Maria Villela

Does living on Earth not also for human beings mean being open to the sky? Watching day alternate with night, relying on the seasonal cycle, finding their way according to the position of the stars, humans have always been aware of their dependence on the sky and tried to understand the origin of life in relation to it. And it is up to the sky again that their imagination and thoughts fly whenever they feel cramped in their earthly habitat. Following the axis of their own vertical position, the earth that is the floor for humans is seen as a ‘down here’ by opposition to an ‘up there’, the sky, towards which they turn their heads and raise their eyes. Up there is the origin of the metaphorical figure and /or dream image of the flight up into the high heavens, or the journey to other stars, or to a spiritual land beyond.

Brazil, land of miscegenation (métisse). An indisputable fact and an unending process. But how should we understand its genesis and how should we, while respecting the requirements of a historiography worth the name, interpret it in terms of our hopes for the future? This is the horizon binding these reflections, which is to be put in perspective in the studies published in this issue of Diogenes.Foregrounding miscegenation, and understanding its origins, has been one of the constant themes among the most distinguished practitioners of Brazilian thought since the 1930s, and has been accepted, indeed demanded, since the 1920s by the artistic and literary movement known as ‘modernism’, of which one of the major figures was the São Paulo writer, Mário de Andrade. Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), who would now have been a hundred years old, comes particularly to mind, as does Sergio Buarque de Holanda (1902–1982). Freyre made history with the publication of his two first works, Casa Grande & senzala [Masters and Slaves] of 1933 and Sobrados e mucambos of 1936. The same year Buarque de Holanda published his Raízes de Brasil [Roots of Brasil]. Motivated by the desire to understand their country, its shaping and – with some kind of concern as to identity – their own origins, both had been led to pave the way for what might be called an ‘open’ sociology, which immediately acquired a strongly anthropological character with Freyre and quickly incorporated increasingly historical aspects with Buarque de Holanda.

« Qui voit ? » C’est à partir de cette question cartésienne, devenue aussi la sienne, et des transformations qu’il lui fait subir, que le privilège de la peinture chez Merleau-Ponty est à comprendre. Du même coup, et a contrario, on saisit pourquoi la musique, comme le regrette Raymond Court, n’a pas donné à penser à Merleau-Ponty, qui, dit-on, écoutait Mozart au moment où la mort l’a frappé. Or, comme la peinture n’existe qu’à prendre corps dans les œuvres des peintres, il y a encore lieu de se demander quels ont été « les peintres » de Merleau-Ponty. Et que lui ont-ils fait voir ?« Who sees ? » It is on the basis of this Cartesian question, which Maurice Merleau-Ponty made his own, that we can understand the sort of « privilege » painting seems to deserve within his thought. At the same time, we can grasp why, when drawing up his ontology of the Flesh, he did not pay attention to music, despite his fondness of it. This lacuna was reproached by Raymond Court, who insisted on the intimate relationship between music and the flesh . But once we acknowledge the main reasons he had to give painting priority, we may ask what he was looking for when he considered some of the modern painters as for instance Cézanne or Paul Klee. And what indeed did they make him see ?

Sur fond de la relation de l'art à la vérité, un bref aperçu des variations que la notion de mimèsis a subies, tant en extension qu'en compréhension, nous conduit à interroger la réhabilitation gadamérienne de cette notion. Gadamer propose de faire retour au sens originaire (pythagoricien) de mimèsis comme « présentation d'un ordre » pour en faire la notion la plus englobante d'une pensée de l'art, ce qui autoriserait à en faire l'application aux œuvres d'art non figuratifs. Cela ne pourrait cependant se faire qu'au détriment de la dimension référentielle, intrinsèque à la notion de mimèsis telle que la comprenaient les Anciens. Mais surtout, subordonnant toute intuition sensible, tout ce qui relève du spatial charnel de l'œuvre d'art à l'ordre de la Sprache, l'herméneutique n'est pas à même de penser l'irréductibilité du sensible dans l'art. N'y a-t-il pas là invitation à une reconversion à la phénoménologie, en deçà ou au-delà du « tournant herméneutique », si l'on veut penser l'art en sa vérité? Taking into consideration the relation between art and truth, this article presents an account of the variations the concept of mimesis has undergone through History and lead us to question the attempt made by Gadamer to recover it as the main and most general concept in thinking about art. According to Gadamer, a return to the first, pythagorean meaning of mimesis as the « presentation of an ordered whole » should allow the application of the concept even to the non-figurative works of art (in modern painting, for instance). But, in fact, that cannot be so, unless we obliterate the intrinsic referential dimension the notion had for the Ancients. Moreover, as the hermeneutical approach subordinates all sensible intuition — that is all perceptible quality and all that is spatial — to the verbal meaning, it necessarily misses the aesthetic appearance of the works of art. By the way are we not invited to go beyond the « hermeneutical turning » and back indeed to a phenomenological approach in order to grasp works of art in their truth? Tendo-se em vista a relação da arte à verdade, uma recapitulação das variações sofridas, tanto em extensão quanto em compreensão, pela noção de mimesis leva a interrogar a tentativa gadameriana de reabilitá-la. Segundo Gadamer, se se recupera o sentido originário de mimesis como « apresentação de um todo ordenado », tem-se então a noção mais englobante de uma reflexão sobre a arte, que pode ser também aplicada às obras não-figurativas. Mas tal aplicação só pode na verdade ocorrer, caso não se leve em conta a dimensão referencial intrínsica à mimesis, tal como a compreendiam os Antigos. Ademais, subordinando a intuição sensível, e tudo o que tem a ver com a espacialidade, à ordem da significação verbal, a hermenêutica desconhece a irredutibilidade do sensível a portanto a dimensão estética sem a qual não se encontra plenamente a verdade da obra de arte. Lemos aí a indicação de um necessário retorno à abordagem fenomenológica para aquém ou para além da « virada hermenêutica »

When he met the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov in Paris in 1927, the Romanian-born French poet Benjamin Fondane had already written an essay on him a few years earlier. Their deep affinities ensured that they became friends, and in his conversations with Shestov Fondane discovered his own identity as a thinker. Both opposed what they saw as the imperialistic domination of Reason over European “philosophy” and theology, despite the resistance of some major figures. Both acknowleged Husserl as a great philosopher, probably the most important of his time, but they accused him, too, of placing Reason above life and above faith in God as the free Creator of the world. Even if we cannot endorse all these criticisms, they are worthy of attention as pointing to a different way of appreciating Husserl and his philosophy. Husserl is indeed much more complex than his first disciples could imagine. As a matter of fact, it is only nowadays, thanks to the University of Leuven's ongoing publication of Husserl’s manuscript papers in the Husserliana series, that the full richness of his thought is coming into view. Fondane's approach to Husserl is that of poet, who is also a thinker. Whereas philosophers intend to move in the realm the universal, the creative writer is able to analyse and paint the singular life, the destiny, of the characters he chooses tell stories about, and so is closer to the individual, the singular person. Fondane can thus be seen as calling Husserl to elude the domination of universal Reason by espousing more closely the texture of individual life.