Study, by Olavo de Carvalho

This series of newspaper columns by Olavo de Carvalho was collected in this order in the book “The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot”.

In “The Tragedy of the Serious Student in Brazil”, Olavo criticizes the Brazilian educational system, especially its universities, for fostering intellectual mediocrity and focusing on left-wing political activism rather than genuine intellectual development. He contrasts the rich intellectual climate of the early 20th century with the shallow, politically motivated discourse that dominates modern Brazilian academia.

In “If You Still Want to Be a Serious Student…”, Olavo offers practical advice for students seeking serious intellectual formation outside of the mainstream educational system. He encourages independent study of classical thinkers, warns against the intellectual decay within universities, and emphasizes the need for a deep, disciplined approach to learning, combining philosophical rigor with historical and spiritual insight.

In “For the Intellectual Restoration of Brazil”, Olavo argues that Brazil needs a generation of students capable of genuine intellectual engagement. He stresses the importance of building an intellectual life rooted in historical and philosophical traditions, free from the ideological constraints of contemporary academia. He calls for the creation of alternative institutions to foster this intellectual growth, especially through the support of the private sector.

Finally, in “Spirit and Personality”, Olavo explores the relationship between thought and spirit, highlighting the transcendent nature of truth. He distinguishes between mere intellectual activity and genuine intelligence, which involves perceiving truths that transcend thought. He advocates for education that fosters intellectual and spiritual maturity, but laments that this goal is unattainable in today’s universities, urging students with initiative to seek intellectual growth independently.

• The Tragedy of the Serious Student in Brazil
• If You Still Want to Be a Serious Student…
• For the Intellectual Restoration of Brazil
• Spirit and Personality

The Tragedy of the Serious Student in Brazil

Diário do Comércio, February 12, 2006

Every week, I receive dozens of letters from students who, in search of intellectual development, found nothing at their universities but low-level, dirty, sub-high-school communist propaganda.

They are not, as is often imagined, victims of immediate political circumstances. They groan under a mountain of adverse factors to human intelligence, which have accumulated over the world, not just in Brazil, in the last few decades. If the first half of the 20th century brought an unusual intellectual blossoming, the second was a general devastation rarely seen in history. The fall was so deep that it can no longer be measured. In a panorama entirely dominated by caricatured charlatans like Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva, the era in which flourished almost simultaneously Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Louis Lavelle, Alfred North Whitehead, Benedetto Croce, Jan Huizinga, and Arnold Toynbee — and in literature T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Jacob Wassermann, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Heimito von Doderer — has become invisible, unreachable to the imagination of our contemporaries. Every comparison is between one thing and another thing. You can’t compare everything to nothing.

This doesn’t mean that the sources of knowledge have dried up. Thinkers of great caliber — an Eric Voegelin, a Bernard Lonergan, a Xavier Zubiri — survived the 1960s debacle and continued their work, the first until 1985, the second until 1984, the third until 1983. But their teachings are still the exclusive possession of select circles. They don’t enter the mainstream of ideas, nor could they without getting tainted, without being turned into fodder for idiotic discussions as has happened, thanks to the political rise of some of their disciples, like the unfortunate Leo Strauss.

For the misfortune happened precisely in the “mainstream.” The end of World War II brought a prodigious reorganization of the social and economic bases of intellectual life in the world. New institutions, new communication networks, new mechanisms for storing and distributing academic information, new audiences, and, above all, the unprecedented expansion of state and private support for culture and the formation of large international bodies like the UN and UNESCO. All this came along with the discrediting of Soviet Marxism and the deep internal mutation of international leftist activism, by then fully imbued with two lessons learned from the Frankfurt School and Georg Lukács (but also, more discreetly, from Martin Heidegger): (1) the essential struggle was not against capitalism per se, but against “Western civilization”; (2) the main agent of the process was the intellectual class.

In these conditions, the fabulous growth of means of action came along with the multilateral effort to appropriate these means by militant groups with little interest in “understanding the world” but wholly devoted to “changing it.” The drastic reduction of intellectual activity to political activism was the desired and planned consequence of this operation, carried out on a global scale starting in the 1960s.

Not that the phenomenon was entirely unknown before that. A vast general rehearsal had been underway in the U.S. since at least the 1930s, through large “nonprofit” foundations that discovered their power to guide and manipulate intellectual, scientific, and educational activity at will simply by ideologically selecting the recipients of their billion-dollar grants.

In 1954, a U.S. Congressional investigation had already discovered that foundations like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford exerted undue control over universities, research institutions, and culture in general, guiding them in a direction frankly anti-American, anti-Christian, and even anti-capitalist. (Don’t ask me for the thousandth time why major capitalists can act against capitalism. The explanation is summarized on my website.)¹ Inevitably, the influence exerted by these organizations did not consist only of introducing a particular political color into cultural production but in altering and corrupting it to the roots, subordinating all demands for honesty, truth, and rigor to the political and advertising objectives in view. Without this interference, massive frauds like the Kinsey Report or Margaret Mead’s pseudoanthropology would never have succeeded in imposing themselves on the academic world and the cultural media as respectable products of normal scientific activity.

The commission was subjected to virulent attacks from the mainstream media, and its work ended up being forgotten, but it is still one of the best sources of reference on the political instrumentalization of culture.² In fact, without it, nothing that happened afterward can be understood, for what happened was that the experiment attempted on an American scale was expanded to the entire world: the appropriation of cultural means of action by militant organizations and the total sacrifice of human intelligence on the altar of the “will to power” simply became globalized.

Incalculably vast resources, which could have been used for the progress of knowledge and the improvement of the human species' condition, were thus wasted to sustain the general war of militant stupidity against the “Western civilization” that had generated these same resources.

Although this process has global reach, it is clear that its weight was felt more densely in new Third World countries, where the creations of previous eras had not been deeply assimilated, and the roots of civilization could be more easily severed. In Brazil, from the 1960s onwards, the progress of barbarism was perhaps faster than anywhere else, astonishingly easily destroying the seeds of culture that, though fragile, had been yielding some promising fruits. The impossible comparison between the two eras, which I mentioned above, is even more impossible in the Brazilian case. In the 1950s, we had, alive and active, Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Graciliano Ramos, José Lins do Rego, Álvaro Lins, Augusto Meyer, Otto Maria Carpeaux, Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Vicente Ferreira da Silva, Herberto Sales, Cornélio Penna, Gustavo Corção, Nelson Rodrigues, Lúcio Cardoso, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Augusto Frederico Schmidt, the list goes on. Today, who represents the image of “Brazilian culture” in the media? Paulo Coelho, Luis Fernando Verissimo, Gilberto Gil, Arnaldo Jabor, Emir Sader, Frei Betto, and Leonardo Boff. Compared to these, Chomsky is Aristotle. It’s the highest degree by which they measure themselves. Calling this a crisis, or even decadence, is deliriously optimistic. Brazilian culture has become a caricature of a farce. It’s an empty, idiotic, shapeless, diseased thing, incalculably ridiculous.

Intelligence, unlike money or health, has this peculiarity: the more you lose it, the less you notice its absence. An intelligent man, accustomed to heavy studies, soon feels that he has become dull when, tired, nervous, or poorly rested, he finds it difficult to understand something. The one who never understood much thinks he’s perfectly normal when he understands even less, for he has forgotten the little he understood and can no longer compare. One of the things that delights me, that brings me to ecstasy when I contemplate Brazil today, is the air of seriousness with which people discuss and pretend to fix Brazil’s economic, political, and administrative problems without giving a damn about the destruction of culture, as if practical intelligence survived the general dumbing down, as if intelligence were an adornment to be added to success after all problems were solved, or as if absolute ineptitude were in no way an obstacle to the achievement of general happiness. The most evident proof of gross insensitivity is the individual not even missing the awareness they once had.

But no, national intelligence did not end the day our students came last in an assessment among secondary school students from 32 countries: it ended shortly thereafter when the Minister of Education said the result could have been worse.

In a deeper sense than the minister imagined, it could indeed have been. In the next election, the country put in the Presidency a careerist, enriched, wearing an Armani suit and polished nails, who, proud of never reading books, was proclaimed a symbol of popular authenticity. The image was false, grotesque, and insulting, but no one noticed. If there is a level below the grotesque, however, it was reached shortly afterward when writer Raymundo Faoro, the more foolish the more celebrated by the left as a luminous intellect, suggested the name of the then-presidential candidate to occupy a seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Compared to that, coming last in a test was almost meritorious.

If the despair of the students who write to me came only from the political situation, there would be hope of remedying it through political action. But political action is a byproduct of culture, and in the state things are in, no intelligent political action, at least on a federal scale, is foreseeable for the next two or three generations. In the next elections, for example, the country will have to choose again between PT and PSDB, that is, the two monstrous offspring generated in the womb of USP, the mother of national sterility, or as well synthesized by poet Bruno Tolentino, the “w… who never gave birth.” Yes, Brazilian politics has turned into a giant assembly of USP students, with the Communist Party on one side, the Popular Action on the other, in a tournament of arrogance, presumption, hypocrisy, mental sadism, limitless mendacity, and endless stupidity. USP took half a century to come to power, and it hasn’t stopped producing ambitious pseudo-intellectuals, eager to rule, thirsty for ministries. Its work of destruction is far from complete.

Nothing good can be expected from politics in any humanly bearable timeframe. A large-scale cultural action — the founding of an authentic institution of higher education, to counterbalance USP’s disaster — is also unlikely, given the omission of the so-called “elites,” always tail-tucked, oscillating between licking the feet of the PT scoundrels a little more or clinging to the first Zé Serra that comes along.

For the student who can still glimpse what intellectual life is and make it the goal of their existence, two paths remain: exile, which may lead to the wrong place (Brazilian misery is born in Paris), and isolation, which may lead the weaker ones to even deeper despair than the one they are already in.

The only viable solution I see is the formation of small, supportive groups, firmly determined to obtain a solid intellectual formation, initially without any official or academic recognition, but later forcing the attainment of such recognition through overwhelming proof of superiority. I no longer teach in Brazil, but experience has shown that many of my students, after a few years of lessons and considerable home study, are already capable of beating, not students, but USP professors of the likes of Demétrio Magnoli and Emir Sader, which, when you do the math, is almost an unfair fight, almost bullying.

The process is laborious but simple: fulfill the traditional tasks of academic study, master the trivium, learn to write by reading and imitating the classics of at least three languages, study a lot of Aristotle, a lot of Plato, a lot of Thomas Aquinas, a lot of Leibniz, Schelling, and Husserl, absorb as much as possible the legacy of the German and Austrian universities of the first half of the 20th century, know very well the comparative history of two or three civilizations, absorb the classics of theology and mysticism of at least three religions, and only then read Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault. If after this regimen you are still impressed with these three, it’s because you are truly stupid, and there is nothing I can do for you.

But the Brazilian university environment today is so low, so filthy, that just by presenting this list — the bare minimum required for serious training as a philosopher or scholar — people already widen their eyes in astonishment. In fact, the Brazilian student reads nothing, only summaries and back covers, in addition to Emir Sader and the Betto & Boff duo, who aren’t worth the summary of a back cover. It’s all a farce, a slapstick, a pose. Everyone knows it, and everyone eventually accommodates to the situation as if it were natural and inevitable. The intellectual abjection of this country is endless.

If You Still Want to Be a Serious Student…

Diário do Comércio, February 27, 2006

“The tragedy of the serious student in Brazil” generated so many letters that I think it’s best to complement, with some tips based on personal experience, the study recommendations I gave at the end of the article.

I’ll start with a casual example.

The other day, I received from friends a copy of an interesting message, posted on some website by a young woman, apparently cultured and university-educated, who, torn between admiring me and despising me, demanded an explanation for the fact that I have been right in so many predictions over nearly two decades, betting almost always against what was being announced by the general opinion of well-meaning thinkers. In the opinion of the sender, as well as other participants in the debate, the most plausible hypothesis was that I must be a CIA agent, therefore connected to a network of secret informants scattered all over the place…

I kept the message with the historiographical care it deserves as an eloquent sign of the times.

What a delightful era this is, where the individual is not blamed for their mistakes, but for their successes! If it’s normal to always be wrong, then what purpose would the thousands of social scientists, historians, journalists, economists, and PhDs that the universities, funded by the hard work of millions of taxpayers who never attended them, dump annually onto the national chatter market serve? Answer: they are not meant to understand the world, but to transform it. However, being unable to know it — since they don’t believe in objective truth — they always lead it in a direction different from what they intended, feeling — for that very reason, blast it! — innocent of the monstrous results they produce and always deserving of renewed trust to start everything over again, and again, and again. Revolution, after all, wouldn’t be revolutionary if it didn’t revolutionize itself and its own history, changing its identity after each new crime and each new failure, and not having to answer to anything other than a future which, when it arrives, is no longer the future and thus has no authority to charge it for anything. Such is, brutally summarized but not at all distorted, the essence of the mindset that can be acquired at any university in this country and in many abroad. It amounts to a certificate of congenital impeccability, granting the right to laureled stupidity, boundless self-love, and innocent crime. It’s no surprise that so many desire it, even knowing that the remuneration for university jobs isn’t much these days. In fact, earning less than they’d like even reinforces their sense of incalculable merit and their revolt against the evil capitalist society that doesn’t properly reward people committed to destroying it.

It’s natural that, in such an environment, the fact of consistently making accurate political predictions would seem very strange, very suspicious, indicating demonic powers or, at the very least, some dirty trick. I totally understand why, in desperation, some resort to the “CIA” hypothesis, without considering that this entity has specialized for at least forty years in producing wrong information.

The hypothesis that there might be an objective reality in political life, that it can be known, that the individual in question studied a lot with the aim of knowing it, and that after forty years of effort he managed to build a reasonable set of scientific criteria for making accurate predictions within a defined framework of possibilities — ah! — that doesn’t occur to anyone. It’s too absurd. It’s scandalous. It’s repugnant. It’s impossible.

And yet I’ll tell you: that’s exactly what happened, you fools. While you were filling your heads with university crap, trying less to seek knowledge than to imitate verbal gestures to fit into the ideological environment around you (see my article “The Juvenile Imbecile”),³ I preferred to stay home studying, believing that this was a better use of the hours the USP crowd spent commuting, chatting, attending assemblies, going on strikes, partying, and having general orgies at the CRUSP, with these various occupations totaling approximately 98% of the useful academic life. By keeping my intelligence from this deadly centrifugation and from the corrupting influence of ignorant advisors, I studied to learn, to resolve my doubts, without any vain hope of provincial academic glory. I don’t deny that I gained something beyond pure knowledge. I gained the pleasure of being able to call these folks dumb without any insulting intention and with strict scientific realism. While they were intoxicated by Eduardo Galeano, Noam Chomsky, Foucault, Derrida, and at best Nietzsche and Heidegger, brilliant professors of mental confusion, I posed to myself the fundamental questions of political philosophy — which is also the philosophy of history — and sought to answer them with all seriousness, surrounding myself with all the help available in books from various eras, scientific journals, and personal contacts with scholars from various countries.

The results were presented, here and there, in the form of lectures and handouts, without the slightest concern for publishing them in books. Books for what? In today’s Brazil, the more serious the book, the greater the certainty that it will be completely ignored except by the circle of scholars who already knew it from the author’s direct speech. In an era when literature is personified by Mr. Luis Fernando Verissimo, philosophy by Mrs. Marilena, and political science by Dr. Emir Sader, any more serious scientific effort feels a little embarrassed to show itself in public. We’ve returned to the era of oral dissemination. All effective knowledge has become esoteric. The essence of what I’ve learned and taught about political philosophy is in the recordings of my courses given at PUC-Paraná, as well as in the handouts “Being and Power,” “What is the Psyche?” and “The Method in the Human Sciences.” Those who have access to this material — which I’ll publish when my journalistic duties give me a break to edit it — know that there are means to objectively describe any political-social situation and predict, with a high degree of accuracy, its possible developments within a defined framework of possibilities. That is, and nothing more, the mystery behind my predictions.

As for the mistakes of others, it’s not my place to explain them.

Some of the most important questions I posed for the analysis of political situations were the following:

1. What is the nature of power, not only in politics but in all human relationships, and what is the specific difference between political power and other forms of power?

2. What exactly is “action” on a historical scale? Under what conditions does the expression “history of this” or “history of that” refer to a real entity capable of continuous action over time, and when does it refer only, metonymically, to an ideal subject without its own unity of action, as, for example, when we talk about the “history of Brazil” or the “history of the bourgeoisie”? In short: who is the subject of history?

3. What is the relationship between the subjective “intentions” of historical agents and the real effects of their actions? What equation is formed between the objective knowledge of the situation’s data, the decisions made, the execution, the specific results, and their dilution in a larger framework where other factors come into play? Is there an efficient historical action, where the effects more or less faithfully reflect the intentions? Or, conversely, is human history always doomed to be, as Weber said, “the sum of the unpremeditated consequences of our actions”?

4. Assuming that no one can place themselves outside the common framework of human life to observe it “from above,” and that therefore all observation is a form of participation, it’s impossible to fully isolate observation and confession. What is the relationship between self-knowledge and historical knowledge? To what extent can and should the knowledge of history be a means of integrating the personal consciousness of the scholar, and to what extent is this reflected in the truthfulness of the historical description obtained? To what extent is all history autobiography and, therefore, every description of a particular political, social, and cultural situation a personal confession?

5. To what extent, then, is the study of the human sciences an “ascetic” practice of self-knowledge, and to what extent can the ascetic and mystical disciplines developed by traditional religions, as well as modern techniques of psychotherapy and self-help, play an essential role in this study?

6. What is the psychology of knowledge in history and in the human sciences in general? From the perception of sensible data (documents, monuments, observed actions) to the general interpretive syntheses, what is the psychological path taken, and how can it be guided to reduce the possibility of errors?

The philosophers I studied most to find the answers (and here they are as suggestions for the interested) were Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, Leibniz, Schelling, Husserl, Scheler, Lavelle, Croce, Ortega, Zubiri, Marías, Voegelin, Lonergan, our Mário Ferreira dos Santos, and the Albert Camus of The Rebel. The great historians of philosophy, such as Gomperz, Ueberweg, and Zeller, should be read with devotion. Other authors in the humanities who helped me greatly were Ibn Khaldun, Vico, Ranke, Taine, Huizinga, Weber, Böhm-Bawerk, von Mises, Sorokin, Viktor Frankl, Paul Diel, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Franz Rosenzweig, Lipot Szondi, Maurice Pradines, Alois Dempf, Max Dvorak, Rudolf Arnheim, Erwin Panofsky, A.-D. Sertillanges, Mortimer J. Adler, Oliveira Martins, Gilberto Freyre, and Otto Maria Carpeaux. Despite countless factual errors, Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon was also very useful for its acute historical psychology. The greatest living historian today is Modris Eksteins (know what “must read” means?). Among poets and fiction writers, those who produced true scientific descriptions of the human condition, very useful in my studies, were Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Camões, Cervantes, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Alessandro Manzoni, Pío Baroja, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Antonio Machado, Thomas Mann, Jacob Wassermann, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Heimito von Doderer, Julien Green, Georges Bernanos, and François Mauriac. The Bible must be reread constantly (don’t read the Gospel in search of “religion”: read it as a narrative of something that really happened; pay special attention to Matthew 11:1-6, where Jesus Himself teaches the criterion to dispel doubts about Him; I think about it all the time). The Quran, the Vedas, the Tao-Te-Ching, and the I Ching, as well as the writings of Confucius, Shankara, and Ibn ‘Arabi, deserve periodic consultations. As for the personal advice I received from generous masters, whom I bothered through letters, phone calls, and visits, I’ll talk about another day.

The important thing is not to study for the sake of studying, to “acquire culture” or pursue an academic career, but to find answers to specific questions that have existential importance for you, for your formation as a human being and not just as a scholar. It’s clear that the questions will define themselves gradually during the course of your readings, but as they do, they will better define the direction of your studies. And it’s essential that, in your eagerness to read, you don’t let your accumulation of knowledge exceed your level of self-awareness, maturity, and personal responsibility in all areas of life. If you are not capable of drawing valid consequences from a book for your moral orientation in the world, then you are not ready to read that book. Never forget Goethe’s advice: “Talent is honed in solitude, character in the tumult of the world.”

For the Intellectual Restoration of Brazil

Diário do Comércio, September 4, 2006

The articles I published here on February 13 and 27⁴ continue to generate letters and questions, which I cannot respond to individually. They reflect not only the unfulfilled desire for knowledge on the part of many Brazilian students, but also a deeper and more general need. A country cannot survive for long without some form of intellectual life in which it can see itself and recognize itself as a historical, cultural, and spiritual unity. This is entirely lacking in Brazil today. Public discussions among supposedly educated people get lost in isolated facts, in ideological chatter with no benefit, or in the random externalization of totally alienated group impressions. They no longer grasp the nation as a whole, much less its situation in the world, in civilization, or in history. Brazil has become invisible to itself, and in the general darkness, monsters grow. Perhaps the ugliest of these monsters is precisely the foolish hope of ridding itself of all the others in the short term, through practical actions in the political sphere, jumping over the prior necessity of intellectual restoration. No human being or country is crazier than the one that believes it can solve all its problems first in order to become intelligent afterward. Intelligence is not the adornment of the victorious; it is the path to victory. It is not the cherry on the cake; it is the recipe for the cake. When will Brazilians come to understand something so obvious? When will they come to understand that not everything can be solved with ready-made formulas, with routine pragmatism, with immediate improvisations, or even with advanced techniques, no matter how sophisticated, if there is not a well-formed, powerful intelligence behind them, capable of transcending them infinitely, and therefore, only by this, capable of using them correctly? The solid stupidity of triumphant petismo[^4] is the culmination of at least a hundred years of disdain for knowledge. The obsessively repeated bet on the magical power of cunning ignorance has finally led to the inevitable result: cultural, moral, and political bankruptcy.

Nothing, nothing is more urgent in this country than creating a generation of students capable of living up to the responsibilities of intelligence. In saying this, I am fully aware that I am asking for urgency in a task that, by its very nature, is long-term. Intellectual life cannot be improvised; it results from the happy confluence of countless personal existential paths into a new common language, laboriously built with materials absorbed, at great cost, from millennial traditions. When imperative urgency is bound to invincible delay, the human spirit is tested to the maximum of its endurance. Nothing is harder than combining the intensity of continuous effort with the long wait for uncertain results. Against despair in such circumstances, the only remedy is found in Goethe’s formula: “It is urgent to have patience.”

To the readers of this newspaper, mostly entrepreneurs, I say without hesitation: your responsibility in this matter is enormous. Universities have become instruments of organized crime, dedicated to silencing voices, paralyzing consciences, destroying talents, perverting vocations, drying up all possible sources of restoration, and, of course, wasting public money. They are expensive and serve only to do harm. It is necessary to invent new forms of social organization for intellectual life and to make them economically viable as soon as possible. Only the business community can take this initiative. Only they have the capacity to organize and pool resources for this purpose. The think tank system may work if taken with due seriousness and effectively adapted to Brazilian conditions. The models of the Heritage Foundation, the Atlas Foundation, and the Hudson Institute are there to be studied. In the U.S., they have become centers radiating positive energy, capable of counterbalancing, and often defeating, the imbecilizing activism of university commissars of the people.

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Meanwhile, I can suggest, to those aspiring to be members of a hypothetical future Brazilian intellectual elite, some general guidelines that might help them find their way in the surrounding darkness.

The formation of intelligence occurs on two simultaneous planes: the strictly intellectual, or cognitive, and the spiritual, or inspirational. What you know depends on who you want to be; the model of what you can be depends on what you know. The connection between these two planes is ignored by current education because it doesn’t even understand that there is a spiritual dimension, although sometimes it talks about it — even excessively — confusing it with simple religious worship, with morality, or with psychology.

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On the intellectual plane, the student should strive for the highest possible qualification, adopting as models for their self-education the best practices historically recorded: those of Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, the European university of the 13th century (with its residual echoes in modern Christian philosophy, for example in La Vie Intellectuelle by A.-D. Sertillanges and Conseils sur la Vie Intellectuelle by Jean Guitton), the superior German intellectual tradition of the 19th century, and the Austrian tradition of the early 20th century (as described, for instance, in the accounts of Eric Voegelin, Otto Maria Carpeaux, and Marjorie Perloff), and, last but not least, the American tradition of liberal education.⁵

The first goal of higher education is negative and dissolvent: it consists of “deculturalization” in the anthropological sense of the term — breaking the ties that bind the student to their culture of origin, to the established notions of “our time,” to the current illusion of the superiority of the present, and making them an inhabitant of all times, of all cultures and civilizations. Nothing can be achieved without a period of confusion and relativism due to the unlimited expansion of horizons. It is not enough to know what Abraham and Moses, Confucius and Lao-Tzu, Pericles and Socrates, or the monks of the Patristic Era thought. One must make an effort to perceive what they perceived, imagine what they imagined, and feel what they felt. Don’t worry about arbitrating, judging, and concluding. In all ideas that have stood the test of time and reached us, there is a core of truth. Hold onto that core and build your collection of truths without being too impressed by apparent or real contradictions. Learn to desire and love the truth, no matter how it presents itself. Get used to living with contradictions, as you will not have time in this life to resolve more than an insignificant number of them.

Brazilian university education is entirely anti-educational, as it aims solely to instill in students the dominant mindset of the current academic class (if not the party slogan of the week), judging the past in light of the present and never the present in light of the past. This locks the student into a temporal provincialism — or chronocentrism, as I like to call it — even more damaging than any geographical, racial, religious, or political ethnocentrism. “All eras are equal before God,” taught Leopold von Ranke. Human intelligence powerfully tends toward universality, but it only approaches it by overcoming the cultural barriers of space and time, one by one. Resist the presumptuous triumphalism of the present. When you read what some contemporary thinker thinks of Plato, ask what Plato would think of them. In 99% of cases, you will see that the supposed progress of knowledge has been largely neutralized by a concomitant progress of ignorance. Jean Fourastié, in Les Conditions de l’Esprit Scientifique, observed that alongside the history of knowledge, we would need to write the history of forgetting. Start now.

I do not speak of this generically. I am talking about a very practical norm. When reading the classics, use everything, absolutely everything you come to learn from them as an analytical tool for understanding the present, including your own personal life. Beyond the broader philosophical and wisdom content, there are treasures of sociology, psychology, and political science in Confucius, Shankara, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Shakespeare. A long association with these sages will give you an idea of what true intellectual authority is, of which your university professors are grotesque caricatures. Don’t be misled by the small errors that modern science prides itself on having “overcome.” Often the overcoming is illusory and only serves to soon be “overcome” again. You read in textbooks, for instance, that Galileo “overcame” Aristotle’s physics. For four centuries, this nonsense was repeated as a final truth. Only around 1950 did scholars realize that Aristotle’s physics was not a physics, but a general scientific methodology far more subtle than Galileo could have ever perceived, and very well suited to the needs of more recent science. The famous errors pointed out by Galileo existed, but they were secondary details that did not affect the overall proposal in any way.

Whatever the issue being studied, aim to meet three conditions: (1) the maximum breadth of basic information, (2) knowledge of the status quaestionis (I’ll explain), and (3) the variety of perspectives.

The breadth of information is obtained by replacing casual absorption with systematic research of the sources. A bibliography as complete as possible is the best start for any investigation. If you know only the titles and dates of the books published on a given subject, you already have a good initial overview of the problem before even reading the first of them. Don’t get lost, however, in the multitude of current academic works, most of which are produced merely to meet administrative requirements or for career advancement. Start with the oldest works, and this will facilitate the selection of the most recent ones.

The status quaestionis, the “state of the question,” is the evolution of debates on a particular point from the origin of the discussion to today. Knowing the status quaestionis distinguishes the professional scholar from the amateur guesser. (All the university professors I know in Brazil, with exceptions that do not exceed half a dozen, are amateur guessers. Forget them. Learn three or four languages and only use Portuguese to read university material from Portugal, which is excellent in all areas. If you cannot physically leave Brazil, leave it intellectually. What is valuable in our past culture can be absorbed in two years at most, except for the work of Mário Ferreira dos Santos, which takes a lifetime, but you can carry it under your arm on your flight out of the country or into yourself.)

The variety of perspectives consists in the ability to think about a problem exactly as the various authors who have addressed it thought. This requires more than intelligent reading. It requires the ability to imaginatively identify with each author’s vision while studying it, without worrying about judging or contesting it, knowing that sooner or later it will be automatically judged and contested when you move on to the reading of other authors. Let the discussion, in your mind, slowly build itself with the various contradictory materials you gather from the readings. When the accumulation of material covers the entire field of the status quaestionis, you will have a wonderful intellectual experience: when the various angles from which you view a problem do not reflect only your imagination, but all the best and most intelligent work written on the subject throughout history, the conclusions you reach will no longer be mere personal opinions — they will be knowledge in the full sense. This doesn’t mean you discovered “the truth,” of course, but it means you got as close to it as the most dedicated and serious part of humanity has. Your horizon will no longer be that of individual subjectivity; it will be that of human knowledge. You may still be a dwarf. But you will be sitting on the shoulders of giants.

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To advance on the spiritual plane, the student must be open to the reality of the transcendent and the infinite, adopting before this dimension the epistemologically appropriate and psychologically obligatory attitude of contemplative admiration, reverential awe, and existential trust.

For many people today, especially the so-called “intellectuals,” this perception is inaccessible and even inconceivable. Not coincidentally, these are the people who talk the most about it, some theorizing their own incapacity in the form of materialist, scientistic, or agnostic chatter, others trying to disguise it by engaging in stereotypical conversations about religion, mystical states, esotericism, alchemy, etc. These two modes of evasion can require a lot of study, and entire lives are spent cultivating them. The student must learn to recognize both from a distance and flee from them as fast as possible.

If the student belongs to any religious confession, they should take its teachings as symbolic mysteries whose content is not easy to discern, and whose life-giving influence can dry up if prematurely subjected to dogmatic interpretations and ready-made moral recipes. Religion is not a doctrine to be “believed” in or a set of external moral commandments like a civil code. It is a series of events of a historical-spiritual order, whose report reaches us through sacred scriptures and tradition. These events can, in part, be historically confirmed, but they cannot be fully understood through history, for they continue to this day, and their meaning only becomes clear through their continuation, as you become aware that they personally involve you. You can participate in them through rites, prayer, faith, and above all, miracles. Faith does not mean adherence to a doctrine but trust in a Person in whose humanity the presence of the transcendent and the infinite is at once self-evident and mysterious. Miracles happen all the time, but most people are too stupid, distracted, or closed-off to perceive them.⁶ Even the repeated experience of answered prayers, weighed down by the inevitable cognitive discomfort of the disproportion between the apparent cause and the real effect, can be neutralized ex post facto through rationalizations of appalling puerility, which many call “science.” But perhaps worse than the lack of experience, or the neutralized experience, is the replacement of the objective experience of the miracle by a psychic substitute — an emotion, a subjective “something” — which some people pompously call “my encounter with Jesus,” “my faith,” or something similar, without realizing that by doing this, they are substituting their inner states for the supreme reality of God Himself. God manifests in the facts of the world, of nature, of history, and in the objective course of each one’s life, not by caressing anyone’s soul. Incredibly, these caresses are the maximum some expect to find in religion, while others, whether atheists or priests, piously believe that religion at its best consists of this, and from there they draw conclusions they find very scientific, like the classic of American anthropological cretinism, Edward Sapir, who defined religion as the search for “peace of mind,” which can also be achieved with a Valium pill. The student must learn to flee from such vulgarities, even at the cost of putting the entire “religious” issue in parentheses until a better understanding is reached.

Spirit and Personality

Diário do Comércio, January 31, 2013

Spirit is that which only reaches us through thought, but which thought, by itself, cannot create or attain. Spirit is the truth of what is thought, which, by definition, is beyond thought, even in cases where thought creates its own object.

For instance, when we mentally create a triangle, it already contains within itself all its geometric properties, which the thought, at that moment, completely ignores; and when it discovers them one by one over time, it will have to admit that they were in the triangle simultaneously before it apprehended them. And even when it apprehends just one of these properties, it grasps something that is in the triangle and not in the mind itself.

There is, in the realm of thought, no difference between thinking falsehoods and thinking truths. Thought only becomes truthful when it touches something that is beyond it, something that is not in any way reduced to the act of thinking nor to the thought itself. This something is what we call “truth.” As seen in the triangle example, truth lies beyond thought even when the object of thought is created by thought itself: thought does not dominate nor create the truthfulness of even purely thought objects. Truth appears only beyond a boundary that thought perceives but cannot cross. Truth is the domain of spirit.

Truth is spirit, even when apprehended in a material object. Our senses can apprehend the presence of an object, but they cannot, by themselves, decide whether this presence is real or imagined. Thought must intervene, posing questions that complete and correct mere impressions. It does this in search of the truth of the object, but when it manages to touch that truth, it knows it lies not only beyond the senses but also beyond itself; otherwise, it wouldn’t be truth at all, only a modified impression by thought.

Truth is always transcendent to the realm of thought, to sensations, emotions, and everything that constitutes the “mental.” IQ tests do not measure the amount of mental activity but its efficiency in transcending itself, in apprehending the truthfulness of the object — its capacity to glimpse, beyond the sphere of the thought, the realm of spirit.

This capacity is not called “thought,” but intelligence. It is entirely unrelated to the quantity, intensity, or formal elegance of thought. “Thinking too much makes a donkey die,” says the saying. Thinking falsehoods can take as much effort, and sometimes more, than reaching the truth. Good thinking is not the kind that delights in the wealth of its own movements but the kind that humbly retreats to allow intelligence, the perception of truth, to pass through.

The formal correctness of thought can sometimes be important, but thought alone has no way of apprehending even the truth of its own formal correctness. Becoming aware of the formal correctness of a syllogism is not a thought: it is the instantaneous perception — intuitive, if you will — of a necessary link between two thoughts. If it were not so, it would only be a third thought, whose connection to the other two would, in turn, have to be proven syllogistically, and so on until the end of time. Even mere formal truth is truth and transcends thought.

People who think a lot are, for that reason alone, called “intellectuals,” but this is wrong: the life of the intellect begins only at the boundary where thought fades to give way to the glimpse of truth.

Thought, impressions, memory, or emotions do nothing but accumulate reasons for truth to emerge later in an instantaneous perception. This accumulation can be long and laborious, but it is never the end, the goal in itself.

All education of intelligence should take these obvious facts into account, but this has become almost impossible in an era that has turned its back on the very notion of truth — let alone spirit — replacing it with projection, adaptation, utility, class interest, cultural creation, etc., as if all these notions did not implicitly affirm their own truth and thus restore, however clumsily, what they would like to suppress.

In the course of its temporal evolution, the individual attains an “intellectual personality” when the habit of subordinating thought to spirit has been acquired and integrated into their soul as a usual, almost unconscious reaction.

In the strict sense, guiding the student toward this transition would be the goal of all higher education, but the reduction of universities to professional schools or ideological training centers for militants has made this goal entirely utopian, elitizing rather than democratizing access to the superior goods of the spirit as all governments of the world promise to do.

The path, of course, is not blocked for students with personal initiative and some resources. The problem is that achieving an intellectual personality in an environment that is unaware of the mere existence of this human possibility — which is certainly the case with the Brazilian university environment today — is a source of countless psychological difficulties for the student, starting with the almost impossibility of finding people at the same level of consciousness with whom they can have dialogue and friendship. Intellectual personality can only be understood by another intellectual personality: dialogue with individuals deprived of it is like broadcasting without a receiver, the occasion for endless misunderstandings and suffering.

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1. Editor’s Note: The author refers respectively to the article “History of Fifteen Centuries,” present in the chapter Revolution of this book, on page 168, and to part 4 of “Marxism, Law and Society,” a debate between him and Alaor Caffé Alves at the University of São Paulo’s Law School, on November 19, 2003, available at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/debate_usp_4.htm.↩

2. See René Wormser, Foundations, Their Power and Influence, New York, Devin-Adair, 1958.↩

3. Editor’s Note: The first article of this book, in the chapter Youth.↩

4. Editor’s Note: The author refers to the two previous articles in this chapter of the book.↩

5. See, in addition to the classic How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler, The Trivium by Sister Miriam Joseph, Another Sort of Learning by James V. Schall, and The House of Intellect by Jacques Barzun.↩

6. Read Megashift by James Rutz.↩