TIEPHENPHENOMENOLOGY
Phenomenology of the Deep
1.Historical environment
May 1945: Unconditional capitulation of Germany.
End of World War II: Cities destroyed, families torn apart, Germany divided, Europe heartless. The horror of the Holocaust oppresses the conscience of the planet.
2. Reaction of the philosophers
French theory, failure of western culture.
French intellectuals reacted by rejecting the Western tradition of thought, which had supposedly made the disaster possible. We had to leave behind the modern era and start a new one, called postmodern. “Oversimplifying as much as possible, incredulity regarding metanarratives is considered «postmodern»,” defined François Lyotard.
What are metanarratives? In the previous era supported by biblical authors and philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel... the foundation of knowledge was sought in a metaphysical reality, God, the spirit, reason, etc. This attitude was considered unsuccessful. Now it was intended to find the foundation of knowledge within science. In reality, it was not primarily about knowledge, what was sought was to speed up the process of emancipation of humanity, which began in the French revolution.
Traditional philosophies and theologies, especially Hegel's philosophy and the so-called revealed biblical texts, are classified as “meta-narratives”. These are defined as schemes of narrative culture, which seek to answer all historical questions. This would have founded authoritarian, totalizing thinking. The Auschwitz tragedy spelled the failure of that way of thinking. From now on, the human being will not accept anything that is not his creation. There is no - according to postmodern ideologues - the truth itself. Truth is human creation and must emerge from consensus. The new attitude causes a radical change in mentality regarding such a fundamental issue as good and evil. The last criterion is success. Good is what most consider as such and it allows me to succeed. Everyone has to try to reach the finish line soon and before the others. With these principles, the vision of life changes. The contents are relativized, the appearance is promoted, which impresses. Background convictions are eliminated. Puns take the place of serious argument.
Sokal scandal
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
(Intellectual impostures)
From the beginning the distrust towards the postmodern movement arises. The precipitation caused by the trauma of war is noticeable. Master the quest for quick success. The movement born in France in 1960 passed, around 1970, to the United States (under the name "french theory"). Postmodern theories multiplied, one of them was the "weak thought" (anti-metaphysical, without interpretative obstacles) propagated from Italy. By renouncing principles and proposing success as a criterion, the door to arbitrariness is opened; to nihilism. New technologies put power in the hands of the masses; The media influence decisions at all levels of society. You don't think for yourself, you do what the media suggest. The scientists sounded the alert. The so-called "Sokal scandal" was a hoax concocted by physicist Alan Sokal of New York University, in order to highlight the haste and lack of seriousness in postmodern publications. Professor Sokal submitted a pseudoscientific article to the postmodern magazine “Social Text”. He intended to verify that a humanities journal would publish “an article riddled with nonsense, as long as: a) It sounds good; and b) Support the ideological prejudices of the editors”. Subsequently, Sokal published, together with Jean Bricmont, a Belgian physicist and professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, the work "Intellectual Impostures" in which postmodern academics are accused of lack of rigor and being carried away by fashion.
The disorientation was evident. The philosophers were less insightful than the scientists. There were isolated attempts to draw attention to the philosophical shallowness of postmodernism, but they went unheeded. Fashion ruled. The only important thing was to make a career. For this, it was necessary to follow the postmodernist current. It was a closed circle. Perhaps now, in the year 2022 - in a historical moment that is also difficult - it will be possible to calmly return to the subject and analyze those warnings with a constructive critical spirit.
The current historical situation is obviously serious. In addition to the trauma of the Shoa, new problems overwhelm us: climate change, the threat of a third world war, pandemic, earthquakes, corruption in people and institutions, sexist crimes, pedophilia. Let's try to reflect on the philosophical aspect.
Nietzsche and Heidegger
An indication of the postmodern philosophical disorientation can be seen in the way too easy (einfältig) to propose Nietzsche and Heidegger, as guides for the renewal of Europe. The same intellectuals who had reduced fundamental Western traditions to meta-narratives turned to two creators of another class of great narratives to reconstruct the culture destroyed by National Socialism, leaving its relationship with Nazi ideology uninvestigated in depth. It was a misunderstanding, which can be corrected, remembering now, with serenity, the life and works of those thinkers.
It has been shown that Heidegger was a convinced National Socialist. In April 1933 he accepted the Rectorship of the University of Freiburg and joined the NSDAP party. In the following months he openly exposed clearly Nazi-leaning ideas. Already in “Being and Time” (Sein und Zeit) one finds expressions (“Geschick”, “Volk” “Helden” “Fürsorge”) that point to ideology. Heidegger's philosophy seems inadequate to guide humanity in times of crisis. It was noticed by scholars who knew the person and the work well. The philosopher psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, for example, proposed to his allies that Heidegger, despite being persona non grata, be granted an income for humanitarian reasons, but advised against reinstating him to teaching for the following reason: "The way of To think of Heidegger seems to me dependent, dictatorial, without communication, for this reason it would be disastrous for teaching” (Heideggers Denkungsart, die mir ihrem Wesen nach unfrei, diktatorisch, kommunikationslos erscheint, wäre heute in der Lehrwirkung verhängnisvoll). We do not endorse this opinion, but we do consider the question legitimate: why did the ideologues of postmodern thought refer to Heidegger? It seemed incomprehensible to Habermas that a thinker of the stature of Heidegger would fall into such a simple mode of veneration for the uncultivated dictator ("Culture doesn't matter, Karl. Look at his marvelous hands", Heidegger would have responded on one occasion to Karl Jaspers referring to Hitler.)
After the publication of the “black notebooks” (schwarze Hefte), the correspondence with Hanna Ahrend and the letters to his wife, published by his granddaughter Gertrud Heidegger, an unexpected image of Heidegger has emerged: a human being struggling to overcome their weaknesses. The image of the philosopher, who urged authenticity in a world submerged in the inauthentic, subjected to the mediocrity of the "man" (vulgar), had to be corrected. Many had imagined him as a hermit from the black forest, engulfed in meditation on the mysteries of being. In reality, he was a restless spirit, fleeing from himself, in need of affection and admiration. The engine of his life, he once confessed to his wife Elfride, was passion. "When my existence is deprived of passion, I become silent and the source does not flow." By day he works furiously; at night, her heart races. He feels shaken “by a force that he called demonic”, he needs to retire from time to time to the silence of the Benedictine Abbey of Beuron, where he likes to say Compline with the monks, and is ecstatic with the hymn “Te Lucis ante terminum”.
That is in keeping with his nature as a philosopher. According to Plato, philosophy is born from the erotic impulse that elevates man from corporeal reality to the Olympus of the gods. Heidegger does not make this movement an explicit subject of philosophical reflection as occurs, for example, in Kierkegaard. That irritates some biographers. The same goes for his political position; Heidegger tried to minimize his adhesion to Nazism, reducing it to a sporadic episode without repercussions in his work. We now know that Nazi-style pan-Germanism was essential in the dynamics of his thinking.
After the victory of the Allies, the need arose in public opinion to demand authenticity from influential figures in society. Gadamer revealed in a speech, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the master, that Heidegger discovered an essential dimension of his life when he met the young Hanna Ahrend; there is a similarity with what Lou Salomé meant for Nietzsche. There is also a certain similarity between Nietzsche's attack in Turin in January 1889 and Heidegger's stroke at the home of one of his lovers in Augsburg in April 1970. Heidegger's lack of reflection on his own personal experiences and policies, from which, he could have adequately interpreted the real human being and the vicissitudes of history. But Heidegger did not start from human nature as it manifests itself in historical reality, his philosophizing is driven by the idealistic dynamics of German thought since Kant, hence the megalomaniac trait that linked him with Nietzsche and brought him closer to Nazism.
Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School
It is probable that this duality between thought and life provoked Theodor W. Adorno's ridiculing expression “Jargon der Eigentlichkeit” (slang for authenticity). Adorno walked a different path than Heidegger. Due to his Jewish ancestry he was excluded from teaching in 1933, he emigrated fleeing the Nazis. In that situation he met Marx Horkheimer, also of Jewish descent, who had also fled from Germany. After 15 years in exile, Adorno decided to return to his country, out of nostalgia and his need to work in his mother tongue. He resumed his teaching activity and was one of the directors of the Institute for Sociological Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) in Frankfurt.
Adorno and Heidegger represent two different ways of experiencing German culture and language, two ways of understanding philosophy based on opposing autobiographies. The right thing to do is not to bet on Adorno and against Heidegger. Fertile is the cooperation of both. By coordinating the vision of Adorno and that of Heidegger, a philosophy open to nature and all human beings could be founded. For a reform of philosophy and science to be possible, a process of maturity of the subject is necessary. It is no longer a question of new theories, but of an essential change of a "conversion" of man. But can the human being change his essence? The Institute for Sociological Research was born in Frankfurt in the interwar period. The country was frustrated by the defeat in the First World War. The decline of the Weimar Republic certainly prompted the triumph of Nazism. To explain this paradoxical development, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno turned to the Enlightenment. They were convinced that everything would improve if humanity took reason as a guide.
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the myth of reason
Historical development refutes that conviction. The research paths proposed by postmodernism, by the Frankfurt School and in later theories present debatable aspects from a philosophical point of view, specifically:
1) The supposed supremacy of the human being in the whole of creation. An ontology capable of exposing the manifestations of being is necessary, without thinking about them, based on differences invented by man.
2) From there discover what is proper to human language. Communication exists at all levels of creation. The proper of human language has yet to be determined without the predetermined intention of demonstrating supremacy. Human language is by nature ambivalent, it separates as much as it unites.
3) The word itself does not translate the intention of the subject.
4) Language is used in its daily use to cover immediate needs, at the highest levels, it also serves to hide intentions. The possibility of new fakes lies in the dynamism of life, in the need to defend oneself. While the ability to pretend is part of the subsistence mechanisms of natural life and is empirically demonstrable in animals, the reason is not susceptible to demonstration, rather its absence is evident. Reason is a matter of faith. Faith in reason is a Greek postulate that has had its critics since ancient times. Discoveries in the field of biology and psychology have shown that human thoughts and feelings arise from a hidden world (as inaccessible as that of microbes, viruses and bacteria) that is beyond our control. The same must be said of the concept of freedom, valid only for elementary levels of life. For example: I am free to go shopping now or do it later; but I was not free to choose the event, the date, the place of my birth, nor can I choose my tastes; I can choose to vote for one party or another, but I cannot decide on the tendencies of my will.
5) Concepts as fundamental as reason, language, freedom were introduced at certain moments in the history of civilization and are part of the human intellectual baggage transmitted from generation to generation and maintained, but have never been subjected to a serious philosophical examination. Even radical thinkers, such as Hume, Descartes, Husserl at the time and later the postmoderns, put tradition in brackets or set it aside, but they did not go to the bottom of a question that defines the very essence of the human being: Is the really free human being? Despite the fact that the core of the problem was clearly perceived already in antiquity: "I do not do what I want, but what I hate" (Letter of Paul of Tarsus to the Romans 7, 15). This evidence of a contradiction within being is part of the intellectual capital of Christianity that is yet to be developed philosophically.
6) Also without developing philosophically, there is evidence of an innate pathology of human nature (perhaps of nature as such), as exposed by Paul of Tarsus in his letter to the Romans cp. 8.
The question asked by the researchers from the Frankfurt Sociological School: “why the radical solution proposed by Nazism triumphed”, did not receive a convincing answer. What is one trying to hide when, in the presence of disasters in human history and in one's own personal life, one speaks of reason as a hallmark of the human being, from a chair founded on corpses? Let us recall the reflection with which Hegel concludes his "Phenomenology of Spirit" that proposes Absolute Knowledge as the end of intramundane history:
For postmodernism, Hegel's philosophy was a prototype of totalitarian thought. Justly. But to overcome it, it is not enough to declare it a meta-narrative, the vision must be completed: Not only the Absolute Spirit, but also an infinity of tiny spirits impose their opinion from a chair, which rests on the corpses that they have been leaving behind in their rise to power.
Nietzsche, Heidegger and the spiritual tradition of the West
The philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger are brilliant compositions with beautiful, creative language, also deceitful, bearers of the megalomaniac thought that led to the horror of Auschwitz. In order to raise Europe up, it would have been good to turn to witnesses of inner freedom and social responsibility, such as Francisco de Asís, Juan de Dios, Juan Bosco, Mechtild von Magdeburg, Hildegard von Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Teresa of Lisieux. In addition to Nietzsche and Heidegger, postwar philosophy should have studied other thinkers such as Dante, Cervantes, Calderón, Goethe, Hölderlin or Machado.
Conclusion: Given the significance of the historical development from 1933 to the present situation, we have studied not only the works, but also the biographies of relevant thinkers (including Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir) and We have observed the daily events in scientific, sports, political and religious institutions in several countries, reaching the conclusion that these are not the problems of a specific institution. They are all touched. The problem is the human being. That is why changing established ways of thinking is no longer useful, it is necessary to start from scratch. For this we have stopped at a thinker who had his peak in the 19th century, then fell into oblivion. It is about the mystical philosopher Jakob Böhme, called Pilosophus Teutonicus (1575-1624). We have studied his work, his life, we have traveled - to exchange with those who know his thought - to his hometown of Görlitz, where he lived and was persecuted by the established power, but also supported by friends and benefactors who longed for a new beginning. Böhme was not an academic, he was a man of the people, a family man, a shoemaker by profession, a worker and a visionary. We have called it "German Presocratic" (der deutsche Vorsokratiker), as a precursor of creative thinking and a healthy and clean life. We have also studied the works of its interpreter, the Bavarian physicist, chemist and physician from Munich, Franz Xaver von Baader (1765 1841), called Boehmius redivivus:
In the course of these investigations, we discovered a surprising intrinsic connection between the empirical experiences of pre-industrial peoples and speculative sketches of great depth, such as that carried out by Jakob Böhme and the investigations of Schelling and, above all, of Baader in the fields of physics, chemistry and medicine. From these investigations has emerged The Phenomenology of the Deep or Tiefenphänomenologie, which we have also called New Presocratic (Neue Vorsokratik).
From the book AURORA or Dawn. Chap. 22 written in the year 1612
I have not studied (...) I have my own teacher who is nature. From her I have learned my Philosophy, Astrology and Theology, and not from people.
Trials on Jakob Böhme
FWSchelling: "One cannot fail to say of Jacob Böhme that he is a miraculous phenomenon in the history of mankind, and especially in the history of German culture."
GWF Hegel: "Jacob Böhme is the first German philosopher."
E. Bloch: "Since Heraclitus nothing like this has been heard."
J. Sánchez de Murillo: Jakob Böhme – Der deutsche Vorsokratiker. Zur Gegenwart und Zukunft der Philosophie. In: Erkenntnis und Wissenschaft – Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), Internationales Jacob-Böhme-Symposium Görlitz 2000 (= Neues Lausizisches Magazin, Beiheft 2). Görlitz-Zittau 2001, pp. 128–153.
J. Sánchez de Murillo, Durchbruch der Tiefenphänomenologie. Die Neue Vorsokratik, (The emergence of the Phenomenology of the Deep. The new Presocratic). Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2002
We have investigated ancient cultures, indigenous architecture, especially the Maya, living in Quiché towns in Guatemala. It has also been enriching to meditate on the Letter from Chief Seattle, in the year 1855, to the President of the United States, which we quote below.
Letter from Great Chief Seattle, of the Swaminsh tribe, to Franklin Pierce, President of the United States of America, 1854.
“The Grand Chief in Washington has sent word that he wishes to purchase our land. The Great Chief also sends us words of friendship and goodwill. (...) We are going to consider your offer, because we know that, if we don't, the white man will come with his firearms and take our lands. (...) How can you buy or sell the sky or the heat of the earth? This idea seems strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air, nor the shine of the water, how can you buy them? Every piece of this land is sacred to my people, every shining pine needle, every grain of sand on the riverbanks, every drop of dew in the shadows of the forests, every clearing in the grove and the buzz of every insect. they are sacred in the memory and traditions of my people. The sap that runs through the body of the trees carries with it the memories of the red man. (...) We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The scented flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, they are all our brothers. The steep mountains, the humid meadows, the heat of the skin of the pony and the man, we all belong to the same family. The murmur of the water of the rivers is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes and give us fish to feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember and teach your children that the rivers are our brothers and also yours, and therefore you must treat the rivers with the same sweetness with which you treat a brother.
We know that the white man does not understand our way of life. One piece of our land matters as much to him as any other, since he is a stranger who comes at night to tear from the earth what he needs. The earth is not his sister, but his enemy and once conquered he abandons it, and continues on his way leaving behind his parents' grave without caring about anything. He steals from the earth what belongs to his children and he doesn't care about anything. Both the grave of their parents and the rights of their children are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things that can be bought, plundered, and sold (…).
I don't understand, our way of life is very different from yours. The mere sight of their cities pains the eyes of the red man. Perhaps it is because the red man is a savage and does not understand anything. There is no quiet place in the cities of the white man, nor is there a place to listen to how the flowers of the trees open in spring, or the movement of the wings of an insect. But perhaps this is also because I am a savage who does not understand things well. The noise of the cities seems to insult the ears. And I ask myself, what kind of life does man have if he cannot hear the solitary song of the nightjar, nor the nocturnal discussions of frogs on the edge of a lake? I am a red skin and I understand nothing. We prefer the soft whisper of the wind on the surface of the lake, as well as the smell of that same wind purified by the midday rain, or perfumed by the fragrance of the pines. The air is something precious for the red skin, since all beings share the same breath, the animal, the tree, the man, we all breathe the same air. (...) If we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with the life it sustains. The wind that gave our ancestors the first breath of life, also received their last breath from them. If we sell you our land, you must keep it sacred, as a place where even the white man can taste the wind scented by the meadow's flowers. We want to consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept it, I will set one condition: the white man must treat the animals of this land as his brothers. I am a savage and I do not understand any other way of life. (…) What would become of man without animals? If all animals were exterminated, man would also perish from a great loneliness of spirit, for what happens to animals will soon also happen to man. All things are interrelated. (...) It is necessary that they teach their children, what our children already know, that the earth is our mother. Everything that happens to the earth will also happen to the children of the earth. (...) This is what we know: the earth does not belong to man, it is man who belongs to the earth. This is what we know: all things are linked like the blood that unites a family. The suffering of the earth will become suffering for the children of the earth. (…) We know one thing that perhaps the white man may discover one day, our God and yours is the same God. You believe that God belongs to you, in the same way that you want our land to belong to you, but it is not so. He is the God of all men and his compassion extends equally to the red-skinned and the pale-faced. This land is precious, and to despise it is to despise its Creator and it would provoke his wrath. The whites will also become extinct, perhaps before all the other tribes. They pollute their beds and one night they will drown in their own waste. You walk towards your destruction surrounded by glory, inspired by the strength of the God who brought you to this earth and who by some special design gave you dominion over it and over the red man. That fate is a mystery to us, for we do not understand why the buffaloes are exterminated, the wild horses tamed, the secret corners of the dense forests impregnated with the scent of so many men, and the view of the landscape of the green hills obstructed. with a swarm of talking wires.
Where is the bush? Destroyed
Where is the eagle? He disappeared.
It is the end of life and the beginning of survival