1. THE GREAT DEBATE
“We can, for example, tell Zarathustra that the news that God is dead is not all that big a deal. We can tell Heidegger that one can be a perfectly good example of Dasein without ever having been what he calls ‘authentic’.”
“Karl Jaspers first introduced the notion of the Axial age in the 1949 book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (2016). Describing the Axial age from the eight to the third BCE as ‘pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity,’ Karen Armstrong cites various Axial traditions from four distinct regions: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece (2006, xii).”
“Rorty judges the devotion of Christian believers electrified by the mystic texts of Bonaventure and Ignatius Loyola as akin to the spiritual commitment of secularists dedicated to Henry James and Marcel Proust.”
“Rorty also notes that in articulating the ideal of egalitarian hope, The New Testament is one of the few historical productions that continue to inspire the vision of a morally edifying world. Regarding it in the same light as The Communist Manifesto, Rorty describes the Christian text as ‘the founding document of a movement that has done much for human freedom and human equality’”
“Notwithstanding his opposition against traditional religion, it is worth mentioning that there is a radical vision of monotheist religion that Rorty restates as hospitable to the concern of secularization. This view involves Gianni Vattimo’s revisionist account of Christianity, which surmises that the process of secularization acquires an ‘extraordinary meaning’ in the contemporary age when linked to the long-standing and figurative story of Christian redemption.”
“If the Bible speaks of being as an event, and of God as the one who abandons his own transcendence, first by creating the world, and then by redeeming it through the Incarnation and the Cross—through kenosis(*)—then the desacralizing phenomena characteristic of modernity are the authentic aspects of the history of salvation.” Vattimo
“This view encourages the interpretation that the theological idea of ‘God’s self-emptying’(*) and the human attempt of realizing that ‘love as the only law’ are the same and that this point licenses Vattimo to regard ‘all the great unmaskers of the West, from Copernicus and Newton to Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, as carrying out works of love’ (Rorty 2005, 38).”
2. OVERCOMING NIHILISM
“For Nietzsche, the ability to transcend the life-negating horrors of nihilism serves as a testament to human resilience and its endless potential for greatness (with the caveat that only a few can achieve this level of self-transcendence). In Heidegger’s view, nihilism is indicated by our increasing attunement to the modern moods of anxiety and boredom, resulting from a world ‘enframed’ by instrumental reason and the relentless advance of science and technology.”
“There are many other influential statements of existential nihilism in the Western philosophical tradition, from C.G.J. Jacobi and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and its conceptual development in the works of Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, the French existentialists, the Russian nihilists, and the Black existentialists of the contemporary period.”
“The sacred redemptionists treat Nietzsche’s anthropocentric response against nihilism not only as unsatisfactory, but dangerous. As we will see in the next sections, and with the nudging of Heidegger, the help of the non-human, or some conception of the sacred, became an attractive option to these philosophers”
“In his 1954 essay Die Frage nach der Technik (trans. ‘The Question Concerning Technology’), Heidegger contends that the most pressing peril in the modern world is that we now live under the dominion of Ge-stell [enframing], [enquadramento] a nihilistic era in which the drive to control and instrumentalize the world, a brutal expression of the Nietzschean will to power, has reached its peak.”
“It is the age in which people build 100-megaton bombs, slash down rain forests, try to create art more thoroughly postmodern than last year’s, and bring hundreds of philosophers together to compare their respective world pictures.” Rorty
“From this Heideggerian perspective, salvation from the nihilism in the era of Ge-stell [Enframing] can take place by reflecting on works of art that function to manifest, articulate, and reconfigure our experiences in the contemporary world.” Pra mim parece um papo-enganação.
“The counter-enlightenment movement, then, despairs for the power of the transcendent in the immanent. Taylor is critical of this movement that mobilizes how art, immanent transcendence, and violence constellate to emphasize the dark and cruel aspects of human experience. Taken this way, modern art serves as a site for the vicious and amoral character of human life. To live a rich and admirable life, these immanent counter-enlightenment thinkers suggest that we must always come close to the brink of annihilating ourselves. Taylor thinks we, surely, ought to stop fetishizing this viciously ‘inward’ approach, since this is neither the best (if at all desirable) nor the only road to existential and spiritual meaning in modernity.”
(op)pon(en)t
“Without any clear and agreed upon sense for what to be aiming at in a life, people may experience the paralyzing type of indecision depicted by T.S. Eliot in his famously vacillating character Prufrock; or they may feel, like the characters in a Samuel Beckett play, as though they are continuously waiting for something to become clear in their lives before they can get on with living them; or they may feel the kind of ‘stomach level sadness’ that David Foster Wallace described, a sadness that drives them to distract themselves by any number of entertainments, addictions, competitions, or arbitrary goals, each of which leaves them feeling emptier than the last.”
“Upton states that Rorty’s attempt to destroy our traditional foundations of knowledge makes him an epistemological nihilist, given that “Rorty claims that nothing can be known, at least known in the Platonic sense of being the object of genuine understanding (episteme, nous) rather than of mere opinion (doxa)” (1987, 1). Madison chastises Rorty for celebrating Nietzsche’s dark legacy of nihilism: ‘If he is anything at all, Rorty is a carefree, happy-go-lucky nihilist who is not about to let himself be bothered any more by the old concerns of philosophy’ (1992, 5). Defending his reading of the classical pragmatist William James, Boffetti argues that as a whole, ‘James’s philosophy does not succumb to the nihilism, atheism, and perspectivalism characteristic of Rorty’s ‘Nietzscheanized’ pragmatism’ (2004, 605). Carr also concludes in her book that Rorty’s antifoundationalism models a dangerous and banalizing form of nihilism in the modern world. In her view, Rorty does not treat nihilism as a big deal, in the sense that he thinks that human beings can still live with themselves without the guidance of absolute moral laws or the hope for universal truth. Carr warns that Rorty’s postmodern and nonchalant attitude to morality and truth in due course culminates into a form of dogmatism”
Resumo do livro: outgrowing, no título, quer dizer, na verdade, circumventing. É isso que Rorty faz em seus escritos: ultrapassa o problema do niilismo ao ignorá-lo. Contorna-o.
3. THE CONCEPT OF REDEMPTION
“By contrast, Rorty argues that there is no deep or interesting epistemological split between the natural and the human sciences. While they have different objects of inquiry, both sciences require hermeneutic intervention.”
“The fear of science, of ‘scientism,’ of ‘naturalism,’ of self-objectivation, of being turned by too much knowledge into a thing rather than a person, is the fear that all discourse will become normal discourse. That is, it is the fear that there will be objectively true or false answers to every question we ask, so that human worth will consist in knowing truths, and human virtue will be merely justified true belief. This is frightening because it cuts off the possibility of something new under the sun, of human life as poetic rather than merely contemplative.”
“Only if we let go of the belief that there is such a thing as objective truth, and that the natural sciences can access it, will the culture of scientism loosen its firm grip on our cultural consciousness.”
“Heidegger decides that, since the Nazis didn’t work out, only a God can save us now. Dewey, it seems to me, is saying: No, neither something like the Nazis, nor something like the descent of the spirit, but just conversation. That is, just us on our own” (Dreyfus et al. 1980, 52)
“while Rorty’s writings enjoyed wide influence in philosophy and the broader humanities, his contribution was eventually reabsorbed into mainstream philosophy. The focus of general academic interest was Rorty’s criticism and apparent rejection of analytic philosophy, and this well-documented view continues to populate the debates around pragmatism and epistemology today.”
“My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society, communication would be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate.” Sem luta, assim, do mais absoluto NADA?!
“Parmenides jump-started the Western philosophical tradition by dreaming up the notion of Reality with a capital R… Plato was enchanted by this hint of something even more august and unapproachable than Zeus, but he was more optimistic. Plato suggested that a few gifted mortals might, by modeling themselves on Socrates, gain access to what he called ‘the really real.’”
“Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, Newton, Husserl, and Russell are system-builders in philosophy. They value objectivity and rationality over mere agreement or convention. Rorty labels this kind of thinking as obsolete” “By contrast, edifying philosophy is suspicious of traditional epistemology. Goethe, Kierkegaard, the later Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and the pragmatists Santayana, James, and Dewey are examples of edifying thinkers.” “But in 2007, Rorty called the distinction a false start, noting his unfamiliarity with post-Hegelian European philosophers who successfully resisted the lure of Kantian representationalism in the 1970s.”
“According to Rorty, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey were initially ensnared by the Kantian conception of philosophy. The search for objectivity was foundational in their early writings before becoming historicist and edifying philosophers (1979a, 5).”
“unlike Wittgenstein who rejected the philosophical purity he admired in Tractatus (1921) in favor of contingency and history in Philosophical Investigations (1953).”
“Rorty, for instance, classifies the modern conceptions of Western philosophizing as Husserlian (or ‘scientistic’), Heideggerian (or ‘poetic’), and pragmatist (or ‘political’): projects that pursue different ends and ally themselves with different disciplines (1991, 9).”
“I have spent my life rummaging through libraries, hoping to be bowled over—transformed—by some fiercely imaginative, utterly original book. Exalted by one such book, I would then come upon another, hard to reconcile with the first. Then I would try to bridge the gap between them, to find ways of restating what was said in each so as to allow for what was said in the other, to do what Gadamer calls ‘fusing horizons’.” Talvez isso seja apenas a forma errada de ler, pois do contrário não vai se começar a opinar sobre nada, apenas ligando pontos improficuamente a vida inteira. Mas curiosamente acabo de ler Lukács, que chamaria Rorty de apenas mais um irracional, o que torna as duas leituras absolutamente incompatíveis… Ou se é marxista ortodoxo ou se é qualquer outra coisa—nesse sentido, eu não sou um marxista.
“Unsurprisingly, Rorty’s edifying approach to texts has infuriated readers and critics.”
“Bernstein, one of Rorty’s most astute readers, finds Rorty guilty of ‘ruthless and violent’ interpretations, of fabricating a Nietzscheanized James or a Wittgensteinian Derrida or a Heideggerianized Dewey.”
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same.”
“While we can anticipate which works will appeal to us based on our Bildung, we cannot know in advance what might bring about a meaningful, self-metamorphosing redemption.”
“literary citizens are open to the possibility that the next place they visit or the next person they fall in love with can change their life.” Os cidadãos literatizados também correm o risco de passar o dia vendo vídeos do tiktok até não serem mais literatizados.
Vivemos num mundo em que o teórico homem com mais poder (Elon Musk) é um tolo completo, escravo de suas próprias pulsões instintivas; e um terço da população passa fome ou vive com coisas como um dólar por dia.
“Is Rorty following a similar logic that runs in the narratives of Nietzsche and Hegel, who both understand human life as converging toward a historical destiny?” ???
4. AVERTING NIHILISM
Leitura interrompida
Seclusão Anagógica 