English

Olavo de Carvalho
O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), September 7, 2002

After the downfall of the USSR became an accomplished fact, the Forum of São Paulo has been, since 1990, the most powerful initiative taken to restart the international communist movement and, in Fidel Castro words, “to regain in Latin America what was lost in East Europe”. Summoned by the Cuban dictator and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Forum joins the legal Communist (and pro-Communist) parties, engaged in the struggle for cultural and political hegemony within their nations, and armed organizations involved in kidnapping, terrorism and drug traffic. Among the last, the outstanding one is Farc, whose connections with the Brazilian drug market were proven with the arrest of Fernandinho Beira-Mar. There are also double-faced organizations, both legal and illegal, like the Chilean Communist Party, whose armed wing had something to do with the kidnapping of Washington Olivetto.

Perhaps the readers will at first find strange a meeting in which legally organized parties fraternize with criminal gangs. Actually, this association only repeats the old Leninist rules that recommend the joining of legal and illegal means in the revolutionary struggle. In fact one of the advantages of the international alliance is to allow that the promiscuous mixture of licit and illicit ways, of moralist rhetoric and drug traffic, of beautiful ideals and the brutality of kidnappings, of humanitarian sentimentalism and organized terror- a mix so clear and evident in continental scale, and at meetings of the Forum- that it appears disguised and nebulous when seen from the perspective of each separate nation. Using Argentineans to act in Mexico, Bolivians in Brazil or Brazilians in Chile, the most obvious connections become invisible to the eyes of local public opinion: the legal parties continue above any suspicion, and the simple suggestion of investigating them is rejected as an intolerable offense, when the arrest of criminals shows full proof of the intimate association between organized crime and leftist politics in the continent; identification that becomes still more evident when the arrest of such persons is followed, with magical coincidence, by the quick and effective mobilization, for the criminals, of officials and “decent folk” of the left.

Since 1990, the Forum of São Paulo has been meeting regularly. The tenth meeting took place in Havana, Cuba, in December, 2001. Mr. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was there. To deny therefore that he is associated politically with the other entities, signatories to the declarations of the Forum, it is to deny the validity of the Brazilian presidential candidate’s signature on official documents of international relevance. As wrote Vasconcelo Quadros in the “Isto É” of March 2002, “Brazil shelters a secret network of support of international guerrilla organizations employed in kidnappings, bank robberies and drug traffic”. In a country in which any phone call to a swindler is enough to place a politician under police suspicion, a countrywide refusal to investigate a link enshrined in public documents it is, at least, surprising.

Still more surprising is that, among so many journalistic commentators, policemen, politicians and the military, all them reputed as intelligent, nobody gets-or wants-to establish a logical link between those facts and the declaration of Dr. Leonardo Boff, in “Jornal do Brasil” of August 23, that with the next election “the time for the Brazilian revolution will have arrived. The sowing was already been done. It is harvest time”. Or, when using the word “revolution”, didn’t the retired clergyman mean anything of the sort, and that all was innocent hyperbole?

The massive and obstinate refusal to face with realism this state of affairs can be explained by the fact that he constitutes a dreadful reality, whose vision would be too traumatic for the delicate nerves of a bourgeoisie dandy, terrified to the point of no longer admitting the reality of the evil that terrifies him. Psychologically kidnapped by a nameless Marxism that permeates the air, the dominant class is already ripe to act its role of docile, smiling and helpful victim.

But, please, don’t think that with those remarks I am acting in favor or against any candidate to the Presidency of the Republic. See this: four candidates, with token differences, have the same ideology, and any one of them, when elected, cannot govern without the support of at least one or two of the other three. It is therefore of a single slate election, subdivided into four temporary denominations. Perhaps what Dr. Boff will not say is that the revolution will be inaugurated with the victory of candidate x or y, but with “the election” itself-no matter who wins. From the psychological point of view, at least, that revolution has already begun: the ideological uniformity, once accepted as the normal state of the democratic politics, is enough to virtually outlaw, as “right wing extremism”, any word henceforth said in favor of liberal capitalism, of the USA or of Israel. Who says it receives regular death threats, no longer with the precaution of delivery as anonymous messages: they are to be seen on internet sites and cause no scandal. Dr. Boff is right: Sowing has already been done. It is harvest time. But all this certainly is mere hyperbole. Yes, it would be a scandal to see some malign intention in such innocent words.

Olavo de Carvalho
Época, 24 de agosto de 2002

If he were President of Brazil,
he would tranquilize the investors

Translated by Pedro Sette Câmara

Judging by the either alarming or tranquilizing diagnostics published in our press, the only things really threatened by an eventual rise of the radical left are foreign money invested here and Brazil’s credit in foreign banks. The whole discussion revolves around whether Mr. John Doe or Mr. John Dude, if elected, can or cannot put these supreme goods at risk. In the first hypothesis, he is a dangerous communist; in the second, a champion of democracy.

However, when Lenin destroyed Russian constitutional order in three weeks and established the reign of terror, the stock market in Moscow and Petrograde did not drop a single point, and in the following years foreign investors made a huge amount of money with the new regime. Therefore, according to Brazilian criteria, there is no way Lenin could be a communist.

The preponderance of this stupid criterion reveals only how Brazilian businessmen are blinded by the canons of that diffuse Marxism which induces them to perform in the theatre of reality the exact stereotypical role reserved to them by communist strategy: that of self-seeking immediatists who can be manipulated through their own interests.

That’s hegemony is: to frame the opponents’ speech, leading them to formulate their thoughts and wishes according a set of mental categories designed to tie them with their own rope.

Brazil’s left may be stupid and incompetent, but, when compared to our businessmen, is a stellar team of geniuses. To anyone versed in Antonio Gramsci’s strategies, to deceive Brazilian businessmen, making them work for their own destruction, is like spanking children. What can the gross pragmatism of those who measure the world by the money in the register do against the complex machiavelism of the ‘cultural revolution’? It’s so coward. I know only businessmen who like to give grand displays of tranquility before the advance of communism, and who, in the face of a leftist intellectual, prostrate themselves in servile adoration. It’s understandable: no matter how much money you possess, intellectual superiority, however small, exerts intrinsic authority and power. In revolutionary strategy, cultural hegemony is the equivalent of that which, in war, is the dominion of air space. Running to hide their treasures, the prey disclose themselves to the eagle who, from above, controls their movements.

That is why instead of losing oneself in vain economicist conjectures, none of them asks the following questions to the presidential candidates:

1. What is your geopolitical view of the world? Do you intend to use a speech against “unipolar power” to align Brazil with the Eastern and communist pole, which existence and growth hides behind that rethoric?

2. After years of dismantlement and constraint of the armed forces, do you intend to complete dialectically the application of the Leninist scheme, offering the humiliated officials some sort of late consolation in exchance for an anti-Western and pro-communist foreign policy which none of them would have accepted before?

3. How will you fight against drug traffic without confronting Cuba, the Farc and the world’s leftist media? Or, on the contrary, will you just stage a fake combat just to terminate the rival cartels – which dominate the state of Espírito Santo, for example – and hand to communist narcoguerilla the absolute control of the Brazilian market?

These are the only important questions. Lenin himself, should he be president of Brazil now, would not even consider the idea of socializing the economy. He would concentrate on the consolidation of capitalism and on tranquilizing the investors, in order to buy time to fight in these three fronts, which are vital to the communist world strategy. Tranquilized by the guarantees offered to their money, the bourgeois would be the first to lend a hand.

Draft for comments in class – Seminar of Philosophy

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

Translated by Henrique Dmyterko, July 14th, 2002

If Kant asserts that metaphysical science is impossible for lacking a representable object in intuition, it is because he has not meditated deep enough about the very notion of “ob-ject”. Intuition of any object is intuition of a finite form, whose borders with other objects immediately reveal us the limits of its entire set of possibilities of action and passion (in other words, possibilities of acting or suffering actions). Looking at a cat, we know by means of intuition that it cannot fly. If this information about the cat were absent from in-tuition, than it would be a false intuition, or else, it would be the intuition of a generic cast of a cat which is not a cat. Looking at a square, we instantly know it cannot be divided by one segment of a straight line into two squares, and if cut by an exact diagonal line, there will be two isosceles triangles as a result. To be able to immediately know these facts is to have the intuition of the square. A simple and passive perception of a square shape, regard-less of any of its inherent form properties, is not yet an intuition: it is pure sensation and matter for a possible intuition which will take place at the precise moment when the square begins to show something of its internal constitution. Hence, intuition is not just a senso-rial perception of a static form. Rather, it is the intellection of a finite system of possibili-ties, the grasping – no matter how diffuse and vague it may be at start -, of an algorithmic formula of an organized and unitary set of potencies. A set whose integral form exactly en-folds both identity and unity of the object of intuition. In view of this, that set of potencies is simultaneously intuited in poles apart: positive and negative. Positive, for the assertion of potencies – at least, of some of them – which reveal themselves in the form of the object. Negative, for the limits that distinguish these potencies from other possible or surrounding ones absent from the object itself, exactly as in the case of the cat, which is instantly per-ceived as a walking and not a flying animal. In short: a form is perceived in one instanta-neous and inseparable way as an articulated set of possibilities and impossibilities.

That very instantaneousness, inherent in the nature of the intuitive act, makes the kant-ian distinction between what is data coming from the object and what is (according to Kant) projected either by a priori structures of our own way of perception or by the catego-ries of our reason onto it, impossible for the matter. These structures, being general and ubiquitous, identical in all men, could not magically adapt themselves to an object’s given forms, one by one, if the object in turn did not mold them to itself by force of its intrinsical constitution. To suppose the contrary would be to admit the object is just pure matter without its own formal limits, being its sole limits those projected by the observer onto it. For that reason, there would not be another way to distinguish among the various objects but for the projections made by the subject of understanding, being this subject free to randomly cast onto this or that object any form he so desired. In principle, nothing could prevent a subject from projecting at a cat the form of a triangle or at a triangle the form of a hen. That would make perception simply impossible, as well as any practical adaptation of the observer to the material surroundings circumstances. It is thus mandatory to admit that the limits of the object — its form, indeed — are manifested in an evident manner by its mere and simple presence. Well, as we have seen, those limits are an organized system of possibilities and impossi-bilities. Thus, possibility and impossibility – as well as the articulation between both of them – are not forms a priori projected onto an object. They are, in fact, constitutive ele-ments of its very presence. To intuit an object is to instantaneously apprehend in its form a defined articulation of possibilities and impossibilities.

But at the same time, neither possibility nor impossibility, and not even their articula-tion, are in themselves objects of sense perception. If they are not pure projected forms, neither are they given to us as objects. They are given “in” an object, but not as objects. The solution to this apparent enigma is that they are indeed the very form of objec-tuality. To be an object – real or imaginary – is to have the power of presenting itself as an articulated system of possibilities and impossibilities, a system condensed in such a way it is instantaneously apprehensible by means of intuition.

In that sense, Kant was right by saying that metaphysics’ “traditional” objects – considering what he regarded as metaphysics, learned from Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Wolff –, i.e., God, liberty, immortality and so on, are not objects of experience.

However, metaphysics, instead of being the study of any of those particular objects, is the study of possibility and of impossibility as understood from their most comprehensive and universal meaning. The very terms used to describe and write about conventional meta-physical issues -omnipotence, infinitude, absoluteness and so on — have no meaning at all, except when defined in terms of possibility and impossibility.

Therefore, possibility and impossibility, not being themselves data coming from experi-ence, are in turn given during experience itself, and no experience happens without them. At the ontological level, by not being objects, they are essential constituents of objectual-ity, as well as of objectivity at the knowledge level. Although they are not themselves ob-jects of intuition, they cannot be disembodied from intuition, because intuition is nothing more than the instantaneous understanding of a given articulation between possibility and impossibility as a definite objective presence.

Accordingly, there is no obstacle whatsoever to prevent possibility and impossibility from becoming objects of scientific knowledge through the very same methods by which other kinds of constituents become objects of any science, i.e., by the abstractive separation of data taken from an experience. Metaphysics is the science of objectuality as such, that is to say: it is the fundamental of the very possibility of constituting any objective knowledge. There is obviously a spontaneous metaphysical understanding embodied in the act of delimitating an object of any science, and without this understanding, no science would be possible. It would not be possible to delimit objects – either those of science or those of any practical or cognitive activity – without the aptitude of perceiving the forms-limits from the data of an experience. That aptitude is precisely the metaphysical talent inherent in human intelligence as a whole. Man is the only animal that produces science because he is the only metaphysical animal: the only animal capable of objectivity, that is, of understanding objectuality in objects.

The conceivable argument against those acknowledgments, such as “possibility and im-possibility are mere generic logical frameworks, without any concrete substantiality”, is worthless. Indeed, it is only in concrete substantiality that they appear and their very ap-pearance, as we have seen, is itself concrete substantiality. Or else, it is the only concrete substantiality of objects of experience. Without this concrete substantiality, those objects could not be intuited, i.e., they could not be understood as substantive presences, but solely as empty forms. The very notion of possibility and impossibility, fathomed as pure logical form, external to the reality of an experience, is simply one of the possibilities we instantaneously apprehend during the concrete articulation between possibility and im-possibility, as presented in an experience. From this articulation, we abstractly separate data that makes it real, and keeping in mind the abstract concept of possibility and impos-sibility, we then proceed by separately considering it as a pure being of reason. Such an abstract separation would be obviously impossible if lacking a previous apprehension of any concrete articulation between possibility and impossibility in a given case, thus, relying on it not only logically as well as ontologically, being worthless any artifice such as throw-ing at an experience something that can only be obtained – by means of abstraction – from the very same experience.

Kant himself, when intending to reduce possibility and impossibility to mere logical cate-gories, independent of experience, has not been able to conceive an experience that were independent of them, which emphasizes the huge difference between a mental distinction and a real-real distinction, as understood by Scholastic philosophers. Possibility and im-possibility can be “independently” conceived, with regards to an experience, precisely be-cause they are the founding conditions of objectuality and transcend any particular experi-ence as well as any particular object. For this same reason, an object -when considered “out” and “independently” of them- is not even pure, amorphous and generic matter. It is just a chimerical conjecture: an object without objectuality.

Hence, there is no way out. Metaphysics is not only possible but also absolutely neces-sary, at least as a fundamental – implicit and explicit – of the possibility of sciences.