Abstract

The question about the thing is one of the main topics in the work of Vilém Flusser. It seeks to reconsider not only the phenomenology of the things and the problem between the natural and the cultural objects but, importantly, a focus on the “thing” forefronts his theory about human evolution from the manipulation of things towards the digitization of the so called non-things. The connection between Eudoro de Sousa and Vilém Flusser, both friends of the Brazilian Philosopher Vicente Ferreira da Silva in the 1950s in São Paulo, goes also back to the History of the Devil, in which Flusser reinterpreted the Devil as a) the lord of the things and b) the time and the seven sins as the inner mechanism of western civilization. In the 1980s, Eudoro de Sousa, wrote his Mythology, in which he also considers the diabolic force of instrumental reason and the necessity of recovering the symbolic possibility and the reintegration of all things in some kind of final harmony. Both philosophers where influenced by the work of Martin Heidegger, and the present essay tries to show their adaptation of Heidegger’s thinking as well as the parallels between Eudoro de Sousa’s and Vilém Flusser’s vision of overcoming the “diabolic” crisis of Western industrialized civilization