Individualism is one of the fundamental traits of our time, based on an emphatic and recurrent defence of individual freedom, as experienced by consciousness. This point of view seems to entail a refuse of all kinds of transcendence, cosmological or onto-theological, characterized by an authoritarian and undisputed heteronomy. However, this perspective does not take into account a third type of transcendence, one that occurs in that radical immanence, in the core of individual freedom and autonomy. This type of transcendence takes (...) shape as an ethical and aesthetical relationship carved in the heart of each individual human being, each one of his particular conscious states and the simultaneous consciousness of his Humanity. The aim of this essay is to give an understanding of Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity and its philosophy of Revelation, as a reflection on religion and its anthropological origins. In our viewpoint, The Essence of Christianity is an effort to ascertain the genetic elements of human religiosity and clarify its meaning as a movement of reconnecting the human individual with a transcendence that is his own Humanity, given in the immanence of his conscious life. Religion remains a law of transcendence, as the feeling that binds the individual to his Humanity, an everlasting commandment coming from an Otherness that projects itself as a horizon to his free actions. (shrink)

This paper intends to give a critical reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s treatment of inter-consciousness relationship as presented in his work L'être et le néant, namely in the chapter L'existence d'autrui. Our main objective is to understand the treatment Sartre gave the referred issue in that particular work, but also to show that his theoretical standpoint falls short on a true determination of the meaning of the experience of Otherness for consciousness. Our method for approaching Sartre’s views stands on a detailed (...) reading of the author’s own analyses, trying to show their limited scope and providing a different, less conflictual treatment and interpretation for the presented data. In Sartre’s view, consciousness is not inhabited by an ego, that is, it doesn’t have an ego until one becomes an object to it, similar to the remaining objects of the world, which occurs with the Other’s entry in the world. That being, Sartre’s fundamental problem is to know how is it possible for consciousness to constitute an ego as an object - as an object among other objects, but whose experience is, for consciousness, different from the one it makes of all other objects -, and, on a second step, to state its identity with that ego, i.e., to be that ego, without loosing, in the process, its subjective spontaneity and freedom. Taken as a subject/object kind of relation, as Sartre affirms it, the inter-consciousness relationship is condemned to failure, doomed to be a permanent struggle for domination of one over an other. Our analysis of the sartrian data as put forward in L'Être et le néant will show that Sartre’s thesis about inter-consciousness relationship is one-sided and that a more comprehensive interpretation of the above-mentioned relationship is possible, an interpretation based in the view that envisaging the Other as an object is founded on an anticipation of its subjectivity and of consciousness’ own subjectivity, that is, on a founding intersubjective relationship. According to our viewpoint, if it is true that an ego can be an object, it is already as a degraded ego and not as the ego properly said, born out of a relationship between subjects. The experience of Othemess shows consciousness, originally and immediately, what it can and should be, and that being has a positivity that remains an other for a concrete, knowable ego. That founding experience, which takes place at an affective level, has the meaning of an experience of the limits which, when surpassed, will allow consciousness to reach a higher dignity of being. Therefore it is as anticipation and project, as desire, as afectivity, that the relationship to an other takes place, as a pure relationality without masks, and not as a dialectical conflict, as Sartre intends to show with his occasionally convincing arguments. (shrink)

RESUMO: A presente incapacidade de o ser humano estar em casa no mundo encontrou expressão numa crise “ecológica” que possui elementos éticos, políticos e ontológicos. Partindo de uma breve elaboração do sentido dessa crise “ecológica” e da sua relação com a própria constituição do ser do humano, este artigo procura traçar um percurso, no quadro do pensamento arendtiano, da relação entre o sentido do ser do humano, a questão da banalidade do mal, a atividade de pensar e o surgimento da (...) consciência moral. Para tanto, o texto faz uso de ferramentas de análise e de descrição fenomenológico-existenciais, para chegar a um tipo de normatividade que não brota de uma necessidade formal dada, mas da própria contingência da fatualidade existencial, isto é, da liberdade, a qual se estabelece como condição de toda a ação, descobrindo-lhe assim a sua própria medida. ABSTRACT: The human being’s current inability to be at home in the world has found expression in an “ecological” crisis which has ethical, political and ontological elements. Beginning with a brief elaboration on the meaning of that “ecological” crisis and its relation with the human’s own constitution of being, this paper aims at drawing a path, within Arendtian thought, between the meaning of the being of humans, the issue of the banality of evil, thinking and the emergence of conscience. To that effect, this paper uses phenomenological-existential tools of analysis and description to arrive at a type of normativity that emerges not from any kind of formal necessity, but from the existential factuality’s contingency itself, that is, from freedom, which is established as a condition for all action, thus finding it its own measure. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism contains a disquieting and devastating diagnosis about our world. This paper aims to discuss the political- philosophical assumptions underlying the crisis identified by Arendt in her work. It will center its attention on Arendt’s book on Imperialism and her view of the nation- state. An indirect and genetic comprehension path will be drawn, starting with the Arendtian criticism regarding the human rights concept in effect to date, in a kind of prolegomenon both to Arendt’s (...) assessment of Human Rights and to her own proposal of a human right. It will be contended that the individual was freed from his humanness viewed as a universal way of being by way of the nation-state and the Imperialism that followed it. It will be shown that, as a result of this emancipatory movement, the positivity of right was abrogated, simultaneously abrogating the individual’s bond to the human community, thus constituting humanness as a problem. (shrink)

The point of departure of this reflexion will be a reading of the Kantian analysis of space, as presented in the section entitled Die transzendentafe A.sthetik of the Kritik of reinen Vernunft, focusing on two central aspects: first, the kantian understanding of space as a predisposition of the subject regarding experience, previous to any particular experience; second, the identification of that subjective condition with the human condition. Hannah Arendt, in her article "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man", (...) tries to reflect upon a scene of appropriation, performed by man, of the conditions of possibility of experience and of existence, which implies an abandonment of his condition as conceived by Kant. This paper intends to show that the reflexion of Hannah Arendt regarding the conquest of space and the human condition constitutes a possibility of founding a wide range of responsible ethics. (shrink)

The ecological crisis is endangering life on Earth as we know it, giving rise to multiple protests, strikes and marches around the world, most of them lead by children and teenagers. The aim of this paper is to argue for the legitimacy of the presence of children and teenagers in political life in the current state of the ecological crisis through a seemingly paradoxical kind of participation: civil disobedience, i.e. refusal to participate. The paper will start by addressing the need (...) to think the ecological crisis and analyze its origins; it will then consider the significance of the role performed by children and teenagers in the political stances regarding the crisis on the basis of Hannah Arendt’s ontological-political thought. (shrink)

A obra de Hannah Arendt tem uma forte presença hegeliana, seja em virtude de convergências temáticas, seja em virtude de divergências fundamentais do ponto de vista metodológico, ontológico e político. Salvaguardadas as diferenças de detalhe no tratamento dessas questões, as convergências temáticas fazem-se notar na distinção entre social e político e no lugar que a singularidade ocupa nas suas teorias políticas. A sua divergência fundamental diz respeito à filosofia da história, à noção de temporalidade que lhe está associada e às (...) suas consequências para a relação entre necessidade, contingência e liberdade, bem como à noção de Progresso. O texto que aqui se apresenta procura contribuir para a clarificação desta divergência, argumentando que nela se constitui o eixo sobre o qual se articula a cisão entre os dois pensamentos.Arendt. Hegel. Tempo. Conceito. Hegelianismo Metafísico. (shrink)