Conflict analysis in the context of pedagogical relationships

Life entails suffering, but throughout life we always experience some degree of suffering that is dosed by fate...

Introduction

The history of man is one of struggle against adversity. During history, they have been interpreted in many ways. Sometimes as a manifestation of the devil, sometimes as bad luck, sometimes as a class struggle. However, they were not definitively resolved (so it seems to me); and more and more man, by using thought, approaches his cause (that is, there why) inhibiting it to the extent that his material life becomes comfortable or there is no risk, as in the past, of ruins. But what is at issue in the different perspectives we have, as humanity, on our conflicts? Now, this is what we will try to examine and problematize [1].

Intelligence as discrimination

To say “examine” implies an activity of “decomposing” or “dividing” something. We will, therefore, divide our text into parts that are related, despite the unusual junction of themes in the same textual axis, examining first the precondition of validating a proposition [which will be true if it obeys the rules of formal logic]; or even, on the other hand, in its “existential” character [that is, its factual mode of concrete or mundane existence], the removal of the question to allow reason its due digestion.

Now! What is meant is that the first general stage of acquiring truth consists in examining the validity of a thought or an idea, which can be done (as I think) in at least two ways: either by rigorous examination of formal logic, that it is a knowledge that comes from the academy; or through the personal reflection of a question pertinent to the spirit [man's thinking activity] and to life, rather than out of pure curiosity.

Our problem requires, above all, a meditative-reflective examination [2] that has intellectual probity as an ethical commitment, that is, respect for truth and facts above our political interest [if this is possible].

The first condition of examining a question, whose answer is acquired only through the meditative-reflective bias, is the distance from the object-problem, which includes the distance from the space-time context of the problem, in favor of objectivity, of which the principle it means not accepting as true anything that is outside the critical scope and too close to the observer-researcher [especially affectively]. Activity that is – as it seems to me – the act of intelligence [that is, the internal movement of discrimination, positioning, categorization, etc.] that, more than structuring the object, aims to position it in the “existential space” (or in the field of vital observation of the “researcher”).

Thus, we understand (here) intelligence as the movement away or distancing. First — or even, in a second moment — “stop” (as Marco Casanova indicates), that is, of “local rupture” and momentary or relative that gives us the necessary “pause” for the critical evaluation of the content in question and that falls to our hand or to our eyes; in order not to reproduce, without further consideration, what we have or what we are or what we live. This “stop” in thought would be something analogous to the old search for the “values” of values; that is, it is that stop we make when we hear a stranger on the street calling us, in which, after, with special attention, in a moment of pause, we actually hear what is said, precisely to issue the correct answer [and not just any ].

In a second moment, the general condition, which is the first in the process, as it is more general, consists of submitting the information to the Method indicated above, indirectly, as a formal analysis of the proposition. Therefore, I am putting formal logic and the scientific method in the same boat because it is our primary object.

Our first objective, in this text, is to say that there are general conditions for something to be true, that is, there are technical devices that are necessary to consider when giving importance to an assertion, but that are not enough in themselves, not for all subjects. , since there are questions that require “meditation” or “continuous reflection” or revisions and that are not exactly of a logical-veritative order (only), whose greatest contribution is to allow us to verify a proposition in its structural sense and, as regards the Method, providing us with the general rules for handling information, in addition to “indicating” an ethical procedure in handling [3].

French romanticism

The truth thus requires discretion. However, the Rousseauian thesis of the noble savage (forgive me, but it sounds like complete nonsense), especially when we confront philosophical literature with everyday reality and precisely because it is a romantic and hasty interpretation [without due rigor] of America .

Considered his time, Rousseau relied on uncertain accounts of how the American savages lived and so quickly gave them good considerations. Rousseau's thought, opposed to verifying the facts, by endorsing such a thesis, based on dubious reports and a strange animation of its time, runs over the limits of common sense by praising savages in a rash way, although the thesis has a profound effect lethargic and aesthetic, since it inverts the immediate intuition about what we generally think of savages; or, above all at the time, what was thought of non-Europeans and, moreover, reads human behavior from a non-accusatory and positive perspective.

Moreover, by praising nature in opposition to civilization (in the sense of culture organized through sophisticated instruments), an act of mutiny is committed against it — which, if it has intrinsic hardness and suffering, is due to the limits of man [4] ; and even if civilization has serious costs — I'm getting slightly off topic — to the instinctual life, as Freud pointed out, it is still necessary or indispensable – without forgetting to say that life in civilization is that way of life, if not the most instinctually puissant, in which the true greatness or strength of man is manifested. It is in this context that we see the tenacity, genius and beauty of the human spirit (it is where, thus, we can rise as a man, by developing our spirit or ethical, aesthetic, moral, intellectual impetus).

Now! But, none of that is considered! What is done, nowadays, is always to adopt the pet author and blindly walk in his footsteps, even when the facts are not favorable to this attitude – as I believe the facts are against Rousseau's thought – which endorses, in a public sphere, a sentimentalist attitude of thought, in which, among its negative effects, is the exemption of responsibility for socially marginalized groups (when they are hostile to public welfare). Now! It is this left-wing populist sentimentality, which suspends the critical sense of the marginalized, which does not make them (among others) acquire both political and social awareness.

In summary, when spaces of victimization are created (and I am not saying that there are no victims or social injustices — if there weren't, they wouldn't even be here), the pedagogue [taken as any teaching-learning relationship] exempts them from criticism or criticism. self-criticism. That is, the condition of sociological minority exempts them from being exhorted.

The pedagogues, heirs of Rousseau's sensibility, when they protect (in the name of ideological principles) the marginalized group, throwing it into immunity... They are, in addition to what was said in the previous paragraph, despite their immense goodwill, exempting them that of struggle [or mobilization of productive forces], among others, because it sees it as inferior or incapable [5]; without saying that love for humanity is strange, especially the love of intellectuals or doctors for the needy population who, as we know, despise them [especially the high school crowd].

The absence, in short, of criteria in the construction of knowledge in Rousseau's pedagogy, which started and endorsed a literarily beautiful thesis, but structurally erroneous and functionally bad, which assumes, from dubious reports from the Americas to Europe, the original goodness of man in nature, just because he did not have the ethical-moral conscience of his behavior, have problematic developments shown above [that of making us hypersensitive with an inadequate image of humanity, that is, as an originally good humanity]; although, it contains interesting principles. Or even that man, being originally good or, at least, neutral in his condition of base/birth, when making mistakes, should not be censored [or interdicted] what contains, moreover, the notion of some difference, since criticism , on the part of media intellectuals (those pedagogues!) is always in the sense of doing it to the authorities [not so much, like, to the agents themselves who burden life or coexistence too much], being, moreover, in theory, much more the active and critical awareness of the popular class about “the facts of life” [which always contain some conflict arising from order or suprahuman forces] is productive.

The problem does not end there. We could go on criticizing the notion of goodness natural or originating in man in nature as well as stepping on the wound, that is, the practical effects of such a mentality.

The epistemological war and its unfolding

Intellectuals on the left tend — so to speak —, I believe with the greatest good will, to create social spaces in which social injustice is reduced, or in which there is a greater increase in justice and well-being among the social body [especially the social class]. popular, to which I belong]. However, they do so by trampling objectivity and intellectual probity when they start from a Rousseauian notion of man, which is more consistent with the view of their class on the population.

In the name of a just life or conditions worthy of survival — to use the current expression — university professors [mainly sociology, philosophy, history and psychology — here called “Roussean pedagogues”], mainly under the influence of Marxist thought [for so to speak; that is, revolutionary [6], even indirectly and little consciously, but not exclusively for that reason, but also because of an implicit “epistemological dispute” (dispute to establish how to think or organize knowledge and how this unfolds in politics) in which we have, in the arena, the essentialism of the conservatives or traditionalists [so to speak, for whom there are eternal truths, which is an important point to signal in our text] against the “anti-essentialism” [or non-foundationalism] of the anti-metaphysicians [ thinking on the left, which I admire] that start from a hypothesis that there are no ultimate essences in the determination of beings; that is, because, we are told, the notion of essence is a linguistic fiction that does not in any way correspond to the facts, facts being always subject to re-readings, since we have on the part of philosophy and science [which is very reasonable in theory] narratives and not facts themselves.

In other words, the “Rousseauian pedagogy” — which should be thought of here in an allegorical way to describe the sentimentalism of pedagogues — is the point of origin of these that makes them look at the student as immune to sincere criticism (especially in the sense of commentary) [so sincere that, moreover, it may contain some element, due to the facts, at first, hostile, but which, being sincere, does not show itself as such under analysis of the intention. That is, when the criticism is sincere, it may sound like an offense to the ears, without, however, really being so in the intention of the one who uttered it] in order to build a whole new theoretical formulation in which one starts from a new notion of man — not another man previously “entified” as originally evil (as Christianity does), in which man, not only South American, but man in general, must be thought of on a non-moral [7] or non-metaphysical basis.

On the one hand, we have the conservatives with the traditionalist notion of man and the world, based on Greek and Christian thought, for which man is thought pre-French romanticism [so to speak, within this scope]; on the other, the moderns and contemporaries (especially the Hegelian, with his notion of non-substantialized being, or the Nietzschean, with his notion of the categories of logical or rational thought as linguistic fictions shaped by biohistorical factors, the pragmatist, with his notion of indifference to truth itself, pure, but more interested in dialogue and the progress of communication) which start from the opposite; that is, of a notion of man and the world still to be given and, sometimes, even contrary to the previous adoption of assumptions about the “human being-there” — to use a Heideggerian expression that goes along with the theme. Finally, behind — so I conjure up — the dispute presented [that is, the epistemological clash between conservatives and progressives], is the Rousseauian pedagogy of the noble savage, the “priori” assumption that man, especially the educating [that who is being educated], is good, but a victim of social problems that sometimes throw them into bad situations for themselves and others.

Moreover, in the name of suspending criticism of a moral nature (which directs behavior and thought to the bases of tradition, or even to the way of evaluating based on something like evaluating oneself and the other based on the concepts of good and evil , based on the assumption that there is something like a relatively correct parameter of goodness and evil), as we will see later, inhibits them from criticism (which must be done without derogatory moral valuation of their dignity or capacity).

Now! For those who are anti-metaphysical or anti-essentialists, therefore, contrary to the prior adoption and valuation of man and the world, especially from the Christian tradition, religious interpretations are metaphors and morality [taken here as sets of prohibitive rules] stems from a certain force of narrating acts or behaviors or practices, with no one good or bad [which is a libertarian impulse, by the way].

There are relationships or practices that are learned and interpreted as good or bad, according to anthropological criteria [not theological or metaphysical], which means, among others, that there is a suspension of consideration of the original status of man prior to his existence.

In theory, starting from the neutrality of man is something very good! But does it correspond to the facts? Does what goes on in thought, or in the text, or in the dissertation, correspond to something in the world?!... I don't know, since the discursive field allows creating fictions and, thus, denying the facts of the world at the whim of my desire [ie, of the speaker's desire].

Now! Anti-essentialist thought is founded on a solid foundation and seems to have every connection in epistemology (theory of knowledge), but the practical and political use is in the sense of exempting groups from moral value, leveling them despite their differences. However, practical values, “atheoretical” [tacit] and religious background, equally well founded, just because, in the light of social thought, it appears as a category of oppression, are dismissed [8].

In other words, the strange pity for suffering humanity, the poor and sick [who have to have their dignity respected in any sense!], is always interpreted by intellectuals (worldwide) as an expression of suffering, whose origin is the struggle of class for its own sake [pedagogues, based on a sentimentalist view, interpret the conflict — ágon — as originating from a struggle between classes]; or, if not, of sexual dysfunctions [generally one reads adversities/conflicts through a Marxist or Freudian bias — it has become common sense!].

In summary, the epistemological problem of considering the “nature” of knowledge, which unfolds into a consideration, even if indirect, of man and the world, becomes ethical-political, whose basic affection is a supposed compassion for suffering humanity, which, therefore, it misleads us as piety speaks louder to our minds than facts or the truth of a proposition.

Conclusion

Life's agonist character—Agon knocks at the door!

Life is intrinsically suffering - in its different degrees [9]. Now, however, it is not always taken in this way, on the contrary, it is not uncommon to say that the world is a place in which it is bad for some or too good for others; but, I insist, life always involves suffering in degrees inversely proportional to luck, but even so, throughout our lives, we always experience some degree of suffering that, ironically, if correctly dosed by fate, constitutes the final ingredient of happiness — when we win, even if momentarily, an adversity.

Yet, for some reason, we don't think so. We, in our eternal youth [the eternal will to live], always look to the future with good eyes, no matter how bad our lives or the socio-political situation are, because the natural impulse of the “organism” or “psychism” , is always forward [to the extent that we are rooted in the principle of reality or subject to the “instinct” of conservation], which, incidentally, among others, throws us, sometimes, into a vicious circle of illusory hope in the future as a local of openness and life, that is, we say to our spirit: “It's bad, yes, but everything passes. Soon, therefore, we will overcome such problems”.

Now! The “agonistic spirit” [the conflict — ágon, understood by the ancient Greeks as the foundation of the nature of things, of the cosmos, of life] is interpreted in many ways — as already indicated in the introduction. Sometimes the agonistic conflict is interpreted as an error, sometimes as punishment for having “salted the Holy Supper”; sometimes as simple bad luck, sometimes as the absence of love; sometimes as a class struggle, without considering the hypothetical assumption that life, in its entirety, involves suffering as a fundamental part of itself, in such a way that we cannot escape; that is, we cannot think of life — beyond the cause of suffering — as possible, but without suffering, conflict, tearing anguish, at times.

Moreover, suffering, despite everything, has a guiding or, in other words, pedagogical element that teaches us something or that pushes us to think, or that highlights what is not said (the hidden, the subtle, the implicit ).

Therefore, in addition to being inherent in life, it is also something of a guide, as in the case of physical pain, which – despite the suffering it causes – tells us that there is something wrong with the body.

Suffering, within this textual clipping, when talking about left-wing intellectuals or left-wing literature, is interpreted [partly rightly] as arising from a class struggle [or even as a struggle between oppressive and liberating forces] , in which this agonistic or suffering character of life is not thought of in this way, as inherent to existence, but as an intentional product of one class over another or, in other words, of the relations of production, to which workers are subjected [no one is saying that working 16 hours, or earning a pittance, is good or fair or does not intensify suffering]; that is, the post-Russeauian [sentimentalists] intellectuals, in this context, explain agon through an enmity, as if one day, by eliminating private property, by making everything equal, by killing all the bourgeois, humanity will stop suffering —or it will be qualitatively different from what it is.

Here, the sentimentalist intellectual, mounted on compassion and inflamed with the desire for justice, speaks as a prophet and spokesman of good news or a doctor, but in the end, I believe, does not know what he is doing, because, as already said, their compassion betrays them.

The socialist intellectual makes sense of suffering and prescribes a remedy: revolution!

To operate such an idea, the sentimentalist — Rousseauian — intellectual who is feeding on the failure, the resentment of a population and the existential suffering itself (the most common among these), in addition to converting the agonist force inherent in life, an impersonal force into a personal force, directs the gaze away from the “cause” or what, creating – like ancient priests – a series of unfounded prescriptions for “evil”, suffering and “sin”. Finally, agon, and a system of enmity, which is not necessary or comes from the difference between rich and poor (by itself); and part of this way of “gazing” of the “intellectual” [all those who work with ideas or concepts] comes from his compassion for suffering humanity and, also, on some level, originated or “triggered” by his life experience — so I suppose —, in which, once he is also taken unfairly for someone of another class, finally, when experiencing pain, based on resentment, he masks his passion or “evilness” and projects his disaffection against something or someone in a public scope and still creates “systems” and “theories” to justify such a way of thinking: the revolutionary.

The aforementioned intellectuals are, in short, misinterpreting suffering and, moreover, using it as a political weapon through the adoption of a collective meaning to suffering, without understanding that life is suffering; and in doing so, moreover, they are interrupting the potentially creative flow of man's ethical-moral elevation [or even artistic creation], among others, because ágon allows the emergence of thought or existential meaning, whose origin is in the individual constitution itself ( and even social).

Here, the biblical saying goes: the letter kills!

Thiago Carvalho.

Psychologist and graduate student in neuropsychology.

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[1] In the introduction, we addressed the issue of conflict that will only be ended in conclusion and indirectly. We say that he was approached sometimes as a manifestation of the devil (which constitutes the religious interpretation), sometimes by chance (whose order is worldly); sometimes as class struggle (whose order is political). The introduction advances something of minor importance, but necessary to comment here in the notes. This is what I have left, although vaguely indicated by the expression "as your material life becomes comfortable", implied that the socialist project (I am using the term socialist or Marxist loosely, with the sole intention of pointing to revolutionary thought or to the left), when trying to organize the agonistic force towards the “outside” and towards the “other”, it does not understand or accept the discomfort or conflict inherent in the living world as part of something that is also part of the nature of nature. .

[2] The so-called meditative-reflective examination consists of the activity of thinking and rethinking the problem without any commitments. It consists, therefore, in just trying to turn the problem from many sides in the sense of seeing it in many ways, exploring – therefore – its possibilities of interpretation; or exploring an alternative way of seeing it.

[3] I am guessing that for every type of problem there is also a suitable type of methodology or approach.

[4] That is, their condition.

[5] The need to exempt someone or a class of responsibility, or to cushion their burden of responsibility towards life and society - especially the way it is done - is an implicit indication of inability of the same class [or of the same group] to assume responsibility, be exhorted or follow certain parameters or requirements.

[6] Although Marxism does not directly fit in there, when it touches on the problem of anti-metaphysical thought, as it is metaphysical and works with the notion of substantial truth — anyway!

[7] That is, today people try to think about problems without reference to the value judgment, as if it did not express some truth or as if there were any judgment in fact (some say that any judgment has valuation as its starting point).

[8] Practical and religious values are seen as devoid of the character of truth, being, therefore, only an expression of a valuation method or a value judgment; not only, but of a negative value, that is, that it condemns, that forbids, that has bad intentions.

[9] There is no way to really think that someone's life, however rich it may be, is in itself absolutely good or perfect. Every form of life suffers! There are always good and bad phases, the worst being, for many, death.

*1) The text is not grafted, neither copied nor memorized, but it was born from my reflections, and this is what explains – in part – the textual flaws — such as the absence of perfect thematic unity and coherence. The base material, in addition to reading books and articles, are videos and posts on Facebook and Youtube [by different authors or people], which I use as a background [as a parameter for measurement and analysis].

*2) My dissertation also has the objective of being an intellectual exercise in the organization of thought.

*3) The text is an essay and should be understood as something analogous to a literary genre, as it works with many metaphors and has no claim to truth (or scientificity).