Olavo de Carvalho

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Olavo de Carvalho, born in Campinas, State of São Paulo, on April 29, 1947, has been hailed by critics as one of the most original and audacious Brazilian thinkers. Men of as different intellectual orientations as Jorge Amado, Arnaldo Jabor, Ciro Gomes, Roberto Campos, JO de Meira Penna, Bruno Tolentino, Herberto Sales, Josué Montello and the former President of the Republic José Sarney have already expressed their admiration for you and for the your job.

The keynote of his work is the defense of human interiority against the tyranny of collective authority, especially when supported by a “scientific” ideology. For Olavo de Carvalho, there is an indissoluble link between the objectivity of knowledge and the autonomy of individual conscience, a link that is lost sight of when the criterion of validity of knowledge is reduced to an impersonal and uniform form for use by the academic class. Believing that the most solid shelter of the individual conscience against alienation and objectification is found in ancient spiritual traditions — Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam —, Olavo de Carvalho seeks to give a new interpretation to the symbols and rites of these traditions, making them the matrices of a philosophical and scientific strategy for solving current cultural problems. An example of this strategy is his brief essay The Literary Genres: Their Metaphysical Foundations, where he uses the symbolism of verb tenses in sacred languages ​​(Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit and Greek) to refound the distinctions between literary genres. Another example is his reinterpretation of Aristotle's logical writings, where he discovers, between Poetics, Rhetoric, Dialectics and Logic, common principles that imply a unified science of discourse in which answers to many very current questions of interdisciplinarity are found (A Philosophy Aristotelian Culture — Introduction to the Theory of the Four Discourses). Along the same lines is the essay Symbols and Myths in the Movie “O Silêncio dos Inocentes” (“The fascinating and — dare I say — definitive analysis”, as Prof. José Carlos Monteiro, from the Film School of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, says in the preface. Janeiro) that applies the criteria of ancient symbolic hermeneutics to a discipline as modern as film criticism. His work published so far culminates in The Garden of Afflictions (1995), where some primordial symbols such as the biblical Leviathan and Behemoth, the cross, the khien and the khouen of the Chinese tradition, etc., serve as structural molds for a philosophy of History, which, starting from an apparently minor event and taking it as an occasion to show the links between the small and the large, expands in concentric turns to encompass the entire horizon of Western culture. The subtlety of the construction makes O Jardim das Aflições also a work of art.

It is very difficult to translate the texts of Olavo de Carvalho into another language, where the depth of the themes, the implacable logic of the demonstrations and the breadth of the cultural references are allied to a most singular style, which introduces the use of popular language — including many wordplays of Brazilian daily life, highly comic, practically untranslatable, as well as sudden changes of tone where the expressions of the sermo vulgaris, interspersed with the most technical and rigorous philosophical language, acquire unexpected connotations and of surprising depth.

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(By Roxane Carvalho in "www.olavodecarvalho.org/dados-biograficos")