This article by Martim Vasques da Cunha, written for Gazeta do Povo, is one of the most thorough journalistic attempts to introduce new readers to the ideas of Olavo de Carvalho. The title is a riff on Olavo’s most famous book, the collection of journalistic columns known as “The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot”.
The Minimum You Need to Know About Olavo de Carvalho’s Thought
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| Writer Olavo de Carvalho is considered the guru of the new Brazilian right – (Photo: Reproduction/Facebook) |
We cannot stare at the sun or death.
La Rochefoucauld
In the “user’s manual” of ‘O Imbecil Coletivo’ (1996) – the final part of the trilogy that includes ‘A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural’ (1994) and ‘O Jardim das Aflições’ (1995), his critical panorama of the Brazilian environment – Olavo de Carvalho writes a passage in which he synthetically exposes the method of “symbolic dialectics” and also proposes, based on the reevaluation of the intellectual environment analyzed in these books, to restore philosophy as a path to purification of the soul.
He states that, when analyzing the famous engraving by William Blake, inspired by the Book of Job (and frontispiece to the early editions of ‘O Imbecil’), the biblical monsters Behemoth and Leviathan represent abyssal forces of nature, “the first reigning heavily over the world, the massive power of its belly firmly supported on its four legs, the second agitating in the depths of the waters, defeated and formidable in its impotent rancor.”
Based on what he calls the “rigorous application of the principles of Christian symbolism,” Olavo writes that Blake perceived, like few others, a great “contrast [between] psychic power and material power: Behemoth is the massive weight of natural necessity, Leviathan is the diabolical infrastructure, invisible under the waters – the psychic world – stirring with its tongue.”
These two monsters inhabit, in one way or another, both the stage of human history and the interior of our soul, each being respectively the spirit of negation and rebellion. In this struggle, Olavo explicitly states that “it is not up to man, nor to Behemoth, to subdue Leviathan. Only God himself can do it.” And he adds:
“Christian iconography shows Jesus as the fisherman who pulls Leviathan out of the waters, hooking its tongue. However, when man avoids the inner struggle, rejecting the help of Christ, then the destructive struggle between nature and the rebellious antinatural or infranatural forces is unleashed. The struggle shifts from the spiritual and interior sphere to the external stage of History. This is how Blake’s engraving, inspired by the biblical narrative, suggests to us with the synthetic force of its symbolism a metaphysical interpretation of the origin of wars, revolutions, and catastrophes: they reflect man’s resignation in the face of the call of inner life. By shying away from the spiritual battle that frightens him but that he could win with the help of Jesus Christ, man exposes himself to material dangers on the bloody stage of History. In doing so, he moves from the sphere of Providence and Grace to the realm of fate and destiny, where the call for divine help can no longer have an effect, for there, truth and error, right and wrong no longer confront each other, only the blind forces of relentless necessity and impotent rebellion.”
The “inner struggle” advocated by Olavo is supported, in his philosophy, by what he calls an obsessive search for the “unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness and vice versa.” This experience would be translated, both in concepts and actions, into the philosopheme, “the ideal system of intuitions and thoughts that hides behind the texts, a system that the texts reflect irregularly and unequally, sometimes with missing parts, and that can only be contemplated by those who reconstruct it,” as explained in the study “Poesia e Filosofia” (Poetry and Philosophy).
However, this unity does not come fully, but rather fragmented, in a draft state, as Olavo would later add in another text from the same period, “Da Contemplação Amorosa” (On Amorous Contemplation). What unites these sketches is precisely the philosopheme – and here he expands a bit more on what this term means, writing that it is
“the essential content of a connection of thoughts, intuitions, and other cognitive acts that form the world and the distinctive style of a particular philosopher. This is what allows us to distinguish between ‘the works of Aristotle’ and ‘the philosophy of Aristotle’… There are philosophers without works – starting with the father of us all: Socrates; there are philosophers whose thoughts come to us through writings by witnesses or assistants (we would not know Husserl’s thought without Fink’s writings). But there is no philosopher without a philosopheme – and he who publishes dozens or hundreds of erudite books, with opinions of philosophical style on philosophical subjects, does not become a philosopher by doing so. The philosophy of a philosopher is not in his texts but in a certain way of seeing things, which can be carried outside of them and participated in by anyone who, leaping over the texts, adopts this way of seeing and integrates it into their own.” (emphasis mine)
Olavo de Carvalho’s search for unity in his writings is part of a major problem that has afflicted modernity, especially in the 20th century, and one that the Brazilian philosopher undoubtedly wants to solve in his own way: the overcoming of the epistemological and ontological impasse of Philosophy – which can be summed up, roughly, as a questioning of the primordial meaning of Being.
At this point, it is evident that Olavo intends not only to recover what the true meaning of Being is – especially in a society possessed by the “new time of the world,” promulgated by the desperate philosophy of a Paulo Eduardo Arantes, seen in the previous article of this series – but also to restore it within what he believes is the very philosophical tradition.
Despite wanting to deny this fact, Olavo is, in Brazilian culture, a consequence of this impasse that, according to Benedito Nunes, has not yet been overcome. In the essay “Os círculos de Heidegger” (The Circles of Heidegger), Nunes starts from Heidegger’s project of the destruction of the history of ontology – whom Olavo, by the way, has no sympathy for – and establishes that the German philosopher’s criticism targets “Hegel’s conception, according to which all philosophical doctrines are part, with equal rights, of the same history of thought, a history that develops contradictions and transcends them, becoming more concrete and truer in each of its evolutionary moments.”
With his “symbolic dialectics,” Olavo tries to absorb and overcome Hegel, accepting the imperfections in the unity of his thought as they arise in the concrete course of History. Despite Nunes talking about Heidegger in the following passage, Olavo is not interested in imitating the journey of these two Germans and intends to find in this “history” the “only truth,” the “truth of fact that we can count on, constituted through an unrepeatable timeless process, whose faces philosophy reconstructs. The ontological question, once posed in antiquity by Parmenides or by Aristotle, received from each of them the only answers it could have received, and was soon overcome in the dialectical and evolutionary movement of the spirit, accomplished according to the character of the times and the cultural conditions of different peoples.”
Unlike Hegel – and Heidegger -, Olavo does not concern himself with shaping a “total system” because, thanks to the intuitive notion of amorous contemplation, he recognizes that reality can only be captured in parts or in a limited way. However, none of this detracts from the complete apprehension that the common man can have of the existence of Being, even in its everyday details. It is in this simultaneous tension – which exists among six anthropological poles (“origin-end,” “nature-society,” “immanence-transcendence”) – that we all live and from which Olavo aims to capture in his philosophy.
The Construction of the Theory
At the threshold of expression between unity and multiplicity – accentuated by the aforementioned tension – Olavo begins to build the edifice of his theory of action and society, based on the apparent oppositions between poetry and philosophy. In the text of the same name, it becomes crystal clear the herculean effort he makes to overcome, at any cost (especially personal), the philosophical impasse described by Benedito Nunes. As Olavo himself affirms, the essential difference between the poet and the philosopher is that the former, to effectively communicate his impressions or feelings about the world, needs to “engage in dialogue with the tribe” – that is, with his contemporaries and those who come after them – while the latter “engages in dialogue with Being” – a statement that, by the way, Heidegger would endorse, at least before rediscovering Friedrich Hölderlin’s work in the late 1930s.
If, in his lectures from that time about the Romantic poet – who was a university companion of Hegel, it must be said – the author of ‘Caminhos da Floresta’ seeks a complete integration between the actions of the poet and the philosopher, without seeing any dichotomy between them, Olavo de Carvalho goes in the opposite direction. For him, it is clear that the first thing a philosopher does “is to turn his back on the community, to ask, through experience, not what it can say at the same time to all men gathered around the campfire, but only what it must eventually say, if all goes well, to those few who continue to contemplate it closely until it opens up and reveals its intelligible content.”
From this viewpoint, the practice of philosophy is essentially an esoteric task – that is, aimed inward to a group of initiates who can understand it in its splendor. Here, Olavo is no different from a Plato or a Hegel. However, one must understand the philosopher’s attitude in general not as a way of deliberately concealing his knowledge. Quite the contrary: he needs to do this so that the definitions about a certain important subject become increasingly clear, both for himself and for those who can follow him in his discoveries.
After all, if the philosophical question par excellence is “Quid?” ("What?") – What is man? What is death? What is good? What is happiness? are the supreme examples of this type of procedure –, still, reflection cannot arrive at the essence of something. It is only an approximation. That’s why Olavo explains that “essences, or quiddities, reveal themselves in the intuitive act that contemplates the presence of an object, whose noetic content the philosopher does nothing but reproduce with the maximum fidelity and precision possible. His activity is as much as the poet’s, a translation of experience, whether internal or external. Every definitive judgment, when its object is a being and not a mere invented logical possibility – and even sometimes in this case –, is always the pure logical formalization of an intuited content, which memory fixes, and inner discourse describes.”
On the other hand, intuition cannot remain confined to the philosopher’s inner life. He needs to communicate the truth he has seen, regardless of others who may oppose it because it would not be comfortable for social life. It is in this clash with the polis – symbolized in the historical confrontation of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle with the rhetoricians and sophists – that philosophy finally becomes dialectical and, “through it, reflection and dialogue: but a dialogue that aims only to restore, above the net of illusions of everyday discourse, the first intuition of self-evident essences. And just as it cannot reveal essences, reflection – except in the sense of descriptive remembrance – cannot lead to the knowledge of principles and axioms.”
Thus, despite the usual dialectical path – quite different from the symbolic dialectic defended by Olavo, as we will see – being a “guidance and warming of intelligence for the awakening of intuition,” the intuition discovered by the philosopher must consider “on one hand, the reality of the data and, on the other hand, the conventions of vocabulary and the technical requirements of logical or dialectical exposition, consecrated by use in the community of craft.”
According to the course of this method, the difference between the philosopher’s process of reflection and that of the poet is that the latter “has to transform the intuited, as immediately as possible, into currency; he has to immediately cast the noetic content [which is already, certainly, poetic form] of an experience that may be highly individual, into the flowing water of common vocabulary, to make it the possession of all men in the language of their time and place”; whereas, the one who practices philosophy needs to understand that it is impossible “to indefinitely dwell on the criticism and repetition of his experience, to gain more clarity, to integrate it more deeply into the structure of his personal being, to distinguish it in its surroundings and neighboring aspects, to progressively make it part of ever wider experiences, to acquire the certainty that it has not revealed just a passing and accidental aspect, but the very nature of his being.” (emphasis mine)
The unity of this can only be achieved through how the knowledge of the experience of this wisdom will be transmitted. In poetry, it will never be hermetic, under penalty of being “an intolerable failure”; but the knowledge acquired through the paths of philosophy can only be, “in principle, something for philosophers, and only rarely for the whole people – except when the philosopher’s vocation is combined with that of the artist, or the educator, or the orator and politician, which is certainly accidental and not required,” because “communication, the concrete form of the written work, is in philosophy the accidental and minor moment of an activity that fundamentally consists in knowing and not in transmitting.”
Therefore, for Olavo de Carvalho, poetry is the “wisdom that knocks on the door of men” and philosophy “seeks no one” because it is itself the “quest for wisdom.” It may seem like a tautology, but it is not, as, despite being a literal and direct quest, unfortunately “the philosopher can only communicate a small part, and sometimes nothing.”
Between these two activities, there is neither a complete misunderstanding nor a complete identification. Once again, we find the anthropological tension described earlier, which will be synthesized, in its philosophical aspect, in the full form of the “bearer of knowledge,” the same man who reflects it and carries it to be communicated to all society. Hence, the imperfection of writing or even oral transmission, because “the book, the treatise, the lecture, is never anything more than the condensation of knowledge into a few general principles and their exemplification in a few samples; and true knowledge, the true wisdom, takes refuge in that living nucleus of intelligence that remains at the bottom of the author’s soul after the book is finished, and that will know how to give these principles other and unlimited incarnations and diverse, unforeseeable, surprising, or even paradoxical applications, according to the unbounded variety of situations in existence. Only in St. Thomas resided the wisdom of St. Thomas. We others can only be Thomists, which is a St. Thomas fixed and diminished, compacted by dehydration.”
Despite this gap between what has been grasped and what has been communicated by the philosopher, it is still essential to view all his records – the smaller writings, the letters, the drafts, the interviews, the class transcriptions – as a unity, even so that they become perfectly organic and coherent with the philosopheme encrypted in his work. At the same time, one must regard this unfinished ensemble – which must have the philosopher’s approval as the “adequate expression of his thought – or that, even without this explicit approval, may have the value of a reliable testimony” – as “an integral part of his Work, to the extent that they help to complete the philosopheme that it essentially consists of.”
But the philosopheme, in turn, is not only realized in an ideal system of abstract theses but also in the concrete personal attitudes with which the philosopher has given them living interpretation in the face of the situations of existence: Socrates' nobility in the face of death is the concrete exemplification of Socratic morality, which we would understand differently, in a more figurative and less strict manner, if its author had shown weakness in the face of the executioners."
Olavo thus articulates the final distinction between those who practice poetry and those who live philosophy. He explains that “of all the creative activities of the spirit, the artistic and literary is the one that demands the least personal commitment to its content: what art requires of the artist is devotion to the work to create it, not fidelity to it, once it is finished.” The work saves the poet; whereas, with the philosopher, what redeems him are the actions that show that he has learned from the philosophy he constructed during his life, in a simultaneous dichotomy that can be seen as follows:
“The relationship of the artist with the finished work is one of total independence; that of the philosopher [...] is one of responsibility and continuity. The artist, when publishing his creations, frees himself from them. The man of thought carries them like the cross of his destiny: whether to defend them or to renounce them, he will always have them before his eyes, to confirm in the past the acts of the present. The infamous life of a poet is redeemed by his writings; the infamous acts of a philosopher are the condemnation of his written work. And far from my mind is the reader who understands all this as a simple moralistic appeal for coherence between actions and works; for I do not say that this coherence should exist, but that it exists necessarily, for better or for worse, and that is why the actions of a philosopher must be incorporated into his philosophy as operative interpretations that the thinker gave to his own thought when translating them from the generality of ideas to the particularity of situations; therefore, in philosophy, biographical studies are not external and supervenient to literature but an integral part, albeit auxiliary, of the understanding of the philosopheme; the life of the philosopher is to his philosophy what jurisprudence is to codes.”
Thanks to his incredible verbal capacity, Olavo opens a breach that, while not exempting the fact that philosophy never excludes from itself the acts of the philosopher who practices it, also gives rise to the opportunity to perceive (and accept), within this same unity of thought, a seed of contradiction between the ideas and actions of the “bearer of knowledge.” Accepting this kind of “pendulum movement” would be one of the main characteristics, according to Olavo, of that intelligence which is obedient to revealed truth.
Judgment and True Intelligence
This is the main theme of the booklet “Intelligence and Truth,” the result of two lectures given in 1994 at the famous Philosophy Seminar, which would later be transformed into the Online Philosophy Course (COF) in the 2000s. Right from the beginning, Olavo makes it clear that his definition of intelligence “does not mean the ability to solve problems, mathematical ability, visual imagination, musical aptitude, or any other specific type of skill.” It is something more serious and profound: intelligence would be the “capacity to apprehend truth,” something completely different from thinking, as it lies in the “realization of its purpose, not in the nature of the means employed,” and thus can only be conceived as “the power to know the truth by any means whatsoever.”
Truth meets intelligence (and vice versa) when we understand that “the essential aspect of human beings, what sets them apart from animals, is not thought, reason, or even exceptionally developed imagination or memory.” Human beings find their essence when they encounter “everything that we imagine, reason, remember,” when “we are capable of seeing it as a whole and, with regard to this whole, we can say yes or no, we can say: ‘It is true,’ or; ‘It is false’.” In other words, true knowledge involves making a choice, a judgment about what something really is.
Therefore, intelligence is related to what to do when faced with moral dilemmas, dilemmas involving difficult choices that may lead to tragic consequences over time. Thus, the philosopher’s question is one that involves both knowledge and ignorance of an object, since “the thing that is offered to me in this moment does not perfectly meet the condition demanded in the word ‘what’ – that consistency, that cohesion of being, acting, and suffering, that power, and above all that fate, that non-being-in-any-other-way, that imperative absence of questions – and the capacity to ask questions – that comes upon me when I know what.”
This definition of intelligence that goes beyond “mere mental acts” opposes the “mistake” that has been “officialized and legitimized by the official education,” according to Olavo. To solve this problem, he proposes not only a method but, above all, the creation of a new community that teaches individuals the true practice of intelligence, the one that “does not consist in coming up with a true result but in admitting that result as true.” To admit, here, means to understand that intelligence is a free act that can “prefer a false result” and then “believe in this result, that is, assume personal responsibility for affirming it and the consequences that derive from it” – thus arriving at a more precise definition of what Olavo considers the act of intelligence: “it is the relationship established between man and truth, a relationship that only man has with the truth, and that only happens in the moment he understands and admits the truth, since he can become unintelligent in the next moment when he forgets or denies it.”
However, for this definition to be practical, intelligence must stop being a “purely cognitive faculty” – the mistake repeatedly propagated by the education of the status quo, according to Olavo – and be understood as a “synthesis of cognitive aptitude and a will to know,” where there is a connection between “inner dishonesty” and the “weakening of intelligence, which ends up being replaced by a sort of clever wickedness.” Olavo further elaborates on this statement and relates it to the existence of the intellectual elite of our present moment:
"Cleverness does not consist of grasping the truth but in grasping – undoubtedly with veracity – the most efficient lie for each occasion. The cunning person is effective but is condemned to fail in situations from which they cannot escape through some subterfuge, situations that require a confrontation with the truth. The connection between intelligence and goodness is recognized by all the great philosophers of the past, just as the corresponding connection, on the side of the object, between truth and goodness. [When we examine the following facts, in which,] frequently, our actions are not accompanied by words that explain them, not even internally; that is, [when] we are capable of acting in certain ways, explaining these acts in exactly the opposite way, precisely because the true motivations, remaining unexpressed and silent, elude conscious judgment. This leads us to nourish a double discourse, at least subconsciously.
From the moment you admit that something is true but proceed, even in secret, even inwardly, as if it were not true, you maintain a double discourse: on one level, affirming one thing, and on another level, affirming something else. [...] Thus, inner falsehood is always harmful to intelligence: it is a scotoma that spreads until it darkens the entire field of vision and replaces it with a complete system of errors and lies. When we get used to suppressing the truth regarding our memories, our imagination, our feelings, and actions, this suppression does not remain confined to the area we touch; it spreads to other surrounding territories, making us unable to understand a particular thing and, consequently, unable to understand many other things as well. [...].
Later, when we wish to study a specific subject that interests us or understand what is happening in our life, and we cannot, we will hardly perceive that we ourselves caused this injury to intelligence. I notice in many intellectuals today a repugnance, an instinctive defense against the truth, to the point that even when they want to accept it, they have to wrap it in a package of lies. The worst thing about this is that frequently this injury is compensated for by a hyperdevelopment of auxiliary faculties, an useless ornamental excrescence [and, therefore,] many of these injured intellects achieve success in intellectual professions."
To prevent others from falling prey to these “injured intellects,” Olavo de Carvalho proposes the construction of a true “national intellectualism,” the definition of which would be “a sufficient number of people capable of perceiving the truth for themselves and who do not need to be persuaded by anyone.” They would function spontaneously as “guardians of collective intelligence.” The main responsibility of this stratum of society – which doesn’t necessarily have to consist of “people engaged in culture or intellectual professions” – is to help people choose “between truth and falsehood,” doing their best to tell the truth and thus preventing them from deceiving themselves. As for who will guide them in this endeavor, Olavo doesn’t reveal anything about it yet, but he doesn’t hesitate to state the following:
“I affirm, unequivocally, that this is the case with the Brazilian intellectualism, which, almost entirely, uses cultural professions to make the people and the Brazilian opinion serve it, confirming its beliefs, of which it has no personal certainty, and for which it seeks precisely to gain collective support. [...] How can the intellectualism simultaneously preach a dissolving relativism, where the criteria of true and false dissolve to the point of becoming indistinguishable, and at the same time demand that politicians be honest and tell the truth to the people? [...] There is no doubt that the corruption of society begins with the corruption of the intellectual class, not with business or politics. [...].”
Undoubtedly, Olavo is absolutely right in this diagnosis. The problem arises when he proposes the following type of cure for the chaotic situation presented by his “critique of culture”:
“[...] From the point of view of usefulness for the individual, the objective of this course is the development of their intelligence, while from the social and cultural point of view, the objective is to provide people for a future true intellectual elite. What is an intellectual elite? It is people trained to perceive the truth as much as a boxer is trained to fight or a soldier is trained for war. In this sense, all nations that have achieved greatness in history had such an elite, formed long before the country gained any economic, political, military projection, etc. For it is not possible to solve problems first and become intelligent afterward. In every debate on national problems currently underway, there is only one thing everyone is trying to solve: Who will solve these problems? Who will examine them? Who has the ability to examine them with effective intelligence? If these people do not exist, then the initial problem is to form them. The top priority of this course is precisely this, if not to form, at least to contribute to forming, tomorrow or later, over perhaps twenty or thirty years, a true intellectual elite.”
Right after the explicit declaration of this mission, Olavo takes great care to emphasize that “with regard to the formation of an intellectual elite, it is not necessary to say that it is absolutely necessary for the members of such an elite to have concordant opinions; indeed, if they have discordant opinions, it may even be better in certain circumstances.” Notice this detail: “certain circumstances.” And what are they? Who determines them? The one who teaches or the one who receives the teaching? Would it be the members of the Philosophy Seminar – or, currently, the members of the Online Philosophy Course? And what would be the filter of intelligence that would make the essential distinction between what is truly important and what are these “certain circumstances”?
On the Edge of the Abyss
These questions begin to be answered when we read the essay “The Specter of Heresy – A Brief Exercise in the Science of Discerning Spirits,” written in 1995, when Olavo de Carvalho had an intense friendship with the poet Bruno Tolentino, whose work was precisely the subject of this text. Drawing parallels between the themes and forms of Tolentino’s poem, “The Specter” (which later became the opening of his magnum opus, ‘The World as Idea,’ published at the end of 2001), and Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s ‘The Machine of the World,’ the philosopher immediately starts his reasoning with a startling statement: that these verses by the author of ‘Katharina’s Hours’ can “only be a deceptive and temporary refutation that the author gives to his own life’s work.”
It should be clear that this warning is not an indication of Olavo’s disdain for Tolentino. It is quite the opposite: he makes this kind of assertion because he admires the poet’s work. As the philosopher himself concludes, it is the destiny of an entire culture, an entire country, all of us, to suffer “when a man of this stature, placed by Providence in such a decisive strategic position for the destinies of a national culture, is led by a suspicious inspiration to dangerously walk on the edge of an abyss.”
So, what would this abyss be? According to Olavo, the so-called denial displayed in “The Specter” can never be seen as a “conscious choice of the poet but one of those monumental lapses in which the soul, by distraction, favors its enemies, who constantly lie in wait to cross the bridge when the watchman falls asleep.” According to the same author who produced the text “Poetry and Philosophy”:
“And since the soul of a poet is a crossroads through which all the currents of force of a civilization pass, there are more than just the ordinary unconscious phantoms that neuroticize the common man among enemies: there are hidden, forgotten, often millennial spiritual and historical currents that yearn to use his voice as a channel through which they can escape from the underground prison and leap upon the entire society. Therefore, the responsibility of the poet is great and fearsome: by opening himself to inspirations that transcend him and giving them voice through a process that does not necessarily include – in fact, almost never includes – the exercise of discernment of spirits, he sometimes becomes the instrument of that which he would least desire to favor. That is why the interpretation of a poem goes far beyond the investigation of the author’s personal ‘intentions’: it extends to the hidden intentions of the Spirit which, mysteriously, delineates the paths of History.”
Beautiful words, undoubtedly, typical of someone who knows their charm very well. But what is the cause of this dispute? By comparing “The Specter” by Tolentino – whose main scene is the encounter of the lyrical self (which may or may not be the poet himself) with none other than the ghost of Charles Baudelaire, the accursed poet of modernity, on the banks of the Thames River – with Drummond’s meditation in “The Machine of the World” – in which the lyrical self (which may or may not be the man born in Itabira) finally comes to know the machinery that explains the cosmos – Olavo de Carvalho judges that in the first quoted poem, there is “a subcurrent that, beneath Tolentino’s consciously Catholic intention, takes us to a territory bordering on Satanism.”
Let’s leave aside the force of adverbs, nouns, and adjectives – and go straight to what seems to be the problem with the poem for Olavo. In the version he had access to (from 1995), before the lyrical self meets Baudelaire’s specter, the poet reflects on an “argument by John Locke about the fortuity of the Earth’s inclination.” This detail leads him to the following reasoning, given that Tolentino’s citations of these two names – one from philosophy, the other from poetry – would be “false attributions” of their roles:
“On the one hand, John Locke did not believe in any ‘conceptual light’ [one of Tolentino’s favorite metaphors], a pure creation of logical-mathematical reason that could superimpose – in Tolentino’s sense of the expressions – the ‘world as idea’ over the ‘world as such.’ The founder of empiricism could not, by definition, have anything Platonic. Not only, for Locke, does all knowledge come from the senses, but reason itself is nothing more than the product of a more or less passive decantation of sensory experience, where the spontaneous grouping of data into similar and different sets establishes, through mere induction, the sense of identity, logical categories, syllogistic forms, and everything else that composes the structures of rational thought. There is no ‘conceptual light’ there: the concept is, on the contrary, nothing more than the residue or mere shadow projected by sensory reality.”
Next, Olavo suggests that, instead of Locke, it would be better to consider “some apostle of absolute rationalism – Spinoza, Hegel – or even some furious logician, like Carnap or Frege.” As for Charles Baudelaire, he is even more categorical: the Frenchman “is also not what can be appropriately called an authorized spokesperson of divine light [which, according to Olavo, is what Tolentino would propose as a counterpoint to Locke’s ‘conceptual light’]. The inner experiences to which he had access were not produced by any religious asceticism but by drug use. They do not have the universal meaning and value of authentic mystical visions but are mere personal experiences, amplified by a rare poetic eloquence that only serves to make them even more misleading.”
As if not satisfied, Olavo calls Baudelaire a “hermit of evil” – and his poetry,
“far from bringing us a universal message of the Spirit, only expresses the subjective protest of the sensitive soul crushed by the ugliness of a world dominated by commercialism and technology. There, it could be considered an apology for the Spirit, albeit melancholic and defeatist. But what distinguishes it from other poetics of subjective protest are two unmistakable traits: first, its universalizing pretense; second, its deliberate, delightful, and perverse contamination in the evil it denounces.”
Thus, according to Olavo, unknowingly, Bruno Tolentino would be “contaminated” by this “Baudelairian method,” the essence of which would be the sum of the “repression of feelings” and the “imaginative exaltation,” in which his “extreme intellectualism,” disguised as fantasy, would be a kind of “twin brother” of John Locke’s “conceptual light,” giving birth to “something other than a snobbish and disturbing version of the ‘world as idea’.” And he concludes:
“[...] ‘The Specter’ goes far beyond an undue appreciation of Baudelaire’s esotericism [a reference Olavo makes to the title of René Guénon’s famous book, ‘The Esoterism of Dante’ – L’Esotérisme de Dante]. It grants the knowledge obtained by Baudelaire’s method of exalted fantasy a comparable, if not superior, authority to that of the Sacred Scriptures. The speaking specter, in fact, demands from its listener the renunciation of discursive thinking, the complete subjection of the soul to imaginative fantasy. The Church has never demanded so much: it limited itself to decreeing the conformity of reason with faith and warning, on the other hand, of the fearsome dangers to which man exposes himself when he allows himself to be carried away by faith not illuminated by reason. The Catholic dogma, strictly speaking, admits in man only two sources of knowledge of God: faith and reason. If there is anything that cannot give us this knowledge in any way, it is ‘experience,’ whether personal or collective. The mystical experience, even if authentic, has no authority and must be validated by its conformity to the precepts of faith, a conformity that is judged by reason. The argument implied here is that of Aristotle and St. Thomas: experience only gives us knowledge of the sensible singular, and it is rational intelligence that introduces into it the criteria of universality, necessity, possibility, contingency, etc., without which it has no cognitive value other than very rudimentary and crude.” (emphasis mine)
From this perspective, Drummond’s “The Machine of the World” would be the poem that dramatizes, through language that discusses the Lesser Mysteries ("corresponding [in esoteric jargon] to the symbolic sciences of nature: astrology, mathematics, alchemy, etc."), both the failure in initiation before these same Mysteries and “the cognitive renunciation that precedes entry into the Great Mysteries” (more specifically, the “vision of God”).
Here, Olavo interprets the verses from the perspective of his perennialist education, the school of thought that had René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon as its foremost exponents, defenders of a “transcendent unity of religions,” which formed the basis of most of the Brazilian philosopher’s studies during his formative years. Whether Drummond knew or had minimal knowledge of this type of line of thought, neither Olavo can predict, hinting, soon afterward, that his own interpretation of “The Machine” – as a “Christian poem of high mystical value” – may be just another interpretation, among many, falling into the same inverted reading that Olavo himself made of Bruno Tolentino’s poem and also of Tolentino’s interpretation of Drummond’s verses.
However, there is something more in this discussion between two extremely intelligent friends. It is not only about finding out if “The Specter” is nothing more than a “gnostic draft of a future great Catholic epic poem” – which indicates that Olavo was fully aware that the analyzed object in question was part of a larger tome that would be released under the title of ‘The World as Idea.’
In fact, it is a debate about the nature of this world possessed by the “conceptual light” and which was a kind of constant denunciation in Bruno Tolentino’s work. To be precise, Olavo de Carvalho wants to appropriate – or rather, control – the great discovery that the author of ‘Imitation of the Dawn’ made for others, always to his own detriment. If not that, then how can we interpret the following definition, in which Olavo ties the defense of the concept as a fundamental instrument of rational intelligence and his own definition of what the so-called “world as idea” should be, according to his point of view?:
"Thinking in concepts is as natural in man as breathing or dreaming; it is an indispensable instrument of our establishment in reality, at least as much as imagination or sensory perception, which without conceptual thinking would eventually wither away to become mere vegetative passivity. If thinking in concepts sometimes distances us from reality and imprisons us in the web of our own subjective inventions, the same accusation can be made, with equal justice, against sensory capacity, emotions, and imagination, not to mention Baudelairean fantasy. It cannot, therefore, be against the concept as such that the struggle for the predominance of the ‘world as such’ over the ‘world as idea’ must be directed; for a world where men could know the real and insert themselves into it without concepts, relying solely on the Baudelairean method of imaginative self-excitement, is as unreal as the most exalted Pythagorean delirium. To fight the concept in the name of Baudelairean fantasy is merely to exchange one world as an idea for another world as an idea, even more deceptive because enveloped in the prestigious aura of ‘direct knowledge.’
What diverts us from the world as such and imprisons us in the arithmetical palace of illusion is not conceptual thinking, which is natural and healthy in itself, but rather the Platonic rebellion against immediate life, the demented mathematism that substitutes models for things, the arrogant abstractionism that prefers the perfection of an invented logical certainty to the uncertainty of the received world – abstractionism that undoubtedly arises less from the internal dynamics of reason than from an aesthetic impulse to give thought the definitive formal perfection of a sonnet or an ode. This abstractionism is certainly incompatible with Christian conceptions of a personal God, the Incarnation, redemption, etc. But it is not incompatible with Baudelaire’s poetics, which arises from the same spirit of rebellion against the created world, the same desire to replace, with the imperfect divine creation, the perfection of an invented world."
The connection that Olavo makes between Baudelaire’s imaginative esotericism and Locke’s empiricism is found in the existential dependence of the latter on the former when “the conception that makes subjective experience enlarged a substantive of divine revelation” has historical and intellectual consequences of great reach, “even in the religious order, where ‘personal experience,’ ‘intuition,’ ‘interior vision,’ etc. have ended up acquiring, in the sensibility of a large part of intellectuals, an authority far superior to that of faith illuminated by reason. Baudelaire is, in this respect, an heir and beneficiary of the Lockean precedent. If we reject Locke’s empiricism, little remains of Baudelaire’s method.”
Without being satisfied, Olavo goes further in his reasoning, claiming that there is an even deeper subordination of Locke’s ideas to Baudelaire’s delusions, assuming the fact that “if reason is a product of experience [according to Locke], and if experience is always individual, confined to the limits of the body that suffers it, then the categories of reason are merely the sum of the experiences of many individuals. They are not universal and necessary but only general – of a quantitative and statistical generality. If the validity of logical reasoning is supported by the experiences of many, then the logical reasoning of a lone individual has no authority against the opinion of the majority” – and thus, this leads Olavo to conclude that “for imagination to acquire an authority superior to reason, it only needs to amplify itself to the dimensions of the collective.”
It was precisely this that led Tolentino, according to the philosopher, to “pit Baudelaire against Locke,” which would be the same as “opposing Satan to Beelzebub,” culminating in the complete and definitive victory of the English empiricist and the dreadful error (according to Olavo) of the poet to “turn against conceptual thinking the hostility that should only be directed against the perverse will that transforms concept, image, feeling, and all other instruments of cognition into instruments of falsehood.”
Drama of Reason
Olavo would be right in this verbal (and logical) acrobatics if it were not for one detail: none of this has anything to do with what Bruno Tolentino really thought about the “world as idea”. This fact must be demonstrated in four points.
The first point is that, right at the beginning of the ten essays that serve as an introduction to the volume finally published in 2001 under the title ‘The World as Idea’, Tolentino makes it clear that he does not despise the use of the concept as a tool for reflection. In fact, he states that he did not live “completely indifferent to the sirens of Idea, far from it,” as it was in the name of the latter that, “century after century since the end of the Middle Ages, the cognitive adventure has been mortgaged to an inverse empiricism, a kind of speculative haven that replaces the perplexities of mortal condition.”
The use of the expression “inverse empiricism” was not accidental; Tolentino immediately wants to eliminate any reference to Locke in the analysis of his thought (and it was not by chance that, in the definitive version of the poem, he replaced the English philosopher with none other than Immanuel Kant, as a deference to Olavo’s observation, although he never mentioned the hermit of Königsberg in “The Specter of Heresy”). The “world as idea” is not merely a philosophical question or another formal or technical problem. It is a moral – and mortal – choice, in which “the life of the spirit” must make the tearing choice “between two postures, only apparently opposed: either ‘withdraw’ from the arena, deactivating its tensions with the abdication of a somnambulist’s mea culpa, tautological and fatalistic, or ‘abolish’ the intractable opacity of the real in a movement of haughty inebriation, of rebellious blindness.”
This latter choice would be the “great temptation,” the “refuge par excellence (and some even say inescapable) of Western restlessness,” while never forgetting that the “concept per se (as with the metaphor, moreover)” is nothing more “than a tool: noble, illustrious, indispensable as it may be,” but extremely dangerous since, with it, one cannot “invert the relationship between means and ends.” The concept can never be “the very substrate of knowledge – instead of the formal counterpoint it is to the tumultuous night of the sensible” – because, if that happens, there will certainly be an exchange of the “world-as-such” for the “world-as-idea”.
Therefore, what Tolentino offers us is not a Byzantine discussion about fantasy, imagination, or empiricism, but rather a diagnosis that affects all of us, without exception, including the poet himself: “Confronted with the tensions and paradoxes from which the cognizant rose is nourished, the life of the spirit tends to capitulate to the seductions of the concept, which, in turn, stupefies it with formulas, methods, and dogmas that achieve nothing more than a supposedly ‘secure’ reading, and in the end, merely reductive, of the foundations of being and the categories of the real.”
In fact, this is what he constantly referred to – perhaps to emphasize to those who did not understand him – as the “drama of reason”, in which the concept is just one of the poles of tension whose balance depends on accepting the fact that “there is no lesson of darkness in the daily realms of the concept, all of them opposed to the ‘empire of the real’.” In this drama, Tolentino also seeks a point of support in the constant (and excruciating) dialectic of sin and Grace, a dialectic completely different from symbolic dialectics by recognizing that, in its movement, “without chiaroscuro, without the mediations of darkness, ‘things’ have no ‘shadow’, and it follows that in this kind of ‘record’ without intellectual interest or any desire for what surpasses it, there must not be a lesson worthy of the name; none, in any case, that does not tend toward what I call the moral marbleization of being – for the conceptual man, the only acceptable response to the restlessness of the mind in the face of the fleeting, the precarious, the elusive.”
It is interesting to note that Olavo de Carvalho never cites the expression “drama of reason” in the text dedicated to his friend’s work – and this leads us to believe that the philosopher analyzed only a part of Tolentino’s poetic and aesthetic intentions, disregarding others that would certainly show that his reasoning about those “Satanic verses” was not so complete. And here is the second reason why his analysis is mistaken: Olavo seems to have forgotten that Tolentino himself responded to the dramatized experience in “The Specter” with another poem, equally complementary, which concludes the First Book of ‘The World as Idea’.
We are talking about “Modeling Lesson”, whose memorable scene of the lyrical self talking internally with none other than Saint Irenaeus of Lyon (the author of the patristic monument ‘Against Heresies’) is the perfect counterposition to the “Satanism” decrypted by Olavo in the encounter of the poet with Baudelaire’s specter. The definition of a “modeling lesson”, which appeared in the late 1980s in poems written in English like “A sermon upon the clay”, is very dear to Tolentino’s work – and, therefore, has nothing to do with the suggestions Olavo might make as consequences of the philosophical discussion started in “The Specter of Heresy”. This lesson would be something that goes “beyond a formal exercise of a mostly symbolic nature”, an “operation of the intelligence that cures, first and foremost, the intractable and apparently formless roughness of the real, and that, in seeking to form any image of it, only legitimizes itself by balancing its tensions and paradoxes in such a way as to effectively touch that vital nerve, that living carnature of language in which meaning and signifier are inseparable – therefore meaningful. It is evident that the spirit of the concept knows nothing and wants nothing to do with this balance, with this exercise, above all moral.” (my emphasis)
Comparing the final result of ‘The World as Idea’ with his provisional analysis of a single poem in the tome, it becomes apparent that Olavo did not preserve this “balance” in his interpretation of “The Specter”. If he had drawn parallels between the hallucination with Baudelaire and the vision with Saint Irenaeus, he would have noticed that what was important to Tolentino was never the appropriate use of the concept as a cognitive instrument, but rather as
regarding the uneasy sum,
of all that will remain
of what we can never
perfect
(not for lack of stimulus,
but for mistrusting
the perennial ambition
of being our own
best architects),
all that does not surpass
indifference to grace,
in the pomp and pride
of the dreams of intellect
which presumes itself autonomous [...]
(“Modeling Lesson”, my emphasis).
Thus, we come to the third reason why Olavo’s interpretation is mistaken: despite having an enviable literary and philosophical repertoire, with references to philosophia perennis, Drummond, Baudelaire, Locke, etc., he simply forgot (or perhaps did not know) that the poem “The Specter” is also a reinterpretation of the famous episode described by T.S. Eliot in the fourth and final part of his ‘Four Quartets’, titled “Little Gidding,” in which the lyrical self has a vision with none other than Dante Alighieri.
This is not mere speculation. Tolentino was extremely self-conscious in his citations – and, sensing that no one would notice this small detail, he made a point of highlighting it through the dedication to Ivan Junqueira (the national translator of both Eliot and Baudelaire). The settings in both poems are eerily similar: Eliot and Tolentino are in London; only the former witnesses a city in ruins, devastated by the bombings of World War II, while the latter is immersed in the “arabesques of the mind” on the banks of the Thames.
The contrast could not be more striking – and, for that reason, evident. What we have here is a poet secretly conversing with another poet, and both are cross-referencing their greatest influences, whether positive or negative. In Eliot’s case, it is the visionary of ‘The Divine Comedy’, foreshadowed by none other than a “dark dove,” the opposite of the bird symbolizing the Holy Spirit, which prompts the Anglo-American to reinterpret his entire literary career; in Tolentino’s case, the dark dove is the very specter of poetry metaphorized in the terrifying presence of Charles Baudelaire, warning the Brazilian colleague that in seeking “the whole part by part,” wanting “the perfections of geometry/ and at the end of the circular dream of art//, you surrender everything to the phantasmagoria, to the juggling games of illusion.”
And here is the fourth, but no less important, reason why Olavo’s interpretation does not correspond to reality. What he did not understand is that “The Specter” is not a philosophical game about the “discernment of spirits,” but it does what all great poetry (and all great art) aims to do: dramatize an extreme experience of the human condition – which, in this case, is the confrontation with the obscure roots of the concept, resulting in that moral aestheticism that harmed not only the biographies of Baudelaire or Drummond, but also those of philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger. It is a poem that portrays, with great ambition and success, the same event described by Eliot in his encounter with Dante in “Little Gidding”: the presence of the “dark dove” in subjects who should live their full philosophical and poetic vocation, as if illuminated by the Holy Spirit.
The only antidote to withstand and overcome this negative presence, close to “non-being,” is to prepare for the execution of a “modeling lesson,” without falling into the traps of those who remain indifferent to the ciphered calls of Grace. Unfortunately, Olavo did not notice any of this when interpreting his friend’s verses. He preferred to take refuge in a formalistic vision of the poem (not Marxist, to be sure, but above all perennialist, if we admit the criticisms that Hans Urs Von Balthasar makes to this school of thought) and to practice a reading similar to what Charles Kinbote, the eccentric character of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel ‘Pale Fire’ (1962), did with the enigmatic cantos created by the poet John Shade before his disappearance.
In Nabokov’s book, Kinbote prefers to set aside the intense meditation on death, immortality, and suffering found in the verses of the prematurely deceased poet, to create delusions about a probably unreal country, Zembla, in the foolish belief that “it is the commentator who has the last word” in relation to the poem. In essence, Olavo behaved like the “purovisibilista,” an expression borrowed by Bruno Tolentino from José Guilherme Merquior and which he feared when someone commented on art in general, as the subject in question did not know “how to listen beneath the clamor of forms, in contact or in conflict, the sometimes elusive and underground murmur of their cultural motivations,” because he was immune to “this critical ear” that felt “the pulse and the problematics of culture” which “make those confidences that allow us to decipher the opulent message of the treasure of works of art.”
Why did the Brazilian philosopher, the same one who wrote the beautiful pages of “Poetry and Philosophy,” take refuge in this mistake? It is not a problem of intelligence absence – and much less of lack of sensitivity. He is too astute to escape these cognitive obstacles. We have only one option left, and that is to go deep to find where the root of this evil lies – that when encountering a work like Bruno Tolentino’s, Olavo de Carvalho’s intelligence had nothing else to do but admit in the inner dialogue with his “being” that “there are mummies that once unwrapped/ have written on their faces our names.”
Tyranny of the Intelligentsia
However, one thing is to misinterpret a poem from a friend in a private setting. Another is to make the same mistake when analyzing the political and cultural conjuncture of a country, as the consequences in this case are much greater and dangerously unpredictable. But since we are analyzing the work of a philosopher who values above all the unity of his thought – and the action that confirms his philosophical idea – it is time to realize that these two types of events are intimately connected.
The fact is that, from 1995 onwards, Olavo de Carvalho insists on his interpretations à la Charles Kinbote – especially when he analyzed, in a famous essay published in ‘O Imbecil Coletivo,’ the book ‘The Revolt of the Elites’ and ‘The Betrayal of Democracy,’ written by the American Christopher Lasch and published in 1996, shortly after the author’s death.
Like a good teacher, Olavo begins his text by explaining exactly what the concept of “the revolt of the elites” that Lasch develops from the “rebellion of the masses,” a term coined by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, means:
“There is a new dominant elite in the world, distinct from the bourgeoisie; it does not rule by owning the means of production but by dominating information; more ambitious than its predecessor, it is not satisfied with power over material wealth and the labor force of people but wants to shape their minds, values, lives, and the meaning of their existence; it does not just want to possess the world, but to reinvent it in its image and likeness, regardless of the consequences (it calls this ‘social engineering’ [...]). [...] The new class does not need intermediaries; it invents its own discourse and is not in danger of being betrayed by the vacillations of hired intellectuals – because it is composed of intellectuals. We are in the full tyranny of the intelligentsia.”
This “new aristocracy of the spirit” was prophesied by James Burnham in his ‘The Managerial Revolution’ of 1941, but it was Lasch who gave it the final finish and formalization into a kind of political principle. While Ortega believed that the “mass man” who fueled Nazi and Communist totalitarianism in the 20th century was the standard behavior in the social world, with his “contented little man” attitude, spoiled temperament, and that it was up to the elites to set an example of correct action and thinking for such people, Lasch reverses the expectations (and the concept) – and asserts that the new “mass man” is none other than the intellectual, the individual who, entrenched in an ivory tower or in his study, imagines altering the structure of reality through the power of his ideas or his impeccable technique, filled with numbers and graphics.
This type of spiritual illness is called pleonexia and is extremely common in individuals with high cognitive power. The practical consequence is that, according to Lasch’s precise description, “thinking classes [or ‘symbolic analysts’] live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world, made up of computerized models of reality – the hyperreality, as it has been called – distinct from the palpable, immediate, and physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women.” Unbeknownst to him, the American had the same intuition as Bruno Tolentino regarding the “world as idea.” What matters to the intellectual analyzed by Lasch – then dominated by the discourse of Marxism and political correctness – is the “social construction of reality,” in which “it reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment, from which everything that resists human control has been excluded.”
Olavo acknowledges the “importance and value” of Lasch’s undertaking but does the same thing he did in the essay “The Specter of Heresy” – that is, insist on a caveat that ironically reveals his admiration for the criticized author. Thus, he does not hesitate to assert outright, “Lasch – like almost every intellectual outside Spain, except for a few scholars of Hispanic subjects like Ernst Robert Curtius – misread Ortega y Gasset very badly.” And he continues in the same tone:
“[Lasch] only understood him through ‘The Revolt of the Masses’ – a collection of articles without complete meaning in itself, as the author himself had repeatedly warned (and in vain). He did not even browse through the rest of the philosopher’s works, where the antecedents and the continuation of his argument can be found. There he could discover, for example, that the distinction Ortega y Gasset makes between elite and masses has no socio-economic sense but only psychological and ethical sense, inspired, as it is, by the Hindu doctrine of castes and dharma, which Western sociology terms do not translate: there are ‘elite men’ among the proletarians and ‘mass men’ in the ruling class. He could discover, worse still, that by ‘masses,’ Ortega y Gasset specifically meant – as stated explicitly in ‘Invertebrate Spain,’ from 1923 – ‘the more powerful masses: those of the middle and upper classes,’ mainly the masses of students who filled the universities, that is, the future managers [...] analyzed by Lasch. In ‘Mission of the University,’ a text almost contemporary with the ‘Rebellion,’ Ortega y Gasset made it very clear that the new barbarian he called the mass man was ‘principally the most knowledgeable professional ever, but also the most uneducated: the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer, the scientist.’ His analysis is from 1928. It remained unknown to the world, buried under the false connotation almost universally attributed to his term ‘masses,’ to the point of there being two images of the author: one Ortega y Gasset of center-left in Spain, which read him; one of far-right to the rest of the world, which read his interpreters. To the non-Hispanic world, Lasch’s analyses will appear unprecedented.”
Despite the clarity of the explanation, Olavo intends to be here “more realistic than the king,” with his cryptic allusions to perennialist thought and his undeniable knowledge of Ortega y Gasset’s work, but he forgets that Lasch merely appropriates the expression of the Spanish philosopher to practice a “rhetorical inversion” and then develop his thesis. There is nothing wrong with that. However, Olavo discredits the importance of Lasch’s book and diminishes the impact of his reflections on the reader who became interested in learning more about him. With this, the Brazilian abuses the tu quoque [the “you too” argument] to reinforce his impression that “the intellectual decline of North America went much deeper than [Lasch] imagined,” since “it contaminated even its most lucid critic”:
“If it were not so, [Lasch] would not dedicate so many pages to the meticulous examination of second-rate ideologists, of merely local importance, while omitting to take a closer look at the philosopher himself who serves as the ostensive postmodern pendant to ‘The Revolt of the Masses.’ Nor would he sacrifice to the idols he exposes by methodically adding to the word ‘men,’ when used with the sense of humanity, the cautious reservation: ‘and women.’ Nor would he suggest, as a remedy for the malady he diagnoses, a return to the tradition of Deweyan pragmatism – a tradition that, by depreciating the notion of ‘objective truth’ in favor of mere useful consensus, has done much to weaken the American mind and generate the current state of affairs. Due to these weaknesses, and especially due to the irresistible tendency to provincially attribute a universal significance to everything that happens in the United States, Lasch’s work itself is, to a certain extent, a symptom of the situation it describes.”
Once again, Olavo does not want to be just “more realistic than the king.” He does exactly what Robert Musil described as the “dissolute agitation of intellectual life,” which “moves in all directions and can wear all the clothes of truth,” without the thinker imagining that the latter “has only one set of clothes on any occasion, one path, and is always at a disadvantage.” And this can be said for one reason: everything suggests that Olavo de Carvalho simply did not read Lasch’s book in its entirety, except for the introduction and the first chapter – just as he did when interpreting Bruno Tolentino’s poem and replacing the whole with just a part.
Singular Man
Olavo’s misunderstandings about Lasch’s work are twofold: first, Lasch actually expands the notion of criticism regarding Ortega’s “mass man,” placing it in a tradition opposed to the “tyranny of the intelligentsia,” roughly characterized as “populist-conservative,” perfectly articulated in the reflections of the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Second, Olavo lacks (or refuses) the sensitivity to perceive that this is the final testament of a man, moments before the breath of death would take him entirely.
Regarding the first misunderstanding, Oakeshott wrote an essay titled “The Masses in Representative Democracy.” In it, he reasons, inspired by Ortega y Gasset’s concept of the “mass man,” that the emergence of this entity called the “mass man” would be seen as the “most significant and far-reaching development within the revolutions of the modern era,” responsible for “transforming the way we live, our patterns of behavior, and the way we conduct politics.”
In addition to what we already know about this concept, according to Olavo and Lasch’s explanations, it should be complemented that the phenomenon of the “mass man” is of someone who does not accept, in any form, that the human condition is a constant shipwreck, and that he himself could be its first victim. It also accepts without complaints that life has grown – with its economic stability, substantial numbers, and deserved prosperity – but refuses to understand how this happened. And in this contentment, he treads his small existence, unaware that there are other people who can distinguish themselves from the crowd. When this happens, the mass quickly acts through irrational and vulgar means, imposing its view of things, which resembles a hallucinatory totalitarianism, insisting that “the vulgar soul, knowing itself to be vulgar, has the courage to assert the right of vulgarity and impose it everywhere.”
However, Oakeshott believes that viewing the modern world through this prism is nothing more than a “grotesque exaggeration.” Thus, to correct what the Spanish philosopher said, the British philosopher decides to undertake a “historical description” – in fact, a “long history” that begins not with the “French Revolution (as some would like)” or the “industrial changes of the late eighteenth century,” but in the mid-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the periods known as the “Humanism” and the “Renaissance,” when what we now know as “human individuality” underwent “a modification of the medieval conditions of life and thought.”
Before, the individual was recognized among others for being a “member of a family, a group, a corporation, a church, a community, a village, a promoter of a district, or an occupant of a customs post,” and this was, until then, “for the great majority, the most circumstantially possible sum of self-knowledge. And this was not limited to one’s livelihood but also encompassed decisions, rights, and general responsibilities. Relationships and alignments usually originated from status and coincided in their character with kinship relations. Most people were anonymous; no one cared about individual character. What differentiated one man from another was insignificant when compared to the privileges of being part of a club of any kind.”
From the Renaissance onwards, the axis of perception of how human beings saw themselves began to change slowly. Oakeshott relies on Jacob Burckhardt to affirm that, from the thirteenth century onwards, especially in Italy, something new was perceived – a “wave of individuality,” or, to be more precise, the arrival of the Uomo Singulare, the singular man, irreplaceable. The conduct of this new individual was “marked by a high degree of self-determination, and his activities expressed personal preferences of behavior, gradually breaking away from his companions. Alongside him, not only the libertine and the dilettante appeared but also the uomo unico, the man who, by mastering his destiny, had become alone and had become a law unto himself. Men examined their conditions and were not shocked by their needs for perfection. [...] A new human image had appeared – and not that of Adam or Prometheus, but that of Proteus – a character distinct from all others due to his multiplicity and infinite capacity for transformation.”
Thus, being an individual became “the most remarkable event in the history of modern Europe.” As this happened over four centuries, an ideal form of government also emerged, one that had to adapt to these “intentions of exploring the intimations of individuality,” building a legal foundation that began with a very cunning requirement in its simplicity: that these “individual interests” had to become rights and duties.
After such a government was established in this way, it required three more things: “first, it should be unique and supreme; only by concentrating all authority in a single center could the emerging individual escape the communal pressures of family and guilds, churches, and the local community; everything that prevented him from fully enjoying his character. Second, it should be an instrument of government detached from prescriptions and, consequently, with the authority to abolish old laws and create new ones: it must be a ‘sovereign’ government. And this, according to the ideas of that time, meant a government in which all those who enjoyed rights were partners, a government in which the ‘pieces’ on the chessboard were direct or indirect participants. Third, it should be powerful – capable of preserving order without which the aspiration of individuality would not be possible; but not so strong that it constituted a danger to individuality itself.”
However, this evolution did not occur with the desired peace. This type of transformation, even if gradual, never eliminated the common problem faced by any human being, even if he is a Uomo Singulare – the capacity to make his own choices. In fact, this became a burden. To complicate matters, Oakeshott describes that
“the old certainties about beliefs, professions, and status were dissolving, not only for those confident in their own power to carve out a new place for themselves in an association of individuals but also for those of a more pessimistic temperament. The counterpart to the entrepreneur, whether from the city or the countryside, of the sixteenth century, was the uprooted worker; the counterpart to the libertine was the disillusioned believer. The familiar communal pressures filled with affection were dissolved in a sea of other tensions – the emancipation that excited some depressed others. The familiar communal pressures filled with affection were dissolved in a sea of other tensions – the emancipation that excited some depressed others. The familial anonymity of communal life had been replaced by personal identity, which, for some, became a burden since they could not transform it into individuality. What some saw as happiness appeared to others as discomfort. The same conditions of human circumstances were identified as progress and decadence. In short, the condition of modern Europe, even before the sixteenth century, gave rise not only to one character but to two antagonistic figures: besides the individual, we now also have the ‘incomplete individual.’ And this ‘incomplete individual’ was not a relic of ancient times but a product of modernity, the residue of the same dissolution of communal bonds that had given birth to the modern European individual.”
The “incomplete individual,” in Oakeshott’s definition, was “a combination of weakness, ignorance, timidity, poverty, or misfortune,” showing an absolute inability to adapt to any hostile environment. His only solution to resolve this existential impasse was to seek a “protector who understood his situation” – and that protector became none other than the State, which never hesitated to meet the needs of the “incomplete individual.” However, with this absolute approval of the pursuit of individuality as the only remaining alternative in modern consciousness, the “weight of this moral victory fell heavily on the head of the ‘incomplete individual’” who, from now on, in addition to feeling “defeated at home, in his own character,” further accentuates doubts about “his ability to withstand the pressure in the struggle for survival” and, as if that were not enough, ends in “a radical lack of confidence in himself,” in which “the discomfort of failure had turned into the misery of guilt.”
Thus, the “incomplete individual” undergoes a new metamorphosis – now either resignation or envy and resentment, in addition to insisting on the impulse to escape this cruel situation, imposing it on the rest of humanity. This is where we witness the transition from the “incomplete individual” to the “anti-individual,” someone totally dominated by feelings instead of thoughts, someone willing to assimilate this definition without worrying about the disintegration of his own character, overthrowing the individual who gave him birth and eliminating any trace of his moral prestige.
From now on, nothing can restrain this “anti-individual,” as he recognizes in himself that “his individuality was so poor that nothing would be enough to save it.” He also knows that the only thing that drove him “was solely the opportunity to escape the anxiety of having to be an individual, as well as the chance to eradicate from the world everything that convinced him of his lack of aptitude for such a role. His situation led him to seek comfort in isolated communities, insulated from the moral pressures of individuality. But the opportunity he sought so much truly appeared when he realized that, instead of being alone in the world, he belonged to the most populous class in modern European society, the class that had no choices of its own” – the “anti-individual” who finally becomes one substance with the “mass” diagnosed by Ortega y Gasset, the one who “cannot have friends (because friendship consists in the relationship between two individuals), only comrades,” as he compels others to be accepted only if they are “replicas of himself, imposing a uniformity of belief and behavior that leaves no room for the pleasures or anxieties of choice” (emphasis added).
Lasch aligns himself with this line of thinking when he discovers the concept of his “revolt of the elites.” For him, the intellectual, by detaching himself from reality through his pleonexia, became a kind of “anti-individual” who, united with his peers, destroyed social fabric and caused what he calls “the betrayal of democracy.” Thus, the only solution left for him was to exchange what was an organic and genuine “community” for a simulacrum of it – and this, in Lasch’s time, happened both with academia taken over by leftist thinking and today with social media, with its hysterical comment boxes, independent of ideological spectrums.
That is precisely why Lasch proposes populism as a form of political practice that opposes the tyranny of the intelligentsia – where the latter concentrates on a kind of “Cathedral of knowledge,” seeking to control all spheres of knowledge, such as universities, the press, culture, and government institutions. This is a totalitarian mentality, embodied by intellectuals who no longer care to liberate human beings through the perfection of inner struggle, the same struggle where Behemoth and Leviathan confront each other in the underground of our soul, and instead use each person’s intelligence to build a power project that dominates and – more – alters human nature. In this sense, according to Lasch, populism
is clearly concerned with the principle of respect. [...] It upholds simple customs and straightforward speech. It is not impressed by titles and other symbols of high social status, nor is it impressed by claims of moral superiority made in the name of the oppressed. It rejects the “preferential option for the poor” if this means treating them as defenseless victims of circumstances, absolving them of responsibility, or excusing them for their offenses based on the presumption of innocence due to poverty. Populism is the authentic voice of democracy. It affirms that individuals deserve respect until they prove otherwise, but it also insists that they must take responsibility for what they do. It is reluctant to form alliances or make judgments based on the idea that “society is guilty.” Populism is “discriminating,” to use a common adjective in pejorative use, a term that shows our capacity to discriminate judgments weakened by the moral climate of “humanitarian” concern (emphasis added).
However, this feeling of recovering political responsibility can only arise from a terrible – and unusual – perspective of mortality. This was precisely what happened to Lasch. Despite a Marxist view that still survives in the first pages of ‘The Revolt of the Elites’, later abandoned in the course of the book, and the predominance of a pragmatism à la John Dewey along with a concession to politically correct language when speaking of “humanity” in the abstract (points very well identified by the author of ‘The Collective Imbecile’ in the text), nevertheless, the thesis of the American sociologist cannot be completely disregarded and used as if it were an exception that confirms the rule – in this case, the hegemony of a leftist elite that enslaved the consciousness of the Brazilian people.
The above argument is an indisputable fact – and cannot be refuted. So why does Olavo sweep Lasch’s argument under the rug, deliberately forgetting that, among other examples, ‘The Revolt of the Elites’, in its final third, offers one of the most moving reflections on finitude, something that compensates for any other shortcomings, with brilliant essays on the “abolition of shame” in a world devoid of transcendence, the invasion of corporatism in university education, and, last but not least, the work of Philip Rieff (a giant who was never a “second-rate ideologue” and who, incidentally, would be cited in the future by Olavo himself in the article “The Islamized West,” written in 2007)?
There is the hypothesis that reading the last testament of a dying man is always disturbing – but this has never been a problem for Olavo who, as a good philosopher, knows that the method of his vocation has always aimed at encountering the unwanted of people. With that, there remains another hypothesis, less disturbing, to be sure, but equally unsettling: that the political principle revealed by Christopher Lasch would go against Olavo de Carvalho’s theory of what power means.
Spiritual Power
In Olavo’s view, as expressed in his booklet “Being and Power” (1997-99), there are only three powers in this world:
“to produce, to destroy, to lead. The first is economic power, the second military power, and the third spiritual power. Rome consecrated them to Quirinus, Mars, and Jupiter, respectively. The three gods defend man against the three fundamental threats: hunger, violence, and error. The well-being of society entirely depends on a balanced worship dedicated to these divinities. The power triangle must be equilateral.”
Each power has a subject who exercises it and an object that is affected by this action. Olavo writes, “The object of economic power is material goods. The object of military power is the human body and its actions. The object of spiritual power is ideas, beliefs, and feelings.”
The subjects of power act in either an active or passive mode, “either vertical or horizontal,” and their respective representatives are, in the case of economic power, “capitalists and workers”; in the military, the army and justice (“the nobility of the sword and the nobility of the robe”); and in the spiritual power, it would be the church, composed of “culture and tradition,” where the “former is active and vertical, seeking to create new beliefs and subject society to the opinions of creative individuals. Tradition is passive and horizontal, seeking to stabilize beliefs in a fixed system leveled by established values.”
Although Olavo’s argument seems to present these levels of power as hierarchically arranged – with economic power first, followed by military power, and lastly spiritual power – in truth, his reasoning only makes sense if we understand that, in the order of being (the only one that truly matters to a philosopher), it is the power of the spirit that supersedes all others.
According to this perspective, ideas have an active power, which resides in the “creators of cultural goods,” with the tendency to concentrate power, “to subject the actions of many to the ideas of a few, to accelerate change, and to break established habits.” On the passive side, we have religious people, who disperse power, leveling “human behavior according to the average of traditional values, erasing the differences between notable individuals and ordinary people, and stabilizing social action in sacralized routines.”
In practical terms, power can only be divided (and formalized) through castes. According to Olavo, “the priestly caste is divided into intelligentsia and clergy; the noble caste is divided into nobility of the sword and nobility of the robe; the producer caste is divided into owners and workers.”
Notice that he suddenly changes the order of presentation because what matters here is not the classification of the subject and object of power but their effectiveness within the castes. One does not exist without the other, of course, but the caste is what gives “functionality” to power because its fascination lies in not necessarily having “fixed occupants”: “dethroned members of the nobility can become part of the capitalist or intellectual caste. An ascending worker can join the intelligentsia or the nobility. Entire masses can be moved from one function to another. The functions remain fixed; the occupants either remain or change.”
Indeed, Olavo remains faithful to his principle of always defining “what is” (quid) something. And what is power, according to his view? It would be the central concept of “a possibility of action,” in the most universal sense, and it would also be “the ability to determine the actions of others,” in the strict sense of politics. However, for this determination of someone else’s action to occur, it is crucial that the subject has the capacity to alter not only someone’s ideas but especially their desires. Hence, it is not by chance that he defines “ideologies as expressions of the desires of various castes” and, to give a concrete example of this type of metamorphosis, Olavo mentions the events of two revolutions – the Russian Revolution and the “revolt of the elites,” which had already been diagnosed by Christopher Lasch:
"In the Russian Revolution of 1917, the intelligentsia, supported by workers and the militia, takes power, immediately assuming the functions of the nobility and clergy. The new nobility, once constituted, absorbs the functions of the capitalist caste, which it could easily do since they were already partially absorbed by the nobility of the old regime in a State capitalism. Marxism appears as a cultural work, but when the intelligentsia that created it rises to power and transforms itself into clergy, it takes on the form of a religion.
In the United States, a powerful capitalist class governs with the support of the Protestant clergy, subjugating the nobility, workers, and intelligentsia. The intelligentsia and workers, with the help of the nobility of the robe, contest the power. The intelligentsia, however, gradually conquers power thanks to technical inventiveness and control of information, as industrial capitalism gives way to a capitalism of goods and services. With social engineering, power centralizes, command efficiency increases, and the State tends towards social democracy. Feeling excluded from power, capitalists ally with workers and the militia in a conservative reaction, dividing the nobility of the robe."
Although Olavo disregarded Lasch’s thesis, he does not hesitate to use it – besides wanting to force the fact that most of these historical events were initially altered due to the desires of a priestly caste. However, there is an appropriation of control in this reasoning – similar to what was done with the concept of “the world as idea,” previously conceived by Bruno Tolentino – as well as a curious inversion, noticeable only between the lines. If, in Lasch’s analysis, the “revolt of the elites” caused the “betrayal of democracy” because its members were anti-individuals detached from concrete reality, for Olavo, it is precisely the spiritual caste that will restore this, always through the existence of someone endowed with “charismatic power”:
“[This type of power] does not reside in a man’s personal gifts but in what other men imagine about him. Unrecognized talent is a real gift but not a charismatic power. For the exercise of charismatic power, it matters little whether the supposed gifts of the one who exercises power are real or fictitious: if the people imagine that a man speaks with God, they will follow him like a prophet. If a prophet speaks with God, but the people do not believe it, he has no followers. The power to make oneself believed (rhetoric) is, however, an authentic charismatic power – either concomitant with other charismatic powers, such as Caesar, who had the gift of strategy and rhetoric concomitantly, or Cicero, who only had rhetoric.” (emphasis added)
In ‘The Revolt of the Elites,’ Lasch exposes that the “democratic malaise” arises precisely because of the moral petrification of the spiritual caste discussed by Olavo. The American does not deny, let alone despise, the priestly function of the man who lives the life of intellect. However, what he criticizes with great perspicacity – and this is something that Olavo seems not to have realized in his essay on the book – is that the “tyranny of the intelligentsia,” the realm of pleonexia, certainly takes hold in the heart of the intellectual dominated by left-wing thinking, but the same phenomenon occurs with those who intend to perform a symmetrical opposition to this type of hegemony. In reading ‘The Collective Imbecile’ as a whole, we have a program to disinfect this Marxist virus, but at the same time, the impression is given that Olavo wants to replace the elite that perverted the spiritual caste with another elite that would put it in its proper place in society.
Ultimately, despite his generally accurate diagnosis, what Olavo proposes, in practice and in detail, is the famous replacement of “six with half a dozen.” In other words, when a particular elite seeks to concentrate its power, even with the noble intention of distributing knowledge and information to the rest of society, the result will inevitably be the opposite. On this subject, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, and Michael Polanyi argue, with an abundance of evidence in their respective works, that in a truly free society, knowledge can only exist if it is chaotic, disorganized, fragmented, and dispersed, coming to coherence only through a decision-making process that comes “from the bottom up,” never through a specific caste led by someone endowed with “charismatic power” who intends to alter the course of a nation in the long run.
However, Olavo de Carvalho thinks the opposite – and this is his central disagreement with the principle discovered by Christopher Lasch, despite using it as convenient for “certain circumstances.” And thus, we arrive at one of the enigmas that this text attempts to answer: to what extent does the individual who seeks at all costs to create a “true intellectual elite” to restore the “intelligence” of the country abandon the inner struggle, essential for the arduous philosophical method, and thereby become possessed by his own “specter of heresy”? It is evident that such a dilemma is natural for a thinker who takes great risks and, for that reason, can also make catastrophic mistakes. The question that arises is whether he, as the philosopher he is, is fully aware of this.
Instability of Knowledge
In the peril of dissolute agitation in intellectual life, it is quite common for an ambitious philosopher attempting to overcome the dilemmas of Lady Philosophy – as exemplified by Olavo, if we recall the problem initially presented by Benedito Nunes – to lose sight of what his philosophical system is. Therefore, he must first have a method that guides him. This is the function fulfilled by the “symbolic dialectic” in the work of the author of ‘The Garden of Afflictions’ – as exposed in an essay of the same name, written in 1985, published in the same year in the volume ‘Astros e Símbolos’, and reissued, almost unchanged, in 2007 and 2015 with the same title, by two different publishers (É Realizações and Vide Editorial, respectively).
These data are crucial because they demonstrate the capital importance of this writing for Olavo, according to his own words in the essay “Outline for a Philosophy System” (1997). The method of “symbolic dialectic” guides him in various fields of philosophy addressed throughout his career – from metaphysics to political philosophy, through epistemology and even logic – and, therefore, whenever someone feels lost when contemplating the complexity of his thinking, that person should always return to the text that presents such a path.
Olavo begins his reasoning with the following statement: despite the gradations of reality as we move from the “abstract concept of balance to the attempt to balance something real – for example, when we learn to ride a bicycle –, we find that our image of perfect symmetry is shattered by successive disappointments: in fact, there is no perfectly static balance anywhere in the sensible world.”
In this stage where the instability of effective and secure knowledge (philosophical episteme) is the rule, there is no balance or symmetry, and our expression of this primordial uncertainty is extremely flawed. However, when we move “from the idea of static balance to dynamic balance, that is, from abstract concept to concrete experience, we realize that balance is not only about symmetry and equidistance, but also about interaction, conflict, and reciprocity between the two poles; thus, they are no longer opposites, but complements.”
This occurs because of the variable of time – or, to be more precise, a reference point that allows us to see a succession of events. This point is man himself. It is he who can naturally make the transition from a “first reasoning,” which is “logical-analytical reasoning – or reasoning of identity and difference – and '[...] a second [which would be] dialectical reasoning (in the Hegelian sense and not the Aristotelian sense).” Olavo further details this distinction:
“Those who imagine themselves to be Hegelians have always accused the logic of identity of being purely static, of aiming at formal abstractions rather than concrete things immersed in the flow of time and subject to incessant transformations. Dialectical reasoning seeks to grasp the movement, vital so to speak, of real transformations in the world of phenomena. Truth, according to this method, is not found in the fixed concept of isolated entities but in the logical-temporal process that simultaneously reveals and constitutes them. It is the sense of Hegel’s famous formula: ‘Wesen ist was gewesen ist’ – ‘The essence [of a being] is what [that being] has become.’ Or, in other words: being is becoming.”
To overcome this impasse of gradation between the two poles, Olavo proposes a third way of thinking: the spiritual symbolic (a term directly taken from the writings of René Guénon), whose major emblems of complementarity would be the “Sun,” representing “intellection, truth,” and the Moon, considered as a symbol of “mind, thought, the subjective image of truth”; in this kind of dialectic, objective truth would be “latent,” constituted in the “human spirit through the process of becoming that reveals it, verifies it.” The important point is that this gradation also marks a “change of level,” as, by “moving from static opposition to dynamic complementarity, from static reasoning to dialectical reasoning, we change our point of view, and a new system of relations becomes evident in the spectacle of things.”
To make this “change of level” truly effective, the dialectic criticized by Olavo needs to realize that it faces a “tragic dilemma”: either it opts “for an endless discourse – which, having no limits, ceases to have identifiable content, as the neopositivist critics of Hegel rightly pointed out – or arbitrarily and irrationally determines some arbitrary endpoint for the dialectical process.” To avoid falling into the same error as Hegel – who believed he had surpassed philosophy and ended up dying shortly afterward without witnessing its continuity – one must “rise above dialectics, climb another step, ascend to a broader and more comprehensive perspective.”
The rescue for this impasse comes from the “celestial model,” where “all oppositions – and all complementarities, therefore – are founded on some common trait, which polarizes inversely in one element and the other.” It is a serious game that goes “from identity to difference and back to identity [and that] can only unfold before a static observer, firmly situated in his observation post.”
One might naturally think of man, the reference point between the poles of balance and instability, as he usually cannot abandon this post. However, he can do something worse: wander in his imagination, “among the celestial spaces,” falling into “shapeless fantasy.” For Olavo, the “antidote to this danger is astronomy: through correct measurement, man reestablishes in his representation the true figure of the heavens and already has the support of a new intellectual model – based, according to Plato, on divine intelligence – to seek a point of view that allows him to transcend vulgar dialectics and penetrate into the realm of what we could call symbolic dialectic.”
The fundamental difference between this dialectic presented as a “new intellectual model” and the “vulgar dialectic” (in this case, Hegelian) is that, whereas before time was significant, now space plays a role, complementing “the model on which our representations and the sensitive models of their respective forms of reasoning relied.” To consolidate all this into a coherent reasoning, Olavo states the following:
"We can say that the common dialectical point of view corresponded to a merely ‘agricultural’ observation of the heavens: all that it captured was the idea of transformation and cycle. Symbolic dialectic, on the other hand, will start from a properly astronomical understanding and delve into the comprehension of the special interweaving of various perspectives and cycles that they reveal.
Now, if we abandon the terrestrial point of view and consider the solar system as a whole – that is, the larger framework of references in which the various elements come into being and differentiate – we find that, in reality, the Moon is not opposed to the Sun, as in static identity reasoning, nor coordinated with it, as in dialectical reasoning, but rather subordinate. Indeed, it is even doubly subordinate, being the satellite of a satellite. The Earth is to the Sun as the Moon is to the Earth. Thus, we form a proportion, and for the first time, we attain a fully rational perspective, since ‘reason,’ ratio, originally means nothing more than proportion. It is the proportion between our representations and experience, and between reasonings and representations, that ensures the rationality of our thoughts and, ultimately, the truth of our ideas."
To maintain the reading of this proportion on the right track, Olavo presents a “third modality” of reasoning that would resolve the “partial aspects” of opposition and complementation, which would reach their proportionality only if they were reabsorbed into a unitary principle that constitutes them. This is the analogy, something that, according to Olavo, is full of “misunderstandings” when debated or used in intellectual circles because “many authors believe it to be the mere observation of the similarity of forms” or “a primitive and vaguely ‘poetic’ way of assimilating reality, radically distinct from rational and logical apprehension.”
For those who dare to practice symbolic dialectics, they must be very careful not to apply analogy as if it were a superior form of reasoning (a common mistake among “astrologers and occultists”) or a derogatory way of cognitive value (as done by “academic philosophers”). It must be used as a “subtle, precise tool,” never compressing “the macro into the micro and [smudging] them,” but to maintain proportionality in differences, since this term “implies a relationship in an ascending sense,” for us to move from the visible to the invisible and thus correctly grasp the “spiritual essence”:
"The two objects united by an analogy are connected from above: it is in their higher aspects, and through them, that beings can be ‘in analogy.’ An analogy is all the more evident the further we move away from sensory particularity to consider beings from the perspective of their universality. Correlatively, this relationship fades the more we view beings from their lower aspects, from their empirical phenomenality, which is precisely the plane where, despite the high claims they make, astrologers and occultists move.
What establishes an analogy between two beings, therefore, are not the similarities they present on the same plane, but the fact that they are connected to the same principle [which can be logical, ontological, or metaphysical], each representing it symbolically in its own way and level of being, and which, containing both in itself, is necessarily superior to both. It is at this level of universality that in the heavens the bond of analogy is celebrated, which connects, in a chain of symbols, gold to honey, honey to the lion, the lion to the king, the king to the Sun, the Sun to the angel, the angel to the Logos. Seen from above, from the principle that constitutes them, they reveal the proportionality between the symbolic functions they play for the manifestation of that principle, each at the cosmological level that corresponds to it, and it is this proportionality that constitutes the analogy. Seen from below, from empirical phenomenality, they break down into the multilateralism of differences. Thus, the analogy is simultaneously evident and ungraspable; obvious to some, inconceivable to others, depending on the unity or fragmentation of their respective worldviews."
In Olavo’s symbolic dialectic, analogy leads to knowledge of the principle which, in a certain way, already existed virtually within us. Trapped between the abstract formulas of universal principles and the “blind and tedious” empiricism of a concrete experience detached from a universal truth, we would need this “escalation of analogies” to precisely transcend this “gap,” always aiming for a “lived and concrete knowledge” of this same principle. Analogy and symbolism, through the sciences and spiritual techniques that aim to crystallize and condense the understanding of symbols in our subjective experience, would help us “transform and expand the individual psyche so that it reaches a universal scope, the image of the universal Man [the prototype of humanity], which is a compendium and model of the entire cosmos.”
With this, we would rediscover the principle of identity, not as an abstract formula but as “full reality, as the meaning of truth and the truth of meaning, as the unity of truth and meaning. It is only in this way that what scholasticism called concrete universal, the synthesis of logical universality and existential fullness, is extended.”
All this would be a way to reunify not only man with himself but mainly to fully aid in the “reunion with God.” Here, Olavo relies on Hugo de São Vítor to say that his symbolic dialectic also means the “reunion of the exterior, or carnal, man with the interior, spiritual man,” in which the “imaginary dimension” between spirit and body would be the “imaginary affection,” the “mediating imagination,” and where the “knowledge of analogies and symbolism in general would take place, and therein, the reunion of universal truth with and within concrete experience.”
Here, if there is no ascent in the world without the help of the “imaginary affection” and without symbolic dialectic, Olavo writes that “the human mind will always be divided between empirical particular and abstract general, unable to rise to the knowledge of infinite universality, which is, upon close examination, the only concrete reality from which all else is an aspect or a fragment obtained only through abstraction.” Such an ascent would coincide with the moment when “sense (knowledge of particulars in indefinite number, without unity) and understanding (knowledge of abstract unity) [unite with] reason (knowledge of concrete unity and infinity) through imagination,” with the apex being the “affirmation [of the principle] of identity” which, according to Schelling, if man “knows its content,” will finally “contemplate God.”
However, in the real world, the “change of level” is only “the moment of reunion” that lasts only briefly, very briefly. To recover it, Olavo suggests the following addition to the method:
“It is necessary, therefore, to descend again from the principle to its particular manifestations, and then rise again, and so on. So that the alternation of yes/no, truth/error, which constitutes the beginning of our investigation, is finally replaced, in a ninety-degree turn, by the alternation high/low, universal/particular. We move from horizontal oscillation to vertical oscillation. And it is precisely the awakening of the ability to constantly ascend and descend that constitutes the goal of all spiritual education, without which the perspective offered to us by symbolic dialectic becomes only a mirage for us. We understand then how vain and childish is any philosophy teaching that remains at the level of pure discussion and does not include a discipline of the soul.” (emphasis added)
Thus, if, for Olavo, philosophy is a path that strengthens the discipline of the soul, he must be extremely careful to ensure that the method of symbolic dialectic and the reasoning of analogy are absolutely correct, as the implications of using them incorrectly can be tremendous for the imagination of each of his students. Thus, we arrive at the question of whether analogy would not be able to achieve, as Jacques Bouveresse would say, both its “wonders” and its “vertigo” in those who practice it indiscriminately.
Symbol
Analogy has always been the strength and weakness of worldviews based on proportional correspondences between the lower and the higher, the invisible and the visible, in this obsessive quest to comprehend “the wonders of the one thing.” It would not be different with Olavo de Carvalho.
In the essay “Speculations on allegory and symbol” (published in volume 8 of the now-defunct Dicta&Contradicta magazine), Professor Henrique Elfes patiently explains that in the swampy territory of symbolic interpretation, there are two types of religions: those based on the “principle of analogy” and those based on the “principle of the word.”
The first type is the pantheistic religion in the broadest sense of the term, as it identifies the very substance of reality, its arché, with the divine substance itself. Divinity, through a necessary process of emanation, gives rise to various “concentric” levels, analogous to each other, of divine or spiritual beings, becoming less “real” the further they are from the center; the lowest level would be that of this world, the material beings, which already border on nothingness. Elfes writes, “the number of these concentric levels, and therefore of the ‘divine’ entities, depends on the author or system we study: from the three basics of Plotinus to the hundreds of Vedic Hinduism.”
On the other hand, the second type deals with religions considered monotheistic. They imply a total distinction between the divine being and the universe, and while for analogical religions, the Hindu principle “While Brahma dreams, the gods are” applies – meaning the relationship between God and the universe is similar to that between a man and the characters he dreams – for word-based religions, this relationship is more like that between a craftsman or artist and his work. In other words, according to Elfes, “God does not emanate the spiritual and material world by a necessary process, but creates it through a rational and free process.”
With this fundamental distinction in mind, we can better understand the ambiguity of applying analogy as a form of thought to correctly understand the world as it is, not the “world as an idea.” Elfes articulates, along with the reflections of Mircea Eliade, how, in this principle, each lower level is a microcosm that reflects analogically (by similarity = "is like…") those superior to it, that is, the macrocosm. Thus,
“the microcosm formed within the human soul reflects the macrocosm of the material universe and the spiritual universe (the One and the gods); the material universe, in turn, is a microcosm that reflects the spiritual macrocosm, and so on. As all levels and all beings are connected to each other analogically, all – except the original, divine being – are merely symbols of other symbols, reflections of other reflections a bit ‘more real.’ All reality dissolves into unreality – the world becomes only maya, ‘illusion’ – and we fall into what Guimarães Rosa describes as 'this series of symbols that is our other life from this side of the grave.’”
Up to this point, nothing different from what Olavo also describes as analogy in his symbolic dialectics. However, Elfes brings up a subtle difference:
“[In other words:] apart from the divine being, there are ultimately no real beings. The divine reality is the only reality, and all things – gods, humans, and material beings – are like fleeting waves, even less, dancing reflections on the surface of the sea of divinity. As analogy allows everything to be linked to everything, everything ends up symbolizing everything, meaning that, in the end, everything means nothing. If this line of thought is taken further, even the divine reality will end up identifying itself with nothingness, as happens in Mahayana Buddhism, where the original ground of being is sunyata, ‘emptiness’.” (emphasis added)
In practical terms, analogy converts man himself into a symbol, making him something extremely abstract and, therefore, capable of uniting diverse and seemingly disparate groups in their main lines, as listed by Elfes:
“Hinduism and its ‘reformed’ version, Buddhism; late Taoism; various polytheisms, Greek, Celtic, Latin, Germanic, and many others; Hebrew Kabbalah and apocalyptic Gnosticisms; various Christian Gnosticisms, from Marcion in the 2nd century onwards; Persian Zoroastrianism and its derivatives, like Manichaean Gnosticism, which St. Augustine briefly adhered to in the 4th century; Catharism in the 12th-13th centuries; alchemy, as we can still see in the 17th-18th centuries through the writings of Isaac Newton; various esotericisms from the 16th-19th centuries, such as Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and many others; Anglo-Saxon spiritualism and French spiritualism in the 19th-20th centuries; the various currents and New Age groups; and equally a certain traditionalism à la René Guénon.”
Now, it is precisely this last group, of which Olavo de Carvalho is a part, directly or indirectly, willingly or unwillingly, that the symbolic dialectics falls. Elfes comments that one of the consequences of this type of thinking is that
“in these [analogical] religions, a secret assassination occurs, that of the principle of non-contradiction [called by Olavo ‘principle of identity’] (because God would have to be both good in himself and evil in [another subject] and in me; logical in the regularities of the world and illogical in the arbitrariness to which human life is subjected; real in itself and unreal in the world, etc.). Now, the principle of non-contradiction is the basis of logic; consequently, reason is inapplicable in these religious systems, and often (as in Zen Buddhism) it is even considered harmful, as it would chain one to illusion. It then becomes necessary to resort to a ‘higher wisdom,’ usually esoteric – reserved for the initiated, the superior spirits, the enlightened ones – which will bring about the coincidentia oppositorium, the 'harmonization of opposites.’” (emphasis added)
At this point, the views on religious symbolism of Olavo and Elfes collide. The former believes that his dialectic underlies and clarifies the principle of identity; the latter states that this type of thinking secretly undermines the foundation of logic and good rationality. Who is right? In truth, both are correct on this point – which reveals an ironic paradox, as it would eliminate the principle of non-contradiction in both reasonings.
However, Elfes indirectly perceives the solution to this impasse by recalling the “notion of creation,” typical of religions based on the “principle of the word.” It brings about a “double reality: the divine, fontal, and absolute one, and the created, which is reflective and relative. Both are, however, real – and thus the danger of dissolving the world into a symphony of entities without substance is prevented. There is undoubtedly an analogical aspect in created reality, but it is a more complex, less direct analogy than in the case of analogical religions.”
For Elfes, the important thing is to highlight that there are two types of analogy when the notion of creation becomes the central axis of orientation in this intricate debate:
"In [analogical religions], a spirit or a divinity is more perfect the closer it is to God, and the human situation is defined by being ‘between’ the non-being of matter and the being of divinity; man does not strictly have a nature, a proper being, but only a reflex and intermediary condition, purely analogical. In word-based religions, on the contrary, each being is all the more perfect the better it expresses its peculiar and proper nature, which in turn reflects God indirectly as it corresponds, so to speak, to a thought, to a project of his: analogy, for lack of a better word, is ‘indirect,’ while in pantheisms, it is ‘direct.’
Consequently, in monotheisms, there is a natural perfection of the human being, a correct life (as described, for example, in Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’), which consists in realizing the rational potentialities of human nature (for the Christian, there is a ‘second’ perfection, that of holiness, which unites man to God through love in His Son, the incarnate Word; this second perfection is based on the first, without nullifying it)." (emphasis added)
This incarnation of God in a concrete man is what enables the “vital nerve,” the “living carnature of language” in which the meaning and the signifier are inseparably united in the “modeling lesson” poetized by Bruno Tolentino – and this leads Elfes to go beyond his reasoning and affirm without hesitation that, instead of being called the “religion of the word,” it is more correct to call it the “religion of the logos.”
For Elfes, Logos here has a much broader sense than the Portuguese term or even the Latin verbum: it means not only “word” and “verb” (the word par excellence) but especially “concept” (the word in the mind), “reason,” “proportionality,” “internal logical structuring” of the real, “truth.” The religion that accepts it also embraces the Greek critique, led by Plato in book X of the Republic, that the logos must guide the mythos – and although Socrates' favorite disciple does not completely do away with the principle of analogy, the latter returns in Christianity (the religion of the logos par excellence) with a tight rein, mainly through the hands of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a Christian Platonic mystic of the 5th and 6th centuries, who revived the tendency to interpret reality as symbolic, without denying that it was created. (On this subject, see the first article in this series published in Gazeta do Povo).
Elfes argues that the notion of creation conceals a revolution not only in the way of reading the writings that establish the metaphysical foundations of the religion of the logos (in this case, the Scriptures), but also of reading the world we inhabit. It reestablishes
"the literal or natural sense of the real world, that of the essences or natures of things, which serves as a ‘anchor’ necessary for any allegorical interpretations. Thus, they establish the properly modern way of seeing the world: reality is primarily rational, and only secondarily analogical. From now on, analogy, imagination will be at the service of the exposition of rationality, of which it will be a precious and even necessary tool [...].
This new way of reading reality has radical consequences, that is, it reaches the roots of our whole way of seeing the world. As we have just seen, in the vision of Platonism [defended by Pseudo-Dionysius], as there is practically no being in itself, man’s perfection consists in his proximity to the divine being, in sanctity, which is a pure divine gift; in the Aristotelian-Thomistic vision, the perfection of each being consists primarily in the perfection with which it expresses its nature, that is, in the virtues it acquires, while sanctity itself rests on the virtues and also works through them.
This new vision of the world is also what allows the progressive detachment of politics and religion, until reaching the current and highly desirable separation between Church and State; the explosion of medieval philosophy, which becomes independent of theology and is therefore free to study the world; and the birth of the sciences from the twelfth century, first of a hesitant physics that still had to free itself from the shells of the egg, that is from Aristotelian Physics (but not from Logic or Metaphysics), and then from all the others".
Henrique Elfes’s lengthy analysis of the use of analogy serves to better understand that symbolic dialectics – the fundamental method of Olavo de Carvalho’s philosophy – can fall into the same danger of exceeding in its “prodigies” as in its “vertigo”, especially when it is applied in the objective reading of the world. After all, Jacques Bouveresse – a philosopher who is neither an academic, much less an inveterate by esoteric disciplines – already warns us that analogy becomes a dubious procedure, especially when this method “rests on two simple and particularly effective principles in literary and philosophical circles: (1) systematically highlight the most superficial similarities, presenting this as a revolutionary discovery; (2) equally systematically ignore the deep differences, displaying them as insignificant details that can only interest and impress punctilious, petty and pusillanimous spirits”. (my emphasis)
Reform of the Human Being
The uses and abuses of analogy, not only as the foundation of religions based on them, but also within the internal logic of the philosophical system outlined by Olavo de Carvalho, result from the excessive preference that the Brazilian philosopher attributes to intellect as a way of understanding – and reading – the structure of reality. In an essay titled “The Value of Intellect,” written and published in 1985, practically at the same time he released the first version of “The Symbolic Dialectics,” he writes that “the deprecation of intellect, even when done in the name of supposed ‘higher means’ of knowledge, is [...] anti-spiritual in its essence.”
Even though he elaborated on this reasoning during the time he was part of Islamic tariqas (inspired by Frithjof Schuon), applying the philosopheme that unifies his arguments, Olavo’s assertion does not lose its validity. He claims that this disdain for intellect would be inspired “by attachment to imagination and sensory functions that, once intellect is repressed or dulled, exert unrestrained power over man, assuming even the authority that belongs exclusively to intellect and claiming ‘truths’ whose very confusion is enough to characterize them as lies or delusions.”
Coincidentally, this is the same argument, summarized in a sentence, that Olavo uses to ascertain that Bruno Tolentino, in the poem “The Specter,” was dangerously approaching “satanism.” However, this does not lead him to despise faith, at least according to his view that it means, in Latin, fides, which
“has the sense of ‘faithfulness,’ ‘constancy,’ and ‘reliability,’ not permitting it to be interpreted in the sense of an irrational adherence to senseless or uncertain beliefs. The virtue of faith means that man, once having learned a truth through reason and evidence, will remain faithful to it, even when his imagination, feelings, or will – not to mention merely external coercive factors such as group opinion or circumstantial pressure – incline him in the opposite direction. Within the Christian context, the conception is no different, as scholastic theology, led by Saint Thomas Aquinas, declares that faith is not an attitude of sentiments – much less some obscure, inexplicable, and ‘subconscious’ impulse – but a decision of intellect and Will. In the Jewish world, the value of intellect and thought is affirmed as a sign of intellectual and moral sovereignty of the human person, attested, among other facts, by the love that the Jewish people devote to books and the art of debate, which is fundamental to the maintenance of the 'living Torah.’”
Olavo also does not belittle mystical experiences, whether Christian or Muslim. On the contrary, he emphasizes that these expressions “proclaiming their faith above and independently of rational motives cannot be dishonestly used to justify an attack on intellect, as they merely express, in hyperbolic mode, the believer’s fidelity to the apprehended truth, even above and independently of the means of discovery and proof that led to it and sustain it in the field of discursive thought.” (emphasis added)
Despite the hyperbolic manner in which these truths are expressed, Olavo makes it clear that “the meaning of these expressions” shows how “truth,”
“even imperfectly grasped, is worth more than an error, even based on apparently logical reasons: it is better to believe in a truth that cannot be proven than to be deceived by false evidence. The very hyperbolic style of such declarations shows that they convey extreme hypotheses, which, taken literally or on a flat level, would result in sheer absurdity.”
Intellect – not reality itself – makes the human being obedient to revealed truth. When reality presents itself in an unavoidable way, intellect organizes the data into a flawed language but capable of guiding those who were lost in the jungle of senses, mainly through rituals and behavioral rules. The confusion arises when intellect “can effectively become corrupted and fail” because, on one hand, “the truth apprehended by thought does not remain,” and on the other hand, it “disappears when a man stops thinking about it and can, therefore, be forgotten.” Olavo’s answer to this dilemma is
"the need for religious and mystical practice that consolidates in the person’s own way of being the possession of perceived truth. This is the meaning, by the way, of the Latin term habitus, which comes from the verb habere, ‘to possess.’ It is not enough to apprehend truth through thought; it must be transformed into a habit or permanent possession, and this can only be achieved by removing distractions and concentrating the intellect. Concentration, as is obvious, intensifies the activity of intellect and never suppresses it in order to develop alleged ‘higher faculties.’ The term ‘inner vision’ used by all mystics refers to the state of permanent evidence achieved by intellect, which could never be reached by its mere sporadic and intermittent exercise but only through voluntary and regular practice.
On the other hand, the possibility of corruption does not arise from any constitutive flaw in intellect itself but from the simple fact that thinking is simultaneously a logical act (therefore ontological) and a psychological act (therefore biological), responding at the same time, on the one hand, to the constitutive demands of truth and, on the other hand, to the contingencies and demands of the body in its instability and cyclical fluctuation. When thought is faithful to its mission, when it adheres to the logical universality that reflects the permanence and universality of being, it is the ‘healthy intellect’ that leads man to truth. When, on the contrary, it becomes entangled in inferior functions and becomes a slave to imagination and desires, it plunges into the subjective obscurity of biological impulses, and it is the ‘sick intellect’ that imprisons man in the realm of lies and illusions." (emphasis added)
The Olavo from “The Value of Intellect” will be traced in future trails, as we have already seen in his analyses of the works of Bruno Tolentino and Christopher Lasch.
But here we find him crystallized as he affirms that a true “spiritual path” will never truly happen if the individual avoids practicing it by restricting or discouraging “the action of intellect,” thereby exciting “imagination (through stories, incongruent situations, a succession of mismatched stimuli).”
At the same time, if one continues in this direction, “they will give free rein to desires and [abolish] any explicit moral rule,” solely contributing “to subjecting intellect to passions and thus to the outbreak of ‘rebellion’ that will make the diseased and worldly intellect a tyrant in the service of the subjective ego,” lowering “man to a level lower than that of an animal, while giving him the tragic illusion of 'evolving spiritually.’”
What Olavo de Carvalho proposes in this passage, in a nutshell, is a program of intellectual, moral, and spiritual reform of the human being, which, while not the modern rationalist reform elaborated by the “masters of suspicion” (such as Descartes, Spinoza, Marx, Freud, or even Foucault), is also a perennialist rationalism whose religious symbolism transforms man into something abstract, analogous to the macrocosm, without any kind of “vital nerve” connecting what we perceive as the “world as it is” and what we think is the “world as idea.”
In fact, despite the disparity of philosophical traditions – from the Renaissance “libertines” (here without any sexual connotation), through Cartesian philosophical rationalism, to the French, German, and even English enlightenments (in fact, the real enemies against whom Olavo’s adapted perennialism invests all its forces) – they can all converge, especially after the Renaissance and the emergence of the “anti-individual,” in the temptation, typical of intellect that hides the original sin that dwells in its roots, that reason is “the only power capable of answering all human questions,” as Henrique Elfes put it.
If we look at everything that has been meticulously discussed in this text from this perspective, this “unilateral rationalism” presents itself as a “salvation through philosophy,” privileging, according to Elfes,
"knowledge acquired in ghettos of specialists and protecting it with hermetic language; destroying the education of emotions that was accomplished through rituals, and therefore creative imagination of symbols; and relegates will to the role of a purely irrational categorical imperative.
[...] [There are several examples of this type of rationalism in the history of ideas, among them,] German idealism with its Geist (‘Spirit’), which evolves dialectically in a series of necessary steps (concentric levels) until it finds its supreme form in… the Prussian State! Or its materialist offspring, Marxism, and its descendants, which endow matter with divine attributes (self-creation, self-structuring, omnipotence, etc.). The same line is followed by National Socialism (which deifies the race) and liberal-pragmatism (the freedom). There’s also Comte’s positivism (‘religion of humanity’...), popular Darwinism (not Darwin’s, but Huxley and Haeckel’s), Freudianism and its progeny, and the current scientism, represented by Dawkins, prostrated in adoration before creative chance and its prophet, the selfish gene. In the face of this panorama, it can only be stated that nothing is more irrational than rationalism."
The examples described above and the behavior considered rationalist constitute a very peculiar attitude, which was anticipated by Michael Oakeshott in a classic essay titled “Rationalism in Politics.” His diagnosis is that the predominant political action in the Western world, especially European, has a reductive root in its actions, unable to accept the “negative capacity” of existence, with a “mental disposition of gnostic contours.”
Thus, the mind of a person who extensively practices this type of rationalism – which is, in fact, a perversion of the faculty of thinking, as we have seen – “has no atmosphere, change of season and temperature; its intellectual processes, as far as possible, are insulated from any external influence and operate in a vacuum.” Their habitual behavior is “pointing fingers at humanity,” seeing the torments of our condition only as “a matter of problem-solving, and no one can claim to be successful in this task if their ‘reason’ is inflexible due to surrendering to habit or is clouded by the effects of tradition.” The “rationalist politics” of our days, if we can call it that, is an extension of “engineering,” a “politics of perfection and uniformity,” where the “eradication” of any flaw, gap, or discontented person becomes the first rule of their creed, dominating the mind. What remains, therefore, is “a comprehensible utopia,” “perfectionism in detail,” and complete disregard for the unpredictable dynamics of human conduct.
This disregard is translated into the fact that the so-called “salvation through philosophy,” which became the root of a mortal enmity against Christianity, refuses to understand that the center of this “religion of the logos” is, according to Elfes' insightful observation, “the concept of person,” and this “installs in collective and individual history the tendency to center everything on the full person, the focus of dignity, rights, and duties, and filled with interiority.”
Illusion of Knowledge
The Online Philosophy Course, the great work of Olavo de Carvalho – originated in 2009, after the philosopher permanently moved to his self-imposed exile in the United States, five years earlier – is nothing more, nothing less than the culmination of the entire process of “salvation through philosophy” – and it is also the ultimate proof of that famous existential principle once articulated by the American historian Daniel J. Boorstin: “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.”
To understand this, it is essential to discover, through a quick analysis of the themes and structure of the COF, what the true unity of knowledge is in the unity of consciousness that Olavo so ardently defends in his classes and writings. And for that, it is extremely important to realize, beforehand, the axis upon which the entire course is structured: confession.
Confession, for Olavo, is that moment when the COF student is willing to show their soul with absolute sincerity, without their social masks, without mannerisms, and most importantly, without the verbal ticks imposed by a historical existence in which everyone lives in a culturally devastated world, whose greatest representations of this are the universities (especially USP) and the mainstream media.
Practically, the student surrenders their inner self through the exercise of obituary, in which the pupil is willing to write their life as if standing before the eyes of God. The willingness to open one’s heart early in the course is already an indication of a change in sensitivity that COF intends to bring not only to the student’s intellectual life but, above all, to their imagination.
Serving as a counterpoint to the barren land of Brazilian culture, Olavo presents himself as the philosopher who will reeducate and restore their “mediating imagination,” provided that the pupil understands that certain rules must be obeyed. The first of these is to understand that the professor is responsible for determining the duration of the course. The COF (with approximately five thousand students) may or may not last about five years. The timeframe will be determined by none other than Olavo himself, who, inspired by the model of none other than Socrates as an example for the philosophical method, will be the center of a new community of friends who will emerge from the “modern obscurantism” and are committed to recovering the “high culture in Brazil.”
Only then can the student embark on what Olavo calls “moral seriousness in philosophical pursuit,” which, in addition to specifically literary readings (to train expression and linguistic ability), also includes philosophical readings, along with meditation exercises that reinforce the habit of intellect and make students realize that there is a total and complete acceptance of objective reality. As if that were not enough, Olavo suggests that each student take a “vow of abstinence from opinions” because only after many years of study will participants in this community of scholars know whether those same opinions can change the current state of affairs.
Among the various exercises that help train the intellect is that of the “presence of the universe.” It consists – according to the transcription of one of the classes, made by the Portuguese Mario Chainho, one of COF’s most loyal students, used as a source in this presentation – in going to
“an open place, with no one around, lie down, feel the density of the earth below and the infinity of the sky above. And we will perceive that we are there truly, without our network of social contacts, without our linguistic universe. This exercise aims to bring about non-verbal awareness of our physical presence in the limitless universe and to develop the sense of the massive presence of reality, in the face of which our thoughts can do absolutely nothing. It is not an exercise to sensitize ourselves to feel more things in the body; it is to let the entire reality of the situation manifest itself, including our body and our thoughts, in which each thing will have its mode of presence. However vast the universe may be, it does not come to us as chaos but emerges terribly organized, everything with a certain perspective (visual, auditory, tactile). It is about accepting reality and not pursuing it.”
Everything leads us to believe that this task is a way to perceive the astonishment of the real, the “thambos” that Aristotle speaks of in his ‘Metaphysics,’ but, in reality, it is a synthesis of the precise application of what was advocated in “The Value of Intellect” and also in “Symbolic Dialectics.” Here, the learning method is articulated in a vertical movement, whose constant rhythm of “descending again from the principle to its particular manifestations, and then ascending again, and so on,” reveals “the awakening of the ability to constantly perform the ascent and descent, which constitutes the goal of all spiritual education.”
With these well-established foundations, Olavo proceeds to make a relentless diagnosis of the corruption of intelligence that has contaminated not only Brazil but also the rest of the world. The enemy, in this case, is globalism, the instrumentalized religion that “dehumanized the person” and “destroyed the knowledge” of the sacred tradition, accentuating the force of scientism in everyday life, and deepening as never before the secrecy surrounding the core of those in power. According to the philosopher (again, according to Chainho’s transcription),
“the globalist movement aims to anticipate how the future should be, where naturally, the globalists will assume ‘human’ control of Nature and the centralization of power, which, in turn, increases the momentum of the movement. Liberals who oppose the centralization of power within nations support international trade and other initiatives whose effect is the creation of powers on a global scale. They are an example of not having a broad enough perspective to understand the global situation, as they adopt the economic perspective, which is clearly insufficient, just as the Marxist approach is insufficient.”
Therefore, the students of the Online Philosophy Course have an “intervening role” to prevent such a situation because
"they must always be aware of the sense of the misery of the environment around them, and have the notion that it is better to stay in emptiness and without references for some time than to resort to some local reference to appear like everyone else or to appear endowed with communicability (which does not really exist nowadays). So, there is no need to aspire to have a role in Brazilian culture with the intention of participating in the conversation at the level it has today. It is necessary to create other functions, invent new means of action; we don’t have to conform to the present state of affairs in any way. We must not try to do something that is understood by the current academic milieu, but do things that will only be truly understood by people like us, who will exist in the future. We can intervene punctually in the current debate, to denounce certain people, but the fundamental concern is to create another debate above this one, which will supersede the current one and, by its weight, make this one yield. To substantially improve the present debate, there would have to be a root of what is good in it, but this condition is not met. The environment in which we live is not only corrupted, but it is also corrupting.
The work that the students will come to carry out may inspire the future political class (this is one of their functions to some extent), but it is necessary to distinguish the intellectual function from the political function, including that of a mere debater of ideas.
The left has always known this: their intellectuals did not seek to convince the masses but were concerned with generating the possibilities of a policy." (emphasis added)
There is no denying that, as we read this passage, Olavo intends to do with COF what he outlined in his writings on “Being and Power” and in the booklet “Intelligence and Truth”: the creation of a spiritual-intellectual caste that, more than being an elite (as he imagined in the distant 1990s in the former Seminar of Philosophy), will influence the direction of the nation in the long term, as he expects the existence of a community to arise only in an indistinct future.
Despite appearing to be a reactionary, Olavo is part of a contemporary trend (imperceptible to other analysts' eyes) in political studies that, along with Nobel laureate in Economics Richard Thaler, represents an unusual fusion of the “Rationalism in Politics” denounced by Oakeshott and the “shipwrecked mind” described by Mark Lilla. This distorted imagination sees itself in a milieu “where others see the river of time flowing as it always has,” and observes “the wreckage of paradise drifting by.” The COF student (and obviously, his professor) is “an exile from the present,” where if “the revolutionary sees the radiant future that others cannot see” and gets excited about it, “the reactionary, immune to modern lies, sees the past in all its splendor and also feels exalted. He feels in a stronger position than his adversary because he considers himself the guardian of what actually happened, not the prophet of what could have been. This explains the strangely captivating desperation that permeates reactionary literature, its palpable sense of mission [...]. The combativeness of their nostalgia is what makes the reactionary a typically modern figure, not traditional.”
This “exile from the present time” stimulates nostalgia for a time that no one has lived because, in practice, no one knows what it was like – not even Olavo himself. Therefore, his alternative is to see philosophy as a discipline of the soul, overcoming the impasses caused by modernity (especially concerning the ambiguity of the nature and meaning of Being, both crushed by the reductionism of liberal technique and Marxist determinism). His great intent is to abolish the separation between idea and life, reintegrating them as a unity within the divine order.
All of Olavo’s philosophical efforts emerge in the following sequence during his studies at COF: (1) the relationships between science and philosophy, where a clearer view of poetic-symbolic discourse provides fruitful dialogue between the two fields; (2) the relationship between poetry and philosophy, already outlined in an essay of the same name, whose division of functions is emphasized in COF studies; (3) the theory of the four discourses, explained in the book “Aristóteles em ‘Nova Perspectiva’ (1994),” in which poetic, rhetorical, dialectical, and logical discourses are absorbed into a hierarchy and seen as four modalities of a single power; (4) the theory of literary genres, already detailed in another essay, “Os gêneros literários: seus fundamentos literários” (1993), which speaks precisely about the transition from one discourse to another, as exposed in the previous theory; (5) astrocharacterology, whose work is to separate poetic language from symbolic language, showing the objectivity of astrological language; (6) the theory of truth as domain, meditating on the fact that we are always within truth, but we can also escape it, leading us to another solution – the domain of the experience of rapture and cognitive abduction; (7) the theory of the subject of History, whose rejection of the abstract leads to a better understanding of individual action within historical course; (8) the theory of empire, in which the fundamental concept is described in detail in “O Jardim das Aflições”; (9) the theory of power, whose reflection aims to determine the influence of the actions of others in history; (10) the theory of law, which, within the study of power, is extremely important in determining who has rights and who has privileges in exercising this same power; (11) the theory of the origin of authority, which attempts to distinguish power from authority; (12) the principle of authorship, whose recognition is to see that humans are the true cause of historical events, not abstract agents; (13) the concept of psyche, examining the interiority of human beings through the constant conflict between authority and reason; (14) loving contemplation, which would be the embryo of the method of confession stipulated as the axis of COF and a form of full acceptance of objective and imperfect reality; (15) the theory of cognitive parallax and revolutionary mentality, which shows in detail the historical result of the “dehumanization of man” that Olavo tries to prevent, motivated by this moral problem that has obsessed him for years.
Thus, Olavo makes it clear that the entire purpose of COF “revolves around the idea of consciousness,” especially moral consciousness, as it is the “fundamental element of integrity of personality.” Here, confession helps not only in self-examination but also in expanding its horizon, culminating in the unity of knowledge, which is reflected in consciousness. The explanation is as follows: “we also seek the unity of our consciousness, which integrates itself and then sets off again in the search for knowledge from another level, where it integrates more unity, integration, hierarchy, order, and organicity. This is a journey that only ends with death.”
So far, this aligns with what a true philosophy course would be, despite going against the academia’s more technical methods. However, the vertical movement of “ascent-and-descent,” already articulated in “A Dialética Simbólica,” returns, claiming that even with the integration of consciousness, the obtained criterion will be “reconstructed several times.” Although they do not have a strictly intellectual profession, COF students have a “cognitive responsibility” and, therefore, do not have the right to “hide behind a profession, nor can they seek shelter in the lack of ambition to become philosophers or intellectuals, so they can lead their lives according to the usual criteria of their environment. If they do that, everything they learn here will be quickly lost.”
Thus, to avoid returning to the psychological state of insecurity they were in before joining COF, these students have, in addition to individual responsibility, “the collective responsibility of forming a new intelligentsia.” Obviously, the “main function” of this intelligentsia “is not to take power or participate in political life, but it is also not to withdraw into the treatment of apolitical and ethereal matters. The function of the intelligentsia is to create the general atmosphere of culture, positioning itself in a layer that can morally and socially judge everything that happens in society, even if it lacks the power to impose decisions.” (emphasis added)
In theory, it seems that we are dealing with a spiritual-intellectual caste that will reform society; in practice, what we are examining is a true thought police, structured as a “hierarchical web,” replacing left-wing political activists and fossilized corporations of the media establishment, uniting in a reduced number – let’s say, about a hundred people – who believe they possess the “true self-awareness, producing material to create another hegemony and cleanse intellectual life, which will flow back into all domains of society.” (emphasis added)
Olavo makes it clear that “anyone who has learned something in the Online Philosophy Course already has this responsibility, even if they do not realize it, and even if they have to reconcile it with the abstinence from giving opinions.” This last observation is markedly ironic because no one can give an opinion about something – except, of course, the teacher himself. And why does this happen? Because, inspired by A.D. Sertillanges' book ‘A Vida Intelectual,’ Olavo de Carvalho sells the idea to his students that “a new intelligentsia is like an apostolate, composed of people who have reorganized their entire lives (even if it means breaking ties with the State) to be able to act with awareness of events, historical forces in motion, and what can be done to minimize the harmful effects.”
Once again, we have the esoteric aspect here, affirming that philosophical knowledge can only exist among a select few capable of understanding that “the world of study is a succession of studies and openings that never ends [...]. As we progress, we will have experiences with greater density and know much more than we can communicate, and these can only be understood by those with an equivalent level of consciousness. This will significantly limit the number of people who can be our friends because there will be fewer and fewer people qualified for a true exchange.” The notion of being truly special intensifies in living “in an environment of cultural warfare,” in which “it is important to know how the process of certain ideas becoming dominant in society takes place.” From here, the important concept of cultural hegemony emerges, a process that, according to Olavo,
“[is like] certain ideas impregnating society to almost a subconscious level, and everyone ends up thinking in harmony without even realizing it (Antonio Gramsci gives hegemony another sense, that of one class’s domination by another). The word ‘revolution’ is a good example of what cultural hegemony is, due to its widespread use in all areas, always based on a false analogy: either with the revolutions of the stars or with a sudden and auspicious change/novelty. The revolution of celestial bodies consists of them always returning to the same places, so there is no novelty whatsoever, to the point that we can calculate the trajectories of planets with millennia of anticipation. On the other hand, social revolutions only seem sudden, but they are actually highly complex and prolonged processes, and only when they erupt do they seem auspicious, but they quickly turn into something macabre, even for many of their enthusiasts who end up being massacred. No matter how wrong these analogies are, the word ‘revolution’ continues to be used with a positive sense, even by its adversaries, for example, many Christians consider it a revolution.”
COF would arise precisely to solve this problem of language contaminated by cultural hegemony, which originates not only with Gramsci but is a process that permeates all of modernity, giving an “aura of rigor” in which there is only “irrationality, lies, deliberate concealment, propaganda, in short, a set of things that constitute the cultural warfare itself.” And because of this, students of the Online Philosophy Course need to have
“an understanding of the entire process and know what is really at stake, something that the representatives of traditional culture lacked. The acquisition of the global panorama – which allows us to make historical predictions and have an idea of what we must do – implies a life of wrong partial syntheses that will always have to be redone. This seems to lead to a nihilistic perspective, but we can never cling to a human belief; we can only believe in the Holy Spirit, regardless of our religion. We will abandon our beliefs countless times until the time comes when it is no longer us who make the synthesis, but the Spirit itself, and then we will see things as they are.” (emphasis added)
What was supposed to be a community of studies later became a “hierarchical web,” whose goal is to spiritually influence the political events of a nation, like a caste – and now they take on the sense of a mission that is a kind of corpus mysticum, where each participant is analogous to a believer who can finally perceive reality in all its nakedness. And who would be the intermediary for all of this? Olavo de Carvalho, of course, who, inspired by the person of Socrates, affirms at the beginning of the course that “even when the student surpasses the master, he knows where he came from and to whom he 'owes everything,’” and when trying to “cut the umbilical cord,” when “confronting him,” is like an “adolescent” who has not overcome the challenges of this age and “then tries to launch them in the 'wrong place.’”
Power Project
The “illusion of knowledge” for those who practice all the requirements demanded by COF arises from two points. The first – and the most obvious, after analyzing the work of Olavo de Carvalho – is that the Online Philosophy Course is nothing more, nothing less than a great manipulation of the consciousness of its students, using the distorted and instrumentalized use of the “mediating imagination,” according to the method of analogy presented in “A Symbolic Dialectic.”
And the second – which finally creates the conditions for the existence of the first point – is that the true unity in Olavo’s philosophy is not the unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness (and vice versa), as he himself obsessively claims, but rather the unity of control.
It is no coincidence that his thinking encompasses various areas of knowledge, ranging from epistemology to ethics. At first, this would be the proper function of someone who practices philosophy to its ultimate consequences. But there is an essential difference here: as observed by Benedito Nunes, the philosophies created by Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and St. Thomas, for example, are the result of a historical moment in which the inherent impasse of modernity had not yet occurred. On the other hand, the philosophies of figures like Spinoza, Hobbes, Hegel, and especially Heidegger continuously feed on this impasse, this questioning about the nature and meaning of Being, which Olavo de Carvalho’s thought, despite his desire not to be part of this problem, can only be understood from.
And here, we touch upon a painful point in the questions we are asking: to what extent does this thinker realize that he is part of this same intellectual environment? Does his refusal to be one of the participants in this impasse mean nothing more than indulgence? After all, it cannot be said that someone like Olavo, endowed with a titanic personality and a clear charismatic character for many of his students, suffers from stupidity or is a habitual practitioner of dishonesty – but it would also not be an exaggeration to assert that he is himself possessed by a force that makes him fervently believe he would escape from this impasse and the very fallacy he constructed at the core of his work.
This force is only apprehended when we observe what Olavo managed to build not only in the purely intellectual world but especially in the real world. And it is evident that such possession is the experience of having certainty about the meaning of human existence and, perhaps, of History itself, to be transfigured sooner or later by the “Spirit that will help the chosen ones see things as they are.”
What Olavo proposes, using an entire metaphysical or religious vocabulary – and with the intention of fighting against the hydra of globalism, cultural warfare, and left-wing hegemony – is to control the typical anguish of those who live in existential uncertainty and do not want to admit, to themselves or others (especially if they are his students), that the experience of faith, according to the definition in Hebrews 11:1, is not about creating a loyalty or developing a habit that enhances intellect to understand reality, but rather to endure, with some resignation, the fragile order of being that occurs when the soul finally opens itself toward the transcendent God, in that almost unbearable state in which the spiritual life extracts its best virtues in periods of waiting, aridity and boredom, contrition and repentance, forgetfulness and hope – what Eric Voegelin calls “the silent calls of love and grace,” and which make us fear losing them when recognizing that the conquest of certainty, if effective, is also an impossibility.
We have seen before that Olavo acknowledges this tension, but he withdraws from it through the unity of control inherent in his thinking – hence the fact that his “outline of a Philosophy system” encompasses so many areas of reflection.
He wants to dominate everything that philosophy has given him and everything that reality can offer him – from political speeches, bibliographic references, students' speeches, enemies' declarations, friends' sayings, in a list that can go on indefinitely and that would start with his readings a la Charles Kinbote of authors like Voegelin, Bernard Lonergan, Xavier Zubiri, Mario Ferreira dos Santos, Bruno Tolentino, Christopher Lasch, Rosenstock-Huessy, Husserl, Kant, Guénon, among many others, to culminate in the last but not least desire to integrate into a political movement that has reached federal power – be it bolsonarism or any other existing under “certain circumstances” – to exert not only his influence but mainly to structure, with the help of the State, his “hierarchical web” that will solidify the COF project permanently.
Although we may not want to perceive this, the unity of control present in a philosophical thought is the striking characteristic of the intellectual who suffers from the disease of pleonexia. And with Olavo, every public manifestation of his showcases the almost desperate desire for his ideas and words to alter not only the pragmatic reality of everyday events but the very structure of reality itself. It is a clear project of power – with mystical touches, for sure, but one that never hides its libido dominandi.
The problem is that the rhetoric employed by Olavo – together with the masterful use of analogy as a way of thinking that connects the various levels of reality – creates in other people who intend to be part of this new intellectual caste, directly or indirectly, a kind of spell that traps each one’s consciousness. In this alternative reality, everyone becomes the anti-individuals detected by Michael Oakeshott and will create a new “revolt of the elites” in our society.
Cultural Totalitarianism
This subliminal charm could only be articulated by a philosopher who condensed, within the controlling unity of his work, all the virtues and vices of Brazil’s intellectual history. And Providence decided to grant this place precisely to Olavo de Carvalho.
All of this is a radical consequence of the “aestheticism” that prevails in Brazilian culture, unfortunately, something few realize exists in each of their actions, in each of their thoughts. This bizarre phenomenon was brilliantly analyzed by Mario Vieira de Mello in his book ‘Desenvolvimento e Cultura’ (1963), where he shows that the Brazilian soul – this strange creature that many intellectuals of our race try to reduce to the extreme, regardless of being from the right or the left – cannot face existence as a moral problem, in which Good and Evil are objective, dependent on a singular choice, but rather as an aesthetic question, similar to a work of art that can be modified at will, even at the expense of others or even oneself, reaching the point of dividing actions that were previously inseparable (as is the case with those who practice poetry and those who live philosophy).
This happened because of the years of Portuguese influence from the Society of Jesus in an education that favored legal rhetoric over dispassionate observation of reality, a mark of Paris and Oxford. Thanks to it, the universities here turned into a stage for the precision of studies and the adornment of words. This was the formal education that a significant part of the intellectual elite of Portugal received at the Colégio das Artes, dominated by the Jesuits since 1555, and it was the passage through minor studies through which they later went to the University of Coimbra, which was also under the control of the Order.
This kind of education removed any ethical component from the teaching of classical philosophers like Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, or Saint Augustine, choosing only the surface of concepts and reasonings that had no connection to a vital reality. It was a kind of inverted paideia that would only please the sensibility of the “anti-individual,” in which philosophical disputes would serve only to train an apparently self-sufficient intellect.
After the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal, enacted by Marquês de Pombal in 1759, a change in mentality was expected at the Colégio das Artes and the University of Coimbra, but nothing of the sort happened. The attraction to ornamentation intensified, merely shifting from humanistic interests to the in-depth study of science as a practical application, which finally placed Portugal among the eminent Enlightenment philosophers of France.
Culturally, France was the main victor with the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portuguese education because it created a void that left both the Metropolis and the Colony without any intellectual orientation to follow. This vacuum caused by the departure of the Society of Jesus allowed French culture to emerge in the early 19th century as the definitive guidance in matters of thought.
However, in the specific case of Brazil, France was elevated to a kind of “spiritual ancestor,” completely cutting its ties with Portugal, in a movement with clear political tendencies that had much to do with our independence declared in 1822. But the virus of rhetoric persisted – due to a simple affinity. While French Romanticism was a reaction against the “monism of reason,” in which Enlightenment thinking insisted on as the only way to understand reality, the emphasis fell on the distorted sensibility of the “anti-individual” who had to survive in this world full of betrayals, playing their own emotions against impartial rationality, now revealed as a dream that awakened the monsters trapped in our inner life, just like Goya’s famous drawing.
The unusual combination of the sentimentality of the “anti-individual” with the love for the empty words of Portuguese sensibility, corrupted by Jesuit Counter-Reformation, added to the “triumph of subjective self over the objective world, a desire for open spaces, a nostalgia for distant lands and epochs” of the Brazilian (in Mario Vieira de Mello’s accurate words) created the nightmare of rhetoric that ultimately dominated the very description of the world. This phantasmagoria became not only a means for intellectuals to convince their audience that their feelings were the best and noblest, but also an instrument of power because, thanks to their purely technical abilities, they could finally prove that they had all the necessary conditions to change the country, which, above all, should progress and liberate an incipient nationality.
Olavo de Carvalho’s work intends to go against this historical avalanche that contaminated our minds. However, even if he does not admit it to himself or his students, he did not achieve this. In reality, he became even more entangled in the cultural totalitarianism that has existed in the country since the Modern Art Week movement of 1922, with its ideological acrobatics that still confuse us today, such as the thread of Ariadne that connects the political tendencies of the final phase of the First Republic with those of the modernist mentality.
If before there was the Jacobin-positivist republicanism (the “castilhismo” that would influence Getúlio Vargas’s youth), conservative republicanism (the official discourse of the Republic), progressive liberal republicanism (advocated by the lofty oratory of Rui Barbosa), authoritarian ruralism of Alberto Torres, and Catholic integralism of Jackson de Figueiredo, now, with a change of verb here and there, we had modern artists, always with a tendency of “socializing evolution” (Mário de Andrade), ex-conservatives who turned to anarchism (Oswald de Andrade), traditionalists like Gilberto Freyre, and proto-fascists like Plínio Salgado.
Rhetoric changes the meaning of words, but the intention remains the same: both yesterday and today, Brazil is divided between a “nationalism of order” and a “nationalism of disorder” – and the country’s intelligence, fragmented between the right and the left full of “anti-individuals,” strives to maintain the expectation that only a “poet,” a “providential leader,” could achieve full integration between the State and the rest of society (in the time of modernism, it was Vargas; in the 1990s-2000s, it was Fernando Henrique Cardoso or Lula; currently, it is Jair Bolsonaro).
The practical result of this cultural totalitarianism in our history is reflected in an idolatry for popular sovereignty – which has nothing to do with the “conservative populism” defended by Christopher Lasch, but is curiously supported by Olavo de Carvalho since the protests of the “new time of the world,” which began in 2013. It was defended both by the military dictatorship and by the protesters of the “Diretas-Já” movement in 1984, who created the “tyranny of the majority” that now infests universities, newsrooms, and political parties.
Using this psychic idolatry to rely on the State and thus completely structure his “hierarchical web,” Olavo’s pedagogical project is sold as the solution to this deleterious environment. But his insistence on the sensitivity of a “shipwrecked mind” only aids him in diving into a true totalitarian project because, by wanting to apply his intellectual, moral, and spiritual reform to the education of ordinary Brazilian men, he actually practices the “tyranny of the intelligentsia,” the same that spreads through all professions around the globe, attempting to control human beings since the early days of modernity, precisely when the “anti-individual” was born.
Incapable of controlling their passions and recognizing their virtues, this type of personality prefers to depend on a master who, aware of their charismatic power, makes their students imagine that they possess a series of teachings that only a few have access to. Unaware of this existential problem rooted in each of them – the true original sin that damages any value that intellect may have – they refuse to admit that the cultural totalitarianism created by their supposed community is much worse than any dictatorial government. It is a very precise and technical form of anti-intellectualism, desiring to alter what we recognize as human, modifying what has always been known about humanity through historical and literary accounts, into a political discourse (with a philosophical or religious appearance, as happens in COF classes) that would solve all our problems, as they fall into the peculiar devotion of those who have just received a celestial enlightenment, where, as Vacláv Havel would say, the center of power is equal to the center of truth.
Politically, Olavo took advantage of the “quietism” of a right-wing that claimed to be balanced in the face of an evidently totalitarian left, to manipulate the “mediating imagination” (read: the moral imagination) of his students and create a new narrative in which he would be nothing less than the Alpha and Omega of Brazilian culture. In a purely intellectual sense, he was victorious, but not in the real world, where his concrete predictions simply failed, proving that he never respected the unpredictable dynamics of human behavior, believing that everything was under the control of his ideas.
As a less important example, Olavo, consistent in his fury of a shipwrecked mind, claimed that the national establishment was corrupt and corrupting, advocating for the demoralization of the entire political system, calling for its reconstruction from scratch. He was also radically against the prudent efforts of the Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL) and lawyer Janaína Paschoal to seek institutional negotiation to resolve the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. He literally wrote that the impeachment was nothing more than “a maneuver for the salvation of the political class” and the maintenance of the left in power. Moreover, he continued to attack several members of the MBL – including Kim Kataguiri, who was once a great admirer of his work – for getting involved in institutional politics, especially after the election of seven city council members in 2016 (one of the winners was Fernando Holiday). His argument was that the so-called “new right” (whose creation he claims – and then denies, in the typical dialectic of those who love to confuse people – is not his fault) should focus on occupying spaces “in schools, in churches, in societies of friends,” and not the State. However, when the 2018 elections showed their results at the polls, with Jair Bolsonaro’s victory by 55 million votes, he never complained about the victory of nine COF students when they became deputies – including Kim Kataguiri, whom he had previously criticized.
This concrete contradiction between what Olavo writes and what he practices in real life indicates a much deeper fissure than we can imagine. It is not just about being torn between the “nationalism of order” and the “nationalism of disorder,” sprinkled with touches of a caricature of populism – which, in the end, is the same type of cultural environment that allowed him to accurately predict all the future movements of the Workers' Party (and hence the fascination that moves the unsuspecting). We are talking about something more serious that accompanies the drama of reason that consumes us since the early times of philosophy, when Plato and Aristotle already understood that every political decision has an intrinsically tragic character.
Circular Ruins
In the two previous articles that are part of this series, previously published in Gazeta do Povo – and which are essential to understand what is at stake when meditating on the work of Olavo de Carvalho – it was argued that poetry, philosophy, and politics will only overcome their respective rivalries if they find their unity of meaning and signifier in the inherent tragedy of each choice that affects the Common Good of society. Furthermore, this view also articulated a peculiar “melancholy” in the imagination of the left (especially the Brazilian left), which, entangled in a deadlock since the presidential victories of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, sought to reorganize reality at an extremely accelerated pace, capable of diminishing the expectations resulting from its failure to comprehend the current horizon of consciousness.
The importance of Olavo and his impact on the social fabric of Brazil is not solely due to the existential implications of his teachings, but mainly because his presence indicates that he embodies the crossroads between the tragedy of the philosopher engaging with the arts of politics and the fact that the overcoming of philosophy, so eagerly desired by him, is the result of what happens when one lives what Paulo Eduardo Arantes calls “the new time of the world.”
In seeking to influence the correct political decision in Brazilian history, Olavo forfeits the chance to be, in his role as a philosopher, a nomos enpsychos – the living law that guides the multiple tensions that occur in the spiritual life of a country when engaged in the dynamics of philosophical eros. But at the same time, he cannot escape this role. It is to be assumed that, deep down, what happened to the theorist of “amorous contemplation” is that, in his eagerness to win the spiritual struggle within his soul, he was completely torn apart by the subterranean forces of Leviathan and Behemoth, as denounced at the beginning of ‘The Collective Imbecile.’
His defeat is the defeat of all of us because, as Brazilians, we are equally dragged by the insane force of a philosophical eros that, in the end, as Mark Lilla wrote in another superb book (‘The Reckless Mind’), shows that “the philosopher also knows the madness of love, the love of wisdom, but does not give up his soul in its name; he remains in control, ruling over himself. The tyrannical man is the inverted image of the philosopher: he is not the ruler of his own aspirations and desires, but a man possessed by the madness of love, a slave to his aspirations and desires, not their ruler.” (emphasis added)
For this reason, it is futile to label Olavo de Carvalho with the reductionist clichés uttered profusely by the press or academia – from “guru of Bolsonarism” and “leader of a sect” to “ideologue of the New Right,” “astrologer,” “reactionary charlatan,” or even the laughable “unqualified philosopher.”
He has already secured his historical importance, but not in the way his detractors or defenders intend. We have here a man who genuinely heeded the call of philosophy and felt its appeal. However, for some unknown reason (and one not for us to judge), the “dark dove” that Eliot saw in the ruins of London during World War II, the “specter of heresy” that visited Bruno Tolentino under the mask of cloaked Charles Baudelaire, and the pale fire of analogy took hold of him, completely perverting the philosophical eros that could have been sowed in his work and in the rest of Brazilian culture.
Acknowledging this sadness does not exempt him in any way from the consequences of his teachings, especially among his students or the members of the political elite who claim to understand his lessons. After all, “responsibilities begin with eros” – and Bruno Tolentino already observed that “beneath the illustrious guise of some of the most sophisticated constructs of the human mind” – and this is precisely the case with Olavo de Carvalho’s philosophical work – lies, for a long time, “not in his love of knowledge (philo-sophia), but in his hatred of this knowledge (phobo-sophia), which, in fact and nature, surpasses him, [...] always the same and most ancient mode of the absurd: the absurd will of a man sick with pride, and the thirst for a ‘knowledge’ that denies or, better yet, replaces divine wisdom.”
Thus, it becomes evident that the philosopheme upon which Olavo bases his thoughts is merely a rhetorical resource, a casuistry, accentuated by the abuse of an analogy that seeks to justify the division between what happens in the world of ideas and the real world. In this hiatus, he separates himself from the consequences of his actions – and blames those who have not yet understood that to live his philosophy, one must immerse oneself “in a certain way of seeing things that is transportable beyond them and can be shared by anyone who, leaping over the texts, adopts that way of seeing and integrates it into their own.” Here we have the example of the tyrannical eros that inhabits the soul of a philosopher – and the result of this is nothing more, as George Steiner writes in ‘Lessons of the Masters,’ than ultimate loneliness:
“True teaching can be a terribly dangerous enterprise. The Master holds in his hands something very intimate of his students: the fragile and inflammable matter of their possibilities. He touches what we conceive as the soul or the roots of being, a touch that is the lesser, though metaphysical, version of erotic seduction. To teach without grave concern, without an uneasy reverence for the risks involved, is frivolous. To do so without caring about individual and social consequences is blindness. Teaching with grandeur is to arouse doubts in the student, to train him to dissent. It is to prepare the disciple to depart (‘Now let me go,’ commands Zarathustra). In the end, the true Master must be alone.” (emphasis added)
However, Olavo de Carvalho’s philosopheme does not prompt the student to abandon the teacher at any moment. It wants to keep them on a leash until the end of time. And here lies the great irony: in trying to overcome the impasse of philosophy in modernity through an ambitious idiosyncratic project, Olavo corrupted not only his own intelligence but also that of those around him, for his primary intention was never to vie for political power but, as he himself described regarding one of his great models – René Guénon – in the text “The Claws of the Sphinx” (2017), “something that is infinitely above that, and from which [...] political power is but a secondary, almost negligible, reflection” – in this case, the pursuit of spiritual authority over the consciences of the “anti-individuals” that we all are.
It is philotyranny in its purest form – the love for tyrannical desire, personified either in a political leader or in a master who guides our souls. As a result, Olavo de Carvalho’s work becomes a collection of texts that, without a unity sculpted in the “lesson of modeling,” practices “indifference to grace,/ in the pomp and pride/ of the dreams of the intellect/ that presumes itself autonomous.”
It is similar to Jorge Luis Borges' famous story, “Circular Ruins,” in which a mysterious magician finds himself in a place full of debris to construct the perfect man and, amid visionary dreams, begins conversing with “clouds of taciturn students,” all eager listeners of “lessons in anatomy, cosmography, magic: the faces listened anxiously and tried to respond with understanding, as if they guessed the importance of that examination, which would redeem one of them from their condition of vain appearance and introduce them to the real world. During dreams and wakefulness, the man considered the answers of his phantoms, not allowing himself to be deceived by impostors, sensing a growing intelligence in certain perplexities. He sought a soul worthy of participating in the universe.”
In the end, the magician’s undertaking fails, even with the construction of the perfect man, who reveals himself not only as the magician’s dream but also – in a typical Borgesian twist – as the very person who dreamt of his creator. This recurring image represents Olavo’s failure, for what we have here is a thought that endlessly revolves, where the philosopheme is the root of a separation that never existed in the palaia diafora between poetry and philosophy, the “old discord” resolved only by their union in tragedy. This artificial division is merely the result of an anomaly typical of a philosopher who incorporates (and unsuccessfully combats) the culture of aestheticism that has always existed at the core of his theory, perhaps aware that this resource is the only way he managed to give some coherence to his “drafts of being.”
In his inability to act like a statesman, someone who thinks about the society he lives in as if it were a grand drama, with each person playing their role in the functioning of the city or state they govern, Olavo could have been the artist who commands and educates, who thinks and reflects, who acts and reacts according to what lies within his inner nomos, showing others his incorporation as something alive in the communal fabric and not just a rule to be corrupted according to the pressures of existence.
The loss is not just ours, as genuine individuals, or that of a country. It is the loss of philosophy as a whole. By proving that Benedito Nunes’s diagnosis was always correct, Olavo de Carvalho’s circular ruins now suffer from the same malady as Heidegger’s thought, both falling into the secret snares prepared for them by Being. The difference is that, while the Brazilian needs to immerse themselves in this “arrogance of the intellect,” the German philosopher acknowledges that “logic is surrounded by a primeval logos, which language condenses and which poets reactivate, unleashing the same foundation that fundamental ontology must reveal, whether through words or silence. Silence, as the absence of language, to express the meaning of Being, is the moment of waiting.”
In the tragic pursuit of the correct political decision, the author of ‘Philosophy and Its Inverse’ (2012) did not want to wait or listen to the silence that he would have gained if he insisted on his inner freedom – and that of his students. Thus, he rejected the tragedy that would have truly made him the great philosopher he always aspired to be. His last years are like the anecdote of the fox told by none other than Hannah Arendt:
“Once upon a time, there was a fox so lacking in cunning that he not only kept getting caught in traps but also couldn’t tell the difference between a trap and something that wasn’t. He built a trap to be his den. ‘I receive so many visitors in my trap that I have become the best of all foxes.’ And there is some truth to this: no one knows the nature of traps better than someone who spends their whole life in one.”
Olavo de Carvalho’s work can only be contemplated with love if we observe it, right from its entrance, with the help of the warning given by a great French moralist: “We cannot gaze fixedly at either the sun or death.” These words from La Rochefoucauld, the moralist we mentioned, summarize everything that remains of what we once knew as philosophy.
Martim Vasques da Cunha is the author of the books “Crisis and Utopia – The Dilemma of Thomas More” (Vide Editorial, 2012) and “The Dust of Glory – An (Unexpected) History of Brazilian Literature” (Record, 2015); he is a researcher at FGV-EAESP.
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