The Extras of Meta-Morphology
© Copyright, All
Rights Reserved:
Dr. Andreas Goppold
Prof. a.D. & Dr. Phil. & Dipl. Inform. & MSc. Ing. UCSB
email: xyz123 (at) mnet-mail de
Version: 20191229
The Home Page is:
A printable .pdf-Version is here:
http://www.noologie.de/_extra.pdf
The .htm version is here:
http://www.noologie.de/_extra.htm
This contains all the www-links that
can be accessed.
Wikipedia: Noology External links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noology
1 Table of Contents: Root Level
7 Words and Morphological Meaning
9 Ode to the Honor and the Memory of the Tax Collector
10 The Work of Aby Warburg and then Some Cryptology
11 Notes about
Eco's The Name of the Rose
12 On Statistics, Population Dynamics and Some Lies
13 Jared Diamond and Guns, Germs, and Steel
14 Lev Gumilev on Empires and then Some
15 Heidegger, Was Heisst Denken?
16 Where even Angels
fear to tread
17 The Meta-Morphology of Evil Empires
18 Some Excerpts from Design und Zeit
20 Philosophen im Spannungsfeld ...
21 Technical Issues of Hypertext Data Base Design
24 The End of the End is the Beginning of Another End
1 Table of Contents: Root Level
Sloterdijk Literature Abbreviations
5.1 Some
History of Morphology
5.2 The
Definition of Expounding
5.3 A Morphology Writer named Oswald Spengler
5.4 Some kinds of Morphology: Meta-Morphosis, and
Meta-Noia
5.5 Meta-Morphology and Morpheus
5.6 Peter
Sloterdijk on Traumdeutung
5.7 Derrida and the Sephardic Knowledge
5.8 On Multi-Valued Logic and the OODA-Loop
6.1 The (Self-)
Reflection and Narcissism
6.3 Spieglein,
Spieglein an der Wand
6.4 Mirroring as a Deep Psychological and Neuronal
Phenomenon
6.5 The Myth of Narcissus and Echo
6.6 The Circular
Structure is also an Architectonic
6.7 The Structure of
the "Rundgesang"
6.8 About
Contemplation, Reflexion, and Refraction
6.10 The Rosary and
Reflexion Theory
7 Words and Morphological Meaning
The Meaning of Ikonos and the Meta-Morphology
The Bildungsreise of the Germans
The
Bildungsreise of Immanuel Kant
Bildung is a typical German Word
7.3 Ambrose Bierce: The
Devil's Dictionary
7.6 Jonathan Swift:
Gulliver's Travels
7.7 Voltaire Candide: Also a Bildungsreise
7.8 Hape Kerkeling: Ich bin dann mal weg
The Pilgrim's Progress from This World
8.1 Introduction to Peter Sloterdijk's Work
The Viewpoint of
the visiting Anthropologist from Mars
The
Anthropological View of Akademik Philosophy
8.2 Some Aspects of the Controversy around Sloterdijk's
Work
The Shape of
Things By Sam Han on the Sphäeren by Sloterdijk
Rezensionen
peter-sloterdijk-du-musst-dein-leben-aendern-der- dreizehnkampfrekordhalter
8.2.2 Üben als zentrale Praktik
8.2.3 Akrobatik, Ästhetik, Athletik
8.4 Nietzsche, Zarathustra: Ihr Einsamen von heute, ihr
Ausscheidenden
8.5 Professor für Philosophie Axel Honneth
8.5.1 Die dreibändigen Sphären waren des Umfangs zu viel...
8.6 Peter Sloterdijk
and Computer Assisted Philosophy
8.6.3 Wikipedia: Mathematics and Art
8.7 Noologie: A
Comparison with Peter Sloterdijk's Morphology
8.7.1 Sloterdijk's
Habit of Name-Dropping
9 Ode to the Honor and the Memory of the Tax Collector
9.1.1 About Tribes and
Tributes
9.1.2 The Evolution of
the Taxes
9.2 Statistics and one more Ode to the Honor
of the Tax Collector
9.2.1 The German
Superiority of Tax Collection
9.3 Slotderdijk and the
Honorable Taxes
9.3.1 The Japanese
Concept of Hara as Seat of the Vital-Soul
9.3.2 The Meta-Morpology
of the Christian Church Fathers
10 The Work of Aby Warburg and then Some Cryptology
10.1 The Abbot Abbo of Fossanova
The Knights Templar and The Rose Cross
10.2 Information about
the Warburg Institute Library
11 Notes about
Eco's The Name of the Rose
11.1 The Tri-Polarity is not Oppositional but Complementary
11.3 Umberto Eco and a Novel about Rose Flowers
11.4 About the Novel
Baudolino
11.5 And now with two Ketzer Monks in the Monastery
11.6 A Few more Names in the Name of the Rose
11.7 Maria Magdalena and the Son of Jesus
11.8 More on the Name of the Rose
11.9 Book Review: The
Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
11.10 What Is The
Name of the Rose About?
11.11 Naming the Rose:
Readers and Codes in Umberto Eco's Novel
11.12.2 Toledo School of
Translators
11.13 Monasterio de las Huelgas
12 On Statistics, Population Dynamics and Some Lies
12.1 Adolphe Quételet, a Master Scientist of Statistics
The Science
Fiction of Isaac Asimov
12.2 Gerd Gigerenzer and How to Lie with Statistics
Journalists,
Tall Stories, and an Aversion to Statistics and Mathematics
The Two
Sides of a Journalist's Soul
Statistics
and the Medical Profession
The Wealth
of Statistical Tricks is Almost Infinite
Some Side
Tracks about Lying with Statistics
12.3 Murder rates, Narco and Terrorist murders, and then...
Road Traffic
The Statistics of Premature Deaths in some Pretty Bad
places
There was a Terrible Car Crash with Four Cars
And Now about the Indian Railway Deaths
The Death
Statistics of Narco Wars against Traffic Deaths
13 Jared Diamond and Guns, Germs, and Steel
13.1 Energy Anthropology and Technical Infrastructures
Hydraulic Architectural
Systems
Herbert Spencer
and Howard Bloom
The Grisly
Story of the Corn Cob
Jared
Diamond on the Maya Collapse
13.2 More on "Guns, Germs and Steel": Continental
Conditions
13.3 The Anthropology of Geography
13.3.1 African River Systems and Problems for Diffusion
13.3.2 The Out-of-Africa
model. A Key Piece in the Puzzle
13.4 Back to the business of "Guns, Germs and
Steel"
13.4.1 Germs,
Germs, Germs, and then some Steel
13.5 Deadly Friendly
Enemies: How Diseases Drive Evolution
13.5.1 The Anopheles
Wonder Mosquitoes
13.5.2 Malaria as a Driver
of Evolution: Siccle Cell Anemia
13.5.3 The Romans Imported
their Downfall from Africa in their Amphorae
13.5.4 About Anopheles
Teleportation
13.5.5 The Business of the
Bacteriology and the Virology of Pigs
13.5.6 The Two-Sidedness
of the Humans and their Domesticated Animals
13.5.7 The Evolution of
Smallpox
13.5.8 Smallpox and
Colonialism
13.6 On the Crumbling of
Empires
The
Business of World Conquest by the Britisher's
13.8 More www on Jared
Diamond
13.10 Popular science
works of Jared Diamond
13.11 The Wikipedia on Jared Diamond
13.12 Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
13.13 All Over the Map: Jared Diamond struggles to
understand a connected world.
14 Lev Gumilev on Empires and then Some
The Better
Morphology of History by Lev Gumilev
Die
geosphärische System-Einbettung der Musterklassen
The Russian
www site of Lev Gumilev
The
Survival Knowledge of Lev Gumilev
Something
in the Context of Lev Gumilev
Some
Battles of the Greeks and Romans against the Persians
Lev Gumilev
and The Empires of Persia
The Spy vs.
Spy Game in Soviet Russia
The Busines
of Codes and Code Breaking of English Renaissance Mystics
Encrypting
methods in the days of Elizabeth I
The
Numerical Values of the Kabbalah letters
Babylonian
Astronomy and the 60-er Number system
The Sokal
Affair, or the Sokal Hoax
15 Heidegger, Was Heisst Denken?
16 Where even Angels
fear to tread
16.3 I. Setting The
Context (Mcb)
16.4 II The World of
Mental Process (GB)
16.5 III Metalogue: Why
Do You Tell Stories? (MCB)
17 The Meta-Morphology of Evil Empires
17.1 The Rise and Fall of the Klingon Empire
More
thoughts on Klingon Star Ship Technology
Back to the
Klingon Empire of Gene Roddenberry
Slavery in
Ancient Rome and the Klingons
About
Klingon Technology and Hitler
Some more
Harrowing Stories about Dilithium
Li(2) ** Li(2)
**** Li(2) **** **** Li(2) **** **** **** **** ...
The
Superior Techology of the 2300's to 2500's
The Mindset
of a Slave Holding Society
The Klingon
Empire, Spartans and Romans
The Star
Trek Script Writers on the Implosion of the Klingon Empire
The
Complete Destruction of the last Vestiges of Antiquity
The
Implosion of the Ancient Roman Power Structure
Collapse is
a Natural Law of the Exponential
The Haughty
Greek Philosophers
Some
Thoughts about the Ancient Greek Engineers
The
Historical Lessons of the Downfall of the Klingon Empire
The History
of the Steam Engine
Some Side
Thoughts about Stealth Aircraft
Some more
Strange Things about the Spartans
About
Japanese Samurai and Yamabushi and Shingon
The Hoe:
How to Defeat some Samurai
18 Some Excerpts from Design und Zeit
18.1 Die Diamant-Metapher der Noologie
19.1 To be a Genius, you must be Mad
20 Philosophen im Spannungsfeld ...
20.1 Die
meisten früheren Philosophen
21 Technical Issues of Hypertext Data Base Design
Some Tech Talk on the side effects of Encrypted Files
MS Win Vista as
crappy as any OS can ever get
Here is some more detail on building an SQL Data Base
The Headlines of the Present Text are the Topmost or
the Root Level
Finally, a few
Good Words about Microsoft
My (un-) usual
Work Environment: 2 Computers, 4 Monitors
Why I produce such huge .htm files
Some nuts and
bolts about Using the MS Word Outline Mode
NEVER USE the MS
Word .doc or .docx format
This compares
nicely with the .html format:
The Methods of
using MS Word and HTML Hypertext
A Structure
Similar to the Warburg Library
21.1 On the Hypertext Database Design of Noology and Sophia
The Hierarchical Method of Designing a Hypertext
Structure
www-Materials
on Data Base Design
On Thinking in the Trees: A Multimedia Database
Structure
Some more Computer Tree Branches
Data on Fir Tree Branches in the woods
The philosophical principle of the complementarity of Form
and Inhalt
The Hypertext Structure of Noology as spelled out in
.htm files
On The Application of the "A" in Morphology
The Inversion Technique of Meta-Morphology
Noology and Computer Assisted Philosophy
21.2 The Hierarchical
Hypertext Structure of Noologie and Sophia
The Structure is just another Deeper Version of the
Form
About the good Hl. St. Augustinus
A few side thoughts about the Hl. St. Augustinus and
Rousseau
21.3 The Display Tree for an Associative Hierarchy
21.4 The Dewey Decimal Classification
22.1.1 The Fallacy of the Fossils
22.1.2 Monty Python and
The Holy Grail
Forensic
Pictures of the Result of Gunshot Suicides
My Favorite
Works of Art by Hermann Nitsch
23.3 Bibliography
Abbreviations
24 The End of the End is the Beginning of Another End
->ambrose_bierce ->andreas_platthaus ->angelsfear ->anopheles ->associative ->ayllu
->bildung_german ->bildungs_reise
->carcrash ->circular_architect ->corncob
->continental_condition ->contemplate_reflect
->derrida_sephardic ->devils_dictionary ->diamond_jared
->diamond_guns_germs ->disease_evolution
->eco_rose ->evil_empires ->expounding_def ->fire_human_evolution
->five_skandhas ->gigerenzer ->gumilev_empires ->hierarch_hypertext
->hydraulic_system ->hypertext ->incommensurability ->kerkeling ->kant_bildungsreise
->ketzer_moench ->las_meninas ->learn_new_guinea
->malaria ->mark_twain ->maya_collapse
->meta_noia ->morphology_science ->morphology_history
->magic_mirror ->mirror_neuronal
->mirror_structure ->mirror_cabinets ->morpheus
->morpholog_bildung ->morpholog_ikonos ->morpholog_meaning
->murder_and_traffic ->narciss_echo ->narcowar ->newguinea ->noologie_comparison
->ode_tax_collector ->ooda_loop ->rosary_reflect ->rundgesang_nietzsche
->samuel_johnson ->self_reflection ->sloterdijk_computer ->sloterdijk_intro
->sloterdijk_special ->sloterdijk_sam_han ->sloterdijk_traum ->sloterdijk_abbreviation
->small_pox ->spengler_morph ->spieglein_wand ->sprach_blasen
->swift_gulliver ->tribes_tributes ->tripolarity_complementary
->warburg1
AG The
Abbreviation AG is used as short for "the present author".
[AG: ... ] This is used for a
comment by AG within a quotation.
[[ ... ]] This is used when AG makes
a longer comment or footnote, because within an .htm text footnotes are
cumbersome and result in excessive clicking. In the www-lingo, there is a very
common misuse called "click baiting". For serious contributors, this
should be avoided.
The writings of Sloterdijk are referenced with these Abbreviations:
Sloterdijk, Peter:
Eurotaoismus, Ed. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (2018), orig. 1989, abk. "Eurotao"
Sphären Band I, Blasen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt (1998), abk. "Blasen".
Sphären Band II, Globen, Suhrkamp,
Frankfurt (1999), abk. "Globen".
Sphären Band III, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt
(2004), abk. "Schäume".
"Im Welt-Innenraum des Kapitals. Zu einer
philosophischen Geschichte der terrestrischen
Globalisierung". Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-518-45814-0. abk. WIKA
"Zorn und Zeit.
Politisch-psychologischer Versuch. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (2006), ISBN
3-518-41840-8, abk. Z&Z.
"Gottes Eifer", Verlag der
Weltreligionen (2007), abk. "Eifer".
"Du
mußt dein Leben ändern. Über Anthropotechnik". Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main
(2009), ISBN 978-3-518-41995-3, abk. DMDL
"Kritik
der zynischen Vernunft". 2 Bände. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main
(1983), ISBN 3-518-11099-3.
abk. "ZynV"
"Was geschah im 20. Jahrhundert?
Unterwegs zu einer Kritik der extremistischen Vernunft". Suhrkamp, Berlin
(2016), ISBN 978-3-518-42507-7, abk. "20JH".
The Science of Morphology is the scientific study of forms (morphae).
All forms change, some very slowly, like in Geology, some very fast like waves
in water. The study of the change of forms is sometimes called Meta-Morphology,
with the special term Meta-Morphosis. In the Insect world we have a good
example of Meta-Morphosis: From a caterpillar through a stage called chrysalis,
to a creature that can take to the airs, a butterfly. So much is very well
known in scientific circles. Morphology is mostly associated with Goethe's
work, who called his scientific studies Morphology. And he practically did the
Morphology of about everything: Plants, Insects, the Cosmos, the Clouds in the
Sky, the Forms of the Waves in Water, even the Morphology of Geology, of Stones
and Minerals. Goethe was interested in everything of the large and wide world.
Even if he was dabbling and an amateur in so many fields. But the idea of
Morphology has stuck. There exists the concept of Morphology in many sciences,
even if there is not much connection to the Morphology of Goethe. The
Goethe-kind morphology tradition is mostly forgotten now, I had made list of
that tradition in my Dissertation and then something more about Goethe.
This is a more theoretical discussion of Morphology:
http://www.noologie.de/desn17.htm
This is a discussion if Whitehead's "Process and Reality"
http://www.noologie.de/desn16.htm#Heading58
This is a more theoretical discussion of Meta-Morphology:
http://www.noologie.de/desn09.htm
This is about the Morphology in Goethe's Faust:
http://www.noologie.de/faust.htm
This is somewhat similar to faust.htm
http://www.noologie.de/desn08.htm
This is somewhat similar to faust.htm
http://www.noologie.de/desn27.htm
On the following www-pages of
Noologie we find some more of the theoretical foundations of Morphology or
Cultural Morphology which I have written in some earlier years.
The design.htm files are from my
dissertation of 1999.
http://www.noologie.de/desn24.htm#Heading130
http://www.noologie.de/desn09.htm#Heading32
http://www.noologie.de/desn17.htm
http://www.noologie.de/faust.htm
http://www.noologie.de/morph.pdf
I have been working on Morphology
since about 1980. I first picked up Spengler and Goethe and I unterstood
something of their thinking. I had already known the work of Joseph Campbell
and I had read extensively the works of the Indian Advaita Vedanta philosophy
of Shankara, then the Buddhist tradition like the works of Nagarjuna, which I
consider the highest achievement that the Buddhist tradition could ever come up
with. I like clear, cold Logic the most, and this is the Nagarjuna Style.
No embellishments, no superfluous rituals or prescriptions for lifestyle,
praying, and doing offerings etc. pp. And the other Scriptures that all what
those different Buddhist schools had produced, were not so much to my liking.
Like the Mahayana Buddhism or even the Tantrayana of the Tibetans. The Dalai
Lama belongs to one of these schools. But these are more or less the Tibetan Bon traditions with a veneer of
Buddhism on top of it. It is pretty much like the Japanese Shinto, like the
Yamabushi who morphed into Shingon Buddhists. Beneath that veneer of Buddhism
there always remained the Shinto. And since the Japanese are very pragmatic
about religion they couldn't care less what kind of name that religion called
itself.
https://stallman.org/articles/yellow-hat.html
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dalai-Lama
http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat6/sub34/item221.html
14th Dalai Lama and 17th Karmapa historic discussion on Four Sects of
Tibetan Buddhism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FTkJyN5M_o
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelug
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon
http://www.spiritwiki.de/w/B%C3%B6n
Introduction to Bon Tradition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhm1vSWwFYw
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche on Bon Buddhism - Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF1VkSdXmVI
I just give the definition of expounding again: You pound on something
so long and so hard until it becomes Ex. "Ex arachaes hoti proton genet
auton", as the good Hesiodos and the good Homeros used to say. The quotes
are identical in both works. So someone must have cribbed something from the
other one. I have no idea to whom the copyright belongs, since at those olden
times, there existed no copyright. It was very privileged knowledge that had
been totally lost to the sages of the Library of Alexandria around 300-200 BCE,
when they morphed that into the common language of the Hellenistic Empires
which was the Koinae.
One other Morphology writer, who is very in-famous by now, was Oswald
Spengler. He claimed that he knew the Morphology of history, which is a pretty
strong claim to make. Because history is only that which we know about history.
And there is quite a lot of history that we don't know anything about. Because
the records are irretrievably lost.
[A particularly bad case of lost records are those of the early times of
the religions of Christianity and Islam. This is very strange indeed, and there
must have been some records. And they are gone, with the wind as one may say. I
have just a little suspicion that they didn't vanish by themselves. Someone
must have helped them in vanishing, this I believe in my naive mind. For
example the earliest written records of the Hadith, the sayings of Mohammed,
were produced a few 100 years after his death (c 632). (Muhammad
al-Bukhari c. 864)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_hadith
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_al-Bukhari
]
History is just in the eye of the beholder, or better this is what the
rulers told the historians (or palace writers) what they had to write and record
about, and for whom it should serve. History is almost always written by the
victors, and the rulers. Sometimes there is a different spelling: His-Story,
since the rulers were mostly male. And as many historians as you have, so many
histories you get. Which proves that history is in the eye of the beholder. And
this is the deeper reason why Spengler's attempt was destined to utterly fail.
But at least he had tried. And he still has made some good contributions
to Morphology, when you ignore his faulty historical work. I have written about
that in my article below. Then there is Peter Sloterdijk who in his
"Sphären" also wrote about Morphology, this time about some round
objects, which are called Spheres, Bubbles, Globes, Bullets, and something like
that, and even Footballs, when he did an exegesis of the "Ludo Globi"
by Cusanus. And he really did a good job at describing the cultural history of
all that is connected to round objects. At this he was more successful than
poor Spengler. I have written more about this here:
http://www.noologie.de/morph.pdf
http://www.noologie.de/morph.htm
Now, as I have stated in my above article, since Morphology is not an established
academic domain, there are as many Morphologies as there are Morphology
thinkers. The problem with a form (or Morphae) is that is entirely in the eye
of the beholder. Now there are some more or less universally accepted kinds of
form, like the form of Mount Everest. And in science, we have also certain
established kinds of form, like the outlay of all the vertebrate animals with a
spine, four legs, a head, an intestine, sometimes a tail, sometimes not. In the
bird class the front legs are converted into wings, but that doesn't contradict
the overall pattern, since the wings are morphed front legs. So here we can see
that forms have their own Meta-Morphosis. But when it comes to less defined
classes of forms, the situation is different. There everyone concocts his/her
own sort of Morphology. This is why the academic establishment doesn't
recognize Morphology per se as academic at all. So here I am also doing my own
kind of Morphology. And I concentrate more on Meta-Morphology, the scientific
study of morphing. And this is a little distinct from other approaches to
Morphology. Since morphing is a process. As I spell this out in greater detail,
this is the Heraklitean approch. Everything is flowing, and there is, in the
long run, nothing that is stable, even if that process takes a few couple of
billion years. There will always be change. This is also the core of Buddhist
thinking. Which is called in the Pali language: Paticca Samuppada. In Sanskrit it is called Pratityasamutpada. I have
enlarged this in the following section of my dissertation:
http://www.noologie.de/desn16.htm#Heading60
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da
Unfortunately this URL doesn't fit into word.
So one has to call the google to search for Pratityasamutpada.
Now there are two more important
terms about Morphology: Meta-Morphosis, and Meta-Noia. Meta-Morphosis is the
description of the time-span when someting is morphing. Now this can be very
short, like a Second, or it can be very long, like a few billion years.
Meta-Noia is the case when an intelligent being, like a human, has a sudden
change of mind. So the mind itself is morphing. And the personality with it.
One has been this kind of person at one instant, and then, suddenly the next
instant, one becomes another person. This doesn't happen very often, and most
often in an accident, which is mostly bad. But there are cases when the
Meta-Noia occurs for the better when one gets hit on the head. I know of one
case when a pretty derelict man and alcoholic, was hit on the head, and then he
became a very famous painter. I don't know the exact literature for this. But
there is always a good place to look for that kind of things: Oliver Sacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Sacks
http://sajtichek.narod.ru/books/without_translation/wife_hat.pdf
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and other clinical tales.
In other more productive cases Meta-Noia is called Enlightenment. There
is a whole lot of literature about this, especially in the Eastern traditions,
like Samadhi (Yoga), or Satori (Zen). But we also have a good example in the
history of Christianity. This was the Meta-Noia of Saulus into St. Paulus. This
was one of the most important Meta-Noia's in the whole history of humanity. I
will go into more detail on this case in a later passage. When one looks at the
spiritual literature of the West, we can find a whole lot of such Meta-Noia's.
It is mostly called sudden conversion, or seeing the Holy Virgin Maria, or
something like that. Also the philosophical Western tradition knows this
phenomenon. Platon had described this in his 7th letter:
Denn es steht damit nicht so, wie mit anderen
Lehrgegenständen: es läßt sich nicht in Worte fassen, sondern aus lange Zeit
fortgesetztem, dem Gegenstande gewidmetem wissenschaftlichen Verkehr und aus
entsprechender Lebensgemeinschaft tritt es plötzlich in der Seele hervor wie ein
durch einen abspringenden Funken entzündetes Licht und nährt sich dann durch
sich selbst.
There is an interesting correspondence between Morpheus, the Greek god
of sleep and dreams, and Meta-Morphology. Because the dreams are these mental
images that have a perpetual morphing. We experience it all, when some forms
and themes of a dream chance imperceptibly from one to the other. Dreams have a
quality that is also called Protean, from Proteus, another Greek god who
constantly changed forms. And in Indian Vedic mythology, there are the Asuras,
who also constantly changed forms. This makes it also very difficult to do
dream-analysis, since the waking consciousness that tries to remember a dream
can follow only one dream-track that makes some sense to it. And the dream is
multi-dimensional, as I write it in some other text. The dream has a quite
holographic quality. Only in ancient times, it seems that the dreams of people
were easier to follow for the people. I also give a few explanations why that
could happen in ancient times but not any more in present-day civilizations.
Peter Sloterdijk has made an interesting discussion of dreams and
dream-interpretation in 20JH, "Derridas Traumdeutung", p. 137++. Here
he mentions the "philosophische Anthropologie" on p. 139 as his
viewpoint. There is also the comparison of living and death and the
dream-images that connect both, and this is also a quite familiar theme for the
present work on Meta-Morphology. The dream consciousness resembles in many
aspects the Tibetan Bardo Thodol imagery. Sloterdijk even mentions some themes
of the "Einprägungen" (p. 144) which are called imprints by Aby
Warburg. But Warburg is never mentioned by Sloterdijk anywhere as far as I
could not find anything in all his works (and I have read most of them).
Because of the lack of an index it is not possible to verify this. But he
mentions also the "Semiodynamik" and "Somatodynamik" on
this page. So there are obvious connections between the psychoanalysis of Freud
and modo Derrida, and the analysis of mythology by Aby Warburg. He
also talks about "Freudianismus, diesem verwelkten Mythos des 20.
Jahrhunderts" on p. 145. His term "Binarismen" is just another, more logical expression for Dualism. On
p. 146 he mentions "die Zukunft des psychologischen Wissens vom Menschen
und der Kulturen". The theme of Tri-Polarity or is also central to
Meta-Morphology. "Derrida ein Ägypter" is a quite fitting expression
since it encapsulates all the Dream-Time knowledge of the ancients, which I
also expound in the Dream of Nabuchandosor. Derrida could of course also rely
on the knowledge of his Hebrew ancestry which was preserved in the Talmud. Here
is the quote (p. 146-148) where Sloterdijk mentions exactly the themes that are
also expounded in the Meta-Morphology:
...Türen
zu öffnen, die in die Zukunft des psychologischen Wissens vom Menschen und der
Kulturen führen. Es sind die gleichen Türen oder zumindest benachbarte Türen,
durch die im vergangenen Jahrhundert Denker wie Ernst Bloch, Gotthard Günther,
Jean Baudrillard und Niklas Luhmann, in unserer Zeit forschende Geister wie
Bruno Latour, Peter Galison, Heiner Mühlmann und Roberto Esposito - um unter
einer Vielzahl von Kollegen nur sie zu nennen - gegangen sind und zu gehen
nicht aufhören. Was diese Denker bei all ihrer Heterogenität verbindet, ist die
gemeinsame Suche nach einer komplexen Begriffskultur, in der die herkömmlichen
Binarismen der metaphysischen, politischen und wissenschaftlichen Vokabulare
überwunden wären - ob es nun um die alte Entgegensetzung von Geist und Materie
geht oder um die von Menschen und Dingen oder die von Natur und Gesellschaft
und was dergleichen altehrwürdige Paar-Formeln mehr sind. ...
Ich
hatte mich seinerzeit entschlossen, nicht in direktem Modus über Derridas Werk
und über den Wortlaut seiner Schriften zu sprechen, sondern mich einer
Methode-der indirekten Spiegelung zu bedienen - eines Verfahrens, das man in
einem anderen Kontext als »Konstellationsforschung« bezeichnet hat.' In
P. 147
dem
kleinen Essay, der den Titel Derrida ein Ägypter trägt, ging es darum, einige
Grundfiguren des dekonstruktiven Denkens durch ihre Versetzung in die nähere
oder fernere Nachbarschaft mit analogen geistigen Gebilden zu »illustrieren« -
die Systemtheorie Niklas Luhmanns, die Freudsche Psychoanalyse, die
humanistische Mythologie Thomas Manns, die Kulturtheorie Franz Borkenaus, die
Mediologie von Regis Debray, die Zeichentheorie Hegels und die Archiv- und
Museumstheorie von Boris Groys. Weil all diese Anmerkungen umständehalber eher
flüchtig als gründlich geraten mussten und mehr der Anregung als der gelehrten
Vertiefung dienten, bin ich froh, mit dem heutigen Vortrag wenigstens an einer
Stelle für etwas mehr Ausführlichkeit sorgen zu können. Ich gebe zu, daß dies
bedenklicherweise die am meisten spekulative und am weitesten von Derridas
eigenem Text wegführende Passage meiner Pariser Kommentare betrifft.
Ich
beziehe mir hier auf den Passus, den ich unter der Überschrift »Thomas Mann und
Derrida« präsentierte. Dort wurde suggeriert, der große Romancier habe, als er
seine Josephs-Tetralogie verfaßte, in gewisser Weise das Phänomen Derrida
poetisch vorweggenommen, indem er in der bezaubernden Figur des jungen Joseph
den Typus des hochbegabten Außenseiters portraitierte, dem es dank
ungewöhnlicher Talente gelingt, von der Peripherie eines Imperiums aus ins
Innerste der Zentralmacht vorzudringen, um sich dort als Traumdeuter, als
Ratgeber, ja als das bessere Selbst des Herrschers, im aktuellen Fall des
Pharaos, unentbehrlich zu machen. Ich nannte diese Struktur bzw. diese Position
den » Josephismus« und wollte damit eine kulturdynamisch brisante Konfiguration
bezeichnen, die in der Moderne zu großer Bedeutung gelangte. Ich behaupte, daß
sich ohne Rücksicht auf sie das Drama der Kämpfe um die Interpretationshoheit
in der westlichen Zivilisation seit
p. 148
dem
späteren 19. Jahrhundert unmöglich verständlich machen läßt.
Die
Unwiderstehlichkeit der josephistischen Position ergibt sich aus dem Umstand,
daß sie es ihrem Agenten erlaubt, gewissermaßen ins »Zentrum, des Zentrums«
vorzustoßen und dabei eine neuartige exzentrische Interpretation der
Zentralität zu erzeugen, eine Interpretation, die für die Inhaber der
Zentrumspositionen selbst von hoher Attraktivität sein kann, sich aber auch
nicht selten als subversiv gefährlich erweist. Die Prozedur, die an den
problematischen Ort führt, den ich das Zentrum des Zentrums nenne, kann - wie
die von Thomas Mann phantastisch erweiterte biblische Geschichte zeigt - keine
andere als die Traumdeutung sein. In den Träumen der Mitte nämlich wird erst
deutlich, daß die Mitte nie wirklich die Mitte ihrer selbst sein kann. Damit
die Dinge von Anfang an deutlich werden, füge ich hinzu, daß es hierbei nicht
um die Deutung von) edermanns Träumen geht, sondern geradewegs um die Deutung
der Träume der hohen Herren, mehr noch, der Träume, die der Herr der Herren,
der Pharao in höchsteigener Person, träumt und die, wenn auch auf vorerst
dunkle Weise, von den Schicksalen des Reiches und des Thrones handeln.
Thomas
Mann hat diese Situation in einer grandiosen erzählerischen Sequenz beschworen:
Der Pharao hatte also die bekannten Träume geträumt, in denen die mageren Kühe
die fetten verschlangen, und hatte seine Hoftraumdeuter befragt, was denn von
diesen Visionen zu halten sei. Unzufrieden mit deren Antworten, greift er
bereitwillig das Gerücht auf, ein junger Jude, der in einem Gefängnis im Süden
des Reichs eine Strafe verbüße, weil er, der Sklave, mit der Frau eines hohen
Beamten ein Verhältnis gehabt haben soll, besäße die Gabe der Traumauslegung in
einem wunderbaren Maß. Der Pharao läßt ein Schiff
über den
Nil entsenden, um den jungen Mann an seinen Hof zu holen, damit er ihm
eine
Probe seiner Kunst gebe - der Rest ist bekannt. Was weniger bekannt ist, dürfte
die Tatsache sein, daß seither viele Hermeneutiker, die große Texte deuten,
ihrerseits von einem nach Deutung rufenden Traum heimgesucht werden.
This article gives some in-depth information about the thought structure
of the Sephardic Jews (of the ancient Moorish empire of Spain) who are called
Marannes in French. Derrida was of Algerian Jewish ancestry and as the article
says, his father was the chief Rabbi of the synagoge of Algiers. I have written
more on the history of the school of Toledo in the Appendix where it connects
to "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco.
https://www.cairn.info/revue-rue-descartes-2014-2-page-102.htm#
Dans une des scènes du
film de Safaa Fathy, D’ailleurs, Derrida, ce dernier est à Tolède, filmé dans la synagogue Santa
Maria la Blanca dont l’architecture est celle d’une mosquée. Cette synagogue
qui, ainsi que toutes les mosquées de Tolède, était redevenue une église après
l’Inquisition, est aujourd’hui un musée. Santa Maria la Blanca suscite en
Derrida l’évocation d’une autre synagogue, celle d’Alger où son père l’amenait,
enfant, avec son frère, les jours de grandes fêtes; la synagogue d’Alger est
aussi une ancienne mosquée et elle l’est redevenue après la décolonisation.
L’énoncé de cette succession d’attributions renvoie bien sûr à une histoire
« coloniale et précoloniale » violente, telle que « tous les
lieux de culte (ont été) appropriés, expropriés, rappropriés, désaffectés,
réaffectés », et ce jusque dans la période post-coloniale. En même temps,
une telle succession de réappropriations et de détournements fragilise toute
prétention d’un culte à la propriété d’un lieu. Aucune installation nouvelle
n’échappe au fantôme des anciens propriétaires, chaque nouveau culte est
toujours hanté par la mémoire de l’autre. Les synagogues, les mosquées et les
églises sont ici des « lieux de passage » à l’identité précaire.
Derrida aime ce type de lieu, comme s’il était plus propice que d’autres à
accueillir sa propre situation « d’émigré ou de migrant », de celui
qui traverse, qui passe par des lieux sans en être, sans qu’aucun de leurs noms
ne le qualifie jamais. Celui qui traverse ou passe n’est cependant pas sans
qualificatif, dans la mesure où « à partir » de l’expérience du
traverser ou du passer, certaines possibilités surgissent. Cet « à partir
de » n’est pas un lieu, mais, dans la mesure où il rend possible quelque
chose, Derrida le nomme une « situation », mot qu’il corrige
pour lui préférer celui de « site », de « site sans lieu ».
Le mot Tolède possède pourtant pour lui un pouvoir évocateur spécifique que le
qualificatif d’émigré ou de migrant ne recouvre pas tout à fait. Tolède c’est
l’Andalousie, l’Inquisition et le phénomène marrane, nom de ces Juifs
extérieurement convertis au catholicisme mais qui perpétuaient et
transmettaient le judaïsme en secret, et dont un grand nombre quitta la
péninsule ibérique pour se réfugier en Afrique du Nord. Aussi Derrida ne se
qualifie-t-il pas seulement de migrant mais encore de « marrane
clandestin », un marrane moderne cependant car indissociable non seulement
d’une « certaine histoire des colonies françaises » mais aussi de ce
qu’il nomme ici la « postcolonialité [1]
[1]Toutes les citations qui
précèdent, sont tirées de la… ».
Certes
« marrane » n’est pas le seul qualificatif que Derrida s’attribue, il
peut aussi parler de lui comme d’un « franco-maghrébin [2]
[2]Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre
ou la prothèse… »
ou du « dernier des Juifs [3]
[3]J. Derrida, « Un témoignage
donné », in Questions au judaïsme.… »,
et il nuance souvent cette qualification en précisant qu’il n’est qu’« une
sorte de marrane [4]
[4]J. Derrida, « Circonfession », in
G. Bennington et J. Derrida,… ».
Le mot « marrane » exerce cependant sur lui une fascination
particulière, comme il l’indique un peu plus loin dans le film de Safaa
Fathy :3
Si je suis tombé amoureux (du mot « marrane ») qui est
devenu comme une sorte d’obsession qui réapparait dans tous mes textes ces
dernières années, c’est parce
qu’il renvoie à ces origines supposées judéo-espagnoles, mais aussi
parce qu’il dit quelque chose d’une culture du secret et naturellement la
question du secret m’a toujours beaucoup occupé indépendamment de ma question
juive [5]
[5]D’ailleurs, Derrida, op. cit.. 4
« Marrane »,
mais on pourrait dire aussi « migration », ne sont pas des concepts,
ce sont des mots chargés d’un pouvoir d’évocation, de renvoi à des sites qui
sont des sites de l’entre (les pays, les religions). De tels mots font naître
des figures qui donnent forme à ce qu’on pourrait nommer des motifs de pensée,
à des thèmes susceptibles d’une pluralité de modulations. Entre ces motifs et
ces sites, Derrida parle de rapport d’« affinité [6]
[6]« Je suis une sorte de
produit colonial ou postcolonial.… ». Dans le film comme dans d’autres textes, il est
remarquable que, pour dire ce rapport d’affinité, Derrida en passe par un mode
d’« anamnèse autobiographique » qui raconte par bribes
« l’enfance d’un petit Juif français doublé d’un petit Juif indigène d’Algérie [7]
[7]J. Derrida,
« Abraham, l’autre », in Judéités. Questions pour… ». Une telle anamnèse ne présuppose pas l’identité
« mais un processus interminable, indéfiniment phantasmatique
d’identification [8]
[8]J. Derrida, Le
Monolinguisme de l’autre, op. cit., p. 31. ».
In the work of Sloterdijk quote we also find Gotthard Günther who had
devoted his life's work to a non-dualistic / non-binary logic, meaning at least
Tri-Polar and then multi-valued logic. All of Gotthard Günther's works are
found on the vordenker.de www site. Of course there exist quite a few
applications of multi-valued logic in practical use. But they are not formal,
and more episodic. The most developed is the logic of war, because war is
always a multi-valued enterprise. But normally philosophers are not too
concerned with the logics of war. This is especially the case with the German
Geisteswissenschaften after WWII, since the Germans didn't want to be reminded
at all about warfare. The only towering exception of a western philosophy of
war is Xenophon, who knew all about this, from hard-won personal experience.
Clausewitz comes in close second place. But he died too early to add some more
importand chapters on the philosophical aspects of warfare. Also Spengler had
some knowledge of this, but he had never known the practical sides. He had
spent WWI in his study, reading all the history books of the Münchner
Staatsbibliothek. And of course the military academies of Sandhurst (British)
and West Point (USA) know all about this. There is the famous principle of the OODA
loop of the US Air Force Colonel John Boyd. But this is practically unknown
outside of the military circles. So there is some room for augmentations beyond
the theses of Peter Sloterdijk. Even Heiner Mühlmann doesn't mention this
essential part of the logics of war in his book "Die Natur der
Kulturen". And one of the foremost strategists of the logics of warfare
was John v.Neumann. And the relevance of his work is practically unknown except
some insiders. Because he had formulated the US strategy of the cold war
against the USSR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
The OODA loop is the cycle observe–orient–decide–act,
developed by military strategist and United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. Boyd applied the concept to
the combat operations process, often at the operational level
during military campaigns. It is now also often applied to understand
commercial operations and learning processes. The approach explains how agility
can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents. It is especially
applicable to cyber security and cyberwarfare [1]
https://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/
https://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/gg_theorie-mehrwert-logik.pdf
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_G%C3%BCnther
Then there is an appropriate quote from the Buddhist Wisdom: The five
Skandhas.
Hier, O Sariputra, Form (rupa) ist Leere (shunyata) und
gerade die Leere ist Form; Leere ist nicht verschieden von Form, und Form ist
nicht verschieden von Leere; was auch immer Form ist, das ist Leere, was auch
immer Leere ist, das ist Form, und dasselbe betrifft Gefühle (vedana),
Sinneswahrnehmungen (samjna), Impulse (samskara), und Aufmerksamkeit (vijnana).
http://www.noologie.de/shunya01.htm
http://www.noologie.de/shunya01.htm#Heading30
This is very deep indeed. And this gives us ample occasion to meditate
upon. This is about the deepest thought that was ever uttered in the spiritual
history of mankind. I will refer to this, when I am speaking about the Kenoma
and the Pleroma in Greek and Christian thought further down. Because Kenoma is
identical to Shunyata. And this is VERY DIFFERENT from the Gnostic idea of
this.
On mirror structures, and the
(Self-) Reflection and Narcissism... And the genius of Diego Velasquez.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez[a] (Spanish: [ˈdjeɣo βeˈlaθkeθ]; baptized June 6, 1599 – August 6, 1660) was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV, and one of the most important painters of the Spanish Golden Age. He was an individualistic artist
of the contemporary Baroque period. He painted initially in a precise tenebrist style, but later developed a free manner characterized by bold
brushwork that produced an illusion of form only when viewed at a suitable
distance. In addition to numerous renditions of scenes of historical and
cultural significance, he painted scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family, other notable European figures, and
commoners, culminating in the production of his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656).
From the first quarter of the nineteenth
century, Velázquez's artwork was a model for the realist and impressionist painters, in particular Édouard Manet. Since that time, famous modern artists, including Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon, have paid tribute to Velázquez by recreating several of his most
famous works.
The production of his masterpiece
Las Meninas (1656).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez#Las_Meninas
Las Meninas
One of the infantas, Margaret Theresa, the eldest daughter of the new Queen, appears to be the subject of Las Meninas (1656, English: The Maids of Honour), Velázquez's magnum opus. However, in looking at the various viewpoints of the painting it is
unclear as to who or what is the true subject.[17] Is it the royal daughter, or perhaps the painter himself? The answer
may lie in the image on the back wall, depicting the King and Queen. Is this
image a mirror, in which case the King and Queen are standing where the
spectator stands? Are they the subject of Velázquez's work? Or is the work
simply a court painting?
Created four years before his death,
it serves as an outstanding example of European baroque art. An apotheosis of the work has been effected since its creation; Luca Giordano, a contemporary Italian painter, referred to it as the "theology
of painting",[18] and in the eighteenth century the Englishman Thomas Lawrence cited it as the "philosophy of art", so decidedly capable of
producing its desired effect. That effect has been variously interpreted; Dale Brown points out an interpretation that, in inserting within the work a faded
portrait of the king and queen hanging on the back wall, Velázquez has
ingeniously prognosticated the fall of the Spanish Empire that was to gain momentum following his death. Another interpretation
is that the portrait is in fact a mirror, and that the painting itself is in
the perspective of the King and Queen, hence their reflection can be seen in
the mirror on the back wall.
Las Meninas (1656). This is a true
masterpiece in the whole history of art, since it shows something quite
unprecedenced. It shows in the background a mirror image of the king and his
queen. And it shows the painter himself on the left side, and the canvas that
he was just painting, of the left border... It was some kind of multiple
reflexion, pretty much the same as I am doing with Reflexion Theory. So the
poor author of the wikipedia article didn't quite understand it so well. There
was no subject per se. It was the mirroring process itself which was the
subject. All the other things in the painting are just paraphernalia. Now this
was in the year 1656. To have come up with this piece of Self- and Other-
(auto- and hetero- and allo-) Reflexion was something quite good for those
times. I just needed about 363 years of thinking until I arrived at the same
kind of Reflexion Theory. This seens like a pretty long time that one needs to
re-think in Logics what Diego Velasquez had already done in his painting. There
is nothing new under the sun, I would say. The phenomenology of mirroring is
quite phenomenal. Because there is so much neuronal processing involved, before
one is able to understand that what one has in front of himself, is a mirror image
of oneself. There are so many animal experiments dealing with what animal can
comprehend that it is looking at a mirror image of itself. Some fish, for
example continue endlessly to battle their own mirror image, believing that it
is a rival. So those poor fish are classified as minor intelligence. I have
read all the literature about this, but at the moment, I don't have the time to
google it all. Actually googling it is quite easy. But it takes time. Most of
the higher animals, like apes and elephants, and I believe also ravens and
crows are able to recognize that they are just confronted with their own mirror
image. So to be able to do this, is a sign of intelligence. And of course
humans are able to do multiple mirrorings. Like when we call it Reflexion
Theory, which is the Theory of Mirroring on many levels at once.
There are many works of art or not
so art, where we have mirror cabinets.
One is The Man with the Golden Gun:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_with_the_Golden_Gun_(film)
Another, more art-like is Hermann
Hesse: Steppenwolf
https://www.zeit.de/1980/09/der-steppenwolf
https://www.inhaltsangabe.de/hesse/der-steppenwolf/
"Spieglein, Spieglein
an der Wand, wer ist die Schönste im Ganzen Land?" This is the Magic Mirror from the
fairy tale Snow White. Aber der
Spiegel war erbarmungslos. (The mirror had no mercy on the poor queen.) He told
this poor queen something like that: You are just an ugly old hag. And you
should not try to be beautiful. At your age you should better try to be wise.
But the Queen in her own Narcissism, she was not so satis-factioned (I can't
get no sätis-fäck'schun'. If you remember that story). So the the Queen in her
own Narcissism, and so on... We all
know the story so I don't need to repeat it. This is what the fairy tales are
for. They are there to make an excursion into your Unterbewusstsein
(Sub-Unconscious, which is even deeper thant the Unconscious), and so deep deep
down, the not-so-conscious, rather the Verdrängungs- Conscious (The right
English expression for this... maybe repression) ... it is always something
that you would be very ashamed of, if anyone of your friends knew about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Mirror_(Snow_White)
The Magic Mirror is
a mystical object that is featured in the story of Snow White, depicted as either a hand mirror or a wall-mounted mirror it is used
by the Evil Queen in order to find out who is the "fairest in the land",
each time the Evil Queen asks this question the mirror states "My Queen,
you are the fairest in the land.", up until it states that Snow White is
in fact more fair. Which results in the Evil Queen hiring a huntsman to kill
Snow White in the contemporary version of the fairy tale.
The process of mirroring is a very deep psychological phenomenon.
Because in Neuro-Science, there exists a type of Neuron, which is called
Mirror-Neuron or Spiegel-Neuron in German. Now since we have the mirroring on a
phenomenological level, we have it also on the Neuronal level. This becomes a
very deep philosophical question to ponder. What is so special about a mirror
on the phenomenological level?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
We all know the sad story of the Narcissos, who fell so much in love
with his own mirror image in the pond, and he became so enchanted with the
beauty of his mirror image, that he lost his balance, and plunged into the
pond. Since he couldn't swim, the poor fellow he was, he just drowned. So much
for suicide because of self-admiration. This is a pretty interesting kind of
suicicide, for all those psychiatrists to meditate upon. The other version is
that he was so transfixed by his image but he could never reach it, and so he
sat there in the same place, until he died of starvation. Not a much better
solution to the problem of Narcissism.
http://www.gottwein.de/Lat/ov/ovmet03339.php
https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/metamorphosen-4723/19
https://www.greekmyths-greekmythology.com/narcissus-myth-echo/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_and_Narcissus
Narcissus
and Echo were tragic Greek characters in a story told by the Roman poet Ovid in
Metamorphoses. This poignant myth crystallizes the tragic problem of
relationships with narcissists. Sadly, both partners are locked into a painful
drama, where neither feel satisfied or sufficiently loved. Although it’s
anguish for them both, the narcissist blames the cause on his or her partner,
and sees him or herself as irreproachable, and too often his or her partner
readily agrees.
Narcissus
was a handsome hunter who broke the hearts of the many women. Despite their
love, he remained aloof and arrogant. Pridefully, he held them in disdain.
Meanwhile,
the beautiful forest nymph Echo had incurred the ire of the goddess Juno, who
punished Echo for talking too much by depriving her of free expression. From
then on, she could only repeat the last words of others. Echo spotted Narcissus
and became infatuated. She longed for his attention, but he was fixated on
himself. She tried to call out to him, yet couldn’t.
One
day, Narcissus became separated from his hunting companions and called out, “Is
anyone there?” Echo could only repeat his words. Startled, he said, “Come
here,” which Echo repeated. Echo jubilantly rushed to Narcissus, but he spurned
her, saying, “Hands off! May I die before you enjoy my body.” Humiliated and
rejected, Echo fled in shame. Nevertheless, her love for Narcissus grew.
To
punish Narcissus for his arrogance, Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, put a spell
on him. When Narcissus next noticed his reflection in a pool of water, love
overtook him. He believed that he’d finally found someone worthy of his love
and became entirely absorbed with his own beautiful image, not realizing it was
actually himself.
Unable
to get Narcissus’ attention, Echo’s obsession and depression grew. As the years
passed, she lost her youth and beauty pining away for unattainable Narcissus
until she wasted away, only leaving behind her echoing voice. He eventually
committed suicide, consumed by his impossible love, leaving a flower in his
place.
I have off-loaded more discussion of
Narcissism to another section. There it is under:
"On the Invention of Narcissism. No it wasn't the Narcissos. It was
someone else".
http://www.noologie.de/noo.htm
http://www.noologie.de/desn.htm
And the circular structure (of the Rosary) is also an Architectonic in the Kantian sense. It is not an Aggregate, and Heidegger had said the same about his S&Z. [S. 182: Die Ganzheit des Strukturganzen ist phänomenal nicht zu erreichen durch ein Zusammenbauen der Elemente.]
It is just a circular Architectonic,
which means that there are no primary foundations on which we may build it up
in a vertical manner to reach the highest conclusion. In a crircular reflexive
structure, all the elements are intermeshed and there is no hierarchy of ideas.
As one goes around the rosary of the last metaphor, reflexions build up, and
they become more and more intermeshed. We can apply a metaphor from Whitehead
who talked about the nexus. A nexus has con-nexions, so the con-nexions build
up to form a spider web like structure. And a spider web is also not built up
from bottom to top, if that metaphor helps us to understand the process of
building a spider web.
[As a little aside thought: I even
believe that the title The Name of the Rose, has also something to do with the
Rosary. But also with the Rosicrucians, and the Rosslyn
Chapel. Oh dear Dan Brown please have pity on me! Rember the Lord's prayer:
and forgive us our trespasses, as we
forgive those who trespass against us
and lead us not into temptation, but
deliver us from evil.
That you may never read a Dan Brown novel.
Amen.]
https://www.rosslynchapel.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosslyn_Chapel
https://www.rosslynchapel.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/explore-the-mystery2a.jpg
I have mentioned the
"Rundgesang" of Nietzsche at the beginning of this text. Now I will
do some enlarging of the concept of the "Rundgesang". As I had said,
the "Rundgesang" also implies the "Rundtanz" which I have
also dealt with in depth in the chapter from "Gold im Wachs". And the
structure of the text of Meta-Morphology is more like a "Rundgesang" in the terminology of Nietzsche,
meaning it is also similar to a "Rundtanz", but of course in a text
one cannot make a "Rundtanz". In consequence, this text is NOT LINEAR
AND GOAL-ORIENTED like maybe a scientific text, where you can write an abstract
in front of it, then do some discussion of the subject, and then come to some
conclusion, to finally make a management summary, to present it to your boss or
your professor or at a conference. Unfortunately with the subject matter at
hand this is impossible. As a "Rundgesang", the (morphological)
structure of Meta-Morphology is similar to
"Sein und Zeit" (S&Z) by Heidegger, who (in my view) also did
some Existential-Philosophy.
In my morphological method one does
it like this: One contemplates the Subject Matter from as many angles as one
can come up with. Since I am using metaphors a lot, we can find some metaphors
here also: So we can look at the Subject matter like one may look at a diamond
and turning it around at so many angles to see all the reflections or better
the refractions it can produce. But since this is just a metaphor, we don't
need to get into the business of reflection and refraction theory too deeply.
Reflection is everything connected with physical rays of light as they are
mirrored on a water or polished metal or mercury surface. Metal mirrors can
have a property that is difficult with water to achieve: They can be curved.
Spherically or A-Spherically, convex or concave. In Astronomy this is put to
good use. When you take a round trough filled with mercury, and you turn it
around on a turntable, you can have some pretty interesting phenomena of
mirroring. Because of the turning and because of centrifugal force, the mercury
forms a perfect parabola, but in 3-d. One could also call this the
phenomenology of mirroring. This is quite an interesting philosophical subject
in itelf. So we can come to the Metaphysics of Mirrors. And the picture Las
Meninas above is a piece of the Metaphysics of Mirrors.
Refraction is everything connected
with physical rays of light as they are broken in a suitable substance like a
diamond. A diamond has the highest Refraction index of all materials. I have
written more about the business of refraction in a diamond in my work:
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm
There is in the Appendix "Die
Diamant-Metapher der Noologie" some more enlargement where I go further
into the details.
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#_Toc512641928
Reflexion is something one does in
the mInd. Therefore I am careful to write it like this, not to confuse it with
Reflection. Meaning that the Thinking is Reflexed onto itself. And I don't
under any circumstance mean the Geist. As I say it everywhere, there is noch
such thing as "the" or "a" Geist. This is all Ghostly
business, in which I don't want to partake at all. To do Reflexion, one needs
to have memory. Because one reflects on the thing that one has in memory, and
that what you are thinking right now.
Another metaphor for Reflexion is a
Rosary. A Rosary is a circular structure and while one is praying the Rosary,
with each completion of one round of the chain, one begins at the start again.
But this time one has in one's mind a memory of the last time around. And so
the second time around, there is a reflexion. What one had done and experienced
the first round, is now overlaid with the new experience of the same thing, the
rosary bead. But it is now "Overloaded" or
"Superpositioned" with the memory. (It is difficult to find the right
term for this). So this means re-thinking what one has thought the last time,
and then reflexing on it. In Philosophy this is called Reflexion Theory. And
the more rounds you go, the more Reflexions build up. [Of course the Religious
Rosary is not intended for such use, there one just reiterates, like when you
go to confession and the priest tells you: Do the Rosary five times, and each
time you have to find a new way to atone for your sins.] So what I am doing
here is some kind of philosophical Rosary and I think that this is a very good
method for actually doing Reflexion Theory with your hands. Because the hands
are also quite useful for doing a proper Reflexion (Manipulare). I have written
about this some more in the main text.
https://www.stjohnpaul.org/rosary-meditations/
http://www.how-to-pray-the-rosary-everyday.com/meditations-on-the-rosary.html
https://udayton.edu/imri/mary/r/rosary-mystery-reflections.php
https://www.ecatholic2000.com/cts/untitled-284.shtml
So the method of the philosophical
Rosary is my way of doing Reflexion Theory. And mInd it: I do not do the
reflexion in my Rational / Language Processor, but in my Associative Processor.
I have off-loaded all this work of memory and reminiscence (see the Aristoteles
book by this title) into the Associative Processor. So my Rational / Language
Processor is not too overloaded with handling too much memory business. The
Associative Processor works simultaneously and in parallel with the Rational /
Language Processor. So I don't even need to think consciously about all those
many reflexions that I mentioned above, or keep them in my conscious mInd. The
Associative Processor does its work, and then re-mInds me, where I have to do
some more reflexion. And this works very well.
We find something like this in the
Hegelian Reflexion Theory (as I think), but here I do it with a different
metaphor and a completely different angle of approach. The philosophers of the
olden times had their Zettelkasten (chit box). Hegel was a master of the
Zettelkasten. Niklas Luhmann was also a master at this. Then there was Arno
Schmidt who was also completely Ver-Zettelt.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
https://www.zvab.com/buch-suchen/titel/arno-schmidt-zettelkasten/
https://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/radiothema/zettelkasten-zu-zettels-traum-100.html
https://das-blaettchen.de/2007/01/gehirntier-isoliert-im-zettelkasten-14462.html
http://www2.gs.uni-heidelberg.de/kvv/vz_imperia_show_item_pdf.php?vid=958
http://ds.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/viewer/ppnresolver?id=ZKLuhm
http://ds.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/viewer/ppnresolver?id=ZKLuhm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4veq2i3teVk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMo0cU2HUvg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIztPpFqCBw
http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/about.php?abs=1
https://zettelkasten.de/book/de/
https://auratikum.de/blog/von-der-zettelwirtschaft-zum-zettelkasten/
Here I give some Definitions of
words in the Morphological and the Meta-Morphological Meaning which are at some
times or more often, most of the times... Quite different from the common usage
in the High-Quality Mainstream Media, like in the US: The New York Times, the
Washington Post, the Atlantic, just to mention some of the best-known of them.
And in Germany, the "spiegel.de", the "welt.de", the
"zeit.de" and the "sueddeutsche.de". As I said it with a
touch of Ambrose Bierce: The "spiegel.de" is like a Spiegel-Ei, but
without the Ei. This is unfortunately not translatable into English. The google
translator translates this faithfully as: fried egg, sunnyside up (Amer.) [COOK.]
das Spiegelei pl.: die Spiegeleier. But the double-think meaning of Spiegel in German meaning a Mirror,
cannot be translated into English so it is difficult to translate. One could
say the German word "Spiegel-Ei" also means "A Mirror-Egg".
So some of the word-plays of the German language are not accessible to all the
other more Latinized languages of Europe. This is one reason why Heidegger came
up with his quip (witzeln) that there are only two languages suitable for
proper Philosph'izing: German and Classical Greek. Latin was not so usable at
all. And since all the other languages of Europe were more or less Latinized,
this is not possible in those languages. This was because the ancient Romans
who didn't know Greek in and out, couldn't properly translate the original Semantic
Fields of Classical Greek. There very few Romans who knew Greek to such a
level of Depth Semantic Fields, since they had their Greek Slaves as
tutors for their children, and as Librarians, who did all that work for them.
I will now cover a subject that goes
into the depths of the Morphological Meanings and Spritual Character of the
Morphology of Semantics, and the Psychology, which I also call Meta-Noia in a
different context. The Meta-Noia is usually a quite sudden experience, and this
is quite related to the Kata-Strophae in the postive sense of the word, meaning
the sudden about-turning of one's World View and especially of one's Spiritual
View. Here we get to the deep structures of the Tropia or Tropos, meaning the
Turining in Itself, like one turns a glove in-itself. It is not the literal
turning around when a car turns around a corner. And this can only be described
in the Terminology of Meta-Morphology. There is a Mathematical Discipline of
Topology, which is quite related to that. But there is as yet no Mathematical
Science of Transformation of Psychical Topology. If it would exist, this would
be synonymous to Meta-Morphology and Meta-Noia.
Bildung is a typical German word
that is hard to translate into other latinized languages, with its full
Semantic Network. It derives from some very old images (imago,
imagination) of Bild, Bildung, Ein-Bildung, Aus-Bildung, Ab-Bildung, and das
Ur-Bild. These are all related to originally
Greek philosophical and mythological concepts of the Bild [Ikonos]. Somehow,
the Ancient Greek mental imageries of Ikonos existed in the Old Nordic
languages also. But there is very little documentation left of the old Nordic Mythological
Imagery, except what was preserved mostly in Iceland, in the Eddas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetic_Edda
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Edda
http://www.noologie.de/wagner1.htm
http://www.noologie.de/wagner1.pdf
The Meaning of Ikon(os) [like Ikone
in the Orthodox Greek Spiritual Art] Ikonos, Eikonos, Ikonik, Idea, Eidotos,
and then some more terms which we find in the philosophy of Platon. In Latin we
have the imago and the imagination, so we can draw some parallel philosophical
tracks between Latin and Greek. And this all refers to Dream Images, on which I
do a lengthy discussion in the present text. As I have stated it somewhere, the
Dreams are the forgotten Language of God. See especially my interpretation of
the Dream interpretaion of Daniel, when he decrypted the Dream of
Nabochondosor. And I did some more Meta-Morphology with this Dream. And I had
stated it also in some passage: The Meta-Morphology of Dreams is quite the same
as the Meta-Morphology of Foam. Because in the German Language one says: Träume
sind Schäume. Dreams are like Foam. They are infinitely Morphable. So this kind
of Meta-Morphology leans heavily on the Morphology of our Dreams. I have done
some in-depth discussion on the powers and applications of the Dream-Time
Processor in the present work.
The complemetarity of Meta-Noia is
this: Die Bildungsreise is more something of a more leisurely manner to
make slow process what one could call the Aus-Bildung of the Character,
meaning the Formation of a Mature Character. As one travels around,
either in some parts of the Geography and the Cultural Landscape of the
Planet Earth, one gains Bildung. Because one gets a lot of impressions of some
very different cultures and climates on the way. So when one is able to do this
with a Multi-Stage Reflexion process, one gains Bildung. The Bildungsreise is
an Age-Old process which was ever present in all the Spiritual Journeys
of humanity. It was also called the Pilgrimage, or Pilgrim's Process,
and the Grand Tour of the Sons of the British'ers Elites. After
completing their reading of the Classics at Oxford or Cambridge, like reading Homer,
Odysee and Illias, and doing some memorizing a few Greek words
from those Classics, and then reading some works of Shakespeare, and of Bunyan
and of Tennyson, and some more of the famous British'er Literature. When
they had finished their studies, the wealthy families of these students sent
them on the Grand Tour as it was called. See also: Pilgrim's Progress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses
So they went to the places of the
Classics that they had read all about in their Seminars at the University, but
now they got the images, the smells, the sounds, and the tastes of these
fabulous lands where the Ancients had concocted their Poetry and their
Mythologies: Italy, Greece, and Egypt. Some even went to India which was very
easy at those times since India was a colony of the Mighty British'er Empire of
the Queen Victoria. And everything there was exotic, but with a veneer of
British'ness so there was really no Culture Shock.
An Excerpt from the Handbook for the
Native Tourist Guides who catered to German Tourists:
Mein Herr, hat das Essen Ihnen gut geschmocken?
The Bildungsreise also existed for
the Germans, like the travels of Goethe to Italy, or the travels of Schopenhauer
in Europe. Or the travels of Alexander v. Humboldt to South America. The
only small problem was that Germany was quite poor in the 1700's up to 1870,
and so the Germans couldn't travel so far and long with the limited money they
had. The best tales about German Tourism at these times were those of the
"Fromme Helene" by Wilhelm Busch, who went to
Heidelberg on honey moon with her newly wed husband, and the story goes like
this.
http://www.wilhelm-busch-seiten.de/werke/helene/
In der frommen Helene beleuchtet Wilhelm Busch satirisch religiöse Heuchelei und zwielichtige Bürgermoral:
„Ein guter Mensch gibt gerne acht,
Ob auch der andre was Böses macht;
Und strebt durch häufige Belehrung
Nach seiner Beß’rung und Bekehrung“
http://www.wilhelm-busch-seiten.de/werke/helene/kapitel09.html
Ruinen machen vielen Spaß. -
Auch sieht man gern das große Faß.
Und - alle Ehrfurcht! - muß ich sagen.
Alsbald, so sitzt man froh im Wagen
Und sieht das Panorama schnelle
Vorüberziehn bis zum Hotelle;
Denn Spargel, Schinken, Koteletts
Sind doch mitunter auch was Nett's.
»Pist! Kellner! Stell'n Sie eine kalt!
Und, Kellner! Aber möglichst bald!«
Der Kellner hört des Fremden Wort.
Es saust der Frack. Schon eilt er fort.
Wie lieb und luftig perlt die Blase
Der Witwe Klicko in dem Glase. -
Gelobt seist du viel tausendmal!
Helene blättert im Journal.
»Pist! Kellner! Noch einmal so eine!« -
Helenen ihre Uhr ist neune.
Der Kellner hört des Fremden Wort.
Es saust der Frack. Schon eilt er fort.
Wie lieb und luftig perlt die Blase
Der Witwe Klicko in dem Glase.
»Pist! Kellner! Noch so was von den!« -
Helenen ihre Uhr ist zehn. -
Schon eilt der Kellner emsig fort. -
Helene spricht ein ernstes Wort. -
Der Kellner leuchtet auf der Stiegen.
Der fremde Herr ist voll Vergnügen.
Pitsch! - Siehe da! Er löscht das Licht.
Plums! Liegt er da und rührt sich nicht.
http://www.wilhelm-busch-seiten.de/werke/helene/kapitel12.html
The pilgrimage of the fromme Helene
is equally hilarious.
Some other works by Busch on
pilgrimages are also very instructive:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Busch#Werke
http://www.noologie.de/Wallfahrt.htm
I have added some humoristic
comments to the work, since it would be senseless if I had just copied it.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_heilige_Antonius_von_Padua
Der heilige Antonius von Padua[1] ist eine der frühen geschlossenen Bildergeschichten des humoristischen Zeichners und Dichters Wilhelm Busch aus dem Jahr 1864, veröffentlicht 1870. Ähnlich wie Die fromme Helene (1872) und Pater Filucius (1872) ist die Bildergeschichte von der antiklerikalen Haltung Wilhelm Buschs geprägt.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knopp-Trilogie
Die Knopp-Trilogie
ist nach Max und Moritz eines der bekanntesten Werke von Wilhelm Busch. Der Zweizeiler Vater werden ist nicht
schwer / Vater sein dagegen sehr stammt aus dieser Trilogie.
Die Trilogie besteht aus drei Teilen: Abenteuer eines Junggesellen war der erste Teil, deren Fortsetzungen als Herr und Frau Knopp 1876 und Julchen 1877 erschien. Erstmals ist hier der Bürger nicht Opfer handlungsstarker Plagegeister, wie es in Max und Moritz oder Hans Huckebein, der Unglücksrabe der Fall war, sondern durchgängig die handelnde Hauptperson.[1]
The most egregious example of the
Bildungsreise in the mInd was Kant, who had never left Köngisberg at all. But
he astounded his erudite visitors who had themselves travelled to all those
exotic places. Kant had read all the travel books that he could get, and he had
memorized them all down to the details. And Kant was able to tell them every
detail of every Monument, every Temple, and then some Public Buildings. He had
such an excellent eidetic mInd that he could visualize all those places.
The only thing that he could not visualize was what the Prostitues did in those
places, and especially their prices. Or what it was to be ripped off by some
natives when they wanted to show the German tourist the best Restaurants and
the best Hotels, and the best Public Spectacles. Because this was just the
business of the Tourism Industry of all Places and of all Times. Those friendly
Tourist Guides always got some good Kickbacks from those Restaurants and
Hotels, on top of the meagre Bakshish that they got from the Tourists.
And since the good German Tourists knew nothing at all about the local
customs they always got ripped off very expertly. The natives knew full well
that the Germans were the most gullible and naive Tourists of them all. And
somehow I have the impression that when you see some present-day German
tourists in all the Antiquities Markets between Tangiers and Abu Simbel, that
the conditions had not changed at all in those 200 years or so. So there was a
wholesale market in Egypt of this time when the Egyptian Antiquities
Forgers came up with so many historical relics of Ancient Egypt that
they had out-produced the Ancient Egyptians by about an order of magnitude. We
will never know how many of those "really original" antique pieces of
Egypt in the German Museums are fakes. My informed guess that it is about half
of them. But when one doesn't want to know, one doesn't ask. And it would be
quite a shame for the good German Museum directors if one would have found out
about all this fakery. So they also never allowed any physicists to make any
age tests with their precious exhibits.
Beware! fake Egyptian antiques
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvUm5MeNBTk
Fakes in the art world - The mystery
conman | DW Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lNSXB4i4fE
Forged Egyptian Antiquities
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRs3cfBoHGM
Sadigh Gallery - Seller in fake
antiquities!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVqzyAf8pIc
Then there was the good Hegel, who
also never got to go anywere except Stuttgart and then some environs...
and then straight to Berlin where he
became Professor of Philosophy.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/environ
As a little side note we may mention
Karl May, who also did a Bildungsreise, in the friendly Library
of the Prison where he was just serving time in. Fortunately this Prison
had a very good library of books about Travels into Far-Far-Away contries, so
the good Karl May could do his Bildungsreise entirely while sitting in his cell
in this Prison, and since he had such a good phantasy, he was able to do the
whole Bildungsreise in his mInd. So this proves that one can do a Bildungsreise
and not leave your little nice cosy Prison Cell at all.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_May
http://karl-may-wiki.de/index.php/Bibliothek_der_Strafanstalt_Schloss_Osterstein
Die Gefangenenbibliothek
Verwaltet wurde die Bibliothek 1867 von Katechet Carl Leberecht Reinhold Hohlfeld. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt bestand die Bibliothek aus 4.289 Bänden. Diese unterteilten sich in 250 Exemplare Neues Testament/Heilige Schrift, 1.041 Gesangbücher, 222 Bände Lutherische Katechismen und Spruchbücher sowie 2.776 anderweitige Bücher belehrenden Inhalts. Für die Zellengefangenen war eine besondere Bibliothek abgezweigt, die exklusive der Neuen Testamente, Gesangbücher und Katechismen 699 Bände der als anderweitige Bücher ausgewiesenen Werke enthielt.
Die 2.077 "anderweitigen" Bände der Kollektivhaft wurden 1867 26.086 mal ausgeliehen, die 699 Bände der Isolierhaft 3.831 mal.
Für die katholischen
Detinierten gab es eine eigene "ziemlich reichhaltige" Bibliothek,
die unter der Verwaltung des katholischen Geistlichen stand.[2]
And the Germans had another
difficulty. Since in the whole of the British'er Empire, which comprised the
better part of the Planet, the Lingua Franca was English, so every Beduin in
Egypt knew some English, equally every Ricksha driver in India and
China. [I just liked this Indiana Jones movie temple of Doom. There the Ricksha
driver has a prominent role.] So the good English'man could be sure to get some
friendly help from "the natives" who were of course eager to get some
"Bakshish" from the always quite wealthy English'er Traveller, who
was surely rich when compared to the income of "the natives". We may
also note a quote by Wilhelm Busch:
https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/plisch-und-plum-4189/27
< Kapitel 27>
Zugereist in diese Gegend, Noch viel mehr als sehr vermögend, In der Hand das Perspektiv, Kam ein Mister namens Pief. "Warum soll ich nicht beim Gehen" -Sprach er - "in die Ferne sehen? Schön ist es auch anderswo, Und hier bin ich sowieso." Hierbei aber stolpert er In den Teich und sieht nichts mehr. "Paul und Peter, meine Lieben, Wo ist denn der Herr geblieben?" Fragte Fittig, der mit ihnen Hier spazieren geht im Grünen. Doch wo der geblieben war, Wird ihm ohne dieses klar. Ohne Perspektiv und Hut Steigt er ruhig aus der Flut. "Alleh, Plisch und Plum, apport!" Tönte das Kommandowort.
[Alleh -> Allez vous, Enfants de la
Patrie. Wilhelm Busch surely didn't like
Napolium.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Temple_of_Doom
In 1935, Indiana
Jones narrowly escapes the clutches of Lao Che, a crime boss in Shanghai, China. With his 11-year-old Chinese sidekick Short Round and the nightclub
singer Willie Scott in tow, Indy flees Shanghai on an airplane that,
unbeknownst to them, is owned by Lao Che. While the three of them are asleep on
the plane, the pilots dump the fuel and parachute out, leaving the plane to
crash over the Himalayas. Indy, Shorty, and Willie discover the sabotage and
narrowly manage to escape by jumping out of the plane on an inflatable raft.
They ride down the mountain slopes and fall into a raging river, eventually
arriving at the village of Mayapore in northern India. The impoverished
villagers believe the three to have been sent by Shiva to retrieve the sacred lingam stone stolen from their shrine, as well as the community's missing
children, from evil forces in the nearby Pankot Palace. During the journey to
Pankot, Indy hypothesizes that the stone may be one of the five fabled Sankara
stones that promise fortune and glory.
The trio receive
a warm welcome from the Prime Minister of Pankot Palace, Chattar Lal. The
visitors are allowed to stay the night as guests, during which they attend a
lavish but grotesque banquet given by the young Maharaja, Zalim Singh. Lal rebuffs Indy's questions about the villagers' claims
and his theory that the ancient Thuggee cult is responsible for their troubles. Later that night, Indy is
attacked by an assassin, leading Indy, Willie, and Shorty to believe that
something is amiss. After Indy kills the assassin, they discover a series of
tunnels hidden behind a statue in Willie's room and set out to explore them,
overcoming a number of booby-traps along the way.
The trio
eventually reach an underground temple where the Thugs worship Kali with human sacrifice. They watch as the Thugs chain one of their
victims in a cage and slowly lower him into a ceremonial lava pit, burning him
alive. They discover that the Thugs, led by their high priest Mola Ram, are in
possession of three of the five Sankara stones, and have enslaved the children
to mine for the last two. As Indy tries to retrieve the stones, he, Willie, and
Shorty are captured and separated. Indy is whipped and forced to drink a potion called the Blood of Kali, causing him
to enter a trance-like state and mindlessly serve the Thugs. Willie is prepared
for sacrifice, while Shorty is whipped and put to work in the mines alongside
the children. Shorty breaks free and escapes back into the temple, where he
burns Indy with a torch to bring him back to his senses. After fighting off the
guards and defeating Lal, Indy stops Willie's cage and cranks it out of the pit
just in time to save her from the fire, while Mola Ram escapes. Indy retrieves
the Sankara stones, and the three return to the mines to free the children. As
Indy fights a hulking overseer, Singh—also under Mola Ram's control—tries to
cripple him with a voodoo doll. Shorty knocks the doll away and burns him to
break the trance, and a restored Indy escapes and leaves the overseer to die in
a rock crusher.
The trio escape
from the temple in a mine cart, pursued by Thugs, while Mola Ram orders a water
cistern dumped in an attempt to flood them out. After barely escaping the
deluge, they are again cornered by Mola Ram and his henchmen on a rope bridge
high above a crocodile-infested river. Indy cuts the bridge in half with one
man's sword, leaving everyone to hang on for their lives. As he and Mola Ram
struggle over the stones, he invokes the name of Shiva, causing them to glow white-hot. Mola Ram burns his hand on the stones,
causing him to lose his grip and fall to his death; Indy catches the last one
safely and climbs up as a company of British Indian Army riflemen, summoned by Singh, arrive and open fire on the Thuggee
archers trying to shoot him. Indy, Willie, and Shorty return to Mayapore with
the children and give the missing stone back to the villagers.
Bildung is a typical German word
that is hard to translate into other latinized languages, since it derives from
some very old images (imago) of Bild, Bildung, Abbild, and Urbild, which are
derived from originally Greek philosophical concepts of the Bild. Meaning Ikon
[like Ikone in the Orthodox Greek Spiritual Art] Ikonos, Eikonos, Ikonik, Idea,
Eidotos, and then some more terms which we find in the philosophy of Platon. In
Latin we have the imago and the imagination, so we can draw some parallel
philosophical tracks between Latin and Greek. And this all refers to Dream
Images, on which I do a lengthy discussion in the present text. As I have
stated it somewhere, the Dreams are the forgotten Language of God. See
especially my interpretation of the Dream interpretaion of Daniel, when he
decrypted the Dream of Nabochondosor. And I did some more
Meta-Morphology with this Dream. And I had stated it also in some passage: The
Meta-Morphology of Dreams is quite the same as The Meta-Morphology of Foam.
Because in the German Language one says: Träume sind Schäume. Dreams are
like Foam. They are infinitely Morphable. So this kind of Meta-Morphology leans
heavily on the Morphology of our Dreams. I have done some in-depth discussion
on the powers and applications of the Dream-Time Processor in the present work.
I will also refer to the diciontary
of Samuel Johnson, who came up with his famous work on 15 April 1755. I would
call his dictionary a precursor of my own Meta-Morphological work on Language,
Linguistics, Neurolinguistic Reframing of words and concepts, and also
the deep structures of Sermantics and Semiotics. See also the work of Umberto
Eco who was one of the Grand Masters of Semiotics, next to Peirce,
Lotman... I have done extensive stories on Semiotics, and I will include some
of that work later on. I have also made some studies on the business of
Dis-Information using the techniques of Bowdler'izing and Euphemism. On can
subsume the latter Dis-Information techniques under the general heading of
Neurolinguistic Reframing, as was so well documented in a recent project of the
ARD (Deutsches Nationales Qualitäts-Fernsehen).
https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13692982.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language
Published on 15 April 1755[1] and written by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes
published as Johnson's Dictionary, is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language.
OPULENCE
Wealth; riches; affluence
"There in full opulence
a banker dwelt,
Who all the joys and pangs of riches
felt;
His sideboard glitter'd with imagin'd
plate,
And his proud fancy held a vast
estate."
There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries
of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London booksellers contracted Johnson
to write a dictionary for the sum of 1,500 guineas (£1,575), equivalent to about £240,000 in 2019.[2] Johnson took seven years to complete the work, although he had claimed
he could finish it in three. He did so single-handedly, with only clerical
assistance to copy the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books.
Johnson produced several revised editions during his life.
Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 173 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent English
dictionary. According to Walter Jackson Bate, the Dictionary "easily ranks
as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the
greatest ever performed by one individual who laboured under anything like the
disadvantages in a comparable length of time".[3]
...
Unlike most modern lexicographers, Johnson introduced humour or prejudice into quite a number of his
definitions. Among the best-known are:
"Excise: a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common
judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid"[11]
"Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in
tracing the original and detailing the signification of words"[12]
"Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland
[it] supports the people"[13]
A much less well-known example is:
"Monsieur: a term of reproach for a
Frenchman"[14]
He included whimsical little-known words, such
as:
"Writative – A word of Pope's, not to be imitated: "Increase of years makes men more talkative
but less writative; to that degree I now write letters but of plain how
d'ey's.""[15]
I also make good use of The
Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. My favorite philosophical
definition is the one on Descartes. Ambrose Bierce had a very keen
understanding of all the nonsense that the good Descartes had concocted in
his... Well er, I wouldn't call this philosophy at all, because this is exactly
a case of very sophisticated Philosophical Schizophrenia. It may be very
sophisticated, but it still is Schizophrenia. Meaning a split, this time of
mInd and the Body, or the Soma and the Spirit. This insanity was consequently
enlarged upon and driven into the ultimate logical Suprematization of
Insanity [See: Sloterdijk: Gottes Eifer] by the good Hegel and his School
of Insanity, er I mean The School of German Idealism. The good Hegel
and his school carried the split just a little further into the lofty heights
of the Logics of Impossibility and of Vacuosity, meaning the Vacuum that forms
in the mInd of a German Idealist Philosopher, instead of any usable
idea: The Split of Leib und Geist, or Körper und Geist, or Materie und Geist.
By the same token, one can also call it The School of German Schizophrenia.
But it all came about by the initial [or original sin] of the system of
Descartes. But we can trace that bad idea back throughout all the ages to the
good Platon, who came up with the bad idea of the idea, and this was the
beginning of all the pitfalls of human thinking. As Whitehead had stated it
quite succinctly: Most of the history of Western Philosophy consists of a
series of footnotes to Platon.
CARTESIAN, adj.
Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher,
author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum -- whereby he was pleased to
suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved,
however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think,
therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any
philosopher has yet made.
BRAHMA, n.
He who created the Hindoos, who are preserved
by Vishnu and destroyed by Siva -- a rather neater division of labor than is
found among the deities of some other nations. The Abracadabranese, for
example, are created by Sin, maintained by Theft and destroyed by Folly. The
priests of Brahma, like those of the Abracadabranese, are holy and learned men
who are never naughty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil%27s_Dictionary
The Devil's Dictionary is a satirical dictionary written by American Civil War soldier, journalist, and writer Ambrose Bierce consisting of common words followed by humorous and satirical
definitions. The lexicon was written over three decades as a series of
installments for magazines and newspapers. Bierce's witty definitions were
imitated and plagiarized for years before he gathered them into books, first as
The Cynic's Word Book in 1906 and then in a more complete version
as The Devil's Dictionary in 1911.
Initial reception of the book versions was
mixed. In the decades following, however, the stature of The Devil's
Dictionary grew. It has been widely quoted, frequently translated, and
often imitated, earning a global reputation. In the 1970s, The Devil's
Dictionary was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of
American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial
Administration.[1] It has been called "howlingly funny"[2], and Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig wrote that The Devil's Dictionary is "probably the most
brilliant work of satire written in America. And maybe one of the greatest in all of world
literature."[3]
(n.) An instrument employed in the
rectification of national boundaries.
(n.) A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.[33]
(n.) A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.[34]
(n.) A person of low taste, more interested in
himself than in me.
(n.) Belief without evidence in what is told by
one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
(n.) One skilled in circumvention of the law.[35]
(n.) A temporary insanity curable by
marriage...
(n.) A household consisting of a master, a
mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
(a.) Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
(n.) A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to
Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
(n.) The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a
living Homer.
Youth is the true Saturnian Reign, the Golden Age on earth again, when figs are grown on thistles, and pigs betailed with
whistles and, wearing silken bristles, live ever in clover, and cows fly over,
delivering milk at every door, and Justice is never heard to snore, and every
assassin is made a ghost and, howling, is cast into Baltimost! —Polydore Smith[36]
Under the entry
"leonine", meaning a single line of poetry with an internal rhyming scheme, Bierce included an apocryphal couplet
written by the fictitious "Bella Peeler Silcox" (i.e. Ella Wheeler Wilcox) in which an internal rhyme is
achieved in both lines only by mispronouncing the rhyming words:
The electric light invades the dunnest deep of Hades.
Cries Pluto, 'twixt his snores: "O tempora! O mores!"
Even though Mark Twain didn't
provide a dictionary, one can extract from his works may interesting entries of
the Meta-Morphing of words and concepts.
Even though Jonathan Swift didn't
provide a dictionary, one can extract from his works may interesting entries of
the Meta-Morphing of words and concepts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver%27s_Travels
Gulliver's Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four
Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships
is a prose satire[1][2] of 1726 by the Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, satirising both human nature and the "travellers'
tales" literary subgenre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a
classic of English literature. Swift claimed that he wrote Gulliver's Travels "to vex the
world rather than divert it".
The book was an immediate success. John Gay remarked "It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery."[3]
Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput
Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag
Part III: A Voyage to Laputa,
Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan
Part IV: A Voyage to the Land of the
Houyhnhnms
Gulliver's Travels has been the recipient of several designations: from Menippean satire to a children's story, from proto-science fiction to a forerunner of
the modern novel.
[It] has three themes:
A satirical view of the state of
European government, and of petty differences between religions
An inquiry into whether men are
inherently corrupt or whether they become corrupted
A restatement of the older
"ancients versus moderns" controversy previously addressed by Swift
in The Battle of the Books
A possible reason for the book's classic status
is that it can be seen as many things to many different people. Broadly, the
book has three themes:
A satirical view of the state of European
government, and of petty differences between religions
An inquiry into whether men are inherently
corrupt or whether they become corrupted
A restatement of the older "ancients
versus moderns" controversy previously addressed by Swift in The Battle of the Books
In storytelling and construction the parts
follow a pattern:
The causes of Gulliver's misadventures become
more malignant as time goes on—he is first shipwrecked, then abandoned, then
attacked by strangers, then attacked by his own crew.
Gulliver's attitude hardens as the book
progresses—he is genuinely surprised by the viciousness and politicking of the
Lilliputians but finds the behaviour of the Yahoos in the fourth part
reflective of the behaviour of people.
Each part is the reverse of the preceding
part—Gulliver is big/small/wise/ignorant, the countries are
complex/simple/scientific/natural, and the forms of government are
worse/better/worse/better than Britain's.
Gulliver's viewpoint between parts is mirrored
by that of his antagonists in the contrasting part—Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being
vicious and unscrupulous, and then the king of Brobdingnag sees Europe in
exactly the same light; Gulliver sees the Laputians as unreasonable, and his
Houyhnhnm master sees humanity as equally so.
No form of government is ideal — the simplistic
Brobdingnagians enjoy public executions and have streets infested with beggars,
the honest and upright Houyhnhnms who have no word for lying are happy to
suppress the true nature of Gulliver as a Yahoo and are equally unconcerned
about his reaction to being expelled.
Specific individuals may be good even where the
race is bad—Gulliver finds a friend in each of his travels and, despite
Gulliver's rejection and horror toward all Yahoos, is treated very well by the
Portuguese captain, Don Pedro, who returns him to England at the novel's end.
This is also a masterpiece of Voltaire's
satirical thinking where he rips apart the Theodicee of Leibniz. The
Morphological similarity with Gulliver's travels is quite apparent, since this
is also a Bildungsroman in the Goethe'an sense.
It means that the character of
Candide in his travels together with Professor Pangloss [This is
Leibniz] undergoes some transformation of character leading to some sort of
Purification or Des-Illusionment. This is again an Age-Old Theme, because it
starts out with the Odyssee.
[I always do the spelling in the
original word of Ancient Greek, and not in the corrupted latinized Version of
Corrupt English which tends to distort the Semantic Network.]
The Bildungsroman is mostly the
Bildungsreise meaning the Spritual Travel or Pilgrimage by which one reaches
Spiritual Maturity. So we can extend this genre to the Don Quixote by
Cervantes, the Travels of Dante into the many tiers of Hell, and Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress and then many many more. The Pilgrimage to Compostela is one
of the better known Spritual Travels and there is quite a good book by Hape
Kerkeling where he describes his inner spiritual experience but with a lot of
humor, as we are accustomed from the humoristic masterpieces of Hape Kerkeling.
Of course the good Hape Kerkeling
did a little word-play here. I am quite absolutely sure, that no-one in Germany
noticed the word-play: It means "Ich bin gerade mal auf dem
Pilger-Weg".
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_dann_mal_weg
Ich bin dann mal
weg – Meine Reise auf dem Jakobsweg ist ein am 22. Mai 2006 als
Buch erschienener Reisebericht des deutschen Entertainers Hape Kerkeling. Er war 103 Wochen lang in den Jahren 2006
bis 2008 auf dem Platz 1 der Spiegel-Bestsellerliste.
Kerkeling beschreibt die Erlebnisse seiner Pilgerreise nach Santiago de Compostela im Jahr 2001. Auslöser für die Entscheidung, den Jakobsweg zu gehen, war ein Hörsturz sowie die Entfernung seiner Gallenblase. Er beschäftigte sich zudem mit Shirley MacLaines Buch Der Jakobsweg: eine spirituelle Reise, in dem die Schauspielerin von ihren bisherigen „Reinkarnationen“ berichtet und ihre Reise mit zahlreichen Erlebnissen ausschmückt. Das Buch sowie ein Wanderführer waren auf der Wallfahrt seine einzige Lektüre.
Kerkeling wählte für seine Wanderung den Camino Francés und musste sich wie alle Pilger mit den physischen und psychischen Anforderungen einer solchen Reise auseinandersetzen. Er lernte dabei nicht nur sich selbst und seinen Glauben, – Zitat – „Buddhist mit christlichem Überbau“, besser kennen, sondern traf auch auf die verschiedensten Menschen, deren Charaktere er sehr plastisch beschreibt. Im amüsant plaudernden Ton schildert Kerkeling seine Erfahrungen, die an manchen Stellen tiefsinnig werden, und reflektiert über den Sinn des Lebens. Mit dem „klassischen“ christlichen Pilger suchte er keinen Kontakt, er schätzt sie als „nicht lernfähig“ ein (Zitat: „Die werden als die gleichen Menschen die Reise beenden, als die sie sie begonnen haben…“). Stattdessen ziehen ihn „Sonderlinge und Exoten“ an, er macht unter anderem Erfahrungen mit einer heiratswilligen Südamerikanerin, einem sexlüsternen Mitwanderer, Spießern, Kirchenkritikern, Esoterikern und Spiritisten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_de_Santiago
The Camino de Santiago (Latin: Peregrinatio Compostellana, "Pilgrimage of
Compostela"; Galician: O Camiño de Santiago),[1] known in English as the Way of Saint James among other names,[2][3][4] is a network of pilgrims' ways or pilgrimages leading to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain, where tradition has it that the remains of the saint are buried. Many
follow its routes as a form of spiritual path or retreat for their spiritual
growth. It's also popular with hiking and cycling enthusiasts and organized
tour groups.
The French Way (Camino Francés) and the Routes
of Northern Spain are the courses listed in the World Heritage List by UNESCO.
During the war of American Independence, John Adams (who would become the second American president) was ordered by Congress to go to Paris to obtain funds for the cause. His ship started leaking and he
disembarked with his two sons at Finisterre in 1779. From there he proceeded to follow the Way of St. James in the
reverse direction of the pilgrims' route, in order to get to Paris overland. He
did not stop to visit Santiago, which he later came to regret. In his
autobiography, Adams described the customs and lodgings afforded to St. James's
pilgrims in the 18th century and he recounted the legend as he learned it:[22]
I have always regretted that We could not find
time to make a Pilgrimage to Saintiago de Compostella. We were informed, ...
that the Original of this Shrine and Temple of St. Iago was this. A certain
Shepherd saw a bright Light there in the night. Afterwards it was revealed to
an Archbishop that St. James was buried there. This laid the Foundation of a
Church, and they have built an Altar on the Spot where the Shepherd saw the
Light. In the time of the Moors, the People made a Vow, that if the Moors
should be driven from this Country, they would give a certain portion of the
Income of their Lands to Saint James. The Moors were defeated and expelled and it was reported and believed, that Saint James was in the Battle
and fought with a drawn Sword at the head of the Spanish Troops, on Horseback.
The People, believing that they owed the Victory to the Saint, very cheerfully
fulfilled their Vows by paying the Tribute. ...Upon the Supposition that this
is the place of the Sepulchre of Saint James, there are great numbers of
Pilgrims, who visit it, every Year, from France, Spain, Italy and other parts
of Europe, many of them on foot.
Adams' great-grandson, the historian Henry Adams, visited Leon among other Spanish cities during his trip through Europe
as a youth, although he did not follow the entire pilgrimage route.[23] Another Enlightenment-era traveler on the pilgrimage route was the
naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilgrim%27s_Progress
The
Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come is a 1678 Christian allegory written by John Bunyan. It is regarded as one of the most significant works of religious English literature,[1][2][3][4] has been translated into more than 200 languages, and has never been
out of print.[5][6] It has also been cited as the first novel written in English.[7]
Bunyan began his
work while in the Bedfordshire county prison for violations of the Conventicle Act of 1664, which prohibited the
holding of religious services outside the auspices of the established Church of England. Early Bunyan scholars such as John Brown believed The Pilgrim's Progress was begun in Bunyan's second,
shorter imprisonment for six months in 1675,[8] but more recent scholars such as Roger Sharrock believe that it was
begun during Bunyan's initial, more lengthy imprisonment from 1660 to 1672
right after he had written his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.[9]
The English text
comprises 108,260 words and is divided into two parts, each reading as a
continuous narrative with no chapter divisions. The first part was completed in
1677 and entered into the Stationers' Register on 22 December 1677. It was
licensed and entered in the "Term Catalogue" on 18 February 1678, which is looked upon as the date of first
publication.[10] After the first edition of the first part in 1678, an expanded edition,
with additions written after Bunyan was freed, appeared in 1679. The Second
Part appeared in 1684. There were eleven editions of the first part in John
Bunyan's lifetime, published in successive years from 1678 to 1685 and in 1688,
and there were two editions of the second part, published in 1684 and 1686.
The entire book is presented as a dream sequence narrated by an omniscient narrator. The allegory's protagonist, Christian, is an everyman character, and the plot centres on his journey from his hometown, the
"City of Destruction" ("this world"), to the
"Celestial City" ("that which is to come": Heaven) atop Mount Zion. Christian is weighed down by a great burden—the knowledge of his
sin—which he believed came from his reading "the book in his hand"
(the Bible). This burden, which would cause him to sink into Hell, is so
unbearable that Christian must seek deliverance. He meets Evangelist as he is
walking out in the fields, who directs him to the "Wicket Gate" for deliverance. Since Christian cannot see the "Wicket
Gate" in the distance, Evangelist directs him to go to a "shining
light," which Christian thinks he sees.[11] Christian leaves his home, his wife, and children to save himself: he
cannot persuade them to accompany him. Obstinate and Pliable go after Christian
to bring him back, but Christian refuses. Obstinate returns disgusted, but
Pliable is persuaded to go with Christian, hoping to take advantage of the
Paradise that Christian claims lies at the end of his journey. Pliable's
journey with Christian is cut short when the two of them fall into the Slough of Despond, a boggy mire-like swamp where pilgrims' doubts, fears, temptations,
lusts, shames, guilts, and sins of their present condition of being a sinner
are used to sink them into the mud of the swamp. It is there in that bog where
Pliable abandons Christian after getting himself out. After struggling to the
other side of the slough, Christian is pulled out by Help, who has heard his
cries and tells him the swamp is made out of the decadence, scum, and filth of
sin, but the ground is good at the narrow Wicket Gate.
There is a very good poem, the
Ulysses by Tennyson, which fits in quite nicely in the present context. So I
just include it here.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these
barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete
and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and
know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will
drink
Life to the lees: All times I have
enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both
with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore,
and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy
Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a
name;
For always roaming with a hungry
heart
Much have I seen and known; cities
of men
And manners, climates, councils,
governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of
them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my
peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy
Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch
wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose
margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an
end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in
use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life
piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to
me
Little remains: but every hour is
saved
From that eternal silence, something
more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it
were
For some three suns to store and
hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in
desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking
star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human
thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the
isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to
fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to
make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft
degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the
good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the
sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I
mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My
mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought,
and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and
opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and
I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his
toil;
Death closes all: but something ere
the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be
done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with
Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the
rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon
climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come,
my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer
world.
Push off, and sitting well in order
smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose
holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the
baths
Of all the western stars, until I
die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash
us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy
Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we
knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and
tho'
We are not now that strength which
in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which
we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but
strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not
to yield.
The French had considerably less of the
famous British'er humour of Samuel Johnson and the others mentioned above. But
they also had some good ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantua_and_Pantagruel
The Life of
Gargantua and of Pantagruel (French: La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François
Rabelais, which tells of the adventures of two giants, Gargantua (/ɡɑːrˈɡæntjuə/; French: [ɡaʁɡɑ̃tya]) and his son Pantagruel (/pænˈtæɡruɛl, -əl,
ˌpæntəˈɡruːəl/; French: [pɑ̃taɡʁyɛl]). The text is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, and features much crudity, scatological
humor, and violence (lists of explicit or vulgar insults fill several
chapters).
The censors of
the Collège
de la Sorbonne stigmatized it as obscene,[1] and in a social climate of increasing religious
oppression in a lead up to the French
Wars of Religion, it was treated with suspicion, and contemporaries avoided mentioning
it.[2] According to Rabelais, the philosophy of his giant Pantagruel,
"Pantagruelism", is rooted in "a certain gaiety of mind pickled
in the scorn of fortuitous things" (French: une certaine gaîté d'esprit
confite dans le mépris des choses fortuites).
Rabelais had
studied Ancient Greek and he applied it in inventing hundreds of new words in the text, some
of which became part of the French language.[3] Wordplay and risqué humor abound in his writing.
https://www.linguee.com/english-german/translation/cognitive+dissonance.html
given by Leon Festinger in which he argued, based on cognitive
dissonance research,
for the incompatibility of intrinsic and...
Leon Feistinger, in dem
er aufgrund von Forschung zu
kognitiver Dissonanz die Unverträglichkeit
intrinsischer und extrinsischer Motivationsquellen darlegte.
There is also a related
expression called Incommensurability. It just means that when one
doesn't realize that when any two concepts / or moral / or ethical / or
law&order ideas are Incommensurable, there arises a Cognitive Dissonance. And that means in turn that especially very moral and very principled
people have a tendency to entertain at the same
time some Incommensurable concepts and ideas, and there must be by necessity be
the Cognitive Dissonance because as we all know, people cannot live by
those highly abstract ideas. The only person in the intellectual history of
humanity who was able to do this was Immanuel Kant. He almost lived perfectly
according to his ethical principles. But that had a cost. He could not marry
because that would contradict his high ethical standards. And he could almost
not do anything practical at all. He probably was, besides Platon, the foremost
and highest life-negating philosopher in the whole intellectual history of
mankind. For all the practical matters he had his servant. And we all know his
nice dictum about marriage: "Marriage is a "bürgerlicher
Vertrag" (meaning a Law&Order pact or contract of the burgeois society
of his time and place of the center of the Prussian Empire) for the reciprocal
use of the genitalia". And I believe that he really meant that in all
seriousness. Of course he never mentioned the concept of "consensual"
which didn't exist in his philosophical world. Because consense can also have
the meaning of con-sensual. And Kant had no idea whatsoever what "sensual"
could mean. His other famous dictum was: Sapere Aude. Also in this dictum, Kant
had forgotten that sapere also means to taste (the fruits of the Tree of
Knowledge). As such, I like Kant very much for his theoretical philosophy,
about as much as I like Platon. They were both "birds of the same
feather". But just like birds in the sky, they knew nothing at all what it
is like to live (and breed of course). So when it comes to Practical
Philosophy, I rather stick to the good Xenophon. He was for all of eternity the
best Practical Philosopher who had ever existed.
incommensurable
adjective
inkommensurabel adj
unvergleichbar adj
less common:
unvereinbar adj
/ unvergleichlich adj /
nicht vergleichbar adj /
nicht messbar adj
/nicht zu vereinbaren
In those earlier times of statehood,
the taxes were called tributes.
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/tribute
1 An act, statement, or gift that is intended
to show gratitude, respect, or admiration.
‘the video is a tribute to the musicals of the
40s’
mass noun ‘a symposium organized to pay tribute
to Darwin’
1.1 in singular Something resulting
from a particular quality or feature and indicating its worth.
‘his victory in the championship was a tribute
to his persistence’
1.2 as modifier Denoting or relating
to a group or musician that performs the music of a more famous one and
typically imitates them in appearance and style of performance.
‘an Abba tribute band’
‘a tribute show’
2historical mass noun Payment made periodically
by one state or ruler to another, especially as a sign of dependence.
‘the king had at his disposal plunder and
tribute amassed through warfare’
3historical A proportion of ore or its
equivalent, paid to a miner for his work, or to the
Origin
Late Middle English (in tribute (sense 2)): from Latin tributum, neuter past participle (used as a
noun) of tribuere ‘assign’ (originally ‘divide between tribes’), from tribus
‘tribe’.
Spoiler Alert! I
don't want to spoil anyone's fun,
but the following
text contains some material which some people
may find Offensive,
and even Politically Incorrect.
But this is
Anthropological Material.
Any further Reading here is wholly on your Own Responsibility!!!
Peter
Sloterdijk is in Germany a popular writer on philosophical subjects wo has
among the highest number of books sold to a large public who have some
intellectual aspirations... That is, compared to other famous philosophical
authors. We can mention a few contenders in popularity: Rüdiger Safranski and
Richard David Precht. Of course there is quite a difference between
"philosophy" in the US-Brit sense and the German akademik sense. So
we could make a sub-classification between "serious" or
"akademik" philosophy on one side, and "pop philosophy" in
the US-Brit sense on the other side. There can even be a "philosophy"
of hamburger cooking. This was developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his theory of
"flow":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi
The experience of "flow" is
strikingly reminiscent of Zhuangzi’s description of "great skill"
achieved by Daoist sages such as carpenter P’ien and butcher Ting, the latter
finding bliss in the art of chopping up ox carcasses by "going along with
the Dao" of the ox. It is no coincidence that these blue-collar sages are
situated on the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy. They discover the Dao much
more readily than Confucian scholars, who, according to Zhuangzi, are studying
the "dregs of wisdom" in lifeless books and have lost touch with the
world of concrete affairs.
https://ze.tt/zum-angeben-diese-werke-praegen-die-philosophie/
https://www.buchreport.de/bestseller/buch/isbn/9783442155286.htm/
https://www.buchreport.de/news/verkaufsliste-als-spiegel-des-zeitgeistes/
Richard David Precht etwa, der mit 3 Titeln unter den Top 5 die Themenbestseller dominiert, hat mit seinen Büchern seine Verdienste für die Popularisierung der Philosophie, aber für die fachphilosophische Diskussion eher keine Impulse geliefert.
One can
safely state a quite obvious general rule: The more success a
"philosopher" has on the pop philosophy market, the more he will be
seriously criticized by the "akademik" philosophy establishment. Such
is quite decidedly the case with Peter Sloterdijk's works. Exactly what his
style of writing and thinking makes it so popular to a wider readership is of
course a source of criticism by the more akademik oriented part of the
Mainstream Philosophical community. And there is especially a faction which
draws its intellectual orientation on the Frankfurter Schule which talks in the
most vicious and adverse terms about Sloterdijk. I don't want to get too
embroiled in those very polemical discussions of a climate of quite violently
flaring tempers that are showing up there. It is, as Sloterdijk sometimes
expresses it: There is no "Streitkultur" in the German Intelligenzia,
but rather more an un-culture of vicious ideological defamation and ad hominem
attacks. See 20JH, p. 262-263, where he becomes quite explicit:
"... wobei auffällt, dass es in Deutschland zwar das Wort für die Sache
gibt, die Sache selbst aber fehlt, weil bei uns anstelle von Streitkultur eine
Hetzkultur, eine Denunziationskultur, eine Herabsetzungskultur entstanden ist,
in der die Dinge vorentschieden sind"... I don't think that there can be a more poignant
expression than this one.
I
personally rather like to view this scenario from the viewpoint of an
anthropologist. Possibly I would even like to take the position of a visting
anthropologist from another very distant interstellar civilization who has
chosen to study the wheelings and dealings of the humanoid inhabitants of the
planet Earth from the stance of a distanced and impartial observer. Or as
Popper (1962) once expressed it: As a visiting Anthropologist doing field
research on the "Totems and Tabus of the natives of the mostly white races
of north-western Europe and North America". In one of my more pointed
definitions of what an anthropologist should consider his main task, is that to
study all those things that the normal "civilized" humans would never
admit that they are doing, despite their overt laws&order and
rules®ulations and their moralðical pro-fessions. A famous saying
about puritanism illustrates the point: "Puritanism means that you can do
anything whatsoever, as long as you don't enjoy it". We can conduct an
anthropological criticism of the ethics and moral rule systems of
"higher" civilizations which mostly mean verbal-written-rational-legal
codes. As opposed to the mostly unwritten "oral tradition" of the
unwritten and often unspoken "Totems and Taboos" of the more
"indigenous" oriented societies.
The Kantian
Ethics are a good example for this. Also we find the Roman system of law as
written out in the Justinian corpus which has more or less become the
foundation of all European Law systems. And in a further development, we find
the code of Napoleon. Because of all those rules®ulations there is a
French way of thinking about law, and one can state it about like this:
"For every exception there must also be a rule or law from which the
exception is derived". And in this context we can quote Sloterdijk's
infamous works on "Menschenpark" and his essay on the
"Self-Domestication" of humanity. See 20JH p. 44-69. The arguments
that Sloterdijk gives are mostly derived from the Neo-Spencerian work by Heiner
Mühlmann "Die Natur der Kulturen". This is based on the "maximal
stress cooperation" MSC theory derived from warfare. He also quotes Arnold
Gehlen on p. 49 in 20JH. Also it should be noted that these theories can be
traced back to the ideas of Hobbes in "Leviathan". Sloterdijk also
references Bazon Brock's ideas of "Selbst-Fesselung" meaning that it
is a social-sanitary precaution that one should not try to comptletely fill out
the limits of expression, be this the artistic expression, or the political and
law expression, or the power potential of science and technology. In any case,
the work 20JH sums up a lot of Sloterdijk's earlier works in shorter chapters
and with less excessive metaphors and ruminations. One could call it a
"Reader's Digest" of the Sloterdijk oevre, which comes in fitting
that it also marks the end of his Akademik career as the Principal of
the Karlsruhe "Hochschule für Gestaltung".
The
anthropological view of akademik philosophy notes that it has its more or less
explicit rules of discourse and conduct, meaning that it should be rational in
the western philosophical definition of rationality. Clearly the controversy
around Sloterdijk's work is going far beyond or better beneath rationality.
There can be an Anthropology of Philosophy but not a Philosophy of
Anthropology. Sloterdijk expresses this a similar vein, when he says that the theologians
seek ever higher suprematizations of their god, whereas the god of the
Morphologians goes into ever more profound depths. And I include here the
observation that theology is a human philosophical endeavor, and in my view,
the Morphologians are also Anthropologists. And the Philosophical Anthropology
must by needs be more profound than the mostly eurocentric western Philosophy,
since it must encompass the whole of humanity and not just its Western European
offshoots. And Anthropology has in its scope a very much wider view of humanity
than the verbal-alphabetic-centric writing culture that is at the base of
Western philosophy. I may make a short reference of Semiotics, because the
endless superposition of textual interpretation is another way to express a
sort of "nearly infinite regress" that is possible when we construct
"almost infinite levels" of contexturalization. They reach as far as
the human spirit can go, and end only when the human energy or mental power is
completely exhausted.
And there
is a point to make that the ancient Greek Sophist way of argument orignally
depended entirely on the spoken word, it was still an oral culture. Also the
Roman legal system was initially purely oral-verbal. The art of the Orator was
highly evolved, and we may cite the works of Cicero in this context. Also the
work of Augustinus is based mainly on his ability as Orator and Lawyer. And so
it is no suprise that Augustinus is also the author of one of the must
inquisitive studies of The Art of Memory, but this time with a Christian
"modulation" as one could say. From the antique tradition derive
these many "Arts of Memory" that were re-discovered in the
Renaissance. The Warburg Library holds one of the largest data bases on this.
Giordano Bruno was one of the last Grand Masters of the art, and Frances Yates
is most famous for her work on that subject. The work of Umberto Eco and the
Semioticians derives at least some of their materials from these sources.
My personal
view of Sloterdijk's work is pretty much in the vein of Nietzsche's famous
dictum: "Thou shalt not only love thyne enemyes, but thou shalt also
loathe thyne friends." And surely, Peter Sloterdijk is no friend of mine.
So I quote one of mye owne favourythe Byble verse, Matthew 5:44
But I say'eth
unto thou, thou shalt Love thy enemyes, bless theym that curse thou, doe goode
to thym that loathe thy, and praye'the for thym why despitefully use thy, and
persycuthe thy.
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/jubilaeum-wechselseitiger-schuettelverkehr-1.3559872
https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/was-ist-ein-philosophieboom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sloterdijk
https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-14022505.html
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kritik_der_zynischen_Vernunft
Die Kritik der zynischen Vernunft ist ein 1983 erschienenes zweibändiges Werk des deutschen Philosophen Peter Sloterdijk. Das Werk behandelt den Kynismus/Zynismus als gesellschaftliches Phänomen der europäischen Geschichte.
https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-14022505.html
AG: Da der Spiegel wie immer schreibt, wenn er einige Schreiberlinge nicht mag, so mag diese Spiegel-Schreiberei als Beispiel dafür gelten, was herauskommt, wenn man das Spiegel-Ei ohne Ei serviert bekommt:
13.06.1983 / Imperiale Gebärde, rasante Gedanken
Reinhard Merkel über Peter Sloterdijks Kultbuch „Kritik der zynischen Vernunft“ ....
Die „FAZ“ hat den Autor mit Schopenhauer verglichen. - Reinhard Merkel, 33, arbeitet am Institut für Rechtsphilosophie der Universität München.
Ein großer bunter Luftballon
steigt auf, und in der Atmosphäre beginnt es zu klingen. Eine philosophische
Flaumfeder, leicht und schön, tanzt hoch über den ausgestorbenen Fluren aller
Dagewesenheiten, und ein vielstimmiger Chorus hebt an: Gepriesen sei der Name
des Herrn. 200 Jahre nach der "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" deutet
einer im Pantheon der Kultur auf den leeren Platz neben Immanuel Kant und sagt,
wenn auch mit feinem Lächeln: meiner!
Sloterdijks erstaunliche
Phantasie vollzieht eine danteske geistige Fahrt durch die Geschichte der
abendländischen Vernunft. Aber es ist eine umgekehrte Göttliche Komödie: der
Weg führt aus dem Paradiso durch eine Art De-Purgatorio zum Inferno, an dessen
historischem Rand im Jahre 1933 Sloterdijks Diabolische Komödie abbricht. Der
Blick des Autors ermißt eine 2500jährige Distanz zwischen zwei Gelächtern:
Jenem anekdotisch berühmten der
thrakischen Magd, die dem beim Sternegucken in eine Grube gefallenen Thales von
Milet zurief, wie er glauben könne, den Himmel zu erkennen, wenn er nicht
einmal die Löcher in der Erde sehe;
[AG: The story of Thales of Milet goes a little differently:
Thales did astronomical observations from the bottom of a well, since this was
in antiquity the way to observe something in the sky without interference from
other objects. The difference between the observations of the sun's position at
differenct latitudes allowed to calculate the circumference of the earth.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/thales/#H8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
He is best known for being the first person to
calculate the circumference of the Earth, which he did by comparing angles of the mid-day Sun at two places, a known North-South
distance apart.[2] His
calculation was remarkably accurate. He was also the first to calculate
the tilt of the Earth's axis, again with remarkable accuracy.[3] Additionally,
he may have accurately calculated the distance
from the Earth to the Sun and
invented the leap day.[4] He
created the first global projection of the world, incorporating parallels and meridians based on the available geographic knowledge
of his era.
]
Bunt
wie ein Paradiesvogel entfaltet die Phantasie des Buches ihre Flügel, die sie
in pulsierender Bewegung über einen weiten Horizont von Themen, Assoziationen
und Symbolen tragen: zwei Begriffe, mobil genug für solche Dynamik - "Zynismus"
und "Kynismus". "Zynismus ist das aufgeklärte falsche Bewußtsein
- das unglückliche Bewußtsein in modernisierter Form", ein Bewußtsein, das
seine Fähigkeiten mit dem Verlust seiner Moral bezahlt, seine herrische
Verfügungsmacht über die Außenwelt mit dem Orientierungsverlust seiner
Innenwelt. ...
Mit der Wunderkerze einer funkelnden, manchmal begeisternden Sprache leuchtet Sloterdijk diesen riesenhaften gedanklichen und geschichtlichen Horizont aus. Aus dem Zwielicht des diffusen Zynismus tauchen Gesichter auf. Philosophen und Henker, Dichter und Feldherren, auch Masken und Lemuren, Lügen und Kunstwerke. Im Sturmschritt seiner Diktion durchläuft Sloterdijk das Szenarium, erhellend, was seine Phantasie zu fassen bekommt: die Aufklärung. ...
Ein Herr Schütte, der sich auszukennen
meint, hat Sloterdijks 1000-Seiten-Tat in der "Frankfurter Rundschau"
als einen "Schlag ins verstaubte Kontor unseres zeitgenössischen
Philosophierens" gefeiert. Tatsächlich hat Sloterdijks empfindliches Gemüt
einen seit Jahren in der Kulturkulisse summenden Ton, ein schlechtes Geräusch
aus vernunftfeindlicher An-sich-Klugheit, habitueller Ironie und neuer
Weinerlichkeit aufgefangen und auf seinen blankpolierten Begriff gebracht. Ein
epidemisch grassierender Gehirnzustand, oszillierend zwischen Orakel und
Grille, also etwa zwischen Nouveaux Philosophes und Bhagwan, dürfte hier die
theoretische Platt-Form finden für jenen sanften Bewußtseinsimperialismus, der
nicht "kynisch" ist, sondern ein Selbstmordmotiv.
https://www.zeit.de/1985/31/ein-unbeschriebenes-blatt/komplettansicht
https://www.zeit.de/2009/40/Sloterdijk-Blasen/komplettansicht
There is a
quite interesting field of German
"Sprachblasen" (language bubbles) which is almost in-translatable
into other languages. This may be an intellectual art form of over-reaching,
over-boarding, and otherwise misplaced metaphors that seems to
thrive and flourish in the hydroponic beds of German Intellectualism.
I include some of these "Sprachblasen" just for the sake of
documentation. They don't have any meaning for me, and probably nothing
useful at all for all the rest of the world.
https://www.fr.de/kultur/literatur/kunstvolle-zerreibung-einer-welterzaehlung-11732960.html
Die Erzählbegabung: fast
geschenkt. Wer käme da heute als Denk-Prosaist (nicht nur im deutschen
Sprachraum) Sloterdijk gleich? Allenfalls Slavoj Zizek, ein freilich noch vagabundierenderer
Geist, unsteter in seinen Anknüpfungspunkten, mit schöner Schlagseite zu
Trivialitätsphänomenen vom Konsumfilm bis zur Popkultur. Derlei erledigt
Sloterdijk eher nebenbei. Er liebt mehr die Höhenluft. Versteht sich als
Urenkel Nietzsches. ...
Ein Gedanke, den die bis vor
kurzem unumstößlich scheinende Fortschrittsapologie perhorreszierte wie nichts
sonst. Sloterdijk propagiert mitnichten die "zyklischen" Weltbilder
konservativer Konsistenz, wenn er auch aus seiner Fortschritts-Skepsis keinen
Hehl macht. Seinen philosophischen Rundbau errichtet er indes nicht in der
steinernen Massivität eines abgeschlossenen Systems. Kein Weltgeist tönt aus
hoher Kuppel. Eher siedelt Sloterdijks Geist in beweglichen, zur Verflüssigung
tendierenden Raumgestalten. In Fruchtblasen eben oder Globus-Imaginationen,
dehnfähig und aufnehmbar für alle erdenklichen Erweiterungen, auch im Sinne des
aktuellen Modells "Globalisierung". ...
Deren Fixierung an den Zeitpfeil
war vor allem in der marxistischen Denktradition eher optimistisch grundiert -
so stellt sich Ernst Blochs Prinzip Hoffnung vor allem als imposante Zeitreise durch eine bis heute andauernde
"Vorgeschichte" des aus der Latenz sich herausentwickelnden Humanum
dar. Von Blochs Gläubigkeit ist Sloterdijk äonenweit entfernt, aber von der
Abenteuerlichkeit seiner Spurensuche ist er, seinerseits ein
Abenteuerschriftsteller, nach wie vor begeistert. ...
... dass derartiger
philosophischer Rückenwind für die "westlichen Werte", im Gegensatz
sowohl zu Adornos (oder Benjamins) Grauen vor den dunklen Seiten der Moderne
als auch zu Heideggers düsterem Existenz-Heroismus, etwas Hausbackenes,
Philiströses ausstrahlt. Dem allzu offensichtlichen Anschein pausbäckiger
Affirmation entgeht Sloterdijks so und durch mitunter herrenreiterhaft
snobistische Attituden und, bei aller Mitteilsamkeit, oft auch einen Hang zu
eskapistischer sprachkombinatorischer Hermetik. ...
Nur, dass er die von ihm
hergestellten Räume dann auch wieder zerstört oder gelassen zusieht, wie sie
sich nach ihrer Bildung, Ein- oder Ausbildung, im Fortschreiten der Analyse
auch wieder auflösen. Am kompaktesten gibt sich, im ersten Kapitel (dem eine
immense, ein Drittel des Bandes ausmachende Einleitung vorausgeht), die
neunfache Aufteilung "anthropogener Inseln" in Chirotop, Phonotop,
Uterotop, Thermotop, Erototop, Ergotop, Alethotop, Thanatotop und Nomotop. Ein
wenig flüchtig übersetzt: Berührungswelt, Klangsphäre, Weltbrutkästen,
Wärmeraum, Begehrens- und Eifersuchtsfelder, Kampf- und Anstrengungszusammenhang,
Wissensraum, Transzendenz, Gesetzes- und Verfassungskontext.
This
discussion of Sloterdijk's work is just a little less polemical than what the
German Intelligenzia could come up with. And I also postulate it that someone
who doesn't know German and Classical Greek in-and-out is in no position to
understand the finer subtleties of Heidegger's philosophy. His is a totally
different mode of thinking and that sets him apart from all the Romanized and
Latinized thinkers of the European tradition. So it is of no use at all when
one quotes a lot of French intellectuals in order to set something straight
about Heidegger. And even though Nietzsche didn't like the German way of
thinking at all, he was so deeply steeped in the Greek modes of thinking that
he didn't realize how these two languages and thinking systems were
"morphologically identical". Of course in my own version of
Morphology. And Nietzsche had only Goethe as his "Spiritus Rector" to
lean on. Even Schopenhauer was not in the same class of Greek thinking, since
Sch. had been in fierce opposition to Hegel's Idealism. And so Schopenhauer was
much more used to think the British'er Empirism way. And it was Whitehead who
managed to bridge all those mental / philosophical abysses.
http://reviewsinculture.com/2013/06/15/the-shape-of-things/
Issue 4.1
| June 15, 2013
Peter
Sloterdijk. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Trans. Wieland Hoban.
Semiotext(e),
2011. 664pp.
For anyone even
remotely interested in philosophy, when a figure sets out to “correct”
Heidegger, you want to pay attention. This is not necessarily out of admiration
for the author of Being and Time, or his ideas, but rather out of a genuine
curiosity made up of equal parts amazement and horror. The interest would be
compulsory, akin to intellectual rubbernecking, for it is more than likely that
he or she, the subject of such an utterance, will, like Heidegger, be
vulnerable to intense scrutiny and interpretation. Therefore, when MIT Press
describes the much-anticipated Spheres trilogy by Peter Sloterdijk as “the
late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger’s Being and Time,” there is
reasonable expectation for it to be disastrous.
Ever since the
English translation of his The Critique of Cynical Reason in 1988, Sloterdijk
has been known in English-speaking intellectual circles as somewhat of a
mercurial figure. Not much, still, is known about him. From where, that is,
what intellectual milieu or tradition, did he emerge? Is he a Frankfurt guy? Is
he a Luhmannite? Is he Heideggerian? The rather out-of-nowhere character of
Sloterdijk’s work, as well as the inconsistent reception of his work outside a
handful of watchers of developments in continental philosophy and social
theory, placed Sloterdijk in the category of “heard of him” (otherwise known as
“oh right, he wrote that one thing”) in North American cultural theory.
But
Sloterdijk’s trajectory differed tremendously in his native Germany. When
copies of Cynical Reason started leaving the shelves at a rapid pace upon its
release, the then-journalist was boosted into the highbrow German intellectual
scene traditionally filled with academics. [AG: he forgets that Sloterdijk had
a Dr. of philosophy.]
Today, we can
count Sloterdijk among the country’s public intellectuals, a group that also
includes luminaries like Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth (more
on these two later). Sloterdijk is also host to a show called “Das
Philosophische Quartett” (The Philosophical Quartet), which airs on ZDF,
the German equivalent to PBS in the United States or NHK in Japan. It features
Sloterdijk alongside guests of various intellectual pedigrees, from academics
to journalists.
More recently,
Sloterdijk has made himself known among the wider American reading public for a
controversy involving welfare state politics, class, ressentiment and
Axel Honneth. As a blog post on the Global Post summarizes:
According to an
article published this past summer in one of Germany’s most widely read
newspapers, the country’s welfare state is a “fiscal kleptocracy” that has
transformed the country into a “swamp of resentment” and degraded its citizens
into “mystified subjects of tax law.” The text, by philosopher Peter
Sloterdijk, goes on in that vein for some 3,000 words[…]
Among the
country's intellectual class, the article has served as kindling for a fiercely
fought and wide-ranging conversation about the national economy that, six
months on, still shows little sign of abating. (Abadi)
The
article, entitled “Die Revolution der gebenden Hand” (“The Revolution of
the Grasping Hand”), ...
[[AG:
I must correct some things right here and now. It is exactly the
opposite mis-translation. "Die gebende Hand" is the giving hand. The
hand of the tax collector is the Grasping Hand. And as an
Anthropologist, I must also correct those poor Intelligenzia-Intellectuals:
Because the system of honor taxes was very widespread and very
successful in almost all "indigenous" or paleo-historic societies. It
was written about in so many stories like Marcel Mauss, and the system
of Potlatch, and the "Feast of the Pigs". Only the poor
US- & European Intelligenzia-Intellectuals didn't know anything
about that. Philosophical Anthropology has had at least some chances to step
aside from the purely eurocentric (alphabet-centric) ways of
intellectualizing, but they nover bothered to do so.
I
also should mention Leslie White here, since he had been an antagonist
of Franz Boas. This didn't serve him well, even though he was at some time
the president of the American Anthropological Association. There were also some
quite fierce ideological battles in American Anthropology, but the Americans
had the advantage that they could not be suspected of being "Crypto-Nazi".
They were just more or less openly "Herbert Spencerians". The
latter one is remembered for his dictum "the survival of the
fittest". There was just one slight problem with that interpretation. In
the Darwinistic sense, being fit means to fit. And there is no
grammatical suprematization of being "fit". No-one of his
followers had understood that "fittest" is a grammatical oxymoron.
You can just take a key and a lock as example. The key that opens the
lock, is fitting. But there can be no more "fitting" key. This is
logically impossible. And we can turn the argument on its head when we study
the Paleontology of Natural History. It were always the "most fitting"
species that died out first. Because the Climate and the Biospheric conditions
change all the time over periods of x* 100.000 or 1.000.000 years. So whenever
there was a slight change in the Biospheric conditions, those
"fittest" organisms died out first. Only the non-specific or not-so-fitting
organisms survived. So it came to pass that the humans as the most
egregiously "not-so-fitting" species of the whole Biosphere came
to dominate all the rest of it. Because in the distant past when the dinosaurians
ruled, our precursors and very distant ancestors were just some shrews. They
could only take over when the atmospheric conditions had changed sufficiently.
After the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, the earth atmosphere became
much thinner, and only suitable for present life-forms.
Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(book)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_White
Leslie Alvin White (January 19, 1900, Salida, Colorado
– March 31, 1975, Lone
Pine, California) was an American anthropologist known for his
advocacy of theories of cultural
evolution, sociocultural
evolution, and especially neoevolutionism,
and for his role in creating the department of anthropology
at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. He
was president of the American Anthropological Association (1964).
]]
...must be read
as a polemic. While it includes some semblance of genealogical (in the
Foucauldian sense) analysis of the modern democratic welfare state, its primary
purpose is to offend. He begins with a meditation on the birth of the
democratic state as the compromise between classical liberalism and anarchism,
each of which was amenable to the declining significance of the state. For
liberalism, the state needed to be minimal and imperceptible to its subjects,
the citizens. For anarchism, the state needed to be destroyed. Hence, the
“modern democratic state gradually transformed into the debtor state, within
the space of a century metastasizing into a colossal monster—one that breathes
and spits out money” (Sloterdijk, “The Grasping Hand”). For a Europe that is
currently under much economic turmoil, and with a Germany that is currently
embroiled in a national debate, hinging in large part on a parochial stance
toward Southern Europe as fiscally irresponsible debtees, about whether to
“bail out” Greece and Spain, this article, for many of its critics, amounted
basically to “piling on.” Further, according to its critics, it preyed on
extant, albeit latent, nationalist sentiment, which culminated in the infamous
book by Thilo Sarrazin, which all but placed the entirety of Germany's economic
woes on its immigrants.
This was the
context for the retort by Honneth, one of the last remaining flag bearers of
the Frankfurt School. There he accused Sloterdijk of, among many things, being
an ideological mouthpiece for advanced capitalism, “a mystical or speculative
[interpreter] of history and the world,” and, rather strangely, a reader of
Michel Foucault.[1] The gist of Honneth's
critique, which I cannot fully assess in this space, is that Sloterdijk has
taken ressentiment as “first psychology” of the lower classes and has attempted
to pull the rug from up under the very foundations of European liberal
democracy—the welfare state—by criticizing it. I bring up Honneth’s public spat
with Sloterdijk in order to portray a picture of the latter that presents not
only his prominence in the German intellectual scene but also his embattled
public image. While Sloterdijk may only recently be gaining mass recognition in
North America, he has, in Europe, at least, been a visible presence for the
past two decades or so.
For Sloterdijk,
the problematic of inhabitation is that which courses through the veins of
Western metaphysics and philosophy. The “old cosmology of ancient Europe,” as
he calls it, “that rested on equating the house and home with the world,” can
be seen in even the disparate philosophies of Hegel and Heidegger. Humans in
this view were “inhabitants in a crowded building called cosmos”(Sloterdijk,
“Spheres Theory”). As it was for his most obvious predecessor, Gaston
Bachelard, the motif of the house—signifying order, unity and certainty—is one
that unduly holds too much purchase in the West. For Sloterdijk, the
Enlightenment should have dispelled the need for a “universal house in order to
find the world a place worthy of inhabiting” (Ibid.). Yet, it remains, thanks
in part to philosophers such as Heidegger, whose self-proclaimed task to “end
metaphysics” as such did not do away with the, if we can call it something, the
“metaphysics of the universal house.” Sloterdijk’s project, therefore, in his
three-volume study called Spheres, is to forge a path beyond Heidegger, by providing
a general theory of “associations.”
For Heidegger,
the overarching question of metaphysics was temporal—with the keywords “being”
and “becoming.” For Sloterdijk, it is spatial; the keyword is “world.” While it
is the case that Sloterdijk views Heidegger to have been wrong all along, there
is something about the current technological, socio-political moment that has
occasioned a particular response. Sloterdijk writes:
It's
the final stage of a process that began in the epoch of Greek philosophical cosmology,
and whose present vectors are rapid transportation as well as ultra-high-speed
telecommunication. At the same time, it's the product of a radical
disappointment, whereby human beings had to abandon the privilege of inhabiting
a real cosmos—which is to say, a closed and comforting world. The cosmos, such
as the Greeks conceived it, was the totality of being imagined under the form
of a great, perfectly symmetrical bubble. Aristotle and his followers were
responsible for this idea of a cosmos composed of concentric, celestial spheres
of increasing diameters, the majority of which consisted of a hypothetical
material they called ether. For us, this model of the world is obviously no
longer operational. (Sloterdijk, “Foreword to the Theory of Spheres” 223)
In response to
this “inoperability,”[2] Sloterdijk offers a
“spherology,” beginning from the micro, which is the subject of volume I of
Spheres entitled Bubbles, all the way to the macro, the subject of volume III,
entitled Foams. Sphere, for Sloterdijk, does not assume a totality or finality
as the phenomenologically inflected “lifeworld” or “world” entails. As he puts
it rather paradoxically, “the primordial existential sphere is created every
time a moment of inter-psychic space happens” (Sloterdijk, “Foreword to the
Theory of Spheres” 223–224). Against the weight of “existence,” Sloterdijk puts
forth a succession of events, of happenings, wherein meaningful and significant
connections are made but do not suffocate. Hence, the microspherology he
presents in Bubbles, the volume under review, is, at root, a theory of
“atmosphere” or as he likes to say, of “air.” He chooses these ethereal
metaphors as he believes that spheres, the closest Heideggerian cognate being
Stimmung (more on this later), “never speak but…brings everything together and
makes everything possible…a treasure that that allowed human beings to realize
the fact that they’re always already immersed in something almost imperceptible
and yet very real, and that this space of immersion dominates the changing
states of the soul down to its most intimate modifications” (Sloterdijk,
“Foreword to the Theory of Spheres” 225).
The development
of this “spatial vocabulary” is necessary, therefore, because the concept of
“world” is simply too bulky to do anything analytically. “Sphere” works better
for several reasons. For one, it is more in tune with the development of
modernity, which is characterized by “the increasing removal of safety
structures from the traditional theological and cosmological narratives”
(Sloterdijk, Bubbles 25) that used to provide human subjectivity with a degree
of ontological security by providing human beings a place in the world, which was
fixed, identifiable and orientating. Yet, these “safety structures” in the form
of “worlds,” according to Sloterdijk, remained. While the emergence of the
Figure of Man, allowed for humans to become the subject and object of
knowledge, the “empirico-transcendental” as Foucault so rightly put it, it did
not mean the complete “end of metaphysics.” It just diverted the sublimated
energy. “People,” Sloterdijk precisely notes, “no longer wanted to receive
their inspired ideas from embarrassing heavens”(Sloterdijk, Bubbles 28).
Instead of God, these ideas came from within, so to speak, albeit mediated via
technology, which reflected the “distance between what God was capable of in
illo tempore and what humans will, in time, themselves be capable of” (37). Hence,
supposedly secular models of subjectivity that emerged in the wake of the
scientific revolutions of Galileo, Copernicus and later Newton, nonetheless
remained closely tied to the imago Dei. The image of man as God simply shifted
the flow of power from one end to another. It did not reconstitute the very
elements of the prior cosmological system. The shape of the world, even after
the emergence of the Figure of Man, did not much change.
But it was not
just the shape of the system that did not budge, but rather the way things in
it related to one another. While Sloterdijk takes much care to provide various
illustrations having to do with the contours of what he is describing, he is in
fact attempting to describe relationality. One could even go so far as to say
that for him the way in which certain elements in a system relate—let us call
this the “relational quantum”—gives the system itself shape. Thus to call
something “foam,” “bubble,” or “sphere” is really an attempt by Sloterdijk to
theorize a “connecting force.” Spheres, then, are “the original product of
human coexistence.” In other words, spheres form out of the relations of
certain existing ontological objects, or as Sloterdijk tends to call them,
“nobjects.” Spheres therefore are unlike environments. “Environment,” while
certainly a milieu for the facilitation of elements in action therein, is
nevertheless a top-down way of thinking about social forms. Environments are
determinants and causes, though perhaps not linear or direct ones. They are,
still, somehow initiators. Spheres are more “atmospheric-symbolic places.” They
are like “air” or even “air-conditioning systems in whose construction and
calibration, for those living in real coexistence . . . is out of the question
not to participate” (46). “Living in spheres” is indeed a condition, a
structure but one which is dynamic and ethereal. It “means inhabiting a shared
subtlety” (46. Emphasis added).
Bubbles, the
first volume of the project, is a “theory of the shared inside” (542). The
bubble is the first step, the most elemental, the smallest unit of sphere. The
question, of course, is what kind of bubble are we talking about here? In
describing it, Sloterdijk references a variety of illustrations, including
vaginas, wombs and soap. Stranger still is Sloterdijk’s embrace of the term
“soul,” not the Cartesian variety but the Platonic one. Spheres are a form of
“soul expansion” that would have previously been associated with “spirit,”
although Sloterdijk claims that what was “meant was always inspired spatial
communities” (19). But today, there is no thinking about spatial communities
without thinking of networks, which has triggered “a general space crisis,” or
what Paul Virilio calls “the annihilation of space.” This complicates, in
particular, age-old ideas about subjectivity.
According to
Sloterdijk, the annihilation of space finally reveals the myth of individual
autonomy, which he describes as the “basic neurosis of Western culture,” that
is, “to dream of a subject that watches, names and owns everything, without
letting anything contain, appoint or own it, not even if the discreetest God
offered himself as an observer, container and client” (86). The Enlightenment
emphasized and augmented loneliness as the default setting of the human being.
This is the case not only with the ancients but also with Hegel and Heidgger in
particular. To the contrary, for Sloterdijk, there is, what we can call, a
primary “intimacy” between beings. Even phenomenological conceptions of
“intersubjectivity” took as its quantum the individual, perceiving subject—a
point made loud and clear most acutely by post-structuralist critics. But more
to the point, the Modern Age too easily discarded the primacy of, what
Sloterdijk describes as a magolological and erotological tendency. He writes:
Among
humans, fascination is the rule and disenchantment the exception. As
desiring and imitating begins, humans constantly experience that they not only
hold a lonely potential for desiring the other within themselves, but also that
they manage, in an opaque and non-trivial manner, to infect the objects of
their desire with their own longing for them; at the same time, individuals
imitate the other's longing for a third element as if under some infectious
compulsion…Where philosophy of the early Modern Age mentions such effects of
resonance and infection, it spontaneously draws on the vocabulary
of magological traditions. As easy as antiquity, it was reflection on
affective causalities of the magical type that initiated the clarification of
the interpersonal or inter demonic concert, which, from Plato's time on, was
interpreted as a work of eros. (208)
Tracing this
genealogy magolological of relation from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern
Age allows for Sloterdijk to contrast the spheres’ model of relationality to
that of subjectivity, which he, after Lacan, refers to as the psychoanalytic
model. In large part, he does this to tie it to Judeo-Christian understandings
of The Law, which “does not encourage merging, but constantly makes the case for
constructive separations; its focus is not intimate fusion, but rather the
discretion of the subject in relation to the other” (217). The Law model of
subjectivity, we can argue, is the basis for so many of the recent theories of
the subject that are no doubt derivative of Lacan and Althusser. In the
Althusserian version, which I think Sloterdijk has in mind although he more
explicitly takes aim at Lacan, the subject is the subject of ideology,
constituted in and through the ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses) that have
surrounded the subject’s entire identity through various layers of
institutional identity formation and recognition. Thus, when the police officer
hails you, the subject was always already interpellated, as evidenced by the
subject's assumption that it is he that office is addressing. Put in
juxtaposition to Sloterdijk, this model seems to be top-down in that there is
no theory of “bindability” beyond the superstructural notion of “ideology.”
This amounts to sacrificing the “relationships between things” for
“being-in-itself” (220). Put differently, Sloterdijk identifies in this model
of subjectivity an overemphasis on the ontic.
The question of
the ontic most certainly leads to questions around notions of thinghood and
objects. Especially nowadays, there has been a flurry of philosophical interest
in ideas of object-oriented ontology. “Things” or objects are a subject of
serious theoretical inquiry. Sloterdijk, hardly a source for many of the
thinkers associated with OOO and speculative realism, nevertheless shares these
analytic concerns.[3] Subjectivity is but one
rather convenient level for him to begin. It is a point of entry, not his
primary intellectual concern. Nevertheless, the importance of relationality
brings Sloterdijk to theorize objects, those very entities whose relations he
expresses such profound interest in. In large part, he use the term “nobject”
from Thomas Macho, a German cultural theorist whose work has not quite reached
the English-speaking theory world quite yet.[4] In Sloterdijk’s rendering,
nobjects are “things, media or persons that fulfill the function of the living
genius or intimate augmenter for subjects” (467). They are “objects that…are
not objects because they have no subject-like counterpart” (294). His examples
of “nobjects” include air as well as placental blood. Air, he writes, “possesses
unmistakable nobject properties as it affords the incipient subject a first
chance at self-activity in respiratory autonomy, but without ever appearing as
a thing with which to have a relationship” (295). Placental blood is one of the
many images of the gynecological register that Sloterdijk draws from throughout
the work. The womb is of particular importance to Sloterdijk as it functions to
counter the assumed importance of “primary narcissism” (320). Instead, he says
that there is a primary duality, which is born out not only in art (a
privileged area of evidence for Sloterdjik) but also in mythology.
This leads him
to venture into some rather odd places. For instance, in a chapter on what he
calls “the primal companion,” he spends a lot of space on what he calls the
“sanitization of afterbirth.” There, he argues that the importance of
afterbirth which subsequently suffered from a “bourgeois-individualist” attempt
to retroactively isolate the subject. He even goes so far as to offer a
periodization. He notes that “modern individualism could only enter its intense
phase in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the general clinical
and cultural excommunication of the placenta began” (384). Thus the “lonely
modern subject” is a “fission product from the informal separation of birth and
afterbirth. Its positively willful being is tainted by a fault to which it will
never admit: that it rests on the elimination of its most intimate pre-object”
(386). Hence, the Modern Age can be thought of as defined by “placental
nihilism.”
Undoubtedly
this is stylization taken to the nth degree. But there is something to
Sloterdijk's overuse of the metaphor. He views the maternal relationship as the
proto-type for his theory of relationality in spheres—“proto-subjectivity.”
“[I]ntimacy is a transmission relationship . . . not taken from the symmetrical
alliance between twins or like-minded parties, where each mirrors the other,
but from the irresolvable asymmetrical communion between the maternal voice and
the fetal ear” (511). While one could not blame any reader for being fed up
with Sloterdijk’s “illustrative” method, there is, in my mind at least, a
method, that is, a clear intention on the part of Sloterdijk. The imagistic
aspect of his illustrative method is born out in not only the dearth of
examples that he uses, but in the countless photographs and illustrations that
Sloterdijk includes in Bubbles.
But returning
to the issue of spheres and proto-subjectivity, Sloterdijk does not necessarily
spend all of his efforts in a nostalgic explication for a time where
ontological thinking was not devoid of magolological or erotological elements.
Instead, he suggests that “modern mass culture” already exhibits this sort of
reality of spheres as it “offers new, direct ways of fulfilling the desire for
homeostatic communion.” He goes on to argue that “pop music and its
derivatives” allow for the “possibility of diving into a body of rhythmic noise
in which critical ego functions become temporarily dispensable” (527). These
sorts of communions share in common with religious communions the opportunity
for “absorption,” as he calls it. The most telling of examples he provides is
that of the Love Parade, held in Berlin for a long time but later moved to
other cities in Germany. Up until its recent cancellation, the Love Parade was
characterized by its particularly EDM (electronic dance music)-heavy focus,
exhibitionist ethos, and the sheer number of attendees with figures (though
disputed) reported to be in the hundreds of thousands. Of this festival,
Sloterdijk writes:
…[T]hey
could easily be called “Truth Parades,” as their aim is to absorb large numbers
of people, all of whom value the attributes of their individuality, into happy,
symbiotic reversible and thus “true” sonospheres. These communions with the
audio gods or the rhythmic juggernauts are based on the same truth model as
post-Freudian psychoanalysis—with the difference that the latter recommends
that its clients develop a strict individual rhetoric of mourning for the lost
primal object, while integristic music therapy in the streets relies on
drug-assisted group euphorias that may advance flirtation with absorption into
a spheric primal body in the short term, but yield little profit for the
participants’ media competence in the sobering periods that follow (527–528).
It is in this
unlikely example of the Love Parade, where I believe the key to Sloterdijk’s
“theory of the shared inside” lies. By viewing this music festival as
“communion,” and thus employing a religious register, Sloterdijk arguably
betrays, what I view to be, his true intellectual concerns—theology. In showing
that “life is always a life-in-the-midst-of-lives, Being-in, then, should be
conceived as the togetherness of something with something in something” (542),
Sloterdijk ends up using the theological concept of “perichoresis,” which the
Protestant German theologian Jürgen Moltmann in his God in Creation describes
as “the principle of mutual interpenetration.”
In Moltmann's
theology, all relationships “are analogous to God.” This is characterized by a
“primal, reciprocal indwelling and mutual interpenetration,” which in
theological terms is called perichoresis: “God in the world and the
world in God; heaven and earth in the kingdom of God,
pervaded by his glory.” This mutual interpenetration disabuses the notion of a
solitary life. Against a panpsychic Leibnizian monadology, which sees
ontologically individual beings that coordinate with another through a divine
pre-established harmony, Moltmann describes the principle of mutual
interpenetration as all living things “[living] in another and with one
another, from one another and for one another”(Moltmann 17). This is analogous
to Sloterdijk's “onto-theology.”
Yet, no matter
how novel Sloterdijk's overall argument, and mode of argument, in the end, it
is rather familiar because it is, even according to him, a corrective. Bubbles,
and the Spheres trilogy generally, is an attempt to demystify, a tact nearly
identical to the theoretical methods of Rudolf Bultmann but
also—surprisingly—the Frankfurt school, especially Adorno and Horkheimer. To
demythologize is to suggest that if we simply understood the proper genealogy
of a particular concept at the root of contemporary metaphysics, it would make
for a better world. For Sloterdijk, it is “sphere,” whereas for the Frankfurt
School, it was “mass culture.” For all of their public back-and-forths
regarding the German welfare state, it seems that Sloterdijk and Honneth, the
current director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, have more in
common than previously imagined.
Works Cited
Abadi, Cameron. “Germany’s Welfare State Under
Fire.” GlobalPost 9 Jan. 2010. Web. 24 May 2012.
Bogost, Ian. “What Is Object-Oriented
Ontology?” IAN BOGOST – VIDEOGAME THEORY, CRITICISM, DESIGN 8 Dec. 2009. Web.
26 Sept. 2012.
Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman.
The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. re.press, 2011.
Print.
Gregersen, Thomas. “Axel Honneth Versus Peter
Sloterdijk.” Political Theory – Habermas and Rawls 26 Sept. 2009. Web. 25 Sept.
2012.
Harman, Graham. Towards Speculative Realism:
Essays and Lectures. O Books, 2010. Print.
Moltmann, Jurgen. God in Creation. 1st Fortress
Press ed. Fortress Press, 1993. Print.
—. God in Creation. Fortress Press, 1993.
Print.
Salam, Reihan. “The Peter Sloterdijk
Controversy.” The Agenda 12 Jan. 2010. Web. 24 May 2012.
Shingleton, Cameron. “The Great Stage: Axel
Honneth: Against Sloterdijk (Die Zeit, 24 September, 2009).” The Great Stage 11
Feb. 2010. Web. 25 Sept. 2012.
Sloterdijk, Peter. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I:
Microspherology. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e), 2011. Print.
—. Derrida, an Egyptian. 1st ed. Polity, 2009. Print.
—. “Foreword to the Theory of Spheres.”
Cosmograms (2005): 223–240. Print.
—. “Spheres Theory: Talking to Myself About the
Poetics of Space.” Harvard Design Magazine 2009: n. pag. Print.
—. “The Grasping Hand.” City Journal Winter
2010. Web. 24 May 2012.
Virilio, Paul. Polar Inertia. Sage, 2000.
Print.
—. The Information Bomb. Verso Books, 2000.
Print.
—. The Vision Machine. Indiana University
Press, 1994. Print.
Notes
[1] While most of this
exchange never made it to English-language publications, much of it has been
chronicled on blogs. See Gregersen, Thomas. “Axel Honneth Versus Peter
Sloterdijk.” Political Theory – Habermas and Rawls. 26 Sept. 2009. Web. 25
Sept. 2012; Shingleton, Cameron. “The Great Stage: Axel Honneth: Against Sloterdijk
(Die Zeit, 24 September, 2009).” The Great Stage. 11 Feb. 2010. 25 Sept. 2012.
[2] One cannot but help to
think of the continual resonance between Sloterdijk’s project and the recent
work of Jean-Luc Nancy. This is the case not only with the recent work by Nancy
on religious themes and globalization but also his earlier work on
“communality” and “singular plurality.”
[3] There are many books and
other writings, mostly on the World Wide Web, on object-oriented ontology. The
best definition of OOO has come from videogame theorist Ian Bogost. That can be
found at: Bogost, Ian. “What Is Object-Oriented Ontology?” IAN BOGOST –
VIDEOGAME THEORY, CRITICISM, DESIGN 8 Dec. 2009. Web. 26 Sept. 2012. Of the
books, the following anthologies provide suitable introductions. Bryant, Levi,
Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism
and Realism. re.press, 2011. Harman, Graham. Towards Speculative Realism:
Essays and Lectures. O Books, 2010.
[4] There seems to be almost
nothing of Macho’s translated into English. He does, however, have a web site. http://www.culture.hu-berlin.de/tm/
Sam Han is a
Seoul-born, New York City-raised interdisciplinary social scientist, working in
the areas of social and cultural theory, new media, religion, globalization,
and race/ethnicity. He is author of Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2011), Navigating
Technomedia: Caught in the Web (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and editor
(with Daniel Chaffee) of The Race of Time: A Charles Lemert Reader (Paradigm
Publishers, 2009). He is at work on two projects on digital religions in the
United States and in Asia. He is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at
Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore.
He can be found
at: sam-han.org.
Andreas Platthaus. Verantwortlicher Redakteur für Literatur und literarisches Leben. FAZ
Für einen Denker wie Peter Sloterdijk ist die höchste sportliche Herausforderung gerade recht und die natürliche Überlegenheit des Dezimalsystems kein Maßstab. Also ist ihm der Zehnkampf noch zu wenig als Muster für die Disziplinen, die es im Ideenwettkampf zu bewältigen gilt. Stattdessen proklamiert er einen Dreizehnkampf jenes intellektuellen Bemühens, das er als „Allgemeine Disziplinik“ bezeichnet. Zu bedenken und selbstverständlich auch denkend zu bewältigen gilt es demnach die Fragen von Akrobatik und Ästhetik, Athletik, Rhetorik, medizinischer Therapeutik, Epistemik, Berufe-Kunde, Technik-Kunde, Administrativik, Meditation, Ritualistik, Sexualpraxiskunde, Gastronomik und schließlich – weil dreizehn Disziplinen ja doch nicht genügen – eine „offenen Liste kultivierungsfähiger Aktivitäten, deren Offenheit die Unabschließbarkeit des disziplinenbildenden und damit Subjektivierungen ermöglichenden Feldes selbst bedeutet“.
Das klingt kompliziert, aber an dieser letzten Formulierung kann man nicht vorbei, weil sie umreißt, was das Thema von Sloterdijks heute erscheinendem neuen Buch ist. Es heißt „Du musst dein Leben ändern“, nach dem Schluss von Rilkes Sonett „Archaïscher Torso Apollos“, und als Adressaten des Titels darf man gewiss auch die eigenen Kollegen identifizieren, denn der in Karlsruhe lehrende Philosoph hat sich nicht weniger vorgenommen als die Umstürzung aller Bewertungen. Was die westliche Zivilisation an metaphysischen Maßstäben vor allem in der Neuzeit herausgebildet haben, ist hinfällig, weil die wichtigste Bezugsgröße auf einem Irrtum beruhte: der Religion. Die gibt es gar nicht, stellt Sloterdijk mit einem verbalen Donnerschlag bereits in der Einleitung fest, wir haben sie uns selbst ausgedacht: als Missverständnis einer anthropologischen Konstante, die Sloterdijk unter dem Begriff der „Übung“ fasst.
Ihr Prinzip beruht auf der „immunitären Verfassung des Menschenwesens“, also dessen Bestreben, sich materiell, symbolisch und rituell zu perfektionieren, um damit individuelle Schutzgewebe zu schaffen. In der Immunisierung sieht Sloterdijk den Beginn aller Systembildung: der biologischen, die sich in Lebewesen artikuliert, und der kulturellen, die ihren Ausdruck in Praktiken findet. Eine dieser Praktiken – und zwar die zentrale – ist die Übung. Und damit werden Wettkämpfe vorbereitet – im agonalen Sinne der Antike, also nicht im neuzeitlichen Verständnis der Konkurrenz.
Die Disziplinen von Sloterdijks intellektuellem Dreizehnkampf sollen sich allen Werkzeugen widmen, mit denen Menschen an ihren Schutzgeweben arbeiten. Als bisherigen Rekordhalter identifiziert Sloterdijk den Kollegen Foucault, der sich immerhin auf sieben der Denkaufgaben eingelassen habe, während die meisten Philosophen sich allein an die Epistemik als ihr eigentliches Fach und bestenfalls noch an drei weitere gewagt hätten. Aber natürlich musste erst Sloterdijk selbst kommen, um es mit der ganzen wilden Dreizehn aufzunehmen.
Das passiert nicht in „Du musst dein Leben ändern“ allein. Bestmmte Fragenkomplexe finden sich bereits in anderen Büchern Sloterdijks angesprochen, so vor allem in der „Sphären“-Trilogie die Bereiche der Therapeutik, Technik-Kunde oder Sexualpraxiskunde, und in „Der Weltinnenraum des Kapitals“ Teile von Administrativik, Rhetorik und Ritualistik. Im neuen Werk sind es nun vor allem die ersten beiden Disziplinen, in denen Sloterdijk sich übt: Akrobatik und Ästhetik sowie Athletik. Denn in dem Maße, wie das Üben zum neuen Schlüsselbegriff Sloterdijks geworden ist, rückt auch der Begriff der Leistung in den Vordergrund – nicht nur als sportliche Wettkampfmetaphorik. Doch es wäre, wie bereits angedeutet, für Sloterdijk ein Unding, wenn man darin Leistungen im Sinne des neuzeitlichen Gesellschaftssystems erkennen würde, dem er völlige Verirrung deshalb attestiert, weil es die Übungskultur umgemünzt habe zu Training, Ausbildung und Arbeit – also zu Übungen, die nicht länger spirituell-individuelle Ziele verfolgen, sondern einem reibungslosen Teamgeist dienen sollen, der die moderne Arbeitsteilung erst ermöglicht. Was Sloterdijk dagegen zum Ideal erhebt, ist eine Übungskultur, die in der Askese ihre Methode findet.
https://www.zeit.de/2009/40/Sloterdijk-Blasen/komplettansicht
AG: This
really "remarkable" (be-denkens-wert) if you know what the Frankfurter
Schule is, and why they have such a liking for Peter Sloterdijk and vice
versa. To understand this better, one should also know the nice professor Habermas,
who is probably behind the scenes of this whole theater. Habermas and
Sloterdijk really loved to hate each other. As much as an arch-enemy can
love his arch-enemy. Because without the enemy one would have nothing
serious to think of. As I have said this in my chapter on the friendly
enemy, and why the enemy is good for the intelligence. When I read
the article by Axel Honneth, I am reminded of the General Law of German
philosophy, that a serious scholar should be careful never to write a
sentence shorter than 4 to 7 lines of text. This is just to ensure that every
reader recognizes the superior erudition and intelligence of the writer.
This traditon was especially pioneered by Kant and Hegel, and has since
then been the Gold Standard of German philosophical writing. Any
philosopher who writes sentences shorter than that is viewed with the suspicion
that he may be a writer of popular entertainment.
I think
that this passage is very good for an introduction because "Ausscheidenden"
has a double meaning in German. It also means "to excrete", as above
so below, we could say.
Wahrlich, ich rathe euch: geht fort von mir und wehrt euch gegen
Zarathustra! Und besser noch:
schämt euch seiner! Vielleicht betrog er euch.
Der Mensch der Erkenntniss muss
nicht nur seine Feinde lieben, sondern
auch seine Freunde hassen können.
Man vergilt einem Lehrer schlecht,
wenn man immer nur der Schüler
bleibt.
...
Ihr sagt, ihr glaubt an Zarathustra? Aber was liegt an Zarathustra!
Ihr seid meine Gläubigen: aber was
liegt an allen Gläubigen!
Ihr hattet euch noch nicht
gesucht: da fandet ihr mich. So thun alle
Gläubigen; darum ist es so wenig
mit allem Glauben.
Nun heisse ich euch, mich
verlieren und euch finden; und erst, wenn
ihr mich Alle verleugnet habt,
will ich euch wiederkehren.
https://www.zeit.de/2009/40/Sloterdijk-Blasen/komplettansicht
Er ist Professor für Philosophie an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main und seit 2001 Direktor des dortigen Instituts für Sozialforschung, der in den zwanziger Jahren gegründeten »Geburtsstätte« der Kritischen Theorie. Einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit bekannt wurde Honneth mit seinem Buch »Kampf um Anerkennung« (Suhrkamp Verlag), das an den jungen Hegel und den amerikanischen Pragmatisten George Herbert Mead anknüpft. Honneths Philosophie zielt auf eine Kritik an den sozialen Verwerfungen moderner Gesellschaften; ihre Themen sind »Entfremdung«, »Verdinglichung« und »Anerkennungsvergessenheit«. Axel Honneth veröffentlichte zuletzt (zusammen mit Beate Rössler) die Studie »Von Person zu Person. Zur Moralität persönlicher Beziehungen«. Zu seinem 60. Geburtstag (ZEIT Nr. 30/09) erschien – ebenfalls bei Suhrkamp – eine 700 Seiten starke Festschrift mit Beiträgen unter anderem von Nancy Fraser, Eva Illouz, Luc Boltanski, Charles Taylor und Michael Walzer.
Hier ist das Zitat:
Gewiss, die dreibändigen Sphären waren des Umfangs zu viel, um sie sich Seite für Seite auch nur zur Ansicht zu bringen; hier reichte die Kenntnisnahme der schwermütigen These, dass wir alle schon im intrauterinen Zustand ein Gefühl der räumlichen Geborgenheit entwickeln, für welche wir, einmal zur Welt gebracht, dann keinen hinreichenden Ersatz mehr finden. Dieser poetische Philosoph war unzufrieden mit den Umständen in anderer Weise, als es die schnöde Gesellschaftskritik der Alten gewesen war; der kritische Einwand galt nicht der institutionellen Einrichtung unseres Gemeinwesens, nicht dem Mangel an sozialer Gerechtigkeit, sondern der Dürftigkeit einer ganzen Kultur, die den harten Gegebenheiten unseres Daseins nicht ins Angesicht zu schauen wagte. Der methodische Zugang, den sich Sloterdijk zu diesen Tatsachen des sozialen Lebens verschaffte, war allerdings alles andere als von philosophischer Raffinesse; so, als habe es Foucaults Einwand gegen den anthropologischen Essenzialismus nie gegeben, so, als seien alle Warnungen vor der Behauptung kultureller Universalien und menschlicher Invarianten in den Wind zu schlagen, ging Sloterdijk schlicht davon aus, dass es bei genauerem Hinsehen eine Reihe von unvermeidlichen Triebkräften im zivilisatorischen Geschehen zu entdecken gäbe. Auf seinem Weg ins Verheißung suchende Milieu schien der Autor alles vergessen zu haben, was er ursprünglich, etwa in einem frühen, glänzenden Aufsatz zu Foucault, selbst einmal geschrieben und gedacht hatte, sodass er nun frei war, eine Art von intuitiver Wesensschau zu betreiben. Um die Schriften des Autors hatte sich in nur wenigen Jahren ein Kokon aus Verehrung, Faszination und schelmischer Sympathie gelegt, an dem vom postmodernen Rundfunkredakteur bis zum alternden Goethe-Instituts-Direktor viele munter webten: Endlich war da jemand der argumentativ überpeniblen, in sich selbst kreisenden Sozialkritik entgegengetreten, hatte deren Fixierung auf die nur mediokren Werte der Gleichheit oder Gerechtigkeit bloßgestellt und uns einen ersten Eindruck von den viel tiefer liegenden, wahrhaften Kräften geschichtlicher Zusammenstöße vermittelt.
Allerdings waren auch nach dieser ersten Staffel von Schriften
die erlösenden Worte, auf die das zum Meister hochblickende Milieu so begierig
wartete, noch nicht gefallen. Sloterdijk hatte in seiner Wesensschau zwar
inzwischen die unterschiedlichsten Sachverhalte zutage gefördert, war
unerschrocken dem heimlichen Sinn all unseres gentechnischen Experimentierens
auf die Schliche gekommen und der ehernen Triebökonomie des Politischen
nachgegangen, aber der unter den Nägeln brennenden Frage nach dem sozialen
Antagonismus unserer Tage hatte er seine Aufmerksamkeit noch nicht gewidmet.
Wie als könne er sein Publikum nicht länger dürsten lassen, machte sich
Sloterdijk daher bald nach der Jahrhundertwende daran, unter dem wuchtigen
Titel Zorn und Zeit ( Suhrkamp Verlag ) eine
"politisch-psychologische" Analyse der Kämpfe im gegenwärtigen
Zeitalter zu verfassen. Wieder ist der methodologische Leichtsinn, mit dem
dabei verfahren wird, atemberaubend, eine bloße Rückerinnerung an die
angebliche Trieblehre der Antike soll ausreichen, um uns mit dem notwendigen
Rüstzeug einer solchen Gegenwartsdiagnose auszustatten.
Der psychologischen Auffassung der Griechen zufolge, so will uns Sloterdijk ohne jede Kenntnisnahme der neueren Forschungsliteratur weismachen, sei der Mensch neben seinem erotischen Verlangen mindestens ebenso stark von einem "Streben nach Erfolg, Ansehen, Selbstachtung" beherrscht; diese "thymotischen Energien", von der Neuzeit mit der Ausnahme einiger großer Denker ignoriert und von der Psychoanalyse endgültig aus unserem Selbstverständnis verbannt, bildeten den eigentlichen Grundstoff aller politischen Zusammenstöße, weil es in ihnen letztlich nämlich immer um die kollektive Rückeroberung von "Stolz" und "Ehre" ginge. Man will gar nicht erst beginnen, schon hier auf eine gewisse begriffliche Differenzierung zu drängen, besteht doch ein großer Unterschied darin, ob jenes Verlangen auf die Zustimmung des Gegenübers zielt oder sich gerade darüber hinwegsetzen will, also nach intersubjektiver Anerkennung oder nach vermittlungsloser Selbstermächtigung strebt; auch scheint es wenig ergiebig, an dieser Stelle darauf hinzuweisen, dass so unterschiedliche Theoretiker wie George Sorel oder Barrington Moore schon viel früher auf die Schlüsselrolle der "Ehre" in der Motivierung politischer Bewegungen aufmerksam gemacht haben. Alles das schert Sloterdijk wenig, denn er will auf Wichtigeres hinaus, etwas, das uns in unserem gegenwärtigen Selbstverständnis elementar erschüttert. Wir lernen weiter, dass das Gegenstück zum Stolz, über den die im "Kampf um Anerkennung" (Sloterdijk) Überlegenen verfügen, das Ressentiment derjenigen ist, die von nun an einen untergeordneten Rangplatz in der gesellschaftlichen Statushierarchie einnehmen müssen; um die Schmach dieser Subordination abzuschütteln, werden von hier unten aus moralische Werte der Selbstbeschränkung und der Gleichbehandlung in die Welt gesetzt, in deren Licht die Mitglieder der zum Erfolg gelangten Schichten als Versager dastehen müssen. Insofern besteht das zivilisatorische Geschehen, wie es in bloßer Wiederholung von Nietzsche heißt, in nichts anderem als den immer gleichen Auseinandersetzungen zwischen lebensbejahenden und lebensfeindlichen Gruppierungen, zwischen Kollektiven, die in Stolz ihr Dasein genießen, und solchen, die jenen ihre Vitalität zu verleiden versuchen.
Die einzig originelle Wendung, die Sloterdijk dieser altbekannten Doktrin verleiht, ergibt sich nun aus dem gegen Nietzsche gerichteten Gedanken, dass in den vergangenen zweihundert Jahren die christliche Ethik den Schwachen gerade nicht ein Instrument ihres Ressentiments und Rachefeldzugs habe sein können; denn die im jüngeren Christentum überlieferten Werte und Normen seien von einer derart "humanitär-übersinnlichen" Art gewesen, dass sie den Ansatzpunkt für eine ideelle Attacke gegen die Privilegierten und Begüterten keinesfalls hätten bieten können. Also bedarf es nach Sloterdijks Auffassung einer "noch tiefer ansetzenden Reflexion", um aus dem verschwommenen Dunkel der vergangenen Kämpfe erfolgreich die Werte ans Licht zu zerren, die den "Ressentimentbewegungen" des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts tatsächlich als Mittel ihrer verschlagenen Revanche haben dienen können – und man ahnt schon, dass jetzt die Schlüsselparole nicht mehr allzu fern ist, auf die die deutungshungrige Gemeinde schon so lange wartete.
Um es kurz zu machen: Nach Sloterdijk sind diese moralischen Werte und Normen diejenigen, die sich die Gleichheitsfanatiker der unterschiedlichsten Couleur auf die Fahnen geschrieben haben, um mit deren Hilfe die Massen zur Attacke auf die bestehenden Verhältnisse zu bewegen. Was hier unter solchen Gleichheitsforderungen verstanden werden soll, bleibt im Ganzen ziemlich unklar, gemeint sind im historischen Prozess aber alle "nationalistischen" und "internationalistischen" Bewegungen, nur dass die ersten soziale Gleichheit ausschließlich für die jeweils nationale Bevölkerung eingeklagt haben, während sie die zweiten für alle Erdenbürger und -bürgerinnen zu reklamieren versuchten. Von hier aus ist es nicht weit zu der Behauptung, dass die weltgeschichtlichen Katastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts durch den Aufstand von zwei "Zornkollektiven" angezettelt wurden, in denen Intellektuelle, die neuen "Weltgeistlichen des Hasses", den aus Beschämung und Geringschätzung entstandenen Zorn der Massen durch moralisch-humanistische Parolen gegen die Eliten zu organisieren wussten. Irgendwie meint man das alles schon zu kennen, glaubt, ein Amalgam aus Gehlen und Ernst Nolte vor sich zu haben, nur dass die Gleichsetzung von Faschismus und Sozialismus und deren gemeinsame Rückführung auf Motive der Gier und des Ressentiments hier hemdsärmeliger, ja protziger daherkommt.
Selten wohl ist vergangenes Gedankengut, das schon zu seiner Zeit nur dumpfe Ängste und Abwehrhaltungen verriet, mit so viel Aplomb wieder aufgefrischt worden, um es als neuestes Stichwort zur geistig-politischen Lage der Gegenwart auszugeben. Gegen Gehlens Moral und Hypermoral , aus der einige der zentralen Verbindungsglieder in Sloterdijks Argumentation zu stammen scheinen, ist schon vor vierzig Jahren eingewandt worden, dass die Gleichsetzung einer um Werte der nationalen Ehre und Solidarität kristallisierten Binnenmoral mit dem moralischen Universalismus des "Internationalismus" übersieht, mit welch unterschiedlicher Absicht sich jeweils auf "Gleichheit" berufen wurde: Während dort die im Inneren erstrebte Egalität aller Angehörigen derselben nationalen Herkunft nur die moralische Kehrseite der nach außen gerichteten Bekämpfung des gemeinsamen Feindes war, fällt hier zumindest der Idee nach jeder polemische Bezug auf eine äußere Gruppierung weg, weil alle Mitglieder der Menschheit in den Genuss gleicher Rechte kommen sollen. Die Wertsysteme des Nationalismus und des Internationalismus stellen daher nicht, wie Sloterdijk uns mit Gehlen glauben machen möchte, zwei Seiten ein und desselben humanistischen Gleichheitsideals dar, sondern bilden unterschiedliche Stufen in der Entwicklung der Sozialmoral.
Nicht besser ist es um Sloterdijks These bestellt, derzufolge die moralische Wut und Empörung der sozial benachteiligten Massen nur mit Motiven eines gegen die Privilegierten gerichteten Ressentiments zu erklären seien; hier fragt man sich, warum der Umweg über eine solche Trivialpsychologie genommen werden muss, wenn doch die politischen Verfassungen westlicher Demokratien die Betroffenen geradezu dazu auffordern, von dem begründeten Anspruch auf rechtliche Gleichbehandlung Gebrauch zu machen. Im Kampf gegen soziale Diskriminierung und ökonomische Benachteiligung versuchen die jeweiligen Akteure nur umzusetzen, was ihnen die moralischen Prinzipien des modernen Rechtsstaates versprechen; dazu ist keine Gier nötig, kein Neid und kein Ressentiment. Natürlich steht es jedem Autor frei, beliebig auf Gedankenmotive der Vergangenheit zurückzugreifen. Aber es bedeutet, Normen der intellektuellen Redlichkeit zu verletzen, wenn dabei das Alte als das Allerneueste ausgegeben wird, nur um sich die Diskussion der längst vorgebrachten Gegenargumente zu ersparen.
Nun stellen die bislang wiedergegebenen Spekulationen für unseren Autor offenbar nur philosophische Lockerungsübungen dar, die jenen politischen Faustschlag vorbereiten helfen sollten, zu dem er dann am 10. Juni 2009 in der FAZ endlich ausgeholt hat. Aus der "politisch-psychologischen" Einsicht in die ewige Wiederkehr des Kampfes zwischen den zu Recht Privilegierten und den neidvoll Schlechtergestellten muss doch irgendwann einmal die Konsequenz gezogen werden, das ungute Treiben wenigstens für einen historischen Augenblick lang stillzustellen; dafür kann es nach geschichtsphilosophischem Maß nur die Lösung geben, den Bessergestellten endlich das zu geben, was sie wirklich verdienen, um ihnen derart die Chance zu stolzen, freiwilligen Geschenken nach unten zu gewähren. Die politische Parole für dieses Programm lautet, man glaubt es kaum, "Steuerstreik".
Aus einsamer Höhe verkündet Sloterdijk die lang ersehnten Parolen zur politischen Gestaltung der Zukunft, Parolen, in denen dem rührseligen Traum vom Sozialstaat endlich der Garaus gemacht wird. Sloterdijk knüpft an einige Überlegungen an, die er schon in Zorn und Zeit angestellt hatte, um aus der Lehre von den unserer Zivilisation zugrunde liegenden Energien des Stolzes und der Selbstachtung die Konsequenzen für eine Neuorganisation unserer kapitalistischen Wirtschaft zu ziehen; unter dunkler Berufung auf Georges Bataille war dort die Rede davon gewesen, dass die Reichen und Begüterten nur dann die ihnen kulturell auferlegte "Selbstverachtung" abschütteln könnten, wenn sie in einer "Ökonomie des Stolzes" ihr Vermögen in "schönen Handlungen" der freiwilligen Beschenkung nach unten an die Bedürftigen verteilen würden. Das sollte im Klartext so viel heißen wie, dass jede staatliche Pflicht zur Abgabe vom eigenen Reichtum diesen Besitzern nur eine Kränkung des Gefühls wohlverdienten Erfolgs bereite, während dessen souveräne Verausgabung bei den Mitgliedern jener Schichten eine Empfindung beglückender Großherzigkeit auslöse. Hier machte sich jemand, so viel ist klar, sehr ernsthaft Gedanken darüber, wie es in Zeiten einer wachsenden Schere zwischen Arm und Reich um die von der "miserabilistischen" Linken vernachlässigte Seite bestellt ist; genug der Klage über die wachsende Zahl der Arbeitslosen, genug auch der trostlosen Beschäftigung mit dem Leben da unten, ist es nicht viel erbärmlicher und schmachvoller, auf Teile seines selbst verdienten Vermögens unter sozialstaatlichem Zwang verzichten zu müssen!
Diese unausgegorenen Überlegungen, in denen an keiner Stelle geklärt wird, warum ein etwa durch Vererbung oder finanzielle Spekulationen erworbenes Vermögen im Sinne irgendeiner Leistung rechtmäßig "verdient" sein soll, liefern Sloterdijk in seinem Artikel nun die Grundlage für eine politische Programmatik revolutionären Zuschnitts. Mit dem Mut des Freidenkers prüft Sloterdijk, mit welchen Mitteln die historischen Gewinner, die Reichen und Vermögenden, dem grausamen Spiel der stets wachsenden Beschämung ihrer Leistungen ein Ende setzen könnten; das Ergebnis dieses In-sich-Gehens des Autors stellt der Artikel Die Revolution der gebenden Hand dar.
Schon der Titel des kurzen Beitrags soll deutlich machen, dass hier jemand über nichts Geringeres nachdenkt als über einen Umsturz all unserer herkömmlichen Werte und Gepflogenheiten; mit einer bloßen Reparatur der gegebenen Gesellschaftsordnung ist es für Sloterdijk nicht getan, wenn so Großes auf dem Spiel steht wie die elende Lage der herrschenden Klassen. Diese könnten sich ihrer beschämenden Situation nur erwehren, so argumentiert Peter Sloterdijk, wenn sie zu politischen Mitteln der Gegenwehr griffen, die den Grund ihrer Beschämung aus dem Weg zu räumen vermöchten; und dieser Grund, die Wurzel allen Übels ist, wie wir weiter lesen, in nichts anderem zu vermuten als der bloßen Existenz des Sozialstaates, jener gigantischen Wohlfahrtseinrichtung, mit deren Hilfe sich die Benachteiligten im Schulterschluss mit den moralisierenden Intellektuellen an den Vermögenden schadlos hielten – so zentral ist Sloterdijk diese Einsicht, so wichtig das damit verknüpfte Anliegen, dass er den "Steuerstaat" ein wenig zusammenhanglos auch in seinem neusten Buch Du musst dein Leben ändern ( Suhrkamp Verlag) wieder zur Erwähnung bringt, wo er unter Verweis auf Friedrich August von Hayek als "real existierender liberal-fiskalischer Semi-Sozialismus" bezeichnet wird.
Man muss auch das damit angedeutete Argument erst mehrmals in Augenschein nehmen, bevor einem dämmert, welche verschrobene These da mit Nonchalance in die Welt gesetzt wird: der Sozialstaat, in Deutschland das Produkt der von oben durchgeführten Reformen Bismarcks, in England oder Frankreich das Resultat erbitterter Kämpfe der Arbeiterbewegung, soll nichts anderes hervorbringen als eine institutionalisierte "Kleptokratie", eine politische Einrichtung also, die die Schlechtergestellten erfolgreich hätten etablieren können, um sich von den Vermögenden finanziell anzueignen, was sie in blindem Ressentiment für unrechtmäßig erworben hielten. Eine kleine Rückerinnerung reicht aus, um die damit entwickelte Behauptung als baren Unsinn zu erkennen, der sich einer Mischung aus historischer Ignoranz und theoretischer Chuzpe verdankt.
Bei ihren kollektiven Bemühungen, Maßnahmen der ökonomischen Umverteilung durchzusetzen und auf diesem Weg soziale Rechte zu erkämpfen, konnten sich die wirtschaftlich schlechter gestellten Schichten während der kapitalistischen Industrialisierung von Anfang an auf zwei verschiedene Quellen der moralischen Legitimierung stützen: Zum einen sprang ins Auge, dass das rasch wachsende Geldvermögen von Teilen der bürgerlichen Klasse nur in geringem Umfang mit eigenen Leistungen und Anstrengungen, in viel größerem Maße aber mit dem Zufall der familialen Herkunft und den enormen Erträgen aus unproduktivem Eigentum zu tun hatte; warum aber sollte es denjenigen, die bloß glückliche Umstände in die Lage zur Vermehrung ihres Reichtums versetzt hatten, so viel besser gehen als den Schichten, deren Mitglieder mit produktiver Arbeit tagtäglich zur Erhöhung des Volkseinkommens beitrugen? War es somit auf der einen Seite die Berufung auf das vom Bürgertum selbst propagierte Leistungsprinzip, was den lohnabhängigen, häufig verarmten Schichten als moralische Grundlage ihres Kampfes für Umverteilungen dienen konnte, so auf der anderen Seite die konsequente Auslegung der in den demokratischen Verfassungen verbrieften Bürgerrechte: War darin nicht allen Mitgliedern der neu entstehenden Gesellschaften zugesichert worden, als Gleiche unter Gleichen angesehen und behandelt zu werden, sodass mit Fug und Recht solche sozialen Bedingungen erstritten werden durften, unter denen jeder Bürger die gleichen Chancen zur Teilnahme am gesellschaftlichen Leben besitzen würden?
Kein Ressentiment war hier nötig, um es zu wiederholen, kein Neid und keine Gier, um die Angehörigen der schlechter gestellten Schichten dazu zu motivieren, sich für eine ökonomische Umverteilung von oben nach unten einzusetzen; einzig eine resolute Applizierung der bereits etablierten, vom Bürgertum mitvertretenen Prinzipien auf die herrschenden Umstände war erforderlich, um die Konzentration von ökonomischen Vermögen in den Händen weniger als "Unrecht" zu erfahren und sich dementsprechend zu einer moralischen Gegenwehr aufgefordert zu sehen. Die ganze Idee, dass es dazu erst noch des zusätzlichen Anstoßes durch ein Gefühl des Ressentiments bedurft habe, war von Anfang an die intellektuelle Ausgeburt eines Klassenkampfs von oben. Sie wird nicht besser dadurch, dass sie in Zeiten verschärfter Sozialkonflikte regelmäßig wiederholt wird, und auch dann nicht glaubwürdiger, wenn ihr willfährige Intellektuelle wie Sloterdijk wortmächtig den Segen erteilen.
Mit der Charakterisierung des Sozialstaats als einer institutionalisierten "Kleptokratie" ist Sloterdijk jedenfalls an den Punkt seiner Argumentation gelangt, an dem er nun glaubt, erste politische Handlungsanweisungen geben zu können. Wenn der Sozialstaat als ein reines Instrument des Neids der unteren Klassen von den "produktiven Schichten" immer mehr an steuerlichen Abgaben verlange, wenn er sich gar, wie in den letzten Jahrzehnten, zu einem "geldsaugenden und geldspeienden Ungeheuer" entwickelt habe, dann sei es Sloterdijk zufolge an der Zeit, die Angehörigen der derart ausgebeuteten Eliten zur Überwindung ihrer andressierten Selbstverachtung aufzufordern; und also ergeht über unser Land der Schlachtruf an die Vermögenden und Reichen, endlich zu den ihnen zu Gebote stehenden Waffen zu greifen und einen "antifiskalischen Bürgerkrieg" zu eröffnen, um wieder zu einem Leben in Stolz und beglückender Selbstachtung zurückzufinden.
Dem befreienden Lachen, das eine solche Kampfparole aufgrund ihres Aberwitzes, ihres geradezu atemberaubenden Leichtsinns auslösen könnte, steht nur der Gedanke entgegen, dass es sich dabei um die Sätze eines von den Medien geliebten, von der politischen Öffentlichkeit verehrten und von den Akademien hochdekorierten Intellektuellen handelt. Es fällt einem wieder ein, dass sich ein SPD-, nicht ein FDP-Landesverband noch vor Kurzem mit einem Vortrag dieses Autors schmückte, es kommt einem in den Sinn, dass er im ZDF eine "philosophische" Diskussionsrunde moderiert – nur wenige mag es geben, die da nicht in ein Grübeln darüber verfallen, ob unsere demokratische Kultur nicht inzwischen einen Grad an Verspieltheit, an Ernstlosigkeit und Verquatschtheit erreicht hat, der ihren eigenen Ansprüchen Abbruch tut.
It comes to
my mind that Peter Sloterdijk was the first pioneering Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftler
who started using a computer for doing multi medial work back in the 1980's. This
was "Die Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, of 1983". He did something quite unprecedented, because
he included a lot of pictures in his work. At those times it was pretty hard in
terms of computer resources to do this. I know this myself, what a struggle it
was with the personal computers of the time, to integrate text and pictures. So
he was quite a pioneer in the field. Contrarily most of the Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftler's
always abhorred to put pictures in their work. Especially the philosophers
would never have to do with pictures, this was and still is something of a
dogma that a philosopher may never use a picture. This is like the Gottseibeiuns
of the Philosophy business. Sloterdijk was therefore something like an
iconoclast. This is something of an irony in itself because he included iconos
(or pictures) in his work. And the conventional philosophers consequently
abhorred the method of Sloterdijk, and made him persona non grata in the
philosophical circles. Such are the ironies in the history of the Deutsche
Philosophie. And consequently no-one in the Deutsche Philosophie
ever noticed what a pioneering work he had done. The Deutsche Philosophers just
bickered so much that the style of writing and thinking of the Sloterdijk was
not to their liking. Fortunately he managed to get the post of director at the
University (or rather Hochschule) of Art and Design in Karlsruhe. This
was the only institution in Germany where there was a "sort of"
fusion of art and technology. And I must say this with emphasis.
[I had seen
some similar works in the USA from around the same time, where it was called
"Geometry and Art", Calter, Paul. Dartmouth College. Retrieved 13
August 2009.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_art
Calter,
Paul. "Geometry and
Art Unit 1". Dartmouth College.
]
This was an
institution of Art, and not of Philosophy. There he had a small circle of
people like Peter Weibel, Bruno Latour,
and Bazon Brock. And here he could develop his works and theories. So
Sloterdijk couldn't care less what the Deutsche Philosophers thought of
him. And he made so much money from his books, which was on top of his salary
at the Hochschule, that he was probably the richest Philosopher in all of
Deutschland.
https://www.hfg-karlsruhe.de/personen/peter-sloterdijk
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Weibel_(K%C3%BCnstler)
Peter Weibel entwickelte diese Überlegungen ab 1969 konsequent
in seinen Videobändern sowie -installationen weiter. Mit seinen
Fernsehaktionen, den teleaktionen, die das Österreichische
Fernsehen (ORF)
1972 im Rahmen der Sendung Impulse ausstrahlte, überschritt er
die Grenzen des Galerieraumes und untersuchte die Videotechnik in
ihrer Anwendung im MassenmediumFernsehen.
Am 7. Juni 1968 nahm Weibel an der Aktion „Kunst und Revolution“ in einem Hörsaal der Universität Wien teil, wo er mit einem brennenden Handschuh einen Vortrag (Schimpftirade) gegen die damalige Regierung hielt. Der Vortrag trug den Titel Was tun?, in Anlehnung an die berühmte Lenin-Schrift Was tun?. Die Aktion war einer der Höhepunkte der Studentenbewegung 1968 in Österreich.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazon_Brock
Bazon Brock[1] (eigentlich Jürgen
Johannes Hermann Brock[2]; * 2. Juni 1936 in Stolp in
Pommern) ist emeritierterProfessor für Ästhetik und
Kulturvermittlung an der Bergischen Universität Wuppertal,
Künstler und Kunsttheoretiker. Brock gilt als Vertreter der Fluxus-Bewegung.[3]
Brocks Arbeitsschwerpunkte
liegen auch nach seiner Emeritierung vor allem in der Neuronalen Ästhetik und
„Imaging Sciences“ am Fachbereich „Architektur, Kunst, Design, Musik“, wo er
lange Jahre Dekan war und im Besonderen als Fachdozent das Fach für
„Nicht-normative Ästhetik“ betreut.
Er ist Mitglied der „Forscher-Familie bildende Wissenschaften“. Diese „fruchtbringende Gesellschaft“ beschäftigt sich vorrangig mit der Kulturgenetik, um Konzepte zur Zivilisierung der Kulturen auszuarbeiten. Die Ergebnisse werden in der Reihe „Ästhetik und Naturwissenschaften“ im Springer-Verlag Wien/New York veröffentlicht.
Bazon Brock wurde am 21. November 1992 der Ehrendoktor der Technischen Wissenschaften von der Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule Zürich verliehen. Er ist Mitglied im P.E.N.-Club Liechtenstein, einem Zentrum der internationalen Schriftstellervereinigung P.E.N.
Im Oktober 1978 präsentierte
Bazon Brock im Rahmen des Steirischen Herbstes in Graz „Die
neurophysiologischen Grundlagen jeder Ästhetik“. 1993 fand in Bonn das
von Olaf Breidbach, Bazon Brock und Detlef B.
Linke organisierte Symposion „Neuronale Ästhetik – Hirnbilder
und Menschenbilder“ statt.
„Mit der ‚Neuronalen Ästhetik‘ soll der Versuch gekennzeichnet werden, die begriffliche Fassung neuronaler Prozesse selber als ästhetische Operation zu entfalten und über korrespondierende Analogien zwischen ‚natürlichen‘, alltäglichen, jedermann von Natur aus beherrschbaren Aktivierungen seines Weltbildapparates und den weltbildkonstituierenden Operationen der Wissenschaftler und Künstler, die ja auch nur über denselben Apparat wie jedermann verfügen, erweiterte und modifizierte Konfrontationen des Geistes und des Prinzips Leben mit ihren Verkörperungsformen zu schaffen.“
The wikipedia article gives a quite lengthy and thorough
overview of the connection of Mathematics and Art. I believe that this is a way of doing mathematics that
would be to the liking of many people who are mathematically inclined, but they
don't care less about the formalisms and idiosyncracies of present-day Akademik
Mathematics. I would say that if humanity had developed a more art-like
kind of mathematics then we would not need any more any professor's of
mathematics. Because everyone would be able to do higher level visual
transformational ana-grammatics and polynomics and topology of mathematics just
by visualizing it. And the worst perpetrators of the present-day quagmire of
mathematics were, of course, Descartes and Leibniz. And then come the close
second-places: Newton and Galileo and finally the good Euklid who had started
all that nonsense. One should have never alpha-bêtize'd (like the bêtise in
French) the mathematics. And all this is because the mathematicians have a
special taste for what they call "elegant" formalisms, or even the
"beauty" of mathematical formalisms. I have the intuition that those
folks would also call the Bavarian "Wolpertinger" as the highest
ideal of representing "Natural Beauty in its Purest Form". Such is
the state of Mathematical Aisthaetiks (derives from Ais-Thaesis).
See also:
http://www.noologie.de/noo04.htm#Heading234
http://www.noologie.de/noo04.htm#Heading236
http://www.noologie.de/noo04.htm#Heading237
http://www.noologie.de/noo04.htm#Heading238
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_art
Mathematics and art are related in a variety of ways. Mathematics
has itself been described as an art
motivated
by beauty. Mathematics can be discerned in arts such as music,
dance, painting, architecture, sculpture,
and textiles. This article focuses, however, on
mathematics in the visual arts.
Mathematics and art have a long historical
relationship. Artists have used mathematics since the 4th
century BC when the Greek sculptor
Polykleitos
wrote his Canon, prescribing proportions based on the ratio 1:√2
for the ideal male nude. Persistent popular claims have been made for the use
of the golden ratio
in ancient art and architecture, without reliable evidence. In the Italian Renaissance, Luca Pacioli
wrote the influential treatise De
Divina Proportione (1509), illustrated with woodcuts by Leonardo da Vinci,
on the use of the golden ratio in art. Another Italian painter, Piero
della Francesca, developed Euclid's
ideas on perspective
in treatises such as De Prospectiva Pingendi, and in his paintings. The
engraver Albrecht
Dürer made many references to mathematics in his work Melencolia I.
In modern times, the graphic
artist M.
C. Escher made intensive use of tessellation
and hyperbolic
geometry, with the help of the mathematician H. S. M. Coxeter,
while the De Stijl
movement led by Theo
van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian
explicitly embraced geometrical forms. Mathematics has inspired textile arts
such as quilting, knitting, cross-stitch,
crochet, embroidery, weaving, Turkish and
other carpet-making,
as well as kilim. In Islamic art,
symmetries are evident in forms as varied as Persian girih and Moroccan zellige
tilework, Mughal
jali pierced stone screens,
and widespread muqarnas
vaulting.
Mathematics has directly influenced art with
conceptual tools such as linear
perspective, the analysis of symmetry, and
mathematical objects such as polyhedra
and the Möbius
strip. Magnus
Wenninger creates colourful stellated polyhedra,
originally as models for teaching. Mathematical concepts such as recursion and
logical paradox can be seen in paintings by Rene Magritte
and in engravings by M. C. Escher. Computer art
often makes use of fractals
including the Mandelbrot
set, and sometimes explores other mathematical objects such as cellular automata.
Controversially, the artist David Hockney
has argued that artists from the Renaissance onwards made use of the camera lucida
to draw precise representations of scenes; the architect Philip Steadman
similarly argued that Vermeer
used the camera
obscura in his distinctively observed paintings.
Other relationships include the algorithmic
analysis of artworks by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, the
finding that traditional batiks
from different regions of Java
have distinct fractal
dimensions, and stimuli to mathematics research, especially Filippo
Brunelleschi's theory of perspective, which eventually led to Girard Desargues's
projective
geometry. A persistent view, based ultimately on the Pythagorean
notion of harmony in music, holds that everything was arranged by Number, that
God is the geometer of the world, and that therefore the world's geometry is sacred,
as seen in artworks such as William Blake's
The
Ancient of Days.
...
As early as the 15th century, curvilinear
perspective found its way into paintings by artists interested in
image distortions. Jan
van Eyck's 1434 Arnolfini
Portrait contains a convex mirror with reflections of the people
in the scene,[36]
while Parmigianino's
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, c. 1523–1524, shows the artist's
largely undistorted face at the centre, with a strongly curved background and
artist's hand around the edge.[37]
Three-dimensional space can be represented
convincingly in art, as in technical drawing,
by means other than perspective. Oblique
projections, including cavalier perspective (used by French military
artists to depict fortifications in the 18th century), were used continuously
and ubiquitously by Chinese artists from the first or second centuries until
the 18th century. The Chinese acquired the technique from India, which acquired
it from Ancient Rome. Oblique projection is seen in Japanese art, such as in
the Ukiyo-e
paintings of Torii
Kiyonaga (1752–1815).[38]
...
The Platonic solids
and other polyhedra are
a recurring theme in Western art. They are found, for instance, in a marble
mosaic featuring the small stellated dodecahedron, attributed to Paolo
Uccello, in the floor of the San Marco Basilica
in Venice;[13] in
Leonardo da Vinci's diagrams of regular polyhedra drawn as illustrations for Luca Pacioli's
1509 book The Divine Proportion;[13] as
a glass rhombicuboctahedron
in Jacopo de Barbari's portrait of Pacioli, painted in 1495;[13] in
the truncated polyhedron (and various other mathematical objects) in Albrecht Dürer's
engraving Melencolia
I;[13]
and in Salvador
Dalí's painting The Last Supper in which Christ and his
disciples are pictured inside a giant dodecahedron.
Albrecht Dürer
(1471–1528) was a German
Renaissance printmaker
who made important contributions to polyhedral literature in his 1525 book, Underweysung
der Messung (Education on Measurement), meant to teach the subjects of linear
perspective, geometry
in architecture,
Platonic solids,
and regular
polygons. Dürer was likely influenced by the works of Luca Pacioli
and Piero
della Francesca during his trips to Italy.[75]
While the examples of perspective in Underweysung der Messung are
underdeveloped and contain inaccuracies, there is a detailed discussion of
polyhedra. Dürer is also the first to introduce in text the idea of polyhedral
nets, polyhedra unfolded to lie flat for printing.[76]
Dürer published another influential book on human proportions
called Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion (Four Books on Human
Proportion) in 1528.[77]
In his work Sphären I, II, and III (1998-2004), Peter Sloterdijk had developed an approach to morphology that is in some
ways similar to the Meta-Morphology of the present project. I had developed
my own version of morphology from about 1990 onwards in the project
"Noologie" and related works. I didn't know of Sloterdijk's Sphären
project until about 2010. So we were at the same time developing some similar
ideas without knowing of each other's work. In my dissertation (1999) I gave a
general outline of the morphological method that I was developing.
Design Und Zeit: Kultur Im Spannungsfeld Von
Entropie, Transmission, Und Gestaltung
http://www.bib.uni-wuppertal.de/elpub/fb05/diss1999/goppold/
http://www.noologie.de/desn.htm
http://www.noologie.de/ag-dis.pdf
The Dissertation project was intended from the
beginning as a dual-form project:
1) In form of a printable book, and
2) in form of a www-Hypertext with many links into the
www.
It also has an automatically generated Hypertext-index
to give a complete reference of all basic points with the direct Hypertext
jumps to the appropriate text passages. The inspiration for this form was the
idea of the "Pyramidal Book" by Robert Darnton. The morphology of
Noologie was developed mainly along the lines of Goethe's work, then Spengler,
Nietzsche, Ruth Benedict, and with the German Gestalt Psychology and Ethnologie
developments between Adolf Bastian and Hertha v. Dechend. There is also some
additional material from Gregory Bateson, Whitehead and Buddhist Tradition.
http://www.noologie.de/desn09.htm
http://www.noologie.de/desn13.htm
http://www.noologie.de/desn17.htm
The similarities between "Design Und Zeit" and
"Sphären" can be summed up with the references to Goethe and
Spengler, whom Sloterdijk mentions in a few passages in
"Blasen", like p. 77 - 79. There he comments shortly on Spengler: P. 78: "Der
erste Versuch, nach dem Scheitern von Oswald Spenglers sogenannter
Morphologie... wieder einem Formbegriff eine höchstrangige Stellung in einer...
kulturtheoretischen Untersuchung zuzuweisen". But
many of the concepts presented in the "Sphären" can be originally
traced back to Spengler, and are only re-worded slightly: P. 58:
"Ethnotechniken, die Generationen überspannen", p. 59:
"Ethnopoietische Prozesse", p. 60: "Die Semiosphärische
Glocke". These concepts were also developed in "Design Und Zeit". Especially
the issue of Trans-Generational Continuity, or Innovation vs. Preservation vs.
Stability and Stasis of a culture. It may also be noted that Sloterdijk's work was criticised for leaning heavily on Spengler's
ideas, meaning some kind of pseudo-fascist ideology. Morphology is today not
deemed worthy as a scholarly or akademik subject. Also it should be noted that
Sloterdijk writes in a style of novel [aka. Bildungsroman], with many quite
extravagant metaphors [eine sehr blumige Sprache], and very little
bibliographical information. An index is completely missing. These are reasons
for a scholarly critique. But it has to be noted that the lack of an index is
mostly for economic reasons of the publishing houses. An index just costs too
much for a book that is aimed at a non-scholarly readership who would never
consult an index at all. As a positive aspect of Sloterdijk's work it is to be
noted that his rich illustrations included in his books clarify many of the
ideas presented there. As an Art historian he makes good use of the principle
that a picture is (sometimes) better than 1000 words.
Something quite disconcerting is Sloterdijk's habit of
name-dropping of the most diverse philosophical and spiritual traditions. In
"Eurotao", he mentions on p. 91 all the traditions of Asia, as if he
were an accomplished expert of those. This kind of cursory short shrift
treatment smacks of a "Überflieger" in the German expression. I
seriously doubt that he has understood these traditions down to the necessary
depth and backgrounds. Especially
revealing is his remark on p. 83 of Eurotao that Japan had committed a
"formvollendete Selbstliquidierung ... und ein Seppuku zugunsten von
Industrie und Geschichte", and further: "Wahrscheinlich wird das alte
Asien im Zuge einer epochalen Selbstkolonialisation eines Tages vom Erdboden
verschwunden sein". Since Eurotao appeared first in
1989, Sloterdijk can be excused that he could not forsee the almost
irresistable rise of Asian mentality in the form of the awaking giant China to
global power in the last 30 years. The ancient (Confucian) Asian mentalities
are just doing their own Meta-Morphosis in ways that the Western intelligenzia
could not have dreamed of. And the Shinto traditions in Japan are also quite
alive and kicking. In the present work on dynamic cultural traditions
(http://www.noologie.de/extra-verb.htm
/ http://www.noologie.de/extra-verb.pdf
)
it is to show that Thomas Immoos and his successors
had a grasp of an essence that the Western intelligenzia just was not able to
understand because of their logocentrism. And this logocentrism is based on a
quite distorted understanding of the "Logos", as was discussed by
Heidegger in WHD. The "Logos" of Heraklitos is quite different from
the "Ratio" of the Latin Roman tradition of philosophy.
As I am expounding in the work on dynamic cultural
traditions, the kineticism or Movement Gestalt (Kata) of the Japanese Shinto
movement rituals is to be understood in quite a different way. Meaning
completely different from what Sloterdijk writes about Kinetiks in Eurotao. And
I make it very clear there that there is a "world beyond words" in
the Asiatic traditions. And there it is understood very well, that words are
more or less vexing verbal shells, that change in a Protean manner, or as I
express it in Morphological terms: Words and Concepts are doing a
Meta-Morphosis all the time. There is no solid ground on which verbal concepts
can rest. One reason for this different understanding is the Chinese writing
which neatly separates the verbal concept and the visual "idea" or
the mental image behind the graphical symbol. But this is not an idea in the
Platonic sense. Ideas don't have an existence in some metaphysical heaven, but
they are entities of the Semiosphere, as I have expounded in "Design und
Zeit". They "live" in the semantic sphere of a
"culture". This is what Sloterdijk calls "Die Semiosphärische
Glocke" above. Unfortunately I have not found any other reference of this
concept in his works, for lack of an index. The Semiosphere is a concept
developed by Lotman and other Semioticians, and they all refer to the works of
Vernadsky. We should also remember that Platon in his Phaidros used a subtle
distinction between grammata for written words and stoichaea for
spoken (only) words. This was rarely noticed by the translators of this work.
And this distinction is well understood not only in Asia but also in all
world-wide intellectual traditions that are not so completely based on verbal
written alphabetic language. This was expounded very expertly by Platon in
Phaidros and his 7th letter. And Western Philosophy is based on a specific kind
of logocentrism, meaning that everything can adequately be expressed and
described in words. [In anthropology this is considered a parochial opinion/
position/ myopia.] And this idea of an "idea" is a fallacy. Therefore
an adequate criticism of Sloterdijk's work should not be made on the grounds of
Western Philosophy. And so my criticism of Sloterdijk is extra-philosophical.
So the Morphology of Project "Noologie" and
the work on dynamic cultural traditions is also quite different from that of
Sloterdijk. The crucial deviation from "Sphären" is the
interpretation of the morphological aspects of
Foam (Schäume) in Vol III of the "Sphären" (p. 13-71). These are taken up in the project
Noologie Vol III especially in:
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm
Here the morphological issue of Foam is developed
along a completely different avenue of thought: The Mathematical Fractal. The
Self-Similarity of Foam and Fractals is another morphological method which is
further developed in Noologie
Vol III.
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#foam_unversal
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#hermeneut_selbst
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#morpho_sloterdijk
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#morpho_wirbel
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#hermeneut_selbst
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#fraktal_prinzip
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#fraktal_schnee
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#fraktal_denk_prinzip
http://www.noologie.de/morph.htm
The project on dynamic cultural traditions seeks to
lay an entirely new groundwork for the concepts of "Form" and
"Inhalt" that orients itself heavily on the work of Nagarjuna, and
the ancient Greek understanding of "Morphae", "Meta-Morphology",
"Meta-Noia/Noiaesis", "Tropäe", "Strophae",
"Kata-Strophae" and "Polytropos", "Kenoma" and
"Pleroma". The words "Polytropos" and
"Polymechanos" are also discussed by Sloterdijk who gives it some
interesting treatment in "20JH". This is his discussion of Odysseus
as the prototypical "Polytropos" and "Polymechanos" in
pages 253-290. It is needless to say that my treatment in Meta-Morphology goes
into a totally different direction than Sloterdijk. The ability to lie (Lügen =
Herein-Legen) is one of the most important foundations of intelligence [or vice
versa], or inter-ligence, which can also mean Legere-Between-The-Lines. And
Legere and Legein are completely different "ideas" even if they sound
so much alike. The Logos has nothing at all to do with the most common meaning
of legere = reading. See the famous dictum of Augustinus: "Tolle
lege!" It means: Take it and read. He had never said anything about
"understanding it". This is not what he had on his mInd.
http://latindictionary.wikidot.com/verb:legere
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legere
1)
to read
2)
understand, interpret, explain, translate, expound
3)
intercept, recite, quote, forestall, gather untimely
I will place some succinct notes on
top, to do a Meta-Morphology of the history of all the states and all the Tax
Collectors in all of human history. From the very beginning, the states could
not have come into existence at all, if there had been no taxes. So Statehood
is Morphologically equivalent to Taxe-hood. [Somehow when I gave this word to
the Google translator it always came up with Robin Hood.]
I have just invented this word since
It doesn't apparently exist in the dictionary of the English language. Or in
other words: Rulership is equivalent to Taxation-Ship.
[The google translator gave me back
the nice word "Steuerschiff" in German which is also a quite humorous
contribution by our nice friends from the google.]
One may also note that there has
been quite some Neurolinguistic Reframing of the word Tax Collection between
the German and English languages. The German word "Steuern
Eintreiben" and the English to "Collect Taxes" contains quite a
bit of Semantic Cognitive Dissonance. The German word "Eintreiben"
means to get some taxes by at least threatening to apply some force if not
using force directly. And it is well known in all the civilized lands that when
you don't pay your taxes, this is a quite sure way to land in prison. Now to
"Collect Taxes" is really a nice kind of Neurolinguistic Reframing,
as if the taxes were just lying around in the open and the nice Tax Collector
just came around and picked them up. Which had probably never been the occurrence
in all the history of Staatehood and of Taxation-hood. Whenever if give the
Google Translator the word Taxation-hood, it faithfully comes up with Robin
Hood. I have no idea how it does this. (This is a joke).
In the Beginning of Hu-man-ity there
was Egaliarian'ism. Until some-one who was quite smart, invented the nice
Neurolingustic Reframing Trick to invent the "more egaliarian than the
egaliarian's. Meaning the advent of stratified political power structure. And this
is the very moment when his-story began as a serious business of rulership.
In those earlier times of statehood,
the taxes were called tributes. Because the tribes were tribus in Latin. And
the Tribal System and later the Feudal System always worked in a similar
manner. It was structured in a Top-Down Hierarchy. Each tribe had its own
Head-Honcho (and some time even a Head-Honcha). Or sometimes there was just a
Head-Honcho who was only elected for some period of time in an emergency, when
the need arose for communal action for the whole tribe to form a unity, like in
a war or a catastrophe. Those were the more egalitarian tribes like the Gallics
and the Nordics, er I mean the Germanics. When there was a permanent power
structure, there were the Head-Honchos and they had their Sub-Head-Honchos in
every village. This was about the tribal structure of the Indians of the plains
in North America. And of course the definition of power was quite varied as you
compare different tribes. The Head-Honchos of the North American Indians were
very limited in their powers. They were mostly leaders when an emergency arose.
As I recall, the North Eastern tribes even were quite democratic and they had a
general assembly of the representatives of the Sub-Tribes who made all the important
political decisions. And the ceremonial Head-Honcho was more or less like the
Speaker of the House in the English parliament. So the social political
structures of the tribes was very varied. So there came the times and the
locations where the states consolidated. Then there was a Super Head-Honcho,
who put him self on top of the Head-Honcho's of many different tribes, and he
became their Over-Lord. This was the Feudal Structure of almost all of the
so-called Antiquity. And to maintain that Super-Structure with the Over-Lord
Head-Honcho, one had to ensure that the logistical structure of that motley
collection of many-tribes didn't just pull itself apart. Because all those
sub-tribes mostly didn't like each other because of Competition Reasons. Such was
the incessant warfare of all the Amerind tribes in the vastness of the USA
plains. It was not at all love and
peace in those times of the Indians of the Plains. As Karl May would be very
kind to tell you all about it. Of course Winnetou was his favorite Hero and all
the others were just the bad guys. In realtiy it was quite a bit otherwise.
So to come back to the Feudal Power
and Politics Structure. The tributes were necessary to manage the upkeep of
this motely bag of not-so-united single tribes. And therefore the tributes had
to be invented. So the local Head-Honcho collected some tributes from his local
area of rule, then he kept some of these tributes for himself, and he sent what
was left over from this, to the Super-Head-Honcho or the Over-Lord. Such was
the structure everywere. And a pretty good example of this was ancient Japan.
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/tribute
historical mass noun Payment made periodically
by one state or ruler to another, especially as a sign of dependence.
‘the king had at his disposal plunder and
tribute amassed through warfare’
3 historical A proportion of ore or its
equivalent, paid to a miner for his work, or to the
Origin
Late Middle English (in tribute (sense 2)): from Latin tributum, neuter past participle (used as a
noun) of tribuere ‘assign’ (originally ‘divide between tribes’), from tribus
‘tribe’.
So it came to pass that the first
Empires arose, with their Super-Super Head-Honcho's. A good example is the King
of Kings of Persia who had coined this very good political expression. Then
there arose the need for a special adminstrator class of Tribute Supervisors,
who at the start were the Priests, since they had invented some form of
book-keeping and even writing. So they were the experts at tributes, and the
tributes did a slow morphing into taxes. And this process took place in the
areas of the first Empires. China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, some time later in
Persia, and in the Americas the precursors of the Inca, the Mayans and the
Aztecs. Apparently the North Amerinds never got around to form Empires for one
reason or another.
Now these power structures were very
delicate and difficult to maintain. The change of ownership of the title of
Super-Super Head-Honcho was often sudden and surprising. This was also the
story that the good Lev Gumilev told when he described his parable of those
Astronaut observers of the Empires on planet Earth that constantly did the most
egregious Meta-Morphoses. Just that Gumilev didn't call it Meta-Morphoses. But
it can be rightly called such, because the change of Power Structure is a sort
of Meta-Morphosis. A simple Morphosis is when a power structure just evolves
over time and differentiates a bit or does some fossilization and some
de-generation, as always happens with such Power Structures. The Meta-Morphosis
is when there will be fundamental changes in the power structure. So mostly
this is war, conquest, genocide, and rebellion and revolution. And some times
widespread Kata-Strophae, like big floods, desiccation, over-salination, rivers
that change their course into where there was just a big city in the way, a
rise of sea level, erratic patterns of the Monsoon, or the Nile floods. There
are many kinds and sizes of Kata-Strophae, of which Jared Diamond did some
writing about. The Ecological history of Civilizations, which means more often
than not, that they did their own undoing by ruining their Ecology. The prime
example is Mesopotamia. They just over-salted their arable land because of
heavy irrigation which left a few megatons of salt on the land over the period
of a couple millennia. He described this more in-depth in: Collapse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed#Synopsis
So there always was a see-saw of
power structures in Ancient Times. And Mesopotamia was one of the worst
see-saw's. In Mesopotamia, there were ALWAYS some Outside Invaders. These were
appropriately called the Hill people. The ancient Sumerian Script was exactly a
picture of a mountain to symbolize the Hill People. Most of the times the Hill
People were a reservoir of slaves. For this the ancient Sumerian Script had the
same symbol for slaves, the same mountain. But at other times the Hill People
thought that it was their turn to invade the plains, and so they did. Thus came
to pass the succession of so many Over-Lord'ships in about 7000 years of
Mesopotamian rulers. And this hasn't stopped ever since, because the war in
Mesopotamia is the rule, and not the exception. So the invaders and there were
quite a few of them, one way they succeeded with their Invasions, was mostly
because the local peasants had had enough of their present Overlords, and they
just wanted a little change of Overlords. But they knew full well, that the
next Generation of Overlords was not so much better than their present ones,
whom they already knew, and they had always devised some ways to evade the
Taxes or to bribe the Tax Collectors. It is always the same with the taxes. One
intelligent man had said: There are two things in life which are inevitable:
Death and Taxes. So it came to pass, at some time in deep Antiquity, there came
a new Generation of Overlords, and they brought with them a very hideous
device, for the Tax Collectors to facilitate their Business of Tax Collection.
And this was called Accounting. We know all this from the studies of Ancient
Mesopotamia. These were Clay tablets engraved with a stylus that produced
characteristic marks called Cuneiform. So after a few hundred years or so of so
much more effective Tax Collection, and some more effective Oppression and
Extraction of Wealth from the Local Populace, one bright mInd came up with the
bright Idea, that those cuneiform were also usable for other things than just
accounting. So it came to pass that the invention of writing, one of the most
important inventions of humanity besides the wheel, was given to us by the Tax
Collectors. So we are forever indebted to the Tax Collectors of humanity and
when we build the Monuments for the Great Kings and Emperors about 10 meters
high, then we should construct an even Greater Monument, of about 30-100 meters
high, for the unknown Tax Collectors of humanity, who had come up with this
idea in the First Place. Because all those Great Empires would have never
existed if it had not been for the Tax Collectors. Honor to who Deserves Honor.
Thankfulness for those to whom thanks are due. Taxes for those to whom Taxes
are due.!!!
See my special material on the
Cun(n)eiform Script:
http://www.noologie.de/cunni.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_taxes_(idiom)
Death and taxes is a common reference to the famous quotation:[1]
Our new Constitution is now established, and
has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be
said to be certain, except death and taxes.
— Benjamin
Franklin, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789
However, Franklin’s letter is not the origin of
the phrase, which appeared earlier in Daniel Defoe’s The Political
History of the Devil.[2]
Things as certain as death and taxes,
can be more firmly believ’d.
— Daniel
Defoe, The Political History of the Devil, 1726.
And in The Cobbler of Preston by
Christopher Bullock (1716)
’Tis impossible to be sure of any thing
but Death and Taxes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_garden
The Paradise garden
The paradise garden is a form
of garden of Old
Iranian origin, specifically Achaemenid. Originally denominated by a single noun denoting "a walled-in
compound or garden", from "pairi" ("around") and "daeza"
or "diz" ("wall", "brick", or
"shape"), Xenophon Grecized the Persian phrase "pairi-daeza" into
"paradeisos".[1]The idea of the enclosed
garden is often referred to as the paradise garden because of
additional Indo-European connotations of "paradise".[which?]
Qualities
The essential qualities of the paradise garden
derive from its original, arid or semi-arid homeland. The fundamental quality
is enclosure of the cultivated area, which excludes the wildness of nature and
includes cultivated and irrigated greenery, providing privacy and security. The
most common design of the perimeter walls is that of a rectangle, and this
forms one of its primary qualities.
Another common quality is the elaborate use of
water, often in canals, ponds, or rills, sometimes in fountains, and less often in waterfalls. The rectangular or rectilinear design is often extended to the water
features, which typically quarter the garden. This design derives from or is
echoed in that of the Garden of
Eden, which in Genesis is described as having a central spring that feeds four rivers,
which each flow out into the world beyond.
Much of the use and symbolism of the paradise
garden is derived from the Garden of
Eden. It was designed to symbolize eternal
life. A tree with a spring issuing from its roots especially symbolises
this. Additionally, the contrast of a formal garden design with the informality
of freely growing plants is a recurring theme in many paradise gardens. Odor
and fruit are important elements of this garden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_River
The Yellow River or Huang
He (Huang Ho) is the second longest river in China, after the Yangtze
River, and the sixth longest river system in the world at the estimated
length of 5,464 km (3,395 mi).[1] Originating in the Bayan Har Mountains in Qinghai province of Western
China, it flows through nine provinces, and it empties into
the Bohai Sea near the city of Dongying in Shandongprovince. The Yellow River basin has an east–west
extent of about 1,900 kilometers (1,180 mi) and a north–south extent of
about 1,100 km (680 mi). Its total drainage
area is about 752,546 square kilometers
(290,560 sq mi).
Its basin was the birthplace of
ancient Chinese civilization, and it was the most prosperous region in
early Chinese
history. There are frequent devastating floods and course changes produced by the continual
elevation of the river bed, sometimes above the level of its surrounding farm
fields.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze
The Yangtze or Yangzi (English: /ˈjæŋtsi/ or /ˈjɑːŋtsi/) is the longest river in Asia, the third-longestin the world and the longest in the world to flow entirely within one
country. Its source is in the northern part of the Tibetan
Plateau and it flows 6,300 km (3,900 mi) in a generally eastern
direction to the East China
Sea. It is the sixth-largest river by discharge volume in the world. Its drainage
basin comprises one-fifth of the land area of China, and is home to
nearly one-third of the country's population.[7]
The Yangtze has played a major role in
the history, culture and economy of
China. For thousands of years, the river has been used for water, irrigation,
sanitation, transportation, industry, boundary-marking and war. The
prosperous Yangtze River Delta generates as much as 20% of the PRC's GDP. The Three
Gorges Dam on the Yangtze is the largest
hydro-electric power station in the world.[8][9] In mid-2014, the Chinese government announced it was building a
multi-tier transport
network, comprising railways, roads and airports, to create a new economic belt alongside the river.[10]
The Yangtze flows through a wide array of
ecosystems and is habitat to several endemic and endangered species including the Chinese
alligator, the narrow-ridged finless porpoise, the Chinese paddlefish, the (extinct) Yangtze River dolphin or baiji, and the Yangtze
sturgeon. In recent years, the river has suffered from industrial pollution,
plastic pollution,[11] agricultural run-off, siltation, and loss of wetland and lakes, which exacerbates seasonal flooding.
Some sections of the river are now protected as nature reserves. A stretch of the upstream Yangtze flowing through deep gorges in western Yunnan is part of the Three Parallel Rivers
of Yunnan Protected Areas, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
https://www.christiantruthcenter.com/nebuchadnezzars-dream/
But there is a
God in heaven that reveals secrets, and makes known to the king Nebuchadnezzar
what shall be in the latter days (Dan 2:28).
We
can look and see what has already being fulfilled and what has not. Here is the
dream;
Dan 2:31-35:
Thou, O king, saw, and behold a great image. This great image, whose
brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible.
This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his
belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part
of clay. Thou saw till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the
image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and broke them to pieces. Then
was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces
together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors; and the
wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that
smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.
King Nebuchadnezzar dream image
The image
represents the world time-line entirely from that time of King Nebuchadnezzar
of Babylon to the coming of Jesus Christ (the last coming of Christ to judge
the world). The four metals in the image are regressing or diminishing in
value; gold is valuable than silver, silver than brass, brass than iron and
iron than clay.
These four
metals speak of four kingdoms, governments or empires who will rule the world
in their order respectively. Know that the four kingdoms, governments or
empires are those who have or had a direct bearing to the Nation of Israel.
Apart from having a direct impart to the Nation of Israel, the four governments
rule the entire world in their times.
The power,
strength and glory of the four governments diminish from the first to the last
accordingly as seeing in the diminishing in value of the four metals from gold
to clay. Their power, strength and glory diminishes in comparison with the
latter power not in comparison to any world power at their times.
In times of
their reign, the four governments rule the entire world and they are the most
powerful, strongest with the highest glory as compared to any other world
governments but not as powerful as the latter mentioned government.
Daniel
interpretation of King Nebuchadnezzar
The head of Gold
Dan 2:37-38:
Thou, O king, art a king of kings: for the God of heaven has given you a
kingdom, power, and strength, and glory. And where-so-ever the children of men
dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven has he given into
your hand, and has made you ruler over them all. Thou art this head of
gold.
Nebuchadnezzar
was the ruler, the king, of the Babylon Empire. The Babylon Empire was an
absolute monarchy and the most powerful, strong, superior empire there ever was
in the world. It had an absolute effect and rule on the entire world than
any other empire there ever was in the world and Nebuchadnezzar was the ruler
of the empire thus the head of gold.
Breast and arms
of silver
Dan 2:39: And
after you shall arise another kingdom inferior to you,…
In 530 BC the
Medes and the Persians overthrew the Babylon Empire. Reason there are two arms
of silver in the image; one arm representing Medes and the other representing
the Persians. The Empire of Medes and Persians was inferior to the Babylon
Empire but they overthrew the Babylon Empire.
They were not as
great as the Empire of Babylon neither in scope nor rulers, and they were a
constitutional monarchy not an absolute monarchy as the Babylon Empire.
The vision of
overthrow of the Babylon Empire and giving it to the Medes and the Persians was
also presented to King Belshazzar who was a son of the former Babylon king,
King Nebuchadnezzar, and we see this in Daniel chapter 5. A hand wrote on
the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace, ‘MENE, MENE, TEKEL and UPHARSIN’.
In interpreting
the writings of the hand to the wall to King Belshazzar, Daniel told him, ‘Thy
kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians’ (Dan 5:28). It is
during the reign of King Belshazzar when Babylon Empire was given to the Medes
and Persians. The Medes and Persians were not as powerful and strong as the
Babylon Empire thus being of silver as seeing in the image.
Belly and
thighs of brass
…and
another third kingdom of brass (Dan 2:39)
The Medes and Persians
were overthrown in 330 BC by the Grecians (Greece). Alexander the great
conquered the whole world including the Medes and Persians when He was about33 years old. After conquering the whole world, Alexander the great
cried and said, ‘is there are no more worlds for me to conquer’.
The Grecians,
led by Alexander the great, were less powerful and strong than the Babylon
Empire and the Medes and Persians thus being the belly of brass in the image.
Brass is less in value than silver and gold.
Legs of iron
Dan
2:40: And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaks
in pieces and subdues all things: and as iron that breaks all these, shall it
break in pieces and bruise.
The Grecian
Empire was overthrown by the Roman Empire being represented by the two legs of
iron in the image. Two legs because the Roman Empire split into two; East and
west Rome. Iron because it was a brutal empire which crashed every person and
government to submission even the Grecian Empire.
The empire was
less powerful and strong than the Grecian Empire, the Medes and Persians and
the Babylon Empire thus being of iron as seeing from the image. Iron is less in
value than brass, silver and gold.
In the reign of
the Roman Empire, in 70 AD the Romans come down into Israel, destroyed the
temple, slaughtered many people, raped women, wiped out everything and every
person and all Jews were scattered all over the world.
This was a
fulfillment of Jesus prophecy holding the Jews accountable for not knowing prophesies as you
have seeing in the fulfilled weeks of Daniel seventy weeks and ignorance of prophecies.
Israel is God’s
time piece as revealed in the article; the church in
Daniel 70 weeks. After the Romans come down, destroyed and wiped out the Jews, Israel
ceased to be a sovereign nation and God clock stopped.
In 1948 AD,
immediately after the end of world war 11 a miracle happened. Israel was
proclaimed a nation and in May 19th 1948 AD,
Israel became a sovereign nation.
See that Israel ceased to be a nation in 70 AD until
1948 AD.
Feet part of
iron and part of clay
Dan
2:41: And whereas you saw the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay, and part of
iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of
the iron, forasmuch as thou saw the iron mixed with miry clay. And as the toes
of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly
strong, and partly broken. And whereas thou saw iron mixed with miry clay, they
shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to
another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.
The foot of the
image has ten toes partly of iron and partly of clay. Immediately Israel became
a nation in May 19th 1948 AD, in May 9th 1950 AD,
six nations come together in the City of Rome, formed the Treaty of Rome and
started a new resurrected Roman empire.
It has been said quite rightly so,
that the French administrators and especially the tax collectors were at all times much
better at collecting taxes than doing some work to improve in the first place
the ability of the people to pay the taxes, ie. to generate some income in the
first place so that the people could live off the money that was left after
they had paid their taxes. This has always since times immemorial been a
problem for the administration of the state, since the Tax Ministery
(Finanzministerium) and the Ministery to increase the Income-Generating
capability of the populace (Wirtschaftsministerium) traditionally knew nothing
about each other. They might as well be on different planets.
Some of the greatest scientists of La Belle France had been Tax
Collectors who had become rich enough to pay for all their laboratory and
equipment and all the staff to work the equipment. Like Lavoisier. And mind
you, no proper French Scientist would ever touch his laboratory equipment with
a 1-meter long stick. This was there for all his staff for the work of the
equipment. We even find some of this in Goethe's Faust. The good Dottore
Faustus would also never touch such a dirty piece like Laboratory Equipment.
And in the Great Britain of those Merry Olden Ages, it was just the other way
'round. Because the Great Newton was also Head of the Royal Mint. This is the
Inverse of the Taxes, even though it is the same, if you can think the Inverse,
and at the same time, the Real Royal Thing. Because who has the Royal Mint has
so much money as one can print. Therefore The Mint is in the Print. Er, the
Bank of England, which is the Royal Bank of the Rothschild's. It makes no
Differance at all, as the good Jacques Derrida would have said.
Now it is quite logical that when the Economy was good, meaning there
was a lot of income in the populace, there would also be a proportionaly high
potential for generating tax revenue, so that the state could re-invest that
into infrastructure, schools, universities and so on, and so on. This is a
system that every Theorist of National Economy would try to implement as good as
possible if this Theorist of National Economy would ever be invited by both
those abovementioned Ministeries. Unfortunately that happened only very rarely
in the Financial History of humanity. Only the British'ers in the heyday of
their Victorian Empire managed to come up with such a thing. That was the Great
Innovation of the British'ers which was their foundation of the Rule of the
World.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom
History of taxation in the United Kingdom
includes the history of all collections by governments under law, in money or
in kind, including collections by monarchs and lesser feudal lords, levied on
persons or property subject to the government, with the primary purpose of
raising revenue.
19th century
Pitt's income tax was levied from 1799 to 1802,
when it was abolished by Henry Addington during the Peace of Amiens. Addington had taken over as prime minister in 1801, after Pitt's resignation
over Catholic
Emancipation. The income tax was reintroduced by
Addington in 1803 when hostilities recommenced, but it was again abolished in
1816, one year after the Battle of
Waterloo.
Addington's Act for a ‘contribution of the
profits arising from property, professions, trades and offices’ (the words
‘income tax’ were deliberately avoided) introduced two significant changes.
First, it allowed taxation at the source; for instance, the Bank of England
would deduct an amount, to be paid as tax, from interest paid to gilt holders.
Secondly, it introduced schedules:
Schedule A (tax on income from UK land)
Schedule B (tax on commercial occupation of
land)
Schedule C (tax on income from public
securities)
Schedule D (tax on trading income, income from
professions and vocations, interest, overseas income and casual income)
Schedule E (tax on employment income)
Income not falling within those schedules was
not taxed. (Later a sixth Schedule, Schedule F (tax on UK dividend income) was
added.)
Although the maximum tax rate under Addington's
Act was 5% – only one-half of the 10% allowed under Pitt's – the other changes
resulted in a 50% increase in revenue, largely because it doubled the number of
persons liable for the tax and somewhat expanded the scope.[10]
Pitt in opposition had argued against
Addington's innovations: he adopted them largely unchanged, however, when he
returned to office in 1805. The one major change he made was to raise the
maximum rate back to the 10%, the rate in his original bill, in 1806. Income
tax changed little for the duration of the Napoleonic Wars, despite changes in government.[11]
Nicholas Vansittart was Chancellor in 1815, at
the time of the Battle of
Waterloo. He was inclined to maintain the
income tax, but public sentiment was heavily against it, and predictably, the
opposition championed its abolition. It was thus repealed in 1816 ‘with a
thundering peal of applause’. In fact, the tax was so unpopular that Parliament
ordered the destruction of all documents connected with it. This was more show
than substance, as the King's
Remembrancer had made duplicates and retained
them.[11]
Only in recent years since about 1989 or so, did the Germans surpass the
French in the business of Tax Collection, since the German Tax Collectors i.e.
the ministr(y/ies) of finances and the ministr(y/ies) of Social Services were
so good at collecting taxes and social security contributions that the first time
in the history of hu-mankind the German citizens lived for about 3/4 of their
productive lives for the tax collector only. Because all those nice
statisticians of Germany who did the accounting of all that load of taxes, they
consistently forgot that on top of the official income taxes and social
security contributions, there was the value added tax or VAT. And since this
was on top of it all, it also hit the poorer people the hardest. And there were
some additional taxes like the energy tax which also hit the poorer people the
hardest. So it came to pass that the Germans were in a pretty sad state of
mInd. But instead of revolting, like their French common sufferers, the
movement vestes jaunes, the Germans chose to vote for the Green Party, which
had been mostly responsible for all those taxes in the first place. Like the
energy sur-taxes. Such was the mental derangement of the poor Germans. There is
very little hope that the poor Germans will ever get their wits together at
all. One may say that as individuals, there are some quite smart Germans
around. Like Peter Sloterdijk. But as a mass, especially the voters of the
political parties, and even more especially the consumers of the German
High-Quality media like the German national television... They are as dumb as
Bernd das Brot. I have no idea how Thomas Krappweis got this in-depth
psycho-anal-ysis of the German National Character. And it is really and exactly
right to the point. In another diction I have called them the Troglodytes, and
the good Nietzsche always liked to call the Germans "Die letzten
Menschen". If there was anything in his philosophy that he was so
absolutely correct about, it was his anal-ysis of the German National
Character.
Now since we are already at the subject of taxes we come to one of the
most advanced ideas about taxes that anyone had come up with since quite a long
time. And this is of course again our good Peter Slotderdijk. And he always has
some interesting ideas up his sleeve: It is the system of honorable taxes or
the taxes of honor. He came up with the splendid idea that one should introduce
a honor system of paying the taxes. Actually this would also involve a complete
Neurolinguistic Reframing of the concept of honor.
To better explain the system of honor that I have introduced in the
above passage I have to expound a little more the Anthropology of Honor.
Therefore I will have to make a little detour into the Japanese Samurai concept
of Honor where it was considered to be the most honorable when a Samurai
committed Sepukku. And by the terminology of Morphology, the Sepukku actually
means to turn one's intestines from the inside to the outside, which would be
also a Meta-Morphology of the Intestines. And the Abdomen or Hara was in the
Ancient Japanese thought the seat of the Vital-Soul. This was the meaning of
the Anima in the original pre-Christian sense of the word. Because in Antiquity
there existed no such concept like the Immortal Soul. That was just grafted by
the early Christian thinkers upon the more ancient of the anima. Anima just
means to be animated, which means living. And it also means breathing. The
Spiritus derived from A-Spirare. So there was a little bit of Meta-Morpology
done by the early Christian Church Fathers, who just liked to turn all the
venerable concepts of the Ancient Metaphysics topsy-turvy, inside- out and then
some more. It was a really pretty complete Meta-Morpology of the Ancient
thought systems. And only by referring to the ancient Shinto Japanese thought
system, we can get to the deep structure of them. The Japanese had been wise
enough to keep all their ancient Shinto thought systems together not to be
tainted by some Christian thoughts. So I must make a little correction to the
work that is described in "Das Gold im Wachs" about which I report in
Part I. The nice present-day Christian Theologians who wrote the book "Das
Gold im Wachs" probably were not aware what a kind of Spiritual Minefield
they had gotten themselves into. As the saying goes: Some things are easier to
get into, than to get out of. And especially when dealing with Shinto
Not-So-Philosophy because it has no connection at all with Western Philosophy
and especially not with Western Theology. One could say that they are
In-Commensurable. Mensura means measure, but it also means Mens, which is the
mInd or the Verstand or the Vernunft, or the Logos or the Ratio or the
Rationality. And as Heidegger had expounded it in WHD, there exists quite a
confusion about what all those concepts really mean in present-day
Philosophical Usage, and what they had possibly had some quite different
meaning and usage in those the olden days before the nice Christian Church
Fathers turned everything around and topsy-turvy as one might say. So the
deeper meaning of those ancient concepts or ideas, as we may call them, had
done some quite strange Meta-Morphoses throughout the last 2500 years of
Christian Philosophy and Theology.
There was also an Animus, which was called a Daimonos in Greek, and
Sokrates mentioned his Daimonos quite a few times. The Daimonos was a sort of
Spiritual Guide, in Latin there is a word Spiritus Rector, which gives some
related meaning. But today that just means a human teacher or professor who
leads onto some path of thinking, like Schopenhauer was (a little bit) a
Spiritus Rector for Nietzsche
[who liked to refer to "Schopenhauer als Lehrer"].
Also and likewise as Nietzsche was (sort of and a little bit) a Spiritus
Rector for Oswald Spengler and probably also for Peter Sloterdijk. So it was by
no means a bad Daemon, and this was only because of the Creative Thinking of
the early Christian Church Fathers. Because they just liked it so very much to
convert those ancient mythological ideas into their polar opposites. This was
also a very early exercise of Dis-Information, and Political Correctness, how
to corrupt something that was very old and very venerable into something that
was very sinister and very bad. And the early Christian Church Fathers
succeeded quite nicely in turning around and about everything from the
Antiquity into something very sinister. So this was also a very good Example of
a Meta-Morphology of the most awful kind. We just take the English word awe,
and when we turn it into awful it also becomes very sinister. Awe means in
German Respekt, even Reverence in English. But it also has its sinister side:
shyness, fear, awe, timidity, inhibition, timidness. So there is this nice US
Army expression of Shock and Awe, which was expoundet in the Irak wars. This is
also a very good example of the Neurolinuistic Reframing. And the Church
Fathers were masters of this kind of Sinister Thinking. So they had turned the
whole of Metaphysical Thinking and the Mythology of Antiquity into something
Demonical. When we today complain about some Dis-Information in the good
Quality Mainstream Media, especially in the German National TV like ARD and
ZDF, we should be aware where the REAL DIS-INFORMATION is hiding in PLAIN SIGHT
or not so plain sight at all. So it needs quite a hevy work of Double- and
Triple- Thinking of Reflexology or Meta-Morphology to get to the Nooks of
Granny, as I some- times call it.
See:
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/sepukku
ha•ra-ki•ri
(ˈhɑr əˈkɪər i, ˈhær ə-, ˈhær
i-) / also hari-kari n.
1. ceremonial suicide by ripping open
the abdomen with a dagger or knife: formerly practiced in Japan by members of
the warrior class when disgraced or sentenced to death.
2. any suicidal action; a
self-destructive act: political hara-kiri.
[1855–60; <
Japanese, =hara belly + kiri cut]
But there is a morphological similarity between comitting sepukku, and
paying taxes. Since for a Samurai, his intestines litterally meant "the
seat of the soul", because the Japanese believe that this is the Hara.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hara_(tanden)
Hara (Japanese: 腹: abdomen, should not be translated as
"stomach" to avoid confusing it with the organ). In the Japanese
medical tradition and in Japanese martial arts traditions, the word Hara is used
as a technical term for a specific area (physical/anatomical) or energy field
(physiological/energetic) of the body.
In the martial
arts
In the martial arts,
Hara is sometimes considered as equivalent to, the lower of the three dantian
(tanden in Japanese). Various styles of martial arts describe this as being
just below or directly behind the umbilicus.[21] In Traditional Chinese Medicine
(TCM) the by-name Dantian is given alternatively to three acupuncture points:
the "Gate of Origin" (Ren 4), and the "Sea of Qi" (Ren 6),[22] and, by some, also to the
"Stone Gate" (Ren 5).[23] All three points are situated on
the midline (centre of the linea alba) of the lower abdomen (i.e. below the
navel). They constitute part of the Ren Mai, usually translated as Conception
Vessel (CV), which is one of the Qi Jing Ba Mai, the Eight Extraordinary
Vessels or eminent energy pathways of the body.
Dantian is often
translated as "elixir field", indicating that the needling points
called "Sea of Qi", "Gate of Origin" and "Stone
Gate" are not really sitting on the Ren Mai like dots on a line. Rather
they represent a place from which the "Sea of Qi" etc. can be reached
and influenced – either via the energy flow along the Ren Mai (Conception
Vessel) or by penetrating deeper into the abdomen (the level to be determined
by the length of the needle and the depth of its insertion, in the case of
palpation, by the depth of penetration and Qi projection, in the case of
breathing or movement exercises by the use of muscle tonus and combination,
direction of connective tissue engagement etc.). Hence, as the point names
indicate, the lower Dantian, which ever point it is associated with, ought to
be seen as a three dimensional area of varying size inside the abdomen, not as
a point on the abdomen. In that sense it is identical with the "small
hara" or the "small abdomen", terms used in some Chinese
classical texts and commentaries that discuss the origin and location of the Qi
Jing Ba Mai (Eight Extraordinary Vessels) to which the Ren Mai belongs and is
connected.[24] Modern commentators believe that
the terms refer to "the kidney reflex area below the umbilicus".[25]
The Hara or
lower Dantian, as conceptualised by the Chinese and Japanese martial arts, is important for their practice,
because it is seen, as the term "Sea of Qi" indicates, as the
reservoir of vital or source energy (Yuan Qi). It is, in other words, the vital
centre of the body as well as the centre of gravity. For many martial arts, the
extension of energy or force from this centre is a common concept.[26] Many martial art styles, amongst
them Aikido, emphasise the importance of "moving from the hara",[27] i.e. moving from the centre of
one's very being – body and mind. There are a large number of breathing
exercises in traditional Japanese and Chinese martial arts where attention is
always kept on the dantian or hara to strengthen the "Sea
of Qi".
]
Now the highest ever possible achievment of honor would be, that the one
who paid the most taxes in the whole of the land, he also was celebrated as the
"most honorable" person in the whole of the land. So he would receive
all the medals of honor, the Bundesverdienstkreuz am Hosenband (on the garter)
and he would be invited to all those parties with his very honorable
Bundespräsident... and so on. So it might just come to pass that there would be
developed a finely structured system of gradation of honor. The "most
supreme honorable" one would be the one who paid the most taxes in the land.
So, he might also be called the King of Honor. Then would come the nobility of
honor: The upper echelon would be called the "very honorable" people.
So there we might find some film stars and other celebrities of the German High
Quality Mainstream media, like also all the directors and highly paid
functionaries of the German High Quality National Television ARD and ZDF.
He may even be invited to some parties where he met also those the very
honorable people, like the very honorable Boris Becker, and then the very
honorable Dieter Bohlen, and the just likely very honorable Verona Feldbusch,
and then and then... I believe that very honorable Master Taxpayer would be in
Taxpayer Heaven, and he would go on and earn so much more money, to be able to
pay so much more taxes. This would be the Finanzminister's Heaven on Earth, and
everyone would be happy forever after without an end, and the finances of the
State would not only bloom, but they would quite explode. And then, you may
have guessed it by now, all the ministers in the country would cry out loud and
say: With so much money to administrate we direly need some more high-paying
administrator's (er, bureaucrat's) positions to administrate all that money for
the better good of the public. Er, I am just having a very bad night-mare right
now as I am day-dreaming. This will not happen in my lifetime at all.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Bohlen
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verona_Pooth
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Becker
There was quite a good joke about the successful implementation of
communism that goes about like this: I will abbreviate this a little bit. The
leaders of the communist parties of Europe decided to make some re-union in
heaven after they had died. And God himself did the hosting of the party
because it was such a high-importance affair. So one after the other did his
spiel how successful he was at realizing true communism in his land. And god
always nodded and said: It will not come to pass, neither in your succesors
life time nor his succesor's succesor. At last the Polish General Secretary of
the Polish Communist Party gave his spiel how successful his implementation of
communism had been. God again nodded and after some deliberation he said: This
will not come to pass in even in my own life-time at all. End of joke.
The work of Aby Warburg can be viewed in direct
connection with the work of Semiotics and Umberto Eco, which I will present in
the next chapter. There is one point to notice and this is that most of the
Semioticians are or were Literature scholars, dealing mostly with novels and
fantasy stories. And I have the impression that the work of the Semioticians including
Umberto Eco was pretty much oblivious of the fact that Aby Warburg had
developed a complete theory of Semiotics in the 1920's which was almost
repeated to a word by the Semioticians of the 1960's to 1990's. The
Semioticians probably didn't know the Secret Structure of the Warburg
Library. So we can heap just another mystery on the already quite large
heap of mysteries of the Name of the Rose.
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#eco_sein
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#eco_cognitive
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#eco_struktur
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#eco_mythologik
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#peirce_triad
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#plato_kratylos
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#plato_stoicheia
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#struktur_semiosphere
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#lotman_semio
But there is also a Semiotics of the Real
Thing, and this is what I call Meta-Morphology. And Meta-Morphology is about
the Super-Position of Meaning, in exactly the sense that the Semioticians
define it. There are super-imposed levels of meaning and each level
pre-supposes that all the levels below it are intact, there is nothing that
disturbs the lower levels. And the Super-Position of Meaning that I am
referring to is also what some people call the Kabbalah. And it is not just a
kind of Jewish interpretation of the Talmud, but it is a generic mode of
Codification Or En-Cryption that is used in all the so-called Esoteric
writings. They are called Esoteric only because the normal people cannot
decrypt them. So there are some levels of En- and De-coding or En- and
De-crypting to go through, which are also called Initiations. To reach a
certain level of De-Coding and De-Crypting is equivalent with the appropriate
level of Initiation. And we then come to the Arch-Meta-Morphosis of them All: Because
in ancient Greek, the Crypting is equivalent with the Kalypso, and the
De-Crypting is equivalent with the Apo-Kalypsis. And in the Heideggerian
terminology, the Apo-Kalypsis means: Die Ent-Bergung. Then we come to the
A-Laetheia, and then some. [We can also find some traces of that in Sloterdijik
20JH, p. 257+]. But I have a quite different and I hope also deeper connection
here:
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#noo_spf1
As I am discussing this, it seems quite strange
to me that neither Umberto Eco nor all his interpreters seem to know about the
Warburg Library. Because the good Aby Warburg would also fit very well into
that fabulous monastery of Umberto's vivid phantasy. [We could also call him
the Wahr-Berg or the Zauber-Berg, or the Mystical Mountain,
and then some...] Maybe we can even find a similar name: The Abbot Abbo of Fossanova. Fossa Nova of course means the New
Well-Spring. Like in: dike, fosse / ditch, trench, canal / moat / a pit, groove, cavity, or
depression.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fossa
We
can enlarge the speculation a little bit when we make a slight Neurolinguistic
Reframing of the Fossa Nova. Because in those olden times there was much
talk about the Fon-Secca meanting Fonte or Fuente Secca. This
means the dried-up well-spring of the older knowledge from the Roman and Greek
times. And the Fuente Nova was of course found by the Knights Templar
who had dug some archeological expeditions into the ancient Jerusalem Temple
Mount. So go all the legends that the Knights Templar had found this Fuente
Nova, and it was somehow connected with the Name of the Rose. What that was
exactly is still waiting to be found out. And the Knights Templar had some
superior knowledge, or as I call it: The Superior Intelligence. And of course
that Superior Intelligence had by needs to be destroyed by King Philip IV of France. This is the official story. And of course
there is a hidden agenda. Because none of the treasures of the Knights Templar were ever found by
the French, and this is a good indication that the Knights Templar had known
what was in store for them, and they had long ago made their preparations for
such a case. At least this is what I would do, when I were confronted with the
historically inevitable destruction of my own Holy Order. Since when I
have the Superior Intelligence, I also must do a little prophesy here and
there. And one doesn't need a crystal ball for that. It is just the age-old law
of the battle of the Inferior Intelligence against the Supreme
Intelligence. Outwardly, the Supreme Intelligence must be defeated by the
Agents of the Matrix (as they are called in the appropriate movie by the
Wachowski's). Because it is also an eternal law that the Superior Intelligence
can and may not use the same base and brutal methods and machinations of the
Eternal Foe. [See the poly-mechanae of Odysseus, see Sloterdijk 20JH, p. 281+].
It is impossible for the Superior Intelligence to engage the same kind of
machination of the Lesser Intelligence. Naturally, since we know the laws of
history, we have made our preparations.
So
we found another dis-guise (Bernardo Gui is just such a dis-guise), and we
did what all the Secret Holy Orders do when they are threatened. So we
know the Meta-Morphology in and out, and we all know that the Holy Sacrament of
Trans-Substantiation is a particular interesting kind of
Meta-Morphology. Meta-Morphae means the changing of form. But if the whole
thing is completely empty, then there is no Trans-Substantiation possible at
all. This turns some very old philosophy on its head, the old classical dualism
of Form and Substance (Morphae and Hylae). Again as we state it. When there is
no substance, and the whole thing is Emptiness, like in Kenoma, or in
Shunyata, then the whole business of Trans-Substantiation is just
senseless. And of course the Holy Roman Kat-holik Church would not have liked
it very much if such a rumor would reach the masses. Then the Holy Roman Rites
would be senseless, and the Holy Communion equally. So when we are good Knights
Templar's we know this already. Anyone here who has some doubts about this
speculation? The Knights Templar went to Portugal and florished there in The
Name of the Rose, of course. And some time later there were the
Rosicrucians who had liked the name, but had no idea what was behind that name,
of the Rosy Cross. Because they had forgotten that the Forma (Morphae)
of the Rose is impossible to incorporate into a cross. The Rose is Penta-
and Hepta-Symmetric and no cross can be found there. A cross is always
Axial-Symmetric, and it is the Duplicity or Duplication of Dualism.
And the more you Duplicate the Dualism, the less will come out of it.
Because it is just a Meta-Morphology of the Original Dualism. And the Cross can
in no way be Meta-Morph'ed or Transcend'ed into a Triad or Trinity. (Which is
again a theme from the Matrix Movie).
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#nootriade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation
Transubstantiation (Latin: transsubstantiatio; Greek: μετουσίωσις metousiosis) is, according to the teaching of
the Roman Catholic Church, the change of substance or essence by which the bread and wine offered
in the sacrifice of the sacrament of the Eucharist during the Mass, become, in reality, the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In this teaching, the notions of
substance and transubstantiation are not linked with any particular theory of metaphysics.[1]
The Roman
Catholic Church teaches that in the Eucharistic offering bread and wine are
changed into the body and blood of Christ.[2] The reaffirmation of this doctrine
was expressed, using the word "transubstantiate", by the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215.[3][4] It was later challenged by various
14th-century reformers, John Wycliffe in particular.[5]
The manner in
which the change occurs, the Roman Catholic Church teaches, is a mystery:
"The signs of bread and wine become, in a way surpassing understanding,
the Body and Blood of Christ."[6]:1333 The precise terminology to be used to refer to the nature of the
Eucharist and its theological implications has a contentious history,
especially in the Protestant Reformation.[7]
In the Greek Orthodox Church, the doctrine has been discussed under the term of metousiosis, coined as a direct
loan-translation of transsubstantiatio in the 17th century. In Eastern Orthodoxy in general, the Sacred Mystery (Sacrament) of the Eucharist is more commonly discussed using
alternative terms such as "trans-elementation" (μεταστοιχείωσις, metastoicheiosis), "re-ordination" (μεταρρύθμισις, metarrhythmisis), or simply "change" (μεταβολή, metabole).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosicrucianism
... an unknown esoteric order to the world and made seeking
its knowledge attractive to many.[1][2] The mysterious doctrine of the
order is "built on esoteric truths of the ancient past", which
"concealed from the average man, provide insight into nature, the physical universe, and the spiritual realm."[3] The manifestos do not elaborate
extensively on the matter, but clearly combine references to Kabbalah, Hermeticism, alchemy, and mystical Christianity.[4]
https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/the-knights-templar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar_in_England
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/the-northerner/2011/jun/27/whatever-happened-to-the-knights-templar
...
In response to these critics, the influential
Bernard of Clairvaux, wrote a multi-page treatise entitled De Laude Novae
Militiae ("In Praise of the New Knighthood"), in which he championed
their mission and defended the idea of a military religious order by appealing
to the long-held Christian theory of a 'just war', which legitimised
"taking up the sword" to defend the innocent and the Church from
violent attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trials_of_the_Knights_Templar
The Knights
Templar trace their beginnings to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in c. 1120 when nine Christian knights, under the auspices of
King Baldwin II and the Patriarch Warmund, were given the task of protecting pilgrims on the roads to Jerusalem,
which they did for nine years until elevated to a military order at the Council of Troyes in 1129. They became an elite
fighting force in the Crusades known for their propensity not to
retreat or surrender.
Eventually,
their rules of secrecy, their power, privileges and their wealth,[a] made them vulnerable to the King of
France’s accusations, and with the Pope’s unsuccessful attempts to prevent it,
their destruction. The Templar leader, Master Jacques de Molay had recently come to France for
meetings with the pope. In 1307, members of the Templar order in France were
suddenly charged with heresy and arrested. In France, many
ultimately, including their leader, were burned at the stake while others were
sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. The events in France led to a series of
trials in other locations, not all of which had the same outcome.
Plan and the arrest
On 14 September
1307 all bailiffs and seneschals[b] in the kingdom of France were sent
secret orders from King Philip IV ordering preparations to be made for the
arrest and imprisonment of all members of the Order of Templars; the actual
arrests were to be executed a month later.[25] At dawn on October 13, 1307, the
soldiers of King Philip IV then captured all Templars found in France.[26] Clement V, initially incensed at
this flagrant disregard for his authority nonetheless relented and on November
22, 1307, issued a papal decree, ordering all monarchs of the Christian faith to arrest
all Templars and confiscate their lands in the name of the Pope and the Church.[27] The order went out to England, Iberia, Germany, Italy and Cyprus. The leader, Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay, and Hughes de Pairaud, a Templar,
referred to in various documents as "the visitor of France", who was
the collector of all of the royal revenues of France owing to the Order, were
both arrested, as were many other Templars in France .[28]
The complete Article on the Warburg Library with all the information is now in
these files:
http://www.noologie.de/aby.pdf
http://www.noologie.de/aby.htm
http://www.noologie.de/warburg-class.html
https://wdl.warburg.sas.ac.uk/
Warburg Digital Library Collections
http://warburg.libguides.com/classification
Ex Libris Aby Warburg: Magic and Science
https://wdl.warburg.sas.ac.uk/islandora/object/islandora%3A3969
Ex Libris Aby Warburg: Magic and Science
The Warburg Institute Library holds a collection
https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/library-collections/library
A video guide is available.
Our Research Guides provide a practical
in-depth guide to the Library’s collections.
Contact the Library
Email: Warburg.Library@sas.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7862 8935/6
Twitter: @Warburg_Library
Facebook: @WarburgLibrary
Subject View
https://wdl.warburg.sas.ac.uk/browse/subject
Grid View of the Library
https://wdl.warburg.sas.ac.uk/islandora/object/islandora%3A3969?page=1&display=grid
https://wdl.warburg.sas.ac.uk/browse/classmark
Some
history of the Warburg Library
Nietzsche: [515]
"Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können."
I
discuss this quite well-known book with some hopefully novel tracks of thought.
I have read almost all of Umberto Eco's books, mostly his semiotic works. I
also found "Name of the Rose" quite good, but mostly for semiotic
reasons, which may be a little bit unusual. His "Foucault Pendulum"
was almost as good. But the later novels, like Baudolino and so on were quite boring
for me, they were only rehashes of some odd pieces of literature. This is what
mostly occurs when a writer has some success initially and then wants to cash
in on that success with some sequels. See also Jared Diamond for another
example. And I like Eco as a scientist and historian as well as a novelist. He
ranks for me as quite on a par with Giordano Bruno. With the exception that
Umberto had a lot of humor, and Giordano Bruno had none whatsoever of that. I
also like a quite good genius with humor better than a much greater genius
without humor. Like Isaak Newton. He was probably the most sourly character in
the whole history of human geniusness. Next to Platon and Aristoteles, I would
say.
[[Bruno
had been a Domenican, and Domenicans are not known for their sense of humor.
For example they had invented the inquisition. Quite to the contrary of
the Franciscans who had a lot of humor, like the good William of
Baskerville of our story.]]
So
now I will repeat some text from the introduction of Meta-Morphology to get us
back on track with that story:
The
Tri-Polarity is not oppositional but complementary. The logics behind this is that there
cannot be an opposition in a Tri-Polarity at all. So there are some deep
mysteries behind this mode of imaging / imagining which was also expounded by
the complete exegesis of Tri-Polarity by Giordano Bruno. I have never found any
literature that even mentioned this besides all those other great works of
Giordano Bruno. Now there is a logical progression by prime numbers. When you
do this, you get to the Penta-Gramma(ton). And then the Hepta-Gramma(ton). Why
is this so? It is one of the Laws of Nature. The Penta-Gramma(ton) is present
in many flowering plants. And it is also called the Law of the Golden Section.
http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/hosted-sites/R.Knott/Fibonacci/phi2DGeomTrig.html
https://www.mathsisfun.com/geometry/pentagram.html
http://jaced.com/2009/12/15/the-golden-ratio-in-a-pentagram/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagram
A pentagram
(sometimes known as a pentalpha, pentangle or star pentagon)
is the shape of a five-pointed star.
Pentagrams were
used symbolically in ancient Greece and Babylonia, and are used today as a symbol of
faith by many Wiccans, akin to the use of the cross by Christians and the Star of David by the Jews. The pentagram has magical associations. Many people who practice Neopagan faiths wear jewelry incorporating
the symbol. Christians once commonly used the pentagram to
represent the five wounds of Jesus.[1][2] The pentagram is also used as a
symbol by other belief systems, and is associated with Freemasonry.
The word pentagram
comes from the Greek word πεντάγραμμον (pentagrammon),[3] from πέντε (pente), "five" + γραμμή (grammē), "line".[4] The word "pentacle" is sometimes used
synonymously with "pentagram".[5] The word pentalpha is a
learned modern (17th-century) revival of a post-classical Greek name of the
shape.[6]
Early history
In early (Ur I) monumental
Sumerian script, or cuneiform, a pentagram glyph served as a logogram for the word ub, meaning
"corner, angle, nook; a small room, cavity, hole; pitfall" (this
later gave rise to the cuneiform sign UB ⌒, composed of five wedges, further reduced to four in Assyrian
cuneiform).[citation needed]
The word Pentemychos
(πεντέμυχος lit. "five corners" or "five recesses")[7] was the title of the cosmogony of Pherecydes of Syros.[8] Here, the "five corners"
are where the seeds of Chronos are placed within the Earth in
order for the cosmos to appear.[9][clarification needed]
And
the Tri-Polarity or the Tri-Gonikos (gonos) is almost completely absent in
living Nature except for some sea snails whose shells are constructed in
Tri-Gonos(ikos) manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntomodrillia_triangulos
The Drilliidae are a taxonomic family of small predatory sea snails with high-spired shells. They are
classified as marine gastropod mollusks in the superfamily Conoidea.[2]
This family has no subfamilies.
http://www.gastropods.com/5/Shell_77165.shtml
But
the Tri-Polarity or the Tri-Gonikos is superbly present in the Crystal
Structure (or crystal lattice) of the Diamond. And this has its own mythology.
There is a quite misleading mis-nomer of the Tetra-Eder, which means the
4-Cornered One. But it is actually the most simple of the Platonic Solids, and
it is constructed out of Tri-Angles, which means Tri-Angulos or Tri-Gonikos. So
the logical progression of Tri- in 2-D goes into Tetra- in 3-D.
I have written something
about this in my work Noologie III: "Der Diamantweg der Noologie: Eine
Ody-See-Reise in die Grenz- und Rand-Bereiche des Denkens". We have heard a lot about Odysseus,
and we will hear much more about him.
http://www.noologie.de/diamant.htm
http://www.noologie.de/diamant.htm#_Toc348694834
http://www.noologie.de/diamant.htm#_Toc348694836
http://www.noologie.de/diamant.htm#_Toc348694848
http://www.noologie.de/diamant.htm#_Toc348694851
http://www.noologie.de/cunni.htm
http://www.noologie.de/cunni06.htm
http://www.noologie.de/cunni06.htm#Heading27
Tres
and Tria are some very old words in almost all the Indo-European languages.
Tri-Murti is the Indian name for the Most Holy Triad of the Gods: Brahma,
Vishnu and Shiva. The English words are:
trey
/ triad / trine / trinity / trio / troika
Therefore
the Tri-Polarity is also the way out of the Dualistic thinking and especially
the dualistic theology of the Abrahamitic Religions. The Dualism originated
[more or less] with Zoroaster, then was amplified out of all proportions by the
Manichaeans, and the Hl. St. Augustinus had been a staunch Manichaean, and had
remained that ever since, even after his (outwardly) conversion to
Christianity. It was mainly because of the Hl. St. Augustinus that Western
Roman Christianity became so dualistic. The Orthodox Christianity was much less
radical in this respect because they still had the HAGIA SOPHIA, WHICH WAS NOT
AT ALL THE VIRGIN MARY. The Gnostics were also very dualistic, as were their
Kathar successors in the middle ages. Kat-har-sis is a Greek word, and
therefore I write it in the Greek spelling, not the Latinized one. We should
stick as close as we can to the originals, and not the Roman Latin fakes.
Why
would one call a mystery novel by the Name of the Rose ? Because of the Rosicrucians
??, or the Rosalyn Chapel ???, or because of the Secret Name of the
Vulva ????? At least one artist had gotten the hint: Vouba, is Vouwa, and
then it is the Baubo, and then you quite get it... [I have put the 5 question
marks there for a very good reason.]
http://vouba.com/geometry-of-rose
Now we also get a mathematical hint: Because there is a rare case of
transforming the penta- into hepta- symmetry in mathematical functions. There
are two kinds of symmetry: Axial and Radial. Axial meaning that you have a
multiple of 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on. They are all dividable by 2. Radial symmetry
doesn't bother with such mathematical finesses. It cannot be divided by 2. So
it is 3, 5, 7, and so on in the order of prime numbers. The botanic scientists
have found a quite arcane name for this kind of symmetry. They call it the Actinomorphic
flower. But higher prime numbers are not so much in use by nature. It
probably ends with 11 and 13. And a Rose flower can do the higher mathematics
of 5- and 7- symmetry quite well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_(mathematics)
https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vectors/geometric-roses-vectors
http://www.flowersociety.org/hidden-geometry.html
The
writer of this work is Keith Critchlow. He is also well known for other, less
mystical works about Sacred Geometry.
There is a specality about Rose flowers since they have the ability of
this abovementioned penta-gramma symmetry. So what makes a Rose so special?
When we look at a picture of a rose it is quite visually comprehensible: The
arrangement of the rose petals is an incredibly complicated superposition
(or mathematically called) a recursion with variant parameters of the pentagrammatical
Ur-Pattern. It is very difficult to describe this in a mathematical
function, but it looks very easy when we see the flower. Now we should also
understand that the kind of Rose that we admire today is totally a product of
human cultivation. There are no manifold interleaved structures of petals in
Nature like this because they would have been selected by Darwinism out of the
Genotype.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floral_symmetry
https://www.maximumyield.com/definition/840/actinomorphic-flower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_in_nature
... Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) noted their
patterned circular arrangement.[3] Centuries later, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) noted the spiral
arrangement of leaf patterns, that tree trunks gain successive rings as they
age, and proposed a rule purportedly satisfied by the
cross-sectional areas of tree-branches.[4][3] Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) pointed out the
presence of the Fibonacci sequence in nature, using it to explain the pentagonal form of some flowers.[3] In 1754, Charles Bonnet observed that the spiral phyllotaxis of plants were frequently expressed
in both clockwise and counter-clockwise golden ratio series.[3] Mathematical observations of
phyllotaxis followed with Karl Friedrich Schimper and his friend Alexander Braun's 1830 and 1830 work, respectively;
Auguste Bravais and his brother Louis connected
phyllotaxis ratios to the Fibonacci sequence in 1837, also noting its
appearance in pinecones and pineapples.[3] In his 1854 book, German
psychologist Adolf Zeising explored the golden ratio expressed in the arrangement of plant parts,
the skeletons of animals and the branching patterns of their veins and nerves, as
well as in crystals.[5][6][7] A. H. Church studied the patterns of phyllotaxis
in his 1904 book.[8] In 1917, D'Arcy Thompson published On Growth and Form; his description of phyllotaxis and
the Fibonacci sequence, the mathematical relationships in the spiral growth
patterns of plants showed that simple equations could describe the spiral
growth patterns of animal horns and mollusc shells.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudolino
In the year of
1204, Baudolino of Alessandria enters Constantinople, unaware of the Fourth Crusade that has thrown the city into
chaos. In the confusion, he meets Niketas Choniates and saves his life. Niketas is
amazed by his language genius, speaking many languages he has never heard, and
on the question: if he is not part of the crusade, who is he? Baudolino begins
to recount his life story to Niketas.
His story begins
in 1155, when Baudolino – a highly talented Italian peasant boy – is sold to
and adopted by the emperor Frederick I. At court and on the battlefield, he is educated in reading and writing
Latin and learns about the power
struggles and battles of northern Italy at the time. He is sent to Paris to become a scholar.
In Paris, he
gains friends (such as the Archpoet, Abdul, Robert de Boron and Kyot, the purported source of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival) and learns about the legendary
kingdom of Prester
John. From this event onward, Baudolino dreams of reaching this fabled land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudolino
Baudolino is a 2000 novel by Umberto Eco about the adventures of a man named
Baudolino in the known and mythical Christian world of the 12th century.
Baudolino was translated into English in 2001 by William Weaver. The novel presented a number of
particular difficulties in translation, not the least of which is that there
are ten or so pages written in a made-up language that is a mixture of Latin,
medieval Italian and other languages (intended to reconstruct how a
barely-literate Italian peasant boy of the 12th century would have tried to
write in the vernacular).
https://libros-gratis.com/ebooks/baudolino-umberto-eco/
En una zona del bajo Piamonte donde años después
se fundaría la ciudad de Alessandria, el fantasioso y embustero Baudolino
conquista a Federico Barbarroja y se convierte en su hijo adoptivo. Baudolino
inventa historias que se transforman en Historia y, empujado por la imaginación
de su ahijado, Federico emprende una cruzada por restituir al Preste Juan las
más prestigiosa reliquia de la cristiandad, el Santo Grial. Federico muere en
el intento, y será Baudolino quien continúe el viaje hacia tierras lejanas,
desafiando monstruos y enamorando a la más singular de las hijas de Eva.
Aventura picaresca, novela histórica, relato de un delito imposible, teatro de
invenciones lingüísticas hilarantes, esta obra es una celebarción del mito y la
utopía..
The
German work Ketzer derives from the Kathars, and Umberto Eco did his nice
little novel around this theme, with the two Ketzer monks in the monastery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose
http://www.cathar.info/cathar_legacy.htm
http://www.cathar.info/cathar_origins.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism
http://www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com/gbe_cathars.htm
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20081845?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=5235
https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Name-of-the-Rose-novel-by-Eco
We
can get some hints from the geometry of the petals of the rose, and transform
it into the names of the characters in the novel. All the names in the novel by
Umberto Eco are of course a little bit ana-grammed from some other well known
characters. William of Baskerville is of course Sherlock Holmes, as in
the Hound of Baskerville. Adso(n) of Melk is Dr. Watson, but as a young
apprentice. Jorge of Burgos is named after the famous library of
Burgos in Spain. Actually it was the library of Toledo, one of the
main centers of scholarship in Medieval Castilia. Castilia means Castle land.
[Another interpretation mentions that Jorge
of Burgos is an anagram for Jorge Luis Borges which fits equally well.
There is a striking similarity between the characters of Jorge Luis Borges
and Aby Warburg, for those who want to know a few more secrets.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges
The
name of the Rose leads us to Miraflores and the Rosicrucians and
Rosalyn Chapel in Scotland. For Miraflores see the Miraflores
Charterhouse in the wikipedia article on Monasterio de las Huelgas. Of course Dan Brown had concocted
his own story from all those bits and pieces of Mythology and Mystery. The name
of Burgos probably derives from the { Burgen / Burg / Berg / Bergen /
Ver-Bergen / Ent-Bergen / Burrow} since there were quite a few Teutonic
Crusaders during the many hundred years of the Re-Conquista which
was about the longest protracted war in the history of humanity. It
lasted about 780 years until 1492, when the Alhambra and Granada finally
fell back to the Christians. So we have the Rolland Mythos also wrapped
into the story. Which was the story when the Moors were decisivly defeated at
Tours by the Frankish army. And now-a-days no-one knows who these Franks
really were. Were they the original French or the orginal Teutonic? The
his-storians can never get their mInds together about this question. And the
good Patrice Ayme' also has his special idea about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland
Roland (Frankish: "*Hrōþiland"; Latin: "Hruodlandus", "Rotholandus"; Italian: "Orlando",
"Rolando"; died 15 August 778) was a Frankish military leader under Charlemagne who became one of the principal
figures in the literary cycle known as the Matter of France. The historical Roland was military
governor of the Breton March, responsible for defending Francia's frontier against the Bretons. His only historical attestation is
in Einhard's Vita Karoli Magni, which notes he was part of the
Frankish rearguard killed by rebellious Basques in Iberia at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass.
The story of
Roland's death at Roncevaux Pass was embellished in later medieval and Renaissance literature. The first and most famous of these epic treatments was the Old French Chanson de Roland of the 11th century.
Two masterpieces
of Italian Renaissance poetry, the Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso (by Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto), are further detached from history
than the earlier Chansons, similarly to the later Morgante by Luigi Pulci. Roland is poetically associated
with his sword Durendal, his horse Veillantif, and his oliphant horn.
Roland was
evidently the first official appointed to direct Frankish policy in Breton affairs, as local Franks under the Merovingian dynasty had not previously pursued
any specific relationship with the Bretons. Their frontier castle districts
such as Vitré, Ille-et-Vilaine, south of Mont Saint-Michel, are now divided between Normandy
and Brittany. The distinctive culture of this region preserves the present-day Gallo language and legends of local heroes such as
Roland. Roland's successor in Brittania Nova was Guy of Nantes, who like Roland, was unable to
exert Frankish expansion over Brittany and merely sustained a Breton
presence in the Carolingian Empire.
According to
legend, Roland was laid to rest in the basilica at Blaye, near Bordeaux, on the site of the citadel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tours
The Battle of
Tours (10 October 732)[8] – also called the Battle of
Poitiers and, by Arab sources, the Battle of the Highway of the Martyrs
(Arabic: معركة
بلاط الشهداء, romanized: Ma'arakat Balāṭ ash-Shuhadā')[9] – was an important victory of the Frankish and Burgundian[10][11] forces under Charles Martel over the raiding parties of the Umayyad Caliphate led by Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, Governor-General of al-Andalus. It was fought in an area between
the cities of Poitiers and Tours, in the Aquitaine of west-central France, near the
village of Moussais-la-Bataille, about 20 kilometres (12 mi) northeast of Poitiers. The location
of the battle was close to the border between the Frankish realm and the then-independent Duchy of Aquitaine under Odo the Great.
The Franks were
victorious. Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi was killed, and Charles subsequently
extended his authority in the south. Details of the battle, including its exact
location and the number of combatants, cannot be determined from accounts that
have survived. Notably, the Frankish troops won the battle without cavalry.[12]
The battle
helped lay the foundations of the Carolingian Empire and Frankish domination of Europe for the next century. Most historians
agree that "the establishment of Frankish power in western Europe shaped
that continent's destiny and the Battle of Tours confirmed that power."[13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Toledo,_Spain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Toledo,_Spain#Medieval_Toledo_after_the_Reconquest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista
I
know that in English it is written "Mary Magdalene" but I have my own
idiosyncrasies of spelling things in a more original way. The last contribution
is a quite mythical / mystical account by which Maria Magdalena was a
"sort of" wife of Jesus Christos [or Chrestos, from Chresma,
or Charisma, as I sometimes call him by his pseudonym], and she was pregnant
with a child of Jesus, when he was crucified. This story was at some
time told by the authors Baigent and Leigh, and later by Dan Brown.
And this was probably a plagiarism of some old Kathar stories, and of the Ste.
Maries de la Mer, the holiest of the pilgrimage sites of the Gypsies.
[It
is to be noted that there are TWO Ste. Maries, one of course being Maria the
Mother of Christ, and the other... well er, I don't know this. But Baigent and
Leigh, and Dan Brown know it all: This must have been Maria Magdalena.]
And
of course, we could have guessed it by now, the Knights Templar are also knee-deep
involved in this "his-"story. I have written some more about this
story, which is quite a nice one, if one wants to believe this. Because as the
legend goes, the Child of Maria Magdalena and Jesus Christos, founded a lineage
that some few 100 years later, led to the Merovingian Dynasty of France.
Also the good Patrice Ayme' had concocted his own version of this story,
although not as far-out as the Dan Brown version of it. See also the Matrix
Trilogy, Part II, where we meet the Merovingian in some other
disguise. And his wife is Persephonae (Per-Se-phonae, Proserpina, and
Mother Kali), all in all this is shock-full of mythology of the finest kind. I
have no idea how the Wachowski brothers (later sisters) could have ever thought
up such a tall story. At least it is more intelligent than the really dumb
story of a super duper computer program that likes to play "the
world". Even Umberto Eco knew these jokes long before the Wachowski's came
up with the idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Baigent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Blood_and_the_Holy_Grail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK12LkSN3ss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR9gBOidq6c
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/30/michael-baigent
https://freimaurer-wiki.de/index.php/En:_Michael_Baigent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose
In
1327, Franciscan
friar William
of Baskerville and Adso of Melk, a Benedictine novice travelling under
his protection, arrive at a Benedictine monastery in Northern Italy to attend
a theological
disputation. This abbey is being used as neutral ground in a
dispute between Pope John XXII, and the Friars Minor,
who are suspected of heresy.
The
monastery is disturbed by the death of Adelmo of Otranto, an illuminator
revered for his illustrations. Adelmo was skilled at comical artwork,
especially concerning religious matters. William is tasked by the monastery's abbot, Abo of Fossanova, to investigate the death, and he
has a debate with one of the oldest monks in the abbey, Jorge of Burgos, about
the theological meaning of laughter, which Jorge despises.
The
next day, a scholar of Aristotle and translator of Greek and Arabic, Venantius
of Salvemec, is found dead in a vat of pig's blood. Previously, William and
Adso had been prohibited from entering the labyrinthine library by the
librarian Malachi of Hildesheim, so they penetrate the labyrinth, discovering
that there must be a hidden room, entitled the finis Africae. Benno
of Uppsala, a rhetoric scholar, reveals to William that Malachi, and his
assistant Berengar of Arundel, had a homosexual relationship, until Berengar
seduced Adelmo, who committed suicide out of conflicting religious shame. The
only other monks who knew about the indiscretions were Jorge and Venantius.
By
the day after, Berengar has gone missing, which puts pressure onto William. William
learns of how Salvatore of Montferrat, and Remigio of Varagine, two cellarer
monks, had a history with the Dulcinian heretics. Meanwhile, Adso is
seduced by a peasant girl, with whom he has his first sexual experience. After
confessing to William, Adso is absolved, although he still feels guilty.
Severinus of Sankt Wendel, the herbalist, tells William that Venantius's body
had black stains on the tongue and fingers, which suggests poison. William and
Adso penetrate the library once more, discovering that Venantius had a book
stolen from him, which they pursue.
On
the fourth day, Berengar is found drowned in a bath, although he bears stains
similar to those of Venantius. Bernard Gui, a member of
the Inquisition, arrives to search
for the murderer via papal deduction. Due to this arrival, Gui arrests the
peasant girl Adso loved, as well as Salvatore, accusing them both of heresy.
Remigio
is interrogated by Gui, who scares him into revealing his heretic past, as well
as falsely confessing to the crimes of the Abbey. Severinus then is found dead
in his room, to which Jorge responds by leading a sermon about the coming of
the Antichrist.
Malachi
returns to the early sermon that day near death, and his final words concern
scorpions. Nicholas of Morimondo, the glazier, tells William that whoever is
the librarian would then become the Abbot, and with new light, William goes to
the library to search for evidence. The Abbot is distraught that William has
not solved the crime, and that the Inquisition is undermining him, so he fires
William. That night, William and Adso penetrate the library once more in search
of the finis Africae.
William
and Adso discover Jorge waiting for them in the forbidden room. He says that he
has been masterminding the Abbey for years, and his last victim is the Abbot
himself, who has been trapped in a secret passage of the library. The Abbot
suffocates, and Jorge tells them that Venantius's hidden book was Aristotle's
Second Poetics, which speaks of the
virtues of laughter, something Jorge despises. Jorge put poison on the pages on
the book, knowing that a reader would have to lick his fingers to turn them.
Venantius was translating the book and died. Berengar found the body and disposed
of it in pig's blood, fearing exposure, before reading the book himself and
dying. Malachi was convinced by Jorge to retrieve the book, which was stashed
with Severinus, so he kills Severinus and retrieves the book, before getting
curious and dying as well.
All of the
murders time out with the Seven Trumpets, which call for objects falling
from the sky (Adelmo threw himself from a tower), pools of blood, poison from
water, bashing of the stars (Severinus was killed with his head bashed in with
a celestial orb), scorpions, locusts, and fire. Jorge consumes the book's
poisoned pages and uses Adso's lantern to start a fire, which burns down the
library. As the fire spreads to the rest of the abbey, William laments his
failure. Confused and defeated, William and Adso escape the abbey. Years later,
Adso, now aged, returns to the ruins of the abbey and collects books that were
salvaged from the fire, creating a lesser library.
https://medium.com/@dsfish/book-review-the-name-of-the-rose-by-umberto-eco-265be0c09e79
The hook couldn’t
be more obvious. When a string of strange deaths plagues a wealthy Italian
abbey, Brother William of Baskerville is called to unravel the mystery. In this
14th-century thriller, every death exposes a new piece of an age-old
conspiracy. Dangerous knowledge and the future of the Catholic Church hang in
the balance. Follow along as William races against time to crack the case!
...
The Name of the Rose is plodding and complex. It does not have the pace of a murder mystery
and that’s because it’s actually much more of a historical novel than anything
else. Its first priority — far above entertaining the reader or advancing the
plot — is to situate itself perfectly in history, to merge so cleanly with the
past that the reader can’t see the seams. The Name of the Rose is obsessive in a lot of ways, beginning with its own credibility.
Your typical
murder mystery starts with a bang, but this one starts with a fake history
lesson. In the opening pages we learn that The Name of the Roseis not actually a novel written by Umberto Eco. Eco has merely
translated and titled a book given to him in 1968 by someone named Abbé Vallet.
This book was Le Manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, Vallet’s 1842 French translation of a Latin text written by an aging
monk, Adso of Melk, in 14th-century Italy. Adso’s original text is the story
itself: the mysterious saga of seven deaths in 1327, which he witnessed
firsthand in his youth while shadowing his master — our detective — William of
Baskerville. To recap: you’re reading a (fictitious) Latin 14th-century
eyewitness account, translated into French by (the fictitious) Abbé Vallet in
1842, translated again (but not actually) into Italian by Umberto Eco in 1980,
and if you’re reading the English version, you can add yet another layer for William
Weaver’s (fantastic) 1983 English translation.
With its own
origins settled, the book spends the subsequent 500 pages weaving itself as
tightly into the fabric of history as possible. The Name of the Rose is part of that special breed of historical fiction that doesn’t merely
fork off of recorded events but integrates so completely with them that it
becomes difficult to separate fact from fiction. I certainly struggled with
this, so if you’re going to read the book I highly recommend brushing up on the
medieval history of the Catholic Church. Key actors and topics includeMichael
of Cesena, Louis IV, William
of Ockham, popes of that time period, and evangelical
poverty. You may also wish to learn Latin.
Here’s the
background I wish I’d had before I started reading. The Name of the Rose pivots on a doctrine known as evangelical (or apostolic) poverty, which
was particularly divisive in the 14th century and which calls for Christians to
live without holding any property. The belief stems from Luke 10, in which Jesus sends his 70 disciples on a mission without any
supplies: “Go away; lo, I send you forth as lambs in the midst of wolves; carry
no bag, no scrip, nor sandals.” Thus a small subset of Catholics began to
equate not having any property with being holy. For obvious reasons this idea
appealed to the impoverished masses, who had a head start on not owning
anything, and the movement picked up steam. In the early 14th century, Pope
John XXII made every attempt to block its progression, in fear that it would
cast a negative light on the Church and ultimately threaten its wealth and land
ownership, and the widespread control they offered. He condemned it as
heretical in 1323 but that didn’t stop the Spiritual Franciscans, so named for
their devotion to Saint Francis of Assisi, from continuing to live by this
contentious doctrine. The Spiritual Franciscans were supported by Louis IV,
then king of the Romans and of Italy, and led by Michael of Cesena. In 1327,
Pope John would summon Michael to Avignon to answer for his order’s “heretical”
behavior, an event that would lead to Michael’s excommunication.
So where does The Name of the Rose fit in? Eco’s story takes place just before Michael’s arrival in
Avignon, somewhere along his journey through Italy, in an abbey tucked into the
mountains. Here, the story goes, Michael and his order would stop to meet with
some of the pope’s men so that they might resolve their differences peacefully
and privately. Presiding over the meeting would be William of Baskerville, a
Franciscan loyalist who might enable the Franciscans to absolve themselves of
heresy before it was too late — before Michael would be forced to walk right
into the pope’s hands at Avignon.
The story begins
with William and Adso traveling to the abbey a few days early to prepare for
the meeting. But upon their arrival they learn some troubling news. One night
earlier, a monk plummeted to his death from the tallest building in the abbey.
Over the next several days more strange and horrible deaths transpire and so
the stakes become clear: William must solve this mystery before the pope’s delegation
arrives. Otherwise, foul play will be suspected and the meeting will be for
naught. The future of the Franciscan order depends on William’s mystery-solving
skills.
It is an absolute pleasure to follow William as
he uncovers the abbey’s darkest secrets, often by making forbidden trips to the
abbey’s labyrinth of a library, and edges closer to solving the puzzle. But
this is no free ride. Much is demanded of the reader; I found it impossible to
keep track of everything without taking notes. The Name of the Rose is not only obsessed with situating itself in history but with
ensconcing the reader in that rich historical context as well. You will learn
more about religious sects and Biblical interpretation than you ever cared to
know. You will be invited to ponder the political aspirations of the Church and
its relation to various European rulers. The text indulges in erudite
discussions of philosophy and semiotics. A central plot device hinges on how
certain geographical locations produce — or should produce — certain manners of thinking. Nothing is easy.
Even the most foundational part of the story,
its characters, proves challenging. The reader is responsible for tracking a
dense list of characters, both real and fictional, that never stops expanding. There are two Williams and two Berengars. There’s Abo and Adso and
Adelmo. There are characters introduced early who never reappear and characters
introduced late who are essential to the plot. I took notes on twenty-two of
them, not counting the historical figures who don’t appear in the story, and
I’m probably missing a lot more.
The question isn’t Does Eco pull it
off? — he does, spectacularly — but Is it worth the
effort? Some books are worth reading simply
because they’re hard. Does The Name of the Rose fit that bill or
is it somehow also enjoyable? Can it be difficult and fun?
I won’t lie to you. It is absolutely a slog at
times. A friend of mine who recently read the book complained to me about a
chapter in which Adso spends six pages describing a door. Adso loves to catalog things, almost to the point of hilarity. At one point he
gains entry to the abbey’s vault and describes the treasures within — “Gold
vestments, golden crowns, studded with gems, coffers of various metals engraved
with figures, works in niello and ivory. […] I saw, wonder of wonders, under a
glass bell, on a red cushion embroidered with pearls, a piece of the manger of
Bethlehem, and a hand’s length of the purple tunic of Saint John the
Evangelist, two links of the chains that bound the ankles of the apostle Peter
in Rome…” — and it’s amazing he doesn’t run out of commas.
So, sure, there are moments when The Name of the Rose feels more like work than play. But it does reward the reader with some
wonderful scenes of sleuthing. Put simply, it is fun in the way you want a
detective novel to be. William of Baskerville is a great character: cunning,
moral, independent, and always a step ahead. You never tire of watching him
solve mysteries. The reader is first exposed to his brilliance during his and
Adso’s initial ascent to the abbey. When the pair is approached by a band of
monks, William immediately intuits that they are searching for a lost horse. He
tells the monks where the horse has been and where it has gone, and describes
its appearance in great detail:
“Brunellus, the
abbott’s favorite horse, fifteen hands, the fastest in your stables, with a
dark coat, a full tail, small round hoofs, but a very steady gait; small head,
sharp ears, big eyes.”
This bewilders
the monks and Adso, too, because, as William says, “ ‘We haven’t seen him at
all.’ ” A few moments later the horse is found exactly where William said he
would be. When Adso asks William how he was able to deduce so much without ever
seeing the horse, William’s response is perfect:
“During our
whole journey I have been teaching you to recognize the evidence through which
the world speaks to us like a great book. […] I am almost embarrassed to repeat
to you what you should know. At the crossroads, on the still-fresh snow, a
horse’s hoofprints stood out very neatly, heading for the path to our left.
Neatly spaced, those marks said that the hoof was small and round, and the
gallop quite regular — and so I deduced the nature of the horse, and the fact
that it was not running wildly like a crazed animal. At the point where the
pines formed a natural roof, some twigs had been freshly broken off at a height
of five feet. One of the blackberry bushes where the animal must have turned to
take the path to his right, proudly switching his handsome tail, still held
some long black horsehairs in its brambles….”
And so on, until
every last detail has been explained. There aren’t a lot of these Sherlock
Holmes-esque reveals but each is more imaginative than the last, making for a
deeply satisfying read.
A good murder
mystery is clever when it needs to be, but this one is clever whenever it can
be. Eco prefers his humor arid, and I can only assume that for every joke I
understood there were about a hundred more that sailed straight over my head.
Join the fun — find the joke in this passage:
“But those
were times when, to forget an evil world, grammarians took pleasure in abstruse
questions. I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights,
the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of ‘ego,’ and in
the end they attacked each other, with weapons.”
No? Your Latin
is in need of a good dusting. The joke is that the rhetoricians were arguing
over the vocative of ego, which is the Latin word for “I.”
In Latin, nouns are expressed in cases, with each case serving a particular function. The genitive case, for
example, is used to show ownership over something: it’s the Latin version of an
apostrophe. The vocative case referred to above is used when directly
addressing someone else. If you wanted to say hello to your friend Marcus,
you’d say “Salve Marce”; the name “Marcus” changes to “Marce” in the vocative
case. The rhetoricians were arguing over the vocative of “I,” which is funny
because one never addresses another person with “I,” and so the argument is
pointless. Well, at least until weapons get involved.
But silly me. I
didn’t realize that this pun isn’t Eco’s own invention but an allusion to a
text by the 7th-century author Virgil the Grammarian. The Name of the Rose is many things, but accessible is not one of them.
Occasionally Eco
tosses the reader a bone. During William and Adso’s visit to the abbey’s vault,
Adso gets starry-eyed over the rare religious artifacts, such as a fragment of
the True Cross, and William cautions him not to
pay them too much heed:
“I have seen
many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our
Lord’s torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but
on an entire forest.”
You’re not alone
if this humor isn’t your cup of tea. Adso has trouble with it, too:
I never
understood when he was jesting. In my country, when you joke you say something
and then you laugh very noisily, so everyone shares in the joke. But William
laughed only when he said serious things, and remained very serious when he was
presumably joking.
The front cover
of my copy of The Name of the Rose features a
snippet from the New York Times review written by Franco Ferrucci: “Explodes
with pyrotechnic inventions, literally as well as figuratively. Hold on till
the end.” I happen to agree with Ferrucci, not because of the story’s climactic
finale but for a different reason: the 30-page postscript that Eco wrote three
years after his novel’s publication. (Apparently his obsession with
contextualization didn’t stop after he finished writing.) Within, Eco addresses
a number of questions that the book raised, as well as what his goals were in
telling this particular story and what he was thinking about as he wrote.
I should
probably mention that his postscript isn’t a cheat sheet or a guide to
interpretation. On the contrary, Eco carefully avoids giving anything away.
“The author should die once he has finished writing,” he explains. “So as not
to trouble the path of the text.” Eco appears to be tapping into the same stuff
that Roland Barthes proposed in his 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author,” which argues that “to give an
Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with
a final signification, to close the writing.” Eco pursues the idea a little
further and implies that if an author’s mere existence is enough to handicap a
novel, then explaining a novel would undermine itsraison d’être:
A narrator
should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have
written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.
So you won’t
find any explanations in this postscript. What you’ll find instead is a bounty
of observations and tidbits that contextualize the writing process much more
than the text itself. The best part of any detective novel is climbing into the
head of the mastermind, so it’s a total joy to climb into the head of the
mastermind behind the mastermind. Where did the idea
for this story come from? How did he make choices in narration and tone? What
regrets does he have? It’s all there, and it’s all fascinating.
Let me give you
an example. It ruins very little about the novel to give away one of its gory
deaths: that one character was discovered dead, “thrust head down into” a jar
of pigs’ blood. This is the kind of detail that makes quite an impression on
the reader — and on the monks who discovered the dead man, to be sure — for
obvious reasons, and the symbolism of the gesture serves a larger plot point
that I won’t go into. But I’ll admit that I never pondered why exactly there
would be a vat of fresh pigs’ blood available. I kind of just accepted it. But
Eco did not include this detail on a whim; he organized the story around it:
But why does
everything take place at the end of November 1327? Because by December, Michael
of Cesena is already in Avignon. […] But November is too early. I also needed
to have a pig slaughtered. Why? The answer is simple: so that the corpse could
be thrust, head down, into a great jar of blood. […] Now, it so happens (I made
inquiries) that pigs are not slaughtered until cold weather comes, and November
might be too early — unless I situated the abbey in the mountains, so there
would already be snow.
The commitment
to historicity— what Eco calls “furnishing a world in a historical novel” — is
astonishing. There are other reveals in his postscript that I am dying to include
but can’t without spoiling the story. Eco’s original motivation for writing
this novel? Hilarious. The secrets behind the labyrinthine library, which he
spent three months designing? Unfathomable. Forgive the apparent hyperbole: the
man is simply that good.
In addition to
revealing a few of the magician’s secrets, the postscript serves to validate
the reader’s journey. I felt rather self-conscious about finding the story
slow-going until I discovered that Eco had made it crawl on purpose:
After reading
the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred
pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I
refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live
there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not,
he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred
pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them,
so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.
The concept of
pace — what Eco calls “breathing” — is only one example of the many ways that
the author has considered his reader. Eco has labored over the title, setting,
historicity, voice, religious history, humor, emotion, entertainment value, and
practically everything else one could consider about a book. The result is
exceptional, and almost nauseating when you realize that this was Eco’s first
novel.
Recall that when
Adso and William first climbed the hill to the abbey, William implored Adso “
‘to recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great
book.’ ” Eco, who died last year, was a trained semiotician and dedicated much
of his life to understanding how the world’s symbols speak to us. He has written
much of himself into William, a character who excels at detective work because
of his commitment to interpreting symbols, symbols that he knows are not
limited but infinite in their expression, and that therefore speak differently
to different people. Likewise, Eco remarks in his postscript that he wanted
every reader of his book to emerge with a different interpretation, and I
expect that he has succeeded. For if it is true that the world speaks to us
like a great book, then perhaps it is also true that a great book can speak to
us like the world, and that like the world it can provide a unique and
transformative experience for everyone involved. Umberto Eco has left us with a
world waiting to be discovered, tucked away in history, in language, in the cold
Italian mountains… Climb the hill.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/kateohare/2019/05/name-rose-sundance-umberto-eco/
What Is The Name of the
Rose About?
Published in
1980 in Italian, and in 1983 in English, Eco’s debut novel is a strange mix of
medieval history, fiction, literary references, Catholicism and classic murder
mystery, with dollops of sex and violence.
It centers on
Franciscan friar William of Baskerville (played by Turturro, and, yes, that is
a Sherlock Holmes reference, if it hadn’t already hit you over the head), a man
of faith and reason — and before you ask, he never loses either — but also a
wise man of the world.
With Benedictine
novice Adso of Melk (Damian Hardung) in tow, he arrives at a Benedictine
monastery in northern Italy in 1327 to attend a theological disputation. Here’s
how Wikipedia describes that:
In the scholastic system of education of the Middle Ages, disputations (in Latin: disputationes,
singular: disputatio) offered a formalized method of debate
designed to uncover and establish truths in theology and in sciences. Fixed rules governed the process: they demanded dependence on
traditional written authorities and the thorough understanding
of each argument on each side.
Among the
questions up for dispute is the wealth of the Church versus the radical poverty
preached by the Fraticelli (Little Brethren), a k a the Spiritual Franciscans. Declared heretical in 1296 by Pope
Boniface VIII, they took St. Francis’ devotion to Lady Poverty to an extreme,
seeing the Church holding any property as scandalous. There were other, similar
heretical Fraticelli sects that popped up in the 14th (that would be the 1300s,
if you’re keeping score) and 15th centuries, mostly in Italy, that broke off
from the main Franciscan order and sometimes set themselves against it.
William of
Baskerville is a Franciscan but not a Fraticelli. He’s also a former
Inquisitor, imprisoned and tortured after refusing to carry out fellow
Inquisitor Bernard Gui’s (Everett) condemnation of a man for heresy.
He’s fictional,
and so is Adso and the abbey, but Gui was real. The novel, the 1986 movie made
of it (starring Sean Connery as William), and the new miniseries freely mix
fact and fiction.
A series of
gruesome murders of monks test William’s investigative skills, as he unwinds
both the killings and the secrets of the abbey’s huge library.
(BTW, for those
who think the Middle Ages was a lost era of ignorance and superstition, first,
they’re wrong, and second, the modern world has monks, especially Irish monks, to thank for dedicating their
lives to preserving many books, including the Greek pagan classics. You’re
welcome.)
Is The Name of the Rose Anti-Catholic?
For
sensible Catholics, the idea that remote monasteries contained a variety of
people, some of them wicked, and others peculiar, including some with physical
and emotional handicaps, should not come as a surprise. That clerics (or
novices) stray from their vows of celibacy and chastity is also not news.
That some
Inquisitors were men of justice but others may have been cruel, sadistic or
corrupted should also not raise eyebrows.
But having
people like these in the book has earned Eco’s novel the reputation of being
anti-Catholic. I’ve always disagreed. Human weakness and depravity are there,
but also nobility and faith. And, as I said, William and Adso remain men both
of faith and reason, until the end.
What I Didn’t
Like About It
I am a fan of
the 1986 movie and enjoyed all eight episodes of the Sundance version — with
two glaring exceptions.
In the interest
of inclusion or diversity or whatever, this version has increased the role of
an illiterate peasant girl that catches Adso’s interest, including making her
literate.
In 1327, unless
she was a nun or aristocratic/royal (and often not even then), the odds of a
woman being literate were pretty slim, but not much more slim than the odds of
any peasant of either sex being literate.
And, the
miniseries adds a female character with a sword, a Joan of Arc bob and revenge
in her heart. As a woman, I continue to find this shoehorning of women into
stories where they don’t naturally belong or originally belonged — or to alter
the characters of real historical women into something they’re not, just to
make a feminist point (looking at you, The Spanish Princess) — to be condescending and patronizing.
Other than this
unwarranted alteration, this new The
Name of the Rose is fairly faithful to the original.
If you find it hard to follow, that’s because the novel is hard to follow (read
here to learn the length some folks go to, to understand it).
The Very
Catholic Both/And of the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages
were a complicated time, both suffering terrible wars, persecution and disease,
and also producing sublime works of art, architecture and literature. The
Church both fought against heresy and protected the wisdom of pagan authors and
promoted education. There were both great, serious saints like Thomas Aquinas,
and gentle Francis of Assisi, who had the soul of a preacher and the heart of a
singing troubadour.
http://www.postmodernmystery.com/name_of_the_rose.html
Essay by Ted Gioia
On any list of unlikely
bestsellers from the last century, The Name of the
Rose must hold a special
place of distinction. Nothing is rarer than for a novel translated from Italian
to reach the top of
the New York Times bestseller list—unless it is, of course, a megahit
book written
by an academic whose best-known previous work was A Theory of Semiotics.
And
did I mention that the plot revolves around medieval theology?
Even
after it was translated into English (and numerous other
languages), The Name of the
Rose still had
intimidating chunks of Latin on
almost every page, and a smattering of other defunct languages scattered
hither and thither. I took four years of high school Latin, yet I still would
have been lost while reading this book if I hadn't had a copy of The Key to ‘The Name of the Rose’
(by
Haft, White & White) by my side. Yet despite these obstacles,
small and large, this arcane novel sold a reported fifty million copies,
which
puts it in the league of Harry Potter,
and ahead of Gone With the Wind, Roget’s Thesaurus and To Kill a
Mockingbird.
But
not all is foreboding and recondite in The Name of the Rose.
The
book also follows the familiar genre patterns of the mystery—think of it as a
cross
between
Agatha Christie's And Then There Were
None and Aquinas’s Summa
Theologica. Monks are dying
under curious circumstances, and the detective (okay,
he’s
just a monk too, but a very smart one) William of Baskerville is asked by the
abbot to
get to get to the bottom of it. Baskerville is assisted by Adso of Melk, who is
sort of a tonsured
Dr.
Watson. In fact, I kept waiting for William to interject: "Eleemosynary,
my dear novice Adso."
In the background, Eco constructs a labyrinth of supporting plots (including
one involving a labyrinth).
William has arrived at the Abbey as a representative of Emperor Louis IV in
order to participate in
negotiations also involving emissaries from the Pope, who is in heated conflict
with the Emperor, and the
Franciscan order, then caught in the crossfire between secular and
ecclesiastical agendas. This part of the
story draws the reader into further subplots involving heretical and rebellious
church movements, and the
various inquisitions and repressive actions employed in combating them.
And
all these elements draw in aspects of theology, philosophy and history, that
constantly linger
in the background of The Name of the
Rose, and sometimes dominate the foreground as well.
This may sound dry and academic, but Eco builds his polemics around forceful
personalities.
Like
any good mystery writer, he knows that it is essential to populate
his story with many likely suspects, a plethora of possible murderers.
Here
we encounter Salvatore, the secretive and gluttonous monk who speaks in a
strange composite
jargon—made up of bits and pieces of contemporary and ancient languages—and who
is disturbingly vague
when asked about certain particulars in his past. Malachi, the librarian, also
arouses our suspicions:
he
never allows anyone into the third floor of the Aedificum, the fortress where
the abbey’s rare
collection
of manuscripts and books are held, yet mysterious lights can be seen
through the windows at night. Severinus the doctor and herbalist might also be
a murderer—
he
knows an uncanny amount about rare poisons. Jorge of Brugos,
the blind man, seems to know even darker secrets and shows up quietly and
stealthily at the
least
expected moments. Even Abo the Abbot is not above reproach,
and comes across as far more concerned with worldly riches and power than is
befitting
for
a Benedictine monk.
But the most compelling character is our detective William of Baskerville. Have
you encountered mysteries
where the private investigator was once a policeman, but left the force after
encountering
too
much corruption?
Well, the same is true of William, except the organization he left behind
wasn't the L.A.P.D,
but
the Inquisition. (Fill in your own wisecrack here.) He didn't like the modus
operandi, and now operates
as a free agent, but—unlike your typical private eye—
he
has the benefit of an Oxford education, and
mentoring by Roger Bacon and William
of Ockham, whose approach to natural philosophy proves to be a good medieval
substitute
for
a degree in criminology.
Much has changed in the world since the late Middle Ages, but there are some
constants.
The
seven deadly sins are still around, and if you have any doubts over
how deadly they might be, The Name of the
Rose will settle the
argument.
Eco
also adds a convincing love story, with just the right dose of concupiscence
for the modern
reader—not easy for a story set in a monastery, but our author is a master of
plotting,
so
such obstacles are deftly overcome. All in all, The Name of the Rose combines the
best elements of a historical romance, a thriller, and a novel of ideas.
Yet our author would not be Umberto Eco, if the book wasn't full of
intertextual, intratextual,
and
countertextual twists. For Eco,
another turn of the screw means another
book within a book, and Eco gives us several additional turns here. Not only
does the story involve texts,
as
well as texts that relate to other texts; not only do manuscripts
figure as possible clues, motives and weapons in The Name of the Rose; but even the narrative
itself
is reportedly drawn from a book
the author found in 1968 that contained
a 14th century text from a Benedictine monk, Adso of Melk. I can’t say much
more without giving
away
the plot, but I will tell you that, after reading The Name of the Rose, you won’t ever again
look
at the library as just a clean, well-lighted place for books.
Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a brilliant mystery set in a fictitious medieval monastery. The text
is rich with literary, historical, and theoretical references that make it
eminently re-readable. The Key makes each reading fuller and more
meaningful by helping the interested reader not merely to read but also to
understand Eco's masterful work. Inspired by pleas from friends and strangers,
the authors, each trained in Classics, undertook to translate and explain the
Latin phrases that pepper the story. They have produced an approachable,
informative guide to the book and its setting--the middle ages. The Key includes an introduction to the
book, the middle ages, Umberto Eco, and philosophical and literary theories; a
useful chronology; and reference notes to historical people and events.
The clear
explanations of the historical setting and players will be useful to anyone
interested in a general introduction to medieval history.
Adele J. Haft is
Associate Professor of Classics, Hunter College, City University of New York.
Jane G. White is chair of the Department of Languages, Dwight Englewood School.
Robert J. White is Professor of Classics and Oriental Studies, Hunter College,
City University of New York.
Naming the Rose: Readers and Codes in Umberto
Eco's Novel
Steven Sallis
http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/paa25/Pierpaolo%20Antonello/It6_files/sallis-eco.pdf
The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language
Association, Vol. 19, No. 2. (Autumn, 1986), pp.
3-12.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0742-5562%28198623%2919%3A2%3C3%3ANTRRAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J
http://www.jstor.org/journals/mmla.html
Umberto Eco's theory of semiotics has taken an
evolutionary path of develop-
ment. A Theory of Semiotics, the first English
edition of Eco's semiotics theory,
was a detailed explanation of his theory of
signs.(1) The major criticism of this
work, a lack of references to specific literary
texts to elucidate the theory, led to
The Role of the Reader.(2) This book repeated
the theoretical basis of the first
book, but it also included a major section of
specific literary texts such as Sue's
Les myste'res de Paris and Allais's Un drame bien parisien.
Eco reaches the most re-
cent stage of his theoretical work with The
Name of the Rose, a novel which was
published in Italy in 1980 and translated into
English in 1983.(3) In this novel, as
one critic suggests, Eco has moved from
semiotic theory to "semiotic fiction."(4)
As Eco himself says in the closing line of his
introduction to The Role of the
Reader: "after having to let semiotics
speak abundantly about texts, it is cor-
rect to let a text speak by itself about its
semiotic strategy" (RR, 40).
In "The Theory of Signs and the Role of
the Reader" Eco explains the evolu-
tion of semiotics during the past twenty
years.(5) During the sixties, semiotics fo-
cused on the theoretical foundation of signs or
sign-tradition. During the seven-
ties, "there occurred a violent shift from
signs to texts"; the emphasis in semi-
otic theory shifted from considering what
constituted a sign to the formation of
the text. The third stage (from the end of the
seventies to the present) does not
center on the "generation of texts but
their reading." Eco believes that current
semiotic theory is concerned with "the
recognition of the reader's response as a
possibility built into the textual
strategy" (TS, 35).
According to Eco, the reader "plays an
active role in textual interpretation
because signs are constructed according to an
inferential model. . . ." Signs are
the beginning of a process that leads a reader
to an "infinite series of progressive
consequences" (TS, 44) and are "open
devices" that evoke meaning for the
reader. This open quality of signs
"postulates an active role on the part of their
interpreter" (TS, 45). By defining this
vital theory of signs as moving the reader
to an infinite number of possibilities for
interpreting a text, Eco argues that
semiotics has moved beyond simply listing
elaborate patterns for understanding
signs and texts (a frequent criticism of
semiotic theories) to the importance of
the reader in understanding the signs found in
the text.
In The Role of the Reader Eco identifies the
possible reader as the "Model
Reader," who deals interpretatively with
the codes within a text just as the
author deals generatively with the codes. The
Model Reader and author thus co-
[Steven Sallis 3]
operate in discovering the codes of a text (RR,
7). The author can create for the
reader two kinds of texts, closed or open. A
closed text is designed by the
author to elicit a specific response from the
reader. However, Eco maintains,
the closed text is actually open to several
possible interpretations. The text is
considered closed precisely because it does not
adequately take the reader's abil-
ity to interpret a variety of readings into
account (RR, 8). The reader of the
open text, on the other hand, feels comfortable
with "the maze-like structure of
the text." A reader can use the open text,
however, only as the open text wants
to be used. Eco adds the caution that no matter
how open a text is it "cannot
afford whatever interpretation" a reader
might try to force on the text (RR, 9).
Thus the Model Reader for an open text must be
open to a multitude of
codes and their interpretations. The open text
can be read in two ways: naively
and critically. The textual strategy for a
particular text dictates whether a naive
reader, a critical one, or both will be
required. The naive reader is unable to per-
ceive the maze-like structure of the open text
and, therefore, is unable to appre-
ciate the text fully. The critical reader
succeeds only by overcoming the naive
reading and discovering the textual strategy
which will help explain the codes
of the text. Both the naive and the critical
reader approach a metatext, a text
which is both closed and open. Requiring such
exactness makes the task of the
reader of the metatext, such as The Name of the
Rose, an exercise in freedom. If
the reader is to enjoy a text, all the
"paths of [the text's] reading" must be ex-
plored (RR, 10).
A reader could explore The Name of the Rose on
several levels. Descriptions of
monastic and civic rivalry, the troubied
history of the papacy in the fohteenth
century, and lists of medieval herbs, beasts,
and favorite books would captivate
a reader with interests in the Renaissance. The
unusual murders, clues to the
murderer's identity, and the narrator's
observations would lead the adept
mystery-reader to the text in order to try to
solve the mystery of the novel's in-
trigue. The exposition of Eco's semiotic theory
would lead the reader interested
in literary criticism to yet another level of
reading, the examination of the role
of the reader in interpreting a text.
As far as I have been able to determine, no one
has yet attempted to explain
Eco's use of the naive and the critical reader
within his novel.(6) Eco reveals the
two kinds of readers through two characters in
the novel who explore the
world within the text by discovering the
meaning of signs just as a naive or a
critical reader outside the text could discover
the meaning of the metatext.
Adso, the narrator, represents the naive
reader. Writing the story as an old
Benedictine monk, Adso describes the events
that took place years earlier when
he was a young novice. Although Adso has a gift
for observation, which he
uses throughout his story to describe such
details as the physical features of the
people he meets and the art and architecture of
the great abbey, his description
is merely a collection of surface details with
little or no reflection on their sig-
Naming the Rose 4 nificance or meaning. Being
unable to see beyond the immediate situation,
Adso is incapable of understanding the real
meaning of the clues presented to
him.
The critical reader is reflected in William of
Baskerville, a fourteenth-century
Franciscan version of Sherlock Holmes.(7)
William is sent to various abbeys on
official church business because of his
reputation as a shrewd observer of life.
Adso describes William's ability to deduce
truth from facts as follows:
He not only knew how to read the great book of
nature, but also knew the way
monks read the books of Scripture, and how they
thought through them. A gift
that, as we shall see, was to prove useful to
him in the days to follow. (NR, 24-
25)
William represents the critical reader who
recognizes various levels of signs in
the universe (the great book of nature) and in
books. Just as a critical reader is
able to find a way through the maze-like
structure of a text, so William is able
to find his way through the maze of clues in
order to solve the mystery he has
been asked to solve.
According to Eco, both the naive and the
critical reader can approach an open
text (RR, 10). In The Name of the Rose Eco
allows both types of readers to be
represented in both Adso and William. Both
characters help to explain the sig-
nificance of the readers of a text by helping
the reader of the novel to find a path
through the text's maze. Eco has helped the
reader to develop a textual strategy
by showing how the text can be "read"
by the naive reader and the critical
reader.
In The Role of the Reader Eco offers a critical
reading of the metatext Un
drame bien parisien. He states that the critical reading not only assumes that the
first (naive) reading has already occurred but
that the critical reading undergoes
"the analysis of its own interpretative
procedures" while it goes beyond the
naive reading (RR, 205). The Name of the Rose
is also a metatext: it is closed "in
its uniqueness as a balanced organic
whole," and it is open "on account of its
susceptibility to countless different
interpretations which do not impinge on its
unadulterable specificity" (RR,49). As a
metatext, The Name of the Rose can be
seen to have several stories to tell (as Eco
suggests for the metatext Un drame
bien parisien):
the story of what happens to its dramatis personae;
the story of what happens to its
naive reader; the story of what happens to
itself as a text (this third story being
potentially the same as the story of what
happens to the critical reader). (RR,
205)
The Name of the Rose is seen in its simplest
form as the story of the characters
themselves. William of Baskerville, a
Franciscan, is on a visitation at a Benedic-
tine abbey. Upon arriving at the abbey, William
is asked by the abbot to inves-
tigate the strange death of one of the monks.
In the course of William's visit,
[Steven Sallis 5]
four other monks are murdered. William, with
the help of his traveling com-
panion, Adso, eventually discovers the
murderer, who commits suicide. The
murderer's death leads to a fire, which burns
down the great abbey. This very
brief summary captures the essence of the first
level of the story.
The second and third levels of the story cannot
be seen apart from their
codes. In brief, codes are the keys which
unlock the signs of a-text. The code
contains elements which are present in the
expression of the story and also refers
to elements which are absent because they are
part of another system.(8) This
presence/absence component of codes allows for
the richness of intertextuality
by which "a text could generate, by
further semantic disclosures, every other
text" (RR, 24). This intertextual element
is extremely important in The Name
of the Rose, as'the dust jacket of the first
Italian edition of the novel suggests:
"this text is a textile of other texts, a
'whodunit' of quotations, a book built
upon books" (Stephens, 51).
Eco skillfully interlaces his text with
allusions to a wide spectrum of religious
texts, philosophy, and literature. In several
passages in the novel, he uses The
Rule of St. Benedict as a text within his text.
William and Adso enjoy a meal
with the abbot which illustrates Eco's use of
the Rule by discussing
that passage in the Rule where the holy founder
observed that wine, to be sure, is
not proper for monks, but since monks of our
time cannot be persuaded not to
drink, they should at least not drink their
fill, because wine induces even the wise
to apostasy, as Ecclesiastes reminds us.
Benedict said 'of our time' referring to his
own day, now very remote. . . . (NR, 94)
A comparison of this passage with Chapter 40,
in the Rule "The Proper
Amount of Drink," reveals that Eco has
used the text well by pointing out
Benedict's admonition to the abbot to take
local needs into consideration in
such matters as food and drink.(9) Texts from
the Bible also find frequent use in
Eco's novel. The murders are patterned after
the Apocalypse, and Adso fre-
quently makes scriptural references a part of
his descriptions. References are also
made to Aristotle, William of Occam, Thomas Aquinas,
and Roger Bacon,
who represent some of the authors of
philosophical texts which find their way
into the novel.
Walter Stephens suggests that the character of
Jorge of Burgos is patterned
after Jorge Luis Borges. Stephens says that The
Name of the Rose "owes its
heaviest literary debt to the fiction and
essays of Borges, and explicates much of
Eco's semiotics as Borgesian." Indeed,
according to Stephens, Borges's idea of
the library as "a semantic cosmos, a
specular inversion of the medieval idea of
liber mundi, of the cosmos as a book" is
reflected in the abbey library in Eco's
novel. The many similarities between Burgos and
Borges, (e.g., both are inter-
ested in literature) point to the skillful use
of intertextuality by Eco in his novel
(Stephens, 58).(10)
Naming the Rose 6 The importance of
intertextuality emerges especially in the final chapter
when Adso describes events after the fire has
consumed the abbey. He returns to
his monastery at Melk to become a monk. Years
later Adso's abbot sends Adso
to Italy, and he cannot resist a visit to the
abbey's ruins. He collects scraps of
books which he finds scattered about the ruins
and upon his return to Melk de-
scribes the restoration process of the remnants
as follows:
I spent many, many hours trying to decipher
those remains. Often from a word
or a surviving image I could recognize what the
work had been. When I found,
in time, other copies of these books, I studied
them with love, as if destiny had
left me this bequest, as if having identified
the destroyed copy were a clear sign
from heaven that said to me: Tolle et lege. At
the end of my patient reconstruc-
tion, I had before me a kind of lesser library,
a symbol of the greater, vanished
one: a library made up of fragments, quotations,
unfinished sentences, amputated
stumps of books. (NR, 500).
Adso has preserved some of the texts for
posterity in his own way by compiling
a collection of the fragments; he has created
his own intertext which will be
saved for future generations.
That the novel is a book built upon books is
particularly important when one
considers that the main occupation of the monks
is related to books. The abbey
has one of the greatest libraries in Europe and
prides itself on the library's repu-
tation. Some of the abbey's books, in fact, are
found nowhere else in the world.
Yet in addition to serving as a repository for
the world's great books, the abbey
library carries on the literary tradition by
helping the monks copy the older
manuscripts to preserve their contents.
(Actually, the monks do not simply
copy the manuscripts but engage in adorning the
text with marginalia, notes,
figures, and other artistic embellishments.)
The monks who work in the scrip-
torium begin to identify themselves with the
manuscripts they are copying and
consider themselves guardians of the great
learning of the world.
What is most remarkable about the abbey library
is not its extensive collec-
tion, however, nor the amount of time the monks
spend in preserving its con-
tents but its physical arrangement. The abbey
library is a labyrinth to which
only the abbey librarian and his assistant know
the solution. The knowledge
found in the library must be mediated through
someone who is able to under-
stand the mystery of its secret (code). Even
when William is given permission
by the abbot to conduct an investigation about
the murders, he is not allowed
to see the library. He must be content, like
other patrons, to find the listing for
a book in the great catalog and ask the
librarian to bring the requested book.
The monks have become so possessive of their
books that they have forgotten
the very purpose for which they are kept: to
allow others to share in the
knowledge contained therein. The library has
become a stagnant entity rather
than a vital force for the members of the abbey
or for any other potential
patrons.
[Steven Sallis 7]
As
William continues his investigation, he is certain that the solution to the
murders lies within the labyrinth/library. All
of the murdered monks had direct
contact with the library, and all the clues
that William is able to deduce are re-
lated to the library. He is determined that the
solution to the library must be
found in order to continue his investigation.
One night William takes Adso
with him to investigate the library. The
results are disastrous. They lose their
way several times and almost give up hope of
finding their way out before they
accidentally discover an exit.
The story at this point remains on the second
level of the naive reading. Here
again, through the events in the story Eco
suggests something about naive and
critical readings. Entering the library for the
single purpose of solving the mur-
ders, William does not take into account the
other possible codes or secrets
which the library might have to offer. As a
result of this narrow possibility for
interpretation, William remains with Adso on
the naive level of interpretation.
As a reader William excludes certain available
interpretations, and thus the li-
brary and its codes are a source of
confusion-the maze is unintelligible. As a
naive reader William creates a closed
interpretation. It is only when William
gives up trying to force his own preconceived
interpretation on the library that
he and Adso are able to find their way out of
it. Similarly, only when a reader
truly responds to a text as the text wishes to
be responded to will a reader find
its true meanings.
The heading of the chapter in which William
finally discovers the secret of
the library's maze states that "William
has some astounding ideas for decipher-
ing the riddle of the labyrinth and succeeds in
the most rational way" (NR,
210). The story begins to move toward the third
level of critical reading.
William knows certain things about the
labyrinth from the experience of being
inside the library when he and Adso were lost.
Yet it is impossible to try to
solve the maze from inside the library because
the possibilities are too limited; as
one moves within it, one is constantly changing
directions and therefore cannot
visualize the whole maze. William tells Adso,
"we must find, from the outside,
a way of describing the Aedificium as it is
inside . . ." (NR, 215). Using logic
and mathematics, William is able to figure out the
general plan of the maze
from looking at the outside of the Aedificium,
the number of windows, the
placement of windows in certain walls, and
other details. By looking at the out-
side structure (the known), William is able to
understand the inside (the not-
immediately-apparent meaning) of the library.
Similarly, the reader of the novel
receives more information on the codes within
the text by William's discovery.
After Adso's preliminary drawing of the library
based on their observations
outside the Aedificium, William and Adso once
again venture into the library
and succeed this time in discovering the secret
(code) of the library. Two pat-
terns of organization for the labyrinth/library
emerge: one according to the
first letter of a passage from the Apocalypse
which appears on the wall of each
Naming the Rose 8 room and the second according
to a map of the world. The answer has required
William's knowledge of the books of Scripture
as well as the book of nature.
If interpreting the code of the library were
enough to solve the mystery be-
hind the murders, Eco would have created a
closed text instead of an open one.
But William still must discover what the
library holds that would merit mur-
der. He returns to books for his answer because,
as he tells Adso, "Often books
speak of other books" (NR, 286). William
pores over the catalog of books,
analyzes handwriting, and tries to uncover the
code for a secret message written
by Venantius, one of the murdered monks. He is
able finally to decode the se-
cret message but ends up with another riddle:
there is a particular book in the li-
brary which holds the secrets of the mystery.
Eco constantly reminds the reader
that codes are very complex in a metatext and
require many levels of interpreta-
tion; naming the rose is not an easy task to
accomplish.
William, with the help of the ravings of the
semi-mad monk Alinardo, be-
lieves that the murders follow the pattern of
the images in the book of the
Apocalypse. For example, the second trumpet
heralds blood; Venantius is found
drowned in a vat of pig's blood. William
discovers the murderer's identity,
however, because he remains open to the clues;
he no longer tries to force the
clues to suit his own needs as he did earlier
in the library when he and Adso
were lost. Moving from the Apocalypse to the
details surrounding the acquisi-
tion of certain manuscripts of the Apocalypse
which also contain the secret
book, William identifies the murderer, the old
blind librarian, Jorge of Burgos,
and the secret book, the second part of
Aristotle's Poetics, which discusses
laughter.
This passage points out the necessity of both a
naive and a critical reader for a
metatext. Although William at this point of the
story has become a critical
reader, Adso remains a naive reader. William
has looked so intently at the clues
that he is unable to see the obvious clue
pointing to Jorge's identity as the mur-
derer. While William and Adso are in the
stables discussing the clues, Adso
suggests to William the identity of the
murderer. It takes Adso's less reflective,
indeed impulsive, suggestion to lead William to
the murderer's identity.
Because of Adso's suggestion, William is now
able to find the finis Africae, a
secret room within the library which he has
been trying to find. He is able to
locate the secret passageway and finds Jorge,
who explains his reasons for pro-
tecting Aristotle's Poetics. Jorge believes
that if the world discovers Aristotle's
book which is devoted to laughter, then the world
will be damned. Jorge has
constantly been admonishing the monks not to
laugh and to choose their words
wisely; he frequently has been quoting the Rule
which contains an admonition
to the monks that they should never laugh (see
the Rule, chapter 7).Jorge fur-
ther believes that Jesus never laughed and that
it is strictly forbidden by the
Christian tradition to engage in the frivolity
of laughter. Falling into the
monastic temptation of "seduction of
knowledge" (NR, 185), the blind Jorge is
[Steven Sallis 9]
unable to see beyond his own narrow vision.
Fallen so deeply into the snares of
the devil that he is seen as the anti-Christ of
the Apocalypse, Jorgc is blind to
any other possible interpretation for the
Poetics. William tells Jorge how he dis-
covered his identity:
Naturally, as the idea of this book and its
venomous power gradually began to
take shape, the idea of an apocalyptic pattern
began to collapse, though I couldn't
understand how both the book and the sequence
of the trumpets pointed to you.
But I understood the story of the book better
because, directed by the apocalyptic
pattern, I was forced more and more to think of
you, and your debates about
laughter. So that this evening, when I no
longer believed in the apocalyptic pat-
tern, I insisted on watching the stables, and
in the stables, by pure chance, Adso
gave me the key to entering the finis Africae.
(hTR, 470-71)
Jorge tells William that he made the later
murders appear to be modeled after
apocalyptic images because that is what William
expected to happen. Jorge,
however, feels no remorse for the deaths. He is
sure that God is directing his ac-
tivities as he tells William, "I became
convinced that a divine plan was directing
these deaths, for which I was not responsible"
(NR, 470). Jorge has merely or-
chestrated the deaths of the monks rather than
directly murdering them.
Having been fooled once, William refuses to be
taken in a second time by
Jorge's plot and realizes that he must take the
book away from Jorge. Jorge,
however, decides that in order to save the
world he must destroy the Poetics. He
chooses to eat the pages of the book, which he
had covered with poison to safe-
guard his secret from possible readers. This
eating of the poisoned book recalls
the action of John in the Book of the
Apocalypse and by
repeating the bibliophagy of St. John and the
'consummation' of the Liber mundi
in the Book of Revelations (the Apocalypse),
which finally makes Eco's fabula an
effective repetition of the Apocalypse, . . .
Jorge's suicide indirectly sparks the ec-
pyrosis which incinerates the Library and the
entire monastery. It is only through
Jorge's mimetic suicide that the Apocalypse and
the liturgy finally structure Eco's
novel in a meaningful sense. (Stephens, 58)
As the monastery burns, there is great
confusion. No one is able to organize
the monks and servants into an effective force
to put out the fire. Everything is
lost; all the monks abandon the abbey. Formerly
the greatest center of learning
in Europe, the monastery is now reduced to
ruins.
As Adso finishes his account (and the novel
ends), he reflects, "I no longer
know what [the manuscript of his story] is
about: stat rosapristina nomine, nomina
nuda tenemus"
(NR, 502). (A translation would be: the rose stands with
its for-
mer name, we hold on to the bare names.")
Adso realizes that he must remain
open to the text; as a reader he can no longer
allow for a "closed semiotic proj-
ect like that which Jorge vainly attempted . .
." (Stephens, 63). At the end of
his story Adso thus takes on the role of the
critical reader. Like William, Adso
10 Naming the Rose also must overcome the naive
reading of the events at the abbey. He must
search for the deeper meanings of the texts
which he saved from the abbey
ruins; he can only accomplish his task as a
critical reader.
Thus as the reader comes to the end of Eco's
novel, the question of whether
Eco succeeds in his piece of "semiotic
fiction" can be asked. If Eco had wanted
explicitly to demonstrate a thesis, he could
have written more theory. Instead,
he wrote a novel, which can only be narrated.12
Furthermore, Eco refuses to ad-
mit ownership of the novel by identifying a
"manuscript" that he fabricates as
the source for the novel (NR, 15). Eco's semiotic
journey moves beyond theory
to narrative. As Teresa de Lauretis claims, Eco
advances the idea of sign to a
universal significance beyond a mere
theoretical foundation.13 This universal as-
pect of sign opens up the world of a text
available to a reader.
Eco thus places one focus in The Name of the
Rose on the reader. Both the
naive and the critical reader find reflections
in the novel in Adso and William,
respectively. The movement of these two
characters toward encountering the
maze-like quality of the library helps the
reader interested in literary criticism to
see the novel as exploring the role of the
reader. Like Adso, the naive reader
(the beginning student of literary criticism?)
comes to the novel without much
critical background but goes away with a new
appreciation that allows for fur-
ther exploration of literary texts. Like
William, the critical reader (the seasoned
literary critic?) brings his extensive
background to the novel and goes away
with the realization that even critical readers
make mistakes but should be able
to enjoy a literary text nonetheless. For the
reader of his novel, Eco has made
the task of understanding an easy one if the
reader is willing to name the rose as
"semiotic fiction" which explores the
value of signs in literature.
The University of Kansas-Lawrence
Notes
1. Umberto Eco, A Theory ofsemiotics
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976).
2. Umberto ko, The Role ofthe Reader:
Explorations in the Semiotics of Texls (Bloomington: In-
diana UP, 1979). This work will be referred to
parenthetically in the text as RR.
3. Umberto Eco, The Name ofthe Rose, trans.
William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jo-
vanovich, 1983). This work will be referred to
parenthetically in the text as NR.
4. Walter E. Stephens, "Ec[h]o in
Fabula," rev. of I1 nome della rosa, Diacritics, 13, No. 2 (1983),
55. This work will be referred to
parenthetically in the text as Stephens.
5. Umberto Eco, "The Theory of Signs and
the Role of the Reader," Bulletin of the Midwest Mod-
em Language Association, 14, No. 1 (1981),
35-45. This work will be referred to parenthetically in
the text as TS.
6. A source unavailable to me which might
contain the discussion of the naive and critical
readers in The Name ofthe Rose is an Italian
publication, Teresa de Lauretis, Umberto Eco, I1 Cas-
toro, No. 179 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1981) as
quoted in Stephens, 51.
[Steven Sallis 11]
7. Stephens, page 55 also describes William as
Sherlock Holmes.
8. For a detailed explanation of Eco's definition
of code, see Umberto Eco, "The Code: Meta-
phor or Interdisciplinary Category," Yale
Italian Studies, l (1977), 24-52.
9. RB 1980: The Rule ofst. Benedict In Latin
and English with Notes, ed., Timothy Fry (College-
ville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1981),
240-41.
10. Stephens's entire essay is a fascinating
exploration of Eco's skill in using intertextuality and es-
pecially of his use of Borges, but the
discussion goes beyond the scope of this paper.
11. The quotation is reflected in "that
which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as
sweet?" (Romeo andjuliet, 11, ii, 43-44).
12. On dust jacket of first Italian edition of
The Name ofthe Rose as quoted in Stephens, 51.
13. Teresa de Lauretis, "Response [to
Eco]," Bulletin ofthe Midwest Modern Language Association,
14, No. 1 (1981), 46.
12 Naming the Rose
The Reconquista[note 1] (Portuguese and Spanish for "reconquest") was the period in the history of the Iberian
Peninsula of about 780 years between the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in 711 and thefall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada to the expanding Christian
kingdoms in 1492. The completed conquest
of Granada was the context of the Spanish voyages of discovery and conquest
(Columbus got royal support in Granada in 1492, months after its conquest), and
the Americas—the "New World"—ushered in the era of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires.
Traditional
historiography has marked the beginning of theReconquista with the Battle of Covadonga (718 or 722), the first known victory in Hispania by Christian military
forces since the 711 military invasion undertaken by combined Arab-Berber forces. In that small battle, a group led by the nobleman Pelagius defeated a Muslim patrol in the mountains of northern Iberia and
established the independent Christian Kingdom of Asturias. In the late 10th century, the
Umayyad vizier Almanzor waged military campaigns for 30 years to subjugate the northern
Christian kingdoms. His armies, mostly composed of Slavic and African Mamluks (slave soldiers), ravaged the north, even sacking the great shrine of Santiago de Compostela. When the government of Córdoba disintegrated in the early 11th century, a series of petty successor states
known as taifas emerged. The northern kingdoms took advantage of this situation
and struck deep into Al-Andalus; they fostered civil war,
intimidated the weakened taifas, and made them pay large
tributes (parias) for protection. After a Muslim resurgence in the 12th century the
great Moorish strongholds in the south fell to Christian forces in the 13th
century—Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in
1248—leaving only the Muslim enclave of Granada as a tributary
state in the south.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Toledo,_Spain#Medieval_Toledo_after_the_Reconquest
On
May 25, 1085, Alfonso VI of Castile took Toledo and established direct personal
control over the Moorish city from which he had been exacting tribute, ending
the medieval Taifa's Kingdom of Toledo. This was the first concrete step taken by the
combined kingdom of Leon-Castile in the Reconquista by Christian forces. After Castilian conquest, Toledo
continued to be a major cultural centre; its Arab libraries were not pillaged,
and a tag-team translation centre was established in which books in Arabic or Hebrew
would be translated into Castilian by Muslim and Jewish scholars, and from
Castilian into Latin by Castilian scholars, thus letting long-lost knowledge
spread through Christian Europe again. Toledo served as the capital city of Castile intermittently (Castile did did not have a permanent capital) from 1085, and the city flourished. Charles I of Spain's court was set in Toledo, serving
as the imperial capital.[106]However, in 1561, in the first years
of his son Philip II of Spain reign, the Spanish court was moved to Madrid, thus letting the city's importance
dwindle until the late 20th century, when it became the capital of the autonomous
community of Castile–La Mancha. Nevertheless, the economic decline
of the city helped to preserve its cultural and architectural heritage. Today,
because of this rich heritage, Toledo is one of Spain's foremost cities,
receiving thousands of visitors yearly. Under the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toledo multiple persecutions (633, 653, 693) and stake burnings of Jews (638
CE) occurred; the Kingdom of
Toledo followed up on this tradition (1368, 1391, 1449, 1486–1490 CE) including
forced conversions and mass murder and the rioting and blood bath against the
Jews of Toledo (1212 CE).[107][108]
Background
Traditionally
Toledo was a center of multilingual culture and had prior importance as a
center of learning and translation, beginning in its era under Muslim rule.
Numerous classical works of ancient philosophers and scientists that had been
translated into Arabic during the Islamic
Golden Age "back east" were well known in al-Andalus (Islamic-era Spain) such as those from the Neoplatonism school, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen,Ptolemy, etc., as well as the works of
ancient philosophers and scientists from Persia, India, and China;[1] these enabled Arabic-speaking populations at the time (both in the east
and in "the west," or North Africa and the Iberian peninsula) to
learn about many ancient classical disciplines that were generally inaccessible
to the Christian parts of western Europe, and Arabic-speaking scientists in the
eastern Muslim lands such as Ibn Sina, al-Kindi, al-Razi, and others, had added significant
works to that ancient body of thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Toledo,_Spain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_School_of_Translators
The Toledo
School of Translators (Spanish: Escuela de Traductores de Toledo) is the group of scholars who worked together in the city of Toledo during the 12th and 13th centuries,
to translate many of the philosophical and scientific works from Classical
Arabic.
The School went
through two distinct periods separated by a transitional phase. The first was led
by Archbishop Raymond of Toledo in the 12th century, who
promoted the translation of philosophical and religious works, mainly from
classical Arabic into Latin. Under King Alfonso X of Castile during the 13th century, the
translators no longer worked with Latin as the final language, but
translated into a revised version of Castilian. This resulted in establishing the foundations of the modern Spanish
language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgos
It has many
historic landmarks, of particular importance; the Cathedral of Burgos (declared World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1984),[4] seat of the Metropolitan Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Burgos, the Las Huelgas Reales Monastery and Miraflores Charterhouse. A large number of churches,
palaces and other buildings from the medieval
age remain. The city is surrounded by
the Fuentes Blancas and the Paseo de la Isla parks.
Castilian
nobleman, military leader and diplomat El Cid
Campeadoris a significant historical figure in the city,
as he was born a
couple of kilometres north of Burgos and was raised and educated here.
The city forms
the principal crossroad of northern Spain along the Camino de Santiago, which runs parallel to the River Arlanzón.
Main article: Las Huelgas
The Monasterio de las Huelgas Reales (Monastery of the Royal Retreats) on
the outskirts of the city, was founded in 1180 by king Alfonso VIII, and was begun in a pre-Gothic
style, although almost every style has been introduced over many additions. The
remarkable cloisters have been described as "unrivalled for beauty both of
detail and design, and perhaps unsurpassed by anything in its age and style in
any part of Europe" (1911 Encyclopædia Britannica). One cloister has
semicircular arches with delicate and varied columns; the other has an ogival
style of early Gothic. The interior of the church has enormous columns
supporting its magnificent vault; the entrance is modern. This convent
historically benefited from extraordinary privileges granted to its abbess by
kings and popes.
Miraflores
Charterhouse
The Carthusian monastery, Miraflores Charterhouse (Cartuja de Miraflores) is situated
about four kilometres from the historic city center. Among the treasures of the
Charterhouse are the wooden statue of St. Bruno, the wooden choir stalls in the
church and the tombs of King Juan II and of his spouse, Queen Isabella
of Portugal, constructed of marble and with their recumbent effigies sculpted in alabaster. Around the top frieze are statues
of angels in miniature. The French soldiers in the Spanish
War of Independence (1814) mutilated this work, cutting off some of the heads and carrying
them away to France. King Juan II's daughters by his first wife, heiresses
Princessses Catherine and Eleanor of Asturias, are also buried in the monastery.
AG: The names of Salvatore of Montferrat,
and Remigio of Varagine, two cellarer monks, had a history with the Dulcinian
heretics. They are styled after
the Kathars, Montferrat is Mont Segur. And so on. Umberto Eco really likes to
paraphrase all the Christian history of the 1200's [Kathar Wars and
Extermination] and then to the 1300's. The Franciscans and Benedictines of
course were no friends of the Dominicans, and later the Jesuites. Each one of
these monastic orders was only nominally united under the common hierarchy of
the Hl. St. Roman Kat-Holik church. In reality they tried as much as they could
to differentiate themselves from each other. The variations of the theme of
Christian monastic orders were about as richly textured as the Buddhist orders.
Since Judaism had no monastic element, there was much less diversity there. But
we can still find a lot of Jewish (especially mystic Chassidim) sects. And in
the Islamic world there were also the many different schools of Sufism which
were quite different from the Sunni Orthodoxy. I have myself been to more Sufi
orders and meetings and dances than I had been to Christian monastic ones.
Since the Christian monks are not so well-known for their dances, they didn't
interest me as much as the Sufis. I even have practiced some of their Zikr or
Dhikr meditations, like the Mevlana Whirling Dervish dance. See also the work
of G.I. Gurdjieff in this tradition. He had probably copied some of the Central
Asian Sufi methods which he then taught at his Institute near Paris (aka School
of Enlightenment).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff
George
Ivanovich Gurdjieff (Russian: Георгий
Иванович
Гюрджиев; 31 March 1866/14 January 1872/28 November 1877 – 29 October 1949[3]) was a mystic, philosopher, spiritual teacher, and composer of Armenian and Greek descent, born in Alexandrapol (now Gyumri), Armenia.[4] Gurdjieff taught that most humans
do not possess a unified consciousness and thus live their lives in a state of
hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a
higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential. Gurdjieff
described a method attempting to do so, calling the discipline "The
Work"[5] (connoting "work on
oneself") or "the System".[6] According to his principles and
instructions,[7] Gurdjieff's method for awakening
one's consciousness unites the methods of the fakir, monk and yogi, and thus he referred to it as the "Fourth Way".[8]
http://henrybayman.com/gurdjieff-and-sufism/
A great deal of
information about Sufism has reached the West at
various times, some along quite unexpected avenues. George I. Gurdjieff
was one of those who acted as a long-unrecognized conveyor of such
information, but he was reluctant to reveal his sources.
John G. Bennett devoted most of his life to tracking down the sources
of Gurdjieff’s wisdom. By the time he wrote Gurdjieff: Making a New
World (1973), he had identified these as the Masters of Wisdom of Central
Asia, the Khwajagan Order that initiated the Naqshbandi branch of
the Sufis. Based on information gleaned from the Sufi Master Hasan
Shushud of Istanbul, Bennett wrote his last book, The Masters of Wisdom
(1977). In this book, published posthumously (he died in 1974),
he definitively identified the Sufis as Gurdjieff’s source—or at least, the
source of the essential core of Gurdjieff’s multifaceted teachings. To support
Bennett’s case would require a separate study in itself, so I shall be
content to indicate just one of the dead giveaways which demonstrate
Gurdjieff’s debt to Sufism.
Some time around
1915, Gurdjieff identified three “ways to immortality,”
these he described as the way of the fakir, the way of the monk,
and the way of the yogi. To summarize, the fakir worked on the physical
body, the monk chose the path of religious faith and love, and the yogi
worked with the mind and knowledge (Gurdjieff must have had the
Raja and Jnana modes of Yoga in mind). All three, Gurdjieff added,
required retirement from the world and renunciation of worldly life.
This requirement would leave the ordinary person in a hopeless situation
in terms of spiritual development, were it not for the fact that a “fourth
way” existed. This way, he added, did not require seclusion, but could be
practiced under the usual conditions of life, work, and social involvement,
without having to go into the hills or the desert.151 Mysteriously,
he described the essence of this way as follows: “what substances he needs
for his aims…can be introduced into the organism
from without if it is
known how to do it.”152
What could this cryptic method be? Gurdjieff leaves few clues as to its
nature. We are left in the dark, until we learn from Annemarie Schimmel
of the Sufic technique of rabita, wherein a “tie” or “connection” is established
between master and disciple,153 enabling the transfer—or download—
of spiritual power or baraka into the disciple’s heart. Establishing
“contact” is mentioned as rabitu in the Koran (3:200), but almost never
interpreted—due to lack of knowledge—in the sense described here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sana%CA%BDa_manuscript
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Quran_manuscript
https://www.islamic-awareness.org/quran/text/mss/soth.html
The very lonesome exception from this overall
pattern was Günter Lüling who had consequently
been thoroughly exorcised from German Arabist
scholarship. His book could not be published
anywhere in Germany, and not even in Europe. So
his widow managed to get it published in India
by Motilal Benarsidass.
He had had the audacity to make linguistic
comparisons between ancient Christian psalms
and some verses in the Koran. And it is also
quite well-known that most of the ancient
Near East and Arabia had some sort of
pseudo-Christian religion. They could have been
Manichaeans, Zoroastrians, Nestorians, and
anything in between.
See also Ernest Gellner:
Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human
History, Ernest Gellner. 1988.
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. ISBN: 0-226-28701-7.
https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article-abstract/24/2/382/1144229?redirectedFrom=PDF
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3644789.html
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/027046768900900426
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#koran_mytho
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#koran_rel_geschicht
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#koran_etymolog
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#koran_uthman
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#_edn553
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#_ednref555
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#_ednref595
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_L%C3%BCling
https://books.google.de/books?id=tqFisOXrUQ8C&printsec=frontcover&hl=de#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_L%C3%BCling
Ich habe auch hier einiges davon in meinem Archiv
aufbewahrt.
Dazu ein Zitat aus dem obigen Artikel:
"Wie geht
Lüling vor? Er legt die extrem defektive Schreibung des frühen Arabischen
seinen Analysen zugrunde. Wie alle semitischen Sprachen gibt das Arabische in
seiner Schrift im allgemeinen nur die Konsonanten und die langen Vokale wieder,
die kurzen Vokale werden weggelassen. Der Koran wird allerdings, weil hier jeder
Buchstabe wegen der Interpretation besonders wichtig ist, mit Hilfszeichen
vokalisiert, die jedoch erst später aufkamen. Dasselbe gilt für jene
Punktation, die darüber entscheidet, ob ein Buchstabe ein b, ein t, ein th, ein
n, ein s, ein sch, ein z oder r, ein f oder q ist. Die heute gebräuchliche
arabische Schrift hat sich von einer nur andeutenden, quasi stenographischen
Schreibweise im Laufe von Generationen zu einer mit Hilfe diakritischer Zeichen
"vollständigen" Schrift entwickelt, ein Prozeß, wie er auch im
Hebräischen unter den Masoreten stattfand. Man kann verstehen, welche
Möglichkeiten der Mißlesung angesichts solcher Eindeutigkeitsmängel in der
Schreibung denkbar sind."
The following essay provides a context for the
next articles about the works of Jared Diamond and other cultural theorists. We
are dealing here with the study of the psychohistory of humanity from
different viewpoints. Quételet took the method of statistical analysis, which
is also being applied by Gerd Gigerenzer. I have at various occasion
mentioned how one can lie with statistics. But Quételet and Gigerenzer are
doing something to use statistics to very useful ends.
The reference to the Science Fiction of Isaac
Asimov is quite useful since good Science Fiction is Macro
History in a Laboratory. The other remarkable work in this vein is "Dune"
by Frank Herbert. Even though the themes of Asimov and Frank Herbert are
virtually on opposite ends of a spectrum, they are quite useful to consider the
different values given to the determinants of human existence and development.
Frank Herbert leans definitely on the Soteriological Side which was also
the subject of Part I of Meta-Morphology. (Not yet published). We can view
the grand events of human destiny as they are unfolding in a purely
statistical way. This may be the blind masses of a sort of struggle
of pure energy and pure entropy of events in the planetary biosphere
with something human on top of it, as Quetelet and Asimov interpret it, or the
forerunner of Gumilev, and Vernadsky. Then we have Rudolf
Steiner who interprets it as a struggle of (the supernatural powers of) Ahura
Mazda against Ahriman. These are Gnostic in Origin, and re-appear in
the Theosophical Literature. Or we can interpret it in terms of a
struggle of the Promethean Human Spirit, that rises up against the Gods.
(We may find such a theme in the Wagner Operas, but also in Nietzsche's
Zarathustra and Oswald Spengler's works). Nietzsche didn't develop a
theory of history, but he had coined "The Will to Power". Lev
Gumilev had "The Will to Suffer". His Passionarnost
is a literal translation of the Greek Pathe which is a little different from
the Latin Passion. But both these words are double-sided. Because
Passion also means a sort of spiritual fervor, like it was described by
Giordano Bruno in "Eroici furori". And Giordano had wrapped
all his passion in his own martyrdom.
http://www.esotericarchives.com/bruno/furori.htm
Similarly, Spengler had his Faustian
Spirit which is also a sort of passion, and Goethe had constructed his
masterpiece around this Germanic / Teutonic Version of Passion. This was
also German Romanticism wrapped up in a neat parcel. We may compare or
rather contrast this kind of passion with the dis-passionate view that the British
Empiricists had cultivated. And of course, Romanticism is not a good
foundation to build an Empire upon, as the poor Gemans had found out under
Emperor Willi II. And of course there was mixed in the Hegel'ian Delusion of
the Objektivation des Geistes which was a thinly disguised euphemism or Apologetics
of the Prussian State Philosophy or Ideology. Frank Herbert had concocted a
mixture of human powers but they are not supernatural but born out of countless
generations of Genetic Engineering by the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood.
These themes re-appear in a quite more crude form in present-day transhumanism.
https://aeon.co/essays/our-behaviour-in-bulk-is-more-predictable-than-we-like-to-imagine
By Ian Steward
In Isaac
Asimov’s novel Foundation (1951), the mathematician Hari Seldon forecasts the
collapse of the Galactic Empire using psychohistory: a calculus of the patterns
that occur in the reaction of the mass of humanity to social and economic
events. Initially put on trial for treason, on the grounds that his prediction
encourages said collapse, Seldon is permitted to set up a research group on a
secluded planet. There, he investigates how to minimise the destruction and
reduce the subsequent period of anarchy from 30,000 years to a mere 1,000.
Asimov knew that
predicting large-scale political events over periods of millennia is not really
plausible. But we all do suspend this disbelief when reading fiction. No Jane
Austen fan gets upset to be told that Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy didn’t
actually exist. Asimov was smart enough to know that such forecasting, however
accurate it might be, is vulnerable to any large disturbance that hasn’t been
anticipated, not even in principle. He also understood that readers who happily
swallowed psychohistory would realise the same thing. In the second volume of
the series, just such a ‘black swan’ event derails Seldon’s plans. However,
Seldon has a contingency plan, one that the series later reveals also brings
some surprises.
Asimov’s
Foundation series is notable for concentrating on the political machinations of
the key groups, instead of churning out page upon page of space battles between
vast fleets armed to the teeth. The protagonists receive regular reports of such
battles, but the description is far from a Hollywood treatment. The plot, as
Asimov himself stated, is modelled on Edward Gibbon’s book The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89), and a masterclass in planning
on an epic scale for uncertainty. Every senior minister and civil servant
should be obliged to read it.
Psychohistory, a
fictional method for predicting humanity’s future, takes a hypothetical
mathematical technique to extremes, for dramatic effect. But, for less
ambitious tasks, we use the basic idea every day; for example, when a
supermarket manager estimates how many bags of flour to put on the shelves, or
an architect assesses the likely size of a meeting room when designing a
building. The character of Seldon was to some extent inspired by Adolphe
Quételet, one of the first to apply mathematics to human behaviour. Quételet
was born in 1796 in Ghent in the Low Countries, now Belgium. Today’s obsessions
with the promises and dangers of ‘big data’ and artificial intelligence are
direct descendants of Quételet’s brainchild. He didn’t call it psychohistory,
of course. He called it social physics.
The basic tools
and techniques of statistics were born in the physical sciences, especially
astronomy. They originated in a systematic method to extract information from
observations subject to unavoidable errors. As the understanding of probability
theory grew, a few pioneers extended the method beyond its original boundaries.
Statistics became indispensable in biology, medicine, government, the
humanities, even sometimes the arts. So it’s fitting that the person who lit
the fuse was a pure mathematician turned astronomer, one who succumbed to the
siren song of the social sciences.
Quételet
bequeathed to posterity the realisation that, despite all the vagaries of free
will and circumstance, the behaviour of humanity in bulk is far more
predictable than we like to imagine. Not perfectly, by any means, but, as they
say, ‘good enough for government work’. He also left us two specific ideas:
l’homme moyen, the ‘average man’, and the ubiquity of the normal probability
distribution, better-known as the bell curve. Both are useful tools that opened
up new ways of thinking, and that have serious flaws if taken too literally or
applied too widely.
Quételet gained
the first doctorate awarded by the newly founded University of Ghent. His
thesis was on conic sections, a topic that also fascinated Ancient Greek
geometers, who constructed important curves – ellipse, parabola, hyperbola – by
slicing a cone with a plane. For a time, he taught mathematics, until his
election to the Royal Academy of Brussels in 1820 propelled him into a 50-year
career in the scholarly stratosphere as the central figure of Belgian science.
Around that
time, Quételet joined a movement to found a new observatory. He didn’t know
much astronomy, but he was a born entrepreneur and he knew his way around the
labyrinths of government. His first step was to secure a promise of government
funding. Then he took measures to remedy his ignorance of the subject that the
observatory was to study. In 1823, at government expense, he headed for Paris
to study with leading astronomers, meteorologists and mathematicians. He
learned astronomy and meteorology from François Arago and Alexis Bouvard, and
probability theory from Joseph Fourier.
One basic number
has a strong effect on everything that happens, and will happen, in a country:
its population
At that time,
astronomers were pioneering the use of probability theory to improve
measurements of planetary orbits despite inevitable observational errors.
Learning these techniques from the experts sparked a lifelong obsession with
the application of probability to statistical data. By 1826, Quételet was a
regional correspondent for the statistical bureau of the Kingdom of the Low
Countries.
One basic number
has a strong effect on everything that happens, and will happen, in a country:
its population. If you don’t know how many people you’ve got, it’s difficult to
plan. You can guesstimate, but you might well end up wasting a lot of money on
unnecessary infrastructure, or underestimating demand and causing a crisis.
This is a problem that every nation still grapples with.
The natural way
to find out how many people live in your country is to count them. Making a
census isn’t as easy as it might seem, however. People move around, and they
hide themselves away to avoid being convicted of crimes or to avoid paying tax.
In 1829, the Belgian government was planning a new census and Quételet, who had
been working on historical population figures, joined the project. ‘The data
that we have at present can only be considered provisional, and are in need of
correction,’ he wrote. A full census is expensive, so it makes sense to
estimate population changes between censuses. However, you can’t get away with
estimates for long, and a census every 10 years is common. Quételet urged the
government to carry out a new census, to get an accurate baseline for future
estimates. However, he’d come back from Paris with an interesting idea, an
idea, he’d got from the great French mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace. If
it worked, it would save a lot of money.
... [AG: The
questions of average people] ...
What about the
average woman? Average child? Which country’s average man is more likely to be
a murderer or a victim? Or be a doctor, devoted to saving lives, rather than a
suicide, intent on ending his own? A different average man (or woman or child)
is needed for each attribute. As Stephen Stigler put it in The History of Statistics
(1986), Quételet considered that ‘the average man was a device for smoothing
away the random variations of society and revealing the regularities that were
to be the laws of his “social physics”.’
After 1880, the
social sciences began to make extensive use of statistics, especially the bell
curve. Francis Galton was a pioneer of data analysis in weather forecasting,
and discovered the existence of anticyclones. Galton produced the first weather
map, published in The Times in 1875, and he was fascinated by real-world
numerical data and the mathematical patterns hidden within them. When Charles
Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859), Galton began a study of human
heredity. How does the height of a child relate to that of the parents? What about
weight, or intellectual ability? Galton adopted Quételet’s bell curve, using it
to separate distinct populations. If data showed two peaks, rather than the
single peak of the bell curve, Galton argued that the population concerned must
be composed of two distinct sub-populations, each following its own bell curve.
Galton grew
convinced that desirable human traits are hereditary, a deduction from
evolutionary theory but one that Darwin repudiated. For Galton, Quételet’s
average man was a social imperative, and one to be avoided. His book Hereditary
Genius (1869) invoked statistics to study the inheritance of genius and
greatness, with what today appears a curious mixture of egalitarian aims
(‘every lad [should have] a chance of showing his abilities, and, if highly
gifted, enabled to achieve a first-class education and entrance into
professional life’) and the encouragement of ‘the pride of race’. In his
Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883), Galton coined the term
‘eugenics’, advocating financial rewards to encourage marriage between families
of high rank or intellect. He wanted to breed people with allegedly superior
abilities. Eugenics had its day in the 1920s and ’30s, but rapidly fell from
grace because of widespread abuses, the forced sterilisation of mental
patients, and the Nazi delusion of a master race, for example. Today, eugenics
is considered racist. It contravenes the United Nations Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the European Union’s Charter
of Fundamental Rights. However, the idea has never completely gone away.
[AG: Viewed this
way, the story of "Dune" is pure-bred eugenics. Of course in Dune one
reads not so much about those who didn't meet the requirements.]
...
Until recently,
pollsters mostly used random samples. The Law of Large Numbers, discovered by
Jacob Bernoulli around 1684 and published in his epic Ars Conjectandi (1713),
or ‘The Art of Conjecture’, tells us that, if the sample is large enough, the
average value of that sample is ‘almost surely’ as close as we wish to the true
average. But this doesn’t tell us how big ‘large enough’ should be. A more
sophisticated result, the Central Limit Theorem, uses a bell curve to relate
the sample mean to the actual mean, and to calculate the smallest sample size
that should work.
...
Polling
organisations use a variety of methods to try to minimise these sources of
error. Many of these methods are mathematical, but psychological and other
factors also come into consideration. Most of us know of stories where polls
have confidently indicated the wrong result, and it seems to be happening more
often. Special factors are sometimes invoked to ‘explain’ why, such as a sudden
late swing in opinion, or people deliberately lying to make the opposition
think it’s going to win and become complacent. Nevertheless, when performed
competently, polling has a fairly good track-record overall. It provides a
useful tool for reducing uncertainty. Exit polls, where people are asked whom
they voted for soon after they cast their vote, are often very accurate, giving
the correct result long before the official vote count reveals it, and can’t
influence the result.
Today, the term
‘social physics’ has acquired a less metaphorical meaning. Rapid progress in
information technology has led to the ‘big data’ revolution, in which gigantic
quantities of information can be obtained and processed. Patterns of human
behaviour can be extracted from records of credit-card purchases, telephone
calls and emails. Words suddenly becoming more common on social media, such as
‘demagogue’ during the 2016 US presidential election, can be clues to hot
political issues.
...
The social and
political challenges are to ensure that such methods are not abused. With the
growing introduction of powerful new methods, social physics has come a long
way since Quételet first wondered how to find out how many people lived in
Belgium, without actually counting them.
This is an
adapted excerpt from the book
‘Do Dice Play
God? The Mathematics of Uncertainty’ (2019) by Ian Stewart, published by Basic
Books in September 2019.
There
is Professor Gigerenzer who is very good at thinking Mathematical and
Statistical Monstrosities. Someone quite intelligent had said something
like this:
Never
believe a statistic that you haven't forged yourself.
It
is probably for a good reason that most of all the good doctors of humanity,
have never learned much statistics in their medical schools. The
distribution of intelligence and education factors in humanity is such
that he who may be a good doctor is likely to have a mediocre to poor ability
in mathematics.
https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/de/mitarbeiter/gerd-gigerenzer
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerd_Gigerenzer
https://www.referenten.de/redner-referent-prof-dr-gerd-gigerenzer-686.html
https://www.zeitzuleben.de/interview-gigerenzer/
https://www.br.de/fernsehen/ard-alpha/sendungen/campus/talks/talks-risiko-gigerenzer100.html
https://www.randomhouse.de/leseprobe/Bauchentscheidungen/leseprobe_9783570009376_1.pdf
https://www.theeuropean.de/gerd-gigerenzer/13832-interview-mit-gerd-gigerenzer
https://psyche-und-arbeit.de/?page_id=3372
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/thema/gerd-gigerenzer
https://www.amazon.de/Bauchentscheidungen-Intelligenz-Unbewussten-Macht-Intuition/dp/3442155037
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy3LXZVjbNM
And when one thinks of the work of
Gerd Gigerenzer one will probably get to imagine some scenario like this: When
the good doctor has the nice Pharmaka Company Sales Representative
coming to his/her doorstep, then the nice Pharmaka Representative presents the
good doctor with some statistics... And then the good doctor should exactly do
what Giordano Bruno advised in his Kabbalah of the Pegasus: Fold your
hands, and bend your knees, and start to pray:
"Dear God don't lead us into
the statistics, and deliver us from the evil... er I mean deliver us from the
Pharmaka Company Sales Representative. Amen."
Unfortunately the good doctor had
never learned anything about praying. Er I mean the preying of the preying
mantis called the Pharmaka Representative. And so my advice is totally in vain.
Amen.
Now since most doctors are
mostly not so good at statistics, it comes to pass that about 3/4 of
clinical studies on the effects of Pharmaka are full of bad statistics. And in
the consequence they are of no scientific value at all. And in the articles
sponsored by the Pharmaka Companies, it will be close to 100%. So the whole Pharmaka
Business is corrupted up over their heads by bad statistics. And the good
German Minister/in of Public Health (or in just any other country) will also be
challenged beyond his/her intelligence since the good Minister has no idea
of Medical and Pharmaka Statistics and on top of that s/he will also have no
idea of medicine. So, incompetence and idiocy always go together well.
And of course then come the out-of-proportion prices of (some patentable)
Pharmaka. Since the Pharmaka Companies just cook up some very old recipes with
minimal molecular changes, and then they call them a new Pharmaka / Medicine
with a whole new patent, and of course a whole new price, about 10 times of the
old Pharmaka.
The
same holds pretty much for all the journalists, because they have studied
journalism because they hate mathematics. The ability to tell tall stories
(like Claas Relotius) versus the sharp but very cotton-dry mathematical
thinking mostly oppose each other and don't fit together well into one human
brain. And I do a little journalistic psychology on the side. The journalists
seem to have "two souls in their breasts" as Goethe would have said
it. On the one side they must be as objective and impartial as possible to give
their readers a view of "the world as it is". Now this may be a lofty
ethos of the profession. But every journalist also has some pathe,
meaning a yearning in his soul that s/he would rather be like the Great
Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had been a journalist "of sorts", but
he was a very passionate one. So actually he used to tell tall stories all the
time. Finally he won fame and fortune by telling tall stories alone
without a journalistic pretense. What information there is on the www is mostly
euphemistic and apologetic about Hemingway. But we can get a hint that
he was very passionate in the way of his writing.
https://spartacus-educational.com/USAhemingway.htm
Ernest Hemingway, the son of Clarence Edmonds
Hemingway, a doctor, was was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on 21st July, 1899.
His mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a music teacher but had always wanted to
be an opera singer. According to Carlos Baker, the author of Ernest Hemingway:
A Life Story (1969), he began writing stories as a child: "Ernest loved to
dramatize everything, continuing his boyhood habit of making up stories in
which he was invariably the swashbuckling hero." ...
After the war Hemingway wrote the novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). The book, which deals
with the Republican partisans in the Sierra de Guadarrama, sold over 270,000
copies in its first year. A former member of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the
writer Alvah Bessie, later
complained about the book: "His (Hemingway) dedication to the cause of the
Spanish Republic was never questioned, even though the VALB men attacked his novel, For
Whom the Bell Tolls, as a piece of romantic nonsense when it was not slanderous
of many Spanish leaders we all revered, and scarcely representative of what the
war was all about."
https://newrepublic.com/article/95915/hemingway-reports-spain
David
Sanders, Ernest Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Experience
So
when we understand those two sides of a journalist's soul better, then
we will be able to dispense some forgiveness onto those poor journalists.
Perhaps the best ever psychogram of the journalist was sketched in the
"Superman" comics. Here the hero is a lowly newspaper journalist who
turns unconspicuously into Superman when the need arises and then returns the
next day to his lowly profession again to tell the latest superman adventure in
his newspaper. Most journalists will not earn fame, but at least sometimes they
earn some free rides. Like the motor journalists who will always get a
free car to "test" for a few months from the nice motor companies,
and of course he will write some nice stories about that car later. Other
journalists get free aeroplane flights and free room and board
and transportation at the location, when they concoct some nice reports about
some nice tourist destinations. Of course all expenses are paid by the
respective tourist ministery of that country which is almost always presided by
a close relative of that country's premier minister or minister president.
And this country's hotels are almost always owned by the president's son or
daughter-in-law. So we will surely really soon come to read some really
exciting stories about the hottest insider tips about tourist hot-spots like
Haiti, the Kongo, and South Sudan. Sociologically, one may note that for
almost all journalists of humanity, the word "truth" is always
spelled like "pravda". There is a famous sketch by Hape
Kerkeling aka Horst Schlämmer who saw his higher calling to become Chancellor
of Germany: „Horst Schlämmer – Isch kandidiere“ in 2009.
https://www.welt.de/fernsehen/article4255117/Horst-Schlaemmer-kandidiert-sie-alle-nieder.html
Now,
10 years later, we all would wish that Horst Schlämmer would have won the
election.
The
wealth of statistical tricks is almost infinite. The one most often used
is "Correlation does not imply Causation". This is a special
trick for all would-be benefactors of humanity who want to either ban
something, like smoking, or to promote something that is either useless or
harmful in great quantity, like Vitamin C (which was the fabrication of Linus
Pauling). Another great trick is to take totally skewed samples or
extremely small and not representative ones.
https://orbitermag.com/the-vitamin-c-hoax/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation
Correlation does not
imply causation
Not to be confused
with Illusory correlation.
In statistics, the phrase "correlation
does not imply causation" refers to the inability to legitimately
deduce a cause-and-effect relationship between two variables solely
on the basis of an observed association or correlation between them.[1][2] The complementary idea that
"correlation implies causation" is an example of a questionable-cause logical fallacy, in which two events occurring together
are taken to have established a cause-and-effect relationship. This fallacy is
also known by the Latin phrase cum hoc ergo propter hoc ("with
this, therefore because of this"). This differs from the fallacy known
as post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after
this, therefore because of this"), in which an event following another is
seen as a necessary consequence of
the former event.
In a widely studied
example of the statistical fallacy, numerous epidemiological studies showed
that women taking combined hormone replacement therapy (HRT)
also had a lower-than-average incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD),
leading doctors to propose that HRT was protective against CHD. But later randomized controlled trials showed
that use of HRT led to a small but statistically significant increase in
the risk of CHD. Reanalysis of the data from the epidemiological studies showed
that women undertaking HRT were more likely to be from higher socioeconomic groups (ABC1), with better-than-average diet and exercise
regimens. Thus the use of HRT and decreased incidence of coronary heart disease
were coincident effects of a common cause (i.e., the benefits associated with a
higher socioeconomic status), rather than one being a direct cause of the
other, as had been supposed.[3]
https://towardsdatascience.com/why-correlation-does-not-imply-causation-5b99790df07e
Es geht um die Frage, ob
bei der Zulassung der teuren Medizin getrickst worden ist. Die mächtige
US-Gesundheitsbehörde FDA wirft Novartis und der 2018 übernommenen Tochterfirma
Avexis vor, dass diese vor der Zulassung manipulierte Testdaten gegenüber den
Aufsehern verschwiegen haben.
Der Vorwurf wiegt schwer: Das Unternehmen habe erst am 28. Juni über die Manipulation von Tierversuchsdaten informiert, obwohl es schon im März davon erfahren habe – mehr als zwei Monate vor der Zulassung am 24. Mai, teilte die FDA mit. An der positiven Einschätzung der klinischen Studien am Menschen ändere sich zwar nichts, und auch die Sicherheit des Mittels sollte davon nicht beeinträchtigt sein.
AG:
I have just discovered one of the most egregious examples how to lie with
statistics that anyone with a little more phantasy than Claas Relotius
could come up with. The following ingenious story is that India will surpass Great
Britain as the fifth largest economy of the world in 2019. We can just
imagine what a great intellectual masterpiece that is. Since Great
Britain has about 66 million (= 66.000.000) people and 242.495 km², and India
has about 1.000.000.000 people and 3.287.000 km². Small wonder that a normal
human being just thinks that the journalists must be just a little bit out
of their minds:
Denn in diesem Jahr wird die
indische Volkswirtschaft aller Voraussicht nach die britische abhängen –
ausgerechnet eine einstige Kolonie überrundet damit die frühere
Kolonialmacht, die damit in
der Liste der größten Volkswirtschaften einen weiteren Platz absteigt. Das
wirft ein Licht auf die wahren Kräfteverhältnisse in der Welt, eine Welt, in
der Großbritannien allein um seinen Platz kämpfen muss.
Auf der anderen Seite dagegen
steht Indien. Dort entwickelt sich die Wirtschaft seit Jahren äußerst
dynamisch. Und erst im Mai wurde die Regierung unter Premierminister Narendra
Modi in den Wahlen eindrucksvoll bestätigt. Das beflügelte die Aktienmärkte.
Der Sensex-Index kletterte im Juni erstmals über 40.000 Punkte und erreichte
ein neues Allzeithoch.
AG:
There is at least one intelligent reader who writes the obvious comment that
any sane human would make:
Zweitens
ist ein so tendenziöser Briten-Bash-Artikel nur möglich, weil Indien so enorm
bevölkerungsreich ist. Pro Kopf lag das BIP 2017 auf dem Niveau der Republik
Kongo. Selbst Swasiland ist da erfolgreicher.
We
can also state another version of this euphemistic story: When compared with
the population increase, the economy of India is even shrinking. And we must
not forget that the environmental cost of that economy is also proportionally
worse than that of China. The reason for this is the situation in the hot
tropics which worsens all environmental problems, especially water shortage
and contamination. In the very near future, India will probably be the
most contaminated region of the planet. And this has nothing at all to do
with climate change. It is just that so many millions of deep-bore water
wells suck the subcontinent dry.
So
we come to another "pet" theme of the Mainstream press: Murder
rates, versus Narco war victims, versus Terrorist victims, versus Traffic
deaths, versus population size, versus length of interstate highways, versus
number of motor vehicles overall and per capita, versus the area size of a
country. The murder rates of any country or population is combed (or tweaked)
around these factors of statistics and how they will always yield very
surprising and mostly very different results. And all the Mainstream Press
monkeys and all the Mainstream Press men, will never get the statistics
together again. Quoting Lewis Carrol himself who was a very good Mathematician.
We have so many cases how to distort murder rates when they are quoted without
any sense of proportion in the Mainstream Press.
1)
The total murder rate in a given country, like Mexico, Honduras or India. In
absolute numbers.
2)
The murder rate in proportion to the absolute number of murders divided by the
total number of population.
For
example we have in Honduras about 10 million, and we may have there about
10.000 murders every year. Now we take India with around 1.000 million, and we
have about 100.000 murders every year.
So:
Which one is the more dangerous country to live in?
But
one should also care about population density, which is dependent on the area
size of the country. Honduras is very small in area, and India is very large.
But this still doesn't cover all the cases. An extreme case: Egypt is quite
large in overall area, but 90% of that is desert, so no people there. The
population tends to be squeezed into a corridor about 20 km wide along the
whole length of the Nile in Egypt. So when one wants to calculate traffic
deaths and murder rates, versus country size, one should heed the distribution
of population density, otherwise one would get very distorted and deceiving
figures. Every country with lots of deserts (ice sheets are also deserts) or
lots of jungles (like Kongo) and difficult mountain ranges (like Japan and
New-Guinea) needs to adjust the population
density proportions.
Then
we have the Khoi San in S. Africa with around 100 murders every year. But the
total size of Khoi San population is maybe 50.000 in total. Again the question
what is the proportional murder rate per capita of population?
3)
Statistical significance of premature deaths. Again what is the more dangerous
country to live in?
Murder
rate vs. traffic accident rate vs. the total population size. Let us again take
India as example. Now one must discount this against total number of traffic
accidents and per capita of population: Railways, and especially National
Interstate Highways which cross the whole Subcontient. The answer of
statistical significance is: we have about 100.000 murders every year, but we
have about 500.000 traffic deaths every year.
So
we ask the same question again: Which one is the most dangerous country to live
in?
And
we come up with India on top, and Mexico a close second, since the Mexicans are
such horrible
macho
Kamikaze Hell-Drivers. And then comes Brazil. But since Brazil is so large, the
statistics
always
lie terribly. Because most of the deaths occur along the great national
highways which have none
whatsoever
devices like the Freeways or the Autobahn, to keep the intersections clean, and
keep the
opposing
traffic from running into each other.
And
then in India as well as in Brazil there are countless other traffic partipicants
or rather obstacles like oxcarts, large animals that cross the roads
unpredictably like cows and sometimes even Elephants. And all those other
traffic partipicants will have no lights at all during night times. And of
course there are the terrible national road conditions. Traffic deaths
concentrate on the more populated highways. These are just small strips that
cut through the country but a very high concentration of accidents occurs
there. Proportional to total population size there are probably about as many
traffic deaths in India as there are in Mexico, and as there are in Brazil. So
we come to the conclusion that one can twist and turn the statistics whichever
way one likes. That is the problem of the Mainstream press which is always
pointing at some terrorists and narcos, while the traffic deaths are about one
order of magnitude higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_accidents_in_India
https://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/road_traffic/countrywork/ind/en/
WHO/T. Pietrasik
The Global status report on road safety 2013
estimates that more than 231,000 people are killed in road traffic crashes in
India every year. Approximately half of all deaths on the country's roads are
among vulnerable road users - motorcyclists, pedestrians and cyclists.
India is a good example for skewed
statistics. With all the murders, thugs, and gang rapes and the dowry burning
of wives it comes to a very high murder rate. And this is also totally
undocumented, because the life of a woman is very cheap in India and it has
always been this way for many many millennia... Dowry murder is a speciality of
India because of the silly dowry rules there...
All those murders are statistically
insignificant when compared to the number of traffic deaths in the country.
Just for the railways alone, there are about some 50.000 railway deaths in
India every year. And you can safely estimate the number of all sorts of
interstate highway and all other traffic deaths would be around 300.000 per
year.
And the Indians are such a bunch of
expert Kamikaze drivers, that when you have a very sleepy village out in the
boondacks... where there comes hardly a car driving by at about a leisurely
rate of one car per hour... so there is some intersection. And lo and behold.
The Indians are able to manage to have a deadly car crash with four cars coming
from all four sides of the intersection...
And as it says in the local
newspaper the next day: There was a terrible car crash with four cars involved,
and there were about 25 to 30 deaths. Now I wonder besides all these other
wonders. How between Heaven and Hell, could you manage to cram 25 to 30 poor
Indians into just four cars? I am still wondering. I think that they could even
manage to have an oxcart traffic accident, with just two oxcarts and about 20
dead. India is surely a country where there are still many miracles happening
every day.
So I give you an appropriate joke,
since we are in India: What is more difficult than getting a pregnant Elephant
into a VW Volkswagen? Quite easy. It is so much more difficult to get an
Elephant pregnant in a VW Volkswagen. Presuming that the female Elephant is
already in the VW Volkswagen. Well er, If you have at any time seen an Elephant
Dick, it is almost as long as the dick of the Moby Dick.
Of course no-one in the enlightened
West could ever care about Indian traffic deaths. And so when there come a few
Islamist Terrorist bombers and they manage to kill about 100 people and maim
about 500 more... There would be such an outcry in all the High Quality
Mainstream Media in the whole world. Such is the hypnotizing Power of Lying
with Statistics.
I know about all this because I had been on the Indian railways and then on some buses on the Indian national main interstate road system some time ago. I have also some nice youtube videos in my archive, of people cut in two by a railway train. I even saw this when the ambulance came after a few hours later, when they lifted one part of the body on the stretcher, and then leisurely lifted to other part on the same stretcher, to put together again what a few hours ago, had been a whole human. You don't need to read the story of Humpty Dumpty of Lewis Carroll to get an idea of this. You just go to the youtube for some videos of this kind. The Indians are not so shy of Political Correctness and some such Moralistic Victorian Puritan dealings. And the Indians are quite un-concerned about death since they believe in re-birth, and they probably think: If I kill myself now, perhaps I will have a better rebirth in my next life. This is the Indian Gamble with Rebirth. I have another nice story about Rebirth which just fits in here. Das Tibetische Bardo Thodol:
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#bardo_thodol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvAhLfYB8Io
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2e0HzFTFjk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q5MbE-PTZw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fjl8QmxGl0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-qo_3wS9Vo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOL0prOLrdk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUXHWKN4Mhg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRZVxInNZBU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vM59ULCiII
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASlAiB24EwY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl0DjJOlDm4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ4YoXxCCOs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzEhYcX01HY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq0u9T6Pf5c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MFC9lRJbME
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdVTlDYcvp4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M7Is8R362M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74qyeiNmdqw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOraHZmEDs0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpLPJ3g2Z7w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0Tb1PQCnlc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec32klue9UI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad3pJzvi-_k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94KuIbpWBIE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eIOaAHYkaA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-I82gxMnDY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ4YoXxCCOs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfEwkILaB34
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq0u9T6Pf5c
...
and then some more of this.
You just put this into the youtube
search: indian railway death
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=indian+railway+death
And you will notice that the Indians
have a totally different attitude about death than we in the west are
accustomed to. And they don't (yet) have the Political Correctness to delete
that material from the youtube. But I am sure that the Agents of the Matrix of
the youtube will finally find out about this and delete all this important
material about death in India, really soon I believe. I have collected some
more interesting ethnograpohic material on the Holy Order of the Thugees. Kali,
die Göttin der Rache und die Thuggees.
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#kali_thugees
Now we are coming to some other
hell-holes on the scarry face of our nice planet Earth. We want to get a
clearer picture of the sum total of all the damages to a National Economy. All
premature deaths and injuries have a cost in a National Economy. Like loss of
income for families, loss of productive hu-manpower for the National Economy.
Costs of treating the wounded. The Quality Mainstream Press will never do a
statistical weighing of the cold factors of death rate totals against more
sensational stories like Terrorism, Narco and Catatastrophe deaths. The many
other statistics of "quite ordinary" premature deaths are just
omitted because they occur routinely and daily.
Next to Africa and India, come as
close seconds Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the countries on the American
Isthmus, like Guatemala, and Honduras, but they are quite small in the total
size of population compared with Africa. A short distance further north, some
parts of Mexico, they are also quite deadly but there is also a large territory
and population size. Narco wars happen just in some parts of Mexico along the
main narco trading routes. We also must account for the fact that most of
Northern Mexico is 1/2 to 3/4 desert. The Mainstream Press tends to
over-estimate the number and significance of deaths due to drug wars of
traffiking narco gangs compared to the overall size of population and
distribution in some quite limited areas. Narco death rates are in the order of
x * 10.000 a year. This is a small percentage compared to the size of the whole
population of Mexico of about 130 million. Statistically it is not so relevant.
Road traffic deaths are so much higher. Since the Mexicans are a whole bunch of
mad macho Kamikaze automobile drivers, ... The number of automobile and truck
traffic deaths on Mexico probably exceeds the number of narco drug gang wars by
about at least one order of magnitude. Lets say about 100.000 every year.
To complement this, we take the
example of Brazil, Sao Paulo. There is a joke about two friends who meet each
other again after some quite long years. Says the one, oh my dear Paolo, I
haven't seen you in so many years, what did happen to you? The other just said:
I had moved to the other side of the road.
This section gives us some more details how one
can go about observing the fates of humanity by very different methods and from
very different viewpoints. The statistical method of Quetelet seems to be the
most scientific one since it derives its method from the "hard
sciences" like astronomy. But Quetelet didn't bother so much about ecology.
This is where Jared Diamond had based his work on. At least in "Guns,
Germs, and Steel". There he spells out the different fates of human
societies according to the ecological conditions of their environment. The
factors of geographical extension, East-West in Eurasia, and North-South in the
Americas and Africa contribute decisively to the (not-so) development of
cultures, as well as the availability of work animals. Inversely the close
presence of animals in human habitations can lead to deadly diseases being
transmitted to humans. The history of Biospheric anthropology goes back to at
least Vernadsky who had single-handedly combined the large-scale geo-morphology
with bio-climatology. It took the Western bio- / eco- / climato- / techno- /
oeconomo- scientists at least 50 years longer to get a grasp on these things.
So Jared Diamond was quite a late-comer to the field, and on top of that, he
was an amateur in the field since he had started out as an Ornithologist. And
Lev Gumilev had followed the work of Vernadsky very closely, but practically
no-one in the West knew about his work.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629617301998
https://www.sciencedirect.com/sdfe/pdf/download/aam/pii/S2214629617301998
A pioneer of the field was Leslie White
who had concentrated his work on energy availability and ‑use, but
today one would call it the field of technical infrastructures of human
societies. Leslie White's work is not very fashionable any more today,
since it is based on the evolutionistic idea. It is not a marker of
higher development, how much human societies use external energies. But this
research still has some reasons. The usage of fire is the most ancient and
important of human energy technology.
Without fire there would be no humanity. Fire
and Cooking is the oldest and most important of external energies used by
humans. Cooking provided vital nutritional energy for the brain to grow. Fire
provided warmth, light, and protection from the elements. Smoke provided
protection from parasites, like mosquitoes. In many third-world countries,
people still cook with open fire, and that is a health hazard. But on the
upside, it provides some protection against mosquitoes. And almost all
"indigenous" societies used fire to selectively clear their
environment for various purposes, like slash burning, clearing underbrush, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trSRozVaco0
Humans: The Cooking Ape, a lecture by Richard
Wrangham.
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/33220
http://www.stephenpyne.com/works.htm
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0263276414536929
Nigel Clark, Kathryn Yusoff, David Tyfield, ...
Combustion and Society: A Fire-Centred History
of Energy Use
As Pyne likes to remind us, members of the
genus Homo are the only creatures on Earth which have routinely manipulated
fire (1994: 889). Some evolutionary anthropologists have suggested that – both
culturally and biologically – learning to handle fire is the single most
important moment in becoming human. While some estimates extend the ability of
hominin species to control fire as far back as 1.6 million years before the
present, clear stratigraphic evidence of the ash remains of in-situ fire use
has been dated to approximately 1 million years ago (Berna et al., 2012).
More than a turning point in human evolution,
Pyne proposes, ‘the capture of fire by Homo marks a divide in the natural
history of the Earth’ (1994: 889). The fact that fire was there to be
appropriated, he argues, reflects the uniqueness of our planet. It is the
presence of life – specifically life-forms capable of converting the
electro-magnetic energy of solar radiation into chemical energy stored in
tissue – that makes combustion such a significant and definitive mode of energy
conversion on our planet.
The next most important achievements of human
large-scale technological culture are the hydrological architectural systems
since about 10.000 years. First and foremost are the massive architectural
works of irrigation which seeded the Egyptian and Mesopotamian and Chinese
civilizations. For this, there was even a special term: Hydraulic
Civilization. The Khmer Empire that florished in the larger area
around the well-known site of Angkor Wat may have been the largest ever
pre-industrial hydrological architectural system. This was possible for several
circumstances: The very flat plain of the territory, the Monsoon patterns,
and the peculiarity of the Mekong River system in the different Monsoon
phases. The Tonle Sap Lake acted as a water reservoir for the dry season,
which was then distrubuted through 1.000's of man-made channels.
https://www.oup.com.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/58191/Chapter-13-The-Khmer-Empire-obook-only.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Empire
https://www.ancient.eu/Khmer_Empire/
But it was not always connected with highly
centralized government and power structures. For example the cases of Indonesia
and Bali testify that this was achieved on a quite localized level of perhaps a
few villages in a valley with adjacent mountains where one gets the water from.
And the people in those areas had built this massive Hydraulic Architecture
just by communal effort. Also they had extremely high and steep terrace systems
high up the mountain sides. Pretty much the same had happened in the areas of
the former Inka empire. And that system was very much older than the Inka, by a
few 1000 years. Before the Inka, those systems were also maintained by local
organization structures, called Ayllu, and only the Inka "sort of"
centralized them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayllu
The ayllu is the traditional
form of a community in the Andes, especially among Quechuas and Aymaras. They are an indigenous local
government model across the Andes region of South America, particularly in Bolivia and Peru. Ayllus functioned prior to Inca conquest, during the Incaand Spanish colonial period, and
continue to exist to the present day - such as the Andean community Ocra.[1] How the ancient form and
current organization correspond is unclear, since Spanish chronicles do not
give a precise definition of the term.[2]
Ayllus had defined territories and were
essentially extended family or kin groups, but they could include non-related
members, giving individual families more variation and security of the land
that they farmed.[3] The male head of
an ayllu is called a mallku which means, literally, condor, but is a title which can be
roughly translated as "prince". They would often have their own wak'a, or minor god, usually embodied in
a physical object such as a mountain or rock. "Ayullus were named for a
particular person or place."[4]
Ayllu were self-sustaining units and would
educate their own offspring and farm or trade for all the food they ate, except
in cases of disaster such as El Niño years when they relied on the
Inca storehouse system.[5] Their primary function was to
solve subsistence issues, and issues of how to get along in family, and larger,
units.[6]
Each ayllu owned a parcel of land, and the
members had reciprocal obligations to each other.[7]
In marriages, the woman would generally join the
class and ayllu of her partner as would her children, but would inherit her land from her parents and
retain her membership in her birth ayllu. This is how most movements of people
between ayllu occurred. But a person could also join an ayllu by assuming the
responsibility of membership. This included mink'a, communal work for common
purposes, ayni, or work in kind for other members
of the ayllu, and mit'a, a form of taxation levied by
the Inca government.[5]
The local authority of Ayllu remained
un-touched until the Spaniards came to conquer and destroy it all. The steep
and tall mountains of Peru, Bolivia and Northern Chile are still covered very
high up with lost and ruined terraces, which give ample testimony of what the
ancient people could achieve with only their manual labor.
Another very good example are the Qanats
of ancient Persia. They were more of an engineering feat than the Roman
Aquaeducts, but one cannot see them because they are underground, just a
lineage of mole hill like structures everywhere in the country-side. These are
some wonders of ancient technology. Another also less well known are water
transport and water cultivation systems. The best of them and the most
completely lost one is that of the Azteks in Tenochtitlan, since they
had intensively cultivated the whole lake where they lived. They had a combined
floating-garden and canal transport system together with an intensive fish
culture. Because what the humans threw away or excreted, was fed into the canal
system and ensured the fertility of the whole system. And the Spaniards, as
ignorant and brutal as they usually were, destroyed it all very diligently. So
the famous city of Venice is a mere shadow of the ancient Aztek system.
There were and are huge river and estuary culture systems all over the planet.
Also in Australia, which is not so well known for higher culture, there were
huge estuary channel systems. Of course they are gone by now, since it was now
the turn of the equally brutal British'ers to exterminate them. Some kind of
this also exists in France, where they have lots of salt pans, and oister
culture. There are so many www sites on these subjects that no more quotes need
to be given for them.
http://www.noologie.de/energie.htm
This is also a very old technology, of
windmills, especially known from Holland. What is not so well-known are wind-traps
or wind-tunnels which are expecially vital for ore smelting furnaces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolian_processes
It is just a nice fiction of present-day
archeologists to presume that the ancients had used only primitive blow-pipes
or bellows for ore smelting. I have seen some vivid but extremely stupid
illustrations in some anthropology journals and books. The ancients were so
much more refined to build their smelting furnaces exactly in those places
where there were always strong winds blowing. It is only that present-day
archeologists don't know about how the ancients knew to use the wind. Even if
the Classical Greek writings are full of stories about such ancient wind-tunnels.
Then comes the sun energy, which is more
recent, and then all the fossil fuels, and then the atomic power. So we have a
hierarchy and structurization in age and in energy density and ressource
availability, and in ecological and human cost. The coal industry is or was
also one of the most dangerous in terms of human deaths, and in China, India,
and Turkey there are yearly a couple 1000 deaths in the coal mines. And for more examples, the sun and wind
energies consume immense amounts of area, about 10 to 100 times more than
fossil fuels, while also being very inefficient and costly next to impossible
to store some energy. Also the wind turbines are now in-famous for shredding
all the birds and bats that come close to them. And they require some
environmentally very dangerous materials like Neodym for the generator magnets,
Cobalt and other difficult to refine materials.
There is a group of writers that can be
classed as more or less Herbert Spencer'ian Social Darwinists. One of
the most pronounced and excentric of this group is Howard Bloom. He sings the
songs of highest praise for the US American Capitalist System.
https://www.heise.de/tp/autoren/?autor=Howard%20Bloom
Then there is Jacques Neyrinck "Der
göttliche Ingenieur". We may contraposition these views against the
work of Patrice Ayme' who is about as vociferous against what he calls the
Plutokrats, ie. just those members of the (mainly) US American Capitalist
Society who have amassed so many billions and who direct the US politics from
behind the scenes, using the politicians as their puppets. And Patrice Ayme' is
by no means a Marxist or a Socialist as one may assume. He believes in the
Democracy of "We the People".
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
As a Morphologist, one believes that it is all
"in the eye of the beholder". By whichever conceptual (or ideological)
system you view the fates of humanity, you will get the appropriate answers.
And the wikipedia is all wrong to call Herbert Spencer a liberal political
theorist. Today the meaning of "liberal" has changed quite a lot.
Today liberal means a bit leftist leaning, and especially Politically Correct.
And if there was anything that Herbert Spencer was not, then it was leftist. So
one has to take all these tall tales with a quite a big Table Spoon Granum
Salis. So the good Jared is like a Story-Telling God, and he writes good, tall stories, which I like
very much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer
Herbert
Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903)
was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era.
Spencer
developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the
physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and
societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of
subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political
theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, and psychology.
During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in
English-speaking academia. "The only other English philosopher to have
achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th
century."[1] Spencer was "the single most
famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century"[2][3] but his influence declined sharply
after 1900: "Who now reads Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.[4]
Spencer is best
known for the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864), after
reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.[5] This term strongly suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended evolution
into realms of sociology and ethics, he also made use of Lamarckism.[6]
https://industrieanzeiger.industrie.de/allgemein/der-goettliche-ingenieur/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Bloom
One may interpret the case of the Maya and Aztek
civilizations from an ecological perspective. It was only recently discovered
that the Mayas were about as blood-thirsty as the Azteks. Quite tellingly, the Maize
God of the ancient Azteks and Maya's also had some brutal aspects. It is
well-known that pre-historic agricultural societies often assumed that the
fruitfulness of the earth could be maintained with human blood sacrifices.
And the ancient Mayas and Azteks celebrated these rites very diligently. And
there are more indicators that Maize culture had its own intrinsic cost. The
Amerind people created the Maize plant out of some very humble grass kind of
vegetation called Teosinte. The simple indicator of this artificial
creation of Maize is that it cannot reproduce naturally. Because the Corn
Kernels don't fall out by themselves when they ripen, and so the Maize
plant is doomed to extinction if the humans don't help it propagate. And the
crucial difference between Maize and Rice and Wheat is the size of the fruit.
When you weigh one Corn Cob against one risp of Rice or one of Wheat you will
notice that the Maize has about 100 times the weight (= the food value) of the
others. The only nutritional problem that Maize has is the lack of certain amino
acids like tryptophan and lysine. So when a human population has to
survive on Maize only they can develop very heavy metabolic diseases. Now we possibly
can come to understand why the Mayas and especially the Aztecs developed such a
special taste for human flesh. It was maybe a problem of chronic Amino
Acid deficiency, which induces some sort of madness or mental illness. So
the Aztecs were "not really" cannibalistic, but they had
developed some very strange forms of hallucinations produced by amino acid
deficiency. There were practically no large domesticated animals around in
pre-historic Meso-America for Protein Food. The Aztecs had some fish in
their lake of Tenochtitlan, but there are no more statistics existant
how large the proportion of fish protein was in their diet. And so the only
remaining source of animal protein left over were the humans. Anyhow, this
practice also served to economize on so many costly and wasteful burial rituals
(like in most other "civilized" cultures) which had become
unnecessary by that specific practice of cannibalism or lets say: "Human
Recycling". The movie "Sylent Green" enlarges on this theme.
http://www.fao.org/3/t0395e/t0395e0c.htm
... The problem
with maize lies in the diet of which it is a component, a diet mostly deficient
in the kind of supplementary foods necessary to upgrade the nutrients ingested
in relatively large amounts of maize. Maize-consuming populations would be
nutritionally better off if the maize consumed had the lysine and tryptophan
genes of QPM or if it were consumed with a sufficient amount of protein foods
such as legumes, milk, soybeans and amaranth seeds and leaves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture
Although
the extent of human sacrifice is unknown among several Mesoamerican
civilizations, such as Teotihuacán,[1] what distinguished Maya and Aztec human sacrifice was the importance
with which it was embedded in everyday life. ...
When
death occurred from battling in a Flower War, it was considered much more noble
than dying in a regular military battle.[11] Additionally, death in the Flower Wars contained
religious importance as those who died were thought to live in heaven with the
war god, Huitzilopochtli.[12] ...
For
many rites, the victim had such a quantity of prescribed duties that it is
difficult to imagine how the accompanying festival would have progressed
without some degree of compliance on the part of the victim. For instance,
victims were expected to bless children, greet and cheer passers-by, hear
people's petitions to the gods, visit people in their homes, give discourses
and lead sacred songs, processions and dances.[13]
...
Some
post-conquest sources report that at the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs sacrificed about 80,400
prisoners over the course of four days. This number is considered by Ross
Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, to be an exaggeration. Hassig
states "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the
ceremony.[11] The higher estimate would average 15 sacrifices
per minute during the four-day consecration. Four tables were arranged at the
top so that the victims could be jettisoned down the sides of the temple.[18] Nonetheless, according to Codex Telleriano-Remensis, old Aztecs who talked with the missionaries told
about a much lower figure for the reconsecration of the temple, approximately
4,000 victims in total.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cente%C5%8Dtl
In the Tonalpohualli (a 260-day sacred calendar used
by many ancient Mesoamerican cultures), Centeotl is the Lord of the Day
for days with number seven and he is the fourth Lord of the Night. In Aztec
mythology, maize (which was called Cintli in Nahuatl, the Aztec spoken
language) was brought to this world by Quetzalcoatl and it is associated with the
group of stars known commonly today as the Pleiades.[9] ...
Corn
was rather essential to Aztec life and thus the importance of Centeotl cannot
be overlooked. It can be seen from countless historical sources that a lot of
the maize that was cultivated by the Aztecs was used in sacrifices to Gods.
Usually at least five newly ripened maize cobs were picked by the older Aztec
women. These were then carried on the female’s backs after being carefully
wrapped up, somewhat like a mother would wrap up a newborn child. Once the cobs
reached their destination, usually outside a house, they were placed in a
special corn basket and would stay there until the following year. This was
meant to represent the resting of the maize spirits until the next harvesting
period came around.[10]
https://www.thoughtco.com/centeotl-the-aztec-god-of-maize-170309
April 30th. To
honor the maize gods, people carried out self-sacrifices, performing blood-letting
rituals, and sprinkling the blood throughout their houses. Young women adorned
themselves with necklaces of corn seeds. Maize ears and seeds were brought back
from the field, the former placed in front of the gods' images, whereas the
latter were stored for planting in the next season.
The cult of
Centeotl overlapped that of Tlaloc and embraced various deities of solar
warmth, flowers, feasting, and pleasure. As the son of the earth goddess Toci,
Centeotl was worshipped alongside Chicomecoati and Xilonen during the 11th
month of Ochpaniztli, which begins September 27th on our calendar. During this
month, a woman was sacrificed and her skin was used to make a mask for
Centeotl's priest.
Jared Diamond had written something in this vein about
the problems of the Maya's who didn't have enough vital protein to eat. See:
The German edition of Collapse: p. 206-207, no draft animals and no animals
for food: p: 208. Also the gruesome practices of very slow and prolonged Torture-killing
p. 217-218. The Azteks had quite the same problems of deranged-mind
since they had the same Protein Food Problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zea_(plant)
https://www.vox.com/2014/10/15/6982053/selective-breeding-farming-evolution-corn-watermelon-peaches
https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/selection/corn/
https://phys.org/news/2009-10-amazing-maze-maize-evolution.html
The amazing maze
of maize evolution
Understanding
the evolution and domestication of maize has been a holy grail for many
researchers. As one of the most important crops worldwide and as a crop that
appears very different from its wild relatives as a result of domestication,
understanding exactly how maize has evolved has many practical benefits and may
help to improve crop yields.
Die neue Studie zeichnet ein anderes Bild. "Die Theorie,
dass die extreme Kriegführung ein wichtiger Faktor beim Kollaps der Maya-Gesellschaft
war, ist nicht mehr haltbar", sagt Francisco Estrada-Belli von der Tulane
University in New Orleans. ...
"Die Belege zeigen, dass die
Maya zu einer Zeit zerstörerische Kriege führten, die als Höhepunkt des
Wohlstands und der künstlerischen Raffinesse gilt", schreibt das Team.
https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/mexiko-das-maya-massengrab-von-uxul-a-1240711.html
In Uxul muss sich einst ein entsetzliches Massaker zugetragen
haben. "Die Menschen wurden nicht einfach nur umgebracht, sondern
regelrecht ausgelöscht", sagt Seefeld. Man hat die Toten zerstückelt,
bevor sie abgelegt wurden, Beine, Arme oder Füße lagen einzeln herum. Dann
wurden die Gebeine mit einer Lehmschicht überzogen. Was genau war hier
passiert?
Um den Tathergang nachvollziehen zu können, probiert Seefeld, die
Knochen einzelnen Individuen zuzuordnen. Keine leichte Aufgabe. Denn die Köpfe
wurden vom Torso abgetrennt, darauf deuten typische Spuren an den Halswirbeln.
Schnittspuren an den Brustbeinen legen nahe, dass der Brustkorb geöffnet wurde.
Auch an der Innenseite der Rippen finden sich welche. Möglicherweise wurden
Organe entfernt.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0671-x.epdf ...
Despite over a century of archaeological research, the
nature and broader consequences of Maya warfare remain poorly understood.
Classic period (250–950 CE) Maya warfare has largely been viewed as ritualized
and limited in scope (1–6). Evidence of violent warfare in the Terminal Classic
period (800–950 CE) is interpreted as an escalation of military tac-tics that
played a role in the socio-economic collapse of the Classic Maya civilization
(7,8). The implications of specific textual references to war events (war
statements) remain unknown, however, and the paucity of field data precludes
our ability to test collapse theories tied to warfare. Here we connect a
massive fire event to an attack described with a Classic period war statement.
Multiple lines of evidence show that a large fire occurred across the ancient
city of Witzna, coincident with an epigraphic account describing an attack and
burning of Witzna in 697 CE. Following this event, evidence shows a dramatic
decline in human activity, indicating extensive nega-tive impacts on the local
population. These findings provide insight into strategies and broader societal
impacts of Classic period warfare, clarify the war statement’s meaning and show
that the Maya engaged in tactics akin to total warfare earlier and more
frequently than previously thought.
AG: So, I was telling a tale from
the book of "Guns, Germs and Steel". Dear Jared could be forgiven
that he forgot in his title, that Guns are normally made of Steel. The
Spaniards of the Conquest of the Americas already had guns made of "some
sort of" steel. But these guns were very laborious to fabricate. It was
called steel hammer forging, which required to take a rod of steel and
hammering it around and around and fuse it together to form a barrel. This was
a very laborious process. The larger Artillery pieces were made of cast Bronze.
This was because the technology of casting (crucible) steel was not available
yet. This became only available with the Bessemer Iron casting
technology.
[[Except of course in Damascene
=crucible Steel. There is a lot to know about the different technologies of
making and working steel, the technologies of smithing, like reducing iron ore,
and smelting and casting, and then crucible steel.]]
When crucible steel became
available on a greater industrial scale, the guns were of course made of steel.
There was just a little bickering on the part of the Arms Industry
Historians.
Jared Diamond was quite correct on
the point when he stated that in contrast to Eurasia, the continents of Africa
and the Americas extend North to South. And this has many ecological and
evolutionary consequences. And this was a considerable obstacle in the way of
migrations and conquests. Because there is a definite obstacle in the way when
you have to cross so many climate zones, which means totally different
ecologies, and especially very interesting different diseases that one comes
across. Like the Tse Tse fly in Africa, and then some more interesting
or difficult species of disease.
A very interesting but rarely
noticed diffusion obstacle in Africa are the rivers. They flow mostly in the
direction East-West, with the exception of the Nile. Near the Equator, there is
so much water and therefore so many big rivers like the Kongo, and they will
all have very dangerous rapids, torrents, in some places and precipitous drops
of a few 100 metres over some kilometres of distance. This means that river
shipping is more difficult (or impossible) compared to the very benign rivers
of Eurasia like the Rhine, the Danube, the Rhone, the Seine, and most important
the Don and the Wolga. In the subtropic regions of Africa, many rivers dry out
in the dry season. And the floodplain forests are an even worse obstacle to
migration. They harbor the most awful type of vegetation that even a
very bad god would have had trouble to create such a botched creation.
The vegetation is nothing short of murderous. And then there are some really
bad anmials on top of it. Lots of mosquitoes, with lots of Malaria,
then Dengue Fever. And then some type of worm, the Guinea Worm
which likes to make the human body as its abode... But when it reaches
maturity, it is about one meter long, and it must wriggle itself out of the
human body, somewhere... And I spare the dear reader the more grisly parts of
that journey of the Guinea Worm. And so on and so on. Africa is a
sort of Hell-Hole by any measure that you want to take. The problematic
thing to think of, how the species of Homo Sapiens could ever develop
there, and then migrate out of it, because of the difficulties of the terrain
and the vegetation and the diseases. So there was and is quite some scientific
speculation whether the theory of Out of Africa made any sense at all. We may
consult also some literature about this:
https://de.slideshare.net/asateren/africakimobst
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Obstacles_Development.html
https://www.natureasia.com/en/nmiddleeast/article/10.1038/nmiddleeast.2018.15
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracunculiasis
The
out-of-Africa model theorized that humans migrated out of Africa in one big
push around 60,000 years ago. At 177,000 – 194,000 years-old, the Misilya Cave
jaw provides evidence to disprove this theory.
This find is
among a host of other discoveries pushing back the date of human evolution, for
example the 300,000 year-old earliest modern human fossil from Jebel Irhoud,
Morocco2 3, and showing an earlier and more varied
pattern of human migration out of Africa, such as a recent study supporting the
presence of modern humans in Asia 120,000 years ago.4
Douka says this
find “confirms the current thought in the community that there was not a single
wave out of Africa, but frequent expansions which often failed.” Bae adds, “New
data like the evidence from Misliya Cave and other areas of Asia is really
forcing us to re-think many of our ideas of modern human origins.”
This find,
according to Hershkovitz, links recent discoveries so that now “everything
starts to make sense.”
https://blog.insito.me/is-the-out-of-africa-model-dead-22bacdd934a7
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18093-chinese-challenge-to-out-of-africa-theory/
The discovery of
an early human fossil in southern China may challenge the commonly held idea that modern
humans originated out of Africa.
Jin Changzhu and
colleagues of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing, announced to
Chinese media last week that they have uncovered a 110,000-year-old
putative Homo sapiens jawbone from a cave in southern China’s
Guangxi province.
The mandible has
a protruding chin like that of Homo sapiens, but the thickness of
the jaw is indicative of more primitive hominins, suggesting that the fossil
could derive from interbreeding.
If confirmed,
the finding would lend support to the “multiregional hypothesis”. This says that modern humans
descend from Homo sapiens coming out of Africa who then
interbred with more primitive humans on other continents. In contrast, the
prevailing “out of Africa” hypothesis holds that modern humans are the direct
descendants of people who spread out of Africa to other continents around
100,000 years ago.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/more-evidence-undermines-the-out-of-africa-theory-of-1619420466
Over on New Scientist, Catherine
Brahic offers a cogent summary of the new evidence. Some comes from Asia, where
scientists have discovered teeth that may be Homo sapiens dating from before 70 thousand years ago, and possibly from as
long ago as 125 thousand. There are also fragments of early human skulls from
Israel, which may date to as early as 150 thousand years ago.
What's emerging
from this fragmentary evidence — which is still far from widely accepted — is a
more complicated picture of when early humans left Africa, and where they went.
Writes Brahic:
A closer look at the genetics also suggests
there was an earlier migration. Recently, Katerina Harvati of the University of Tubingen
in Germany and her colleagues tested the classic "out of Africa at 60,000
years ago" story against the earlier-exodus idea. They plugged the genomes
of indigenous populations from south-east Asia into a migration model. They
found that the genetic data was best explained by an early exodus that left
Africa around 130,000 years ago, taking a coastal route along the Arabian
peninsula, India and into Australia, followed by a later wave along the classic
route (PNAS, doi.org/tz6).
So back to the business of
"Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. There was another decisive
factor that the Europeans had in favor of them. The cows (or oxen), the
donkeys, the goats and sheep, the pigs, the horses, and all those domesticated
animals which the Amerind autochthonous people of the Americas had very few of.
Especially with the load carrying animals. The Llamas and Alpacas are not able
to carry big loads, and no way that they could pull a cart or a plow. I had
somewhere enlarged on this in the Spiritual History of Antiquity that
the donkeys and the oxen were quite a driver of civilization. Horses
less so, because the upkeep of a horse is very expensive indeed. So they were
reserved for the higher nobility and the cavallery which was pretty much the
same, like in the European Middle Ages.
I would write a work like that of good Jared, I would just re-title it A
LITTLE BIT. I would write it thusly: "Germs, Germs, Germs, and then some
Steel, but Guns are really of Minor Importance in this Business of Biological
Warfare". So that is it: Biological Warfare. And the rest is
his-story as the historians would tell us in their fairy tales. And the poor
Spengler, as erudite as he was, he was not an epidemiologist, he knew
next to nothing about bacteria and viruses. So it eluded him hat he hadn't
gotten the slightest idea of WHAT REALLY drives History and Evolution. Too bad
for Spengler. There were more armies defeated by disease than by their enemies.
Sometimes even Welt-Online has a good idea on this:
Diseases drive evolution like nothing else. This is not Darwinism, but Spencerism
in Pure Breed: Disease kills the weak. Even for all the humanist
well-wishers and tree-huggers, the disease is the Grim Reaper, and this
Grim Reaper goes for the weak first. We have seen this in European history with
Smallpox, Cholera, and the Bubonic Plague.
Über Jahrtausende hinweg waren die Pocken die Geißel Europas. Schon in
altägyptischen Gräbern wurden ihre Opfer entdeckt. Bis in die Neuzeit zählte
sie zu den häufigsten Todesursachen. Nach einer britischen Studie war im London
des 18. Jahrhunderts einer von 13 Todesfällen pockenbedingt. Noch im 20.
Jahrhundert forderte die Seuche weltweit rund 300 Millionen Tote.
Die Ursprünge der Seuche sind nicht bekannt. Eine Spur führt nach
Ägypten, wo sich schon früh auf engem Raum eine Hochkultur entwickelt hat. Da
das Virus einer ausreichenden Zahl von Menschen bedarf, um zu überleben, fand
es offenbar gute Bedingungen vor. Zu den ersten bekannten Pockentoten zählt
Pharao Ramses V., der Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. starb. Archäologen
entdeckten auf seinem mumifizierten Schädel Spuren der charakteristischen
Pusteln, wie sie bei Variola vorkommen.
There is another wonder of nature which is not so nice at all.
There are some quite dangerous species of Mosquito mainly in Africa but also in
South America like the Anopheles. The adults live just a short time, just long enough to mate and breed. But
when they see it fitting to take cover in the luggage of some intercontinental
traveller, they get carried onto an Aeroplane, and then they go flying
right into Europe or the USA. There they get out of the luggage and look for greener
pastures. If it happens by chance that there are both a female and a male
Mosquito on the same plane, then there is a good chance that they will mate and
become the Ur-parents of a whole new population of Anopheles Mosquitos that are
the carriers of Malaria. This would be quite an interesting case of Xeno-Species
life in the middle of, say Italy. There it is warm enough for their larvae to
make it through the winter, and then the next year there will be a thriving
population of Malaria-carrying Anopheles Mosquitos.
But Malaria is also a strong driver of evolution. But only in the
backwards sense, because of Siccle Cell Anemia. This is also a very
forbidden territory of Political Incorrectness. Because no-one would ever think
in their sane minds that Siccle Cell Anemia has something to do with Oxygen
Supply or Oxygen Starvation of the brain.
Timothy
C. Winegard: „The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator“.
(Dutton, New York. 485 S.)
Die
größte Feindin des Menschengeschlechts brüllt nicht, röhrt nicht, kreischt
nicht, krächzt nicht. Sie summt. Die größte Feindin des Menschengeschlechts ist
die Stechmücke – sei es, dass sie zur Gattung Anopheles oder zur Gattung Aedes
gehört.
Nicht weniger als sechs Stacheln benötigt sie, um in die Haut eines Menschen einzudringen. Zwei davon haben winzige Zacken; mit ihnen sägt sie sich durch die Epidermis. Zwei weitere Stacheln spreizen die Haut auseinander. Mit einem Strohhalmstachel sucht sie nach einem Blutgefäß, dann saugt sie das Blut.
Die Weltgesundheitsorganisation
berichtet, dass 2017 ungefähr 435.000 Menschen an Malaria starben, die meisten
im südlichen Afrika. Dem Gelbfieber erlagen zur gleichen Zeit circa 45.000
Menschen; zu einem schweren Ausbruch kam es in Brasilien. Am Dengue-Fieber, das
vor allem in Asien grassiert, erkrankten 2015 mehr als zwei Millionen Menschen,
und 1181 starben.
An den tückischen
Stechmückenseuchen sind Abermillionen krepiert. Und weil die Mücke keinen
ökologischen Nutzen erfüllt – sie ist nicht Teil einer Nahrungskette, sie
befruchtet keine Pflanzen –, könnte man auf den zynischen Gedanken kommen,
Anopheles und Aedes seien einzig und allein dazu da, um die Menschheit zu
dezimieren. Vielleicht ist es kein Zufall, dass fiktive christliche
Darstellungen des Teufels (blutrote Flügel, stechende Hörner, langer Schwanz)
auf verwirrende Weise an den Moskito erinnern.
In seinem makaber-vergnüglichen
Buch „The Mosquito. A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator“ erzählt
der Historiker Timothy C. Winegard, wie die Stechmücke immer wieder Geschichte gemacht
hat. Nehmen wir die alten Ägypter: Es gibt Hinweise, dass das Reich am Nil seit
dem Jahr 1500 v. Chr. von Malariaepidemien heimgesucht wurde; und als Pharao Tutanchamun um 1323 v. Chr. vermutlich
dieser Krankheit erlag, bedeutete dies das Ende einer antiken Supermacht. Die alten
Chinesen sprachen von einem dreifachen Dämon, der die Menschen heimsuche –
einem bösen Geist mit einem Kübel voller Eiswasser (dem Schüttelfrost), einem
Fieberdämon (unerträglich heißes Kohlenfeuer) und schließlich einem Geist mit
einem Hammer (Schweiß, Kopfschmerzen). ...
Wer hielt am Ende die Truppen des großen Strategen Hannibal auf,
sodass er Rom nur beinahe erobert hat? Malaria. Wer gab dem Imperium Romanum
den Rest, als es schon auf dem letzten Loch pfiff? Die Malaria. (Die
Pontinischen Sümpfe im Südosten von Rom wimmelten von summenden Insekten.)
Was war das Christentum, das sich nach dem 3. Jahrhundert in ganz Europa verbreitete? Vor allem ein Kult, der sich im Namen der Nächstenliebe um Malariakranke kümmerte. Es gibt viele christliche Amulette, die im Namen Jesu vor der Seuche schützen sollten, und das Zentrum der neuen Religion, der Vatikan, stand mitten in einem Malariasumpf. (Noch im 19. Jahrhundert fiel Reisenden auf, dass die Einwohner von Rom ziemlich krank aussahen.)
Den größten Einfluss dürften die
Stechmücken allerdings in der Neuen Welt gehabt haben. Die Schiffe, mit denen
Kolumbus nach Amerika aufbrach, wurden von ihnen umschwirrt. In Nord- und Südamerika
hatte es aber vor der Ankunft der Europäer keine Malaria gegeben. In der Schule
wird gelehrt, Hernán Cortés habe mit 500 Mann das Großreich der Azteken in die
Knie gezwungen; das ist naturgemäß Unsinn. Cortés und die anderen
Konquistadoren metzelten nur jene paar Indios nieder, die noch am Leben waren,
nachdem die Seuchen 90 Prozent von ihnen umgebracht hatten. (Zu diesen Seuchen
gehörten auch Pocken, Tuberkulose, Masern und die Grippe – aber die Malaria war
der schlimmste Killer.)
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20450-how-sickle-cell-carriers-fend-off-malaria/
So how can it be that free haem is at once
dangerous and protective? Soares’s findings suggest that a mechanism similar to
vaccination is at work.
The low levels of free haem circulating in the
blood of mice carrying the sickle-cell gene stimulate the production of an
enzyme that breaks it down, called haem oxygenase-1. This releases small
quantities of carbon monoxide – a gas that in large quantities is highly toxic.
AG: There is also a quite "Politically
Incorrect" linkage between CO (Carbon Monoxide) and sexual Potency. This
is also called the NO - CO cycle. Because all this is so "Politically
Incorrect", I will not enlarge on this. One has to do their own research
on these matters. See also the appropriate articles in the Specialist Journals
on Sexology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sildenafil
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4369255/
The ability to get and keep an erection is
important to men for several reasons and the inability is known as erectile
dysfunction (ED). ED has started to be accepted as an early indicator of
systemic endothelial dysfunction and subsequently of cardiovascular diseases.
The role of NO in endothelial relaxation and erectile function is well
accepted. The discovery of NO as a small signalling gasotransmitter led to the
investigation of the role of other endogenously derived gases, carbon monoxide
(CO) and hydrogen sulphide (H2S) in physiological and pathophysiological
conditions. The role of NO and CO in sexual function and dysfunction has been
investigated more extensively and, recently, the involvement of H2S in erectile
function has also been confirmed. In this review, we focus on the role of these
three sister gasotransmitters in the physiology, pharmacology and
pathophysiology of sexual function in man, specifically erectile function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_malaria
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19066765
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/malaria-roman-empire-remains
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENPIZhULtXA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTDD4FGHSlQ
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/malaria_01.shtml
https://blogs.transparent.com/latin/roman-fever-did-malaria-bring-down-the-roman-empire/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/evolution-of-malaria-in-roman-empire-1.3881892
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/feb/21/rorycarroll
This is a kind of "alternative history thinking". It
would be difficult to prove this, since one will find not many written records
of some strange disease happening, when people don't know that there are
insect-borne diseases that cause premature deaths, especially in children under
5 years of age. The name Mal-Aria is telling in itself. It means bad
air(es). And that was especially the case near some swamps. And many of the
lowland areas of Italy were swamps, especially those close to the sea. There is
a quite telling archeological curiosity that we are very fortunate to have: The
temples of Paestum in South Italy. They are so well preserved in
contrast to most other destroyed temples of antiquity, just because of the
swamps. After the Roman Empire had collapsed, there was no more man- (ie.
slave-) power available for the upkeep of the drainage systems that had kept
the swamps dry during Roman times. So these areas became uninhabitable after
the collapse. And that kept marauding bands of "some certain sort of
people" away from them. And therefore they are still so well preserved. We
may sing an ode to the honor of the Malaria. Sometimes a bad thing has
quite good or beneficial results.
The Romans did their own kind of Anopheles Teleportation with
their Amphorae full of oil and other foodstuffs which they imported from
Africa. In those fortunate times, North Africa was the breadbasket of
the Roman Empire. Egypt was especially successful in nourishing half the
Roman population. These were quite wondrous times, especially compared to the
desert conditions in these countries in present times. So the Romans brought
their own seeds of destruction with their ships and amphores. This is (or may
be) one reason for the breakdown of the Roman Empire that hardly any previous
historian ever had thought of. Only an Archeological Sherlock Holmes
could dream up such a Malaria Epidemy which de-populated the country-
side and the swamps of Italy. And the effects are quite clear to see: Once a
greater part of the working population had died from Malaria, then there are
not enough workers (ie. slaves) to drain the swamps, and so the swamps were
filling up again. And then the Anopheles grew out of all proportion in the
exponential. So we might out-do Gibbon and Spengler by an order of
magnitude. It was the Anopheles which did in the Roman Empire. Nothing else can
come close to such Kata-Strophik run- away self- multiplying, exponential
growth function like the Explosion of Anopheles and Malaria
around the years 300- 500 CE. The his-story is re-written all the time, under
our very own eyes. And the frogs like to eat Malaria Anopheles larvae, and fish
also like them... Now we go around the full circle for the Heinous Influence
of Christianity, or what the Roman Christian Church Fathers had made
out of the Original (or the Origines) Christianity. Because the Apiaceae
were also the Birth-Control plants, and by the well-meaning efforts of
the Christian Church Fathers, while eradicating all the knowledge about the
Apiacae, there was also lost the beneficial effect of the Apiacae to control
the Mosquito populations, and this also did in the Roman Empire for good. This
is the lesson learned by those who believe in Religion in the Roman Katholik
Sense or better Non-Sense. It was one of the greatest idiocies in all of human
history. The Roman Katholik Christians dug their own grave. And when
they had reached the bottom of the pit, they just continued, digging deeper and
deeper. The only reason why the Christian Empires thrived in the northern
countries like Gallia, was of course that the Anopheles couldn't survive the
winters there. The good Patrice Ayme' has unfortunately no idea of that part of
the "Missio Civilatrice". I have to state that. Even a
genius like Patrice Ayme' doesn't get the finer points of his-story.
So I give some more background information on the germs. Because of the fact that that the Eurasians had so many
domesticated animals around them, they had proportionally as many animal
diseases around them also. And if one knows the science of bacteriology and
virology just a little bit, then one knows that those diseases have a
fabulous tendency to mutate and then change hosts. Like especially the germs
of the pigs. And I am also telling a bit of Jewish Sanitary Wisdom
that you should not keep pigs and never eat them. Because a pig likes not only
to waddle in the swamp, but it also really likes to eat carrion of the worst
kind. It they can get to it. In our present-day Sanitized European World,
there is not so much carrion left over that a pig could feast upon. But in
those olden days, there was ample supply of carrion, because besides the pigs
there were not so many big animals who liked to feast on carrion. So we have to deal with the bacteriology
and virology especially of the pigs. As the popular saying goes, for every
thing of utility for humans, there is a good side to it and a bad side. It is
the principle of complementarity or more generally, the-two-sidedness of
everything. Being good or bad always means being good or bad in some situation
or context and for someone for doing some things with it, or being influenced
by it. We can even use a fitting visual metaphor, the flip picture of the
Boring Women, to visually demonstrate the working of the good and bad
principle in the neuronal system.
So we come to the two-sidedness of the human dealings with domesticated
animals, and in this case the pigs. As I describe it at another chapter in
the present text, Pigs can be divine and even being parts of a very holy Rite,
and even have some spiritual qualities. I explain this in the chapter on
Antonius von Padua and the Eleusian Mysteries. But the backside or problematic
side of the pig for human health should not be forgotten. Pigs are in a
metaphor, some kind of Super Aeroplane Carrier of the most nasty Bacteria
and Viruses and Worm Parasites, and then some more. This I will
now enlarge on, in this chapter. Most of all the other domesticated animals of
the Eurasians, except the cats, and dogs, and pigeons, and other fowls... are
vegetarians. They only eat plants, and plants don't usually carry diseases that
could do harm to humans. But the pigs are another quite different affair, and
so much more deadly. Most of the infectious diseases of humanity came from
mutations of some pig bacteria and viruses. Like smallpox and quite a few other
very nasty ones.
In the wikipedia article it says that the variola virus originally came
from a rodent. I don't quite believe that.
But since the pigs had been around humanity for at least 10.000 years
(probably even more than 10.000 years)... It came to pass that pretty much the
whole of Eurasian humanity was infected with smallpox. And there was so much
cosmetic powder consumed to cover up all those smallpox scars, that the powder
industry was one of the largest businesses in the whole of Eurasia. You can
take the Queen Elizabeth I as a fine example, or Josif Stalin. All were victims
of the smallpox and they had survived, even if they were badly scarred.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Disease_emergence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Evolution
The date of the appearance of smallpox is not
settled. It most likely evolved from a terrestrial African rodent virus between
68,000 and 16,000 years ago.[29] The wide range of dates is due to the
different records used to calibrate the molecular clock. One clade was the variola major strains (the
more clinically severe form of smallpox) which spread from Asia between 400 and
1,600 years ago. A second clade included both alastrim minor (a phenotypically
mild smallpox) described from the American continents and isolates from West
Africa which diverged from an ancestral strain between 1,400 and 6,300 years
before present. This clade further diverged into two subclades at least 800
years ago.[30] A second estimate has placed the separation of
variola from Taterapox (an Orthopox virus of some African rodents including gerbils) at
3,000 to 4,000 years ago.[31] This is consistent with archaeological and
historical evidence regarding the appearance of smallpox as a human disease
which suggests a relatively recent origin. If the mutation rate is assumed to
be similar to that of the herpesviruses, the divergence date of variola from Taterapox
has been estimated to be 50,000 years ago.[31] While this is consistent with the other
published estimates, it suggests that the archaeological and historical
evidence is very incomplete. Better estimates of mutation rates in these
viruses are needed.
AG: The wikipedia is probably wrong about the
story of the African Rodent Virus. There was the Yersinia Pestis, which
is the Pestilence Bacterium, which is endemic in rodents, the Mermot(a)s. But
the life cycles of Rodents and Humans overlap very rarely, which is an
oversight of the Epidemiologists. Only those animals that are around humans on
a daily basis, can become Virus Carriers. Like the pigs, or the fowls. For this
reason, the Influenza Virus is endemic in birds, like chicken and ducks and geese
and propagates with the migrating birds, on a world wide basis. See the
Influenza epidemy after WWI which killed more people than the whole war.
Therefore by the birds, it can be so easily transmitted to humans. Especially
in China which is the largest fowl-keeping human population on the planet. So
the pigs are the only other daily companions of humans that can be carriers of
deadly viruses and germs.
Smallpox was the Number One Killer of Eurasian Humankind.
Countless numbers had died, especially children who had died in their lower
ages between 0 and 15. It must have been staggering numbers. So many, that the
populations of Eurasia couldn't explode until the smallpox vaccine was
developed. So the smallpox prevented a population explosion which was,
by the terms of Neurolinguistic Reframing a very good thing. But just
nearly so. Now we come to the superfluous sons of the Eurasian people. There
were very many superfluous sons, and because of the Primogenitur, they
had nothing to inherit. So some of them went to the Clergy, and others to the
seafarers, and then some others to the newly expanding business of the Conquistadores.
And then we come to the Real Business of World conquest, exploitation, and
extermination. And the good thing about this is: I am now doing a very very
bad kind of Neurolinguistic Reframing. This time it is really really very
very bad: Because the Conquistadores carried all those smallpox germs around
with them... And those germs did the really bad business for the
Conquistadores. They did the business of extermination of the Amerind autochthonous people of the Americas, quite ahead of the Conquistadores. And when they went
ahead themselves they could only find Hundreds and Thousands of empty deserted
villages and towns. Where between Heaven or Earth had those people gone (with
the wind of course). It was the deadly wind of the smallpox which had
exterminated about 9/10 of the original Amerind autochthonous people of the Americas. The Spaniards were not the
culprits, since they didn't know the slightest thing about virology. They were
just the survivors of the scourge of smallpox that had taken away so many of
their brothers and sisters in the early years of life, under 12-15 years of
age. Such are the fates of humanity in co-evolution with the germs that were
transmitted to them by the pigs. As I said it, this is a Neurolinguistic
Reframing of the Worst Kind. Very very bad indeed. But as Forrest Gump had
said it: Shit happens, and the pigs like nothing better than human shit. In
those olden days the outhouse was placed directly above the pig pen. And the
pigs just loved it. The sanitary problem was only: Together with the shit, it
became pig meat, and then you have the nice pork chops, and all the germs that
had accumulated in the shit, they got immediately recycled back onto your
dinner or supper table. This was a very interesting business of recycling shit.
And it was so ecological, that I think that the Green Parties of Present-Day
Never-days would have never come upon a better idea of recycling shit. So we
have it all-together now in the sow. The business of "Guns, Germs and
Steel". And it wasn't so much the guns and the steel that did the job. It
was the Germs.
So this was the business of Hernan
Cortez and Francisco Pizzarro (the latter one had been a pig herder
in the Extremadura of Spain before he became the world-famous Conquistador).
And they succeeded very nicely in this business, one would say, considering to
building an empire or better: an Imperium where the sun would never set. This
was the heyday of the Spanish Habsburg Empire after Columbus, 1492, and
then some 100 or 200 years onwards. But as his-story has it... even from the
times of Nebuchandosor and the Achaemenids of Persia: Empires
have a tendency to crumble. This was the Generic Idea of the Dream of
Nebuchandosor and it came to pass inevitably. And there is nothing miraculous
about de-cyphering that dream. Since it was obvious that Empires just have this
fatal tendency to go crumbling. I have enlarged this a little bit in my work:
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#eschatol_krieg
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#kali_thugees
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#bardo_thodol
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#eschatol_krieg
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#goetter_wirkung
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#gottes_beweis
Every historian knows that every
Empire will crumble at some time sooner or later. For this revelation, one
doesn't need to read the good Spengler or Gibbon at all. The Writing is on the
Wall. It is just obvious when you just have a little knowledge of his-story.
Because Empires are creatures of Accumulation, Aggregation, and their downfall
is Entropy, in the physical sense. The most shortest lived Empire of humanity
was that of the Napolium.
[[I write this wrong spelling with
full intention, since it refers to the Napolium game of the Wilhelm Bus(c)h'ius
of the George William Fitzgerald Bush'is of the Bush family fame.]]
The second most short lived
Imperium was that of the Inka's. It lasted only 90 years. But it was cut short
with the friendly assistance of the nice Spaniard Conquistadores. But it
was not of the making of the Spaniards alone. Because the nice Inka Emperors
had subjugated so many other autochthonous peoples in their conquests, that
those poor autochthonous peoples saw in the Spaniards their saviors and they
allied with the Spaniards. Much to their chagrin later on, when the Spaniards
subjugated them in much worse ways than the Inka's had done. But his-story is
always in the hindsight or what is called the 20/20 vision of his-story. When
you think of it, you should have stayed with your old and trusted oppressors
who could be calculable. The new oppressors were completely un-calculable and
much much worse. This is the same story as the rise of Bolshevism in Russia.
Only some time later it was called Communism. If the people of Russia had had
the slightest inkling what dire fate would befall them under the rule of Lenin,
Trotzky and Stalin, they would have had second thoughts about getting rid of
the Czar. But then it was too late. The Czar was dead already, the terror of
the Bolsheviks took the terrible toll of, let's estimate, about 50 million
lives in Greater Russia. Peter Sloterdijk has given us some pretty good (or really
bad) data about that in his "Zorn und Zeit".
After the Spaniards it was the
Britisher's who had refined this business of world conquest quite a bit and
they went on the become the first Global World Power where equally the
sun would never set upon their lands. This empire was from about 1700 CE to
1950 CE when this one crumbled also.
AG: This is a quote from an article about Jared Diamond and New Guinea.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/03/11/learning-from-new-guinea/
John Barker, reply by Jared Diamond
March 11, 2004 Issue
To the Editors:
In a lively review of David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral [NYR,
November 7, 2002], Jared Diamond writes: “It will surprise most Jews,
Christians, and Muslims to learn that this link between religion and morality
is entirely absent in the New Guinean societies of which I have experience.” I
don’t think they will be nearly as surprised by this assertion as people
familiar with New Guinea societies and religions. Diamond is certainly correct
in stating that morality in traditional Melanesian societies tended to be
highly relational and localized. But moral behavior was, all the same, infused
by religious precepts and practices. A variety of divine entities, ranging from
ancestral spirits to demigods, rewarded good behavior and punished bad in local
communities. Humans themselves also developed many methods of deploying sacred
powers to punish miscreants, through sorcery or witchcraft, or to heal those
they felt had been unjustly set upon by others using magic or by ancestral
spirits. In several areas of Melanesia, societies evolved elaborate initiation
and mortuary complexes that entailed both the teaching and proclamation of
moral values. Traditional religious beliefs and practices varied immensely
throughout New Guinea, but nowhere was morality divorced from religion.
Instead, the spiritual and the moral were deeply conjoined—even in the case of
warfare, I might add—as has been documented in hundreds of articles and books.
Diamond’s casual treatment in his review of contemporary New Guinea
people as if they were all the same, and as if they represent our own tribal
ancestors, also gives pause. Some anthropologists oppose in principle the use
of studies of modern tribal peoples as a means to understand the general course
of human evolution. I am not among them. Yet I accept that it is critically
important, on both ethical and scientific grounds, to acknowledge openly that
one can only draw imperfect and incomplete analogies. Contemporary indigenous
peoples are as much members of the present as the rest of us; they are not
relics of the past. Prior to colonization, New Guinean societies varied greatly
and changed through time. Today, Papua New Guinea is an independent
nation-state and West Papua a reluctant province of Indonesia. Almost everyone
is at least a nominal Christian and one would be hard put to find even remote
communities that have not been affected by national and international
institutions or by global capitalism. Diamond clearly respects the
“traditional” New Guineans of whom he writes. And yet his portrayal of them as
timeless tribals perpetuates a widespread stereotype of New Guinea as the “last
home of stone-age man,” a stereotype that many of its people regard as a
pernicious legacy of colonial prejudice. Ironically, his assertion that
traditional New Guinea morality lacked a religious content or basis feeds a
related powerful stereotype, one that has both motivated and legitimated
missionary campaigns to replace “amoral” (in their view) Melanesian religions
with Christian morality.
Jared Diamond replies:
Of course New Guineans are members of the present, vary greatly, and are
not timeless tribals. No sensible person would be silly enough to claim
otherwise. But it is equally clear that, until the European arrival, New Guinea
societies shared many features with each other, with tribal societies elsewhere
in the world, and with past tribal societies; they were different in many ways
from the state societies that we first-world denizens now take for granted.
Those earlier features still have strong legacies in New Guinea today. They
included: political organization at the level of the band, tribe, or small
chiefdom, not at the level of the paramount chiefdom or state; tribal religions
rather than state religions; and moralities grounded tightly in relationships.
There is nothing stereotypical in acknowledging, and learning from, such
obvious salient features.
Since Jared Diamond Diamond is just such a good
writer, he is everywhere on the www and on youtube. He writes very lucidly, and
he is a good story-teller. But when one hears him talk, one is just grossed
out. He has such a bad (Bronx or Boston or whatnot) accent that one would never
think how he could have made it to become a professor at some Ivy League
University.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond#The_Third_Chimpanzee_(1991)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Is_Sex_Fun%3F
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed#Synopsis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_crisis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IESYMFtLIis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gqJM-3PB6w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWXr7pXoCTs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBUq0Mf5aU8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceLuaf7low4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rP8vkG3dmQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=refwHvF6ZA0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n7yTEALxNc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgGw8kZnJxE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvaxPH3ftUQ
https://io9.gizmodo.com/jared-diamond-sued-by-new-guinea-natives-for-crimes-of-5226368
Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel,
is being sued by two Papua, New Guinea, men who claim the award-winning
science writer lied about their lives to prove that tribal culture is violent.
Diamond's
article in the New
Yorker was called "Vengeance
Is Ours," and described a young New Guinean man, called Wemp, and his
violent quest for revenge after his uncle Soll was killed by another tribe.
Diamond claimed Wemp was out to destroy a tribal leader called Isum, and that
to do so he went on a murderous rampage, recruiting dozens of
"soldiers" to aid him, and ultimately killing 17 people as well as
injuring several others grievously. One of the injured was supposedly Isum
(pictured, at far right), whom Diamond describes as being in a wheelchair.
Diamond used the
men's story to illustrate a story from his own life, about how his father-in-law
had the opportunity to kill the man responsible for murdering his family in a
Polish prison camp during World War II. Instead of killing the man, Diamond's
father-in-law turned him into police, who released him a year later. Apparently
Diamond's father-in-law regretted for the rest of his life that he did not take
violent revenge, and it weighed on his conscience.
But the New
Guineans, Diamond claims, have no such neuroses because unlike civilized
European guys they exact violent revenge on each other all the time.
The problem is
that Diamond's notion of tribal culture is based on a fantasy of Diamond's own
- one that was propagated by the New Yorker, which never fact-checked his story
with the two men it featured as main characters. Wemp killed nobody, and Isum
is not in a wheelchair - as you can see from the picture above. Indeed, the two
men say they have never met and Isum has suffered no injuries at all. After the
story went up online, Wemp suffered tremendously: He'd been accused of heinous crimes,
which the men's lawsuit says he did not commit. Other mistakes Diamond made
include extremely basic facts, such as which tribes the men are associated
with.
The Third
Chimpanzee (1991)
Diamond's first
popular book, The Third
Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991), examines human
evolution and its relevance to the modern world, incorporating evidence
from anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology, and linguistics. The book traces how humans evolved
to be so different from other animals, despite sharing over 98% of our DNA with
our closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees. The book also examines the animal
origins of language, art, agriculture, smoking and drug use, and other
apparently uniquely human attributes. It was well received by critics and won
the 1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books[14] and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.[15]
Guns, Germs, and
Steel (1997)
His second and
best known popular science book, Guns,
Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, was published in 1997. It asks
why Eurasian peoples conquered or displaced Native
Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of vice versa. It argues that
this outcome was not due to biological advantages of Eurasian peoples
themselves but instead to features of the Eurasian continent, in particular,
its high diversity of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication
and its east/west major axis that favored the spread of those domesticates,
people, and technologies for long distances with little change in latitude. The
first part of the book focuses on reasons why only a few species of wild plants
and animals proved suitable for domestication. The second part discusses how
local food production based on those domesticates led to the development of
dense and stratified human populations, writing, centralized political
organization, and epidemic infectious diseases. The third part compares the
development of food production and of human societies among different
continents and world regions. Guns, Germs, and Steel became an
international best-seller, was translated into 33 languages, and received
several awards, including a Pulitzer
Prize, an Aventis Prize for Science Books[14] and the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science.[16] A television documentary
series based on the book was produced by the National Geographic Society in 2005.[17][18]
Why is Sex Fun? (1997)
In his third
book, Why is Sex
Fun?, also published in 1997, Diamond discusses evolutionary factors
underlying features of human sexuality that are generally taken for granted but
that are highly unusual among our animal relatives. Those features include a
long-term pair relationship (marriage), coexistence of economically cooperating
pairs within a shared communal territory, provision of parental care by fathers
as well as by mothers, having sex in private rather than in public, concealed
ovulation, female sexual receptivity encompassing most of the menstrual cycle
(including days of infertility), female but not male menopause, and distinctive
secondary sexual characteristics.
Collapse (2005)
Diamond's next
book, Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, published in 2005, examines a
range of past societies in an attempt to identify why they either collapsed or
continued to thrive and considers what contemporary societies can learn from
these historical examples. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he argues against
explanations for the failure of past societies based primarily on cultural
factors, instead focusing on ecology. Among the societies mentioned in the book
are the Norse and Inuit of Greenland, the Maya, the Anasazi, the indigenous people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Japan, Haiti,
the Dominican Republic, and modern Montana. The book concludes by asking why
some societies make disastrous decisions, how big businesses affect the
environment, what our principal environmental problems are today, and what individuals
can do about those problems. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapsewas
translated into dozens of languages, became an international best-seller, and
was the basis of a television documentary produced by the National Geographic
Society.[19][20] It was also nominated for
the Royal Society Prize for Science Books.[14]
"Vengeance is Ours"
controversy (2008)
In 2008, Diamond
published an article in The New Yorker entitled
"Vengeance Is Ours",[21] describing the role of revenge
in tribal warfare in Papua New
Guinea. A year later two indigenous people mentioned in the article filed a
lawsuit against Diamond and The New Yorker claiming the
article defamed them.[22][23][24] In 2013, The Observer reported
that the lawsuit "was withdrawn by mutual consent after the sudden death
of their lawyer."[4]
Natural Experiments in
History (2010)
In 2010, Diamond
co-edited (with James Robinson) Natural Experiments of History, a
collection of seven case studies illustrating the multidisciplinary and comparative approach to
the study of history that he advocates. The book's title stems from the fact
that it is not possible to study history by the preferred methods of the
laboratory sciences, i.e., by controlled experiments comparing replicated human
societies as if they were test tubes of bacteria. Instead, one must look at natural
experiments in which human societies that are similar in many respects have
been historically perturbed, either by different starting conditions or by
different impacts.[clarification needed]The book's afterword classifies natural experiments, discusses the
practical difficulties of studying them, and offers suggestions on how to
address those difficulties.[25]
The World Until
Yesterday (2012)
In The World Until Yesterday, published in 2012, Diamond asks
what the western
world can learn from traditional societies. It surveys 39 traditional
small-scale societies of farmers and hunter-gatherers with respect to how they
deal with universal human problems. The problems discussed include dividing
space, resolving disputes, bringing up children, treatment of elders, dealing
with dangers, formulating religions, learning multiple languages, and remaining
healthy. The book suggests that some practices of traditional societies could
be usefully adopted in the modern industrial world today, either by individuals
or else by society as a whole.[citation needed]
Upheaval (2019)
In Upheaval:
How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change Diamond is examining whether
nations can find lessons during crises in a way like people do. The nations
considered are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the
U.S.[26] Anand Giridharadas, reviewing for The New York Times, claimed the book contained many
factual inaccuracies.[27] Daniel
Immerwahr, reviewing for The New
Republic, reports that Diamond has "jettisoned statistical analysis"
and the associated rigour, even by the standards of his earlier books, which
have themselves sometimes been challenged on this basis.[28]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond
Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American geographer, historian, and author best known for
his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee (1991); Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize); Collapse (2005); and The World Until Yesterday(2012). Originally trained in physiology, Diamond is known for drawing from
a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is a professor of geography
at UCLA.[1][2]
In 2005, Diamond was ranked ninth on a poll
by Prospect and Foreign Policy of the world's top 100 public
intellectuals.[3]
The Third Chimpanzee (1991)
Diamond's first popular book, The Third
Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991), examines human
evolution and its relevance to the modern world, incorporating evidence
from anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology, and linguistics. The book traces how humans evolved
to be so different from other animals, despite sharing over 98% of our DNA with
our closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees. The book also examines the animal
origins of language, art, agriculture, smoking and drug use, and other
apparently uniquely human attributes. It was well received by critics and won
the 1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books[14] and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.[15]
Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)
His second and best known popular science
book, Guns,
Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, was published in 1997. It asks
why Eurasian peoples conquered or displaced Native
Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of vice versa. It argues that
this outcome was not due to biological advantages of Eurasian peoples
themselves but instead to features of the Eurasian continent, in particular,
its high diversity of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication
and its east/west major axis that favored the spread of those domesticates,
people, and technologies for long distances with little change in latitude. The
first part of the book focuses on reasons why only a few species of wild plants
and animals proved suitable for domestication. The second part discusses how
local food production based on those domesticates led to the development of
dense and stratified human populations, writing, centralized political
organization, and epidemic infectious diseases. The third part compares the
development of food production and of human societies among different
continents and world regions. Guns, Germs, and Steel became an
international best-seller, was translated into 33 languages, and received
several awards, including a Pulitzer
Prize, an Aventis Prize for Science Books[14] and the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science.[16] A television documentary
series based on the book was produced by the National Geographic Society in 2005.[17][18]
Why is Sex Fun? (1997)
In his third book, Why is Sex
Fun?, also published in 1997, Diamond discusses evolutionary factors
underlying features of human sexuality that are generally taken for granted but
that are highly unusual among our animal relatives. Those features include a
long-term pair relationship (marriage), coexistence of economically cooperating
pairs within a shared communal territory, provision of parental care by fathers
as well as by mothers, having sex in private rather than in public, concealed
ovulation, female sexual receptivity encompassing most of the menstrual cycle
(including days of infertility), female but not male menopause, and distinctive
secondary sexual characteristics.
Collapse (2005)
Diamond's next book, Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, published in 2005, examines a
range of past societies in an attempt to identify why they either collapsed or
continued to thrive and considers what contemporary societies can learn from
these historical examples. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he argues
against explanations for the failure of past societies based primarily on
cultural factors, instead focusing on ecology. Among the societies mentioned in
the book are the Norse and Inuit of Greenland, the Maya, the Anasazi, the indigenous people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Japan, Haiti,
the Dominican Republic, and modern Montana. The book concludes by asking why
some societies make disastrous decisions, how big businesses affect the
environment, what our principal environmental problems are today, and what
individuals can do about those problems. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse was
translated into dozens of languages, became an international best-seller, and
was the basis of a television documentary produced by the National Geographic
Society.[19][20] It was also nominated for
the Royal Society Prize for Science Books.[14]
https://louisproyect.org/2008/11/03/jared-diamond-on-tribal-warfare-in-new-guinea/
Louis Proyect:
The Unrepentant Marxist
November 3, 2008
Jared Diamond on
tribal warfare in New Guinea
Recently
somebody who shares my distaste for Jared Diamond alerted me to an article that
appeared in the April 21, 2008 “New Yorker”. Titled “Vengeance is Ours: What
can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?”, it is focused on his
account of so-called tribal wars in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, where
Diamond has conducted many field trips studying the flora and fauna, as well as
the bestial tribesmen apparently.
Papuan native:
key to unlocking wars and ethnic cleansing?
Using interviews
with an ostensibly self-confessed killer, who is a member of the Handa clan,
the innocent reader is led to believe that the highlands of Papua are a kind of
a Rosetta stone for understanding wars and ethnic cleansing. The feuding in the
highlands, which usually involve slights such as a pig belonging to one clan
ruining the garden of another clan, leads to a steady escalation of
Hatfield-McCoy type confrontations that remind Diamond of the worst crimes of
the 20th century:
Indeed, his
Papuan “confessor’s” bloodlust triggers memories of Diamond’s late
father-in-law Jozef Nabel (a Jew) who refused at the list minute to wreak
vengeance on Polish villagers who had killed his wife, sister and niece in
pursuit of loot. Nabel, who served in a Polish division attached to the Red
Army, eventually caught up with the perpetrators but decided at the last minute
not to wreak vengeance since the new Polish government would be expected to
carry out justice. But by relinquishing control to a higher body, a kind of primitive,
almost animal-like satisfaction is lost as Diamond puts it:
My conversations
… made me understand what we have given up by leaving justice to the state. In
order to induce us to do so, state societies and their associated religions and
moral codes teach us that seeking revenge is bad. But, while acting on vengeful
feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not
merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who
has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves,
those feelings are natural and powerful. Many state governments do attempt to
grant the relatives of crime victims some personal satisfaction, by allowing
them to be present at the trial of the accused, and, in some cases, to address
the judge or jury, or even to watch the execution of their loved one’s
murderer.
The first thing
that leapt out at me when reading Diamond’s article is how devoid of social or
economic context it is. You feel that you are reading something out of the Old
Testament-but without the deity instructing the Israelis to punish the
Egyptians, etc. Diamond makes it clear that such considerations do not interest
him. He writes:
Anthropologists
debate whether the wars really arise from some deeper underlying ultimate
cause, such as land or population pressure, but the participants, when they are
asked to name a cause, usually point to a woman or a pig.
Unfortunately, I
find Diamond’s reliance on the testimony of his subjects somewhat unreliable given
what appears his tendency to put words in the Papuan’s mouth. Now I might be
wrong, but somehow I find it far-fetched that a Papuan would have expressed
himself to Jared Diamond in the words attributed to him in the New Yorker
article:
I admit that the
New Guinea Highland way to solve the problem posed by a killing isn’t good. Our
way disturbs our day-to-day life; we won’t be comfortable for the rest of our
lives; we are always in effect living on the battlefield; and those feelings go
on and on in us. The Western way, of letting the government settle disputes by
means of the legal system, is a better way. But we could never have arrived at
it by ourselves: we were trapped in our endless cycles of revenge killings.
Just try to
imagine a Papuan self-confessed killer using these formulations. I can’t.
Frankly, it smacks of Jared Diamond using this unfortunate individual as a
sock-puppet for his own sociobiological predispositions. Lurking beneath the
surface of his article are certain assumptions about a “killer instinct” that
fit neatly into the “naked ape” nonsense that flourished once upon a time in
the pages of Time Magazine and elsewhere. Despite Diamond’s reputation as a
scrupulous biologist, his career involves making exactly the same types of speculations
as a Robert Ardrey as I pointed out in one of the installments in my dissection
of “Collapse”:
Diamond showed
his sympathy for this trend with the publication of “The Third Chimpanzee” in
1993. This exercise in sociobiology (an updated version of the 19th century
social Darwinism) includes a chapter titled “The Golden Age That Never Was”…
Diamond has many other interesting things to say about any number of subjects.
He argues that since animals have an evolutionary imperative to pass on their
genes, art must be a clever stratagem by men to lure women into bed. This led
Tom Wilkie to drolly observe in the May 22, 1991 Independent that this lesson
must have been lost on Tchaikovsky, Andy Warhol and other homosexual artists.
Diamond also believes that sexual jealousy is an important cause of war: ”It
was the seduction (abduction, rape) by Paris of Menelaus’s wife Helen that
provoked the Trojan War”. In light of the fact that the Iliad also claims that
gods and goddesses took part in the fighting, Wilkie wonders how reliable a
guide to history it is.
Unrepentant
Marxist that I am, it is incumbent on me to bring up those oh-so-boring issues
of land or population pressure. In an article titled “Ol I Skulim Mipela:
Contemporary Warfare in the Papua New Guinea Eastern Highlands” that appeared
in the Oct. 1984 issue of “Anthropological Quarterly”, George D. Westermark
pointed to the introduction of capitalist farming in the region as a prime
aggravator of tensions between native peoples forced to compete for fewer and
fewer resources. Coffee plantations and cattle ranching promoted by Australians
led to less land available for subsistence farming. In other words, the same
kinds of pressures that made Rwanda a living hell have also increased
in-fighting in the highlands of Papua.
Furthermore, if
Jared Diamond was truly interested in reducing the level of violence in New
Guinea, he should start with the imperialist companies that have put these
kinds of pressures on the indigenous peoples. As somebody with the kinds of
connections he has with Chevron, which has seen its profits fattened through
drilling in New Guinea, Diamond might persuade the owners of Freeport Copper to
take their operations elsewhere given the impact they have had had on the lives
of Papuans.
In the 1960s,
the Indonesian government sent its troops in to destroy resistance to the
Freeport mining that led to the death of at least 45,000 people. Villages were
bombed and burned in an effort to break the back of the movement. Any tribal
fighting is dwarfed by this kind of wholesale bloodshed.
Another copper
company based in Bougainville was just as vicious. Indigenous peoples armed
with nothing but bows and arrows went into battle against the multinational
that once again relied on the Indonesian government for protection. Forests
were cleared in order to establish the copper mine in 1969, leaving hundreds of
native peoples landless. Further “economic development” left others without
fishing rights. Altogether two hundred and twenty (220) hectares of local
forests were poisoned, felled and burnt, and then bulldozed into nearby river,
along with tons of rich organic topsoil.
All in all, the
people of Papua New Guinea have been subjected to the same kinds of
quasi-genocidal onslaughts from Indonesia that the people of East Timor have
suffered. Amnesty International and most other human rights organizations agree
that at least 100,000 Papuans (one sixth of the total population) have been
killed during the occupation. In an effort to exploit the region’s riches,
native peoples have been slaughtered and driven into submission. This is the
real story, not the Hatfield-McCoy scenario that Jared Diamond titillated his
New Yorker audience with.
AG: More on Jared Diamond. He has his own
political twist, which is analyzed very thoroughly by Daniel Immerwahr.
"All over the Map". I must laugh when I read the author's name.
Immerwahr means "always speaking the truth", which is also called the
Aletheia in the Philosophical Lingo. I have referenced the "Philosophy of
the Lie" by Arno Baruzzi. This is also "a kind of" Immerwahr. (I
am laughing really hard, ROFL in www lingo).
I like this criticism of Jared Diamond as much
as I like the tall stories of the good Jared. It is mostly the same, whether we
take the 3-volume piece of the Matrix, and the xyz-volume pieces of the Star
Wars Saga. The more volumes one adds on top of the original work, the more
diluted it becomes. So the later works of Jared Diamond are just a re-hash.
"Collapse" has not very much new to say since the theme has been
re-worked thoroughly by the "Club of Rome" crowd who see
"collapse" going on all around us. The ecological situation world
wide is on "collapse course" except maybe in Switzerland, and maybe
in Norway. We have no idea as yet, why the ecology there is not
"collapsing". Perhaps it is because the Swiss know the Land
Management for about 500-1000 years or so. And in Africa and Asia and South
America no-one has the slightest idea what Land Management is all about. I iust
add a few "??? - signs" and a few "$$$ - signs" just to
amplify the question why "collapse" happens in some places but not in
other places.
"Guns Germs and Steel" was quite
original, and the evolutionary ecological history is a field that hadn't been
worked too much by his-storians. Except of course Lev Gumilev, who had
expounded all of Vernadski, who had been the first evolutionary ecological
historian of hu-manity. It is just such a pity that no-one of the Western
historians ever noticed that. And especially not the German historians like the
good Herfried Münkler. And it is quite correct that Jared Diamond is quite as
good as a political propaganda machinator, who has all the best
"friendships" with all the elites of all the (near-) collapsing
nations that he describes. "Honni soit qui mal y pense". As I say it again and again: A his-storian is the pet dog (or minion) of
the power mongers and he is kept in a good and well-paid professor position so
that he writes the elogies and the euphemisms and apotheoses of All the Good
Head Honchos. Since we all know the business of the his-storians by now, we
should not be surprised at all.
Back to the article All Over the Map: By Daniel Immerwahr, June 11, 2019
https://newrepublic.com/article/154142/jared-diamond-upheaval-book-review
Jared
Diamond doesn’t use a computer. He relies “completely” on his secretary and on
his wife for “anything” requiring one, as he puts it. Diamond also confesses
that he lacks the ability to turn on his “home television set” and can “do only
the simplest things” with his newly acquired iPhone. “Whenever friends have
shown me how to use a computer, they turn it on and something goes wrong,”
Diamond once explained to an aghast reporter. “I just get frustrated.”
UPHEAVAL:
TURNING POINTS FOR NATIONS IN CRISIS by Jared Diamond Little, Brown and
Company, 512 pp., $35.00
Why It Matters How Powerful Men Treat Women
Give War a Chance
The First Democratic Debate Failed The Planet
The Supreme Court’s Covert Plan to Gut the
EPA’s Powers
Why Georgia Brings Out Putin’s Insecurities
Such
incapacities haven’t held Diamond back. Just the opposite. He has spent much of
his career explaining and championing the “modern ‘Stone Age’ peoples,” as he
calls them—cultures reliant on tools and practices dating back thousands of
years. The most “vivid part of my life,” Diamond has written, was spent in
“technologically primitive human societies,” especially the “intact” societies
of New Guinea, where Diamond worked for decades studying birds. It was on one
such ornithological trip in the 1970s that Diamond encountered a “remarkable”
Papua New Guinean named Yali. Diamond met him by chance on a beach, the two
walked together for an hour, and Yali—with a “penetrating glance of his
flashing eyes”—asked a big question: Why did whites have so much and New
Guineans so little?
Diamond’s
breakout book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, was his answer. It offered a sweeping
survey of the past 13,000 years. Thinking as a scientist, Diamond searched for
the variables that had shaped societies. Though he couldn’t run laboratory
experiments on large human groups, he could find “natural experiments,” similar
societies that differed in just a few crucial respects. Their divergent fates
could illuminate the effects of those differences. Islands and other locales
with a “considerable degree of isolation,” Diamond wrote, work best for this
purpose.
On
the scale of millennia, Diamond concluded, individual decisions don’t make much
difference to the trajectories of societies. Environmental factors are far more
important. Guns, Germs, and Steel emphasized the shape of continents. Eurasia’s
horizontal axis allowed plants and germs to spread easily along latitudinal
belts, endowing its inhabitants with large populations, powerful technologies,
and fiercely contagious diseases (useful weapons in colonizing foreign lands).
The Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, run on vertical axes and
produced smaller and less epidemiologically menacing civilizations. It was a
reassuring conclusion, conspicuously rejecting racism and chauvinism in its
account of nonindustrial cultures.
The
book was stuffed with hundreds of pages of geography, epidemiology, and
archaeology, and it presented virtually no characters besides Yali.
Nevertheless, it caught fire, selling more than 1.5 million copies in dozens of
languages, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and taking up a permanent perch in airport
bookstores across the planet. It helped that Guns, Germs, and Steel was fun.
Diamond offered charming explanations of why humans learned to farm almonds but
never acorns (“slow growth and fast squirrels”), or why they ride horses but
not zebras (nasty dispositions and a penchant for biting). Eight years later,
Diamond produced a sequel, Collapse, studying mainly “small, poor, peripheral,
past societies” that had fallen apart—the Norse in Greenland, and the
ill-omened inhabitants of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. These, too, he chronicled
with palpable sympathy. “They were people like us,” he wrote. And perhaps,
without care, we might share their fate.
Jared
Diamond is back, now with the final installment of what his publisher describes
as his “monumental trilogy.” Where Collapse explored places that failed, the
new volume, Upheaval, asks about those that survived. It takes Diamond far from
the sorts of societies where he’s felt most alive: the closed-off tribes, the
“Stone Age” peoples. Upheaval examines such large countries as the United
States, Finland, Japan, and Chile, and mainly in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. Through them, Diamond hopes to show how nations have made it through
destabilizing crises. But what we see instead is how poorly suited his
approach—honed on nonindustrial and isolated societies—is for large, connected
ones in an age of globalization.
If
Yali inspired Guns, Germs, and Steel, the inspiration for Upheaval was
Diamond’s wife, Marie Cohen, a clinical psychologist. Her work at a community
mental health center in the first year of their marriage acquainted Diamond
with factors that therapists have identified to predict whether a patient will
prevail in a crisis. Diamond selects a dozen: acknowledging the crisis, accepting
responsibility, defining the problem, getting help, having patience, and so on.
The same twelve variables, he argues, can be applied with slight modification
to nations. Examining seven cases, Diamond sets out to show how his factors
account for countries’ ability to weather tumult.
Twelve
variables, seven cases—this is the language of scientific history, the approach
Diamond has long championed. A centerpiece of Collapse was his study of the
effects of nine variables (such as temperature, moisture, and airborne volcanic
ash) on island societies’ survival. Though Diamond’s high-velocity romps
through history often vex specialists, this one earned him “high marks” from
Patrick Kirch, a distinguished archaeologist of Oceania. Diamond had designed
his study carefully. Nine variables were a lot, he acknowledged, so it “would
have been utterly impossible to evaluate them without a large database and
without the use of statistics.” He and his fellow researcher, Barry Rolett,
began with the hunch that Rapa Nui’s storied collapse was environmentally
caused. But without their careful statistical analyses of 80 other islands and
similar locales, Diamond wrote, that guess “could not have been accepted.”
Past
Jared Diamond, meet Present Jared Diamond. Whatever rigor Diamond demanded of
himself in writing Collapse has been set aside in Upheaval. Now we have more
variables (twelve), and significantly fewer cases (only seven). Worse, the
variables, ported from the psychological study of individuals to the
sociological study of nations, are unquantified and maddeningly hard to pin
down. How to know whether a nation has “honest self-appraisal”? And how to
balance the variable of “national core values” against “national
flexibility”—wouldn’t one cancel the other out? Diamond initially sought to
find ways to measure his variables and test their effects, as he’d done for his
island study. But he concluded that this would entail “a large project.” And
so, displaying a decided lack of variables 2 (accepting personal responsibility),
4 (getting help from others), and 9 (patience), he gave up.
What
remains is a “narrative survey,” speculative and loose. Finland endures the
Soviet Union. Australia sheds its white identity. Germany recovers from Nazism.
The crises differ in type and severity. What unites them is that the nations in
question survived.
Survival,
it must be said, is a low bar to clear. Consider one of Diamond’s cases,
Indonesia. Its crisis was that in 1965, two army units killed six generals in a
coup attempt. The ensuing tumult gave the general Suharto an opening to push
aside Indonesia’s left-leaning president, Sukarno. And the army inaugurated a
massacre of some half-million suspected communists. Suharto soon took over,
ruling Indonesia as a corrupt dictatorship for some 30 years.
It
wasn’t all bad, argues Diamond, who worked in Indonesia for 17 of those years.
The ousted Sukarno had been no saint, and, “neglecting Indonesia’s own
problems,” he had “involved himself in the world anti-colonial movement.”
Suharto, by contrast, was an “outstanding realist” who rightly “abandoned
Sukarno’s world pretensions” and concentrated on internal affairs. His regime
“created and maintained economic growth,” promoted family planning, and
“presided over a green revolution.” And the subsequent years have given the
country, Diamond notes, a “deepening sense of national identity.”
What
accounts for Indonesia’s success, such as it was? It’s hard to say. The problem
isn’t merely that Diamond has jettisoned statistical analysis. It’s that the
crisp explanations that populated Guns, Germs, and Steel—the acorns, zebras,
and continental axes—are missing. We learn that the government articulated core
values, but that Indonesians, divided among thousands of islands and hundreds
of languages, suffered a weak national identity. Indonesia identified its
problems but at first lacked honest, realistic self-appraisal. Diamond isn’t
noticeably wrong in those judgments, vague as they are; it’s just that he adds
little to our understanding by them. It is hard to imagine a reader shouting
“Aha! Core
national values! Now I get why Indonesia’s economy grew.”
Lacking
those eureka bursts, Upheaval settles into story time. There are joys here,
particularly in Diamond’s historical accounts. He narrates Finnish guerrilla tactics
against the Red Army in World War II with infectious glee (skis and white
camouflage, it turns out, fare well against tanks). He applies a similar gusto
to the tale of nineteenth-century Japan, crediting Japan’s “unifying national
ideology” and realistic self-assessment with its mastering of Western
technologies during the Meiji Restoration.
Yet
the closer he gets to his own time and place, the less brightly this crazy
Diamond shines. One problem is the basis of his authority. Diamond chose his
case studies not for the insights they offer, but because they’re the countries
he’s lived in (save for Japan, though Diamond reassures the reader that he has
Japanese cousins and nieces by marriage). Rather than ground his pronouncements
in the scholarship he’s read, he repeatedly invokes “my own first-hand
experiences and those of my long-term friends.” His “friends” tell him that a
coup against Chile’s elected leftist President Salvador Allende was
“inevitable,” that Japanese teenagers text too much to date, and that U.S.
venture capitalism succeeds because it takes bold risks. Those friends include
senators, investors, and a member of the Dutch defense force in New
Guinea—nearly all represent the elite of Diamond’s chosen societies.
Perhaps
it’s not a surprise that the meandering accounts that follow offer mainly
middle-class nostrums and bland conventional wisdom. Chile was right to proceed
cautiously in punishing members of the Pinochet dictatorship. Japan should
apologize more fully for World War II. Australia’s wines are delicious—Diamond
recommends De Bortoli’s One, Penfolds Grange, and Morris of Rutherglen’s
Muscat.
Upheaval’s
final case is the United States, where Diamond worries most about the loss of
compromise and civility. It’s a problem he knows well; a peer-reviewed
scholarly journal recently ran an editorial titled “F**k Jared Diamond.” Yet
reading Diamond on “declining courtesy” in elevators, the super-abundance of TV
channels, and younger people’s obsession with their cell phones, one feels oneself
less in the presence of a penetrating social theorist than a dyspeptic relative
at the Thanksgiving table. As Bernard DeVoto once said of Margaret Mead: “The
more anthropologists write about the United States, the less we believe what
they say about Samoa.”
At
the start of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond identifies Yali as a “local
politician” who had “never been outside New Guinea.” A reader, noting the
pictures Diamond includes of New Guineans in traditional garb and reading his
talk of “intact societies” there, might take Yali for someone bound by custom,
a man with constrained horizons.
But
that would be wrong. Yali had left his home—the Ngaing bush area of Sor—at a
young age to work in a European-run hotel. He had been a sergeant in the
colonial police, left his country, joined an intelligence unit of the
Australian army, spent time on a U.S. submarine, led an insurrection, and
served nearly six years in prison for “incitement to rape.” I know this
because, eight years before Diamond met Yali, the anthropologist Peter Lawrence
profiled him extensively in his classic study of cargo cults, Road Belong
Cargo. In Lawrence’s telling, Yali was thoroughly enmeshed in an international
economy and international politics. His time outside New Guinea—contrary to
Diamond’s claim that he’d never left the island—had been crucial to his
evolving political thought.
The
difference between Diamond’s Yali and Lawrence’s Yali illustrates a key feature
of Diamond’s oeuvre, one that has great bearing on Upheaval. Diamond has always
been drawn to “isolated” cultures or those just on the cusp of contact with
outsiders. They best suit the natural experiments methodology as he practices
it, and they have been the reliable source of his most memorable material. But
the other side of the coin is that Diamond has a noticeable habit of
downplaying the external connections of the places he’s describing. Instead of
Yali the anti-colonial leader or Yali the Allied intelligence officer, we get
Yali the provincial New Guinean lowlander. It is, the geographer Alf Hornborg
writes, an “atomistic approach,” one that looks at the world and sees only
separate societies “managing their own destinies.”
Diamond
has always been drawn to “isolated” cultures. He looks at the world and sees
separate societies managing their own destinies.
That
approach, perhaps appropriate for Rapa Nui circa 1500, falters when applied to
modern countries. Again, take Indonesia. Surely, Diamond is correct that its
national identity, core values, problem-solving skills, and self-appraisal
mattered. But it seems bizarre to focus on these while saying so little about
external factors. Most notably, Indonesia at the time of its crisis was a Cold
War battleground. Both the United States and Soviet Union poured military aid into
the country, while China egged the communists on. These powerful outside forces
helped mold local political fights into a war over communism, and they
intensified the resulting violence. “It is impossible to think of Indonesia in
1965–1966 outside of the Cold War,” the historian Bradley Simpson insists.
The
broader context mattered for what came next, too. Diamond notes with
satisfaction that Indonesia has calmed and prospered in the past half-century.
But these are not unusual outcomes. The International Monetary Fund expects
only 5 percent of national economies to shrink this year. Per-capita deaths
from war—civil or otherwise—have diminished sharply since 1945. Indeed, the
awkward fact about Upheaval is that the outcome it seeks to explain, persistence
through change in modern times, is the overwhelming norm.
The
sort of “we have no more food and are, in fact, all dead” collapse that Diamond
described fifteenth-century Vikings suffering in Greenland is today extremely
rare (and it’s not even clear Diamond was right about the Vikings). There is
thus little surprise that Chile, Japan, Finland, Australia, and Germany
survived their storms. What is perhaps surprising is that health, peace, and
prosperity have on average risen dramatically in the past 50 years. But as
these are global trends, they cannot be satisfactorily explained by many
individual nations defining problems clearly or exhibiting “situation-specific
national flexibility”—Diamond’s variables. To say that few societies have
fallen apart recently is no guarantee of a tranquil future. It’s just that, if
catastrophe lies ahead, we will almost certainly experience it not as “nations”
but as a planet, at the scale where Diamond’s variables seem less relevant.
Diamond
acknowledges the difficulty of applying his Twelve Habits of Highly Effective
Nations to the world as a whole. Using the traits of individuals to diagnose
societies is intellectually treacherous enough; using them on an entire species
is worse. Does humanity exhibit enough unity to even have “core values”? In
response, Diamond weakly offers a parable about bird-watching in the Middle
East. Despite hostility between Lebanon and Israel, birders in each country
have agreed to send warnings about large avian flocks heading into each other’s
country, where they pose dangers for planes. This, Diamond cedes, “falls short
of an agreement for all 216 nations constituting the whole world.” But it’s a
start.
The
first page of Diamond’s trilogy—his conversation with Yali—was memorable. The
last page is not. “Crises have often challenged nations in the past,” Diamond
writes. “They are continuing to do so today.” Fortunately, he concludes,
summoning the final gust of wind like an undergraduate completing a term paper,
“familiarity with changes that did or didn’t work in the past can serve us as a
guide.”
That’s
not wrong, but nor is it helpful. Diamond seems unsteady in a world illuminated
by iPhone screens. Complex countries, global economies, and international
politics strain his “nations are like people” view of things. You’re left with
the sense that he was on firmer ground where he started, chatting amiably as he
strolled along the New Guinean shore.
Lev
Gumilev was a quite a bit better than Spengler at thinking the Morphology of
History. He called it the "Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere". And this was much better and clearer than the work of Spengler.
Because Spengler had done some thinking that was quite dyed in the wool with German
Romanticism, like the work of Nietzsche and Goethe, which usually doesn't
lead one into clear and precise thinking. And even the good Schopenhauer, as
good as he was, was not a friend of systematics, for all of his other merits
that he had. I am so sorry to say that. He didn't really bother writing a lot
of headlines or a lot of table of contents for his work. So everyone who wanted
to know what Schopenhauer had to say, was forced to read the whole voluminous
tome. Heidegger in WHD had done some very good work to explain Nietzsche to us.
Better you read Heidegger WHD first. You can learn the Systematics mostly from Whitehead,
who was an English Thinker through and through. And he wrote about the
best table of contents, even with some abstracts for each chapter. If only more
philosophers would write like him. [AG: I wish that for all the German
Philosophers.] And the English philosophers knew it better than to engage in Romanticism.
So I am very much indebted to Gumilev, as one of the First and Foremost
Thinkers of the History of the Ethnology, or better: The Morphology of the
Psycho- Anthropology of Hu-Mankind. Since the work of Gumilev is also a
quite large volume, there is no room to include this in the present text. I
just give some extracts of the Table of Contents, which I had converted into
Hypertext, to facilitate the Reading a little bit, and to make the quoting a
little bit easier. The work is therefore much easier to access, than just
giving the page numbers of the book. Since his book is practically unknown to
the Western Historians, it is also pretty useless to quote from the
book, because practically no-one has this book. And to get it from the Library
is also not so easy. But it is there on the Internet, for everyone who wants to
get it. And I surely hope that the Copyright Hunters of the Matrix
have not yet found out that this book exists on the www. Because then it would
vanish into thin air in no time flat. I know this very well, how the best books
on the www just vanish, when the new EU copyright rules really take effect. So
I am very cautious and I save everything in my Archives, for the case that they
vanish from the www. And to give some backgrounds of Gumilev's work. He leaned
heavily on the theory of the Biosphere of Vernadski. And this man was
one of the most egregious Thinkers of Biology and Ecology long before the
Western Biology and Ecology professors were able to come up with the concept.
Since I have read the most important works of Vernadsky, I am also very
familiar with that thought structure. And then there was Lotman, who had
invented the Semiosphere. And most thinkers of the Western
Intelligenzia had never heard of such a thing. Not even the good Umberto
Eco. And I have done some extensive quoting of this in my Dissertation
under those Headings. From the .htm and from the .pdf version:
http://www.noologie.de/desn.htm
http://www.noologie.de/ag-dis.pdf
Vernadskys Arbeit handelt wesentlich von den Interaktionen des Lebens, der Biosphäre, mit der
(Atmo- (Hydro- und (Litho- Sphäre))),
welches er als chemisch- energetisches Gesamtsystem betrachtet.[1] Lovelock formulierte unabhängig von Vernadsky in seiner Gaia-Hypothese eine ähnliche Sicht dieses Gesamtsystems, und entwickelte es in seiner Zusammenarbeit mit Lynn Margulis weiter.[2] Da der terrestrische Film des Lebens, die Biosphäre, hauptsächlich wasserbasiert ist, können wir es [.1]als [.2]Extension der Hydrosphäre ansehen.[3] Der wesentliche neu dazukommende Faktor der Biosphäre sind die o.g. Musterklassen des Lebens, die sich ebenfalls mit der Sphären-Metapher darstellen lassen:
(Bio- (Oeko- (Semio- (Anthropo- (Ethno- (Noo-
Sphäre)))))
Diese Schachtelung stellt einen Ansatz dar, verschiedene Gliederungen, die z.T. der Nachfolge von Vernadsky entstammen, weiter zu systematisieren. Diese weiteren Sphären sind weitere logische Ordnungen, bzw. Entwicklungen der Biosphäre. Die Oekosphäre (A.G.) wird hier als Generalbegriff für alle inter-organischen Kommunikations- und Interaktions-Formen eingeführt, die in der heutigen Ökologie vor allem unter ihrem energetischen und materiellen Aspekt untersucht werden. [.3]Die Semiosphäre als Sammelbegriff der Zeichenkommunikation der Lebewesen stammt von Lotman,[.4][4] Anthroposphäre[.5] als Gesamtheit der menschlichen Biomasse,[5] und Ethnosphäre der verschiedenen menschlichen Kulturmuster von Gumilev,[6] Noosphäre der höheren symbolischen Gebilde von Chardin, LeRoy und Vernadsky.[7] Ebenfalls bei Gumilev findet sich der Begriff Technosphäre für die dem Naturkreislauf (zeitweise) entzogenen Artefakte des Menschen,[8] und im Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit wurde der Begriff Bibliosphäre geprägt.[9]
Lotman (1990) coined the term Semiosphere (here also called SEMsphere)
for the realm of all mental projections that are intersubjectively shared or
exchanged, mainly through language. The SEMsphere is also the world of
relations between communicating organisms as viewed from the viewpoint of
semiotics. In the following quotation, Lotman refers to the work of Vernadsky
as influence to his concept.
Lotman (1990: 123): By analogy with the biosphere, (Vernadsky's concept) we
could talk of a semiosphere, which we shall derive as the semiotic space
necessary for the existence and functioning of languages, not the sum total of
different languages; in a sense the semiosphere has a prior existence and is in
constant interaction with languages. In this respect a language is a function,
a cluster of semiotic spaces and their boundaries... Outside the semiosphere
there can be neither communication, nor language.
The unit of semiosis, the smallest functioning
mechanism, is not the separate language but the whole semiotic space of the
culture in question. This is the space we term the semiosphere. The
semiosphere is the result and the condition for the development of culture; we
justify our term by analogy with the biosphere, as Vernadsky defined it, namely
the totality and the organic whole of living matter and also the condition for
the continuation of life.
The next quotation shows that Vernadsky
considered the biosphere as a system of societies of living beings in quite the
exact sense as Whitehead had expressed it in more philosophical terms in the
section before[10].
Lotman, (1990: 125), [citing Vernadsky on the biosphere]: ... all
life-clusters are intimately bound to each other. One cannot exist without the
other. This connection between different living films and clusters, and their
invariancy, is an age-old feature of the mechanism of the earth's crust, which
has existed all through geological time.
The same idea is expressed more clearly again:
The biosphere has a quite definite structure
which determines everything without exception that happens in it... A human
being observed in nature and all living organisms and every living being is a
function of the biosphere in its particular space-time[.6][.7].
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#gumilev_passionary
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#gumilev_soviet
Alexander Sergeevich Titov: Lev Gumilev,
Ethnogenesis and Eurasianism:
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1446515/1/U602440.pdf
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere: Introduction
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe0.htm
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere: Chapter One
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe1.htm
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere: Chapter Two,
Part 1
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe2a.htm
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere: Chapter Two,
Part 2
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe2b.htm
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere: Chapter Three
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe3.htm
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere: Chapter Four
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe4.htm
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere: Chapter Five
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe5.htm
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere: Chapter Six
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe6a.htm
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere: Chapter Six,
Part 2
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe6b.htm
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere: Chapter Six,
Part 3
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe6c.htm
'System' in ethnology.
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe2a.htm#_Toc351821108
Levels and types of ethnic systems.
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe2a.htm#_Toc351821109
Self-regulation of an ethnos.
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe2a.htm#_Toc351821112
When Immortality Is More Terrible Than Death
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe4.htm#_Toc351823232
Clio vs Kronos.
http://www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe4.htm#_Toc351823242
And this extremely important
material can still be found there on the Russian www site. Lev Gumilev was one
of the most important anthropologists in the whole of the USSR, even if there
were so many academic detractors who lamented his flamboyant style, and his
somewhat un-conventional approach to the history of man-kind almost world wide.
Gumilev was of a better class than the good Oswald Spengler since he had had
the occasion to do so much field work while he was in the Gulags. Even if that
doesn't sound so nice, there is no better place to learn everything about the
not-so-nice sides of Human Nature than when Gumilev was in the Gulags for a
couple of years. This is very important field-work for any Anthropologist, I
would say.
Because his many academic
detractors always thought that it cannot be historically scientific at all,
when you don't write it according to the dogma of historical sciences. This
means that the historical scientific dogma states that you have to write
everything in a very technical jargon, and in the completely obscure and
cotton-dry style, as it is the norm especially in Germany. So Gumilev was
always quite a bit suspicious for the historical scientific dogma. It didn't
help that so many of his students were quite devoted disciples, and they
considered Gumilev as a kind of Guru. When you are a Guru for so many
disciples, and there were quite many of them, then you are already heavy on the
Black List of the Academic Historical Scientific Professors. It cannot be other
than that because these are the iron laws of the Academe. In the Western
Countries probably more than in Russia, because in all of the universities of
the USA and Europe there rules the iron law of Political Correctness. And he
who doesn't follow these laws will get publication prohibition, will never get
his papers accepted by any high-profile academic publishing house etc. pp. He
who doesn't know his/her ways around the present-day laws of Correct Behavior,
and Politically Correct thinking and writing, and quoting, will be rigorously
exorcised from everything important in Academia. Now it was more or less a
blessing in disguise [just another little Neurolinguistic Reframing to make]
... that the good Lev Gumilev had learned in the Gulags something very
important down to his bones.
Since Gumilev had spent so many
years in the nice Gulags of Väterchen Stalin, he knew what it means to
be able to Double- and Triple- Think. Every halfway intelligent citizen
of the USSR during these times of the Bolshewik and Stalinist purges had
to learn this, or it was the Death Sencence, by your friendly agents of the Tscheka
and the KGB, and then some. And there was no such thing as a legal
procedure. If someone thought the "Denunziant" or the Informer, that
someone other was a traitor of the Fatherland or of Communism - A single
denunciation was all that was needed. And that was the end for this poor soul.
Even if the Denunziant only had just a little personal grudge with that other
one, like having a dispute about some woman. The nice Bolshewik Fatherland and
later the communist USSR had so many secret police and military organizations,
starting with Lenin, then Trotzki, and then Väterchen Stalin. And those secret
police and other secret organizations were also rivalling each other who would
be more efficient in killing as many potential opponents of the regime as was
humanly possible. See also the harrowing tales that Peter Sloterdijk wrote in
"Zorn und Zeit". He had a Russian colleague who had studied all this
down to the dirtiest details. The henchmen of the regime were so busy that they
went out of ammunition quite a few times. Since one needed a special type of
ammunition which didn't penetrate the whole skull of the victim on both sides
immediately. The preferred method of execution was that the executioner went
behind the victim and gave him a shot in the base of the skull, exactly where
the spine connects to the skull. In German it is called the
"Genickschuss". And the henchmen of the Bolshewik regime were quite
proficient and trained at this job. They never missed at all. It was precision
work, because there was the Medulla Oblongata. And this meant instant death.
Which was "sort of humane" so that the victim didn't suffer too much.
As I said above, with ordinary pistol ammunition, the projectile would go right
through the skull and that would produce a terrible mess in the execution room.
So the henchmen tried to avoid this as much as possible, and they used a
special, low power powder charge so that the projectile didn't fly out at the
other end of the skull. Because that would make a hole so big that you could
put your fist into it. I think there was this story in "Zorn und
Zeit" about one such very proficient henchman who had such a stench of
death and human cadaver decay odor around him that he couldn't wash it off any
more. And he had a German Shepherd dog. And this poor dog tried to flee from
this stench, and it crawled under the sofa, because this stench was even
unbearable for the poor dog. This was quite a tall story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_police
The term secret police (or political
police)[1] refers to intelligence, security or police agencies that engage in covert operations against a government's
political opponents and dissidents. Secret police organizations are characteristic of totalitarian regimes.[2] Used to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian regime, secret police often, but not always, operate outside the law and are used to repress dissidents
and weaken the political opposition, frequently with violence, assassinations, and torture.[3]
History
In East Asia, the jinyiwei (Embroidered Uniform Guard) of the Ming Dynasty was founded in the
1360s by the Hongwu Emperor and served as the dynasty's secret police until the collapse of Ming
rule in 1644. Originally, their main functions were to serve as the emperor's
bodyguard and to spy on his subjects and report any plots of rebellion or
regicide directly to the emperor. Over time, the organization took on law
enforcement and judicial functions and grew to be immensely powerful, with the
power to overrule ordinary judicial rulings and to investigate, interrogate,
and punish anyone, including members of the imperial family. In 1420, a second
secret police organization run by eunuchs, known as the dongchang (Eastern Depot), was formed to suppress suspected political opposition
to the usurpation of the throne by the Yongle Emperor. Combined, these two organizations made the Ming Dynasty one of the
world's first police states.[4]
In Europe, secret police organizations
originated in 18th-century Europe after the French Revolution, when such operations were established in an effort to detect any possible
conspiracies or revolutionary subversion. The peak of secret-police operations
in most of Europe was 1815 to 1860, "when restrictions on voting,
assembly, association, unions and the press were so severe in most European
countries that opposition groups were forced into conspiratorial
activities."[5] The secret police of the Austrian Empire were particularly notorious during this period.[5] After 1860, the use of secret police declined due to increasing
liberalization, except in autocratic regimes such as the Russian Empire.[5]
In the Russian Empire, the secret police forces were the Third Section of the Imperial Chancery and then the Okhrana. After the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union established the OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MVD, and KGB.[6]
In Nazi Germany, the Geheimstaatspolizei (Secret State Police, Gestapo) (1933–1945) was used to eliminate opposition; as part of the Reich Main Security Office, it also was a vital organizer of the Holocaust. Although the Gestapo had a relatively small number membership (32,000
in 1944), "it maximized these small resources through informants and a
large number of denunciations from the local population."[7] After the defeat of the Nazis, the East German secret police, the Stasi, likewise made extensive use of an extensive network of civilian informers.[8]
Control
A single secret service may pose a potential
threat to the central political authority. Political scientist Sheena Chestnut
Greitens writes that: "When it comes to their security forces, autocrats face a fundamental 'coercing dilemma between empowerment and control.
... Autocrats must empower their security forces with enough coercing capacity
to enforce internal order and conduct external defense. Equal important to
their survival, however, they must control that capacity, to ensure it is not
turned against them."[12] Authoritarian regimes therefore attempt to engage in
"coup-proofing" (designing institutions to minimize risks of a coup).
Two methods of doing so are increasing fragmentation (i.e., dividing powers
among the regime security apparatus to prevent "any single agency from
amassing enough political power to carry out a coup") and increasing
exclusivity (i.e., purging the regime security apparatus to favor familial,
social, or ethnic groups perceived as more loyal).[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_secret_police_organizations
Federal Security Service (FSB) (Russian: Федеральная
служба
безопасности
Российской
Федерации
(ФСБ), tr. Federal'naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii,
IPA: [fʲɪdʲɪˈralʲnəjə
ˈsluʐbə bʲɪzɐˈpasnəstʲɪ
rɐˈsʲijskəj
fʲɪdʲɪˈratsɨjɪ])[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46]
AG: We all know about the battles of the Greeks against the Persians
like the battle of the Thermopylae, and the sea battle of Salamis. But very
much less is known about the wars that the Romans led against the Persians, and
lo and behold, they could never conquer them. And this is quite something to
think of, because the Romans could not duplicate the successes of Alexander the
Great, even if they had been able to defeat the Sarissa forces of the
Macedonians decisively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonian_Wars
https://www.britannica.com/event/Macedonian-Wars
http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub407/entry-6251.html
The mighty Roman Army was not able to break the mighty Persian Empire
even after it had been defeated by Alexander the Great in the years around 330
BCE. Persia or Parthia or the Sassanids or Seleucids rose again to
unprecedented heights around the first centuries CE. And the Romans were
defeated a few times very bitterly such that even one Roman Emperor who had led
his Legions against Parthia or Persia was made a slave and had to serve as
footstool for the Parthian / Persian King. Such were the bitter defeats of the
Romans against the Parthians. The Persians had learned a few important lessons
of warfare, it seems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman%E2%80%93Seleucid_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seleucid_Empire
In the following section I will give some food for thought by Lev
Gumilev, who was one of the greatest story tellers in the whole history of the
business of historians. And he was really unsurpassed in his skill of
story-telling and these were very enlightened stories. This was the Russian
side of his daimonos, the stories of the Baba Jaga of which I have
made some reference. This is the typical Russian ability to tell tall
stories, like Tolstoi and Dostojewsky, and some others, who
were masters in the age-old heritage of telling Fairy Tales but with a very
deep Psycho-Historical Background. And this art had been long lost to
the Western Europeans and Americans, who had already been converted to
perfectly one-track thinking Neuro-Robotons. The German School of Idealism
according to Hegel is one prime example of this. The only one in German
Philosophical history who could out-think this was Nietzsche, and his somewhat
ideal, Hölderlin. And consequently enough, Nietzsche followed his ideal of
Hölderlin by becoming mad himself. I have written quite a lot about the fate
and the psychology of Nietzsche, especially about the pitfalls of his kind of
philosophy. So no need to re-tell all those well-known stories here. Heidegger
had given us many clues in WHD to think about re-thinking the thoughts of
Nietzsche.
This is the Russian www where all the materials on and by Gumilev can be
found.
Gumilev, Lev: "Ethnogenesis and
the Biosphere", Progress, Moscow (1990).
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/ebe.htm
Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom: The Legend of the Kingdom of Prester
John
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/sik.htm
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/biography.htm
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/bibliography.htm
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/maps.htm#HPH
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/Article01.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov
Lev Gumilev (1912-1992). Scientific heritage of Dr. Lev N. Gumilev.
Fortunately, the copyright hunters of the Matrix will not be so
successful in Russia as they are or will be really soon now, in the Western EU.
I daresay that in about 1 year or 2 or so, in the whole of the EU www at large,
all interesting material and all interesting youtube videos will be purged out
of existence and of course out of Political and Moral Correctness. So we can be
quite lucky that there are a few interesting www-sites in Russia that cannot be
purged by the copyright hunters of the Matrix. The Russians couldn't care less
about copyright. In this they still are very copy-left-ist. Communism may be
gone or not, this doesn't interest anyone at all. The Russians are quite well
the world-class experts in circumventing any censure which anyone may concoct.
This is a very valuable lesson that the Russians had learned in so many about
70++ years of oppression by Bolshevism and Communism. Lenin, Trotzky and Stalin
were just so good teachers. And the Russians had built up something like an
immunity against Brain Washing and Propaganda. The favorite newspaper of the
Russians in the Soviet era was the Prawda or Pravda. This literally means
"Truth". And it really was. And this is no joke.
The expert Russians could read the Pravda every page, and they were able
to Double- and Triple- Think everything that the Communist Party Political
Supervisors of the Pravda tried to hide and distort. But where there is a Spy,
there is a Counter-Spy. And the Editors and Journalists who produced the Pravda
managed to hide the contents that they wanted to convey, in the plain sight of
the Communist Party Political Supervisors. There are a few coding methods that
only some very good spy-masters were able to produce. Like Anagram,
Steganography, and 2-D word code stencils.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England
Elizabeth I (7 September 1533 – 24 March 1603)[1] was Queen of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death on 24 March 1603. Sometimes
called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana or Good Queen Bess,
Elizabeth was the last of the five monarchs of the House of Tudor.
Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, his second wife, who was executed two-and-a-half years after
Elizabeth's birth. Anne's marriage to Henry VIII was annulled, and Elizabeth
was declared illegitimate. Her half-brother, Edward VI, ruled until his death in 1553, bequeathing the crown to Lady Jane Grey and ignoring the claims of his two half-sisters, Elizabeth and the Roman Catholic Mary, in spite of statute law to the contrary. Edward's will was set aside and Mary became queen, deposing Lady Jane
Grey. During Mary's reign, Elizabeth was imprisoned for nearly a year on
suspicion of supporting Protestant rebels.
In 1558 upon Mary's death, Elizabeth succeeded
her half-sister to the throne and set out to rule by good counsel.[2] She depended heavily on a group of trusted advisers, led by William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley. One of her first actions as queen was the establishment of an English
Protestant church, of which she became the Supreme Governor. This Elizabethan Religious Settlement was to evolve into the Church of England. It was expected that Elizabeth would marry and produce an heir;
however, despite numerous courtships, she never did. She was eventually
succeeded by her first cousin twice removed, James VI of Scotland. She had earlier been responsible
for the imprisonment and execution of James's mother, Mary, Queen of Scots.
https://blog.degruyter.com/cryptography-decoding-mathematics-secret-messages/
https://www.garykessler.net/library/crypto.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_cipher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cryptography
David Kahn notes in The Codebreakers that modern cryptology originated among the Arabs, the first people to systematically document cryptanalytic methods.[13] Al-Khalil (717–786) wrote the Book of Cryptographic Messages, which
contains the first use of permutations and combinations to list all possible Arabic words with and without vowels.[14]
The invention of
the frequency analysis technique for breaking
monoalphabetic substitution ciphers, by Al-Kindi, an Arab mathematician,[15][16] sometime around AD 800, proved to be the single most significant
cryptanalytic advance until World War II. Al-Kindi wrote a book on cryptography
entitled Risalah fi Istikhraj al-Mu'amma (Manuscript for the
Deciphering Cryptographic Messages), in which he described the first
cryptanalytic techniques, including some for polyalphabetic ciphers, cipher classification, Arabic phonetics and syntax, and most
importantly, gave the first descriptions on frequency analysis.[17] He also covered methods of encipherments, cryptanalysis of certain
encipherments, and statistical analysis of letters and letter combinations in
Arabic.[18][19] An important contribution of Ibn Adlan (1187–1268) was on sample size for use of frequency analysis.[14]
In early
medieval England between the years 800-1100, substitution ciphers were
frequently used by scribes as a playful and clever way encipher notes,
solutions to riddles, and colophons. The ciphers tend to be fairly
straightforward, but sometimes they deviate from an ordinary pattern, adding to
their complexity and, possibly, to their sophistication as well.[20] This period saw vital and significant cryptographic experimentation in
the West. ...
Essentially all
ciphers remained vulnerable to the cryptanalytic technique of frequency
analysis until the development of the polyalphabetic cipher, and many remained
so thereafter. The polyalphabetic cipher was most clearly explained by Leon Battista Alberti around the year AD 1467, for which
he was called the "father of Western cryptology".[1] Johannes Trithemius, in his work Poligraphia, invented the tabula recta, a critical component of the Vigenère cipher. Trithemius also wrote the
Steganographia. The French cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère devised a practical polyalphabetic
system which bears his name, the Vigenère cipher.[1]
Cryptography, cryptanalysis, and secret-agent/courier betrayal featured in the Babington plot during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I which led to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Robert Hooke suggested in the chapter Of Dr. Dee's Book of Spirits, that John Dee made use of Trithemian steganography, to conceal his communication with
Queen Elizabeth I.[22]
The chief
cryptographer of King Louis XIV of France was Antoine Rossignol and he and his
family created what is known as the Great Cipher because it remained unsolved from its initial use until 1890, when
French military cryptanalyst, Étienne Bazeries solved it.[23] An encrypted message from the time of the Man in the Iron Mask (decrypted just prior to 1900 by Étienne Bazeries) has shed some, regrettably
non-definitive, light on the identity of that real, if legendary and
unfortunate, prisoner.
Outside of
Europe, after the Mongols brought about the end of the Islamic Golden Age, cryptography remained
comparatively undeveloped. Cryptography in Japan seems not to have been used until
about 1510, and advanced techniques were not known until after the opening of
the country to the West beginning in the 1860s.
In World War I the Admiralty's Room 40 broke German naval codes and
played an important role in several naval engagements during the war, notably in detecting
major German sorties into the North Sea that led to the battles
of Dogger Bank and Jutland as the British fleet was sent
out to intercept them. However its most important contribution was probably
in decrypting the Zimmermann Telegram, a cable from the German Foreign Office
sent via Washington to its ambassador Heinrich von
Eckardt in Mexico which played a major
part in bringing the United States into the war.
The elaborate Encrypting methods that were invented by the English in
the days of Elizabeth I and the Great Armada helped them quite a bit to win
that war. And at those times there had been some good code-producers and some
code-breakers around in England. So we can even put the Warburg Library to good
use, since those were the very same people who are portrayed in the works of
the Dame Frances Yates. The Renaissance Mystics and Neo-Platonists surely knew
their ways around some codes and encryptions. The Jewish Kabbalah encryption
system had probably been the most studied and puzzled about of them all. So
every Renaissance Mystic invented his own method of decryption of the Kabbalah.
And of course the Grand Master of all this was the good Giordano Bruno. And his
master piece was "La Cena Delle Ceneri" or the Ash Wednesday Supper.
I have enlarged a little bit about this work somewhere in this text. I also
notice some puzzling details about literature about codes and en- and
de-cryption. I had read "The Code Book" by Simon Singh, and I was
quite surprised that I didn't find anything about the abovementioned cyphering
methods. This may seem strange at first, but then it is only logical. Because a
popular writer may not write anything about what is still considered a National
Secret by the British Secret Intelligence Services. Even if all the rest of the
world knows everything about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_intelligence_agencies
Their
intelligence assessments contribute to the conduct of the foreign relations of the United Kingdom, maintaining the national security of the United Kingdom, military planning and law enforcement in the United Kingdom.[1] The main organisations are
the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), the Security Service (MI5), the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and Defence Intelligence (DI).
...
The
history of the organisations goes back to the 19th century. The decryption of
the Zimmermann Telegram in 1917 was described as the most significant
intelligence triumph for Britain during World War I,[2] and one of the earliest occasions on which a piece of
signals intelligence influenced world events.[3] During the Second World War and afterwards, many observers
regarded Ultra as immensely valuable to the Allies of World War II. In the post-war period, intelligence cooperation
between the United Kingdom and the United States became the cornerstone of
Western intelligence gathering and the "Special Relationship" between the United Kingdom and the United
States.[4]
I give just a little warning about the numerical values of the Kabbalah
letters. This is a problem for the poor modern Kabbalist's like the nice
Madonna, who also likes to do some Kabbalah. For every first semester student
of ancient number systems one thing is immediately clear. The ancient Hebrews
who went to Babylon, which was the place where the Bible also was the first
time written down, and became a codex. ... They just did some plagiarizing of
the very very ancient Babylonian Archaeo-Astronomy and -Astrology. This dates
back around 7000 years, as I know from my studies of the very ancient deep
structures long before civilization even began. So the good Hebrews of ancient
Babyolon did same plagiarizing of this ancient Babylonian science. And for
those people the decimal system had just not been invented yet. They did all
their calculations in the Hexagesimal System. And there is good material to be
found on this because there was also the Indian Vedic science of
Archaeo-Astronomy and -Astrology. So the poor modern Kabbalists who try to do
the Kabbalah in decimal, are totally out of luck. And on top of this, a
Kabbalist must by needs also be an accomplished Talmudist. This is because the
Semantic Root structures lie deep behind the ancient Aramaic (and not so much
in Hebrew, which was invented much later). So when one doesn't know his/her way
around all these things, one cannot do the Kabbalah at all. And as we all know,
doing Talmud studies necessitates at least 7-10 years of concentrated studying,
so that one has no time at all except some eating a little bit and then
sleeping a little bit. Studying the Talmud is not for the faint-hearted. So you
can't get the Talmud and the Kabbalah in some evening seminars for around $$$
1000.00 a pop. Even not for the nice Madonna. And I know that Giordano Bruno talked
quite a bit about the Kabbalah, but I don't know how deeply he could descend in
the Underground of Hebrew Talmudic Thought. Quite surely the earlier
Renaissance Mystics like Marsilio Ficino and Picco della Mirandola must have
had some expert Jewish connections. Just by the way, Platon mentions in the
Timaios explicity that the lecturer Timaios had studied astronomy in Babylon.
And this is the only "dialog" in the whole of all the works of Platon
where it is not Sokarates who does all the talking, but here it is Timaios.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaios
http://www.noologie.de/plato.htm
http://www.noologie.de/infra09.htm
The wikipedia apparently doesn't know Hexagesimal as it calls it the
Sexagesimal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal
Sexagesimal (base 60) is a numeral system with sixty as its base. It originated with the ancient Sumerians in the 3rd millennium BC, was passed down to the ancient Babylonians, and is still used—in a modified form—for measuring time, angles, and geographic coordinates.
The number 60, a superior highly composite number, has twelve factors, namely 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60, of which 2, 3,
and 5 are prime numbers. With so many factors, many fractions involving sexagesimal numbers are simplified. For example, one hour can
be divided evenly into sections of 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 12
minutes, 10 minutes, 6 minutes, 5 minutes, 4 minutes, 3 minutes, 2 minutes, and
1 minute. 60 is the smallest number that is divisible by every number from 1 to
6; that is, it is the lowest common multiple of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
In this article, all sexagesimal digits are
represented as decimal numbers, except where otherwise noted. For example, 10 means the number ten and 60 means the number sixty.
It is possible for people to count on their fingers to 12 using one hand only, with the thumb pointing to each finger bone on the four fingers in turn. A traditional counting system still in use
in many regions of Asia works in this way, and could help to explain the
occurrence of numeral systems based on 12 and 60 besides those based on 10, 20
and 5. In this system, one hand counts repeatedly to 12, displaying the number
of iterations on the other, until five dozens, i. e. the 60, are full.[1][2]
According to Otto Neugebauer, the origins of sexagesimal are not as simple, consistent, or singular
in time as they are often portrayed. Throughout their many centuries of use,
which continues today for specialized topics such as time, angles, and
astronomical coordinate systems, sexagesimal notations have always contained a
strong undercurrent of decimal notation, such as in how sexagesimal digits are
written. Their use has also always included (and continues to include)
inconsistencies in where and how various bases are to represent numbers even
within a single text.[3]
The most powerful driver for rigorous, fully
self-consistent use of sexagesimal has always been its mathematical advantages
for writing and calculating fractions. In ancient texts this shows up in the
fact that sexagesimal is used most uniformly and consistently in mathematical
tables of data.[3] Another practical factor that helped expand the use of sexagesimal in
the past even if less consistently than in mathematical tables, was its decided
advantages to merchants and buyers for making everyday financial transactions
easier when they involved bargaining for and dividing up larger quantities of
goods. The early shekel in particular was one-sixtieth of a mana,[3] though the Greeks later coerced this relationship into the more base-10
compatible ratio of a shekel being one-fiftieth of a mina.
Apart from mathematical tables, the
inconsistencies in how numbers were represented within most texts extended all
the way down to the most basic Cuneiform symbols used to represent numeric quantities.[3] For example, the Cuneiform symbol for 1 was an ellipse made by applying
the rounded end of the stylus at an angle to the clay, while the sexagesimal
symbol for 60 was a larger oval or "big 1". But within the same texts
in which these symbols were used, the number 10 was represented as a circle
made by applying the round end of the style perpendicular to the clay, and a
larger circle or "big 10" was used to represent 100. Such multi-base
numeric quantity symbols could be mixed with each other and with abbreviations,
even within a single number. The details and even the magnitudes implied (since
zero was not used consistently) were idiomatic to the particular time periods,
cultures, and quantities or concepts being represented. While such
context-dependent representations of numeric quantities are easy to critique in
retrospect, in modern time we still have "dozens" of regularly used
examples (some quite "gross") of topic-dependent base mixing,
including the particularly ironic recent innovation of adding decimal fractions
to sexagesimal astronomical coordinates.[3]
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertha_von_Dechend
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet%27s_Mill
https://www.frobenius-institut.de/en/
https://www.per-aspera-ad-astra.net/index.html
Ernest G. McClain: The Myth of
Invariance. This gives us some decoding methods.
https://ernestmcclain.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/mythsofinvariance_sanscartoonsoptimized.pdf
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2003JHA....34...79I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_astronomy
Babylonian astronomy was the study or recording of celestial objects during early history Mesopotamia (a historical event in Babylonian atronomy) These records can be found
on Sumerian clay tablets, inscribed in cuneiform, dated approximately to 3500–3200 BC.[1]
In conjunction with their mythology, the Sumerians developed a form of astronomy/astrology that had an influence on Babylonian culture. Therein Planetary gods played an important role.
Babylonian astronomy seemed to have focused on
a select group of stars and constellations known as Ziqpu stars.[2] These constellations may have been collected from various earlier
sources. The earliest catalogue, Three Stars Each, mentions stars of the
Akkadian Empire, of Amurru, of Elam and others.[3]
A numbering system based on sixty was used, a sexagesimal system. This system simplified the calculating and recording of
unusually great and small numbers. The modern practices of dividing a circle
into 360 degrees, of 60 minutes each, began with the Sumerians.[4]
During the 8th and 7th centuries BC, Babylonian
astronomers developed a new empirical approach to astronomy. They began studying and recording their belief system and philosophies dealing with an ideal nature of the universe and began employing an internal logic within their predictive planetary systems. This was an important
contribution to astronomy and the philosophy of science, and some modern scholars have thus
referred to this novel approach as the first scientific revolution.[5] This approach to astronomy was adopted and further developed in Greek and Hellenistic astrology. Classical Greek and Latin sources frequently use the term Chaldeans for the astronomers of Mesopotamia, who were considered as priest-scribes specializing in astrology and other forms of divination.
The Connection Between a Calendar, Mathematics,
and Astronomy
The exploration of the Sun, Moon, and other
celestial bodies affected the development of Mesopotamian culture. The study of
the sky led to the development of a calendar and advanced mathematics in these
societies. The Babylonians were not the first complex society to develop a
calendar globally and in nearby North Africa, The Egyptians developed a
calendar of their own. The Egyptian calendar was solar based, while the
Babylonian calendar was lunar based. A potential blend between the two that has
been noted by some historians is the adoption of a crude leap year by the
Babylonians after the Egyptians developed one. The Babylonian leap year shares
no similarities with the leap year practiced today. it involved the addition of
a thirteenth month as a means to re-calibrate the calendar to better match the
growing season.[27]
Babylonian priests were the ones responsible for
developing new forms of mathematics and did so to better calculate the
movements of celestial bodies. One such priest, Nabu-rimanni, is the first
documented Babylonian astronomer. He was a priest for the moon god and is
credited with writing lunar and eclipse computation tables as well as other
elaborate mathematical calculations. The computation tables are organized in
seventeen or eighteen tables that document the orbiting speeds of planets and
the Moon. His work was later recounted by astronomers during the Seleucid
dynasty.[27]
Arithmetical and geometrical methods
Though there is a lack of surviving material on
Babylonian planetary theory,[6] it appears most of the Chaldean astronomers were concerned mainly with ephemerides and not with theory. It had been thought that most of the predictive
Babylonian planetary models that have survived were usually strictly empirical and arithmetical, and usually did not involve geometry, cosmology, or speculative philosophy like that of the later Hellenistic models,[29] though the Babylonian astronomers were concerned with the philosophy
dealing with the ideal nature of the early universe.[5] Babylonian procedure texts describe, and ephemerides employ,
arithmetical procedures to compute the time and place of significant
astronomical events.[30] More recent analysis of previously unpublished cuneiform tablets in the British Museum, dated between 350 and 50 BC, demonstrates that Babylonian astronomers
sometimes used geometrical methods, prefiguring the methods of the Oxford Calculators, to describe the motion of Jupiter over time in an abstract mathematical space.[31][32]
In contrast to Greek astronomy which was dependent upon cosmology, Babylonian astronomy was
independent from cosmology.[18] Whereas Greek astronomers expressed "prejudice in favor of circles
or spheres rotating with uniform motion", such a preference did not exist
for Babylonian astronomers, for whom uniform circular motion was never a requirement for planetary orbits.[33] There is no evidence that the celestial bodies moved in uniform
circular motion, or along celestial spheres, in Babylonian astronomy.[34]
Contributions made by the Chaldean astronomers
during this period include the discovery of eclipse cycles and saros cycles, and many accurate astronomical observations. For example, they
observed that the Sun's motion along the ecliptic was not uniform, though they were unaware of why this was; it is today known
that this is due to the Earth moving in an elliptic orbit around the Sun, with the Earth moving swifter when it is nearer to the
Sun at perihelion and moving slower when it is farther away at aphelion.[35]
Chaldean astronomers known to have followed
this model include Naburimannu (fl. 6th–3rd century BC), Kidinnu (d. 330 BC), Berossus (3rd century BCE), and Sudines (fl. 240 BCE). They are known to have had a significant influence on the Greek astronomer Hipparchus and the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy, as well as other Hellenistic astronomers.
Back to the Renaissance Mystics and the Warburg Library, where all those
books can be found, that Aby Warburg had collected. And there were some very
rare works that are pretty hard to find anywhere else on Earth. Now this is not
so difficult as it may seem at first. Because when you have a virtual
Planetarium on your Personal Computer, you can look up all those ancient star
mysteries of the wandering of the star system in the Equinoctial Precession,
right on your computer. There are enough Astronomical Computer Programs around.
These things have become so much easier since the days of Aby Warburg and
Hertha v. Dechend. You don't need all those voluminous tables any more, since
you can get the Astronomy in a program. And I suppose there are also programs
that can do the Hexagesimal number system in and out. Because calculating in
Hexagesimals makes a lot of sense for Astronomical Calculations and makes them
a lot easier than in Decimal. This is because of the multiplication factor of
the base number 12, which is not only there for the 12 disciples of Jesus, but
also for the 12 hours of the day, and the 12 Zodiac star signs and then some
more. It is quite convenient when you just multiply 12 by 5, and you get 60.
This is called the factoring method.
http://www.noologie.de/aby.htm
http://www.noologie.de/aby.pdf
https://www.purplemath.com/modules/factnumb.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization
https://www.calculator.net/factor-calculator.html
Babylonian
astronomy was the study or recording of celestial objects during early history Mesopotamia (a historical event in Babylonian atronomy) These records can be found
on Sumerian clay tablets, inscribed in cuneiform, dated approximately to 3500–3200 BC.[1]
In conjunction
with their mythology, the Sumerians developed a form of astronomy/astrology that had an influence on Babylonian culture. Therein Planetary gods played an important role.
Babylonian
astronomy seemed to have focused on a select group of stars and constellations known as Ziqpu stars.[2] These constellations may have been collected from various earlier
sources. The earliest catalogue, Three Stars Each, mentions stars of the
Akkadian Empire, of Amurru, of Elam and others.[3]
A numbering system based on sixty was used, a sexagesimal system. This system simplified the calculating and recording of
unusually great and small numbers. The modern practices of dividing a circle
into 360 degrees, of 60 minutes each, began with the Sumerians.[4]
During the 8th
and 7th centuries BC, Babylonian astronomers developed a new empirical approach to astronomy. They began studying and recording their belief system and philosophies dealing with an ideal nature of the universe and began employing an internal logic within their predictive planetary systems. This was an important
contribution to astronomy and the philosophy of science, and some modern scholars have thus
referred to this novel approach as the first scientific revolution.[5] This approach to astronomy was adopted and further developed in Greek and Hellenistic astrology. Classical Greek and Latin sources frequently use the term Chaldeans for the astronomers of Mesopotamia, who were considered as priest-scribes specializing in astrology and other forms of divination.
And since I know many of the works of the Warburg Library myself, I can
Double- and Triple- Think my own way around them. So this is a nice side effect
when you study Renaissance Mysticism and you suddenly end up with some very
valuable material about Crypting and De- Crypting Methods. Now we get to the
encoding method and how it works. I just call it Stencil Encoding, since I
don't know the right keyword to look it up in the Google. And you take a sheet
of the size of the letter that you are writing, a sort of stencil with some
appropriate holes in it, where about 10 to 20 words would fit in. So then you
write your secret message into those holes, and then you write a very lengthy
letter around these holes. Like what you tell your dear Mother-in-law what you
did this day or another, like you were just an English Tourist on his Grand
Tour but this time in the Spanish and Portuguese harbors, where the Great
Armada was just preparing their expedition to conquer England. You have to be a
little inventive since you have to write at least 15 pages of useless letter
where you can hide your code words. And then there is a double encoding.
Because when you say "ships" and "guns" and
"tonnage" and "soldiers" in your innocent letter to your
dear mother-in-law, there would be some "raising of eyebrows" as it
is said colloquially. And the good Code Breakers of the Secret Police at the
court of the King of Spain, they would surely get an idea that something else
was going on in that letter. So you make a second layer of the coding, and you
write: Piss Pots for "Ships". Farts for "Guns" and Mouse
for "Guardians" and Cats for "Soldiers". Or something like
that. So the English were very inventive at those things and they could
out-smart the smartest Spaniards. (Because the Spaniards had just thrown out
all the Jews from their country. And the Jews would have been smart enough,
since the Talmudists were of course also experts of the Kabbalah and encrypting
and decrypting). So this happens when you throw out the smartest mInds of your
country. You will have to pay the price, in blood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
The Sokal
affair, also called the Sokal hoax,[1] was a scholarly publishing sting perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New
York University and University
College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural
studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual
rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether "a leading North
American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such
luminaries as Fredric
Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it
sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological
preconceptions".[2]
The article,
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity",[3] was published in the Social Textspring/summer 1996
"Science
Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum
gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal
did not practice academic peer
review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.[4][5] Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed
in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.[2]
The hoax sparked
a debate about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by
those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including
whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social
Text; and whether Social Text had exercised appropriate
intellectual rigor.
Sokal reasoned
that if the presumption of editorial laziness was correct, the nonsensical
content of his article would be irrelevant to whether the editors would publish
it. What would matter would be ideologic obsequiousness, fawning references to deconstructionist writers,
and sufficient quantities of the appropriate jargon. Writing after the article
was published and the hoax revealed, he stated:
The results of
my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable
sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy.
The editors of Social Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion:
that "the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful
intellectual support for the progressive political project" [sec. 6]. They
apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of
the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported
conclusion.[8]
This is a short quote from the
lecture script "Was Heisst Denken?":
The script comes in different
versions for different editions.
There are some spelling errors which
are due to the US-OCR which doesn't
recognize the German Umlaute.
I Erste Stunde
(S. 1)
In das, was Denken heisst, gelangen wir, wenn wir selber denken.
Damit ein solcher Versuch glückt, mussen wir bereit sein, das
Denken zu lernen.
Sobald wir uns auf dieses Lernen einlassen, haben wir auch
schon zugestanden, dass wir das Denken noch nicht vermögen.
Aber der Mensch heisst doch der, der denken kann - und das
mit Recht. Denn er ist das vernünftige Lebewesen. Die Vernunft,
die ratio, entfaltet sich im Denken. Als das vernünftige Lebewe
sen muss der Mensch denken können, wenn er nur will. Indes will
der Mensch vielleicht denken und kann es doch nicht. Am Ende
will er bei diesem Denkenwollen zu viel und kann deshalb zu
wenig. Der Mensch kann denken, insofern er die Möglichkeit
dazu hat. Allein dieses Mögliche verbürgt uns noch nicht, dass wir
es vermögen. Denn wir vermögen nur das, was wir mögen. Aber
wir mögen wiederum wahrhaft nur Jenes, was seinerseits uns seI
ber und zwar uns in unserem Wesen mag, indem es sich unserem
Wesen als das zuspricht, was uns im Wesen halt. Halten heisst ei
gentlich hüten, auf dem Weideland weiden lassen. Was uns in
unserem Wesen halt, halt uns jedoch nur so lange, als wir selber
von uns her das Haltende be-halten. Wir be-halten es, wenn wir
es nicht aus dem Gedachtnis lassen. Das Gedachtnis ist die Ver
sammlung des Denkens. Worauf? Auf das, was uns halt, insofern
es bei uns bedacht ist, bedacht namlich deshalb, weil Es das
zu-Bedenkende bleisst. Das Bedachte ist das mit einem Andenken
Beschenkte, beschenkt, weil wir es mögen. Nur wenn wir das
mögen, was in sich das zu-Bedenkende ist, vermögen wir das
Denken.
Urn das Denken zu vermögen, müssen wir es lernen. Was ist
Lernen? Der Mensch lernt, insofern er sein Tun und Lassen zu
dem in die Entsprechung bringt, was ihm jeweils an Wesenhaf
tern zugesprochen wird. Das Denken lernen wir, indem wir auf
das achten, was es zu bedenken gibt.
(S. 2)
Unsere Sprache nennt z. B. das, was zum Wesen des Freundes
gehort, das Freundliche. Dementsprechend nennen wir jetzt das,
was in sich das zu-Bedenkende ist: das Bedenkliche. Alles Be-
denkliche gibt zu denken. Aber es gibt diese Gabe immer nur in
soweit, als das Bedenkliche von sich her schon das zu-Bedenkende
ist. Wir nennen jetzt und in der Folge dasjenige, was stets, weil
einsther und allem voraus, zu bedenken bleisst: das Bedenklichste.
Was ist das Bedenklichste? Wie zeigt es sich in unserer bedenkli-
chen Zeit?
Das Bedenklichste ist, dass wir noch nicht denken; immer noch
nicht, obgleich der Weltzustand fortgesetzt bedenklicher wird.
Dieser Vorgang scheint freilich eher zu fordern, dass der Mensch
handelt und zwar ohne Verzug, statt in Konferenzen und auf
Kongressen zu reden und sich im blossen Vorstellen dessen zu be-
wegen, was sein sollte und wie es gemacht werden mtisste. Somit
fehlt es am Handeln und keineswegs am Denken.
Dnd dennoch - vielleicht hat der bisherige Mensch seit Jahr-
hunderten bereits zu viel gehandelt und zu wenig gedacht. Aber
wie kann heute jemand behaupten, dass wir noch nicht denken,
wo doch tiberall das Interesse für die Philosophie rege ist und
immer lauter wird, wo beinahe jedermann wissen will, was es
denn mit der Philosophie auf sich hat. Die Philosophen sind
»die« Denker. So heiBen sie, weil sich das Denken eigentlich in
der Philosophie abspielt.
Niemand wird bestreiten wollen, dass heute ein Interesse für
die Philosophie besteht. Doch gibt es heute noch etwas, wofür der
Mensch sich nicht interessiert, in der Weise namlich, wie er das
»interessieren« versteht?
Inter-esse heisst: unter und zwischen den Sachen sein, mitten
in einer Sache stehen und bei ihr bleiben. Allein für das heutige
Interesse gilt nur das Interessante. Das ist solches, was erlaubt, im
nachsten Augenblick schon gleichgtiltig zu sein und durch ande
res abgelost zu werden, was einen dann ebensowenig angeht wie
das Vorige. Man meint heute oft, etwas dadurch besonders zu
wtirdigen, dass man es interessant findet. In Wahrheit hat man
durch dieses Urteil das Interessante bereits in das Gleichgtiltige
und alsbald Langweilige abgeschoben.
DaB man für die Philosophie ein Interesse zeigt, bezeugt noch
keine Bereitschaft zum Denken. GewiB gibt es allenthalben eine
ernsthafte Beschaftigung mit der Philosophie und ihren Fragen.
Es gibt einen rtihmenswerten Aufwand von Gelehrsamkeit zur
Erforschung ihrer Geschichte. Hier bestehen nützliche und lobli
che Aufgaben, zu deren Erftillung nur die besten Krafte gut ge
nug sind, zumal dann,
(S. 3)
wenn sie uns Vorbilder groBen Denkens
vor Augen ftihren. Aber selbst die Tatsache, dass wir uns Jahre
hindurch mit den Abhandlungen und Schriften der groBen Den
ker eindringlich abgeben, leistet noch nicht die Gewahr, dass wir
selber denken oder auch nur bereit sind, das Denken zu lernen.
1m Gegenteil: die Beschaftigung mit der Philosophie kann uns
sogar am hartnackigsten den Anschein vorgaukeln, dass wir den
ken, weil wir doch unablassig »philosophieren«.
Gleichwohl bleisst es befremdlich und erscheint als anmaBend
zu behaupten, das Bedenklichste in unserer bedenklichen Zeit
sei, dass wir noch nicht denken. Darum mtissen wir diese Behaup
tung beweisen. Noch ratsamer ist indessen, die Behauptung erst
einmal zu erlautern. Es konnte namlich der Fall eintreten, dass
die Forderung nach einem Beweis hinfallig wird, sobald eine ge
niigende Helle in das kommt, was die Behauptung sagt. Sie lautet:
Das Bedenklichste in unserer bedenklichen Zeit ist, dajJ wir noch
nicht denken.
Wie der Name »das Bedenkliche« zu verstehen sei, wurde be
reits angedeutet. Es ist das, was uns zu denken gibt. Beachten wir
es wohl und lassen wir jetzt schon jedem Wort sein Gewicht. Es
gibt solches, was selber, von sich her, gleichsam von seinem Haus
aus, uns zu denken gibt. Es gibt solches, das uns daraufhin an
spricht, dass wir auf es 'bedacht sind, dass wir, denkend, ihm uns
zuwenden: es denken.
Das Bedenkliche, das, was uns zu denken gibt, ist demnach kei
neswegs durch uns festgesetzt, nicht durch uns erst aufgestellt,
nicht durch uns nur vor-gestellt. Was am meisten von sich aus zu
denken gibt, das Bedenklichste, ist nach der Behauptung dies: dass
wir noch nicht denken.
Dies sagt jetzt: wir sind noch nicht vor das und noch nicht in
den Bereich dessen gelangt, was von sich her in einem wesentli
chen Sinne bedacht sein mochte. Dies wird vermutlich daran lie
gen, dass wir Menschen uns dem, was bedacht sein mochte, noch
nicht hinreichend zu-wenden. Dann ware dies, dass wir noch
nicht denken, lediglich eine Saumnis, eine Verzogerung im Den
ken oder, wenn es hoch kommt, ein Versaumnis von seiten des
Menschen. Daher konnte einer solchen menschlichen Saumselig
keit auf menschliche Weise durch geeignete MaBnahmen abge
holfen werden. Das menschliche Versaumnis gabe zwar zu den
ken, aber doch nur vorubergehend. DaB wir noch nicht denken,
ware zwar bedenklich, durfte jedoch als dieser augenblickliche
und behebbare Zustand des heutigen Menschen nie-
(S. 4)
mals das Bedenklichste schlechthin genannt werden. Wir nennen es aber so
und deuten hierdurch folgendes an: dass wir noch nicht denken,
liegt keineswegs nur daran, dass der Mensch sich noch nicht ge
nugend dem zuwendet, was von Haus aus bedacht sein mochte,
weil es in seinem Wesen das zu-Denkende bleisst. Dass wir noch
nicht denken, kommt vielmehr daher, dass dieses zu-Denkende
selbst sich yom Menschen abwendet, langher schon abgewendet
hat.
Sogleich werden wir wissen wollen, wann dies geschah. Wir
werden vordem schon und noch begieriger fragen, wie wir denn
überhaupt von einem solchen Ereignis wissen konnen. Die auf
der Lauer liegenden Fragen solcher Art uberstürzen sich voll
ends, wenn wir dazu noch dieses sagen: das, was uns eigentlich zu
denken gibt, hat sich nicht irgendwann zu einer historisch datier
baren Zeit yom Menschen abgewendet, sondern: das eigentlich
zu-Denkende halt sich von einsther in solcher Abwendung.
Andererseits hat der Mensch unserer Geschichte immer in ir-
gendeiner Weise gedacht; er hat sogar Tiefstes gedacht und dem
Gedächtnis anvertraut. Als der so Denkende blieb er und bleisst er
auf das zu-Denkende bezogen. Gleichwohl vermag der Mensch
nicht eigentlich zu denken, solange sich das zu-Denkende entzieht.
Wenn wir nun, so wie wir jetzt hier sind, uns nichts vorreden
lassen, mtissen wir das bisher Gesagte als eine einzige Kette lee
rer Behauptungen zuruckweisen und auBerdem erklaren, dass das
Vorgebrachte mit Wissenschaft nichts zu tun hat.
Es wird gut sein, wenn wir möglichst lange in solcher Abwehr
haltung zu dem Gesagten ausharren; denn so aIlein halten wir
uns in dem notigen Abstand für einen Anlauf, aus dem her viel
leicht dem einen oder anderen der Sprung in das Denken gelingt.
Es ist namlich wahr, dass das bisher Gesagte und die ganze folgen
de Erörterung mit Wissenschaft nichts zu tun hat, gerade dann,
wenn die Erörterung ein Denken sein dürfte. Der Grund dieses
Sachverhaltes liegt darin, dass die Wissenschaft ihrerseits nicht
denkt und nicht denken kann und zwar zu ihrem Gluck und das
heisst hier zur Sicherung ihres eigenen festgelegten Ganges.
Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht.
Das ist ein anstössiger Satz. Lassen wir
dem Satz seinen anstössigen Charakter auch dann, wenn wir so
gleich den Nachsatz anfügen, dass die Wissenschaft es gleichwohl
stets und auf ihre besondere Weise mit dem Denken zu tun hat.
Diese Weise ist allerdings nur dann eine echte und in der Folge
keine abschätzige Beurteilung; keine Feststellung einer Tatsache; vielmehr
eine Wesensbestimmung (das »nicht« kein Versäumnis sondern »Verweigerung«):
dies sagt: die Wissenschaft hat die Seinsweise ihres Gebietes als solche nicht zum
Thema - ihrem Thema - kann dieses uberhaupt nicht haben -
Denken im Sinne der Denker
Denken bestimmt von seinem Geheiss her das Geheiss des Austrags. -
»Zur Sache des Denkens« Seinsgeschick und ontologische Differenz
Wissenschaft und Besinnung - Technisch und politisch masslos
AG: There is quite a similarity
between the thought of Gregory Bateson and my own type of Meta-Morphology. I
have at some time been a disciple of Bateson. The information, or the difference
that makes a difference is one of the main themes. Meta- Morphology is just
another way of expressing this. The change of form is a difference. And the
cumulations of changes of form is the cumulation of differences that make a
difference.
http://www.oikos.org/angelsfear.htm
I Introduction
II The
World of Mental Process (GB)
III Metalogue:
Why Do You Tell Stories? (MCB)
We acknowledge the generosity of M.
C. Bateson for the permission to publish in this site two chapters of Angels
Fear by G. Bateson.
This pages are protected by
copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.
ANGELS FEAR: TOWARDS AN EPISTEMOLOGY
OF THE SACRED
Gregory Bateson & Mary Catherine
Bateson
Full fathom five thy father lies;
of his bones are coral made;
Those pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Seanymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them, Ding-dong,
bell.
SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest
Acknowledgments xi
I Introduction
(MCB & GB) 1
II The
World of Mental Process (GB) 16
III Metalogue:
Why Do You Tell Stories? (MCB) 31
IV The
Model (GB) 36
V Neither
Supernatural nor Mechanical (GB) 50
VI Metalogue:
Why Placebos? (MCB) 65
VII Let
Not Thy Left Hand Know (GB) 69
VIII Metalogue:
Secrets (MCB) 82
IX Defenses
of Faith (GB) 88
X Metalogue:
Are You Creeping Up? (MCB) 100
XI The
Messages of Nature and Nurture (GB) 110
XII Metalogue:
Addiction (MCB & GB) 125
XIII The
Unmocked God (GB) 135
XIV Metalogue:
It’s Not Here (MCB) 145
XV The
Structure in the Fabric (GB) 151
XVI Innocence
and Experience (GB & MCB) 167
XVII So
What’s a Meta For? (MCB) 183
XVIII Metalogue: Persistent Shade (MCB) 201
Glossary 206
Notes on Chapter Sources 213
Index 216
It was six years ago that I undertook to complete the book my
father was working on at the time of his death, and a great deal has happened
in the interval. My first thanks should go to those who have waited patiently
for a work they were already anxiously looking forward to, my father's widow,
Lois Bateson, other family members, my father's publisher, and common friends
and colleagues, who have exercised great restraint in pressing for completion.
A number of institutions have played
a role in making this work possible, particularly in providing the settings and
contexts for Gregory's work and thought: the Esalen Institute, the Camaldolese
Hermitage in Big Sur, San Francisco Zen Center, the Lindisfarne Association.
The Institute for Intercultural Studies has formal disposition of my father's
literary estate and provided me with a computer on which the manuscript was
typed. Amherst College facilitated this work by permitting me to go off salary
and put necessary distance between myself and that institution, making
concentrated work and creative thought possible.
This book has had the same agent,
John Brockman, and editor, William Whitehead, since it was first conceived, and
these two have been highly supportive in keeping it alive through changes in
both authorship and publisher. Other individuals who played an important role
include Lois Bateson, my brother, John Bateson, at whose home in British
Columbia several chapters were composed, Joseph and Jane Wheelwright. More
recently, I have benefited from help and suggestions from Rodney Donaldson,
Richard Goldsby, Jean Houston, David Sofield, William Irwin Thompson, and
Francisco Varela, each of whom has contributed a valuable perspective, whether
for change or for restraint.
Most of my work on this book has
been done in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the support of my most enlivening
critic, my husband, Barkev Kassarjian. I have also relied on the companionship
of a large, sweet Akita puppy who tirelessly assures me that epistemology is
indeed a matter of relationship and comforts me for the vagaries of the
computer.
MCB
Cambridge, Massachusetts
August 1986
I Introduction (MCB & GB)
In 1978, my father, Gregory Bateson,
completed the book titled Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Dutton, 1979).
Under the threat of imminent death from cancer, he had called me from Tehran to
California so we could work on it together. Almost immediately, as it became
clear that the cancer was in extended remission he started work on a new book,
to be called Where Angels Fear to Tread, but often referred to by him as Angels
Fear. In June 1980 I came out to Esalen, where he was living, having heard that
his health was again deteriorating, and be proposed that we collaborate on the
new book, this time as coauthors. He died on July 4, without our having had the
opportunity to begin work, and after his death I set the manuscript aside while
I followed through on other commitments, including the writing of With a
Daughter's Eye (Morrow, 1984), which was already under way. Now at last,
working with the stack of manuscript Gregory left at his death --miscellaneous,
unintegrated, and incomplete -- I have tried to make of it the collaboration he
intended.
It has not seemed to me urgent to
rush this work forward. Indeed, I have been concerned on my own part to respect
the warning buried in Gregory’s title: not, as a fool, to rush in. The real
synthesis of Gregory's work is in Mind and Nature, the first of his books
composed to communicate with the nonspecialist reader. Steps to an Ecology of
Mind (Chandler, 1972, and Ballantine, 1975) had brought together the best of
Gregory's articles and scientific papers, written for a variety of specialist
audiences and published in a multiplicity of contexts, and in the process
Gregory became fully aware of the potential for integration. The appearance of
Steps also demonstrated the existence of an audience eager to approach
Gregory's work as a way of thinking, regardless of the historically shifting
contexts in which it had first been formulated, and this moved him along to a
new synthesis and a new effort of communication.
Where Angels Fear to Tread was to be
different. He had become aware gradually that the unity of nature he had
affirmed in Mind and Nature might only be comprehensible through the kind of
metaphors familiar from religion; that, in fact, he was approaching that
integrative dimension of experience he called the sacred. This was a matter he
approached with great trepidation, partly because he bad been raised in a
dogmatically atheistic household and partly because he saw the potential in
religion for manipulation, obscurantism, and division. The mere use of the word
religion is likely to trigger reflexive misunderstanding. The title of the book
therefore expresses, among other things, his hesitation and his sense of
addressing new questions, questions that follow from and depend upon his
previous work but require a different kind of wisdom, a different kind of
courage. I feel the same trepidation. This work is a testament but one that
passes on a task not to me only but to all those prepared to wrestle with such
questions.
In preparing this book, I have had
to consider a number of traditions about how to deal with a manuscript left
uncompleted at the time of a death. The most obvious and scholarly alternative
was that of scrupulously separating our voices, with a footnote or a bracket
every time I made an editorial change and a sic every time I refrained when my
judgment suggested that a change was needed. However, since it was Gregory’s
own intention that we complete this manuscript together, I decided not to
follow the route of the disengaged editor, so I have corrected and made minor
alterations in his sections as needed. The original manuscripts will, of
course, be preserved, so that if the work proves to merit that kind of
attention, someone someday can write a scholarly monograph about the
differences between manuscripts and published text that incorporates the work
of us both. I will limit my scrupulosity to the preservation of the sources.
After some hesitation, I decided not to supplement the materials Gregory had
designated for possible use in this book by drawing extensively on his other
writings, but I have made omissions and choices, as Gregory would have.
Material that partly duplicates previous publications, however, has often been
retained for its contribution to the overall argument.
On the other hand, where my
additions or disagreements were truly substantive, I have not been prepared
simply to slip them in, writing prose that the reader might mistake for
Gregory's own. This would be to return to the role of amanuensis, the role I
was cast in for Mind and Nature, in which I merged all of my contributions in
his, as wives and daughters have done for centuries. The making of this book
has itself been a problem of ecology and of epistemology, because Gregory's
knowing was embedded in a distinctive pattern of relationship and conversation.
Thus, it seemed important that when
I made significant additions, it should be clear that these, right or wrong,
were my own. I have chosen to do this partly in the form of inserted sections,
set in square brackets, and partly in the form of what Gregory called metalogues.
Over a period of nearly forty years, Gregory used a form of dialogue he had
developed between "Father" and "Daughter," putting comments
and questions into the mouth of a fictionalized "Daughter," asking
the perennial question "Daddy, why . . . " to allow himself to
articulate his own thinking. Over a period of about twenty years, we actually
worked together, sometimes on written texts, sometimes in public dialogue or
dialogue within the framework of a larger conference, and sometimes across the
massive oak table in the Bateson household, arguing our way towards clarity.
The fictional character he had created, who initially incorporated only
fragmentary elements of fact in our relationship, grew older, becoming less
fictional in two ways: "Daughter" came to resemble me more fully, and
at the same time I modeled my own style of interaction with Gregory on hers.
This was a gradual process. Part of
the dilemma I faced in deciding how to deal with the materials Gregory left was
that he never defined what he was doing in relation to me. He attributed words
to a character named "Daughter," words that were sometimes real and
sometimes imagined, sometimes plausible and sometimes quite at odds with
anything I might have said. Now I have had to deal with an uncompleted
manuscript left by him, using my own experience of the occasions we worked
together and my understanding of the issues as guides. The lines given to
"Father" in these metalogues are sometimes things Gregory said in
other contexts, often stones he told repeatedly. But these did not, as
conversations, ever occur as presented here. They are just as real – and just
as fictional – as the metalogues Gregory wrote himself. Like Gregory, I have
found the form sufficiently useful and flexible not to observe stringently his
original requirement that each metalogue exemplify its subject matter in its
form, but, unlike his metalogues, the ones in this book were not designed to
stand separately. Nevertheless, it seems important to emphasize that the
father-daughter relationship continues to be a rather precise vehicle for
issues that Gregory wanted to address because it functions as a reminder that
the conversation is always moving between intellect and emotion, always dealing
with relationship and communication, within and between systems. Above all, the
metalogues contain the questions and comments I would have raised had we worked
on this manuscript together, as well as my best approximation of what Gregory
would have said. I have also allowed myself near the end to emerge from the
child role of the metalogues and to write in my own present voice. Each section
of the book is labeled "GB" or "MCB," but this should be
understood to be very approximate, meaning no more than "primarily GB"
or "primarily MCB." The section of Notes on Chapter Sources provides
further detail.
At the top of the stack of materials
Gregory had accumulated for the book was a draft introduction, one of several,
that began with this story:
"In England when I was a boy,
every railroad train coming in from a long run was inspected by a man with a
hammer. The hammer had a very small head and a very long handle, rather like a
drumstick, and it was indeed designed to make a sort of music. The man walked
down the whole length of the train, tapping every hotbox as he walked. He was
testing to find out if any one was cracked and would therefore emit a
discordant sound. The integration, we may say, had to be tested again and
again. Similarly, I have tried to tap every sentence in the book to test for faults
of integration. It was often easier to hear the discordant note of the false
juxtaposition than to say for what harmony I was searching."
I only wish that in drafting an
introduction Gregory had been describing something he had actually done rather
than something he still aspired to do. Gregory was working in an interval of
unknown length while his cancer was in remission. He was living at Esalen, an
environment where he had warm friendships but not close intellectual
collaborations. Even though the "counterculture" has faded in the
1980s, Gregory's occasional references to it provide a clarifying contrast for
the shifting population and preoccupations of Esalen underlined his essential
alienation. Always, for Gregory, the problem was to get the ideas and the words
right, but his life-style in that last period, without a permanent base or a
steady source of income, required that he keep on producing, reiterating, and
recombining the various elements of his thought as he sang for his supper, but
without doing the tuning or making the integration that they needed. It also
meant that Gregory, always sparing in his reading, was more cut off than ever
before from ongoing scientific work. He combined great and continuing
originality with a store of tools and information acquired twenty years
earlier. In effect, his groping poses a challenge to readers to make their own
creative synthesis, combining his insights with the tools and information
available today, advances in cognitive science, molecular biology, and systems
theory that are nonetheless still subject to the kinds of muddle and
intellectual vulgarity he warned against.
There is no way that I can make this
manuscript into what Gregory wanted it to be, and at some level I doubt that
Gregory could have done so or that we could have done it together. Certainly
what he wanted was still amorphous at the time of his death, the thinking still
incomplete. But although the ideas were not yet in full flower, they were
surely implicit in the process of growth.
Surely, too, the richest legacy lies
in his questions and in his way of formulating questions.
In the autumn after the completion
of Mind and Nature, living at Esalen, Gregory wrote several poems, one of which
seems to me to express what he felt he had attempted in the work just
completed, and perhaps an aspiration for the work that lay ahead.
So there it is in words
Precise
And if you read between the lines
You will find nothing there
For that is the discipline I ask
Not more, not less
Not the world as it is
Nor ought to be –
Only the precision
The skeleton of truth
I do not dabble in emotion
Hint at implications
Evoke the ghosts of old forgotten
creeds
All that is for the preacher
The hypnotist, therapist and
missionary
They will come after me
And use the little that I said
To bait more traps
For those who cannot bear
The lonely
Skeleton
of Truth
Because Gregory's manuscript did not
yet correspond to this aspiration, I could not read it as the poem commands. It
has not been possible for me to avoid reading between the lines -- indeed, that
has often been the only way I could proceed. Often, too, working within the
context of a metalogue, I have deliberately admitted emotion and evocation. In
fact, Gregory's own language was often highly evocative. His ambition was to
achieve formalism but as he groped and ruminated, he often relied on less
rigorous forms of discourse.
The poem is important here, however,
not only for what it asserts about method and style, but because it proposes a
context for interpretation. In this poem, Gregory was expressing real caution
and irritation. A great many people, recognizing that Gregory was critical of
certain kinds of materialism, wished him to be a spokesman for an opposite
faction, a faction advocating the kind of attention they found comfortable to
things excluded by atomistic materialism: God, spirits, ESP, "the ghosts
of old forgotten creeds." Gregory was always in the difficult position of
saying to his scientific colleagues that they were failing to attend to critically
important matters, because of methodological and epistemological premises
central to Western science for centuries, and then turning around and saying to
his most devoted followers, when they believed they were speaking about these
same critically important matters, that the way they were talking was nonsense.
In Gregory's view, neither group was
able to talk sense, for nothing sensible could be said about these matters,
given the version of the Cartesian separation of mind and matter that has become
habitual in Western thought. Again and again he returns to his rejection of
this dualism: mind without matter cannot exist; matter without mind can exist
but is inaccessible. Transcendent deity is an impossibility. Gregory wanted to
continue to speak to both sides of our endemic dualism, wanted indeed to invite
them to adopt a monism, a unified view of the world that would allow for both
scientific precision and systematic attention to notions that scientists often
exclude.
As Gregory affirmed in his poem, he
had a sense of his thinking as skeletal. This is a double claim: on the one
hand, it is a claim of formalism and rigor; on the other hand, it is a claim to
deal with fundamentals, with what underlies the proliferation of detail in
natural phenomena. However, it was not dry bones that he aspired to outline but
the functioning framework of life, life that in the widest sense includes the
entire living planet throughout its evolution.
In attempting to rethink these
issues, Gregory had arrived at a strategy of redefinition, a strategy of taking
words like "Love" or "wisdom, " "mind" or
"the sacred" -- the words for matters that the nonmaterialists feel
are important and that scientists often regard as inaccessible to study -- and
redefining them by invoking the conceptual tools of cybernetics. In his
writing, technical terms occur side by side with the words of ordinary
language, but these less daunting words are often redefined in unfamiliar ways.
(A glossary has been provided at the end of the book.)
Inevitably, this attracted several
kinds of criticism: criticism from those most committed to the orthodoxy of the
meaninglessness of these terms, asserting that they are impermissible in
scientific discourse; criticism from those committed to other kinds of
religious and philosophical orthodoxy, arguing that these terms already have
good, established meanings which Gregory failed to understand and respect; and,
finally, the criticism that to use a term in an idiosyncratic way or to give it
an idiosyncratic definition is a form of rhetorical dishonesty -- one for which
Alice taxed Humpty Dumpty.
In fact, Gregory was endeavoring to
do with words like "mind" or "love" what the physicists did
with words like force, energy, or mass, even though the juxtaposition of a
rigorous definition with fuzzy popular usage can be a continual source of
problems. It is a pedagogue's trick, counting on the redefined term to be at
once memorable and grounded, to be relevant both to general discourse and
matters of value. But what is most important to Gregory is that his
understanding of such words as "mind" should be framed in precision,
able to coexist with mathematical formalism.
The central theme of Mind and Nature
was that evolution is a mental process. This was shorthand for the assertion
that evolution is systemic and that the process of evolution shares key
characteristics with other systemic processes, including thought. The aggregate
of these characteristics provided Gregory with his own definition for the words
"mental" and "mind, " words that had become virtually taboo
in scientific discourse. This allowed him to emphasize what interested him most
about thought and evolution, that they are in an important sense analogous:
they share a "pattern which connects," so that a concentration on
their similarities will lead to significant new insight with regard to each,
particularly the way in which each allows for something like anticipation or
purpose. The choice of such a word as "mind" is deliberately
evocative, reminding the reader of the range of issues proposed by these words
in the past and suggesting that these are properly matters for passion.
Similarly, Gregory has found a place
to stand and speak of "God," somewhere between those who find the
word unusable and those who use it all too often to argue positions that
Gregory regarded as untenable. Playfully, he proposed a new name for the deity,
but in full seriousness he searched for an understanding of the related but
more general term "the sacred," moving gingerly and cautiously onto
holy ground, "where angels fear to tread." Given what we know about
the biological world (that knowledge that Gregory called "ecology,"
with considerable cybernetic revision of the usage of this term by members of
the contemporary biological profession), and given what we are able to
understand about "knowing" (what Gregory called
"epistemology," again within a cybernetic framework), he was
attempting to clarify what one might mean by "the sacred." Might the
concept of the sacred refer to matters intrinsic to description, and thus be
recognized as part of "necessity"? And if a viable clarity could be
achieved, would it allow important new insight? It seems possible that a mode
of knowing that attributes a certain sacredness to the organization of the
biological world might be, in some significant sense, more accurate and more
appropriate to decision making.
Gregory was quite clear that the
matters discussed in Mind and Nature, the various ways of looking at the
biological world and at thought, were necessary preliminaries to the challenge
of this present volume, although they are not fully argued here. In this book
he approached a set of questions that were implicit in his work over a very
long period, again and again pushed back: not only the question of "the
sacred," but also the question of "the aesthetic, " and the
question of "consciousness. "
This was a constellation of issues
which, for Gregory, needed to be addressed in order to arrive at a theory of
action in the living world, a cybernetic ethics, and it is this that I have
listened for above all in his drafts. Imagining himself at the moment of
completion, Gregory wrote, "It was still necessary to study the resulting
sequences and to state in words the nature of their music." This is necessary
still, and can in some measure be attempted, for the implicit waits to be
discovered, like a still-unstated theorem in geometry, hidden within the
axioms. Between the lines? Perhaps. For Gregory did not have time to make sure
that the words were complete.
II. DEFINING THE TASK (GB)
The actual writing of this book has
been a research, an exploration step by step into a subject matter whose
overall shape became visible only gradually as coherence emerged and discord
was eliminated.
It is easier to say what the book is
not about than to define the harmony for which I was searching. It is not about
psychology or economics or sociology, except insofar as these are chiaroscuro
within some larger body of knowledge. It is not exactly about ecology or
anthropology. There is the still wider subject called epistemology, which
transcends all the others, and it seems that the glimpses of an order higher
than that of any of these disciplines have come when I have touched on the fact
of anthropological and ecological order.
The book, then, is a comparative
study of matters that arise from anthropology and local epistemology. As
anthropologists we study the ethics of every people and go on from there to
study comparative ethics. We try to see the particular and local ethics of each
tribe against a background of our knowledge of ethics in other systems.
Similarly it is possible, and begins to be fashionable, to study the
epistemology of every people, the structures of knowing and the pathways of
computation. From this kind of study it is natural to go on to compare the
epistemology implicit in one cultural system with that in other systems.
But what is disclosed when
comparative ethics and comparative epistemology are set side by side? And when
both are combined with economics? And when all is compared with morphogenesis
and comparative anatomy?
Such comparison will inevitably
drive the investigator back to the elemental details of what is happening. He
must make up his mind about the universal minima of the overlapping of all
these fields of study. The minima are not parts of any one field; they are not
parts even of behavioral science at all. They are parts, if you will, of
necessity. Some are what Saint Augustine called Eternal Verities, others are
perhaps what Jung called archetypes. These fundamentals, which must underlie
all of our thought, are the subject matter of the next section.
Of course, the anthropologist and
the epistemologist, the psychologist and the students of history and economics
will all have to deal, each in his or her field of concentration, with every
one of these Eternal Verities. But the verities are not the subject matter of
any special field and are, indeed, commonly concealed and avoided by the
concentration of attention upon the problems proper to each specialized field.
Many before me, aware of these
higher levels of order and organization and sense, including Saint Augustine
himself, have attempted to share their discoveries with those who came after.
There is a vast literature of such sharing. In particular, every one of the
great religions has contributed texts to the unraveling of these matters -- or
sometimes to their further obfuscation.
Again, many of the contributions of
the past have been made within the historically unique context of science, and
yet today the intellectual preoccupation with quantity, the artificiality of
experiment, and the dualism of Descartes combine to make these matters even
more difficult of access than they have been heretofore. Science, for good
reason, is impatient of muddled definitions and foggy confusions of logical
typing, but in attempting to avoid these dangers, it has precluded discussion
of matters of first -- indeed of primary -- importance.
It is, alas, too true, however, that
muddleheadedness has helped the human race to find "God." Today, in
any Christian, Buddhist, or Hindu sermon, you are likely to hear the mystic's
faith extolled and recommended for reasons that should raise the hackles of any
person undrugged and unhypnotized. No doubt the discussion of high orders of
regularity in articulate language is difficult, especially for those who are
untrained in verbal precision, so they may be forgiven if they take refuge in
the cliché "Those who talk don't know, and those who know don't
talk." If the cliché were true, it would follow that all the vast and
often beautiful mystical literature of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and
Christianity must have been written by persons who did not know what they were
writing about.
Be that as it may, I claim no
originality, only a certain timeliness. It cannot now be wrong to contribute to
this vast literature. I claim not uniqueness but membership in a small minority
who believe that there are strong and clear arguments for the necessity of the
sacred, and that these arguments have their base in an epistemology rooted in
improved science and in the obvious. I believe that these arguments are
important at the present time of widespread skepticism -- even that they are
today as important as the testimony of those whose religious faith is based on
inner light and "cosmic" experience. Indeed, the steadfast faith of
an Einstein or a Whitehead is worth a thousand sanctimonious utterances from
traditional pulpits.
In the Middle Ages, it was
characteristic of theologians to attempt a rigor and precision that today
characterize only the best science. The Summa theologica of Saint Thomas
Aquinas was the thirteenth-century equivalent of today's textbooks of
cybernetics. Saint Thomas divided all created things into four classes: (a) those
which just are -- as stones; (b) those which are and live -- as plants; (c)
those which are and live and move -- as animals; and (d) those which are and
live and move and think -- as men. He knew no cybernetics and (unlike
Augustine) he was no mathematician, but we can immediately recognize here a
prefiguring of some classification of entities based upon the number of logical
types represented in their self-corrective and recursive loops of adaptation.
Saint Thomas's definition of Deadly
Sin is marked with the same latent sophistication. A sin is recognized as
"deadly" if its commission promotes further committing of the same
sin by others, "in the manner of a final cause." (I note that,
according to this definition, participation in an armaments race is among the
sins that are deadly.) In fact, the mysterious "final causes" of
Aristotle, as interpreted by Saint Thomas, fit right in with what modern
cybernetics calls positive feedback, providing a first approach to the problems
of purpose and causality [especially when causality appears not to flow with
the flow of time].
One wonders whether later theology
was not in many ways less sophisticated than that of the thirteenth century. It
is as if the thought of Descartes (1596-1650), especially the dualism of mind
and matter, the cogito, and the Cartesian coordinates, were the climax of a
long decadence. The Greek belief in final causes was crude and primitive, but
it seemingly left the way open for a monistic view of the world, a way that
later ages closed and finally buried by the dualistic separation of mind and
matter, [which set many important and mysterious phenomena outside of the
material sphere that could be studied by science, leaving mind separate from
body and God outside of the creation and both ignored by scientific thinking].1
For me, the Cartesian dualism was a
formidable barrier, and it may amuse the reader to be told how I achieved a
sort of monism -- the conviction that mind and nature form a necessary unity,
in which there is no mind separate from body and no god separate from his
creation and how, following that, I learned to look with new eyes at the
integrated world. That was not how I was taught to see the world when I began
work. The rules then were perfectly clear: in scientific explanation, there
should be no use of mind or deity, and there should be no appeal to final
causes. All causality should flow with the flow of time, with no effect of the
future upon the present or the past. No deity, no teleology, and no mind should
be postulated in the universe that was to be explained.
This very simple and rigorous creed
was a standard for biology that had dominated the biological scene for 150
years. This particular brand of materialism had become fanatical following the
publication of William Paley's Evidences of Christianity (in 1794, fifteen
years before Lamarck's Philosophie zoologique and sixty-five years before On
the Origin of Species). To mention "mind" or "teleology" or
the "inheritance of acquired characters" was heresy in biological circles
in the first forty years of the present century. And I am glad I learned that
lesson well.
So well that I even wrote an
anthropological book, Naven,2 within the orthodox antiteleological frame, but,
of course, the rigorous limitation of the premises had the effect of displaying
their inadequacy. It was clear that upon those premises the culture could never
be stable but would go into escalating change to its own destruction. That
escalation I called schismogenesis and I distinguished two principal forms it
might take, but I could not in 1936 see any real reason why the culture had
survived so long, [or how it could include self-corrective mechanisms that
anticipated the danger]. Like the early Marxists, I thought that escalating
change must always lead to climax and destruction of the status quo.
I was ready then for cybernetics
when this epistemology was proposed by Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and
others at the famous Macy Conferences. Because I already had the idea of
positive feedback (which I was calling schismogenesis), the ideas of
self-regulation and negative feedback fell for me immediately into place. I was
off and running with paradoxes of purpose and final cause more than
half-resolved, and aware that their resolution would require a step beyond the
premises within which I had been trained.
In addition, I went to the
Cybernetics Conferences with another notion which I had developed during World
War II and which turned out to fit with a central idea in the structure of
cybernetics. This was the recognition of what I called deutero-leaning, or
learning to learn.3
I had come to understand that
"learning to learn" and "learning to deal with and expect a
given kind of context for adaptive action" and "character change due
to experience" are three synonyms for a single genus of phenomena, which I
grouped together under the term deutero-learning. This was a first mapping of
behavioral phenomena onto a scheme closely related to Bertrand Russell's
hierarchy of logical types4 and, like the idea of schismogenesis, was easily
attuned to the cybernetic ideas of the 1940s. [The Principia of Russell and
Whitehead provided a systematic way of handling logical hierarchies such as the
relationship between an item, the class of items to which it belongs, and the
class of classes. The application of these ideas to behavior laid the
groundwork for thinking about how, in learning, experience is generalized to
some class of contexts, and about the way in which some messages modify the
meaning of others by labeling them as belonging to particular classes of
messages.]
The significance of all this
formalization was made more evident in the 1960s by a reading of Carl Jung's
Seven Sermons to the Dead, of which the Jungian therapist Jane Wheelwright gave
me a copy.5 I was at the time writing a draft of what was to be my Korzybski
Memorial Lecture 6 and began to think about the relation between
"map" and "territory." Jung's book insisted upon the
contrast between Pleroma, the crudely physical domain governed only by forces
and impacts, and Creatura, the domain governed by distinctions and differences.
It became abundantly clear that the two sets of concepts match and that there
could be no maps in Pleroma, but only in Creatura. That which gets from
territory to map is news of difference, and at that point I recognized that
news of difference was a synonym for information.
When this recognition of difference
was put together with the clear understanding that Creatura was organized into
circular trains of causation, like those that had been described by
cybernetics, and that it was organized in multiple levels of logical typing, I
had a series of ideas all working together to enable me to think systematically
about mental process as differentiated from simple physical or mechanistic
sequences, without thinking in terms of two separate "substances." My
book Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity combined these ideas with the
recognition that mental process and biological evolution are necessarily alike
in these Creatural characteristics.
The mysteries that had challenged
biology up to the epoch of cybernetics were, in principle, no longer
mysterious, though, of course, much remained to be done. We now had ideas about
the general nature of information, purpose, stochastic process, thought, and
evolution, so that at that level it was a matter of working out the details of
particular cases.
In place of the old mysteries, a new
set of challenges emerged. This book is an attempt to outline some of these,
[in particular, to explore the way in which, in a nondualistic view of the
world, a new concept of the sacred emerges]. It is intended to begin the task
of making the new challenges perceptible to the reader and perhaps to give some
definition to the new problems. Further than that I do not expect to go. It
took the world 2,500 years to resolve the problems that Aristotle proposed and
Descartes compounded. The new problems do not appear to be easier to solve than
the old, and it seems likely that my fellow scientists will have their work cut
out for them for many years to come.
The title of the present book is
intended to convey a warning. It seems that every important scientific advance
provides tools which look to be just what the applied scientists and engineers
had hoped for, and usually these gentry jump in without more ado. Their
well-intentioned (but slightly greedy and slightly anxious) efforts usually do
as much harm as good, serving at best to make conspicuous the next layer of
problems, which must be understood before the applied scientists can be trusted
not to do gross damage. Behind every scientific advance there is always a
matrix, a mother lode of unknowns out of which the new partial answers have
been chiseled. But the hungry, overpopulated, sick, ambitious, and competitive
world will not wait, we are told, till more is known, but must rush in where
angels fear to tread.
I have very little sympathy for
these arguments from the world's "need." I notice that those who
pander to its needs are often well paid. I distrust the applied scientists'
claim that what they do is useful and necessary. I suspect that their impatient
enthusiasm for action, their rarin'-to-go, is not just a symptom of impatience,
nor is it pure buccaneering ambition. I suspect that it covers deep epistemological
panic.
1 Square brackets indicate an insert
by MCB. [Back to text]
2 Naven: A Study of the Culture of a
New Guinea Tribe from Three Points of View (Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP,
1936). 2d ed., with additional "Epilogue 1958" (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford UP, 1958). [Back to text]
3 See C. Bateson, "Social
Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning," Steps, 159-76 (Chandler
ed.), and elsewhere. [Back to text]
4 Alfred North Whitehead and
Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, 3 vols., 2d ed. (Cambridge, England:
Cambridge UP, 1910-13). [Back to text]
5 Carl Gustav Jung's Septem Sermones
ad Mortuos was privately published in 1916. There has been a more recent
British edition (Stuart and Watkins, 1967), but the work is most accessible as
a supplement to some editions of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela
Jaffe (New York: Pantheon, 1966 and later editions only). [Back to text]
6 See my essay "Form, Substance
and Difference," in Steps, 454-71 (Chandler ed.). [Back to text]
II
The World of Mental Process (GB)
III
Metalogue: Why Do You Tell Stories?
(MCB)
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BEFORE we proceed further, I want to
elaborate on the contrast made by Carl Gustav Jung 1 between Creatura and
Pleroma. This will give us an alternative starting point for epistemology, one
that will be a much healthier first step than the separation of mind from
matter attributed to René Descartes. In place of the old Cartesian dualism,
which proposed mind and matter as distinct substances, I want to talk about the
nature of mental process, or thought, in the widest sense of that word, and the
relationship between "thought" and the material world.
I am going to include within the
category mental process a number of phenomena which most people do not think of
as processes of thought. For example, I shall include the processes by which
you and I achieve our anatomy – the injunctions, false starts and
self-corrections, obedience to circumstance, and so on, by which the
differentiation and development of the embryo is achieved. "Embryology"
is for me a mental process. And I shall also include the still more mysterious
processes by which it comes about that the formal relations of our anatomy are
recognizable in the anthropoid ape, the horse, and the whale – what zoologists
call homology – i.e. along with embryology I shall include evolution within the
term "mental process."
Along with those two big ones –
biological evolution and embryology – I include all those lesser exchanges of
information and injunction that occur inside organisms and between organisms
and that, in the aggregate, we call life.
In fact, wherever information – or
comparison – is of the essence of our explanation, there, for me, is mental
process. Information can be defined as a difference that makes a difference. A
sensory end organ is a comparator, a device which responds to difference. Of
course, the sensory end organ is material, but it is this responsiveness to
difference that we shall use to distinguish its functioning as
"mental." Similarly, the ink on this page is material, but the ink is
not my thought. Even at the most elementary level, the ink is not signal or
message. The difference between paper and ink is the signal.
It is, of course, true that our
explanations, our textbooks dealing with nonliving matter, are full of
information. But this information is all ours; it is part of our life
processes. The world of nonliving matter, the Pleroma, which is described by
the laws of physics and chemistry, itself contains no description. A stone does
not respond to information and does not use injunctions or information or trial
and error in its internal organization. To respond in a behavioral sense, the
stone would have to use energy contained within itself, as organisms do. It
would cease to be a stone. The stone is affected by "forces" and
"impacts," but not by differences.
I can describe the stone, but it can
describe nothing. I can use the stone as a signal – perhaps as a landmark. But
it is not the landmark.
I can give the stone a name; I can
distinguish it from other stones. But it is not its name, and it cannot
distinguish.
It uses and contains no information.
"It" is not even an it,
except insofar as I distinguish it from the remainder of inanimate matter.
What happens to the stone and what
it does when nobody is around is not part of the mental process of any living
thing. For that it must somehow make and receive news.
You must understand that while
Pleroma is without thought or information, it still contains – is the matrix of
– many other sorts of regularities. Inertia, cause and effect, connection and
disconnection, and so on, these regularities are (for lack of a better word)
immanent in Pleroma. Although they can be translated (again for lack of a
better word) into the language of Creatura (where alone language can exist),
the material world still remains inaccessible, the Kantian Ding an sich which
you cannot get close to. We can speculate – and we have speculated very
carefully and very creatively about it – but in the end, at the last analysis,
everything we say about Pleroma is a matter of speculation, and such mystics as
William Blake, for example, frankly deny its existence.
In summary then, we will use Jung's
term Pleroma as a name for that unliving world described by physics which in
itself contains and makes no distinctions, though we must, of course, make
distinctions in our description of it.
In contrast, we will use Creatura
for that world of explanation in which the very phenomena to be described are
among themselves governed and determined by difference, distinction, and
information.
[Although there is an apparent
dualism in this dichotomy between Creatura and Pleroma, it is important to be
clear that these two are not in any way separate or separable, except as levels
of description. On the one hand, all of Creatura exists within and through
Pleroma; the use of the term Creatura affirms the presence of certain
organizational and communicational characteristics which are themselves not
material. On the other hand, knowledge of Pleroma exists only in Creatura. We
can meet the two only in combination, never separately. The laws of physics and
chemistry are by no means irrelevant to the Creatura – they continue to apply –
but they are not sufficient for explanation. Thus, Creatura and Pleroma are
not, like Descartes' "mind" and "matter," separate
substances, for mental processes require arrangements of matter in which to
occur, areas where Pleroma is characterized by organization which permits it to
be affected by information as well as by physical events.
[We can move on from the notion of
mental process to ask, what, then, is "a mind"? And if this is a
useful notion, can one usefully make a plural and speak of "minds"
which might engage in interactions which are in turn mental? The characterization
of the notion of "a mind" was one of the central thrusts of Mind and
Nature, where a series of criteria were laid out for the identification of
"minds." The definition anchors the notion of a mind firmly to the
arrangement of material parts:
1. A mind is an aggregate of
interacting parts or components.
2. The interaction between parts of
mind is triggered by difference.
3. Mental process requires
collateral energy.
4. Mental process requires circular
(or more complex) chains of determination.
5. In mental process, the effects of
difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e. coded versions) of events
which preceded them.
6. The description and
classification of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of
logical types immanent in the phenomena. 2
[If you consider these criteria, you
will recognize that they fit a number of complex entities that we are used to
talking about and investigating scientifically, such as animals and persons
and, in fact, all organisms. They also apply to parts of organisms that have a
degree of autonomy in their self-regulation and functioning: individual cells,
for instance, and organs. Then, you can go on to notice that there is no
requirement of a clear boundary, like a surrounding envelope of skin or
membrane, and you can recognize that this definition includes only some of the
characteristics of what we call "life." As a result, it applies to a
much wider range of those complex phenomena called "systems,"
including systems consisting of multiple organisms or systems in which some of
the parts are living and some are not, or even to systems in which there are no
living parts. What is described here is a something that can receive
information and can, through the self-regulation or self-correction made
possible by circular trains of causation, maintain the truth of certain
propositions about itself. These two provide the rudiments of identity – unlike
the stone, the mind we are describing is an "it." There is, however,
no reason to assume that it will be either conscious or capable of
self-replication, like some of the minds we count among our friends and
relatives. A given mind is likely to be a component or subsystem in some larger
and more complex mind, as an individual cell may be a component in an organism
or a person may be a component in a community. The world of mental process
opens into a self-organizing world of Chinese boxes in which information
generates further information.
[This book is above all concerned
with certain characteristics of the interface between Pleroma and Creatura and
also with interfaces between different kinds of mental subsystems, including
relations between persons and between human communities and ecosystems. We will
be especially concerned with the way in which our understanding of such interfaces
underlies epistemology and religion, bearing in mind that because what is is
identical for all human purposes with what can be known, there can be no clear
line between epistemology and ontology.]
When we distinguish Creatura from
Pleroma by some first, primary act of distinguishing, we are founding the
science of Epistemology, rules of thought. And our Epistemology is a good
epistemology insofar as the regularities of Pleroma can be correctly,
appropriately translated in our thought, and insofar as our understanding of
Creatura, namely of all of embryology, biological evolution, ecology, thought,
love and hate, and human organization – all of which require rather different
kinds of description than those we use in describing the inanimate material
world can grow and sit on top of (can be comfortably deductive from) that
primary step in Epistemology.
I think that Descartes' first
epistemological steps – the separation of "mind" from
"matter" and the cogito – established bad premises, perhaps ultimately
lethal premises, for Epistemology, and I believe that Jung's statement of
connection between Pleroma and Creatura is a much healthier first step. Jung’s
epistemology starts from comparison of difference – not from matter.
So I will define Epistemology as the
science that studies the process of knowing – the interaction of the capacity
to respond to differences, on the one hand, with the material world in which
those differences somehow originate, on the other. We are concerned then with
an interface between Pleroma and Creatura.
There is a more conventional
definition of epistemology, which simply says that epistemology is the
philosophic study of how knowledge is possible. I prefer my definition – how
knowing is done – because it frames Creatura within the larger total, the
presumably lifeless realm of Pleroma; and because my definition bluntly
identifies Epistemology as the study of phenomena at an interface and as a
branch of natural history.
Let me begin this study by
mentioning a basic characteristic of the interface between Pleroma and
Creatura, which will perhaps help to define the direction of my thinking. I
mean the universal circumstance that the interface between Pleroma and Creatura
is an example of the contrast between "map" and "territory"
– is, I suppose, the primary and most fundamental example. This is the old
contrast to which Alfred Korzybski 3 long ago called attention, and it remains
basic for all healthy epistemologies and basic to Epistemology.
Every human individual – every
organism – has his or her personal habits of how he or she builds knowledge,
and every cultural, religious, or scientific system promotes particular
epistemological habits. These individual or local systems are indicated here
with a small e. Warren McCulloch used to say that the man who claimed to have
direct knowledge – i.e. no epistemology – had a bad one.
It is the task of anthropologists to
achieve comparisons between the many and diverse systems and perhaps to
evaluate the price that muddled systems pay for their errors. Most local
epistemologies – personal and cultural – continually err, alas, in confusing
map with territory and in assuming that the rules for drawing maps are immanent
in the nature of that which is being represented in the map.
All of the following rules of
accurate thought and communication apply to the properties of maps, that is, to
mental process, for in the Pleroma there are no maps, no names, no classes, and
no members of classes.
The map is not the territory
The name is not the thing named.
The name of the name is not the name.
(You remember the White Knight and
Alice? Alice is rather tired of listening to songs and, offered yet another,
she asks its name. "The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes,'
" says the White Knight. "That's the name of the song, is it?"
says Alice. "No, you don't understand," says the White Knight,
"that's not the name of the song, that's what the name is called."4)
The item in the class is not the class (even when the class has
only one item).
The class is not a member of itself.
Some classes have no members. (If, for example, I say, "I
never read the small print," there is no class of events consisting of my
reading the small print.)
In the Creatura, all is names, maps,
and names of relations – but still the name of the name is not the name, and
the name of the relation is not the relation – even when the relation between A
and B is of the kind we denote by saying that A is the name of B.
These constraints are Eternal. They
are necessarily true, and to recognize them gives something resembling freedom
– or shall we say that it is a necessary condition of skill. It will be
interesting to compare them with other basic components of Epistemology such as
Saint Augustine's Eternal Verities or Jung's archetypes, and see where these
fall in relation to the interface.
Now, Saint Augustine was not only a
theologian, he was also a mathematician. He lived in Hippo in North Africa and
was probably more Semite than Indo-European, which means in the present context
that he may very well have been quite at home in algebraic thought. It was, I
gather, the Arabs who introduced the concept "any" into mathematics,
thus creating algebra, for which we still use an Arabic word.
These verities were rather simple
propositions, and here I quote Warren McCulloch,5 to whom I owe much:
"Listen to the thunder of that saint, in almost A.D. 500: 'Seven and three
are ten; seven and three have always been ten; seven and three at no time and
in no way have ever been anything but ten; seven and three will always be ten.
I say that these indestructible truths of arithmetic are common to all who
reason.' "
Saint Augustine's Eternal Verities
were crudely or bluntly stated, but I think the saint would go along with the
more modern versions: e.g. that the equation
x + y = z
is soluble, and uniquely soluble --
there is only one solution -- for all values of x and y, provided that we agree
on the steps and tricks which we must use. If "quantities" are
appropriately defined and if "addition" is appropriately defined,
then x + y = z is uniquely soluble. And z will be of one substance with x and
y.
But, oh my, what a long step it is
from the blunt statement "Seven plus three equals ten" to our
cautious generalization hedged with definitions and conditions. We have in a
certain sense pulled the whole of arithmetic over the line that was to divide
Creatura from Pleroma. That is, the statement no longer has the flavor of naked
truth and instead is clearly an artifact of human thought, indeed of the thought
of particular humans at particular times and places.
Is it then so, that Saint
Augustine's Eternal Verities are only spin-offs from peculiar ideas or customs
cherished at various times by various human cultural systems?
I am an anthropologist by trade and
training, and ideas of cultural relativity are a part of anthropological
orthodoxy . . . but how far can cultural relativity go? What can the cultural
relativist say about the Eternal Verities? Does not arithmetic have roots in
the unchanging, solid rock of Pleroma? And how can we talk about such a
question?
Is there then such a subject of
inquiry as Epistemology, with a capital E? Or is it all a matter of local and
even personal epistemologies, any one of which is as good, as right, as any
other?
These are the kinds of questions
that arise when we try to survey the interface between Pleroma and Creatura,
and it is clear that arithmetic somehow lies very close to that line.
But do not dismiss such questions as
"abstract" or "intellectual," and therefore meaningless.
For these abstract questions will lead us to some very immediately human
matters. What sort of question are we asking when we say, "What is
heresy?" or "What is a sacrament?" These are deeply human
questions – matters of life and death, sanity and insanity, to millions of
people – and the answers (if any) are concealed in the paradoxes generated by
the line between Creatura and Pleroma . . . the line which the Gnostics, Jung,
and I would substitute for the Cartesian separation of mind from matter . . .
the line that is really a bridge or pathway for messages.
Is it possible to be
Epistemologically wrong? Wrong at the very root of thought? Christians,
Moslems, Marxists (and many biologists) say yes – they call such error
"heresy" and equate it with spiritual death. The other religions –
Hinduism, Buddhism, the more frankly pluralistic religions – seem to be largely
unaware of the problem. The possibility of Epistemological error does not enter
their epistemology. And today in America it is almost heresy to believe that
the roots of thought have any importance, and it is undemocratic to
excommunicate a man for Epistemological errors. If religions are concerned with
Epistemology, how shall we interpret the fact that some have the concept of
"heresy" and some do not?
I believe that the story goes back
to the most sophisticated religion that the world has known – that of the
Pythagoreans. Like Saint Augustine, they knew that Truth has some of its roots
(not all) in numerology, in numbers. The history is obscure, probably because
it is difficult for us to see the world through Pythagorean eyes, but it seems
to be something like this: Egyptian mathematics was pure arithmetic and always
particular, never making the jump from "seven and three are ten" to
"x plus y equals z." Their mathematics contained no deductions and no
proofs as we would understand the term. The Greeks had proofs from about the
fifth century B.C., but it seems that mere deduction is a toy until the
discovery of proof of an impossibility by reductio ad absurdum. The
Pythagoreans had a whole string of theorems (which are not taught in schools
today) about the relations between odd and even numbers. The climax of this
study was the proof that the isosceles right triangle, with sides of unit length,
is insoluble – that Ö2 cannot be either an odd or an even number, and therefore
cannot be a number or be expressed as a ratio between two numbers.6
This discovery hit the Pythagoreans
squarely between the eyes and became a central secret (but why secret?), an
esoteric tenet of their faith. Their religion had been founded on the
discontinuity of the series of musical harmonies – the demonstration that that
discontinuity was indeed real and was firmly founded upon rigorous deduction.
And now they faced an impossibility
proof. Deduction had said no.
As I read the story, from then on it
was inevitable to "believe," to "see" and "know"
that a contradiction among the higher generalizations will always lead to
mental chaos. From this point on, the idea of heresy, the notion that to be
wrong in Epistemology could be lethal, was inevitable.
All this sweat and tears – and even
blood – was to be shed on quite abstract propositions whose Truth seemed to
lie, in some sense, outside the human mind.
As I see it, the propositions that
Augustine and Pythagoras were interested in and which Augustine called Eternal
Verities are, in a sense, latent in Pleroma – only waiting to be labeled by
some scientist. If, for example, a man is pouring lentils or grains of sand
from one container into another, he is not aware of any numbering of the units,
but still within the crowd of lentils or grains it is true – or would be true
if somebody got in there and did some counting (perhaps the ghost of Bishop
Berkeley might be willing to do it for us, just to make sure that the truth is
still the same when we are not there) – that seven plus three equals ten among
the lentils.
In this sense there is a whole slew
of regularities out there in Pleroma, unnamed, ready to be picked up. But the
distinctions and differences that would be used in an analysis have not been
drawn, in the absence of organisms to whom the differences can make a
difference. (Bishop Berkeley always forgot the grass and the squirrels in the
woods, for whom the falling tree made a meaningful sound!)
I want to make very clear the
contrast between Pleromatic regularities and those regularities that exist
inside mental and organized systems the necessary limitations and patterns of
mental process such as those of coding and logical typing.
McCulloch's famous double question:
"What is a number that a man may know it: and what is a man that he may
know a number?"7 takes on a very different coloring, presents new
difficulties, when we substitute some archetype for the utterly impersonal
concept "number." The Jungian archetypes have a certain claim to
transcend the purely local, but they belong squarely in the realm of Creatura.
What is a father that a man, a
woman, or a child may know him; and what is a man, or woman, or child, that he
or she may know a father?
Let me offer you an example, what in
field anthropology we would call a native text -- a crucial cultural utterance:
Our Father which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
The epistemology latent in that text
is enough to keep us busy for a long while.
The words themselves are sanctified
-- hallowed, to use their own idiom-by the gospel narrative (Matt. 6:9),
according to which Jesus recommended this prayer to his disciples for myriad
repetition. In every Christian ceremony, these words are in a strange way the
rock upon which the whole structure stands -- the words are the familiar theme
to which the ritual continually returns, not as to a logical premise but rather
as music returns to a theme or phrase from which it is built.
For while the quasi-Pleromatic
verities of Augustine and Pythagoras have roots in logic or mathematics, we are
now looking at something different.
"Our Father ..."
This is the language of metaphor,
and a very strange language it is.
First we need some contrasting data
to show that we are in the realm of epistemology with a small e. (If you would
seek for an absolute Epistemology among the metaphors, you must go one or
perhaps two stones higher-- straight on and up the stairs...)
In Bali, when a shaman, or balian,
goes into a state of altered consciousness, he or she speaks with the voice of
a god, using the pronouns appropriate to the god, and so on. And when this
voice addresses ordinary adult mortals, it will call them "Papa" or
"Mama." For the Balinese think of the relationship between gods and
people as between children and parents, and in this relationship it is the gods
who are the children and the people who are the parents.
The Balinese do not expect their
gods to be responsible. They do not feel cheated when the gods are capricious.
Indeed, they enjoy minor caprice and charm as these are exhibited by gods
temporarily incarnate in shamans. How unlike our dear Job!
This particular metaphor, then,
between fatherhood and godhead, is by no means eternal or universal. In other
words, the "logic" of metaphor is something very different from the
logic of the verities of Augustine and Pythagoras. Not, you understand,
"wrong," but totally different. [It may be, however, that while
particular metaphors are local, the process of making metaphor has some wider
significance -- may indeed be a basic characteristic of Creatura.]
Let me point up the contrast between
the truths of metaphor and the truths that the mathematicians pursue by a
rather violent and inappropriate trick. Let me spell out metaphor into
syllogistic form: Classical logic named several varieties of syllogism, of
which the best known is the "syllogism in Barbara." It goes like
this:
Men die;
Socrates is a man;
Socrates will die.
The basic structure of this little
monster -- its skeleton -- is built upon classification. The predicate
("will die") is attached to Socrates by identifying him as a member
of a class whose members share that predicate.
The syllogisms of metaphor are quite
different, and go like this:
Grass dies;
Men die;
Men are grass.
[In order to talk about this kind of
syllogism and compare it to the "syllogism in Barbara," we can
nickname it the "syllogism in grass."] I understand that teachers of
classical logic strongly disapprove of this way of arguing and call it
"affirming the consequent," and, of course, this pedantic
condemnation is justified if what they condemn is confusion between one type of
syllogism and the other. But to try to fight all syllogisms in grass would be
silly because these syllogisms are the very stuff of which natural history is
made. When we look for regularities in the biological world, we meet them all
the time.
Von Domarus long ago pointed out
that schizophrenics commonly talk and act in terms of syllogisms in grass,8 and
I think he, too, disapproved of this way of organizing knowledge and life. If I
remember rightly, he does not notice that poetry, art, dream, humor, and
religion share with schizophrenia a preference for syllogisms in grass.
But whether you approve or
disapprove of poetry, dream, and psychosis, the generalization remains that
biological data make sense -- are connected together -- by syllogisms in grass.
The whole of animal behavior, the whole of repetitive anatomy, and the whole of
biological evolution -- each of these vast realms is within itself linked
together by syllogisms in grass, whether the logicians like it or not.
It's really very simple -- in order
to make syllogisms in Barbara, you must have identified classes, so that
subjects and predicates can be differentiated. But, apart from language, there
are no named classes and no subject-predicate relations. Therefore, syllogisms
in grass must be the dominant mode of communicating interconnection of ideas in
all preverbal realms.
I think the first person who
actually saw this clearly was Goethe, who noted that if you examine a cabbage
and an oak tree, two rather different sorts of organisms but still both
flowering plants, you would find that the way to talk about how they are put
together is different from the way most people naturally talk. You see, we talk
as if the Creatura were really Pleromatic: we talk about "things,"
notably leaves or stems, and we try to determine what is what. Now Goethe
discovered that a "leaf" is defined as that which grows on a stem and
has a bud in its angle; what then comes out of that angle (out of that bud) is
again a stem. The correct units of description are not leaf and stem but the
relations between them.
These correspondences allow you to
look at another flowering plant -- a potato, for instance -- and recognize that
the part that you eat in fact corresponds to a stem.
In the same way, most of us were
taught in school that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing, but what
we should have been taught is that a noun can stand in various kinds of
relationship to other parts of the sentence, so that the whole of grammar could
be defined as relationship and not in terms of things. This naming activity,
which probably other organisms don't indulge in, is in fact a sort of
Pleromatizing of the living world. And observe that grammatical relationships
are of the preverbal kind. "The ship struck a reef" and "I
spanked my daughter" are tied together by grammatical analogy.
I went to see the nice little pack
of wolves in Chicago at the Brookfield Zoo, ten of them lying asleep all day
and the eleventh one, the dominant male, busily running around keeping track of
things. Now what wolves do is to go out hunting and then come home and
regurgitate their food to share with the puppies who weren't along on the hunt.
And the puppies can signal the adults to regurgitate. But eventually the adult
wolves wean the babies from the regurgitated food by pressing down with their
jaws on the backs of the babies' necks. In the domestic dog, females eventually
wean their young from milk in the same way. In Chicago they told me that the
previous year one of the junior males had succeeded in mounting a female. Up
rushed the lead male -- the alpha animal -- but instead of mayhem all that happened
was that the leader pressed the head of the junior male down to the ground in
the same way, once, twice, four times, and then walked off. The communication
that occurred was metaphoric: "You puppy, you! " The communication to
the junior wolf of how to behave is based on a syllogism in grass.
But let us go back to the Lord's
Prayer:
Our Father which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Of course, my assertion that all
preverbal and nonverbal communication depends upon metaphor and/or syllogisms
in grass does not mean that all verbal communication is -- or should be --
logical or nonmetaphoric. Metaphor runs right through Creatura, so, of course,
all verbal communication necessarily contains metaphor. And metaphor when it is
dressed in words has added to it those characteristics that verbalism can
achieve: the possibility of simple negation (there is no not at the preverbal
level), the possibility of classification, of subject-predicate
differentiation, and the possibility of explicit context marking.
Finally there is the possibility,
with words, of jumping right out of the metaphoric and poetic mode into simile.
What Vaihinger called the as if mode of communication becomes something else
when the as if is added. In a word, it becomes prose, and then all the
limitations of the syllogisms that logicians prefer, Barbara and the rest, must
be precisely obeyed.
The Lord's Prayer might then become:
It is as if you or something were
alive and personal and if that were so, it would perhaps be appropriate to talk
to you in words. So, although, of course, you are not a relative of mine, since
you only as if exist and are, as it were, in another plane (in heaven), etc....
And you know, in human ethnography,
the creativeness of human minds is capable of that extreme, and most
surprisingly, that extreme can itself constitute a religion -- among
behaviorists for example. In a currently fashionable metaphor, the right
hemisphere can applaud (and be reassured in) the prosy, cautious logic of the
left.
The very act of translation -- from
grass to Barbara, from metaphor to simile, and from poetry to prose -- can
itself become sacramental, a sacred metaphor for a particular religious stance.
Cromwell's troops could run around England, breaking the noses and even heads
and genitals off the statues in the churches, in a religious fervor,
simultaneously stressing their own total misunderstanding of what the
metaphoric-sacred is all about.
I used to say -- have said many
times -- that the Protestant interpretation of the words "This is my Body
-- This is my Blood" substitutes something like "This stands for my
Body -- This stands for my Blood." This way of interpretation banished
from the Church that part of the mind that makes metaphor, poetry, and religion
-- the part of the mind that most belonged in Church -- but you cannot keep it
out. There is no doubt that Cromwell's troops were making their own (horrible)
poetry by their acts of vandalism-in which indeed they smashed the metaphoric
genitals as if they were "real" in a left brain sense --
What a mess. But nonetheless, we
cannot simply discard the logic of metaphor and the syllogism in grass, for the
syllogism in Barbara would be of little use in the biological world until the
invention of language and the separation of subjects from predicates. In other
words, it looks as though until 100.000 years ago, perhaps at most 1.000.000
years ago, there were no Barbara syllogisms in the world, and there were only
Bateson's kind, and still the organisms got along all right. They managed to
organize themselves in their embryology to have two eyes, one on each side of a
nose. They managed to organize themselves in their evolution so there were
shared predicates between the horse and the man, which zoologists today call
homology. It becomes evident that metaphor is not just pretty poetry, it is not
either good or bad logic, but is in fact the logic upon which the biological
world has been built, the main characteristic and organizing glue of this world
of mental process that I have been trying to sketch for you.
1 In Septem Sermones ad Mortuos. In
later works, e.g. in Answer to Job, Jung uses these words in such a way as to
include his archetypes within Pleroma. I believe that this latter usage is more
in step with classical and medieval thought, but I also believe that Jung's
earlier way of talking provides a clearer base for epistemology. [Back to text]
2 p. 92. [Back to text]
3 Science and Sanity (New York:
Science P, 1941). [Back to text]
4 Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the
Looking Glass (New York: New American Library, 1960), 212. GB here uses the
example from Alice to make a transition from Korzybski to the theory of logical
types. [Back to text]
5 Warren McCulloch, Embodiments of
Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1965), 3. [Back to text]
6 Gregory seems to have become
interested in this material as the result of an article by Curtis Wilson,
"On the Discovery of Deductive Science," The St. John's Review
(January 1980): 21-31. [Back to text]
7 Embodiments of Mind, 1-18 [Back to
text]
8 E. von Domarus, "The Specific
Laws of Logic in Schizophrenia," Language and Thought in Schizophrenia,
ed. J. S. Kasanin (Berkely: U of California P, 1944). GB developed these ideas
in response to criticism by Nick Humphrey ("New Ideas, Old Ideas")
The London Review of Books, 6 December 1979) of the argument of Mind and
Nature, which may be said to have the following structure:
Evolution is stochastic (able to achieve novelty by a
combination of random and selective processes);
Mental process (such as thought) is stochastic;
Evolution is a mental process. [Back to text]
DAUGHTER: Daddy, why do you talk
about yourself so much?
FATHER: When we are talking, you
mean? I'm not sure that I do. Certainly there is a lot about myself that never
comes up.
DAUGHTER: That's right, but you tell
the same stories again and again.
For instance, you presented your
epistemology for the introduction by telling how you arrived at it, and now
you've been telling about going to the zoo in Chicago. And I've heard you tell
a hundred times about going to the San Francisco Zoo and watching the otters at
play, but you never talk about what you played with as a child. Did you ever
have a puppy to play with when you were a little boy? What was its name?
FATHER: Whoa, Cap. That's a question
that's just going to remain unanswered. But you're quite right that even when I
tell stories out of my experience, it's not my own history I'm talking about.
The stories are about something else. The otter story is about the notion that
in order for two organisms to play, they have to be able to send the signal
"this is play." And that leads to the realization that that kind of
signal, the metacommunication or the message about the message, is going to be
part of their communication all the time.
DAUGHTER: Well, but we're two
organisms. And we have that same problem you're always talking about, of
figuring out whether we are playing or exploring or what. What does it tell me
that you don't talk talk about play. I want to talk about talking about play --
how the otters go about it and how we might try to go about it.
DAUGHTER: Talking about talking
about talking. Cosy. So this has turned into an example of logical types, all
piled up. The otter story is a story about metamessages, and the stories of you
growing up in a positivistic household are about learning -- because it was in
thinking about learning and learning to learn that you began to realize the
importance of the logical types. Messages about messages, learning about
learning. I must say, even though the logic boys say they have new and better
models of logical types that you don't take account of, you get a lot of
mileage -- a lot of insight -- out of using them, when almost nobody else does.
But, Daddy, can you just go along at
the top of the pile? I don't think you can talk about talking about talking
without talking, and I mean talking about something specific, something solid
and real. If you tell a story about play when I'm not part of it, does that mean
we're not playing?
FATHER: Playing we may be, but
you're nipping at my heels in this particular game. Look, we're getting into a
tangle. You have to distinguish the logical types in the words of our
conversation from the overall structure in the communication, of which the
verbal conversation is only part. But one thing you can be sure of is that the
conversation isn't about "something solid and real." It can only be
about ideas. No pigs, no coconut palms, no otters or puppy dogs. Just ideas of pigs
and puppy dogs.
DAUGHTER: You know, I was giving a
seminar one evening at Lindisfarne, Colorado, and Wendell Berry was arguing
that it is possible to know the material world directly. And a bat flew into
the room and was swooping around in a panic, making like Kant's Ding an sich.
So I caught it with somebody's cowboy hat and put it outside. Wendell said,
"Look, that bat was really in here, a piece of the real world," and I
said, "Yes, but look, the idea of the bat is still in here, swooping around
representing alternative epistemologies, and the argument between me and
Wendell too. "
FATHER: Well, and it is not
irrelevant that Wendell is a poet. But it's also true that since we're all
mammals, whatever word games we play we are talking about relationship.
Professor X gets up at the blackboard and lectures about the higher mathematics
to his students, and what he is saying all the time is "dominance,
dominance, dominance." And Professor Y stands up and covers the same
material, and what he is saying is "nurturance, nurturance, " or
maybe even "dependency, dependency," as he coaxes his students to
follow his argument.
DAUGHTER: Like the mewing cat you're
always talking about that isn't saying "milk, milk" but
"dependency, dependency." Hmm. You wouldn't want to comment on the
nationality of your two professors, would you?
FATHER: Brat. What is even more
interesting is that someone like Konrad Lorenz can be talking about
communication of relationships among geese, and he turns into a goose up there
at the blackboard, the way he moves and holds himself, and it's a much more
complicated account, a much richer account of the geese than we have had here
about otters. . . .
DAUGHTER: And he's talking to the
audience about dominance and so on at the same time. A man talking about a
goose talking about a relationship that's also about the man's relationship to
the other men . . . oh dear. And everybody in the room is supposed to pretend
that it isn't happening.
FATHER: Well, the other ethologists
get pretty resentful of Lorenz. They talk as if he were cheating, somehow.
DAUGHTER: What is cheating anyway?
FATHER: Mmm. In conversation it is
"cheating" to shift logical types in ways that are inappropriate. But
I would argue that for Lorenz to move like a goose or to use empathy in the
study of geese is appropriate -- the way he moves is part of the empathy. But I
run into the same problem: people say I'm cheating when I use the logic of
metaphor to speak about the biological world. They call it "affirming the
consequent" and seem to feel that anyone who does so should have their
knuckles rapped. But really it seems to me to be the only way to talk sense
about the biological world, because it is the way in which that world, the
Creatura, is itself organized.
DAUGHTER: Hmm. Empathy. Metaphor.
They seem similar to me. It seems to me as if making those things against the
rules -- calling them cheating -- is like the kind of constraints you have in a
relay race. You know, one hand tied behind your back, or your legs in a sack.
FATHER: Quite.
DAUGHTER: Well, but Daddy, I want to
get back to the subject. I want to know why you are always telling stories
about yourself. And most of the stories you tell about me, in the metalogues
and so on, aren't true, they're just made up. And here I am, making up stories
about you.
FATHER: Does a story have to have
really happened in order to be true? No, I haven't said that right. In order to
communicate a truth about relationships, or in order to exemplify an idea. Most
of the really important stories aren't about things that really happened --
they are true in the present, not in the past. The myth of Kevembuangga, who
killed the crocodile that the Iatmul believe kept the universe in a random
state --
DAUGHTER: Look, let's not get into
that. What I want to know is, why do you tell so many stories, and why are they
mainly about yourself.
FATHER: Well, I can tell you that
only a few of the stories in this book are about me, and only apparently so at
that. But as for why I tell a lot of stories, there's a joke about that. There
was once a man who had a computer, and he asked it, "Do you compute that
you will ever be able to think like a human being?" And after assorted
grindings and beepings, a slip of paper came out of the computer that said,
"That reminds me of a story . . . "
DAUGHTER: So human beings think in
stories. But maybe you're cheating on the word "story." First the
computer uses a phrase that's used for introducing one kind of story . . . and
a joke is a kind of story . . . and you said that the myth of Kevembuangga is
not about the past but about something else. So what is a story really? And are
there other kinds of stories, like sermons in the running brook? How about
trees, do they think in stories? Or do they tell stories?
FATHER: But surely they do. Look,
just give me that conch over there for a minute. Now, what we have here is a
whole set of different stories, very beautiful stories indeed.
DAUGHTER: Is that why you put it up
on the mantelpiece?
FATHER: This that you see is the
product of a million steps, nobody knows how many steps of successive
modulation in successive generations of genotype, DNA, and all that. So that's
one story, because the shell has to be the kind of form that can evolve through
such a series of steps. And the shell is made, just as you and I are, of
repetitions of parts and repetitions of repetitions of parts. If you look at
the human spinal column, which is also a very beautiful thing, you'll see that
no vertebra is quite like any other, but each is a sort of modulation of the
previous one. This conch is what's called a right-handed spiral, and spirals
are sort of pretty things too -- that shape which can be increased in one
direction without altering its basic proportions. So the shell has the
narrative of its individual growth pickled within its geometric form as well as
the story of its evolution.
DAUGHTER: I know -- I looked at a
cat's-eye once and saw the spiral, so I guessed it had come from something
alive. And that's a story about our talking that did get into a metalogue.
FATHER: And then, you see, even
though the conch has protrusions that keep it from rolling around the ocean
floor, it's been worn and abraded, so that's still another story.
DAUGHTER: You mentioned the spinal
column too, so that the stories of human growth and evolution are in the
conversation as well. But even when you don't actually mention the human body,
there are common patterns that become a basis for recognition. That's what I
meant -- part of what I meant -- when I said years ago that each person is his
own central metaphor. I like the conch because it's like me but also because
it's so different.
FATHER: Hello, snail. Well, so I
tell stories, and sometimes Gregory is a character in the story and sometimes
not. And often the story about a snail or a tree is also a story about myself
and at the same time a story about you. And the real trick is what happens when
the stories are set side by side.
DAUGHTER: Parallel parables?
FATHER: Then there is that class of
stories we call models, which are generally rather schematic and which, like
the parables presented by teachers of religion, exist precisely to facilitate
thought about some other matter.
DAUGHTER: Well, but before you go
off on models, I want to point out that the stories about snails and trees are
also stories about you and me, in combination. And I'm always responding to the
stories you don't tell as well as the ones you do, and doing my best to read
between the lines. But now you can tell me about models or even about
Kevembuangga if you want to. That's safe enough -- I've heard it before.
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/15/books/i-do-not-believe-in-ghosts.html
ANGELS FEAR Towards an Epistemology of the
Sacred. By Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson. 224 pp. New York:
Macmillan Publishing Company. $18.95.
KENNETH BURKE once said, ''A person has the
right to worship God according to his or her own metaphor.'' Gregory Bateson's
metaphor came to be ''metaphor'' itself, as his anthropology crept, like
Yeats's rough beast, toward a new vision of religion. This is made
interestingly plain by Mary Catherine Bateson's intelligent and loving editing
of her famous father's last manuscript (he died in 1980), ''Angels Fear.''
At the end of his life, Bateson believed that
''we are not going to get far unless we acknowledge that the whole of science
and technology . . . springs out of and impinges on religion.'' The way was
prepared for this view in ''Mind and Nature,'' in which Bateson affirmed a
holistic unity among human mental processes and culture and biology. He
described there how this connection is only comprehensible metaphorically,
particularly in metaphors which are familiar from religion.
For Bateson, ''it becomes evident that metaphor
is not just pretty poetry, it is not either good or bad logic, but is in fact
the logic upon which the biological world has been built, the main
characteristic and organizing glue of this world of mental process.'' Indeed,
metaphor is the clue, the link to what others may find diverse and
oppositional. ''Metaphor'' itself is thereby the metaphorical connection
between science, cybernetics and epistemology, on the one hand (''this book is
not much concerned with truths about things - only with truths about truths''),
and, on the other hand, poetry, parable, anecdote, humor, play and myth (''it
is time to reverse the trend which since Copernicus has been in the direction
of debunking mythology''). As Mary Catherine Bateson properly remarks, her
father's method is ''insight through analogy.'' ''Angels Fear'' is an essay in
discovery, an uncovering of ''the natural history of the relations between
ideas.''
This is all bound to bother those who feel that
the work attempts to reinvent the wheel of being, that it is one more instance
of science coming late to what philosophers and theologians have known all
along. It is also bound to irritate those who deem amateur philosophizing and
theologizing hopelessly unsophisticated. Such readers will think that the ideas
of Wittgenstein, W. V. O. Quine and John Searle render this book
epistemologically beside the point, that Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida make
it look naive in literary terms and that it is theologically simplistic in the
face of the work of Mircea Eliade, Paul Tillich and Bernard Lonergan.
Continue
reading the main story
Bateson anticipated those objections: ''The
logic boys say they have new and better models.'' But the fact is that, by
reading this work of the Batesons through such prisms as are provided by
conventional academic wisdom, a reader may rush foolishly to conclusions that
even angels would fear. For in fact, ''Angels Fear'' is not one more instance
of the cultured despisers of religion experiencing evangelical rebirth.
Bateson is holistic, to be sure, but he is not
literal about that; ''uniformity is surely one of those things that becomes
toxic beyond a certain level,'' he says. He is against dualisms, but he is not
using religion to fill the gap between mind and body, ideology and politics,
subject and object, thinking and feeling. Rather, he names the connection
between these opposites with a paradoxical image borrowed from C. G. Jung, who
in turn took it from ancient Gnosticism - ''pleroma/creatura.'' Implied in this
image is the idea that the fundamental connection is not between two
substances, mind and matter. Rather, mind (or Bateson's ''god'') is the pattern
and fabric, texture and weave (pleroma) in all matter (creatura).
Unlike the adherent of conventional piety (or
conventional scientism, for that matter), Bateson affirms discontinuity and
difference as an integral part of order in the world: ''This gap is inevitable
and necessary.'' ''All knowledge has gaps.'' ''Gaps are a characteristic of
Creatura.'' Bateson knows that his perspective is metaphorical and indirect. He
speaks eloquently and compellingly in praise of secrecy and noncommunication,
precisely on behalf of the goal of openness and connection, and he gives many
examples - from Coleridge, Greek myth and cybernetics - of metaphor in everyday
life. For Bateson, the ''angel'' (the Greek word originally meant
''messenger'') appears in the gap rather than in the certainty. He detests the
literalism of current cultural pieties: ''I do not believe in spirits, gods,
devas, fairies, leprechauns, nymphs, wood spirits, ghosts, poltergeists, or
Santa Claus. (But to learn that there is no Santa Claus is perhaps the
beginning of religion.)'' ''When the bagel is eaten, the hole does not remain
to be reincarnated in a doughnut.'' In Bateson's religion, ''in the asking of
questions, there will be no limit to our hubris; and . . . there shall always be
humility in our acceptance of answers. In these two characteristics we shall be
in sharp contrast with most of the religions of the world. They show little
humility in their espousal of answers but great fear about what questions they
will ask.''
BATESON lived in the gaps, betwixt and between.
Not that he, or the book, idealizes the absurd. Mary Catherine Bateson has
masterfully pulled together what must have been a hodgepodge of several years
of reflections. As a connecting device, she engages her father in dialogue
about the book and its ideas. The imaginary conversations are often constructed
from notes of real ones, but just as often they are purely fictive. This
strategy works. It aids the reader and is appropriate to the content of
Bateson's argument.
Bateson's liminal stance is understood best
when he speaks about the ''unacceptable solutions'' to the mind-body problem
represented by supernaturalism and materialism: ''Very simply, let me say that
I despise and fear both of these extremes of opinion and that I believe both
extremes to be epistemologically naive, epistemologically wrong, and
politically dangerous. They are also dangerous to something which we may
loosely call mental health.'' So he takes as his task ''to explore whether
there is a sane and valid place for religion somewhere between these two
nightmares of nonsense.'' Especially, he hopes that the metaphoric view may
provide ''a new and badly needed humility.''
I believe there is a clue to this humility, and
to this book, in the shifting title. Bateson began the writing in 1978. His
daughter tells us that it was to be called ''Where Angels Fear to Tread,'' but
that he often referred to it as ''Angels Fear.'' She retained the latter. This
title appropriately, if subtly, calls up notions of angelic reticence and
humility rather than an image of fools rushing into religion. But there is also
a hint of a missing apostrophe in the title, like the one omitted in Joyce's
''Finnegans Wake.'' This opens the possibility that fears may be viewed as angelic.
For in profound fears one may discover a response to the question the
anthropologist shares with the Sphinx and the Psalmist: ''What is the human?''
Deep in such fears are the angels - ''deep unconscious philosophies,'' as
Bateson calls them. ''The myths in which our lives are embedded . . . are built
deeply into character, often below awareness, so that they are essentially
religious, matters of faith.'' It would seem that Bateson knew both the humor
and the truth in some wag's saying: ''A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or
what's a 'meta' for?''
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/092137408900200407?journalCode=cdya
The deep history of "evil
empires" has its own his-story.
This may seem like a joke at first sight, but it isn't at all. Here I do
a little Meta-Morphology of the Deep History of some Empires which were
a special sort of Empires of a Warrior Elite Class. Most Empires of
Antiquity were of this sort. Only in European history there arose an Empire
of the Merchant Class, as was the case with the Netherlands Economical
Empire, and the Dutch East India Company which was founded in 1602.
(Dutch: Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC). It was the first-ever
multinational corporation. And the British'ers emulated this success story with
a few improvements here and there. So back to the history of empires. Most empires
of humanity were of the type "Warrior Elite Class". And Gene
Roddenberry knew his way around many things in the business of history and
technology. So he modeled the Klingon Empire to closely resemble the Spartan or
Roman or Mongolian ways of Politics and Power. The Klingon Empire was just a
way of Gene Roddenberry to think the "What If". Meaning what if the
Spartans had managed to form a Real Empire, which in the history they were
never able to do. The reason for this is their method of a slave holding
society which was quite without parallel even for all the slave holding
societies of Antiquity. The usual case was that one imported his slaves from
some far (or even near) away other populations of defeated enemies. But the
Spartans did it the other way around. They had enslaved the local autochthonous
population of their territory to keep as self-reproducing slaves, which was
more of a feat than the other slave-holders. And they based their society
structure around this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Roddenberry
Eugene Wesley Roddenberry (August 19, 1921 – October 24, 1991) was an American
television screenwriter, producer and creator of the original Star Trek television series, and its first spin-off The Next Generation. Born in El Paso,
Texas, Roddenberry grew up in Los
Angeles, where his father was a police officer. Roddenberry flew 89 combat
missions in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and worked as a commercial pilot after
the war. Later, he followed in his father's footsteps and joined the Los Angeles Police Department, where he also began to write scripts for television.
When Roddenberry pitched Star Trek to
MGM, it was warmly received, but no offer was made.[49] He then went to Desilu Productions, but rather than being offered a one-script deal, he was hired as a
producer and allowed to work on his own projects. His first was a half-hour
pilot called Police Story (not to be confused with the anthology series created by Joseph
Wambaugh), which was not picked up by the networks.[50]Having not sold a pilot in five years, Desilu was having financial
difficulties; its only success was I Love
Lucy.[51] Roddenberry took the Star Trek idea to Oscar Katz,
head of programming, and the duo immediately started work on a plan to sell the
series to the networks. They took it to CBS, which ultimately passed on it. The
duo later learned that CBS had been eager to find out about Star Trek because
it had a science fiction series in development—Lost in
Space. Roddenberry and Katz next took the idea to Mort Werner at NBC,[51] this time downplaying the science fiction elements and
highlighting the links to Gunsmoke and Wagon
Train.[50] The network funded three story ideas, and selected "The
Menagerie", which was later known as "The Cage", to be made into a pilot. (The other two later became episodes of
the series.) While most of the money for the pilot came from NBC, the remaining
costs were covered by Desilu.[52][53] Roddenberry hired Dorothy Fontana, better known as D. C.
Fontana, as his assistant. They had worked together previously on The
Lieutenant, and she had eight script credits to her name.[51]
Roddenberry and Barrett had begun an affair by
the early days of Star Trek,[52] and he specifically wrote the part of the character Number One in the pilot with her in mind; no other actresses were considered
for the role. Barrett suggested Nimoy for the part of Spock. He had worked with both Roddenberry and Barrett on The
Lieutenant, and once Roddenberry remembered the thin features of the actor,
he did not consider anyone else for the part.[54] The remaining cast came together; filming began on November 27,
1964, and was completed on December 11.[55] After post-production, the episode was shown to NBC executives and
it was rumored that Star Trek would be broadcast at
8:00 pm on Friday nights. The episode failed to impress test audiences,[56] and after the executives became hesitant, Katz offered to make a
second pilot. On March 26, 1965, NBC ordered a new episode.[57]
I give just some side thoughts on Star Ship Technology. The
Klingon's had some pretty good engineers, to be sure. And that famous Cloaking
Device was surely a nice invention. But only for the Star Trek Script
writers who knew next to nothing how such a device works. We all know that
there is artificial gravity on those Star Ships of the Stellar
Federation and the Klingon's alike. Now when you create artificial gravity
you must also create quite a huge deformation of the Space Time Structure
around your ship, which is pretty impossible to shield, since gravity is the
force that permeates all of the Universe. So it extends practically into
infinity. And when you have such an artificial gravity device on your Star
Ship, the Gravity signature of that will also extend practically into
infinity. So the famous Cloaking Device is of no use at all when your
enemy has a gravity detector on board. The problem is only that in order to
detect another Center of Gravity, you must by the technical
requirements, shut off your own Gravity Generator, or otherwise you can
detect only your own Gravity field. This would of course make for some quite
uncomfortable ride of your own Star Ship crew. It is pretty much the same
business as with Sonar Devices on Submarines. When you emit any sound at all,
this can be heard across the whole ocean for more than 1000 kilometers around.
The same holds with the Neutron Emissions. The thermonuclear
reactors on board of these Star Cruisers emit so many tons of Neutrons, and it
is quite difficult to shield them. There is water and one other material: Beryllium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_radiation#Ionization_mechanisms_and_properties
Because
neutrons are uncharged, they are more penetrating than alpha radiation or beta radiation. In some cases they are more penetrating than gamma radiation, which is impeded in materials of high atomic number. In materials of
low atomic number such as hydrogen,
a low energy gamma ray may be more penetrating than a high energy neutron.
Neutron radiation protection relies on radiation shielding. Due to the high kinetic energy of neutrons, this radiation is
considered the most severe and dangerous radiation to the whole body when it is
exposed to external radiation sources. In comparison to conventional ionizing
radiation based on photons or charged particles, neutrons are repeatedly
bounced and slowed (absorbed) by light nuclei so hydrogen-rich material is more effective at shielding than iron nuclei. The light atoms serve to slow down the neutrons by elastic scattering so they can then be absorbed by nuclear
reactions. However, gamma
radiation is often produced in such reactions, so additional shielding must
be provided to absorb it. Care must be taken to avoid using nuclei that
undergo fission or neutron
capture that causes radioactive
decay of nuclei, producing gamma rays.
Neutrons readily pass through most material,
and hence the absorbed dose (measured in Grays) from a given amount of radiation is low, but interact enough to cause
biological damage. The most effective shielding materials are water, or hydrocarbons like polyethylene or paraffin
wax. Water-extended polyester (WEP) is effective as a shielding wall in
harsh environments due to its high hydrogen content and resistance to fire,
allowing it to be used in a range of nuclear, health physics, and defense
industries.[3] Hydrogen-based materials are suitable for shielding as they are
proper barriers against radiation.[4]
Perhaps one would need about 1/2 Kilometer thickness of shielding. But
how could one carry around a shield of 1/2 Kilometer of (beryllium or) water
around the reactors in the Star Cruiser? It would weigh a few Megatons, and
then the whole beast wouldn't be able to move at all, let alone moving at warp
speed. So when your nice enemy has a neutron detector on board you are out of
luck again. And by your own neutron emissions you can be tracked at around a
distance of about 1/2 Parsec. But in the first place, the whole crew of the
Star Ship would be cooked right away after about 10 seconds of running their
Thermonuclear Reactors. Neutrons are pretty difficult to shield. And ironically
the best shield is water, H2O. Now since humans are about 70% H2O, they don't
exactly serve as shield, but they catch up most of the Neutrons that are flying
about. Humans are Neutron catchers if you want to make a joke of this.
It is also the way a Neutron bomb works. It doesn't have so much explosive
energy, but converts most of its power into Neutrons. So when such a device
explodes, it destroys very little in terms of technical infrastructure, but
very much so, all those living things which have all about the same content of
H2O, meaning 70%.
So I don't know if a Star Ship with this kind of reactor would ever be
able to carry a human crew. Now some more bad facts about the Cloaking Device.
It eats up so much of your thermonuclear power that you must shut it off, when
you want to fire your weapons. This was amply made clear in so many Star Trek
movies. At least the Script writers had understood this problem. So they had to
uncloak themselves when they got ready to fire, and before you fire you should
better do some aiming and that takes some valuable time. And this is the one
thing the poor Script writers didn't understand clearly: The Cloaking Device
device works both ways by the laws of Physics. So while you have it switched
on, you are also not able to see anything. This is pretty bad news if you just
have some Asteroid fields to navigate around. Then to sum it up: A Cloaking
Device is a nice toy but altogether useless. This is the reason why the Federal
Star Fleet Engineers never thought of such a technological imbecility.
So back to the Klingon Empire of Gene Roddenberry. It was the "what
if" the Spartans had managed to form a Real Empire. These are or will
(may) be the Klingons. They are the perfect slave holding society who had their
slaves working their souls away in the Dilithium Mines. Pretty much the same as
the Athenians did with their Silver Mines which were the foundations of
Athenian power and wealth. Similar to the underground cave cities of the mines
of the Carthagians. These folks literally created a Hades. The Roman mining
business was not much better. And the best and richest mines of Antiquity were
in Spain. That is why the Romans were so eager to take those posessions away
from the Carthagians, and after a while they succeeded when they had done away
with Hannibal and his brother Hasdrubal Barka.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasdrubal_Barca
Hasdrubal Barca (245 – 22 June 207 BC), a latinization of ʿAzrubaʿal (Punic: एआओँएऋ)[1] son of Hamilcar Barca, was a Carthaginian general in the Second Punic War. He was the brother of Hannibal and Mago Barca
Now more on the Klingons: Gene Roddenberry knew his way around Dilithium
quite well, since he knew a lot about the work of Edward Teller, who had
practically invented the Hydrogen Bomb himself. What is not very well
known even today, ist that Lithium is a more important component of the Thermonuclear
Fusion Bomb as it is more correctly called. There were a few little
suprises when the USA tested a few of the early models of this type of bomb and
they had miscalculated the effect of Lithium in the mixture. So the bomb was
much stronger than expected and it did scare the hell out of those observers
who had thought that they were a safe distance away. Unfortunately, it was not
so safe. But by sheer luck, no-one was killed in that experiment. But some of
the observation bunkers were quite a bit dented after the experiment. This is
all in the wikipedia articles and no need to repeat it here. Dilithium was the
anwer that Gene Roddenberry came up with to do thermonuclear fusion without the
incredible temperatures and pressures that one usually needs to keep a
thermonuclear fusion going and continue it as long as the supply of Dilithium
lasts. And this is quite a long time since it is such a dense energy source.
Uranium 235 is also a quite dense energy source but it has much less energy
density than the thermonuclear fusion which is the second most potent energy
source in the whole of the universe. Except of course the complete annihilation
of matter and antimatter which results in such a huge flash of lightning, that
it is enough to illuminte half of the Galaxy for a microsecond or so. The
famous photon torpedoes of the Star Fleet and of the Klingons also were
made with this stuff. The small problem is only how to keep the antimatter away
from reacting with ordinary matter at some un-predictable instant, like for
example when there is a collision of Star Ships, and the ammunition gets
bounced around quite a bit. This was the story of one of the childish novels by
Dan Brown who had not the slightest idea what it means to first produce that
anti-matter in any sizeable quantities, and then to store and handle it in some
routine ways. So there still remain some unsolved problems when dealing with
anti-matter. The other small problem is the same as with the fission of
Plutonium, which is quite a different matter than Uranium 235, since you just
cannot put a kilo or two of Plutonium together and wait for the fission
reaction to produce some Kaboom. Plutonium is not so easy, since it tends to
tear itself apart before the fission chain reaction really gets going. One has
to come up with a lot of compression of the material to produce an Atomic Bomb.
The trick is that you have to create an implosion before you have an explosion.
Meaning that you have to compact the Plutonium in such a way that it will not
tear itself apart before the chain reaction really starts. The same problem but
some orders of magnitude more diffictult is when you try to get enough matter
and antimatter together before everything flies apart before they can properly
react with each other. And it is easy to see that you cannot build explosive
lenses for that, since these are just matter, and they will react with the
antimatter also. So this may remain Science Fiction until some very intelligent
Klingon or some very intelligent Vulkanian or some very intelligent Romulanian
comes up with the technology to do this. This will probably happen more later
than sooner, and even more probably never at all.
AG: There is just a little side story to tell. We have all seen or heard
about the movie Gladiator. What we surely haven't seen or heard about is
how the good pre-Gladiator land-Owner (Latifundium) Maximus Decimus Meridius
(Meritokratius / Meritokrassius of Plutokratik fame, see Patrice Ayme') had
previously managed his estate in the province of Iberia or Espania. He had done
this of course with a small army of slaves. And it didn't take a lot of
ruffianism from the side of the good Commodus, to do the job. Just a small
slave rebellion also did this perfectly. And slave rebellions were quite common
in ancient times as much as in the European / US Slavery systems. The best
known rebellions were in the French colony of La Española aka Saint-Domingue.
The irony of history is that when the slaves were finally set free, they became
so much worse oppressors of the rest of the populace of Haiti and other places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion
The most successful slave rebellion in history was the
18th-century Haitian Revolution, led by Toussaint Louverture and later Jean-Jacques Dessalines who won the war against
their French colonial rulers, which founded
the country formerly known as Saint Domingue.
In
the ninth century, the poet-prophet Ali bin Muhammad led imported East African
slaves in Iraq during the Zanj Rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate; Nanny of the Maroons was an 18th-century leader who rebelled against
the British in Jamaica; and the Quilombo dos Palmares of Brazil flourished under Ganazumba (Ganga Zumba). The 1811 German Coast Uprising in the Territory of Orleans was the largest rebellion in the continental
United States; Denmark Vesey rebelled in South Carolina, and Madison Washington during the Creole case in the 19th century United States.
And the story of Gladiator has some common themes with the "Gone
with the Wind" epos. The US-American South slave holding society was
only marginally more humane than the Roman one. There was a popular joke in the
US South states slave society around these times: When a slave wasn't behaving
properly, there was no great punishment needed (like it was so grossly
exaggerated in the novels and movies)... It was just sufficient to tell the
poor slave that if he didn't behave better in the future, then his master would
be forced to sell him to a slave manager in the plantations of the Dutch West
Indies. This was enough of a threat to make every slave behave as (s)he should.
I will not tell more of this joke, as not to spoil it. I will just give another
literature hint: One justs read V.S. Naipaul: "The Middle Passage"
(160-161).
Jan Jacob Hartsinck "The story of the Slave Rebellion in Barbice".
https://www.emlc-journal.org/articles/10.18352/emlc.61/
“Their power has been broken, the danger has passed.” Dutch newspaper
coverage of the Berbice slave revolt, Author:
Esther Baakman
In February 1763 one of the largest and longest slave
revolts erupted in the Dutch colony of Berbice. As the majority of the white
population fled, colonial authorities were left behind with few, and mostly ill
soldiers, and in no time the insurgents controlled the colony almost
completely. This rebellion did not only shake the colonial government to the
core, but also made a significant (media) impact in the Dutch Republic.
...
On
21 May 1763, the very last bulletin of the Amsterdamsche
Courant brought news
from the Dutch colony of Berbice (in modern-day Guyana) relaying that in
February ‘a revolt of the Negroes had taken place’. Due to the absence of any
further particularities, however, it was unclear how severe the situation was.2 As it turned
out, a group of enslaved labourers, led by former house slave Coffij and his
second-in-command Accarra, revolted in late February in protest against their
harsh and inhumane treatment. Within days Dutch colonial authority completely
collapsed and the rebellion was joined by the majority of the enslaved
population. The colonists, well aware that they were outnumbered ten to one,
panicked after the insurgents killed around thirty Europeans on the Peereboom
plantation, one of the major Dutch sugar plantations about seventy miles
upstream from the coast, and fled north rather than make a stand against the
insurgency. With the help of reinforcements from Suriname, directly to the east
of Berbice, the Dutch managed to regain control of the Dageraad plantation,
about ten miles downriver from Fort Nassau, in early April (fig. 1).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3786300?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
"Slave insurrections were a usual rather than unusual symptom of
disorganizations
in these territories which embraced several slave systems."
Michael Craton: Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British
West Indies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_place_names_in_Iberia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator_(2000_film)
Crowe portrays Hispano-Roman general Maximus Decimus Meridius, who is betrayed when Commodus, the ambitious son of Emperor Marcus
Aurelius, murders his father and seizes the throne. Reduced to slavery, Maximus
rises through the ranks of the gladiatorial arena to avenge the murders of his
family and his emperor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome
Slavery in
ancient Rome played an important role in society
and the economy. Besides manual labor, slaves performed many domestic services,
and might be employed at highly skilled jobs and professions. Accountants and
physicians were often slaves. Slaves of Greek origin in particular might be
highly educated. Unskilled slaves, or those sentenced to slavery as punishment,
worked on farms, in mines, and at mills.
Slaves were
considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture and summary execution. Over time, however, slaves gained increased legal protection,
including the right to file complaints against their masters.
A major source
of slaves had been Roman military expansion during the Republic. The use of former soldiers as slaves led perhaps inevitably to a
series of en masse armed rebellions, the Servile Wars, the last of which was led by Spartacus. During the Pax Romana of the early Roman Empire (1st–2nd centuries AD), emphasis was placed on maintaining
stability, and the lack of new territorial conquests dried up this supply line
of human trafficking. To maintain an enslaved work force, increased legal restrictions on
freeing slaves were put into place. Escaped slaves would be hunted down and
returned (often for a reward). There were also many cases of poor people
selling their children to richer neighbors as slaves in times of hardship.
In his Institutiones
(161 AD), the Roman jurist Gaius wrote that:
[Slavery is] the
state that is recognized by the ius gentium in which someone is subject to the dominion of another person contrary
to nature.
— Gaius,
Institutiones 1.3.2[2]
The
1st century BC Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus indicates that the Roman institution of slavery began with the
legendary founder Romulus giving Roman fathers the right to sell their own children into slavery, and kept growing
with the expansion of the Roman state. Slave ownership was most widespread throughout the Roman citizenry
from the Second Punic War (218–201 BC) to the 4th century AD. The Greek geographer
Strabo (1st century AD) records how an enormous slave trade resulted
from the collapse of the Seleucid Empire (100–63 BC).[3]
The Twelve Tables, Rome's oldest legal code, has brief references to slavery, indicating
that the institution was of long standing. In the tripartite division of law by
the jurist Ulpian (2nd century AD), slavery was an aspect of the ius gentium, the customary international law held in common among all peoples (gentes). The "law of
nations" was neither considered natural law, thought to exist in nature and govern animals as well as humans, nor civil law, belonging to the emerging bodies of laws specific to a people in
Western societies.[4] All human beings are born free (liberi) under natural law, but
slavery was held to be a practice common to all nations, who might then have
specific civil laws pertaining to slaves.[4] In ancient warfare, the victor had the right under the ius gentium
to enslave a defeated population; however, if a settlement had been reached
through diplomatic negotiations or formal surrender, the people were by custom to be spared violence and enslavement. The ius gentium was not a
legal code,[5] and any force it had depended on "reasoned compliance with
standards of international conduct."[6]
During the
period of Roman imperial expansion, the increase in wealth amongst the Roman
elite and the substantial growth of slavery transformed the economy.[19] Although the economy was dependent on slavery, Rome was not the most
slave-dependent culture in history. Among the Spartans, for instance, the slave class of helots outnumbered the free by about seven to one, according to Herodotus.[20] In any case, the overall role of slavery in Roman economy is a
discussed issue among scholars.[21][22][23]
Delos in the eastern Mediterranean was made a free port in 166 BC and became one of the main market venues
for slaves. Multitudes of slaves who found their way to Italy were purchased by
wealthy landowners in need of large numbers of slaves to labor on their
estates. Historian Keith Hopkins noted that it was land investment and agricultural production which generated great wealth in Italy, and considered that Rome's
military conquests and the subsequent introduction of vast wealth and slaves
into Italy had effects comparable to widespread and rapid technological
innovations.[3]
Augustus imposed a 2 percent tax on the sale of slaves, estimated to generate
annual revenues of about 5 million sesterces—a figure that indicates some 250,000 sales.[24] The tax was increased to 4 percent by 43 AD.[25] Slave markets seem to have existed in every city of the Empire, but
outside Rome the major center was Ephesus.[24]
Estimates for
the prevalence of slavery in the Roman Empire vary. Estimates of the percentage
of the population of Italy who were slaves range from 30 to 40 percent in the
1st century BC, upwards of two to three million slaves in Italy by the end of
the 1st century BC, about 35% to 40% of Italy's population.[26][27][28] For the empire as a whole during the period 260–425 AD, according to a
study done by Kyle Harper, the slave population has been estimated at just
under five million, representing 10–15% of the total population of 50–60
million+ inhabitants. An estimated 49% of all slaves were owned by the elite,
who made up less than 1.5% of the empire's population. About half of all slaves
worked in the countryside where they were a small percentage of the population
except on some large agricultural, especially imperial, estates; the remainder
the other half were a significant percentage 25% or more in towns and cities as
domestics and workers in commercial enterprises and manufacturers.[29]
And since we all know our way around present-day technological history,
we really soon find out about the famous Nazi German technologies of WWII,
which were about as useless as that fancy Klingon Technology. Only the
poor Hitler had no idea about any sorts of the true costs and the true value of
those kinds of technology. So that he could be fascinated about some super
weapons that would finally win the war for him. And the poor German
engineers who concocted all those fabulous technologies had only one thing on
their mInds: How to avoid being drafted into the last bid for the German
Wehrmacht to be thrown into the meat grinder of the Ostfront. So
they had to come up with quite some creative thinking to impress the Fuehrer a
little bit, since they knew full well that the dear Fuehrer had no idea at all
what the logistics were all about, of the development, testing, and production,
especially of the strategic metals, of these nice toys. The famed German Me 262
had no such strategic metals in their jet engines and their turbines
burned out at about 20 hours of use. No inconel at hand at all. That was
more the British way of doing jet engines. Also heat resistent ceramics. So it
came to pass that the one-time socialist government of Great Britain had
nothing better to do than to sell a few of the pretty ingenious and infamous Nene
engines to the Russians in 1946. What a nice technology transfer that was,
especially when the Mig-15's showed up as a nasty suprise for the Allies
over the Korean War theater. And what the Russians lacked in terms of
very heavy industrial power base, like the US did, they made up nicely with
their master spies in the KGB. So when those nice KGB agents did a visit to the
Rolls Royce Nene plant, where they were shown the milling machines that
shaped the Nene turbine blades out of inconel flats, and they had shoes with
extra spongy soles, and so they picked up some shavings with these soles and
sent them back to the USSR to analyse them. And so they found out about the
secrets of inconel which were pretty closely guarded secrets in the year 1946.
Just to remind: The good Vladimir Putin had once been a master spy in East
Germany. So he knows the German language and the German mInd very well. So back
to Nazi Jet Engine Technology: The Germans didn't have inconel so their jet
engines burned out as quickly as they could.
https://www.revolvy.com/page/Rolls%252DRoyce-Nene
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconel
Inconel is a family of austenitic nickel-chromium-based superalloys.[1]
Inconel alloys are oxidation-corrosion-resistant materials well suited for service
in extreme environments subjected to pressure and heat. When heated, Inconel
forms a thick, stable, passivating oxide layer protecting the surface from further attack. Inconel retains
strength over a wide temperature range, attractive for high temperature
applications where aluminum and steel would succumb to creep as a result of thermally induced crystal vacancies. Inconel's high
temperature strength is developed by solid solution strengthening or precipitation hardening, depending on the alloy.[2][3]
Inconel alloys are typically used in high
temperature applications. Common trade names for Inconel Alloy 625 include: Inconel 625, Chronin 625, Altemp 625, Haynes 625, Nickelvac 625 and Nicrofer 6020.[4] Inconel Alloy 600 include: NA14, N06600, BS3076, 2.4816, NCr15Fe (FR), NiCr15Fe
(EU) and NiCr15Fe8 (DE). Inconel 718 include: Nicrofer 5219, Superimphy 718,
Haynes 718, Pyromet 718, Supermet 718, and Udimet 718.[5]
The Inconel family of alloys was first developed
in the 1940s by research teams at Wiggin Alloys (Hereford, England), which has since been acquired by Special Metals Corporation,[6] in support of the development of the Whittle jet engine.[7]
In June 2018, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced completion of work on a new Inconel superalloy called SX 300 developed for high-temperature, high-pressure, highly-oxidative environments in a rocket engine.[8]
Inconel alloys are oxidation- and corrosion-resistant materials well suited for service in extreme environments
subjected to high pressure and kinetic energy. When heated, Inconel forms a thick and stable passivating oxide layer protecting the surface from further attack. Inconel retains
strength over a wide temperature range, attractive for high-temperature
applications where aluminium and steel would succumb to creep as a result of thermally induced crystal vacancies (see Arrhenius equation). Inconel's high temperature
strength is developed by solid solution strengthening or precipitation strengthening, depending on the alloy. In age-hardening or precipitation-strengthening varieties, small amounts of niobium combine with nickel to form the intermetallic compound Ni3Nb or gamma double prime (γ″). Gamma prime forms small cubic crystals that inhibit slip and creep effectively at elevated temperatures.[14] The formation of gamma-prime crystals increases over time, especially
after three hours of a heat exposure of 850 °C, and continues to grow
after 72 hours of exposure.[15]
Inconel is a difficult metal to shape and
machine using traditional cold forming techniques due to rapid work hardening. After the first machining pass, work hardening tends to plastically
deform either the workpiece or the tool on subsequent passes. For this reason,
age-hardened Inconels such as 718 are machined using an aggressive but slow cut
with a hard tool, minimizing the number of passes required. Alternatively, the
majority of the machining can be performed with the workpiece in a solutionized form, with only the final steps being performed after age hardening.
External threads are machined using a lathe to "single-point" the threads or by rolling the threads in
the solution treated condition (for hardenable alloys) using a screw machine. Inconel 718 can also be roll-threaded after full aging by using induction heat to 1,300 °F (700 °C) without increasing the grain size.[citation needed] Holes with internal threads are
made by threadmilling. Internal threads can also be formed using a sinker electrical discharge machining (EDM).
In 1946, the Cold War was not only not a thing,
but still perfectly avoidable. As such, Clement Attlee’s government authorised
the export of 40 Rolls-Royce Nene engines to the USSR. Since the Nene was a
conservative, underpowered centrifugal flow engine as opposed to the axial flow
Avon the British were intending to use going forward, exporting the Nene was
not thought to be a problem. Contrary to what the other answers state,
Rolls-Royce was paid in full for the 40 engines they exported.
The Soviets studied the Nene, re-designed it to
be bigger and more powerful and proceeded to produce it as the VK-1. They also
helped the Chinese to set up production of the VK-1 where, in the late 50s, a
bod from Rolls-Royce saw them, threw a strop and started demanding over 200m
pounds in license fees. With the Cold War in full effect and given that
Rolls-Royce never provided any of the tooling or technical materials to aid in
production, needless to say those demands were not met.
The idea that this was some sort of massive
error that gave the Soviets a massive advantage is a bit of a myth. They had
their own research as well as access to research materials from the Germans
(albeit not the actual scientists, who ended up in American hands one way or
another). Moreover, by 1946 the trick wasn’t necessarily designing the engine -
how it was supposed to work was well-understood - but in how to manufacture it.
This is what let the Germans down - they had little access to rare metals in
order to produce alloys with the necessary qualities.
This myth arose largely as a result of
MiG-15bis’ superiority in the Korean War, but its fundamental advantage was the
swept wing design and all the work that went into aerodynamics (the Gloster
Meteor would for example become unstable at high speeds). The Nene engine was a
shortcut, but anyone who can reverse-engineer something like that can also
design it and the Soviet metallurgy solutions were original.
NB: This is a good spot to acknowledge Frank
Whittle, who invented the engine that Rolls-Royce then licensed and developed,
back in the mid 1930-s when it *was* a technological marvel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Nene
The Rolls-Royce RB.41 Nene is a 1940s
British centrifugal compressor turbojet engine. The Nene was a complete redesign, rather than a scaled-up Rolls-Royce Derwent[1] with a design target of 5,000 lbf, making it the most powerful engine of its era. It was Rolls-Royce's third jet engine to enter production, and first ran less than 6 months from the start of
design. It was named after the River Nene in keeping with the company's tradition of naming its early jet engines
after rivers.
The design saw relatively little use in British
aircraft designs, being passed over in favour of the axial-flow Avon that followed it. Its only widespread use in the UK was in the Hawker Sea Hawk and the Supermarine Attacker. In the US it was built under
licence as the Pratt & Whitney J42, and it powered the Grumman F9F Panther. Its most widespread use was in the
form of the Klimov VK-1, a reverse-engineered, modified and enlarged version
which produced around 6,000 lbf of thrust, and powered the famous Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15, a highly successful fighter aircraft which was built in vast numbers.
A more powerful slightly enlarged version of
the Nene was produced as the Rolls-Royce Tay.
The Nene was designed and built as a result of
an early 1944 Air Ministry request for an engine of 4,200 lbf thrust, and an engine was schemed-out by Stanley Hooker and Adrian Lombard as the B.40. In the summer of 1944 Hooker visited the US and discovered
that General Electric already had two engine types, an axial and a centrifugal, of
4,000 lbf thrust running. On returning to the UK Hooker decided to go for
5,000 lbf of thrust and, working with Lombard, Pearson and Morley, a
complete redesign of the B.40 resulted in the B.41,[1] later to be called the Nene.
The double-sided impeller was 28.8 inches in diameter, compared to 20.68 for the Derwent I, to
produce an airflow of 80 lb/s, while the overall diameter of the engine
was 49.5 inches. A scaled up Derwent would have a 60-inch diameter. The
compressor casing was based on Whittle's Type 16 W.2/500 compressor case which
was more aerodynamically efficient than that on the Derwent but also eliminated
cracking. Other design advances included nine new low pressure-drop/high
efficiency combustion chambers developed by Lucas and a small impeller for rear bearing and turbine disc cooling.[2] The first engine start was attempted on 27 October 1944. A number of
snags delayed the run until nearly midnight, when with almost the entire day
and night shift staff watching, an attempt was made to start the engine,
without the inlet vanes, which had not yet been fitted. To everyone's dismay
the engine refused to light - positioning the igniter was a trial-and-error
affair at the time. On the next attempt, Denis Drew unscrewed the igniter and
as the starter motor ran the engine up to speed, lit the engine with an oxy-acetylene torch. The engine was run up to
4,000 lbf and more, and a cheer went up around the assembled personnel.
Upon Hooker's arrival next morning, and informed that the inlet vanes had been
fitted during the night, Hooker was satisfied to see the thrust gauge needle
registering 5,000 lbf, making the B.41 the most powerful jet engine in the
world. Weight was around 1,600 lb.[3]
The Mig 15 would have been much later as a
reliable engine would have taken much longer to develop than copying the
Nene/Derwent engine sent to USSR. At the time people had not woken up to how
relations would develop and change in late 40s so a left leaning UK government
would not have realised how things would develop. The transfer of German
prisoners-civilians who were on gas turbine teams in WWII were quite numerous.
On the night of Oct 22 1946 250 BMW and 350 Junkers specialists were
transferred to USSR.
The BMW task was to improve and support BMW 003 production at 2,200 lbt rating.
Rotten turbine material meant the life and integrity of the blades was low and
only a small number were built.
The Junkers group worked on developing a 6,700 lbt jet based on the Jumo 012;
again turbine blade integrity meant the engine could not pass the Russian 100
hr type test and development was stopped in 1948. The combined Junkers/BMW team
were then tasked with developing a 6,000hp turboprop.
Nikolai Kuznezow was the chief designer who ensured test beds and rigs were
constructed while German specialists...
Alfred Schreiber and Josef Vogts supervised development, Ferdinand Brandner-
the construction of prototypes and Karl Prestel supervised test bed trials.
Now we come to some more harrowing stories about that strange element Deludium,
er I mean Dilithium. I had said it, Gene Roddenberry knew somthing about
Thermonuclear Fusion, since he had read the story of Edward Teller
diligently. What only few people know is that Dilithium is in the atomic
formula: Li(2). Now that is quite strange. Because Hydrogenium exists only as
H(2). There is no such thing as a single Atom of Hydrogenium. And the good Gene
Roddenberry did some really clever analogous thinking. So he had probably
thought to himself: When Hydrogenium only comes as H(2), why don't we try this
with Lithium. And here things become interesting. By analogous thinking he
arrived at the speculative conclusion, that if there is Dual Lithium,
one could use this property to stack Lithium Atoms together Li(2), and they
would have the fabulous property that you can stack them together like so many
Lego blocks. So you take two Li(2)'s and you stack them together, then you
suddenly have something even more strange. Because it is now Li(2) ** Li(2).
The ** are shorthand for exponential. Then you take two pairs of Li(2) ** Li(2)
and then another Li(2) ** Li(2). You suddenly get something really complicated
and it becomes quite difficult to write it as a formula. Because it now becomes
something even stranger:
Because the more often you stack this together, it becomes more of an
exponential function. So once you have stacked enough of them together, about
30 times, you already can initiate a pretty good thermo-nuclear process with
very little Energy input. Now this is pure speculation of my mInd running wild.
But as I always have some good intuition, when I do things like that... I know
what an exponential is, and it multiplies itself like wildfire. I have already
demonstrated this with the Exponential of Fire of human Intelligence, copyright
by our good Heraklitos. It is just too bad that next-to-no-one in the whole of
humanity (Die Letzten Menschen), is able to think this. And I quote again the
good Patrice Ayme'.
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/09/12/prediction-the-arctic-will-melt-suddenly/
Patrice Ayme' is about as good as yours truly (I mean me) to think the
Exponential. So we are just some oddballs in the whole of humanity. Especially
because I have never seen or heard about a journalist who had had the slightest
idea about what an exponential is. A nuclear chain reaction is also always an
exponential of the kind of the Li(2) experiment mentioned above. First you have
2 Neutrons, then you have 4, then you have 8 ... and then when you get to
around at about 30 or so Exponential'izations, the whole thing goes kaboom!
This is the mechanism of an Atomic Bomb in about 30 words or less. Even Edward
Teller could not have given you a shorter story. I am quite sure of that. See
also:
http://www.noologie.de/energie.htm
Only the script writers of Star Trek were sure that the superior
techology of the 2300's to 2500's would come up with an answer. I think it will
be round about the 23.000's that we have to wait for, if it ever comes to pass,
since there is a good chance that about the time of 2170 there will be no more
humanity around to invent anything at all. The Star Trek movie First Contact
(1996) enlarges a little bit on the possibilty of how any-one of humanity could
come up with the first warp drive. And this is such a ridiculous idea that only
the Star Trek Script writers could come up with. Unfortunately Gene Roddenberry
wasn't around any more or he would have surely stopped such a ridiculous idea.
Now this is all Science Fiction but there are still a few valuable
lessons to be learned. And some of these lessons are of technological nature.
As I had said it in another of my articles on the mindset of a slave holding
society, that the elite becomes complacent and haughty and aloof when you let
the slaves do all the menial ie. manual work for you and you just do the
thinking and directing and ordering around the slaves. This was essentially the
downfall of ancient Greek society and also of the Romans. And the protoypical
example of this haughtiness and aloofness was our poor Platon, who was so
aristokratic, that he would never touch any dirty, heavy, and sordid matter,
not even with a one meter-long stick. And unfortunately the poor Roman Katholik
Christians after the 3rd century or so, had nothing better to do than make the
poor Platon their Leitgeist or their Zeitgeist. As the Freudians would say it:
The Spiritus Rectum. (This is just a little dirty Freudian joke). The GIGO
principle states: When you start out with Garbage, you will also faithfully
continue to re-produce Garbage, which was pretty much the whole of Christian
Philosophy in the gist of what Whitehead had stated: Most of Christian
philosophy is just a series of footnotes to Platon. This means: Most of Western
Christian philosophy (ancilla theologiae) just belongs to the rubbish heap of
bad ideas carried to their logical extremes in the form of the Suprematization
of the theology. And Peter Sloterdijk in "Gottes Eifer" had some very
intelligent things to say about that pitfall in the history of Christian
Thinking right from the start. I have just enlarged a little bit about the
haughtiness of thinking philosophy only and leave the dirty work to the slaves.
http://www.noologie.de/zeno.htm
Now coming back to the Klingon Empire. The Klingon's were pretty much
the same as the ancient Greeks, especially the Spartans, and also very much
like the Romans. They also considered it beneath their dignity to do any menial
work at all, since the Klingon's had their slaves for this business, and so
they were the Super-Spartans and Romans of the Galaxy. Of course the Star Trek
movies rarely spell this out in all the gory details. But there was this one
scene with James T. Kirk who was made prisoner on one of the many Prison
Planets of the Klingon Empire. And we can be pretty sure that the Klingon's had
quite a lot of Prison Planets. We can make a rough estimate by exrapolating the
number of slaves in the Roman Empire, and they were about about 35% to 40% of Italy's population. I am always surprised how
detailed and thoroughly researched the US wikipedia articles are. And the
German wikipedia is just a bunch of crap in comparison. So back to the Klingon Empire. We may safely
assume that it had about 100 to 1000 planets under its iron (er Dilithium)
rule. Otherwise it would just have been no Galaktik Empire at all. So we make
the extrapolation that there must have been proportionately as many as 40
prison planets up to 400 prison planets, comprising the surprising number of...
There must have been a slave population of 400 * 10 billion slaves in the whole
of the Klingon Empire. When we rougly calculate about 10 billion slaves per
slave planet. So this is it what you get, when you have a slave holding Empire
out of all proportions. And since you need to have around one slave guardian
for every 100 slaves... Well I can't get the numbers in the wikipedia any more.
I think that I have exhausted the wikipedia.
... So the the Star Trek script writers really did a good job with this
Klingon Empire even if they didn't show us the exact figures. But with some
extrapolating the slave statistics of the Roman Empire, we get to some very
plausible numbers. And now we can do a little Double-Thinking to get to more
dirty details. And the Klingon's would have vanished out of the Galaxy just by
their own doing, just like the Spartans and the Romans did. It was the same
bloody numbers calculation that led to the undoing of the Roman Empire. When
the expansion of the Roman Empire stopped cold in its tracks after the times of
about Marcus Aurelius, this was the end of the expansion and the beginning of
the collapse or one may better call it The Implosion. There were no more fresh
streams of slaves flowing into the Roman economy, that means the whole business
plan of the Roman Empire collapsed altogether with the slave population. So I
hope that I made the point correctly that it was REALLY NOT the Christians who
were the culprits for the Roman collapse.
What I am saying here about "the Christians" should be taken
with a large table spoonful of "Cum Grano Salis". As it is always in
humanity, there were some intelligent religious believers and some very
stupid ones. Unfortunately, a horde of about 100 very stupid religious
believers in about 100 days, can do so much more ever-lasting damage, than
it would take 1000 intelligent ones about 1000 years to amend the damage. And
this example doesn't come out of thin air. Because it really took the European
civilization about 1000 years after the complete destruction of the ancient
civilization (around 400 CE) to re-build something even moderately close after
the year 1400 CE. Such was the wholesale and wanton destruction of Antiquity,
and we will never know the true extent of it, since all the records were also
destroyed of what had been there before the destruction.
So when the implosion of the ancient Roman power and civilization
structure was really quite complete, (some of) the good Christians did what
they could to destroy even the last vestiges of Ancient Roman Civilisation.
Which was around the time of the Emperor Theodosius around 395 CE, and then the
DARK AGES REALLY BEGAN, the wholesale Cultural Memory Loss of the Ancient
Civilization. And for this the Christians were MOST CERTAINLY THE CULPRITS. We
should not believe the euphemistic stories of the Anachoretes in the Egyptian
Desert, like for example in the "Glasperlenspiel" of Hermann Hesse.
This is pure propaganda of the finest Christian Sort. And even the good Lenin
and the good Trotzki and the good Stalin wouldn't have been able to produce a
better (or worse) propaganda. Because the Christian Anachoretes were more
likely the CircumCelliones, and they liked to loot and pillage, to burn and
tear down, and to rape, and drink and even suicide themselves en masse so that
they became proverbial for the next 1800 years or so. The CircumCelliones and
their ilk took bloody revenge on the remaining heathen population of the former
Roman Empire. Whereas the Christian Martyr victims on the whole never exceeded
more than about 1000, the CircumCelliones and their ilk took the lives of at
least 10.000, give or take a few 10.000 more.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23960151.pdf
https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/shaw/020603.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarian_violence_among_Christians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarian_violence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarianism
The Collapse is just the inverse of the natural law of the exponential
which cannot go on forever, and it suddenly turns into the inverse, or a Minus
Sum Game to phrase it in the terminology of John von Neumann's theory of
games and economic behaviour. I have read the new title
"Collapse" by Jared Diamond, and it is clear that the good Jared does
the same spelling out the dire message that I am just expounding. See also the
very enlightening work of Patrice Ayme' who goes much deeper into the
dirty details than I do. He rightly calls it the Iron Law of the Exponential
and the Law of Plutocracy which is pretty much the same. Unfortunately I
couldn't come up with more quotations of the deeds of the Emperor Theodosius,
since the good Patrice dwells upon the Emperor Constantine much more.
[[And now I do some wondering: Just the same day when I wrote this, the
good Patrice just happened to come up with an article featuring the Emperor
Theodosius. I was quite surprised when I read his article, and I came quite
close to believe in C.G. Jung Synchronicity.
]]
Now the good Patrice is not an Übermensch and it is not the
destiny of us humans to know everything in those huge large expanses of the
Universe of our Knowledge. So we must at some times pretend that we are
Sokrates, and we know that we know next to nothing about this huge the Universe
of our Knowledge. And as Newton had rightly stated it: What we know is a drop,
and what we don't know is the Ocean. I will immediately believe him. And just
as a little side thought, the good Patrice Ayme' had mis-understood Sokrates
completely since he had read only the Platon version of Sokrates and not the
Xenophon version, where Sokrates is quite completely a very different person at
all. The good Patrice cannot read all the works of the history of philosphy and
neiter can I. I am very humble to confess this right here and now.
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/?s=augustine
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/?s=exponential
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/?s=plutocracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_I
Theodosius I (Latin: Flavius Theodosius Augustus;[1] Greek: Θεοδόσιος Αʹ; 11 January 347 – 17 January 395), also known as Theodosius
the Great, was a Roman Emperor from 379 to 395, and the last emperor to rule over both the Eastern and the Western halves of the Roman Empire. On accepting his elevation, he campaigned against Goths and other barbarians who had invaded the Empire. His resources were not
sufficient to destroy them or drive them out, which had been Roman policy for
centuries in dealing with invaders. By treaty, which followed his indecisive
victory at the end of the Gothic War, they were established as foederati, autonomous allies of the Empire, south of the Danube, in Illyricum, within the Empire's borders. They were given lands and allowed to remain
under their own leaders, a grave departure from Roman hegemonic ways. This turn
away from traditional policies was accommodationist and had grave consequences
for the Western Empire from the beginning of the century, as the Romans found
themselves with the impossible task of defending the borders and deal with
unruly federates within. Theodosius I was obliged to fight two destructive
civil wars, successively defeating the usurpers Magnus Maximus in 387–388 and Eugenius in 394, though not without material cost to the power of the Empire.
He issued
decrees that effectively made Nicene Christianity the official state church of the Roman Empire.[2][3] He neither prevented nor punished the destruction of prominent Hellenistic temples of classical antiquity, including the Temple of Apollo in Delphi and the Serapeum in Alexandria. He dissolved the Order of the Vestal Virgins in Rome. In 393, he banned the pagan rituals of the Olympics in Ancient Greece. After his death, Theodosius's young sons Arcadius and Honorius inherited the east and west halves of the empire respectively, and the
Roman Empire was never again re-united, though Eastern Roman emperors after Zeno would claim the united title after Julius Nepos's death in 480.
Theodosius is
considered a saint by the Armenian Apostolic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church[4], and his feast day is on January 19.[5]
In 325, Constantine I convened the Council of Nicaea, which affirmed the doctrine that
Jesus, the Son, was equal to God the Father and "of one substance"
with the Father (homoousios in Greek). The Council condemned the teachings of Arius, who believed Jesus to be inferior to the Father.
Despite the
council's ruling, controversy continued for decades, with several christological alternatives to the Nicene Creed being brought forth. Theologians
attempted to bypass the Christological debate by saying that Jesus was merely
like (homoios in Greek) God the father, without speaking of substance (ousia).
These non-Nicenes were frequently labeled as Arians (i.e., followers of Arius) by their opponents, though not all would
necessarily have identified themselves as such.[33] For lack of a better name, they are known to history as Semi-Arians.[34]
The Emperor
Valens had favored the group who used the homoios formula; this theology was prominent in much of the East and had under Constantius II gained a
foothold in the West, being ratified by the synod of Rimini, though it was later abjured by a
majority of the western bishops (after Constantius II's death in 361).[35] The death of Valens damaged the standing of the Homoian
faction, especially since his successor Theodosius steadfastly held to the Nicene Creed which was the interpretation that predominated in the West and was held
by the important Alexandrian church.
The Christian
persecution of Roman religion under Theodosius I began in 381,
after the first couple of years of his reign in the Eastern Roman Empire. In
the 380s, Theodosius I reiterated Constantine's ban on some practices of Roman religion, prohibited haruspicy on pain of death, decreed magistrates who did not enforce laws against polytheism were subject to criminal prosecution, broke up some pagan associations
and tolerated attacks on Roman temples.
Between 389–392
he promulgated the Theodosian decrees[40] (instituting a major change in his religious policies),[41]:116 which removed non-Nicene Christians
from church office and abolished the last remaining expressions of Roman religion by making its holidays into workdays, banning blood sacrifices, closing Roman temples,
confiscating Temple endowments and disbanding the Vestal Virgins.[42] The practices of taking auspices and witchcraft were punished. Theodosius refused to restore the Altar of Victory in the Senate House, as asked by non-Christian senators.[41]:115
In 392 he became
sole emperor. From this moment till the end of his reign in 395, while
non-Christians continued to request toleration,[43][44] he ordered, authorized, or at least failed to punish, the closure or
destruction of many temples, holy sites, images and objects of piety throughout
the empire.[45][46][47][48][49][50]
In 393 he issued
a comprehensive law that prohibited any public non-Christian religious customs,[51] and was particularly oppressive to Manicheans.[52] He is likely to have discontinued the ancient Olympic Games, whose last record of celebration
was in 393, though archeological evidence indicates that some games were still
held after this date.[53]
I have written something about the haughty Greek philosophers in this
article:
http://www.noologie.de/zeno01.htm
So now for a little backtrack: The Greek engineers were not in the same
hierarchical societal class structure of Greece as the ancient Greek
philosophers were. We recall that Sokrates was a Stone Mason by his profession.
And the ancient Greek Stone Mason's were quite a bit like the Freemasons,
except that they Really Knew their business of Temple Archi-Tecture,
and then some more of Ancient Sacred ‑Architecture, ‑Geometry, ‑Geomancy,
and Sacred‑ Musicology. I have expounded this a a little bit more in my
Wagner article. So I don't know if Platon just wanted to tell us a joke about
Sokrates confessing that he knew nothing. When one is an initate of the sacred
traditions of the above crafts and initiations, then it is quite impossible to
not know something. As I said this already a few times. The good Sokrates is a
person around whom so many bad stories had been concocted, especially by our
good Platon. And it was the greatest disservice he did for humanity that he
pictured Sokrates in a wholly confusing and distorted way. One needs to restore
the real Personality or the Daimonos of Sokrates behind this false Persona that
Platon had concocted. We may recall that the ancient meaning of Persona
just means Per-Sonare, and this is called to "Sound Through a
Per-Son" the Message of the Divine. And by this, a worse misreading
and distortion of the daimonos of Sokrates than what Platon did, was not
sprematiz-able, as Peter Sloterdijk would call it in "Gottes Eifer".
http://www.noologie.de/wagner.htm
http://www.noologie.de/wagner.pdf
https://haribhakt.com/secrets-of-the-tanjore-thanjavur-big-temple-built-by-raja-chola/
And all those very clever engineers
that the Greeks had, like the fellows who built the Antikythera Mechanism
or like Archimedes of Syracuse, or the steam toy of Heron of Alexandria, which was just used to do some plaything
like a little temple door-opener magic. The haughty Greek philosophers just couldn't think of anything useful to do with
those inventions until about 2000 years later in the late 1600's, when the
first seeds of the Industrial Revolution were sown. Interestingly enough the
French scientists were about as haughty as the Greek philosophers, and they left the Industrial Revolution to
the British'ers, much to their later chagrin. The French Academy head
honchos were about as much aloof as the ancient Greeks were. And for our
surprise the French Salons were a pretty exact copy of the ancient Greek
Symposion's. With about as much wine and then some Hashish, some Opium,
and later some Cocaine. The only thing different from the Greeks was
that the Salons mostly were managed by the women of society who were a sort of Soap
Opera Conductors. So they had a little different role than that of the
ancient Greek Hetairae.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_art_salons_and_academies
From the
seventeenth century to the early part of the twentieth century, artistic
production in France was controlled by artistic academies which
organized official exhibitions called salons. In France, academies are institutions and learned
societies which monitor, foster, critique and protect French cultural
production.
Academies were
more institutional and more concerned with criticism and analysis than those
literary gatherings today called salons which were more focused on
pleasurable discourse in society, although certain gatherings around such
figures as Marguerite de Valois were close to the academic spirit.
Academies first
began to appear in France in the Renaissance. In 1570 Jean-Antoine de Baïf created one devoted to poetry and
music, the Académie de poésie et de
musique, inspired by Italian models (such
as the academy around Marsilio Ficino).
The first half
of the seventeenth century saw a phenomenal growth in private learned
academies, organized around a half-dozen or a dozen individuals meeting
regularly.[1] By the middle of the century, the
number of private academies decreased as academies gradually came under
government control, sponsorship and patronage.
The first
private academy to become "official" and to this day the most
prestigious of governmental academies is the Académie française ("French Academy"),
founded in 1634 by Cardinal Richelieu. It is concerned with the French language. In the fine arts, the Académie de peinture et
de sculpture ("Academy of Painting and
Sculpture") was founded by Cardinal Mazarin in 1648 and was soon followed by a
number of other officially instituted academies: the Académie royale de danse ("Royal Academy of
Dance") in 1661; the Académie
royale des inscriptions et médailles ("Royal Academy of
Inscriptions and Medals") in 1663 [renamed the Académie royale des
inscriptions et belles-lettres ("Royal Academy of Inscriptions and
Literature" or "Royal Academy of Humanities") in 1716]; the Académie royale des
sciences ("Royal Academy of
Sciences") in 1666; the Académie d'Opéra ("Academy of Opera") in
1669 [renamed the Académie royale de musique ("Royal Academy of
Music") in 1672 and the Académie de musique in 1791]; and the Académie royale
d'architecture ("Royal Academy of
Architecture") founded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1671.[1][2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_royale_de_peinture_et_de_sculpture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_des_Beaux-Arts
https://arthistoryunstuffed.com/french-academy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Academy_of_Sciences
The French
Academy of Sciences (French: Académie des sciences) is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the
spirit of French scientific research. It was at the forefront of
scientific developments in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, and is one of
the earliest Academies of Sciences.
Currently headed
by Sébastien Candel[out of date?] (President of the Academy), it is
one of the five Academies of the Institut de France[1].
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Academy-of-Sciences-French-organization
Academy of
Sciences, French Académie des Sciences, institution established in Paris in
1666 under the patronage of Louis XIV to advise the French government on
scientific matters. This advisory role has been largely taken over by other
bodies, but the academy is still an important representative of French science
on the international stage. Although its role is now predominantly honorific,
the academy continues to hold regular Monday meetings at the Institut de France in Paris.
The Academy of Sciences was established by Louis’s
financial controller, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to formalize under government
control earlier private meetings on scientific matters. In 1699 the Academy
received a formal constitution, in which six subject areas were recognized: mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, chemistry, botany, and anatomy. There was a hierarchy of membership, in which the senior
members (known as pensioners, who received a small remuneration) were followed
by associates and assistants.
The Academy
organized several important expeditions. For example, in 1736 Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis led an expedition to Lapland to
measure the length of a degree along the meridian. His measurement verified Isaac Newton’s contention that the Earth is an oblate
spheroid (a sphere flattened at the poles).
So back to the lessons that the downfall of the Klingon Empire will
surely tell us in the near of even not so far future. The Klingon's would have
surely managed their own extinction, when their expansion came to a halt, just
the same fate that befell the Ancient Romans. As George Santayana had
put it succinctly:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Santayana
And if the Klingon's would just have had a few more 100 years of
exponential growth and then the inevitable collapse to really experience their
own kind of fall of their Empire. And so we heed the lessons of his-story and
we just witness the collapse of our own exponential growth not-so civilization.
We are already quite a good way into the total biospheric collapse, and the
human population collapse. And by the year 2170 or so, there may be just about
500 million of "Die Letzen Menschen" left over on our once beautiful
planet, which by then will be ravaged and pillaged beyond any recognition. So
the Matrix story of the Wachowski's is just some kind of prophesy,
except that they got the scenario totally wrong. I would have never been able
to think of a more hare-brained theory than that of the Matrix: The sole source
of energy would be huge bee-hives of warm human bodies. Because the human
bodies, and especially their brains, are the biggest consumers of energy, in
the whole of the Galaxy. I don't like to make prophesies because they are
pretty hard, especially when they concern the future, which I always like to
say. But one thing is for sure: The kind of technology the we have now is no
way out, and neither are the sorry attempts at solar and wind power. The good
Patrice always says that we direly need Thermonuclear Power. But I still
don't have any idea how we could get that without an ample supply of Dilithium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_First_Contact#Themes
Frakes believes
that the main themes of First Contact—and Star Trek as a
whole—are loyalty, friendship, honesty and mutual respect. This is evident in
the film when Picard chooses to rescue Data rather than evacuate the ship with
the rest of the crew.[12] The film makes a direct comparison between Picard's hatred of the Borg
and refusal to destroy the Enterprise and that of Captain Ahab in Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick. The moment marks a turning point in the film as Picard changes his
mind, symbolized by his putting down his phaser.[12] A similar Moby-Dick reference was made in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and although Braga and Moore did not want to repeat it, they decided
it worked so well they could not leave it out.[16]
In First
Contact, the individually inscrutable and faceless Borg fulfill the role of
the similarly unreadable whale in Melville's work. Picard, like Ahab, has been
hurt by his nemesis, and author Elizabeth Hinds said it makes sense that Picard
should "opt for the perverse alternative of remaining on board ship to
fight" the Borg rather than take the only sensible option left, to destroy
the ship.[71] Several lines in the film refer to the 21st-century dwellers being
primitive, with the people of the 24th century having evolved to a more utopian society. In the end it is Lily (the 21st-century woman) who shows
Picard (the 24th-century man) that his quest for revenge is the primitive
behavior that humans had evolved to not use.[16] Lily's words cause Picard to reconsider, and he quotes Ahab's words of
vengeance, recognizing the death wish embedded therein.[71]
The nature of
the Borg, specifically as seen in First Contact, has been the subject of
critical discussion. Author Joanna Zylinska notes that while other alien
species are tolerated by humanity in Star Trek, the Borg are viewed
differently because of their cybernetic alterations and the loss of personal
freedom and autonomy. Members of the crew who are assimilated into the
Collective are subsequently viewed as "polluted by technology" and
less than human. Zylinska draws comparisons between the technological
distinction of humanity and machine in Star Trek and the work of artists
such as Stelarc.[72] Oliver Marchart drew parallels between the Borg's combination of many
into an artificial One and Thomas Hobbes's concept of the Leviathan.[73] The nature of perilous first contact between species, as represented by
films such as Independence Day, Aliens and First Contact, is a marriage of classic fears of national
invasion and the loss of personal identity.[74]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man
"Fat Man" was the codename for
the nuclear bomb that was detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki by the United States on 9 August 1945. It was the second of the only
two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare, the first being Little Boy, and its detonation marked the third nuclear explosion in history. It
was built by scientists and engineers at Los Alamos Laboratory using plutonium from the Hanford Site, and it was dropped from the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Bockscar piloted by Major Charles Sweeney.
The name Fat Man refers to the early design of
the bomb because it had a wide, round shape; it was also known as the Mark III.
Fat Man was an implosion-type nuclear weapon with a solid plutonium core. The first of that type to be detonated was
the Gadget in the Trinity nuclear test less than a month earlier on 16
July at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico. Two more were detonated during the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946, and some 120 were produced between 1947 and 1949, when it was
superseded by the Mark 4 nuclear bomb. The Fat Man was retired in 1950.
Oppenheimer brought John von Neumann to Los Alamos in September 1943 to take a fresh look at implosion.
After reviewing Neddermeyer's studies, and discussing the matter with Edward Teller, von Neumann suggested the use of high explosives in shaped charges to implode a sphere, which he showed could not only result in a faster
assembly of fissile material than was possible with the gun method, but which could greatly
reduce the amount of material required, because of the resulting higher
density.[8] The idea that, under such pressures, the plutonium metal itself would
be compressed came from Teller, whose knowledge of how dense metals behaved
under heavy pressure was influenced by his pre-war theoretical studies of the Earth's core with George Gamow.[9] The prospect of more-efficient nuclear weapons impressed Oppenheimer,
Teller, and Hans Bethe, but they decided that an expert on explosives would be required.
Kistiakowsky's name was immediately suggested, and Kistiakowsky was brought
into the project as a consultant in October 1943.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller
Edward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as
"the father of the hydrogen bomb" (see the Teller–Ulam design), although he did not care for the
title.[1] He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (in particular the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermi's theory of beta decay, in the form of Gamow–Teller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the
Jahn–Teller effect and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller
(BET) theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in
physics and chemistry.[2] Teller also made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, along with Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, and his wife Augusta Teller, Teller co-authored a paper that is a standard starting point for the
applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics.[3] Throughout his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability
and for his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality.
Teller was born in Hungary and emigrated to the
United States in the 1930s. He was an early member of the Manhattan Project, charged with developing the first atomic bomb; during this time he made a serious push to develop the first fusion-based weapons as well, but these were deferred until after World War II. After his controversial testimony in the security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos Laboratory superior, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller was ostracized by much of
the scientific community. He continued to find support from the U.S. government
and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program. He was a co-founder of Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and was both its director and associate director for many
years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
A thermonuclear weapon, or fusion
weapon, is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication over pure fission weapons may afford it
vastly greater destructive power than first-generation atomic
bombs, a more compact size, a lower mass or a combination of these benefits.
Modern fusion weapons consist essentially of two main components: a nuclear
fission primary stage (fueled by uranium-235 or plutonium-239) and a separate nuclear
fusion secondary stage containing thermonuclear fuel: the heavy hydrogen
isotopes deuterium and tritium, or in modern weapons lithium deuteride. For
this reason, thermonuclear weapons are often colloquially called hydrogen
bombs or H-bombs.[1]
A fusion explosion begins with the detonation
of the fission primary stage. Its temperature soars past approximately one
hundred million Kelvins, causing it to glow intensely with thermal X-radiation. These X-rays
flood the void (the "radiation channel" often filled with polystyrene
foam) between the primary and secondary assemblies placed within an
enclosure called a radiation case, which confines the X-ray energy and resists
its outward pressure. The distance separating the two assemblies ensures that
debris fragments from the fission primary (which move much slower than X-ray
photons) cannot disassemble the secondary before the fusion explosion runs to
completion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
Castle Bravo was the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon
design tests conducted by the United States at Bikini
Atoll, Marshall
Islands, as part of Operation
Castle. Detonated on March 1, 1954, the device was the most powerful nuclear
device detonated by the United States and its first lithium
deuteride fueled thermonuclear weapon.[1][2] Castle Bravo's yield was 15 megatons
of TNT, 2.5 times the predicted 6.0 megatons, due to unforeseen additional
reactions involving 7Li,[3] which led to the unexpected radioactive contamination of areas to
the east of Bikini Atoll.
Fallout from the detonation fell on residents of Rongelap and Utirik atolls and spread around the world. The inhabitants of the islands
were not evacuated until three days later and suffered radiation sickness. Twenty-three crew members of the Japanese fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryū Maru ("Lucky Dragon No. 5") were also contaminated by
fallout, experiencing acute radiation syndrome. The blast incited international reaction over atmospheric
thermonuclear testing.[4]
The device was
called SHRIMP and had the same basic configuration (radiation implosion)
as the Ivy Mike wet device, except with a different type of fusion fuel. SHRIMP used lithium deuteride (LiD), which is solid at room temperature; Ivy Mike used cryogenic liquid deuterium (D2), which required elaborate cooling equipment. Castle
Bravo was the first test by the United States of a practical deliverable fusion bomb, even though the TX-21 as proof-tested in the Bravo event was not
weaponized. The successful test rendered obsolete the cryogenic design used by Ivy
Mike and its weaponized derivative, the JUGHEAD, which was slated to be tested as the initial Castle Yankee. It
also used a 7075 aluminum 9.5 cm thick ballistic case. Aluminum was used
to drastically reduce bomb's weight and simultaneously provided sufficient
radiation confinement time to raise yield, a departure from the heavy stainless
steel casing (304L or MIM 316L) employed by contemporary weapon-projects.[6]:54:237[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_of_Alexandria
Hero described[12] the construction of the aeolipile (a version of which is known as Hero's engine) which was a rocket-like reaction
engine and the first-recorded steam engine (although Vitruvius mentioned the aeolipile in De Architectura some 100 years earlier than Hero). It was created almost two millennia
before the industrial revolution. Another engine used air from a
closed chamber heated by an altar fire to displace water from a sealed vessel;
the water was collected and its weight, pulling on a rope, opened temple doors.[13] Some historians have conflated the two inventions to assert that the
aeolipile was capable of useful work.[14]
The first vending machine was also one of his constructions; when a coin was introduced via a
slot on the top of the machine, a set amount of holy water was dispensed. This
was included in his list of inventions in his book Mechanics and Optics.
When the coin was deposited, it fell upon a pan attached to a lever. The lever
opened up a valve which let some water flow out. The pan continued to tilt with
the weight of the coin until it fell off, at which point a counter-weight would
snap the lever back up and turn off the valve.[15]
A windwheel operating an organ, marking the
first instance in history of wind powering a machine.[4][5]
Hero also invented many mechanisms for the
Greek theater, including an entirely mechanical play almost ten minutes in length,
powered by a binary-like system of ropes, knots, and simple machines operated
by a rotating cylindrical cogwheel. The sound of thunder was produced by the mechanically-timed dropping of metal balls onto a
hidden drum.
The force pump was widely used in the Roman world, and one application was in a fire-engine.
A syringe-like device was described by Hero to control the delivery of air or
liquids.[16]
In optics, Hero formulated the principle of the shortest path of light: If a ray of light propagates from point A to point B within the same
medium, the path-length followed is the shortest possible. It was nearly 1000
years later that Alhacen expanded the principle to both reflection and refraction, and the
principle was later stated in this form by Pierre de Fermat in 1662; the most modern form is that the path is at an extremum.
A standalone fountain that operates under
self-contained hydrostatic energy (Hero's fountain)
A programmable cart that was powered by a
falling weight. The "program" consisted of strings wrapped around the
drive axle.[17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine
The 1698 Savery
Steam Pump - the first commercially successful steam powered device, built
by Thomas Savery
The first
recorded rudimentary steam engine was the aeolipile described by Heron of Alexandria in 1st-century Roman Egypt.[1] Several steam-powered devices were later experimented with or proposed,
such as Taqi al-Din's steam jack, a steam turbine in 16th-century Ottoman Egypt, and Thomas Savery's steam pump in 17th-century England. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen's atmospheric engine became the first commercially
successful engine using the principle of the piston and cylinder, which was the
fundamental type steam engine used until the early 20th century. The steam
engine was used to pump water out of coal mines
During the Industrial Revolution, steam engines started to replace water and wind power, and eventually became the
dominant source of power in the late 19th century and remaining so into the
early decades of the 20th century, when the more efficient steam turbine and
the internal combustion engine resulted in the rapid replacement of the steam engines. The steam turbine has become the most common method by which electrical power generators
are driven.[2] Investigations are being made into the practicalities of reviving the
reciprocating steam engine as the basis for the new wave of advanced steam technology
Picking up some dangling bits and pieces of the Klingon Cloaking
Device. Pretty much the same thinking holds for present-day Stealth
Aircraft which are not so stealthy at all. You can see them pretty well as
they are flying around in the skies. Stealth is completely a matter of
frequency or better the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation. The technology
of Stealth Aircraft does one thing only. They make it diffucult for the X-band
radars of your friendly enemy to track and home in on you, and just at this
exact wavelength of the X-band radars. It just makes the tracking and homing of
anti-aircraft mssiles a little more difficult. On anything with a longer
wavelength you are pretty well visible. So in the VHF and UHF bands of
conventional radars you are about as visible as a christmas tree with so many
flashlights. So no stealth at all. And this gives a stealty aircraft just some
valuable seconds or minutes before they are detected anyhow. And when it comes
to the wavelength of visible light you are out of luck totally. And the North
Koreans have in their arsenals some 10.000 old anti-aircraft guns from surplus
USSR armories which they had bought very cheaply. And when you have a couple
1000 anti-aircraft guns with nothing else than optical sights, which cannot be
deceived at all by stealth, you just need some good eyeball technology version
1.0 and then some lucky shots, and then goes the Stealth Aircraft down with
Kaboom - Bäng - Bäng. Of about 200 Million $$$ over-the-conter price. And we
add some surprising biological data: Because the North Koreans are so poor,
they don't have so much in terms of Television. That translates directly into a
superior eyesight. Nowadays more than half of the children in the West and in
China need glasses, because of TV, Gaming Computers, and pretty bad on top of this,
the new LCD lights and the LCD screens that emit light wavelenths that can make
you blind. Because of the very high percentage of blue light of 7000 Kelvin.
And this kind of light will just eat away your Melatonin, and this causes
pretty bad insomnia.
And the intelligent forecasters of Aviation Technology are pretty well
able to predict: There will come a day when the combined Air Forces of the USA
will be able to pay for ONE aircaft only. Then they have to share it: The Air
Force can have it to fly from 06:00 in the morning until 14:00 sharp, and then
the Navy Air Force will have it until 12:00 midnight. Since the Navy Air Force
usually has better training for their pilots to do Night-Time landings. To take
off at Night-time is no problem at all. But landing at Night-time on a heaving,
lurching and wavering Aircraft Carrier flight deck is quite another kind of
business. And the Marine Air Force can use the plane every leap year or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Golden_Age
The Dutch Golden Age (Dutch: Gouden Eeuw Dutch
pronunciation: [udə(n)
eu]) was a period in the history of the Netherlands, roughly spanning the 17th century, in which Dutch trade, science, military, and art were among the most acclaimed in the world. The first section is
characterized by the Eighty Years' War, which ended in 1648. The Golden Age continued in peacetime during
the Dutch
Republic until the end of the century.
The transition by the Netherlands to the
foremost maritime and economic
power in the world has been called the "Dutch Miracle" by
historian K. W.
Swart.[1]
Several other factors also contributed to the
flowering of trade, industry, the arts and the sciences in the Netherlands
during this time. A necessary condition was a supply of cheap energy from
windmills and from peat, easily transported by canal to the cities. The invention[4] of the windpowered sawmill enabled the construction of a massive fleet of ships for worldwide
trading and for military defense of the republic's economic interests.
Birth and wealth of
corporate finance
In the 17th century the Dutch — traditionally
able seafarers and keen mapmakers — began to trade with the Far East, and as the century wore on, they gained an increasingly dominant
position in world trade, a position previously occupied by the Portuguese and Spanish.[5]
In 1602, the Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC)
was founded. It was the first-ever multinational corporation, financed by shares that established the first modern stock exchange. The Company received a Dutch monopoly on Asian trade, which it would
keep for two centuries, and it became the world's largest commercial enterprise
of the 17th century. Spices were imported in bulk and brought huge profits due
to the efforts and risks involved and seemingly insatiable demand. This is
remembered to this day in the Dutch word peperduur (as
expensive as pepper), meaning something is very expensive, reflecting the
prices of spices at the time. To finance the growing trade within the region,
the Bank of
Amsterdam was established in 1609, the precursor to, if not the first true central
bank.[6]
Although the trade with the Far East was the
more famous of the VOC's exploits, the main source of wealth for the Republic
was in fact its trade with the Baltic states and Poland. Called the
"Mothertrade" (Dutch: "Moedernegotie"), the Dutch imported
enormous amounts of bulk resources like grain and wood, stockpiling them in
Amsterdam so Holland would never lack for basic goods, as well as being able
sell them on for profit. This meant that unlike their main rivals the Republic
wouldn't face the dire repercussions of a bad harvest and the starvation it
accompanied, instead profiting when this happened in other states (bad harvests
were commonplace in France and England in the 17th century, which also
contributed to the Republic's success in that time). In time the Dutch traders
gained such a dominant position in Poland and the Baltic they all but turned
into de facto satellite states.
The Spartans were a pretty extreme ethnos in the whole of the ancient
world. Their society was entirely based on and geared to One Thing Only: War.
Even the famed Samurai of Japan could not come close to that Warrior Ethos of
the Spartans. So they also serve as a good model for the Klingon Empire. It is
like an "if it were that the Spartans had built an Empire". Which of
course was impossible for the Spartans.
The Spartans also had an interesting ritual called the Crypteia. It was
a kind of initiation ritual for the young warriors to become full-fledged
Spartan warriors. Because the young candidate had to kill a Helot. And this was
so easy that it could not be called a great deed at all. Since the Helots were
forbidden to carry any sort of weapon, they were easy prey. But it is very
doubtful that the Crypteia served any practical purpose or was it just some
sardonic theater to inflict some terror on the poor Helots? Even catching a
hare was much more difficult compared to this. In other not-so cultures it was
pretty much more of an intiation ritual because that necessitated to kill a
member of an opposing tribe. And since the opposing tribe knew that very well,
that when the time of the intiation ritual came up, you should better be aware
not to go anywhere alone. And you always better carry your weapons around with
you. This was the state of constant war-fare of every tribe against every other
tribe in New Guinea. So it came to pass that no-one in his right mind would go
anywhere alone, not even to the toilet. So the going to the toilet was also a
community ritual. The island of New Guinea was not such a nice place to live
in, and the only one who had no idea what was going on, was the good Jared
Diamond. At least I had never found in all of his books any two words about
that constant warfare. To the contrary, the good Jared did everything he could
do to explain that the New Guinean's were as intelligent as all the rest of
humanity. Which is really true, but since the New Guinean's were always on the
war path (as Karl May would have said it) ... They just didn't have any time at
all to spare than to think about the next blood revenge to revenge some distant
relative of poor you, who had been killed by the (not-so-) friendly neighboring
tribe. So as a corollary, when you think all the time about killing and not
being killed yourself, you have practically no time to do anything creative.
Like inventing an aeroplane, for example. There are some nice anthropological
tales to tell about the Cargo Cult of these islands. But this is another
matter. One can get it quite easily when one googles "Cargo Cult".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypteia
The Crypteia or Krypteia (Greek: κρυπτεία krupteía from κρυπτός kruptós, "hidden, secret
things") was an ancient Spartan state institution involving young Spartan men. Its goal and nature are
still a matter of discussion and debate among historians, but some scholars
(such as Henri-Alexandre Wallon) consider the Krypteia to be a kind of secret police and state security force organized by the ruling class of Sparta, whose purpose was to terrorize the servile helot population. Others (including Hermann Köchly and Wilhelm Wachsmuth) believe it to be a form of military training, similar to the Athenian ephebia.
Certain young Spartan men who had completed
their training at the agoge with such success that they were marked out as potential future leaders
would be given the opportunity to test their skills and prove themselves worthy
of the Spartan polity through participation in the Krypteia.
Every autumn, according to Plutarch (Life of Lycurgus, 28, 3–7), the Spartan ephors would pro forma declare war on the helot population so that any Spartan citizen could kill a helot without fear
of punishment. At night, the chosen kryptes (κρύπτες, members of the Krypteia) were sent out into the Laconian countryside armed with knives with the instructions to kill any helot
they encountered and to take any food they needed. They were specifically told
to kill the strongest and best of the helots. This practice was instigated to
prevent the threat of a rebellion by the helots and to keep their population in
check.
According to Cartledge, Krypteia members
stalked the helot villages and surrounding countryside, spying on the servile
population. Their mission was to prevent and suppress unrest and rebellion.
Troublesome helots could be summarily executed. Such brutal repression of the
helots permitted the Spartan elite to successfully control the servile agrarian
population and devote themselves to military practice. It may also have
contributed to the Spartans' reputation for stealth since a kryptes (κρύπτης) who got caught was punished by whipping.[1]
Only Spartans who had served in the Krypteia as
young men could expect to achieve the highest ranks in Spartan society and
army. It was felt that only those Spartans who showed the willingness and
ability to kill for the state at a young age were worthy to join the leadership
in later years.
Plato (Laws, I, 633), a scholiast to Plato, and Heraclides Lembos (Fr. Hist. Gr., II, 210) also describe the krypteia.
On the battlefield
In his Cleomenes, Plutarch describes the
Krypteia as being a unit of the Spartan army; during the battle of Sellasia, the Spartan king Cleomenes
"called Damoteles, the commander of the Krypteia, and ordered him to
observe and find out how matters stood in the rear and on the flanks of his
army".[2] Various scholars have speculated on the presence and function of the
Krypteia on the battlefield, describing it as a reconnaissance, special operations, or even military police force.[2]
As rite of passage
Jeanmaire points out that the bushranger life of the Krypteia has no common point with the disciplined and
well-ordered communal life (see Homonoia) of the Spartan hoplite, but as it is only a short part in a very long and thorough training,
this could precisely fit an additional skill useful when separated from one's
unit. Jeanmaire suggests that the Krypteia was a rite of passage, possibly pre-dating the classical military organisation, and may have
been preserved through Sparta's legendary religious conservatism. He draws
comparison with the initiation rituals of some African secret societies (wolf-men and leopard men).[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helots
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-important-events/helots-slave-warriors-ancient-sparta-003184
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypteia
The Crypteia
or Krypteia (Greek: κρυπτεία krupteía from κρυπτός kruptós, "hidden, secret things") was an ancient Spartan state institution involving young
Spartan men. Its goal and nature are still a matter of discussion and debate
among historians, but some scholars (such as Henri-Alexandre Wallon) consider the Krypteia to be a kind
of secret police and state security force organized
by the ruling class of Sparta, whose purpose was to terrorize the
servile helot population. Others (including Hermann Köchly and Wilhelm Wachsmuth) believe it to be a form of
military training, similar to the Athenian ephebia.
Certain young
Spartan men who had completed their training at the agoge with such success that they were
marked out as potential future leaders would be given the opportunity to test
their skills and prove themselves worthy of the Spartan polity through
participation in the Krypteia.
Every autumn,
according to Plutarch (Life of Lycurgus, 28, 3–7), the Spartan ephors would pro forma declare war on the helot population so that any Spartan
citizen could kill a helot without fear of punishment. At night, the chosen kryptes
(κρύπτες, members of the Krypteia) were sent
out into the Laconian countryside armed with knives with
the instructions to kill any helot they encountered and to take any food they
needed. They were specifically told to kill the strongest and best of the
helots. This practice was instigated to prevent the threat of a rebellion by
the helots and to keep their population in check.
According to
Cartledge, Krypteia members stalked the helot villages and surrounding
countryside, spying on the servile population. Their mission was to prevent and
suppress unrest and rebellion. Troublesome helots could be summarily executed.
Such brutal repression of the helots permitted the Spartan elite to
successfully control the servile agrarian population and devote themselves to
military practice. It may also have contributed to the Spartans' reputation for
stealth since a kryptes (κρύπτης) who got caught was punished by
whipping.[1]
Only Spartans
who had served in the Krypteia as young men could expect to achieve the highest
ranks in Spartan society and army. It was felt that only those Spartans who
showed the willingness and ability to kill for the state at a young age were
worthy to join the leadership in later years.
Plato (Laws, I, 633), a scholiast to Plato, and
Heraclides Lembos (Fr. Hist. Gr., II, 210)
also describe the krypteia.
I am now telling another tall story: Even the fearsome Japanese Samurai
couldn't manage to completely enslave their peasant population since the
Samurai always needed an Over-Lord to command them and whom they followed into
their deaths, which happened quite often. When the Over-Lord was killed, it was
the honorable occason for the all the good Samurai troops in his entourage to
commit wholesale Sepukku, meaning Harakiri. Because as a honorable Samurai, to
be out of an Overlord (being a Ronin), was the ultimate disgrace. And that
could only be absolved by committing Sepukku. One of the best chroniclers of
the Japanese Samurai Ethos was Akira Kurosawa whose movies are still considered
as timeless masterpieces.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=akira+kurosawa+playlist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwR2kVOcwNI&list=PLjp9cDM5tlPpUUbai4r1ybum_Usb--JNH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOdvuGb_wx8&list=PLGKf-FbNKYAUREzzp3JGV3ipKTLpKQ_Yt
The Japanese Overlords just nearly kept the Japanese peasant class as
their personal slaves, but there were limits to their power, because of the
Shinto Way of Life, and the Yamabushi (Shinto) and Shingon (Buddhist sort-of)
sects. These were some quite strange Anachoretes who lived in the mountains.
They also practiced the High Art of Self-Mummification, of which I have
reported in Part I. And there are quite a few shrines where you can see them
and visit them. Fortunately I have some youtube videos about this, otherwise
no-one would believe me. And the mountains were sacred spaces in the Japanese
Shinto mInd. Since Japan is more or less a collection of Volcanoes on the
Pacific Rim of Fire, there are consequently a few more mountains in Japan than
there is flat arable land. And so it came to pass, that the Overlords and their
Samurai dominated the plains and the rice fields of the peasants, but they did
better to avoid the mountains. Besides being sacred and being hard to get into
them, it was much more difficult to get out of them. As the saying goes: Some
things are easier to get into, than to get out of. And especially in the
southern islands of Japan where the vegetation is sub-tropical. It was very
easy to get totally lost there and wander around for a few days without food
and water, and this was it. People disappeared without any trace left. So it
was said that the spirits of the mountains had taken care of them. And the
Yamabushi's and later the Shingon's dominated the mountains and the Over-Lords
of the plains couldn't do anything about them. There was another quirk to it.
Only the Samurai were privileged to carry their swords, the Katana. And for all
the other people it was forbidden at the punishment of death to carry weapons.
But the Japanese were inventive as usual. Instead of a sword they carried an
iron fan. They were quite handy and very unsuspecting because everyone in Japan
carried a fan. So they used the fans as weapons and then could defeat even the
Samurai.
A hoe is a tool used for gardening. Eine Hacke ist ein Werkzeug, das zum Gärtnern verwendet wird.
There was just another famous story of a peasant son who carried his
steel rake or hoe as he was working the field of his father. And there came
along two Samurai who were quite drunk. And they threatened the poor guy. So
what he did with his hoe, he hacked the Samurai to pieces. Such good use one
can make of a peasant's tool. Of course the authorities could not allow such a
thing, because a peasant may never do anything against a Samurai even in
self-defence. So this poor guy had to flee into the mountains, and there he
became a famous Yamabushi or Shingon saint. This story is from Part I of this
book. I will look this up the next time when I have some time to spare. Another
tall story is that of Musashi. He was the greatest warrior, er slaughterer of
his day. What very few people know today is that he almost never used a sword
(katana) in his fights. He either used a wooden stick (bokken) or some other
ad-hoc weapon. So he took his opponents quite by surprise because they had
known only the tactics to use against another sword or a lance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C5%8Dnin
A rōnin
(浪人, "drifter" or "wanderer")[1][2] was a samurai without a lord or master during the feudal period (1185–1868) of Japan. A samurai became masterless upon the death of his master, or after the
loss of his master's favor or privilege.[3]
In modern
Japanese usage, sometimes the term is used to describe a salaryman who is unemployed or a secondary school graduate who has not yet been admitted to university.[4][5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-seven_r%C5%8Dnin
The revenge of
the forty-seven rōnin (四十七士 Shi-jū-shichi-shi, forty-seven
samurai), also known as the Akō incident (赤穂事件 Akō jiken) or Akō vendetta,
is an 18th-century historical event in Japan in which a band of rōnin (leaderless samurai) avenged the death of their master. The incident has since become
legendary.[1]
The story tells
of a group of samurai who were left leaderless (becoming rōnin) after their daimyō (feudal lord) Asano Naganori was compelled to perform seppuku (ritual suicide) for assaulting a court official named Kira Yoshinaka, whose title was Kōzuke no suke. After waiting and planning for a year, the rōnin avenged
their master's honor by killing Kira. In turn, they were themselves obliged to
commit seppuku for committing the crime of murder. This true story was popularized in Japanese culture as emblematic of
the loyalty, sacrifice, persistence, and honor that people should preserve in
their daily lives. The popularity of the tale grew during the Meiji era, in which Japan underwent rapid modernization, and the legend
became entrenched within discourses of national heritage and identity.
Fictionalized
accounts of the tale of the Forty-seven Rōnin are known as Chūshingura. The story was popularized in
numerous plays, including bunraku and kabuki. Because of the censorship laws of the shogunate in the Genroku era, which forbade portrayal of current events, the names were changed.
While the version given by the playwrights may have come to be accepted as
historical fact by some,[who?] the first Chūshingura
was written some 50 years after the event, and numerous historical records
about the actual events that predate the Chūshingura survive.
The bakufu's
censorship laws had relaxed somewhat 75 years later in the late 18th century,
when Japanologist Isaac Titsingh first recorded the story of the forty-seven rōnin as one of
the significant events of the Genroku era.[2] To this day, the story continues to be popular in Japan, and each year
on December 14, Sengakuji Temple, where Asano Naganori and the rōnin are buried, holds a
festival commemorating the event.
So back to the Spartans. They managed the upkeep of this superior
warrior class and they were the Overlords of the Helots. And this was a very
interesting type of Slave Holder Society. But they never managed to form an
empire. Because this kind of society was in a sense self-limiting. The poor
Spartans just didn't have the poliltical wits and acumen to subjugate the whole
of ancient Greece as their slaves. And finally they were defeated by the sacred
band of Thebes who outfought the Spartans by a narrow margin. The ancient
Greeks were of course Aryans and as such they were fiercely independent
warriors, so they could not be subjugated for long until they rose again. Like
the Persians had to find out to their detriment. The Helot population of the
Spartans were not the Aryan Greeks at all but they were the autochthonous
indigenous population of that area on the Peloponnes. Their societal and
spiritual system was of the much much older type that Marija Gimbutas had
described in her works. So there are some parallels with ancient Vedic Indian
body politics since the untoucheables were also the indigenous Dravidic
population whereas their Overlords were the Aryans who had invaded India some
millennia back in the dark depths of Pre-history. The Vedas especially the Rig
Veda depict quite vividly those battles that the Aryans fought against the
Dravidic's. And this is quite a good piece of political propaganda, where the
Dravidic's were always the dark dark bad guys. And this is quite literally so,
since "autochthonous" derives from chthon, and this was the dark mother
goddess, the Kali in Vedic terms. But she had also found her rightful place in
the Pantheon of the Vedics, since they knew well enough that one cannot
exorcise the dark gods. So the vedics preserved the rite and the cults of the
dark Mother Kali and that just was the Cult of the Thugees or Thugs.
[[Like the Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, and the Gnostics, and finally the
Christians tried to extinguish the older Goddesses, but in vain. And I have
come up with quite a remarkable parallel to the Kali, and this was the Black
Madonna. Not even the Christians could exorcise the black Mother Godess
completely, even if the good Church Fathers tried as much as they could. She
faithfully re-appeared in just another (dis-) guise.
]]
Hier bringe ich einige
Zitate aus:
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm
Die Analogie von Licht und Geist kann man noch einen
Schritt weitertragen, zu der Diamant-Metapher der Noologie. Diese wurde aus
folgenden Gründen gewählt. Erstens, weil der Diamant ein optisch so
aussergewöhnliches Material ist.[83] Zweitens,
weil er das härteste ist. Der Diamant-Weg der Noologie ist
somit auch der härteste Übungsweg im Sinne von Sloterdijks
DMDL. Ein weiteres, eher zufälliges Thema der Diamant-Metapher ist der
Kontrapunkt zu Sloterdijks "Sphären". Wenn die Sphären das rundeste
Denk-Ding im menschlichen Gedanken-Kόsmos[84] sind, so sind
Diamanten das eckigste. Denn die hohe Kunst des Diamanten-Schleifens[85] besteht
darin, dem Stein so viele Ecken und Kanten wie möglich zuzufügen. Die besondere
optische Eigenschaft des Diamanten basiert darauf, dass er (fast) nicht mit
Licht interagiert (also seine extrem hohe Transparenz) und der extrem hohe
Refraktionsindex, der bei 2.419 liegt.[86] Diese
Kombination ist eine Ausnahme gegenüber aller sonst noch bekannten Materie.
Wasser und Glas sind zwar auch transparent, aber haben einen wesentlich
geringeren Refraktionsindex, zwischen 1,3 und 1,5. Betrachten wir nun einen
absolut klaren, lupenreinen, geschliffenen Diamanten, einen Brillianten.
In seinen Tausenden von Facetten bricht und spiegelt sich das Licht in
unzähligen unendlich bunten Reflexen. Das Phänomen dahinter ist die Reflexion / Refraktion und Interferenz des
Lichts. Der Diamant selber ist völlig klar, durchsichtig, transparent, und
völlig unbeeinflusst von dem ihn durchfliessenden Licht. Für den Diamanten ist
das Licht Nichts, er ist völlig Licht-leer. Er ist
ein absolut reines Kristallgitter. Und für das Licht scheint völlig
er Materie-leer zu sein, beinahe ein absolutes Nichts. In normaler
Materie würde sich das Licht irgendwo absorbieren, und damit sich verlieren,
und den entsprechenden Materiepunkt entweder erwärmen oder zu einem Farbpunkt
werden lassen.
Nehmen wir nun einen grossen Opal. Auch hier sehen wir
Lichtbrechungen in unzähligen unendlich bunten Reflexen. Aber der Opal ist
praktisch undurchsichtig, milchig, und das Prinzip der Erzeugung der Farben ist
ein etwas anderes: Es ist die Interferenz des Lichts in Nano-Schichten.
Einen ähnlichen Effekt sehen wir bei bestimmten Schmetterlingsflügeln
der Gattung Schillerfalter oder Morpho. Auch hier
ist es die Interferenz, oder Wellenbrechung des Lichtes, die die
schillernden Farben erzeugt.
Neben seinen optischen Eigenschaften ist der Diamant das härteste Mineral des Universums,[87] aufgrund seiner perfekten Tetraeder-Kristallstruktur mit dreiecksförmigen Seiten. Der Tetraeder ist der erste und der einfachste der Platonischen Körper, d.h. es ist die erste mögliche 3-d Struktur. Deshalb stand er auch in der Heiligen Geomtrie und im Timaios an erster Stelle.[88] Kepler hat in "Mysterium Cosmographicum" sogar ein Modell der Planetenbahnen aus den ineinandergeschachtelten Platonischen Körpern konstruiert.[89] Kant verwendete in seinen mathematischen Betrachtungen ebenfalls das Bild des Diamanten als Metapher.[90] Dreiecke sind, wie wir aus der Geometrie wissen, un-ver-rückbare Figuren, und Tetraeder sind das un-ver-rückbare 3-D Körper- Pendant dazu.[91] Die Un-ver-Rückbarkeit übersetzt sich physikalisch in Unvergänglichkeit. So ist der Diamant auch die im physikalischen Universum perfekteste Manifestation der Ewigkeit. D.h. ein Diamant, der heute existiert, wird bis ans Ende des Universums weiter bestehen bleiben.[92] Im Alt-Griechischen heisst das: A-Tropos,[93] im Gegen-Satz zu En-Tropos, oder En-Tropie.[94]
http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-74502017000200110
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) is
considered by many to be the best composer of all time.1 He left behind over 600 pieces of work, including more than 50
symphonies, 27 vocal concertos, 26 works for string quartets, 25 piano
concertos, 21 operas, 17 piano sonatas, 15 masses and 12 violin concertos.
Several of his works are considered some of humankind's best musical creations.2 However, despite his genius and fame, Mozart's life was short and he
suffered great financial difficulties and multiple diseases, including scarlet
fever, smallpox and typhus. It is said that he used a language (spoken and
written) associated with behaviours that have led several authors to consider
the possibility that the Austrian genius may have suffered from Gilles de la
Tourette syndrome, described by the French neurologist after whom it was named
in 1885. The main characteristics of this condition are: simple and complex
vocal and motor tics, which arise between 2 and 15 years of age and persist for
over 12 months. Onset should not occur after 18 years of age. Coprolalia,
coprographia and copropraxia may be present in 30% of cases. Symptoms decrease
with the passage of time and are significantly reduced in adult life.3,4
This article draws a parallel between the life
of the musical genius and the main findings that indicate this possibility.
Biographical data
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on 27 January
1756 in Salzburg. He was the son of Leopold Mozart (1719-1787), a composer at
the Salzburg court, and Anna Maria Pertl (1720-1778). His parents married in
1747 and had six children, only two of whom reached adulthood: Maria-Anna,
known as "Nannerl" (1751-1829), and Wolfgang Amadeus (Amadeus means
"loved by God")5 (Fig. 1). Wolfgang married Constanze Weber (1763-1842) in 1782 and the couple
had two sons, Karl (1784-1858), who was a trader, and Wolfgang (1791-1844), a
composer and pianist. 1
Variations of the genius's name
It is well known that Mozart introduced himself
with different variations of his name depending on the region, era or a
particular whim at the time. His middle name, Amadeus, as we know it today,
seems to be a “joke” or, rather, another of his uncontrollable and amusing
impulses. The most common are “Wolfgango Amadeo”, as he called himself in Italy
in 1770, and from 1777 onwards, “Wolfgang Amadé”, which was possibly his
favourite, as this was the name he used to sign his certificate of marriage to
Constanze.5
However, other more exotic variants included
“Wolfgang Gottlieb” and “Trazom” (Mozart backwards). He only used “Wolfgangus
Amadeus Mozartus” as a joke or gag, as seen in letters where, as well as his
name, both the date and other words end in -us, which is ironic, given that it
ended up being the name that stuck after the 19th century to the present day.5
If we examine this situation in detail, it can
be inferred that perhaps this custom of using multiple names was not only an
eccentric trait, but also evidence of uninhibited complex tics and impulses
that could be explained by Tourette’s.5
Mozart’s early life was marked by his artistic
genius. Figures as important as Goethe, Grimm, Haydn, Wagner, Kierkegaard and
Barth spoke in glowing terms of his extraordinary talent.1
As soon as his father discovered his musical
skills, he decided he would do everything he could to turn him into a great
musician and to devote the rest of his existence to educating his children.1
Fortunately for humanity, Leopold was an
excellent teacher. Although he was always strict when imparting lessons to his
children, instilling a sense of ethics and effort, he managed to make music
lessons fun. This enabled both of them to excel, at least in principle,
alongside each other.6
Mozart had virtually no other teacher. At 6
years of age, he played short pieces of music that his father carefully turned
into scores (minuets K. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). By then, Leopold felt it was time to
perform at the courts of Europe.1
The trips were exhausting, the weather
conditions sometimes harsh and Mozart had ill health. He is known to have
suffered from scarlet fever, recurring tonsillitis, smallpox and typhus. He ate
irregularly and undertook excessive physical and intellectual work, which
affected him considerably. He also suffered from symptoms of jaundice, which
were probably linked to viral hepatitis (Table 1).7-9
Later, he followed Hieronymus, the
Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, to Vienna, who mistreated him. Following an
altercation, he decided to move into the Weber family home in the capital. In
1782, he married Constanze Weber. He then began to encounter significant
financial difficulties, which would last for the rest of his life. 1
Mozart had great successes, such as the opera
The Marriage of Figaro, which premiered in Vienna on 1 May 1786. He would enjoy
even greater and more lasting success in Prague. In this city, Mozart had
admirers like in no other. His triumphs were celebrated and sessions are
described in which he demonstrated his extraordinary improvisation skills. A
music impresario by the name of Bondini asked him to write another opera, and
thus Don Giovanni was born, which he premiered and conducted on 29 October
1787, with extraordinary success. 1
He returned to Vienna, where his poor financial
circumstances persisted, in addition to his wife's health issues. Mozart was
also named the Emperor's chamber composer, but his earnings remained
insufficient. He sought to improve them by undertaking different music-related
activities, including composing, teaching and conducting, but the conditions
were extremely difficult.1
The last three years of his life were marked by
enormous financial and emotional hardship, but were, from an artistic point of
view, the most fruitful.
His last three symphonies, considered by
experts to be the most beautiful, were composed over a six-week period in 1788.
Cosi fan tutte ("Women are like that") was written in Vienna in 1790,
and he composed three other important pieces in 1791 simultaneously: The Magic
Flute and The Clemency of Titus, for the coronation of Leopold II in Prague,
and Requiem, a piece commissioned by a mysterious character who wished to
remain anonymous.1
Between 1780 and 1790, the great composer
started to present significant depression. He was visited by a mysterious
character who entrusted him with composing a requiem mass in exchange for 30
ducats. The master composer accepted the proposal.8 He suffered episodes of loss of consciousness, probably syncopal, and
started to think that he was writing his own requiem mass, that his days were
numbered, he was being poisoned and that his deterioration was evident. At the
end of November, in a state of dismay, he worked a bit more on composing the
piece, but while working on the Lacrymosa, he burst into tears and felt he was
unfit to finish it. Mozart issued instructions to his student Süssmayr, with
whom he spent most of his time in the final few months. Mozart was convinced he
had been poisoned, and even claimed it had been with Aqua Tofana, a substance
containing lead. 8
With admirable talent and respect, Süssmayr,
following the death of his teacher, filled the gaps in the work (only Requiem
and Kyrie were completely finished) and wrote Sanctus and Agnus.1
Aged 36, the greatest genius in the history of
music died on 5 December 1791 at around one o'clock in the morning. His death
certificate stated "miliary fever" as the cause of death. 1 However, subsequent analysis of his medical history, which has been
extensively studied by various authors, reveals that the most probable cause of
death was actually chronic nephritis and, in turn, end-stage kidney disease.7
Mozart's personality has been described as
frivolous, eccentric, restless and unpredictable, and he expressed himself with
exaggerated grimaces and gestures. His friend Joseph Lange, the husband of
Aloysia Weber, saw Mozart's need to expose himself and his radical decision to
let himself go as a way of escaping all that had been denied to him throughout
his life. His music did not communicate his state of mind, but rather his
process of self-control.
von Thymos, Eros und Logos
Es existiert ein interessantes Spannungsfeld, zwischen Thymos, Eros und Logos gerade bei den Philosophen selber, die ihr Leben ja dem Dienst des Logos verschrieben haben. Von ihren Vitae wissen wir, dass ein sehr grosser Prozentsatz der Philosophen ein ziemlich gespaltenes Verhältnis zum Eros hatten. Siehe dazu: "Die Liebhaber der Sophie"[311] Man kann die grossen Philosophen, die ein geregeltes Sex-Leben hatten, wohl an einer Hand abzählen:
Hegel: Er hatte eine sehr junge Frau, für die er wohl aber eher Vater-Figur war.
Gotthard Günther (der wegen seiner jüdischen Frau emigrieren musste).
Whitehead[312]
Heidegger, der war zwar durch & durch "Normalo"
bürgerlich, aber auch nicht so ganz geregelt:
Da er sich mit seinen Studentinnen
vergnügte, ich glaube es war Hannah Arendt.[313]
Kant gehört hier zwar überhaupt nicht rein, weil der
absolut gar kein Sex-Leben hatte, eber als so ca. grösster aller deutschen
Philosophen, ist er bekannt wegen seines berühmten Ausspruchs zur Ehe:
Die bürgerliche
Ehe ist ein Vertrag zum gegenseitigen Gebrauch der Geschlechtsteile.
Moses Mendelssohn,
von dem eine wahrhaft rührende
Story überliefert ist, wie er seine Frau gewann.
http://www.wisdomportal.com/Romance/Mendelssohn-Gugenheim.html
Sartre: war ein wahres Sex-Monster, wohl auch nicht so ganz
geregelt. [314]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir
Rousseau war zwar auch verheiratet, aber er schrieb
seitenlange Elegien über seine Masturbations-Erlebnisse.[315] Seine Kinder (es waren
eine ganze Menge) gab er übrigens beim Waisenhaus ab.
Marx: Aber seine Frau litt unter Dauer-Depressionen. Irgendwo
war das Sex-Leben trotz der vielen Kinder nicht ganz so harmonisch gewesen wie
man denken könnte. Es war damals (und ist auch noch heute) der Brauch bei
orthodoxen Juden, dass zur höheren Ehre Gottes eben jedes Jahr ein Kind
gezeugt, und dem Volk der Juden zugeführt wurde.
Peirce: Eine eher traurige Geschichte, denn er liess sich von
seiner ersten Frau scheiden, die war die Tochter des Präsidenten von Harvard.
Damit war er seinen Job los, und bekam auch nie wieder einen, dank der
freundlichen Unterstützung des Präsidenten von Harvard. Und dann heiratete er
seine wirklich- und wahre Geliebte, und fortan lebten sie glücklich, aber in
bitterster Armut.
Michel de Montaigne
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne
Aristoteles (war aber wohl auch nicht so ganz geregelt)[316]
Sokrates: Er soll aber viel Streit mit seiner Frau Xantippe gehabt
haben,
aber zum Trost bekam er von den
Hetären öfter mal eine Freifahrt spendiert.[317]
Diogenes ist für mich deswegen Philosophie-Geschichtlich
bedeutsam, weil er sexuall so ziemlich auto-poiaetisch war, also eben ein Existen-zialist.
Einmal masturbierte er öffentlich auf dem Athener Marktplatz, der Agora. Da
fragten ihn die aufgebrachten Athener Bürger, was er denn da mache. Allso sagte
er da: Ich will euch nur vorführen, wieviel einfacher das Leben wäre, wenn man
Hunger hat, bräuchte man sich nur den Bauch zu reiben, und schon wäre man satt.
... aber waren entweder christlich
Zölibatär,
Abaelard war gezwungenermassen
enthaltsam, dank des kleinen Messerchens,
Origines hatte sich da wohl selber
nachgeholfen.
ewige Singles (Kierkegaard),
unglücklich verliebt (Nietzsche,
in Lou Salome)[318]
Frauen- Hasser / -Verächter, (wie
Plato und Schopenhauer)
Jenseits von Gut & Böse
(Plotin, Kant)
Vollkommene Meister der Ataraxia
(die Stoiker)
Schwul (Wittgenstein)
oder
Syphilitisch. [319]
Heutzutage aber führen die meisten
Universitäts-Philosophen ein durchaus bürgerliches Leben, sind verheiratet,
haben eine Familie, oder sie sind schwul. Das ist dem heutigen akademischen
Selektions-Verfahren geschuldet, denn wer es durch ca 6-8 Jahre
Philosophie-Studium inclusive Doktorat schaffen will, muss vor allem Ausdauer haben,
eine sehr notwendige Qualität in der heutigen bürgerlichen Gesellschaft,
und Anpassungsfähig an seinen/ihren jeweiligen Doktor-Vater
oder ‑Mutter sein, denn ansonsten sind die Karriere-Chancen eher mässig,
weil man/frau heutzutage nur noch über das Protektions-System in eine
akademische Philosophie-Karriere kommen kann. Ebenfalls hat die Promotion auch
viel mit Leidensfähig zu tun, insb. der Willkür des
Doktor-Vaters / der ---Mutter.
I don't know any better place to put
this. The original file became too big, even for my very big computer to handle
it. Which had in the .rtf format about 10 Megabytes. This is a little tradeoff
or "drawback" when using the .rtf format. It is so much larger than
the compacted .doc format. And since the .doc format becomes so easily
corrupted, it is safer to use .rtf, which is a text file, of sorts. And the
since the .docx format is also encrypted, ONE MAY NEVER USE .DOCX EITHER!!! You
will come to regret it some day, when your term paper is due, or your whole
dissertation, and then your computer goes kaboom! And then you have lost so
much precious lifetime.
Never trust the MS-
Data Protection Schemes. You have been warned!
They are only there
to protect the MS patent and trade secrets.
And to handle the .rtf format with
about 10 Megabytes is only possible with present-day computers. Even 15 years
ago, a 10 Megabyte MS Word .rtf file would have been difficult to handle. I
know this since the XP computer on which I am presently running MS Word 2000,
is of 2006 or so vintage. Of course when I bought the computer, it was a HP Elitebook 2730p. It was the smallest, the fastest, and the most expensive tablet
Computer of the time. And it even had a pen to write the input on the LCD touch
screen. It was quite a marvel for its time. I know this because it originally
had MS Win Vista as OS. The first thing I did with the computer, was to rip out
MS Vista, and install MS Win XP. Some time later I even put MS Win 7 on top of
that. It all ran, and still runs like a charm.. And I had bought it used and quite cheap, at about 1/4 of the original
price. Since I always buy my computers used, and since I run on them Win 7
maximum, they also run quite a bit more fast than today's super duper computers
with Win 10.
https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/hp-elitebook-2730p
The HP EliteBook 2730p offers strong
performance and endurance with a well-rounded feature set and a good pen
experience. Its $1,599 price is very competitive, considering the Lenovo
ThinkPad X200 Tablet starts at $1,884 and the Dell Latitude XT costs north of
$1,700.Apr 2, 2009
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista
Windows Vista is an operating system that was produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs and media center PCs. Development was completed on November 8, 2006,[2] and over the following three months, it was released in stages to
computer hardware and software manufacturers, business customers and retail
channels. On January 30, 2007, it was released worldwide[3] and was made available for purchase and download from the Windows Marketplace; it is the first release of Windows to be made available through a digital distribution platform.[7] The release of Windows Vista came more than five years after the introduction
of its predecessor, Windows XP, the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft Windows desktop operating systems.
So we do some more tech-talk. We are dealing with the methods of
handling the very large Data Sets of Project Noologie and Meta-Morphology. The techniques used are Hypertext and the Logics of Data Base Design. Because to build an extremely large Data Base like the
present project is something quite different from, lets say a commercial Data
Base. See the passage below where we do some exploration of the Amazon Data
Base and how it is used. Now the Data of the Project Noologie and Meta-Morphology are unstructured. They are texts, articles, books, pictures, and
videos. And the Hypertext Data Base has to ensure that they can be accessed,
and most importantly, we need some categories by which they are ordered. And
here comes the Warburg Library. I refer to the relevant information in the
articles on the Aby Warburg Library:
http://www.noologie.de/aby.htm
http://www.noologie.de/aby.pdf
http://warburg.libguides.com/classification
http://www.noologie.de/warburg-class.html
[[As an introjection, here is some
information how Amazon builds and maintains its Data Base. There we have a
quite strictly defined data structure and an Item Number. Each item has to have
its unique number. Then there is a set of data connected to the items that be
stored and retrieved. Like a huge mass of items (wares) in an inventory of a
(very) huge store like Amazon. One has a very long list of these items, where
they are stored in the warehouse, how many of them, what they cost, and many more
data on the items or things that are to be sold. Then one has another list,
which is the customer list. All the data on and about them. What they bought,
what they also bought, what payment, and a very important information, WHERE
they live. Is it an affluent neighborhood, or a poor one? When people buy cars
or sports equipment, or even book some (Amazon sponsored) leisure activities,
this is the place where Amazon can really cash in. Because this will give them
a psychological profile of their customers. Anyone who has ever bought anything
from Amazon, may be surprised how much Amazon knows about their customers.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/090716/7-ways-amazon-uses-big-data-stalk-you-amzn.asp
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predictive-analytics.asp
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/social-networking-service-sns.asp
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/socialcapital.asp
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/big-data.asp
https://www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=712
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-17/new-patent-amazon-will-collect-much-customer-data-google
https://www.enginecommerce.com/consumer-data-collection-ecommerce-amazon/
https://www.quora.com/What-database-does-Amazon-use-to-store-product-information
I can’t really divulge too much, but reading
the other answers I want to make sure people don’t get the wrong impression.
As most people
correctly wrote, Amazon does not use an RDBMS (a traditional
relational DB, e.g. Oracle) to store product data. RDBMSs simply don’t support
the required scale (amount of data and query throughput/latency).
According to external sites (e.g. this one[1]) Amazon has on the order of half a billion products
for sale, and that’s just the main US site (admittedly the biggest). According
to this[2], it serves roughly 1B pages per day, which is roughly 10,000 pages per
second on average, and much higher at peak.
As someone else
observed, there is also no single DB used throughout Amazon. That was actually
true in the very early days, when a single Oracle instance stored everything: product
data, user accounts, orders, inventory… This hasn’t been the case for many,
many years now.
However, there
is a single “conceptual” DB that stores the vast majority of product
information displayed on the site. It’s huge, super-fast, and extremely
available.
This DB isn’t DynamoDB,
or any other DB publicly available on AWS (RedShift, Aurora, etc.) It’s
proprietary and private. This isn’t to say that you couldn’t build
our catalog on top of one of those; I honestly don’t know.
Edit: thanks to Vipul Patel, who works on the team that owns the database in question, for pointing
out the team page on the Amazon Jobs site[3] that includes the following excerpt (my emphasis):
We own one of
the largest NoSQL databases in the world, serving trillions of requests
daily. And we develop world-class solutions leveraging AWS
technologies where we can (and build our own where we cannot).
Footnotes
[1] How Many Products does Amazon Sell? -
August 2017
[2] amazon.com Traffic Statistics
https://www.scrapehero.com/number-of-products-on-sale-at-amazon-com-august-2017/
Amazon has a
total of 536,641,219 products on sale.
In comparison.
Amazon had 372 million
products on June 20th, 2017.
https://www.amazon.jobs/en/teams/fast-data-technologies
https://www.quora.com/What-database-technology-does-Amazon-use
http://www.noologie.de/db/db-nrm.htm
http://www.noologie.de/db/db-nrm_c.htm
End of introjection.
]]
The Headlines of the present text
(xxx.pdf and xxx.htm) are the Topmost or the Root Level of the Hierarchic Deep Structure
of the Project Noology. It is the top of so many levels of Hierarchy extending
and expanding into the present text and then into the deep www. It is an
Associative Hypertext Database. This is because the Table of Contents
(Inhalts-Verzeichnis) is also a Hypertext Mechanism. By clicking on any entry
in the Table of Contents, we can jump immediately to the corresponding
subsection of the text. The reason why we have so many headlines is that we can
jump to all these subsections by using the Hypertext Methods of MS Word and the
MS Word Outline Folding Mechanism. When one has a very large text like this,
the Outline Folding is an essential tool to manage this. In a flat text without
the Deep Outline Structure this would be utterly impossible. And it also gives
a very easy way to re-organize the text. In this manner, it is exactly a Mind
Mapping tool. Only the term Mind Mapping is a very obscure and obfuscating way
to describe a Hierarchical Nesting Associative Data Structure. There is one
crucial difference between MS Word and most other programs that have "a
kind of" outlining feature: In most other programs one must click on each
outline to open up its sub-outlines. And this is an extremely tedious process
when you have a deeply nested structure with some 5-10 nesting levels. I have
no idea how any programmer worth his salt would come up with such an insanity.
Fortunately, the good MS people who designed MS Word did at least once,
something right. This outline feature was already present in MS Word 2.0 of
1992 or so. That one ran on the Win 95 OS which was based on DOS. And they just
ported it to the Win NT, then Win 2000, and finally Win XP. But as I said it,
it doesn't fit too well into Win 7, and none at all in Win 8 and Win 10. Too
bad. So much for some Hellish Programming at the behest of ...
And then the MS Word .html
conversion the Hypertext gives us immediately the .htm file Structure. I don't
like the MS folks so much because of their Business Politics. But the MS Word
is a stroke of Genius. It is the best Word Processor in the world. Nothing
comes close to it. We just may look at the sorry Open Office or Libre Office.
This is just a bunch of crap compared with MS Word. And I am strictly using MS
Word 2000, all the later versions of MS Word are again a bunch of crap. In
German there is a proverb which says: Verschlimm-Besserung, meaning something
like Up-Down-Down-Grading. The good people at MS decided to "Upgrade"
the good old MS Word 2000 Program to something much much worse.
[See also the Matrix Trilogy by the
Wachowski's about "upgrading". I never thought that the Wachowski's
were such good programmers, and that they knew the mInd of Bill Gates inside
and out. But since the Matrix is a computer program, the Wachowski's may have
known a bit about this business.]
Unfortunately, the problem is that
of a world simulation. We may take the "Kant und das Schnabeltier" as
a quite good bad example that Umberto Eco had concocted. The good Umberto was
(he is dead by now) a quite good philosopher and semiotician and more. But he
was NOT SO GOOD AT COMPUTER SCIENCE. And at that I am better than the good
Umberto. It is entirely impossible to do a simulation on a computer that goes
bottom up from the Subatomic level, into Atoms, then Molecules and then Cells,
and then Living Life. This is a problem of computational complexity. Because to
simulate the Universe, one needs about 10**xyz**zyx more Simulation Bytes, than
the whole Universe contains atoms. This is the pitfall of the Matrix movies, it
is just technically impossible to "Second Source" or "Reverse
Engkineer" the complexities of Mother Nature Herself. (The Matrix is the
Mater, therefore the Mother Nature). So the Wachowski's just lost out, and only
12-year old kids will believe the nonsense that they had concocted.
And this is the MS "Upgrading
Principle": With every new "upgraded" version the MS Office
became more and much worse. And MS Word 2000 unfortunately doesn't run on Win 7
very well and it doesn't run at all on Win 8 or Win 10. Therefore for my own
work, I have to use a separate computer with Win XP running on it, and it is
connected via local network to my main working computer, which runs Win 7. So
this is the trouble that one has to put up with, because the good MS people had
decided that there is no such thing as "Backwards Compatibility" in
the MS Business Plan. Of course they want to sell all their new (upgraded)
software with the new OS's 8 and 10. And so they decided that the old Win XP
software doesn't run (too well or at all) any more in Win 8 and Win 10. There
is an age-old wisdom of programmer lore: If your program is running alright,
YOU MUST NEVER UPGRADE. You will always invite some more trouble.
[I have this saying that MS is so
successful because it sells to the poor Users of the world some solutions for
problems that the poor Users in all of the world wouldn't have, if they didn't
use MS products at all. (Success means Suck-Cess-Pool or Suck-Seed which means
Fellatio).
]
There is another good side to MS
Word 2000. It doesn't need a registration with MS. So one can have as many
copies of the program on as many computers as one likes. MS doesn't know
anything at all about those many copies. And I can give a more detailed picture
of how I work: I have two computers, one running XP and the other Win 7. Each
computer has a separate monitor on its second video output. So I have 4
monitors around me. I have some real problems, not with the monitors themselves
but with the 7000 Kelvin of their Luminescence Spectrum. 7000 Kelvin eats up
the Melatonin in your brain, and one gets very heavy insomnia from staring all
day into those monitors. This is what is called a "job hazard". One
may even can become blind from that. But there are as many studies that state
that this is not true. When the Guardian says something, we should better take
this with a little Grain of Salt. (Cum
Grano Salis).
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/17/17724658/screen-time-blue-light-blindness-science
https://www.preventblindness.org/blue-light-and-your-eyes
And hopefully no-one will believe
me, when I am saying this. I have two work computers: One is the HP EliteBook
2730p with a high-res screen of 22*17 cm, the other is quite a Behemouth of a
Schlepptop. This thing is Really Heavy. The Asus X93SM-YZ125V 46,7 cm (18,4
Zoll) Notebook with a high-res screen of 30*23 cm. This is about the biggest
and heaviest Schlepptop Computer that was ever produced. So because no-one will
believe me, I have included some photos of my two computers and four monitors.
http://www.noologie.de/comp-sml/comp1.jpg
http://www.noologie.de/comp-sml/comp2.jpg
http://www.noologie.de/comp-sml/comp3.jpg
http://www.noologie.de/comp-sml/comp4.jpg
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-K93SM-YZ085V-Notebook.73450.0.html
Big item. When looking at the voluminous package of the Asus K93SM-YZ085V, the
first thing that springs to mind won't be a notebook. More likely than not, you
might expect an HD receiver or a Blu-ray player. Nevertheless, the box contains
a notebook with an 18.4 inch display - surely not a device for everyone.
"The air is
thinner at the top" - this also applies to desktop replacement notebooks
with a display size upwards of 18 inches. Our reviewed device, the Asus
K93SM-YZ085V, certainly doesn't have a lot of competition in terms of size at
the moment. ...
With Asus in on
the other hand, 18.4 inch devices apparently appear to belong to the standard
repertoire. There definitely doesn't seem to be any other way of explaining the
fact that the Taiwanese manufacturer has only recently thoroughly overhauled
the K93 series. Asus has proclaimed the four new models which can perform the
tasks of a PC as high performance all-round notebooks, which can be considered
to be full-scale desktop replacement notebooks for this reason. The price range
of the current K93 series spans a range between 849 and 1149 Euros, whereby the
K93SM-YZ085V we have for review is the top model with an Intel Core i7-2670QM
processor.
18 inch
tinderbox: Asus K93SM18 inch tinderbox: Asus K93SM
The case of the
Asus K93SM-YZ085V above all else stands out due to its sheer size. With dimensions
of 441 x 295 x 42-55 millimeters, it could also serve a purpose as a small
table top. The weight of 4.1 kilograms predestines the device more for an
evening workout than for mobile use, although it clearly wasn't developed for
this purpose as a self-proclaimed desktop replacement. The distance between the
office desk and the living room can still easily be traversed with this
sizeable device.
This is not because I am such a
maniac about huge .htm files but because a full text search is quite tedious
when you have split it up in about 20 small files. I have learned this the hard
way in my dissertation (of 1999) first Noologie I project (of 2995). And I had
a quite hard time to find all my quotes. I had to use the Google www-site
search function to find anything at all. And quite often it occurred that the
Google couldn't locate it even though I knew that it was right there in that
.htm file. And it is very tedious when the Google gives you some results, but
it doesn't tell you where exactly in the .htm file you have to go. As far as I
know the .htm definition has no function that gives the entry point by line
numbers, because there are no line numbers in a .htm file. Because every
browser makes its own formatting. It could be done with the <br> tag. And
perhaps I have just not been able to find the appropriate function. The command
for the site: search goes like this. Unfortunately MS Word doesn't do a .html
conversion for this format:
xyz site:http://www.noologie.de
The MS Word Outline Mode is an
extremely powerful tool if applied in the right way. (This means that one needs
to write a few Macros to make it work efficiently). There exist on the SW
market some tools called Mind Mapping. This is exactly the same as the MS Word
2000 Outline Mode. But because no-one knows this (except me of course), the
people, who are all the Rest of Us, have no idea how to use this feature.
"Mind Mapping" is just a fancy term for "Structured Nested
Hierarchical Thinking". And the former term totally obfuscates what the
essence of this method is. I just call it by its "Real Name". Anyhow,
a programmer who cannot do "Structured Hierarchical Thinking", is no
programmer at all. (I also call this Objective Programming, which is somewhat
related to but not identical with "Object Oriented Programming"). See
a further discussion in a later chapter.
https://www.ayoa.com/how-to-mind-map/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMInYGhwa2A4wIVmM13Ch0CVQz6EAAYAiAAEgKxivD_BwE
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-free-mind-map-tools-best-use/
MindApp is a mind
mapping tool available in-browser or as a Windows desktop app. It features
a drag and drop interface, keyboard shortcuts, children's options, and map
and text formatting. You can save mind maps online in your free personal
account or as images on your desktop, which can be used in other applications.
And I have some good advice to add
on top of that: NEVER USE the .doc or .docx format. You must not do this,
because when your computer goes "kaboom", or when there is an EMP
surge, then your whole day's (or week's) work will be lost in Nirvana. Never
trust the MS recovery procedures. It always happens in the right moment, when
your term paper is due or even your dissertation, and the computer inevitably
goes "kaboom". I have a nice joke about that: "Jesus Saves"
further down. YOU MUST ALWAYS use the .rtf format. This is a sort of very
primitive .xml, long before XML was invented. And it looks pretty strange when
you put it into a programmer's editor. But it is just the same as XML,
converted into a strange MS format. The { ... } are the markup signs just like
the <xyz> and </xyz> in XML. This is what it looks like. One can
immediately see that it is a deeply nested structure just like XML. The
difference between XML and HTML is that HTML is a sort of Pidgin XML, since in
HTML one doesn't always need to exactly balance the <xyz> with the
corresponding </xyz>.
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\uc1 \deff0\deflang1031\deflangfe1031
{\fonttbl
{\f0\froman\fcharset0\fprq2
{\*\panose 02020603050405020304}
Times New Roman
{\*\falt Times New Roman};
}
{\f1\fswiss\fcharset0\fprq2
{\*\panose 020b0604020202020204}
Arial
{\*\falt Arial};
}
{\f2\fmodern\fcharset0\fprq1
{\*\panose 02070309020205020404}
Courier New
{\*\falt Courier New}
;}
{\f3\froman\fcharset2\fprq2
{\*\panose 05050102010706020507}
Symbol;
}
{\f4\froman\fcharset0\fprq2
{\*\panose 02020603050405020304}
Times
{\*\falt Times New Roman};
}
<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type
content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name=ProgId
content=Word.Document>
<meta name=Generator
content="Microsoft Word 9">
<meta name=Originator
content="Microsoft Word 9">
<link rel=File-List
href="./hagia-Dateien/filelist.xml">
<link rel=Edit-Time-Data
href="./hagia-Dateien/editdata.mso">
<!--[if !mso]>
<style>
v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
.shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
</style>
<![endif]-->
And so on...
We have four Interlocking and
Complementing Methods of Access for the Hypertext:
1) The headlines in MS Word, which
allow Hypertext Jumping.
2) The MS Word Outline Folding
Mechanism allows us to display any levels 1 or 2 or 3 or 5 or more of the
Headlines. But 5 Levels of Outline are enough for practical usage. This for the
ergonomics of human memory.
3) MS Word automatically converts
any URLs given in the text into real .htm Hypertext links according to the
definition of the HTML specification.
4) MS Word converts a Word text into
a www HTML page.
So one can design a printable .pdf
text and the same time a www .htm file, which comes in quite handy because now
it is possible to use the Word text in parallel with the HTML method. So these
are also complementary methods with large and deeply structured texts, and even
more deeply structured Hypertexts. As I have said, the Project Noologie
contains about 400 .htm files in ca. 50 megabytes. This is an immense amount of
data. With normal paper-and typewriter methods this would be utterly impossible
to manage. And even when using a conventional Text Processor (Like Open Office
or Libre Office) without the Outline Folding and the Hypertext jumps this would
also be quite difficult and tedious and therefore next to impossible to manage.
An abbreviated version of the Hypertext Design Principles is given in these
files:
http://www.noologie.de/hytxt-design.htm
http://www.noologie.de/hytxt-design.pdf
So we have all the essential tools
for ordering and managing our Hierarchic Associative Hypertext Database. As I
say it in the text, it is a Structure similar to the original Library Structure
of Aby Warburg to which I owe so much.
[The following is similar to the
original Structure of the Warburg Design. It is present in the catalogue of the
Computerized Warburg Library.
https://wdl.warburg.sas.ac.uk/browse/subject
https://wdl.warburg.sas.ac.uk/
http://www.noologie.de/warburg-class.html
]
Aby Warburg constructed this Structure
in the 1920's. All that without computers. At his time it was a quite
super-human task. With the full power of present day Hypertext and Outline
folding, this has become not only possible but also quite efficient and even
easy. Of course one needs to be able to use the available computer tools to
their maximum effectiveness. See also the more in-depth research about the
Warburg Library.
http://www.noologie.de/aby.htm
http://www.noologie.de/aby.pdf
In a further section we will do some more in-depth exploring of the
Design Principles of a very deeply structured Hierarchical Associative Hypertext Database.
So the Zettelkasten was a very
powerful mnemonic tool in those olden times. Until the computer came around.
There you have something better than the Zettelkasten, and this is called
Hypertext. In a Zettelkasten, things must necessarily be in some sequential
order, one Zettel and then the next. If you do it in alphabetic manner, the
succes of this method depends on what kind of keywords you use. This sort of
ordering is also a very hot topic of library science. We find many different
classification methods for use in libraries. They all have their advantages and
their drawbacks. And it happens more often than not that a book gets lost in
the nooks and crannies of a classification system. I know something about this
since I had studied classification systems also.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification
These are the subtitles of my paper
for the ISKO Conference. Unfortunately they don't exist on the www any more
since the person who had administered the ISKO website, is not there any more
and so it fell out of the www. But the ISKO website still exists. But these old
articles don't since it now resides on a different www.
The Hierarchy and Histio-logy of
Noo-logy.
Hypertext as a practical method for
balancing the Hierarchy and Histio-logy of Knowledge.
http://www.noologie.de/isko.htm
http://www.noologie.de/symbol23.htm#Heading430
http://www.noologie.de/neuro.htm
http://www.noologie.de/symbol22.htm
In a Hypertext structure, one can
order things in a hierarchical manner also. This is also the structure of the
Warburg library. See the appendix: "The Hierarchical Structure of the Warburg Library". So when we do Hypertext, we can computerize "The Hierarchical Structure", and then things become much faster.
There is only one thing to take great care of: The Hierarchical Structure must
be designed correctly, or one will just get lost in Hypertext. Now this is similar to the Business of Objective Programming
which I deal with further down. One has to come up with a clean set of
Categories, or Patterns of Thinking (just another Morphology), and these
Categories must fulfill some very strict requirements:
1) They must not intersect, meaning
what is in one Category must never be in another Category.
2) There must be a Hierarchical
Order. So that you can have a Hierarchical Tree of Sub- Categories.
3) The Hierarchy and the Category
width, meaning that one cannot keep in one's mInd more than
10 Categories, better it is to have
just 5 or 7. So there is some human memory capacity / economy to heed.
Since all the philosophers could not
come up with more than 10 Categories, this shows the limitations of human
Category thinking. And it is entirely useless to have many more Categories.
Because there is also a logical demand: The Categories must be combinable. This
is pretty heavy business, and I will spare that for later, how to combine
Categories logically. This is very much like Boolean logic, but when you have
xyz-many Categories, this is not two-valued, but exactly so xyz-valued, how
many Categories you have. Gotthard Günther had devised something like that: He
called it Kontexturen (Contextures). I will deal with this in more depth in the
chapter on Gotthard Günther. Kontexturen are what I have called Categories in
the above text. Perhaps it is better to drop the term Categories altogether and
use Kontexturen, because then there will be no problem of confusion with all
those Categories that all those Philosophers had come up with. Since each
Philosopher who did some Categori'zing, had come up with a different set of
Categories, so that there is quite a lot of confusion in Philosophy, what
Categories really are. So one should altogether stay clear of this potential
philosophical mine field.
"The Hierarchical Structure of the Warburg Library" is something
like a blueprint pattern (just another morphae) for building up a Hypertext
Database. Aby Warburg had done all the groundwork in the 1920's and 1930's, I have
read the most important works that are mentioned there: Ernst Cassirer, Giulio
Camillo’s L’idea del theatro, The Theater of Memory, and Mnaemosynae. (I use a
little different spelling than in conventional philosophy, since I believe that
the aeta in Greek is pronounced like the German ä, but there is only one other
philosopher whom I know, who has the same interpretation about the
pronounciation of aeta: Arno Baruzzi).
... And a little personal note. I
knew all that literature of Aby Warburg very well. The only problem was that
Bazon Brock, my nominal "Doktorvater" had none whatsoever idea what
that was. Because Bazon Brock had never done a doctorate. He was, so to say, Professor
Humoris Causa. And I mean this in al sincerety. Because, as much as I know
about this, his post at the University of Wuppertal was paid for by Hubert
Burda. Bazon Brock and Burda were close friends, and if you want to have a
friendship of Three, there also in there belonged Peter Sloterdijk. This was
the friendship structure behind the scenes. I have read an autobiographical
book by Peter Sloterdijk, where he mentions exactly this. If I have the time, I
will get the proper literature quote. But since I have this in my memory (the
Mnaemosynae) this is enough for now. Back to my doctorate. So I had all the
literature and everything, the only problem was that Bazon Brock had no idea
whatsoever of all this. Perhaps, if he had talked to Peter Sloterdijk, there
could have been a connection. But this was not to happen. So I had my doctorate,
so to say, hanging in thin air. Ein Titel ohne Mittel ist auch nix wert.
This was 20 years ago in 1999. In those times, the www was still in some
infancy, compared to today. And this vital literature was not yet accessible to
me.
http://www.noologie.de/aby.htm
http://www.noologie.de/aby.pdf
But this is it now. And it just
proves everything that I have done in the last 20 years or so, that I had been
on the right track. So, this is better than having it post-humously. I finally
had the reassurance that my thinking of the Mnaemosynae, did exactly what Aby
Warburg had done in the 1920's to 1930's. There was just the unfortunate
circumstance that Aby (Abraham) Warburg and Ernst Cassirer were Jews. And so
the Nazis were quite successful in eradicating their work from the Cultural
Memory of the Deutsche Intelligenzia. And therefore, there was no-one Professor
of Philosophy or Cultural History, or anything like that in the Whole of
Deutschland, after 1945, who had any idea what Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer
had concocted. Poor old Deutschland! This was Cultural Amnesia at its best.
This was another reason, why my whole doctorate was hovering in thin air. Now I
don't complain. It could have been worse, if I had lived around the year 1600
or so. I am pretty sure, that I would have surely shared the same fate as
Giordano Bruno. Mind you, the works of Giordano Bruno were at the center of the
work of Aby Warburg and the Warburg Institute. It is surely better to be
forgotten than to be grilled like so much as a piece of Hamburger on the Grill.
(This is just a joke, since the Warburg Institute resided originally in
Hamburg). This is a quote from the above:
P. 385
Already in 1936, however, two years after the
Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg had moved from Hamburg to London and
re-opened as the Warburg Institute...
P. 392
The design he received was indeed later carved
into the lintel of the foyer
at Heilwigstrasse 116 in Hamburg.(2)
As I state it: There is a Dialectics of Form and Inhalt. I use the
German word "Inhalt" instead of the Contents. The Inhalt is a
technical term so that it will not get confused with the Contents. This is a
kind of Heidegger'ian reasoning. I will explain this in a later chapter. For
now, we call the Form also the Structure. This is "kind of" similar
to the Phenomenology of Hegel, and sometimes I say something good about Hegel.
There is also a dialectics when one looks at the work of Hegel, and I just
don't believe in his Idealism, as I point it out again and agan. I don't like
WHAT he says, his Inhalt. For example that he admired Napolium [I spell it this
way with intention.] as an objectivation of the Geist, nor do I like his
adulation of the Prussian state for the same reason. But I REALLY LIKE it HOW
he says this. He is an extremely structured thinker. And so NOW this time is
the right time to say SOMETHING GOOD about Hegel.
[I would just think that his way of thinking was a typical example of a
"Schwabe". The Schwaben's may be not the brightest people on Planet
Earth, but when they are doing something, they do with the utmost diligency and
precision. I have found this out to my own dismay when I came up against the
"Schwäbische Kehrwoche". There is a German expression for this:
penibel. [[Undoubtedly this word is etymologically related to "penis"
meaning to penetrate. Penibel is a method that is penetrating. Undoubtedly this
is also related to "pain" (German: Pein), poena, penitentia, and
something of the like in Latin.
]]
We may give as an example, a Schwarzwald Cuckoo Clock. Such was also the
most prominent character trait of Hegel. See my jokes about the Schwaben's.
Nietzsche war quite the opposite. I like very much WHAT Nietzsche says in his
"sort of" philosophy. But he is totally unstructured, and therefore I
call this "Pop Philosophy". Another interesting example is Heidegger.
In his "Sein und Zeit" he is extremely structured, but in his late
works he becomes more like a freewheeling thinker. And similarly with
Wittgenstein. His "Tractatus" is extremely structured and later in
his life he turned just into the opposite. So we can even speak of a
"Meta-Noia" of the philosophers.
]
Back to Hegel: ecause when thinking the "Geist" only and
nothing else, this is also a "kind of" Thinking in Structure. The
metaphysical meaning of "Geist" can be interpreted as an empty
Structure, in the terms of the Shunyata and the Kenoma. An empty Structure is
about as close as one can get, to think about Emptiness in a complicated way.
So the metaphysical meaning is that even though the Emptiness is empty, but it
can also have a Structure. This is the metaphor that I use here, like an Empty
Database System. So we get quite another Dimension of Emptiness. And this
necessitates that one starts from a completely different vantage point about
thinking Emptiness. The common thinking about Emptiness is that it cannot have
a Structure, that it may be just a Chaos or Tohu Wa Bohu as it says in the
Bible. (Chaos in the Ancient Greek sense, the gaping, yawning). This may be
correct in many cases. But there are some cases where there can be a Structure
of Emptiness. And this is exactly what I am doing here.
I will repeat my favorite quote from Nagarjuna to make the point a
little bit clearer because on-one in all the history of human thought was
better able to formulate this than Nagarjuna:
Hier, O Sariputra, Form
(rupa) ist Leere (shunyata) und gerade die Leere ist Form; Leere ist nicht
verschieden von Form, und Form ist nicht verschieden von Leere; was auch immer
Form ist, das ist Leere, was auch immer Leere ist, das ist Form, und dasselbe
betrifft Gefühle (vedana), Sinneswahrnehmungen (samjna), Impulse (samskara),
und Aufmerksamkeit (vijnana).
The Structure is a specific kind of Form. One could call it the Deep
Structure of Form. This enlarges the common idea of Form a little bit more.
Usually one thinks of the Form as some kind outline, or a view from the
outside, like the form of a coffee cup. What we do when we look at the
Structure, we look at it from the inside. This is similar to a Mathematical
Topology, because we have a lattice of points that are connected. A topology
can be stretched and bent whichever way one may like, but the lattice of points
cannot be changed, if one wants to do Topology. It it is quite easy to see the
Structure when we think of a Computer Database System. The Database System must
be there before it can take up some data. And the Form of the Computer Database
System may never change, because if that happens, all your precious Data will
be gone, with the wind as the saying goes. So we need to do some heavy thinking
about the Form, before we can fill it with the Data. In Computer Science, the
Design of a Database System is a crucial affair. One must not commit any errors
in that. And since I am a Computer Scientist, I am well versed in this art.
Because it really is an art. One cannot let a machine do this. Because the deep
Structure of the Inhalt determines the Logical Structure. Here is some www
material on that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Topology.html
https://www.math.colostate.edu/~renzo/teaching/Topology10/Notes.pdf
https://www.ntnu.edu/imf/research/topology
https://brilliant.org/wiki/topology/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_design
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_design#Logically_structuring_data
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_design -
ER_diagram_(entity-relationship_model)
http://www.noologie.de/db/db-nrm.htm
http://www.noologie.de/db/db-nrm_c.htm
On Thinking in the Trees. I have just used an odd mode of expression.
This is not a joke at all. It means to think in hierarchical Tree Structures.
As a computer scientist one must be quite good at Thinking in the Trees,
meaning some hierarchical data structures like a Balanced Binary Tree. This is
one of the Essences of Data Base design. Now the requirements for memory trees
like the Aby Warburg Library are quite different from that what one does in
Computer Science. The Computer Science Tree has to be balanced for Optimal
Access Time vs. Computer Resources. In the case of doing Thinking Trees, it is
a little different. One needs to keep an overview which is limited by the
display size of the Computer Screen. This has about 39 lines for my Computer.
And the newer models of laptops are not as good any more, because of the craze
of having a TV compatible display which just gives you some more columns, but
not any more lines. And the display of the lines is what counts when you want
to have the overview. So there is a Tree width, which should not exceed the
number of lines that you can display. Doing a lot of scrolling up and down is
not a good way to keep an overview. I give an example for the base of such an
Associative Tree. This is the root level of the Video Archive of the Noologie
project. Here you can see the main categories by which I subdivide the many
different subjects of the first or the root level of the tree. You may notice
that this tree is not balanced at all, because the design depends on the depth
of the subtrees that you have under each root level heading. There is no patent
recipe how to subdivide a knowledge Data Base. I am sure that Aby Warburg had a
better subdivision. But here the requirements are different since I also
include a lot of Entertainment Videos, and then a lot of Music Videos. And then
some Natural Science and Technology Videos, which was not the purpose of the
Warburg Library. So the scope in the present Database is so much wider.
http://www.noologie.de/aby.htm
http://www.noologie.de/aby.pdf
\video\doku-craft-handwerk-art
\video\doku-geo
\video\doku-hist
\video\doku-hist-antik
\video\doku-nat-astro
\video\doku-natwiss
\video\doku-paleo
\video\doku-rel
\video\doku-rel-anthro-ethno
\video\doku-rel-esoteric
\video\doku-sozwiss
\video\doku-tech
\video\film-comic
\video\film-hist
\video\film-scifi
\video\film-video
\video\komiker-deutsch
\video\music
\video\music-antik
\video\music-asien-indien
\video\music-esoteric
\video\music-ethno
\video\music-klass
\video\music-modern
\video\music-other
\video\music-rel
\video\philosophy
\video\wagner-film
\video\wagner-music
\video\wagner-other
One of the earliest application of the balanced tree structure was the
Mumps Database. It ran on something like a PDP 11. Which could roughly be
compared to the Apollo Guidance Computer. Here is some Computer Gobble-De-Gook,
it is all Greek to Us. Since this was a long gone era, of 1969, which has now
in 2019, quite exactly a 50-year Jubilee. Quite interesting I would say to
write something like that for the 50-year Jubilee. And it is June now. So I am
probably the only one in the Whole of Germany who is still surviving with a
living memory from that era.
The Branching of Trees is part of the Science of Fractals. There are
some very nice pictures which of course give us so much more than 10.000 words.
https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Fractal_tree
https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-1-1.html
A fractal is a pattern that repeats at
different scales, and examples are all around us. Technically, we call shapes
like this "Self-Similar" because a little piece of the shape looks
similar to itself. This fern shows a rough self-similarity, being made of
little copies of the same overall shape.
Fractal Trees
The plant kingdom is full of fractal patterns,
and while we have only started calling these patterns 'fractal' since the
1970's, people have been observing these kinds of patterns for much longer.
Perhaps the first description of a fractal pattern in nature came from the
great artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century.
Leonardo wrote in his notebooks: "All the
branches of a tree at every stage of its height when put together are equal in
thickness to the trunk [below them]." This was a logical inference, and
has come to be known as Leonardo's Rule for Branches. This came from the idea
that branches act as pipes to move fluid, and the total cross-sectional area
must be the same at different levels of the tree. This rule has actually been
shown to be not entirely correct (Ref), but it is a good initial model.
http://mwskirpan.com/FractalTree/
Make Your Own Fractal Tree!
Using the parameters below you can grow your
own trees using fractals (well, approximately a fractal). The tree is generated
by starting with a trunk of a certain length and then adding two branches that
split off at a specified angle and length that is a ratio of the trunk. We
continue adding these split branches for every branch that is drawn, up to a
certain depth. If you were to repeat this process, as the limit approached
inifity, you would have a set of numbers that were of a fractional dimension
and had a self-repeating structure. Namely, a fractal set.
Below, I provide access to some parameters so
that you can draw one of your own trees by: (1) controlling the number of
layers you compute, (2) changing the length ratio of the branches to their
parent branch, and (3) shifting the angles where the branches emerge. You can
also set the width and length of the trunk, which will change the look of your
whole tree (making it thicker and taller). You also have a color choice. The
branches get filled in on a color spectrum where the starting color is your
trunk's hue and the ending color is your leave's hue. Lastly, I made some
little flower buds that you can add. The code is all done in JavaScript's D3
library, and can be found on my GitHub.
Suggesions on Parameters
The following article gives some data on fir tree branches but I didn't
get the branching level.
This is more of a kind of joke:
http://www.realchristmastrees.org/dnn/Education/Tree-Varieties/Noble-Fir
NCTA: The
Professional Organization for The Real Christmas Tree Community
The National Christmas Tree
Association (NCTA) is the national trade association representing the
Christmas tree industry. NCTA represents more than 700 active member farms, 29
state and regional associations, and more than 4,000 affiliated businesses that
grow and sell Christmas trees or provide related supplies and services.
Members are located throughout North America, as well as in South America
and Europe. It is estimated that those affiliated with the NCTA produce roughly
three-quarters of the farm-raised Christmas trees in the United States.
The need for a recognized, nationwide Real Christmas Tree community – with the
desire to have its voice heard – has never been stronger. The NCTA represents
the Real Christmas Tree community with one voice to protect and advocate on the
industry's behalf.
Vision
NCTA's vision is that a farm-grown tree is a
part of every Christmas celebration.
Mission
NCTA's mission is to protect and advocate
for the farm-grown Christmas Tree industry.
Guiding Principles
The National Christmas Tree
Association will:
Conduct its
affairs with honesty and integrity
Advocate for
all segments of the industry
Include
members and state/regional associations in issue and policy development
Communicate
fully and accurately with members, state associations and related industries on
a continuous and timely basis.
I also apply the philosophical principle of the complementarity of Form
and Inhalt in all of my philosophical / or rather: Metaphysical thinking.
Because the abstract concept of Form and Inhalt is metaphsical. In the wohle of
the Physical Universe there cannot exist such a thing like a Form without an
Inhalt. I think that this is quite logical. Anyhow, in the Physical Universe
there just doesn't exist anything like a Form without an Inhalt. Because a Form
is a figment of the mInd or better, of the imagination.
First we have the important bibliography files in the .htm files.
http://www.noologie.de/denk-bib.htm
http://www.noologie.de/bib.htm
http://www.noologie.de/bib_c.htm
This is the Noology Archive of Video Collections. These are about 4
Terabytes.
http://www.noologie.de/video.txt
AG-Dissertation
Design und Zeit: Kultur im Spannungsfeld von Entropie, Transmission, und Gestaltung
http://elpub.bib.uni-wuppertal.de/edocs/dokumente/fb05/diss1999/goppold/
http://www.noologie.de/desn.htm
On Extra-Verbal Cultural Traditions
http://www.noologie.de/desn23.htm
In the following is a more or less complete collection of all the
project noologie files that are quoted in the present text. It is quite next to
impossible to get them into any systematic order at all, since this covers
about 30 years of work, and I had started working with personal computers quite
at the very time when they were invented and available with some kind of
reliability. This was around and about 1978 on some CP/M computers which were
then featured in the Byte Magazine. There were so many Computer Assembling
Garage Enterprises in that era. Until the IBM PC came around and that was the
end of all those Garage Enterprises, except of course the Apple Computers, and
some "sort of" computers like the Amiga and some other oddballs that
were produced for those kids who didn't have the money to buy a real CP\M or
IBM PC computer.
I have never used an Apple Computer, even though I had one sitting in my
basement for some time. I then donated this to some charity organization to
help some poor children in Upper Volta to get some basic Computer experience. I
even got a letter of thanks from some remote place in Upper Volta. They said
that the Apple Computer was nice, but because of the Electricity Conditions in
Upper Volta, they could use it only one hour a day, so their improvement in
Computer Experience was not so Revolutionary. In order that you may not be
confused, this paragraph is a kind of joke that I like to pull off some time or
another.
First come what I would call the Core Files. When I have the time I will
write some descriptions for them. But unfortunately I don't have the time.
I have in the Noology Archive all the videos of the Dance Traditions
that I reference here. The Dance Traditions are extra-verbal, and No Verbal
Description can tell us about: That, Which is Un-Describable in words and Only
in Dance. There is a lot of Verbal Material in the Derra-De-Moroda Dance
Library at the University of Salzburg. I have read extensively in this Library,
but reading so many books, doesn't help understand the dances. In this case, One
Video can convey a Message, that 10.000 words can never convey. This is the
power of Modern Multi Media Technology. All the videos referenced here, are
also in the Noology Video Archive. These are under:
http://www.noologie.de/video.txt
Of Phonosemantics and Fuzzy Categorization
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#category_system
Phonosemantics: The Semantic Fields, and Sem{e/aio}phonic Rhizomes
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#phono_semantics
Die Denk-Technik der semantischen Spannungsfelder
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#semant_spannung
Ein Versuch, die Logik der Hl. St.
Dreifaltigkeit nachzuvollziehen
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#_Toc512641957
Das pneumatische "Wir" und der ethnotechnische Genius
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#sub_obj_sem
The Indo-Aryan-European and Vedic Indian Sanskrit language have a common
Linguistic Operator for Negation. This is the "A" operator. And this
is quite a trick of Linguistic Magick. Every time you put an "A‑"
in front of any word, you instantly turn it into the opposite or its Negation.
Like A-Dvaita which means non-Dual or un-divided like in the Advaita Vedanta.
Then one can come up with A-Laetheia, which means a "sort of"
enlightenment, but this is not the original meaning. It just means the opposite
of Laetheia, and Laetheia means "Endarkenment" or
"Forget(ful)ness". The ancient myth states that when one dies, one has
to go to the river Laethe, and drink some water from it. This causes immediate
Amnesia. A-Mnesia just means the Negation of Mnesia or Mnaemae, which is the
Memory or the Reminiscence. Aristoteles wrote a quite enlightening piece of
work titled "Peri Mnaeme kai Ana-Mnaesis". This appears in the
contemporary word Anamnesis which means Ana-mnaesis. Ana means Uphill, like the
Ana-Basis of Xenophon.
But we can even do one better. Because there is not just Negation, but
also Inversion. This is a term for a particular application of Meta-Morphology.
One can make an Inversion of some Morphable Structure, and this is like one
takes a glove and turns it inside out. So when it fits on your right hand in
its original configuration, when you turn it inside out, it suddenly fits on
your left hand. This is called in Mathematics a Topological operation. Topology
means that all the points in a net stay connected. So when we take a different
kind of glove, like a chain mail or net glove, and then we turn this inside
out, wee see clearly how the connectivity of the net chain stays right the
same. This time not even doing anything particular like topological stretching,
but only Inverting. There are of course fotos on the www, of such chain mail
gloves.
javascript:;
And I call this a Topological Inversion Process of Meta-Morphology. This
is probably something that one cannot think with the usual Negation Operator of
the A‑ or Ant-Agonism. So it is quite outside of the thinking range of
all of conventional thinking that hu-manity has practiced in the last 3000
years or so. It truly is a Terra Incognita of Thinking. We may also call this
the Brave New Age ot thinking Morphology.
http://www.noologie.de/neuro07.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis
https://perspektiefe.privatsprache.de/platon-die-anamnesislehre/
https://anthrowiki.at/Anamnesis
https://www.textlog.de/platon-3.html
My project of Noology is an advanced application of Computer Assisted Philosophy. I have written extensively about that in the Volume Noology III: Der Diamantweg der Noologie. (2011 bis 2017)
http://www.noologie.de/diamant.htm
But I have also kept a secret Volume Noology III: Which is quite
no-name, because there is only a provisional title for that work. I don't want
to reveal all that to humanity, until the right time comes. If it comes at all,
and if not, so may be it. It is not listed in the root URL:
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm
And so if you don't know its URL you will not be able to find it in the
Google. Which suits me very well.
The secret title is:
"Die Kultur-Mythen-Analyse und Die Ethno-Kybernetik: Das Fraktal-Denken der Noologie".
This title is of no use whatsoever, because not so many people know
about Fractals, and even fewer know about thinking in Fractals. I believe I am
the only one who does this. So this is just a bad marketing idea. Until I come
up with a better title. Ethno-Kybernetik is also not so very well known. Except
if one knows the works of Peter Sloterdijk in and out. He speaks in his works
about Ethno-Techniken. Which is about the same as Ethno-Kybernetik. Since I
don't want to plagiarize Sloterdijk all the time, I had just thought up this
new word. Kultur-Mythen-Analyse is also not very well known, because today,
people are not so much interested in Mythology, and when they are, they just
think of some new sequels to the Star Wars endless sequel series, or of Star
Trek, or of the Matrix, or of the Prometheus in the Alien sequels, or something
in this genre. I have written more extensively in my article about the
Mythology in the Ring of Wagner, and then some.
http://www.noologie.de/wagner.htm
And
in Appendix III: Die Denk-Technologie der Noologie
I write everything there is to
write about the: WWW- Hypertext- Computer- Technik, of the Noology.
I just give some headlines of this,
so you can get an idea what I am talking about:
Die
Noologie- Navigations- Hilfen: Die Google-Erinnerung
Die
WWW- und Google-Methoden der Noologie
Die
Noologie als philosophische Wissensbasis
Die
Hyper- Text- Aesthetik- Theorie der Noologie
Die
Kunst der rekursiven Fuss-Note
A Hypothetical Sem{e/aio}phonic
Rhizome Network of Aoide Vocabulary
I have already said some things about: The Hierarchical Method of
Designing a Hypertext Structure. So I don't need to repeat this. But it just
fits in here as well. But since you should not step in the same river more than
once, I just refer to the above chapter about Right-Thinking. And the structure
of the Warburg library.
The whole of The Project Noologie
and Hagia Sophia has a volume of about 57 Megabytes in ca. 400 .htm files. This
is an immense mass of data to juggle around. The .htm format is a Hypertext
"of sorts" and therefore it is tremendously practical to do most of
the Literature References by linking into the Deep Structure of the www. I have
come to value the US wikipedia as very good source of references, they are
usually well recherched and documented. So they should be regarded as
trustworthy source. Since I know the material of so many wikipedia articles by
my own researches into the deeper recesses of the Classical Literature of
Antiquity, I can assure that the sources are correct. And the other good thing
about the US wikipedia is that they usually give a good abstract of the larger
text. And this is very handy when I cut and paste those abstracts in my own
text. This saves a lot of work, and I am thankful to those nameless authors who
have devoted so much of the time of their lives to do the research for the
articles. What if all those thinkers of Antiquity and the Renaissance up to
1990 had had a personal computer and www access?
The good Thomas Aquinas, Athanasius
Kircher, Marsilio Ficino, Picco della Mirandola, and the good Giordano Bruno,
and the good Leibniz, and the good Goethe, and the good Oswald Spengler, and the
good Aby Warburg, and the good Umberto Eco... They all would have just jumped
out of their mInds at the phenomenal perspective to get a computer for some
Universal and Encyclopaedic Knowledge. And I have to qualify that this is just
a very special Encyclopaedic knowledge about some very special subjects which
are all in the collection of the Warburg Library. But nowadays you can find
some good selections of the Warburg Library on the www. If you know where and
how to look for it, and use the Google in some clever ways. And so I am able in
just around 1/10 to 1/20 the fraction of the precious lifetime to do a research
on some things that the poor book-reading students of philosophy would need
countless hours to pore through library catalogs, then go to the library, and
schlep the books home, do some readings, do some annotations, do some
excerpting and quoting... And so on. I just have so much pity for those poor
students who do not know how to use the Computer and the www and the Google to
go fishing for precious information, with a dragnet. And I would be curious if
those students also go to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and then scan in
their books at the scanner, and take the scan files home and put them through
the OCR, so you need to make only some corrections where the OCR couldn't do it
all by itself. And this surely saves a lot of time. On top of this is the
enhanced Google search. And then one needs to get the retrieved material into
some Structure. And this Structure is the catalogue of the Warburg Library. As
I believe, this is one of the best catalogs in the whole of Library Science. It
is not ordered according to some stupid Alphabetical or Numerical Principle,
but according to its Deep Inhalt (the deep Content). And to determine what the
Inhalt is, one needs to read the book, at least a little bit. There is also the
ISKO organization International Society for Knowledge Organization. I have been
at some conferences of that organization around 1997-1999, and I had presented
some of my ideas. I had not yet been able to get the Structure of the Warburg
Library at that time. And so I could not give the fitting example for my theory
of Hierarchical Associative Hypertext.
The Dewey
Decimal Classification (DDC), colloquially the Dewey
Decimal System, is a proprietary library classification system first published in the United States by Melvil
Dewey in 1876.[1] Originally described in a four-page pamphlet, it has been expanded
to multiple volumes and revised through 23 major editions, the latest printed
in 2011. It is also available in an abridged version suitable for smaller
libraries. OCLC, a non-profit cooperative that serves libraries, currently maintains
the system and licenses online access to WebDewey, a continuously
updated version for catalogers.
The Decimal
Classification introduced the concepts of relative location and relative
index which allow new books to be added to a library in their
appropriate location based on subject. Libraries previously had given books
permanent shelf locations that were related to the order of acquisition rather
than topic. The classification's notation makes use of three-digit Arabic
numerals for main classes, with fractional decimals allowing expansion for
further detail. Using Arabic numerals for symbols, it is flexible to the degree
that numbers can be expanded in linear fashion to cover special aspects of
general subjects.[2] A library assigns a classification number that unambiguously
locates a particular volume in a position relative to other books in the
library, on the basis of its subject. The number makes it possible to find any
book and to return it to its proper place on the library shelves.[notes 1] The classification system is used in 200,000 libraries in at least
135 countries.[3][4]
And the Structure is just another
deeper version of Form. It is Form in a deeply and highly structured manner.
And this is exactly what the Warburg Library is all about. Because without a
deeply nested hierarchical structure it is quite impossible to think such a
thing like the Warburg Library is. And of course this is all about the Project
Hagia Sophia. Its structure is a deeply nested Hierarchical Hypertext. And in
would be pretty impossible to do this without the right Computer Tools. I have
in part developed Hypertext Structures myself in the early 1980's. That was
quite some time before the idea of Hypertext was even developed.
I use the German word Inhalt as a technical term, to distinguish it from the (in-) contents (or In-Continentia of "Life of Brian" fame). This is my favorite application of thinking Form and not Inhalt. When I read the writings of the Hl. St. Augustinus I am always con-vulsing with re-vulsion. Really. Augustinus is one of those characters whom I just love to hate. But I only hate WHAT he thinks, the Inhalt. And I just love the Form of his Thinking. I will just remember the verses of Nietzsche: Ihr Einsamen von heute, ihr Ausscheidenden:
Wahrlich, ich rathe euch: geht fort von mir und wehrt euch gegen
Zarathustra! Und besser noch: schämt euch seiner! Vielleicht betrog er euch.
Der Mensch der Erkenntniss muss nicht nur seine Feinde lieben, sondern
auch seine Freunde hassen können.
And this is also the way I go about
the good Hl. St. Augustinus. Since I am doing Complementarity Thinking, I have
noticed something: Even when I hate the Inhalt of the excessive ruminations
of St. Augustinus, I just love the Structure of his Thought-System.
Because he had been a very good Lawyer, and Rhetor, and Orator and he was a
Manichaean on top of that. Now to be a Manichaean is the best thing to do when
you are in the Law Business. To think the Manichaean way means to be "dyed
in the wool" with Dualistic Thinking. Manichaean'ism was probably the
highest logical suprematization of Dualistic thinking that ever existed. (See
also: Peter Sloterdijk "Gottes Eifer" on more information about
Suprematization). Manichaeanism is derived from the ancient Persian Zoroastrism
of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman as the Dualistic Spirits who are in an ever-lasting
battle about who controls the world, and the mInds of the Humans. I also refer
to the theory of Rudolf Steiner who had done some enlagement of this theory.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ahura-Mazda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahura_Mazda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahriman
I just give a little side thought
about the Hl. St. Augustinus. And I had pretty much the same revulsion when I
read Rousseau. The thinking style of them both was quite of the same kind of
excessive rumination, like the Hl. St. Augustinus did. But I just didn't get
the idea why the good Rousseau ruminated so excessively about masturbation.
Rousseau was about the same obsessed with masturbation as the good Marquis de
Sade was with his sexual tortures. At least the stories of the good Marquis de
Sade made for some interesting reading for an Anthropologist. One can always
learn something more about human sexual deviation, even if the stories the good
Marquis de Sade were complete fiction since he was in the Bastille at the time
when he wrote those stories. I believe that there must have been a reading
Salon in the assembly room for all the prisoners in the Bastille, and when the
Marquis de Sade did his readings, the room was always packed full. Since the
prisoners had very little other entertainment. I could do quite a bit of
psycho-analysis about this. But what struck me with so much Shock and Awe
(remember the 2003 Irak war of G.W. Bush)... Was the fact that even such
enlightened thinkers like Jacques Derrida had so much admiration and adoration
for Rousseau, and I even think that the French Intelligenzia believes that the
poor Rousseau was some sort of National Philosophical Hero. And Rousseau was
really the poorest, and basest, and most erroneous thinker of the whole of the
French Intelligenzia, which was more of a Demenzia at those times, just like
the good Descartes a few years before Rousseau. This would be about the same
achievement as if the Germans would take the Dr. Josef Goebbels as their
National Philosophical Hero. To quote the good Asterix: Ils sont fous les
Romains. The retort is: Ils sont fous les Francais Intelligenzia or better the
Demenzia.
Abstract: Once I went climbing somewhere. The
equipment was heavy, the rope cumbersome, the slope steep. On the side of that
upward struggle, a foot away, a boulder with a flat top, pretty crystalline
colors. It invited me to put my hand on it, for a welcome rest. As I engaged
the motion, some engine of systematic suspicion inside my brain addled by the
effort, had an automatic, and, it turned out, life saving, second look. A
magnificent viper was coiled on the colored rock, its pretty camouflage
perfectly adapted. It puffed, ready to strike when I jerked back. As we will
see, human vipers, are also perfectly adapted, perfectly camouflaged, and
that’s what makes them so pretty.
It’s not because an ideology sounds good, and
looks pretty, that it is. Baits look good, and that’s why fishes bite them
(experienced fishes do not bite baits, they know the difference). So beware of
all too seductive ideologies… All the more as plutocratic propaganda finds
alluring all and any ideology which
serves it, and has the means to finance it, beyond your wildest dreams. In France, in the 1950s, more than 50 major opinion makers were on the
CIA roll. Surely, would the naive say, not icons such as Sartre and De
Beauvoir? Well, for those, the situation was even worse.
Yes, I know, top philosophers have always been
iconoclastic. Top philosophers break icons. Nothing that is viewed favorably in
this celebrity worshipping, thus superficiality craving, age of the greedy
critters.
...
Existentialism as a cancer of the spirit:
An example of a ruinous ideology has been
so-called “Existentialism”, a nebulous “philosophy” preoccupied with the self,
which played a crucial role in deploying, and justifying Lenino-Stalinism,
Nazism, “Maoim”,the “American Century”, also known as “neo-liberalism”…
Existentialism gave a justification, if not
inception to the “Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi” (me, me, me) philosophy, which
brought us, in turn, both the cult of wealth supreme (“neo-liberalism”,
“inequality”) and “communitarianism” (my community is all I need to enjoy and
know, by birthright; in particular Islamism, but it could be Buddhism in Burma…
or sexism).
“Neo-liberalism” is neither: neither “liberal”,
nor new in any sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida
https://de.pons.com/%C3%BCbersetzung/franz%C3%B6sisch-deutsch/ils+sont+fous+ces+romains
https://www.linguee.com/french-english/translation/ils+sont+fous+ces+romains.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelix
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Asterix
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Non-English_snowclones
https://mobile.secouchermoinsbete.fr/1299-la-signification-des-lettres-spqr-a-rome
https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/61lhc5/ils_sont_fous_ces_romains/
http://www.thefullwiki.org/Asterix
As I said in the main text. the
display of the lines is what counts when you want to have the overview. So
there is a Tree width, which should not exceed the number of lines that you can
display. Doing a lot of scrolling up and down is not a good way to keep an
overview. I give an example for the base of such an Associative Tree. This is
the root level of the video archive of the Noologie project. Here you can see
the main categories by which I subdivide the many different subjects of the
first or the root level of the tree. You may notice that this tree is not
balanced at all, because the design depends on the depth of the subtrees that
you have under each root level heading. There is no patent recipe how to
subdivide a knowledge Data Base. I am sure that Aby Warburg had a better
subdivision. But here the requirements are different since I also include a lot
of Entertainment Videos, and then a lot of Music Videos. And then some Natural
Science and Technology videos, which was not the purpose of the Warburg
Library. So the scope in the present Database is so much wider.
\doku-craft-handwerk-art
\doku-geo
\doku-hist
\doku-hist-antik
\doku-nat-astro
\doku-natwiss
\doku-paleo
\doku-rel
\doku-rel-anthro-ethno
\doku-rel-esoteric
\doku-sozwiss
\doku-tech
\film-comic
\film-hist
\film-scifi
\film-video
\komiker-deutsch
\music
\music-antik
\music-asien-indien
\music-esoteric
\music-ethno
\music-klass
\music-modern
\music-other
\music-rel
\philosophy
\wagner-film
\wagner-music
\wagner-other
Here I show some entries of the next
levels of the tree. You can see some of the volume of the material that is
stored under each tree root level.
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\blacksmith-traditional
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\chinese arts and crafts
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\dance
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\der letzte seines standes
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\diamant-glas
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\diamant-saphir-smaragd
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\indian arts & crafts
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\japanese crafts
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\japanese woodworking
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\japanese-other-garden
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\kunsthandwerk bayern
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\miyoko
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\oel-platin
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\tonneau-barrel
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\wax casting techique
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\wolle
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\diamant-glas\audio_ts
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\diamant-glas\video_ts
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\diamant-saphir-smaragd\audio_ts
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\diamant-saphir-smaragd\video_ts
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\oel-platin\audio_ts
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\oel-platin\video_ts
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\wolle\audio_ts
\doku-craft-handwerk-art\wolle\video_ts
\doku-geo\afrika
\doku-geo\amerikas
\doku-geo\asien
\doku-geo\austral-oceanien
\doku-geo\china
\doku-geo\earth-story
\doku-geo\ethiopia
\doku-geo\eurasien
\doku-geo\europ
\doku-geo\geo afrika arab
\doku-geo\near-east
\doku-geo\tibet
\doku-geo\zdoku-others
\doku-geo\asien\burma
\doku-geo\asien\burma\burma-reise
\doku-geo\asien\burma\burma-taron
\doku-geo\asien\burma\burma-reise\audio_ts
\doku-geo\asien\burma\burma-reise\video_ts
\doku-geo\asien\burma\burma-taron\audio_ts
\doku-geo\asien\burma\burma-taron\video_ts
\doku-hist\hist modern
\doku-hist\hist paleo
\doku-hist\hist personen
\doku-hist\hist-asien
\doku-hist\hist-mediev-renaiss
...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification
The OCLC has maintained
the classification since 1988, and also publishes new editions of the system.
The editorial staff responsible for updates is based partly at the Library
of Congress and partly at OCLC. Their work is reviewed by the Decimal
Classification Editorial Policy Committee, a ten-member international board
which meets twice each year. The four-volume unabridged edition was published
approximately every six years, with the last edition (DDC 23) published in
mid-2011.[36] In 2017 the editorial staff announced that the English edition of
DDC will no longer be printed, in favor of using the frequently updated
WebDewey.[37] An experimental version of Dewey in RDF was previously available at dewey.info beginning in 2009,[38] but has not been available since 2015.[39]
Design
The Dewey
Decimal Classification organizes library materials by discipline or field of
study. Main divisions include philosophy, social sciences, science, technology,
and history. The scheme comprises ten classes, each divided into ten divisions, each having ten sections. The
system's notation uses Arabic numbers, with three whole numbers making up the
main classes and sub-classes and decimals designating further divisions. The
classification structure is hierarchical and the notation follows the same hierarchy. Libraries not needing
the full level of detail of the classification can trim right-most decimal
digits from the class number to obtain more general classifications.[41] For example:
500 Natural
sciences and mathematics
510 Mathematics
516 Geometry
516.3 Analytic
geometries
516.37 Metric
differential geometries
516.375 Finsler
geometry
The
classification was originally enumerative, meaning that it listed all of the
classes explicitly in the schedules. Over time it added some aspects of a faceted classification scheme, allowing classifiers to construct a number by combining a
class number for a topic with an entry from a separate table. Tables cover
commonly-used elements such as geographical and temporal aspects, language, and
bibliographic forms. For example, a class number could be constructed using 330
for economics + .9 for geographic treatment + .04 for Europe to
create the class 330.94 European economy. Or one could combine the class 973
(for the United States) + .05 (for periodical publications on the topic) to arrive at the number 973.05 for
periodicals concerning the United States generally. The classification also
makes use of mnemonics in some areas, such that the number 5 represents the
country Italy in classification numbers like 945 (history of Italy), 450
(Italian language), 195 (Italian philosophy). The combination of faceting and
mnemonics makes the classification synthetic in nature, with
meaning built into parts of the classification number.[42]
The Dewey
Decimal Classification has a number for all subjects, including fiction,
although many libraries maintain a separate fiction section shelved by
alphabetical order of the author's surname. Each assigned number consists of
two parts: a class number (from the Dewey system) and a book number, which
"prevents confusion of different books on the same subject".[7] A common form of the book number is called a Cutter
number, which represents the author and distinguishes the book from other
books on the same topic.[43]
Classes
Main article: List of Dewey Decimal classes
(From DDC 23[44])
000 – Computer science, information & general works
100 –
Philosophy & psychology
200 –
Religion
300 –
Social sciences
400 –
Language
500 –
Pure Science
600 – Technology
700 – Arts & recreation
800 – Literature
900 – History & geography
Tables
(From DDC 23[44])
T1 Standard
Subdivisions
T2 Geographic
Areas, Historical Periods, Biography
T3 Subdivisions
for the Arts, for Individual Literatures, for Specific Literary Forms
T3A Subdivisions
for Works by or about Individual Authors
T3B Subdivisions
for Works by or about More than One Author
T3C Notation to
Be Added Where Instructed in Table 3B, 700.4, 791.4, 808–809
T4 Subdivisions
of Individual Languages and Language Families
T5 Ethnic and
National Groups
T6 Languages
Relative
Index
The Relative
Index (or, as Dewey spelled it, "Relativ Index") is an alphabetical
index to the classification, for use both by classifiers but also by library
users when seeking books by topic. The index was "relative" because
the index entries pointed to the class numbers, not to the page numbers of the
printed classification schedule. In this way, the Dewey Decimal Classification
itself had the same relative positioning as the library shelf and could be used
either as an entry point to the classification, by catalogers, or as an index
to the Dewey-classed library itself.[45]
Here are some contributions that
have no proper context place as yet:
The fallacy of the fossils is ecological. The place where fossils are
abundant, is mainly because they don't rot so easily. In the middle of a jungle
everything organic gets recycled very quickly and thoroughly. So the chance of
fossilization is small. Almost the only examples to the contrary are the tar
pits like LaBrea in Los Angeles and the Messel Pit. And then
there are the Glaciers and the Permafrost of Siberia. Because these are
melting, they also will become veritable treasure troves of hitherto unknown
and unknoweable ancient proto-civilizations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messel_pit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Brea_Tar_Pits
The best preserved fossils are exactly in those places where life has a
hard time to survive. Like the Badland belt of the USA from Arizona, New Mexico
going to the north, and in Asia it is the Gobi Desert. The same it is
with the rift valley of East Africa, where some quite arid areas are very
suitable for fossil preservation, so Louis Leakey and friends made most of
their discoveries there. The fallacy of the fossils is similar to the joke
where a man is searching for his lost keys, under the lantern, because he can
see better there, even though he had lost the keys somewhere else where it is
dark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Leakey
And there arose those famous knights (of the Arthurian Legends of
course). When they produced the movie "Monty Python and The Holy Grail", the poor Monty Pythons didn't have
enough money for horses. So it came to pass that the German title was: "Die Ritter der
Kokosnuss" (Cocoanut). How could a German translator /
synchronizer come up with that funny German title ??? Now if you know the movie
business, you know that in all the German synchronizations of US or english
movies, the horses were imitated with empty Kokosnuss shells. But if you didn't know this trick, you were out of
luck, when you went to the cinema, and there was none whatsoever Kokosnuss to
be seen. It was just to be heard. But the poor German movie-goers had no idea
of that. I myself did a whole lot of wondering when I first viewed "Die
Ritter der Kokosnuss" in the movie theater. And it took me about 20 years
of heavy thinking to figure out what this joke was all about.
Monty Python And The Holy Grail 1975
HD
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=monty+python+holy+grail
Spoiler
Alert! I don't want to spoil anyone's fun,
but this
text here contains some material which some people may find Offensive, Disgusting,
Grossed out, and even Politically Incorrect.
But this is
Anthropological Material. And as an Anthropologist,
who cannot
take such kind of Material, one should better look
for another
kind of job, like an Accountant.
You have
been warned!
Any further
Reading here is wholly on your Own Responsibility!!!
I just have some second thoughts about the Stalinist Purges, and
the gunshot executions. In the USA, suicide by gun is a preferred
method, especially for men who are gun lovers. Perhaps one has (n)ever seen
some forensic pictures of the results of botched gunshot suicides in the
USA, and there are quite a lot of them, and I have seen my share of them.
Because you just take a shotgun, put it to your mouth, and then Kaboom. But
there were even some morons who missed the shot and I have no idea how they
could miss at about 5 centimeters distance. The head shot was the preferred
method of suicide that Ernest Hemingway (... almost always) used. He used a
shotgun just to make sure. The one thing I was always puzzled about is: A
shotgun is quite long, so one will have a hard time when one wants to pull (or
better push) the trigger because the arm doesn't reach that far. But maybe he
used a broomstick to improvise. The good Ernest Hemingway always had a keen sense
for drama, even when he committed suicide. I would not have liked to be his
cleaning maid, to clear up the mess that he had produced. He must have shot
most of his head away. A shotgun is no toy for children to play with.
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/why-ernest-hemingway-committed-suicide/
Suicide always leaves the question of “Why?” in its
wake, and this is especially true when the person who commits the act seemingly
has so much to live for.
Such is the case of Ernest Hemingway. As his friend,
A. E. Hotchner wondered, why would someone “whom many critics call the greatest
writer of his century, a man who had a zest for life and adventure as big as
his genius, a winner of the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, a soldier of
fortune with a home in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, where he hunted in the
winter, an apartment in New York, a specially rigged yacht to fish the Gulf
Stream, an available apartment at the Ritz in Paris and the Gritti in Venice, a
solid marriage . . . good friends everywhere . . . put a shotgun to his head
and [kill] himself”?
While an answer to this kind of question can never be
offered with any certainty, given the complexity of mental health, and the time
that has passed, there are several plausible possible explanations.
What we do know is that at the end of his life, Ernest
Hemingway was suffering in mind, and likely in body as well. Over the course of
his life he had weathered malaria, dysentery, skin cancer, high blood pressure,
and high cholesterol, and these maladies had taken their toll. Additionally, he
had suffered six serious, essentially untreated concussions (two within
back-to-back years), which left him with headaches, mental fogginess, ringing
in his ears, and very likely a traumatic brain injury.
Several years before his suicide, he was almost killed
in two separate plane crashes, in two days, which ruptured his liver, spleen,
and kidneys, sprained several limbs, dislocated his shoulder, crushed vertebra,
left first degrees burns over much of his body, and cracked his skull, giving
him one of the aforementioned concussions (this one so severe that cerebral
fluid seeped out of his ear). He was in constant pain for a long time
afterwards, which he dealt with by drinking even more heavily than he usually
did.
The results of the suicide by shotgun look pretty much like my favorite
works of art by Hermann Nitsch. Since one usually leans against a wall, so that
performing the suicide will be a little more stable. When you miss, you will be
out of luck entirely.
http://www.nitsch.org/malaktionen/
http://www.nitsch.org/biografie/
http://www.nitsch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/aktionen_02-612x407.jpg
http://www.nitsch.org/aboutactions/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i07MePe6yMA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrALo-R3eAg
Face transplant: These are some quite nice photos of Face
transplantations. Even with pre-op and post-op photos. The doctors are quite
proud of their successes. So they put the photos on the www, to make some
advertisement of their skills. This is not for the faint-hearted! You have been
warned. You do this entirely on your own responsibilty! If you have
night-mares, please don't complain to me. I haven't forced you to look at those
photos. Too bad. As I say it again and again. When one wants to be a true
Anthropologist, one must have a professional attitude about these photos. Or
otherwise one will be a quite incompetent Anthropologist. And the medical
schools do everything they can to harden their students to such views. A doctor
must keep his/her cool even with such sights. And when one looks at them in the
flesh... a doctor should not faint when looking at the scene in Real Life. In
other countries the doctors are not so shy. When one goes to some Korean
www-sites, one will see some even more grisly photos. But I will spare the poor
reader even more harrowing photos.
The following nice youtube video is of someone who had tried to commit
suicide by gun. So this is it when one does a near miss. I have no idea how
that poor guy could miss, when one just has to hold the gun (I mean a pistol,
not a rifle) to the mouth and pull the trigger. As I said above to kill
yourself the Hitler way, one needs to take the gun in the mouth and direct it
at about an angle of 45 degrees upwards to the back of the mouth. Then one
pulls the trigger. Kaboom!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dYQjT4u3z8
The following photo is about a french woman who was so drugged out of
her mind for a few days, and she had a little pet dog, and it was just quite a
little dog, and after a day or two the dog was hungry. And the poor woman lay
on the floor, drugged out. So the poor hungry dog just started to chew its way
where it was softest, of the woman's flesh. And that was her mouth. So when the
woman finally woke up from her koma, she wanted to smoke a cigarette. Then she
realized that she had no mouth any more. The dog had eaten it. Fortunately for
our good night's sleep the good French doctors omitted the photo what she
looked like before the transplantation surgery.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/media/images/64388000/jpg/_64388483_624_dinoire_comp2.jpg
The very extensive Literature is now
under:
http://www.noologie.de/denk-bib.htm
http://www.noologie.de/bib.htm
http://www.noologie.de/bib_c.htm
This is the Noology Archive of Video
Collections. These are about 4 Terabytes.
http://www.noologie.de/video.txt
AG-Dissertation
Design und Zeit: Kultur im Spannungsfeld von Entropie, Transmission, und Gestaltung
http://elpub.bib.uni-wuppertal.de/edocs/dokumente/fb05/diss1999/goppold/
http://www.noologie.de/desn.htm
On Extra-Verbal Cultural Traditions
http://www.noologie.de/desn23.htm
A more or less complete collection
of all the noologie files that are quoted in the present text:
http://www.noologie.de/sophia.htm
http://www.noologie.de/sophia.pdf
http://www.noologie.de/quer.htm
http://www.noologie.de/quantum.htm
http://www.noologie.de/wagner1.htm
http://www.noologie.de/wagner1.pdf
http://www.noologie.de/spf-noo.pdf
http://www.noologie.de/noo.htm
http://www.noologie.de/noo2.htm
http://www.noologie.de/noo2.pdf
http://www.noologie.de/aby.htm
http://www.noologie.de/aby.pdf
http://www.noologie.de/desn.htm
http://www.noologie.de/desn24.htm
http://www.noologie.de/desn-diss.htm
http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm
http://www.noologie.de/morph.pdf
http://www.noologie.de/morph.htm
http://www.noologie.de/diamant.htm
http://www.noologie.de/zeno.htm
http://www.noologie.de/gbruno.htm
http://www.noologie.de/cunni.htm
http://www.noologie.de/plato.htm
http://www.noologie.de/Hesiodos.htm
http://www.noologie.de/erga-kai.htm
http://www.noologie.de/akasha.htm
http://www.noologie.de/symbol.htm
http://www.noologie.de/infra.htm
http://www.noologie.de/Hesiodos.htm
http://www.noologie.de/erga-kai.htm
http://www.noologie.de/akasha.htm
http://www.noologie.de/soter.htm
http://www.noologie.de/soter.pdf
http://www.noologie.de/desn24.htm
http://www.noologie.de/video.txt
www.noologie.de/gumilev/ebe0.htm
http://www.noologie.de/witze.htm
http://www.noologie.de/sophia.htm
http://www.noologie.de/morph.pdf
http://www.noologie.de/shinto.htm
http://www.noologie.de/quantum.htm
http://www.noologie.de/wagner1.htm
http://www.noologie.de/video.txt
Hamlet's Mill
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/hamlets_mill/hamletmill.htm
These are more Materials of the
Mentioned Themes.
http://www.noologie.de/diamant.htm#_Toc349324159
http://www.noologie.de/diamant.htm#_Toc349324172
http://www.noologie.de/plato.htm
http://www.noologie.de/neuro04.htm
http://www.noologie.de/neuro07.htm
http://www.noologie.de/morph.htm
Lev Gumilev
This is the Russian www where all the materials on and by Gumilev can be
found.
Gumilev, Lev: "Ethnogenesis and
the Biosphere", Progress, Moscow (1990).
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/ebe.htm
Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom: The Legend of the Kingdom of Prester
John
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/sik.htm
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/biography.htm
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/bibliography.htm
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/maps.htm#HPH
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/Article01.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov
Lev Gumilev (1912-1992). Scientific heritage of Dr. Lev N. Gumilev.
I have in the Noology Archive all
the videos of the Dance Traditions that I reference here. The Dance Traditions
are extra-verbal, and No Verbal Description can tell us about: That, Which
is Un-Describable in words and Only in Dance. There is a lot of Verbal
Material in the Derra-De-Moroda Dance Library at the University of Salzburg. I
have read extensively in this Library, but reading so many books, doesn't help
understand the dances. In this case, One Video can convey a Message,
that 10.000 words can never convey. This is the power of Modern Multi Media
Technology. All the videos referenced here, are also in the Noology Video
Archive.
Wolfgang Nastali: Ursein - Urlicht -
Urwort
Die Überlieferung der religiösen
"Urquelle" nach Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken Bö Yin Ra.
Most of the Literature
used is in these .htm files:
http://www.noologie.de/denk-bib.htm
http://www.noologie.de/bib.htm
http://www.noologie.de/bib_c.htm
Some new additions to the above are given here:
Irvin D. Yalom:
"When Nietzsche wept", "Love's Executioner", and "The
Gift of Therapy".
These are
probably the best books about the business of Psycho-Therapy there ever were.
It saves you the
time and the cost of going to Psychology / Psycho-Therapy school for so many
semesters.
Amd so much time
and money that you can save by this. Then you take that money and you go out
and have some
fun. I know some kinds of fun, for which one needs some money,
or otherwise
this will be no fun whatsoever.
Haarmann , H.: Language in Its Cultural Embedding, de
Gruyter, Berlin (1990)
Haarmann, H.: Universalgeschichte der Schrift, Campus, Frankfurt (1992a)
Haarmann, H.: Die Gegenwart der Magie, Campus, Frankfurt (1992b)
Haarmann, H.: Geschichtsschreibung der Semiotik, in: Posner, p. 668-709 (1997)
Catherine Nixey:
„Heiliger Zorn – Wie die frühen Christen die Antike zerstörten“.
A. d. Engl. v. Cornelius Hartz). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München. 397 S.
Nastali, Wolfgang: Ursein - Urlicht - Urwort
Die Überlieferung der religiösen "Urquelle" nach Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken Bö Yin Ra.
Brock, Bazon: (1986) Abk.: AGEU
Giordano Bruno: Ed. Samsonow, Reihe
Philosophie Jetzt, Diederichs (1995) Abk.: Bruno
Goppold, A.: "Design
und Zeit: Kultur im Spannungsfeld von Entropie, Transmission, und
Gestaltung". Dissertation, Univ. Wuppertal, bei Bazon Brock, 300 S.,
(1999d).[4]
Abk. D&Z,[5] Design und Zeit
Eco,
Umberto: "Kant und das Schnabeltier", Eco 2000.[6] Abk. Eco
Günther, Gotthard: "Grundzüge
einer neuen Theorie des Denkens in Hegels Logik", Meiner, Hamburg,
(1978b). abk. GRDZ
Heidegger:
"Was heisst Denken?"
abk. WHD.
"Sein und Zeit" (1977)
abk. S&Z.
Spengler, Oswald: Der Untergang des Abendlandes. C.H.Beck München (1980), abk. Spengler.
Sloterdijk, Peter:
Eurotaoismus, Ed. Suhrkamp (2018), orig. 1989, abk. "Eurotao"
Sphären Band I, Blasen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt (1998), abk. "Blasen".
Sphären Band II, Globen, Suhrkamp,
Frankfurt (1999), abk. "Globen".
Sphären Band III, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt
(2004), abk. "Schäume".
"Im Welt-Innenraum des
Kapitals" (2005), abk. WIKA
"Zorn und Zeit" (2006), abk. Z&Z.
"Gottes Eifer", Verlag der
Weltreligionen (2007), abk. "Eifer".
"Du musst Dein Leben ändern"
(2009), abk. DMDL
Kritik der zynischen Vernunft abk.
"ZynV"
Was geschah im 20. Jahrhundert,
Suhrkamp (2016), abk. "20JH".
https://petersloterdijk.net/werk/du-musst-dein-leben-aendern-ueber-anthropotechnik/
https://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/peter-sloterdijk/du-musst-dein-leben-aendern.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HACuGjLWElw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH7eGOxPggo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R29_3zPY9cc
Technische
Fussnote [1]
[1] Gumilev (1990: 215), Nach Vernadsky (1930) ist die Lithosphere zu einem wesentlichen Teil das Produkt der chemischen Umformungen, und mineralischen Absonderungen und Ausscheidungen der Lebewesen (z.B. Stromatolithen, Muschelschalen oder Korallengerüste). Geo, 4/96, p. 174-175 zur Theorie der Entstehung der Dolomiten in den Alpen bzw. des Dolomit-Gesteins durch Bakterien.
[2] Vernadsky (1997: 16, 31, 32)
[3] Gumilev (1987: 23): "All these form a
single system in which the key link is water."
Frei Otto: "Naturverständnis" (1985), p. 29: Hydraulik als essentielle mechanische Grundlage der Organismen.
[4]
Lotman (1990: 123, 125), Hoffmeyer (1997) ‑>:SEMIOSPHERE, p. 116
Was Spengler (1980: 712-720) in diesem Abschnitt "Das Wesen der Sprache" (712) nennt, läßt sich heute als eine intuitive Beschreibung der Semiosphäre bezeichnen. Z.B.: "Mit dem Menschen darf eine Untersuchung der Sprache sicherlich nicht beginnen." "... daß nicht einmal einzellige Wesen ohne alle Sinnesorgane sprachlos gedacht werden dürfen." (714) "Die Weltsprachen hoher Zivilisationen sind nichts als äußerst verfeinerte Möglichkeiten, welche sämtlich schon in der Tatsache des gewollten Eindrucks einzelliger Wesen aufeinander enthalten sind."
[5] Gumilev (1987: 360): In this perspective
mankind is regarded as a certain covering of the planet Earth or as part of the
biosphere... the anthroposphere... the biomass of all people together with the
products of their activity... domestic animals, cultivated plants... the
anthoposphere is ... a mosaic [consisting of] ... collections of persons.
[6] Gumilev (1990: 175), (1987)
[7] Vernadsky (1997: 155), Hofkirchner (1997)
[8] Gumilev (1990: 268)
[9] ‑>:BIBLIOSPHERE, p. 195
[10] The idea of a
global networked system of organisms has been taken up and elaborated by Howard
Bloom. It is available
on the WWW under:
->
http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/special/glob/default.html
[1] Technische Fussnote
The End of the End is the Beginning of
another End
Please Give
me Another End!
This
is The End of the Never Ending End.
Seite: 48
[.1]energetisch /thermodynamisch /chemisch
Seite: 48
[.2]Subsystem /, p.
Seite: 48
[.3]sphäre
Seite: 48
[.4] Spengler:
Ein Bezug zu Heideggers "Sorge" ist "Dieser Tatsache liegt ein
Urgefühl der Angst zugrunde." (715)
http://www.molbio.ku.dk/MolBioPages/abk/PersonalPages/Jesper/Semiosphere.html
file:///G|/0NA/BRIEFS/BIOS2/NA255.HTM
Seite: 48
[.5]Technosphäre
Seite: 117
[.6]Vernadsky's work
has remained largely unknown outside of Russian-speaking expert circles since
little was translated into EnglishMy information on Vernadsky's work derives
largely from conversations with Dr. Peter Krüger, Mineralogist, who was before
the breakdown of the GDR lecturer at Humboldt University, Berlin. He has
apparently studied all (or the main) works of Vernadsky and is possibly the
authority in Germany. He had presented his work at the FIS 96 conference in
Vienna (FIS96).
Seite: 117
[.7]In his notes dating from 1892
Vernadsky pointed to human intellectual activity as a continuation of the
cosmic conflict between life and inert matter:
the seeming laws of mental activity in people's lives has led many to
deny the influence of the personality on history, although, throughout history,
we can in fact see a constant struggle of conscious (i.e. not natural)
life-formations with the unconscious order of the dead laws of nature, and in
this effort of consciousness lies all the beauty of historical manifestations,
the originality of their position among the other natural processes.