Olavo de Carvalho accused Mário Ferreira dos Santos of being conflicted. On the one hand, Mário’s genius as a philosopher moved him to boldly present highly original and audacious theories, inevitably using the technical language required to do so while maintaining a dialogue with the main currents of contemporary thought; on the other hand, his vocation as an educator moved him to want “to teach everyone, to be didactic, to spread philosophy books throughout all of Brazil, to be understood even by the humblest worker in the anarchist center, where his lectures had won him solid and lasting friendships.”[1] According to Olavo, this internal conflict led Mário to write disjointed books which are too simple for the learned in some parts and too difficult for the unlearned in other parts, the prime example of which was the first book of his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, called Philosophy and Worldview.
I find that Olavo himself resembles this criticism that he made of Mário, insofar as he says many things, in the midst of materials which are ostensibly targeted at laymen, which are only comprehensible to those who already understand philosophy. One example of this is his definition of philosophy as “the search for the unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness and vice-versa”, which he repeats in various places, but rarely explains. To the unprepared, it seems to just be a confusing, though nice-sounding, tongue-twister, which couldn’t really define philosophy. But now that I have read this passage of his book about Mário Ferreira dos Santos, after having undertaken extensive reading of philosophical works, it has all become clear to me:
Every form – every particular unity, everything that exists in the “manifested world,” an expression of René Guénon – has tension; there is only no tension in the absolute unity.
Mário Ferreira’s work is a great systematization of this fact. However, I do not believe that any system should be built based on this knowledge. The reason is simple: science has no unity. The immense progress of scientific knowledge is compatible with its fragmentation into countless sealed and incommunicable fields of research. Only philosophy is responsible for safeguarding the unity of knowledge. And this is what every philosopher seeks, whether he knows it or not, when doing philosophy. Philosophy is the search for the unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness and vice-versa. A complete system of scientific knowledge, as dreamt of by Russel, is impossible; but the possible unity of this system can be achieved by the philosopher’s mind, at least as a measure to which his ordered consciousness tends. Philosophy prevents the world from going mad.
[— Olavo de Carvalho, Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Guia para o estudo de sua obra (Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Guide for the Study of His Work), p. 82. The italics are from the original. I think he meant “Russell”, referring to the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, but I’m not sure, since I haven’t actually read this idea in Russell. So I kept the spelling from the book.]
That is, the “unity of knowledge” would be the systematization of knowledge, the idea of connecting all scientific theories to create a comprehensive understanding of reality. Many scientists, including all the best ones, have dreamt of this, of having a “theory of everything,” an explanation for every existing thing in a coherent way – an explanation, for example, of all of biology in terms of chemistry, of all of chemistry in terms of physics, etc. But given the empirical nature of scientific research, the ongoing development of new theories, and the complexity of reality itself, this unity is never achieved. It exists only as an idea, and this idea is developed and elaborated by philosophy. There is nothing mysterious about this: theories consist of technical terms and their applications, and philosophy seeks to study terms and propositions of absolutely universal application, such as the relationship between causes and effects, the relationship between wholes and their parts, etc.
The unity of consciousness, in turn, is especially difficult to understand in Portuguese, where, just as with the French word “conscience”, the single word “consciência” serves for what is distinguished in English into two terms, “consciousness” and “conscience”. In English, we have “consciousness” for that by which we are conscious of something, and “conscience” for our internal moral guide, our “Jiminy Cricket”. In Portuguese, the term is ambiguous, and in addition to this ambiguity, we have the complication that, even if we know that we are talking about consciousness rather than conscience, this is not of much help because, even in English, “the unity of consciousness” is a technical philosophical term that refers to something specific – it is not just any uniting of those things of which we are conscious.
The “unity of consciousness”, as I interpret it, refers to what Kant called the “unity of apperception.” Apperception, in turn, is a term that comes from Leibniz: Leibniz called all the data that comes to our senses “perceptions,” and created the term “apperception” to specifically refer to the perceptions of which we are conscious. For example, your eyes perceive your entire field of vision, but your consciousness only “apperceives” the things on which you are focused, such as for example this blog post, ignoring anything that is “in the corner of your eye,” in the less focused parts of your visual field. Therefore, “apperception” refers to what we would today call “consciousness”, and we can translate the Kantian term as “unity of consciousness”, as long as we understand the sense of the term. This is exactly what Olavo is doing, but without signaling it in any especial way.
The unity of consciousness, then, for Kant, refers to the “unifying” function of our minds that allows us to see the world as a unified and ordered “experience,” instead of just perceiving a bunch of confused sensory impressions— a jumble of colors and sounds with no order at all, making no sense. By interpreting sensory impressions through the concepts we have in our minds, we can unify the various impressions so that we can experience things – for example, instead of seeing confused images of something brown and somewhat squarish, we can see that we are looking at a table, thanks to the concept of “table” we have in our mind. And so on. The unification of our impressions under our concepts is the unity of consciousness, and for Kant, these very concepts are unified by the function of the “I think”, of the awareness that we ourselves are the ones thinking this. This is Kant’s explanation of Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” in the terms of his own philosophy: the consciousness that I think, for Kant, is indeed included in any thought, but only as such a unifying function. For Kant, this unifying function of self-consciousness is insufficient for the purpose for which Descartes had it in mind, that is, the purpose of proving the immortality of the soul.
Returning to Olavo, however, it is clear that the unifying function of our concepts comes from our own concepts themselves, and therefore from the total system of our concepts, if we happen to have such a total system. Philosophy, then, is to seek to find the interpretation of our experience in such a total system of knowledge. And the “vice-versa” comes from the fact that, of course, our total system of theories also has to adapt to our experience. If our “theory of everything” does not serve to interpret the things that we actually encounter, then we must revise it. Therefore, there is a mutual adaequation between the system of our concepts and the experience of the world to which we apply them, and this is what Olavo’s formula expresses. It ends up sounding much more esoteric if you don’t understand it.
[1] Guia breve para o estudioso da obra filosófica de Mário Ferreira dos Santos (Brief Guide for the Student of the Philosophical Work of Mário Ferreira dos Santos), originally published as an introductory study to A sabedoria das leis eternas (The Wisdom of the Eternal Laws), a posthumous work by Mário Ferreira dos Santos (text edition by Olavo de Carvalho; São Paulo: É Realizações, 2001), and later integrated into O futuro do pensamento brasileiro: estudos sobre o nosso lugar no mundo (The Future of Brazilian Thought: Studies on Our Place in the World) since its third edition (São Paulo: É Realizações, 2007; 4th edition: Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2016); read in the book Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Guia para o estudo de sua obra (Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Guide for the Study of His Work; Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2020), pages 17–18.
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