Julio Cabrera Quotes

Inferências lexicais e Interpretação de redes de predicados. Editora da UnB, Brasília, 2007 (co-authored by Olavo da Silva Filho), p. 15 <small></small>

Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015 (2nd edition), p. 47 <small></small>

What is meant by "ethics" in this initial context of reflection cannot be anything too complicated or strongly committed to particular ethical theories, but rather quite a basic concept that could be accepted by them all. I propose to speak of a "Fundamental Ethical Articulation" (FEA from now on) to refer to the following concept: In decisions and actions, we must take also into account the moral and sensitive interests of others and not only our own, trying not to give systematic primacy to the latter just because they are our interests.

Diário de um filósofo no Brasil. Editora Unijuí, Ijuí, 2013 (2nd edition), p. 219-220 <small></small>

Humans live in automatic ways, maintaining routine relationships with each other while knowing almost nothing about those other humans they deal with on a daily basis; summary knowledge about others is sufficient to work and behave. They greet each other and ask "how are you doing", but they no longer listen to the answer; they only want to know if "everything is all right" in order to be able to carry on distractedly with their epidermal relationships. And if, by chance, someone says that they are not well (that they are very ill, or in debt), the person they are talking to will remain silent, as if the other had broken a sacred rule of conviviality; after a few minutes they will say: "But other than that, things are all right, aren't they?" Humans found this relaxed, indifferent, summary, and self-centered way of "leading life" when they realized that living life, really living it and not just "leading it," would entail a huge expense in terms of suffering, loneliness, reflection, and connection with the world.

Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015 (2nd edition), p. 366 <small></small>

Diálogo | Cinema. Edições SENAC, São Paulo, 2013 (in collaboration with Márcia Tiburi), p. 94 <small></small>

Mal-Estar e Moralidade: Situação Humana, Ética e Procriação Responsável, (2018), pp. 350-351 <small></small>

If freedom, according to traditional morality itself, is a fundamental ethical value, the very basis of ethics, one must be aware that the creation of a child may be the first huge disrespect of the freedom of the human person. The issue of freedom suffers here from the same problem as the issue of pain: it is a matter of ethical value that the traditional affirmative ethics is unable to radicalize.

Wittgenstein is a philosopher rich enough (or sufficiently vague and imprecise enough) to the point of multiple interpretations. Analytical, hermeneutic-transcendental, phenomenological, and Marxian-dialectical interpretations of Wittgenstein's philosophy are examined (...) as an expository resource to better characterize various types and styles of twentieth-century language philosophies. The assumed pluralism (...) makes all such interpretations as viable, so that none of them dismiss the others as "false", claiming to have presented "the true Wittgenstein." This presupposes a conception of what philosophy is and a way of producing and developing it. In each of the interpretations different aspects of the same thought are accentuated, as in a Gestalt experiment.

As Wittgenstein would point out, the word "poor" does not have an absolute reference, but acquires its meaning in reference to specific language games, in which it acquires its reference to the world dynamically. The poverty to which Marx referred does not necessarily diminish by extending the benefits to the workers within the alienated society. A well-paid slave remains a slave and therefore alienated and poor in the Marxian sense. (...) the worker did not enter into a state of "non-poverty" in the relative sense of Marx (and Wittgenstein), but he remains alienated, living with the minimum (relative to the society that alienates him).

Parents know perfectly well that they are giving a product of doubtful quality only for their own accomplishment and happiness; in admitting that the person may want to return it, they themselves fully realize the dubious value of the gift.

A good deal of uncertainty and suffering will still await the baby after the primary crying stage. The baby will have to be nourished, one of the most delicious ceremonies for the two proud genitors. However, for the baby, it is still not very clear what goes in and what comes out of his small body. He does not know what it means to eat or defecate, but both things are unpleasant, so he cries bitterly at the moment of wanting to ingest and at the moment of expelling. There is not for him much difference between the two (the baby has not yet been taught to conceal this shameful proximity). All of the inescapable and tyrannical bodily necessities are already presented to the baby in the form of new cries and sufferings. Progenitors will become increasingly conscious of this and they will keep saying: “He’s crying; maybe he’s hungry”; “He’s crying; maybe he’s cold”; “He’s crying; maybe he’s tired”, without ever arriving at the ominous “He’s crying because he was born”.

The best would have been not to be born. Not being born is, in a negative ethics, the absolute good; but it is, precisely, the good that cannot be sought. (Attention: the situation is more radical than in the case of goods that can be sought but never achieved; not being born cannot even be sought).

The being of human life is to have arisen as a force contrary to the internal terminality of being: the human being decays, deteriorates and dies in the sense of doing all this in an oppositional, reactive, escaping manner, as if the being given to humans could not be lived in its positivity but always negatively, reactively, creatively. But the terminality of being will eventually occupy all the creative space, swallowing the “mortal-being” that decays, deteriorates and dies. In its place will appear the hole that constituted it from the very beginning and that only now became totally evident.