Time and being

In a small notebook , made in Jena between 1803 and 1806, entitled Wastebook -"book of waste", it could be translated-, its author, the young Hegel, wrote a hundred aphorisms that, despite the premeditated title , they have no waste. Rather, these aphorisms are of enormous importance for understanding the transit accomplished by the great thinker in the arduous and patient task that made the construction of the "science of the experience of consciousness" possible. One, in particular, inspires, and is probably his premise, the lines that follow: “Kant is admiringly quoted, indicating that he did not teach philosophy, but philosophizing; as if someone taught carpentry, but did not teach how to build a table, a chair, a door, a cupboard, etc.” In Latin America the complexes -that continuous source of resentment and spiritual poverty- are plenty. For example, affirming that in Venezuela the existence of philosophers is “unimaginable”, since, if there are perhaps philosophy professors, it is a recklessness that in itself captures the spirit of the tearing present in the Kantian formulation, between what is and what is done. There is nothing pompous about thinking and teaching how to think, just as there is nothing exuberant about knowing history and exposing it, knowing the law and advocating for its compliance, or learning medicine and ensuring the health of patients.

 

Denying the possibility of the existence of philosophy, but pretending to exercise it, "carrying out" a "reflection on the nature of Venezuela, finding its essence, unraveling, Heideggerianly speaking, its “Being and  Time", is an audacity, more worthy of the inventive audacity of Simón Rodríguez than of the subtle prudence of Andrés Bello, who, by the way, was not only a first-class linguist -as Heidegger was-, but also the author of a Philosophy of knowledge, whose proximity with Kant and what remains of Hume in him, are admirable, above all for the fact that he is also a child of the culture of "tropical hedonism, prevailing barbarism, exuberant nature, sudden enrichment and opulence, a little coarse, vulgar and ragged, without any finesse” who, however, contributed decisively to the construction of the Chilean Bildung , since he was a Senator, editor of the Civil Code and Rector of the University of Chile. A people cannot be judged only by its geographical characteristics or its miscegenation. Much less because of what some villains -tropical hedonists- have decided to do with him. If this were so, it would have to be affirmed that a few Roman emperors or a few European monarchs and dictators only lacked the palm trees of the Venezuelan coasts to also be “tropical hedonists”.

 

Theodor Adorno affirms, in Negative Dialectic, that the great defect of Heidegger's ontology consists in the pretense of founding a concept of historicity lacking “the salt of history”. By the way, for Marx, the science of history is neither more nor less than philosophy detached from any ahistorical formulation . It is about understanding philosophy in a living way. Croce had the privilege of defining it under the following terms: “philosophy is history and nothing but history”. Of course, this conception of history does not consist of an accumulation of chronicles -or chronologies-, nor in a museum of wax or old junk, accompanied by the respective nostalgia for what will never return. It is history in fieri, in a continuous act. Not, then, history Res Gestae , but history Rerum Gestarum , as an understanding of the self that is a we and of the we that is a self, of the substance that becomes a subject. And this is precisely what it is about: the being is not a fixed, rigid, static, immovable entity. Being is what is being done, continuous becoming . The so-called human essence is not a photograph or a statistical table, and is determined by the cultural formation that men are capable of generating among themselves.

 

When a society has split, the extremes appear ( erscheinen ) quite clearly. Light and shadow are separated and concentrated, while the chiaroscuro gradually fade until they show their evanescence and their consequent insubstantiality. The fictio of the “center” or of the middle ground is not, not because the extremes push against it, but because, out of fear and hope, they do not push hard enough. There is no moderation without conflict. Rather, moderation is the result of the conflict, its conquest, its Aufgehoben . In his independent Venezuela, Mariano Picón Salas -another “unimaginable” Venezuelan thinker- asks: “Why was it not from the great and golden Viceroyalties of Peru and Mexico that the insurgent movement spread throughout Hispanic America? but from provinces somewhat marginal to economic life and colonial splendor, such as Caracas and Buenos Aires?” His answer is not Heideggerian , although it is historicist: unlike the closed indigenist movements, the formation and will of their leaders had a much more universal character. They are not satisfied with the myth of the restoration of the lost world of the indigenous, that fantasy that, by the way, brought so much benefit to the Chavista cartel. The independence of America was interpreted not as a local but a global issue. It was not a racist revolution, Indian or black, to overthrow Pizarro or Cortéz and restore the empire of the Incas or Aztecs; It was not about turning back the clock of history to go back to the cosmic time of the Mayans: it was about placing oneself, unapologetically, at the height of his time. But no time is good or bad in itself. Every time has its advantages and disadvantages, its virtues and its defects. This is precisely why time becomes and becoming makes itself be.

 

What extremism, whatever its position, fails to understand is that not only can it not remain unscathed, but in its efforts to remain unscathed it assumes - and one could say expropriates - the logic of the other extreme. That is why left-wing extremism, taken to its last instances, ends up becoming right-wing extremism. The terms of the opposition mirror each other. They are the other of the other. An era of schizophrenia justifies the vileness of tearing. Venezuela is not the exception but -in the words of Carlos Fuentes- the most transparent region, in this case, of the morbidity of the present. Today, more than ever, the task of intelligence consists in untangling the loop that society itself has imposed as being of time and as time of being.

 

Averroes and Maimonedes.

 

The philosophers of Al -Andalus

"Thought has wings and there is nothing that can stop its flight."

 

"There is no other magisterium than that of reason, man was born to know, being the ultimate happiness to reach wisdom ". Averroes .

 

 

The twelfth century began with the permissive existentialism of the Almohad court and ended ashamed of its discoveries (those made by Maimonedes , Abentofail and Averroes as top representatives) that for the Almohad Muslim orthodoxy (still existentialist was very orthodox, read “The self learned  philosopher “where Abentofail at all times expresses itself "respecting" and worshiping the Islamic orthodox rules) and even more so for other Islamic branches, such as the Almoravid , the reason derived from Aristotle and its consequent enunciations were something external to Islam. Something that was, the cause of the persecution of their representatives and  the destruction of their works (with the exception of Abentofail , who was not persecuted), a fact that did nothing but weaken the Muslim settlement in Al - Andalus ( Islamic  Spain)  The difficulties that Averroes encountered and the conversion,(fake  or sincere) of Maimonides - in 1148 when the Almohads conquered Córdoba - illustrates a general environment and, beyond the Andalusian case, the old tension between the rational or intrusive sciences and the religious interpretations or traditions that existed in Islam.

 

 

At the end of 1168, Ibn Tufayl , who was vizier and doctor to the Almohad prince Abü Ya'qub Yüsuf introduced Averroes to the aforementioned sultan , who reassured the philosopher about his dedication to thought and even recommended that he shouldcomment on Aristotle’s philosophy. The monarch's assistance was quite important, as Averroes acknowledges in the dedication made to his beneficiary in Plato's Exposition of the Republic. In the year 1169 was appointed Saracen judge of Seville, there he exercised his degree with the approval of the Sevillians, who showed him their affection in the temporary moments in which he suffered harsh criticism. In 1182 he was appointed chief judge of Córdoba and chief physician of the court. After the battle of Alarcos (June 18, 1195), when  the Almohad troops crushed the Christian ones, the demanding alfaquíes and ulemas (facultative and wise men of the Mohammedan tradition ) of Córdoba denounced Averroes and he was banished to Lucena, for about twenty months. In the year 1198  the prince pardoned Averroes , restored his charges and took him with him to Marrakech, perhaps to protect him from his Hispano-Arab enemies. But on December 10th, 1198, at the age of seventy-two, Averroes died in the Moroccan city.

 

 

The significant fact  is that Renaissance modernity  begins with these three philosophers, and above all  with Averroes.,  reaching  the original Aristotle, in all his possible notions: concepts of wisdom, degrees of knowledge, role of logic, concrete sense of knowledge. , the role of understanding, the constitution of the concrete entity and the ethical life of the sages. Despite working on a translated text and not on the original Greek, Averroes reaches and shared Greek reality and the biological reason of Aristotelian thought.

 

Averroes ' exile in Lucena lasted twenty months. The city of Cordoba was previously popular for its large Jewish quarter and this led to the rise of fables about the friendship between Maimonides and Averroes . On the contrary, it was not this way. The family of Mosé ben Maymün , known as  Maimonides , had not lived in Córdoba for a long time. When Averroes arrived in Lucena, Maimonides had been living in Cairo for thirty years. If Maimonedes and his family boasted of something, it was of two things: their Judaism and their Hispanic- Muslim influence . Established in Córdoba  memorable  to the Jewish community of Córdoba, Rabbi Isaac ben Maymün , father of Maimonides , raised him in the capital of the Guadalquivir river. The philosopher was born on Saturday March 30, 1135. Later in Córdoba he received education in Arabic and Hebrew sciences and in the faith of Abraham and Moses. But in the year 1147, when the Almohad troops conquered Córdoba, Rabbi Isaac and his kin including his two sons David and Moses ( Maimónedes ), left the city and took refuge in Granada, where they lived for about two years (1149-1150), marching after this to Almería in which the teaching of Mosé ben Maymün was completed . But when the Almohads approached the aforementioned population, Moses and his family had to leave it in 1160, settling later in Fez, and having to appear superficially Muslim. But shortly after they continue their trip to Egypt, settling in Cairo. Maimonides wrote most of his work there and held important positions, among them that of physician to the court of Saladin . At this time (1185-1200) he wrote the most universal of his works, the Guide for the Perplexed, written in Arabic like all his manuals. It was just then that the writings of Averroes arrived in Egypt , his opinion being that the Arab philosopher from Cordoba "interprets Aristotle using approved and true reasoning". Of course, the Arab thinkers who influenced Maimonides and Averroes were the Mu\' tazila , Al - fârâbï and Avempace ( Ibn Bayya ) and surely still the Andalusian Ibn Tufail .

 

 

The three philosophers tried to apply Aristotelian thought to their society, and with it, the ethical principle of the essential unity of man who lives in society.. The man who thinks  , does it a natural way, just as he lives, feeds and reproduces, man thinks, by his nature and without limits. Reflective knowledge is the impeccable characteristic that recognizes the total application of the citizen. The truth is only reached by knowing . Ibn Rusd also believes in the Aristotelian truth that the success of man is better in the community, which multiplies experiences, increases the field of knowledge and amplifies the virtues and discoveries of our knowledge. The supreme virtue of man resides in knowledge. The wise man is the one who deals with ordering knowledge and is aware that he knows, and it is also the most useful for men who live in society. In this way the Andalusian philosophers give way to the Renaissance modernity of the West, mainly after the translations of their works into Latin, the meeting of these and the Christianization of them by St. Thomas Aquinas  and the subsequent exhibition and acceptance of them by the Western world. . Just as good old Spinoza (who, as we know, had works by Andalusian philosophers in his library ) continued with the Hispaic- Muslim legacy in his  ethics..

 

Television and crowd control

Umberto Eco. Paleo television 

 

Once upon a time there was Paleotelevision, which was made in Rome or Milan, for all viewers, and which spoke of inaugurations presided over by ministers and tried to ensure that the public learned only innocent things, even at the cost of telling lies. Now, with the multiplication of channels, with privatization, with the advent of new electronic marvels, we are living in the age of Neotelevision,  fading away because of the Internet and social media. From Paleo TV a small dictionary could be made with the names of the protagonists and the titles of the broadcasts. With Neo TV it would be impossible, not only because the characters and the rubrics are infinite, not only because no one is able to remember and recognize them anymore, but also because the same character today plays different roles depending on whether he speaks on state or private screens. Studies have already been carried out on the characteristics of Neo TV (for example, the recent investigation into entertainment programs, carried out on behalf of the parliamentary surveillance commission, by a group of researchers from the University of Bologna). The speech that follows does not want to be a summary of this or other important investigations, but takes into account the new panorama that these works have discovered.

 

The main feature of Neo TV is that it talks less and less (as Paleo TV did or pretended to do) about the outside world. She talks about  herself and the contact she is establishing with the public. It matters little what she says or what she talks about (because the public, with the remote control, decides when to let her speak and when to switch to another channel). In order to survive this switching power, it then tries to retain the viewer by saying: “I am here, I am me and I am you.” The biggest story offered by Neo TV, whether it's about missiles or about Stan Laurel making a closet fall, is this: “I'm telling you, oh wonder, you're looking at me; If you don't believe it, try it, dial this number, call me and I'll answer you”.