Dialectics and distinction

Benedetto Croce said that the price of civilization is to maintain "continuous vigilance" against barbarism. As never before in history, barbarism - that broken mirror that reflects the shattered shards of ethics - seems to have deciphered the traditional ethical-political codes of surveillance, control and security, established by civilization. And, code in hand, not only has it been outsmarting them, but it has managed to camouflage itself until it cunningly penetrates their entrails to destroy it step by step, just as cancer cells are inserted into organic tissue until it tumorizes it. Now it's just a matter of time. Western society, prey to the glories of its abstract understanding, is on the trail of its recurrent "statistical and methodological investigations", guessing, to see if among figures they can detect the way to restore the keys, and with their eyes cast on the corner of the impotence of a humanism of props, fictitious and alien to the glories of Bocaccio, it is proposed, "ultimately", to resort to negotiation or dialogue, as things are done between civilized people, to see if could agree on some "firm" and "realistic" agreement that, as in other times, stops or puts an end to the growing voracity of the legitimate heirs of the empire of the nomads. It is no longer a "threat": they are here and in Ecuador, in Chile, in Bolivia, in Spain, and nobody seems to notice.

 

 Benedetto Croce was one of the two great Italian thinkers of the first half of the 20th century. The other was Giovanni Gentile, with whom Croce discussed in depth the dialectical and historical logos, and particularly the concept of opposition. Hegel, according to Croce, had the merit of discovering that the opposition is the soul of reality, and that the spirit is both the opposition and the unity of the opposite terms. The problem is that, in his opinion, he ended up extending his conception of opposition even to what he is not opposed to, confusing it with what is different. The beautiful is opposed to the ugly in aesthetics, the true to the false in logic, the useful to the useless in economics, good to evil in ethics. But there is no opposition, for example, between beauty and falsehood, because one and the other have a different status of reality and correspond to different degrees of the life of the spirit. Theoretical activity cannot be confused with practice, nor can the concrete with the abstract, or the particular with the universal.

 

 A concrete universal is a cultural and historical construct. It is the result of the practical and theoretical activity of the spirit, and it is far from being an abstraction, because the abstract is not - as has been made to believe - neither the lofty or ethereal nor the complicated and profound, but, rather, the partial. and incomplete. For this very reason, for Croce there is no possibility of opposition between a particular abstract degree and a concrete universal degree, as, for example, between utility and ethics. The useful is an act of satisfaction of a desire based on immediate needs. For what is useful to become ethical, it is decisive that it ceases to be abstractly and arbitrarily useful and reaches a higher level of concreteness that allows it to transform mere desire into free will, in other words, into awareness of necessity, into law. Only in this way, through effort and cultural training, can a certain being make the qualitative leap from barbarism to civilization. Between the one and the other there is, therefore, no dialectical opposition but rather a relation of different terms. There is no opposition between them but distinction, because their logic does not contain parity.

 

Will a politician moderately aware of his public priesthood, with a certain cultural and professional training, with ethical-political values ​​that are tendentially modern -including a taste for baseball- and with a minimum awareness of the importance of commitment to the word, will he be able to sit down dialogue with a barbarian -a gangster who intends to intoxicate the minds of as many Westerners as possible with narcotics until they implode- and agree with him on the terms of a negotiation -as itinerant salesmen of household appliances unhappily say- of a type 'win win'? “The barbarian is astonished when he hears that the square of the hypotenuse must be equal to the sum of the squares of the two legs. He believes that it could also be otherwise. He is afraid of the intellect and sticks to intuition,” says Hegel. Croce would add that the barbarian's intuition is of the same nature as that of abstract utilitarian desire, never of the concrete universal of ethics. Was Valentinian III able to sit down and negotiate a "win-win" agreement with Attila, "the scourge of God", a paradigm of cruelty, destruction and rapine? If the moral codes of the eventual interlocutors are not only different but incompatible, if what for one turns out to be an aberration for the other turns out to be good and natural, if honor is interpreted as dishonor, submission as peace, rationing as abundance and manipulation as truth, will it be possible to establish a relationship of dialectical opposition between the two? For barbarism, being ignorant means being strong. In Eurasia and EastAsia, says Orwell, the deepest-rooted feeling is that of the worship of death and the disappearance of the self.

 

 In reality, there is no dialectic of the different. One can only speak of dialectics when there are two opposite terms, such as the north pole and the south pole, right and left, father and son, because what makes the existence of one of the terms possible, what determines it, is its other. Is it possible for the north pole to exist without the south pole? And, in the hypothetical case that it came to exist, would it be polo with respect to what? In such a way that the only thing that gives meaning and meaning to each pole is not found in it but in its correlative opposite term. For this reason, once again, it is worth asking if, for example, the Al Capone of El Furrial or the offspring of a terrorist and kidnapper by trade could come to form the opposite, correlative, dialectical term of some respectable politician, since , in spite of the suspicions that the vile intrigues may instill, they exist.

 

 The problem continues to be that of the present incompatibility between the different ones. And, by virtue of the distinction, it is worth thinking seriously, beyond the statistical graphs, about the risks to the security of today's Western civilization, in the face of the growing narco-terrorist threat. It will not be by following the recipes of prescriptive psychology or sociology that the solution will be obtained. Gangrene is not cured with eau de cologne. Machiavelli is more relevant today than ever.

 

Time and Being

In Latinamerica

In a small notebook of notes, 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 and treacherous 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.” The complexes – that continuous source of resentment and spiritual poverty – are superfluous. For example, to affirm that in a Latinamerican country, such as Venezuela, the existence of philosophers is "unimaginable", since, if there will be philosophy professors, it is a temerity that in itself captures the spirit of the tearing present in the Kantian formulation, between what is 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 its 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-rate linguist -as Heidegger was-, but also the author of a Philosophy of knowledge, whose closeness to Kant and to what remains of Hume in him, are admirable, especially 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. You cannot judge a people only because of 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 beautiful Venezuelan coasts to also be "tropical hedonists".

 

Theodor Adorno affirms, in Negative Dialectics, 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 Maya: 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.

Reading of Eroticism, Book by Georges Bataille

Some Extracts

Eroticism of bodies, hearts and sacred

 

I will talk about these three ways one after another. I will deal with the eroticism of bodies, the eroticism of hearts and, lastly, sacred eroticism. I will speak of all three in order to show clearly that in all cases it is a question of a substitution of the isolation of being —its discontinuity— by a feeling of profound continuity.

 

It is easy to see what we mean when we speak of the eroticism of bodies or the eroticism of hearts; the idea of ​​sacred eroticism is less familiar to us. For the rest, the expression is ambiguous, to the extent that all eroticism is sacred; although we find bodies and hearts without having to enter the sacred sphere itself. At the same time, the search for a continuity of being carried out systematically beyond the immediate world designates an essentially religious way of proceeding; In its familiar form in the West, sacred eroticism is confused with the search or, more exactly, with the love of God. For its part, the East carries out a similar search without necessarily putting into play the(( representation of a God. Buddhism, in particular, dispenses with this idea. Be that as it may, I want to insist right now on the significance of my attempt. I have endeavored to introduce a notion that at first glance might seem strange, uselessly philosophical: that of continuity, as opposed to discontinuity, of being. I can finally underline the fact that, without this notion, we would not be able to understand in any way the general significance of eroticism and the unity of its forms.

 

What I am trying to do, taking the detour of an exhibition on the discontinuity and continuity of the smallest beings, involved in the movements of reproduction, is to get out of the darkness that has always covered the immense field of eroticism. There is a secret of eroticism that I am trying to violate right now. Would that be possible without going to the deepest entrance, without going to the heart of being?

 

If we refer to the meaning that these states have for us, we will understand that the tearing of being from discontinuity is always the most violent. The most violent thing for us is death; which, precisely, rips us out of the obstinacy we have to see the discontinuous being that we are last. Our hearts fail at the thought that the discontinuous individuality that is in us will suddenly be annihilated. We cannot assimilate in a too simple way the movements of the animalcules that are in the process of reproducing with those of our heart; but, however insignificant some beings may be, we cannot represent to ourselves without violence the putting into play of the being that occurs in them; it is, in its entirety, the elemental being that is at stake in the passage from discontinuity to continuity. Only violence can put everything at stake. Only the violence and nameless rift that is linked to it! Without a violation of constituted being—constituted as such in discontinuity—we cannot represent to ourselves the passage from one state to another that is essentially different. Not only do we find ourselves, in the confused changes of the animalcules that have entered into the act of reproduction, with the background of violence that in the eroticism of the bodies takes our breath away, but there the intimate meaning of that violence is revealed to us. violence. What does the eroticism of bodies mean if not a violation of the being of those who take part in it? A rape bordering on death? A violation bordering on the act of killing?

 

In any case, the eroticism of bodies has something heavy, something sinister. It preserves individual discontinuity, and always acts in the direction of cynical egoism. The eroticism of hearts is freer. Although it apparently distances itself from the materiality of the eroticism of bodies, it proceeds from it by the fact that it is often only one of its aspects, stabilized by the reciprocal affection of the lovers.

 

But for those who are affected by it, passion can have a more violent meaning than the desire for bodies. We must never doubt that, despite the promises of happiness that accompany it, passion begins by introducing disagreement and disturbance.

 

Its essence is the replacement of the persistent discontinuity between two beings by a wonderful continuity. But this continuity makes itself felt above all in anguish; this is so to the extent that this continuity is inaccessible, it is an impotent and trembling search.

The possession of the loved one does not mean death, on the contrary; but death is found in the search for that possession. If the lover cannot possess the loved one, she sometimes thinks of killing him; she often would rather kill him than lose him. In other cases she wishes her own death. What is at stake in that fury is the feeling of a possible continuity glimpsed in the loved one.

 

We suffer our isolation in discontinuous individuality. Passion repeats to us endlessly: if you possessed the loved one, that heart that loneliness oppresses would form a single heart with that of the loved one. Now this promise is illusory, at least in part. But in passion, the image of this fusion takes shape —and sometimes in a very different way for both lovers— with a crazy intensity. Beyond its image, its project, the precarious fusion that does not threaten the survival of individual egoism can, in some way, enter reality. But it's the same; of that precarious and at the same time profound fusion, suffering —the threat of a separation— must almost always maintain full awareness.

Gottlob Frege: Notes on Sense and Reference

 It is important to know that Gottlob Frege was -initially- a mathematician. he thought that ordinary (natural) language was not ideal for expounding mathematical reasoning. So, in the search for an ideal language to perfectly express the structure of mathematical reasoning, he led to a semantic analysis of linguistic expressions, in such a way that he raised philosophical issues about language. Can we express the truth without linguistic ambiguities? You are right. However, this then required the development of what he called 'ideography', a logically perfect language not only for mathematics, but also for the sciences in ge

 

Luckily, he ended up founding the necessary principles to do what we understand today as Philosophy of Language. Since it is language that places man above the rest of beings and gives him dominion over them, it constitutes, due to its nobility, a topic that deserves to be investigated.

 

Indeed, it is good to know that Frege makes use of three fundamental terms such as: sign, sense and reference. Here is the novelty in his work Sinn und Bedeutung [Sense and Reference], a work that we are studying at the moment.

 

Before Frege, such a problem had perhaps not been considered in linguistic expressions. An expression in which the predicate is related to the subject or object can be considered valid, so we could assign a truth value (T or, F). In Frege, this is not enough, for a sentence to be assigned a truth value judgment it must necessarily have a reference (real object).

 

There is an example that the author uses to explain this, the phrase: "The will of the people" is an expression that makes sense, but lacks a reference (extra-mental object) so it cannot be assigned a truth value, far from it. I can submit it to a scientific type of analysis.

 

A sentence must be understood -according to Frege- as an articulated whole that provides the necessary elements for a reasonable explanation of how to say something true or false through it.

 

Critique of knowledge for life.

 Henri Bergson Lecture on Creative Evolution

A theory of life that is not accompanied by a critique of knowledge is forced to accept, verbatim, the concepts that the understanding puts at its disposal: it can only enclose the facts, by choice or by force, in squares. pre-existing ones that it considers definitive. He thus obtains an easy symbolism, perhaps even necessary for positive science, but not a direct vision of his object. On the other hand, a theory of knowledge, which puts intelligence back into the general evolution of life, will teach us neither how the frames of intelligence are constituted, nor how we can extend or surpass them. It is necessary that these two investigations, theory of knowledge and theory of life, come together, and, by a circular process, push each other indefinitely.

In this way they will be able to solve by a safer method, closer to experience, the great problems that philosophy presents. Because, if they were successful in their common enterprise, they would make us witness the formation of intelligence and, therefore, the genesis of this material whose general configuration draws our intelligence. They would delve to the very root of nature and spirit.

They would replace Spencer's false evolutionism —which consists of cutting the current reality, already evolved, into small pieces no less evolved, then recomposing it with these fragments and thus giving oneself, in advance, everything that is trying to be explained— by an evolutionism true, in which reality would be followed in its generation and growth.

But a philosophy of this kind will not be done in a day. Unlike the systems properly speaking?, each of which was the work of a man of genius and presented itself as a block, which can be taken or left, can only be constituted by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers too, completing, correcting, straightening each other. But neither does the present essay try to solve the most important problems at once. I would simply like to define the method and suggest, on some essential points, the possibility of applying it.

 

The plan has been drawn by the object itself. In a first chapter, we test for evolutionary progress the two garments available to our understanding: mechanism and purpose 1; we show that neither one nor the other is valid for us, but that one of the two could be cut, re-sewn, and, in this new form, fit less badly than the other. To go beyond the point of view of understanding, we try to reconstruct, in our second chapter, the great lines of evolution that life has traveled alongside the one that led to human intelligence. The intelligence is thus placed, once again, in its generating cause, which it would then try to apprehend in itself and follow in its movement. It is an effort of this kind that we attempt—albeit incompletely—in our third chapter. A fourth and last part is destined to show how our understanding itself, subjecting itself to a certain discipline, could prepare a philosophy that surpasses it. For this, a look at the history of systems would be necessary, at the same time as an analysis of the two great illusions to which it is exposed, since human understanding speculates about reality in general.