The Minimum About Olavo de Carvalho, by Ronald Robson, serves as a comprehensive introduction to one of Brazil’s most influential yet polarizing philosophers. It offers readers an insightful exploration of Olavo de Carvalho’s intellectual trajectory, from his early engagement with esotericism and astrology to his later critiques of modernity, science, and political thought. By focusing on Olavo’s major themes, such as his critique of modern philosophy, the role of intuition in knowledge, and the theory of the four discourses, Robson skillfully outlines the central ideas that shaped Olavo’s philosophical legacy.

In this work, Robson also highlights how Olavo’s philosophy is deeply rooted in the pursuit of reality through direct experience, beyond the conceptual frameworks that dominate contemporary thought. Olavo’s emphasis on “presence” as a foundational category for knowledge challenges modern epistemology and calls for a return to a more immediate, intuitive understanding of existence. The book takes readers on a journey through Olavo’s complex ideas, offering clarity on his unique blend of metaphysics, epistemology, and cultural critique.

More than just a biographical account, The Minimum About Olavo de Carvalho situates Olavo’s work within the broader context of Western thought while addressing the controversies that surrounded his life and career. Robson’s writing provides both novices and seasoned readers with a clear, structured entry point into Olavo’s profound—and often misunderstood—philosophical contributions. Through careful analysis, the book reveals the ways in which Olavo sought to reframe the intellectual landscape of Brazil and, ultimately, the Western world.

Introductory Note

This book deals with the philosophy of Olavo de Carvalho and serves as a general introduction to it. It is true that I mention fundamental details of his life in the first and second chapters, but I do so only insofar as is indispensable to understanding his thought, assembling for that purpose elements of an intellectual biography. A full biography of Olavo, in the broad sense, fact by fact, has yet to be written.

To those who have read my book Conhecimento por Presença: Em Torno da Filosofia de Olavo de Carvalho (2020), I warn you that this text is not a shortened version of the previous one. It is an entirely new book, with a few points of contact with the earlier one, but it follows a different interpretative path and presents new material. I had to choose what to present to the reader as indispensable to the spirit of Olavo’s work, something that would manifest its originality and at the same time not alienate the novice with less philosophical training. I hope my choices, especially in chapter 3, prove to be correct.

Besides offering new information and having a much more modest scope—merely to expose a bit of Olavo’s philosophy, without intending to advance it, as I did before (though I couldn’t resist doing a little of that)—this study also differs from the previous one in another aspect: when it comes to sources for Olavo’s thought, I now stick almost exclusively to his books, especially those published after Conhecimento por Presença. In the previous study, printed sources held equal footing with unpublished ones; references to course recordings abounded, especially the Online Philosophy Course (COF). This time I was able to proceed differently, restricting myself to documentation that is mostly public and published. The reader can easily assess the accuracy of my exposition by turning to those writings, without having to get lost, beneficial as that might be, among some dozens or hundreds of hours of recorded lectures.

At the end of the book, an appendix indicates the topics in Olavo’s philosophy that are not covered in this book but are important to know (for which I refer to the relevant pages of Conhecimento por Presença, which I invite the reader to study after completing this volume), as well as the most important publications on the philosopher’s life and thought.

I thank Bruno Fontana, whose comments helped me clarify a critical passage in the third chapter.

To Maria Inês Carrières and Mariana Dean, I owe punctual but precious information, and I am also in debt to them.

The intelligent reprimands from Ambassador Nestor Forster Jr., dissatisfied with several points in the essay, forced me to be more didactic and precise, for which I thank him.

Without the meticulous and stubborn textual revision of my wife, Yane Botelho Robson, the defects of this book would be even more glaring. I lovingly dedicate to her what I could not dedicate with perfection: what is written in this book, but also what is unwritten.

São Luís, June 2023

Reading Saturn’s Hieroglyph

The last book Olavo de Carvalho sent to press, to be published just weeks after his death, O Saber e o Enigma (The Knowledge and the Enigma), now takes on a sibylline tone for me. With some naïveté but also some truth, one could say that Olavo’s thought constantly oscillated between what is known and what is unknown, with the goal of gradually moving from the realm of the “enigma” to the realm of “knowledge,” but without for a moment presupposing that this journey could be made definitively, in a triumphant farewell to everything enigmatic.

Olavo would maintain, even into old age, a great respect for what mystics and visionary saints had to say about the broader field of ignorance that encompasses knowledge, without, however, adhering to any visionary method. He was a strangely postmodern philosopher in the way he skirted the clash between knowledge and enigma, “science” and “religion,” “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” to the point that even the opposition between “realism” vs. “idealism” betrayed for him a tragic division of the spirit that could only lead, as it did, to war, genocide, and oppression.

Understanding Olavo’s work will provide the individual with a reorientation towards the world, not as one who merely adheres to new ideas, no matter how correct they may be, but as one who feels the global orbit of knowledge shift, its trajectory thus corrected. In attempting to capture something of this strange phenomenon in the sky of ideas, I will trace through his work a path from enigma to knowledge, from the esoteric depths of his early writings to the luminous vault of his most original thought.

Entering the New Age—To Exit It

Olavo de Carvalho was born on April 29, 1947, in Campinas (SP), although for the purposes of this small book it will be more useful to follow him step by step only from a few years later. Let us simply say that young Olavo left school around age 16 and began working in editorial offices shortly afterward. From 1966 to 1968, he was a member of the Communist Party.¹ He was essentially self-taught for most of his life, but did not escape unscathed from a few personal contacts, three of which would be decisive for his work in the 1980s and his future philosophical output: Juan Alfredo César Müller, Michel Veber, and Fr. Stanislavs Ladusãns, names to which I will return.

Like many of his generation—the generation of the counterculture—Olavo, despite his Catholic upbringing, distanced himself from the Church, perceiving it as less and less the guardian of the mysteries it ought to safeguard, and more absorbed by worldly matters, if not even by politics. In a 2018 course, he recalled that time:

[...] without breaking with the Church, I began to investigate what was around, to seek possible alternatives, in order to find something I called (and many still call) “spirituality.” Evidently, what was most accessible were Eastern doctrines, especially Buddhist and Hinduist ones—the interest in Islam would only come later. I was also drawn to indigenous and African religions and the whole New Age movement, with which I had deep contact due to having been, for years, an editor at Planeta magazine, which was solely interested in such topics. [...]

I spent almost twenty years traversing that field of studies. Not only did I read Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, Daisetsu Suzuki, and many other related authors, but I also translated The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts, the New Age guru in the United States.²

Starting in 1980, Olavo began to consolidate some of his reflections into writings that, while modest in scope and with limited circulation, already indicated some intellectual ambition. However, in the future, he would reject them from his bibliography, viewing them as no more than preliminary exercises, moreover written in an unsatisfactory style. Nonetheless, I consider them important for a clearer understanding of his later work, which is why I now offer a brief review of them, useful both to those already familiar with Olavo and to those just now, with this Mínimo, seeking a clearer vision of him: after all, no comprehensive study of these little books exists yet.

Olavo wrote them spurred by a double discovery. On one hand, the depth psychology developed in the 20th century in the wake of psychoanalysis, particularly along the paths opened by Carl Gustav Jung in Zurich. The revival of traditional symbols, which had been dismissed since the Enlightenment and valued by recent psychological schools, offered a new—but because it was very old and forgotten—interpretive key to the human being. On the other hand, Olavo’s discovery of the sciences of religion, according to the esoteric and metaphysical approach of French thinker René Guénon, was decisive. Guénon’s work emphasized a critique of modernity already implicit in the psychologists Olavo was reading (suffice it to say that Guénon criticized the very “psychologizing” understanding of symbols, arguing that symbols came “from above,” from the principles governing the cosmos, rather than “from below,” from some collective unconscious).

It was through the Argentine psychologist Juan Alfredo César Müller (1927–1990) that Olavo became acquainted in the late 1970s with post-Freudian psychology (as practiced by authors like Lipot Szondi and Igor Caruso) and with astrology understood as the most complete symbolic system,³ of which others are but parts, and through which a more realistic image of the human being’s place in the cosmos can be reconstructed, beyond any scientistic reductions. It was through the French martial artist and artist Michel Veber (1926-?)⁴ that Olavo deepened his study of Guénon and authors from the “perennialist school,” though he had already been aware of them before meeting Veber.⁵

In 1979, not only did Olavo collaborate with César Müller in an astrology course offered as an extension course at PUC-SP, but he also founded the Escola Júpiter de Astrologia (Jupiter School of Astrology) in São Paulo, alongside two other partners. A year later, he helped organize a series of lectures on traditional sciences, with speakers that included, besides Olavo and other regular teachers from the school, a Japanese alchemist and Veber. Veber’s lecture was a commentary on Guénon’s study La Métaphysique Orientale (1939). Seminar participants were later given copies of Olavo’s translation of the booklet.⁶ According to a student of the Escola Júpiter at the time, Veber’s lecture caused such a sensation that almost all the students—along with Olavo—began training tai chi chuan with the French artist and scholar at the Kannon Academy,⁷ which was directed by him.

Mandalas and Stars

In 1980, the book-manual A Imagem do Homem na Astrologia (The Image of Man in Astrology) was published—though “mimeographed” would be a more accurate term. Olavo is listed as the author, but in the preface, he notes that the text is made up of “notes written for students of the course ‘Clinical Astrology,’” taught by César Müller, though limited to the content of the first class. “As is often the case when a deep friendship,” writes Olavo, “is cemented by diligent intellectual collaboration, ideas merged and proliferated, and so, of the conceptions presented in this essay, I no longer know which belong to Dr. Müller and which to myself.”⁸

The language employed in this 37-page text is predominantly psychological, with a hint of New Age spirituality, though the bibliography includes names commonly found in traditionalist libraries: Guénon, Titus Burckhardt, Henry Corbin, Gilbert Durand, Mircea Eliade.

At one point, Olavo refers to the article “Mandala,” which he had published in Planeta magazine (issue no. 59) in August 1977.⁹ Although he revisits the content of that article, he does so with a different bias: now, mandalas serve as an initiation into a traditional worldview, without the Orientalist fads that typically accompanied these objects. This signals a timid turning point, a maturation of Olavo’s vague spirituality into a more articulated and well-informed perspective on the history of religions and the metaphysical doctrines they convey.

The mandala would allow contemplation of the accidental variety of existence in its most particular extremes (the outermost parts of the circular figure), but this variety would be referred back to the center of being. Between one level and another, different circular structures would symbolize the ascent through mysteries, initiation after initiation, until reaching the governing principles of the cosmos and the psyche of the individual. For the one journeying through this symbolic itinerary, this process would have therapeutic functions.¹⁰

Traditional civilizations kept alive the idea of foundation and unity of all existence, with reference to this foundation. In such a world, the sense of the whole mattered more than the specificity of the parts, to the point that technique—any technique—was no more than the application of the foundational principles to a specific sector of existence. In this view, the world exhibited an inescapable hierarchy of layers of reality—from the most material and limited to the most immaterial and unlimited—, each subordinated to the next.

Modernity—“the last three centuries,” as Olavo puts it—would be entirely opposed to this: in the modern world, processes matter more than essences; temporality is more salient than the timeless principle that drives it; and knowledge is experienced with great dispersion of meanings:

For modern science, knowing means collecting data about fragments of the world that reach our senses and then organizing them according to a fixed criterion, accepted by the scientific community, based on identity, causality, and uniform procedures of investigation. (...) For traditional sciences, on the other hand, the unifying principle of knowledge cannot be any criterion invented by man, a mere product of the concrete mind; rather, it is given by the internal unity the man receives at birth and which he reencounters by abandoning attachment to sensible multiplicity and turning to inner knowledge. While modern knowledge first apprehends the data and then seeks to fit them into a conventionally predetermined nexus, traditional knowledge first seeks the personal encounter with the internal nexus, the experience of Meaning, which then reflects back on the data, illuminating them.¹¹

Olavo would maintain this critical stance on modernity until the end of his life, and in this lies the most immediate link between his early, limited-circulation works and his later, more public-facing cultural confrontations of the 1990s: from this comes, for example, his critique of the sacralization of time and space after the loss of eternal benchmarks in modern man’s experience, one of the main subjects of O Jardim das Aflições.¹²

However, the early books of the young Olavo are less combative and more focused on symbolic investigation, especially astrological symbolism. Around 1981, Olavo reached the limits of his experience with New Age-style ecumenical spirituality and began a phase of more solid traditionalist research.

Saturn is a witness to this. In the visible sky, it is the most distant of the planets, and for that reason, it is related to all that conveys the idea of limitation. In 1983, Olavo dedicated a short study of a few pages to its hieroglyph, marking a stage of clarity and rigor in the application of the principles of symbolic analysis. The semicircle at the bottom of the figure symbolizes, by opposition and complementarity to the full circle, the substantial aspect of reality, awaiting something to concretize it. The cross at the top is the fourfold symbol of existence in time and space, the realization of an essence. The combination of the two symbols indicates "the moment in the cycle of mutations when all possibilities of the plastic substance in question have been exhausted, leaving no possibility of further mutations."¹³ Olavo expands the analysis to the goat-fish of the Capricorn sign and the Chinese ideogram Ch’iao. He had already mastered the style of authors publishing in the journal Études Traditionnelles.

As for his studies of astrology, Olavo would proceed toward formulating a “psychological astrology” and revising the known predictive and typological systems. In 1983, he published a programmatic text, “Notas para uma Psicologia Astrológica” (Notes for an Astrological Psychology),¹⁴ which opened two pathways. One would lead to astrocaracterology,¹⁵ the program of a science dealing with the relationship between the nature of astrological facts and the systems that approach them, from which a theory of knowledge inherent to astrology could be extracted.¹⁶ The other, representing a subtle deviation from the former, or—to stretch the term a bit—a “secularization” of a subject emerging from the realm of sacred sciences, would lead to a phenomenology of human development, the origin of the theory of the twelve layers of personality, which, by extension, serves as an ordering framework for the most diverse psychological schools, utilizing the most appropriate aspects from each theory for each layer.¹⁷

Foundations of Future Work

Many of Olavo’s studies from this period would form the foundation for his more complex and original developments in the 1990s.¹⁸ Suffice it to say that an important study like “A Dialética Simbólica” (The Symbolic Dialectic), which the author reedited in 2007, is part of the 1983 booklet Questões de Simbolismo Astrológico. Or that his reading of René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy in Universalidade e Abstração (Universality and Abstraction, 1983) would be revisited in the Online Philosophy Course (2009–2022) and documented in the book Visões de Descartes (Visions of Descartes, 2013). Or that in this Universalidade e Abstração, the general outlines of what would later be presented in the booklet “Fato Concreto e Depuração Abstrativa” (Concrete Fact and Abstract Refinement, 2002) are already present.¹⁹

Olavo, though with his course Introdução à Vida Intelectual (Introduction to the Intellectual Life, 1987), had already given new direction to his role as a teacher, had not yet fully ventured into assuming the position of a full-fledged philosopher, where he would be forced to give new form to those familiar ideas, but in need of more refined philosophical treatment. He did so gradually, so much so that his earlier studies still resulted in books like Os Gêneros Literários: Seus Fundamentos Metafísicos (Literary Genres: Their Metaphysical Foundations, 1991) and Símbolos e Mitos no Filme “O Silêncio dos Inocentes” (Symbols and Myths in the Film “The Silence of the Lambs”, 1993). Moreover, Olavo continued to teach courses in astrocaracterology and traditional sciences, such as alchemy—in its spiritual sense—at least until 1996.

In the Garden of Afflictions

The 1990s, especially the year 1996, marked Olavo’s entry into the Brazilian public debate and the beginning of an independent philosophical career, in which he did not entirely renounce his earlier studies of symbolism and comparative religions but transcended them insofar as he used them to serve original ideas born from his philosophical activity.

How Philosophy Is Done

In 1990, Olavo was introduced to Fr. Stanislavs Ladusãns (1912–1993), an Estonian philosopher responsible for the Center for Philosophical Research (Conpefil) housed at PUC-RJ, the third of the influential figures I mentioned at the beginning of the previous chapter.

Olavo showed the professor two works,²⁰ and he enrolled in a philosophy degree, which he did not complete due to the sudden and unforeseen death of Fr. Ladusãns.

But the course served its purpose. Olavo recounts that it was during the classes of this priest, who was part Neothomist, part phenomenologist, that he witnessed for the first time what philosophy truly was, how a philosopher practiced his craft, right there in the classroom, in front of everyone. For Ladusãns “was not a professor of philosophy; he was a philosopher who happened to be philosophizing out loud in front of a group of students.”²¹ What he saw in those classes was not “knowledge already made,” but

a philosophy in fieri, the struggle of intelligence to pierce the opacity of thought and reach the reality of things.

— That’s it, my God!, I exclaimed within myself. That was what I was missing, that was what was missing in all the so-called philosophy teaching I had known until then in Brazil: not historical erudition, not text analysis [...], but the living experience of philosophizing, the example of how it is done. It was as if a deaf person, having read musical scores and known music only through its mathematical structure, suddenly had their ears opened and their soul flooded by the chords of a Bach cantata.²²

Later, Olavo would systematize the practice of philosophy into seven stages in the course “Introdução ao Método Filosófico” (Introduction to the Philosophical Method, 2015), whose content is briefly outlined in the essay “Miséria sem Grandeza.”

The Gods of Today

With A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural (The New Age and the Cultural Revolution, 1993), Olavo’s work assumed an explicit tone of civilizational critique, and it is with this title that he truly marked his debut as a writer and philosopher. In this volume, he observed, at a time when it was not easy to do so, that Marxist ideology (according to its update by Antonio Gramsci) and the “spirituality” of the New Age movement (represented by Fritjof Capra) had points of contact: both reduced the entire horizon of human existence to what fit within history (Marxism) or nature (New Age). They either threw humanity into extreme activity, in a frenzy of transforming reality, or into a depressing passivity, that of someone who merely “feels” the world as it comes to them, irresponsibly enjoying it. In truth, that activity even combined with this passivity, which is why both contributed to a further amputation of the modern human image and to the construction of societies where the greatest hedonism of the New Age aligns with the subtlest means of domination of Gramscian practice.

The closure of the cosmos into a static and mechanical image corresponded to the closure of intelligence into a psyche made only of cultural walls, with no spiritual windows, which could only express itself in increasingly complex neuroses, each marking a more radical stage of rupture between humanity and the foundation of its action. To the point of reaching the conception of an entirely civil society, where the State itself, as the long shadow of ancient Roman power, becomes the arbiter of questions concerning the foundation, concerning Being, while the knowledge accumulated by religious traditions must retreat, if at all, into the intimate forum of the faithful.

This is the central theme of O Jardim das Aflições: De Epicuro à Ressurreição de César. Ensaio Sobre o Materialismo e a Religião Civil (The Garden of Afflictions: From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar. An Essay on Materialism and Civil Religion, 1995), Olavo’s masterpiece, his most polished book, the one with the broadest historical scope, and perhaps the finest essay of ideas ever written in Brazil. The book recovers several elements that Olavo had explored in his essays a decade earlier, but it places them within ideas that announce his mature thought. The theory of Western history as the history of the imperial idea gains originality in his hands, which is lacking in other authors who formulated similar theses: particularly in the way he reevaluates the dilemmas of the Catholic Church vis-à-vis the constituted powers in the Middle Ages and the “liberal” revival of the imperial idea in modernity, phenomena viewed through the inventive lens of the confluence of ancient Epicureanism (with its false promise of happiness, hence the garden of delights replaced by the garden of afflictions) and modern revolutionary thought. Thus, the author expanded the duality already present in A Nova Era.

The critique of modernity is crowned at this point with the chapter dedicated to “spiritual materialism,” a framework resulting from the “deification of time” and the “deification of space.” The poet Bruno Tolentino would draw on part of these ideas in his book, titled in a fortunate stroke, Os Deuses de Hoje (The Gods of Today, 1995). This volume is overshadowed by a premonition of approaching times of decay, death (there are so many dead recalled there), in accordance with the will of the ruling gods and according to the epigraph he took from O Jardim. In the homonymous opening poem, he proclaims: “The slow gods, those who advance / without haste, to the pace / of man, the son of the wolf, / on this sad piece lost from a globe / now proceed / in packs.”²³ Everywhere, packs of fools.

The Collective Imbecile

Upon publishing O Imbecil Coletivo: Atualidades Inculturais Brasileiras (The Collective Imbecile: Brazilian Incultural Trends, 1996), Olavo closed a trilogy: this volume is "the workbook that accompanies the main text brought in O Jardim das Aflições, with A Nova Era serving as a beginner’s guide."²⁴ The aspect of the book as the final part of a trilogy went largely unnoticed: with no fewer than six editions in eight months, the work almost became a police case, so furious and slanderous were the reactions to it. Olavo had stirred up the ideological hornet’s nest of sinecures, public funding, and friendly publicity that powered the show business that Brazilian culture was becoming.

The book gathers texts of diverse nature that, drawing upon the theoretical framework of the previous two titles, sound the alarm over the cultural decadence sweeping through Brazil and confront some of the cherished topics of the rising intellectual class in Brazil: feminism, the Black movement, political correctness, the green movement, the gay movement, and the exaltation of banditry transfigured into anti-prison advocacy.

The backbone of the book lies in the critique of intellectuals’ abdication, their surrender in Brazil to the lowest form of leftist political activism and the usurpation of merits that should belong only to a few, who were almost entirely expelled from cultural circles for not subscribing to the dominant orthodoxy. Brazilian-style Marxism would recklessly embrace North American pragmatism, a true scourge in the 1990s, despite how odd it seemed at the time (though it no longer seems odd today) for socialists to admire pragmatists. Both schools united, above their fundamental differences, in their attack on the idea of truth and in the practice of a convenient relativism (the truth of the left is unquestionable, but the opponents' claim to truth is merely a sign of authoritarianism).

If Olavo rebelled against the “intellectualocracy” in Brazil, it was because he believed the task of his life was, essentially,

to break the circle of limitations and constraints that ideological discourse has imposed on the intelligences of this country, to link our culture to the millennial and highest currents of spiritual life in the world, to ensure, in sum, that Brazil, instead of looking only in the narrow mirror of modernity, imagining that four centuries are the entire history of the world, can see itself on the scale of the human drama before the universe and eternity.²⁵

This same ambition drives his work in O Futuro do Pensamento Brasileiro (The Future of Brazilian Thought, 1997), where he concentrates his fire on attacking chronocentrism: the methodological habit, often implicit, of taking our own era as the benchmark for evaluating all past eras.²⁶ To elevate Brazilian culture to the universality to which some of its highest creations (like those of Gilberto Freyre, for instance) point, Olavo invites us to do the opposite: to let ourselves be judged by the dead, to ask Aristotle what he thinks of us,²⁷ to listen to what a Benedictine monk from the 9th century would have to say about our culture. He calls this activity historical retroprojection.²⁸

In more recent years, Olavo’s critique of modern science would take on a tone closer to Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) than to Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (1945). Thus, his primary target would be the distance between the objects of scientific experimentation (with their “primary” and quantifiable qualities) and what constitutes the totality of human experience. And this to such an extent that, even in Galileo’s scientific method, the most decisive splits of modernity—between subject and object, knowledge and value, existence and meaning—were already implicit.

Olavo elaborated his criticisms more extensively in the “Philosophy of Science” course²⁹ (2010) and in the Online Philosophy Course, although some aspects of these critiques were recorded in articles and books. For example, the management of society by scientists, invested with the role of social engineers, especially when they preach epistemological humility or an active distrust of humanity’s capacity to know, is attacked in “O Mundo da Rainha de Copas: Ciência e Anticiência na História da Mentalidade Revolucionária” (The World of the Queen of Hearts: Science and Anti-Science in the History of Revolutionary Mentality),³⁰ while neopositivist ideology and other branches of the analytical school, seen as auxiliary arms of the dominant scientific discourse, are criticized in A Filosofia e Seu Inverso (2012).

Real World

Olavo de Carvalho’s cultural critique expanded with new tools of applied political philosophy. For 10 years, he wrote a weekly column for Diário do Comércio (SP), titled Mundo Real (Real World), which gave rise to the 10-volume collection Cartas de um Terráqueo ao Planeta Brasil (Letters from an Earthling to Planet Brazil).

A unique feat: for a decade, a Brazilian political scientist analyzed events in Brazil and the world in real-time, aided by tools inherited from philosophy and sociology, but, above all, driven by the use of his own theories, whose genesis remains to be fully explored. The theory of empire, the subject of history, the spiritual typology of powers, the three globalist blocs, and metacapitalism give a distinctive character to the collection, belying the appearance of a mere compilation of articles.³¹

In truth, many of these texts reveal the conscious effort of a philosopher inviting the public not only to know the results of his experiments but also to visit his laboratory of ideas, to which some audiences had already been granted access through the extension course on “Theory of the State,” which he taught at PUC-PR between 2003 and 2004 (by then, the philosopher was residing in Curitiba).³² Part of these ideas continued the critique of modernity initiated in O Jardim das Aflições, now, however, from a much more personal point of view: more than a historical discussion, it is a systematic assessment of the necessary conditions for human action in general, and political action in particular.

A decisive part of these conditions relates to the phenomenon of cognitive parallax: endemic in modernity, Olavo describes it as “the structural displacement between the axis of a thinker’s real experience and the axis of his theoretical construction.”³³ At first, philosophers would make subtle formulations already refuted by the very conditions of their enunciation. Later, political activists would be more brash and gross in denying the most evident realities, which they would replace with what Voegelin called—a term frequently used by Olavo—a “second reality.” Today, the most glaring example of this is gender ideology: any activist promoting it must have been born of a father and a mother, biologically male and female respectively, but it is precisely this fact that the activist denies, i.e., the existence of biological sexes prior to any social construction.

In this confused mental framework, the revolutionary mentality prevails:

“Revolutionary mentality” is the state of mind, permanent or transitory, in which an individual or group believes themselves capable of reshaping the entire society—or even human nature in general—through political action; and they believe that, as an agent or bearer of a better future, they are above all judgment by present or past humanity, having to answer only to the “tribunal of History.” But the tribunal of History is, by definition, the very future society that this individual or group claims to represent in the present; and since that society can only testify or judge through this same representative, it is clear that this representative thus becomes not only the sole sovereign judge of their own actions but also the judge of all humanity, past, present, or future.³⁴

As can be seen, *to the inversion of time the revolutionary adds an inversion of moral experience, since every fault of theirs becomes not a shameful matter but something justified beforehand, for all their actions, if they contribute to the revolution, are good, and any evil can then be a good. Furthermore, there is an inversion of subject and object, for if a revolutionary imprisons, kills, or tortures their opponents, they do so with full conviction that it is they who are being oppressed, when in fact it is the revolutionary who is the subject and not the object of oppression. Olavo noted the proximity between revolutionary mentality and the clinical condition of "delusion of interpretation."³⁵

The 2000s were Olavo’s period of most intense discoveries in political philosophy, which culminated in his interventions in the debate with the Russian activist and writer Alexander Dugin in 2011.³⁶

The Emergence of the Online Philosophy Course (COF)

The late 1990s and early 2000s were not particularly easy times for Olavo. His persistent denouncement of the Foro de São Paulo, the strategic center of Latin American left-wing politics—whose existence was even denied by the Brazilian press and political class—attracted the disfavor of editorial heads, especially since his columns were among the most-read in O Globo and Época (2000–2001). He was dismissed from these major outlets, but at least his books found new life through a different publisher, É Realizações, which immediately allowed O Jardim das Aflições to return to bookstores in 2001 (and it was only with this edition, in truth, that the work became slightly better known).

The reader will forgive me for briefly touching upon some well-known facts from a more recent period in the philosopher’s life.

In 2005, he moved to Virginia in the United States, as an international correspondent for the Jornal do Comércio. The following year, he started an online radio program, True Outspeak, which achieved great success, with many of its episodes being, in fact, short lectures. He continued teaching private courses to students who sought him out in the United States, until in 2009, he launched the Online Philosophy Course (COF), the most successful—financially included—distance education project in Brazil. At the end of that decade, he returned to the sacraments of the Catholic Church. In 2013, he became a best-selling author with the collection of articles and brief essays O Mínimo que Você Precisa Saber Para Não Ser um Idiota (The Minimum You Need to Know Not to Be an Idiot),³⁷ of which hundreds of thousands of copies were sold. He also exerted some influence on the government of Jair Messias Bolsonaro (2019–2022), an influence that, while it dwindled as the months went on, began with nothing less than the recommendation of the ministers of education and foreign affairs.

Until shortly before his death, by reaching lecture number 585, the COF was the central axis of Olavo’s philosophical work, which sought to return philosophy to its roots in human experience, privileging the personal dimension and a high ethical commitment to the truth, not just as something thought but as the very style of the philosopher and the distinctive mark of the environment he inhabits.³⁸

Two books were directly born from the COF, A Filosofia e Seu Inverso (Philosophy and Its Inverse) and Visões de Descartes (Visions of Descartes, 2013), and successive courses were mounted around it, five of which have so far become books, whose texts I prepared: Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Guia Para o Estudo de Sua Obra (2020), Introdução à Filosofia de Louis Lavelle (2021), A Consciência de Imortalidade (2021), and O Saber e o Enigma: Introdução ao Estudo dos Esoterismos (2022).³⁹

The summa of his thought is in a book that, since the late 1990s, he alternately called “O Olho do Sol” (The Eye of the Sun) or “Ser e Conhecer” (Being and Knowing), but to which he finally gave the title Inteligência e Verdade: Ensaios de Filosofia (Intelligence and Truth: Essays in Philosophy, 2021), containing no fewer than nine of the twelve texts projected for the work in earlier versions. This shows a continuity of thought in Olavo’s work over more than 20 years. In this volume lies the core of his thinking, at least in the areas of epistemology and the philosophy of consciousness.

Olavo de Carvalho passed away on January 24, 2022.

Initiation into Philosophy (and Particularly into Olavo’s Philosophy)

The operative center of the human being, the most immediate fact from which one cannot escape, is consciousness. It is through consciousness that the individual becomes aware of the world, but not only that: it is also through it that they become aware of themselves, that is, become self-consciousness. Not surprisingly, Olavo always sought to initiate his students into philosophy by teaching them to intensify and broaden their consciousness. Perhaps he would appreciate someone doing something similar when presenting his thought. Thus, that is what I do here, applying to Olavo’s philosophy the introductory method he himself applied to philosophy in general.

At the Core of the Dilemma: Consciousness

Olavo did not believe in “introductions” to philosophy that were not already philosophical practice. “There is no elementary philosophy,” he says. "Wherever you enter a philosophical question, no matter what it is, you will land right in the middle of the dilemma."⁴⁰

The center from which philosophy emerges would lie in that object of knowledge which is also the very medium through which we know: consciousness. "The process of knowledge must be caught in fieri, that is, in the place and moment where it occurs."⁴¹

Conscious experience is not the same as the mere perception that consciousness exists. It is a deepening of conscious experience; it is elusive, requiring practical discipline, of which cultural records can only give a pale suggestion.

We know something of an aspect of reality when we delve into its causes and meaning, but we know even more when we delve into our own consciousness. He who knows more is he who knows consciousness better—not, however, according to its biological and physical dimensions, but according to its intrinsic, that is, conscious dimension. The individual knows consciousness more fully the more they know their own incommunicable consciousness, which is achieved mainly by expanding the data it deals with: “Consciousness grows as it recognizes itself, and it can only recognize itself by permanently opening up to knowledge that transcends its previous heritage,” says Olavo. “The openness to transcendence—to that which lies beyond the current horizon of experience—is, therefore, a permanent feature of the structure of consciousness.”⁴²

The moments of greatest intensity in conscious life must be cultivated, observed and remembered according to their contacts and reverberations in all other conscious activities. In this regard, Olavo speaks of moments of lucidity. To describe this, he refers to the following passage from Louis Lavelle’s text “Testimony,” from the volume De l’intimité spirituelle (On Spiritual Intimacy):

There are, in life, privileged moments in which the universe seems to light up, in which our life reveals its meaning to us, in which we desire the destiny assigned to us, as if we ourselves had chosen it. Then the universe closes: we once again become solitary and miserable, groping our way down a dark path where everything becomes an obstacle to our steps. Wisdom consists in safeguarding those fleeting moments, in knowing how to make them live again, in transforming them into the fabric of our everyday existence and, so to speak, into the habitual dwelling place of our spirit.⁴³

The Substantive Self

These moments of lucidity may perhaps be forgotten, like most of the moments we experience. However, we endure through time, and we endure because we are able to remain individuals (unified, unmistakable) beyond the discontinuities of experience.

No one has ever been fully aware of all aspects of their being in every moment of their life. Many things happen to us—both to our bodies and to our psyche and consciousness—without our being aware of them, or without our being able to recall them later. It’s true that the individual is everything they do and everything that happens to them. But if time passes, if a vast number of events go unrecorded consciously, yet still contribute to that one personal individuality, where does this self reside? — Where, so to speak, do the scars accumulate, without which no one comes into this world or leaves it? They accumulate in the substantive self, says Olavo, the self that we truly are, even if we are not aware of it, and which persists continuously amid discontinuities. It is this self that does philosophy; it is this self that truly exists, beyond the bodily, social, and biographical layers.⁴⁴ Only for this self can philosophy be defined as the search for the unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness, and vice versa.⁴⁵

The Primacy of Unity

It is worth asking if the unity of the person corresponds to any unity in the world. After all, our existence is anchored in the implicit belief that there is continuity between what was real yesterday, is real today, and will be real tomorrow. We conceive a unity of everything that exists for our senses and call it the world, just as we conceive the individuality of each element within this greater unity as a form of unity as well.

Olavo sees human life as something personal, so personal, among other reasons, because the world compels us to respond individually to each of its particular elements: one unity speaking to other unities.

This view contrasts with the modern distrust of “substance.” Hume is at the origin of a fragmented perception of the universe, a perception that does not recognize full autonomy and existential unity in it and, on the contrary, attributes the task of completing it to human intelligence. However, it is especially to Descartes and Kant that Olavo attributes the decisive steps in abolishing the unity of individual substances, the unity of the real, and the intellectual unity between man and the world.

We might perceive the shape of a cube, the color red, and a certain spatial proportion, dimension, and location. But how would we perceive the unity of a red cube in front of us? According to Kant, it would be through the a priori forms of perception, namely time and space, to which the pure categories of understanding (in this case, particularly the category of unity) would be added. These a priori forms and categories would function like nets that we throw over objects to organize them to some extent, since we do not reach the things-in-themselves, what they would be independently of our perception. “Suddenly,” Olavo comments,

this common universe disintegrated into a heap of disconnected appearances, the Divine Reason retreated to the world of improbable hypotheses, and the only remaining ordering force was the reason of the human community, eternally separated from the things-in-themselves by a wall of a priori forms and condemned forever to patch together appearances with mathematical formulas, without ever being able to know whether they referred to anything real or were merely a convenient arrangement.⁴⁶

Since there is no certainty that things exist in the way we perceive them, there would at least be the certainty that the categories through which we perceive them are univocal, universally shared, and permanent. Even if the thing itself is not real, the way it presents itself to us is certainly real (so that it no longer makes sense to oppose reality and appearance), and we, through our perceptual forms, would construct what Olavo calls a “sign.”

Intuition of the Real, Thought of the Sign

The consequences of this theoretical shift are profound. The formal validity of rational thought, as it is commonly understood, does not signify the “reality” of something, but its “validity.” From the syllogism, “Olavo is a philosopher; all philosophers drink sherry after finishing a book; therefore, Olavo drank sherry after completing O Jardim das Aflições,” I can say that the reasoning is valid, but I cannot conclude that Olavo (a teetotaler, incidentally) actually drank sherry on that occasion. The premise “all philosophers drink sherry after finishing a book” is obviously false, not because, undoubtedly, some philosophers drink during the writing of their books (their contents provide ample proof of this), but because—for just one counterexample—Plato did not drink sherry after finishing The Republic: after all, Spaniards had not yet distilled that beverage.

The veracity of the false premise is a matter of experience, not of logical deduction performed by thought. With Kant, however, both realms—the realm of sensory experience and the realm of thought; the realm of reality and the realm of veracity—became confused:

Transferred, thus, from the world of things to a semblance of a world where everything is a sign and nothing is a thing, our direct intuitive certainty of sensible beings disappeared completely and was replaced by the simple rational manipulation of signs. But if all the veracity of our knowledge ultimately depended on the direct intuition of objects of experience, while logical reasoning possessed only validity and not veracity, it follows that the limitations of logical thought spread across the entire domain of human knowledge, and no one could speak of “truth” or “veracity” anymore, only of “validity” or "rationality."⁴⁷

Olavo proposes, in the face of such a serious confusion, that we reexamine the role of the intuitive faculty in knowledge. Reason, he reminds us, has to do with the constructive faculty of the intellect, with our ability to create new information from pre-existing data. These latter elements, on the other hand, are objects of intuition (like the false premise in the sherry example). Broadly speaking, what is intuitively grasped is what is present, whereas what is thought is what is absent (even if, at the same moment, it is right before the eyes of the individual; it is absent to their thought).

I can think of the concept of “horse” without a horse being present in front of me. But—here is the important step—I cannot think of the concept of “horse” without that very act of thinking being present in my consciousness. “What is absent is the thought, not the thinking,” says Olavo. Everything that presents itself to us is an object of intuition:

If intuition is direct knowledge of something that is present, and rationality is the indirect knowledge of something that is absent and comes to us only through thought, this thought, in the moment it is thought, is as present to consciousness as an object of sensory perception, and it is, in this sense, an object of intuition.⁴⁸

Olavo calls this position radical intuitionism.

When we perform a deduction, even the most rigorous mathematical demonstration, we establish a connection between successive intuitions. Every axiom, every proposition, and every rule for deriving new statements (from axioms and already derived propositions) are data present to consciousness, thus intuitions. More than that, the very connection between these various intuitions (the link, for example, between a derivation rule and two propositions to which it applies) is also an object of intuition. In other words, a deduction "is nothing more than a chain of intuitions glued together by a logical connection also perceived intuitively,"⁴⁹ or otherwise, it would be necessary to offer proof of the connection through another deduction, and then proof of the proof of the connection, and so on ad infinitum, such that scientific discourse would never finish deducing even the humblest of conclusions.

The Light

To affirm that all discourse can only be apprehended as intuition, can only be intuited, points the way to the genesis or form by which consciousness perceives things in the world and abstractions. This indication, however, is not sufficient to guarantee that what is perceived has a foundation in the real, that it corresponds to something effectively existing. To convey the certainty of this guarantee to us, Olavo invites us to imagine an experience that took place in a distant age.

He does so in two pages that, without exaggeration or concession, stand among the most beautiful in the history of philosophy. It is worth quoting them at length:

Before electric light, there was gas lighting; before gas, there were lanterns; and before lanterns, there were torches and bonfires. But there was a time when man had not yet mastered fire, and in that time, the transition from light to darkness, and from darkness to light, could not be mediated by any human act: it was a natural fatality, regulated by a rhythm exterior to man, the rhythm of the appearance and disappearance of the Sun. At that time, the perception of darkness and light bore the inescapable mark of extreme contrasts, which artificial light would later attenuate. From seeing to not seeing, man did not pass; he was passed, powerless and passive, by the movements of the Sun in the sky. For it was in this time, I say, that primitive man, each primitive man, one day became aware of this presence and this absence, which determined the daily cycle of his sight and blindness. It is clear that the movement of the Sun had always been there, the eternal mold of human cyclicity. But the fact that the Sun existed did not mean that primitive man, each primitive man, knew it from the beginning. Like everything that exists, the light of the Sun had a day when it was perceived, when it entered the circle of consciousness. And so I speak the supreme obviousness: primitive man, each primitive man, could not have become aware of sunlight without, in the same act and indivisibly, becoming aware of his own sight and, more still, of the contrast between seeing and not seeing. He could not have become conscious of light without, in the same act and indivisibly, perceiving that light is the determining condition of the very act of seeing.

Nothing that can be said to exalt the importance of this moment in the history of human consciousness will be exaggerated.⁵⁰

In this moment, the triple original intuition takes place: in a single act, 1) we perceive the light, 2) we perceive that we are capable of perceiving, and 3) we perceive the link between the act of perceiving and the presence of light.⁵¹ These are three intuitions, if analyzed retrospectively using memory, but they are temporally coincident and mutually dependent.

There is an external and natural motivation that triggers a series of intuitions. Consciousness does not conceive of the eye as endowed with vision, a source of sensory knowledge, unless the light is present. Thus, a fact entirely alien to consciousness, to human subjectivity, decides the destiny of our intellect. This is why the symbolisms that connect the eye and the sun are so accurate: "The traditional symbol in which the Sun is the eye of the world and the eye is the sun of the body is not a mere metaphor but a true functional correspondence, anchored in the real causal connection that links light to vision."⁵²

If all discourse, in its parts and in its connections, is composed of intuitions, it is because reason is "the triple intuition considered as mere potentiality, not yet realized, but understood as a possibility,"⁵³ a possibility that is actualized every time we reason, deduce, or relate one abstraction to another. When we understand something, even the most banal perception, we reproduce in miniature that act of encountering an evidence that characterizes the triple original intuition.

Olavo teaches us much through this, but it is not everything: as, for him, all knowledge is symbolic, a bundle of potentials that can either actualize or not, just as from a symbol one can extract this or that meaning, both of which are equally part of the whole; as for him, everything known points toward layers of the unknown—for we are not capable of rationally filling in every detail of a thing, being able only to imagine it in its entirety and all its relations with the sum of other existing things—it follows that the symbol of all knowledge, light, is the model of all other symbols. Just as the foundation of all formal reasoning is in intuition, the foundation of all knowledge lies in natural symbolism, whose most notable forms are those linked to cosmic rhythms: the alternation between day and night, the lunar phases, the seasons, the directions of space, and the ages of life.⁵⁴

The Rotational Perspective

Intuition is the axis of the unifying vocation of human intelligence, before which reality often escapes. We can only see one or another aspect of each thing at a time, not due to any deficiency of ours, but because of the very way things present themselves. “The simplest example I can give refers to a cubic object,” says Olavo.

We can only see three sides of it at once, but it is impossible for there to be a cube with just three sides. If it lacks the other three, it will not be a cube. We can only see all six sides of the cube at once if we dismantle it, as is done in descriptive geometry. In that case, the various sides are laid out on paper, forming a cross to be assembled. But that is no longer a cube, it is just a piece of paper.⁵⁵

Each known element of an object announces other unknown elements. We move from one aspect to another, composing its unity, or from one connection to another, building the unity of reasoning. We circle, as it were, around the object, focusing now on one element of it, now on another, thus respecting both its mode of presentation and our mode of perception. Here lies the rotational perspective:

Both abstract thought and sensory perception have the structure of a rotational perspective: the knowing subject circles around the object as much as they circle around the concept, and they do so precisely because their focus of attention is circled by the latent presence of innumerable objects, concepts, and signs.⁵⁶

World and Presence

We apply this rotational perspective to everything that exists in the world, but we cannot apply it indefinitely to the experience we have of the world itself, whose presence is “the most constant and uninterrupted human experience, the foundation and condition of every particular experience.”⁵⁷ We always have an “immediate perception of the meaning and unity of the world.” It is the “immediate knowledge we have about what we are doing at that precise moment, and where we intend to go next, and where we intend all our actions to ultimately lead.”⁵⁸ Beneath and above all our experiences, there lies this foundational experience.

It is not easy to approach this experience. Philosophical vocabulary, even the most subtle, is too contaminated by oppositions between the knower and the known. When we touch the world, we soon divide it, we soon analyze it, and thus distance ourselves from its first integrity. How, then, can we access this unity of existence? The world is a subject, a source of cognitive action, when it imprints itself upon consciousness, shaping it; and it is also a source of cognitive reaction when it receives the impression of consciousness:

Being could not transform into knowing if it were not already, in itself, knowledge—simply seen from the reverse side: nothing could be an object of knowledge if it did not contain records, and nothing can hold records without already being, somehow, knowledge "in potential.” [...]

There is, therefore, a form of knowing that simply consists in being. It is to be a bearer of records and, in some way, a receiver of them. [...] "This form of knowing that consists in being, I summarily call presence."⁵⁹

At all times, behind everything we know, there lingers all that we have known before—but are not currently knowing—, all that we will come to know in the future, and all that we will never know. We have constant access to all these unknown layers of reality under the category of knowledge through presence. Everything that exists, whether known or unknown, is in reality.

Even more. As strange as it may seem, it is not only true judgments that are part of reality. Just like objects, any proposition, once thought, already is, it has already entered existence, even if only in the ideal mode of existence. Everything we think and say exists; what can be verified is the falsity or non-existence of what we think and say. The truth of the judgment “it is raining” would be, according to common realism, in its correspondence to the fact of the rain. But the judgment must exist and, in this respect, be true—and even if it is not actually raining, the judgment still retains some truth by the mere fact of its existence, while its falsity is indicated by its opposition to the absence of rain.

Olavo concludes that “truth exists in reality, not just in judgments, or else it could not exist in judgments at all”; it "is not a property of facts, judgments, or relations: it is the domain within which facts, judgments, and relations occur."⁶⁰ This is the theory of truth as a domain, which accounts not only for the true and the existent but also for the false and the non-existent:

Since it is the foundation not only of the veracity of true judgments but also of the falsity of false judgments, if veracity is only present in true judgments and cannot be present in false judgments, truth, on the other hand, must be present in both, as the foundation of the veracity of the former and the falsity of the latter. Therefore, the territory of truth is not identical to the set of possible true judgments, but it encompasses both this set and the set of possible false judgments.⁶¹

Speaking Presence

Olavo gives great attention to the most elusive layers of reality, those that do not scream for our attention. In the triple intuition, he found the foundation of all intuitions and natural symbolism; in knowledge through presence, he identified the primary condition for the existence of the world and communication between everything that exists. And all this came from an investigation of consciousness, especially viewed from its receptive aspect.⁶² But what about the transition from reception to creation, from the known to the thought and spoken? This is the subject of the theory of the four discourses.

What we think and say is not addressed indifferently: it has a target, an objective that shapes it. This target may be closer to the type of experience we have when we encounter natural symbols, with their concentrated, undifferentiated blocks of meaning. For example, the sight of a leafless tree in autumn might stir a vast number of meanings, all simultaneous and equally faithful to that intuition. The meaning is present, densely packed, and therefore difficult to discern clearly. But the aim of our speech could be the opposite: it could lie closer to the type of experience we have when producing an analysis, like the one you are reading now, where we break down a whole into parts and analyze them. In other words, we can communicate in a more symbolic or more analytical manner, staying closer to the latencies of a symbol (its multiplicity of meanings) or focusing on this or that particular aspect of it.

These two types of discourse, polar opposites and complements, are called poetic discourse and analytical discourse by Olavo.⁶³

What fundamentally changes between one and the other is the universe of possibilities that each encompasses: the more symbolic and imaginative the discourse, the broader the possibilities it accepts (you won’t be surprised by the presence of a dragon in a fairy tale); the less symbolic and more analytical, logical, the stricter the possibilities it tolerates. The former ideally deals with the possible in its highest degree; the latter with the certain in its highest degree.⁶⁴

Discourse includes intermediate stages between these two extremes. You might, for example, analyze the geopolitical scenario and consider the Third World War something more than just a mere possibility. In the modern age, it’s always a latent possibility. But perhaps certain specific indications lead you to believe that it is not only possible but likely. In this case, from the perspective of credibility, you have moved closer to poetic discourse but are dealing with a more limited range of possibilities; you’ve managed to “obtain something more than minimal certainty,” and you’ve entered the realm of rhetorical discourse.⁶⁵

Or perhaps—let’s take another example—you’re not perfectly sure that the best philosophy comes from authors who have reached maturity in life, after the age of 50 or 60. That seems to be the case, but you’re not entirely certain. Even so, you’ve gathered a significant number of examples supporting this thesis and even added the opinions of renowned authors. In this case, you “tend towards maximum certainty but cannot achieve it.” You would be in the realm of dialectical discourse, which deals with the probable.⁶⁶

The contingencies of human communication influence this fundamental axis of necessity, as Olavo illustrates with the following diagram:⁶⁷

Each discourse is distinguished, then, by its function:

Man speaks to open the imagination to the vastness of the possible [poetic], to make some practical decision [rhetorical], to critically examine the foundations of the beliefs that underpin their decisions [dialectical], or to explore the consequences and extensions of judgments already accepted as absolutely true, building with them the edifice of scientific knowledge [logical].⁶⁸

Thus, there is a procession of the possible, the likely, the probable, and the certain in human discourse, allowing us to approach natural symbolism, which originates more explicitly in intuition, or to approach more complex symbols shaped throughout cultural history, without any traumatic division between the fields of art and science. In any case, the task is to bring what is present—the merely present—up to the level of consciousness and, even further, to the level of language shared in society.

Elegy

Ives Gandra Martins was correct: Olavo was “the teacher of all of us.”⁶⁹

He updated the humanities in Brazil like perhaps only Gilberto Freyre and Otto Maria Carpeaux had done before him. He not only edited the works of Carpeaux and Mário Ferreira dos Santos but also provided new interpretative keys for them.⁷⁰ He published three important titles in a Philosophy Library that he directed at Record Publishing, unfortunately cut short: one by the French philosopher Émile Boutroux,⁷¹ another by the Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica,⁷² and yet another by the German philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.⁷³ He was actively involved in the founding of at least two publishing houses (É Realizações and Vide Editorial), whose catalogs bear the marks of the bibliographical recommendations he distributed in thousands of articles, lectures, and books.

His classes could easily move from critiques of modernity to critiques of modernity’s critics like René Guénon, or from the philosophy of science of Edmund Husserl to the philosophy of illumination in the Persian tradition. In his texts, it was not uncommon to see a Brazilian popular expression and an obscure citation from an ancient author share the same paragraph.

Because of this vastness of ideas and styles, and also due to the novelty of his methods, Olavo became a problem for the official Brazilian culture—if you’ll allow the expression. His very authority, his centrality, pushed him to the margins of the cultural debate, doomed to play the role of an eccentric author—an outsider—, with this or that interesting idea and perhaps an attractive prose style, but never to be cited as an authority on any matter, especially after associating his name with the Jair Bolsonaro government. Similarly, in certain academic circles, it is impossible to mention the name of Freyre without referencing his support for the military regime.

There is, however, a deeper reason for his marginalization: Olavo not only did not aspire to be a university intellectual, whose research would already be shaped to fit that environment, but in a way, he didn’t even aspire to be an intellectual at all.

The intellectual, as we know him today, is a creation of the French publicism of the 18th century. His existence is intimately tied to the new tasks that the former clerics, the literati, began to undertake with the expansion of the “public sphere,” which mediated between the royalty and the people. This space, gradually wrested from the absolute power of kings, was handed over to people of reasonable culture who found no other way to live except by claiming to say something supposedly important. The intellectual’s destiny would be to “change the world,” as Marx wanted, or to “make the world a better place,” as sentimental people, both young and old, say today.

Olavo had complete incompatibility with this image of the intellectual; hence his discomfort in the 1990s when he was frequently labeled as a “polemical” figure. On the contrary, he aimed to silence the “polemics,” the noise of discourses, in order to hear reality. He was an intellectual by dissent, which is far more than a mere dissenting intellectual.

All of Olavo de Carvalho’s philosophy is geared toward dissolving the conceptual constructions that confuse, and even obstruct entirely, the individual’s experience of the real. From his studies on symbolism to his studies on the revolutionary mind, the philosopher always circled around the notion of presence, that highly individual layer of reality that grounds the very possibility of us knowing anything, and that, as a grounding element, cannot itself be grounded by cognition. Olavo sought a less obstructed path to the real. He knew that today we need training to refine the touch of our intellect, which takes the gloves we use to grasp the real as if they were the real itself. Ultimately, the task of Olavo de Carvalho’s philosophy—and the core of the revision of modern thought he contributed to—is to dissolve itself into experience. The ambition of his work is vast compared to the humility of its goal.

Vast, indeed, because much of it remains in the condition of a project. In truth, Olavo was a project. Not that he left too many things incomplete (although he did leave some, regrettably, such as the essay A Marcha dos Abismos), not that he neglected the formal precision his later works demanded (although he did, in fact, neglect this), not that he wasted energy on matters and people who didn’t deserve even a word from him (though this, too, happened). No, I’m not talking about any of that. I’m referring to the core of his thought; I’m talking about the need to unfold many topics of his philosophy into works of art, books, and research—like his startling theory of the triple intuition, which he himself did not elaborate further. I’m referring to the need to give the theory of the four discourses rightful recognition in various fields of knowledge, and as far as I know, none of its most obvious applications in historiography—frequently suggested by Olavo himself—have been explored by anyone. His vast critique of Kant’s philosophy remains scattered across the most heterogeneous sources, awaiting someone to map and extend it.

It’s essential to exercise the freedom that Olavo gave us, a freedom that will transcend political liberties or restrictions. His work will grow to the extent that we make it our own, to the extent that it grows within us. Let us make his last great book, Inteligência e Verdade: Ensaios de Filosofia (Intelligence and Truth: Essays in Philosophy), the axis of his posterity. Let us embrace the project-like nature that runs through all of Olavo’s work and transform it not into another ivory tower for intellectuals, nor into a battering ram to storm university gates, but rather into the form and substance of unpremeditated cultural experiments, still impossible to predict, which are yet to arise in this inglorious part of the globe, at this time of decline in much of what we knew as the West. There is nothing to lament: it will be fun.

Not everything so far has been fun, though. Olavo lived the life he chose, not the one he deserved—much less the one we, his readers and students, deserved. With all his idiosyncrasies, he chose to be a teacher, a full-time professor, which bewildered many people, tempted to imitate not only his gestures and tastes but every one of his words on everything and everyone. Just as it bewildered those who saw in him nothing more than the sheen of profanity and insult, and who made gossip their yardstick for measuring his work. That Olavo made an erroneous prediction when he said, "Bolsonaro is the natural and predestined leader of the Brazilian revolution,"⁷⁴ should no longer scandalize anyone today, at least no more than the fact that he wrote such a thing in the first place.

Olavo was despised by the PT (Workers’ Party) and the MBL (Brazil Free Movement), by military personnel and Bolsonaro supporters, by Fernando Haddad and Marco Antonio Villa, by progressive Catholics and traditionalist Catholics, by Muslims and by LGBT activists—but I’ll stop before naming YouTubers. It’s a formidable résumé, which does not exempt him from errors nor cloak him in the mantle of an immaculate outsider, but which highlights a constant trait of his career: Olavo lived and died as a foreign body in the ailing organism of Brazilian culture. But in the future, he will tend to emerge more as himself, without the noise that surrounds him today, and he will grow larger as a living source of culture.

Fundamental Themes in Olavo de Carvalho’s Philosophy

Below, I indicate the pages from my book Conhecimento por Presença: Em Torno da Filosofia de Olavo de Carvalho (Knowledge by Presence: Around the Philosophy of Olavo de Carvalho) that deal with topics not covered in this work. Any judgment of Olavo’s work as a whole must necessarily consider these subjects.

Contemplative Love: 249-258
Symbolic Dialectic: 219-225
Twelve Layers of Personality: 51-62
Concrete Fact: 322-323
Literary Genres: 155-167
Horizon of Consciousness: 394-395, 397-398, 403, 475
Self-Evident Judgment: 211
Map of Ignorance: 74
Metacapitalism: 563-569
Method of Confession: 266, 269-270, 583-584, 586, 591
Miracle: 371, 376
World of Principles: 359
Forgiveness: 361
Poetry: 178-180
Qualified Witness Principle: 400-402
Authorship Principle: 40-41
Socratic Project: 271
Psyche: 36-38
Subject of History: 417-421
Philosophical Technique: 268-269, 285, 297, 591
Typology of Power: 421-423
Translatio Imperii: 449
Trauma of the Emergence of Reason: 33, 581-582
Will: 65

Publications on the Life and Work of Olavo de Carvalho

Here are some notable references on Olavo de Carvalho’s life and thought:

BOTELHO, João Seabra. “Aristóteles em Nova Perspectiva” (Aristotle in a New Perspective). Leonardo, May 10, 2009. Available at: https://olavodecarvalho.org/aristoteles-em-nova-perspectiva-por-joao-seabra-botelho/. Last accessed: 05/30/23.
BRUNO, Victor. “Philosophy, Mysticism, and World Empires: Elements of the Philosophy of Olavo de Carvalho,” The Political Science Reviewer, vol. 43, no. 1 (2019).
CABRERA, Julio. “A Filosofia no Fogo Cruzado de Direita e Esquerda” (Philosophy in the Crossfire of Left and Right). Argumentos: Revista de Filosofia/UFC, Fortaleza, Year 13, no. 25, Jan./Jun. 2021. Available at: mentos/article/view/61494. Last accessed: 05/30/23.
CARVALHO, Edil. “Astrocaracterologia: 30 Anos de Pesquisa” (Astrocharacterology: 30 Years of Research). Contra os Acadêmicos, 02/13/23. Available at: https://contraosacademicos.com.br/blog/astrocaracterologia-30-anos-de-pesquisa. Last accessed: 05/30/23.
CAYMMI, Stella. “Notas Autobiográficas, ou: No Tempo da Carne Moída” (Autobiographical Notes, or: In the Time of Ground Meat). In: CARVALHO, Olavo de. Diário Filosófico, Volume 1 (2013-2015). Organized by Stella Caymmi and Carla Farinazzi. Campinas, SP: Vide, 2021, pp. 9-14.
CHAINHO, Mário; RODRIGUES, Juliana; VISTAS, Pedro (eds.). O Magistério de Olavo de Carvalho: Para Uma Paideia Integral (The Teaching of Olavo de Carvalho: For an Integral Paideia). Curitiba, PR: Editora Danúbio, 2022.
FAUSTO, Ruy. Caminhos da Esquerda: Elementos para uma Reconstrução (Paths of the Left: Elements for a Reconstruction). São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2017, pp. 47-53.⁷⁵

KEHL, J. R. Labirinto (Labyrinth). São Paulo: Terceiro Nome, 2015.⁷⁶

PAMPALONI, S.I., Massimo. “Coscienza Individuale e Imbecille Collettivo” (Individual Consciousness and the Collective Imbecile). In: Oltre il Sipario delle Ombre Cinesi. Un Dibattito tra Aleksandr Dugin e Olavo de Carvalho (Beyond the Curtain of Chinese Shadows: A Debate between Aleksandr Dugin and Olavo de Carvalho). Translated by Massimo Pampaloni, S.J. Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale & Valore Italiano, 2020. (GEO Collection), pp. 7-30.
ROBSON, Ronald. Conhecimento por Presença: Em Torno da Filosofia de Olavo de Carvalho (Knowledge by Presence: Around the Philosophy of Olavo de Carvalho). Campinas, SP: Vide, 2020.
SETTE-CÂMARA, Pedro. “Algumas Memórias da Década de 1990” (Some Memories of the 1990s), Nabuco — Revista Brasileira de Humanidades, no. 1, Aug. 2014, pp. 53-63.
TEÓFILO, Josias. Olavo de Carvalho: O Filósofo e Sua Circunstância (Olavo de Carvalho: The Philosopher and His Circumstance). With a bio-bibliography of O. de C. by Bruno Fontana. Campinas, SP: Vide, 2023.⁷⁷

Ronald Robson is the author of Conhecimento por Presença: Em Torno da Filosofia de Olavo de Carvalho (Knowledge by Presence: Around the Philosophy of Olavo de Carvalho) (Vide, 2020) and the editor of O Que Restou de 22: Uma Semana na Contramão da História (What Remained of 22: A Week Against the Grain of History) (7Selo, 2022). He was the editor of Nabuco — Revista Brasileira de Humanidades (2014-2016) and maintains the newsletter Jornal de Um Só Homem: pingback.com/ronaldrobson.

You can find him on Twitter: @ronaldrobson_ Information about his online course “Introduction to the Philosophy of Olavo de Carvalho,” as well as his other courses and activities, can be found on his website.

Bruno Fontana. “Vida e obra de Olavo de Carvalho.” In: Josias Teófilo. Olavo de Carvalho: O Filósofo e Sua Circunstância. Campinas, SP: Vide, 2023, p. 197.↩
Course “Esotericism in History and Today.” As recorded in: O. de C., O Saber e o Enigma: Introdução ao Estudo dos Esoterismos. Campinas, SP: Vide, 2021 [but effectively released only in Feb. 2022], pp. 176-177. Olavo preferred the spelling “Islam” to maintain the triliteral Arabic root slm (saláam, peace) and “because in Islamic religion the spelling of words has a ritual use and a deep symbolic meaning—similar to Hebrew—that is completely lost in arbitrary adaptations” (in O Jardim das Aflições).↩
According to the chronology established by Bruno Fontana and mentioned in an earlier footnote, Olavo is believed to have met the Argentine psychologist in 1977.↩
I was able to establish only an approximate date for his death: around 2005.↩
It was a girlfriend of Olavo at the time—according to people very close to him—who introduced him to René Guénon. As for the philosopher himself, he recounts the following: “My first contact with the perennialist school was through the book The Sword of Gnosis: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Tradition, Symbolism [1974], edited by Jacob Needleman (whom I later met). It is an anthology of texts by Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon himself, Titus Burckhardt, and others. It was all very impressive, and it made me feel that the game was over; now I was dealing with something first-rate.” O. de C., “Esotericism in History and Today.” In: O Saber e o Enigma, p. 178.↩
René Guénon. La Métaphysique Orientale. Translation and notes by Olavo de Carvalho. São Paulo: Escola Júpiter, 1981.↩
J. R. Kehl. Labirinto. São Paulo: Terceiro Nome, 2015, pp. 49–54.↩
O. de C. A Imagem do Homem na Astrologia. São Paulo: Escola Júpiter, 1980, p. 4.↩
The article was, in turn, a summary of the book Mandala (1977) by José and Miriam Arguelles.↩
O. de C. A Imagem do Homem na Astrologia, pp. 10–16.↩
Olavo de Carvalho. A Imagem do Homem na Astrologia, pp. 18–19. A relevant curiosity: one of Olavo’s main sources on the nature of modern science, in this text and others from the 1980s, is Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966).↩
Cf. the next chapter.↩
O. de C. Questões de Simbolismo Geométrico. São Paulo: Speculum, 1983, p. 105.↩
O. de C., Questões de Simbolismo Astrológico, pp. 85–97.↩
For an introduction to the topic, see Edil Carvalho’s essay (refer to the appendix) and Conhecimento por Presença, pp. 607–614 (“O que é Astrocaracterologia”).↩
Cf. O. de C., O Caráter como Forma Pura da Personalidade. Rio de Janeiro: Astroscientia Editora/Instituto de Artes Liberais, 1993.↩
Cf. O. de C., “As Doze Camadas da Personalidade Humana e as Formas Próprias de Sofrimento,” a booklet available at the Seminar of Philosophy (www.seminariodefilosofia.org).↩
What I am presenting in this chapter and will continue to elaborate in the next is by no means a settled subject. My theses about the transition from Olavo’s discrete, esoteric phase to his public and philosophical phase are not without risks and should be received as they are: new information to be pondered, discussed, refined.↩
Olavo reedited Questões de Simbolismo Geométrico under a new title, Astros e Símbolos (Stars and Symbols, 1985; with only one new text), which inaugurated a trilogy: joining it were Astrologia e Religião (Astrology and Religion, 1986) and Fronteiras da Tradição (Boundaries of Tradition, 1987), titles marking his farewell to the esoteric circles of São Paulo.↩
Estrutura e Sentido da “Enciclopédia das Ciências Filosóficas” de Mário Ferreira dos Santos (Structure and Meaning of the “Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences” by Mário Ferreira dos Santos) and Leitura Analítica da “Crise da Filosofia Ocidental” de Vladimir Soloviov (Analytical Reading of the “Crisis of Western Philosophy” by Vladimir Solovyov).↩
O. de C., “Miséria sem Grandeza: A Filosofia Universitária no Brasil” (Misery without Grandeur: University Philosophy in Brazil). In: A Filosofia e Seu Inverso (Philosophy and Its Inverse). Campinas, SP: Vide, 2012, p. 148.↩
Ibid., pp. 147–148.↩
Bruno Tolentino. Os Deuses de Hoje. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1995, p. 19.↩
O. de C. “Manual do Usuário de O Imbecil Coletivo [...] e dos Volumes que o Antecederam: A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural [...] e O Jardim das Aflições [...].” In: O Imbecil Coletivo: Atualidades Inculturais Brasileiras. 10th ed. Campinas, SP: Vide, 2021, p. 41.↩
Ibid., p. 42.↩
O. de C. “Os Mais Excluídos dos Excluídos: O Silêncio dos Mortos como Modelo dos Vivos Proibidos de Falar” (The Most Excluded of the Excluded: The Silence of the Dead as a Model for the Living Forbidden to Speak). In: O Futuro do Pensamento Brasileiro. 2nd rev. ed. São Paulo: É Realizações, 2007, p. 104.↩
On Olavo’s important studies of Aristotle in the 1990s, I will say more in the third chapter.↩
O. de C., “Os Mais Excluídos dos Excluídos.” In: O Futuro do Pensamento Brasileiro, p. 99.↩
Available at www.seminariodefilosofia.org.↩
Digesto Econômico, Nov./Dec. 2013, pp. 48–55.↩
The ten books are as follows, all published by Vide Editorial: Apoteose da Vigarice (2013); O Mundo Como Jamais Funcionou (2014); A Fórmula para Enlouquecer o Mundo (2015); A Inversão Revolucionária em Ação (2015); O Império Mundial da Burla (2016); O Dever de Insultar (2016); Breve Retrato do Brasil (2017); Os Histéricos no Poder (2018); O Progresso da Ignorância (2019); A Cólera dos Imbecis (2019).↩
The audio recordings of these lectures are available at the Seminar of Philosophy (www.seminariodefilosofia.org).↩
Olavo de Carvalho, Visões de Descartes: Entre o Gênio Mau e o Espírito da Verdade (Visions of Descartes: Between the Evil Genius and the Spirit of Truth). Campinas, SP: 2013, p. 129.↩
Olavo de Carvalho, “A Mentalidade Revolucionária” (The Revolutionary Mentality). In: A Fórmula para Enlouquecer o Mundo. Cartas de um Terráqueo ao Planeta Brasil—Vol. III. Campinas, SP: Vide, 2014, p. 364. Very naturally, the individual imbued with this mentality will demand ever greater portions of power to achieve their goals. That is why Olavo believes that one can only legitimately speak of “revolution” when a proposal for a total transformation of society is accompanied by the demand for the concentration of power in the hands of a ruling group as a means of achieving that transformation. “A Revolução Globalista” (The Globalist Revolution). In: A Filosofia e Seu Inverso e Outros Estudos (Philosophy and Its Inverse and Other Studies). Campinas, SP: Vide, 2012, p. 220.↩
Olavo de Carvalho, “URSS, a Mãe do Nazismo” (USSR, the Mother of Nazism). In: A Inversão Revolucionária em Ação (The Revolutionary Inversion in Action). Cartas de um Terráqueo ao Planeta Brasil. Campinas, SP: Vide, 2015, p. 441.↩
Alexander Dugin, Olavo de Carvalho. Os Estados Unidos e a Nova Ordem Mundial (The United States and the New World Order). Campinas, SP: Vide, 2012.↩
O. de C. O Mínimo que Você Precisa Saber Para Não Ser um Idiota. Ed. Felipe Moura Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2013.↩
On Olavo’s pedagogical style and his Socratic inspiration, see Mário Chainho, “Olavo de Carvalho as Philosopher: An Integral Approach.” In: Chainho, Rodrigues, Vistas. O Magistério de Olavo de Carvalho: Para uma Paideia Integral (The Magisterium of Olavo de Carvalho: For an Integral Paideia). Curitiba, PR: Editora Danúbio, 2023, pp. 63–77.↩
This last one, a true philosophical testament of the author, brings together the courses “Symbolism and Cosmic Order” and “Esotericism in History and Today,” accompanied by other texts. I also prepared the volume Edmund Husserl contra o Psicologismo: Preleções Informais em Torno de uma Leitura da Introdução às ‘Investigações Lógicas’ (Edmund Husserl Against Psychologism: Informal Lectures on a Reading of the Introduction to the ‘Logical Investigations’) (2020), the important course that Olavo taught in Rio de Janeiro between 1992 and 1993, but this edition, plagued by various issues, should be consulted with great caution. See the article “Sobre Meu Trabalho como Organizador de Livros de Olavo de Carvalho” (On My Work as Editor of Olavo de Carvalho’s Books) available at pingback.com/ronaldrobson.↩
O. de C., “Notas para uma Introdução à Filosofia” (Notes for an Introduction to Philosophy). In: A Filosofia e Seu Inverso, p. 161.↩
O. de C., “Crença e Percepção” (Belief and Perception). In: Inteligência e Verdade: Ensaios de Filosofia. Campinas, SP: Vide, 2021, p. 241.↩
O. de C. A Consciência de Imortalidade (The Consciousness of Immortality). Campinas, SP: Vide, 2021, p. 94.↩
Translation by O. de C. He referred to this text on several occasions in his introductory philosophy (or “intellectual life”) courses. He used it in the first lectures of the COF (Online Philosophy Course), but also as early as 1989, as documented in the text “O Momento de Lucidez” (The Moment of Lucidity). In: Inteligência e Verdade, p. 284. See also, in the same volume, “Conhecimento e Presença” (Knowledge and Presence).↩
O. de C. A Consciência de Imortalidade, p. 22. This corresponds to the immortal human soul, in which Olavo sees one of the premises of philosophical activity. Cf. A Consciência de Imortalidade, pp. 73–76.↩
O. de C. A Dialética Simbólica (Symbolic Dialectic). São Paulo: É Realizações, 2017, p. 9.↩
O. de C., “Conhecimento e Presença” (Knowledge and Presence). In: Inteligência e Verdade, p. 267.↩
Ibid., p. 265.↩
Ibid., p. 253.↩
Ibid., p. 254.↩
O. de C., “A Tripla Intuição Originária, ou Fundamento Intuitivo da Prova Racional” (The Triple Original Intuition, or Intuitive Foundation of Rational Proof). In: Inteligência e Verdade, pp. 183–184.↩
Ibid., p. 185.↩
Ibid., p. 188.↩
Ibid., p. 191.↩
O. de C., “Simbolismo e Ordem Cósmica” (Symbolism and Cosmic Order). In: O Saber e o Enigma (Knowledge and the Enigma), pp. 53–64.↩
O. de C., “Simbolismo e Ordem Cósmica.” In: O Saber e o Enigma: Introdução ao Estudo dos Esoterismos (Knowledge and the Enigma: Introduction to the Study of Esotericism). Campinas, SP: Vide, 2021, p. 37.↩
O. de C., “Notas Sobre Simbolismo e Realidade.” In: O Saber e o Enigma (Knowledge and the Enigma), p. 20.↩
Ibid., p. 26.↩
Ibid., p. 25.↩
O. de C., “Ser e Conhecer” (Being and Knowing). In: Inteligência e Verdade, p. 129. From knowledge through presence, we reach the cybernetics of existence: everything emits information to everything, and all the information is registered as presence. On the elements of information theory I found in Olavo’s thought, see my course “A Filosofia de Olavo de Carvalho: Uma Introdução Experimental” (The Philosophy of Olavo de Carvalho: An Experimental Introduction) on www.ronaldrobson.com.↩
O. de C., “O Problema da Verdade e a Verdade do Problema” (The Problem of Truth and the Truth of the Problem). In: Inteligência e Verdade, p. 59, author’s emphasis.↩
Ibid., pp. 54–55.↩
An immediate extension of this aspect is contemplative love. See the appendix.↩
Olavo derives his typology of discourses through an analysis of Aristotle’s works, which we will not delve into here.↩
O. de C., Aristóteles em Nova Perspectiva (Aristotle in a New Perspective), New revised ed. São Paulo: É Realizações, 2006. (Olavo de Carvalho Collection), p. 78.↩
Ibid., p. 81.↩
Ibid., p. 81.↩
Ibid., p. 83.↩
Ibid., p. 38.↩
Video message available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zklEKLiPYR4. Last accessed: 05/30/23.↩
See the studies “Otto Maria Carpeaux” and “Guia Breve para o Estudioso da Obra Filosófica de Mário Ferreira dos Santos” (A Brief Guide for the Scholar of Mário Ferreira dos Santos’s Philosophical Work) in the volume O Futuro do Pensamento Brasileiro (The Future of Brazilian Thought). See also O. de C. Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Guia para o Estudo de Sua Obra (Mário Ferreira dos Santos: A Guide to the Study of His Work). Campinas, SP: Vide, 2020.↩
Émile Boutroux, Aristóteles. Translated by Carlos Nougué. Introduction and notes by O. de C. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2000. Philosophy Library Collection.↩
Constantin Noica, As Seis Doenças do Espírito Contemporâneo (The Six Diseases of the Contemporary Spirit). Translated by Fernando Kablin. Introduction and notes by O. de C. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1999. Philosophy Library Collection.↩
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, A Origem da Linguagem (The Origin of Language). Translated by Pedro Sette-Câmara, Marcelo De Volli Bezerra, Márcia Xavier de Brito, Maria Inês Panzoldo de Carvalho. Introduction by Harold M. Stahmer and Michael Gorman-Thelen. Notes by O. de C. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2002. Philosophy Library Collection.↩
Facebook post (April 19, 2020).↩
A brief critical portrait of O. de C., with some attempt to understand, if not his philosophy, at least his philosophical interests. It’s quite a mess, but worth reading.↩
A vivid account by someone who was close to O. de C. in the 1980s.↩
It is also essential to watch the film Josias Teófilo directed about O. de C.: O Jardim das Aflições (2017).↩

Thiago’s Translations Blog

Thursday, September 19, 2024

The Minimum About Olavo de Carvalho, by Ronald Robson