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REFORM OF UNDERSTANDING
By Victor Excelcius
Lisbonna, MMXXI
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So, what do we live for? What is the value of life? Is there a way through philosophy, like others such as biography, biology, the way of common sense? Is finitude the defining criterion of "how one should live life"? Doesn't this awareness of finitude prevent us from living it? Yes, how should life be lived? And is there a moral purpose to this precept of the mind?
If science seeks to better understand the human condition through the study of human discourses and behavior, human and social science, where to insert and how to understand madness and unreason? At least we have these two variables, which more or less accidentally man attends to and the scientist understands. But what has become of the philosopher in this somewhat "social" framework? Society subsumes divinity, is it not also a totality of human manifestations? Isn't man the forgotten, decentered center of philosophy?
Isn't the journey of the spirit a strictly spiritual conquest? And isn't what is mental also mental? Doesn't man need to flee from himself to find himself, without having to invent happiness in (minimal) recurring spaces, in a certain larger space like the city?
The city, moreover, is a medina, in our view.
Is not, on the other hand, the woman (or the man) the Alter Ego of the heterosexual or homosexual couple? Yes, the couple is a kind of incompatible strand of the more or less solitary Ego, and on this the world rests, its moral dimension is taken to the extremes of consanguinity, with or without dowry, in the nuclear dimension of society, a microsociety that represents and animates it. Even the writer who writes for himself is haunted by the shadow of the Other, which he needs in order to feed spiritually (which comes in its origin from spiritual, from spirit), in himself and in the Other as Self, in the Self as Other.
Thus, in terms of a social philosophy, a method must be offered to philosophy, namely the ethnographic method, through ethnographic fieldwork. This is where 5
we see man (and woman) in action in their spatio-temporal context. Is it not, therefore, necessary to go back to traditional society to understand man, i.e., to do philosophy about man and his condition in terms of a social, cultural determination?
And what is this construction of the society that awaits us? Why not liberalize in the face of suicide? Look at the problem in philosophical-social terms and in terms of the autonomy of the self. If Western society has conquered material freedom, it can be a trap for those who, having conquered everything, are not happy and therefore think and realize that there is nothing more to conquer, and so a ruinous cycle of unhappiness is generated that leads to drugs and death by suicide. But, since we were born, aren't we dying in and for the world?
Then, in another way, life is not always celebration, as some anthropologists would have us believe. It is also anguish, which does not mean that philosophy is necessarily anguish. But it takes the decaying Being and tries to understand it, instead of lifting it up, as if removing from it the strength to do one thing or another, giving it the space, in time, on the edge of virtue, to get up and to stand up, to walk again, because philosophy is first of all not the goal, but the path, therefore happiness, instead of celebration in social and cultural terms.
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We intend to refocus the debate of the human sciences on man, the subject of social action, of the discourse on the sciences, indicating that philosophy can be endowed with the method of social anthropology, that is, the fieldwork of inquiry into the Other's opinion about himself. In other words, it is about bringing maieutics back to the center of philosophical debates. This amounts to philosophy considering as useful, its own, the vocations of anthropology, art, science or merely activity, philosophical labor. It matters not only the opinion of the subject, be it philosopher, but the opinion of the Other, too, as what is usually with anthropology and need not be primitive. On the other hand, the study of social psychology, ethology, sociobiology, makes us more attentive to the unfolding of social life, understanding the various aspects of which man is made up, what humans are made of, and the way they both challenge reality, social and physical, and adapt to it, in order to later transform it for their benefit. He is in the midst of the others, including the minerals and vegetables, and it is not sound language that makes him superior, but the capacity for abstraction. Therefore, an opportunity to do philosophy. And, how to define Man?
He has the gift of being at the outset framed in a social, cultural context. It is this pre-determination that defines him and even if he was on the margins of society, he always has with him, carries with him, a certain identity, that is, he is id of something, he is "that" something, always in relation to the Other.
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So, does the philosopher have a role in society? If so, which one? The one that everyone else doesn't want, lost and diverted from the century? In order to mate does he need to be inserted in that century, in those times? And what particular idea do you have a b o u t m a t i n g , if hormones are configured in that sense? Isn't the philosopher just a living organism with an excess of rationalization? That is why, we argue, the philosopher needs to be an anthropologist, to incorporate certain principles of social anthropology, namely, to ask the Other what he thinks, whether he is primitive or not, so as not to be trapped in the Cave all the time, from where he only comes out to breathe and satisfy basic needs?
They know the intellectual superiority of the philosopher. But, not all philosophers are intellectuals, in fact, a large part of them are lazy and make a certain way of thinking, not to say a certain number of people, dependent on their minds. So what is the status of the philosopher in society, the sociologist, the anthropologist? One does philosophy of science, and many engineers or mathematicians are philosophers without having taken an academic course in the social sciences and humanities. A rather disruptive ga this...
The importance of the philosopher is of intrinsic quality, that is, only the philosopher can feel the anguish and despair proper to the philosopher. The others, other than the philosopher, do not feel these feelings, therefore, the social utility of these feelings to the condition of doing philosophy, more than reading, therefore, the capacity of abstraction is an activity that not everyone can access and that is achieved with time, with training of the most diverse dispositions of the human spirit that extends, distends and perceives in time...
Because if Being is important in philosophy, Belonging can also be important in anthropology and sociology, that is, we are attached to each other and this decides every ethical undertaking, also with regard to finitude, that is, the contingency in the face of time that can make us better people, even without much recourse to religion, 8
to religious explanation. Man is not without, on the other hand, the mask, the persona
of his personality, therefore man is always an actor, whether in artistic terms or as a social actor, in the plasma of the human landscape of everyday life of what is conventionally called reality in generic terms and social reality in strict terms.
How, therefore, to erect a science of the social if the object of study is always in motion, if not even literature or art can capture the immensity of what is human, of the human soul? It will be philosophy to erect such a building. Much of philosophy does not build, but has a critical task. How then to understand man, in the desert or in the big cities? Is this the task of religion? Is theology a science, a science of the indivisible, of the unspeakable?
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In fact, the common issue in all relationships is power, that is, what organizes and silences people is the power of something higher than them in terms of decision, so religion fits in this area. We always believe in something (a totem) or in someone (a god, an authority) that is superior to us, never inferior, because we ourselves, even in a small way, exercise power, even if it is in the face of a domestic animal. What is special about those beings that are not daring in hierarchical relationships of power, that see society as a potency and locus of equality, egalitarianism, is that they are more contemplative than active, that is, their will hovers in the air before they take a decision. This is why they don't like to be criticized. Usually, in one way or another, this is a way of exercising power, that is, I am not an eminently practical subject because practicality generates equality and philosophical discourse generates instances and conditions of a somewhat symbolic power. In this way, it is easy for the philosopher, I mean familiar, to feel nausea of his existence and to be close to borderline situations or even to abuse certain resources, like drinking or smoking, because he is focused, he is busy, of a world that has no actors, in which he is with his mind, the only actor, That's why he feels nausea and loneliness that put a dent in his personality, in his social persona, and make him a kind of untouchable in society, that is "the one who cannot be touched", who is imitated in behavior and whose opinion is respected, while the mob is in revelry he reads and writes philosophical treatises, somehow to perpetuate himself and the society that welcomes him as a pensarilho, a wandering thinker, where the instrument of his perception is not the senses, as in anthropology, gastronomy and wine, the pleasures of sex, but the vice of thinking, often generating a certain inferiority complex that he feels, precisely because he is not in the realm of the century, in the present, untouchable and at the same time the fruit of a society, of a context of cultural scope, that at the same time circumscribes and makes him abandon his philosophical system of thought.
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Thus, how the present life is characterized by the mask in a plague context. A mask, in the anthropological sense. The plague, in the philosophical sense, that is, what is threatened is the persona as the mask carrier that hides and dissimulates its true Self, we are all masks in the context of a plague that only the domestic sphere intends to elide or, at least disguise. But while the mask is medical, therapeutic, indicates the social function of health, in terms of the neurovisibility of the medical, societal sphere, the plague evidences what is, probably, the greatest fear that the national group has, in individual and collective terms: the Last Judgment. This is why the Mass is still held, even if only with the celebrants, the clergy, and the singing group. Without the assembly, even God trembles, because he has no one who gives him existence, subsistence, prominence, namely, the people.
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Because the Good God is the one who allows his authority to be questioned, like the head of a family in agreement with the destiny of his children, of his sheep, like the voters and citizens in a democracy, that is, gauging the manifestation of the most basic rights, be they animal or human, on the stage of differences and minorities, purified by so many centuries of philosophy and science.
Thus, what the poet reduces to the enchantment and training of mysticism, the philosopher reduces to the banality of the engine of thought: everyday life, between the dazzle and the punctuality of celebration. The philosopher then sees no need to celebrate, because his success comes from his action-satisfaction extended in the time he fulfills by his status in everyday life. So too, he has to breathe supernaturality from the plunge into culture, punctuating his daily life by waiting for the right thought and, if he writes, the right concept and word, as if describing the undoing of souls, either in gasp or in ecstasy, still in this world and returning to it that he is witness to. The philosopher's culture, then, is Time, the time he has to be a poet of the emphasis of culture and the star movement of the stars and satellites of feeling that can inhabit a nightclub in Bairro Alto.
Thus, the sphere of practicality is, above all, that of construction, world building and adding worlds to this half-built world, making domestic the globe as in the globalizations of the Discoveries. But it is also a sphere of destruction, as demonstrated by the recent guerrillas for independence in Spain, in Catalonia and the Basque Country. In social and individual, socio-individual terms. On the other hand, the sphere of contemplation has first of all to do with the context of religion, that is, to contemplate, in another moment of practicality, the work done, that is, to contemplate the action second-hand and prepare new action, so that action and contemplation, practicality and theory are just different moments of a process, on the threshold of human history and ingenuity. Hence the pertinence of anthropology in the context of a
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new understanding of Man and the Cosmos.
And, to put it another way, is there room for solidarity among those who do philosophy today? Philosophy has become, as well as other social sciences, a justification many times for evil, to protect the dictatorial power of the media handed over always to the same people, to the same families, as well as in politics, in sports in general and in soccer in particular. There is, therefore, a philosophical discourse that, among us, has to do even with the exaggeration of evil, in order to, as they say, understand human nature at home, in a realm of maximum possibilities that end up making the meaning and pure reason of the most banal circumstances sick, promoting a society of spectacle and love-dripping romantics, instead of the old dream of the man who wants to build houses in his village and surroundings and who has in his DNA the same as the entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution, to build, to build, in an ultimate plan in favor of otherness, of the Other, of giving to the Other his maximum possibilities to live and to win, to succeed, to "defend" himself.
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Like wine, life, biography, existence, needs to be assessed and if we have this, this process, through time in intergenerational terms, this is anthropology, social and cultural, that is, we are looking for the missing link of human existence, but it is right under our noses, under our beards, because even the younger generations recognize certain principles that, more than merely educational, are cultural, have to do with a common background that is transmitted from parents to children, from children to grandparents, as bonds that are sometimes made and sometimes broken with the use and domestication of time in a given space, in a cosmos that is more or less adequate, more or less manufactured and thought out, obviously in a context where money has to be earned to feed and preserve certain purposes of life in terms of individual and family existence. In all of this, there is a time of the void of existence, that is, moments of the moor, which correspond more to days and days of melancholy and almost inactivity, because what is most precious to social life has been lost, namely interaction, and no philosophy can do without this, because even the hermit sees some people. Or has seen.
Afterwards, when social scientists or philosophers discover the isthmus, the link between common sense and philosophy, many answers can be fully given, that is, while on the one hand we have the majority of the population, in demographic terms, who are inclined to common sense thinking, we have another component, the intellectuals, whose way of understanding reality is scientific, erudite. This phenomenon can be seen in philology, that is, in the evolution of language, as happened with Latin, for example. There was in Rome an erudite form, that of the upper castes, and a vulgar Latin, for the use of the people. There are interferences from one side to the other, from one form of language to the other, communicating vessels, interferences, interpenetrations, and both registers evolve by exchanging influences, with the erudite one feeding on the vulgar and the latter, in this case, ended up withering away while the language of the people gave rise to the neo-latin 14
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languages, better known as Romance languages. In this case, the Church 15
has definitely played an important role in the composition of what is Currently the Portuguese, it shaped what was said, said what could be said, and didn't say what couldn't be said.
The collective, social life needs to be stimulated by celebration and from there influence the exteriority of the subject. But if the subject is not the sum of all and then some, if it has no interchangeable flame, it soon withers away. Therefore, both social and individual life need to be stirred up, sometimes by the feasts of the local saint, sometimes by the love relationship. Does the hermit, at the height of his transcendence, have memories of his former life? Is it he who is in the cave, or is it everyone else together, by ties that are certainly fleeting in lovelessness, when existence in time perfects us and makes us wiser, if we know how to find a distinct balance in the course of days? Even the monk has his community, which obeys a very specific rule. And in the intense social life or in the convent, isn't happiness what it is all about? Isn't happiness what we all seek on our more or less starry path?
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Why does anthropology have one of its brightest fields in human sexuality, when philosophy seems to have always been made, planted by men, mostly full of flaws and, above all, macho? The spirit, trapped in a body of different shapes, has a hard time understanding sexuality, reason has always been the enemy of the senses. But is this really so? Hedonism, logical positivism, avant-gardism, which movement is right, and what is the role of the intellectual in today's life, in this practically post-pandemic society? Yes, because human and social relationships are at stake, and the virus, the disease, have changed the pattern of people's relationships with each other and, by extension, the way of seeing sexuality and affections in the fabric of everyday life, which has become banalized banal instead of celebrated festive...
So, what is the meaning of life. To be happy is to discover that meaning? Or is there another more or less specifically mechanical way to extract meaning for mind and heart from this time-crossed sojourn of ours? Is it Time that robs us of meaning and therefore of happiness? If we were eternal, would we be happy forever?
So too, forgetting and remembering are two devices that are part of and propel human action. What, then, is existential to human action? The phenomenology of truth, the fact, the accuracy in relating to the environment, the production of meaning that helps it to progress within the social and natural space? What is essential to human action?
The fact that your soul is always sticking to the space around and ahead, unlike the pathology that separates you from the world and erects reason as the holder of truth?
Be that as it may, what is existence? The object outside of meaning? Or just the essence transformed into something that the subject apprehends and relates to others in order to make a chain of meaning, overvalued at some moments and transformed into something absolutely banal at others? Does the philosopher need, in order to be properly so, to come out of himself, of the Ego, in order to relate the Id to the most diverse things in nature?
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If the monk cannot have the Have, the philosopher can. But the philosopher tends to annul the monk's territories, to occupy them, before and after leaving himself in a nihilistic pessimism that characterizes many who don't even suspect the overwhelming role of depression and mental illness, perhaps because he has never gone through philosophical crises, those crises that make one grow, and had always valued only material values and not Heideggerian Being-there. So why is the philosopher so prone to depressions and carrying the weight of the world? Because he worries; the world, in its possibility of eternity, is the fruit of anticipated worry.
Therefore, happiness, as if he alone knows how to tame time, including the Time of the Other, and asks nothing in return but the recognition of his writings and the philosophical diatribe. But the philosopher lives in the world, the monk does not, even if we can see convents as replicas of society, of a certain form of society, where he is happy, I don't know if happier than the philosopher, deluded by capitalist consumerism and oblivious to the things of religion other than in ceremonial terms, as if to fulfill a ritual that he soon gets rid of in the daily routine, in the banal roll of the post-modern, hyperactive, hypertextual society, where there are many people producing on the same theme, many people producing on the most varied themes, in a society that erodes the high for lack of ethics, even if when there were ethics at the same time it, on the other hand, did not exist. Can happiness be achieved, then, these days, with a lack of ethics? What is it, in fact, to be happy? Is it like eating a good meal? Is it obeying the classical authors, even though most of them are sexist and patriarchal in their thoughts? This is why there are few women philosophers, in my opinion.
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Sadness and melancholy take possession of the one who seeks the reasons for existence, who doesn't rest until he generates more and more questions about what is real, and then, further on, he realizes that these feelings are proper to each and every person and solves problems, yes, because philosophy also answers, it is not only a given realm of issues, of questions, but also a "realm of the whys. Only that it takes questions more seriously, trying to see what is under a pebble in the street where it passes, that is, it plants the ultimate reasons for Being, for being (here and there), for Belonging...
Why, then, is man unworthy of living life, of going forward, raising questions for everything and for nothing. Is it the lack of God? No, perhaps God is still present in the inner core of many people, while to others He says nothing. And, on the one hand, by putting pressure on this inaugural moment, man is driven to action, even without reflection, even without meditation, like a spring in the face of reality. And so, how should life be lived? The philosopher knows the same frustrations as the man of common sense, but in a more acute sense, because the latter easily frees himself from them, from the affections of the soul, taking refuge sometimes in food, sometimes in meat, despising things of the spirit, as if camouflaging himself against the danger of the passing of time. On the other hand, the motto "healthy mind in a healthy body"
seems to be, again, after the Greeks and Romans, the motto of modern, Western civilization. And this modus vivendi spreads to the rest of the world, even if the master, trained by consumerism and orgiastic communism of mixed bodies, flees upwards, to the side, out of reality. But, in order to understand this misunderstanding, psychiatry is erected as the highest of the wisdoms, dethroning philosophy, which in fact has never been queen in an age of technique in Western society, even if mental health is the most despised domain of health policies...
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We are, therefore, at every moment on the verge of forgetting who we are, taking new feathers in our spirit and adapting it to a new reality, a new great reality that is the Life of the spirit. Yes, the mind is demanding and small perceptions go against the religious ideal of the perfection of the mind, not knowing that it comes with time and the lumps of doubt outline the past better than a vision of the idea of God, where everything, including the landscape, is perfect. God is everything? The All? Yes, for those who believe in him, and yet in different degrees.
The peak of Western civilization, America, is an imagetic realization, reaping the risk to forget, to be remembered through forgetting, in the grounding of death and
potsmortem, as if undertaking a visual and conceptual saturation that is achieved, on the plane of the real in which the screen is the almost supernatural and what occupies the space of the Church is not the same as in Europe, at least in Portugal and Spain, but is something distinct, beyond in the diatrical register of the mind. To be American is, then, to be metaphysical. Perhaps up there, beyond, after all the criminal and existential issues, the true God is to be found, the One who makes man sweat so that he too can become a god, or at least a demi-god?
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Then, the realm of envy; what I have that you don't have or vice versa, what you do or know that I neither do nor know. Of all the intrigues of the spirit, the greatest is to envy someone intellectually, that is, to be envious of their social representation, something that can lead to crimes and harmful and toxic relationships, and in the limit, to domestic violence and death from jealousy.
Basically, addictions -alcohol, tobacco, drugs- keep you attached to the world, to a square, geometric, spatial locus, determined when you love too much the woman who has crossed your path and, in a certain way, you don't need God, you dismiss Him because you feel too alive to feel you need supernatural help. The more you know men, the more you know God. He is everywhere. Hence the actuality of pantheism.
"God is everything," my mother told me as a child... And America bears witness to this, for better or for worse, a Bahá'í God who accepts all prophets as Beings sent by the supernatural to the service of the great Father.
Thus, the Good God also feels loneliness, because his creation, autonomized by the merry-go-round of reason, has taken a turn away from Good, has taken its own path and threatens to replace it, to occupy its own spiritual territories, now mental, if only by shadow zones dictated by parapsychology, by telekinesis, by spiritism, processes by which the spiritual facies is altered because a new geography of beings and biographical, videographical ghosts is at stake. Everything is used to deny God, when man can never shake off this idea, because He is in his core of humanity and will always bless or persecute him, as does the Devil he carries on his back.
Isn't the solution to the ills of much of our society, the solution to the lack of unhappiness and psychic well-being in the excess of communication? Nowadays there is no reserve, go, but easy forgetfulness? The work suggested by José Mattoso of a medieval author, "The Cloud of Not-knowing", in his text 21
"Raise the Sky," seems to assign to the realms of the human a certain amount-dose of secrecy that you need to be happy. There are people who are more secretive than others, people who are more reserved than others. Even so, we Portuguese seem to be in an eight and eighty regimen, when nobody can stand to be in one of the two registers for very long. Are we still looking for the right register to undertake new discoveries, this time those of the spirit? What has become of the Portuguese Church, which continues to forget certain items much more accepted by a more progressive Church, such as the marriage of priests and the ordination of women, to the level of belief and acceptance? I speak of the Catholic Church. And what about the Church of Lisbon? It remains sad, in the shadows and disguised in a cultural environment that is more profane and pagan than exactly Muslim in terms of heritage. Why is it that being a Christian is still a sign of weakness of spirit for some? A sign of poverty of concepts, a sign of limited ignorance?
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The world has become clogged, clogged, as on the tip of a cigarette, of references and so little valuable as what is close to us ceases to matter to us, as much as at the point of the cigarette, lheno of references, what is far away matters much more than the cigarette that is done, when that doesn't matter at all. Therefore, metaphysical bridges are lacking, and in the disbelief of religion, which is an instrument for climbing the social ladder for the poor, see the American executives, North and South Americans, like the Portuguese, who do not give up claiming God for their social purposes. On the other side, those lay people who, at the very least, want to be as rich as possible in life, because in death there is no point, so one has to mark this world with the seal of one's individuality, the laymen, the unbelievers, most of them university professors, atheists and agnostics, who never knew a metaphysical experience when they were young, or if they did know it as adults, they want to forcibly get rid of it because such a mnemonic record undermines your so-called sanity of spirit and steals the notion and space of divinity in their lives. Because religious experience is always replaced by the experience of the world, in a pretension and protension to become itself an instituted God, more or less wandering, with or without a physical church, with or without worshippers and believers. See in this respect the evangelical churches in the US and in Latin America, which replace the presence of the great religions of the Portuguese, Spanish and other European settlers.
So, if the Devil bothers a lot of people, in this day and age, God bothers a lot more.
Or, at least, the idea of Good, of what is Just, or of what is normal. Take domestic violence, a real social scourge, along with pedophilia and rape of women, which makes us think seriously, I would say philosophically, what kind of family we want to have. Minority rights have become the banner of civilization in terms of human rights, to the point that minorities are the ones who govern peoples. Isn't that too whimsical? The so-called
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normal? What about those who are normal if they are not normal? And those who are not normal if
well being? Where is the snapping of criteria is thus the progress of the human spirit, which goes back and forth, making sense, interspersed with the thought of the slingshot as if diving into a sea of understanding of what is most immense in the universe, that is, human nature.
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The epidemic has made society more monastic, therefore, not in its habits, but in its relationships, not fearful of a dangerous and reckless God, but with themselves, and has brought out the lowest common denominator, being human. When the
"Perseverance" probe lands on the surface of Mars we make a year of confinement, with a few exceptions. It is the practice of social relations that has changed with this pandemic, that is, we have to account up to the state of our health, which has become the most important issue, as professional soccer, of such abundance, has spread to the female sex.
Relationships that are too socially open are forbidden, under the pretext of a fine or of contagion; to leave home one needs justification; one can work, but telecommuting, at home. Meanwhile, the numbers are starting to drop, and after a year and several false alarms, we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. For many, loneliness is a heavy burden and mental illnesses skyrocket, because psychiatry here in town has always argued that spending too much time at home is bad for mental health, you need to go for a walk, even if it's with the dog, go to the movies, socialize, which is the best remedy for an illness like loneliness and some other mental illnesses.
Yes, Covid may be leaving soon. But let's not kid ourselves. The poison is out there and it is at the core of all of us in social relationships. This is the real poison that, when awakened from our hearts, does the most harm to our society and the more it spreads, whether in economic or psychic or computer form, it does enormous damage. It is the virus of intolerance and meanness, but also of the bourgeois spirit instead of the cosmopolitan spirit and the virus of cosmopolitanism instead of the house connected to the world and the surroundings of the heart.
Thus, life is recognized in a certain space, celebratory, mediatic, proper to the disco and the pub, while death is relegated to a secondary plan, behind the curtain of the (social) stage of life. By stamping so hard on life, man 25
He certainly seeks death in the most unsuspected forms, but by hiding death so much, it ends up exploding like a grenade in his hands, instead of being thrown away. But this is also a news story. And the question is the same as always: What kind of television do we have? Who are the programmers? Is the man of culture forever condemned to RTP2 or ARTE, if he doesn't want to make a melting pot of culture with his sedentary television experience?
The act of smoking sums up the essentials of Western civilization, in its meager good habits: I avoid smoking as much as possible, because I know it is bad for me, like all vices. But, I am planted in a civilization of pleasure (and its discontents), in a hedonistic, yet democratic civilization; therefore, I can choose to have pleasure and feel the need to have pleasure over and over again, even if the deprivation of that pleasure brings me pain, for the lack of that substance that the body feels. The same is true of voyeurism in terms of porn. Do those who do it have moral principles? That is, is cultivating the body for the purpose of pleasure spectacle legitimate, even in a democracy, shall we say? Addiction, pleasure, soft drugs, hard drugs, prostitution.
And why does visiting the girls slow down the desire to see sex? Isn't porn just and only, a machinal product, as existential autonomy and some unity because profitable, a product of industrial society, first, of the making, and of Western society, of American tenor, later? Sexual freedom is confused with freedom in general, when it is not even a form of freedom, better, libertinism, rebellion, well embodied in movies where James Dean, Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, Marlon Brando act. It is a certain spirit at work, alien to the pleasures of religion and monasticism. But there is much more between porn and monasticism, there is the social life and the will that animates to fulfill a mission like being the head of a family. In fact, this is where the supreme pleasure comes from: being, as it were, (all) social scientists, even if not all of us realize it through scientific articles.
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Thus, the role of the artist is nothing but to eternalize the moment, to make it memorable, celebratory of some rave in Israel, for example. And if literary writing is an art, the writer takes the forms of divinity when creating, and it is no wonder that it is said that each book is a son. There are those who have many and are a big-men, there are those who have only two or three, but the thing doesn't go unspoken because of that, the quantity. But it is rare for a writing slim to be prolific, to be overlooked and forgotten, and to leave writing for writing's sake, with good and bad moments and in various registers. This is the case for us, which is why we write this essay i n these pandemic times that obligation to quanse spiritual recollection, even without running in particular and physical exercise in general.
Thus, what matters most in this Existenz is not so much the present moment, the moment that is, but the moment that is being, in a designable Heideggerian dasei that we deposit on the instant, on doubt, and that we manage in a certain training of the dispositional functions of everyday life, a-la-mano.
Remember: if someone like you is lonely, there is always someone else who is more lonely: We are one and many, there are always those who have had good experiences but in the end come to their senses and have not truly lived life. And truly living life has nothing to do with loneliness or mating, it has to do with giving up certain things in favor of other things that are much more important, you are like the spiritual component that everyone has in potential and that not everyone develops, like a talent for the supernatural, a will to live instead of a will to power, based on a strong vocation for meditation and contemplation, and that life can either give everything or, at another moment, take everything away, but the spiritual perspective no one can take away from you, no matter how hard you try. You celebrate life for life's sake, then you become a monk, because you weigh your spiritual and emotional balance and see that you could have acted differently but the pressure of the moment led you to abandon certain people, when later you even became too demanding in relationships.
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Yes, because with this epidemic the normal man has been trapped at home and the ghosts of loneliness have risen again; the artist turns around and uses the dead times of friendlessness to create. However, creation is nothing but a reflection of his social situation and he too needs to socialize. What results from this last year is an unprecedented social reconfiguration, as if a bomb had fallen on us or a new holocaust, the price of having friends is new, and even creation itself has been installed to give way to almost chronic depression.
Inspiration is not, as always, inside the ear, but it can be behind the ear, in a climate outside the Being, in the realm of exteriority in the face of poetic inspiration.
Thus, beauty is not only in the face or the body, it is in the way we model our will in the face of the demands or concessions of the environment, physical and social, and if sometimes we feel despair at being alone, sometimes we feel euphoria at being presentable and no one can see us, being that social visibility was cut with this flu that changed, also yes, the perception of reality, especially among the younger ones, because the more mature ones were already used to seeing reality in a more cautious way, after the Troika crisis...
It is thus that the very notion of exteriority is threatened, because through confinement we have returned to ourselves, to the convent, to the monastic life of the first castros of Iberian civilization, that is, to the domain of the home and of the conquest of territory that we undertake every time we go to the supermarket, every time we travel to work. We then confuse the domain of exteriority with that of interiority, and we no longer know for sure what is intimate and what is public, if it is more intimate what is redoubledly public if it is the customary private.
Thus, we can see monads as individual subjects with various implications in social life, that is, when they meet for a long time, frequenting their intimacies, they end up reproducing themselves. But they can also meet for a certain long time and not reproduce, reproducing other forms of social procreation, 28
of reproduction, at the level of ideas and spirit, that is, by entwining around them new forms of sociability that reproduce in automata and robots and that simulate the roll of social relations, forged in coadunation with the social and environmental environment. Social failure comes, most of the time, in the inability to have patience with what happens in terms of social phenomena, of professional phenomena, and comes in the eagerness and haste in the face of what is done and whose representativeness for being greater or lesser. As in love relationships. Patience is what is required when you want to succeed socially, artistically, because your profile and social representation comes with time, usually associated to age cycles and what is like this today can be like this tomorrow.
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The human soul, after a certain moment, after a certain stage, is nothing but selectivity, it only does and thinks what it likes, what is proper of its own redoubt.
Many artists try to capture the human soul, something common to all or else something siungularly beautiful that needs to be highlighted for posterity, postponed for posterity. While some try to do it through music, through literature, others believe that such task is done through cinema, opera, multimedia. The human soul can be captured by a breath of life and activity, others believe it will be in the long term or else by religion, with more or less work. This search is mostly associated with the veneration of beauty, with an idea of perfectibility in the articulation of mind and body. For this reason, others see the crucible of the human soul in sports, and not much else is said, or in the era of technology, in speed or recreational cars, others adapted to daily life and work, usually in a city context.
Thus, philosophy is of the nocturnal regime and art of the diurnal regime, while some celebrate, another works for itself through art and this one is nothing, like philosophy, nothing without social recognition, if only to continue doing the same, art or philosophy. But philosophy, unlike literature, is a pretended evidence, a making evident, of the creative process, hence its singular vocation of unmasking between what is human and what is transcendent. To this extent, it fulfills a function and is also a technique, not only of living, but also of reading, reading the world and the possibilities of evidence of new from what is old and shrunken. In this way, it is ultimately a non-exclusive form of wisdom because it is open to the most varied expectations of Being, Existing, and Belonging.
The philosopher does not live in the moment, he lets the moment pass in us and in others and wants to surf in the transcendent, to inhabit the moment that already was, already passed, in order to resurrect it for the already, the now, on the one hand and in the there, in terms of the future. Hence his intimate relationship with Time, which he tries to tame, yes, the philosopher is, first of all, a tamer of 30
time, when the anthropologist relates it to the social and cultural world and leaves the bureaucracy and politics for the sociologist and others The local and the global come from human geography and history, from the voyages and discoveries of navigators, and philosophy makes the near distant and the distant near, even geographically, because it is an art of relativizing, just like anthropology, which makes strange what is near and near what is distant. The rest is politics and governance, that is, politically correct ways of ordering subjects architecturally in a certain space when they are bound to a certain time.
Thus, practice comes from a certain form of economy inscribed in Time, at the same time that it abdicates transcendence, which is always a refusal of a present moment, it is inscribed in history, personal and social, something that is in the scope of an experience that is not registered, that is, there is a gap, in certain societies, between literate and illiterate knowledge, while the literate puts everything in question, the illiterate is meant for and comes from an instinct of conservation of a group, of a way of life. It is the relationship between these two ways of facing reality that interests me scientifically, philosophically.
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Thus, the eroticism of relationships has to come with a greater or lesser investment in the world, in the things of the world, that can only be seen from afar, just as an investment in anthropology has to come with things and the relationships between things and people, in the most diverse contexts with the end of erecting the theory with which others, artists or technicians, will understand a world where in most cases they are blind and not everyone knows how to glimpse it correctly in its most diverse forms and questions of unfolding to the eyes, to the senses. Then, philosophy has to do with the transcendent, not eliding theology, which in a certain way is the one that is closest to philosophy. A philosophy of knowledge, that can be transmitted and even given, offered to the human race so that man can understand that which poses the most enigmas, precisely, not so much God, but himself...
Because time is short and we need to do something important with our lives and, contrary to what it may seem, in this chapter philosophy has a central role, not to complicate, but to lay a brick in the building of the human sciences. Philosophy is the deepest echo of existence, a call from the man who suffers and wants to see life go forward, even if his perception is and is constituted in terms of a peripheral knowledge, that is, the philosopher is thrown and judged in his existential stronghold and his words transform and inflame an already hollow and sad world, filling, filling, the empty lives of culture, usually tied up in certain social roles, constituting itself as a building that questions the Other without judging him, moving forward in words, wrapped in a logic that is not even man's, not human, but perhaps even more Martian than the astronauts who will be sent there, or being, taking into account the Other and giving anthropology the role it probably never had in philosophy, that of the connecting thread between the explanatory monads with human speech and behavior.
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Thus, knowledge, philosophical or social science, needs, as if it were a sponge, the oldest living being that dwells at the bottom of the sea, to be squeezed in function of the world, so that it can spread and fructify, with the due manure of human action, towards the social world in a perspective of understanding man in his activities and in his thinking and logics, so that it finally ceases to be a poor, marginalized and ostracized knowledge and becomes the center of the current reflection on the condition of Being, relativizing the knowledge of common sense, which is always a professionalized knowledge, which legitimizes the logics of the here and now, usually by more or less monad people who never erect reflection as the center of their lives.
It is clear that philosophy does not interest the world. Neither does anthropology and sociology. They constitute themselves as opponents to the rolling and blushing of the world and only intervene from time to time, and in Portugal they are restricted to the academies. Of course this, this question, obeys to fashions, to times of greater or lesser interest. In my opinion, after the experience of the pandemic, because it is the world as will and representation that dictates its laws, philosophy should be constituted as a social science. Because the core of what it is to be human is not in the Self, but in the relationship, in its tension and intention towards the Other. This, in my view, is what defines man. Even with the greatest of adventures, the stellar, the galactic, what man seeks is to answer that essential question before the immensity of the universe: are we alone?
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Thus, the realm of Belonging, rather than the realm of perception, is something that precedes man's own destiny and defines him, just like Being, he is attached to Parecer, that is, glimpsing the space between monadic real and social representation, there is a space of inhabitation where man spends more time with himself and it is even a memory of Belonging, of the relationship with the Other, that defines him as Being.
But not everyone practices philosophy, not everyone distributes bread to the villages, hence the idea of complementarity, that you need a little bit of everything, not everyone subjects themselves to being mocked by their own relatives, not having work, as philosophers or not. Human beings are opportunistic and self-interested by nature, and they shy away from dependence, be it economic or strictly physical, labor. But this does not imply that they stop betting on ties, essentially on those that give them advantages of various kinds. Also in the academy there are dependencies in the fight for the symbolic capital that is who writes better, who speaks and thinks better. It is the domain of competition, even though many do their activities alone.
Thus, the philosopher, unemployed or retired, is always subject to criticism from others ("do the same", "get along", even from the kids, always subject to criticism and I still can't understand why, maybe because he is out of touch with the present moment, or because of the lack of solidarity and companionship of the philosophers here in town. Or, perhaps, because another philosophy is needed, one more attentive to social power relations in a competitive world from which not even the philosopher, like the religious, can escape, because before being, be it there or there, he is under the eagerness of belonging, he is part of and therefore accountable to his superiors or inferiors.
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