Monday, July 17, 2023

Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Guide for the Study of His Work, by Olavo de Carvalho

Throughout more than two decades of teaching, Olavo de Carvalho has sometimes expounded to his students the principles and monumental discoveries of the philosophy of Mário Ferreira dos Santos, whom Olavo does not hesitate to refer to as “one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century—not only in Brazil but in the world.” This book brings together the essence of what Olavo has written and taught about Mário’s work.

According to Mário Ferreira, there would be a kind of central line of philosophy, crossing all of history, which would go from Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle to Saint Thomas and Duns Scotus, and so on, until finally reaching Mário himself. This would be the backbone of philosophy, something I also believe in; in this lineage, I would also include Leibniz, Schelling, and Edmund Husserl, not to mention Louis Lavelle. What Mário achieves is, to parody the title of Frithjof Schuon’s famous book, a kind of ‘transcendent unity of philosophies’; thus, he can say that he is not making his philosophy; he is making philosophy.

Organizer’s Note

This book brings together the essential aspects of what Olavo de Carvalho wrote and taught about the work of Mário Ferreira dos Santos:

Part i – "Brief Guide for the Student of Mário Ferreira dos Santos' Philosophical Work," originally published as an introductory study in A sabedoria das leis eternas (The Wisdom of Eternal Laws), Mário Ferreira dos Santos' posthumous work (text edited by Olavo de Carvalho; São Paulo: E Realizações, 2001), later integrated into O futuro do pensamento brasileiro: estudos sobre o nosso lugar no mundo (The Future of Brazilian Thought: Studies on Our Place in the World) from its third edition (São Paulo: É Realizações, 2007; 4th edition: Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2016).

Part ii – “Aspects of Concrete Philosophy,” the title given in this volume to the course “Mário Ferreira dos Santos – Guide to the Study of His Work,” taught by Olavo de Carvalho from November 28 to December 2, 2017, in Richmond, Virginia, with online broadcasting. The transcription and preparation of the text were done by Ronald Robson, with a significant tolerance for the oral nature of the exposition, as desired by the author.

Part iii – “From ‘Archimedean Point’ to ‘Mathesis Megiste’,” originally two lectures given in Rio de Janeiro on July 25 and 26, 1997, transcribed by Fernando Antonio de Araújo Carneiro and prepared by Ronald Robson, following the same criteria for preserving its oral quality.

Part iv – “Mário Ferreira dos Santos and Our Future,” Dieta & Contradicta, No. 3, June 2009, an essay later incorporated into the book A filosofia e seu inverso (Philosophy and Its Inverse) (Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2012).

As can be seen, the distribution of the four parts of this volume does not follow a chronological criterion but an analytical one: a general introduction is followed by three more specific approaches.

The decision was made not to remove a few occasional coincidences in analysis or information from the texts. When properly considered, they actually increase in documentary importance, as they do not conceal the continuities and discontinuities in the author’s engagement with Mário Ferreira dos Santos' work over a span of twenty years.

It was deemed opportune to include in this book the notes that Olavo de Carvalho added to the text of A sabedoria das leis eternas, a book that has long been out of print and extremely rare even in second-hand bookstores, which makes its content, in many respects enlightening, largely inaccessible. Whenever the text of these notes was included – as is the case in Parts II and III – their insertion is indicated with < at the beginning and > at the end. The recovered notes, whose texts may have been edited for certain details, come from the following passages in the edition of A sabedoria: note 1 on page 46; note 2 on page 50; note 4 on page 47; note 14 on page 52; note 7 on page 70; and note 16 on page 54.

The “Bibliography of Mário Ferreira dos Santos,” included in the appendix, was also prepared by the author originally for the edition of A sabedoria.

Part I: A Brief Guide for the Student of Mário Ferreira dos Santos' Philosophical Work

1. Introduction

For how long will the alliance between indifference, ineptitude, and envious disdain be able to maintain the extended web of shadows that has fallen upon the luminous work since the death of our greatest philosopher? How much longer will the reign of philosophical jesters, whose noisy carnival muffles the discourse of the highest intelligence, endure?

In the hope that this reign is nearing its end, I present here1 the magnificent work that I have unearthed from the unpublished legacies of Mário Ferreira dos Santos, and to which I have given, in response to an honorable request from the author’s daughter, the best textual preparation I could provide, accompanied by this Introduction to guide the reader.

In the following pages, I do not attempt to provide a summary or analysis of Mário Ferreira dos Santos' philosophical thought, which would require more extensive study, but rather outline only a brief biographical profile of the author, a structure outline of the cyclical work in which this book is situated—the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences—and a short account of the editorial efforts undertaken to publish these Eternal Laws. I am well aware that discerning the outlines of a global internal structure in a mountain of texts is already a form of interpretation, and quite a substantial one. At the very least, it removes the main obstacle on the path to interpretation, especially in the case of a work of oceanic proportions where even capable readers have only been able to perceive a moving and incomprehensible chaos. However, if I venture into the investigation of this structure here, it is not as a philosophical interpreter, at least not yet, but rather as a proper introducer, so that the reader does not get lost among the colonnades and corridors of the greatest philosophical temple ever erected in the Portuguese language. These pages, therefore, have an exclusively practical and utilitarian purpose, without the ambition of being1 a philosophical study, which, nevertheless, they prepare for and announce with sincere intent, in the hope that well-intentioned promises do not replace the fulfillment of duty.

2. Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Biographical Notes

Mário [Dias] Ferreira dos Santos2 was born in Tietê, São Paulo state, on January 3, 1907, at 1:20 PM, the son of Francisco Dias Ferreira dos Santos and Maria do Carmo Santos.

His father, of Portuguese descent, came from a family of lawyers and jurists but pursued a career in the arts and became known as one of the pioneers of cinema, having produced and directed dozens of films, including “O crime dos banhados,” recognized as the first feature-length film in world cinematography. As a child, Mário participated as an actor in some of his father’s films.

Although married to a devout Catholic woman, Francisco dos Santos was an atheist and a Freemason. Mário would later tell his children that the contrast between his parents' beliefs was one of the first reasons that aroused his philosophical curiosity at an early age. Despite his convictions, Francisco Santos greatly admired Jesuit education, which is why, after settling with his family in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, he enrolled his son at Ginásio Gonzaga (nowadays directed by Marist priests).

Mário Ferreira dos Santos always considered himself indebted to the Jesuits, from whom he received his first notions of philosophy and religious education to which he remained faithful, despite temporary crises, until his last day. He owed them something more: feeling what he presumed to be a clerical vocation awakening within him, he was advised by his teachers to seek a different path for his life.

In 1925, he entered the Law School of Porto Alegre, making his debut as a lawyer in 1928, achieving success even before completing his degree. In the same year he graduated in Law and Social Sciences, 1930, he abandoned the profession to work in his father’s film production company. At the same time, he was the editor of the Rio Grande do Sul newspaper A Opinião Pública. As a journalist, he actively supported the Revolution of 1930, but soon criticized certain actions of the new revolutionary government, which led to his arrest and forced him to step down from the newspaper’s leadership.

While still in Porto Alegre, he worked for Diário de Notícias, Correio do Povo, and some magazines. As a political commentator, he wrote over a hundred articles about World War II, some of which were later compiled into books.

From 1943 to 1944, he made several translations for Editora Globo, including “Os pensamentos” by Blaise Pascal, “Diário íntimo” by Amiel, “A fisiologia do casamento” by Balzac, and “Vontade de potência” by Nietzsche.

Nietzsche was a significant influence in shaping our philosopher’s development, and he translated several of Nietzsche’s works—always directly from the original German—such as “Aurora,” “Beyond Good and Evil,” and “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” The latter was accompanied by detailed commentaries that analyze the symbolism of the work and remain one of the most valuable resources in Nietzschean studies to this day. Additionally, Mário Ferreira wrote a lengthy essay titled “The Man Who Was Born Posthumously,” in which he defends Nietzsche against his detractors, speaking on behalf of the philosopher-poet.

During this period, Mário Ferreira also wrote several other philosophical essays, which, while treated more as literature, gradually revealed some of the author’s fundamental themes of concern. Facing difficulty in getting them published, Mário Ferreira became his own publisher and achieved remarkable success with various books released under a staggering array of pseudonyms. From then on, he never ceased his editorial activity, founding several companies. The main ones were Livraria e Editora Logos S.A. and Editora Matese Ltda., both located in São Paulo, through which he published not only his own books but also numerous translations of classical works, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and anthologies of all sorts, printing them in his own printing press.

In the 1950s, he moved to São Paulo, where, while continuing his editorial work, he managed four cinemas. Simultaneously, he taught courses and delivered lectures, wrote for newspapers and magazines, and progressively, over the years, wrote his philosophical oeuvre with increasing speed. Mário was a man of volcanic activity—characteristic of the choleric temperament according to Le Senne’s typology—and possessed entrepreneurial genius. He introduced the system of selling books on credit, door-to-door, in Brazil, which gained tremendous popularity. His success was further amplified by the impact of his Oratory and Rhetoric course, attended by renowned politicians, businessmen, and intellectuals. When the course was published as a book, it sold no fewer than eleven editions. In his spare time, he directed a Correspondence Philosophy Course, personally correcting the lessons sent by hundreds of students. He also found time to act as a counselor to troubled individuals who frequently sought his wisdom. This latter activity inspired him to write two books that remain among the most interesting in the self-help genre: “Course on Personal Integration” and “Invitation to Practical Psychology.”

Starting in 1952, he passionately devoted himself to the construction of his magnum opus in philosophy: the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, a collection of fifty volumes, most of which were published during the author’s lifetime. However, some fundamental texts remained unpublished, and the present volume marks the beginning of their ordered publication.

Mário Ferreira dos Santos never held a public office or a university chair. Nor did he seek to do so, as he shaped his life with a fierce independence and demonstrated his ability to overcome obstacles on his own, which left entire generations trembling. His only experience as a faculty member at a university occurred in the last year of his life when, at the insistence of an admirer and friend, the Latvian philosopher residing in Brazil, Father Stanislavs Ladusãns, S.J., Mário agreed to give a few lectures at the Faculty of Philosophy of Nossa Senhora Medianeira, a Jesuit institution. Thus, he concluded his life as a scholar just as he had begun, among the soldiers of Christ. The lectures lasted only a few weeks. Mário was already in poor health, suffering from severe heart problems exacerbated by excessive work and immense sorrow due to the military power that dominated Brazil. The school administration, anticipating the worst, had an oxygen tank installed next to the classroom for any emergency.

Mário did not die in the lecture hall but at home, surrounded by his loved ones—his wife Yolanda, his daughters Yolanda and Nadie-jda, his sons-in-law Fernando and Wilmar: the only true allies and collaborators he had in a life of battles and creations. Sensing the approaching final moment, the philosopher requested that his family lift him up. He declared that dying lying down was beneath a man’s dignity. He died standing, reciting the words of the Lord’s Prayer.

3. The Encyclopedia and Its Realization

If Mário Ferreira dos Santos had died in the first half of the 1950s, his biography would have already portrayed a remarkable man known for his creativity, diverse talents, and public engagement as a journalist, editor, and educator. However, hidden beneath this array of occupations, an even richer inner biography was unfolding.

The documents provide us with little information on this matter. The intellectual and spiritual development of Mário Ferreira is shrouded in mystery because the writings published until 1952 only partially and obscurely reflect the profound concerns that stirred within him and the vast plans that were already being prepared, perhaps, in his subconscious.

It is known, of course, that throughout this period he never ceased to study the great works of philosophy, to take notes, to have rare books from abroad brought to him, and even to commission copies of old folios from libraries. For example, he did so with the works of Portuguese philosophers from the Renaissance, to whom he was perhaps the first great thinker, after Leibniz, to devote extensive study and profound admiration. This internal activity was secretly generating, within the essayist, the translator-commentator of Nietzsche, the brilliant journalist and editor, a new man: a philosopher in the fullest sense of the word. In fact, the Brazilian philosopher. However, the writings published until the beginning of the 1950s, while announcing the fundamental themes and problems that the philosopher would engage with, do not even remotely reveal the depth, scope, and solidity of the thoughts that were germinating in the soul of Mário Ferreira dos Santos. In stark contrast to the previous phase, the new man emerges ready, as if coming from nothing, and bursts forth in a sequence of ten brilliant works published between 1952 and 1957: “Philosophy and Worldview,” “Logic and Dialectics,” “Psychology,” “Theory of Knowledge,” “Ontology,” “Treatise on Symbolics,” “Philosophy of Crisis,” “Man Facing the Infinite,” “General Noology,” and above all, the greatest work of this period: “Concrete Philosophy,” in three volumes. Published? No, unleashed, at a rate of one volume every four months. The state of the editions reflects the improvisation of production, unable to keep pace with the storm of dazzling intuitions that succeeded one another, becoming increasingly rich and comprehensive within an intellect that seemed to want to embrace the totality of reality with a single gaze. The incompleteness of these books, the lack of attention to revision, the frequent gaps in exposition, and the sudden changes of subject may have repelled many readers in a country where the snobbery of elegant covers and well-crafted editions is still a sine qua non condition for a book to be respected even by intellectuals. However, contained within this careless and opaque literary form is not only marvelously ordered thought but also a total, organic, systematic philosophy—an encyclopedia in the etymological sense of the term: a comprehensive teaching, with a perfectly circular or spherical structure. Because it is evident that these ten books were conceived all at once, as chapters of a continuous exposition intended to comprehensively and logically cover the basic themes of philosophical inquiry. In order, indeed, because disorder is only present in stylistic details: the structure, both of the series as a whole and of each book, is clear.

But the unity of the whole cannot be concluded solely from the examination of the books. The author’s family members recount that during a conference in São Paulo, Mário suddenly fell silent and, after a few minutes of general discomfort, asked the audience to excuse him. He had just had an idea and needed to record it on paper before it slipped away. He went home and that same night drafted the series of main theses of “Concrete Philosophy.” These numbered theses progress like a mathematical demonstration, from self-evident principles to the farthest-reaching consequences across various domains of philosophy. Later, Mário added demonstrations—crossing various logical and dialectical methods—comments, and scholia, etc. Simply examining the remaining nine titles of the first series of the Encyclopedia confirms that they only serve to fill out the framework that was sketched out, to detail the program of “Concrete Philosophy,” unfolding in dialectical confrontation with multiple currents of thought, and enriching the scheme with a variety of examinations from the perspectives of different philosophical disciplines. This scheme will be presented in a geometrically ordered synthesis in the final book of the series.

The first volume, “Philosophy and Worldview,” still shows the author’s hesitations regarding the direction of the collection. On the one hand, it was a matter of presenting a new philosophy, original to the point of audacity, while rooted in the archaic soil of Pythagoreanism, and of engaging in dialogue with the major currents of contemporary thought, to which it offered itself as a comprehensive synthesis of their positive moments. On the other hand, there was the vocation of the educator who wanted to teach everyone, be didactic, spread philosophy books throughout Brazil, and be understood even by the humblest worker in the anarchist center where his lectures had won him solid and lasting friendships.

The impossible mixture did not work. Oscillating between empty didacticism in the passages where he addresses the classical problems of philosophy and the inevitable obscurity in those where he presents his answers with unparalleled audacity and greatness, Mário has left us with a hybrid and hesitant work that, in my opinion, constitutes the worst possible introduction to his thought. Of course, this does not diminish the lofty merits of the book, especially its final parts, where Mário, as if in a sudden burst, in a moment of urgency, abandons all didactic and informative concerns to deliver to us, in pages of extreme density, the living core of his thought. However, the result is that the philosophy-savvy reader is repelled by the didacticism of the early pages, and the layperson by the obscurity of the later ones, so that lacking patience in the latter and humility in the former, both fail to benefit from the reading.

The second volume suffers from the same defect, albeit attenuated, because an intermediary chapter on the various dialectics throughout history serves as a bridge between the first part—a manual of classical logic—and the second part—a concise presentation of the author’s new dialectical method, decadialectics. This intermediate chapter produces an effect of increasing difficulty, which was likely what Mário had intended to do, unsuccessfully, in the first volume.

From the third volume onwards, the argument gains momentum, the new perspectives opened up by the decadialectical method emerge with dazzling progression, and Mário Ferreira dos Santos’s philosophy takes shape until it culminates in a summa of geometric demonstration across the three volumes of “Concrete Philosophy.”

At the halfway point, Mário has a relapse into didacticism, but it is a providential relapse. The sixth volume of the series, “Treatise on Symbolics,” which deals with a relatively unknown subject in Brazil at the time, even among the educated readership, interrupts the exposition of Mário’s personal philosophy to provide the fundamental principles of a science of symbolism, summarized from the works of esteemed scholars such as Matila Ghyka, Mircea Eliade, René Guénon, and others. Among these principles, the symbolic interpretations of numbers 1 to 10 according to Pythagoreanism emerge, which, when juxtaposed with other visual symbols, acquire greater clarity than if they were presented in the abstract without this sensory support. It also happens that Mário Ferreira’s entire methodology, dialectic, and ontology are ultimately based on a deepening of the meaning of numbers in Pythagoreanism. This book, seemingly the least philosophical in the series, unintentionally serves as the most didactic introduction to Mário Ferreira dos Santos’s thought, and it is recommended that readers make it their first encounter with the philosopher’s work. This will provide them with a sensory and imaginative foundation upon which to ascend to the almost breathless heights of abstraction that await them in the subsequent volumes, which were already foreshadowed in the “Theory of Knowledge” (vol. iv) and “Ontology” (vol. v).

Cario Beraldo, in the extensive entry dedicated to Mário Ferreira in the Philosophical Encyclopedia of the Center for Philosophical Studies of Gallarate,3 defined the philosophy of the Brazilian master as a synthesis—“at once traditional and personal”—of Pythagoreanism and Thomism. While this definition is incomplete, it is true in its essence and provides a good pathway to understanding this philosophy.

Mário Ferreira’s starting point is a complete reinterpretation of Pythagoreanism, partly based on the remaining texts of the Pythagorean school and partly on the idea of ideally reconstructing this philosophy, assuming its “intrinsic coherence”—the historically plausible conjecture that Pythagoras, or the Pythagorean school, could not have overlooked the immediate logical consequences and even some not-so-immediate ones of the principles they postulated.

However, this reconstruction does not necessarily have a historical sense but rather a doctrinal and logical one. According to Mário, if it does not provide us with historically authentic Pythagoreanism, it gives us the authentic philosophy of Mário Ferreira, more inspired by than derived from Pythagoras. This philosophy unfolds in stages—not in the chronological sense but in the logical sense—that expand and deepen the meaning of an original intuition, ultimately reconstructing the entire edifice of philosophical sciences with it at the center. The stages are four:

First stage. Mário initially understands the Sacred Decad of the Pythagoreans as a system of logical categories. From this perspective, he constructs a new dialectical method—the decadialectic—which, by approaching a question from ten interrelated viewpoints, provides a dialectical counterbalance to the abstractionism of formal logic. According to decadialectics, every entity (or problem) must be approached successively and rotationally as unity, opposition (internal), relation (between the opposites), proportion (between the internal relations), and form (the concrete synthesis of the four preceding aspects). This completes the examination of its internal constitution. Subsequently, the object must be viewed in its harmony (with the surrounding environment), its aspects of rupture and crisis that starkly separate it from the environment and subject it to mutations, its potential for transcendence or assimilation (through which, having lost its intrinsic harmony, it integrates into an immediately higher harmony), the higher unity of comprehensive form (which brings together the previous eight aspects and integrates them into the cosmic whole), and finally, its teleological insertion into the transcendent unity of the real, the Supracosmic Being, the Supreme Good spoken of by Plato.

There is a second way to apply the decadialectic. Here, the ten aspects become ten fields, each defined by a basic opposition:

  1. Subject x object;

  2. Actuality x potentiality;

  3. Real possibilities x non-real possibilities;

  4. Intensity x extensity;

  5. Actualizations (and virtualizations) of intensity x actualizations (and virtualizations) of extensity;

  6. Reason x intuition (oppositions within the subject);

  7. Knowledge x ignorance (oppositions within reason);

  8. Actualizations and virtualizations of intuition x actualizations and virtualizations of reason;

  9. Knowledge x ignorance (oppositions within intuition);

  10. Variant x invariant.

Only when approached through these ten prisms, in their two versions, can a philosophical problem be considered sufficiently elaborated and, eventually, ready to be resolved. The method encompasses the use of ancient and modern formal logic, various dialectics (Aristotelian, Hegelian, Nietzschean, etc.), as technical elements that are integrated and transcended as a whole. When the object or theme is viewed as a whole, decadialectics also includes a complement, the pentadialectic, which focuses on it in five successive planes:

  1. As unity in itself;

  2. In the whole of which it is an element;

  3. In the series to which it belongs as a stage;

  4. In the system in which it is functionally and tensionally integrated;

  5. In the universe, considered in a schematic and abstract manner.

Second stage. Having constructed this method and demonstrated its effectiveness in solving a variety of philosophical problems, it takes the next step: to demonstrate that the ten numbers are not only logical categories, but also noetic ones: they govern not only the structuring of coherent and ideal reasoning, but the entire sphere of real human cognition. The categories are thus elevated to archetypes. In this stage, it demonstrates the coherence between its interpretations of Pythagorean categories and the symbolism of numbers from 1 to 10, as found in sacred artworks, sacred texts of various religions, and so on.

Third stage. Having done this, it advances further; it demonstrates that they are not only archetypes in a noetic sense, but also ontological ones; they necessarily rule over every possible being, independently and beyond the forms of human cognition: the archetypes become principles.

Fourth stage. Finally, it will demonstrate that the universal principles thus found are not only schemes of universal possibility but ontological laws that effectively govern all orders of realities.

These stages are traversed in immense cycles, in which the philosopher’s gaze progressively encompasses all the themes and problems of universal philosophy, reordering them according to new, increasingly comprehensive syntheses that reconcile the most opposing theses, the most antagonistic currents, finally reconciled in the light of Mathesis megiste—the “supreme teaching.”

Mathesis megiste: Mário uses this Pythagorean expression to name the final series of his Encyclopedia and the culmination of his teaching. To explain what it is about, he begins by classifying knowledge-transmitting languages into four types: pragmatic, for everyday communication; symbolic, for poetry and religion; scientific, to provide clear concepts for things classified by knowledge; and finally philosophical, “where concepts attain their maximum purity, valid for all sectors of human knowledge.” The ultimate and plenary realization of philosophical language, Mathesis megiste, thus constructs "a universe of discourse valid for all spheres of knowledge."4 As for its content, Mathesis consists of truths per se notae, collected from the works of all the major philosophers (there was none who did not perceive something) and arranged systematically. Mathesis is, therefore, something like a transcendent unity of philosophies, in which the self-evident principles underlying all possible philosophy are expressed; it is, at the same time, the internal logic of every system of metaphysics and ontology and finally a supramethodology of all philosophical disciplines.5

To give expression to this grand thought, Mário conceived the plan of his Encyclopedia in three parts, following the requirement of his decadialectic that every approach to a philosophical problem, large or small, should first be approached with a rapid synthetic overview, then analytically unfolded into its various aspects and components discerned through abstraction, and finally, the various abstractly separated angles should be reunified, concretized (from cum crescior: “growing together”) in the simultaneous vision of the ten dimensions of being.

This ternary scheme—and this is fundamental to understanding Mário’s thought—orders not only the construction of each individual book but also that of the Encyclopedia as a whole and each of the three series of which it is composed, consistently with the same scheme. The rigorous geometry of the whole escapes the reader who examines Mário’s works separately, even if they are read in large quantities; and it is only the structure of the whole that illuminates the sections and the individual books, reflecting the whole in the parts and the parts in the whole.

But the geometric order of construction goes even deeper: in the first and third series of the Encyclopedia, that is, in the initial synthesis and the final concretion, the distribution of volumes follows, in terms of subject matter, the progression of Pythagorean categories from 1 to 10, that is, the first volume focuses on its theme through the prism of unity, the second through opposition, the third through relation, and so on. The intermediate series could not follow a similar ordering since it is the analytical part of the Encyclopedia, in which themes and problems are examined one by one, and their division and subdivision could, in principle, continue indefinitely. Therefore, the numbering is free, obeying only the chronological sequence of editions.

The structure of the Encyclopedia can be visualized according to the diagram on page 36. There, the internal order of a philosophical work is clear and distinct, a work in which the author’s contemporaries—including the shamans and leaders of the philosophical Tupiniquim tribe—could only see the confusion of its external form, driven by an illusion—how shall I say?—typographical. And of course, in making this criticism, I am aware that I have not grasped this structure at a glance of genius insight, but in a continued effort over several years. But I have made that effort, driven by the confident foreboding that behind the apparent jumble of texts, there was something precious to understand, while they, the important figures of the day—many of whom are still important today—immediately turned up their noses and turned their backs on this magnificent work, founded on the presumption that there was nothing to be understood there. Presumption in the double sense of supposition and vain pretension. And it is also clear that the work materially realized does not fully conform to this ideal structure in all points, leaving various gaps and imperfections—especially in the final ten volumes, unpublished and some incomplete—which, however, are far from enough to hide the outlines of the whole from the eyes of a patient reader.

Regarding the general sense of the work, Cario Beraldo’s formula, while incomplete—as there are many other influences in Mário’s thought beyond Pythagorean and Thomistic ones—draws attention to a fundamental point: observing the general tendency of the modern world toward the mathematization of philosophical thought, Mário made a deep effort to purify this tendency of its prejudiced Gnostic and anti-Christian heritage, and supposed, apparently with reason, that the evils of mathematism could only be healed homeopathically with an even deeper mathematism. The critique he undertook of mathematical logic in one of his books, which was among the most affected by editorial neglect,6 shows an almost visionary intuition of one of the main roots of the contemporary tragedy: the mathematization of thought undertaken by lesser intellects, incapable of grasping from mathematics anything other than its logical-formal aspects and completely blind to the higher sphere in which, behind pure formalism, appears the supreme reality of ontological principles, essentially the same as those proclaimed by Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Mário believed he found the bridge between mathematism and ontology in Pythagoras. Hence the essential correctness of Beraldo’s formula.

Moreover, it does not matter whether the referenced Pythagoras is the historical one or a mere projection of a higher aspect of Mário Ferreira dos Santos' soul. Mário himself played with this hypothesis, representing himself, in a philosophical dialogue,7 as a character named Pitágoras de Mello.

However, it is not impossible that the precise fantasy of his Pythagoreanism struck deeper historically than he himself supposed. For, in his audacity as an ideal reconstructivist, he advances his conjecture to the point of outlining, based on pure deduction, what could have been Plato’s oral teaching; and here he hits the bullseye, as seen through the perfect homology between his ideal Plato and the one revealed, two decades after the death of our philosopher, by the exhaustive historical comparison of texts undertaken by the Italian historian Giovanni Reale.8

4. The Text of this Edition

When Mário Ferreira dos Santos died in 1968, he left behind not only almost a hundred published books but also a voluminous collection of unpublished works, among which, I can assure you, are his most valuable works. Among them, these “Eternal Laws” stand out, which an objective examination allows us to place, without any exaggeration, as one of the pinnacles of metaphysical thought in the 20th century.

However, it was not solely the consideration of its unique value and importance that made me decide to start the publication of the series of Unpublished Works by the great Brazilian philosopher with this book. There were two reasons. The first one, purely practical: among the unpublished works, this was the most finished one, with the least editorial preparation difficulties. 9 10

The second reason requires further explanation. Mário Ferreira dos Santos wrote his magnum opus, the “Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences,” consisting of more than fifty volumes, all in one go, tirelessly working from 1952 until the year of his death (1968), driven by a central intuition that never wavered for a single instant throughout the entire series.

As a systematic and circular work, the various volumes that compose it support and explain each other, with frequent cross-references from one to another. Since the author had already envisioned the completion of subsequent volumes while writing one of them, it often happens that a particular argument will be developed or substantiated in a later work that, at that time, only existed as intention and plan. Given the frenetic pace at which the author worked, it is understandable that he often referred to a work by different titles, either due to distraction (he himself would penance himself by citing the famous Aristotelis insignis negligentia in scribendo) or because he decided to change the title or because he decided to expand the originally planned work into several volumes or compress multiple works into one. To a reader who is only familiar with the volumes published during the author’s lifetime, even if read in their entirety, Mário Ferreira dos Santos' work may appear fragmented and formless in its gigantism, making it difficult to recognize the underlying lines of an architectural coherence that the author proclaims to exist. The idea that comes to mind when faced with this mountain of thoughts is the absolute impossibility of completing the execution of such an ambitious project. Therefore, it was with astounding surprise that I discovered, when examining the unpublished works, that the announced plan had been fully realized, that the “Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences” was a reality, a complete and finished whole, with not a single missing volume among the many that the author promised.

Faced with this fact, the task that remained was to organize the whole, following the sometimes conflicting indications left by the author regarding the lines of construction and the distribution of parts, and then prepare the text of each volume for publication.

For the first of these tasks, the solution was miraculously found in a fragment of paper, the size of a palm, tucked between the cardboard folders kept at the house on Avenida Irerê, in the Planalto Paulista neighborhood of São Paulo, where Mário Ferreira dos Santos had lived his last days. On this small piece of paper, the philosopher hastily scribbled the numbering of the last ten volumes of the Encyclopedia, which together form a complete series dedicated to the study of the discipline that the author called, in Pythagorean terms, “Mathesis megiste,” the “Supreme Teaching” – the culmination of his philosophical system. On the other hand, the first ten volumes of the published work – from “Philosophy and Worldview” (1954) to “Concrete Philosophy” (1957) – also constituted a complete series, of an introductory nature, making the division of the Encyclopedia into three blocks or series clear: a series of ten titles at the beginning, another of ten at the end, each forming a synthetic unit; in between, several dozen works dedicated to specific topics, approached analytically. The structure of the whole faithfully followed the author’s expository method, adopted within each individual work, which divided the subject into an “initial abstract synthesis,” an intermediate analytic unfolding, and a “final concrete synthesis.” The confused pile of papers resolved itself into a building with perfectly crystalline lines.

In Mário Ferreira dos Santos' brief note, the final volumes of the Encyclopedia were distributed into eight titles and ten volumes as follows:

I. The Wisdom of Principles; II. The Wisdom of Unity; III/IV. The Wisdom of Being and Non-Being (2 vols.); V. The Wisdom of Eternal Laws; VI. Concrete Dialectics; VII/VIII. Treatise on Schematology (2 vols.); IX. General Theory of Tensions; X. God.

These volumes were supposed to present, transcribed and corrected, the content of the course that the author had been giving to a private group since 1966, under the general denomination “Mathesis megiste.” The first three titles were published. Volume II of “The Wisdom of Being and Non-Being” was released shortly after the author’s death, at the initiative of his daughter Yolanda Lhullier dos Santos (Mário Ferreira was his own publisher, with a large printing house where he put all his family members to work). The remaining titles were found in manuscript form, in the following state:

“The Wisdom of Eternal Laws.” Transcription of six lectures, recorded on tape and typewritten by the philosopher’s wife, Yolanda Santos Burdette, and still unrevised by the author.

“Concrete Dialectics.” It consisted partly of transcribed lectures and partly of handwritten notes by the author.

“Treatise on Schematology.” Ditto.

“General Theory of Tensions.” A collection of brief notes, transcribed and numbered by D. Yolanda as they were given to her by the author, accompanied by some plans and diagrams for the structure of the work.

“God.” Under this title, the author gathered materials from various times and origins under the unity of an overall plan. He partly used what he had written decades earlier for a book planned under the title “God: Arguments For and Against His Existence,” adding recent notes and transcriptions of Mathesis lectures. 11

In addition to the eight titles of the final series, Mário also left several others that, as I understood, were part of the intermediate series since they always dealt with specific topics. Some of them consisted of commented translations – Saint Bonaventure, Plotinus, Laozi, Duns Scotus – following the author’s habit, as manifested in his published work, of presenting some of his ideas in the form of comments on famous philosophers.

Of all the unpublished works, only four could be considered incomplete: the “General Theory of Tensions,” a collection of loose fragments that did not cover all the topics announced in the accompanying Plan; the translation of “De Primo Principio” by Duns Scotus, which lacked the promised commentaries; the translation of Plotinus' “Enneads,” also without the announced commentaries; and “Philosophy and Romanticism,” of which only scattered fragments were found. All the other announced titles of the second and third series were complete, albeit in draft form. The Encyclopedia had been realized. The philosopher did not leave this world without completing his task.

He even left an abbreviated but no less eloquent indication of what he expected from his future editor: to complete, above all else, the “Mathesis” series, thus closing the unity of the Encyclopedia, in which the remaining volumes could later fit as complementary details. The philosopher himself followed this path, publishing the first three volumes of the final series before the other unpublished works he left behind. That is why I am starting the publication of the Unpublished Works with these “Eternal Laws,” the fourth volume of the “Mathesis megiste” series. Any other choice would be incorrect, although perhaps more convenient from a purely editorial point of view.

As to the text of this edition,12 I followed as faithfully as possible the transcription made by the philosopher’s wife of the recordings of lectures 85a to 91a of Mathesis, a transcription to which D. Yolanda added the following note at the end:

Lectures given by Prof. Mário Ferreira dos Santos in 1966. These six lectures, numbered from 85 to 91, totaling fifty pages, would later be revised and completed by the author for the volume “The Wisdom of Laws,” which would be published after “The Wisdom of Being and Nothingness.” However, this did not happen due to the death of Prof. Mário Ferreira dos Santos in April 1968. They were typed directly from the recorded tape and, therefore, have not been corrected by the author.

It was inevitable to cut useless repetitions and complete some truncated sentences, naturally highlighting, in brackets and with smaller fonts, the editor’s additions. Since the text is compact, dense, and difficult to read for those who are not familiar with Mário Ferreira dos Santos’s previous books, I deemed it appropriate to support the text with notes and references, especially to indicate the places in the remaining work where the reader can find more detailed explanations on certain obscure points and to highlight some possible points of comparison between the author’s thought and some contemporary philosophical currents. Since all the notes were authored by the editor, it made no sense to repeat “Editor’s Note” every time, so the obsessive little letters were omitted.

Mário Ferreira dos Santos used to maintain, in the text of his works, the use of some silent consonants that were eliminated by the 1943 spelling reform because he believed that highlighting the etymology of words helped to grasp their profound meaning, for example, in “acto,” “dialectica,” etc. I considered it artificial to imitate this usage in a text that did not come directly from the philosopher’s pen but was prepared by me from a recorded tape.13 Therefore, I used the current spelling. However, for the reader’s guidance, I provide an appendix with a list of words in this text that I saw written with silent consonants in other works by the author.

As for the title, in some notes by the author, it appears as “The Wisdom of Laws,” in others as “Eternal Laws,” and in others still as “The Wisdom of Eternal Laws,” which I preferred as it contains the other two.

The editor of this work has the duty to add a few words to these warnings that may sound strange and unpleasant.

Mário Ferreira dos Santos is by far the greatest of Brazilian philosophers. The Philosophical Encyclopedia of the Centro Studi Filosofici di Gallarate implicitly recognized this by granting our author an entire page entry, while the other Portuguese-speaking thinkers were given only a few lines. This recognition can also be made by any qualified and honest reader after a careful examination of this and the other fundamental books by the author, especially “Concrete Philosophy,” “Pythagoras and the Theme of Number,” “The Wisdom of Principles,” “The Wisdom of Unity,” even without knowing the other unpublished works in which the philosopher reaches the heights of pure wisdom.

Despite this, and perhaps because of it, the vast work of Mário Ferreira dos Santos has found only persistent indifference and sometimes malevolence from our university establishment, which only attests to the dazzling incompetence of many crowned heads, crowned with the gray aura of envy.

Mário was not unknown. Some of his works had nine, ten, fifteen editions during the author’s lifetime, and many celebrities with “soft brains” were his students, who received extraordinary teachings but neither recognized them nor proved themselves worthy by working for their rescue and dissemination after the master’s disappearance. After the author’s death, an ominous curtain of silence fell over his work.

In any serious country, a philosophical legacy of this magnitude would be considered national heritage, and technical teams, under the support of the State, would strive to organize, edit, study, and discuss the manuscripts from all perspectives. Mário Ferreira is rightfully the “Philosophus brasiliensis”; his work testifies to the late but splendid emergence of a fully worthy philosophical consciousness in this country and marks Brazil’s true entry into the spiritual history of the world, no longer as a listener but as a speaker and master.

However, the absence of state support does not excuse the personal negligence of those who, through direct contact with the master, became heirs to his philosophical heritage and morally responsible for its custody and care.14 As for those who, without being his students, had the opportunity to learn something about his work through other means and did not even perceive the greatness of what they had before them, they attest to the ineptitude of an intellectual class that sees nothing with their own eyes and only recognizes a philosopher when he comes with the label of authenticity signed by some foreign authority. Unfortunately, the Brazilian philosophical milieu is still dominated by this futile, frivolous, and verbose people.

Many factors may have contributed to fostering and legitimizing this neglect. The first of them is, evidently, the monumental size of Mário’s work, its editorial disorder, and the abstruse style that, combined with typographical errors, sometimes frustrates the reader. But this is no excuse. When Aristotle’s works were rediscovered in the 1st century BC, they were not in better condition, and in terms of incompleteness and confusion, our philosopher’s texts are no more frightening than those of Jakob Bõhme or the stenographic originals of Edmund Husserl, which were still published and studied.

A second factor is the anti-scholastic prejudice deeply ingrained in Brazilian intellectuals, to the point of making them blind to the mere possibility that something new or valuable may emerge someday from this philosophy, which they take a priori as a relic of a dead past or as a sub-philosophy of textbooks. A priori, of course, because they are unfamiliar with it: I have never known in this country a card-carrying anti-scholastic who has read, for example, anything more than “De Ente et Essentia” or some parts of the “Summa Theologica” by Saint Thomas—works that the author himself classified as elementary and introductory. A complete translation of Aquinas’s commentaries on Aristotle, made by my friend Antônio Donato Rosa, did not arouse the slightest interest from the USP hierarchy or publishers in general.

A third, more subtle factor is the strong propensity, prevalent in dependent cultures, for each intellectual to be interested only in works that express ideas akin to their own or those of their reference group. In an atmosphere dominated by the “collective intellectual” of Gramscism, only works that express general aspirations of the learned community are attractive— aspirations that can be summarized as seizing power and quickly freeing oneself from scientific obligations in the name of supposed greater urgencies. The criterion for valuing ideas there is purely market-driven, and even the deepest truths, if uttered by a solitary man in a language that does not resonate immediately in the hearts of intellectual multitudes, are rejected as of lesser importance. The empire of majority opinion in learned communities, a sad legacy of the literary clubs of the French Revolution, is the modern and absolutized version of the magister dixit. To be right alone is, for the collectivist mentality, the worst sin. Socrates or Jesus Christ, for these people, simply did not happen.

The editor of this book profoundly disagrees with many of Mário Ferreira dos Santos’s opinions and does not consider himself, in any way, his follower or disciple. He never personally met him, let alone was his student, only becoming aware of his work in 1981, thanks to a fortunate coincidence that brought the philosopher’s daughter, D. Yolanda Lhullier dos Santos, into his presence. Her friendship greatly honors him, and her trust, in asking him to revise and edit these pages, exceeds all measure. But even before she asked, he had already taken on this unshakable duty, solely motivated by the illuminating impact of a first reading and by the feeling of discontentment with the ignorance in which the only philosophy fully deserving of this name produced in the Portuguese language and in this country languished. It never crossed his mind to wrinkle his nose, affectedly disdainful, driven by minor objections, at a work whose greatness and value should be manifest to any serious reader, no matter how much they may disagree on one point or another, or even as a whole. He fails to understand why those who knew it earlier and enjoyed the personal company of its author did not have the same feeling or why, if they did, it did not move them to anything. Working on his own, without support from any state or private institution and without any remuneration, he considers himself more than generously rewarded by the simple opportunity to know, through direct contact with the manuscripts, a philosophical thought of such elevation and magnitude and to be able to contribute to giving it an editorial garment closer to its merit.

Rio de Janeiro, October 1994.

5. Structure of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences

Structure of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences
SYNTHESIS I Unity Synthesis Series I
  II Opposition Analysis Ten
  III Relation   volumes,
  IV Reciprocity   numbered
  V Form   according to
  VI Harmony   the order of
  VII Mutation   Pythagorean
  VIII Assumption   categories
  IX Integration    
  X Transcendent    
    Unity Concretion  
ANALYSIS I Series II
II Free
III numbering
Etc.
CONCRETION I Unity Synthesis Series III
II Opposition Pythagorean
III Relation numbering
IV Reciprocity
V Form Analysis
VI Harmony
VII Mutation
VIII Assumption
IX Integration
X Transcendent
Unity Concretion

Part II: Aspects of the Concrete Philosophy

1. The Meaning of Mário Ferreira dos Santos' Work

They often ask me why I don’t usually mention Mário Ferreira dos Santos or use his concepts in my work, even though I consider him one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century – not only in Brazil, mind you, but worldwide.

My simplest answer would be to say that Mário Ferreira was the greatest of the Platonists in history, while I am not a Platonist in any way. I mean to say that he did something that I have never done, nor would I do, nor do I think I should do. So, as much as I appreciate everything he has done for Brazil, and that this country has not yet fully benefited from, personally, he does not serve as an example to me regarding the overall direction of his monumental philosophical effort, which, however, I will try to characterize as best as possible throughout this course, and then indicate the points where I diverge from the project of concrete philosophy.

Before delving into the content of his philosophy, it would be appropriate to say something about the state of his work in material terms. It all suffers from better literary and editorial treatment. So far, everything that has been done to alleviate the problem has involved examining the various editions that the philosopher published during his lifetime in order to arrive at what would be the author’s final intention for his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences.

In the case of Mário, this effort is fruitless. All his books have monstrous deficiencies. Since many of these titles were born from the transcription of lectures and courses, it would be necessary to check the original audio recordings again in order to, by contrasting them with the edited and unpublished written records, partially or even fully reconstruct the volumes of the Encyclopaedia. This is how it was done – I always like to give this example – with the book “Topics in Education” by Bernard Lonergan, a result of transcribing several courses, the restructuring of which (with the purpose of creating a text that could be read with a beginning, middle, and end) took years of work by a large team.

I consider “Philosophy of Crisis” (1956) to be his best-written and most elegant book, and it is clear that it was a work that was written in its entirety by the philosopher, possibly without the mediation of transcriptions. As for many other titles, the case is quite different. In many passages, Mário Ferreira’s books reach such a level of obscurity that it is necessary to resort to what is called conjectural textual reconstruction in philology: one seeks to grasp what the subject meant, beyond what he actually managed (or failed) to say. It is necessary to reconstruct the sentences within the spirit of the philosopher’s work, without distorting their meaning, in order to find the written equivalent of what can be expressed orally in a clumsy manner without compromising the content. There are passages with errors in writing (in addition to the involuntary anacolutha, which abound) that Mário simply would not be capable of making – they are indeed slips that do not exactly correspond to the author’s thought. Many of Mário’s typescripts contain insertions and corrections made by his own hand, it is true, but for the most part, they are insufficient revisions of a text that was transcribed inadequately.

Let’s take an example at random. In “Analysis of Social Themes,” when discussing socialism, he writes: “to socialize is to make social what was not before, it is to give to society or take in the sense of society what it was not” – but what was it not? Obviously, the author means to say that it is a matter of giving to society what did not belong to it before, or calling something social that was previously called by another name. The sentence shows the typical gap in oral speech, which cannot be accepted in writing. In the following sentence, “Therefore, to say ‘social’ and to speak of ‘socializing’ or ‘socialization’ does not yet mean to speak of socialism, as many confuse,” there are two more gaps of the same kind: firstly, the author means to say that when speaking of socialization, one is not yet speaking of socialism, which is expressed in a syntactically problematic sentence; and the same can be said of “as many confuse.” In another part of the same book, he writes: “Thus, nations today united, [sic] separate tomorrow to fight against each other, unite with the enemies of the day before, and within them whole castes and classes forget their compatriots, like some capitalists who import low-wage workers to replace their fellow countrymen and many other attitudes” – a passage in which I highlight, in italics, the obviously involuntary suggestion that the “workers” would also replace the “many other attitudes.” In the previous paragraph, he writes that the term “nation” was used “to indicate the mercenary soldiery, the gypsies, the Jews, the vagabonds,” with a manifest and confused shift from direct object (“the soldiery”) to indirect objects.

To defend Mário, it must be said that he was fully aware of all these problems. Through his family, I learned that when he sent such problematic texts for printing and someone warned him of the need to work on them more, he would say, “There won’t be enough time. After I die, someone will do it for me.” Responding to this call is an obligation for all of us Brazilians. And, for my part, I was able to prepare the text of “The Wisdom of Eternal Laws,” a posthumous work.

When I became aware of Mário’s work in 1983, I was immediately impressed by his mastery of the logical techniques developed over more than two millennia, from Aristotle to Frege and Wittgenstein. It was something that did not fit into Brazilian culture, but it was happening there: in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s, someone was doing philosophy at the highest level and publishing it in books that were sold door to door.

Naturally, I sought out his former students, disciples, and acquaintances. I soon noticed that they had not understood anything of his thinking, even when it came to people who had benefited from their interaction with him, especially from his courses on oratory and rhetoric – which have little or nothing to do with his philosophy – people who even pursued careers in politics and university teaching. These individuals did nothing for Mário’s memory, nor did they derive any significant intellectual gain from his work, and they couldn’t because they did not understand what that man was doing. From one of them, a priest whom I called, I heard that Mário Ferreira was “a commentator on Nietzsche,” which is an insult to the philosopher’s memory. Unfortunately, I found a similar impression in the great Miguel Reale, who also understood Mário in this diminished sense, but Reale is another giant, and he and Mário Ferreira did not understand each other. It is not uncommon for great philosophers to be unable to assess each other’s greatness. That is forgivable. But what can be said about the younger ones, Mário’s students, who have established careers within the philosopher’s own circle of relations? One of them, a high-ranking Freemason, in response to my appeal to do something for Mário’s work, turned up his nose and said, “But Mário has that somewhat esoteric thing…” I was amazed. Has Freemasonry ceased to be esoteric? I turned my back and left. Even his family was incredulous when I affirmed that he had been one of the greatest philosophers of humanity. In the Portuguese language, he was a kind of founding philosopher. It is possible to rebuild Brazilian culture based on Mário.

He worked under precarious conditions and could not benefit from the assistants that the enormity of his undertaking necessitated (assistants that philosophers like Husserl and Hegel had, to the point that their students wrote entire courses for them). His office was a passageway between the living room and the kitchen. He was a man of immense concentration, who could work amidst the chores and noises of home.

Mário Ferreira dos Santos transcended the consciousness horizon of the Brazilian intelligentsia in every way. I was able to perceive this because I am an outsider, not immersed in the cultural circuit, with no obligation to please that environment. I have always maintained my independence, as much as Mário maintained his, but with one difference – I know how to deal with Brazilian society, something he did not know how to do. He had grand pedagogical plans for Brazil, and everything came to absolutely nothing. I cannot say that I am an incomprehended genius: I may not be a genius, but I am certainly understood by my students and readers, who are already carrying on my work. Intellectually, I do not compare myself in stature to Mário, but pedagogically I have been more successful.

The fact that he had a large audience during his lifetime, with large print runs of books that sold one after another, and yet nothing has borne fruit from it, is quite telling. After he died, it seems that everything disappeared. His son-in-law, who directed the Logos publishing house (responsible for publishing the Encyclopaedia and of which Mário was the owner), attested that no more copies were sold after the philosopher’s death.

Obviously, I cannot say that Mário Ferreira’s effort was sterile. But he sowed seeds that are still stored, awaiting the opportune moment to bear fruit. I hope that some of my students, who have a closer affinity with this line of thought than I do, can carry on his work.

I go on to define, in general terms, what was the philosophical effort of Mário Ferreira dos Santos.

If you observe the books he wrote before Philosophy and Worldview (1952), you will conclude that Mário was what was derogatorily called a “belles-lettres” in USP, a person without professional philosophical training, who has ideas – some of them very good – and some literary talent, and nothing more. He did not yet exhibit mastery of philosophical technique; there was already something of his genius, to be sure, in the comments on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but no trace of the organized thought that would come soon thereafter. The passage from one phase to another is a mystery of the kind of the famous “click” of Father Vieira. His daughter, Yolanda, told me that one day, when he was giving a lecture, he suddenly stops; he says he cannot continue because he had an idea and needed to go home to write. Thus began the writing of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, and apparently those early notes would become the theses of the tenth volume of the collection, the Concrete Philosophy (1957). From there, he embarked on the notes, classes, and lectures that would give rise to the other volumes.

What does this intuition consist of that completely and suddenly changed Mário Ferreira’s thinking?

The Encyclopedia is divided into three phases. The first ten volumes expose what will culminate in Concrete Philosophy. Then come those that Máçio called “problematic books,” a set of writings on various topics, such as Concrete Philosophy of Values (1960) and The One and the Multiple in Plato (1958). Finally, there is the series Mathesis megiste.

〈Mathesis megiste: “Supreme Teaching,” “Maximum Teaching,” or “Supreme Wisdom.” With this Pythagorean expression, Mário Ferreira designates the uppermost and final part of the integral system of philosophy. The place he assigns to this science corresponds to the one that, in René Guénon’s formulation, belongs to “metaphysics.” Mário, giving this science the name Mathesis, retains the name metaphysics for general ontology, following the nomenclature that has been established in Aristotelian tradition (although it is not Aristotle’s own), from which Guénon departed precisely to underline that what he understood by “metaphysics” transcended, as does Mathesis, the field of general ontology. Note that Guénon recognized the purely conventional and provisional nature of the term “metaphysics,” stating his intention to use it “as long as we have not proposed a better term to replace it.” Therefore, the reader should not become entangled in apparent terminological confusion. In both cases, we are dealing with metaphysics in the Guénonian sense (and not the academic sense). It is also extremely important to note that, just like metaphysics in Guénon, which was not only a theoretical science but implied a “spiritual realization” of which theory constituted the preparation,15 16 likewise Mathesis, according to Mário Ferreira, would be associated, in the Pythagorean context, with a "third degree initiation."17 〉

In the first phase, it is clear that Mário is uncertain whether to present his doctrine or educate the reader. Philosophy and Worldview, which opens the Encyclopedia, presents itself as an introduction to philosophy, therefore a didactic work through which a lay reader would be led step by step to the great philosophical questions. But as a popular expositor, Mário was very deficient; he did not know if he was speaking to a lay audience or to people who already knew the entire scholastic vocabulary: he goes on to expose what would be rudimentary propaedeutic elements, and suddenly starts discussing decadialectics, with an extraordinary rise in the level of thought but with little relevance to the whole of what he had been exposing. This is strange because he had given practical courses, such as self-help or oratory, in which he was exemplarily didactic; however, when he started to deal with philosophy, things went awry.

Thus, his thought is most transparent in moments when he has no pedagogical concerns, feeling at ease to mobilize all the techniques he mastered in order to communicate his philosophy in the most direct way and without major stylistic concerns, even though he himself wrote the books, most of which remained unpublished. Mário’s fundamental intuition becomes more evident, therefore, in the last books of the Encyclopedia, in volumes such as The Wisdom of Principles (1967), The Wisdom of Unity (1967), The Wisdom of Being and Nothingness (1968), The Wisdom of Eternal Laws, etc. It is an intuition of a Pythagorean-Platonic nature.

Among the titles of the intermediate phase, the most important is undoubtedly Pythagoras and the Theme of Number (1960). It is a book that allows one to begin to understand Mário. In this study, he distinguishes the senses in which the notion of “number” can be considered. First, there is the quantitative sense, the one used in elementary arithmetic and calculus. Then there are numbers as logical forms. For example, the number 1 can be taken as the absolute unit, but it can also be taken ordinally as the first in the counting series; these are two levels of meaning: as the first in the series, the number 1 possesses a series of properties that it did not have as the absolute unit. The number 2 can be taken as a duplication of the unit, as a certain quantity understood in an arithmetical sense; however, it already implies another level of meaning, that is, a certain relation between two elements: for example, the two elements belong to the same species (let’s say two cats), but they are numerically different. Is each of these elements the same or the other? There is a tension between specific unity and numerical difference.

Just with that, we already have a tremendous philosophical problem. Saint Thomas said that we all share the same species, the human species. Only the species would have an essence, and the individuals would be numerically distinguished. But if it were so, Duns Scotus retorted, the salvation of the soul would make no sense, for each soul is only saved as an individual and therefore has something different that goes far beyond numerical difference. In light of Mário Ferreira’s philosophy, we realize that this problem is already given in the multiplicity of senses of the number 2.

If I speak of two elements and assume a relationship between them, I am actually speaking of three elements. The relationship between these two elements is not itself an element of the series, but it must be present for us to arrive at the number 3. With the number 4, we reach the elements of a proportion, a / b = x / y, a proportion without which I would not be able to explain what I have just said about the number 2: if it were impossible for me to establish a proportional relationship between two elements that belong to the same species but have a numerical difference between them, I could not understand the implications of duality. Therefore, in speaking of duality, I am already speaking of quaternity, of proportion, which situates those two elements in their pertinent order. And thus it can continue: the equality between a / b and x / y is not confused with a, b, x, or y; it is a fifth element, which will explain the relationship between the numbers 1 and 2. That is, the number 5 closes in a new unity what was already given in the number 1.

Now, however, we are dealing with an explained and differentiated unity, the explicitation of the individual form of the 1; but if we take this individual form as an element of a series, and not as a unified whole, we will have to conclude that there will always be something beyond the quinary, and thus 5 becomes 6. Mário Ferreira will continue up to the number 10, reaching a marvelous idea: if these numbers are not only quantities but also logical forms, then it must be noted that we can only proceed with counting because there is a range of relations that are outside the series, for example, the relation between ordinal and cardinal (we can speak of one, two, and three, or of first, second, and third). Furthermore, if counting from 1 to 10 implies traversing a series of logical relations, why not articulate them into a general logical methodology? This was Mário’s first great intuition, from which pentadialectics (covering the count from 1 to 5) and decadialectics (from 1 to 10) would derive.

The metaphysical or ontological doctrine that Mário Ferreira develops in his concrete philosophy arises from this methodology inspired by the simple order of numbers, with which he intends to go beyond the Platonic level of forms or ideas and reach the world of principles. This was the subject of Plato’s famous oral teaching, someone who, as is known, disbelieved in the possibility of writing and disseminating the most complex parts of his philosophy, access to which was exclusive to his most prepared students. Parallel to this project of Mário Ferreira, the great historian of philosophy Giovanni Reale was trying to reconstruct what that Platonic oral teaching had been. It is worth noting that he did not want to develop a new philosophy, he only wanted to interpret what could be reconstructed from Plato’s oral teaching based on the testimonies left by students, listeners, and commentators. Astonishingly, the principles he exposes in his Towards a New Interpretation of Plato correspond to those to which Mário arrived through other paths. Both authors were unaware of each other, but the Brazilian’s analytical-deductive method led to the same discoveries as the Italian’s historical-philological method. But Mário’s Platonism makes the Pythagorean nature of Platonism clearer; it shows, after all, that Platonism is a kind of Pythagoreanism.

With this doctrine in hand, Mário begins to question the possibility of developing an entirely apodictic philosophy. The logical methodology based on the series of ten numbers would articulate all the logical methods created throughout history, in addition to dialectics and rhetoric, and even poetics, in some way, to the extent that it also deals with symbolism. This indestructible philosophical construction – the project of concrete philosophy – would go beyond the logical realm and deal with the structure of being, ontology, starting from a founding premise: something exists.18 19 Nothingness, from which nothing is produced, cannot exist; nothing produces nothing, so something must exist.

This goes far beyond Descartes' cogito, which is a subjective experience – I know that I exist, but for me to exist and be able to reflect on it, I must admit that there is the language I use to reason; in addition, the “therefore I exist” is a conclusion, something that presupposes notions of anteriority and posteriority, which will be another subordinating datum of the cogito. Thus, in saying “I think, therefore I exist,” Descartes affirms not only his self but also the very infinity of elements that compose the universe and enable him to say that.

By the way, Descartes has tremendous difficulty in, from the existence of his self, grounding the knowledge of the external world; for this, he invokes the idea of a benevolent God who would not create the entire universe just to deceive him – which is evidently an appeal; the invoked God is an element external to the reflection he was developing. He does not reason like Saint Augustine, who immediately perceives that the self has no proper foundation and presupposes antecedents. The Cartesian God is ex machina.*

But Mário’s something exists escapes this problem: for me to exist, something must exist, even if that something is just myself. The futility and impossibility of nothingness are immediately affirmed. This something, besides being something, is necessarily an existing thing. The simple affirmation that something exists, therefore, establishes the distinction between essence and existence, from which Mário Ferreira will develop in Concrete Philosophy a set of theses that will take that original statement to its ultimate consequences. All this – Mário is right – is apodictic (in Greek, “indestructible”), irrefutable.

Mário Ferreira realizes that these indestructible theses can serve as a tool to destroy all other contrary philosophies. According to him, the philosophies that throughout history go in the direction of something exists – philosophies that he calls “positive” – prevail over the others. Thus, there would be a kind of central line of philosophy crossing through history, ranging from Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle to Saint Thomas and Duns Scotus, and so on, until finally reaching Mário himself. This would be the backbone of philosophy, something in which I also believe; in this lineage, I would also include Leibniz, Schelling, and Edmund Husserl, not to mention Louis Lavelle. What Mário Ferreira achieves is, to parody the title of Frithjof Schuon’s famous book, a kind of “transcendent unity of philosophies.” Thus, Mário Ferreira can say that he is not creating his own philosophy; he is creating philosophy.

The history of philosophy would present several positivities, that is, positions that, once affirmed, cannot be refuted, and which would show a deep agreement among philosophers beneath their divergences. There may be disagreement, for example, regarding what that something that exists may be – some may say matter, others may say spirit, etc. – but all would converge in the affirmation that something exists; thus, their divergences could be resolved through the demonstrative sequence that Mário Ferreira created in his concrete philosophy.

I believe that his attempt to create a transcendent unity of philosophy was very successful; later we will see what kind of development he gave to this effort and how I differ from it.

2. The Pentadialectic

The first phase of Mário Ferreira dos Santos' philosophy is entirely focused on logical and methodological concerns. It is only in the final stage that he gives this concern an ontological scope – already outlined, however, in the Concrete Philosophy, somewhat in the same sense that Plato jumps, in his oral teaching, from knowledge of forms to knowledge of principles.

The reading difficulties presented by Mário’s texts – in addition to the editorial vicissitudes I mentioned earlier – are due to the absorption and use not only of all scholastic vocabulary but, in a way, of all philosophical traditions. With regard to research methods, his knowledge was astonishing. If he deals with dialectics, he seeks to absorb Platonic dialectics (the higher science that, through discussion, reaches the highest levels of truth), Aristotelian dialectics (a more modest conception, which sees dialectics as a simple method, not of discussion, but of investigation through the confrontation of hypotheses)20, Hegelian dialectics (dialectics as a temporal process through which an essence, initially abstract, concretizes itself in facts – so that, as Hegel’s famous expression says, the essence of something is what it becomes at the end of the process), tragic dialectics (the one in which oppositions find no solution – Mário Ferreira tends to identify it with Nietzsche), and Marxist dialectics (dialectics as the motor of history understood in a material sense: contradictions always leading to new syntheses, which in turn will be dialecticized until the socialist consummation of history eliminates them).

Mário Ferreira’s goal is, through the integration of all dialectics (according to the categories of the numerical sequence from 1 to 10) and logical formalism, to reach the hidden premises that guide the entire discussion of a particular theme, thus reaching a level where there is no longer room for dissent. All further development of research will then be of a logical-deductive, apodictic nature, so that one conclusion will follow another in an irrefutable manner.

In the Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas uses dialectics to arrive at various logically articulated conclusions. All the questions he investigates start from an “it seems that,” from a supposition about something, followed by a “but” with the divergent view of an author, which is in turn succeeded by another “but,” opening up the divergent view of another author, and so on. After reaching a conclusion through the confrontation of these various theses, Saint Thomas no longer discusses it and takes it as a premise for further developments. In this respect, the Summa is a masterpiece of the articulation of dialectics and logic. What Mário Ferreira accomplishes is of the same nature: he uses the dialectical method to reach certain conclusions that can be articulated with each other in an indestructible manner. In fact, Concrete Philosophy has a structure that is more clearly analytical than medieval Summas: the theses are linked to each other by a more evident bond of necessity, and they are all contained in the initial something.

According to Mário himself, his methodological teachings – the same ones he uses, for example, to delimit and solidify the theses of Concrete Philosophy – are synthesized in pentadialectics and decadialectics, that is, in a dialectical examination at five levels and ten levels. Through it, he intended to escape from abstraction and achieve a concrete philosophy. However, I do not believe that he actually achieved this concretion; on the contrary, what he ultimately does is rise to a higher level of abstraction, to the level of necessary universality.

Through the examination of concepts, one never arrives at any concrete reality. Concepts are always generic, while facts only exist in the form of individualities. It is strange that, in search of the most concrete knowledge, Mário Ferreira makes such an effort to ascend further and further into abstraction, instead of dedicating himself to the examination of singular facts.

Therefore, what I will do now is something different from what he did: to illustrate pentadialectics, I will examine a concrete theme not examined by Mário – socialism – in order to show the strength of this method when applied to factual realities. It is impossible to descend linearly from the realm of abstraction to the realm of immediate and singular reality; concreteness, to be achieved, requires that we start at its level.

Conceptual analysis of socialism will never say anything essential about what the socialist movement has historically been. An individual, when choosing any doctrinal form in the name of which he intends to act, will perform acts in which elements originating from that conscious doctrinal option will intrude. These elements may arise, for example, from the individual’s established habits or psychological inclination. Mário himself would acknowledge this; we only need to think that, alongside the social analyses he carries out, in some books he resorts to typological and characterological treatment of the individual – using the names of planets to designate types of the human psyche (“Martian,” “Saturnian,” etc.) – and to indicate how each of them would understand a doctrine like socialism in a particular way. It is true that one can even clarify the concept of socialism by resorting to the varied understanding that different people have of it, but this cannot lead to any conclusions about the historical phenomenon of socialism.

Therefore, what I will do is apply pentadialectics not to the concept of socialism, as Mário does, but to socialism itself as a historical reality.

Pentadialectical Analysis of Socialism

The five levels of study proposed by pentadialectics are 1) the level of unity, 2) the level of the part, 3) the level of the series, 4) the level of the system, and 5) the level of universality.

  1. Unity of socialism – If we can conceptually speak about socialism, this worldwide phenomenon, using a single word, it is because we assume some unity of the phenomenon. Even in the case of speaking about “socialisms,” we would be referring to species of the same kind – they would imply some unity. But what is the unity of the socialist movement, and not of the concept of socialism? It is a movement that involved millions of people and actions, countless different strategies in many different places. There is only one way to find the unity that defines the field of study of this phenomenon: the realization that socialism is a self-image that people have of themselves – they believe they are socialists.

Let us assume, therefore, that one who says they are a socialist is a socialist. This is the first identifying feature of the unity of socialism: there are many groups and individuals who believe they reflect the concept of socialism, even though they define it differently.

It is not useful to deduce theses such as the one stating that socialism only exists where there is the nationalization of the means of production based on the concept of socialism. Not even in the Soviet Union was nationalization complete; there was a clandestine market. Partial nationalization may occur, a mixed Chinese regime may be formed, or there may even be the opposite, certain liberalization of the economy, as happened in Lenin’s government with the NEP; and even so, it will still be the historical phenomenon we call socialism.

The unity of the socialist movement is characterized not only by the self-image of its members but also by being something directed towards the future: every individual or group that calls themselves socialist has a certain future in mind for humanity. Such an individual may write entire books describing the socialist utopia or may follow Karl Marx’s approach, who believed that describing the future is of little value because what matters is praxis, and the movement will define itself in the course of its realization, in a dialectical relationship between the near future and the current state of affairs. Praxis ends up being incorporated into the definition of the unity of socialism because, in general, the socialist does not need to define a future to which they aspire.

Thirdly, alongside the facts of the self-image of socialists and their inclination towards the future, socialism is individualized by being a proposal for a future of global, not national or local, scope. Socialism is conceived as something applicable to the entire human species; thus, its universality becomes a distinctive feature of this political movement. From the doctrinal to the narrow-minded militant, devoid of the slightest idea of the whole socialist endeavor, there is a personal belief that, in some way, they are contributing to this future that will unify humanity and eliminate all conflicts.

A fourth element that gives unity to the socialist movement lies in the fact that the individual who starts to participate in it believes themselves already integrated into a total human effort; their effort would ultimately be that of the entire human species, which, however, remains unconscious in most people or is countered by antagonisms. Nevertheless, through socialism, the individual becomes part of a history that is destined to have a brilliant future.

This is, therefore, the content that individualizes socialism: it is a self-image nurtured by individuals who are committed to an idea of the future to be realized on a global scale and who believe that they are fulfilling what would be the secret aspiration of all. The unity of the socialist movement consists solely of this. Other elements – such as the aforementioned nationalization of the means of production – may or may not be present, as they do not distinguish this movement. Historical materialism, for example, is obviously part of Marxism, of its original definition, but it is not part of socialism in general – there may be, for example, Christian socialists who may not accept historical materialism. We cannot say, in principle, that socialism is or is not materialist or spiritualist. This datum does not indicate its unity.

  1. The socialist movement as part of a whole – However, having established this unity, we can ask ourselves in what the socialism is embedded, that is, what it is a part of, to which group of movements it will belong. If you look for other movements that define themselves in a similar way – such as the ideal or illusory integration of the individual into a millennial historical effort aimed at the future unification of the human species without mutual exploitation or conflicts – you will only find one group that displays something of this nature, which is Freemasonry. It also aims at a better future, the unification of the human species, a future that seems better to it, but it has much less doctrinal definition than socialism. Historically, Freemasonry has embraced Christians, socialists, anarchists, and monarchists alike; it has great elasticity of thought. This explains the organizational confusion of Freemasonry compared to socialism. It is organized into lodges, which often ignore each other’s activities. It is thus a fertile ground for the emergence of all kinds of dissent, variety of ideas, something that cannot be formally admitted within the socialist movement. Socialism needs an irrefutable master line that leads to the future that will fulfill all the endeavors of human history.

Other broad movements pursue different objectives. It is true that Islam aims at the unification of humanity, but it makes no economic references in stating this goal; it does not assert that poverty will be abolished but rather that a part of humanity will be saved, will reach paradise, in another world, not here. Christianity, on the other hand, is similar to Islam in this respect, as it does not aim at any earthly purpose, even though throughout history there have been significant interventions by Christianity in society. However, the transformations originating from Christianity are not taken as symbols or anticipations of a future; they are intended only to alleviate the causes of sin, at most.

One could also try to group socialism together with Gnostic movements of very remote origins. The basic Gnostic experience is living in a hostile universe. The Gnostic believes that the universe as it exists must be destroyed or modified. While this Gnostic sentiment has exerted great influence on socialism – a fact abundantly demonstrated in the books of Eric Voegelin, James Billington, and Norman Cohn – socialism is not to be confused with Gnosticism.

As a final example, we can ask ourselves if liberalism belongs in the same category as socialism. Liberals also promise a better world, but they do not have any project for the unification of the human species. Liberalism also lacks the messianic tone that is characteristic of socialism. No one feels their heart beat faster because they have embraced liberalism. The identification of the soul with a great human epic is a characteristic of socialism that is not present in liberalism. Incidentally, liberal theorists tend to insist on the difference between what would be a practical policy capable of generating positive results (something proper to liberalism) and what would be a policy driven by ideals, by excessively abstract ideas that would only lead to destruction (something attributed to socialism).

The case of fascism is more particular. It arises among militants of the socialist cause – I am referring specifically to the Italian origins of the movement. The first fascists were soldiers who returned from the battlefields of World War I. They had witnessed unprecedented carnage and destruction, an experience that destroyed in them any idea of social stability, order, or peace. All the illusions of the bourgeois liberal world of the late 19th century had been shattered. This experience inclined them towards a disenchanted and cynical view of society, based on the belief that there is only one efficient force: murderous violence. Thus, they believed that the project of a particular social order can only be implemented through force.

In addition, fascism has deeply anarchic elements. Hence, for example, the tremendous importance of fascist personalities in the modernist artistic movements, which at the time were dissolving traditional artistic forms and proposing a kind of formless art (as is the obvious case of Marinetti, who had a great influence on Brazilian modernists). Fascist tendencies can include the advocacy of unrestrained sexuality, as seen in D.H. Lawrence (a man with pronounced fascist sympathies, at least for a certain part of his life), or even the worship of ancient tyrannical regimes, as is the case with Julius Evola’s admiration for the Roman Empire, with strong traces of anti-Christian sentiment; or intense militarism, which in this case appears as an imitation of the Soviet regime (the first proposal for a militaristic regime in the 20th century was made by Leon Trotsky – he argued for the militarization of society as a whole, especially work; he believed that even an automobile mechanic performs work that falls within the military sphere, part of the army). This militarism appealed greatly to the fascists, who saw it as another way to express their revolt against the bourgeois world. In fact, the hostility of the communists towards the bourgeois world is nothing compared to the hostility of the fascists.

The irrational element present in fascism (for example, in the monstrously emphatic speeches of Mussolini and later Hitler) led some observers to think that fascism did not have a doctrine and was nothing more than a collection of anarchic feelings. This is a mistake. Fascism was as theoretically elaborated as socialism. Its main theorist, Giovanni Gentile, who was, for all intents and purposes, a great philosopher, even attempted to systematically shape the new generations within the fascist spirit, a project he implemented as Minister of Education under Mussolini. This fascist spirit aimed at the complete absorption of the individual by the State. According to Gentile, what confers humanity upon a person is the State, not the nature of things or God, an idea that, incidentally, resurfaces today in socialist or leftist circles in a broad sense, which are unaware of the origin of this orientation.

When Mussolini proposes the famous norm, “Everything for the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State,” it is accepted for doctrinal reasons, but as a kind of hyperbole, a feeling of participation by all in an ordered whole that cannot be justified by bourgeois ideas of rights, freedom, etc., but by the simple principle of authority condensed in the adoration of one person. There is a syllogism there: since the rational order of liberalism has failed, we will establish a new irrational order based on sentiment. This, as I have already said, is incomprehensible without the bloody experience of total disorder lived by the soldiers of the First World War. The trench warfare made the experience of the absurd very close, which was essential for modern art.

Fascism is the most irrational wing of modernism, while Marxism, which predates this phenomenon, provided the socialist movement with a rational argument based on a comprehensive interpretation of history, something that the fascists never had. Furthermore, fascism could not point to a future of human species unity because, based on the immediate experience of chaos and suffering, it could only appeal to animistic symbols deeply rooted in the local situation; hence the nationalist character of fascism: only people who already feel a sense of brotherhood are part of fascism. Without discussing the future of the human species, fascism speaks of the future of a nation, which is why the idea of a fascist International presented so many problems and never materialized. The introduction of racist theories into fascism itself reflected this impasse: how could Germans, Italians, and Japanese demonstrate at the same time that they were part of the superior race? This is impossible. We are here at the antipodes of the socialist idea of the future unification of the human species.

Socialism, sui generis, presents itself as part of a set of historical, political, and moral currents that have completely different objectives. It is within this set that it dialectically emerges as a part, an antagonistic part to liberalism, fascism, Islam, Christianity, Freemasonry, and Gnosticism. Strictly speaking, it is a movement that has no competitors – no other movement has objectives congruent with those of socialism.21 As it has no real competitors, to define itself through antagonisms, it must treat all other movements as if they were its antagonists. This is a constant in the socialist movement: to treat as competitors movements whose objectives do not in any way align with those of socialism. Hence the recurring attack on individuals or works that seem harmless and innocuous; hence, for example, the first decree of mass arrests and executions signed by Lenin on November 10, 1917, was directed against the Party of Cadets, a democratic party to which the Bolsheviks owed the amnesty decree that had allowed them to resume activities in Russia. In other words, the party that not only had not opposed them until that date but had also done them a great favor was the first to be persecuted. Later, when creating the Cheka (predecessor of the KGB), Felix Dzerzhinsky launched a campaign of persecution against the “class enemy.” He authorized the secret police agents to immediately shoot on sight any individual suspected of being a “class enemy.” The criterion for distinguishing enemies would be, in Dzerzhinsky’s words, the “revolutionary instinct.” The choice of any enemy, real or imaginary, to unleash all the hostility of the socialist movement upon them is a constant feature of socialism in the 20th century – perhaps insufficient to identify the unity of the movement, but sufficient to indicate one of its properties.

This detail alone is enough to illustrate why socialism cannot be doctrinally defined. If you define it based on a particular doctrine, you will have to conclude that its enemies are those who possess an antagonistic doctrine. The Catholic Church has a doctrine according to which Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God who came into the world to save souls through His sacrifice. If you deny that Jesus is the Son of God, then you are an enemy of the Catholic Church from a doctrinal point of view. Well then, socialism, understood as a concrete historical movement, does not require doctrinal opposition of this nature. It does not need a doctrinal enemy, because such an enemy does not exist. Nor does it have competitors in its final aspiration regarding the future world.

  1. The series to which the socialist movement belongs – When you take the four elements that individualize socialism and place them in the context of time, situating them in relation to the other movements that make up the whole of which socialists are a very specific part, you thus obtain a historical unity: socialism as a series. The characteristic features of socialism have materialized over time, according to circumstances and perceived or invented antagonisms, and the vicissitudes of the movement itself. The self-definition of the movement occurs in praxis, and to understand it in this way is to understand it as a series.

Throughout the history of socialism, we can identify several dominant strategies, often antagonistic to one another. Before the First World War, socialism, with its claim to represent humanity as a whole (according to Karl Marx, the proletariat is the bearer of the highest ideals of humanity, while the other classes only pursue their own interests), led people to believe that anyone who participated in the movement, even if not of proletarian origin, was a representative of the highest human aspirations. It was, fundamentally, an internationalist strategy.

However, will the socialist strategy directly reflect this internationalist breadth, or will it reflect it indirectly and even inversely? The desired image is internationalist, but it is not always possible to follow an internationalist strategy; sometimes it has become necessary to proceed in the opposite direction, as became apparent during Stalin’s government. Since the expected European revolution did not occur – on the contrary, the proletarians of various nations adhered to the supposed bourgeois interests that had determined the war – Trotsky’s perspective of world revolution was at least temporarily suspended in favor of Stalin’s idea of socialism in one country. Suddenly, all the nationalist rhetoric of the former Russia resurfaces and blends in a very strange way with internationalist socialist rhetoric: “We are socialists, yes, we defend the interests of humanity as a whole, but it is precisely in view of the best global interests that it is important to prioritize Russia at the moment.” This is the tone of the discourse. Even the expression “Mother Russia,” which, from a doctrinal point of view, should have been banned, becomes common again.

Soon after, starting from World War II, the socialist strategy becomes globalized once again. At that time, Soviet interference in Third World countries increased, where they fomented nationalist revolts against American and European imperialism. There are multiple nationalisms there, sometimes conflicting with each other, integrated into the globalist ideal. Things become too complicated at this point: if you are born in an African or South American country, you must join a national liberation movement against imperialist domination; but if you are born in an imperialist country, you must assume an anti-nationalist stance.22

Historically, the socialist movement presents serious contradictions, as I have just pointed out, but this in no way affects the power it exercises over the consciousness of its militants. The individual who fights for Mother Russia, so that it invades Poland and kills countless Poles and exploits that territory to exhaustion, still firmly believes that he is fighting for the unification of a united humanity. The individual believes in one thing, affirms it, and acts in a way that is completely opposite to what he believes he is accomplishing in practice. But the entire Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe is considered a dialectical chapter in the journey towards the unification of the human species. You can follow the direct or indirect path, you can act in one way or in the opposite way, without the fundamental identity of being a socialist changing in the slightest. The psychological consequences of this for the militant are devastating. He becomes a kind of chameleon, capable of doing anything that is in the interest of the party or himself personally, without his feeling of representing the highest human ideals being shaken in the least. Anyone who opposes his disposition to act in the most cruel or deceitful manner, if necessary, is taken as an enemy of the human species.

This is an experience that can also be found on a smaller scale in fascist circles. Heinrich Himmler said that when he sent another batch of thousands of Jews to concentration camps, he would cry and complain that those damned people forced him to commit such atrocities. We find the exact same sentiment in Che Guevara: it was the Cuban political prisoners who forced him to execute them, to commit inhuman acts against them, but it was because they were enemies of humanity…

Note well that this involves a parasitism of Christianity: the socialist movement often behaves like a group that achieves with excellence what Christians did out of selfishness. The Christian would only think of the salvation of his own soul; the socialist thinks of salvation not as an ideal, but as a material one for all of humanity, and for that, he feels authorized to soil himself with blood. It is through this that one can see how complex the relationship between selfishness and altruism is in the mind of the socialist. Herbert Spencer said that all authentic feelings are “ego-altruistic,” that is: I cannot detach my personal satisfaction from the objective fact that my act translates into a good for the other person. If I help someone in need, that person will express gratitude for the good I have done to them, and I, for my part, will be pleased to assist them. My act was “altruistic,” but it was also “selfish” – it was ego-altruistic. However, for the socialist, this process can take an inverse form: inflicting harm on others will be doing them good because it will be a benefit to all of humanity, and the one who inflicts this harm may feel good in doing so or may express some discomfort. Either way, it is impossible for the individual to be a socialist without believing himself to be a benefactor of humanity, not necessarily of the present, but undoubtedly of the future. And – as even Graciliano Ramos said – it is a matter of loving humanity in the abstract and not individual human beings.

In the name of love for future humanity, the socialist feels authorized to do the evil that he deems necessary for present humanity. What then will be the limit between the evil practiced for the benefit of the movement as a whole and the evil practiced for one’s own benefit, which in this case would be a genuine malevolence and a deviation from socialist orthodoxy? Strictly speaking, this limit does not exist.

In summary, socialism, understood as a series, will show the persistence of the unity of a sense of belonging throughout a succession of practically unlimited chameleon-like mutations.

  1. The socialist movement as a system — When analyzing the series through which socialism unfolds over time, we reach the concrete unity of its materialization, which complements the more abstract unity that we initially defined by considering the socialist movement as a whole. In other words, we start with a definition obtained partly in an Aristotelian manner, with the identification of a near genus and specific difference, and partly in a Husserlian manner, with the identification of the invariants of an object. Then, we position socialism within the scheme it shares with its potential competitors or enemies, and in a third step, we establish a perspective from which it is possible to view the history of socialism as a series of repetitions of notes. The conjunction of both units — the unity of the definition of the movement and the unity of its historical manifestations — can lead us to glimpse socialism as a system. Only at this point do we truly comprehend what socialism is, when we see it exhaust its possibilities for actualization. It is its tomb, in the sense that Titus Burckhardt said that tombs are dug numbers 6 — the senary is the symbol of the complete, closed system, the middle height of the zodiac, from which a new revolution begins.

  2. Socialism apprehended from the perspective of universality — The closure of socialism as a system calls us to see it in its subsequent processuality by other means. It, no longer developing from its own potentialities, now ascends to a situation of development within higher units. It is thus updated and absorbed by another movement of global scale originating from big capital, a phenomenon we witness today.23 Everything the socialist does today is under the command of those who hold great fortunes. You will not perceive this if you adhere to an abstract conception of communism; you will say that it is over, and it will indeed have ended in its pure conceptual form; but it continues to act even if it achieves the opposite of what it previously aimed for, but this opposite dialectically integrates into its history.

Thus, we have once again the unity of socialism, constituted not only by its abstract invariants but by the totality of its development. In view of this — socialism finally closed in a system — we can now judge it on the scale of universality: appreciate what socialism means within total human history.

Today, when we speak of socialism, we are referring to a concrete entity, historically existing and endowed with a total, enclosed form. Only when socialism in a certain way dies and is absorbed by another scheme do we understand it. Whether this process of its liquidation will be completed or reversed, I do not know. But undoubtedly, today we can say what the socialist movement was, as its current form is not the same as before — an external form has incorporated it, and this externality allows us to see it more clearly.

Theoretically, at this point, we can take the current stage of socialism — apprehended in the fifth stage of the pentadialectic, that is, from the perspective of universality — as a new unity and restart the pentadialectic analysis. In theory, we can proceed in this way with any object, applying the method developed by Mário Ferreira. But, concretely, it is still too early. It is necessary for the conjunction of Western globalism and socialism to further develop, to reveal more distinctive notes of theirs and extend in a historical series, in order to reach the perception of a new system and be able to apprehend it with sufficient universality.

I conclude here this illustration of the pentadialectic, a creation of Mário Ferreira dos Santos, but applied to a type of object to which he never applied it.

The best you can take from the methods he created — I will still talk about the decadialectic — will only emerge when, having already mastered them, you forget them. The techniques of rhetoric, dialectic, and logic are only useful when they become part of your muscle memory, so that you naturally employ them without needing to think about them. A pianist, while performing a piece, does not think about music theory. If they were to stop and think about it, the performance would end.

Similarly, logic and dialectic have internal difficulties that, as soon as they capture our attention, entangle us and hinder their natural application during the concrete investigation of a specific problem. An individual can then spend the rest of their life discussing details of logical theory and not be capable of efficiently dealing with a concrete problem. This is also because these methods of analysis are not external to the knowledge we have of the object. We cannot isolate the object on one side and then take certain techniques that we will only then employ in understanding it. In fact, the knowledge we have of any entity, formal or concrete, depends in some way on the more or less perfect use of the analytical techniques encompassed by the pentadialectic and the decadialectic. But no one thinks with logic; one can think logically or illogically, but in the concrete act of thinking, there is no direct and conscious recourse to logical techniques?24

To think at every moment by resorting to logical verifications is something that would require us to think like a computer, but that is impossible for us: when thinking, we rely not only on logic but also on countless other faculties over which we have no control. For example, I remember that the psychologist Juan Alfredo César Müller often spoke of a particular neurotic condition he called “epileptic depersonalization,” in which the individual loses the ability to guess: thus, they become lost in space. That is, there is a strong element of divination in any thought, an element contrary to formal treatment, yet of vital importance for one’s own mental health.

The attempt to rigorously formalize the most banal thoughts will result in such sterilization that no conclusions can be reached. We can only think through the articulation of the four discourses, and sometimes we perceive at the poetic, rhetorical, or dialectical level things that we are incapable of articulating logically. Mário Ferreira’s effort for total logical articulation also leads, therefore, to impoverishment and a decrease in the treated contents. Philosophy, which wanted to be concrete, becomes too abstract.

3. The Decadialectic

Today I will discuss decadialectics. I will proceed in the same way as with pentadialectics, that is, I will exemplify its use by applying it to the same concrete problem (not just conceptual) of socialism. Finally, I will try to show how decadialectics was already somehow embedded in pentadialectics.

Decadialectical Analysis of Socialism

The ten angles of analysis of a concept or concrete entity specific to decadialectics are 1) subject and object, 2) actuality and virtuality, 3) real virtualities and non-real possibilities, 4) intensity and extensity, 5) intensity and extensity in actualizations, 6) oppositions of reason and intuition in the subject, 7) oppositions of knowledge and ignorance in the subject, 8) actualizations and virtualizations of reason, 9) oppositions of intuition, and 10) variant and invariant.

  1. Socialism as subject and as object — Everything that exists can be analyzed from a subjective point of view and from an objective point of view. Everything you think about something refers to something and, at the same time, is a cognitive act of your own. I see something, and there is the angle that privileges what is being seen and the angle that privileges the act of seeing.

These two angles only make sense, however, if they are interconnected. Note that in the previous class, I began to define socialism from a subjective angle — the way in which people construct their image of socialists. In this case, I see socialism as something that these people believe they are participating in. However, when I analyze socialism as a part in pentadialectics, I immediately take it from an objective angle. The other doctrinal currents, including those in which socialism is inserted and moves, positioning themselves in relation to them, objectively exist and are not part of the subjective representation of socialism; they exist independently of it.

  1. Socialism between virtualities and actualities — Socialism itself claims the distinction between the virtual and the actual because its entire movement refers to something in the future, therefore to something that only exists virtually in human history — objectively, thus, albeit in a virtual manner. From a subjective point of view, however, the socialist future exists as actuality. The faith that the socialist revolutionary has in their bright future has more persuasive power for them than historical past. The past is given and cannot be changed anymore in itself, but the interpretation one makes of it can be altered. The socialist makes this interpretation based on the future towards which they imagine history is heading.

Notice something interesting: each new stage of decadialectics is encapsulated in the previous stage, as can be seen from the fact that the analysis of an aspect of socialism’s virtuality and actuality refers us back to the previous distinctions of objectivity and subjectivity (in this case, the difference between the past as such and the interpretation made by the socialist revolutionary, as well as the objectively virtual future contrasted with the subjectively actual future).

To me, the distinction between the virtual and the actual is of additional interest in echoing what I call the object’s latency circle. No object is limited to being just as it appears at a given moment. If you don’t know what it can undergo or suffer in the next instant, then you don’t know anything about it. To have knowledge of an entity is to know what is manifest in it and what is latent in it. Or, as Mário would say, what is given as actuality and what is given as virtuality.

  1. Real possibilities and non-real possibilities of socialism — The future to which socialism is directed establishes a reference point from which certain things can be done and others cannot. There are, not from the perspective of socialist theory (Karl Marx believed that the realization of socialism was not only possible but inevitable), but from the perspective of how things conform in reality, insurmountable limits to human intentions. There are difficulties (often unforeseen) that arise on the path of socialism towards its goals and neutralize certain possibilities that reveal themselves as unreal. A classic example (which I will return to) is the failure of the total nationalization of the Soviet economy when Lenin came to power, settling for a kind of provisional capitalism. What was the central objective of socialist doctrine is not immediately achievable. It was undoubtedly a possibility in itself — you cannot say it was a total impossibility, a metaphysical impossibility because there was no contradiction in stating this possibility — but a relative impossibility, a factual impossibility.

  2. The intensive and extensive in socialism — There is what can be measured by its extensity: not only the width, for example, of a certain object, but also its weight. Extensity is given in the capacity of a certain quality to be measured according to a quantitative standard. But how to measure the intensity of an emotion? It is not a measurement of the same kind; there are no units to be measured that have existence in themselves. You can cut the length of a sofa into one-inch sections; each inch of that length will exist physically and individually. But you cannot separate the parts of a feeling according to a standardized measure of elements that constitute it. Its intensity is qualitatively distinct from what can be quantitatively measured in entities marked by extensity.25

Imagine the effort to construct socialism in the Soviet Union. There were several intensive elements there. For example, the deep involvement of the militants, their capacity for sacrifice, and even the degree of violence they were capable of — all of this is intensive. But there were also extensive elements, such as the quantity of wheat produced in a year — which would be the cause of the hunger of millions of people. All of this had to be taken into account in the construction of socialism. The morale of the militants can decrease, or the production rate of wheat can increase, but the fact is that extensive and intensive elements contribute or not to the realization of the socialist project. There is even a reflexive relationship between the intensive and the extensive. What can be expected — I continue with the same example — from the enthusiasm of the militants if they are hungry due to the scarcity of grains? In this case, an extensive factor influences an intensive factor.

These intensive and extensive elements were already present in the previous stages of this dialectical analysis: the tension between actualities and virtualities already foreshadowed the interchange between intensive and extensive, and intensity and extensity can manifest as real possibilities and unreal possibilities. Decadialectics, in a certain way, peels the layers of its object progressively; each stage does not separate itself from the previous or the subsequent ones but reveals a deepening in the course of the same inquiry.

  1. Intensity and extensity in the actualizations of socialism ~ At each moment of the execution of the socialist project, certain elements are actualized, and they can be actualized intensively or extensively. The launch of the NEP by Lenin intensified the capitalist system and virtualized the militants' commitment to controlling the means of production. From the perspective of the capitalist economy, there is a quantitative increment that can be measured according to a standard, and therefore, it is an extensive element of this actualization.

On the other hand, the temporary decrease in subjective dedication of the militants in favor of the socialist future shows a regression of a qualitative nature, that is, an intensive element given in a virtualization that resulted from that actualization.

  1. Oppositions between reason and intuition in socialism as a subject — One thing is the rationality of the plan or theory you want to implement, and another thing is the intuition of the present state of affairs. This intuition can either confirm what your rational argumentation has asserted or negate it. In the case of negation, there will be a series of adaptations between the project and the facts according to the order of intensity and extensity and the way in which they manifest themselves as actualizations or virtualizations. Facts that are antagonistic to the project can lead to the intensive virtualization of a specific aspect, while extensively virtualizing what was previously an actuality. These shifts of elements and plans are constant during the implementation of any process.

  2. Socialism facing the oppositions between knowledge and ignorance in reason itself — This angle of analysis coincides with my insistence on studying the consciousness horizon of the agent. An individual cannot act in spheres of reality whose existence they are unaware of. This means that every action takes place simultaneously on two planes, a subjective one, where the world is conceived as the individual sees it, and an objective one, where the real world transcends the individual’s conceptions of it. The socialist acts based on the knowledge they have and also based on the unknown of which they are not aware but still reflects in their action (one can say, in general terms, that the socialist acts based on the knowledge they have of themselves as an agent working for the liberation of humanity, while remaining unaware of how much their project reflects an increasing enslavement of particular individuals). This is true not only in the case of actions attributable to the socialist movement but of human action in general.

  3. Socialism facing the actualizations and virtualizations of reason — Knowledge and ignorance are not static. There are continuous actualizations (things that were unknown and are now known, perhaps through study) and virtualizations (things that were known and are now unknown, maybe due to simple inattention or forgetfulness over time). Therefore, what I call the horizon of knowledge — what Mário Ferreira, according to the seventh angle of analysis, would call oppositions of knowledge and ignorance in reason itself — does not have a monolithic and unalterable conformation. The knowledge that a socialist possesses at a given moment, which facilitates the execution of their plans, may be more or less in accordance with the objective knowledge of things given in reality. It may either approach or move away from that knowledge but will always present a dynamic structure in relation to that objective reference point.

  4. Socialism facing the oppositions of intuition — To what extent is the subject involved in socialist efforts aware of the clash between knowledge and ignorance, or between the virtual and the actual, or even between the intensive and the extensive? The same question can be asked about the immediate intuition we have of the facts and characters we study in the history of socialism (or any other movement). At a given moment, we intuitively take certain actualities of Lenin’s thought into account as justification for his actions, while ignoring other actualities (thus virtualized, not to mention elements that were virtual for Lenin himself, although perhaps not for us). Likewise, we may privilege a certain extensive component of his action and ignore other intensive components, so that the interplay between knowledge and ignorance of the historical agent (in this case, Lenin) is reflected in the interplay between knowledge and ignorance of the political scientist at a given intuitive moment of their analysis.

  5. The variant and the invariant in socialism ~ The final stage of decadialectics brings us back to the first stage of pentadialectics: we rediscover, now quite distinct, the unity of socialism, after having distinguished its variant and invariant traits in the nine previous dialectical steps. Certain virtualizations and intensive elements will have an invariant character (the virtualization of historical past and the intensive valuation of the effort to construct a radically new human experience), while certain actualizations and extensive elements will have a variant character (it may be appropriate or not to extensively accelerate capitalist industrial production), not to mention that current and virtual knowledge and ignorance can vary greatly (the internal discussions of the Party, for example, may reflect at different times different degrees of a mixture of ignorance and awareness of fundamental data of a certain situation). Variants and invariants now sufficiently individuate socialism.

Throughout the entire decadialectic process, Mário Ferreira dos Santos is guided by the symbolism of numbers. As I have explained before, each number or quantity is not just an element of the counting scale; on the contrary, it also implies a set of internal, formal relations. The relations between six elements exhibit types of form, for example, that do not correspond exactly to the types of form in the relations between two elements. Each number is a specific logical form.

Mário Ferreira’s boldest step is in his attempt to understand the famous phrase of Pythagoras according to which everything is numbers, that is, according to which reality is constituted of numbers. In general, a quantitative interpretation is given to this statement; it is assumed that full knowledge of the quantitative data of a process will provide complete knowledge of it. But Mário Ferreira understands that statement intensively, taking number as a logical form. Reality would then be, in a Pythagorean sense, structured according to the set of possible logical relations implied in the counting from 1 to 10. Each number expresses a structure of possibilities that will manifest in different ways in different objects, so that all numbers are present in any element or object, whether in nature or in history, as it must have some opposing duality (two), some relation (three), which will form some proportionality or reciprocity (four), and so on.

The articulation between these relations creates a form, which Mário calls the “intrinsic proportionality law” of the entity. It is in the light of this perception that we can understand the Pythagorean saying: every object possesses an internal form, which remains constant as long as that object endures; however, when it dissolves, it is integrated into another thing, thereby realizing a higher synthesis and establishing a new numerical form, that is, a form with a new type of articulation of possible logical relations among its elements. Ideally, each of these forms can be described mathematically. But only ideally, although nowadays there are mathematical tools to describe extremely complex relations. A branch of mathematics, topology—which reduces the representation of reality to representations of relations and continuities, which can thus be mapped in a certain way—is capable of accurately describing the form of a political conflict. Philips J. Davis and Reuben Hersh mention, in “The Dream of Descartes,” the very common situation of heads of mathematics departments at universities being unable to evaluate the thesis projects that come to them, given the specialization of the field. Much of the acceptance of research proposals is done blindly. This immense progress in mathematics suggests that, in principle, the intrinsic proportionality law of each object can be described mathematically. But if we cannot currently make that description, we can at least do it virtually: everything that exists is a complex unity (only God can be a perfectly simple unity); hence, it has a particular form based on the interrelationship of its elements, which we can at least glimpse. This form of intrinsic proportionality corresponds approximately to the concept of “heceity” by Duns Scotus.

〈This logos, this reason of its “essential form,” synthetically expresses the entire body of possibilities of manifestation of the entity. The arithmós arkhê (archetypal number, as Mário Ferreira calls it) of the same entity is thus the number that, due to its intrinsic properties, structurally corresponds to this logos through an analogy of intrinsic attribution (or analogy of proportionality). For example, to an entity whose essential form has a senary structure, the arithmós arkhê 6 will correspond. Both the logos and its mathematical expression or arithmós designate the entity considered merely in the sphere of possibilities (and combinations of possibilities, or, as Leibniz said, of compossibilities). For this entity to manifest itself in a real universe, there must also be, on a lower level than that of the pure arithmós arkhê, a senary law that governs and delimits its manifestation, just as the number 6 governs and delimits its essence,26 〉

There is harmony between each individual entity and its environment. You may even assume it to be a disharmony, but the fact is that this disharmony will be the specific type of harmony in question. In the case of discontinuity or a gap between the entity and the framework in which it is placed, a crisis will arise. Crisis, according to the Greek etymology of the word, means separation. An individuality enters into a crisis when its form separates from its surrounding framework of existence. In some writings, Mário Ferreira states that this critical process is the “motor of cosmic evolution.”

〈The term “evolution” is not used by the author either in the Darwinian sense (with all its ideological implications of belief in supposed “indefinite progress”) or, even less, in the sense of pseudo-spiritual evolution popularized by occultist currents. As he clarifies, “it is not evolution in the axiological sense,” that is, the passage from a “worse” to a “better,” but rather the passage from a “anteriority” to a “posteriority.” In turn, “anteriority” and “posteriority” do not have a temporal sense here, but a logical, ontological, and mathematical sense. According to Mário, “anteriority” and “posteriority,” implying hierarchical “priority,” are matetic laws, universal laws independent of any and every manifestation and, a fortiori, of temporal manifestation.27 〉

The entire process by which an individuality affirms its form and tries to persevere in it—all that exists seeks to persevere in being—is part of a larger framework with which it sooner or later comes into conflict. The form of stones goes into crisis due to erosion (a conflict between the stones and their environmental conditions), the form of animals goes into crisis because they lack food (perhaps due to scarcity in the environment that serves as the habitat for the animal, which then has an opposing element in its surrounding space). All these processes can be appreciated in themselves and also from the perspective of a much larger set of transformations, within which each particular crisis reflects only a passage or reintegration of singular elements into successive general harmonies—precisely what Mário Ferreira would call “higher evolution.” Hence, there are different levels of appreciation for processes of crisis: each crisis of an individual form is encompassed by the totality of the cosmic process, and the entire cosmic process is encompassed by a higher evolution that transcends it.

4. Personal Experience and Philosophy as a System

The qualitative and formal nature of numbers derives from their own quantitative aspect. The limitation of a certain quantity of elements is also a limitation of the modes of relation that are possible for them. This is reflected even in geometry. Three points arranged in a non-coincident manner with a straight line will necessarily form a triangle, whose properties can be studied in trigonometry; but this will not hold true for the figure formed by four non-aligned points—they will never form a triangle (if taken individually as vertices, that is). The quantity four allows for completely different formal possibilities than those allowed by the quantity three.

The form of each object is its intrinsic law of proportionality, the constitutive rule that the object must obey in order to exist as that object and not another. This form not only determines the object itself; by determining the relationships it is capable of, it also determines, to some extent, the other objects. From this, it can be deduced that laws such as the law of intrinsic proportionality—in general, all formally described numerical relationships—apply to the totality of existence. This is how Mário Ferreira will speak of absolutely inescapable eternal laws that transcend even logic.28

Not that these laws have explanatory power. Mário Ferreira does not develop a general explanation of everything. He develops a metalanguage of all knowledge, a way of articulating them, and not a doctrine that expresses the content of that knowledge. Everything that exists must obey numerical laws, but that does not mean that all knowledge about everything can be known in advance through them; it will be necessary to resort to the positive and practical sciences developed historically.

But here we come to a problematic point. Although Mário Ferreira defines decadialectics as a method of concretion, through which one would escape purely abstract discussion (thus articulating the transition from eternal laws to specific entities), he never applies it to any concrete data in his work, and the analyses he makes of abstract concepts become even more abstract.

One can abstractly define the word or concept of “socialism” without defining anything about the concrete and historical phenomenon of socialism. No one has ever managed to fully nationalize or socialize the means of production; this fact could lead to the conclusion that socialism has never existed if one reasons based solely on the formal statement of the objective of a political movement. However, the socialist movement exists, and it exists not in the form of the nationalization of the means of production, but in the form of the struggle to achieve this objective—it is what it really is, regardless of whether the desired end is feasible or not. Discussions limited to conceptual formalities can lead to a sense of suffocation, an excessive rarefaction in the treatment of ideas, which the reader may sometimes experience in Mário’s books. He creates highly efficient methods to avoid this risk, but he does not use them to remedy his own abstract discussions.

Often, we reason as if the world did not exist. But we can only do this because we exist and because there is a world within which we exist. If we were outside of it, none of this would be possible. I can imaginatively suppress certain data from a question by considering it irrelevant to what I am interested in discussing. But that data came to my knowledge in some way. I can only pretend not to know it if I know it. And during these operations of abstraction and return, between abstractions and present data, the subject often forgets that they started from a world in which both the abstracted and the concretized are equally present. To always keep this in mind requires concentration of will, which is not naturally given. To achieve this concentration, you need to take the various elements of your psyche and direct them towards a specific point, to which they would not necessarily or naturally be directed. And when you do that, you affirm your unity. And that is why the human personality, devoid of the practical exercise of concentration of will, tends to weaken its unity. The difficulty lies not in the power; it lies in the will, in the effective capacity of the subject to will, to strive consequently for a goal.

However, Mário Ferreira knows that nothing exists solely with the notes displayed in his concept. Every entity is characterized by tension. In summary, it is not enough to know the formal scheme of an object; it is necessary to show that it actually behaves according to that scheme. Mário affirms that the real action of the object occurs through a tension that concretizes its various elements and makes it persist in its form. Tension is the affirmation of the unity of the object above all its elements. It is for this reason that, in addition to the Treatise on Eschematology (dedicated to the static expression of the schemas and forms that structure being), Mário adds his General Theory of Tensions, which is almost a cosmo-logy or philosophy of nature that explains cosmic processes through the play of tensions. Both of these writings from the philosopher’s later phase remain unpublished.

Furthermore, if it were asserted that the forms embedded in numbers are static, they would prove to be as problematic as Platonic forms. A numerical form cannot generate anything, but simply by containing oppositions, relations, proportions, etc., it possesses a conflicting aspect. The law of intrinsic proportionality of a being should not be understood only geometrically, but as a set of tensions that partly maintain the unity of that being and partly dissolve it. Equipped with the concept of tension, Mário Ferreira can leap over the Aristotelian objection to Plato. Every form—every particular unity, everything that exists in the “manifested world,” René Guénon’s expression—possesses tension; tension only does not exist in absolute unity.

Mário Ferreira’s work is a great systematization of this fact. However, I do not believe that one should construct a system based on this knowledge. The reason is simple: science does not have unity. The immense progress of scientific knowledge is compatible with its fragmentation into countless separate and uncommunicative fields of research. Only philosophy is responsible for safeguarding the unity of knowledge. And that is what every philosopher seeks, whether they know it or not, when they engage in philosophy. Philosophy is the pursuit of unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness and vice versa. A complete system of scientific knowledge, as dreamed by Russell, is impossible; but the possible unity of this system can be achieved by the philosopher’s mind, at least as a measure to which their ordered consciousness tends. Philosophy prevents the world from going mad.

I disagree with the very common assertion that philosophy lies in the problems it deals with. Not at all. The problems are only its stimulus. Philosophy is defined by tension, not by given content. Mário Ferreira, for example, does what is the great task of a philosopher: he takes all available knowledge and seeks to discern a structure within it. The discovery of this structure does not solve all problems, which will always arise; and furthermore, the problems that one philosopher deals with are not equivalent to those dealt with by another philosopher.

Mário intended to create a Christian philosophy, but he did not. Although his philosophy is not incompatible with Christianity, it disregards a central aspect. Jesus Christ said, “I am the Truth.” He did not say that he was stating the truth, nor that he was the bearer of the truth. Truth does not appear in Christianity as a doctrine or theory; it appears as a Person. Therefore, in my understanding, truth cannot be known in the same way as you know a doctrine or a system of propositions, but rather as you know a person. The knowledge we have of each person is at the same time immediate, obvious, and indescribable. I have known my wife for 33 years, but I cannot say everything I know about her—I cannot even think of all the information I have about her. Nevertheless, I have a familiarity with her that allows me to recognize her as the same person at all times. This is exactly the mode of knowledge we recognize in the act of knowing the truth, which is not compatible with the formulation of a macro-system. All non-verbal, inexpressible knowledge, even the capacity for divination—all of this is embedded in real, concrete knowledge.

I have never tried to construct a system that expresses my truth. What I want, rather, is to be able to recognize the truth continuously. When I know the truth, I often realize that I already knew it. This recognition can only be achieved in concrete life, in dealing with concrete problems of reality, not in the construction of a system. And that is what I dedicate myself to. I am not a mathematician, I am not an architect, nor a system builder.

Everything that Mário Ferreira presents is a part of the logos, the divine reason. But this is the disembodied logos. But now: the logos became incarnate; therefore, it is necessary to elaborate another modality of knowledge that is appropriate to it.

To the extent that concrete philosophy is an effort to reach the logos as a system of propositions, it moves in the gnostic sphere, as this knowledge will become a knowledge that encompasses reality and dominates it in some way. It is, so to speak, a closed knowledge—a clear mark of gnosticism (Mário himself declared that his philosophy absorbed gnostic elements). Whereas knowledge of truth as a Person creates a completely different disposition.

The central problem of philosophy is the formation of personality and consciousness; its primary needs are not doctrinal. Before the great scholastic period, during the time of St. Albert and St. Thomas, there was another phase of European education that did not take place in universities but in the so-called cathedral and monastic schools. There, what was taught was not philosophy in the theoretical sense of the word, but the formation of the person, the human individual. It was this great flourishing of well-formed personalities that allowed the emergence of great scholasticism as its symbolic expression.29

The philosopher’s function should not be to form doctrines; it should be to form people. In general, the high point of Platonic dialogues is the narration of a myth, not the enunciation of a purified doctrine. The myth, like all symbolic material, is not intended to convey a clear concept, but to awaken intellectual possibilities. It is because this was Plato’s habitual procedure that the great scholar Julius Stenzel, in his book Plato as Educator, affirms that the nature of his work was eminently pedagogical. The educator does not need to state where he is going because he does not know where his students will go; he only wants them to arrive. This is completely lacking in Mário Ferreira, whose philosophy disregards the personal aspect of existence.

While, on the one hand, as I have already said, Mário Ferreira dos Santos transcended the horizon of Brazilian consciousness, on the other hand, however, one can say that he fell short of it. Throughout his work, there is not even a serious attempt to analyze any Brazilian cultural phenomenon—for example, works of Brazilian literature or any relevant historical event in the history of Brazil. Mário Ferreira confined himself to the metaphysical sphere; everything is discussed only from a doctrinal point of view, without appreciation for the discussion of facts. Even when he talks about the Vertical Invasion of the Barbarians, he is addressing the entire West in the most generic way possible, not Brazil in particular. His discussion of socialism in Analysis of Social Themes is also entirely doctrinal; socialism does not appear there as a set of facts, as something that has a history. Even in The Man Facing Infinity, we find no personalization whatsoever: it only speaks of the abstract man, and there is not even a hint of the particular presence of the man Mário Ferreira dos Santos. In short, his work lacks an articulation of metaphysics with the experience of the individual soul.

The great attention he gives to cognitive processes and faculties, in the abstract, without the active presence of an individual, made me admire the greatness of Mário from the beginning and at the same time distance myself from his efforts. It must be recognized, however, that during the short period in which he wrote the main part of his work, there would hardly have been time to address other problems related to factual, material realities. In a way, it is up to us to complete his work, to delve into the social realities and moral realities that he ignored. Also, because there is no way to study a philosophy except by extending it, going beyond what it has given us. What is in the text is only what the philosopher said until the moment of his death. His situation was not our situation. What he said based on the reality he lived must be recognizable in the reality you live and in relation to which you engage with the philosopher. If a philosophy like Mário’s applied only to the reality he lived, that philosophy would have only historical significance. You would have no reason to study it other than knowledge of the past. But the purpose of philosophy is different. Its study consists of reliving the cognitive moments of the philosopher based on other material—the form remains, but the objects seen in the light of that form change.

And it is in this spirit that the problem of the concrete situation of the individual soul—how I position myself in relation to the methods of knowledge and their higher principles—must be added to Mário’s philosophy.

Part III: From the “Archimedean Point” to the “Mathesis Megiste”

1. Towards Concrete Philosophy

The work of Mário Ferreira dos Santos presents a series of characteristics that prevent it from being approached, at the outset, as one generally approaches the work of any philosopher. The state in which he left it, in published books and unpublished original works, attests to little editorial care and even occasional carelessness in the content presented. However, this does not mean that Mário Ferreira left his philosophy unfinished or that he did not fully realize the grand editorial project he had embarked upon.

In this regard, it is worth repeating what I have had the opportunity to tell you in other classes. Philosophy is not essentially transmitted through texts, but only accidentally. That is, the idea of a work that we have in literature cannot be directly transposed to philosophy. The work of a poet is his poems; it does not matter the poem the poet had in mind, only the poem to which he gave a definitive form matters. The literary work is a recognizable physical presence; it would be nothing without its sonorous stratum. To read a poem properly, each of its sounds must be reproduced in the same way every time, requiring the vocalization of the same sequence of sounds each time it is read. When reading a poem in a language whose phonetics are unknown to you, you quickly realize that it does not work, it does not have the efficiency it would have in a language whose phonetics you know. And it is precisely this physical presence of the work that, in the case of philosophy, becomes dispensable. The work of the poet is his poems, the work of the novelist is his novels, but the work of the philosopher is not his books, but his philosophy.

Philosophy is in a certain style or a certain set of perspectives that the subject casts upon the object, in a freely chosen manner, and that forms what is called a philosopheme. The philosopheme is not only a set of theses, but also a set of methods, and not only a set of methods, but also, as I said, a style. A style not necessarily of thinking: it is a style of looking, of approaching certain questions.

What I am saying is quite evident, although it may seem somewhat scandalous in light of established practices, such as reducing philosophy to a treatment of texts. It is also a notion with the most extraordinary consequences from a methodological and pedagogical point of view. Among other reasons, because it implies that the same philosophy can be presented in many different ways, and the way in which it was presented — in writing, in a lecture — is only one of them, not necessarily the best. We cannot exclude the hypothesis that even the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle could be better expounded by other individuals than by themselves — which does not mean that these individuals understood them better, but that they explained them better.

Often, popularization works are better written than the original works they are based on. It also happens that fundamental works of philosophical thought are only fragments, drafts, lecture notes, or texts produced by others. It would suffice for this to have happened only once for you to understand that the complete form of the written work is not part of the essence of philosophy, although it may incidentally be very important for this or that particular philosophy if written expression is a preferred form of expression for a particular philosopher. If it so happens that the subject has a vocation for writing, in addition to being a philosopher, then it is evident that the written word will prevail. Just as if the individual has the gift of oratory, perhaps the oral medium will become predominant. It may even happen that the individual is a great conversationalist, like Socrates, who was not only not a writer but also was not, in the strict sense, an orator; he was, I repeat, a conversationalist.

In the case of studying Mário’s work, it is necessary to keep this in mind all the time because his writings do not make it easy: on the contrary, they hinder access to his philosophy and constitute one of the main reasons, I think, for the repugnance that many people have for the philosopher. A somewhat unconscious repugnance, that is, almost a laziness to approach this work and to question its possible greatness. Even if Mário’s books were absolutely chaotic and difficult to navigate, it would still be the readers' obligation to embark on the reconstruction of the ordered philosophy that lies beneath the apparent disorder. Mário Ferreira dos Santos' philosophy may not be inviting in his books and unpublished writings, but it can be perfectly updated in the minds of the readers.

Another factor that leads many to repel Mário Ferreira’s work is disbelief itself: one is reluctant to believe that a Brazilian could have done something truly important — which, in the present case, is understandable. Brazil is really not prepared to swallow something like this. The best members of our intellectual class are those who maintain an activity on par with a current European university — at the level of the average in that environment, so to speak. They are individuals who have managed to be good students, complete their master’s and doctoral degrees, but will not go beyond that. All the education they receive is measured by the stature of certain works and certain authors that are in vogue at the moment. However, there is a great distance between being able to apply a theory that was just invented and having a global participation in all epochs — moving through Greek, medieval, and oriental thought with security and autonomy. Our academic intellectuals tend to feel comfortable in Paris, alongside Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Foucault, but outside of Paris, they are hicks, and the further they move away from the present time, the more hick they become. Our intellectuals are trapped within the spirit of an era and cannot escape it: they cannot see anything behind or necessarily ahead.

For an audience like this, Mário is a very peculiar creature because he engages in dialogue with the philosophy of all eras. He speaks face to face with Plato and Aristotle and can then have a conversation with Nietzsche in the next instant because, for him, all of this happens on a plane of universality, and it doesn’t matter whether an author is his contemporary or lived two thousand years ago. He can even discuss with philosophers who are completely unknown in the Brazilian milieu because he does not depend on an external consensus to tell him which author is important and deserves to be discussed. Therefore, he can update, on his own, the thought of Portuguese scholastics who had no presence in our philosophy departments. In short, it is a problematic fact: one man is much more learned than the entire intellectual community that, professionally at least, is committed to philosophical work.

Mário Ferreira chose to ignore the cultural environment that surrounded him. He did not engage in dialogue with the university, which he transcended to a great extent. This is reflected in the written form of his work. For example, I cannot imagine Saint Thomas Aquinas outside the environment of the medieval university because he somehow embodies that spirit. There are no gaps between him and his milieu; there was a perfect fit between author and audience, he knew who he was writing for. But Mário didn’t. He did not belong to any specific environment, let alone the university environment, which did not constitute the audience he had in mind. He addresses a common philosophical audience, waiting for someone to speak to them. And in a way, an imaginary audience, a future audience that, however, Mário assumes already exists — which complicates the shaping of his written work too much. So he speaks to an undefined audience, while still offering some possible means of access to professional philosophers of his time. On the other hand, he is discussing with philosophers from other countries, sometimes dead for centuries or millennia, and it is not clear which audience is capable of even perceiving this dialogue.

At the beginning of his career, Mário wrote a bunch of books under pseudonyms that are not strictly philosophical but rather lito-philosophical, like “If the Sphinx Spoke” or “Theses on the Existence and Inexistence of God,” books that deal with philosophical subjects but have the appearance of literary chronicles aimed at an audience that is not composed of philosophy students. The intention of learning seems to be less important than that of recreation. Thus, even with less philosophical power, the early writings have some unity of genre and style. However, as Mário embarks on the path of his definitive thinking, this unity dissolves. “Philosophy and Worldview” (1952) already shows the author’s total hesitation regarding the genre in which he will situate his books.

Because he starts as if he were giving an introduction to philosophy to an audience unfamiliar with the subject, in a very peculiar pedagogical intent to educate a reader he is simultaneously creating. However, with a glimpse of the ultimate goals of his philosophy and his work, something very difficult to explain to a beginner audience, he oscillates between the role of a teacher and that of an original philosopher. Thus, at certain points, he abandons the supposedly didactic tone and engages in extremely difficult discussions that the reader will only be able to fully understand after grasping the general sense of Mário Ferreira dos Santos' philosophy.

This is how a Nietzschean philosophical chronicler — in short, a philosophizer, in the same sense that we can say José Guilherme Merquior is the greatest Brazilian philosophizer — becomes a philosopher in the formal sense of the term, dedicated to constructing a philosophical system in the most organized way you can conceive. And the most paradoxical thing is that the most extreme organization of philosophical thought begins to appear precisely in a disorganized work like “Concrete Philosophy.” However, as Mário continues with the publication of the other books, you realize that it is a philosophical construction of an ancient type, like the classical metaphysics of idealism or the scholastics. He writes treatises on each of the philosophical disciplines, rearticulating them according to his new conceptions. This is where the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences begins.

The first nine volumes correspond to the basic disciplines, and as the Encyclopedia progresses, the philosopher delves into increasingly higher realms of thought, applying the techniques of those disciplines to a wide variety of specialized themes (in the volumes of “problematics”), and finally investigating the highest principles from which they originate — with the final series of ten books dedicated to the “Mathesis Megiste,” the “supreme teaching.” To get an idea of the intended organization, the systematic nature of the endeavor, it suffices to say that not even Saint Thomas attempted a reformulation of all philosophical disciplines in the same way that Mário did.

There is a first book of general introduction to philosophy, “Philosophy and Worldview.” Then there is a book on logic, “Logic and Dialectics” (1953), followed by a psychology (1953) and a theory of knowledge (1954). After that, there is a treatise on being, “Ontology and Cosmology” (1954), one on symbolism, “Treatise on Symbolics” (1956), and a book called “Philosophy of Crisis” (1956), which justifies Mário Ferreira’s thought in light of the state of his era, as well as being almost a philosophy of culture. The series is completed by a philosophical theology, “Man Facing Infinity” (1956), a study of the nature and properties of the spirit, “General Noology” (1956), and “Concrete Philosophy” (1957), which is the conclusion of the system.

“Concrete Philosophy” is a book with which one could start reading Mário’s work (in its third edition from 1961, greatly expanded and better completed in three volumes). There is no pedagogical intention there, no oscillation between the objective of providing basic information and the objective of communicating an original philosophy. Precisely this axiomatic system, a reading for philosophers, is clearer than the other titles in the first series of the Encyclopedia. In this case, starting from the end of the series actually corresponds to an understanding that is very characteristic of Mário. He believed that all knowledge begins with an initial synthesis that is confused, followed by analysis, and finally concluded with a clear and distinct final synthesis. If you read the books in the order in which they were published, you will get lost in the midst of analysis; it is better, therefore, to start from that synthetic point, “Concrete Philosophy,” which may be confusing at first, and gradually analyze the elements contained therein through the other books until you reach a more distinct synthesis.

If only the first ten volumes of the Encyclopedia had survived from Mário’s work, we would have an idea of its overall scope, but not the total extent that the philosopher would give to his thought. However, during the second phase of the endeavor, the “problematics” volumes, there was at some point a radical deepening of the philosophy conceived in the first phase. Beyond the attempt to establish the foundation of the entire world of knowledge that constitutes the core of “Concrete Philosophy,” he conceived the ambition to create a mode of reasoning that functions as a metalinguage of all possible knowledge, allowing for the approach and interconnection of all sciences. This was, in short, the “mathetic” project, as he called it. Thus, there are three Mários: first, the philosophizing writer; then, the philosopher of Concrete Philosophy; and finally, the philosopher of Mathesis Megiste.

He was a prodigy: he created two philosophical systems, but one was within the other. “Concrete Philosophy” turns out to be an introduction to “Mathesis Megiste.”

2. Fundamental Theses of Concrete Philosophy

The Concrete Philosophy proposes itself to be an axiomatic system composed of evidences and proofs: what is not automatically evident will have to be proven, but what is self-evident will only be stated. But it is not just that; its enterprise is not limited to the deductive model of systems like Spinoza’s Ethics. As it chains thesis upon thesis, Mário Ferreira solidifies them with critical comments. There is a central deductive line, and along the margins of this line, he continues to dialectize.

According to Mário, the basic problem of all philosophy is to find what he calls the Archimedean point, something that cannot be denied in any way. He will state his finding as follows (I will continue to comment until the tenth thesis of the Concrete Philosophy):

First thesis: “Something exists, and absolute nothingness does not exist”.30

This something, which at first may seem like an entirely empty concept, is actually the fullest thing that exists. With it, the impossibility of total denial is affirmed: the very act of denying that something exists will cause the denial to exist; therefore, something exists. All privations or denials exist in function of something that exists, they are in a certain way a manifestation or aspect of the something that exists.

This something exists expresses a logically necessary sentence – but not only that. From a logical point of view, necessary is what cannot not be. Notice: to what extent could you consider the necessary as merely hypothetical? Or, put another way, what would the hypothetically necessary be? Take the following proposition, if A, then necessarily B follows, and ask what would be its hypothetical form, what interpretation would be suitable for the necessarily. Of the two, one: either the hypothetical character of this sentence is merely thought, or it is also real, ontological. This means that nothing necessary can be taken only as a hypothesis; it will be a hypothesis for the one who thinks it, but it will be a necessary thing in the set of the real.

This refers us to the ontological argument of Saint Anselm, who affirms that God exists because he is a necessary being and the necessary being cannot not exist – the idea of necessity would contribute to the concrete reality of his existence. The Kantian critique of the argument is to say that this necessity refers only to the concept of God; and that, if this concept is real, then the necessity of being follows, but only as a hypothetical necessity. The mere suggestion that this being can be taken only as a hypothetical thing, however, excludes in advance the possibility that it is necessary; and, interestingly, it can also not be necessarily hypothetical. There can be no necessity derived from its pure concept in it ontologically. It can only be hypothetical in our heads; nor will it necessarily be so. As we can see, there is no middle ground between the hypothetical and the necessary.

Suppose, hypothetically, the existence of an absolutely necessary being. To what extent can we raise this hypothesis? To suppose this hypothetical existence, I must think of it as only hypothetically true, and not as necessarily true. But if I say that it is a hypothetically true being, hypothetically necessary, then it remains to know whether this hypothetical character is also necessary or only accidental. That is, is it necessarily hypothetical? Can it only be hypothetical? If it can only be hypothetical, then it is not necessary. But the necessary being requires that, by its nature, one moves from hypothesis to necessity. In fact, the simple act of formulating the hypothesis – the ontological argument – already affirms the existence of this necessary being that was initially considered from a hypothetical point of view.

Similarly, the very hypothesis that something exists is enough to verify that, in fact, something does exist. The simple attempt to make it hypothetical affirms it as necessary. You can say that nothing exists because something exists. The possibility of denial depends on the something exists. Being and nothingness, thus understood, identify themselves. You cannot point out a single feature, a single note of nothingness, that distinguishes it from being, because nothingness has no distinctive feature. Nothingness can only be an entity of reason, but in being so it affirms precisely being. That is, from nothingness we know that it is not, and as we know this we perceive, at the same time, this is; and of being we manifestly know that it is.

Second thesis: “Absolute nothingness, being impossible, can do nothing”.31

According to the reasons I have just pointed out – and which I will complement – about the relations between the necessary and the hypothetical. Nothingness, this nothingness can while being nothing; and, if it can, it is by affirming being through its denial (and thus it will no longer be nothingness, but being).

Third thesis: “Proof is shown and not only demonstrated”.32

The third thesis apparently deviates a little from the ontological line of the two previous theses. Instead of saying something about being, it now says something about our way of knowing being. Mário Ferreira affirms that the concept of demonstration implies that something is shown, that is, the demonstration would be an indirect “showing” (For those who follow my classes, it is evident that this corresponds to what I call the evidence of the proof).33

“The first certainty naturally has to be shown” – that is, the demonstration requires that something be definitively shown so that another thing can be demonstrated through this first displayed element -; “The axiom that something exists is self-evident, and shows its validity per se, independently of the human schematic, because this can vary, the schematic contents can vary, but that something exists is evident to us, and extra-mentis”.34

By self-evident, Mário Ferreira understands what neither requires nor admits proof. For my part, I believe there is a universal method of proof that something is evident in itself: every self-evident proposition is characterized by not admitting a univocal contradiction; the attempt to formulate such a contradiction will necessarily lead to a double-meaning sentence.

What would be, for example, the contradiction of “something exists”? Would it be “something does not exist”? Or would it be “nothing exists”? Or both? The fact is that both can be formulated and can be accepted as a contradiction to something exists, but it is not possible to choose one over the other – it is logically undecided. As the contradiction of something exists is ambiguous, this something exists is a self-evident truth.35

The problem with the concept of evidence is that it seems to have an irrational residue: every logical reasoning, grounded in terms of its formal order, will have an unprovable foundation. The fact that what is demonstrable depends on the undemonstrable (the “showable,” as Mário would say) is a mystery, it is something that imposes itself, it is something that escapes the world of reason. Therefore, we need to somehow establish an additional logical criterion to decide what is evidence and what is not. And this, I believe, is the criterion: no self-evident judgment admits a univocal contradiction.

Why is this so? I don’t know. I know the fact, but not its foundations. And realize that this is already something that I affirm, and not Mário; it’s something that I consider necessary to solidify his argument, because it was not enough to say that the assumption of nothing would lead to absurdities. Nothing, at first, eliminates the hypothesis that reality itself was absurd.

Fourth thesis: “Demonstration requires the middle term; the ‘showing’, however, does not require it.”

He clarifies: “The ‘showing’ follows an intuitive path. The evidence of what is shown imposes itself, for its non-acceptance would lead to absurdity. You can also make a direct demonstration through the mere comparison mentioned above; or indirect, like the reductio ad absurdum”.36

I insist: besides the reduction to absurdity, it is necessary to show the impossibility of the univocal contradiction. The reduction to absurdity does not effectively prove a thesis, it only proves the absurdity of its contradiction. But an absurd sentence can have a contradiction that is also absurd. You can say that all men who ever existed are alive, which is an absurd sentence. However, to contradict that no man is alive is also absurd. That is, the absurdity of the contrary does not serve as positive proof of a judgment. Things only change in the case of impossible to formulate contradictions, as I explained.

Besides this, it is necessary to distinguish the level of intuition of simple essences (“cat”, “man”, “wall”) from the level of complex judgments (“this wall is white”, “the cat meowed”). Aristotle said that the apprehension of simple essences is error-free. The risk of error would only arise when you decide to affirm something, that is, to elaborate a judgment. You see a cat and apprehend its form – always, and without any failure. The most that can happen is an error in denomination: suppose you see a cat, but call it a fish. Even so, the thought content is true in itself, the essence was apprehended correctly.

The situation is not the same when we move on to the declaration of a judgment. It may seem to you that the wall is white and the cat meowed, and yet, the wall is another color and the cat remained silent. The guarantee of correctness in our apprehension of reality data is that we take them as essences known intuitively, not as a construction we make a posteriori.

When you think “Socrates is a man”, you are making a judgment. Perhaps he was not a man; perhaps he was a hippopotamus. However, this is only possible in a verbal plane. Nobody ever apprehends the essence “Socrates” without at the same act apprehending the fact that it is a man. His humanity is self-evident; the moment I removed it from my horizon, I would no longer be talking about the same “Socrates”. Therefore, I do not need to formulate the judgment that Socrates is a man, his own essence already brings me this information. And not only. All the logical properties of the concept of “man” come at once associated with the essence “Socrates”. I do not assemble a deductive chain according to which “Socrates is a man”, “Man is a rational animal”, therefore “Socrates is a rational animal”. The moment I apprehend “Socrates”, I apprehend immediately all this data in a single and simple intuition. I do not separate “Socrates” from his animality and his rationality, to compose a new whole at a second moment. This essential whole is given from the beginning.

The problem is that the expression of the apprehended essence requires you to use logical forms. Thus, what you have apprehended as essence will have to be expressed as a judgment, which in common language will take the form of a proposition, in which “Socrates”, “animal” and “rational” will appear as analytically diverse elements, separated, which are then gathered into a single whole – when, in fact, the initial essence already brought this whole complete. Analytical judgments detail the content of the concept, in which they were already logically implicit.

It may happen by accident that, when thinking about a certain concept, you consider it with all its logical implications or only with a very reduced part of them. That is, from the apprehended essence you can elaborate judgments that recover it “full”, full of its determinations, or almost only nominally, as a mere reference, without major specific determinations. In this latter case, you will need to unfold analytically new judgments in order to reach the genus, the species, the properties and the accidents of that essence – and this is where the danger of error intervenes. What for one person is attainable immediately and intuitively can cost another a relatively difficult and risky elaboration of syllogistic chains, but we both start from the same essence.

It is clear that the distinction between rational and intuitive actually originates from a confusion of facts: the same thing can be rational at a given moment, and intuitive at another, depending on how you address it. It’s merely a functional distinction, not a real one. In Mário’s terms, one could say that the demonstration is already embedded in the “display”; it is merely an accident, a coincidence, the fact that you sometimes take something as evident and sometimes take it as needing proof.

Fifth thesis: "There are undeduced propositions, intelligible by themselves, per se evident (axioms)".

In fact, he has even stated one of these propositions: something exists.

Sixth thesis: “One can construct philosophy with universally valid judgments”.37

Seventh thesis: “Absolute nothingness is the contradiction of something exists”.38

Which is already given in the very formulation that something exists, see my previous argument.

Eighth thesis: “What exists — is; it is being. What does not exist is non-being”.39 40

Ninth thesis: “The proposition ‘something exists’ is sufficiently noted by itself”.

The enunciation of the theses shifted from an ontological perspective to a gnoseological perspective: it started by dealing with how something actually was in reality, until it began to deal with how we know this ontological fact.

From a cognitive point of view, we don’t need to refer to anything else to understand that something exists. The knowledge that something exists comes from the fact that something exists and nothing more.

Tenth thesis: “‘Something exists’ is not just a being of reason, but a real-real being”.41

In this thesis, Mário Ferreira makes the opposite movement: he says that it is something not only grasped by reason, but that exists as reality.

3. Decadialectic and First Principles

In view of the theses that open Concrete Philosophy, one might think that Mário Ferreira dos Santos is satisfied with an expository formalism. That is not the case.

He distinguishes very well the object he is talking about and the cognitive activity he uses to apprehend it. Knowledge will have an ontological aspect, specific to the object, and a psychological aspect, specific to cognitive activity. Mário realizes that he cannot confine himself to purely logical demonstration: it is in the nature of the cognizing subject to tend towards abstraction and distance from the object, and therefore it is necessary to employ a tool that prevents the disjunction between the psychological and ontological aspects of knowledge. This tool is dialectics.

Dialectics – Mário emphasizes the Greek root dia, “through” – is a thought that proceeds through hypotheses or through errors in search of something. It is essentially critical thought, critical of itself. And it is in this understood dialectic that our philosopher will trust in approaching the same object from multiple planes, under different aspects, so that a single line of qualities is not privileged, which, if left to logical deduction alone, would become more and more abstract. He will then ask himself: in how many different ways do we need to look at an object to be sure that we have delimited and known it sufficiently? Thus arises the decadialectic, a set of ten points of view from which to approach an object. I will not detail these ten points of view here, but they are justified by the ten basic ontological categories, which are structured as follows:

  1. Every form constitutes a unity: this object, that object, understood as individualities in themselves.

  2. From the moment each of these objects is considered as something before another object (or as an individuality that encounters other individualities with which to relate), it is seen according to duality, that is, from the perspective of opposition.

  3. But this opposition, in itself, is not reduced to any of the related objects; it exists in itself in some way and adds to the objects. It is a relationship that, when added to the two related elements, constitutes the ternary.

  4. Each relationship is distinguished by the way it is articulated. That is, the elements that are related have a specific type of position relative to each other, or else any objects that maintain a relationship with each other (a hunter who relates to his prey, or the water of the seas that relates to the system of rain) would be ipso facto related in the same way. Therefore, each relationship has its own proportionality.

  5. When you consider that initial unity at this point, seeing it as opposed and related according to a specific proportionality, you become capable of apprehending it as a unity with a higher level of specificity. You now come face to face with the form of the object, its intrinsic proportional form, a pentagram grasped globally as a single point.

  6. This complete unity, considered in relation to any other unity, will compose a harmony. Both units exhibit some similarity in form that allows them to be grasped from a more comprehensive unity. For an object to be comparable to another object, it must be seen according to some standard of harmony, without which no comparison could be established.

  7. Even if harmony is established, one individual form will not be confused with another. One can be compared to another according to a specific harmony, but one separates from the other according to specific notes that do not contribute to the harmony. If seen in this way, individuality is being appreciated under the category of separation or abyss, that is, crisis. Crisis is the irreducibility of one thing to another.

  8. Between these two individual forms, however, which come together in harmony and separate according to their respective critical aspects, it is still possible to establish some kind of relationship that allows for speaking of both as a single set. This is no longer simply about harmony, as it has already been attenuated by highlighting the elements of crisis. Now it is about some category, some law that transcends both forms, going beyond both their harmony and their crisis. This octonary category is called integration.

  9. The two individually integrated forms cannot be exclusive: by integrating with each other, they necessarily integrate into a larger set that points to the totality of all that can be integrated. This is transcendental integration.

  10. However, this integration is only possible because a new unity arises. Here, unitary forms are understood only as moments of a broader unity; what stands out is not the fact that individual forms are integrated transcendently, but the fact that they are elements of a transcendental unity.

The subtlety of distinctions from the octenary to the decad can be understood through an example. Napoleon Bonaparte, as an individual form, experienced a crisis at the moment of his death; the senary harmony in which he lived was disrupted, causing a crisis. But Napoleon’s form, to the extent that it continues to exert historical influence, resurfaces octonarily in a new integration: his individuality was absorbed by the character.42 This character will carry out, from the nonary point of view, a set of possibilities that will integrate him into a greater universality: let’s say that Napoleon is understood not only in the historical cycle in which he acts but also within the total history of the world. At this point, we return to unity, but now as a transcendent full unity, the closure of the decade. And there, you may wonder about the meaning of Napoleon’s existence from the perspective of the totality of being, of existence understood in its transcendence.

It is easy to see that the first ten theses of Concrete Philosophy have a structure similar to the numbers that designate them. First, something is affirmed, being, unity. Then nothing is addressed, which is the contradictory of being, something that opposes being dually. The third thesis speaks of the problem of proof, of syllogism, that is, the ternary. The fourth thesis brings a comparison between “monstration” and demonstration, between the requirement of the middle term and its dispensation, establishing a proportion between two elements in relation to that requirement and that dispensation: a / b = x / y. With the fifth thesis, we return to unity, but now from a cognitive point of view: the fact that there are propositions that are not deducible, intelligible in themselves, self-evident, implies an irreducibility, a new unity. The sixth thesis affirms the possibility of constructing a philosophy through universally valid judgments placed in relation to each other, that is, through harmony. According to the seventh thesis, absolute nothing contradicts something exists, and a contradiction would occur when the absence and presence of the same aspect occur simultaneously in the same object — this is a crisis. The eighth thesis moves from the idea of something to the idea of being; there is an integration, a generalization, an elevation. In the ninth thesis, it is said that the proposition something exists is sufficiently noted by itself, which is already a cognitive or noological aspect of the fact, a new integration that gathers new aspects of being. Finally, in the tenth thesis, the ontological reality of something exists is affirmed: this is not a proposition of merely formal validity but an ontological one. It concerns the totality of being in its unity.

Well, it is through a set of questions derived from these ten angles of approach that we can ensure that we have known an object in its concreteness: what is the opposition that composes it or of which it is an element? What is the relationship between the two parts of this opposition, and how can we equate them in a proportional formula? What form does this proportional formula acquire to present itself as a distinct unity, and not a simple one? What is the harmony and crisis that exist between the object and everything else that surrounds it? How does the integration that encompasses the harmonic and critical aspects persist, as a new integrated whole, and how does it situate itself in the transcendent unity of all things?

Thus, the logical distinction of the object regarding its proximate genus and specific difference is extremely important, but its integration according to the ten ontological categories exposed is no less important, and in fact, you will only understand the abstract logical distinction well through the concrete dialectical distinction, and vice versa, as one cannot be fully conceived apart from the other. The nominalism of the analytical procedure is correct, and the realism of the concretion procedure is also correct. That is why Mário combines them in Concrete Philosophy, as he surrounds the deductions of the 327 theses with dialectical approaches that pass through ten levels.

Anyway, although his intuition from Philosophy and worldview to the phase of Mathesis megiste seems to be the same, I don’t know how much awareness he already had at the time of writing Concrete Philosophy of the laws or principles that he would end up reconstructing as a kind of ideal Pythagoreanism, a work mainly carried out in Pitágoras e o tema do número (1965). However, there is progressive clarification of that intuition. The decadialectic, at first, only reflects an appropriate mode of knowledge. Then it will say something about the way beings exist concretely. Finally, it will ascend to the category of supreme laws that govern the entire conformation of being. This progression originates from the perception that the Pythagoreans (historical or ideal) understood the concept of number not in the concrete mathematical sense but as an expression of the form of being. The number of a being would be its formula, its law of intrinsic proportionality, that which makes it be what it is. And all the possible forms and relations of a being, Mário Ferreira concludes, originate from unity and the dyad.

〈 Mário, inclined to the vocabulary of the Pythagorean tradition, designates unity Hen Prote, First One, which is omnipotence and the principle of Hen Dêuteron, the Second One, which, in turn, is the principle of manifestation of particular entities. To avoid confusion on this point, René Guénon prefers to call Hen Prote “Non-Being,” and only Hen Dêuteron “Being.” However, as the notion of “Non-Being” can be erroneously confused with “nothing,” Frithjof Schuon suggests the term “Supra-Being.” Whatever the case may be, it can be understood that the arithmós arkhê (archetypal number) “One” is not itself a proper number (since it can only be a number when considered differentially in relation to other numbers that proceed from it). Thus, this supreme pre-unity is often symbolized as zero, not in the sense of being “nothing” but in indicating that it transcends numerality. The Supreme Principle is thus the Non-Numeric One, or "Zero."43 〉

For there to be number in the mathematical sense, there must be “numerocity.” This idea of quantity requires unity, but not only that: it requires that this unity has the possibility of multiplying itself, of being several things at the same time — fundamentally, the possibility of manifesting itself as one and as two. This view leads Mário to the idea that all the fundamental concepts of philosophy (being, nothing, cause, antecedent, consequent) can be articulated in an axiomatic system whose exclusive principles are unity and dyad. Thus, it would be possible to formulate, based on the ten numerical categories, the expression of universally valid statements of philosophy and science. The categories can thus be expressed not only in terms of unity, duality, ternarity, etc., but as universally valid judgments: 1) everything that is, is one; 2) this one always consists of an opposition; 3) the opposites are related; 4) their relationship forms a proportionality; 5) this proportionality has a form, and so on. These statements are absolutely undeniable because they are at the same time the structure of elementary arithmetic, the structure of possible forms of being, and the foundation of basic scientific and philosophical concepts.

After making this discovery, Mário Ferreira realizes something even more astonishing: the counting continues beyond the tenth category, and thus the principles of being continue as well. If the tenth law affirms that the whole of being forms a transcendental unity, the eleventh rule (expressed as 1.1) affirms the unity of the transcendental unity, and the twelfth rule (expressed as 1.2) affirms that the transcendental unity consists of an opposition. The developments of this doctrine are exposed in The Wisdom of Eternal Laws.

At this point, Mário no longer knew if what he was expounding was his own philosophy or simply wisdom, the golden chain that descended from Pythagoras to him. This would be the shared thought, consciously or unconsciously, more clearly or more obscurely, of all philosophers since the beginning of time.

4. A New Realism

All of Mário Ferreira dos Santos' effort goes in an anti-Kantian direction. His work displays a great confidence in the act of knowledge, establishing the possibility of a new realistic metaphysics.

Understandably, Kant perceived the danger of formulating a metaphysics to support Christian dogma. Christianity takes the form of a mystery that we approach through symbols. However, when you systematize it as a set of dogmas and formulate a metaphysics to support it, it ceases to be a mystery and becomes a subject of discussion. And the end of religion. To prevent this from happening, Kant invests forces to preserve the domain of mystery: he distinguishes what we can know through reason and what we can know through faith.

This is a good intention. Christ himself calls the generation that demands proofs “perverse” (Mt 16, 4). In fact, the path of proof is not blessed. It is a path of torment and doubts, subject to temptations, and can lead to both correctness and error. Whereas faith offers a direct and more secure path. On the other hand, the fact that Christian doctrine is a mystery in which the Christian must believe does not mean that it cannot be, to some extent, subjected to proof. You can seek evidence for faith, but initially, you should not. Discovering the proof requires you to enter the dialectical realm, and the dialectical realm is one of dispute between yes and no, it is the devil’s dispute. But you engage in philosophy because some circumstance has made it necessary, not because you enjoy dialectics. To practice dialectics, one must have a spirit of contradiction; this spirit is assumed out of necessity, not out of preference, and out of a necessity of the entire human society, not just of a particular individual.

In defending the world of faith, Kant ends up denying the possibility of knowledge, although not explicitly. His philosophy distrusts the foundation of any knowledge that is not purely formal. All absolutes are discarded, except for the limits of human understanding — the limits of human understanding, in turn, become a new absolute. These limits are ignorance, and thus Kant removes the possibility of knowledge of divine truths and replaces them with the limits of our understanding. This is equivalent to exchanging God for ignorance. From then on, you no longer seek God because He is good, because He is the truth, but simply because you do not know Him. This rupture, so characteristic of the Protestant world, is reflected in the doctrines that God is the wholly other, the totally different and inaccessible, impervious to intelligence, and therefore must be accepted without effort of comprehension. Master Eckhart, although a Dominican friar, is the most exemplary representative of this tradition.

I see a fundamental error in the doctrines of mystics who, like Eckhart, share in that Kantian enthronement of ignorance. They talk a lot about the unknowable, about mystery, but the truth is that the facts of faith are not that mysterious. If Christ incarnated, if He walked among us, if He was seen and touched, it is because in some way He can be known as a real Person, about whom certainties can be had. He is a mystery, to be sure, but He can be known, albeit never fully known. The underlying dramaticism of Kant leads to the belief that, since God is unknowable, it is of no use for you to strive to know Him, which amounts to saying that you cannot have knowledge of the ultimate foundation of existence. In this regard, all that is left for you is an effort of faith. But faith in what? How can you believe in something that you are completely unaware of? This implies a radical separation between man and God. Following a relentless logic, the tradition that comes from Eckhart, passes through Luther and Kant, could only end in the death of God. It becomes a theology of despair.

On the contrary, a characteristic of the mainstream of Catholic thought is to oscillate between knowledge and ignorance without settling in one pole or the other and without despairing. Mário Ferreira dos Santos decisively aligns himself with this line. He demonstrates that knowledge exists, that it is possible, objective, and can be proven, but that it does not eliminate the need for faith. Faith means fidelity, which is opposed to doubt or denial. Peter was the first manifest case of a Christian who had faith and denied it. But he denied it because he knew. He had accompanied Jesus for a long time, witnessed the transfiguration, he knew full well that Jesus was the Christ, but even so, in a moment of fear, he ceased to believe. Faith cannot only be understood as trusting in something you do not see, but also as confirming belief in something you have known but do not have direct testimony of at a certain moment. This is what fidelity consists of, even in the Hebrew world, in which emunah is fidelity to a promise. It is necessary to be faithful not only to a promise regarding the future but also to the promises made in the past. There is no fidelity to the future without fidelity to the past. It is necessary to be faithful to the given word, to what you already know, have declared, and thought.

Faith cannot have total ignorance as its object. Something must be given to you so that you may believe in the rest. Christ heals a blind man and tells him that his faith has saved him (Mk 10, 52), but the leper first had to have some news about Christ — otherwise, it would not have been possible for him to believe. That is why the Church has aversion to all this cult of faith and the unknown, which necessarily leads to a fatal dualism. It is a kind of tragic vision of knowledge that separates form and matter, act and potency, individual and world, subject and object of knowledge, without perceiving the need for some proportionality between these poles.

Mário Ferreira has a keen understanding of this. He knows that every act contains something of potency, otherwise, it would be realized and exhausted at once. Similarly, potency must also possess some aspect of act; otherwise, it would be nothing, not even potency — to be potency, it must first be, which is already an act to some extent. To the extent that potency is, it possesses its own form. Thus, the potency of knowing has something of the act of knowledge, and that which exists, which is knowledge in actuality in reality, has something of the possibility of being known. There is a proportion between one thing and the other. Mário Ferreira calls this intrinsic proportionality “law of intrinsic proportionality.” Symbolically, it corresponds to the number five, a key number for Mário Ferreira. The understanding of the physical world, the actually existing world, begins with five, with intrinsic forms, comparable to what Aristotle called individual substance. However, Mário Ferreira goes a little further, as his ontology encompasses the idea that the intrinsic form not only groups matters but also possibilities, among which there are contradictions. It is precisely the cluster of contradictions that forms the individual being.

To these contradictions, which exist within being and make it exactly the way it is, our philosopher calls tensions. He realizes that the individual substance is not just a form but a tensional form, an idea that already appears somewhat nebulous in Leibniz’s “monad.” Nevertheless, aristotelically, each individual being must have a form, and this form must have a purpose; but this form — Mário Ferreira will say — must be tensional. Furthermore, this tension is internal. It is not a simple monad with a single will, a single form, directed towards a single purpose; it is a cluster of elements and conflicting purposes that produces, from an external point of view, a particular resultant. If there were no tensions within the individual itself, it could only undergo changes coming from the outside. If every monad were something simple and univocal, it could not act on itself, it could only act outwardly. All existing beings have a form originating from the proportionality between form and matter, whose tension produces the tonus of their individuality.

This shows how much Mário distances himself from any tragic view of knowledge.

Part IV: Mário Ferreira dos Santos and Our Future44

When the work of a single author is richer and more powerful than the entire culture of his country, there are two possibilities: either the country agrees to learn from him or it rejects the gift from heaven and inflicts upon itself the deserved punishment for the sin of pride, condemning itself to intellectual decline and all the accompanying moral miseries that necessarily follow.

Mário Ferreira occupies a position in Brazil similar to that of Giambattista Vico in Neapolitan culture of the 16th century or Gottfried von Leibniz in Germany at the same time: a universal genius lost in a provincial environment incapable not only of understanding him but of seeing him. Leibniz still had the recourse of writing in French and Latin, thus opening up some dialogue with foreign interlocutors. Mário is closer to Vico in his absolute isolation, which makes him a kind of monster. Who, in an intellectual environment imprisoned by the pettiest immediatism and the most depressing materialism – materialism not even understood as a philosophical stance, but as a vice of believing only in what has bodily impact – could suspect that in a modest office in Vila Olímpia, actually a passage filled with books between the kitchen and the living room, an unknown person was discussing on equal terms with the great philosophers of all times, meticulously demolishing the most fashionable schools of thought and on their ruins erecting a new standard of universal intelligibility?

The problems that Mário faced were the highest and most complex in philosophy, but precisely because of that, they are so far above the banal cogitations of our intellectualism that it could not confront him without undergoing a metanoia, a conversion of the spirit, the discovery of an ignored and infinite dimension. It was perhaps the unconscious premonition of terror and awe – the Aristotelian thambos – that impelled it to flee from this experience, seeking refuge in its usual pettiness and gradually dwindling until reaching complete insignificance; certainly the greatest phenomenon of intellectual self-annihilation ever to occur in such a short time in any era or country. The disproportion between our philosopher and his contemporaries – far superior, however, to the current generation – is measured by an episode that took place in an anarchist center, on a date that escapes me now, when Mario and the then most eminent official intellectual of the Brazilian Communist Party, Caio Prado Junior, confronted each other in a debate. Caio spoke first, answering from the Marxist point of view the question proposed as the leitmotif of the debate. When he finished, Mário stood up and said something like this:

I regret to inform you, but the Marxist point of view on the chosen topics is not what you have presented. Therefore, I will redo your lecture before giving mine.

And so he did. Highly appreciated in the anarchist group, not because he was fully an anarchist himself, but because he defended the economic ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mário was never forgiven by the communists for this humiliation imposed on a sacred cow of the Party. This fact may have contributed somewhat to the wall of silence that surrounded the philosopher’s work since his death. The Communist Party always claimed the authority to remove authors who bothered it from circulation, using its network of agents in high positions in the media, the publishing world, and the education system. The list of those condemned to ostracism is long and notable. But in Mário’s case, I don’t believe that was the decisive factor. Brazil chose to ignore the philosopher simply because it did not understand what he was talking about. This collective confession of ineptitude certainly has the mitigating factor that the philosopher’s works, published by himself and sold door to door with a success that contrasted pathetically with the complete absence of mentions in cultural media, were printed with so many omissions, truncated sentences, and general revision errors that reading them became a true torment even for the most interested scholars – which certainly explains but does not justify it. The disproportion evidenced in that episode becomes even more eloquent because Marxism was the dominant or sole center of intellectual interests for Caio Prado Junior, while in the infinitely broader horizon of Mário Ferreira’s fields of study, it was only a detail to which he could have devoted only a few months of attention: in those months, he learned more than the specialist who had dedicated an entire lifetime to the subject.

Mário Ferreira’s mind was so tremendously organized that it was easiest for him to immediately locate any new knowledge that reached him from a strange and unknown field within the whole intellectual order. In another lecture, when questioned by a professional mineralogist who wished to know how to apply the logical techniques that Mário had developed to his specialized field, the philosopher replied that he knew nothing about mineralogy but that, through deduction from the general foundations of science, the principles of mineralogy could only be such and such – and he listed fourteen of them. The professional acknowledged that he only knew eight of them.

The philosopher’s biography is full of these demonstrations of strength that frightened the audience but meant nothing to him. Those who listen to the recordings of his lectures, recorded in the faltering voice of a man affected by the severe heart disease that would kill him at 65, cannot help but notice the touching modesty with which the greatest sage ever known in Lusophone lands addressed even the most unprepared and coarse audiences with more than paternal education and patience. In these recordings, little is noticeable of the grammatical hiatuses and incongruities inherent to oral expression, almost inevitable in a country where the gap between speech and writing widens day by day. The sentences come complete, finished, in an admirable hierarchical sequence, spoken in a straight tone, as in dictation.

When I refer to mental organization, I am not only talking about a personal skill of the philosopher, but about the most characteristic feature of his written work. If, at first glance, this work gives the impression of an unmanageable chaos, a complete editorial disaster, a more thorough examination reveals in it, as I demonstrated in the introduction to "The Wisdom of Eternal Laws,"45 a plan of exceptional clarity and integrity, realized almost flawlessly throughout the 52 volumes of his monumental construction, the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences.

In addition to the poor editorial care – a sin that the author himself recognized and rightly attributed to lack of time – another factor that makes it difficult for the reader to perceive the order behind the apparent chaos comes from a biographical cause. Mário’s written work reflects three distinct stages in his intellectual development, of which the first gives no hint of the two subsequent ones, and the third, compared to the second, is such a formidable leap in the scale of degrees of abstraction that it seems as if we are facing not a philosopher struggling with his uncertainties, but a prophet-legislator enunciating revealed laws before which human capacity for discussion must yield to the authority of universal evidence.

Mário Ferreira’s inner biography is truly a mystery, so great were the two intellectual miracles that shaped it. The first transformed a mere essayist and cultural disseminator into a philosopher in the most technical and rigorous sense of the term, a complete master of the issues debated over two millennia, especially in the fields of logic and dialectic. The second made him the only – I repeat, the only – modern philosopher who withstands a direct comparison with Plato and Aristotle. This second miracle is announced throughout the entire second phase of his work, in a sequence of enigmas and tensions that demanded, in a certain way, to explode in a storm of evidence and, escaping from the dialectical game, invite intelligence to an attitude of contemplative ecstasy. But the first miracle, befalling the philosopher in his forty-third year, has nothing, absolutely nothing, that could have foreseen it in the published work up until then. The philosopher’s family was witness to the unexpected. Mário was giving a lecture in the somewhat literary, somewhat philosophical tone of his usual writings when suddenly he apologized to the audience and withdrew, claiming that he had “had an idea” and urgently needed to write it down. The idea was nothing more, nothing less than the numbered theses intended to constitute the core of Concrete Philosophy, which in turn crowned the first ten volumes of the Encyclopedia, which would be written simultaneously or subsequently, but were already embedded there in some way. Concrete Philosophy is constructed geometrically as a sequence of self-evident assertions and conclusions exhaustively grounded in them – an ambitious and successful attempt to describe the general structure of reality as it must necessarily be conceived for the affirmations of science to make sense.

Mário names his philosophy “positive,” but not in the Comtean sense. Positivity (from the verb “to put”) there means only “affirmation.” The goal of Mário Ferreira’s positive philosophy is to seek what can legitimately be affirmed about the whole of reality in light of what philosophers have investigated over 24 centuries. Beneath the differences between schools and currents of thought, Mário discerns a multitude of points of convergence where everyone agreed, even without declaring it, while at the same time constructing and synthesizing the necessary methods of demonstration to support them from all conceivable angles.

Hence, positive philosophy is also “concrete.” A concrete knowledge, he emphasizes, is a circular knowledge that connects everything belonging to the studied object, from its general definition to the factors that determine its coming into and going out of existence, its insertion into larger totalities, its place in the order of knowledge, etc. That is why a sequence of geometric demonstrations is complemented by a set of dialectical investigations, so that what was obtained in the sphere of high abstraction is rediscovered in the realm of the most singular and immediate experience. The ascent and descent between the two planes occur through decadialectics, which focuses on its object from ten aspects:

  1. Subject-object field. Every being, whether physical, spiritual, existing, non-existing, hypothetical, individual, universal, etc., is simultaneously an object and a subject, which is the same as saying – in terms that are not used by the author – receiver and transmitter of information. If we take the highest and most universal object – God – He is evidently the subject and only the subject, ontologically: generating all processes, He is not the object of any. However, for us, He is the object of our thoughts. God, who ontologically is pure subject, can be an object from a cognitive point of view. At the other extreme, an inert object, like a stone, seems to be pure object, without anything subject-like. However, it is obvious that it is somewhere and emits some information about its presence to the surrounding objects, for example, the weight with which it rests on another stone. With an immense gradation of differentiations, each entity can be precisely described in its respective functions of subject and object. To know an entity is, first and foremost, to know the differentiation and articulation of these functions. Some exercises for the reader to warm up before delving into the study of Mário Ferreira’s work: (1) Differentiate the aspects and occasions in which a ghost is subject and object. (2) And an abstract idea, when is it subject, when is it object? (3) And a fictional character, like Don Quixote?

  2. Field of actuality and potentiality. Given any entity, one can distinguish between what it actually is at a certain moment and what it can (or cannot) become in the next instant. Some abstract entities, such as freedom or justice, can be transformed into their opposites. But a cat cannot become an anti-cat.

  3. Distinction between real possibilities and non-real or merely hypothetical possibilities. Every possibility, once logically stated, can be conceived as real or unreal. We can only obtain this gradation through the dialectical knowledge we have of the object’s powers.

  4. Intensity and extensity. Mário borrows these terms from the German physicist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932), separating what can only vary in terms of different states, such as the feeling of fear or the richness of meanings of a word, and what can be measured by means of homogeneous units, such as lines and volumes.

  5. Intensity and extensity in actualizations. When entities undergo changes, these changes can be both intensive and extensive in nature. The precise description of changes requires the articulation of both points of view.

  6. Field of subject oppositions: reason and intuition. The study of any entity under the first five aspects cannot be done based solely on what is known about them, but must take into account the modality of their knowledge, especially the distinction between the rational and intuitive elements that come into play.

  7. Field of reason oppositions: knowledge and ignorance. If reason provides knowledge of the general and intuition provides knowledge of the particular, in both cases there is a selection: to know is also to not know. All the dualisms of reason – concrete-abstract, objectivity-subjectivity, finite-infinite, etc. – proceed from the articulation between knowing and not knowing. An object is not known until one knows what must be unknown in order for it to become known.

  8. Field of rational actualizations and virtualizations. Reason operates on the work of intuition, actualizing or virtualizing, that is, bringing to the forefront or relegating to a background the various aspects of the perceived object. Every critical analysis of abstract concepts presupposes a clear awareness of what has been actualized and virtualized there.

  9. Field of intuition oppositions. The same separation between the actual and the virtual already occurs at the level of intuition, which is spontaneously selective. If, for example, we look at this book as a singularity, we abstract from the other copies of the same edition. Like reason, intuition knows and does not know.

  10. Field of the variant and the invariant. There is no absolutely new fact nor one absolutely identical to its predecessors. Distinguishing the various degrees of novelty and repetition is the tenth and final procedure of decadialectics.

Mário complements the method with pentadialectics, a distinction of five different levels on which an entity or fact can be examined: as a unity, as part of a whole of which it is an element, as a chapter in a series, as a piece of a system (or a structure of tensions), and as part of the universe.

In the first ten volumes of the Encyclopedia, Mário applies these methods to the resolution of various philosophical problems divided according to the traditional distinction between the disciplines that make up philosophy – logic, ontology, theory of knowledge, etc. – thus composing the general framework with which, in the second series, he will delve into the detailed study of certain singular themes.

It so happened that, in the elaboration of this second series, he lingered longer on the study of numbers in Plato and Pythagoras, which ended up determining the spectacular upgrade that marks the philosopher’s second metanoia and the final ten volumes of the Encyclopedia, as I explained in the introduction to “The Wisdom of Eternal Laws.” The book “Pythagoras and the Theme of Number,” one of the author’s most important works, bears witness to this transformation. What caught Mário’s attention was that, in the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition, numbers were not regarded as mere quantities in the sense in which they are used in measurements, but as forms, i.e., logical articulations of possible relations. What Pythagoras meant by his famous statement that “everything is numbers” is not that all differentiating qualities could be reduced to quantities, but that the quantities themselves were, so to speak, qualitative: each one of them expressed a certain type of articulation of tensions whose set formed an object. But if that is indeed the case, Mário concludes, the sequence of integers is not just a count, but an ordered series of logical categories. Counting is, even unconsciously, ascending the steps of a progressive understanding of the structure of reality. Let us see, just to exemplify, what happens in the transition from the number one to the number five. Any and every object is necessarily a unity. “Ens et unum convertuntur,” “being and unity are the same thing,” says Duns Scotus. At the same time, however, this object contains within itself some essential duality. Even simple unity, or God, does not escape the gnoseological dualism of the known and the unknown since what He knows about Himself is unknown to us. At the same time, the two aspects of duality must be linked together, which requires the presence of a third element, the relation. But the relation, by articulating the previous two aspects, establishes a proportion between them, or a quaternity. The quaternity, considered as a differentiated form of the entity whose abstract unity we grasp in the beginning, is in turn a fifth form. And so on.

The mere act of counting expresses, synthetically, the set of internal and external determinations that make up any material or spiritual object, actual or possible, real or unreal. Numbers are, therefore, “laws” that express the structure of reality. Mário himself confesses that he does not know whether his very personal version of Pythagoreanism materially coincides with the philosophy of historical Pythagoras. Whether it is a discovery or a rediscovery, Mário’s philosophy unveils before our eyes, in a differentiated and meticulously finished manner, an entire doctrinal edifice that, in Pythagoras – and even in Plato -, was only embedded in a compact and obscure way. At the same time, in “The Wisdom of Principles” and the other final volumes of the Encyclopedia, he gives his own philosophical project an incomparably greater scope than could have been predicted even by the masterful “Concrete Philosophy.” At this point, what began as a set of methodological rules is transmuted into a complete system of metaphysics, the “Mathesis Megiste” or “supreme teaching,” far surpassing the original ambition of the Encyclopedia and elevating Mário Ferreira’s work to the status of one of the highest achievements of philosophical genius of all time.

I have no doubt that, when the current phase of intellectual and moral degradation in the country passes and it becomes possible to think of a reconstruction, this work, more than any other, must become the foundation of a new Brazilian culture. The work itself does not need this: it will survive very well when the mere memory of something called “Brazil” has disappeared. What is at stake is not the future of Mário Ferreira dos Santos: it is the future of a country that has given him nothing, not even a recognition in words, but to which he can give a new life in spirit.

Appendix: Bibliography of Mário Ferreira dos Santos

The editor thanks Ana Célia Rodrigues Warschauer for her help in researching Mário Ferreira dos Santos’s bibliography. 46

[Translator’s note: Since most of the books themselves have not been translated, the bibliography has been left untranslated as well.]

Seção I — Enciclopédia das ciências filosóficas

Primeira série

  • I- Filosofia e cosmovisão. São Paulo, Edanee, 1952 (6a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1961). 47

  • II- Lógica e dialéctica. São Paulo, Logos, 1953 (5a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1964).48

  • III- Psicologia. São Paulo, Logos, 1953 (5a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1963).

  • IV. Teoria do conhecimento (gnosiologia e criteriologia). São Paulo, Logos, 1954 (4a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1964).

  • V. Ontologia e cosmologia. São Paulo, Logos, 1954 (4a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1964).

  • VI. Tratado de simbólica. São Paulo, Logos, 1956 (5a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1964).49

  • VII. Filosofia da crise. São Paulo, Logos, 1956 (5a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1964).50

  • VIII. O homem perante o infinito (teologia). São Paulo, Logos, 1956 (5a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1963).

  • IX. Noologia geral (A ciência do espírito). São Paulo, Logos, 1956 (3a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1961).

  • X. Filosofia concreta. São Paulo, Logos, 1957 (4a ed., revista e ampliada, 3 vols., São Paulo, Logos, 1961).51

Segunda série

(A) Publicados

  • XI. Filosofia concreta dos valores. São Paulo, Logos, 1960 (3a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1964).

  • XII Sociologia fundamental e ética fundamental. São Paulo, Logos, 1957 (3a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1964).

  • XIII Pitágoras e o tema do número. São Paulo, Logos, 1956 (2a ed., São Paulo, Matese, 1965), Ibrasa, 2000.

  • XIV. Aristóteles e as mutações (tradução e comentário de Da geração e da corrupção das coisas físicas, de Aristóteles). São Paulo, Logos, 1955 (2a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1958).

  • XV. O um e o múltiplo em Platão (tradução e comentário do Parmênides, de Platão). São Paulo, Logos, 1958.52

  • XVI. Métodos lógicos e dialécticos, 2 vols. São Paulo, Logos, 1959 (4a ed., revista e ampliada, 3 vols., São Paulo, Logos, 1965).

  • XVII. Filosofias da afirmação e da negação. São Paulo, Logos, 1959.53

  • XVIII. Tratado de economia, 2 vols. São Paulo, Logos, 1962.

  • XIX. Filosofia e história da cultura, 3 vols. São Paulo, Logos, 1962.

  • XX. Análise de temas sociais, 3 vols. São Paulo, Logos, 1962 (2a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1964).

  • XXI. O problema social. São Paulo, Logos, 1964 (2a ed., São Paulo, Logos, 1964).

  • XXII. Dicionário de filosofia e ciências culturais, 4 vols. São Paulo, Matese, 1963 (4a ed., São Paulo, Matese, 1966).

  • XXIII. Origem dos grandes erros filosóficos. São Paulo, Matese, 1965.

  • XXIV. Grandezas e misérias da logística. São Paulo, Matese, 1967.

  • XXV. Erros na filosofia da natureza. São Paulo, Matese, 1967.

  • XXVI. Das categorias, de Aristóteles (tradução, notas e comentários). São Paulo, Matese, 1960 (2a ed., São Paulo, Matese, 1965).

  • XXVII. Isagoge, de Porfírio (tradução, notas e comentários). São Paulo, Matese, 1965.

  • XXVIII. Protágoras, de Platão (tradução, notas e introdução). São Paulo, Matese, 1965.

  • XXIX. O Apocalipse de S. João: A revelação dos Livros Sagrados. São Paulo: Cone Sul, 1998.

(B) Inéditos

  • XXX. Comentários a S. Boaventura. Original datilografado, 100 pp.

  • XXXI. As três críticas de Kant. Original datilografado, 226 pp.

  • XXXII. Comentário aos “Versos Áureos” de Pitágoras. Original datilografado, 88 pp.; mais tradução dos Comentários de Hiérocles, 57 pp.

  • XXXIII. Cristianismo, a religião do homem. Original datilografado, 69 pp.54

  • XXXIV. Tao Te Ching, de Lao-Tsé (tradução e comentários). Original datilografado, 85 pp.

(C) Dispersos e fragmentos

XXXV. Filosofia e romantismo. Inacabado. Original datilografado, 42 pp.

XXXVI. Brasil, país de excepção. Inacabado. Original datilografado, 50 pp.

XXXVII. Sto. Tomás e a Sabedoria — e outras palestras inéditas. Transcrição datilografada, 158 pp.

XXXVIII. Enéadas, de Plotino. Tradução. Original datilografado, 179 pp. O comentário anunciado não chegou a ser escrito.

XXXIX. De Primo Principio, de John Duns Scot. Tradução. Original datilografado, 68 pp. O comentário anunciado não chegou a ser escrito.

XL. Da interpretação, de Aristóteles. Tradução. Original datilografado, 36 pp. O comentário anunciado não chegou a ser escrito.

Terceira série

(A) Publicados

  • XLI. A sabedoria dos princípios. São Paulo, Matese, 1967.

  • XLII. A sabedoria da unidade. São Paulo, Matese, 1968.

  • XLIII. A sabedoria do Ser e do Nada, 2 vols. São Paulo, Matese, 1968 (póstumo).

  • XLIV. A sabedoria das leis eternas. Edição, notas e introdução por Olavo de Carvalho. São Paulo: E Realizações, 2001.

(B) Inéditos

  • XLV. Dialéctica concreta. Original datilografado, 196 pp.

  • XLVI. Tratado de esquematologia. Original datilografado, 215 pp.

  • XLVII. Teoria geral das tensões. Inacabado. Original datilografado, 131 pp.

  • XLVIII. Deus. Original datilografado, 228 pp.

Seção II — Livros avulsos55

  • I. O problema social. São Paulo: Logos, 1962 (2a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • II. Curso de oratória e retórica. São Paulo: Logos, 1953 (12a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • III- O homem que nasceu póstumo: temas nietzschianos. São Paulo: Logos, 1954 (3a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • IV. Assim falava Zaratustra. São Paulo: Logos, 1954 (3a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • V. Técnica do discurso moderno. São Paulo: Logos, 1953 (5a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • VI. Práticas de oratória. São Paulo: Logos, 1957 (5a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • VII. Curso de integração pessoal. São Paulo: Logos, 1954 (6a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • VIII. Análise dialética do marxismo. São Paulo: Logos, 1954.11

  • IX. Páginas várias. São Paulo: Logos, 1960 (10a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • X. Assim Deus falou aos homens. São Paulo: Logos, 1958 (2a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • XI. Vida não é argumento. São Paulo: Logos, 1958 (2a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • XII. A casa das paredes geladas. São Paulo: Logos, 1958 (2a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • XIII. Escutai em silêncio. São Paulo: Logos, 1958 (2a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • XIV. A verdade e o símbolo. São Paulo: Logos, 1958 (2a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • XV. A arte e a vida. São Paulo: Logos, 1958 (2a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • XVI. A luta dos contrários. São Paulo: Logos, 1958 (2a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • XVII. Certas sutilezas humanas. São Paulo: Logos, 1958 (2a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • XVIII. Convite à estética. São Paulo: Logos, 1961 (6a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • XIX. Convite à psicologia prática. São Paulo: Logos, 1961 (6a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • XX. Convite à filosofia. São Paulo: Logos, 1961 (6a ed., São Paulo: Logos).

  • XXI. Dicionário de pedagogia e puericultura. São Paulo: Matese, 1965, 3v. 56

  • XXII. Invasão vertical dos bárbaros. São Paulo: Matese, 1967.57

  1. Published as the Introduction to: Mário Ferreira dos Santos, A sabedoria das leis eternas. São Paulo, É Realizações, 2000.↩↩

  2. Idem, op. cit., p. 30.↩

  3. Translator’s note: “Alguma coisa há, e o nada absoluto não há”. Mário was quite nuanced about how he used “existir” (to exist), “ser” (to be) and “haver” (not quite translatable, roughly to “be there”), but these nuances will be left for a translation of the Concrete Philosophy itself, since they do not affect this exposition of it.↩

  4. Translator’s note: “Prova-se mostrando e não só demonstrando”. The thesis clearly takes advantage of the similarity of the verbs for “showing” and “demonstrating”, but it would not be advantageous at this time to coin the word “monstration”.↩

  5. Cf. my course Edmund Husserl against psychologism: informal lectures around a reading of the logical investigations. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2020.↩

  6. Idem, op. cit, p. 32.↩

  7. I could say the same about Saint Anselm’s ontological argument: the contradiction of “The necessary being necessarily exists” is “The necessary being contingently exists” or “The necessary being necessarily does not exist”? It’s an undecided issue. Therefore, the ontological argument is a self-evident proposition. I discuss the notion of self-evidence in more detail in “Identity and univocity”, a handout available at www.olavodecarvalho.org; cf. also Edmund Husserl against psychologism.↩

  8. Idem, op. cit., p. 32.↩

  9. Ibid, op. cit., p. 33.↩

  10. Ibid, op. cit., p. 34.↩

  11. Ibid, op. cit., p. 34.↩

  12. Ibid, op. cit., p. 37.↩

  13. Ibid, op. cit., p. 38.↩

  14. The “character” corresponds to the eleventh level of my theory of the twelve layers of personality. See the booklet “The twelve layers of human personality and the proper forms of suffering,” available at www.seminariodefilosofia.org.↩

  15. 〈 See René Guénon, “Remarques sur la production des nombres” in Mélanges, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, pp. 58 et seq., and also Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “Kha et autres mots signifient ‘zéro’ dans leur rapports avec la métaphysique de V espace” in Le Temps et L’Étemité, trans. Gérard Leconte, Paris, Dervy-Livres, 1976, pp. 117 et seq. I disagree with Guénon regarding the foundations of his metaphysics of “Non-Being.” See my criticisms in lecture 389 (06/24/2017) of the Online Philosophy Course (hosted at www.seminariodefilosofia.org).〉↩

  16. Dicta & Contradicta, n. 3, São Paulo, June 2009.↩

  17. São Paulo: É Realizações, 2001.↩

  18. Olavo de Carvalho makes this acknowledgment as the editor of “The Wisdom of Eternal Laws”. It was considered appropriate to keep this bibliography as the author had organized it at the time of the publication of “The Wisdom” (2001). The subsequent reprints that have come out since then, as well as the previously unpublished works edited for the first time, are indicated in the subsequent footnotes.↩

  19. Reedições: São Paulo: É Realizações, 2014; 2018↩

  20. Reedição: Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2007.↩

  21. Reedição: São Paulo: É Realizações, 2007.↩

  22. Reedição. São Paulo: É Realizações, 2017.↩

  23. Reedição: São Paulo: É Realizações, 2009 (3t. em um único vol.).↩

  24. Reedição: São Paulo: Ibrasa, 2001.↩

  25. Reedição: São Paulo: É Realizações, 2017.↩

  26. Primeira edição: Florianópolis: Edusc, 2003.↩

  27. Entre estes veio a se incluir um romance até então inédito: Homens da tarde. São Paulo: É Realizações, 2019.↩

  28. Reedição: Sâo Paulo: É Realizações, 2018.↩

  29. For these biographical notes, I relied extensively on unpublished work by Nadiejda Santos Nunes Galvão, Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Biography (original typewritten, 55 pp.), as well as information conveyed to me by Yolanda Lhullier dos Santos.↩

  30. Firenze: G. C. Sansoni Editore, 2a ed., 1969.↩

  31. Cf. The Wisdom of Principles, pp. 15ff.↩

  32. Beraldo was particularly insightful in pointing out that this synthesis is “at once traditional and personal,” as Mário does not present Mathesis as an original work of his own but rather as a personal elaboration of a science already announced and partially realized by the great philosophers of the past, particularly Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Bonaventure.↩

  33. Magnitudes and Miseries of Logistics. São Paulo: Matese, 1966.↩

  34. Philosophies of Affirmation and Negation. São Paulo: Logos, 1959.↩

  35. See Giovanni Reale, Per una Nuova Interpretazione di Platone: Rilettura della Metafisica dei Grandi Dialoghi alla Luce delle “Dottrine Non-Scritte,” 5th ed., Milano, Vita e Pensiero, 1987, and also Henrique C. de Lima Vaz, “Um novo Platão?” Síntese (Belo Horizonte), no. 50, July-September 1990, pp. 101-103.↩

  36. The expression is not accidental: in the catastrophic disorder and incompleteness in which the author left his manuscripts, the “easiest” for the editor may, at best, mean only the “least difficult.”↩

  37. The title is uncertain. The author sometimes uses “Encyclopedia of Philosophical and Cultural Sciences,” sometimes “Encyclopedia of Philosophical and Social Sciences,” and sometimes just “Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences.” To simplify matters, the editor chose the latter option.↩

  38. Curiously, the oldest texts predate even the initial intuition of the Encyclopedia (1954), which marks a decisive change in the course of the author’s thoughts. I later discovered that Mário Ferreira, having undergone a major inner transformation around the age of forty, when he was already the author of many published works and many unpublished ones, attempted to reintegrate his youth works into the new lines of his thinking through corrections, cuts, and rearrangements, with varying degrees of success. God is the only example of a rearrangement carried out to its completion with full effectiveness, giving rise to an entirely new work forged with old words.↩

  39. At the time, this meant the work “The Wisdom of Eternal Laws” by Mário Ferreira dos Santos. São Paulo: É Realizações, 2001.↩

  40. Mario himself, admittedly a terrible self-editor, did not always adhere consistently to proper usage, so even a reissue of his published texts will bring about quite complicated editorial difficulties. In almost all of his books, there are errors, fragmented sentences, word swaps, and confusion in the organization of parts, among other things. According to Yolanda, the philosopher’s daughter, he was aware of these shortcomings but, in the urgency to finish the planned work, he couldn’t afford to pause for proper revisions. He frequently expressed the hope that, at least after his death, someone would give his texts the appropriate editorial treatment.↩

  41. The only, and praiseworthy, exception was the São Paulo psychologist Thomaz de Aquino Ferreira, who made every effort to disseminate Mário’s work in academic circles, but adverse circumstances prevented him from completing the work he had started. The editor expresses sincere tribute to this pioneer here.↩

  42. 〈René Guénon. La Métaphysique Orientale, Paris, 1939; Éditions Traditionnelles, 1976, p. 8. 〉↩

  43. 〈Ibid. Op. cit., pp. 12-13. 〉↩

  44. 〈Mário Ferreira dos Santos. Pitágoras e o tema do número. São Paulo: Matese, 1965, pp. 75-79. 〉↩

  45. This is the first thesis of Concrete Philosophy. I believe the most appropriate expression would be “something exists,” because at first, we do not know if what exists is a thing. It could be, for example, a process.↩

  46. I develop this critique of Descartes with much greater scope in Visões de Descartes. Campinas: Vide Editorial, 2013.↩

  47. In formulating dialectical method, Aristotle already formulates the entire scientific method. There is no other scientific method that is ultimately not reduced to what Aristotle proposed. Cf. my “Aristóteles em nova perspectiva: introdução à teoria dos quatro discursos” [Aristotle in a new perspective: an introduction to the theory of the four discourses]. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2013.↩

  48. Or at least it had no competitors. Today, they already exist. I will discuss this later.↩

  49. As we will see when discussing “decadialectics,” this can be understood according to what Mário Ferreira called “updates and virtualizations” in the course of their own “updates.”↩

  50. Cf. my debate with Alexander Dugin: “The USA and the New World Order.” Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2012. Cf. also my articles collected in the section “Globalism” of “The Minimum You Need to Know Not to Be an Idiot.” Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2013.↩

  51. Edmund Husserl, in “Logical Investigations,” even demonstrates that logic is not an ‘art of thinking’: it is the pure articulation of concepts in an ideal sphere. Logical entities are purely formal, but their formality is neither created by thought nor a useful convention. Cf. my “Edmund Husserl against Psychologism: Informal Lectures on a Reading of Logical Investigations.” Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2020.↩

  52. 〈 On the opposite and complementary concepts of extensity and intensity, see Mário Ferreira dos Santos. Filosofia e cosmovisão. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Logos, 1955, pp. 164-77. The concepts were originally presented by Ostwald and Lupasco. They correspond, in part, to quantity and quality. Lupasco (dt. supra) associates the concept of extensity with: identity, homogeneity, materiality, spatiality, simultaneity, permanence, etc.; and the concept of intensity with: non-identity, heterogeneity, succession, disappearance, development, analysis. 〉↩

  53. 〈The concept of the “logos of an entity” can be found in “A sabedoria dos princípios” (The Wisdom of Principles). São Paulo: Matese, 1967, pp. 68-91; the concept of arithmós arkhê in “Pitágoras e o tema do número” (Pythagoras and the theme of number). 2nd ed. São Paulo: Matese, 1965, pp. 72-82. 〉↩

  54. 〈See, for example, “A sabedoria dos princípios,” pp. 29-30. It is necessary to state this in order to nip in the bud any attempt to exploit the author’s somewhat casual terminology in favor of theses that he would totally repudiate. Regarding evolutionism in particular, Ferreira demonstrated, in “Noologia geral,” the impossibility of explaining the emergence of third-degree abstracting capacities in humans through animal evolution, and in relation to Teilhard de Chardin, he said that he was philosophically “unimpressive” (unpublished lecture). 〉↩

  55. “The transition from the study of ‘pure possibilities’ to that of the ‘laws that effectively govern being’ corresponds, therefore, in Guénonian terms, to the descent from the plane of ‘metaphysics’ to that of ‘general ontology’ (‘metaphysics’ in the Aristotelian sense). If the arithmoi arkhai are the ‘pure principles,’ the laws are the ‘principles of manifestation’ of these pure principles.”↩

  56. C. Stephen Jaeger. The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe (950-1200). Trans. Nelson Dias Corrêa. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2019.↩

  57. Reedição: Sâo Paulo: É Realizações, 2012.↩

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