Axelos (2023) – o humano acessa o mundo através de mediações

(Axelos2023)

The human accesses the world through the intermediary of mediating great powers, fundamental powers that establish the relationship human–world and take charge of it through institutions. Fundamentally activated by the elemental forces – language and thought, work and struggle, love and death, play – of which they constitute elaborations edifying us from the outset of the play, these powers are called:

• magic, myths (and mythology), religion,
• poetry and art,
• politics,
• philosophy, sciences and technology.

They open us to the world and open it to us, constitute it for us and form us for it. It can be that they manifest themselves simultaneously, proceeding from the same source – which? – as is the case for the great epochs of world history. It also happens that one or many of them are lacking, by retreating so to speak from the increased and stifling power of the other or other powers. But none of them alone exhausts the being in becoming of the totality – no more than their ensemble exhausts it. None is separately the first foundation and none is the servant of the other. Without being autonomous or separate, even though specific, each referring to all the others, impregnating them, implicating them more or less explicitly but without artificial symmetries, the great powers – dimensions, openings and routes – all emerge from the same problematic centre. Their saying and their making are penetrated by the being of all that is; they make it be and call it. Particular and total totalities at the heart of the totality, each is a total aspect of the totality of the world, a constituent of the totality. They are not isolated elements of a whole, simple parts of an ensemble. They communicate with each other, interpenetrate, fight and fertilise each other, connect, but not through relationships of cause and effect. Because specific ‘objects’ or ‘subjective’ modes of an approach do not correspond to them. Each of them specifically approaches and fragmentarily expresses the totality of what is and is done, by imprinting its mark on it.

The great powers of the world, born from the original violence of the architectonic logos and poetic praxis, emanating from a common centre – a working totality composed not of levels but of domains – are carried and supported each time by great humans and great peoples and give the measure of historical time. They are not always all present. For the sacred to become religion, for speech to become poetry, for phenomena to become art, for the community to become political, for thought to become philosophy and science, there must be the decisive contest of the great powers. Once constituted – they do not form simultaneously – they are all at work, but sometimes one slumbers, sometimes the other awakes. When one or more of them do not manifest, others take over. During very great epochs they are all present, proceeding from their unnameable and unique source. Very often, however, more vague and original movements substitute for the great formative and formed powers: for what inspires religion, poetry and art, politics, philosophy and the sciences does not always deploy itself as religion, poetry, art, politics, philosophy, science. Sometimes we can even go so far as to suspect that divinity, poeticity, plasticity, the organisation of the community, thought and research are withdrawing.

If all the great powers derive from the same centre, what is and where is this centre? It is easier to delineate it negatively than positively. This centre is not the spirit of an epoch, a people, a society or a time, for where would this spirit arise from? It does not reside in economic and political history, the development of the productive and structuring forces, for where would the source of this dialectical movement reside? It is not the idea or absolute or historic spirit, nor cosmic matter or the material of human labour, without being for that the junction of spirit and matter, idea and reality. The one focus, from which the great multiple powers develop, hides, so to speak, behind and in them, though it renders them visible and they render it ‘visible’ but unavoidable. If religion, art, politics, philosophy and the sciences have a common structure for the totality of an epoch and a society of which they are actualisations of a certain register, from whence then comes the so-called global structure that makes correspondences emerge or gather? To privilege one or the other of these powers, to see it as determining – sometimes in a general manner, sometimes according to cases – can and does happen, affirming and invalidating itself. This does not however solve the problem, does not even pose it, and remains too unilateral. Once more: from whence comes the ‘spirit of the time’, over which no one can jump? And even if all or each of the powers express the epoch, how does the epoch impress itself?

The great powers form a totality in progress, without centre or focus, origin or motor, source or kernel, foundation or principle that would limit the play of their structure. This non-centre – non-existent or non-disclosable, if the question follows this formulation – is not a lack or a loss, but the play itself that also plays in the search for the centre.