Juliana de Albuquerque Katz

Tel Aviv University, Israel.

In a journal entry from July, 1927 Simone de Beauvoir establishes to herself an imperative not to take Philosophy as a joke; to systemize her thoughts and believe in the worth of ideas; to read as if for the first time and doubt of the unspoken certainty that it might be false. She sought to take everything seriously and to be implacable against herself in as much as being less skeptical in regards to others. The discipline and commitment of the young student were acknowledged by the jury in charge of the agrégation, who placed her second after Jean-Paul Sartre but that also claimed that of the two of them, she was the philosopher.

Much like an athlete or a performer, a philosopher’s work entails sacrifice and discipline in order to achieve the exact attunement with the complexity of her own times and the equilibrium between the dragging and abyssal forces of tradition. In this paper I do not intend to question the originality or the place of Beauvoir in the Philosophical Tradition. Instead I want to analyze the structure of her philosophical ideas in order show what made her rise as a philosophical genius that sought for equilibrium between thinking-with a philosophical canon and setting up her own philosophical autonomy.

In order to achieve this purpose I will place Simone de Beauvoir on a high wire, facing the depths of Hegelian Philosophy with the aid of Heidegger as an ingenious and yet questionable balancing tool. This metaphor will be addressed as I try to answer two fundamental questions directed at her metaphysical novel All Men are Mortal: how did thinking-with Hegel modeled Beauvoir’s approach to intersubjectivity and how did she made use of Heidegger’s criticism of Metaphysics in order to come up with her own ethics of relations.

Beauvoir, whose readings of Hegel pre-dates the famous lectures by Kojève at the École Normal Supérieure, had a broad knowledge of the Hegelian System. Her works reveal a comprehensive reading of Hegel’s Logic, of his Philosophy of Nature, of the Philosophy of Right, and, of course, of the Phenomenology of the Spirit. However, far from using Hegel as an intellectual ornament, she tried to deal with his texts in their demanding complexity, without ever becoming a prisoner of his system.

For instance, although Beauvoir claims that All Men are Mortal is a novel developed out her intensive dialogue with Hegelian philosophy, in which she explores the possibility of Hegelian notion of the mutual acknowledgement, she also manages to add her own criticism to the formula – By describing a main character who had become immortal and, therefore, has seen his particularity subsumed in an universality which does not account for the ambiguous nature of man’s life – for the tragedy comported in one’s own finitude, Beauvoir criticizes what she considers to be Hegel’s optimism, i.e., his faith in the Absolute and in History – his lack of sensibility to notice that difference and contradiction carried within the subject are the witness to our fundamental ambiguity, i.e., that the series of phenomena that discloses the truth about man’s existence is marked by the fact that man is finite and at the same time tries to run away from his own finitude; that man is free, but at the same time ventures with the possibility to abdicate his own liberty, etc. That man at the same time is fundamentally alone but logically dependent upon others.

In the novel, the acknowledgement of the finitude of man – his existence in time and the inevitability of his death – is what accounts for the fact that he can built reciprocal relations with other men partaking in that same situation. While in Hegel’s work the particularity of man and its finitude are dialectically suppressed in the universal; according to Beauvoir, an existentialist ethics should account for a plurality of finite men transcending in direction of their own projects, through the experience of their own situation as Individuals within whom particularity is as radical and irreducible as their own subjectivity.

Beauvoir maintains with Heidegger that her philosophy is based on difference – instead of investigating being by taking the absolute concept as an object of thought. She seeks to take difference qua difference as an object of thinking: a thinking that emerges and develops itself in the finitude. To Beauvoir, bounds of love; the bounds out of which our ethical and philosophical experience is made possible can only happen in the recognition of our fundamental separateness and finitude and it’s acceptance by other beings experiencing that same situation.

Part 1 

“And if the earthly no longer knows your name,

whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.

To the flashing water say: I am.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

Silence is usually characterized as holding no positive value, or as an impediment to effective communication – “Silence is often treated as an obstacle to be overcome,”[1] as means of isolation. It indicates a lack of activity, hence the meaning of the expression dead silence as inactivity and unproductivity – the absence of familiar life.

In dealing with our daily affairs we are confronted with noise: the alarm clock, the cars, the phone calls, the text messages, the philosophy lectures, the queue at the cafeteria, the songs busting loose from the speakers spread all over the campus.  Noise is there to tell us that things are working properly – that everything is in its right place.

Our “civilization is a conspiracy of noise,” and a constant striving for progress and productivity, says Zerzan. Hence, one should not be surprised to notice the eventual failure of our philosophical tradition in positively addressing silence. For instance, Hegel would say that

(…) the more truthful form of intuition, ^{which is a sign, is an existence in time, – a disappearance of existence in its being there, and, according to its further external, psychic determination, a being-posited by the intelligence out of its (anthropological) own naturalness,} – the sound, [is] the fulfilled externalization of the interiority manifesting itself.[2]

Sound, and, therefore, the spoken word organized in a language system, attributes a second and more perfect nature to sensations and intuitions. “In Hegel, the sound of the sign-producing imagination presents itself exclusively as voice, as the productivity of the subjectivity.”[3] The Hegelian Spirit qua language is the voice which overcomes imagery and, through immateriality, bridges Spirit and thought – the Hegelian consciousness is a speaking consciousness.[4]

Although, in world of speaking consciousness, silence would be a means of isolation, one cannot fail to notice that, nowadays, the absence of silence renders our world empty and isolating. The endless noise of chatter and our daily use of language as a technique for ciphering and deciphering ready-made meanings, fails to understand that “more than a means, language is something like a being,”[5] which does not need a table of correspondence but which unveils its secrets itself.

Thus, says Merleau-Ponty

(…) if we rid our minds of the idea that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text, we shall see that the idea of complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive – that is, if you like, silence.

To the French philosopher, silence is the field of the latent expressiveness which is always present to the living subject. “In short, we must consider speech before it is spoken, the background of silence which does not cease to surround it and without which it would say nothing.”[6] Contrary to the Hegelian world of speaking consciousness, Merleau-Ponty argues that there is no point-to-point correspondence between the spoken word and sense – truth passes into language by means of a blank between words. Language is clear because it stands out from an obscure background – “The movement of speech is a movement from and upon the field of silence.”[7]

He insists that true speech does not consist in ascribing a word to each and every thought. If it were so, sign would be immediately obliterated by its own sense and thought would never encounter anything other than itself.[8] It would set men in a state of expressive aphasia, i.e., a condition characterized by an inability to comprehend language or to speak with appropriate and meaningful words. However, the experience of aphasia renders men incapable of articulating himself in language, muteness is unspeakable and contrary to sound; silence, on the other hand, pervades the domain of speech and remains, therefore, a complement to sound.

The domains of silence and speech remains dialectically intertwined.[9] Silence is an active performance always conjoined with utterance; it is a complex phenomenon which accompanies different kinds of discourse. Arguing against the common sense notion that silence indicates the lack of use of certain expressions, Dauenhauer affirms with Merleau-Ponty that such an argument cannot explain all the appearances of silence. His thesis advances in the following steps:

(1) silence is a positive phenomenon because the nondeterminate is preeminent in man; (2) silence is emotionally polyvalent because all of our meditational performances are tentative; (3) silence shows more fully than any other phenomenon that the nondeterminate is primary in human affairs; (…) (5)silence shows that no determinations in themselves are definitive.[10]

He demonstrates that the common sense notion cannot explain all appearances of silence. While silence does indeed interrupt determinate expressions, it may also expand the possibilities of discourse.”[11]

Silence is pregnant of expressiveness. If “all objects have a language which we can decipher only in total silence,”[12] then true speech should be able to present and free the senses captive within the things. As Merleau-Ponty claims, language is oblique and autonomous and it “speaks peremptorily when it gives up trying to say the thing itself.”[13]

Thus in Being and Time, Heidegger conceives silence as one of the possibilities of discourse (Rede), i.e., a mode of being of Dasein, which is extra-linguistic, i.e., which does not concern words themselves but what is communicated through the revelation of something as the “letting it be seen by pointing it out.” (BT, 32) According to Heidegger, to be silent involves having something to say, – i.e., “to show: to make appear, to set free…” – and in order to do so, one must have at his disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of oneself (BT, 34).

To the philosopher, Silence, therefore, should not be mistaken by muteness. In the analysis about the opposition between Silence qua saying and muteness, it is possible to differentiate a genuine or true conversation, as a mode of discoursing, – which “articulates the intelligibility of Dasein in so primordial manner that it gives rise to a potentiality-for-hearing which is genuine, and to a Being-with-one-another which is transparent;” (BT, 34) – from Idle Talk (Gerede), or the fallen form of discourse in which communication ceases to be important and discourse turns into the activity of speaking and of words themselves, implying concealment instead of disclosure of truth. Thus focusing on Heidegger’s observation that maybe someone who never speaks cannot keep silent at any given moment.

Indeed, when Heidegger claims that silence involves having something to say, he echoes the words of Pascal, to whom “(…) there is eloquence in silence that penetrates more deeply than language can.”[14] As in the Book of Revelations (8:1), both authors refer to a silence that quiets heaven, but engenders the truth which is revealed to men.

Thus, silence is the beginning of Phenomenology,[15] i.e., of a phenomenology which became a meditation of finitude. “In which the idea of truth and not-truth, of disclosure and undisclosure, indicates the incompleteness of all understanding of Being and truth, to the extent that it occurs in the facticity of Dasein.”[16]  In order to clarify this, one need only to remember Heidegger’s call for an attentive listening [a scanning] of Being from the point of view of what it is, while it is being.[17]

Zerzan explains that

The Latin root for silence, silere, to say nothing, is related to sinere, to allow to be in a place. We are drawn to those places where language falls most often, and must crucially, silent. [18]

What is at place in silence is the disclosure of man’s fundamental structure as being-with and being-with-others. Silence is the closest thing to language[19] and that, on the other hand, is what is closest to man, hence, our difficulty to apprehend it. However, once we stop taking it lightly, i.e., once we decide to bare and endure silence, [20] then we will notice that

The inexhaustibility of language changes it into that which always escapes man; into that which is most strange to him, that which flees from his hold inasmuch as it always removes him from what is familiar.[21]

The removal from familiarity is that which allows original language and its relation to silence to give density to the existence of man – to distinguish and to give more authenticity to what each thing is in itself. Silence is an invitation to the actualization of each and every one of us. [22] Silence rises from the dialog in which man is placed. It gives the dialog its ‘thickness,’ it works on that which is absent. It shows our connection to a fundamental temporality, it allow us to be.

But due to our difficulty to grasp the phenomenon of silence in its completeness, the question about how does silence come to be should be answered taking into account Merleau-Ponty’s precious advice that

If we want to understand language as an originating operation, we must pretend never to have spoken, submit language to a reduction without which it would once more escape us by referring us to what it signifies for us, gaze at it as deaf people look at those who are speaking, compare the art of language to other arts of expression, and try to see it as one of these mute arts.[23]

To analyze silence as a phenomenon involves the exercise to say it through the interpretation of an expressive art form. For instance, cinema is among the expressive arts which benefits from the presence of silence in its relation to language. However, film owns certain uniqueness in relation to other expressive arts, – e.g., painting – and this uniqueness lies on the projective and feature of its medium.

If Malraux claims that “painting and language are comparable only when they are detached from what they ‘represent’ and are brought together under the category of creative expression,”[24] this would be even more the case if we give a close look at cinematic expression. The analysis of visual silence in film, is what allows Merleau-Ponty to claim that although movies always display stories and ideas, their function is not primarily to make these facts and ideas known to us – “the meaning of a film is incorporated into is rhythm just as the meaning of a gesture may immediately be read in that gesture: the film does not mean anything but itself.”[25]

In relation to film, silence is not only the unspoken background of sound[26] but it is the space which allows world disclosedness to take place. A paradigmatic example of this can be found in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Bleu, in the famous sugar cube scene. There, visual silence is raised by virtue of a close-up [insertion/insert] order to communicate the character’s mood and her relation to her immediate environment –

(…) the heroine’s world from her point of view, to show that she sees these little things, things that are near her, by focusing on them, in order to demonstrate that the rest doesn’t matter to her.[27]

The moment the sugar cube is finally soaked and drops inside the coffee cup, is the moment of silence that precedes sound and which allows the subsequent disclosure of the character as being there with-others, – in a world of men where all of us share the same silent origin and partake in its understanding. The further development of this analysis, which intends to advance through the coming forth of Kieslowski’s scene, is to prove, aligned with the structure and motion of the Heideggerian inquiry, that silence as an original language is, therefore, the own freedom of Being and the time of creation.

My talk was called “Simone de Beauvoir: ‘Did she come to Stay?’ or the place of an intellectual woman in the Philosophical Tradition” and there I tried to show the relevance and originality of Beauvoir existentialist ethics and how did she develop it through a careful study of the works of Hegel and Heidegger (among others) and through her criticism of Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of the Other, as famously portrayed in Being and Nothingness.

My goal was simply to analyze the originality Beauvoir’s contribution to Philosophy in order to hold it as a proof to her early gender biased reception by the Philosophical Tradition and to establish her relation to Sartre as one of cooperation instead of the commonly held assumption that she might have been largely indebted by his thought.

Contrary to  the classic scholarly literature on French Existentialism, I maintained, together with the new literature on Simone de Beauvoir, that there is very little of “Sartrean-like” ideas at play in the core notions of Beauvoir’s Philosophy – her pivotal concepts of freedom and alterity differing from their Sartrean counterparts on the basis of her belief that one should overcome a tradition based on subjectivity and build a philosophy or an ethics of relations to which the metaphysical basis for an idea of justice would lay  in a reciprocal acknowledgment of the other’s freedom and whose denial would consequently lead to a fundamental form of injustice.

Here is the abstract of my presentation:

To the occasion of Simone de Beauvoir’s 100th anniversary many of her works received new editions and even new translations to English. But one particular novelty called the attention of the scholarly public: a set of six private journals written by Beauvoir from 1926 to 1930 which were edited and published by Gallimard in 2008 under the title of Cahiers de Jeunesse. The Cahiers were that which was necessary to finally ascribe Beauvoir with the philosophical genius that some of her scholars had previously attributed to her but fell into public disbelief. After all, they were talking about Simone de Beauvoir: woman of letters and disciple of Jean-Paul Sartre. Who could ascribe any philosophical independence to someone in that position? However, page after page of Beauvoir’s youth diaries proved the public wrong: they show the making of an intellectual who carefully devoured her readings, schemed her study hours, her routine and tried to develop her own ideas through the questioning and the struggle to establish her own self-identity. Accepting the precious gift of Cahiers, the present work is my own attempt to provide some insights on Simone de Beauvoir’s position as an intellectual with independent ideas, who has much to say to our century after we finally have the opportunity to re-examine her basic concepts in the light of the development of her own body of work – and not Sartre’s. Which books called her attention as a young student? How did she receive their ideas and how did she develop or even criticize them later on, in works such as Tous les Hommes sont Mortels or Pour une Morale de l’ambigüité? In order to answer these questions I will analyze Beauvoir’s concept of self, other and ambiguity and try to establish her much deserved place in the Philosophical Tradition.

We have  much to learn from Simone de Beauvoir either as a philosopher or as woman who defied her own situation and decided to dedicate her life to the careful study and reevaluation of philosophical ideas. I hope my work may have contributed to offer other students the chance to grasp a better notion of Beauvoir’s philosophy – a notion devoid of clichés and attuned to her intellectual challenges.

]]> http://dosespiritos.com/2012/03/31/simone-de-beauvoir-did-she-come-to-stay/feed/ 1 Juliana de Albuquerque K. http://dosespiritos.com/2011/04/28/appearance-and-reality/ http://dosespiritos.com/2011/04/28/appearance-and-reality/#comments Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:54:00 +0000 Juliana de Albuquerque K. http://giuliettadeglispiriti.wordpress.com/?p=563 ]]> (or reading Russell’s Problems of Philosophy while reading Heidegger)

Juliana de Albuquerque Katz

The style of the text we have been given¹ leads the reader to a rationalist approach of the question concerning appearance and reality. As a matter of fact its first paragraphs seems to be a parody of the style of the cartesian meditations. In order to make such reference clear, there are three moments of the text I would like call attention to: its very beginning with the question is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?; its following explanation to which philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions; and the affirmation that knowledge is to be derived from our present experiences but any statement as to what is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong.

 Moments that, if we attentively observe them in their full development, will culminate in the following situation: if the world qua object of our investigation exists, it should not be the same one as experienced by our immediately experience. Actually, it should be an inference from what is immediately known to us. Thus leading us to very tricky questions concerning the existence of the external world and its characterization as an object.

 The distinction between appearance and reality: “between what things seem to be and what they are” often puzzled the modern philosophers and had one of its most emblematic moments in the philosophy of Descartes. Thus, it will not be a coincidence, that in the 19^th century Hegel – who was against the modern distinction between subject and object – will criticize the French philosopher and try to build his own version of the problem by affirming that appearance will be related to an essence that will appear or show itself. Says Michael Inwood: “in this case Sein (‘being’ i.e., what we are immediately acquainted with) is Schein, both in the sense that it is dependent on something else, an essence, and in the sense that it does not fully manifest that essence.”

 Hegel’s claim on these matters seems to have been influenced by the expressionist turn carried on by German Philosophy under Herder and the Romantics. These philosophers were against the shift of modern times to a self-defining and atomistic subject that was bound to a sense of control of the world, i.e., the objectification of the world. A world that would have lost its sense of embodied meaning to a mechanistic notion that could easily be grasped by a mathematical reasoning: the locus of neutral, contigent correlations freed from final causes and related to efficient causation only.

 In fact says Charles Taylor:“Herder reacts against the anthropology of the Enlightenment, against what he called the ‘objectification’ of the human nature, (…) against a calculative notion of reason, divorced from feeling and will. And he is one of the principal of those responsible for developing an alternative anthropology, one centered on the categories of expression.”

 It seems to me that Heidegger is not too far from Herder and Hegel in his critique of rationalism and and the consequences of the full import of the cartesian model to our way of thinking the world and our relation to it; since they all appear to maintain that the objectivity of the moderns portraits a reality in which the world as that which shows itself in itself – as manifest, is actually forgotten.

 This forgetfulness of the phenomenon of the world by the moderns is the cause of its skepticism about the external world. A position which is avoided by Heidegger – and, as a matter of fact, also by Hegel, although his thoughts on this matter won’t be explained in this text – by reacting towards the the modern representationalist framework of the investigation about reality. In fact, Heidegger will claim that the contextless world of representationalism is an illusion. He will say that the world is the humam world: “it is the affirmation of the reality of what shows up for us”.

 This idea that the world is the human world finds its foundations on husserlian intentionality because it admits that every consciousness is consciousness of something. Every consciousness is in relation to its object. There are no consciousness apart from its objects as there are no objects objects apart from consciousness. Dasein is being-in-the-world and its structure favors it to already have a previous knowledge of this reality because it happens to be thoroughly in contact with it.

 This amounts that Dasein’s previous knowledge of the world is on the basis of its familiarity with the world. This familiarity is what enables Dasein to find its way around. One must toss away the cartesian notion that our mind bares inside of itself a representation of the world. There is no such a thing. In reality we are always outside of ourselves in the world and towards the world as transcendence.²

 Accompanying the moments which I mentioned in the very beginning of this text, Russell gives the reader a very interesting example about a table that may be set to illustrate exactly what Heidegger seems to criticize about Descartes, in the section 21 of Being and Time about the Hermeneutical Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the World. Says Heidegger: “we must then demonstrate explicitly not only that Descartes’ conception of the world is ontologically defective, but that his Interpretation and the foundations on which it is base have let him to pass over both the phenomenon of the world and the being of those entities within-the-world which are proximally ready-to-hand”.

 According to Heidegger, Descartes’ conception of the world is ontologically deficient because it is based on a tradition that insists in being as present-at-hand (the metaphysics of presence) and finds in mathematical science a suited ally. Thus, the table in Russell’s text is not a in order to for Dasein (i.e., an equipment or a tool). It appears as being examined while dissociated of its usefulness or the concern it might have for Dasein. It is a collection of characteristics: “to the eye it is oblong, it is brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives out a wooden sound.” Its whole apprehension is its theorization. This shows that Descartes and the cartesian tradition skip the problem of how to get an appropriate access to entities within-the-world. Thus the cartesian reliance on intuition (noesis) against sensation although, Heidegger says, “sensation as opposed to intellectio, still remains possible as a way of access to entities by a beholding which is perceptual in character.”

 In relation to the experience of the table, if I were to reconstruct Russell’s text in a heideggerian fashion it would read this way:

 Dasein’s most basic way of being is even more basic than seeing something as something which it is. In its averageness Dasein is in a pre-reflexive way and it acquires the understanding of things within-the-world while skillfully coping with these things. There is a direct connection between Dasein and the things and everything it does already presupposes this a priori involvement. Heidegger does not want to separate Dasein from the world on the assumption that it would render both of them closely to the subject-object relation.

 The way of being of the table is readiness-to-hand. Since it is not self-sufficient, a table is not presence-at-hand. The readiness-to-hand of the table can be understood in its usefulness for Dasein. A Dasein uses a table in order to work or to read Being and Time. In using the table as an equipment it becomes present to Dasein and it is freed from holistic background of relations and equipment in the study room. If Dasein copes with the table in a satisfactory fashion it can be said that it [Dasein] is by using the world to take a stand on itself. Thus, the table in the study room will be described in a completely different fashion from the explanation given by Russell. Instead of primarily comporting a series of characterizations, it will be described through Dasein’s familiarity with it: the table used in order to study.

 The aim of Heidegger’s deconstruction of Descartes (and of the present deconstruction of Russell text) is exactly to provide an explanation that will cease the confusion between scientific description of things and our experience of the world. Although Descartes is gives the foundation of the scientific conception of the world as nature. One must understand that to a heideggerian point of view the world is not a thing. It is not a material thing due to nature’s characteristic as res extensa. World is part of the fundamental structure of Dasein itself as being-in-the-world: it is Dasein’s way of being. It is grounded on the way Dasein exists.

 Like in the past when Descartes distinction between nature and spirit – res extensa and res cogitans – raised the suspicion of Herder and Hegel; this time it comes to Heidegger’s attention that far from revealing Descartes rebellious character against tradition, it proves that the structure of nature as res extensa actually places Descartes amongst the tradition itself because it takes being “that simple awareness of something present-to-hand in its sheer present to hand” says the German philosopher.

 Another issue to the cartesian interpretation of world is that it obscures the meaning of the being of Dasein. This occurs because it also is interpreted along with tradition under the category of substance. If one tries to do the effort to think with Heidegger, one will see while reading the Meditations that the relation between Dasein and the world becomes totally obscure and this is becomes clear if we also analyse Russell’s explanation.

 Finally, although much more could be said about the issues being dealt in this text, I would like to say that the punch line of Heidegger’s critic of Descartes is obviously the confusion the French philosopher does in using particular ontology to work general ontology. A critic that Hegel also directed to his contemporaries who insisted in doing ontology through the means of particular sciences. I quote Large: “any ontical science (however interesting and true it might be on its own terms) cannot be an answer to an ontological question”.

 Reference:

Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary. Blackwell Publishers, Massachusetts, 1999.

Large, William. Heidegger’s Being and time. Indiana University Press, Indiana, 2008.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Harper Perennial, New York, 2008.

Heidegger, Martin. Introdução à Filosofia [Eintelung in die Philosophie]. Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 2008.

Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975.

1The following observations were an exercise based on the first two pages of the chapter about appearances and reality of Russell’s book The Problems of Philosophy.

2Hubert Dreyfuss maintains that: as a fundamental determination of Dasein’s ontological structure, transcendence will found intentionality. The intentionality inaugurated by Heidegger is a primordial mode of intentionality which differs from its husserlian counterpart. Actually this primordial intentionality refers to Dasein’s non-representational and non-mental absorbed coping was Dasein is in its averageness.

Esse tipo de apoio Israel dispensa. Porque Israel não se faz presente no delírio salvacionista da Diáspora. Israel é um país que vive : ora pulsa virtudes, ora  luta contra os próprios defeitos. E, se para os vivos, o apoio é aquilo que funda, empresta base e protege; espera-se que o apoio revele qualquer verdade.

O contrário do apoio é a propaganda.

A propaganda brinca com uma ilusão de verdade.  Ela mente por omissão. O objetivo principal da propaganda é a conquista. O objetivo máximo da verdade é a liberdade.

Ser palestino não é fácil.

Também não é fácil ser judeu. Mas, neste mesmo espaço e nesta mesma angústia estão inseridas tantas minorias quantos homens existem: negros, homossexuais, mulheres, índios, filósofos ou escafandristas. A questão não está na dificuldade em ser ou isto ou aquilo.  A questão é ser e para ela ainda não foi encontrada qualquer resposta.

Juliana de Albuquerque Katz

Philosophy Student at Tel Aviv University

juliana.albuquerque@gmail.com

A small account of Brazilian Carnival through the eyes of a Philosophy student trying to understand her own country and its culture. As a mix of narrative and Philosophical enquire, the article aims to cause a reflection about gender discrimination and its probable genesis in Brazil. From the letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha to the poems of Ascenso Ferreira the author observes an increasing objectification of women which makes her ask herself about the Brazilian ethical behavior through History. Which, in fact, would explain the difficulty to analyze how Brazilian values are built in a context of social and moral permissibility. Would Brazil be more intelligible if dealt as an Ethical-Aesthetical project such as in some of Darcy Ribeiro’s reflections? If so, how can we think of using the notions of body and sexuality to reinterpret the concept of the Hegelian recognition in order to prove with Simone de Beauvoir that the first step towards acknowledging the other should be affectivity and not conflict? Thus, what does our current Aesthetic vices tell us about the constant objectification of women? Do women take part of an Ethical world or are they set aside as an absolute other? To the author this is the riddle Momus casts upon us all. Key-words: Carnival, Brazilian Culture, Recognition, Gender Discrimination.

I

It is Saturday morning and the streets of Recife’s commercial center are packed with people. They all dress very differently from their daily clothing. Instead of the seriousness of the socially accepted disguises it is time to come out of the closet and chose to be oneself beyond its limitations. Supermen, ballerinas, Indians and even Carlitos seem to invade the streets. Some men dress as women and some women dress in minimalistic clothes. They dance and sing nonstop.

Street vendors walk along with the crowd selling cold beer with buckets pilled on their heads. I can’t find any coins in my pocket and another person pays for my drink. We instantly become friends. It’s an everlasting Carnival friendship until the next corner of the street where we take different directions. I head to the main bridge in town where an enormous and colored rooster stands still although the crowd seems to make the entire city vibrate. I am inside the famous Galo da Madrugada, the world’s biggest carnival street party that involves at least three traditional commerce neighborhoods in the city of Recife. The party starts at Bairro de São José, continues at Bairro de Santo Antônio where it apparently achieves its zenith at Avenida Guararapes, although the crowd also invades the city center main avenue already in Bairro da Boa Vista. Overall, a crowd of at least 1.5 million people follow the party on its 9 Km route.

It is insane! The heat is unbearable and can only be overcome by the beer. Suddenly everybody seems to be drunk and irreverence takes place. Men grab women by the arm and kiss experiencing no trace of resistance but reciprocity. People watching the party from above the old buildings start to dance on the edge of their balconies. Everywhere there is the smell of sweat, urine, ether and marijuana.

For the next three days not only Recife but the entire country will slow down and get involved in an atmosphere of consented social misdemeanors. In Salvador, crowds will follow the famous trios elétricos, modified cars with ultra-potent sound-systems, on the top of which artists such as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Daniela Mercury sing and dance to the rhythm of Axé Music. In Rio de Janeiro many people will watch samba schools perform on Sunday and Monday evenings. But street parties are also bound to happen in many of Rio’s neighborhoods. In fact, street parties are the main characteristic of Brazilian Carnival. Nevertheless, although they seem to acquire a different flavor in each one of the country’s regions due to Brazil’s diverse cultural and ethnical formation, their essence still the same: the struggle of the people in forming a Brazilian identity freed from the historical oppression of illegitimate political elites.

Thus the atmosphere of social misdemeanors; which is a more exuberant picture of the historical Brazilian people’s relaxed threshold of moral values: a consented and decadent people’s revolution.

Such characteristic of this population is well examined by the historical documentation in Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s book História Geral da Civilização Brasileira. In this work, the author quotes Bishop Pero Fernandes Sardinha report to the King of Portugal «many more things ought to be dissimulated instead of punished in such a new land (…)» (Holanda, 1963:119) A quote that can be accidently linked to the 20^th century Chico Buarque’s Carnival tune that celebrates the inexistence of sin bellow the Equator.

II

This historical context of social and moral permissibility marks my difficulty to explain to my foreign colleagues how our values are built if the concepts of sin and, consequently, redemption do not seem to take effective part of our social structure.

One should try to understand Brazil as an Ethical-Aesthetic project. Something like Darcy Ribeiro’s idea of a “Brasil bonito” and, therefore, one should have the courage to face Brazilian reality. Only then, the country and its manifestation will acquire some intelligibility and let itself be spoken of.

I struggle to analyze the issue of Brazilian ethical behavior through the History of a Aesthetic clash between Civilization and Eros. Such clash in our national History has its roots well fixed 510 years ago, when the first Europeans arrived at the newly discovered Terra de Vera Cruz, and nowadays, is well portrayed by the annual Carnival season with the exploitation of female image.

In this case, the History of such exploitation dates back in the 16^th century when Pero Vaz de Caminha wrote a letter to the Portuguese king about the marvelous newly discovered land and its inhabitants – the native South American Indian tribes. And those natives (male and female) as portrayed by Caminha were of such beauty and innocence that they would walk around naked without a trace of shame on the presence of strangers.

Needless to say that in many quotes from the letter, Caminha attains himself to the elaborate description of female beauty and writes to the king about their round bodies and gracious genitalia. To which, he states, are of such a beauty that would cause envy to the European ladies of the court.

Nowadays, however, the European ladies of the court exchanged places with middle- class women who year after year sit in front of their television sets to watch the traditional advertisement of the carnival season broadcast by Rede Globo (the country’s largest television company).

My early Carnival memories go back to this traditional advertisement. Since 1991, its video take presents a mulata dancing frenetically to the rhythm of samba while being stripped out of colorful make-up in order to become a bit more naked in every annual season.

The envy felt by many women over the image of the beautiful mulata is indeed the result of a lack of confidence of average female to self-image and reliance to the body nurtured on the female while on the early stages of formation of her social character, a fact that has been examined since Simone de Beauvoir’s writing of Le Deuxième Sexe.

According to the French philosopher, not to have confidence in the body is not to have confidence in oneself which lead us to figure out that the body should be understood as the objective expression of the subject (Beauvoir, 1986: 93, vol. II). Such a theory was drawn by the Husserlian concept of Leib, and later adopted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his work Phenomenology of Perception in the notion of corps vivant which Beauvoir was familiar with and evolved in her works, most notably Le Deuxiéme Sexe and Pour une morale de l’ambigüité.

I want the reader to focus on the sole idea of the body being the objective expression of the subject. Because, if it is so, what can be said about the situation of women in Brazil due to the fact that their body is only recognized as an object instead of being acknowledged as the expression of her self?

Ascenso Ferreira (1895-1963) is a well-known Brazilian poet. In his works he portraits regional themes from northeastern Brazil. In one of his verses about Carnival he says: «I saw the Genius of the Race!/ (I bet you think I will talk about Rui Barbosa)/ How!/ The Genius of the Race that I saw was that little chocolate mulata/ doing the siricongado step/ on Tuesday of carnival!»ⁱⁱ.

In the poem, a man envisions a woman’s perfection as being a mouth-watering chocolate colored mulata. The relation of a food in order to describe the woman’s main features should be rated as offensive wasn’t for Ferreira’s poetic efforts. As a matter of fact, such a comparison shows nothing that can be considered remarkable but for the fact that it consolidates a female image as man’s mere object of immediate satisfaction.

To this fact one can picture gender relations in Brazilian cultural expressions to be quite precarious. In fact, they are an emulation of medieval European content. And, therefore, they betray Darcy Ribeiro’s theoretical utopia of a new Tropical Civilization.

III

Now, to understand how such a Tropical Civilization would be possible, one must understand the Carnival phenomenon not as a mere transgression of traditional imposed values, but as a synthesis of values and as an adaptation of all the other civilizations taking part on a larger than life tropical attitude.

Thus, the simple emulation of medieval European content to the gender relations in the country already sounds as an imposed value due to suffer a modification. And such a change can be set in motion if we reinterpret the Hegelian concept of Recognition through the application of body and sexuality as its possible fundamental tools – which would bring us face to face to the fact that the living body is indeed part of our situation.

To the mulata in Ferreira’s poem or simply to any other Brazilian female, this should mean a chance to become free and to actually take part on the social and political process of the making of a country and of a new tropical civilization.

In this new tropical civilization, Carnival would play a true revolutionary role. It would remodel affective relations and our way to face the other, which would not be seen as menace, or as the unknown absolute different; but as one like me which I am able to love. Such feeling would extrapolate particular relations and occupy an ethical function in providing grounds for a universal recognition and the legitimacy of political institutions.

Let Carnival be an open invitation to acknowledge the other. In the previous paragraphs I quoted Pero Vaz de Caminha. One should attentively read his letter and examine the way in which the Indians received the Portuguese travelers. It might have been innocent but it was not naïve: it was a phenomenological approach. They were open and ready to witness the unveiling of their Portuguese counterparts. If only the Portuguese were bound to ascribe themselves in the same movement without attributing the new land and its inhabitants the weight of being «(…) the paranoid and salvationist extension of Portugal and Iberia (…)»ⁱⁱⁱ we might have had the courage to develop a tropical civilization from our very beginning.

Those were my thoughts as I left Galo da Madrugada already late in the afternoon but they soon deemed away as I, perplexed, entered the night and found myself new adventures to play.

——

I am constantly mesmerized by the ability through which commonsense demonstrates the possibility of producing philosophy out of anything. In fact, I would like to be able myself to share its belief and to philosophize about the most mundane of matters in the most feeble of fashions. Although this does not seem to be the right path to engage into the suffering of philosophizing as an outrageous fortune it certainly is a good way to make money by selling false promises of wisdom to those naïve listeners of good will.

According to Harry Frankfurt, the most salient feature of our culture is that it produces bullshit,i.e., a quasi-equivalent to Wittgeinstein’s nonsense. But what is nonsense? Plainly speaking, ‘nonsense is encountered when a proposition is even more radically devoid of meaning, when it transcends the bounds of sense.’

In fact, it is Frankfurt’s idea that, much differently from what it is commonly presumed, the etymology of the word bullshit has little to do with bovine excrement. Indeed, its prefix bull comes from bluff which is a talking which is not to the propose – a bravado, or a hot air. Thus, if commonsense’s good-willing tactics do not elevate philosophizing to its ultimate consequences, what is it then? Bullshit, deviant reasoning, cheap-chat: hot air.

Until the present moment I tried to illustrate what is not philosophizing. Consequently all that one knows about it by this text is that it is not bullshit. So, what then shall I mean when I ask myself: what is philosophizing?

To philosophize is to engage oneself in rigorous thinking activity. Thinking, says Hannah Arendt, concerns a journey towards the understanding of the meaning of our world. It is the never-ending activity of questioning whatever that is that we encounter. It is not a job that can be considered to be done through the acquisition of positive knowledge. Instead, thinking involves the tiering work  of the negative. Through thinking one is bound to return to questions concerning “the meaning that we give to experiences, actions and circunstances”.

Yesterday I have been confronted with the following question: which of which is more important to philosophical thinking – dialogue with myself or controversy with the other?

In exchanging correspondences with Marcelo Dascal I came to learn that controversy is fundamental to the birth of knowledge because it compels one to question positive knowledge while it generates cooperation needed to the nurturing of knowledge on the make. Whereas, if thinking concerns the journey towards the understanding of the meaning of our world, and if we are talking about a human world being thought by a thinking human being one must come across the fact that human beings are beings-with-others, a truth which undermines the naïve structures of solipsism and necessarily grounds our thinking in thinking with and against others in an exercise of controversy.

Thus, the solitude of the philosopher, – much defended by the colleague who posed me the question-, necessary to the activity of thinking, must not delude us into assuming that philosophical thinking does not involve or worst, should not necessarily in involve, confrontation with others in a broader sense. In the most extreme of cases, a philosopher who engages himself into thinking, in the solitude of his cabinet, does not do so by excluding others from his inner dialogue. Instead, such a philosopher, is only able to philosophize with or against the others which are part of a philosophical tradition – that is to say, if he is interested in doing Philosophy at all. Therefore, to think, says Heidegger, is ‘coming-into-nearess to the distant‘.

In her effort to explain Heidegger’s claim about thinking and her own views on the subject, Hannah Arendt explains that to think is to engage oneself with things and people which are absent. While presence is necessary to  the immediate knowledge of the sensible world, it is absence that enable us to think about what sensible presences are in themselves. Thus, Arendt says, that to think about a man one need not to be posed directly in his presence.  In fact, she states: “one can easily bring this point home by familiar experience. We go on journeys in order to see things in farwaway places; in the course of this it often happens that the things we have seen come close to us only in retrospect or recollection (…)” Thinking, she explains, necessarily “removes what is close by, withdrawing from the near and drawing the distance into nearess.”

There is, in fact, nothing new about this assumption. Hegel, in his Phenomenology of the Spirit, just as Plato did in the past, invited his reader into a journey of consciousness to the truth about itself. A journey that could  only be done by those who reached its end and, therefore, were capable of remembering all its past moments. Memory and remembering: anamnesis is a conditioner of philosophical thinking. And, I said before, remembering in philosophical thinking cannot be detached from its Other: tradition. Thus, as long as one is not a simplon, and one does not assume philosophers develop their thinking over physical entities called books, one will realize philosophical knowledge and its renewal can only be supported by the dialogue and interlacement of the thinking activity of many human beings engaged in the task of doing Philosophy.

It is the communal efforts of philosophers in philosophizing that presents the seen and also the unseen possibilities within tradition. For instance, even though Hegel considered the act of thinking, as a solitary activity, in various passages of his philosophical system he emphasizes the importance of the dialectical moment to the organicity of his Speculative Philosophy. As a matter of fact, it is Hegel who says, in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830), and again, on Lectures on the History of Philosophy that Philosophy and its History should be understood as the continuous dialectical development of the diversified levels of the Idea: ‘the relation of the philosophical systems of the beginning to those that came afterwards is in general the same relation of the preceding stages of the logical idea to its successors; in a way that, in truth, the succeeding stages will always contain in themselves their predecessors as dialectically suppressed.’

Does this not involve relatedness to others and dialogue? My idea is simple (and can be refuted, if not entirely accepted): the writing and production of a philosophical work still involves orality and dialogue with others as aufhebt [dialectically supressed] by the inherent structures of the text. For instance, it can be said, for example, that Plato’s works ‘preserved the power of the spoken word on the written page’. But let us try to use another example which might pose us some difficulty.

One must give some attention to Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s style while writing the Investigations. According to the American philosopher, Wittgenstein constructed the text based on two voices: the voice of temptation, understood as that of metaphysics and skepticism; and, the voice of correctness, which represents the ordinary.

That would mean that the book could be understood as a dialogue. But, Cavell also points further: he affirms that in such a dialogue, neither of the voices can be taken as Wittgenstein’s own views. Suggesting that the style Wittgenstein adopts is the one of a confession in which the author seeks to find his way between temptation and correctness.

To say so implies that, as a attentive listener of these voices, the reader should work together with them, i.e., with the writer; in order to learn something. Such a reading will evoke an exercise for acknowledgment between the reader and the text, proving that what is being said should tell him something.

In What is Literature?, Jean-Paul Sartre raised a very interesting argument on this subject when he said that ‘The book, serving as a go-between, establishes an historical contact among the men who are steeped in the same history and who likewise contribute to its making. Writing and reading are two faces of the same historical fact, and the freedom to which the writer invites us is not a pure abstract consciousness of being free.’

I personally like this quotation because it serves to justify that the role of the confession-like style of Wittgenstein’s Investigations would raise a path to acknowledgment. Thus, giving support to Cavell’s idea in Must we mean what we say? that ‘In confessing you do not explain or justify, but describe how it is with you. And confession, unlike dogma, is not to be believed but to be tested, and accepted or rejected.’

Philosophy books are alive and they are the voice of a textual subject who wants to be acknowledged, i.e., recognized by an Other. Whereas, I find it weird when somebody tries to tell me that Philosophy as a dialogue was neglected in favor or writing philosophical books. Or, worst, I find it weird when somebody tries to tell me that the writing of books proves that inner dialogue (which, ironically enough, is still a dialogue) is sufficient to produce truth because ‘existentially speaking’ controversies with others should be alien to our structure.

Nevertheless, ‘existentially speaking’, we are fundamentally beings-in-the-world and, for that matter, beings-with-others. Proving, once and for all, that: truth, reason and knowledge  (and, maybe even thinking!) bare relatedness as the basis for its manifestation.

…Picasso, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Gide, Queneau, Aron, Borges, Camus, …

…, Juliana.

Neste momento serei uma pessoa mais feliz ao tomar o meu Earl Grey. Mas é triste não ter com quem dividir essas coisas: o chá, a canequinha amarela, o Deux Magots, as músicas de Gréco, as fofocas existencialistas, as leituras de Hegel, a descoberda de Heidegger, as receitas de omelete, o vinho, as castanhas, o jornal, Platão, a minha pesquisa, o bourbon, o chocolate, a chuva, o frio, o jazz, a pipoca, o filme, o guarda-chuva, o mesmo lado da calçada, o Ser e o Nada, Gainsbourg, o jambeiro do cemitério, o cais do porto, Rilke, a praia, o sol, a areia, o estrangeiro, o frisbee, as fotos, o diário, os sanduíches, os queijos, o pé de jaca, o barro, a grama, a risada, Guimarães Rosa, a poça d’água, os sapatos molhados, o vento, os cabelos arrepiados, o rio, o barquinho, os carangueijos, o Cartier Latin, o molho de tomate, Kojève, o engarrafamento, o mercado, a Coca-Cola gelada, o cheiro de peixe, o rosto pingando de suor, a cumplicidade sincera dos açougueiros, o fado, a Rua da Aurora, o Prix Goncourt, o carro de som, a Conde da Boa Vista, o sebo, as tardes inteiras no sebo, a cadeira do lado, os aborrecimentos, Kafka, o ônibus da Torre, a tristeza, Piaf, o delírio, o sorvete de creme, os sonhos e Jean Cocteau.

Pior que uma cadeira vazia é uma mesa posta de possibilidades.

Bonjour tristesse.

Publicado no meu antigo fotolog em 2007.