Read the text and then mark the correct alternative:
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. It is not necessary for the entire universe to arm itself to crush you. A vapor, a drop of water, is enough to kill him. But, when the universe crushes him, man would be even more noble than what kills him, because he knows he dies; and the advantage the universe has over him, the universe ignores it. (PASCAL, Blaise. Thoughts, XI ).
The text of the mathematician and philosopher Pascal says that man is noble because he knows he dies. “Knowing that one dies”, from the point of view of human temporality, of properly historical time, means:
a) be merely animal, like everyone else.
b) not be aware of death, as is the universe.
c) to be intelligent is to be immortal.
d) be aware of one's finitude.
e) not being able to dominate the universe.
question 2Many scholars of mythical and religious texts, such as the Romanian Mircea Eliade, point out that there is a crucial difference between the way in which the classical, Greco-Roman, and the Judeo-Christian tradition see the human time. This difference consists in the fact that, in classical culture and in Judeo-Christian culture, the following concepts prevail, respectively:
a) of time reincarnated and the eternal return.
b) of linear development and cyclic eternity.
c) of eternal recurrence and cyclical time.
d) of linear development and eternal return.
e) of eternal recurrence and linear development.
question 3When Napoleon Bonaparte was in Egypt in the late 1790s, during the Revolutionary Wars, he said to his soldiers, pointing with his arm to the Pyramids of the Valley of Giza:“Look, men , 40 centuries are watching you”. Considering that there is an ancient Egyptian proverb that says “Men fear time, but time fears pyramids”, it is correct to say that:
a) Napoleon's phrase refers to the ingenuity of Egyptian engineers.
b) Napoleon's phrase refers not to the resistance of the physical materiality of the Pyramids, but to the various human generations they represent.
c) Napoleon's phrase highlights the fear that the French had of the Valley of Giza.
d) Napoleon's phrase refers to the astronomical observatory of the Pyramid of Cheops.
e) Napoleon's phrase has no historical meaning whatsoever.
question 4Read the text and then mark the correct alternative:
In the 19th century, it is no longer the despotic power of kings that has to be overthrown, it is this new omnipotent instance, the force of historical necessity, which arises to determine the course of events. Contrary to the humanist idea of Enlightenment that postulated the glorious power of human reason, what Hegel's philosophy heralds is a new Absolute:from the King's Bon Plaisir to the ineluctable Ukase of historical law - an immanent and irrevocable process that the new prophets sought to interpret. and foretell as authentic priests of the divine mystery . (PENNA, José Oswaldo de Meira. The Spirit of Revolutions:From the Glorious Revolution to the Liberal Revolution. Campinas, SP:See Editorial, 2016. p. 161 ).
Taking into account the main events that characterize the 19th century, it is possible to say that Meira Penna refers to “overthrowing the force of historical necessity”:
a) to the conception of time of the absolutist kings, who preached the demolition of aristocratic and clerical privileges.
b) to the classical conception of time, which prevailed in ancient Greek and Roman civilizations and which had its return in the 19th century.
c) to the conception of revolutionary time, born with the French Revolution and which spread in the 19th century.
d) to the conception of time in the Middle Ages, in which priests waited for the Last Judgment, for the end of time and for the reintegration of Man with Eternity.
e) to the conception of cyclical time, inherited from Indian culture by European intellectuals of the 19th century.
answers Question 1Letter D
To know oneself mortal, according to Pascal, is to be nobler than the entire universe. With this, Pascal reiterates the deepest understanding that one can have of what historical time is. To be a historical entity is to be aware of one's own finitude, of one's own death. That is why man produces culture, because, unlike other animals (which do not know that they die), man needed and still needs to develop symbolic systems that give meaning to his finite existence.
Question 2Letter E
The Greco-Roman conception of time is that of the eternal return, or cyclic, that is, time was not seen as something progressive, which could culminate in an ultimate end, which would be the integral realization of the human destiny on Earth. No, men were trapped (both in life and after death) in a form of time that incessantly returns in new forms. For the Judeo-Christian tradition, on the contrary, time is a linear development, which has a beginning (Genesis) and will have an ultimate end (the Judgment, The Kingdom of Glory). Time would then be just a form of earthly passage of the immortal soul towards contact with the Eternal.
Question 3Letter B
Napoleon does not refer to the “40 centuries” just to emphasize merely the natural chronological time, but rather to tell his soldiers that, when they fought in that region, 40 centuries of human tradition, represented by the pyramids, would be observing (and witnessing) the historic feats that the French themselves were performing in Egypt at the end of the 19th century.
Question 4Letter C
Meira Penna's text refers to the conception of historical time born with the French Revolution, especially with the Jacobins, such as Robespierre, who preached the “acceleration of historical time” through revolution. It is this conception that history can be shaped, that the future can be built, that dominated the political ideologies of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.