Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

Leibniz (1646-1716) theorized that truth is related to reason: “I understand by reason, not the faculty of reasoning, which can be used well or badly, but the chain of truths which can only produce truths, and one truth cannot be contrary to another”, so from a half-truth a truth cannot emerge, this is the problem with contemporary narratives and truth is linked to Being through language.

Leibniz’s philosophical project included a “symbolic language” that would be the very language of philosophy, he called it “characterística universalis” through which we could express truth, but in his time the division between realism and nominalism led to a victory for Enlightenment realism, and Leibniz and his disciple Christian Wolff (1679-1754) were rejected (picture).

Leibniz thought of three principles for his project: Identifying and structuring simple ideas hierarchically, stipulating a suitable system of signs and establishing logical rules for composing complex ideas.

Christian Wolf goes so far as to elaborate a system of concepts, different from Porphyry’s tree of knowledge, but also based on Aristotelian thought (Isagoge). It is from Porphyry (232-304) that Boethius takes the famous quarrel about universals: whether universals are things or just words (categories of Aristotle) that we attribute as names to things.

Modern ontology, especially in Hannah Arendt and her interpreter Byung-Chul Han, creates new concepts that link this dualism in thinking about the Vita Activa and the Vita Contemplativa: “the quest for immortality, for immortal glory, is, according to Arendt, ”the source and center of the vita activa“ (Han, 2023, p. 145), but ”he must return to his surrounding world” (idem).

One thus lives in a paradox between the eternal and the temporal: “as soon, however, as a thinker abandons the experience of the eternal and begins to write, he surrenders to the vita activa, whose ultimate goal is immortality” (pgs. 145-146).

Arendt “marvels at Socrates who doesn’t write, who voluntarily renounces immortality” (Han, 2023, p. 146), even though writing “can be a contemplation that has nothing to do with the quest for immortality” (Han, 2023, p. 146), one can also think of the experience of Jesus who didn’t write at all, so one should follow his word and his example and not his writing, thus orality has “vita activa” (actions life) while writing seeks potency.

Arendt also recalls Plato, but Han thinks that this “distorts” Plato’s allegory, “it is the story of a philosopher who frees himself from the chains that bind him and his companions” (pp. 147-148), he acts when he returns to the cave “with its shadows, to a regime of truth”.

To put words into the vita activa is therefore to imitate them, neither proclaiming them nor quoting them, says Han: “The vita activa without the vita contemplativa is blind” (Han, 2023, p. 149).

Han, B.-C. (2023). Vita Contemplativa: ou sobre a inatividade. Trad. Lucas Machado, Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.