Thanks, Rafael, for the nice posting. I should clarify however that the
original message was from Karl. I re-entered it into the list but forgot
to put the usual label at the beginning "message from...". These days
spam filters are too active and I have to intervene quite often, thus
it happens that/ aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus!
/Anyhow, I will try to find some spare time during next days to pen a
decent response to your terse message.
best wishes
---Pedro
Rafael Capurro escribió:
Dear Pedro
you write:
"There is a large risk of becoming
subjective, therefore unitelligible, if one leaves the
foreground-background convention of the unified, standard, invariable
against chaotic, unpredictable, varied."
Is it really like this? or is it like this as seen from the
perspective you give a
priority by qualifying the other perspective as "subjective"? Is not
not much
more the case that what seems "subjective" is the primarily experience of
the singularity of being in the world, this eery experience? The
predominance
of the common experience as described by you is what metaphysics (and
later on science!) has been saying for centuries.
Some days ago I sent this text to Joe that I forward it to the other
FIS members
Let me quote Octavio Paz "El mono gramático" (The grammatical monkey)
(Mexico 1974, pp. 97-98; 100) first in Spanish then in a free (with a
lot of mistakes!) English translation
"Por la escritura abolimos las cosas, las convertimos en sentido; por
la lectura, abolimos los signos, apuramos el sentido y, casi
inmediatamente, lo disipamos: el sentido vuelve al amasijo primordial.
La arboleda no tiene nombre y estos árboles no son signos: son
árboles. Son reales y son ilegibles. Aunque aludo a ellos cuando digo:
/estos árboles son ilegibles/, ellos no se dan por aludidos. No dicen,
no significan: están allí, nada más están. Yo lo puedo derribar,
quemar, cortar, convertir en mástiles, sillas, barcos, casas, ceniza;
puedo pintarlos, esculpirlos, describirlos, convertirlos en símbolos
de esto o de aquellos (inclusive de ellos mismos) y hacer otra
arboleda, real o imaginaria, con ellos; puedo clasificarlos,
analizarlos, reducirlos a una formula química o a una proporción
matemática y así traducirlos, convertirlos en lenguaje - pero /estos/
árboles, estos que senalo y que están más allá, siempre más allá, de
mis signos y de mis palabras, intocables, inalcanzables,
impenetrables, son lo que son y ningún nombre, ninguna combinación de
signos los dice. Y son irrepetibles: nunca volverán a ser lo que ahora
mismo son. [...]
La noche me salva No podemos ver sin peligro de eloquecer: las cosas
nos revelan, sin revelar nada y por su simple estar ahí frente a
nosotros, el vacío de los nombres, la falta de mesura del mundo, su
mudez esencial. Y a medida que la noche se acumula en mi ventana, yo
siento que no soy de a quí, sino de allá, de ese mundo que acaba de
borrarse y aguarda la resurrección del alba. De allá vengo, de allá
venimos todos y allá hemos de volver. Fascinacion por el otro lado,
seducción por la vertiente no humana del universo: perder el nombre,
perder la medida. Cada individuo, cada cosa, cada instante: una
realidad única, incomparable, inconmesurable. Volver al mundo de los
nombres propios."
"With writing we abolish things, we transform them into meaning;
through reading we abolish signs, we accelerate meaning and delete it
almost immediately: meaning goes back to the primordial chaos. The
small forest has no name, these trees are not signs, they are trees.
They are real and one cannot read them. Even when I refer to them and
say: 'these trees are not readable' they do not care about what I am
saying. They say nothing, they do not mean anything: they are there,
just there, nothing more. I can throw them down, burn them, cut them,
turn them into masts, chairs, ships, houses, ash; I can paint them,
carve them, describe them, turn them into symbols of this or that
(including of themselves) and I can make another small forest, a real
or an imaginary one. I can classify and analyze them, reduce them to a
chemical formula or to a mathematical proportion and in this way
translate them into lenguage - but /these /trees, that I now mean and
that are beyond, always beyond my signs and words, untouchable,
unreachable, impenetrable, are what they are and there is no name, no
combination of signs that can say what they are. They are
unrepeatable: they will never be again what they are right now. [...]
Night brings deliverance to me. We cannot /see /without the danger of
getting mad: things reveal themselves to us without revealing
anything, just with their pure being there in front of us, the void of
names, the lack of measure of the world, its essential dumbness. And
as night comes closer and closer to my window I feel that I do not
belong to here but to there, to that world that just disappeared and
waits for the resurrection of the morning. I come from there, all of
us come from there and must go back there. Fascination on the one
hand, being seduced by the non-human slop of the universe: loosing
name, loosing measure. Every individual, every thing, every moment: a
unique reality, uncomparable, unmeasurable. Go back to the world of
the proper names."
The world of the proper names is the paradise in which there is a name
for each thing. The "small forest" is not such a proper name, then
there can be a lot of small forests that are incomparable in their
singunalirty. There is no possibility of getting this singularity into
a dialectics of the general and the particular (which is not the same
as the singular). Octavio Paz writes that the critique of the paradise
is called language which means the abolition of the proper names to
which we (or he) want to go back, the world of singularities, beyond
language (and "logic") that deals with the general and the particular.
But then, Paz says, there is the critique of language which is done by
poetry, deluding names. In the first case the world turns into
language and then into logic (the one you and Lupasco criticize!). In
the second case, language turns into world, which is what you want,
thus becoming near to the poets than to the (Socratic and
post-Socratic) philosophers or to philosophy altogether. Thanks to
poets (and poet-scientists like you) the world looses names, and then,
as Paz says, "just for a moment, we can see it as it is - a beautiful
blue. And this vision turns us down and makes us mad; if things are
but have no name/ there is no measure on earth/."
I think that the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers/thinkers/poets
came near to this dramatic and contradictory experience of tertium
datur, that things are there and are not there, I can point to them,
turn them into formulae, concepts, definitions, metaphors... and they
resist all my magic and still are there, presenting themselves in the
nackedness of their there-being, and making me aware of my own
singularity, of the singularity of being there in front of them,
letting them present themselves to me, a kind of basic logic, if I may
say, or a contradictory saying that says nothing belonging to the
logic of the universal and the particular. I want to avoid this
frightening experience of what appears coming not from me, my
language, my logic, my rationality, my... but appears or unveils TO
me, calls me without saying a word, a-logically, without logos, so
that I can feel the limits of my logos and logic facing the
singularity of the wholeness of what is, not just the unmeasurable
quantity of what is, in case it is possible to count everything that
is, but the wholeness of beings as being which means as coming into
being from beyond. The pre-socratic thinkers called this process of
unveiling of things into being, nature / physis, having its
unmeasurable measure on what they believed to be the LOGOS
(Heraclitus) as the unknown and unthinkable measure of the whole in
its unfolding process that the Chinese wise (Lao Tse) called the DAO.
You write: "This implies that objects and events do not existe or take
place in time, but are the sources of, or 'unroll' (déroulement) their
own time." Excellent! This is not the homogenous time of modern
science, that is of great help as a measure for what is universal and
particular but not for what is singular, such as the universe / physis
/ nature itself. The same with regard to space. The space-time of
physics also of quantum physics, is an abstraction. We now take for
granted (after Einstein) that Newtonian space-time is such an
abstraction. We must go one step further! Which means also to go
beyond modern mental representationalism (Descartes) that transforms
trees into mental representations.
So I would say that Lupasco's (and your own?) predecessors are the
pre-Socratic, less Kant and Hegel (for whom all reality turns into
logic) and Peirce, for whom trees are signs
and.. in fact "away from language and toward what is" (p. 22) the
amazing experience of reality, of what Wittgenstein said that this
produces "Angst" in the Heideggerian sense:
which means astonishment that things ARE, nacked, without names,
before and beyond our names, logics, ethics, ontologies, religions,
sciences, politics, literatures... it is hard to stay there even for a
short moment, no words, facing the potentiality of being, without any
effort to giving reasons for it, or finding compromises or looking for
a better world or... Just a basic acceptance of this eery message...
that gives as a vague feeling of WHO we are (or can be) facing
beautiful blue that sometimes shines forth in painting and music as
well as in the free expression of mutual appreciation - beyond words.
best regards
Rafael
Dear Joseph,
On Similarity and Differences
The human nervous system processes both the similarity and the diversity
properties of the world (of the sensous impressions the organs
transmit). We polarise in our mental concepts based on evolutionary
achievements.
For the animal, it brings survival and reproduction advantages, if it
remembers correctly. Remembering is based on the similarity property of
impressions (ex perception and ex memory are compared and matched). We
have deep cultural agreements that
* it is good to remember correctly,
* it is good to recognise the similarity property above the diversity
property,
* it is good to relate one's subjective impressions to a common,
objective factor,
* it is good to have one common experience each one is subject to in an
equal fashion,
* the common experience is transcendental, invisible, eternal,
ubiquitous, egalising
To talk about diversity is to leave the common ground. It is
unquestionably more civilised to talk about the common, the unifying,
the objective. Therefore, there are huge communicational difficulties to
be expected, if one talks about that what is not always there, may be
very much varied, is not uniform. There is a large risk of becoming
subjective, therefore unitelligible, if one leaves the
foreground-background convention of the unified, standard, invariable
against chaotic, unpredictable, varied.
To overcome this communicational danger, the accountant has created a
Table on which one can demonstrate the relation between foreground and
background, that is, between similarity and diversity. Here, one can
observe, what you write, namely: "Some things (the most interesting
ones) are partly similar to and partly different from others at the same
time, and the predominance of one can increase at the expense of the
other. Further, in the system of Stephane Lupasco (Principle of Dynamic
Opposition, up-dated in Logic in Reality), diversity, negativity,
inexactitude, vagueness, instability, etc. are given appropriate
ontological value vs. identity, stability, etc., their "positive"
partners. "
Maybe in Varna we can get around to find a toy-maker who will produce
136 pairs of wooden blocks and we can spend a morning or afternoon
ordering (and re-ordering) these. Then, the meaning of the terms you
refer to can be explicated by deictic methods.
It is not the intellectual level needed that makes it complicated to use
a two- or three-dimensional concept of order. It is rather the
convention of not doing such because such is not done. Once one has
overcome the feeling of "breaking taboos brings forth punishment" one
can break the taboo of talking about what diversity is to be found in
the collection {1+16, 2+15, 3+14, ..8+9} which to our conventions is all
alike. After the fundamental break with cultural conventions has been
achieved and fully, internally accepted (like waging the crises of
adolescence and daring to talk back to Teacher /parents, authority, dear
leader, brother no. 1, etc./), it will be easy to extend this experiment
to the collection {1+1, ...,16+16}. Then, one can discuss, whether an
order on the red building blocks is more pleasing to the eye than an
order on the blue building blocks. After this, one may discover the
concept of a "convoy", that is, of those pairs of buiding blocks that
have to move together during a reorder. From this point on, the
seduction will have worked and the participants of the workshop will
order and reorder like fallen angels.
There is a forbidden pleasure in paying attention to details no one
should pay attention to and disregard that what everybody is told to
look at. There are libraries about how not to behave like one should
behave. Some, like Robin Hood, Spartacus, Stauffenberg, and some others,
have a positive image. There are some others who are killed because they
are not so as they should be e.g. Giordano Bruno and some others. It is
not easy to leave the common understanding.
We can always pretend we investigate a problem of number theory,
category theory, information theory or so while we play with the
building blocks, if the System Stability Agency Special Forces take us
away in Varna for enhanced interrogations. In fact, we will have
overthrown the predominance of the Oneness over the Differences.
I do hope that these remarks will be helpful.
Karl
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Prof.em. Dr. Rafael Capurro
Hochschule der Medien (HdM), Stuttgart, Germany
Capurro Fiek Foundation for Information Ethics
(http://www.capurro-fiek-foundation.org)
Director, Steinbeis-Transfer-Institute Information Ethics (STI-IE), Karlsruhe,
Germany (http://sti-ie.de)
Distinguished Researcher in Information Ethics, School of Information Studies,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
President, International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE)
(http://icie.zkm.de)
Editor in Chief, International Review of Information Ethics (IRIE)
(http://www.i-r-i-e.net)
Postal Address: Redtenbacherstr. 9, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
E-Mail: [email protected]
Voice: + 49 - 721 - 98 22 9 - 22 (Fax: -21)
Homepage: www.capurro.de
--
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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554
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