3. Time, Memory, Knowledge and Information Technology
PREVIEW OF NOOLOGY VOL III
© Andreas Goppold
Prof. a.D., Dr. Phil., Dipl. Inform., MSc. Ing.
UCSB
The Noo-Series: Vol III
3.1. Preview of Vol III of the Noology - Series
Vol III of the Noology - Series is intended to have a more
technical bent than the other volumes which are more philosophically oriented.
In Vol III, the themes of:
Time, Memory, and
Knowledge
will be reiterated towards specific approaches of
Information
Technology
.
For the present purpose, the following is a short preview of
that work. Here actual approaches at constructing and implementing
Phono-Semantic Tension Fields or
Sem{e/aio}phonic Fields
are devised. Consider
this as an alpha-preview version of what might become if sufficient time,
expertise and
funding
may be applied to the project. This would necessarily be a large team effort
involving many person years of programming and experience.
3.2. What is Noology ?
The word
Noology derives from
the greek words "
noos"
or
"
nous"
and
"
logos"
.
212.212.
[212]
The meaning of both is quite similar. "Noos"
is a term
roughly covering the semantic field of the present colloquial words:
{"know/ing/ledge"
[213]
/ mind / understanding / intelligence / thinking}.
The word
"logos"
has a very similar semantic field, but
with a slight bent towards systematics and ordering. For this reason, all the
names of present-day sciences are constructed by using some field indicator like
"psycho-"
with the appendage
"-logy"
. The meaning of "logos"
is further defined by its relation to the latin term
"ratio"
which today re-appears in the word
"rational/ity"
.
[214]
The main aspect which distinguishes "logos"
from
"noos"
is this admixture of
"ratio"
which also means proportion, measure. But that
is more due to the medieval philosophical usage which was dominated by a certain
rendering of latin
terms,
[215]
and was not quite that distinct in the times of ancient Greece when those people
lived whom we identify as the founding fathers of philosophy: Thales,
Anaximandros, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Heraklitos, Parmenides, Sokrates, Platon,
and
Aristoteles.
[216]
That was between ca. 600 BC and 300 BC.
Noo-logy thus
outlines a systematic study and (attempt at) organization of everything dealing
with knowing and knowledge. Of course there are already quite a few
philosophical and scientific schools dealing with these matters, like
Epistemology, Knowledge Organization, Classification, Library Science, and Mind
Sciences. What is the use of this special term, and what can be offered with it?
I am certainly not proposing to build up an entirely new scientific and
philosophical enterprise from scratch. One main reason for using some special
vocabulary is simply a necessity of dictionary ordering or rather, dictionary
confusion. Everyone who has some experience with the history of philosophy
realizes that the terms used throughout the ages have seen a quite large
variation of meaning such that it is very difficult to really outline the
semantic field of any of them clearly. Of course this is partly due to the
matter itself: mind, intelligence, understanding, etc. are still quite elusive
subjects, even after 2500 years of philosophical examination. The other reason
why I use some special terms (more will soon come) is that they cannot easily be
mis-translated. When I read english translations of german philosophical texts,
and vice versa, I am often appalled by the wide gap between the renderings of
german terms like "gedächtnis", "
geist",
"
vernunft", etc. with some english counterparts like
"memory", "spirit", "
mind",
"
reason", intelligence, intellect, etc. This has in the
past given much difficulty for the understanding between german and anglo
schools of philosophy. Especially with works by Hegel, Schelling, Fichte (the
idealist school) and later, the works of Heidegger.
The other reason why I use this specific
term is to indicate a certain orientation on which I want to focus:
"Time, Memory, Knowledge and Information
Technology".
Part of this enterprise may be called
philosophical, but another important part deals with technical information
matters. I have a background in computer science and I have done quite a bit of
programming myself. I have also dealt with philosophy, cultural anthropology,
semiotics, and a few other fields like (paleo-)linguistics, neuro sciences, and
pre-history of civilization and culture. This is a specific background of
knowledge for which I have not found any useful reference in any of the
scientific and philosophical schools that I have encountered. So I am forced in
some way to "roll my own"
. Noology thus indicates that I
put a strong emphasis on the "living"
memory aspect of
knowledge, and its interrelation with time, and the phenomenological aspects of
time, ie. reminiscence and forgetting. In my opinion, these aspects have been
dealt with inadequately by the physicalistic oriented natural sciences. More on
this later.
3.3. LaKnowledge or LhWissen
... or: Time, Memory, Knowledge and Information
Technology
The terms "LaKnowledge"
or
"LhWissen"
are a shorthand for this specific orientation
on "Time, Memory, Knowledge and Information Technology". It is my impression
that there is some kind of a "missing link" between the hard sciences and
technologies dealing with Information Machinery, and the
"softball"
approaches of philosophy when it comes to
matters of knowledge, thinking, memory, time, and Information. This missing link
shows up most distinctly in the role of human memory. No scientific or other
endeavor would be possible without human memory, but this is hardly ever found
in any scientific text dealing with time and
information.
[217]
The
other gap which seems problematic for me is the frequent confusion of knowledge
and information. With this I will deal now:
3.3.1. Information, Real-Life Action, and
Time
Probably everyone dealing seriously with knowledge and
information matters will already know that the mathematical Shannon definition
of information and its many interesting applications in concurrent information
technology have little relevance as to matters of knowledge in real-life or
real-business application situations. As opposed to the mathematical information
concept, application of knowledge in real-life situations is something much
harder to define, since it is essentially a human-factors affair. Among the many
efforts to brindge that gap between "information"
and
"knowledge"
I believe that a valuable approach was
presented by Rainer Kuhlen who has coined the adage: "information is knowledge
in action" (Information ist Wissen in Aktion). Of course this is not a
definition in formal terms and therefore the mathematically oriented computer
science and computer information community could not make very much use of this.
But it introduces the notion of action. Action belongs to the domain of the
"real world" because "facts"
are created by
"actions"
. And every action has to take place in some
measure of time, and as we all know, time is always too short, especially when
some kind of action is required quickly. Therefore it is often so that (no
action = false action). This introduces at least one stringent formal
requirement for information technology, that the necessary information required
for any action has to be delivered quick or "asap"
:=
"as soon as possible", "at your fingertips", as so many information technology
advertisements claim.
3.3.2. The crucial factor of human
memory
The other crucial factor of LaKnowledge is
human
memory. Again, there is a lot of confusion around memory going around in the
information industry, because someone at some unfortunate moment decided to
reference the various computer storage technologies as
"memory"
like RAM, while it is nothing but "data
storage". Human memory must by no means be confused with computer data storage.
This misunderstanding has served to render much of concurrent information
technology pretty much mis-informing. In some respect, this is also due to a
congential deformation of the mathematical foundations of computer science
(Informatics in computerese). All the while computing is crucially dependent on
time factors, its mathematical foundation is pretty oblivious of time. This can
be demonstrated with a very simple, striking example. Let us take any
programming code line like this:
$variable = $variable +1 ;
This is actually mathematically false, since (A =/= A + 1) as
everyone has learned in school. By the identity axiom, A must at all times be
equal to A. The requirement "at all times"
can also mean
"without regard for time" and this can be called
the Platonic foundation of
mathematics
, and without it, mathematics would be
senseless. The proposition (A=A) is so to say the cornerstone of all mathematics
and with it, of all exact sciences. Of course, there is the
"t"
factor for time in mathematics. Properly written,
the above code line would have to be:
$variable[t+1] = $variable[t0] +1 ;
This indicates that a time step of computer processing lies in
between the right and the left hand side of the program statement. The first
example above is just a shorthand, but it (introduces / indicates) a kind of
obliviousness towards time factors in computer science since the engineers
always assume that some later generation of computers will overcome any
computational time barriers that may exist now.
3.3.3. Computers, Programming, Memory,
and Time
In a certain respect, computers are "time
machines"
, meaning that computer programs formulate
strictly and rigrorously highly complex sequences of time-step-actions. On
closer examination, one of the main sources of programming errors is that no
real good formal means exist to ensure that a mis-matching of time steps is
prevented. That is: It is in practical programming usage very hard to ensure
that a variable or more general, an area of data storage, has been properly
initialized or declared, before it is referenced. Conversely, this means that
one part of a program expects some data value, which has not yet been produced
(or something different than expected by the program was produced) by some
different part of the program. While the control structure of the program is a
formal mathematical affair that can be validated by a compiler, the sequencing
of computing actions is given by the interaction of this control structure and
the data. And there is no way of mathematically insuring that the right kinds of
data are available for any subroutine of the program to be processed correctly.
All approaches to ameliorate this fundamental problem, like Structured
Programming, Software Engineering (SWE), Object Oriented Programming (OOP), etc.
have not proven to give any better overall results. These methods introduce
their own specific drawbacks and complexities, mostly through overblowing the
size of the code, and the complexification of the syntactic rules which force
the programmer to take all kinds of detours for solving a computational
problem.
[218]
3.3.4. Mathematics as Platonic
Affair
But there is a deeper problem for the mathematics underlying
computer science. Mathematics is, by the history of ideas, a Platonic affair.
(Not to be confused with a platonic love affair). By Platonic I mean, that
Platon the ancient Greek philosopher actually didn't quite believe in time. He
was mainly concerned and strived for "a timeless universe of eternal ideas which
is where resides all the truth, the goodness, and the beauty" (Das Wahre, Gute
und das Schöne)
[219]
. Somehow this
fancyful timeless universe of otherwise quite impossible ideals made it through
the times into two real-life implementations: One is the Christian Heaven of God
and the Angels (as well as Jewish and Islamic variations thereof) and the other
is the Mathematical Realm of Absolute
Truth.
[220]
I am not concerned with theology
here.
[221]
But the other application poses a real problem. Mathematics is entirely
oblivious of human memory. Although mathematics is unquestionably a trade that
requires extremely stringent human memory training to be proficient in, the
human memory itself doesn't show up anywhere in its formulas and equations. I
pull the arguments together now: Computer science as Informatics as a
specialized application of mathematics has as yet no relevant place for human
memory. But human memory is one of the most crucial factors of programming. That
means: The discrepancy between (the very limited and fallible) human memory
capacity and the formal rigor and complexity of computer programs has caused
that present-day computing is a quite unreliable affair, as everyone can attest
to when using a MS Windows system (or any other computer program system for that
matter).
3.3.5. The Typology of Programming Errors
The typology of programming errors can be summed up in these
three main factors:
3.3.5.1. Storage Synchronization Errors
As mentioned above, a main cause of programming errors is due
to the fact that some programmer had forgotten that s/he had declared a variable
here different than s/he used it there, or that a pointer had no reference, or
something of the like. This can be called broadly "Storage synchronization
errors"
.
3.3.5.2. Logical Interdependency Errors
The next class of errors can be called "Logical
interdependency errors"
. This means that the program
logic is flawed because there are overlapping or incomplete subsections of the
boolean logic driving the code. In programming code, this often shows up as
monumental edifices of if .. elsif elsif ... constructions.
3.3.5.3. Documentation / Specification Errors
Another main class of errors is that the applied subroutine or
subprogram does something else (or has some other preconditions) than what the
documentation says or what the programmer interprets the documentation to mean.
This applies as well to program libraries that are supplied by a compiler
vendor, as to those routines which the programmer/s write/s themselve/s. In
large project teams dividing up the task of a project, this is a very common
problem. But it applies as well to one single person when one has written a
function library and one has forgotten later what the exact preconditions and
what the exact workings of a function are.
3.3.6. The Inequality Axiom of
LaKnowledge (A' =/= A)
In a short aphorism, the difference between Mathematics and
Information Science and the LaKnowledge of Noology is the "Inequality
Axiom"
. When human memory comes into play, then the
following statement is true:
(A[t+i] =/= A[t0]) or otherwise written as:
(A' =/= A)
This means: when one has observed something
"A"
once, and then observes it a second time (meaning
one recognizes it as "A"
), then a paradoxy arises:
Although A' is recognized as belonging to some class
"A"
, it is also identified as being "not
A"
because one remembers "A"
from the first encounter and it is unquestionably clear that A[t+i] is not the
same as "A[t0]"
. This is because there is the memory of
"A"
present, and one knows intuitively that the newly
presented A' is not the memory of "A[t0]"
.
An exception to this general rule is the so called "deja
vu"
encounter, when one thinks that something very
unusual must have happened, like entering a time tunnel: One believes to be
teleported to some other time in the past, when exactly the same sequence of
things occurred in the same setting with the same persons. A similar formulation
of this is: While the common sense tacitly assumes a (more or less) identity of
common objects through time (eg. my car, my house, my pen), it is quite startled
when some sequence of action happens exactly the same at time [t+i] as it did at
time [t0]. The exception to this are of course computers, mechanic automation,
and less strictly, ceremonies and rituals, which are expected to follow at least
a general rule, even while it is assumed that some of the environment and some
of the participating persons may change.
3.3.7. Bergson or Heraklitean
time
Time, in all philosophical systems adhering to the
mathematical, physical, or Newtonian / Einstein thought system, is just one
dimension in a coordinate system, which together with the spatial dimensions
make up the space / time framework and can be mapped on Cartesian coordinates.
When we bring human memory into the system, the concept of time changes
drastically: This concept can also be called Bergson or Heraklitean time, for
the philosophers who are probably best known for outlining its specific
differences to mathematical time. Friedrich Nietzsche also devoted some effort
to these paradoxa. In the objective Newtonian / Einstein conception of time,
human memory is simply disregarded, it is a phenomenon of the observer, or of
subjectivity.
In the real world, no thing "A"
at
time [t0] is ever equal to its appearance at time [ti], even if we see an object
"A"
, a chair, or a pen right now, and then one second
later. Physically, that is due to the second law of thermodynamics or the
entropy law. Phenomenally (in the mind) it is the difference between observing
something "A[t0]"
for the first time, and then observing
the A[ti] in superposition with the memory of "A[t0]"
.
This process is quite unconscious, but without the effect of memory, recognition
would not be possible. This is a paradox which can not be equated
away.
This was a slight degression and we return to the current aim:
How to arrive at some tools and techniques for LaKnowledge.
3.4. The Noologic Domain: Categorization and Category Systems.
The
noologic domain (or short:
the
domain) is the term used in my system of
Noology for everything which can or could be
known
. The noologic domain is also colloqually
known as "the
universe and the
mind", ie the domain consists of everything:
1) that we perceive in and about the (external) world, and
that
a) exists factually, or
b) could exist possibly, probably, and/or according to "the
laws of nature".
2) that we perceive as (processes in / apparitions of) our
minds,
that can or could appear somehow in our minds as feelings, thoughts, ideas,
phantasies, wishes, emotions, impulses,
etc.
The philosophical term
categorization is used here in a specific
meaning: Categorization is that mental framework by which we make our most
fundamental distinctions of the
noologic domain.
Systematically, categorization is the design of a
category
system
. In Noology, a category system is a construct
of ideas. This is also a question of philosophical debate, since the Platonic
schools in Mathematics and Natural Science assume that humans can only trace and
track a pre-existent ordering of the
Kosmos
[222]
.
The use of a category system is to specify any given item out
of the noologic domain exhaustively by its attributes, and ideally, it should be
set-theoretically clean. This means that all items of the domain categorized by
our system should form disjunct sets. (In common sense philosophy this is called
pigeon-holing). Something of the like is the rationale behind the information
technology of the relational DBMS which is the machinery behind the current SQL
query languages and most commercial Database systems. The difficulty of
correctly designing the logical structure of a relational DBMS, called
"normalizing"
has the same logical reason that makes a
categorization so difficult. Since Noology is not dealing with "ideal" worlds,
but with organizing the knowledge of the messy world of humans and society, its
category systems cannot give those ideal clean sets. Rather, it works with fuzzy
sets. (More on this later).
Categorization is the most crucial task for setting up a
knowledge system. If you have the wrong categorization then your knowledge
system will most likely be skewed, flawed, or outright useless. Needless to say,
a good category system is hard to come
by.
[223]
Many philosophers have come up with many different types of
category systems and have given their reasons for designing them. Up to now, no
philosopher had information machinery in mind when he designed his system. So
for the present purpose, the design criteria for the category system are
influenced by these factors:
1) the human mind and the human memory (or
mnemonomic
factors).
[224]
2) the various types and kinds of the universe of concepts
which we want to categorize
3) technical requirements and capabilities of the available
information machinery.
It is a philosophical problem whether there exist
"natural"
categories. My working assumption about this
is that any categories are imposed on the world by:
1) our nervous system (which is of course biological, and in
some sense also natural) and by
2) our thinking patterns and habits (which are partly
cultural, ie dependent on upbringing and education) but also subtly influenced
by what our nervous system takes for granted before we even start to
think.
We can think of categories as "flavored
containers"
somewhat like variable types of programming.
There we have integers, floating, strings, arrays, truth values, and the OOP
languages go so far as to construct a specific object type for any data
item.
3.5. The Big W's
... Where, When, Who, hoW, What, Why, Whatfor, Whatwith,
Whatagainst
The mnemonomic factor of Noology is expressed best by the
famous dictum "five plus minus two
chunks"
[225]
. Ie. a category system should
not have more than about 5 to 7 basic categories, while of course there can be
many more subcategories. Natural language gives a few basic patterns for the
Noologic instrumentarium since it has served the human mind and memory factors
for countless ages to prove that it works. The interesting factor there is that
so many and so different languages exist, and all seem to be workable somehow,
since the peoples that used them, survived up to our day.
The germanic languages give a
"natural"
instrumentarium for categorization with the
"W"
questions. Here are the German, English and Greek
equivalences:
1) Wo? - Where? - pou
2) Wann? - When? - póte
3) Wer? - Who? - tís
4) Wie? - hoW? - pae
5) Was? - What? - tí
6) Warum, für Welchen Zweck? - Whatfor?
7) mit Welchen Mitteln? - Whatwith?
8) gegen Welche Widerstände - Whatagainst?
9) Woher? - Where from? - póthen
10) Wohin? - Where to? - poi
...
etc.
This is already a categoric framework that can carry us quite
far. But for now, I don't want to delve too much into matters of content, but
will deal more with the logical structure of the framework, or with the empty
categories.
[226]
3.6. Phonetic categories
3.6.1. A phonetic category
framework.
I will first construct an empty framework for a database
retrieval system, which has a mnemonic factor. It is more or less given
"naturally"
by the capabilities of the human phonetic
instrumentarium. This has a slight slant towards indoeuropean and semitic
languages, but I want to construct a framework that can be represented as ASCII
strings and that is not possible with extra-european phonetics for which we
would need a Unicode representation.
Vowel Domain:
(1-8) a i ä e ü ö o u
The vowels "ä"
,
"ü"
and "ö"
are from
the german language, but they reflect the greek distinction of alpha and eta,
omicron and omega, even though the sound values may be
different.
[227]
Consonant Domain:
(1-22)
key name phonetic value / pronounciation
example
y aleph english: yes, german: ja
q qof arabic qof
k ka english: king
g ge german/ english: gold
r ro german: rad, rot
rch rch german: acht, nacht, wacht, krach
ch chi greek: chimaira, german: nicht, licht, gicht
h ha german/ english: hunger
j je english: join
sch sch german: schön, schluss
s sigma english: soon
z zeta german: zeit
l lambda english: lip
d delta english: do
t tau english: tea
th theta english: thought
f phi english: food
b beta english: brain
p pi english: pod
w we german: wein
n nu english: noon
m mu english: moon
Vowels and Consonants are arranged in a table:
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y
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a
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i
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ä
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By use of this construction method we have the benefit that we
can name anything that we want with a string of pronounceable words. This is
primarily a memory requirement (also called mnemotechnics), because it is harder
to remember something for which one has no pronounceable word. (There are
exceptions: Feelings and physical sensations, like smells, of course can be
remembered very well without words). The string formation follows the regular
expression rules and always starts with a consonant. By using y = aleph as first
consonant (which is also a vowel) we can allow words that would otherwise start
with a vowel. In hebrew (mytho-poetic) usage, the aleph is called the
mother/father of all sounds, because all pronounced sound formation must start
with a breath (ruach, pneuma). The use of "y"
as key
fits also well to the technical requirements. It must be an ASCII consonant that
is in the ordinary 7-bit character set available on every keyboard, and it must
not collide with any other of the characters in the set. Because y is also used
in indo-european languages as both vowel and consonant, this makes it a suitable
candidate.
By this scheme we can form all words of the indoeuropean
language system, which serves well for constructing a dictionary of all entities
of the noologic domain.
Another requirement for a category system is that it should be
frugal, ie that it should be easily memorable. A table of (8 * 22 ) = 176
elements is manageable, but something less is desirable. The decimal
multiplication table has 100 elements, and that is about the memory capacity
that one can assume for normal iq primary school students. To make these tables
available to the general public, the memory limits of a normal iq person were of
course one of the main stringent constraints. As can be observed in actual
language use, most indoeuropean languages don't use the full vowel or consonant
table, so that in effect the actual size of the table comes more close to 100
elements. Also some vowels and consonants are used more sparingly than others.
In most cases, the standard keyboard vowels: "a i e o u"
(five chunks) will be
sufficient.
[228]
3.6.2. Reference to ancient memory
technologies
This table was constructed with reference to the ancient
memory technologies of the distant past, before writing was invented. That means
those at least hundred thousand years during which some kind of human culture
was transmitted by memory alone. The last 3-5000 years of writing civilization
are very short compared with that time depth. All those times, mnemotechnics was
a prime cultural necessity, because people had to memorize all the things that
were worth remembering in their minds only. I have extensively researched on
these techniques and written about them in some of my
publications.
[229]
From these times, only
some rudiments have passed down to us, and probably with distorted meanings and
connotations. For example the well known vedic mantra
"aoum"
contains the primary vowels (the
in-between-vowels can be produced when one lets the sounds slide into each
other). Likewise for the christian mantra "amen"
. In
ancient greece, the word for hearing was "aio"
, and the
"aoide"
was the ancient memory bearer, the singer of the
ancient lore (like the Homeric epics and Hesiod's works).
"audae"
was the ancient greek word for the recital of
those hymns. In the germanic tradition, the god "odin"
was the bearer of the memory knowledge. In Africa, there exists a similar
tradition of "griots"
.
In order to honor this tradition, I have made the
"m"
the last sound of the consonants, by this way we can
construct the "aoum"
with a (nearly) diagonal
cross-section through the table.
The word "aio"
is of course contained
in the first line.
3.6.3. The order of
consonants
The order of consonants is given somewhat approximately how
they are produced in the vocal tract: First come the "deep
throat"
sounds, of which the semitic languages have a
richer variation than indo-european. Here the sound is produced by the voice box
only without use of the tongue. Then come the gutturals. The tongue moves from
the deeper posterior parts of the palate upwards and frontwards, until it
reaches the dentals, labials and nasals. The "m"
is a
half-closure, as the air stream switches from the mouth to the nose, and for
this reason it was used in the "aoum"
mantra, to let the
humming sound drift off into infinity. Of course the spiritual aspects of these
techniques are of no concern here, but the ordering function can profit from the
ancient principles.
3.6.4. The nesting of
categories
So far, this table gives us only an empty framework but this
is a powerful technique to generate unambiguous strings with the regexp
principle, which is very important for computer processing. As to the task of
categorization, we have a rich literature of different systems that try to
"pigeonhole" the world knowledge for bibliothecary uses into sets, by which the
library stacks and catalogs can be ordered in some manageable way. This task is
more commonly known as classification. Usually, these schemes give only very
rough distinctions, like the Dewey classification system, but here the governing
principle is more to provide a financially adequate system (ie cheap enough) for
ordering the library stacks and catalogs. It depends more often than not purely
on the interpretation of the library personnel into which class a book will be
more or less properly fitted. And more often than not, a book is classified in
this way never to be found again.
Since so many category and classification systems have been
devised, it is not really useful to add yet another version to this mountainous
material. It has long become obvious that the world of knowledge can not be
fitted into a table of any memorable dimension and to hope that these categories
will ensure that the material will be adequately positioned and then, by use of
these categories, that it can be retrieved. The problem of retrieval is that a
researcher often thinks that the item s/he is looking for, is located under
quite different categories, than where it is actually stored. This problem will
not concern us for the moment. Instead I will embark on something that today is
technically easier than what the philosophers of the past had to their avail:
The nesting of categories.
The nesting of categories is a quite ancient technique for
which Aristoteles gave a famous quote: "man is a featherless biped animal". When
we be analyse this with a class structure graph, we get the nesting, which is
implicit (hidden) in the quote of Aristoteles:
(class animals
(class birds, attr:feathers, attr:2ped),
(class no_birds, attr:no_feathers, (attr:0_ped | attr:4_ped |
attr:6_ped | ... | attr:1000_ped),
(class man, attr:no_feathers, attr:2_ped),
)
)
By this logic, man belongs to the super-class
"animals"
and to sub-class
"no_birds"
, by virtue of
attr:no_feathers, and man is unique there by
attr:2_ped.
Actually this classification makes sense only in the
improbable case that all the scientists were birds. For all the rest of us, it
is just nonsense.
A.D.
In all the sciences, the nesting of categories is well
developed and presents a formidable edifice, like the classification of
organisms. The principle is to identify a class by a certain set of attributes,
like:
(class1.1 attr1 attr2 attr3 )
and then identify a super-class by a subset of these
attributes like:
(class1 attr1 attr2 )
The rationale is that "attr1"
and
"attr2"
are of a more general kind, and
"attr3"
is a more specific kind.
Likewise one can define different subclasses with differing
sets of further attributes like:
(class1.2 attr1 attr2 attr3a )
(class1.3 attr1 attr2 attr3b )
(class1.1.1 attr1 attr2 attr3 attr4 )
(class1.2.1 attr1 attr2 attr3a attr4 )
and so forth.
In present information technology, this classification
technique is the principle of "object oriented
programming"
and is also called
"ontology"
in current www organizing systems.
Unfortunately, time and again, it appears necessary to reorder
these categorizations according to different principles. To implement these
changes in the textbooks and library systems is usually a quite monumental task.
But with present data processing technology, this has become much
easier.
So we can view the above table actually as a stack of tables
which can be searched with computers. Each table houses a number of strings
which are [primary, secondary, tertiary ... ] retrieval keys for a database
system. Permuting and reordering these strings is technically quite easy, and
with the capacity of computers also within the technical and practical
usability. After all, the time factor is crucial and one must search any number
of permutations and combinations to find a specific item when one is not sure
where it is exactly stored. In computer science, this topic appears for example
under the title "inverted database"
.
3.6.5. Fuzzy categories and fuzzy
logic
For 2300 years, from around 330 BC (the time of Aristoteles)
to around 1970 the scientific progress of humanity dealt mainly with disjunct
sets.
[230]
This is
the base of Aristotelian logic, and the Boolean logic which drives our
computers.
The principle is:
Any item X either belongs to some class
or set Q or it does not
. In formal terms, this is
expressed like this:
(X e Q) || (X (not)e Q)
e := means: being element of a set, or (not)e
[231]
|| := means: exclusive OR (technically: XOR)
The relational DBMS technology is an implementation to extend
this principle to practical data processing applications. Example:
An item X which is characterized by attributes (attr1, attr2,
attr3, attr4, ...) is either present in a warehouse Q or it is not.
Some time around 1970, Lotfi Zadeh invented a technique called
"Fuzzy Logics"
. Since that time, there has been a shift
in focus to things that cannot be categorized according to the rigid disjunct
set theory. For example:
"Day"
means: attr: sun is shining,
stars are not visible, it is bright.
"Night"
means: attr: sun is not
shining, stars are visible, it is dark.
"Morning"
and
"Evening"
are terms for describing specific phases of
the diurnal circle, where the attributes are neither completely dark nor really
bright, some stars are visible (like the proverbial Venus), etc. But it is not
possible to exactly specify with binary values the attributes which characterize
"Morning"
or "Evening"
. Their
attributes form a "fuzzy set"
.
3.6.6. Fuzzy
Phonetics
The same is the case with the phonetics that are the base of
the alphabet. While the alphabetical letters give the impression of outlining a
clearly distinct set, the sounds they represent are a quite fuzzy set. This is
more apparent with the vowels. In the english language, the
"a"
can stand for almost any vowel sound, depending on
context. It is also possible to slide through the above sequence of "a i
ä e ü ö o u" and produce all sorts of intermediate sounds
which can belong to either one or the other vowel class. Similarly with many
consonants: l and r can slide into each other (this is why the Chinese people
have such a difficulty to distinguish them since for them it is only one sound),
f and w, b and w, d and t, etc. Therefore such similar consonants are grouped by
linguistics in classes like nasals, labials, dentals, glottals, etc. In this
way, the different variations of phonetic values of characters of the alphabet
are more close to fuzzy sets than to the strict disjunct set theory. This is
another reason for the letter classification presented here. The issue is of
course how to adequately deal with the information technology of fuzzy
sets.
3.7. Semantic Fields / Sem{e/aio}phonic Networks
The following is an introduction for using a
Fuzzy
Phonetics model
, called
Sem{e/aio}phonic Networks
, or
Sem{e/aio}
phonic Tension Fields,
which go in the
German text under Semantische Spannungsfelder
, or
Semantische Rhizome
.
3.7.1. A Hypothetical Sem{e/aio}phonic
Network of Aoide Vocabulary
3.7.1.1. The Greek Root Sound fields
Linguistics has done much work to discover the drifting
patterns of sound and meaning fields of languages in the centuries and millennia
of their development. The hypothesis stated above was that the Aoidoi had a
greater role in the formation of these drifting patterns than is generally
assumed. It may even be suggested that the language used by the Aoidoi was not
the common vernacular of the man in the street. In the ancient Greek language of
Aoidoi, there is a considerable overlap between meaning and sound fields. The
meaning or semantic structures of greek words are visible when we look at their
root sound-relations. The related sound fields are:
1) gutturals: chi, gamma, xi, kappa, rho, aspirated
'h'
2) labials: pi, beta, phi, psi
3) dentals: tau, theta, delta, zeta, sigma
The phonetic formation patterns of greek root words can be
roughly compared to the semitic formation pattern: a common root frame of
consonants filled in with vowels. These vowels will combine in the most unusual
combinations. For example, -io and -oi, -ea and -ae will be interchanged, and
the flexion of verbs will display these surprising morphic patterns.
Historically, all modern European languages were structured
with extensive loans from Latin and Greek. In these modern languages, there is
very little concordance between sound and meaning. This is certainly due to the
influence of the Alphabet, which broke and hid the original phonetic/semantic
connections. Conjectures have been made that there was an original archaic
indo-aryan language from which Greek, Awesta Persian and vedic Sanskrit derive.
In this language, there would be an even better coupling of sound and semantics.
Knowing the extension and drift factors of sound fields enables the researcher
to find related words whose connections are obscured by alphabetically organized
dictionaries. The following structure has been made through partially recovering
those sound fields. Of course, listing them sequentially is not the best
solution, but for the present form of linear text presentation, it must suffice,
until we can get around actually constructing it in a suitable technical
system.
3.7.1.2. Alpha
The field of aio
Closely related to the root sound of
aoidos is the verb
aio
. It has a very
interesting saemeiphonic structure. It is built of vowels only. Since Greek did
not have a notation for "u"
, we have actually all the
vowels wrapped up in one word. This is highly significant. The closest
pan-indogermanic connection to this kind of sound structure is the Sanskrit
mantra
aoum
.
The next interesting aspect of
aio
is its
omnidimensional meaning: It simultaneously means: to
hear, to
perceive,
to
sense, to
see,
to
understand, to
know. Then it also has the meaning of the
aspiration, the
spirit. We will immediately see the connection to
Aleph
mentioned earlier. The significance of this field
cannot be grasped with our common categories of knowing. The
aoidos
was the knower of
a different kind of knowledge.
This is the archaic knowledge, the living,
breathing, aspirating pneuma of
logos
,
of which
Plato
talks in Phaidros
(276a)
.
aer
means air, wind, mist, fog.
aeros or
eros
has a connection
here.
aiora
aiera
means suspension,
hanging or floating freely in the air.
1.2.3. aidoia
aideomai schämen, scheuen
aidoi- / -os / a schamteile , schamglied (24) -> maedaea
aidae- / -s / -los privat, verborgen
aidnos unsichtbar
aithal- rauch (24)
aitho- feuer -> pyr
aithops glühend, funkelnd, flammend
The saemeiphonic Field of Aoidos
Let us picture the saemaiphonic field of the words connected
with the
aoidos. We noted that the Aoidos is not
only a poet and a bard but also a seer and prophet. Hesiod uses the word in
numerous locations in HESIOD 1978
. We can consider his
work as a path leading us back into the
aoide
thought structure. Just by outlining the saemeiphonic connections contained in
the word
aoidos are we able to set a starting
point for the uncovering of this archaic thought system. Since european thought
has been shaped so intimately, using the words of the european mother language,
greek will serve best to introduce us back into this territory that humanity has
lost 2500 years ago.
aoidae is the hymn or poetry, the myth.
audae is the sound, the voice, the call, the
message.
aeido
, (17)
aeisomai
, asomai
, means: to
sing, call, shout, or making any sound when struck (like metal
objects).
aoidos and eidos are sound-connected, leading into the field
of
idea.
alaeth
alaetheia (43): Wahrheit, Wahrhaftigkeit,
alaethaes : wahrhaftig sein
alaethinos
amph
amph- beidseitig
amphora -> pherei
ana
ana- : darauf, daran, auf, hinauf, über, hin durch,
entlang, währen (zeitlich), hindurch.
apo ...
apo : ab- weg- (nehmen)
apo-kalypto aufdecken, enthüllen,
entblößen
-> kalyptron, kalyptras , Parmenides proim.
apo-kalypsis
apo-kalypsis -> Enthüllung, Offenbarung
kalymma, kalypto
Bedeckung, decke hülle, verhüllung,
fruchthülse, schale einer muschel oder schnecke
kalyx: blumenkelch
kalyptaer Hülle, Decke, Deckel Schachtel
aporos unwegsam, unpassierbar, schwierig, unmöglich,
schlimm, heillos; Pers. hilflos, ratlos, unfähig, mittellos, arm
-> poros Durchgang, Überfahrt, Furt, Passage,
Straße, Weg, Hilfsmittel, Einkünfte, Erwerbung
Anankae
Zwang, Notwendigkeit, Naturgesetz, innerer Drang, Trieb,
Bestimmung, Schicksal
Demonstration, Beweis,
3.7.1.3. The Sem{e/aio}phonic circle of Chi-Gamma-Xi-Kappa-Rho-Chi
A short overlook of the Sem{e/aio}phonic
gyros, or
kyklos
(both denoting the circle) of
Chi-Gamma-Xi-Kappa-Rho is given in the following
chapter
. Its picture is given in
ILL:G-1
. The center is formed by the aspirated
"h"
which has no own character in Greek, for which
stands the semitic sign
Aleph
. This aspirated
sound of Aleph has special significance in cabbalistic interpretations as it is
the source and origin of everything else (SUARÈS 1976). The diagrams
following ILL:G-2
show the architectonic extensions of
this scheme, including the sound fields of beta, phi, psi, pi and delta, theta,
tau, zeta, and sigma. These architectonics can be graphically displayed and
navigated with the proper hypermedia tools.
The Chi Root - The Crossing
The Greek root sounds
gamma
,
chi
,
kappa
,
xi
,
rho, are closely related which does not show in the dictionary because
the word ordering sequence has spaced them far apart. All words containing these
sounds will be candidates for inspection. At the time when Greeks learned
writing, the letter
chi
was connected with
crossings
[232]
.
chiasmos
and
chiasma
denote cross patterns as
grammata,
graphae, or
glyphae
, like cross-marks
in clay or as wooden sticks laid cross-wise (like nordic
rune
s, German
Buchstaben
-
Buch-stäbchen
). The cross-mark also
denotes something recognized as false or suspicious.
It should therefore be noted with special attention that the
characteristic symbols of our european culture are the
cross
and the
christos
(the anointed
, the messias, the
crucified
). We just have to exchange the sound patterns
of
christos
with
chiastos
and are back at an original crossing
obscured by the christian mythological overlay. The
cross or
chiasmos
is the character or the sign of
the
chiastos, in its most technical sense.
Of course the important question to ask is: what has been
crossed with what and why was this original crossing obscured? We may
look for more material on this in the greek creation mythology of Hesiodos.
The Chi Extends in Semantic Space
chae
is, if we allow us the
freedom to interpret Hesiod, the first incarnation and the invisible,
unconscious, and subsurface (or chthonic)
name and
aspect of the
Mother Earth
(
gaia
being her surface aspect, see the
gamma
entries).
Persephone
is the other name of this aspect. In
the myth, she is the daughter of De meter
, going to
Hades
(chades
) every winter and
re-emerging every spring in the month of
gamelion.
chthon
is everything connected
to
chae. In Hesiod
's account of The Beginning, we
can see the drift from
chaos
to
chaea
to
ara-chae
to
chthon.
(HESIOD
1978
) This is mirrored by the meaning of
cave
, cavis
,
cueva
, all descendants of the original root sound,
also the female womb,
hysteron
-chysteron
.
chiazo
has a connotation in the
musical realm, using an unusual (suspicious) sound or harmony pattern. Here we
see the crossover or crossing of harmonies shine up as
chi
.
chilia
denotes a thousand-fold,
like a millennium or a thousand men. The
chiliastai
are the believers in the
chiliasmos
, the
millennium-long reign of
the
christos
/
chiastos
.
We have a correspondance in the roman numeral
X, the greek
chi,
which means not thousand but ten.
cheramos
is a more specific
word for caves, crevices, holes, hiding places.
cheir- means: hand. Its semantic field extends wide and
far through ancient Greek thought.
Heidegger gives an extensive discussion of the Greek / German
semantic rhizome connecting
Hand and
Hand-Werk: (WHD, 49-55).
Wir nannten das Denken das ausgezeichnete
Handwerk.
Das Denken leitet und trägt jede
Gebärde der Hand. Tragen heisst wörtlich:
gebärden.
Heidegger (WHD, 53)
chrae- requiring, in need of, dt.: brauchen, is also
connected to cheir, likewise:
chra
o,
chraesthai,
chraomai.
See Heidegger (WHD, 114-115, 118-119).
echein / schae- / chero- / chreo
- /
chres- / chresto- also belong to this semantic field.
The German words
Handel,
Händler, preserve the connection between
cheir- and chres-
.
chero
has the meaning of
robbed, deprived, widowed. Let us recall the more delicate parts of
Hesiod
's account of
The Beginning (HESIOD
1978
) when
chronos
or
kronos
(the time
god
or Saturn
) privated or
deprived the sky god
ouranos
of his private
parts
by means of a scythe or
harpae
(chero - charpae
-
sharp
-
scharf
)
, thereby
separating the
chaea
or
gaia
from her consort
ouranos
, and depriving her of her lover and
making her a widow. (See also: DECHEND 1993
, p.
120-124.) The privated private parts of ouranos fell into the sea, the
okeanos
, there becoming transformed into froth, and in
the course of events fathering the love goddess Aphrodite
(aphros=froth)
, born of the froth, rising from a sea
shell or
cheramis
. We can assume a sound
connection between
chero
and
cheronos
.
chloro- means everything green, i.e. the children of
mother earth, the plants.
choanon
is the hollow form into
which molten metal is poured. The sound pattern is the reversal of chao - choa.
See the connection to
texis
.
chnon
or
choinike
is the wheel hub. We find this in
Parmenides' text: (PARMENIDES69
, PARMENIDES74, B1,
6
). The wheel hub is
that which does not move while
everything around it moves. This has found ample metaphorical use in the Tao
Te King
and Buddhist
teaching
about the wheel of rebirths
. (See also:
LAOTSE)
. Further meanings are:
axis
, center of astronomical
rotations
, like the earth axis. (See also: DECHEND
1993
, p. 125-126.)
We would make the
conjecture that the proimion (opening
passage) of Parmenides' work which is framed by the words
"hippois"
at the beginning and
"hippous"
at the end has a special meaning.
(PARMENIDES74
, B1, 1,21
)
Parmenides was not just trying to add some dramaturgic spice to his lecture
about "to gar auto noein estin te kai einai" (
to know is to be). The
connection of whistling wheel hubs and red-hot axles may as well point into a
cosmological dimension that we are no more aware of:
axin d'en chnoiesin hiei syringos auten
aithomenos doiois gar epeigeto dinotoisin kyklois
amphoterothen...
PARMENIDES74, B1, 6-8
chro
- has all the connotations
of time
. The god
Chronos
or Kronos
reigns this semantic sub-field. A connection
with
gaia
or
chea
is through the word
ches
or
chizo
which denotes everything belonging to the
past. Appropriately,
chrono
- belongs to the
present moment and extends into the future.
chronologia
is the connection of logos, i.e.
measuring and time.
chry
- is connected to gold,
like gold the metal. Gold is the material preferably used by
Hephaistos
, the divine smith and craftsman
(tekton). Gold is in all cultures invariably connected to the divine, the
heavenly realm. We have a connection to the
golden
age
of which the ancients spoke so often. We might
call this age golden because it was under the reign of
ouranos
, before time had set in, i.e. before
Kronos
(the time god) had separated
chaea
and ouranos or heaven and earth. In that age, they
were still united and heaven reigned on earth. The sound pattern switching from
chry (gold) to
chro (time, Kronos) should amply indicate a
fundamental shift from the
better to the
words (actually we wanted
to write
worse, but as it came out,
words fits equally
well).
chre
- is connected to the
earthenly realm of money, commerce, the realm of the god
Hermes
(chermes
). In a further related meaning, we come to
title, name, and character.
chre- and
chry- converge (or better:
cross over) in the word
christos
.
chreo
- is connected to lack of
money, need, necessity.
chresme
-
chreste
- is the semantic field of oracles.
chresterion
is the sacrificed animal (again a
connection to
christos where we have a sacrificed
lamb
)
.
chrestes
is a money-lender.
Remark the opposition of
chrestes vs.
christos
as recounted in the New
Testament
.
chresto
- denotes the word field
of everything useful, obiedient, honest, sincere, benign, compassionate, meek.
For example as a good christian citizen.
chrima
and
chrisma
means the semantic field of: 1)
honorable: ointment, perfume, 2) practical: whitewashing, painting (as in house
painting, not picture), and 3) demeaning: smear, grease, cheat. From this we
fall into the word root of the Christian
Religion
:
christos
the anointed, painted,
greased, or cheated. Pick the meaning of your choice. There is a strange
correspondence between the cherished Christian mythology and the impression we
get from the sound field: Christianity always talked about and wished for the
recurrence of the Golden Age of humanity, the
aion chryseon, with the
Christos
the
pantokrator
,
as the reigning god of the age. What we see actually happening though, is
something falling a little short of this noble aim: Our age is the
age of the
chrestes
: money reigns the world.
Onoma-Semaiophonic links in other languages:
english: grease
french: gras (-se)
Before It All Began: The Chaos
Not without good reason does Hesiod
tell us that before The Beginning (the
ar-chae
), there was
something quite useless to try to even name. Therefore he called it the
chaos, the unfathomable cave, the gaping, the yawning, the emptiness, the
void, or in the words of Anaximandros: the
apeiron
. See also: Bolz
(1992), Bolz (1994), Diels (1954), Hesiodos (1978), Sturm (1996,
452-521).
Our Brave New Age of Chaos:
Also with good reason, our present age is the age of
re-emergence of the chaos
, as is amply evidenced by the
rise of Chaos Theory
, and the general chaos pervading
all the personal, political, ethical, and noetic domains of human life.
The sound pattern is:
Chi
,
Alpha
and
Omega
. This may lead us
in a deep abyss
indeed. Because chaos may not be a word
defined by a meaning (which is
nothing) but an
anagram
of the
chiasmos
or crossing of Alpha and Omega. And the
word
ar-chae can be parsed as the
ara-chae, that is what follows
the
chae.
ara
means everything following
in temporal or logical sequence
[233]
. The
drift from
chae
to
chao
is described below. We can further list the
words:
chasko
,
chasmos
,
charybdis
,
charon
,
the ferry- (pherein-) boat man to
hades
or
chades
. We see the intense mythological
connection with sound fields.
The meaning of "Alpha and
Omega"
is overlaid by christian
interpretations but below these, more material is hidden. We can see the
connection to the buddhist use of
shunyata
(Sturm
1996, 452-521). We may also be able to establish a connection to the symbolical
machines mentioned above: We have here a word that is not arbitrarily connected
to meaning, rather it is a kind of mental computer program to calculate and find
meaning in.
Chi and the archaic Greek Thought Universe
In the root sound chiasmos of chi, gamma, xi, rho,
and kappa we can find a rich semantic crossover. Following this line,
we can unravel the connectivity of the Greek thought universe in a concise
architectonic model. The works of the greek philosophers would make a different
sense if a semantic connectivity system like this were used. This can be made
commonly accessible with hypermedia structures. Philosophy would take an
entirely different turn if tools like that were commonly available.
The Semantic Field of Gamma
The semantic field of
gamma is reigned by the second
incarnation of the
Mother Earth
goddess
gaia
, ge, or
gea
(or
chaea
in
her subconscious
chthonic
or
Persephone
aspect). Gaia is also called
Demeter
for "
de
meter"
or
mater
,
mother
,
mère
,
Mutter
as her name derivations are in the
european languages.
ge-, geo- is everything connected to agriculture
and land.
gala
is the milk (the mother
gives), also the
galaxis
or milky way. (See also:
DECHEND 1993
)
gamos
is the semantic field of
marriage and sexual reproduction.
Hieros gamos
is
the annual celebration of the celestial marriage of the mother goddess gaia with
her seasonal consort.
gamelion was the greek month reserved for marriage,
between january and february. This was in Greece the time of pre-spring, i.e.
when Persephone, the chthonic aspect of gaia re-emerged to the
surface.
gaster is everything connected to nutrition, digestion,
like in gastronomy, that is the nutritive aspects of gaia.
gaulos is a vessel to contain the gala, the milk.
Connected to storage and transportation of goods. In one special meaning a
phoenician trade ship.
geito- means everything in the neighborhood.
gena- and gina- gono- is connected to family,
descendance, birth, birthday, life-span, generation, genealogy, genitals,
genetics. kine- and kinai- are the relations in the kappa
field.
gyno- is everything connected to women.
gera- and gero- means everything connected to
old age.
The ge-gantes or gigantes are the ab-orignal
(ar-chaic) sons of mother earth ge or chea.
glypho- connects us to the semantic field of
graphe and
gramma. The process is always the same: inscribing or
furrowing marks or patterns or forms or morphae into some mother substance or
hyle
or
xyle
or
ghyle
or
adamah
.
gloss- is everything connected to the tongue and the
spoken word.
gnos- and gnom- are related to nous and
noos, also to genos via genoma to gnoma, meaning
sign, symbol, mark. To know.
The field of
gnos-,
gnosis is reigned by
Sophia
the mother goddes of
knowing
.
graphe
or
gramma
derived from the process of inscribing or
furrowing. Grammar, science, learning, documentation.
grammata
are the written
characters of the Alphabeta. See the correspondence with
stoichea
. Plato talks in Phaidros of the grammata
as the shadow pictures of the living, animated logos.
griphe
is a riddle, related to
gryph-
and
kryph-
(krypto).
gorgo
is the horrible aspect of
ge
. In the hindu pantheon this is
Kali
.
gorgyre is a subterranean prison.
goni- is everything connected to angles. The connection
to gyne- will be visible to everyone who knows the old sumerian ideogram
for woman. (Unfortunately not available as character under Windows.)
The gamma semantic field is completed, with gyros, the
circle. We will see the connection of gyros and kyklos.
The Semantic Field of Xyle or Hyle
hyle (wood, building material, the famous term used by
Aristoteles in his philosopical meaning) is sound-related to xyle, which
also gives rise to a whole collection of words all dealing with wood and
woodworking. From there we come to our word stylus.
The connection goes on: xiphi- and xiphe-
denotes everything connected with steel as in sword, dagger, but also steel
tools. xois is a wood carving knife. xyale also denotes a carving
knife. Here is also the connection to the writing tool stylus.
The root xes- concerns words that deal with polishing,
roughing, scratching, engraving, and all sorts of surface finishing. Here we
come in close semantic proximity to the already known root of graphe- and
gramma.
xoanon means a woodwork wood carving, also an
idol.
xyro- is the root for everything connected with cutting
hair. Interestingly enough, the well known expression of the sword suspended
from a horse's hair finds its etymological roots here: "
epi xyrou histatai
akmes". "
It all depends on one hair",
"
by hair's breadth". Everyone who already has
experienced a
close shave will find some meaning there.
The Semantic Field of Kappa
This semantic field of kappa is extremely varied and it
is not really possible to adequately display the twisted webwork of its many
intertwined semantic threads in any other than graphic display. There are many
connections with the chi and gamma sound fields as is to be
expected.
There is a whole field of roots that spell different but have
similar meanings of hollowness, roundness, and emptiness. This gives a strong
semantic connection to the chaos and chthon sound field.
kaetos derives from chaetos-chthon and means a large monster in
the sea, like Leviathan.
keno- keneon ( -> chnon, ->
choanon), are roots connected with emptiness. kados, kaddichos
(hollow measure), kaiadas (gaping hole in the earth).
kong{e/os} a hollowness and roundness, hollow shield,
sea shell, like cheramis used for ladling water. Modern language
derivations are conch and concha. koilos is likewise a
hollowness, a cave, or a bay, likewise kotyle.
korone and koronis are connected to
crown, ring, corona, German: Kranz.
kosmos means not only the cosmos, but also order,
arrangement, decoration, embellishment, laud(atio).
The sound field of ky- contains a whole collection of
relations. The reigning root might be kyklos, cycle or circle. It has
many connotations, like wheel, cyclic movement, yearly seasons, the celestial
vault or globe. kyllos is everything bent, round. kylindros is the
cylinder. kyle is a cup, bowl, beaker. In German, there are the words
Kuhle and Kelle bearing a sound relation.
kytos (<-> kotys), kyttaros,
kyphella have a strong connection to keno, hollowness.
The root kym- is equally rich. Here we find many words
related to waves. kymbaton is a wave, kymaino means making
waves. kymbe, kymbalon is a cymbal, i.e. a (hollow) metal bowl
that makes sound waves. kymbos is equally a hollowness or a bowl.
Hollowness and roundness semantically connect the kyklos to the
kymbo-, i.e. waveness.
kyo- means pregnant, mentioned in Hesiod's theogony
(HESIOD 1978
). Here we connect back to
chaia and
gaia.
kytokia is birth.
koima means sleep, sleeping together, (in the Indian
language: kama), karos (deep sleep, ~ of death) and koma
(sleep of death).
koi- (switched io-sound from kyo) means
everything connected to the nuptial bed. koitos is the root of
koitus, not, as is falsely assumed, from the Latin
co-ire.
kinai means lust, i.e. the agitated movements at
the occasion of the koitos, which leads us into the next field of
kine.
kine- is connected to everything moving. In
Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophy, the kinesis is the distinction of
life. In Timaios 52d to 53b, Plato talks about the kinetic device to mix
and separate everything in the creation of the kosmos.
kinion is a spindle, leading to kloste (thread),
klosma (web, thread), and finally klotho, the goddess of fate who
spins the thread of fate.
kadmos is the sound connection to
adam and
kedem
.
3.7.1.4. Lambda
laethae -> thanatos -> lysis
lysimelaes gliederlösend (hesiod, 121),
glied-erlösend
3.7.1.5. My
mae
mae : verneinend -> meontik
maedo- Beschluß, Ersinnen,
maedos Sorge, Klugheit, Verschlagenheit
männliche Geschlechtsteile -> maedea
maelon Apfel, Birne, Baumfrucht, Quitte
mealouchos / maelon echoo : Brusthalter
maelo- schafe... (82)
maen- / maeni- / -os : monat-
maenithmos : zorn, groll (maeni thymos ? ) (83)
maenis (homer) / maenit / maenio zorn, groll
meta / metr
meta zwischen, unter, mit, durch, vermittels
meta-noia (Matth. 4, 17) Zollitsch, Verhaltensbiologische
Essays, p. 69, 70
meta-noeite:denkt um,
seine Meinung ändern, (spätere) Einsicht,
Reue
nach massgabe , unter uebereinstimmung mit den
gesetzen
der Zeit nach , hinterher
(II, 68)
metro (II, 78) messen, zaehlen, schaetzen, beurtailen ->
timao
maetis , maetiaoo
maestor (II, 83) -> ratgeber
maetietaes -> maetiomai
maetis -> klugheit, einsicht, geschicklichkeit, rat,
vorsicht, überlegung
maeryomai -> Wolle zupfen, auflockern, einweben
maetis: sinn
maetiaoo im Sinne haben, beratschlagen
maetiomai ersinnen erdenken, bewerkstelligen, anstiften
maetis Klugheit, Einsicht, Ratschlag, Vorsicht,
Überlegung
maetaer
maetaer (83) mutter
maeterios mütterlich
maetra (84) mutter, gebärmutter
maetr- ... maetro-
maechan
maechanaoo - künstlich, ersinnen bereiten, aussinnen,
heimlich, tückisch (84)
maechanae Instrument, Maschine, Hilfsmittel, Mittel,
Erfindung, Kunst, Kunstgriff, List, Kniff
maechan / -ikos / -oeis
maechos 85 Hilfsmittel (maechanae)
-> technae
mimnaeskoo / mnaesoo 87 erinnern mahnen gedenken, nicht
vergessen
mis- hassend, gegen etw. sein
Melos
Melos: Melody, Song, Harmony,
Member
{G}lied, Lied, Singweise, Melodie, Harmonie
melpo, melpomai / melpsomai, singen
melphd- melphdaema Gesang
maedaea: Geschlechts-Glied
mnao
90-91
mnaomai / mnoomai, mimneskomai: to remember, remind,
reminiscence, sich erinnern, ge-denken
mnaema: Memorial, Ankenken, Denkmal Denkstein,
mnaemae: Memory, Remembrance, Gedächtnis, Erinnerung,
Erwähnung
mnaemo- =
mnaemosynae: Mother of the Muses, die Gedächtnis
(Heidegger, WHD)
mnaemon
monopol-: monopoly, alleinhandel 96
mousa: deity of song and music, Göttin des Gesangs, der
Musik 99
endo- / eso- morphology and exomorphology
3.7.1.6. O
onoma- : name, denomination,
appellation, designation,word, expression.
onta,
einai - being things.
With the "to ti aen einai" the thingness of things starts to
appear in Aristoteles. Plato uses this term sparingly (385b) and he does not
seem to differentiate very
3.7.1.7. Pi
Para-men-ithys (aka Parmenides)
can be read as: "straight beyond the mind".
pragma - things done, business,
negotiation.
This term is used by Kratylos. There is very slight variance
to
chraema, but it might be significant. The
saemei-phonic field of pragma is a little more oriented towards process,
dealings, and doings. The word
praxis belongs to this field.
Plato uses this term in the majority of places that are
translated as "thing"
.
Verschlagenheit -> Odysseus -> oudeis,
poly-tropos
verschlagen werden apoplanastei
plangchthae od. 1,2
Peira bedeutet Versuch,
gemachte Probe, Erfahrung (haben), aus Erfahrung wissen / belehrt sein.
peira,
peirazo (Verführer), Zollitsch,
Verhaltensbiologische Essays, p. 69, 70
peirastaes: Versucher,
Verführer -> erastaes: Liebhaber
peirastikos: zum Versuchen /
Probieren gehörig. -> en-peiria / em-peiria
peirar /
peiras:
peiratos.
Ende, Grenze , der höchste Grad, das Ziel, Vollendung
pera: Ort - darüber
hinaus, Zeit: länger
peras: das Ende, das
äußerste, Vollendung, Vollbringung, Vollziehung
perasis: Durchgehen,
Darübergehen, Übersetzen
perat
osis
:
Begrenzung, Endigung
peri- : rings herum
(Lieblingstitel bei Aristoteles)
poiae- and pathe-
The etymological connotations of the word
information and its uses indicate the
active-principle-centric thought system of western cultures. (As exemplified by
the Genesis creation mythology
[234]
, as well
as greek accounts: Plato, Timaios). These mythologies are always given from the
vantage point of an active agent doing some kind of in-formation with some
essentially passive matrix substance
[235]
.
This cultural complex is common to all Christian, Judaic, and Islamic, as well
as many other widespread thought systems, but it is not the only one possible.
The polarization between
active and
passive principles is best exemplified by its
greek roots
[236]
:
poiae- and
pathe-.
The rhizome
poie- indicates
anything relating to
actively doing, creating, bringing
forth
,
and extends into the latin rhizome
pote- with all
its european-language descendants:
potestas,
potency,
potential,
despotic etc., as well as the rhizome
pater,
father,
Vater,
patre,
patria, papa
,
Pope,
pitar
(Sanskr.). Maturana makes direct use of this concept with his principle of
autopoiaesis.
poiaesis: machen, hervorbringen, Erzeugen, Schaffen, Bilden,
Bauen, Verfertigen (Handwerker, Künstler), Dichten, Dichtkunst, Poesie,
Darstellung
poiaetaes: Verfertiger, Erfinder, Schöpfer, Gesetzgeber,
Dichter, Schöpfer eines geistigen Werkes
The range and classes of the impressions and expressions of the human body
The
poie- and
pathe- polarity and complementarity has found a
continuation in all major european languages through the latin roots of the
Impression and
Expression polarity. The range of
impressions of the human being is roughly
coincident with the senses, with some additional elements. The word
im-pression is related to
in-formation
[237]
.
In semiotic terminology, for anything to be appreciated as a sign, it must be
noticed, distinguished, experienced, and by any way enter into consciousness. In
information technogy, this is called the
input
channel
. Examples are: auditive, visual, kinesthetic
and tactile, smell, taste.
Vice versa, matching the spectrum of
impressions, are the
expressions. If something is to serve as a
cultural transmission instrument, a means of CMS, the human body must be able to
produce it, and
modulate it, consistently, repeatably, and the
results must be consistent with the intentions. This will cover the range of
expressions. In information technogy, this is
called the
output channel. Between the
impressions and expressions is a complementary relationship, but it is entirely
not symmetrical. To the contrary, its greatest cultural significance is its
asymmetry.
por
porphyr- purpur
pous: Foot, Fuss, Anthropos,
Oedipos (swollen Foot)
pragma: the deed, das Getane,
die Tat, Unternehmung, Verhandlung, Unterhandlung, Geschäfte
3.7.1.8. ph
phero /
phora tragen forttragen,
fortreißen
tragen, leiten, lenken, regieren
am-phora: amphi-phora, Gefäss mit zwei (beidseitigen:
amphi-) Henkeln
pheromenos: eilends, rasch,
botschaft überbringen
phren- Verstand, Geist, (Herz
?)
phos/phaos
The saemeiphonic field of
phos
,
phaos
,
photo-
,
phoos
is reigned by
phoibos
the god of light:
Apoll
.
photisma
.
phoibos: splendor, shining, sparkling, brilliant,
luminous.
This field extends to everything seen, visualized, also
luminance, and illumination:
phoibasma,
phoibetes: prophet, oracle, mantics.
phoinos
: purple,
phoenician, dark red (glowing).
A further connection exists to
aithomenos.
phosphoros
:
luck, fortune, rescue.
phos and
phone
are strongly
related.
phone is connected to everything making
sounds, the realm of voice, speaking, talking. We see the connection to
logos
.
The next interesting observation is the polarity of
Phaos and
Chaos.
This becomes relevant when we look at the song of the
aoidos of
chaea
, the
chaes-aoidos
, or as he is
better known:
Hesiodos
.
Here we find the
chaos or
. As we
will recall, it is an often used imagery of creation myths, also the one in the
bible, to describe a
transition of chaos to
phaos
. (Let there be light). This corresponds to the
phonemic switch from guttural, deep down in the throat to labial, which is at
the outer ends of the lips. This phonetic change could be quite
significant.
phys-
Physis, or the
Natura, the
Birth Giving,
the
womb
that gives birth to all existing things of nature,
and this is called
physis
in Greek, from
phyo,
phyein
, for begetting,
procreating, creating, growing. Then there is the field of
phytowhich covers everything relating to plants, then
phyllo which covers all the green and growing,
sap-containing leaves, and the grass. Because the universal
matrix gives birth to all the existing things, we
can call it the
hypo-physis. She is the one that
is
preceding, and
underlying the
physis.
Let us no follow the word-sounds of the famous Aristotelian
term of
hyle (substance), which is originally
wood, (and also a wide range of related terms:
forest, trees, building material, matter). We could tentatively contrast the
term
hylae, the dead, dry wood, and the
phylae, the green sprouting, sap-containing
living plant, and perhaps gain some insight into the contrasting views of those
approaches that treat the world as living being, and those which treat matter
(mater) only as dead thing.
3.7.1.9. The Semantic Field of Rho
This field is reigned by the third incarnation of
chaia,
gaia, and now
rhea (HESIOD
1978
, 135). She is the mother of Zeus, the ruler of the
fourth generation of gods. The drama of Ouranos and Kronos was repeated by Zeus
(HESIOD, 453-507).
rho is also a guttural, albeit not usually recognized
as such. Its character shows in the arabic and hebrew language where ch
and chr are the same sound.
Here we find
rhema
, the river,
the stream.
rheo / rhoo-
: everything in
dissolution by flowing away and apart.
panta
rhei
, as Heraklit
said.
rhoae
, rhoos
,
rhytos
is again everything flowing.
rhoth
- is connected to the
sound of moving water, waves, waterfalls etc.
(
Rauschen,
Brausen) as opposed to
rhythmos
, this type of
sound has an equal frequency distribution (fourier spectrum) of
overtone-sounds. In technical terms, this is
today called
white noise.
rhaegm- breaking waves
rhema
,
rhaesis
and
rhaeto
is
everything connected to
rhetorics
.
rhaps- pertains to the rhymes and poems.
rhombos
is connected to
kymbo and
kyklos, latin:
rot-, the
modern derivation
rotation.
rhyax
,
rhyas
is the upwelling and breaking forth of
forceful currents and undercurrents.
rhythmos
is again connected to
rhombos,
kymbo and
kyklos. It is
the rhythmic recurrence in all cyclical processes, also the (well-formed)
proportion of
Pythagoras
fame, leading us into
harmonia.
3.7.1.10. Sigma
sapro / saeper faul (saepsis)
seautou / s'auton deiner selbst (408)
selas licht glanz
semn- / o / a / oma wuerde, verehrung
semnaion = geheiligter ort, tempel, tempel der
Erinnyen
semno- göttern gleich, ehrwürdig
semelos = kochlias (II,410) -> (I,591) Schnecke mit
gewundener schale / alles schneckenförmig gewundene / schraube /
wendeltreppe
kochlos = auch musikinstrumente
Saema
saem- (411-412)
saema zeichen zeichen, merkmal, was sichtbar ist,
schriftzeichen, malzeichen, anzeichen, vorzeichen, siegel, grenzzeichen
meilenstein
= saemeion
saemaleos / saemansis / saema... / saemaia / saemasia
saemaino merklich machen, bezeichnen, ein signal geben,
besiegeln, versiegeln
saemeioo / -ein / oo , zeichen geben
saemantaer zeichengeber, heerführer
saemeiootikos = zum bezeichnen, bemerken
-> saemeio-phonae A.G.
men -> mne
Semele
Semele, Graves 27,11 p. 110, Semele was the other name for
Core, or Persephone, Isis
mother of Dionysios (Osiris) 134.4
Sperma
sperma ... Same(n), seed, sperm
Stoich{a/e}o...
In most translations of Plato's works,
stoicheia
and
grammata
are treated as
synonyms: meaning letters of the alphabet. But for Plato, there is a quite
marked distinction: when he talks about
stoichea,
he talks about spoken sounds, or
phonemes
, and when he
says
grammata, he means the
writtenletter. The translation of Kratylos has to be
treated with special care to yield any useful information of what Plato was
talking about. The saemei-phonic field of stoichea is:
stichao reih und glied
stichinos / sticho verse (441)
stoiche (442)
stoicheoma: element, fundamental building block, first
principle
stoicheoo: to teach the basics
stoicheomata:
the 12 signs of the zodiac
stoicheon:
letter of the alphabet
stoichos:
the rod or stylus of a sundial that casts
the shadow by which the time is
indicated on the dial
stoicheo: in Reihe stehen
It is easy to see that the term is heavy with connotations
from ancient cosmology. This subject has been treated in another of Plato's
dialogues: Timaios
. The first meaning of
stoicheoma
denotes the
idea of a first principle of the
cosmos
. The
zodiacal
signs can be clarified in connection with the
sundial
. The sundial was introduced in Greece by
Anaximandros
.
Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon of Classical Greek
stoicheion, to:
I. in a form of sun-dial, the shadow of the gnomon, the length
of which in feet indicated the time of day, hotan êi dekapoun to s. when
the shadow is ten feet long...
II. element,
1. a simple sound of speech, as the first component of the
syllable, Plat. Crat. 424d; to rhô to s. IBID=au=Plat. Crat. 426d;
grammatôn s. kai sullabas IDEM=Plat. Theaet. 202e; s. esti
phônê adiairetos Aristot. Poet. 1456b22; phônês s. kai
archai dokousin einai taut' ex hôn sunkeintai hai phônai
prôtôn IDEM=Aristot. Met. 998a23, cf.Gal.15.6:--stoicheia therefore,
strictly, were different from letters (grammata), ... s. letters which are
pronounced, A.D.Adv.165.17; grammata and s. are expressly identified by
D.T.630.32; the s. and its name are confused by A.D. Synt.29.1, but distd. by
Hdn.Gr.ap.Choerob.in Theod.1.340, Sch.D.T. l.c.:--kata stoicheion in the order
of the letters, alphabetically, AP11.15 (Ammian.); dub.sens.in Plu.2.422e.
2. in Physics, stoicheia were the components into which matter
is ultimately divisible, elements, reduced to four by Empedocles, who called
them rhizômata, the word stoicheia being first used (acc. to
Eudem.ap.Simp.in Ph.7.13) by Pl...
3. the elements of proof, e.g. in general reasoning the
prôtoi sullogismoi, Aristot. Met. 1014b1; in Geometry, the propositions
whose proof is involved in the proof of other propositions, IBID=au=Aristot.
Met. 998a26, au=Aristot. Met. 1014a36; title of geometrical works by Hippocrates
of Chios, Leon, Theudios, and Euclid, Procl. in Euc.pp.66,67,68F.: hence applied
to whatever is one, small, and capable of many uses, Aristot. Met. 1014b3; to
whatever is most universal, e.g. the unit and the point, IBID=au=Aristot. Met.
1014b6=lr; the line and the circle...
4. generally, elementary or fundamental principle, arxamenoi
apo tôn s. Xen. Mem. 2.1.1; s. chrêstês politeias Isoc. 2.16;
to pollakis eirêmenon megiston s. Aristot. Pol. 1309b16; s. tês
holês technês Nicol.Com.1.30, cf. Epicur. Ep.1p.10U., Ep.3p.59U.,
Phld.Rh.1.127S., Gal.6.306.
5. astrôn stoicheia the stars, Man.4.624; s. kausoumena
luthêsetai 2 Ep.Pet.3.10, cf. au=2 Ep.Pet. 3.12=lr; esp. planets,
stoicheiôi Dios PLond.1.130.60 (i/ii A.D.)
6. s. = arithmos, as etym. of Stoichadeus,
Sch.D.T.au=PMag.Par. p.192 H.
stichao: rank and file
stichinos / sticho: verse
stoicheoma: element, fundamental building block, first
principle
stoicheoo: to teach the basics
stoicheomata: the 12 signs of the zodiac
stoichos: the rod or stylus of a sundial that casts the shadow
by which the time is indicated on the dial
stoicheo: to stand in rank and file
Plato and the stoicheia
In most translations of Plato's works,
stoicheia
and
grammata
are treated as synonyms: meaning letters
of the alphabet. But for Plato, there is a quite marked distinction: when he
talks about
stoichea, he talks about spoken
sounds
, and when he says
grammata, he means the
written letter.
In Timaios
, more meanings are given:
The first meaning of
stoicheoma
denotes the idea
of a first principle of the
cosmos
. The
zodiacal
signs can be clarified in connection with the
sundial
. The sundial was introduced in Greece by
Anaximander
. (Gadamer)
Plato talks in Phaidros
(276a) of the
grammata as the shadow pictures of the living,
animated logos
. He uses a very subtle word-play here,
the opposition of
eidotos
(true knowledge) and
eidolon
(shadow image):
Ton tou eidotos
logon legeis, zonta kai enpsychon, ou ho gegrammenos eidolon an ti legoito
dikaios
'You mean the living, ensouled speech, the
logos, of the truly knowledgeable, of which the written version can only be
looked at as shadow image?'
stom- / stro- / sym-
Canonical: {/s}{/t/tr}{e/o}{m/n/ph}
stom / a ... mund, maul, schlund
streph
o... drehen,
winden (445) ->
trepho /
tropae
-> strophae, Drehen, Wenden, Kreisen
kata-strophae Um- und
Rückkehr , Wendepunkt im Drama, Polyb. Luc. (Rost 535)
kata-streph
o umkehren
umdrehen, umwenden
strophalinx wirbel,
krümmung (447)
strophinx, zapfen,
türangel, -> gomphois
s.chaema haltung gestalt form
figur (496)
sya- sye-
wilde schweine, lat: sus
sybotes schweinehirt
sybaris: schwelgen
Syn-
mit samt, nebst, auf jemandes Seite, Kameraden,
Anhänger
mit, nach, gemäß
Verbindung, Gemeinschaft, Teilnahme
zusammen
3.7.1.11. Thaeta
th ist häufig wie s gebraucht (432)
thaema . . theama theaeme
thaeaeto anschauen, staunen (445)
thao säugen, melken
theaomai anschauen, sehen, wahrnehmen
thaumazo bewundern
thanatos tod
a-thanatos unsterblich
3.7.1.12. Tau
techne
When we look at the saemei-phonic field of
techne, we find many similar-sounding words that
bear some connection of meaning, but are spelled slightly differently.
1 kunst, gewerbe, handwerk wissenschaft
2 kunstfertigkeit, geschick
3 Kunstgriff, list betrug
4 sitte, art, mittel etwas zu erreichen
5 kunstwerk
-> maechanae
tetykein: to create, form,
manufacture, smithing, carpentering: to create, form, manufacture, smithing,
carpentering
the root verb form of the field
techne: art, craft, skill,
trick, fraud
tekton: carpenter, constructor,
smith, creator, procreator->tekno
tektaino: woodworking,
carpentering, metal working-> texis
tektonike: the art of
woodworking (giving the hyle a morphe)
teuchos: tool, gear, ship gear,
vessel, armor, weapon
tykos: stone hammer ->
tykisma -> typis -> teich
tykisma: stone building, stone
wall
teich-: everything pertaining
to fortification walls
tekmar: to set a goal, to judge
from signs, conclude, to reckon, : to set a goal, to judge from signs, conclude,
to reckon,
to calculate
tekno: to procreate
children
tokos teke tekno -> gebären / zeugen, ->
tiktein
texis: melting, dissolve->
etaxen, ->taxis
to change appearance through dissolution
taxis: order, battle
order
tagma: the thing ordered,
positioned
taktikos: pertaining to the
battle order, tactical
typo-: everything created
through impression, embossing, printing, engraving
tiktein: zeugen ->
gennan
theo-gonia
chaes - aoid aio: chaes-{aoidos/odos} -> Hesiodos
ara: ch - ae : ch-aos ch - aea -> nyktos ->
gaea
ouranos rhea
Tri-gono-m{a/ae}trie
Das griechische Rhizom geno- gono- gyno- hat mit Winkeln
(Schamdreieck), und allem weiblichen zu tun. Trigonometrie heißt also
ursprünglich: Die Urmutter (meter) mit dem Schamdreieck (gono). Also eine
ursprüngliche matriarchale Dreifaltigkeit. Euklid würde sich im Grabe
umdrehen! Ob sich eine Verbindung von (geno- gono- gyno-) zu
genius ziehen läßt, weiß ich
nicht, ich müßte mal wieder im indogermanischen Wörterbuch
nachblättern, dazu komme ich aber nur in München am Institut für
Indogermanistik.
Tropae
Tropae (trepo): das Umwenden, das Umkehren, Schlagen,
Forttreiben der Feinde
Umkehr, Rückkehr, Wendung, Veränderung
haeliou tropai: Die Sonnenwende(n), cheimerinai:
Winter/Sommersonnenwende
tropikos: der Sonnenwende zugehörig
tropologeo: tropisch, figürlich
sprechen
tropos: Wendung, Richtung,
Art & Weise, Einrichtung, Verfassung, Manier, Sitte,
Gebrauch, Mode, Charakter, Wesen
-> en-tropae: (en-tropomai) das in sich gehen, Scham,
Achtung, Rücksicht (328)
-> en-tropia: Windungen oder Ränke
-> strophae
3.7.1.13. W
weben, webstuhl -> Ill 1,31 epoichomenae den Webstuhl
umgehend / auch Gebärstuhl (Rost 375)
histourgia (Weberei, textus), hyphainein
3.7.2. An example of epic imagery: The
Proimion of Parmenides
The work of Parmenides stands at a cultural cross-roads, or
cultural switch which the greek
self-reflexion
aka
history of philosophy (
Denken über
das Denken
, Heidegger WHD: das
légein des
lógos) made
around -600 to -500. Formerly, this reflexion style was clothed in the epic
poetry of Homer and Hesiodos (glossary: Epos), and after Parmenides, the
influence of the newly invented technology (around -600) of the written text
(
textus,
histourgon) made itself felt, and philosophy
became based on the prosa style used by the later philosophers. Heidegger
devotes his work WHD mainly to this important philosophical-historical junction.
His main focus is a crucial passage in the main text:
chrae to légein te noein t' eon
emmenai
Nötig ist zu sagen und zu denken,
dass das Seiende ist.
Parmenides, Frag. VI / Heidegger: WHD, 105
The work of Parmenides is still composed in Hexameter but its
content is already philosophical, not mythical any more. Conceptually, this work
is a very significant step in the development that led to Plato, and Plato
derives many of his key ideas from Parmenides. But Platon sharply polemized
against the epic style and ductus of the
aoidoi-poets. It has been asked why Parmenides
resorted to a style of writing that was already antiquated at his time and would
under philosophical views not be considered fitting to the subject matter.
Parmenides can be considered as one who still had access to the old traditional
art of the
aoide, and knew how to apply it.
The present work seeks to continue the exploration of semantic
rhizomes as Heidegger has pioneered in WHD. We will choose his work as point of
departure, and focus on the most enigmatic part of the work: the proimion
(introductory passage). Here it can be experienced to the full where Parmenides
uses the formal methods and the mental imagery of the older epic tradition to
full effect. It has been noted that the proimion poses a strong contrast in
style to the main text: Whereas the main text deals with the immutable eternal
realm of truth, the proimion recounts a breathless race Pleger
(1991
, p. 102).
The following is the first part of the proimion. In the
original, it continues to verse 32. We will only consider the part framed by
hippoi ... hippous.
3.7.2.1. The Text
Quoted from Parmenides (1974), engl. transl. A.G.
B1
hippoi tai me pherousin, hodon t' epi
thymos hikanoi, (1)
pempon, epei m' es hodon beaesan polyphemon
agousai
daimonos, hae kata pant' astae pherei
eidota phota.
tae pheromaen. tae gar me polyphrastoi
pheron hippoi
harma titainousai, kourai d' hodon
haegemoneuon. (5)
axin d' en chnoiaesin hiei syringos
autaen
aithomenos. doiois gar epeigeto
dinotoisin
kyklois amphoterothen, hote sperchoiato
pempein
Heliades kourai, prolipusai domata
nyktos
eis phaos, osamenai kraton apo chersi
kalyptras. (10)
entha pylai nyktos te kai haematos eisi
keleuthon,
kai sphas hyperthyron amphis echei kai
lainos oudos.
autai d' aitheriai plaentai megaloisi
thyretois.
ton de Dikae polypoinos echei klaeidas
amoibous.
taen dae parphamenai kourai malakoisi
logoisin (15)
peisan epighradeos, hos sphin balanoton
ochaea
aptereos oseie pyleon apo. tai de
thyretron
chasm' achanes poiaesan anaptamenai
polychalkous
axonas en syrinxin amoibadon
eilixasai
gomphois kai peronaeisin araerote. taei rha
di auteon
ithys echon kourai kat' amaxiton harma kai
hippous. (21)
3.7.2.2. The Sem{e/aio}phonic Field
hippoi tai me pherousin
the horses that carry me
hurriedly
The Sem{e/aio}phonic field of
phora
,
phero
contains the meanings of carry, fly, pull away. The english words
ferry,
far,
furthering,
forth have a connection here. In German,
there are distantly connecting words:
Fahren,
Fahrt (in einem Pferde-Wagen),
Fähre,
Furt.
Via
Ferd, the word
Pferd itself equally continues this line.
pheromenos means hurriedly, fast, quick. This leads over to the field of
messages and messengers. The connotations of "carry"
carry over into the semantic field of bearing (fruit), fertility. In modern
medical science, there appears a wonderful "magic"
word:
pheromone, which was intended to mean something like "(some kind of)
hormone, transferred by aerial passage".
pheromones are said to work
directly on the limbic system, bypassing the higher cognitive centers of the
pre-frontal brain.
hoson
as far as
t' epi thymos hikanoi
the will will carry
thymos
means not only
will but also
soul, feeling, heart, courage, boldness.
pempon,
pulled me forth,
epei m' es hodon (path) baesan polyphemon
(renowned ) agousai (lead) daimonos (goddess)
having led me onto the renowned path of the
goddess
agousai /
agós: leader,
ag
o: to lead, to drive, to bring, to rule,
order,
ag
on
:
fight, exertion arab.:
jihad
/
jehad
hodos
: the way, the path.
directly connected by the sound is the word
hosos
: as far, as much, as long (on the
way).
polyphemon
also means: where
many voices are heard. We can relate
phaeme
to
lat.
fama, and
fame. A further relation is with
phone
. See below, the connection to
phos.
daimonos
means god, goddess,
divine being, and the (super-) human souls of the golden
age
(see above:
chrys
-
chros
- and the accompanying Sem{e/aio}phonic
field).
daemon
: knowing, sage.
daemosyne
is experience, knowledge, wisdom,
sagesse. Here we have the connection to the lost wisdom of the golden
age.
hae kata pant' astae pherei eidota
phota
which leads the well educated man through
all places.
(This translation may lead us into strange places
indeed.)
hae kata (downwards) pant' (all, the All) astae (educated)
pherei (carry) eidota (image, idea) phota (illuminated)
We first notice that we have a full succession of words for
"leading"
(to somewhere specific) from the wealth of
archaic greek sound imagery:
pherousin..
hoson...
hikanoi...
pempon...
hodon...
agousai...
pherei. The last word gives us the lead where we are being led to: into
the reigning concept of the proimion: The
Light -
Phos. We know
the word
pharos
for lighthouse, "the light that
leads the way".
pherei -
pharos -
phos. This is implied
here.
asteios
: urbane, well
educated.
We are probably not mislead too far off the right path when we
assume that the eidota phota bears a special meaning here, as the
illuminated and illuminating images that we are being led to by the
daimonos or the spirits of the archaic age of aoidoi.
3.7.2.3. The field of eidos
eidos
idon
: to see, to appear, to know, to understand,
to recognize,
eidol
- is everything connected to
images and idols. We can draw a direct connection from
eidos to
aoidos.
idea
and
idaee
leads us into the
platonic
philosophy of
idea
or
essence of
the
phenomena. This is the essence of Parmenides'
work: the eternal, unchanging being that can be grasped and understood only with
the
nous
or spirit-understanding.
3.7.2.4. The field of phos/phaos
The Sem{e/aio}phonic field of
phos
,
photo-
,
phoos
and
phaos
is
reigned by
phoibos
the god of light:
Apoll
. This field extends to
everything seen, visualized, also luminance, and illumination:
photisma
.
phoibos: splendor, shining,
sparkling, brilliant, luminous.
phoibasma,
phoibetes: prophet,
oracle, mantics.
phoinos
: purple, phoenician,
dark red (glowing).
phosphoros
: luck, fortune,
rescue.
phos and
phone
are
strongly related.
phone is connected to everything making sounds, the
realm of voice, speaking, talking. We see the connection to
logos
.
The next interesting observation is the polarity of
Phaos and
Chaos. This becomes relevant when we look at the song of
the
aoidos of chaea
, the
chaes-aoidos
, or as he is better known:
Hesiodos
. Here we find the
chaos or
. As we
will recall, it is an often used imagery of creation myths, also the one in the
bible, to describe a
transition of chaos to phaos. (Let there be light).
This corresponds to the phonemic switch from guttural, deep down in the throat
to labial, which is at the outer ends of the lips. This phonetic change could be
quite significant.
tae pheromaen.
thus I was carried forth
tae gar me polyphrastoi (knowledgeable)
pheron (carried me) hippoi (horses)
to where the knowledgeable horses carried
me
We may assume that there is a subtle Sem{e/aio}phonic
connection between
phero,
phora, and
phrasto- via the
metaphor of message mentioned above.
polyphrasto-
derives from
phraenae, and can be translated as
having wit or as being
sagacious. The subtle connection to the word
carry can be constructed when we
carry over
meandings
from one context into another (different
or higher order). In Philology, we speak of
trans-lation (Über-setzung ->
Fähre). In Philosophy, we find a similar field in Hermeneutics and
Interpretation. In Psychology, this is called
transference or
Übertragung. Otherwise it is also known as
inter-ligence.
As a side note: from this passage derives the old military
adage for the soldiers that they should abstain from thinking and leave this to
the horses, who have larger heads than they (A.D.)
harma (chariot) titainousai (tearingly pull
forth),
they tearingly pulled forth the
chariot
titaino
- connects us to the
archaic word of
titanic energies. The meaning is connected to an
ultimately extended or intended bow. The mental imagery gives us the figure of a
titan who is stretched bent between heaven and earth. We have a titanic effort
descripted here,
all forces are bent under the will-power to the point of
breaking. We are being told and being led into the deeper and deeper reaches
of the archaic mind, the titanic mind, of the first generation of creation that
Hesiod tells us about.
harma
is the two-wheeled
chariot of homer
ic adventure origin. We will get some
interesting details on it in a moment. For classical Greek thought, the
harma is the "Leitmotif"
or lead symbol of the
archaic mental frame. We recall
Phaeton
, because
this is the point where he lost control over his horses and careened straight
into his desaster with the sun chariot. We are on the safe side, because we have
expert guidance without which we would have no chance.
Further meanings of the root
harm
- are: put together, join together, couple,
sleep together, unite,
harmony,
harmonikos. In the indian Sanskrit
we find the
Yoga or
jugum im Latin, both meanding
yoke. The
yoke is
the device by which two oxen are chained together, to draw a pullock
(pull-oxen). The technological advantage of the
harma
-warriors of the bronze age (of
Homeric fame), was that their war chariots were drawn by speedy horses, while
their hopeless adversaries had only heavily armored oxen carts, which the speedy
harma
-warriors outran in a series of
bronze-age Blitzkriege, by which the ancient
aristocratic order of
harma
-warriors was
established all across the Eurasian continent. See Spengler's masterful analysis
of that once
Geheimwaffe of the ancient warrior
mythology. One very
Geheimwaffe aspect of the
technological art of
harma
-war is that the
yoke which is useful for the oxen, will
choke the horses. Something more fitting for then
had to be found (an old meaning of
fitting,
fitness is: to
equip with suitable
weaponry
. again we find our old friend the horse:
equip means:
quippous,
hippous)
kourai d' hodon (the way) haegemoneuon
(guided).
Sun-daughters guided the
way
Here we have the connection to the sun god(ess). Actually, it
is explicitly given later on, in (9), where we get the word
Heliades
.
This is Women's Work.
axin (wheel hubs) d' en chnoiaesin hiei
syringos (reed whistle) autaen aithomenos (red hot).
the axle in the wheel hubs screetched the
shrill sound of a reed whistle, red hot was it.
aithos
or
aitops
is the field of fire, burning, heat,
glowing red with heat, also the red hot iron.
We are lead back deep into the semantic rhizome of
phos
and
phonae
,
giving us the connection of the light and the sound, the
phoinos
, which means purple red. We also get a
cosm{ological/gonic} connection by the sound field of
chnon
, axon
,
pramantha
or
prometheus
, the fire drill, leading us into the
deepest abysses (
chasms,
maelstroem) of archaic cosmology.
Dechend / Santillana (1993)
In
syringos and the connection
of
aithomenos ...
aisomenos ...
aidomenos
, the double meaning of
aio as
hearing and wind-sound reappears, only immensely magnified to the limits of
endurance. The sound fields of
audae and
asomai appear.
(7,2-8,1) doiois gar epeigeto dinotoisin
kyklois amphoterothen,
because it was driven by two whirling wheels on both
sides
we may recall the other meanings of
kyklos
in the cosmic realm, meaning eternal recurrences
and stellar revolutions.
(8,2-9,1) hote sperchoiato pempein Heliades
kourai,
as with even more hurry the heliadic daughters led the
way
We get the feeling of continuously rising tension. This is
very serious business, fraught with danger, and we must not slow down, because
something (the night) will catch up with us when we do, engorging and engulfing
us mercilessly, throwing us back into the abyss. This is the next best visual
imagery coming as close as is possible to some very phantastic scenes out of the
Star Wars Mythology
where the rocket ships of the
federation make it barely through a closing stellar passage.
(9,1-10,1) prolipusai domata nyktos
eis phaos,
leaving behind us the house of night,
toward the light.
Now we have almost made it. We have escaped the precession of
the equinoxes
and are now beyond the time
barrier
. We have entered the realm of the
eternal
. (Interpretation according to: DECHEND
1993
).
(10,2) osamenai
kraton apo chersi kalyptras.
forcibly removing the veil from the
head.
osamenai
has the root sound of
ousia
, the essence of
Aristoteles
. We are connected back to
eidota
, the
images of the eternal being.
The veil is removed, now we can see clearly, truly, and really. The eternal
vision is cleared for us. It takes some more effort to remove this last veil.
ous- is the root word for a handle, the handle by which we can hold
things in reality.
(11) entha pylai nyktos te kai haematos
eisi keleuthon,
here is the gate of the ways of the night
(nyktos
) and the day
(haematos
).
keleuthos
is again another word
for the way, the path, the voyage. The next connection to a known sound field we
have is
kyllos
, leading us to
kyklos
. There are
straight and directed
(ithys
) paths and voyages and there are
cyclical
paths. This gate signifies their parting, the cosmic cross-roads.
Keleutheia
is a name for Pallas
Athene
.
There is one more station to pass, but it is not an obstacle
to us, just another sign that we have made it. This is the gate separating the
Ways. It is the gate of the passage of time, of endless ever-recurring kyklois
of day and night.
kai sphas hyperthyron amphis
echei kai lainos oudos.
and a gate lintel and a stone step surround
it.
We find in the word
hyper-thyron
the root of the german
Türe
Tor
, and the
english
door
.
lainos
means made from stone.
echo
- means: hold, hold fast, give a
hold.
autai d' aitheriai plaentai megaloisi
thyretois.
The gate itself, shining with etheric
light, is filled with huge swinging doors
ton de Dikae polypoinos echei klaeidas
amoibous.
for which Dike the all-sentencing
(punishing) polypoinos
holds the keys to entry
and exit.
This will lead us straight to
Anaximandros
and the
apeiron
. There the Dike is not a mythological
goddess but the impersonal cosmic law of all things arising and
decaying.
taen dae parphamenai kourai malakoisi
logoisin
peisan epiphradeos,
To her spake the Sun-daughters with gentle
words and persuaded her
hos sphin balanoton ochaea aptereos oseie
pyleon apo.
to pull back the bolted bar from the
door
tai de thyretron chasm' achanes poiaesan
anaptamenai
and it opened wide, like a yawning, gaping
abyss, the gorge of the doors
This leads us straight to Hesiod
's
account of
The Beginning.
chasm
and
achanes
is the imagery of the
chaos
. Depicted is the gate of the
apeiron
which is the gate of
chaos. We are
now lead through the maelstrom, called
Amlodhi's (Hamlet's)
mill
(Dechend 1993
). The
theme is the same as above. We are leaving the realm of temporal existence,
proceeding into the eternal realm. We may call to memory our contemporary
physical cosmological imagery of
black holes
, the
maelstrom of gravity that exactly parallels this archaic tale.
polychalkous axonas en syrinxin amoibadon
eilixasai
gomphois kai peronaeisin araerote.
turning the
polychalkous
brazen / bronze (aere perennis) axes
(pylons) with nails and rivets in their hinges
taei rha di auteon ithys echon
kourai kat' amaxiton harma kai
hippous.
right through there, in the straight way,
the Sun-daughters guided the chariot and the horses.
ithys
,
itharos
is everything connected to
straight(forward), also clear, pure.
idea
is not
far away from this idea.
ithyphallos
is the
erected phallos.
amaxa-
,
amaxi-
, is everything belonging to the chariot
and the cart. Also the
stellar signs of the big and little
dipper
(great and small vessel,
mahayana
and
hinayana
).
Now we have left the kykloid ways of temporal existence and
have returned to the straight path of Eternal Truth. This brazen door
made of aere perennius had slammed shut 2500 years ago, and no one had
entered here afterwards. Plato only had a dim recollection of what had occurred
here. He did not have the key any more. For him, this was already dark, obscure
mythology, as it was for all the countless generations of philosophers after
him.
3.7.2.5. Deeper meanings of Greek names
After this tour de force which will surely earn us a heavy
beating by linguists, philologists, and philosophers alike, we might be really
brazen and get tempted to ask a really idiot question (See:
->:IDIOT-QUESTION
). What if there
was more to the name Parmenides than just an arbitrary name (onoma homoion to
pragmati)? We know from the amerind people how they chose names to reflect an
essential character trait of the bearer (Chief Sitting Bull). What if we were to
parse the word
Parmenides and come to something
like:
para-men-ithys (straight beyond the mind).
We can then graduate to Hesiodos, and analyse that as
chaes-aoidos , the aoidos of
chaos-chea-gea-gaia-rhea, which is exactly what
describes the essence of his work
(
->:SEM{E/AIO}PHON-NET
). Then we might
advance to Anaximandros, and get something like: Anax-andros, or
Ana-Axin-Andros. Timaios has some connection to the greek word
timao, or to weigh, to deliberate. Then we might
try
Prometheus, whose brother interestingly was
called
Epimetheus (the
before-thinker, and the
after-thinker). Santillana and v.Dechend note
that there is a connection to the vedic root term
Pramantha, or fire drill (DECHEND
1993
). And last, but not least, we get the toughest job
of them all: Homer. He was the first and foremost
aoide as we have already mentioned. See
->:AOIDE
. That again is connected to
aio. Let us now make a quick detour to a different corner of the world and take
up the thread that we connected to the word
aoum. We now get this little
onoma-Sem{e/aio}phonic kyklos:
aoide - aio - aoum - soma - haoma - homeros -
aoide
3.7.2.6. The Omnipresence of embedded Ontologies
The forces that shaped modern european languages are to be
found 2500 years ago in the development of greek language. The semiotic
decisions and developments made between the time of Heraklit and Anaximander
about -600 and the time of the Alexandrinian library became the foundation of
the whole of western thought structure. They filtered directly into Roman
Imperial Latin, the language of Cicero and Horaz, and from there into Church
Latin, the Scholastic Age, and from there, with incorporation of the wisdom of
the Byzantine Empire in european Renaissance thought and finally the thought
systems of modernity: Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Descartes, Leibniz and
Kant. The apparent diversity of european languages makes us forget that the
underlying world models, their built-in ontologies, are extremely uniform.
Because it is so all-pervasive, it is extremely difficult to separate out the
determinants of this world-system. Kant's Critique was only the last of a long
series of efforts to sort them out in a set of universal categories and arrive
at a base that is not determined by the indo-european graeko-roman thought
structure.
3.7.2.7. Seven Seals
... On Multi-Level Codings and Experimental
Linguistics
We might conclude this tour through The Aoide
Sem{e/aio}phonic Universe with showing some vistas that up to now had to
remain beyond current scientific validation because of lack of proper
instruments. Perhaps by using new fuzzy phonetics logic and statistical based
tools can we gain an approach that is above mere speculation. This is the field
of Multi-Level Codings. It was said of the old scriptures that they were
guarded by seven seals, only to be fully understood by the initiates. Although
we have learned to decipher many of the old texts, and we are able to read a
sense in them, the question is: While we have a meaning, do we have the
message? This question must remain so far outside the realm of scientific
investigation until the Symbolator is actually constructed. Only then can we
interrelate all the available data of the old scriptures and epic tradition in
one coherent data model. As coding theory tells us, any feature of an epos might
serve as information carrier. Thus, we don't only have the conventional meaning
of the words, but also their arrangement, the subtle variations of rhythm, of
melody, and many more factors. When we can take all these factors into account,
we can start at a work that could be called Experimental Linguistics,
because now, it would be possible to construct and validate a great number of
variations of codification.
This work has a long tradition, of course. In "Hamlet's
Mill"
Giorgio Santillana and Hertha von Dechend propose
a codification of astronomical knowledge in the old mythology (Dechend 1993). A
similar case is advanced in "The Myth of Invariance" by Ernest McClain (McClain
1978). Finally, we could mention the cabalistic tradition, as exemplified by
Carlo Suarez (Suares 1976). Perhaps we can then uncover something in the great
Vedic Tradition that has been hidden during thousands of years, carefully
guarded in hundreds of generations of oral transmission by the Brahmin culture,
and immensely valuable for the future of humanity on this planet.
3.7.3. Plato, Kratylos: Onoma homoion to
pragmati
In Kratylos, Plato talks about the relation betweeen the
sounds of words and namings, and their meaning. He opposes two views:
1) The names of things and people are products of social
convention only. Prodikos (384b) and Protagoras are (386a) the proponents of
this view. The famous statement of Protagoras is cited:
panton (all)
chraematon (things-of-daily-use )
metron(measure)
einai (is)
anthropon (the-human).
'The human is the measure of all things.'
2) The view of Kratylos is summed up in (Kratylos
434a):
to onoma homoion to
pragmati
the name similar the thing-being-dealt-with
'The name is similar to the thing'.
Plato's treatment of the subject is peculiar. As in most of
his dialogues, he lets Sokrates do most of the talking, but he professes to be
ignorant about the subject (Cusanus: idiota de mente). And those who are
knowledgeable, are not present (Prodikos and Protagoras), or are given no
opportunity to talk. Kratylos appears only in the last quarter of the text,
starting at 428d to 440. He has hardly the opportunity to say two coherent
sentences about his view on the matter when he finally gets the word. Therefore,
the Kratylos dialogue has even been interpreted as a semiotic joke that Plato
made to befuddle his students in the academy and us across the millennia. Or it
can be assumed that Plato didn't have the right conceptual tools to make a
semiotic analysis. This seems to be a modern interpretation which is also
proposed by Eco (1994: 25). There are two questions remaining: First: Plato is
known to be one of the most outstanding geniuses of mankind, but humor was not
one of his strong points. Second: Why did he go through such an effort to make
it known to posterity, that he didn't know very much to say about the matter? If
we assume that Plato saw enough relevance in the subject to write about it, then
there are again two possibilities: 1) He knew more about it than he wanted to
write, keeping the unwritten teachings hovering in the background. 2) He was
guessing himself, but wanted to preserve something that even he, one of the most
knowledgeable men of his time, had only a dim recollection of, so that it became
not totally lost to posterity.
Now what shall be proposed here, is not an answer to the
question, if there ever is an answer at all, for in its profundity, this is the
question of
the ideal universal language (Eco
1994: 25). Instead, a way of continuing the socratic method of asking questions
shall be proposed. We are ignorant, but we have a
docta
ignorantia
(Cusanus) to apply. In order to ask
better questions, we need a different conceptual infrastructure. We need to
apply different research methods that have come to our reach only just now with
the availability of very powerful computer based (fuzzy linguistics, bayesian
logic) linguistic tools. In order to enlarge on the arguments presented here the
computing machinery would have to be available in the first place.
3.7.3.1. The Kratylos hypothesis and the autopoiesis of language
In 434a, the view of Kratylos is even extended to include not
only the words but also the letters of which the words consist:
(Oukoun eiper estai to onoma homoion to
pragmati,)
anankaion pephykenai ta stoicheia homoia
tois pragmasin
necessity in-natural-manner the {sounds /
the letters} similar to the things
'then by necessity must the sounds (the
letters) be similar to the things also'.
In full: "If now the name is similar to the thing, then by
natural necessity must the {sounds / letters} be similar to the things also".
Let us call this statement the
Kratylos
hypothesis
. This statement of Plato contradicts the
"signe arbitraire"
principle of current linguistic
consensus as it was coined by Saussure. The observation of Wilhelm v. Humboldt
makes a similar statement: "In reality is a statement not constructed of the
words that it consists of, but to the contrary, the words arise from the
totality of the statement."
Humboldt, (1963, Ges. Werke, VII, 17, p. 72.)
3.7.3.2. The terms used by Plato
The translation of classical greek texts usually causes no
problems when one needs to find equivalents for words of common culture use
like:
house, ship, knife, loom, horse, sheep, river, tree,
mountain
,
etc., because they denote easily identifiable tangible, physical objects that
are common in western, indo-european cultures. Philosophical texts present more
of a problem for translation because of the extreme variance of semantic fields
of key terms used as compared with modern european languages. Kratylos is even
more problematic because Plato uses his words in a technical sense, and uses
them while he talks about them, without having a proper meta language at his
disposition. Here are the semantic fields of some of the keywords used by Plato
(based on Rost 1862):
onoma - name, denomination,
appellation, designation,word, expression.
chraema - this semantic field
denotes things of practical relevance and objects of human environment: thing,
action, usage, money, belongings, happenings. There are many similar-sounding,
similar-meaning words in the field: chreia, chreos, chreoo, chrae, chraezoo,
chraestos, chraestes, chraeo.
chraema was the
term used by Protagoras. If the very global meaning of "thing" is substituted
for the more specific sense of "objects of human environment" then we get the
most obvious and commonsense statement of "the human is the measure of all
objects of the human environment". No one would want to argue against this.
Otherwise what would they be there for? Today, one would call that statement a
core requirement of
ergonomics.
pragma - things done, business,
negotiation. This term is used by Kratylos. There is very slight variance to
chraema, but it might be significant. The
semantic field of pragma is a little more oriented towards process, dealings,
and doings. The word
praxis belongs to this
field. Plato uses this term in the majority of places that are translated as
"thing"
.
onta,
einai
- being things. With
the "to ti aen einai" the thingness of things starts to appear in Aristoteles.
Plato uses this term sparingly (385b) and he does not seem to differentiate very
much between the terms.
3.7.3.3. The stoicheia as used in Kratylos and Timaios
In most translations of Plato's works,
stoicheia
and
grammata
are treated as
synonyms: meaning
letters of the alphabet. But
for Plato, there is a quite marked distinction: when he talks about
stoichea, he talks about spoken sounds, and when
he says
grammata, he means the
written letter. The translation of
Kratylos has to be treated carefully to yield any useful information of what
Plato was talking about. The semantic field of stoichea is:
stoicheoma: element,
fundamental building block, first principle
stoicheoo: to teach the
basics
stoicheomata: the 12 signs of
the zodiac
stoicheon:
letter of the
alphabet
stoichos:
the rod or
stylus of a sundial that casts the shadow by which the time is indicated on the
dial
It is easy to see that the term is full of connotations from
ancient cosmology. This subject has been treated in another of Plato's
dialogues: Timaios. The first meaning of
stoicheoma
denotes the
idea of a first principle of the cosmos
. This is also
called the
archae
. The
zodiacal
signs can be clarified in connection with the
sundial
. The sundial was introduced in Greece by
Anaximander
. He is also connected with the original
formulation of the greek theory of the four elements
and
the
apeiron
(Hölscher 1989
, p. 172). The corresponding passage
is in Timaios 48b:
Instead, as if we knew what really is the
true nature
of the fire
, the
water
and the others, we talk about them as the origins
(archa
i), in a way that we equate them with the letters
(the
stoichea
or original
components) of the cosmos. But it is not adequate that the amateur may even
compare them with the form of the
syllables
.
This passage shows direct correspondence with the Kratylos
hypothesis. The four elements
as Timaios describes them
in the quotation, are also called
stoichea.
Anaximander
had brought the sundial from
Babylon
. The dial is partitioned in 12 sections, like
any modern clock is, corresponding to the 12 hours of the day. The 12-scheme of
the hours corresponds to the 12-scheme of the months of the year and the 12
zodiacal signs wich are all of babylonian
(or
chaldean
) origin. In the world of antiquity, if one
wanted to learn about astronomy/astrology
, one went to
Babylon
, because here were the first and foremost
experts of all the
oikumene
[239]
on that subject. Timaios,
who is the fictional narrator
in that monologue, has been introduced to the group in 27a as the one who is the
most expert of them on Astronomy/Astrology
. Obviously
Timaios
must have been in
Babylon
to learn the basics (or
stoicheoma
) of the story
he is telling in Plato's
Timaios, just like
Anaximander
before him. We now have one detail left to
clarify: why and how might the word
stoichea have
acquired the meaning of letter-of-alphabet which is usually denoted by the word
grammata
? Let us create a mental image of a
sundial
: We see a rod, or stylus, the sun shines, and
the stylus casts a shadow. Then we call into memory another memorable fable of
Plato
, the
cave
parable
. There, Plato talks
about a big cave where miserable humans are chained fast to their seats so they
cannot move and only watch the shadows dancing on the cave walls, forever
entertaining themselves guessing what these shadows mean and what they stand
for. The connection to the stoichea becomes immediately clear. The symbols of
the alphabet
are viewed as the shaped holes through
which the pure light of the divine logos shines. The shadows that are cast on
the dial of the sundial or the cave walls are the meanings of those symbols as
we perceive them from our lowly perspective. Plato talks in
Phaidros
(276a) of the grammata as the shadow pictures
of the living, animated logos
. He uses a very subtle
word-play here, the opposition of
eidotos
(true knowledge)
and
eidolon
(shadow
image):
Ton tou eidotos
logon legeis, zonta kai enpsychon, ou ho gegrammenos eidolon an ti legoito
dikaios
'You mean the living, ensouled speech, the
logos, of the truly knowledgeable, of which the written version can only be
looked at as shadow image?'
With all these indications and examples from different works,
it is sure worth trying to formulate a hypothesis Plato's interesting
speculation.
3.7.3.4. The examples of Kratylos are taken from greek epos
When we look at the examples given in Kratylos for the
similiarity of name and thing, we quickly see that Plato was careful to choose
words that have no physical referent. He derives his terms mostly from greek
mythology and the ethical domain. He starts out with the best known of the
ancient greek
aoidoi, as the poets, singers, and
bards of greek antiquity were called: Homer as one of those people who are
daemiourgon onomaton, or master in the art of
forming words (390e). (This and all following locations are again from
Kratylos). This gives a significant correspondence to the
daemiourgos of Timaios who is creating the world.
Then he goes through an assorted list of greek gods and heroes. In this, he
follows the genealogy list as given by the other great aoide, Hesiodos, and in
(409), he comes to the planets and stars, the four elements, and the four
seasons. In (411) he talks about abstract and ethical terms like virtue,
righteousness, etc. This gives an indication that Plato did not have the
intention to show us the relations of names of physical objects but rather, to
the thought and association structure contained in the greek mythologies. And
here, it makes much more sense to speculate about a connection between the thing
and the name and the sounds of the names: this structure was created and
transmitted by the ancient
aoidoi.
3.7.3.5. Epic rhythm, meter, association, and the orality debate
So there is no problem to find a relation of the names to the
phenomena perceived. The greek gods and mysteries literally
"lived"
in the rhymes and metres of ancient greek
poetry, and it would be impossible to extract them from there. Another
indication for this is Plato's use of
pragma to
denote the "things"
. He doesn't talk about a
thingness-in-itself as Kant may have postulated,
but about a mental process
[240]
. That is
exactly the case when reciting an epic text. While the text was recited, the
mental imagery unfolded in the inner vision of the aoide and his audience. So
the examples Plato refers to, his
pragmata, were
for the ancient greek audience of epics a true process, of the nervous system,
and not concepts. In this respect, we can perceive an
auto-poieitic element, as the sounds themselves
create their meaning by rhythm, meter, and association. This subject has given
rise to hot controversies in the classical philology community under the name of
the
orality debate. One side has been proposed by
the followers of Milman Parry and researchers in the english speaking countries,
while their opponents are located on the european continent, namely in Germany.
There is not enough space for enlarging on this theme, the bibliography
references in Latacz (1979), Parry (1930), Assmann (1983-1991d), and Havelock
(1986-1990) contain most of the material. Also, Bolter (1990, 1991), Derrida
(1974), Haarmann (1990, 1992), McLuhan (1972), and Mellaart (1989) may be
referred for further information.
3.7.3.6. Neurology, Epics, and the Brain Hemispheres
The question of self-stabilizing neuronal homeostatic patterns
evoked by metered poetry has been treated by Turner and Pöppel (1988) (in
Rentschler 1988, p. 71-90) and Barbara Lex "The Neurobiology of Ritual Trance"
in (Lex 1979). In their paper, Turner and Pöppel make a strong case for the
effects of metered poetry on the development of what they call "a wholesome,
whole-brained" usage of the mind. Metered poetry has the capability of inducing
the brain to a mode of functioning that is actually of a higher quality than the
free-form prosaic mode of thinking that has become the norm in script based
civilization. They point out:
Human society itself can be profoundly changed by the
development of new ways of using the brain. Illustrative are the enormous
socio-cultural consequences of the invention of the written word. In a sense,
reading is a sort of new synthetic instinct, input that is reflexively
transformed in to a program, crystallized into neural hardware, and incorporated
as cultural loop into the human vervous circuit. This "new
instinct"
in turn profoundly changes the environment
within which young human brains are programmed... our technology [functions] as
a sort of supplementary nervous system. (p.75).
The fundamental unit of metered poetry is what we shall call
the line... it is recognizable metrically and nearly always takes from two to
four seconds to recite... The line is nearly always a rhythmic, semantic, and
syntactical unit as well - a sentence, a colon, a clause, a phrase, or a
completed group of these. Thus, other linguistic rhythms are accomodated to the
basic acoustical rhythm, producing that pleasing sensation of appropriateness
and inevitability, which is part of the delight of verse and aid to the memory.
(p.76)
The second universal characteristic of human verse meter is
that certain marked elements of the line or group of lines remain constant
throughout the poem and thus indicate the repetition of a pattern. The 3-second
cycle is not marked merely by a pause, but by distinct resemblances between the
material in each cycle. Repetition is added to frequency to emphasize the
rhythm. These constant elements may take many forms, the simplest of which is
the number of syllables per line... Still other patterns are arranged around
alliteration, consonance, assonance, and end rhyme. Often, many of these devices
are used together, some prescribed by the conventions of a particular poetic
form and others left to the discretion and inspiration of the individual poet.
(p. 77)
The third universal characteristic of metrical poetry is
variation. Variation is a temporary suspension of
the metrical pattern at work in a given poem, a surprising, unexpected, and
refreshing twist to that pattern... Meter is important in that it conveys
meaning, much as melody does in a song. Metrical patterns are elements of an
analogical structure, which is comprehended by the right cerebral hemisphere,
while poetry as language is presumably processed by the left temporal lobe. If
this hypothesis is correct, meter is partially a method of introducing right
brain processes into the left brain activity of understanding language. In other
words, it is a way of connecting our much more culture-bound linguistic
capacities with relatively more primitive spatial recognition pattern
recognition faculties, which we share with the higher animals. (p.77)
The imagery of the poem can become so intense that it is
almost like a real sensory experience. Personal memories... are strongly evoked;
there is often an emotional re-experience of close personal ties with family,
friends, lovers, and the dead. There is an intense realization of the world and
of human life, together with a strong sense of the reconciliation of opposites -
joy and sorrow, life and death, good and evil, human and divine, reality and
illusion, whole and part, comic and tragic, time and timelessness... There is a
sense of power combined with effortlessness. The poet or reader rises above the
word, so to speak, on the "viewless wings of poetry" and sees it all in its
fullness and completeness, but without loss of the clarity of its details. There
is an awareness of one's own physical nature, of one's birth and death, and of a
curious transcendence of both, and, often, a strong feeling of universal and
particular love and communal solidarity. (p.81-82)
To reinforce their hypothesis the authors turn to new and
speculative fields of scientific inquiry, which are variously termed
"neurobiology"
,
"biocybernetics"
, and
"psychobiology"
. Quoting an Essay by Barbara Lex, "The
Neurobiology of Ritual Trance", they state:
... various techniques of the alteration of mental states...
are designed to add to the linear, analytic, and verbal resources of the left
brain the more intuitive and holistic understanding of the right brain; to tune
the central nervous system and alleviate accumulated stress; and bring to the
aid of social solidarity and cultural values the powerful somatic and emotional
forces mediated by the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and the
ergotropic and trophotropic resources they control. (p.82)
The traditional concern of verse with the deepest human values
- truth, goodness, and beauty - is clearly associated with its involvement with
the brain's own motivational system. Poetry seems to be a device the brain can
use in reflexively calibrating itself, turning its
"hardware"
into "software"
, and
vice versa... As a quintessentially cultural activity, poetry has been central
to social learning and the synchronization of social activities. Poetry enforces
cooperation between left brain temporal organization and right brain spatial
organization and helps to bring about that integrated stereoscopic view that we
call true understanding. Poetry is, par excellence, kalogenic - productive of
beauty, of elegant, coherent, and predictively powerful models of the world.
(p.84-85)
If we apply the scientific findings to our hypothesis of the
societal role of the Epic Tradition, we get this surprising picture: The Aoidoi
of the past Oral Age served a much more important function than history had
allotted to them. They were the guardians of the sacred chants and poems whose
purpose was much more than entertaining, or keeping a mythological record of the
past, a sort of proto-history. They were the masters of the forgotten arts of
attuning the soul with the body, of projecting the past and the future, and
healing the cracks and fissures of human society. When civilization arose and
humans adopted writing, the use of poetry as cultural memory system was quickly
discarded and relegated to purely entertainment purposes. The important
cathartic role played by theater, and especially tragedy, in ancient greek
society is one of the last vestiges of this once vigorous tradition.
[212]
Some articles on the
main philosophical terms are given here:
[213]
It seems as if the
modern english word is a direct descendant of the old greek word.
[214]
The traditional latin
rendering of "logos" was "ratio et oratio".
[215]
In ancient philosophy
before the christian age, the roman philosophers tried to fit their terms to the
greek terms, and the key term of philosophical discussion, "logos" posed a
special problem since it had no direct latin equivalent.
[216]
I am giving here a
"greek" transliteration for those names instead of Anaximander, Plato, and
Aristotle. This is non-standard for english philosophical texts, but I like the
greek names better.
[217]
An example is Klaus
Mainzer's book on time - "Zeit". This is a work of scientific (physics)
philosophy. The text contains no reference for human memory.
[218]
Of course this is a
personal opinion which I have come to after several decades of programming
experience. There is no way a sophisticated method can substitute for clear
thinking.
[219]
See also the
adaptation by Ken Wilber which I have referenced in Noology, Vol I.
[220]
Although there are
sub-schools ot mathematics which hold that even mathematical thruths are
time-dependent conventions, most of the mathematicians are Platonists, even if
they don't know what the term means. To be a Mathematician, involves a
conviction that there must be some absolute truth, somewhere. Otherwise one
wouldn't go through so many mental contortions to find it, or some more elegant
expression (= formula) for it. Mathematics is in psychological parlance, based
on an obsession with order and structure, and an abhorrence for insecurity and
ambiguousness, or in other words, all those messy things that occur in the Real
World and in Real Life of Human Wheelings and Dealings. And that was the
dominant character trait of Platon the Philosopher. His psychological structure
has, by this way, thus influenced a lot of western philosophy and
science.
[221]
With the theological
themes I have dealt in my other writings. The connection between Platonic
Philosophy and Theology has to do with the dominance of order and structure in
the pantheon. See also the next footnote on "Kosmos". The Judeo/Christian
theology unites all the factors of regularity and (law and) order in the Supreme
God Jahve or Jehovah, whereas all the factors of irregularity und chaos are
delegated to the demons and devils. This differentiates the Judeo/Christian
theology from the pantheons of most other theologies of ancient civilizations
where the Gods of Chaos were equally important and revered members of the
pantheon. Eg. the Indian gods of time and destruction: Kala and Kali, the
Asuras, or the Mesoamerican gods of rain and weather, (H)Uitzilopochtli, Tlaloc,
etc. One main effort to reintroduce the principle of irregularity und chaos to
western thinking was Goethe's character Mephistopheles, whom he introduced as
incorporation of this suppressed arch-spirit and archae-elemental.
Nietzsche had identified a similar opposition in his work on
the Dionysic and Apollinic factors of Greek mythology: "Die Geburt der
Tragödie"
Keywods: "der Jünger eines noch "unbekannten Gottes",
...
"Antwort auf die Frage "was ist dionysisch?" ...
"Nothwendigkeit der Traumerfahrung":
R.A. Wilson had elaborated on the same theme in the
"Illuminatus" trilogy with his "Principle of Discordia" or Eris.
The painter W. Turner introduced this element into pictorial
art. Instead of concentrating on the outlines, he focussed on the contrasts of
color fields.
See also the references in my writings:
[222]
The meaning of the
ancient greek term Kosmos was, literally, decor(ation/um) and ornament, but was
subsequently used philosophically, as a principle of (law and) Order to
contra-distinguish it from the Chaos. Thus, the Kosmos was also synonymous for
everything orderly in nature and the universe. Theology, philosophy and the
sciences dealt for 2500 years mainly with these orderly factors, and only
recently have the disorderly and chaotic elements of nature found entry into the
halls of science under the name of Chaos Theory, Turbulent Fluid Dynamics,
etc.
[223]
The most interesting
case of an obviously messy category system is the Chinese Encyclopedia of
animals by Borges.
[224]
More colloquially one
can also call this
ergonomic.
[225]
Which comes from
memory psychology and indicates how many otherwise meaningless items a normal
human can remember. Of course, since Noology deals with Knowledge, ie. meaning,
this psychological rule can only be applied with a grain of salt (cum grano
salis).
[226]
Apart from the
technical usage in programming science, this method owes some credit to Gotthard
Günther's Kenogrammatics.
[227]
My own interpretation
of the phonetic sound of these characters differs from conventional philological
usage.
[228]
The reason why I
don't use the standard alphabetical ordering has to do with the sound slide
factor. It is easier to pronounce aieou in one sliding sound. The ancient memory
technologies are another reason which are dealt with in the next
section.
[229]
See for example my
dissertation.
[230]
"Pigeonholing" means
a pigeon can be only in one hole, and cannot be in any other hole at the same
time. The paradox of Schroedinger's cat is a quantum theory variant of the fuzzy
set paradigm. In fuzzy set theory, Schroedinger's cat can be about 70 % alive
and 30 % dead, all the while and at the same time.
[231]
For reasons of
graphic simplicity, the mathematical "element" symbol is here substituted with
"e".
[232]
Here we have a
typical hen-egg question of the history of writing: It is commonly assumed in
linguistics that the sound
chi could only be corresponded with a
cross-mark
after the alphabet was invented. But since the cross-mark is
probably one of the oldest ornamental symbols of all, to be found in the symbols
of the Vinca culture predating the alphabet by 5000 years, it should not be
ruled out altogether that there is an older connection of
chi and cross.
(Maria Gimbutas).
As a side line thought: The
Chi compares to the
Aleph by its looks quite like a child exercise that didn't get it right
on first try.
[233]
Again, it should be
noted that this is not so by standard linguistic practice. But we have to remind
here that we are not attempting standard linguistics.
[234]
See the Flusser
account in the appendix.
[235]
This can also be
equated with an ideology of prevalence of male elements, like they occur in
patriarchic societies. In all of western and social natural history, the
imprinting, or informing factor was considered more important, more valuable,
etc. than the substrate factor.
[236]
As they appear in the
discussions of Aristoteles and Plato's Timaios.
[237]
The pressing being a
somewhat more robust variation of forming.
[238]
Liddell-Scott-Jones
Lexicon of Classical Greek:
[239]
the ancient world,
known to the Greeks, later in Hellenistic times, the territories that had been
under the rule of Alexander and his successors.
[240]
In present-day
constructivist cognitive neuronal theories, one would talk about neuronal
connection and excitation structures, networks, and association maps, that are
localized in specific brain regions.
