Distropia

Well, some of you read us in English, some of you in Portuguese. So I’ll go for the cosmopolitan option and write this post in both languages.

I just want to let everyone know about the Phenomenology Research Center at Southern Illinois University. This is, I quote:

[a] collaborative community of learning that hosts national and international graduate students, post-doctoral students, as well as junior and senior scholars. Located in Carbondale, Illinois at Southern Illinois University, the Center accommodates interdisciplinary perspectives, and focuses on joint research as a way of informing individual study.

We are ready to receive scholars interested in researching on phenomenology, if you are interested please mail admin@phenomenologyresearchcenter.org for instructions as to how to apply and more information about the center.

Right now, you should get all information you need about the center at this website. We currently have three associated researchers working in the center, under the direction of Prof. Steinbock. Two more researchers are scheduled to join us next semester. Soon, I’ll add more pictures of the center and more information regarding applications and work projects to the website.

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Bom, vamos para o Português.

O centro para pesquisa em Fenomenologia acabou de ser aberto aqui na Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Trata-se de um centro para suporte em pesquisa e investigação interdisciplinar dentro do método fenomenológico, o centro tem condições de dar suporte institucional e técnico para quem tem interesse na área. Ainda estamos trabalhando na possibilidade de oferecer bolsas próprias ao centro, mas alunos de pós graduação interessados em  passar um semestre ou um ano pesquisando fenomenologia no centro devem definitivamente mandar um email para admin@phenomenologyresearchcenter.org.

Considerando a atual excelência da pesquisa desenvolvida pelo professor Steinbock, principalmente relacionada com Husserl (fenomenologia generativa), Merleau-Ponty (estudos sobre o corpo e ontologia social) e Levinas (misticismo e filosofia da religião), eu realmente acredito que alunos  brasileiros interessados neste tema podem se beneficiar do contato com os demais pesquisadores no centro e o acesso privilegiado à atual pesquisa avançada pelo Prof. Steinbock. Trata-se, sem dúvida, de uma das dez melhores instituições onde fazer um estudo de curto prazo em fenomenologia, e um dos poucos centros (creio que existem três) para pesquisa nesta área nos Estados Unidos.

Estou desenvolvendo a página em Português e Espanhol, mas vocês já podem acessar a página do centro em inglês – totalmente funcional – aqui.

Dúvidas, comentários e sugestões na caixa de comentário, ok?

Since Levinas and Derrida the question of ethics and ontology has been called into play for a variety of reasons. As a matter of fact, one can trace this effort back to Heidegger and his fundamental ontology, as the question of Care and Being was cast in order to deal with issues of Authenticity and Integrality.

Heidegger, of course, couldn’t care less about the well-being of others, the happy life or decency in general. His concern was with a fundamental question of neutralizing modes-of-being as concepts and dealing with these modes to stablish a ground that would make it possible for all beings to be. Dasein and the care for Dasein arise in this context. Authors like Loparic, Arendt and to a certain extent Agamben, try to show how this movement might have something to say about ethics, case in point, the relationship between Care and Moral Epistemology – Care would be the basis of moral behavior in the same way that Existence is the basis of being-oneself.

The question of ontology is then recast also by authors like Levinas and Derrida in the context of Ethics as first philosophy, the concreteness of the Other would give rise to dynamics of recognition and capture that give the sense of Ethics as ground – Ethics would then ground Being and Care. The self emerges as an emotional response to the Absolute Other, to this immanently given alterity. Levinas moral epistemology (that I assume to be to a great extent shared by Derrida) has some quite interesting points, most of them would be related to the incarnation of moral perceptions and the substitution of the Other in the Same – the so-called movement of Totalization. Indeed, some of Levinas’ descriptions of moral constitution and self-constitution seem to be spot-on. Problems arise, however, when we are faced with the conclusion of such ontoligization (sic) of morals.

And this is true both to the construction of Care as the basis for moral epistemology and to the attempt to expose the Ethical core of everydayness. Because the question of Care in Heidegger is completely neutralized in order to give rise to the issue of Authenticity – there is no emotional ground to Care in Heidegger, there is no Ethics at play there, and we must question the consequences of taking such dry notion as grounding to a moral epistemology. Moreover, one should not ignore the sheer anachronism that claiming to ontology as the fundamental question of contemporary ethics brings.

As for the exposure of the Ethical Core of everydayness, it brings problems when we are faced with the perfectionism of Levinasian morality. Levinas philosophy is deeply conservative in its conceptions of behaviour, emotion and obligation, and this conservative background is not purely coincidental, it is a consequence of the attempt to ontologize Ethics. In order to create an Ethical ground one needs moral facts that are not temporalized, one needs a deeply rooted notion of Good and Goodness, one that is fully incompatible with the subtlety of modern life. If Levinas was able to point at issues of Moral Epistemology fittingly, he was not able to develop those issues in order to narrate forms of being-moral that are compatible with our current lifeworld, moreover, he was not able to scape an exoteric and hyperbolic view of moral facts and obligations that imply on behaviour that most of us would rather not seek – the life of a Saint is fitting to some, but not to all , and it is quite clear Levinas is a perfectionist because he trusts we could make ourselves Holy, we could make ourselves more like the moral facts out-there.

Derrida seems to be a little less radical as he points to the enforcement of morality in the dynamics of recognition, as well as to the construction of a moral field. In this, he aims at a similar point to the one forwarded by Arendt. The moral world is built linguistically, and we are as moral as the predicate assertions we use to describe the world. Acts of signification are always moral acts. To a certain extent, its hard not to agree with this point – that Husserl already pointed in the notion of representation in Idees I. However, the question becomes rather complicated when the issues of ontology are again brought to play. Arendt tries to associate her linguistic turn with the Kantian normative turn, and in this she lets go of some of the ontological presuppositions of Heideggerian care. Her political philosophy – if problematic – is still able to deal with most of our problems without resorting to anachronism – but it still seems to be haunted by a ghost, one that is even more apparent in Derrida.

This ghost is the claim that from linguistic forms of predication we can derive moral behavior. There’s more at stake here, even if expression does indicate linguistic ethical forms it does not imply that the forms it indicates are fittingly constructed to deal with issues. Though it is an interesting movement in terms of – again – moral epistemology, I am not sure as to the extent these descriptions of how we assert morality are helpful in order to identify moral problems. Moreover, I am no sure if there is not a huge step backwards in this attempt to establish the concreteness of moral problems.

If we admit morals are constructed in time and accordingly to forms of living, we must also recognize that the moral problems that we identify are always at hand, they are not expressive forms of substantial Being, but ever-modified expressions – given in multiple ways and hardly reducible to ontological relevances. In this, we must recognize the genius of Husserl when he points that different forms of givenness call for different descriptions of phenomena. And phenomena are not simply controlled by a dry ontologization of Care or hyperbolic imposition of Otherness. Certainly, that was part of Derrida’s point, but when he fell into the question of Alterity and Moral Obligation, he fell into an abyss of ontologizing forms of moral expressions that must be so, and that’s a steping back 400 years of moral philosophy. It sacrifices a great deal of the progress in moral discussion that were had since Hume showed us that where we once found predicates that Ought we could actually find predicates that are - and since Rawls has shown us that even this distinction between realism and emotivism could be best dealt with if we first recognized that the issue of morals is not metaphysical, but political.

there are laws of mythical thinking as strict and rigorous as you would find in the natural sciences.

“I’m just working in my workshop on very particular questions which can hopefully make a little more rigorous some of the human sciences. Nothing I’m doing is going to particularly ease mankind’s problems. I’m a theoretician.”

Com Lévi-Strauss morre o último dos grandes racionalistas clássicos franceses, com ele um estilo de organização sistemática e apelo ao coerentismo marcado pela presença de estruturas fortes de análise de tipos desaparece, perde seu último grande defensor – e em alguns aspectos, o inventor de uma forma de abordagem para fenômenos estruturais. É verdade que Lévi-Strauss viveu para ver sua teoria ser a crista da onda e depois detonada, viveu para ver um ou dois revivals de sua teoria e até foi testemunha da apropriação tardia dos próprios textos – poucos autores tem o privilégio de ver a recepção das suas obras clássicas 50 anos depois da publicação destas.

Lévi-Strauss, se não for colocado no Pantheon, certamente mereceria estar lá. Não pela atualidade da sua obra, mas pela importância do que ele fez, do seu esforço teorizante de compreensão da estrutura do mundo – ainda que hoje possamos ver algumas partes deste esforço de identificação de estruturas abrangentes como essencialmente igênuo, é importante reconhecer o que significou para uma geração de pesquisadores as condições metodológicas estabelecidas por Lévi-Strauss. No mais, talvez nenhum pesquisador estrangeiro tenha sido tão importante para o estabelecimento de uma cultura de pesquisa no Brasil que hoje torna a nossa antropologia uma das mais qualificadas do mundo – inclusive, se algum campo de humanidades no Brasil é relevante internacionalmente, este campo é sem sombra de dúvida a antropologia, e sem Lévi-Strauss antropólogo algum no Brasil escreveria uma linha hoje.

Para quem escreve e fala de filosofia, a importânciafica neste apelo quase que originário a estruturas e ao racionalismo, ao coerentismo semântico e rigor procedimental é indispensável. Lévi-Strauss é importante para autores tão diferentes quanto Tugendhat, Umberto Eco e Geertz justamente por esta razão, e cada um destes autores vai pegar um elemento diferente para criticar, apropriar e re-considerar.  Mesmo teólogos como Levinas e Caputo acharam espaço para a consideração de Lévi-Strauss enquanto um pensador que oferece elementos teóricos indispensáveis para a pesquisa sobre símbolo, sobre experiência e sobre ídolatria.

Mas a lição da biografia intelectual de Lévi-Strauss é a da importância de manter uma teoria consistente e aberta à crítica, que faz a crítica e a construção do conhecimento possível. O apelo a estrutura, ao coerentismo, é justamente o elemento que permitiu que tantos pudessem criticar Lévi-Strauss tão fortemente e a importância da obra dele é justamente ter instigado e dado o tom para duas ou três gerações de antropólogos, sociólogos, filósofos e mesmo teólogos.  Lévi-Strauss nos ensina que sem rigor, sem coerência e sem apelo a algum tipo de fundo estrutural, a gente tá perdido – e esta é uma constatação cada vez mais difícil de escapar.