Why something and not nothing? Why the entity and not nothing?

by Maria Odete Madeira

"Why something and not nothing?” (Leibniz) Nihil est sine ratione; “Why the entity and not nothing?” (Heidegger).

The matter of the foundation of the Being is a good, endless and disturbing metaphysical question that started with Parmenides and was lengthily developed by Heidegger.

Schelling placed the question of the foundation as a self-position of the Being unfolded in two positions: one as Absolute in itself and another as the other of itself, this last, reciprocally presupposed in a circular topology.

By placing itself as the foundation of itself, the Being placed itself in existence, as a difference from which all things come.

For Heidegger, each entity is one of the modes of the Being, and, each entity, is also its difference, each entity is the being-there (dasein) referring to itself (ek-sistence).

The truth of the Being (aletheia) belongs to the Being itself, Being physis is aletheia. The Being gives itself (es gibt) as Being and Time and, thus, as something that has given itself, the being is event (Ereignis), the logos that wants to be heard.

Love (Hegel, Hölderlin, Unitrinity, Schelling...)

by Maria Odete Madeira

Hegel and Hölderlin introduced a new thinking about sensitivity, in opposition to the anguish and insecurity before alterity (natural, personal and social), that were at the origin of Aufklärung.

This new thinking tried to capture and recuperate the pulsional dynamism and the affective dimension that constitute the human being.

The issue of love was developed as a reply to intrinsic problems and to an internal determinant dialectics, that operated as function of synthesis in the system, that is, a middle-term between the theoretical order and the practical domain.

Love was incorporated, in Hegel’s logical system, as fundament of the harmony of the “Spirit”, in its function of unification of reflexive and effective synthesis of the thought and the feeling.

Love configurated, in Hegel, the dialectical motion of reason, as exposition, negation and return of reason to itself, surpassed. The loving dynamics adequately described the character of the “Absolute” as a fundament of itself, that is, the reconciled return to itself, from its other (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Theorie Werkausgabe).

A different thinking about the feeling of love, seems to come from the notion of Unitrinity, that inscribes itself in the kenosis of the Son (Christ) that reveals God’s mystery as love, a gift that inscribes in space and time an ineffable exchange within the divinity itself. That is, the love as a feeling towards the other, because God as unity does not exclude the other (Son), the Son is already within divinity itself as object of intentionality, for the realization of the love, realizing what can be considered a Superunity (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite).

In the unity, the feeling of love is already a communion with the other without negation, unlike Hegel, and closer to Schelling.

One cannot find, however, in any philosopher, a feeling without an intentionality, without an underlying reason for its being, in the case of Hegel this reason is to be negated and surpassed.

In a neurobiological framework and in a philosophical framework, both feelings and emotions possess an unsurpassable intentionality, they are always about something (their object of intentionality) that relates the individual/agent/subject with his/her environment (culture, civilization, people, recollections, artifacts, etc), possessing a fundamental adaptive value.

Epicurus - Clinamen

by Maria Odete Madeira

While disagreeing, with regards to the topos of the universal essences, Plato and Aristotle were in agreement with regards to a fundamental point: the scientific discourse (episteme) could only be considered as true when that same discourse satisfied criteria of universality and of necessity. Thus, it was demanded of the inquiry to find the foundation of any statement of truth or of falsehood, in what were the first causes and the first principles of the things, themselves.

In this way, in order to have discursive rigor, the matter and its forms or essences (eidos) should be analyzed separately as different things, both in terms of their identity as well as of the value that was assigned to them. The epistemic analysis of one should not contaminate, interpretatively, the epistemic analysis of the others.

The object of knowledge, that object's matter and its form or essence, as well as its meaning and definition, obeyed, for Plato and for Aristotle, rigorous criteria of appropriateness and agreement, that would allow a general deductive semantics. These criteria prolonged themselves in Euclid’s geometry and in the statics of Archimedes, both based upon a system of axioms that constituted self-evident truths, and upon a system of theorems derived from those same axioms.

The semantic determinism of the Greek scientific discourse was generalized as an epistemic model until Epicurus, distancing himself from the primitive atomism of Democritus, introduced the notion of clinamen (declination) as a capability, an arbitriu that the atoms have to deviate themselves spontaneously from their trajectories. Thus, Epicurus incorporated, in the philosophical and scientific discourse, an irreducible element of unpredictability at the epistemic level, absent up until then, with ontological and epistemological consequences about that which was considered as criterion of truth.

Without putting into question the “general laws of nature”, known at the time, the author localized a present and permanent dispositional element of constitutive arbitrariness (arbitriu), in any process of formation of emergent structures, as an element incorporated in the dispositional genetics of these same structures with consequences at the level of the systemic perception and cognitive processing/computation, and at the ontological level of the threat of destructuration and the opportunity of structuration, present in any physical existent, and that function as mechanisms of potential risk (linked to the mechanisms of life and death) and, thus, undetermined, permanently displaced, within the structure itself.

About the Life of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Life

by Maria Odete Madeira

Any production of knowledge is supported by an organizing activity that acts in accordance to rules that have, as their objective, the resolution of problems that promote the organism’s survival and adaptive fitness.

The discovery of the double-helix, by Watson and Crick, allowed the application, to the notion of living organization, of the cybernetic scheme of a machine governed by an informational program, inscribed in the structure of the DNA molecules, that organizes and directs all the activities of the cellules (Morin, 1986).

In this way, a living organization can be signaled and referred as a self-cognitive, self-organizing and self-replicating agent that is capable, through exchanges with the environment, of concentrating, in itself, the flows of order that feed it and sustain it as a spatio-temporally localized individuated structure.

The knowledge of the life of the systems introduces us to the life of the knowledge, itself. Being, doing and knowing are, thus, inseparable.

The development of communication networks, between the different agents, allowed the transformation, of the natural flows and turbulences, in the subjugated motricity that was at the origin of the human space of millions of years ago, and that can be signaled as a bio-anthropological space aimed at the satisfaction of the biological needs of survival and of the immediate and practical interests, full of feelings and emotions, fantastic visions and terrors, but also full of techniques and precise calculations, synchretically linked to the objects.

In that historical time, the time of the myth, the interface with the environment was profoundly biological, accompanied by that which Damásio (1999) designates by core consciousness, characterized by a weak grasping ability and a weak reflexive operativity that did not allow the exercise of abstract thinking.

The type of thinking produced was profoundly linked to the aleatority of the motion of the natural forces, whose nature revealed itself as powerful, threatening and dramatic.

In this way, the production of judgments exhibited a perceptual and conceptual pattern that allowed the hominidian networks to signal, identify an classify the ecosystemic space, as a fluid and fluctuating nature, determined by local dynamic, unstable, coevolutionary and organic rules, foundationally conditioned by locally emergent mechanisms of territorialization and deterritorialization, rhizomatically aleatorial, producer of myths (meudh, mudh, myo, mytheo, mythos) and of rites, linked to the vital emotions and feelings of immediate survival and creators of visual, tactile, acoustic, and olphactive action spaces, conceptually non-schematizable, but that interacted with the strategic calculus that allowed the development of techniques of working the stone, then the bone and, also, the metal, as well as the development of cognitive memories, associated with the knowledge of the plants, of the animals and of the environment.

From the passage of the mythological thinking towards the so-called rational thinking, the knowledge came to be explicitly referred to as kosmos, or order, and as logos, term of Greek origin, derived from the verb legein that, originally meant to gather, to enumerate or to choose.

In turn, the noun logos, that initially meant collection and (re-)collection of the multiple, came to mean the discourse.

The kosmos and the logos, that substituted the myth as an attempt of interpretation and explanation of the reality, in its complexity, corresponded to the development of the capability of the organismic human grasp, accompanied by the expansion of consciousness.

The core consciousness, thus, lost operative protagonism to the extended consciousness, which came, since then, to operate in the interface with the environment. In accordance with Damásio (1999), if core consciousness is the indispensable foundation of consciousness, extended consciousness is its glory.

Unlike core consciousness, extended consciousness allows to work on temporally more expanded interaction surfaces, connectable to mechanisms of retension and protension.