Download Every man is an island, every culture is a continent, and the

 Every man is an island, every culture is a continent,
and the historical process is hyperdialectical
Paper to be read at the International Seminar
“The art of cultural interchange”,
Queen Mary University of London
London, June 10, 2015
Mércio P Gomes
Anthropologist
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
May the spirit of John Donne look down on me in serenity – and may
his fellow living Britons momentarily hold back their righteous
judgement – as I respectfully depart from the timeless meaning of the
poet´s verse to propose the unfathomable insularity of man, the
multifarious, continental nature of culture, and the ineffable unfolding
of history.
1. A personal experience
About thirty years ago, I happened to stay one night in an UrubuKaapor village, in eastern Amazon, in the company of a Guajá Indian
called Txipatxiá, and Gabriel, my eight-year-old son. The Guajá are of
one of the few viable hunting and gathering people not only in Brazil
but perhaps on the American continent. Only a few years previously,
the Guajá people had been living independent (or isolated) from any
contact or relationship with Brazilian society. I was a lucky
anthropologist to have befriended them. The Urubu-Kaapor and the
Guajá had been traditional enemies for at least a couple of centuries,
with recurrent fights, killings, and abduction of women, but they were
on good terms at the time. They speak languages from the same
linguistic family, the Tupi-Guarani, but the languages are not close
enough to make them thoroughly mutually understandable. So I was of
some help in translating the more incomprehensible trends of
conversation because the Urubu-Kaapor spoke reasonable Portuguese
and I myself had been practicing the Guajá language for a few months.
My friend Txipatxiá knew we had to pass through his erstwhile enemies’
village, and trusted that no evil would result, but he was nonetheless a
bit anxious. The Urubu-Kaapor chief graciously invited us for dinner,
dancing, and conversation, and we had a great night together. Later on,
as the three of us were lying in our hammocks talking the events over,
Txipatxiá suddenly raised his voice a bit and said: “They are like us!”
When I figured out what he was saying, it was a eureka moment.
Txipatxiá used the inclusive form of the Guajá first person plural, which
meant the inclusion not only of himself, me, and my son, but perhaps
every human being. In short, he had spontaneously stated that the
Urubu-Kaapor were not an anomalous or animal-like people, as Guajá
culture might have inclined him to imagine, but a people in their own
right, similar to his own Guajá people. In great joy I realized that
Txipatxiá was able to transcend his culture and see other people´s
culture from the other´s perspective.
Ever since then it has been my business to figure that moment out in
anthropological and philosophical terms, and to apply the ideas and
concepts resulting from this continuing reflection onto other
anthropological reports to construct a new vision of anthropology. What
follow now are samples of my assessment of the amazing accounts from
two of the most important pioneers in appraising inter-cultural
relations.
2. Michel de Montaigne and Thomas More
When someone foreign, say a German or an Indian, comes to a certain
culture, say Brazilian or English, it is fitting and proper that he see
things through the intellectual and emotional lenses that his own
culture provides. Unless, of course, he is an anthropologist. For the
received doctrine of anthropology states that if he were of that
particular trade he should do well to disable his cultural lenses and get
equipped with a fresh and unhampered mind to look into the other
culture, delving deeply into it, living it out as fully as possible, just so
that he get a clear understanding of it. We will see later on how far that
is possible, and whether that is exclusive or not to the anthropologist.
Would not an ordinary man or woman be inherently able to see from
within the other’s culture? How could that be so?
Long ago, before John Donne was born, the insightful French
philosopher Michel de Montaigne became interested in the inhabitants
of the New World on account of the extraordinary news relayed to him
by different sources, all of them concerning the Tupinambá Indians
from the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. First, there was a man in his
service who had stayed with the Tupinambá for some twelve years.
Secondly, he received reports of the talks that the French court had had
with three Tupinambá Indians who had been brought to the city of
Rouen (one of them married and left progeny whose descendants may
still be with us today). Thirdly, Montaigne himself had a long
conversation with one of those Indians and also read published
accounts by visitors who had themselves been with the Tupinambá.
Montaigne would have made a fine anthropologist! Whatever did the
Tupinambá make of their stay in France? Apparently they were
impressed by what they had been shown of French city and country life
in the 1570s, but at the same time they were both distraught and
amazed at what they saw. Montaigne declares he was taken by three
observations the Indians had made, one of which he had unfortunately
forgotten by the time he came to write his essay “Of Cannibals”. The
Tupinambá were flabbergasted at the intensity of the social inequality
they observed, in which a few were too rich, and a multitude too poor.
And he also recalled that they found it incomprehensible that Charles
IX, the king of the mighty and rich French, was a mere infant.
Montaigne’s essay argues in a light, quasi Socratic, dialectical fashion a
comparison between Tupinambá cannibalism, with its ritualized killing
and eating of affinal enemies [those related by marriage rather than
blood] for the purpose of acquiring their inward power, and the
senseless intestine warfare between Huguenots and Catholics, with all
its mutual torturing of compatriots. How daring of Montaigne to make
such a comparison! Having considered everything, he has no qualms
about imposing on the reader´s mind and self-righteousness his own
perception as to who really is the savage. And with that, anthropologists
everywhere concur: Montaigne laid the foundation of cultural relativism.
Please, bear with me a little longer, for there may be more to reflect on
from this episode. If we could imagine ourselves eavesdropping on this
fortuitous conversation between Montaigne and his Tupinambá
companion in a street in Rouen, we should be keen to know whether
the Tupinambá was looking into French society with the lens of his own
culture, or was he seeing things the way the French might see or
wanted him to see? Where does this seemingly sociological and political
interest come from on the part of the Tupinambá? Montaigne subtly lets
us imagine that the Tupinambá somehow knew what they were talking
about and laid their judgements in a clear way.
The graciously unrepentant Thomas More (may his soul rest composed)
wrote his splendorous Utopia based on the accounts, not tales, that
Dutch and English sailors had told him of their stay with Tupinambá
Indians on the coast of Rio de Janeiro. Thomas More may not have
talked to any Tupinambá himself, but he certainly got a good gist of
their society through these fine observant sailors. The geography of that
far-off island on the South Atlantic Ocean certainly resembles Rio de
Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay. More’s description of that far-fetched society
fits well with reports from other eyewitnesses of Tupinambá society and
culture, such as the German Hans Staden, who lived imprisoned with
them in the 1540s, the Portuguese Jesuit priest José de Anchieta, who
indoctrinated them in the 1550s, the French Huguenot Jean de Lery
who researched them in the 1560s, and others later on. Utopia became
the inspirational groundwork for the great intellectual and sociopolitical transformations that were to sweep across Europe for the next
five centuries. The eventual applications of its inspiring vision may have
had some wayward political consequences, yet the great lesson of Utopia
remains that the world is multitudinous and cultures can change by
social design.
3. Cultural attitudes and individual visions
Let us remind ourselves that the Tupinambá were not the first Indians
from Brazil, or for that matter, the New World, to come to Europe and
commingle and converse with European men of the people,
intellectuals, and nobles. Ever since Columbus brought natives from
the Caribbean Islands and Pedro Álvares Cabral from the coast of
Brazil, Indians were brought into Europe – Portugal, Spain, France, the
Netherlands, possibly England or Ireland – to appease the curiosity of
Europeans, so that they could ensure those exotic savages were really
as their sailors were telling them they were. Wild and grotesque they
may have been, but they were also intriguingly worthy and wholesome.
In many respects, sixteenth-century Europeans treated Indians as fullminded individuals. The quality of this picture was to change radically
in the nineteenth century when the new dogmas of social evolution
predominated. A lesser-minded Indian, a child at best, emerged to be
placed at the bottom of the recently concocted racial ranking.
One might rightfully bring the historical record into focus with a
demonstration that Europeans were not only extremely cruel to the New
World Indians in the sixteenth century but also throughout the colonial
period. Are we to forget the so-called Black Legend, i.e., the Spanish
and Portuguese massacres of Indians during the long years of conquest
and colonization? Was there anything other than absolute inhumanity
in that? What about the mind-boggling question raised by more than a
few European thinkers as to whether the Indians had or had not souls,
were or were not human beings?
Harsh judgement and cruelty were part of the ordinary methods of war
and enmity in those times, and the Indians were no exception. Shall we
consider, by comparison, what happened between the Spanish and
Arabs during the seven hundred years of continuous wars for the reconquest of Spain? How about the Inquisition or the fiendish massacres
of their own peoples during both the English and the French
Revolutions? How about all the millions of European, Arabic, Turkish,
Slavic and other peoples tortured and murdered, and pushed to the
brink of annihilation? Do I need to bring up the horrors perpetrated by
Europeans against Europeans through history to our present times?
My point here is both complicated and troublesome, with tinges of both
pessimism and optimism in my outlook, and I beg the reader’s pardon
for making it in such haste. Contrary to most historians and
anthropologists I don’t think Europeans were particularly, or
exceptionally, cruel to Indians in any different way than they were to
their enemies in other wars, either of conquest or of economic, political
or religious rivalry. I surmise further that on occasions when mostly
incomprehensible changes were shaking up their societies, European
men of vision gauged, and even looked up to, Indian and other foreign
cultures to help understand their own problems. In doing so, these
visionaries intended not only to bring forth innovations, but also to
influence their people and governments. They frequently failed in their
earnest attempts but left legacies that would eventually come into play
one way or another in times ahead.
Historical process does not follow a rectilinear teleology, but is subject
to circumstances – mostly of a cultural nature – that influence its
course in ways imperceptible to most people. In the sixteenth century
Europeans were experiencing the threshold of a new era. They were
generally horrified with what they were experiencing both in their own
countries and overseas, and some of them were avid knowledge seekers,
desirous of working out their internal cultural predicaments. In the
nineteenth century Europeans (and their direct descendants) were
cocksure in consolidating the ways and means of modern capitalism
and the overwhelming dominance of the scientific outlook. They had a
drive to articulate an absolute expression of their unconscious,
collective self-esteem. That resulted in a terrible era of racism and racial
self-consciousness, of which even today we can hardly say we are free.
The Tupinambá individuals, Thomas More, Michel de Montaigne were
island men in their own right and in their own times. However
enmeshed in the wiring of their own cultures they were able to re-focus
their cultural lenses to discern the fabrics of other cultures, either by
living them out or by simply listening to other peoples’ heartfelt and
discrete accounts, even if none of them was methodologically trained for
such a process.
You don’t have to be a philosopher, an anthropologist, or, for that
matter, a psychologist, to understand the other. There is something in
each and every individual that equips us with the highest inherent
capacity to go beyond our selves and our ordinary cultural discernment.
In its turn, culture is a multifarious continent of geo-socio-historical
layers, high mountains and deep valleys rupturing and twisting about,
and with its wiring done by a good-hearted, but poorly skilled and wily
designer now called the historical process. What it will come to, none of
us can fathom.
Of course the individual is short-circuited, too. And it might be as well
that his bad wiring is his greatest asset, for in the end he needs some
escape routes to bear out his outrageous fortunes. Nonetheless, no
matter how close or peninsular, or how connected by bridges and fords
and low tides, an island always lies a little off a continent, pace Donne.
The individual per se and the individual as a social being don’t always
see eye to eye. To put it in anthropological and philosophical terms, the
collective unconscious - i.e., society and culture - though a direct
product of the individual in collectivity, does not match with the
potential that the individual carries within himself.
4. Ethnocentrism and ethnoexocentrism
If we take it that culture is not merely a notion that represents shared
behaviours amongst socially related individuals, but actually fixes a
social identity for individuals, we may concede that cultures are entities
in their own right that relate to one another. Consequently, there is
cultural interplay, which means competition, cooperation,
understanding, misunderstanding, accommodation, rejection, in short,
mutual acculturation – all working as processes. Ethnocentrism as a
concept describes the innermost feeling of value that any culture places
on its own way of seeing the world (and other cultures). Every culture is
ethnocentric, just as every individual is egocentric. The ethnocentric
feeling is a centripetal force that keeps a culture whole and makes its
individual members feel part of a shared entity. That is well known even
outside the field of anthropology. But how do cultures understand other
cultures? If they do not think, how can that be possible? Is there an
opposite force that allows culture to open up to other cultures? Is the
mechanism to understand another culture a virtue exclusive to the
transcendent subjectivity of the individual? Or is it a virtue exclusive to
“superior” cultures, such as is proposed by the Polish philosopher
Leszek Kolakowski for Western civilization?
I believe there is something amiss in this whole discussion, and here is
where I highlight the notion of ethnoexocentrism, a direct opposite of
ethnocentrism. I have postulated elsewhere that as much as
ethnocentrism in its own right, ethnoexocentrism is a necessary
cultural drive that favours a genuine acceptance of other cultures where
individuals can relate and intermingle with one another.
Ethnoexocentrism is for the most part dormant in every culture, and it
only comes to light when called for, particularly when inescapable intercultural relations require it. Ethnoexocentrism is a more complex
feeling than ethnocentrism, for it necessitates a self-conscious appraisal
of one’s own sentiment and the sentiment of the other culture. Were it
not for the sentiment of ethnoexocentrism, not even total domination of
one people over another would be sufficient to produce social and
cultural commingling. In short, cultures, as collective, unconscious
entities, do relate to one another because they allow the individual to
become self-conscious of their own culture. Individual understanding
and compassion can of course improve the connexion between cultures,
but the potential for understanding is proper to any culture.
Without the driving power of ethnoexocentrism, the process in which
two or more cultures are in interrelation would necessarily result in the
assimilation of a less resilient culture by another. This is what
anthropologists have called acculturation, a notion much rejected since
the 1970s, but not replaced by any other more feasible explanation.
Acculturation is conceived as a dialectical process, whose final outcome
is taken to be the disappearance of a less resilient, or, if you will, less
adapted, culture. The historical record is full of examples of cultures
that were wiped out, in some cases physically, in others spiritually. But
what about those cultures that suffered so much oppression by a
dominant culture and yet remained whole, at least maintaining a basic
or dormant core, only to resurface when occasion permitted?
By taking into account the ethnoexocentric drive as an essential part of
the inter-cultural interplay, one can appraise the historical process as
more complex than normal dialectics would allow us to believe. The
historical process is rather less combinatory of its constituent
contradictory elements, and, inversely, more wholesome because it
allows the constituent elements to keep on existing. The working out of
this process is of a higher order, one that takes all the contradictory
and complementary elements of the historical process in a holistic but
not totalitarian, rather an open and formative way, called
hyperdialectical1.
The historical process is hyperdialectical and we as human beings are
also hyperdialectical in our way of being and thinking. For our purposes
here, hyperdialectics simply means that the interplay of cultures
produces syntheses in a slower mode than the purported dialectical
process. These syntheses are not totalizing, but open to renovation with
the same elements that constituted them. There may not be
consciousness in this process, but somehow, there is purpose and
intentionality. And man may be able to fathom it.
5. England and Brazil
Let us now briefly peruse the examples of the historical processes in
England and in Brazil, consider how their respective cultures were
See Appendix 1 for a reading of how the Brazilian philosopher Luiz Sergio Coelho de
Sampaio developed his logical and philosophical system that he called hyperdialectics.
1
formed and ask how they have been dealing with new inter-cultural
challenges.
England
In ethnic, cultural, and social terms, one might say that England had
become constituted as an identifiable culture by the twelfth century
with ethnic elements from Celts, Romanized Celts, Anglo-Saxons,
Vikings, and Normans. The process of mingling peoples and cultures
was certainly not a peaceful one, but things turned out well in the end,
with minor but resolvable disturbances along the way. It took eight
centuries for the outcome of that process to be challenged with the
arrival of former colonials from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Asia,
and still more recently from Central and Eastern Europe. This eight
hundred year time lapse, conjoined by the formidable economic and
political rise of the nation, strengthened and solidified a “natural”
ethnocentric feeling of the English (or perhaps British) identity. The
English cultural reaction to the newly arrived culturally, religiously, and
racially different peoples has been dominated by a measured if not
nonchalant self-confidence. It is unfortunate that this nonchalance may
have produced a polite indifference to the incomers, and served to keep
English culture apart. How much the English let the incomers know
that they were welcomed into their culture is hard to ascertain.
The fact is that the way English culture accepted immigrants was made
easier for the natives because of post-war social policies, a lasting
period of peace, and the economic and cultural enrichment of the
English polity. There was enough for everyone, more or less, and by and
large people got along. To many observers it seemed that English
culture was experiencing a novel and bright zeitgeist. This fortunate,
cultural combination provided fertile ground for the application of
ethnic policies deriving from the cultural-ideological-political
formulations of multiculturalism. Circumstances made things flow with
comparative ease. However it should be noted that it was not only
because of its particular circumstances that England received
immigrants with such aplomb. This nation, like any other culture and
people, has a drive, and its own degree of ethnoexocentrism.
For all its ethnoexocentric potential and its special zeitgeist, England’s
long historical record of ethnic self-confinement brings with it an
awkward burden both on the natives and on immigrants from other
cultures. Multicultural policies are generally viewed as proper to our
times, but their purposes are less clear. Are these cultures to be set
apart on their own, as in a latter-day, benign, segregationist model, or
are they in the long run to be somehow assimilated? The acute current
debate, from what I can understand, focuses attention on Muslim
immigrants. For example, there is a perceived conundrum about
whether educational policy should be soft (full acceptance of religious
and social customs) or hard (education through the backbone of British
ways). Where to find a new English paideia, a dynamic, middle ground
to favour cultural interplay, not purposeful assimilation -- that seems to
be the question, and this moment urges a new approach.
Brazil
Let us turn to Brazil. Brazilian polity was formed by the mid-eighteenth
century with the cultural and social amalgamation of the three ethnic
and social stocks that were brought together: Indians, Africans, and
Portuguese. The historical process ground everyone in the same mill,
particularly Indians and Africans, most of whom were incorporated into
Brazil as servant-like labour hands or slaves. Brazilian polity arose from
extreme social inequality and political instability. Even though modern
Brazil has an economic and political elite, challenges from the insecure
middle-class and the working-class majority are constant and
apparently on the rise. The time lapse between Brazil’s cultural and
social formation and the arrival of East-Central and Southern
European, Middle Asians, and Japanese immigrants in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was short enough – in
comparison to the time lapse during the formation of English culture –
to provide the circumstances for not only integration but a generalized
assimilation of the majority of the new arrivals. This fact has been taken
to constitute a kind of national cultural ideology by Brazilians but also
by acute-minded foreigners, such as Stefan Zweig and Vilém Flusser.
The result is that there is no inherent ethnic strife in Brazil, though
there are plenty of economic and social frictions in our inequality-ridden
cities, across indigenous territories, the rural quilombos of African
descendants and lands owned by the barons of agribusinesses.
Brazilian culture reigns supreme and hegemonic despite all these
divisions, even for the Indians who have preserved and continue to
practice significantly different cultures of their own. No Brazilian has
any qualms about being Brazilian and each unabashedly acts on this
sentiment, pulling anyone foreign in to their cultural bosom. The
hyperdialectical historical process moves back and forth in time, and
allows for the possibility of the permanence of different cultures.
However, there is no certainty that Indian cultures will continue to be
practised as the future unfolds.
Back to the United Kingdom. Do Scots, Welsh, and Irish peoples still
live out cultures of their own? For all I can gather, they do, and we can
say that they do so because both the hyperdialectical process and the
zeitgeist allow it. They live out their cultures with the understanding
that culture changes endogenously as well as adapting to exogenous
circumstances. They feel that they have been constituents in the
formation of the British culture and polity, which they now want to be
opened up more widely.
5. Beyond assimilation and segregation
If there is a cultural disposition in Brazil for assimilating in-comers –
and consequently for homogenizing cultural diversity - and if there is,
contrarily, a cultural disposition in England for segregating in-comers
and consequently for strengthening multiple ethnocentrisms rather
than ethnoexocentric commingling, there are also in both cases
dispositions for inter-cultural dialoguing, for social experimentation, for
mutual emotion through art, and for the individual to rise above his
circumstances. And that is what I understand we are doing here.
For all we know, and of course we don’t know much, the future is not
foreseeable, precisely because the hyperdialectical historical process
cannot be fully understood nor manipulated by our scientific logic nor
by dialectics as such. We essentially need a new form of logic to account
for the interplay of cultures. The pervading application of scientific
reasoning and its main tools, mathematics and cybernetics, enables us
to grasp the historical process and comforts us somewhat by providing
a sense of possibilities of action, but it is not enough to fathom the
being of history. Scientific, systemic logic is a conventionalized form of
thinking and - as Nietzsche and Heidegger have pointed out in much
harsher terms – is soulless, wayward, and without sense of purpose. An
appeal to Hegelian dialectics, which does provide the sense of purpose
or teleology usually produced by philosophers of history, does not solve
the question because dialectics distinguishes itself in postulating an
outcome based on simple premises and just as easily and cynically
corrects it ex-post factum, as it eventually goes wrong. On the other
hand, an appeal to tradition or a “spirit of the people” or an atavistic
nativism disconnected from the reality of our times usually results in
mindless cultural regression or in worsening ethnocentrism,
xenophobia, and racism.
We, human beings, are hyperdialectical: our mode of thinking goes
beyond the possibilities of scientific reasoning. We move forward -that is
our purpose. But even as we become conscious of that fact we can
hardly find a position from which we can look into ourselves and view
the historical process to comprehend ourselves in our own
overwhelming complexity. Our actions, our social practices, spin out
from our understanding and our control, and the consequences thereof
bounce against other social actions to make everything appear
senseless and entropic.
And yet we are meant to try to understand our times, just the same,
and to act upon the circumstances that are present for us to discern.
We cannot disregard what we as human civilization have reached so far:
a critical knowledge of our convoluted histories, a consciousness of the
best of our traditions, a practice of dialoguing with other traditions, our
commitments to solidarity, a balanced rationality, an earnest and
honest disposition, a mild penchant to prospective designing, free will,
and hopefully an unrelenting faith in man as individual, as culture, and
as nature. For all the vicissitudes of life, self-conscious dialogue is
possible, cultures contain unknown potentials, and if there is not clear
purpose in existence, perhaps we ought to create it.
And finally let us pay homage to our poet John Donne, because, all
things considered, no man is meant to be an island.
Annex 1
The Hyperdialectical Logical System by Luiz Sergio Coelho de
Sampaio
Luiz Sergio Coelho de Sampaio (1933-2003) was a Brazilian philosopher
and logician who elaborated a philosophical system where Being (man
and the world) is conceived to be of a five-fold (quinquintary) nature.
This five-fold nature can be comprehended as five dimensions or logics.
For Sampaio, logic is a concept not at all restricted to what is generally
known as classical or scientific or mathematical logic, the logic that was
originally expounded by Aristotle. Sampaio conceives logic as a mode of
thinking that develops from a pre-mathematical, innermost predisposition pertaining of Being. Logic is what makes us perceive the
multifarious world. There are therefore five logics that explain Being:
logic of identity (I), logic of difference (D), dialectics (I/D), systemic logic
(D/2), and hyperdialectical logic (I/D/2). The first two logics are
autonomous and fundamental logics, whereas the next three are formed
in synthetic, ascending constructions of the interplay of the two
fundamental logics. The hyperdialectical logic subsumes and
synthesizes the previous four logics and consequently commands the
whole system. Taking Being for the moment as man, logic can be
understood as man´s proper mode of thinking to apprehend an object,
either in its parts or in its entirety. Taking the world momentarily as
Being, each one of the five logics, and all of them together as a whole,
represent the structuring of the world, from atomic particles and forces
to the configuration of man through history.
Sampaio´s hyperdialectical logical system (HLS) rests on a principle
thought out long ago by the Greek philosopher Parmenides, the
principle that “thinking and being are the same”. I shall expound this
principle as it pertains to HLS. Next, I will summarize HLS in relation to
a few logical ideas that have been propounded by other philosophers.
Thinking and being are the same
Parmenides’ proposition that “thinking and being are the same” means
that our mode of thinking corresponds to the way the world is. The
question arises: what is our mode of thinking? And that is what HLS is
all about. It is pertinent to note that many centuries later Descartes’
dictum “cogito ergo sum” means something to the same effect as
Parmenides. On another level, that proposition is unquestionably the
basis for the sociological understanding that the way man thinks (logic)
corresponds somehow to how the world functions. Or, in still other
words, pace Marx and Gramsci, the predominance or hegemony of a
certain way of figuring out the world, its main philosophical mode of
thinking (ideology, superstructure), corresponds to the way the world or
society functions (infrastructure). In short, man is his zeitgeist. And he
is also a representation of the world.
Man as a quinquintary, hyperdialectical being
Let me now briefly review some of the founding insights in philosophy
that can be seen as pivotal points in the constitution of HLS. The first
set of thinkers that pristinely produced these insights comes,
unsurprisingly, from Classic Greece. They are said by Sampaio to have
perceived thinking/being in particular, original perspectives, each one
of which stands for what he defined as one of the five logics.
First, there is Parmenides himself who not only introduced the idea of
being/thinking, as we just presented it, but, in a great spurt of
abstraction, concocted the proposition that everything that is (exists), is
but One single entity. Outside of this One there is but Nothing; outside
of what is real there is only the unreal; outside of the single truth
(áletheia), there is only opinion (doxa). For Sampaio, Parmenides is the
first philosopher to articulate the so-called logic of identity (I), which is
the fundamental logic that allows man to perceive the world as a reality,
to know that he exists, that he has a conscience and that he knows he
can act.
Second, comes Heraclitus, known as the “Obtuse” (after epigrams such
as “being and not-being are and are not the same”). Two of his better
known and perhaps more intelligible, aphorisms are “everything flows”
and “no man crosses the same river twice”. Heraclitus’ visionary
aphorisms represent the logic in man’s thinking/being that allows him
to perceive both that he and the world are in constant flow and that
things can also be paradoxical or inconsistent, undecipherable by
conscience (i.e., by the logic of identity). Both Plato and Aristotle, in
their own ways, interpreted Heraclitus as the inspirer of sophistry, but
also as the philosopher who established the notion of the multiplicity
and variety or difference of things, even things within the same group or
genus. Sampaio calls this mode of thinking the logic of difference (D)
and attributes to it the place of the unconscious in man, as well as
unconscious and intuitive knowledge, the significant in language, etc.
The logic of identity (I) and the logic of difference (D) are the two
fundamental logics. They stand on their own merits and represent two
opposite modes of perceiving the world. In a monistic way, logic I
represents the unity of being; logic D stands for the differential
uniqueness and therefore the multiplicity of each and every being. Logic
I favours the perception of time; logic D, the perception of space. Logic I
opens our mind to the phenomenal real; logic D to the elusive unreal.
One affirms; the other doubts and questions. In a dualistic way, they
come together in contrast as subject/object, individual/culture,
consciousness/unconsciousness, etc.
Third, there is Plato who, among many ideas, created the Idea itself, i.e.,
what today we call “concept”, as both the unfathomable Form that
stands eternal in an ideal, model world representing empirical “things”
in all their varied instances and also an ordinary synthesis of the one
and the multiple. Sampaio calls this mode of thinking the dialectical
logic, or dialectics. It is a secondary logic, for it derives from the
synthesis of the logic of identity with the logic of difference. Dialectical
reasoning is always conceptual and totalizing, therefore anti-empiricist;
deductive; and opportunist; and ineluctable.
Fourth, there is Aristotle, who established the basis for scientific
reasoning, first by formalizing the principles of identity, contradiction,
and the excluded middle [i.e. no third option can exist that is neither
“self” nor “other”]; and second, by placing as a property of entity its
relation with other entities in a systemic conventional structure, where
there is no room for a third, undefined, or ambiguous element. In his
monumental works on logics, the great Stagirist applied the
propositions brought forth by Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato, and
integrated them to lay down the principles and methods of science.
Sampaio calls Aristotle’s logics the groundwork of the systemic logic,
axiomatized in the nineteenth century, and widely known as the logic of
the excluded third/excluded middle and the logic of scientific reasoning.
Thus, those genial Greek philosophers brought forth (Sampaio likes to
use the expression “unveiled”) to us the four fundamental logics proper
to man and to entities that constitute the world: ultimately, proper to
Being, as originally conceived by Parmenides. In addition, those
philosophers may have gone a step further in pre-conceiving Being as
having a quinquintary nature. Indeed, both Plato and Aristotle devised
the possibility of the existence of five characteristics of Being. In his
dialogues Theaetetus, Sophist, and Parmenides, Plato argues that Being
is made up of itself (what is, i.e., the Parmenidean being, or the One), its
opposite or negation (non-being, the other, or the Multiple), its
sameness or Form (the idea, or concept), its relation with others (the
class of connected things, or system), and its full Being (in discourse,
meaning). Likewise, in discussing the causes, one might wonder
whether Aristotle’s primary cause, the “unmoved mover” may not be
construed as precisely the basis of a fifth characteristic of Being,
perhaps a fifth logic. After all, he, in his work on physics, proposed that
there should be a fifth element in the composition of the world - ether,
later called quintessence - besides the basic four elements known
throughout the ancient world, namely air, water, fire, and earth.
Nonetheless, with all due respect, neither Plato nor Aristotle had in
mind that Being was necessarily quinquintary, and that its ultimate,
fifth logic should be not only a logic in itself but the very logic that
governs, subsumes, and produces meaning together with the others, in
consequence forming one single, totalizing logic by means of a process
of a highly intensive hyperdialectical synthesis. In short, Sampaio’s
hyperdialectical logical system is a re-arrangement of received and yet
partially recognized logics, a system that purports to characterize the
very nature of Being, i.e., man and the world.
The advent of modernity - dating back to the resurgence of studies of
Aristotle’s logic by scholastic philosophers, the early developments of
capitalism, and the ever-continuing enveloping dominance of scientific
reasoning – brought forth a host of thinkers and philosophers that
made use, in their turns, of each of these previously outlined logics,
especially the fundamental four. I will briefly review the most prominent
of them as representations of the working out of the HLS as humanity
refined science and made the world better understood.
Logic I
Descartes (cogito ergo sum) and Kant both use the logic of identity to
define the subject of systemic knowledge, i.e., of science. It should be
noted that at about the same time, the capitalist system was identifying
the entrepreneur (in America, the self made man) as the agency of its
developing machine. In the twentieth century Husserl refined Kant’s
subject of science by conceptions and methods to grasp and attain
knowledge with the minimal carryover of one’s cultural biases. In the
science of anthropology, this method influenced the school of historical
particularism and the notion of culture as self-containing entity.
Logic D
Pascal (the heart, i.e., emotion, has its own particular reasoning),
Kierkegaard (contradictions or antitheses can never be synthetized or
turned into syntheses), Freud (the unconscious predicates the
conscious), Lacan (the unconscious forms a language system of its
own), Nietzsche (only by the deconstruction of the Platonic concept can
the world make sense again), and Heidegger (truth {áletheia} is selfevident, the dasein, whereas scientific truth is adequatio, i.e.,
conventional knowledge) – are all partakers of the logic of difference,
challenging one way or another the logic of identity, dialectics, and the
ever-prevailing systemic logic. Philosophers that are identified as postmodernists, such as Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and others all
predominantly work their arguments with the tools provided within the
logic of difference. The foremost influence of this logic in anthropology
rests on the idea that the collective (un)conscious, proposed by
Durkheim, is an entity in itself, a non-visible reality, with its own
structure and designs, beyond the sum total of its participants.
Logic I/D
Hegel (thesis/antithesis/synthesis), Marx and epigones (historical
society as the by-product of class struggle), the evolutionists in general,
etc. developed their explanations by means of the dialectic logic. Hegel
insisted that dialectics was superior to what he called analytic logic,
with the argument that dialectics reconstitutes that which analytics
splits up but does not reconstitute. That may have been his most
harmful influence on Marx and other dialecticians. It made Marx think
that dialectics is the proper logic to explain capitalism. Dialectics is a
triadic synthesis, whereas the systemic logic is a synthesis of four
elements, including dialectics. If Marx had elaborated his view of
capitalism by means of the systemic logic, he would probably have to
consider the role of another class, let us call it “middle class”, as the
agency of technology, as a class of its own. Of course he was aware that
technology was an important economic factor in capitalism, but he was
blinded by dialectics in not ascertaining that technology is not just a
by-product of capital/labour. Technology is a factor of production
engendered by people who form a social class in its own right. His
predictions of the downfall of capitalism, as a consequence of the
conflicts between bourgeoisie and proletariat, would certainly not
assume such urgency at every short-term capitalist crisis. But that is a
whole other story, to be left here without much ado.
Logic D/2
The whole host of modern scientists and mathematicians, from Newton
to Einstein, the positivists, analytic philosophers, Popper, and so on
(the conventional schematic truth/the mathematical reduction/proofs
and falsifiability), are the heirs and improvers of Aristotelian classical
logic, turned into systemic logic, the logic that does not admit a third,
indefinite, ambiguous, element. Mathematics, including probability -but not the likes of Gödel (incompleteness and inconsistency), fuzzy
logicians, and logicians of the third included (Lapasco, for instance) - is
the epitome of this reasoning. Proponents and practitioners of systemic
logic have in mind that mathematical model explanations of the
physical world should necessarily one day be applied to man.
Computational mathematics and cybernetics have already been telling
us what to do, before and beyond what we might think we should do. At
present economics, as the social science of capitalism, reigns supreme
precisely because it is operated by the systemic logic rather than by
dialectics. In anthropology, structuralism is the most ambitious
derivation from the application of systemic logic.
Logic I/D/2
The hyperdialectical logic is the reigning logic of HLS. It is a logic in
itself, and it also commands the other logics, constituting a working,
holistic set. Its modern thinker and proposer is of course Sampaio. The
hyperdialectical logic permits us to apprehend things and events in
their constitutive dimensions: as entities in themselves, as entities in
movement, as conceptualized entities, as interconnected entities, and as
entities with purpose, direction, or intentionality. So Man is a being in
himself (conscious and determined), a being for another (unconscious,
paradoxical), a being in transformation (historical, dialectical), a
contextualized being, and a fully subjective being with intentionality.
Man as a collective entity constitutes culture, and its interplay through
time constitutes the historical process. The unfolding of the historical
process across some 200,000 years accounts for man’s saga. The
recognition and awareness of this realization is our foremost intellectual
duty. Even though we can discern moments of change in time where
one mode of thinking, one logic, might prevail over others, thus
characterizing the inner working of a culture, the process is always
hyperdialectical. At any moment, man as an individual is capable of
becoming aware of what he is doing, though in so many cases the
cultural forces that impinge upon him might not allow him to change
course. The ancient Greeks called this man’s moira, or destiny, fate. The
hyperdialectical logical system is an attempt to come to terms with that.
In sum, the HLS can be applied to many themes. Sampaio himself has a
few published, and many yet unpublished, works on logics,
mathematics, theoretical physics, economics, psychology, theology, the
anthropic principle, and other themes. I myself have published an
application of HLS to the formation, constitution, methodology, and
design of anthropology. This on-going essay has also the spirit of
hyperdialectical thinking.