Julio Cabrera is an Argentine philosopher living in Brazil. He is a retired professor of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Brasília and former head of the department. Previously he taught in Argentina, at the National University of Córdoba, the University of Belgrano and then in Brazil at the Federal University of Santa Maria. He is best known for his works on "negative ethics" and cinema and philosophy. Other areas of philosophy that he deals with are philosophy of language, logic and Latin American philosophy. Biogram on Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico. Entrevista al Dr. Julio Cabrera, Serie Entrevistas, Fundación Dr. Jaime Roca, 2014. J. Cabrera, Who I am.
Negative ethics
In his book A Critique of Affirmative Morality (A reflection on Death, Birth and the Value of Life), J. Cabrera, A critique of affirmative morality (A reflection on death, birth and the value of life), Brasília: Julio Cabrera Editions, 2014 (English edition). J. Cabrera, Crítica de la moral afirmativa: Una reflexión sobre nacimiento, muerte y valor de la vida, Barcelona: Gedisa, 1996 (original Spanish edition). Julio Cabrera presents his theory about the value of human existence. Human life, for Cabrera, is "structurally negative" insofar as there are negative components of life that are inevitable, constitutive and adverse: as prominent among them Cabrera cites loss, scarcity, pain, conflicts, fragility, illness, aging, discouragement and death. According to Cabrera they form the basic structure to human life, which he analyzes through what he calls naturalistic phenomenology, drawing freely from thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Cabrera has called his work an attempt to put together Schopenhauer and Heidegger, introducing a determinant judgement of the value of being into the analysis of Dasein, and putting morality above life, against Nietzsche.
Cabrera develops an ethical theory, negative ethics, that is informed by this phenomenological analysis. He argues that there has been an unwarranted prejudice in ethics against non-being, a view he calls "affirmativity". Because affirmative views take being as good, they always view things that threaten this hegemony as bad; particularly things like abstention from procreation or suicide. Cabrera criticizes affirmative ethics for asking how people should live without asking the radical question of whether people should live tout court. He argues that, because of the structural negativity of being, there is a fundamental "moral disqualification" of human beings due to the impossibility of nonharming and nonmanipulating others. Nonharming and nonmanipulating others is called by him the "Minimal Ethical Articulation" ("MEA"; previously translated into English as "Fundamental Ethical Articulation" and "FEA"). The MEA is violated by our structural "moral impediment", by the worldly discomforts – notably pain and discouragement – imposed on us that prevent us from acting ethically. Cabrera argues that an affirmative morality is a self-contradiction because it accepts the MEA and conceives a human existence that precludes the possibility of not-harming or not-manipulating others. Thus he believes that affirmative societies, through their politics, require the common suspension of the MEA to even function.
Cabrera's negative ethics is supposed to be a response to the negative structure of being, acutely aware of the morally disqualifying nature of being. Cabrera believes children are usually considered as mere aesthetic objects, are not created for their own sake but for the sake of their parents, and are thrown into a structurally negative life by the act of procreation. Procreation is, Cabrera argues, a harm and a supreme act of manipulation. He believes that the consistent application of normal moral concepts – like duty, virtue or respect – present in most affirmative moralities entails antinatalism. Cabrera also argues that a human being adopting negative ethics should not only abstain from procreation, but also should have a complete willingness for an ethical death, by immediate suspension of all personal projects in benefit of a political fightJ. Cabrera, Políticas negativas y ética de la libertación. ¿Es posible ser um pessimista revolucionário? (Mi encuentro con Enrique Dussel), Essay 9 in: Análisis y existencia: pensamiento en travesía, Córdoba: Ediciones del Copista, 2010. or an altruistic suicide, when it becomes the least immoral course of action.
Cabrera's Critique is one of his most systematic defenses of negative ethics, but he has also explored the same ideas in other works, such as Projeto de Ética Negativa,J. Cabrera, Projeto de Ética Negativa, São Paulo: Mandacaru, 1989 (second edition: A Ética e Suas Negações, Não nascer, suicídio e pequenos assassinatos, Rio De Janeiro: Rocco, 2011). English translation of the first chapter of Projeto de Ética Negativa. Ética Negativa: problemas e discussões,J. Cabrera (ed.), Ética Negativa: problemas e discussões, Goiânia: UFG, 2008. Porque te amo, não nascerás! Nascituri te salutant, J. Cabrera, T. Lenharo di Santis, Porque te amo, não nascerás! Nascituri te salutant, Brasília: LGE, 2009. English translation of the first chapter of Porque te amo, Nao nascerás! Nascituri te salutant Discomfort and Moral Impediment: The Human Situation, Radical Bioethics and Procreation,J. Cabrera, Mal-estar e moralidade: situação humana, ética e procriação responsável, Brasília: UnB, 2018. J. Cabrera, Discomfort and Moral Impediment: The Human Situation, Radical Bioethics and Procreation, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019 (English edition) and A moral do começo: sobre a ética do nascimento. J. Cabrera, H. Bensusan, A.M. Wuensch, A moral do começo: sobre a ética do nascimento, Porto Alegre: RS: Editora Fi, 2019
Cinema and philosophy
In his first book about cinema-philosophical thought, Cine, 100 años de filosofia: Una Introducción a la Filosofia A Traves del Análisis de Películas,J. Cabrera, Cine, 100 años de filosofia: Una Introducción a la Filosofia A Traves del Análisis de Películas, Barcelona: Gedisa, 1999 (second edition in 2015). Julio Cabrera proposes the notion of "logopathy" (from Greek: "logos" – "reason" and "páthos" – "feelings"), that is, of "cognitive-affective concepts", treating them as capable of putting in question the traditional view of philosophy about concepts, which he calls apathetic and tied to purely intellectual concepts. Cabrera sustains that logopathic philosophy is of the order of meaning, and not of truth, and that it adds affective elements of judgment to these traditional intellectual view of concepts.
Cabrera considers cinema one of the most fruitful means for the generation of concepts of a logopathic type, specifically denominated by him as "concept-image", as opposed to "concept-idea", the apathetic type of concept. He believes that cinema, by its powerful audiovisual means of expression, would provide a "superpotentiation" of conceptual possibilities, and therefore, of the establishment of the experience of the film, indispensable to the development of the concept-image, with the consequent increase of affective impact.
On the other hand, Cabrera believes that throughout history of European philosophy, at various moments, written philosophy – the opposite of visual philosophy – has also been logopathic, it has thought through affections, but without assuming it openly, while cinema usually has been seen only as a mere affective phenomenon, without relevant cognitive power. His notions of logopathy and concept-image seek to eliminate this dichotomy, pointing to the affectivity of the intellect and the cognitiveness of affections.
Cabrera gave continuity to the exposition of his cinema-philosophy thinking in books like De Hitchcock a Greenaway pela história da filosofia: novas reflexoes sobre cinema e filosofia J. Cabrera, De Hitchcock a Greenaway pela história da filosofia: novas reflexoes sobre cinema e filosofia, São Paulo: Nankin, 2007. (a sort of second volume of Cine: 100 anos de filosofia) and Diálogo/cinema,J. Cabrera, M. Tiburi, Diálogo/cinema, São Paulo: Senac, 2013. where in a debate through letters with Marcia Tiburi, he discusses the subject from the perspective that, long before the invention of the cinema, philosophy was already "filming" ideas through images, and also in articles Para una des-comprensión filosófica Del cine: el caso Inland Empire de David Lynch, J. Cabrera, Para una des-comprensión filosófica Del cine: el caso Inland Empire de David Lynch, Enl@ce, year 6, number 2, Maracaibo: Universidad del Zulia, 2009. Três ensaios sobre a repetição: Kierkegaard, Jarmusch, Hitchcock, Van Sant e três damas que desembarcam antes de chegar (Uma reflexão transversal sobre escrita e imagem),J. Cabrera, Três ensaios sobre a repetição: Kierkegaard, Jarmusch, Hitchcock, Van Sant e três damas que desembarcam antes de chegar (Uma reflexão transversal sobre escrita e imagem), in: Ri. Timm De Souza et alia, Literatura e Cinema. Encontros contemporâneos, Porto Alegre: Dublinense, 2013. Existencia naufragada. Los 4 viajes del Titanic,J. Cabrera, Existencia naufragada. Los 4 viajes del Titanic, Per la Filosofia, Pisa-Roma: Fabrizio Serra, 2015. Repetición y cine vacío.J. Cabrera, Repetición y cine vacío, La Cueva de Chauvet, La Plata: Malisia, 2016. and Cine, filosofía y filosofía analítica.J. Cabrera, Cine, filosofía y filosofía analítica, in: F. Santamaria Velasco et alia, Cine y Pensamiento, Estéticas contemporáneas 9, Bogotá-Medellin: Universidad Claretiana, Universidad Santo Tomás, 2017.
Philosophy of language and logic
For Cabrera, philosophies of language are philosophies for which language does not matter in so far as it merely conveys something, but insofar as it constitutes – and implements – concepts and structures of understanding of the world. From this large sense of the term, he identifies four philosophies of language, which are: analytical, hermeneutic, phenomenological and meta-critical. Looking through the prism of negativity, Cabrera shows how the four above types of philosophies of language fail at a common point: their incapacity to fight against the failures of meaning. For the analytics, the point presents itself in the "meaninglessness" of expressions which is treated as a limit beyond which one should not go. However, according to Cabrera, this analytic objectivism excludes fundamental dimensions of the problem of meaning, such as time and lived experience. Phenomenology expands the analytic semantic horizon with the dimension of intentionality (of which analytic intensionality is only an inauthentic correlate, essentially objective) without the problem of meaninglessness being tamed. It remains for phenomenology, however, the temporality and historicity that hermeneutics adds to the approach of the problem, which is called "misunderstanding". Hermeneutic falls into the basic "distortions of meanings", something stronger than "meaninglessness" and "misunderstanding", a subject of meta-critical philosophies, represented by Karl Marx's and Sigmund Freud's philosophies of language.