Arquivo para August, 2021
The intermittents of death
31
Aug
José Saramago (1922-2010), in addition to his famous book
Essay on Blindness, written in 1995 and which later became a film directed by Brazilian Fernando Meirelles and scripted by Don McKellar, wrote many other novels: O memorial do convento (adapted from an opera), The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Essay on lucidity, and many others, I highlight here As Intermitências da Morte (2005).
In 1998, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, but two works seem prophetic for today: The essay on blindness, which we have already posted, and the Intermitências da Morte.
Skeptical and ironic, Saramago did not fail to notice the dramas of our time, but the unexpected way it ends. Lucidity, I would say using the Heideggerian metaphor that clearing is possible if we penetrate the existential drama of life.
In The Intermittencies of Death, he penetrates into the existential dramas of life, as a religious skeptic, he will also mock the outputs with an answer “from above”, that is, transfer to “another world” our permanently mundane dramas, among them, what it’s life itself.
He says in a passage on page 123: “It is possible that only a painstaking education, one of those that is already becoming rare, along, perhaps, with the more or less superstitious respect that in timid souls the written word usually instills, has led readers, although they were not lacking in reasons to manifest explicit signs of ill contained impatience, not to interrupt what we have been reporting so profusely and to want to be told what it is that, in the meantime, death has been doing since the fatal night when it announced the your return.” (in the photo a picture of Gustav Klimt’s painting).
After inquiring in every book about life, something unusual these days, because all you want is a return to frivolity, the normality of emptiness, the absence of life, consumption and false joys, the author will say in end of the book that death is normality, said like this:
“He stayed in his room all day, had lunch and dinner at the hotel. Watched television until late. Then he got into bed and turned off the light. Didn’t sleep. Death never sleeps.” (Saramago, 2005, p. 189).
And he concludes that his common irony in times when the pandemic was not even dreamed of (his pandemic was The Essay on Blindness), he says about death: “(…) I don’t understand anything, talking to you is the same as having fallen into a labyrinth without doors, Now that’s an excellent definition of life, You’re not life, I’m much less complicated than it, (…)” (Saramago, 2005, p. 198). Oh what a pity, a pity even that Saramago had never believed in a true life, this disbelief is also in all his work, especially “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” (1991), but at least he was not indifferent to the theme, something “bothered him”.
SARAMAGO, José. (2005) The intermittence of death. Brazil, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Caution and caution with new variants
30
Aug
In Brazil until Saturday, the Ministry of Health distributed more
than 230 million of the vaccines against covid-19, these 187 million have already been applied, being 128.4 million in first doses and 59 million having completed the scheme, which gives 36 .9% of the population, and still not enough, as the new variants affect while the scheme is not completed.
The number of deaths and infections in Brazil has been falling slowly, but it is still in the range just below the 1,000 daily deaths of the moving average and close to 20,000 daily infections.
Extensive research carried out by FioCruz revealed that by completing the vaccination scheme, the AstraZeneca-Fiocruz and CoronaVac vaccines are effective against infection, hospitalization and death: AstraZeneca-Fiocruz with 90% protection and CoronaVac with 75%.
Thus, with 36.9% of the vaccination schedule, the current stage of immunization is still fragile, and the new protocols for flexibility have no scientific basis, except for research carried out with rigor and proven data, all information disclosed, even by official bodies, is not are reliable.
The infectologist and researcher at Fiocruz Julio Croda, said in an interview with CNN, that it is necessary to speed up vaccination to protect people more effectively against the Delta variant, and that the effectiveness drops for the elderly and people with comorbidities.
As for the possibility of using the mixed vaccine scheme, called interchangeability, a study conducted by the University of Oxford, UK, showed that the vaccines that show better immune responses are the combination of Pfizer and AstraZeneca, with an interval and four weeks, with the highest results being AstraZeneca followed by Pfizer.
Flexibility is the responsibility of government health agencies, but care is a personal measure that we can all take, while avoiding crowding, using masks correctly and using alcohol gel, must continue to follow the protocols.
A long period of pandemic also causes personal and psychological stress, it is necessary to find occasions for outdoor walks, relaxation in different ways and virtual contacts with friends and colleagues in the work environment.
Law and justice
27
Aug
Human systems are in crisis because if in rhetoric there are new
forms of sophistry, populism is a complex of sophistry, and they have always appeared in the crises of the polis, our justice that comes from the Roman Empire, with strong idealistic and positivist colors, cannot remain on a line of coherence, there is always a double interpretation according to the defendant.
This is due to populism in the current context, more broadly, in the absence of an ethical approach as proposed by Paul Ricoeur, neither the deontological system that claims to be exempt from any metaphysical aspect, nor the
This aim proposed by Ricoeur, as already explained, is not restricted to the field of personal freedom, because by the very requirement of universality it must have a “coercive effect”, this is applied by a force of law, but it is not limited to ethics either ” institutional”, since there must be a set of “estimated good” actions, for example, each person has an intrinsic dignity, death and violence are not fair resources for coercion, and there may be borderline cases, etc.
But an estimated good action, difficult in times of polarization is one that comes from a golden rule, do not do to the other what you would not like to be done with you, there must always be the possibility of discussing the contradictory always, even in actions ” good estimates” and there must be a prevalence of the community over the individual, without embarrassment or excessive “coercive force”, different cultures interpret what is good differently
The limiting and unacceptable discriminatory point, in addition to the sophistry that since antiquity has recourse to rhetoric and the force of persuasion, but demagoguery and public lie, for example, that which omits cases of appropriation of public property as a clear case denial of the common good.
Governance over natural goods and resources that are national or even planetary heritage, not only nature, but also museums, libraries, historic buildings, whatever cultures they may be, cannot be seen as acceptable.
This deontological legalism (which would be justified by the ends), is also present in the Christian biblical narrative, the Pharisees and teachers of the Law asked Jesus about the customs of washing hands, of following the “tradition of the ancients”, as in the passage of the evangelist Mark (7,5-7):
“Why do your disciples not follow the tradition of the ancients, but eat bread without washing their hands?” and Jesus replied: “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, hypocrites, as it is written: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. The worship they render me is useless, as the doctrines they teach are human precepts’. you forsake God’s command to follow the tradition of men”.
For no one can love the God who does not see if he does not love the Other (neighbor) who sees (1 John 4:20).
The current debate on justice
26
Aug
Heir of John Rawls, Michael Sandel is successful, he says what 
he says to many others who are successful: “Those who are successful tend to think it’s thanks to themselves”, certainly if they weren’t a professor at Harvard, they wouldn’t give assisted lectures by thousands of people, and could not speak of polarization without a clearer definition of its own position.
His book A tyranny of merit (Editora Civilização Brasileira, released in September 2020), drew the attention of progressive sectors, but there is a veiled criticism of these sectors, accused of “embracing, in response to the challenges of globalization, a culture of merit that led to a legitimate resentment of the working classes, of disastrous consequences that were manifested, even in the management of this pandemic” (Daily El País, September 2020).
It has the merit (making a paradox) of saying what is obvious, that without a policy of quotas and breaking the barriers of inequalities (including the cultural one that he points out) there is no possibility of mobility for the underprivileged, but the line of thought de Sandel is rooted in the readings of John Rawls, and his work “Liberalism and the Limits of Justice” (Gulbenkian, 2005) is proof of this, and both were colleagues at Harvard.
In the early 1980s, Rawls himself cited Sandel’s communitarian critique as “the most scathing of all” and although he called into question “deontology with a human face” (see the roots of this thought in the previous post), it was an inherent thought. to the Rawlsian theory of a “deontological liberalism” combined with a “reasonable empiricism”, the terms can be found in Sandel’s work.
In order to obtain a “liberal policy without metaphysical constraints”, Sandel called on his colleague Rawls, ultimately, to abandon the deontological argumentation of an “unencumbered self”, “incapable of self-respect” and “self-knowledge, in any morally serious sense”, see that there is an objectivism within what Hegel calls ethics.
Rawls himself had already been led to reformulate his political liberalism, starting from the context of reasonable pluralism and moving away from a comprehensive moral theory of justice.
Sandel’s lectures are successful in the US and now also abroad, and also in his case it is nothing other than the fruit of meritocracy (Harvard in this case), but his works must be read carefully.
SANDEL, Michael. (1982) Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In Portuguese (2005): Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Trans. C.P. Amaral. Lisbon: Gulbenkian.
Ethics in the morals of Paul Ricoeur
25
Aug
In his 1990 text, Paul Ricoeur has already elaborated what he called
a little ethics, simplified into three theses:
- the priority of ethics over morals, that is, the priority of the life of the good life (comes from the Greek concept of goodness), with and for others, in just institutions, over the moral norm;
- The need, however, that the ethical approach (here opposes the Hegel/Kantian ethics) through the sieve of the moral norm: this passage from ethics to morality, with its imperatives and its prohibitions, is, as it were, demanded by the ethics, insofar as the desire for the good life meets violence in all its forms; and,
- the legitimacy of a recourse from the moral norm to the ethical aim, when the norm leads to conflicts and for which there is no other way out than practical wisdom, the creation of new decisions in difficult cases, such as in law , in everyday life and in medicine.
Ricoeur clarifies that neither in the etymology of the words, nor in the history of the use of the terms, there is no clear distinction between morals and ethics, but there is a nuance in the term ethics “for the aim of a life carried out under the sign of good deeds” , and the moral term “towards the obligatory side, marked by norms, obligations, interdictions characterized at the same time by a demand for universality and an effect of coercion” (Ricoeur, 1991a, p. 256).
In this sense, its “ethical aim” must be understood, nor is it restricted to the field of personal freedom, since it admits “the requirement of universality and an effect of coercion” nor is it limited to institutional ethics since it must be “under the sign of good esteemed actions”.
It is thus possible to distinguish more clearly in his ethical approach, the distinction between two inheritances, the Aristotelian “ethics characterized by its teleological perspective (from telos, which means ends), and the Kantian deontological inheritance (“morality is defined by character from the norm’s obligation and, therefore, from a deontological point of view (deo of “duty”).
Thus, his analysis, rather than excluding one or another thesis of modern ethics, complements both the work of Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle, and the Grounds of Moral Metaphysics and Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, but without the need for to be faithful to the orthodoxy of neither is not an evasive solution, but an inclusive one.
RICOEUR, Paul. (1991). Éthique et morale, Lectures 1: Autour du politique. Paris, Seuil, Pp. 256-269.
The just and hermeneutics
24
Aug
The traditional concept of Justice is one that comes from the 
Enlightenment and idealism, will have its consecration in the Introduction to Hegel’s philosophy of law, the margin of this right survives Christian, Islamic and other beliefs (Haiti, for example, had a Creole constitution) , but always the margin.
One can, for historical reasons, return to Kant and Fichte to discuss theoretical questions of justice, but the modern state and its laws, which are the foundations of contemporary justice, at least in the West, have their foundation in Hegel, and an essential concept there is that of ethics, which comes together with the idea of justice based on the equity itself and not on what is fair.
So Hegel theorizes ethics as “objective morality” or “ethical life”, remember Kant’s categorical imperative: “acts in such a way as to be a model for others”, thus an individual morality, but Hegel’s two abstract concepts they are law and morality.
The scope of ethics, to realize the ideal of freedom, is present in the family, in civil society and in the State, but with the State as sovereign over the other institutions for which it establishes a contract, and the moral and ethical rules are defined by someone who acts in this way, then this is a quality of ethics and ethics.
It goes beyond Kantian thought by stating that there is a subjective morality and an objective morality, a classic dualism of idealism to which Hegel is an apogee, for Kant was the first to say “acts in such a way” that it is universal, for Hegel it is the second and for this will define a new (abstract) concept of the “self-determination of the Will”, which is an objective morality.
It may seem that the “individual” (questionable) right is preserved, but in almost all legislation in “missing” situations, it is the state through the judge that determines the justice, see article 4 in the Brazilian case, of the Introduction to the Civil Code:
“Art. 4th. When the law is silent, the judge will decide the case according to analogy, customs and general principles of law“, there is no objection of collective or individual conscience and there is also no self-determination of the will, it is decided by the State, and already in this it differs from morality.
The current discussion has advanced in phase to serious social problems, on the issue of equity, and even on the veil of contractualism (the law ruled by the state), the most eminent name is John Rawls, for whom his discussion advances on intuitionism and utilitarianism, which Paul Ricoeur will focus on to question his concept of Justice in his work: “The fair or the essence of Justice” (1997).
Essentially, the discussion is about collective, diffuse rights (of nature for example) and equity, Paul Ricoeur moves towards a hermeneutics of law, while Rawls towards liberal law and equity in the face of justice and not the social rights of human dignity, and different from equity and social justice.
References:
RAWLS, John (1997). A Theory of Justice/John Rawls: Trans. Almiro Pisetta and Lenita MR Esteves – São Paulo: Martins Fontes.
RICOEUR, Paul. (1995). The just or the essence of justice. Trans. Vasco Casimiro. Lisbon: Instituto Piaget.
Delta variant still worries
23
Aug
The cases of the Delta variant and the new Alfa variant, which
came from the United Kingdom are still worrying, monitoring is needed, movement control, and in the case of Brazil, the state of Ceará, which has 43 cases, provides an example, having created a monitoring center and screening for travelers, Ceará has 43 Delta cases and there is already a case of the Alfa variant coming from the United Kingdom.
The cases in state of Ceará (Brazil) are 24 women and 19 men, the majority (33) are between 20 and 39 years old, which makes sense because the second dose is still happening at the ages, there are cases coming from Nova Friburgo (RJ) and São Paulo and the others live in 20 different municipalities in Ceará, all of whom had mild, moderate, or asymptomatic symptoms.
It is a moment of caution and the flexibility of many state governments may be premature, the curve of deaths and infections is at a stable level, and with vaccination, the expectation was for it to fall.
As reported by the consortium of press vehicles, the number of people who received the first dose is 122 million while 54 million took the necessary doses (a vaccine uses only one dose), were the data of last Saturday (21/08).
As safety for the delta variable is necessary for complete immunization, the exact number of 54,890,099 people (24.92%), which gives a quarter of the population, is too low for the new Delta and Alpha variants (which are already starting to advance in the country), the possibility of reaching 60% immune is still far, September will be a fatal month, and the level of infections and deaths is still high and stable.
Some states are slightly above (states of Brazil) Mato Grosso do Sul (40.59%), São Paulo (32.40%), Rio Grande do Sul (31.62%) and Espírito Santo (28.33%), the others are close or below of an average of 25% complete immunization, according to the press consortium.
Recents data indicate that the Southeast pulls the infection curve up by 7%.
We must learn from Southeast Asian countries as infections grow due to low vaccination rates, even countries like China, Japan and South Korea are seeing increasing outbreaks, as reported by the CNN website, data from Brazilian daily “O Globo” indicates data from some countries in the region, infections in blue and deaths in black (figure).
Polycrisis and hard words
20
Aug
We have already talked about the crisis of thought, the excess of very
special people who lose sight of the whole, the idealist prison, which was born in a pre-Socratic idealism, as Popper pointed out, and an emptiness of the capacity to renew thought.
Morin’s proposal to reform thought is to open the drawers of thought and articulate them in a complex model (from the Latin complexus, which is woven together) outside of “specialty” and conceptualism.
What before seemed like a warning is now present in several speeches besides ecologists: the planet shows signs of exhaustion, extreme temperatures, even in places where it seemed impossible: cold in the southern hemisphere and intense heat in the northern hemisphere, also animal life is perishing, the current news is the almost extinction of the emperor penguin, which were large colonies.
The planetary core also manifests itself, the number of volcanoes and earthquakes grows, Haiti calls for help after a new earthquake and a hurricane that weakened even more that poor country.
The return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, the military in Myanmar and other neo-totalitarianism, all these seem harsh and pessimistic words, of course we always hope, it is not humanity’s first crisis, but perhaps this is the most global and the most general of all and could become a civilizing crisis, in the midst of a pandemic that persists, and it is neo-denial to say that it has passed, the new variants are threatening, and the WHO itself and many scientists are warning.
Perhaps a barely perceptible level is that of religiosity, in addition to the disrespect for various beliefs, there is internally a crisis that we can call a “despiritualized ascesis”, using a word from Peter Sloterdijk, which we translate here by its root, ascesis “without” admitting The spirit.
It says a biblical passage in which Jesus is questioning his disciples who thought his word was too harsh (Jn 6:61-63):
“Knowing that his disciples were murmuring about this very thing, Jesus asked: “Does this offend you? And when you see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? The Spirit gives life, the flesh does nothing. The words I spoke to you are spirit and life. But among you there are some who do not believe”.
He is speaking to his disciples and to those who believe, and if he does not have spirituality, he does not have Faith.
Modern sophistry and the crisis of democracy
19
Aug
Through the posts we develop the crisis of thought and modern
sophisms, no longer based on justifications of power, but to promote new neo-authoritarian models of power, it is psychopolitics as developed by Byung Chul Han, which is beyond Foucault’s biopolitics.
On the reform of thought Edgar Morin developed an extensive work that is summarized in his book “The well-made head: rethinking the reform, reforming thought”, with two important aspects, in addition to the reformed thought itself: ecological thinking and overcoming of the mechanistic model.
A century after the triumph of quantum physics, the model of our thinking is still Newtonian, mechanistic and dualistic, the quantum model admits a third excluded, in which matter pulsates and there is a third state between one point of matter and another, called na In tunneling effect physics, he enshrines Werner Heisenberg’s initial view of the uncertainty principle and rediscovers the wave nature of matter and not just light, which is also massless matter.
Edgar Morin uses this concept of uncertainty to reform reform, that change we all want but which is still focused on two poles, and induces much of modern thought towards fundamentalisms that admit reforms neither an excluded third nor a third way.
These strands make the planet move towards an unprecedented political crisis of democracy, neo-authoritarian governments, such as Myanmar and now in Afghanistan, and planet dictatorships already almost consolidated throughout the West, threatening the emergence of new and even more radical ones.
Edgar Morin says in his book: “An intelligence incapable of perceiving the context and the planetary complex becomes blind, unconscious and irresponsible” (Morin, 2014) and will later say: ““[…] a way of thinking, capable of uniting and solidarize separate knowledge, it is capable of unfolding in an ethics of union and solidarity among humans. A thought capable of not being confined to the place and the particular, but of conceiving the sets … would be able to favor a sense of responsibility and citizenship” (Morin, 2014).
See “would be able to” in Morin´s phrase, possible but difficult in the current stage.
MORIN, Edgar (2014) A cabeça bem-feita: repensar a reforma, reformar o pensamento. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil.
The Roots of Enlightenment and the Crisis of Reason
18
Aug
Karl Popper in “The World of Parmenides: Essays on the
Presocratic Enlightenment” clarifies two fundamental points of the essence of contemporary thought in its Greek roots: Parmenides’ problem with regard to truth, where there is already a certain amount of relativism and negation from ontology, where the being is not seen as having a relationship with the entity, an original separation between subject and object.
Popper describes the origin of doxa, through the poem (fragments) of Parmenides, through the revelation of the goddess Diké:
“The revelation is divided into two parts as the goddess makes clear. In the first part the goddess reveals the truth – the whole truth, about what really exists: about the world and things in themselves. In the second part, the goddess talks about the world of appearances, about the illusory world of mortal man” (Popper, 2014, p. 134).
Popper clarifies this division of revelation: “…usually differentiated as the “Via da Verdade” and the “Vay of Opinion”, it creates the first and biggest unresolved problem about the work of Parmenides” (idem), and asks why the goddess “… contained not only a true explanation of the universe, but also an untrue explanation, as she explicitly says” (idem), it is easy to explain even today with the enormous advance of Enlightenment science, little do we know.
However, the initial idealism of Parmenides, whose foundation being is and non-being is not, which is not an ontology, is also Popper who defends this contrary to many philosophers: “I do not believe that there is such a thing as an ontology or theory of being or that one can seriously attribute an ontology to Parmenides” (Popper, 2014, p. 137).
His attempt to “prove” an ontological statement is tautological, said thus “only that it is (exists) is (exists)”, but there is no way from a tautological theory to create or derive a non-tautological one, so the theory of being there is empty, as Popper explains, and I would say a dualistic view.
But it is this kind of eidos, transformed into the idea of being is or is not, that arrived at idealism, Popper even goes so far as to say that a true epistemology was born of Parmenides, and the Enlightenment vision developed in Popper’s book as “the enlightenment pre-Socratic”.
This means that we inherited from Parmenides, through the Enlightenment, the dualism of the “way of truth” and the ‘way of opinion”, and these two paths have always haunted philosophers, says Popper.
So we live today with the sophisms, in logics more and more worked, after all the power of the sophists has always been to sophisticate their arguments, but we do not leave this heritage and the Enlightenment in fact has Parmenidians roots, and the forgetfulness of being is still present today .
POPPER, K. The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment. trans. Roberto Leal Ferreira. 1st. ed. Brazil, São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2014.
