[1][2][3] In his book A Critique of Affirmative Morality (A reflection on Death, Birth and the Value of Life),[4] Julio Cabrera presents his theory about the value of human existence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[12] (a sort of second volume of Cine: 100 anos de filosofia) and Diálogo/cinema,[13] 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,[14] 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),[15] Existencia naufragada.
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.
However, according to Cabrera, this analytic objectivism excludes fundamental dimensions of the problem of meaning, such as time and lived experience.
But according to him, also the other philosophies of language show their faults, from phenomenology to hermeneutics and even meta-criticism harboring therapies redeeming only in an illusory manner: psychoanalytic healing or communist utopia.
This conception of philosophy owes the hardly unorthodox intersections that Cabrera did in his studies of logic, connecting Saul Kripke with Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant with John Austin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein with Jean-Paul Sartre.
The specific work on concept networks in lexical logic was developed in partnership with the physicist Olavo Leopoldino da Silva Filho, from the University of Brasilia.
In Cabrera's view, according to the affirmative approach, the multiplicity of answers given by philosophy is a mistake which must be "resolved" in some way.
This practice can be found in important philosophical works in Latin America such as that of Enrique Dussel with which Cabrera maintained published debates.
[19][28] Over time, he extended this metaphilosophical approach in the direction of making it an element of the struggle against what he began to clearly see as the colonized state of philosophy in Latin America.
Cabrera notes that philosophy in Brazil, especially made in departments in the academy, is particularly blind to the sources of Latin American thought, both from the classics (Bartolomé de Las Casas, António Vieira, Flora Tristan, Juan Bautista Alberdi, José Martí and José Enrique Rodó) and contemporary (José Carlos Mariátegui, Edmundo O'Gorman, Leopoldo Zea, Miguel León-Portilla, Roberto Fernández Retamar and Santiago Castro-Gómez), known only in isolated expert communities.
The idea is to read nineteenth-century European philosophers who challenged intellectualist and Christian traditions, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche (and their precursors Michel de Montaigne, Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau), as creating ideas whose origins already existed in the Amerindian ways of living and thinking.