The general understanding of the term ‘higher education’ is that it basically means the training for the well-paid professions. From this concept we may conclude, without the slightest chance for error, that every normal human being is able to receive it and that any elitism whatsoever would be unjust, even when the case is not one of intentional discrimination but of unequal distribution of luck. However, if we are to understand by the name of ‘higher education’ the overcoming of the intellectual limitations of the environment, the access to a universal perspective of things, and the realisation of the highest spiritual qualities a human being possesses, then we will find that many candidates have a personal impairment that, sooner or later, will end up excluding them and assuring that ‘higher education’ – in the strong and not in the administrative sense – continues to be, by their own right, a privilege of few.
Book Excerpts
O Imbecil Coletivo ("The Collective Imbecile"), 5a ed., pp. 60-67.
"Error speaks with a double voice, one proclaiming the false and the other denying it; it is a dispute of yes and no, called contradiction... Error is condemned, not by the mouth of the judge, but ex ore suo." -
Benedetto Croce
"Philosophy originated from the attempt to escape to a world in which nothing changed. Plato, who founded this field of culture we today call 'philosophy', believed the difference between past and future to be minimal."
A chapter from "The Collective Imbecile", 5th ed., pp. 68-74.
And Charles Sanders Peirce generated William James, who generated John Dewey, who generated Richard Rorty, who, upon his arrival in Brazil, generated great frisson and mental confusion among the natives. Let us go back to the origins.
An essay from The Collective Imbecile
The success of Richard Rorty in Brazil might seem strange, as local intellectuality is mainly of Marxist extraction and would have every reason to reject pragmatism as a capitalistic ideology. But the stage was already set for the arrival of Rorty in Brazil by three decades of Gramscian hegemony. Gramsci, the most influential Marxist theorist in Brazil, was not a pure-breed Marxist, but a mixture of Marxist and pragmatist, of the lineage of his master Antonio Labriola. Labriola not only agrees with pragmatism in general terms, but in particular, in a significant coincidence, his Philosophy of History is identical to Richard Rorty’s in a point where both are in evident disagreement with Karl Marx: they both deny that History has a "meaning". This denial is obviously inconsistent with the ideology of "progress" which is intrinsic to Marxism.
The Garden of Afflictions, Chapter VI, §16-17
§16. Epicurus and Marx
Epicurus inverts, as seen on § 10, the logical relationship between practice and theory. If normally theory is the logical basis of practice and if the latter is the exemplification of the first in the level of facts, in Epicureanism practice is what produces the psychological conditions which will make the theory believable, and the theoretical discourse will be nothing but the discursive element of practice, the translation into speech of the belief produced by habit. The Epicurean theory does not describe the perceived world, but its practice alters, by way of exercises, the perception of the world so that it becomes similar to the theory. The point is not to understand the world, but to transform it.
The New Age and the Cultural Revolution: Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci, Chapter I.
IAL and Stella Caymmi, Rio de Janeiro, 1993. (3rd edition)
In early November,(1) Brazil will be receiving Mr. Fritjof Capra, summoned by Brasília Holistic University (Universidade Holística de Brasília) to talk about the New Age, as heralded in his book The Turning Point.
Author's note to the first brazilian edition (1991)
The text of this small book is composed of four classes, delivered in April 1987 in my course Introduction to Intellectual Life. In the oral exposition I was able to add comments and developments which, even though omitted from the book, can be hinted at by the footnotes.