Every man is an island, every culture is a continent,

and the historical process is hyperdialectical

Paper to be read at the International Seminar “The art of cultural interchange”,Queen Mary University of London

London, June 10, 2015

Mércio P GomesAnthropologist

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

May the spirit of John Donne look down on me in serenity

– and may his fellow living Britons momentarily hold back

their righteous judgement – as I respectfully depart from

the timeless meaning of the poet´s verse to propose the

unfathomable insularity of man, the multifarious,

continental nature of culture, and the ineffable

unfolding of history.

1. A personal experience

About thirty years ago, I happened to stay one night in

an Urubu-Kaapor village, in eastern Amazon, in the

company of a Guajá Indian called Txipatxiá, and Gabriel,

my eight-year-old son. The Guajá are of one of the few

viable hunting and gathering people not only in Brazil

but perhaps on the American continent. Only a few years

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previously, the Guajá people had been living independent

(or isolated) from any contact or relationship with

Brazilian society. I was a lucky anthropologist to have

befriended them. The Urubu-Kaapor and the Guajá had been

traditional enemies for at least a couple of centuries,

with recurrent fights, killings, and abduction of women,

but they were on good terms at the time. They speak

languages from the same linguistic family, the Tupi-

Guarani, but the languages are not close enough to make

them thoroughly mutually understandable. So I was of some

help in translating the more incomprehensible trends of

conversation because the Urubu-Kaapor spoke reasonable

Portuguese and I myself had been practicing the Guajá

language for a few months. My friend Txipatxiá knew we

had to pass through his erstwhile enemies’ village, and

trusted that no evil would result, but he was nonetheless

a bit anxious. The Urubu-Kaapor chief graciously invited

us for dinner, dancing, and conversation, and we had a

great night together. Later on, as the three of us were

lying in our hammocks talking the events over, Txipatxiá

suddenly raised his voice a bit and said: “They are like

us!” When I figured out what he was saying, it was a

eureka moment. Txipatxiá used the inclusive form of the

Guajá first person plural, which meant the inclusion not

only of himself, me, and my son, but perhaps every human

being. In short, he had spontaneously stated that the

Urubu-Kaapor were not an anomalous or animal-like people,

as Guajá culture might have inclined him to imagine, but

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a people in their own right, similar to his own Guajá

people. In great joy I realized that Txipatxiá was able

to transcend his culture and see other people´s culture

from the other´s perspective.

Ever since then it has been my business to figure that

moment out in anthropological and philosophical terms,

and to apply the ideas and concepts resulting from this

continuing reflection onto other anthropological reports

to construct a new vision of anthropology. What follow

now are samples of my assessment of the amazing accounts

from two of the most important pioneers in appraising

inter-cultural relations.

2. Michel de Montaigne and Thomas More

When someone foreign, say a German or an Indian, comes to

a certain culture, say Brazilian or English, it is

fitting and proper that he see things through the

intellectual and emotional lenses that his own culture

provides. Unless, of course, he is an anthropologist. For

the received doctrine of anthropology states that if he

were of that particular trade he should do well to

disable his cultural lenses and get equipped with a fresh

and unhampered mind to look into the other culture,

delving deeply into it, living it out as fully as

possible, just so that he get a clear understanding of

it. We will see later on how far that is possible, and

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whether that is exclusive or not to the anthropologist.

Would not an ordinary man or woman be inherently able to

see from within the other’s culture? How could that be

so?

Long ago, before John Donne was born, the insightful

French philosopher Michel de Montaigne became interested

in the inhabitants of the New World on account of the

extraordinary news relayed to him by different sources,

all of them concerning the Tupinambá Indians from the

coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. First, there was a man

in his service who had stayed with the Tupinambá for some

twelve years. Secondly, he received reports of the talks

that the French court had had with three Tupinambá

Indians who had been brought to the city of Rouen (one of

them married and left progeny whose descendants may still

be with us today). Thirdly, Montaigne himself had a long

conversation with one of those Indians and also read

published accounts by visitors who had themselves been

with the Tupinambá. Montaigne would have made a fine

anthropologist! Whatever did the Tupinambá make of their

stay in France? Apparently they were impressed by what

they had been shown of French city and country life in

the 1570s, but at the same time they were both distraught

and amazed at what they saw. Montaigne declares he was

taken by three observations the Indians had made, one of

which he had unfortunately forgotten by the time he came

to write his essay “Of Cannibals”. The Tupinambá were

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flabbergasted at the intensity of the social inequality

they observed, in which a few were too rich, and a

multitude too poor. And he also recalled that they found

it incomprehensible that Charles IX, the king of the

mighty and rich French, was a mere infant.

Montaigne’s essay argues in a light, quasi Socratic,

dialectical fashion a comparison between Tupinambá

cannibalism, with its ritualized killing and eating of

affinal enemies [those related by marriage rather than

blood] for the purpose of acquiring their inward power,

and the senseless intestine warfare between Huguenots and

Catholics, with all its mutual torturing of compatriots.

How daring of Montaigne to make such a comparison! Having

considered everything, he has no qualms about imposing on

the reader´s mind and self-righteousness his own

perception as to who really is the savage. And with that,

anthropologists everywhere concur: Montaigne laid the

foundation of cultural relativism.

Please, bear with me a little longer, for there may be

more to reflect on from this episode. If we could imagine

ourselves eavesdropping on this fortuitous conversation

between Montaigne and his Tupinambá companion in a street

in Rouen, we should be keen to know whether the Tupinambá

was looking into French society with the lens of his own

culture, or was he seeing things the way the French might

see or wanted him to see? Where does this seemingly

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sociological and political interest come from on the part

of the Tupinambá? Montaigne subtly lets us imagine that

the Tupinambá somehow knew what they were talking about

and laid their judgements in a clear way.

The graciously unrepentant Thomas More (may his soul rest

composed) wrote his splendorous Utopia based on the

accounts, not tales, that Dutch and English sailors had

told him of their stay with Tupinambá Indians on the

coast of Rio de Janeiro. Thomas More may not have talked

to any Tupinambá himself, but he certainly got a good

gist of their society through these fine observant

sailors. The geography of that far-off island on the

South Atlantic Ocean certainly resembles Rio de Janeiro’s

Guanabara Bay. More’s description of that far-fetched

society fits well with reports from other eyewitnesses of

Tupinambá society and culture, such as the German Hans

Staden, who lived imprisoned with them in the 1540s, the

Portuguese Jesuit priest José de Anchieta, who

indoctrinated them in the 1550s, the French Huguenot Jean

de Lery who researched them in the 1560s, and others

later on. Utopia became the inspirational groundwork for

the great intellectual and socio-political

transformations that were to sweep across Europe for the

next five centuries. The eventual applications of its

inspiring vision may have had some wayward political

consequences, yet the great lesson of Utopia remains that

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the world is multitudinous and cultures can change by

social design.

3. Cultural attitudes and individual visions

Let us remind ourselves that the Tupinambá were not the

first Indians from Brazil, or for that matter, the New

World, to come to Europe and commingle and converse with

European men of the people, intellectuals, and nobles.

Ever since Columbus brought natives from the Caribbean

Islands and Pedro Álvares Cabral from the coast of

Brazil, Indians were brought into Europe – Portugal,

Spain, France, the Netherlands, possibly England or

Ireland – to appease the curiosity of Europeans, so that

they could ensure those exotic savages were really as

their sailors were telling them they were. Wild and

grotesque they may have been, but they were also

intriguingly worthy and wholesome. In many respects,

sixteenth-century Europeans treated Indians as full-

minded individuals. The quality of this picture was to

change radically in the nineteenth century when the new

dogmas of social evolution predominated. A lesser-minded

Indian, a child at best, emerged to be placed at the

bottom of the recently concocted racial ranking.

One might rightfully bring the historical record into

focus with a demonstration that Europeans were not only

extremely cruel to the New World Indians in the sixteenth

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century but also throughout the colonial period. Are we

to forget the so-called Black Legend, i.e., the Spanish

and Portuguese massacres of Indians during the long years

of conquest and colonization? Was there anything other

than absolute inhumanity in that? What about the mind-

boggling question raised by more than a few European

thinkers as to whether the Indians had or had not souls,

were or were not human beings?

Harsh judgement and cruelty were part of the ordinary

methods of war and enmity in those times, and the Indians

were no exception. Shall we consider, by comparison, what

happened between the Spanish and Arabs during the seven

hundred years of continuous wars for the re-conquest of

Spain? How about the Inquisition or the fiendish

massacres of their own peoples during both the English

and the French Revolutions? How about all the millions of

European, Arabic, Turkish, Slavic and other peoples

tortured and murdered, and pushed to the brink of

annihilation? Do I need to bring up the horrors

perpetrated by Europeans against Europeans through

history to our present times?

My point here is both complicated and troublesome, with

tinges of both pessimism and optimism in my outlook, and

I beg the reader’s pardon for making it in such haste.

Contrary to most historians and anthropologists I don’t

think Europeans were particularly, or exceptionally,

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cruel to Indians in any different way than they were to

their enemies in other wars, either of conquest or of

economic, political or religious rivalry. I surmise

further that on occasions when mostly incomprehensible

changes were shaking up their societies, European men of

vision gauged, and even looked up to, Indian and other

foreign cultures to help understand their own problems.

In doing so, these visionaries intended not only to bring

forth innovations, but also to influence their people and

governments. They frequently failed in their earnest

attempts but left legacies that would eventually come

into play one way or another in times ahead.

Historical process does not follow a rectilinear

teleology, but is subject to circumstances – mostly of a

cultural nature – that influence its course in ways

imperceptible to most people. In the sixteenth century

Europeans were experiencing the threshold of a new era.

They were generally horrified with what they were

experiencing both in their own countries and overseas,

and some of them were avid knowledge seekers, desirous of

working out their internal cultural predicaments. In the

nineteenth century Europeans (and their direct

descendants) were cocksure in consolidating the ways and

means of modern capitalism and the overwhelming dominance

of the scientific outlook. They had a drive to articulate

an absolute expression of their unconscious, collective

self-esteem. That resulted in a terrible era of racism

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and racial self-consciousness, of which even today we can

hardly say we are free.

The Tupinambá individuals, Thomas More, Michel de

Montaigne were island men in their own right and in their

own times. However enmeshed in the wiring of their own

cultures they were able to re-focus their cultural lenses

to discern the fabrics of other cultures, either by

living them out or by simply listening to other peoples’

heartfelt and discrete accounts, even if none of them was

methodologically trained for such a process.

You don’t have to be a philosopher, an anthropologist,

or, for that matter, a psychologist, to understand the

other. There is something in each and every individual

that equips us with the highest inherent capacity to go

beyond our selves and our ordinary cultural discernment.

In its turn, culture is a multifarious continent of geo-

socio-historical layers, high mountains and deep valleys

rupturing and twisting about, and with its wiring done by

a good-hearted, but poorly skilled and wily designer now

called the historical process. What it will come to, none

of us can fathom.

Of course the individual is short-circuited, too. And it

might be as well that his bad wiring is his greatest

asset, for in the end he needs some escape routes to bear

out his outrageous fortunes. Nonetheless, no matter how

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close or peninsular, or how connected by bridges and

fords and low tides, an island always lies a little off a

continent, pace Donne. The individual per se and the

individual as a social being don’t always see eye to eye.

To put it in anthropological and philosophical terms, the

collective unconscious - i.e., society and culture -

though a direct product of the individual in

collectivity, does not match with the potential that the

individual carries within himself.

4. Ethnocentrism and ethnoexocentrism

If we take it that culture is not merely a notion that

represents shared behaviours amongst socially related

individuals, but actually fixes a social identity for

individuals, we may concede that cultures are entities in

their own right that relate to one another. Consequently,

there is cultural interplay, which means competition,

cooperation, understanding, misunderstanding,

accommodation, rejection, in short, mutual acculturation

– all working as processes. Ethnocentrism as a concept

describes the innermost feeling of value that any culture

places on its own way of seeing the world (and other

cultures). Every culture is ethnocentric, just as every

individual is egocentric. The ethnocentric feeling is a

centripetal force that keeps a culture whole and makes

its individual members feel part of a shared entity. That

is well known even outside the field of anthropology. But

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how do cultures understand other cultures? If they do not

think, how can that be possible? Is there an opposite

force that allows culture to open up to other cultures?

Is the mechanism to understand another culture a virtue

exclusive to the transcendent subjectivity of the

individual? Or is it a virtue exclusive to “superior”

cultures, such as is proposed by the Polish philosopher

Leszek Kolakowski for Western civilization?

I believe there is something amiss in this whole

discussion, and here is where I highlight the notion of

ethnoexocentrism, a direct opposite of ethnocentrism. I

have postulated elsewhere that as much as ethnocentrism

in its own right, ethnoexocentrism is a necessary

cultural drive that favours a genuine acceptance of other

cultures where individuals can relate and intermingle

with one another. Ethnoexocentrism is for the most part

dormant in every culture, and it only comes to light when

called for, particularly when inescapable inter-cultural

relations require it. Ethnoexocentrism is a more complex

feeling than ethnocentrism, for it necessitates a self-

conscious appraisal of one’s own sentiment and the

sentiment of the other culture. Were it not for the

sentiment of ethnoexocentrism, not even total domination

of one people over another would be sufficient to produce

social and cultural commingling. In short, cultures, as

collective, unconscious entities, do relate to one

another because they allow the individual to become self-

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conscious of their own culture. Individual understanding

and compassion can of course improve the connexion

between cultures, but the potential for understanding is

proper to any culture.

Without the driving power of ethnoexocentrism, the

process in which two or more cultures are in

interrelation would necessarily result in the

assimilation of a less resilient culture by another. This

is what anthropologists have called acculturation, a

notion much rejected since the 1970s, but not replaced by

any other more feasible explanation. Acculturation is

conceived as a dialectical process, whose final outcome

is taken to be the disappearance of a less resilient, or,

if you will, less adapted, culture. The historical record

is full of examples of cultures that were wiped out, in

some cases physically, in others spiritually. But what

about those cultures that suffered so much oppression by

a dominant culture and yet remained whole, at least

maintaining a basic or dormant core, only to resurface

when occasion permitted?

By taking into account the ethnoexocentric drive as an

essential part of the inter-cultural interplay, one can

appraise the historical process as more complex than

normal dialectics would allow us to believe. The

historical process is rather less combinatory of its

constituent contradictory elements, and, inversely, more

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wholesome because it allows the constituent elements to

keep on existing. The working out of this process is of a

higher order, one that takes all the contradictory and

complementary elements of the historical process in a

holistic but not totalitarian, rather an open and

formative way, called hyperdialectical1.

The historical process is hyperdialectical and we as

human beings are also hyperdialectical in our way of

being and thinking. For our purposes here,

hyperdialectics simply means that the interplay of

cultures produces syntheses in a slower mode than the

purported dialectical process. These syntheses are not

totalizing, but open to renovation with the same elements

that constituted them. There may not be consciousness in

this process, but somehow, there is purpose and

intentionality. And man may be able to fathom it.

5. England and Brazil

Let us now briefly peruse the examples of the historical

processes in England and in Brazil, consider how their

respective cultures were formed and ask how they have

been dealing with new inter-cultural challenges.

England

1 See Appendix 1 for a reading of how the Brazilian philosopher Luiz Sergio Coelho de Sampaio developed his logical and philosophical system that he called hyperdialectics.

14

In ethnic, cultural, and social terms, one might say that

England had become constituted as an identifiable culture

by the twelfth century with ethnic elements from Celts,

Romanized Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans. The

process of mingling peoples and cultures was certainly

not a peaceful one, but things turned out well in the

end, with minor but resolvable disturbances along the

way. It took eight centuries for the outcome of that

process to be challenged with the arrival of former

colonials from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Asia, and

still more recently from Central and Eastern Europe. This

eight hundred year time lapse, conjoined by the

formidable economic and political rise of the nation,

strengthened and solidified a “natural” ethnocentric

feeling of the English (or perhaps British) identity. The

English cultural reaction to the newly arrived

culturally, religiously, and racially different peoples

has been dominated by a measured if not nonchalant self-

confidence. It is unfortunate that this nonchalance may

have produced a polite indifference to the incomers, and

served to keep English culture apart. How much the

English let the incomers know that they were welcomed

into their culture is hard to ascertain.

The fact is that the way English culture accepted

immigrants was made easier for the natives because of

post-war social policies, a lasting period of peace, and

the economic and cultural enrichment of the English

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polity. There was enough for everyone, more or less, and

by and large people got along. To many observers it

seemed that English culture was experiencing a novel and

bright zeitgeist. This fortunate, cultural combination

provided fertile ground for the application of ethnic

policies deriving from the cultural-ideological-political

formulations of multiculturalism. Circumstances made

things flow with comparative ease. However it should be

noted that it was not only because of its particular

circumstances that England received immigrants with such

aplomb. This nation, like any other culture and people,

has a drive, and its own degree of ethnoexocentrism.

For all its ethnoexocentric potential and its special

zeitgeist, England’s long historical record of ethnic

self-confinement brings with it an awkward burden both on

the natives and on immigrants from other cultures.

Multicultural policies are generally viewed as proper to

our times, but their purposes are less clear. Are these

cultures to be set apart on their own, as in a latter-

day, benign, segregationist model, or are they in the

long run to be somehow assimilated? The acute current

debate, from what I can understand, focuses attention on

Muslim immigrants. For example, there is a perceived

conundrum about whether educational policy should be soft

(full acceptance of religious and social customs) or hard

(education through the backbone of British ways). Where

to find a new English paideia, a dynamic, middle ground to

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favour cultural interplay, not purposeful assimilation --

that seems to be the question, and this moment urges a

new approach.

Brazil

Let us turn to Brazil. Brazilian polity was formed by the

mid-eighteenth century with the cultural and social

amalgamation of the three ethnic and social stocks that

were brought together: Indians, Africans, and Portuguese.

The historical process ground everyone in the same mill,

particularly Indians and Africans, most of whom were

incorporated into Brazil as servant-like labour hands or

slaves. Brazilian polity arose from extreme social

inequality and political instability. Even though modern

Brazil has an economic and political elite, challenges

from the insecure middle-class and the working-class

majority are constant and apparently on the rise. The

time lapse between Brazil’s cultural and social formation

and the arrival of East-Central and Southern European,

Middle Asians, and Japanese immigrants in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was short enough

– in comparison to the time lapse during the formation of

English culture – to provide the circumstances for not

only integration but a generalized assimilation of the

majority of the new arrivals. This fact has been taken to

constitute a kind of national cultural ideology by

Brazilians but also by acute-minded foreigners, such as

Stefan Zweig and Vilém Flusser. The result is that there

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is no inherent ethnic strife in Brazil, though there are

plenty of economic and social frictions in our

inequality-ridden cities, across indigenous territories,

the rural quilombos of African descendants and lands owned

by the barons of agribusinesses. Brazilian culture reigns

supreme and hegemonic despite all these divisions, even

for the Indians who have preserved and continue to

practice significantly different cultures of their own.

No Brazilian has any qualms about being Brazilian and

each unabashedly acts on this sentiment, pulling anyone

foreign in to their cultural bosom. The hyperdialectical

historical process moves back and forth in time, and

allows for the possibility of the permanence of different

cultures. However, there is no certainty that Indian

cultures will continue to be practised as the future

unfolds.

Back to the United Kingdom. Do Scots, Welsh, and Irish

peoples still live out cultures of their own? For all I

can gather, they do, and we can say that they do so

because both the hyperdialectical process and the

zeitgeist allow it. They live out their cultures with the

understanding that culture changes endogenously as well

as adapting to exogenous circumstances. They feel that

they have been constituents in the formation of the

British culture and polity, which they now want to be

opened up more widely.

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5. Beyond assimilation and segregation

If there is a cultural disposition in Brazil for

assimilating in-comers – and consequently for

homogenizing cultural diversity - and if there is,

contrarily, a cultural disposition in England for

segregating in-comers and consequently for strengthening

multiple ethnocentrisms rather than ethnoexocentric

commingling, there are also in both cases dispositions

for inter-cultural dialoguing, for social

experimentation, for mutual emotion through art, and for

the individual to rise above his circumstances. And that

is what I understand we are doing here.

For all we know, and of course we don’t know much, the

future is not foreseeable, precisely because the

hyperdialectical historical process cannot be fully

understood nor manipulated by our scientific logic nor by

dialectics as such. We essentially need a new form of

logic to account for the interplay of cultures. The

pervading application of scientific reasoning and its

main tools, mathematics and cybernetics, enables us to

grasp the historical process and comforts us somewhat by

providing a sense of possibilities of action, but it is

not enough to fathom the being of history. Scientific,

systemic logic is a conventionalized form of thinking and

- as Nietzsche and Heidegger have pointed out in much

harsher terms – is soulless, wayward, and without sense

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of purpose. An appeal to Hegelian dialectics, which does

provide the sense of purpose or teleology usually

produced by philosophers of history, does not solve the

question because dialectics distinguishes itself in

postulating an outcome based on simple premises and just

as easily and cynically corrects it ex-post factum, as it

eventually goes wrong. On the other hand, an appeal to

tradition or a “spirit of the people” or an atavistic

nativism disconnected from the reality of our times

usually results in mindless cultural regression or in

worsening ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and racism.

We, human beings, are hyperdialectical: our mode of

thinking goes beyond the possibilities of scientific

reasoning. We move forward -that is our purpose. But even

as we become conscious of that fact we can hardly find a

position from which we can look into ourselves and view

the historical process to comprehend ourselves in our own

overwhelming complexity. Our actions, our social

practices, spin out from our understanding and our

control, and the consequences thereof bounce against

other social actions to make everything appear senseless

and entropic.

And yet we are meant to try to understand our times, just

the same, and to act upon the circumstances that are

present for us to discern. We cannot disregard what we as

human civilization have reached so far: a critical

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knowledge of our convoluted histories, a consciousness of

the best of our traditions, a practice of dialoguing with

other traditions, our commitments to solidarity, a

balanced rationality, an earnest and honest disposition,

a mild penchant to prospective designing, free will, and

hopefully an unrelenting faith in man as individual, as

culture, and as nature. For all the vicissitudes of life,

self-conscious dialogue is possible, cultures contain

unknown potentials, and if there is not clear purpose in

existence, perhaps we ought to create it.

And finally let us pay homage to our poet John Donne,

because, all things considered, no man is meant to be an

island.

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Annex 1

The Hyperdialectical Logical System by Luiz Sergio Coelho

de Sampaio

Luiz Sergio Coelho de Sampaio (1933-2003) was a Brazilian

philosopher and logician who elaborated a philosophical

system where Being (man and the world) is conceived to be

of a five-fold (quinquintary) nature. This five-fold

nature can be comprehended as five dimensions or logics.

For Sampaio, logic is a concept not at all restricted to

what is generally known as classical or scientific or

mathematical logic, the logic that was originally

expounded by Aristotle. Sampaio conceives logic as a mode

of thinking that develops from a pre-mathematical,

innermost pre-disposition pertaining of Being. Logic is

what makes us perceive the multifarious world. There are

therefore five logics that explain Being: logic of

identity (I), logic of difference (D), dialectics (I/D),

systemic logic (D/2), and hyperdialectical logic (I/D/2).

The first two logics are autonomous and fundamental

logics, whereas the next three are formed in synthetic,

ascending constructions of the interplay of the two

fundamental logics. The hyperdialectical logic subsumes

and synthesizes the previous four logics and consequently

commands the whole system. Taking Being for the moment as

man, logic can be understood as man´s proper mode of

thinking to apprehend an object, either in its parts or

in its entirety. Taking the world momentarily as Being,

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each one of the five logics, and all of them together as

a whole, represent the structuring of the world, from

atomic particles and forces to the configuration of man

through history.

Sampaio´s hyperdialectical logical system (HLS) rests on

a principle thought out long ago by the Greek philosopher

Parmenides, the principle that “thinking and being are

the same”. I shall expound this principle as it pertains

to HLS. Next, I will summarize HLS in relation to a few

logical ideas that have been propounded by other

philosophers.

Thinking and being are the same

Parmenides’ proposition that “thinking and being are the

same” means that our mode of thinking corresponds to the

way the world is. The question arises: what is our mode

of thinking? And that is what HLS is all about. It is

pertinent to note that many centuries later Descartes’

dictum “cogito ergo sum” means something to the same effect

as Parmenides. On another level, that proposition is

unquestionably the basis for the sociological

understanding that the way man thinks (logic) corresponds

somehow to how the world functions. Or, in still other

words, pace Marx and Gramsci, the predominance or hegemony

of a certain way of figuring out the world, its main

philosophical mode of thinking (ideology,

superstructure), corresponds to the way the world or

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society functions (infrastructure). In short, man is his

zeitgeist. And he is also a representation of the world.

Man as a quinquintary, hyperdialectical being

Let me now briefly review some of the founding insights

in philosophy that can be seen as pivotal points in the

constitution of HLS. The first set of thinkers that

pristinely produced these insights comes, unsurprisingly,

from Classic Greece. They are said by Sampaio to have

perceived thinking/being in particular, original

perspectives, each one of which stands for what he

defined as one of the five logics.

First, there is Parmenides himself who not only

introduced the idea of being/thinking, as we just

presented it, but, in a great spurt of abstraction,

concocted the proposition that everything that is

(exists), is but One single entity. Outside of this One

there is but Nothing; outside of what is real there is

only the unreal; outside of the single truth (áletheia),

there is only opinion (doxa). For Sampaio, Parmenides is

the first philosopher to articulate the so-called logic

of identity (I), which is the fundamental logic that

allows man to perceive the world as a reality, to know

that he exists, that he has a conscience and that he

knows he can act.

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Second, comes Heraclitus, known as the “Obtuse” (after

epigrams such as “being and not-being are and are not the

same”). Two of his better known and perhaps more

intelligible, aphorisms are “everything flows” and “no

man crosses the same river twice”. Heraclitus’ visionary

aphorisms represent the logic in man’s thinking/being

that allows him to perceive both that he and the world

are in constant flow and that things can also be

paradoxical or inconsistent, undecipherable by conscience

(i.e., by the logic of identity). Both Plato and

Aristotle, in their own ways, interpreted Heraclitus as

the inspirer of sophistry, but also as the philosopher

who established the notion of the multiplicity and

variety or difference of things, even things within the

same group or genus. Sampaio calls this mode of thinking

the logic of difference (D) and attributes to it the

place of the unconscious in man, as well as unconscious

and intuitive knowledge, the significant in language,

etc.

The logic of identity (I) and the logic of difference (D)

are the two fundamental logics. They stand on their own

merits and represent two opposite modes of perceiving the

world. In a monistic way, logic I represents the unity of

being; logic D stands for the differential uniqueness and

therefore the multiplicity of each and every being. Logic

I favours the perception of time; logic D, the perception

of space. Logic I opens our mind to the phenomenal real;

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logic D to the elusive unreal. One affirms; the other

doubts and questions. In a dualistic way, they come

together in contrast as subject/object,

individual/culture, consciousness/unconsciousness, etc.

Third, there is Plato who, among many ideas, created the

Idea itself, i.e., what today we call “concept”, as both

the unfathomable Form that stands eternal in an ideal,

model world representing empirical “things” in all their

varied instances and also an ordinary synthesis of the

one and the multiple. Sampaio calls this mode of thinking

the dialectical logic, or dialectics. It is a secondary

logic, for it derives from the synthesis of the logic of

identity with the logic of difference. Dialectical

reasoning is always conceptual and totalizing, therefore

anti-empiricist; deductive; and opportunist; and

ineluctable.

Fourth, there is Aristotle, who established the basis for

scientific reasoning, first by formalizing the principles

of identity, contradiction, and the excluded middle [i.e.

no third option can exist that is neither “self” nor

“other”]; and second, by placing as a property of entity

its relation with other entities in a systemic

conventional structure, where there is no room for a

third, undefined, or ambiguous element. In his monumental

works on logics, the great Stagirist applied the

propositions brought forth by Parmenides, Heraclitus, and

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Plato, and integrated them to lay down the principles and

methods of science. Sampaio calls Aristotle’s logics the

groundwork of the systemic logic, axiomatized in the

nineteenth century, and widely known as the logic of the

excluded third/excluded middle and the logic of

scientific reasoning.

Thus, those genial Greek philosophers brought forth

(Sampaio likes to use the expression “unveiled”) to us

the four fundamental logics proper to man and to entities

that constitute the world: ultimately, proper to Being,

as originally conceived by Parmenides. In addition, those

philosophers may have gone a step further in pre-

conceiving Being as having a quinquintary nature. Indeed,

both Plato and Aristotle devised the possibility of the

existence of five characteristics of Being. In his

dialogues Theaetetus, Sophist, and Parmenides, Plato argues

that Being is made up of itself (what is, i.e., the

Parmenidean being, or the One), its opposite or negation

(non-being, the other, or the Multiple), its sameness or

Form (the idea, or concept), its relation with others

(the class of connected things, or system), and its full

Being (in discourse, meaning). Likewise, in discussing

the causes, one might wonder whether Aristotle’s primary

cause, the “unmoved mover” may not be construed as

precisely the basis of a fifth characteristic of Being,

perhaps a fifth logic. After all, he, in his work on

physics, proposed that there should be a fifth element in

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the composition of the world - ether, later called

quintessence - besides the basic four elements known

throughout the ancient world, namely air, water, fire,

and earth.

Nonetheless, with all due respect, neither Plato nor

Aristotle had in mind that Being was necessarily

quinquintary, and that its ultimate, fifth logic should

be not only a logic in itself but the very logic that

governs, subsumes, and produces meaning together with the

others, in consequence forming one single, totalizing

logic by means of a process of a highly intensive

hyperdialectical synthesis. In short, Sampaio’s

hyperdialectical logical system is a re-arrangement of

received and yet partially recognized logics, a system

that purports to characterize the very nature of Being,

i.e., man and the world.

The advent of modernity - dating back to the resurgence

of studies of Aristotle’s logic by scholastic

philosophers, the early developments of capitalism, and

the ever-continuing enveloping dominance of scientific

reasoning – brought forth a host of thinkers and

philosophers that made use, in their turns, of each of

these previously outlined logics, especially the

fundamental four. I will briefly review the most

prominent of them as representations of the working out

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of the HLS as humanity refined science and made the world

better understood.

Logic I

Descartes (cogito ergo sum) and Kant both use the logic of

identity to define the subject of systemic knowledge,

i.e., of science. It should be noted that at about the

same time, the capitalist system was identifying the

entrepreneur (in America, the self made man) as the

agency of its developing machine. In the twentieth

century Husserl refined Kant’s subject of science by

conceptions and methods to grasp and attain knowledge

with the minimal carryover of one’s cultural biases. In

the science of anthropology, this method influenced the

school of historical particularism and the notion of

culture as self-containing entity.

Logic D

Pascal (the heart, i.e., emotion, has its own particular

reasoning), Kierkegaard (contradictions or antitheses can

never be synthetized or turned into syntheses), Freud

(the unconscious predicates the conscious), Lacan (the

unconscious forms a language system of its own),

Nietzsche (only by the deconstruction of the Platonic

concept can the world make sense again), and Heidegger

(truth {áletheia} is self-evident, the dasein, whereas

scientific truth is adequatio, i.e., conventional

knowledge) – are all partakers of the logic of

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difference, challenging one way or another the logic of

identity, dialectics, and the ever-prevailing systemic

logic. Philosophers that are identified as post-

modernists, such as Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and

others all predominantly work their arguments with the

tools provided within the logic of difference. The

foremost influence of this logic in anthropology rests on

the idea that the collective (un)conscious, proposed by

Durkheim, is an entity in itself, a non-visible reality,

with its own structure and designs, beyond the sum total

of its participants.

Logic I/D

Hegel (thesis/antithesis/synthesis), Marx and epigones

(historical society as the by-product of class struggle),

the evolutionists in general, etc. developed their

explanations by means of the dialectic logic. Hegel

insisted that dialectics was superior to what he called

analytic logic, with the argument that dialectics

reconstitutes that which analytics splits up but does not

reconstitute. That may have been his most harmful

influence on Marx and other dialecticians. It made Marx

think that dialectics is the proper logic to explain

capitalism. Dialectics is a triadic synthesis, whereas

the systemic logic is a synthesis of four elements,

including dialectics. If Marx had elaborated his view of

capitalism by means of the systemic logic, he would

probably have to consider the role of another class, let

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us call it “middle class”, as the agency of technology,

as a class of its own. Of course he was aware that

technology was an important economic factor in

capitalism, but he was blinded by dialectics in not

ascertaining that technology is not just a by-product of

capital/labour. Technology is a factor of production

engendered by people who form a social class in its own

right. His predictions of the downfall of capitalism, as

a consequence of the conflicts between bourgeoisie and

proletariat, would certainly not assume such urgency at

every short-term capitalist crisis. But that is a whole

other story, to be left here without much ado.

Logic D/2

The whole host of modern scientists and mathematicians,

from Newton to Einstein, the positivists, analytic

philosophers, Popper, and so on (the conventional

schematic truth/the mathematical reduction/proofs and

falsifiability), are the heirs and improvers of

Aristotelian classical logic, turned into systemic logic,

the logic that does not admit a third, indefinite,

ambiguous, element. Mathematics, including probability --

but not the likes of Gödel (incompleteness and

inconsistency), fuzzy logicians, and logicians of the

third included (Lapasco, for instance) - is the epitome

of this reasoning. Proponents and practitioners of

systemic logic have in mind that mathematical model

explanations of the physical world should necessarily one

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day be applied to man. Computational mathematics and

cybernetics have already been telling us what to do,

before and beyond what we might think we should do. At

present economics, as the social science of capitalism,

reigns supreme precisely because it is operated by the

systemic logic rather than by dialectics. In

anthropology, structuralism is the most ambitious

derivation from the application of systemic logic.

Logic I/D/2

The hyperdialectical logic is the reigning logic of HLS.

It is a logic in itself, and it also commands the other

logics, constituting a working, holistic set. Its modern

thinker and proposer is of course Sampaio. The

hyperdialectical logic permits us to apprehend things and

events in their constitutive dimensions: as entities in

themselves, as entities in movement, as conceptualized

entities, as interconnected entities, and as entities

with purpose, direction, or intentionality. So Man is a

being in himself (conscious and determined), a being for

another (unconscious, paradoxical), a being in

transformation (historical, dialectical), a

contextualized being, and a fully subjective being with

intentionality.

Man as a collective entity constitutes culture, and its

interplay through time constitutes the historical

process. The unfolding of the historical process across

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some 200,000 years accounts for man’s saga. The

recognition and awareness of this realization is our

foremost intellectual duty. Even though we can discern

moments of change in time where one mode of thinking, one

logic, might prevail over others, thus characterizing the

inner working of a culture, the process is always

hyperdialectical. At any moment, man as an individual is

capable of becoming aware of what he is doing, though in

so many cases the cultural forces that impinge upon him

might not allow him to change course. The ancient Greeks

called this man’s moira, or destiny, fate. The

hyperdialectical logical system is an attempt to come to

terms with that.

In sum, the HLS can be applied to many themes. Sampaio

himself has a few published, and many yet unpublished,

works on logics, mathematics, theoretical physics,

economics, psychology, theology, the anthropic principle,

and other themes. I myself have published an application

of HLS to the formation, constitution, methodology, and

design of anthropology. This on-going essay has also the

spirit of hyperdialectical thinking.

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