Elements of Olavo de Carvalho’s Philosophy, by Ronald Robson

“Elements of Olavo de Carvalho’s Philosophy”, by Ronald Robson, provides a comprehensive overview of the key principles and concepts in the philosophical framework developed by Olavo de Carvalho. The work emphasizes the significance of individual consciousness as the foundation of knowledge, going beyond traditional subject-object distinctions. Olavo’s philosophy explores the complex layers of personality and the process of self-awareness, proposing a theory of twelve distinct layers that shape an individual’s development. The book delves into the role of confession and the method of extrusion in integrating personal experiences and articulating them through language.

The text also delves into the theory of four discourses, drawing inspiration from Aristotle’s work, to understand different modes of human communication. Olavo’s philosophy encompasses the investigation of reality and the world of principles, aiming to uncover the metaphysical foundations that govern existence. The author explores the importance of knowledge through presence, training consciousness to allow reality to speak to it, and advocates for cultural criticism as a means to challenge symbolic and political structures that limit individual consciousness.

Furthermore, the book delves into the concepts of cognitive parallax and the revolutionary mentality, highlighting their impact on intellectual understanding and social dynamics. Olavo’s political theory is presented, focusing on power as the ability to determine the actions of others, and identifying economic, military, and intellectual powers as essential aspects. The text concludes by emphasizing the significance of individual consciousness and self-awareness in Olavo’s philosophy, as well as the role of traditions, esoteric organizations, and intellectual orders as shaping forces in history.

Overall, “Elements of Olavo de Carvalho’s Philosophy” provides a comprehensive and in-depth exploration of the key ideas and principles within Olavo’s philosophical framework, encompassing metaphysics, epistemology, and political theory. It offers valuable insights into the nature of knowledge, individual development, communication, and societal dynamics, making it a significant contribution to the understanding of Olavo’s philosophical perspectives. After the end we have a list of references, which has been left untranslated, as most of the works have not been translated into English yet.

Elements of Olavo de Carvalho’s Philosophy

Ronald Robson

Ad Hominem, August 2013

Notes for a reading of “The Minimum You Need to Know Not to Be an Idiot” (Record, 2013)

I. Olavo de Carvalho’s work possesses a fundamental intuition: that only individual consciousness is capable of knowledge (1). What may seem like a banal statement at first glance dissipates when we realize that it speaks of “individual consciousness,” not just the “subject,” the bare term commonly used in metaphysics in recent centuries. One thing is the subject as merely opposed to the object in the theory of knowledge; another thing is the mode of historical existence of a being endowed with consciousness, which by definition can only be individual. It is important to pay attention to the subtle vocabulary because it affirms a substance and its property: “individual consciousness” as the first, and “capacity for knowledge” as the second. From a biographical point of view, the substance actualizes this property through a trauma of the emergence of reason (2), which consists of the discrepancy between the individual’s growing accumulation of experiences over time and their more limited capacity to cohere and give expression to that mass of facts that, initially amorphous, can be ordered – as the individual expresses themselves – to the point where a form becomes discernible within it. Each traumatic stage corresponds to a pattern of self-awareness, a central axis of individual structuring, at least at the psychological level, which can be better understood through a theory of the twelve layers of personality (3): characterologically, the development of the psyche can be appreciated in twelve distinct layers, some integrative (forming a stable integrated framework), others divisive (establishing a rupture of the previous order, thereby providing a new order). The third layer, for example, which is generally the subject of schools like behaviorism and Gestalt – which mistakenly, like other schools, take a layer of the psyche as its own substance (4) – comprises the period of concentrated cognitive effort to acquire knowledge that allows the individual (child, here) to orient themselves in the world with some degree of independence, at least physically. The fourth layer, divisive and decisive in its own way, which was ultimately the true object of study for Freud and Klein, encompasses the instinctual history of the individual concerned primarily with their affectivity, with desiring and feeling wanted. And with the fifth layer, integrative and individuating (Jung), the objective problem of the individual’s real purposes and how to achieve them begins to arise – the question ceases to be about affectivity and becomes about power. And so on, passing through layers that can only be reached, but not necessarily, such as the layer of individual synthesis (eighth), the layer of intellectual personality (ninth), or even the layer of ultimate destiny (twelfth).

II. The identification of the layer one is in can only be done through a gesture of assent to one’s own acts and thoughts. This acceptance, when seen anthropologically, has its foundation in the principle of authorship (5): each individual is responsible for their actions, and this assertion is universal; there is no record of any culture in which an individual’s actions should be attributed to someone else (which, beyond the observation of fact, demonstrates the anthropological constant that a man is a whole, he is his actions, and these actions cannot be alienated from him). But this acceptance is based solely on the principle of authorship, not its means or method, precisely because this principle only encompasses individual actions that are socially witnessed. Beyond these, there are other acts of a different order and greater importance – acts without witnesses (6). These are the acts in which the individual recognizes themselves as the author out of an inner obligation, not an external one; as they recognize themselves in these acts, they integrate their personality and thus become less subject to any automatisms of thought or behavior. This other order of object of consciousness is specifically incorporated into the individual through the method of confession (7): since all social expression depends on individual and inner expression, and since the latter only becomes possible after a condensation of meaning in the form of judgment, which, before becoming a proposition – in the logical sense – endowed with public comprehensibility, must be affirmed by the individual to themselves – the individual must, in short, confess to themselves what they already knew but were not aware of until then. This Socratic enumeration of what is known and unknown is followed by the process of extrusion, through which the individual gives linguistic and symbolically articulable form to their own experience.

III. The emergency trauma of reason reproduces, on a private scale, a central problem of any philosophy of culture: the mediations between the individual and society; or, in other words, between individual expression and socially disseminated symbols. This psychological development of the individual corresponds, evidently, to an epistemological development that can be apprehended not only at the individual level but also at the social level. The theory of the four discourses (8) thus attempts to describe, on a historical and personal scale – a philosophy of culture and pedagogy, therefore – the unity among the four types of discourse studied by Aristotle (poetic, rhetorical, dialectical, analytical), while also attempting to review the interpretation of the logical corpus: human discourse, according to the theory, is a unique power that manifests itself in four ways – expressing general structures of possibility (poetic), general structures of verisimilitude (rhetorical), general structures of probability (dialectical), and general structures of certainty (logical or analytical). The mediations between the individual and knowledge, especially socially disseminated knowledge, can thus occur through these four levels – from a strictly more symbolic pole, the first, to a more analytically discernible pole by contrast. Different levels of credibility of human discourse are at stake there, but so are different forms of unwarranted claims to credibility, which requires the study of both eristics (9) and the epistemological conditions of scientific knowledge, in other words, a philosophy of science (10). It is also necessary to consider the specific forms that discourse acquires, some being more suitable or less suitable for discourses at this or that level – and thus attention must be paid to the metaphysical foundations of literary genres (11), whose theory, roughly speaking, takes into account the spatiotemporal modality of language and the human being who employs it, applying spatial, temporal, and numerical (in the ancient sense: discrete or continuous) distinctions to discourse, extracting from them the principles of “narration” (time), “exposition” (space), and “prose” and “verse” (number). The specific articulations and different degrees of these principles in a work give it its substantive character – its genre.

IV. If discourse is the eminent means by which the individual appropriates knowledge, the purpose of this, as a conscious being, is not to be limited to mere discursive mastery of knowledge. It is to reach knowledge itself, which moreover involves verifying its own conditions of existence. It is, in a word, to reach the first metaphysical basis, to investigate that realm of reality that Plato sought in his “second navigation,” beyond the “ideas” and toward the world of principles (12) that govern them, among which the principle of identity takes precedence. Everything that exists is to the extent that it has the possibility of being, so that the actualizations of the qualities of each entity have their foundation in a structure of pre-existing possibilities – for example, the ontological possibility (of which logic is only a discursive expression) that something may be the actualization of a potentiality. The possibility of possibility leads intelligence to investigate what may be the most substantive and enduring aspect of an entity. But, in this case, the word “investigation” is not the most appropriate. It is more a matter of, through confession, accepting this body of embedded possibilities; it is a knowledge through presence (13), of training consciousness so that, instead of speaking to reality, it allows reality to speak to it: since the concept of an entity is already potentially within its substance, since all mineralogy is already within minerals, the individual must strive to perceive that the problem of truth is subject to the problem of the substantive presence of reality. Even the most refined logical-analytical technique is only a means of returning to what has always been there. It is becoming aware of a presence that encompasses us and everything else. Here is the remote nexus between knowledge and existence.

V. Eventually, it is necessary to break the veil of cognitive limitations of a particular civilization and return to an acceptance of presence by carrying out cultural criticism (14). This could be provisionally defined as the act by which an individual consciousness invests against the symbolic or political structures that dull its sensitivity. These structures can either be purely symbolic and discursive – in the arts, sciences, and public communication – or they can even reach the physical curtailment of freedom of consciousness. Here, the object of broader cultural criticism is the metamorphosis of the idea of empire throughout Western history and the related idea of “civil religion,” which involves tracing the remote foundations of contemporary collectivist and scientistic ideology. Scientism and the new Pax Romana, although separate in other respects, converge in flattening the total horizon of human experience (a process that has been long prepared, for example, since the ideas of “volonté générale” and the general quantification of the physical sciences). The drama of human life, once conceived as substantive souls living “sub specie aeternitatis,” becomes limited to social roles in an entirely closed space-time world (numerous examples could be found in general culture: Dostoevsky would still be connected to the first perspective, while Balzac’s characters would conform mainly to the second). With the denial of access to the universality of experience at a metaphysical level, the possibility of individual knowledge is also denied. There is an indissoluble link between the objectivity of the world and the individuality of experience, which is undermined in a cultural environment of general politicization (Gramscism) and the proliferation of substitutes for truly foundational experiences of knowledge (“New Age”) – in other words, collectivism, in the end, is subjectivism. Against this, knowledge asserts itself as radical intuitionism (15): contrary to common belief, the most objective and specifically human aspect of knowledge is what the ancient logicians called “simple apprehension,” which is the act by which consciousness becomes aware of the presence of a particular datum of reality. “Reasoning,” syllogistic construction, and its derivatives come later and are more prone to errors because they involve a constructive aptitude. This means that humans make more mistakes in the internal expression of what they apprehend than in the apprehension itself since the most refined methods of logic merely analytically uncover something that was already present in the initial intuition. And each intuition, in turn, inaugurates a potentially limitless chain of other intuitions; this is what the theory of triple intuition (16) addresses: the act by which the individual intuits (first intuition) is simultaneously an intuition of something (second intuition) and an intuition of the conditions of that intuitive act (third intuition). This also explains certain natural symbolisms, such as the association of “sun” or “light” with knowledge in many cultures, as in primitive societies without the use of fire, something is only visible – and vision is the sense most directly associated with knowledge – in natural light. Thus, the individual realizes that they intuit, realizes that they intuit something, and perceives the underlying possibility of that intuition parallel to a natural situation. Ultimately, this affirms the possibility of objective knowledge against the contemporary discourse that claims only conventional truths exist while denying the existence of objective and, so to speak, natural truths.

VI. Another chapter of cultural criticism focuses on cognitive parallax (17), which has spread widely in modernity. It can be defined as the displacement between the axis of individual experience and the axis of theoretical formulation. In other words, it is responsible for formulating ideas that are contradicted by the concrete conditions on which the individual depends to formulate them. Machiavelli’s work is exemplary in this sense, as it is constructed upon intrinsically conflicting data, but particularly conflicting with what Machiavelli himself knew – or should have known – to be manifestly false based on his immediate experience. The acute manifestation of cognitive parallax is found in the revolutionary mentality (18), characterized by two basic inversions: the temporal inversion, in which the revolutionary takes into account the hypothetical future for which they work as the parameter for judging their actions, no longer being accountable to the past (and, ultimately, to anyone since, by definition, their utopian society moves away as the revolutionary process advances, never materializing and therefore lacking a tribunal where actions or ideas can be openly judged); and the inversion of subject and object, in which the revolutionary, while attacking the opponents of their future society, perceives them as the attackers who hinder the achievement of their plans, thus inverting the causal relationship between the two. Cognitive parallax, especially the revolutionary mentality, hinders an intellectual environment in which the confessional method leads individuals to become aware of the knowledge immediately present to them. The former does so by making the subject of knowledge distinct from the individual who shapes their own life; the latter threatens to destroy all the social foundations of human coexistence since revolution involves the concentration of power in the hands of a revolutionary elite with the aim of establishing a societal project, which deprives individuals of their freedom and, ultimately, their own physical existence, as demonstrated by the revolutionary totalitarianism of the past century.

VII. Political theory (19) arises not so much from a proposal contrary to the state of affairs analyzed in these cultural criticism studies but from a methodological adaptation (20) to the specific type of object in social science. Its fundamental premise is that power (21) is the possibility of action in a general sense, but in politics, it has the strict sense of the ability to determine the actions of others. In a universal sense, humans have only three powers: the power to generate, to destroy, and to choose, which correspond, respectively, to economic power, military power, and intellectual or spiritual power. These powers can be exercised actively or passively and typologically correspond to the castes of producers, nobles, and priests. The first is exerted through the promise of benefit, the second through the threat of harm, and the third through persuasion or cooptation. In each civilization, these three types of powers tend to crystallize into specific groups (today, respectively, Western globalism, the Russian-Chinese alliance, and Islam), but the specification of these groups comes after identifying who can be the subject of history (22): since an individual agent is perishable in the short term and limited geographically in their action, traditions, esoteric organizations (or secret societies), royal and noble dynasties, or other entities of a similar nature can become subjects of history. Thus, the Catholic Church and the revolutionary movement, in this specific sense, are subjects of history, but not St. Francis or Lenin. The truly decisive power in the long run is the power of the priestly or intellectual order.

VIII. This multiplicity of subjects and disciplines covered by the production of a single philosopher is not fortuitous. Philosophy itself is defined as the search for the unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness and vice versa (23). Any other definition would be partial, making it difficult to distinguish fundamentally between a philosopher and a scientist, a philosopher and a poet (24). A scientist can produce knowledge without having to engage in the confessional retrieval process through which each new piece of knowledge integrates into the entirety of what they are as an individual at that moment. A poet can produce a work based solely on intuitions that manifestly contradict their character and the truth itself because what matters is the unity of that expressive moment. The philosopher is not limited to any of this because their effort is guided by a specific philosophical technique consisting of seven points:

1. Anamnesis, in which the philosopher traces the origin of their ideas and assumes responsibility for them.
2. Meditation, in which they seek to transcend the circle of their ideas and allow reality itself to speak to them in an original cognitive experience.
3. Dialectical examination, in which they integrate their cognitive experience into the philosophical tradition and vice versa.
4. Historical-philological research, in which they appropriate the tradition.
5. Hermeneutics, in which they make the sentences of past philosophers and all other cultural heritage elements necessary for their philosophical activity transparent to dialectical examination.
6. Examination of conscience, in which they integrate the acquisitions of their philosophical investigation into their total personality.
7. Expressive technique, in which they make their cognitive experience reproducible by others (25).

References

(1) “Esboço de um Sistema de Filosofia”, apostila do Seminário de Filosofia [doravante referido como SdF]. (2) “O trauma de emergência da razão”, Curso de Astrocaracterologia (1990-1992).(3) “As doze camadas da personalidade humana e as formas próprias de sofrimento”, apostila do SdF; Curso “Conceitos Fundamentais da Psicologia” (4 a 19 de setembro de 2009, Virginia). (4) “O que é psique”, apostila do SdF. (5) Aula 32 do Curso On-Line de Filosofia [doravante referido como COF] (14/11/2009). (6) Aula 2 do COF (21/03/2009). (7) A Filosofia e seu Inverso & Outros Estudos (Vide, 2012); Aulas 9 (06/06/2009) e 13 (04/07/2009) do COF. (8) Aristóteles em Nova Perspectiva: Introdução à Teoria dos Quatro Discursos (Vide, 2013). (9) Como vencer um debate sem precisar ter razão: Comentários à “dialética erística” de Arthur Schopenhauer (Topbooks, 1997). (10) Edmund Husserl Contra o Psicologismo (IAL, 1996; apostila); Curso “Filosofia da Ciência I” (10 a 15 de maio de 2010, Virginia). (11) Os Gêneros Literários: Seus Fundamentos Metafísicos (in A Dialética Simbólica: estudos reunidos, É Realizações, 2007). (12) “Sobre o mundo dos princípios”, aula do SdF (20/04/2009). (13) “O problema da verdade e a verdade do problema”, apostila do SdF (20 de maio de 1999); “Conhecimento e presença”, apostila do SdF (27/09/99); Aula 10 do COF (13/07/2009). (14) A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural: Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci (IAL, Stella Caymmi, 1994); O Imbecil Coletivo I: Atualidades Inculturais Brasileiras (É Realizações, 2006); O Imbecil Coletivo II: A longa marcha da vaca para o brejo (É Realizações, 2008); O Jardim das Aflições: de Epicuro à ressurreição de César. Ensaio sobre o materialismo e a religião civil (É Realizações, 2000); O mínimo que você precisa saber para não ser um idiota (Record, 2013). (15) “Esboço de um sistema de filosofia”, apostila do SdF; aula 32 do COF. (16) “A tripla intuição”, apostila do SdF. (17) “Introdução à paralaxe cognitiva”, transcrição de aula de 26/08/2006, São Paulo; Maquiavel, ou A Confusão Demoníaca (Vide, 2011).(18) “A Estrutura da Mentalidade Revolucionária”, conferência realizada em Bucareste, 16/06/2011; “Resumo de A Mente Revolucionária”, partes I e II, SdF (19/06/2009). (19) Curso “Teoria do Estado”, em 11 aulas, PUC-PR (2003-2004); Os EUA e a Nova Ordem Mundial (Vide, 2012) [debate com Alexander Dugin]. (20) “Problemas de método nas ciências humanas”, apostila do SdF. (21) “Teses sobre o Poder”, apostila do SdF. (22) “Quem é o sujeito da história?”, apostila do SdF. (23) A Filosofia e seu Inverso. (24) “Poesia e Filosofia”, in A Dialética Simbólica.(25) A Filosofia e seu Inverso, p. 133.

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This is a rough, summary, and highly personal outline of what could be called – and is even more so called the less it is known – Olavo de Carvalho’s work. It is not a synthesis of it, but at least a preliminary map for which I alone am responsible (I believe Olavo himself would not be pleased). I took the initiative to draw it, with all the flaws and omissions that may be noted (a lot was left out), thinking of the reader who, reading The Minimum You Need to Know to Not Be an Idiot, Olavo de Carvalho’s most recent book (ed. Felipe Moura Brasil), could somehow perceive the broader unity that the 193 texts in the book testify to and, therefore, become interested in better understanding the man’s work. Taking as a parallel the sections of these “elements of Olavo de Carvalho’s philosophy,” I would point out the following texts from the book as the most relevant to their respective themes:

I – “O poder de conhecer”, p. 38; “A mensagem de Viktor Frankl”, p. 49; “Redescobrindo o sentido da vida”, p. 53; “Um capítulo de memórias”, p. 91.

II – “Sem testemunhas”, p. 41.

III – “Quem eram os ratos?”, p. 261; “Da fantasia deprimente à realidade temível”, p. 324; “O testemunho proibido”, p. 405; “Como ler a Bíblia”, p. 409; “Debatedores brasileiros”, p. 456; “Zenão e o paralítico”, p. 460.

IV – “Jesus e a pomba de Stalin”, p. 355; “Espírito e personalidade”, p. 610.

V – “Espírito e cultura: o Brasil ante o sentido da vida”, p. 59; “A origem da burrice nacional”, p. 67; “Cavalos mortos”, p. 94; “Os histéricos no poder”, p. 96.

VI – “Que é ser socialista?”, p. 119; “A mentalidade revolucionária”, p. 186; “Ainda a mentalidade revolucionária”, p. 191; “A mentira estrutural”, p. 196; “A revolução globalista”, p. 159; “A fossa de Babel”, p. 287; “A ciência contra a razão”, p. 393.

VII – “Os donos do mundo”, p. 541; “O que está acontecendo”, p. 543; “Quem manda no mundo?”, p. 545; “Salvando o triunvirato global”, p. 570; “História de quinze séculos”, p. 168; “Onipresente e invisível”, p. 162; “Lula, réu confesso”, p. 472.

VIII – “A tragédia do estudante sério no Brasil”, p. 595; “Se você ainda quer ser um estudante sério…”, p. 599; “Pela restauração intelectual do Brasil”, p. 604.

That said, I affirm that The Minimum…, if read properly, can be a good introduction to the serious study of Olavo de Carvalho’s thought (although it is quite obvious that most of the texts only belong to a third part of the philosopher’s work – the cultural criticism part; the other two parts, the history of philosophy and the production of philosophical works proper, must be sought in other books and courses). The organization that Felipe Moura Brasil has given to the texts is excellent, with sections and subsections, and very enlightening notes added to them (along with good notes from the editor as well). I have only one criticism to make: the absence of an index. A good index would make the book a highly efficient reference tool – and even for study, limited as it may be – with onomastic and thematic entries, which would be a great complement to the already remarkably well-structured summary found at the beginning. It would be a joy to see this absence addressed in a future edition of the book.

Finally, and thanking you for your patience: I wish you all happy reading.