I only dimly remember the short but moving scene: one night as I wandered home in a wild drunken tumble I came across a woman in one of the monotonous streets of the great city who invited me back to her place with her. She was not beautiful, though she was beautiful in a way. Being in the state I was in, I tried out on the midnightly being all kinds of ridiculous and drole figures of speech, highly amusing above all to myself, and as I did so, true to the gifts of drunken inspiration, I noticed that I appeared to be having quite a comic effect on her. In fact it was more than that: I was actually attractive to her and, as we walked a little further, I formed the impression that, gentle-hearted as she was, she was abandoning herself to a certain weakness vis-à-vis her new companion. I wanted to go my own way, but she wouldn’t let me be. “Please don’t leave me," said she. "Come with me, dear friend. Are you going to be cold-blooded about this? Do you feel nothing for me at all? Don’t be this way! You’ve had a lot to drink, young man. Still, anyone could see that you’re sweet. Are you going to be horrid and turn me away and humiliate me now that I’ve grown fond of you? Please don't! If only you knew . . . But women like us aren’t meant to come at men with feelings like this, are we – otherwise all you do is sneer at us. If only you knew how I suffer from all this coldness, from the emptiness of all these pleasures that are my fear-inspiring, tragic trade. Till today I thought of myself as a monster, worth nothing but a good kick. Now I feel something mild, something sweet, something godly – you have awakened this in me, dear young man, and now you – you want to throw me back into the monstrous abyss? Please don't! Stay with me, stay, come with me. Let’s laugh away the whole night together. I know I’ll be able to show you some fun, you’ll see. If you’re kind-hearted, then weren’t you created to have some fun? After a long time – the longest time – I – I’m happy again too. Do you know what that means for one like me, who's been so degraded? Do you? Are you smiling? You have a lovely smile – I love that little smile of yours. And now you want to behave like a loveless lump, turn your back on our noble friendship, tread underfoot the happiness I feel looking at you? Are you going to destroy what makes me happy, what makes me happy again after a long – the longest – time? Dear, dear friend! After all the creepy nonsense I had to go through – the leaden horrors – aren't I allowed to give myself up to something that's a true pleasure for once? Please, please, don’t be cruel. I’m telling you – you won’t regret it. You'll bless the hours you spend with the vilified one, the dishonoured one – you’ll give thanks for them in your innermost being. Be kind and come with me. Don’t be kind on my behalf ever again, but be kind now, now only, join with the abused one and trust her. Look how the tears well up into my eyes! Can't you hear how I’m pleading! If you go off into the night without a friendly word, all around me will be darkness. But if you’re kind to me, the sun will shine brightly into the depths of night. Be the friendly star in my heaven tonight, be as auspicious as you seem to be. You’re a little touched? You’re giving me your hand? You’ll come with me? You love me?” – –
Post-script: Could this not be Circe – she who beseeched the knightly sea-faring Odysseus to stay with her? He wants to get home – she pleads with him not to leave her. She is an evil sorceress – one who turns all men who look at her into grunting swine. To be sure, she disputes that; according to her, she’s not a sorceress, but has herself come under an evil spell. Nor would that be impossible. Into the bargain, she is beautiful in the most moving way. She has a soft voice and a lisp – her eyes are indeterminately sea-green or sea-blue, as the eyes of cats from faraway places sometimes are, and from those eyes a wonderful, dear, proud radiance breaks forth. She isn't unhappy and yet she isn't happy either. In Odysseus she seeks and finds her happiness – and then he wants to leave her and return to his ever-patient Penelope. Tragedy of tender hearts!
Among other things she says to him that his companions have turned into swine all by themselves. The blame and shame of the whole episode is on their heads, not hers. Because they behaved like swine, they’ve become swine. She smiles and a tear insinuates itself into that smile. She has her ironic ways and is at the same time quite in earnest, she’s risqué and melancholy all at once. “Don’t you see,” she says, taking his hand in hers, “that I’m not the sorceress anymore, but that you are the sorcerer? Be my friend, my protector, my dear magnificent sorcerer! Protect me from Circe. I’m not Circe, if you’re here with me. She keeps her distance when you stay near.” That’s what she says, heaping affection on him. And yet he – he in the end – – sets sails. He leaves her to Circe, he leaves her to herself, he leaves her to that indwelling cruelty of hers, he leaves her to the shame whose slave she is. Can he set sail? Is he so hard-hearted?
Monday, May 31, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Karl Kraus: In praise of a perverse way of life
From the German by CS and MM:
In praise of a perverse way of life
I had come all too soon to feel the unhappy effect on body and soul of the “normal” way of life I had been trying for a time. So I resolved before it was too late to begin living unreasonably again. Once more I see the world with a special rosy gaze that not only helps me deal with the reality of earthly misery, but grants me so many exaggerated notions of life’s joys as well. I am a living demonstration of the healthy principle of a perverse way of life within a perverse world-order.
I too was once a master of the art of rising with the sun and going to bed not long after it went down. But the unbearable objectivity with which it shines indiscriminately on all my fellow citizens, on all deformity and ugliness, is not everyone's cup of tea; whoever can spare himself in timely fashion from the peril of seeing the world clearly by day acts wisely, he has the good fortune of being avoided by the very people he flees. For when the day was still divided into morning and evening, it was a pleasure to awaken at cockcrow and go to bed when one heard the night watchman call. But then it all got divided up differently – into the time for the morning paper and the time for the evening paper, and the world began to lie in wait for Events. If one has observed for a while how shamefully the latter debase themselves before human curiosity, how cravenly the course of the world adapts itself to the spiraling lust for information and how time and space finally become nothing more than the modes of experience of journalistic souls, then one turns over in bed and goes on sleeping. “Oh tired eyes, seize this opportunity to close yourselves again to the sight of this shameful earthly abode.”
And so I sleep well into the day. And when I wake, I spread the whole papery disgrace of humanity out in front of me to find out what I’ve missed, and I am happy. Stupidity rises early, and so events are in the habit of happening in the morning. Much can indeed take place before evening, but in general the afternoon lacks the raucous bustle with which human progress wishes to show itself worthy of its good name up till its lunchtime feeding hour. A true miller awakes only when his mill comes to a halt; whoever wishes to have nothing to do with people whose idea of existence is being in on the act - rises late.
I cross the Ringstrasse and watch them prepare for a parade. The racket goes on for four weeks, like an enormous symphonic poem on the theme of money-grubbing. Mankind rigs itself up for a holiday, the carpenters knock up the stands and the price-boards and when I consider I’m never going to see the splendiferous end result, my heart too begins to beat more gladly. If I led a normal way of life, I would have to leave town because of these festivities; now I can stay put and still miss the whole thing. An old king of Shakespeare’s waves his followers away: “Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains. So, so, so. We’ll go to supper i’th’morning.” His fool confirms the perversity of this world and adds: “And I’ll go to bed at noon.” But if I have my breakfast in the evening, everything will already be over and I can find out the day’s total number of sunbeams at my leisure in the papers at a later date.
All important accidents occur in the morning. I know of them only from hearsay and by always arriving too late I maintain my faith in the excellence of human affairs. In the evening papers, it is not only events that are reported, but the names of those involved too, so that one feels one is at a safe distance from the scene of the fire, but still has the opportunity to count the heads of one’s loved ones, of whom not a single one is absent. One turns to one’s advantage the transformation of the cosmos into a local fragment as best one can; one avails oneself of that new technique which turns time into jam and calls the jam jar a newspaper. The world has grown uglier since it began taking a look at itself twice daily in the mirror. So let’s make do with the reflection, and avert our eyes from the original completely. It is uplifting to lose one’s belief in a reality that matches the descriptions in the papers. He who has slept through half the day has gained half of life.
All exceptional stupidities occur in the morning; a good citizen should only wake after the Close of Business. After his evening breakfast, he will step out into life’s stream when it is free of politics. Admittedly he won’t be able to learn from the evening papers that all assassinations occur in the morning; for most of them are missed by the dozy-eyed correspondents too. There was once a newspaper that sent one correspondent after another to Paris to report presidential assassinations as they happened; would you believe it - one president after another met his end and each time the death of the president had its mirror image in the sleep of the correspondent. When the German princes sojourned in our city, I knew nothing of it. But this occurrence had no adverse effects either - the worst was that I didn’t get my regular beefsteak for breakfast and so had to renounce a cherished habit with which I had given demonstration up till then of my affiliation with the city I live in. The waiter apologised and told me in a consoling tone of the consolidation of the Triple Entente – the true step forward taken that day and one that put local interests in the shade.
When a theologian fights his way through to disbelief in the immaculate conception, it occurs in the morning; when a nuncio disgraces himself, it occurs in the morning; and it is surely better still that the noise of farmers storming universities or the cries of “Away with universal suffrage!” disturb our morning sleep rather than the peace of afternoon. I can only remember one minister ever resigning after lunch. By chance I was on my way past. How very messy the afternoon version of the resignation-business was. At 3 the police were handing out fines to the crowd that had been calling for the honourable minister Badeni to walk. By 3.15 they were already telling them to pack it in “’cause Badeni packed it in a while back himself!”
And what of justice? She is blind only in the morning, and if by exception a judicial murder ever occurs at a more advanced hour, it's bound to be someone exceptional who’s being executed. What sometimes happens in Germany is that the details of some sexual escapade are on the march, sometimes for 25 years in fact, and then, to be sure, truth needs the aid of the afternoon hours. To let an event like that escape one’s notice it’s no use withdrawing to your bedroom – it being a well-known fact that the bedroom has proved the least secure of refuges from the lust for truth.
Though sleeping through the operations of government bureaucracy is indeed one of the pleasures of life, I'm sorry to have to say that there is one area of my policy where I've no luck at all, and this is the realm of art. For it has been established that most opening-night flops occur precisely in the evening. One’s compensation is that at night there’s complete calm across all general fields of public activity. Nothing stirs. There is nothing new. The rubbish van alone makes its way through the streets, like the symbol of a perverse world-order, and spreads the dust that the day has left behind, and when it rains the hosing truck moves along behind it. Otherwise, all is quiet. Stupidity is asleep, and so I go to work. In the distance, I think I hear the noise of printing presses: stupidity is snoring. And I steal up to all that stupidity and take pleasure in harbouring murderous intentions. And when the first morning paper appears on the eastern horizon of the cultural world, I go to sleep . . . Those roughly are the advantages of a perverse way of life.
Vienna, 19 June, 1908
In praise of a perverse way of life
I had come all too soon to feel the unhappy effect on body and soul of the “normal” way of life I had been trying for a time. So I resolved before it was too late to begin living unreasonably again. Once more I see the world with a special rosy gaze that not only helps me deal with the reality of earthly misery, but grants me so many exaggerated notions of life’s joys as well. I am a living demonstration of the healthy principle of a perverse way of life within a perverse world-order.
I too was once a master of the art of rising with the sun and going to bed not long after it went down. But the unbearable objectivity with which it shines indiscriminately on all my fellow citizens, on all deformity and ugliness, is not everyone's cup of tea; whoever can spare himself in timely fashion from the peril of seeing the world clearly by day acts wisely, he has the good fortune of being avoided by the very people he flees. For when the day was still divided into morning and evening, it was a pleasure to awaken at cockcrow and go to bed when one heard the night watchman call. But then it all got divided up differently – into the time for the morning paper and the time for the evening paper, and the world began to lie in wait for Events. If one has observed for a while how shamefully the latter debase themselves before human curiosity, how cravenly the course of the world adapts itself to the spiraling lust for information and how time and space finally become nothing more than the modes of experience of journalistic souls, then one turns over in bed and goes on sleeping. “Oh tired eyes, seize this opportunity to close yourselves again to the sight of this shameful earthly abode.”
And so I sleep well into the day. And when I wake, I spread the whole papery disgrace of humanity out in front of me to find out what I’ve missed, and I am happy. Stupidity rises early, and so events are in the habit of happening in the morning. Much can indeed take place before evening, but in general the afternoon lacks the raucous bustle with which human progress wishes to show itself worthy of its good name up till its lunchtime feeding hour. A true miller awakes only when his mill comes to a halt; whoever wishes to have nothing to do with people whose idea of existence is being in on the act - rises late.
I cross the Ringstrasse and watch them prepare for a parade. The racket goes on for four weeks, like an enormous symphonic poem on the theme of money-grubbing. Mankind rigs itself up for a holiday, the carpenters knock up the stands and the price-boards and when I consider I’m never going to see the splendiferous end result, my heart too begins to beat more gladly. If I led a normal way of life, I would have to leave town because of these festivities; now I can stay put and still miss the whole thing. An old king of Shakespeare’s waves his followers away: “Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains. So, so, so. We’ll go to supper i’th’morning.” His fool confirms the perversity of this world and adds: “And I’ll go to bed at noon.” But if I have my breakfast in the evening, everything will already be over and I can find out the day’s total number of sunbeams at my leisure in the papers at a later date.
All important accidents occur in the morning. I know of them only from hearsay and by always arriving too late I maintain my faith in the excellence of human affairs. In the evening papers, it is not only events that are reported, but the names of those involved too, so that one feels one is at a safe distance from the scene of the fire, but still has the opportunity to count the heads of one’s loved ones, of whom not a single one is absent. One turns to one’s advantage the transformation of the cosmos into a local fragment as best one can; one avails oneself of that new technique which turns time into jam and calls the jam jar a newspaper. The world has grown uglier since it began taking a look at itself twice daily in the mirror. So let’s make do with the reflection, and avert our eyes from the original completely. It is uplifting to lose one’s belief in a reality that matches the descriptions in the papers. He who has slept through half the day has gained half of life.
All exceptional stupidities occur in the morning; a good citizen should only wake after the Close of Business. After his evening breakfast, he will step out into life’s stream when it is free of politics. Admittedly he won’t be able to learn from the evening papers that all assassinations occur in the morning; for most of them are missed by the dozy-eyed correspondents too. There was once a newspaper that sent one correspondent after another to Paris to report presidential assassinations as they happened; would you believe it - one president after another met his end and each time the death of the president had its mirror image in the sleep of the correspondent. When the German princes sojourned in our city, I knew nothing of it. But this occurrence had no adverse effects either - the worst was that I didn’t get my regular beefsteak for breakfast and so had to renounce a cherished habit with which I had given demonstration up till then of my affiliation with the city I live in. The waiter apologised and told me in a consoling tone of the consolidation of the Triple Entente – the true step forward taken that day and one that put local interests in the shade.
When a theologian fights his way through to disbelief in the immaculate conception, it occurs in the morning; when a nuncio disgraces himself, it occurs in the morning; and it is surely better still that the noise of farmers storming universities or the cries of “Away with universal suffrage!” disturb our morning sleep rather than the peace of afternoon. I can only remember one minister ever resigning after lunch. By chance I was on my way past. How very messy the afternoon version of the resignation-business was. At 3 the police were handing out fines to the crowd that had been calling for the honourable minister Badeni to walk. By 3.15 they were already telling them to pack it in “’cause Badeni packed it in a while back himself!”
And what of justice? She is blind only in the morning, and if by exception a judicial murder ever occurs at a more advanced hour, it's bound to be someone exceptional who’s being executed. What sometimes happens in Germany is that the details of some sexual escapade are on the march, sometimes for 25 years in fact, and then, to be sure, truth needs the aid of the afternoon hours. To let an event like that escape one’s notice it’s no use withdrawing to your bedroom – it being a well-known fact that the bedroom has proved the least secure of refuges from the lust for truth.
Though sleeping through the operations of government bureaucracy is indeed one of the pleasures of life, I'm sorry to have to say that there is one area of my policy where I've no luck at all, and this is the realm of art. For it has been established that most opening-night flops occur precisely in the evening. One’s compensation is that at night there’s complete calm across all general fields of public activity. Nothing stirs. There is nothing new. The rubbish van alone makes its way through the streets, like the symbol of a perverse world-order, and spreads the dust that the day has left behind, and when it rains the hosing truck moves along behind it. Otherwise, all is quiet. Stupidity is asleep, and so I go to work. In the distance, I think I hear the noise of printing presses: stupidity is snoring. And I steal up to all that stupidity and take pleasure in harbouring murderous intentions. And when the first morning paper appears on the eastern horizon of the cultural world, I go to sleep . . . Those roughly are the advantages of a perverse way of life.
Vienna, 19 June, 1908
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The Art of Having Something to Say 11: More Lichtenberg
"Dreams, the impartial outcome of our entire being. . ." And Other Aphorisms
7.1 To make known the weaknesses of the great is a kind of duty: in doing so one comforts thousands without doing the great any harm. D'Alembert's letter on Rousseau in the Mercure de France, September 1779, deserves to be better known.
*7.3 Herr Camper related that when a missionary painted the flames of Hell to a congregation of Greenlanders in a truly vivid fashion, and described at length the heat they gave out, all the Greenlanders began to feel a strong desire to go to Hell.
7.7 What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
7.10 Men who know well how to observe themselves and are secretly proud of it often rejoice at the discovery of a weakness in themselves when the discovery ought to disturb them. That much higher do many rate the professor over the man.
7.17 People find it harder to believe in miracles than in traditions of miracles, and many a Turk, Jew etc., who will now let himself be killed for his tradition would have remained very calm and composed had he been witness to the miracle when it happened . . .
7.21 The heroes of the poets of antiquity are very different from those in, e.g., Milton. They are brave, shrewd and wise, but seldom amiable or compassionate in the sense of our morality. Milton took his from the Bible. Does our Christian morality perhaps have its origin in a certain weakness, in a Jewish cowardice, while the other is founded on strength? Universal acceptability is perhaps only a fair chimera and something that will never be attained.
7.24 To make man as religion wants him to be resembles the undertaking of the Stoics: it is only another grade of the impossible.
7.27 How happily many a man would live if he concerned himself with other people's affairs as little as he does with his own.
7.31 A great genius will seldom make his discoveries on paths frequented by others. When he discovers things he usually also discovers the path to discovery.
*7.32 Popular presentation is today all too oten that which puts the mob in a position to talk of something without understanding it.
7.33 The plain style of writing is to be recommended if only because no honest man takes elaborate pains over what he says.
7.40 If someone left 100,000 Louis d'or to the greatest rogue in Germany, how many claimants there would be to the legacy!
*8.2 Among those things that have most made me smile is the idea entertained by certain missionaries of baptizing a whole yardful of proselytes with a fire-engine . . .
8.3 There is a great difference between believing something and being unable to believe its opposite. I can very often believe something without being able to prove it, just as I do not believe something without being able to refute it. The stance I adopt will be determined not by strict proof but by preponderance of evidence.
8.5 I believe the surest way of promoting the progress of mankind would be through the civilizing of the natural talents of the barbarian (who stands between the savage and the civilized man) by means of philosophy communicated by the polished reason of the civilized man. If the savage and the barbarian should ever vanish from the world it will be all up with us.
8.9 There are truths which go around so dressed up you would take them for lies, but which are pure truths nonetheless.
8.11 An imaginary incapacity can with timid people long play the role of a real one, in works of the head just as much as of the body.
*8.12 Because people have such a strong tendency to put things off and take things slowly, so that what ought to happen at five in the morning commonly takes place at six, you can count for certain on retaining the upper hand in any matter if you do everything without the slightest delay.
8.21 It is a great trick of oratory sometimes merely to persuade people when you could have convinced them; then they will ofen think they have been convinced when in fact all you are able to do is merely persuade them.
8.22 Nothing arouses the curiosity of youth more than fragments of useful knowledge interwoven into pleasing poetry. Thomson's Seasons is a masterpiece in this, and must have awoken a love of nature in many an Englishman.
8.24 One begets the idea, another is godfather at its baptism, the third begets children by it, the fourth visits it on its deathbed, and the fifth buries it.
8.25 Not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn't even aftraid of them.
8.32 Our false philosphy is incorporated in our entire language; we can, so to speak, not reason without reasoning falsely. We fail, to consider that speaking, regardless of what, is a philosophy . . . Our whole philosophy is rectification of colloquial linguistic usage, thus rectification of a philosophy, and indeed of the most universal and general . . .
8.34 One cannot too often reflect that the existence of a God, the immortality of the soul, and the like are things merely conceivable, not perceptible. They are combinations of ideas, thought-games, to which nothing objective needs to correspond. . . .
8.35 To say we perceive external objects is contradictory; it is impossible for man to go outside himself. When we believe we are seeing objects we are seeing only ourselves. We can really perceive nothing in the world except ourselves and the changes that take place in us. It is likewise impossible for us to feel for others, as it is customary to say we do; we feel only for ourselves. The proposition sounds a harsh one, but it is not when it is correctly understood. We love neither father, nor mother, nor wife, nor child: what we love are the pleasant sensations they produce in us . . . Nothing else is at all possible, and he who denies this proposition cannot have understood it . . .
*8.36 Rational free-spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which they heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.
8.37 The ass seems to me like the horse translated into Dutch.
8.38 What am I? What shall I do? What can I believe and hope for? Eveything in philosphy can be reduced to this . . .
9.3 Where we experience no localized sensation, where we do not actually feel an impression on our organs of sense, we cannot reduce anything to bodily effects. If we were unable to close our eyes we would not know whether we see with our head or with our belly . . .
9.4 If the New Testament faithfully transmits the precepts of the Christian religion then the Catholic religion is hardly Christian . . . The Catholic religion received its present form during ages of the grossest ignorance; it is impossible for a man again permitted to employ his reason to continue to adhere to it - it can be maintained only by fire and sword.
*10.9 One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being. This thought deserves to be taken very much to heart.
10.20 Alas, he exclaimed when things went wrong, if only I had done something pleasantly wicked this morning I would at least know why I am suffering now!
*10.24 When in a dream I dispute with someone and he contradicts and instructs me it is I who am instructing myself, that is to say reflecting. This reflection thus presents itself in the form of conversation. Can we be surprised, therefore, if earlier people expressed their thoughts about the serpent (as with Eve) with: the serpent spoke to me. The Lord spoke to me. My spirit spoke to me. Since we do not know where we think, we can remove our thoughts to wherever we wish. Just as we can speak so that he who hears us believes the voice is coming from a third person, so we can think, too, as though we were being spoken to. Genius Sokratis, etc. What an astonishing amount may we not yet learn from dreams.
7.1 To make known the weaknesses of the great is a kind of duty: in doing so one comforts thousands without doing the great any harm. D'Alembert's letter on Rousseau in the Mercure de France, September 1779, deserves to be better known.
*7.3 Herr Camper related that when a missionary painted the flames of Hell to a congregation of Greenlanders in a truly vivid fashion, and described at length the heat they gave out, all the Greenlanders began to feel a strong desire to go to Hell.
7.7 What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
7.10 Men who know well how to observe themselves and are secretly proud of it often rejoice at the discovery of a weakness in themselves when the discovery ought to disturb them. That much higher do many rate the professor over the man.
7.17 People find it harder to believe in miracles than in traditions of miracles, and many a Turk, Jew etc., who will now let himself be killed for his tradition would have remained very calm and composed had he been witness to the miracle when it happened . . .
7.21 The heroes of the poets of antiquity are very different from those in, e.g., Milton. They are brave, shrewd and wise, but seldom amiable or compassionate in the sense of our morality. Milton took his from the Bible. Does our Christian morality perhaps have its origin in a certain weakness, in a Jewish cowardice, while the other is founded on strength? Universal acceptability is perhaps only a fair chimera and something that will never be attained.
7.24 To make man as religion wants him to be resembles the undertaking of the Stoics: it is only another grade of the impossible.
7.27 How happily many a man would live if he concerned himself with other people's affairs as little as he does with his own.
7.31 A great genius will seldom make his discoveries on paths frequented by others. When he discovers things he usually also discovers the path to discovery.
*7.32 Popular presentation is today all too oten that which puts the mob in a position to talk of something without understanding it.
7.33 The plain style of writing is to be recommended if only because no honest man takes elaborate pains over what he says.
7.40 If someone left 100,000 Louis d'or to the greatest rogue in Germany, how many claimants there would be to the legacy!
*8.2 Among those things that have most made me smile is the idea entertained by certain missionaries of baptizing a whole yardful of proselytes with a fire-engine . . .
8.3 There is a great difference between believing something and being unable to believe its opposite. I can very often believe something without being able to prove it, just as I do not believe something without being able to refute it. The stance I adopt will be determined not by strict proof but by preponderance of evidence.
8.5 I believe the surest way of promoting the progress of mankind would be through the civilizing of the natural talents of the barbarian (who stands between the savage and the civilized man) by means of philosophy communicated by the polished reason of the civilized man. If the savage and the barbarian should ever vanish from the world it will be all up with us.
8.9 There are truths which go around so dressed up you would take them for lies, but which are pure truths nonetheless.
8.11 An imaginary incapacity can with timid people long play the role of a real one, in works of the head just as much as of the body.
*8.12 Because people have such a strong tendency to put things off and take things slowly, so that what ought to happen at five in the morning commonly takes place at six, you can count for certain on retaining the upper hand in any matter if you do everything without the slightest delay.
8.21 It is a great trick of oratory sometimes merely to persuade people when you could have convinced them; then they will ofen think they have been convinced when in fact all you are able to do is merely persuade them.
8.22 Nothing arouses the curiosity of youth more than fragments of useful knowledge interwoven into pleasing poetry. Thomson's Seasons is a masterpiece in this, and must have awoken a love of nature in many an Englishman.
8.24 One begets the idea, another is godfather at its baptism, the third begets children by it, the fourth visits it on its deathbed, and the fifth buries it.
8.25 Not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn't even aftraid of them.
8.32 Our false philosphy is incorporated in our entire language; we can, so to speak, not reason without reasoning falsely. We fail, to consider that speaking, regardless of what, is a philosophy . . . Our whole philosophy is rectification of colloquial linguistic usage, thus rectification of a philosophy, and indeed of the most universal and general . . .
8.34 One cannot too often reflect that the existence of a God, the immortality of the soul, and the like are things merely conceivable, not perceptible. They are combinations of ideas, thought-games, to which nothing objective needs to correspond. . . .
8.35 To say we perceive external objects is contradictory; it is impossible for man to go outside himself. When we believe we are seeing objects we are seeing only ourselves. We can really perceive nothing in the world except ourselves and the changes that take place in us. It is likewise impossible for us to feel for others, as it is customary to say we do; we feel only for ourselves. The proposition sounds a harsh one, but it is not when it is correctly understood. We love neither father, nor mother, nor wife, nor child: what we love are the pleasant sensations they produce in us . . . Nothing else is at all possible, and he who denies this proposition cannot have understood it . . .
*8.36 Rational free-spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which they heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.
8.37 The ass seems to me like the horse translated into Dutch.
8.38 What am I? What shall I do? What can I believe and hope for? Eveything in philosphy can be reduced to this . . .
9.3 Where we experience no localized sensation, where we do not actually feel an impression on our organs of sense, we cannot reduce anything to bodily effects. If we were unable to close our eyes we would not know whether we see with our head or with our belly . . .
9.4 If the New Testament faithfully transmits the precepts of the Christian religion then the Catholic religion is hardly Christian . . . The Catholic religion received its present form during ages of the grossest ignorance; it is impossible for a man again permitted to employ his reason to continue to adhere to it - it can be maintained only by fire and sword.
*10.9 One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being. This thought deserves to be taken very much to heart.
10.20 Alas, he exclaimed when things went wrong, if only I had done something pleasantly wicked this morning I would at least know why I am suffering now!
*10.24 When in a dream I dispute with someone and he contradicts and instructs me it is I who am instructing myself, that is to say reflecting. This reflection thus presents itself in the form of conversation. Can we be surprised, therefore, if earlier people expressed their thoughts about the serpent (as with Eve) with: the serpent spoke to me. The Lord spoke to me. My spirit spoke to me. Since we do not know where we think, we can remove our thoughts to wherever we wish. Just as we can speak so that he who hears us believes the voice is coming from a third person, so we can think, too, as though we were being spoken to. Genius Sokratis, etc. What an astonishing amount may we not yet learn from dreams.
Monday, May 17, 2010
The Art of Having Something to Say Part 10: Lichtenberg
"When sometimes I had drunk a lot of coffee. . ." and Other Aphorisms
1.5 Rousseau was right to call accent the soul of speech, and we often regard people as stupid and when we look into it we find it is merely the simple sound of their manner of speaking.
1.7 If we want to draw up a philosophy that will be useful to us in life, or if we want to offer universal rules for a perpetually contented life, then, to be sure, we have to abstract from that which introduces a much too great diversity into our contemplations - somewhat as we often do in mathematics when we forget friction and other similar particular properties of bodies so that the calculation will not be too difficult for us, or at least replace such properties with a single letter. Small misfortunes incontestably introduce a large measure of uncertainty into these practical rules, so that we have to dismiss them from our mind and turn our attention only to overcoming the greater misfortunes. This is incontestably the true meaning of certain propositions of the Stoic philosophy.
1.16 When sometimes I had drunk a lot of coffee, and was consequently startled by anything, I noticed quite distinctly that I was startled before I heard the noise: we thus hear as it were with other organs as well as with our ears.
1.20 A sensation expressed in words is like music described in words: the expressions we use are not sufficiently at one with the thing to be expressed. The poet who wants to excite sympathy directs the reader to a painting, and through this to the thing to be expressed. A painted landscape gives instant delight, but one celebrated in verse has first to be painted in the reader's own head. . .
1.25 The animalcula infusoria are bladders with desires.
1.26 It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure, the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.
1.29 The contention over signification and being which has caused such mischief in religion would perhaps have been more salutary if it had been conducted in respect to other subjects, for it is a general source of misfortune to us that we believe things are in actuality what they in fact only signify.
1.32 When Plato says the passions and natural desires are the wings of the soul he expresses himself in a very instructive way: such comparisons illuminate the subject and are as it were the translation of difficult concepts into a language familiar to everyone - true definitions.
1.35 The peasant who believes the moon is no bigger than a plough wheel never reflects that at a distance of a few miles a whole church appears only as a white speck but the moon on the contrary seems always to be the same size: what prevents him from connecting these ideas, which are all presented to hm distinctly? In his ordinary life he does in fact connect ideas and perhaps does so by more artificial connections than these. This reflection should make the philosopher pay heed: perhaps in some of the connections he makes he is still a peasant. We think early in life but we do not know we are thinking, any more than we know we are growing or digesting; many ordinary people never do discover it. Close observation of external things easily leads back to the point of observation, ourselves, and conversely he who is for once wholly aware of himself easily proceeds from that to obseving things around him. Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.
1.37 The philosophy of mankind as such is the philosophy of one certain individual man corrected by the philosophy of others, even of fools, and this in accordance with the rules of a rational assessment of degrees of probability. Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.
1.38 To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject. Cautiousness in judgements is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
2.10 Everyone ought to study at least as much philosophy and belles lettres as will serve to heighten his sensual pleasures, If our country squires, courtiers, counts and others took note of this they would often be astounded at the effect a book can produce. . .
2.14 Character of someone I know. His body is such that even a bad draughtsman could draw it better in the dark, and if it lay in his power to alter it many parts of it would be less obtrusive. Although his health is not of the best, this man has always been more or less content with it, and he possesses to a high degree the gift of making good use of healthy days. On such days his imagination, the most loyal of his companions, never deserts him; he stands at the window with his head between his hands, and if the passer-by sees nothing but a moper with his head in his hands he himself often silently confesses he has again been indulging in an excess of pleasure. He has but few friends, in fact his heart is open only to one who is actually present, though for several who are absent; his courtesy and complaisance make many believe he is their friend, and he does indeed serve them, but it is out of ambition or philanthropy, and not from the instinct that drives him to be a servant of his real friends. He has loved only once or twice, the first time not unhappily but the second time very happily; he gained through cheerfulness and levity alone a good heart through which he now often forgets both, though he will always revere cheerfulness and levity as qualities of his own soul which have procured for him the pleasantest hours of his life; and if he could choose another life and another soul I do not know that he would choose different ones if he could have his own back again. Even as a boy he was very free and independent of mind as regards religion, but never thought it would do him honour to be a free-spirit, nor however that to believe everything without exception would do him honour either. He is capable of fevent prayer and has never been able to read the 90th Psalm without an indescribable feeling of exaltation. Before the mountains were brought forth etc. means infinitely more to him than Sing, immortal soul etc. He does not know whom he hates more, young officers or young clergymen, but he could not live long with either of them. For assemblies his figure and his dress have seldom been good enough or his sentiments sufficiently - . He hopes never to have more than three courses for lunch and two for dinner, with a little wine, or less than potatoes, apples, bread and also a little wine every day: more than the one and less than the other would both make him unwell, as they always have done when for a few days he has lived beyond their boundaries. Reading and writing are as necessary to him as eating and drinking, and he hopes he will never be without books. He thinks about death very often and never with aversion; he wishes he could think about everything with so much composure, and hopes his Creator will one day demand of him gently a life of which he was, though not a particularly economical, a by no means profligate possessor.
2.17 He was so witty that any thing served him as an intermediate term for comparing any pair of other things with one another.
2.18 It is silly to assert that we are sometimes not really in the mood for anything; I believe that the moment in which we feel strong enough to suppress one of our principal drives, namely the drive to work and act, is the moment when we are perhaps best fitted to undertake the strangest and greatest things. The state we are in is a kind of langour in which the soul percieves as much that is uncommonly small as when in a state of ardent enthusiasm it does that which is uncommonly big; and as this latter state can be compared with the bold undertakings of the astronomers, so the former can be compared with the exertions of a Leeuwenhoek [ ].
2.21 Human pride is a strange thing, it is not easy to suppress: when hole A has been stoped up, before you know it it is peering out of hole B, and if that is closed it is already behind hole C, etc.
2.25 Sometimes I do not go out of the house for a week and live very contentedly: an equal period of house-arrest would make me ill. Where freedom is possible we move easily in our circle; where thought is under constraint even permitted thoughts come forth nervously.
2.27 Drinking, provided it is not indulged in before the age of 35, is not so greatly to be censured as many of my readers will imagine. This is approximately the time when a man emerges from the aberrant paths of his life out on to the plateau upon which he sees his future course lying open before him. It is depressing if, now discovering it is not the right course, his should be too weak on his feet at this stage to seek another. Should this discovery be attended by a sense of disquietude, experience has taught that wine sometimes works miracles; that five or six glasses put a man in the situation he has otherwise failed to attain . . .
2.30 He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.
1.5 Rousseau was right to call accent the soul of speech, and we often regard people as stupid and when we look into it we find it is merely the simple sound of their manner of speaking.
1.7 If we want to draw up a philosophy that will be useful to us in life, or if we want to offer universal rules for a perpetually contented life, then, to be sure, we have to abstract from that which introduces a much too great diversity into our contemplations - somewhat as we often do in mathematics when we forget friction and other similar particular properties of bodies so that the calculation will not be too difficult for us, or at least replace such properties with a single letter. Small misfortunes incontestably introduce a large measure of uncertainty into these practical rules, so that we have to dismiss them from our mind and turn our attention only to overcoming the greater misfortunes. This is incontestably the true meaning of certain propositions of the Stoic philosophy.
1.16 When sometimes I had drunk a lot of coffee, and was consequently startled by anything, I noticed quite distinctly that I was startled before I heard the noise: we thus hear as it were with other organs as well as with our ears.
1.20 A sensation expressed in words is like music described in words: the expressions we use are not sufficiently at one with the thing to be expressed. The poet who wants to excite sympathy directs the reader to a painting, and through this to the thing to be expressed. A painted landscape gives instant delight, but one celebrated in verse has first to be painted in the reader's own head. . .
1.25 The animalcula infusoria are bladders with desires.
1.26 It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure, the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.
1.29 The contention over signification and being which has caused such mischief in religion would perhaps have been more salutary if it had been conducted in respect to other subjects, for it is a general source of misfortune to us that we believe things are in actuality what they in fact only signify.
1.32 When Plato says the passions and natural desires are the wings of the soul he expresses himself in a very instructive way: such comparisons illuminate the subject and are as it were the translation of difficult concepts into a language familiar to everyone - true definitions.
1.35 The peasant who believes the moon is no bigger than a plough wheel never reflects that at a distance of a few miles a whole church appears only as a white speck but the moon on the contrary seems always to be the same size: what prevents him from connecting these ideas, which are all presented to hm distinctly? In his ordinary life he does in fact connect ideas and perhaps does so by more artificial connections than these. This reflection should make the philosopher pay heed: perhaps in some of the connections he makes he is still a peasant. We think early in life but we do not know we are thinking, any more than we know we are growing or digesting; many ordinary people never do discover it. Close observation of external things easily leads back to the point of observation, ourselves, and conversely he who is for once wholly aware of himself easily proceeds from that to obseving things around him. Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.
1.37 The philosophy of mankind as such is the philosophy of one certain individual man corrected by the philosophy of others, even of fools, and this in accordance with the rules of a rational assessment of degrees of probability. Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.
1.38 To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject. Cautiousness in judgements is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
2.10 Everyone ought to study at least as much philosophy and belles lettres as will serve to heighten his sensual pleasures, If our country squires, courtiers, counts and others took note of this they would often be astounded at the effect a book can produce. . .
2.14 Character of someone I know. His body is such that even a bad draughtsman could draw it better in the dark, and if it lay in his power to alter it many parts of it would be less obtrusive. Although his health is not of the best, this man has always been more or less content with it, and he possesses to a high degree the gift of making good use of healthy days. On such days his imagination, the most loyal of his companions, never deserts him; he stands at the window with his head between his hands, and if the passer-by sees nothing but a moper with his head in his hands he himself often silently confesses he has again been indulging in an excess of pleasure. He has but few friends, in fact his heart is open only to one who is actually present, though for several who are absent; his courtesy and complaisance make many believe he is their friend, and he does indeed serve them, but it is out of ambition or philanthropy, and not from the instinct that drives him to be a servant of his real friends. He has loved only once or twice, the first time not unhappily but the second time very happily; he gained through cheerfulness and levity alone a good heart through which he now often forgets both, though he will always revere cheerfulness and levity as qualities of his own soul which have procured for him the pleasantest hours of his life; and if he could choose another life and another soul I do not know that he would choose different ones if he could have his own back again. Even as a boy he was very free and independent of mind as regards religion, but never thought it would do him honour to be a free-spirit, nor however that to believe everything without exception would do him honour either. He is capable of fevent prayer and has never been able to read the 90th Psalm without an indescribable feeling of exaltation. Before the mountains were brought forth etc. means infinitely more to him than Sing, immortal soul etc. He does not know whom he hates more, young officers or young clergymen, but he could not live long with either of them. For assemblies his figure and his dress have seldom been good enough or his sentiments sufficiently - . He hopes never to have more than three courses for lunch and two for dinner, with a little wine, or less than potatoes, apples, bread and also a little wine every day: more than the one and less than the other would both make him unwell, as they always have done when for a few days he has lived beyond their boundaries. Reading and writing are as necessary to him as eating and drinking, and he hopes he will never be without books. He thinks about death very often and never with aversion; he wishes he could think about everything with so much composure, and hopes his Creator will one day demand of him gently a life of which he was, though not a particularly economical, a by no means profligate possessor.
2.17 He was so witty that any thing served him as an intermediate term for comparing any pair of other things with one another.
2.18 It is silly to assert that we are sometimes not really in the mood for anything; I believe that the moment in which we feel strong enough to suppress one of our principal drives, namely the drive to work and act, is the moment when we are perhaps best fitted to undertake the strangest and greatest things. The state we are in is a kind of langour in which the soul percieves as much that is uncommonly small as when in a state of ardent enthusiasm it does that which is uncommonly big; and as this latter state can be compared with the bold undertakings of the astronomers, so the former can be compared with the exertions of a Leeuwenhoek [ ].
2.21 Human pride is a strange thing, it is not easy to suppress: when hole A has been stoped up, before you know it it is peering out of hole B, and if that is closed it is already behind hole C, etc.
2.25 Sometimes I do not go out of the house for a week and live very contentedly: an equal period of house-arrest would make me ill. Where freedom is possible we move easily in our circle; where thought is under constraint even permitted thoughts come forth nervously.
2.27 Drinking, provided it is not indulged in before the age of 35, is not so greatly to be censured as many of my readers will imagine. This is approximately the time when a man emerges from the aberrant paths of his life out on to the plateau upon which he sees his future course lying open before him. It is depressing if, now discovering it is not the right course, his should be too weak on his feet at this stage to seek another. Should this discovery be attended by a sense of disquietude, experience has taught that wine sometimes works miracles; that five or six glasses put a man in the situation he has otherwise failed to attain . . .
2.30 He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.
Friday, May 14, 2010
The Art of Living: Master K
Some snippets from Master Kung (Confucius) - as he appears in Karl Jaspers' beautiful, simple summation in *The Great Philosophers* (Trans. Ralph Manheim, 1962):
Without learning, all other virtues are obscured as though by a fog and degenerate: without learning, frankness becomes vulgarity; bravery, disobedience; firmness, eccentricity; humanity, stupidity; wisdom, flightiness; sincerity, a plague.
Manners and music are fundamental. The essential is to shape men's nature, not to quench it. The ethos is fashioned in men's association with each other and in government.
A nation can be guided only by custom, not by knowledge.
A man is awakened by the Odes, strengthened by the *li* [imperatives of conduct], perfected by music. - Mere form, like mere knowledge, has no value without the originality that fulfils it, without the humanity that is enacted in it.
Confucius advocates self-mastery, not asceticism. Nature requires to be shaped, but violence can only harm it. Even hatred and anger have their place. The good man can love and hate in the right way. For example - He hates those who themselves are base and slander those who are above them; he hates the bold who know no morality; he hates the reckless, bigoted fanatic.
**What makes a place beautiful is the humanity that dwells there. He who is able to choose and does not settle among humane people is not wise.
Towards friends - Take no friends who are not at least as good as yourself. Loyalty is the foundation. Friends should - loyally admonish one another and tactfully set one another right. Friends can be relied on - Even if the season be cold, we know that pines and cypresses are evergreen.
When an appeal is made to the laws, it means that something is not in order. - When it comes to hearing complaints, I am no better than anyone else, says Master K. What interests me is to see that no complaints arise.
Do nothing overhastily; that will not succeed. Do not consider the small advantage, for no great work can prosper in this way.
**The political conditions must be such as to make effective action possible. Where the prevailing state of mind leaves no room for effective action, the true statesman remains in hiding.
All goodness, truth, beauty are combined in the ideal of the superior man (gentleman, chün-tzu). Noble in birth and endowment, he has the manners of a gentleman and the wisdom of a sage.
The character, cast of thought, gestures of the superior man are described. He is contrasted with the inferior man. The superior man is concerned with justice, the inferior man with profit. The superior man is quiet and serene, the inferior man is always full of anxiety. The superior man is congenial though never stooping to vulgarity; the inferior man is vulgar without being congenial. The superior man is dignified without arrogance; the inferior man is arrogant without dignity. The superior man is steadfast in distress; the inferior man in distress loses all control of himself. The superior man goes searching in himself; the inferior man goes searching in others. The superior man strives upward; the inferior man strives downward. The superior man is independent. He can endure long misfortune as well as long prosperity, and he lives free from fear. He suffers from his own inability, not from others' failure to understand him. He avoids all competition, but if it must be, then only in archery. He is slow in words and quick in action. He is careful not to let his words outshine his deeds: first act, then speak accordingly.
Master K is conscious of facing a great alternative: to retire into solitude or to live in the world and try to shape it. His decision is unequivocal - A man cannot live with the birds and beasts. If I do not live with men, with whom shall I live? And - he who is concerned only with the purity of his own life ruins the great human relations.
In their private lives these two hermits found purity; in their retirement they found what the circumstances demanded. I am different. For me there is nothing that is possible or impossible under all circumstances.
The nature of man is called *jen*. *Jen* is humanity and morality in one. The ideogram means "man" and "two," that is to say: to be human means to be in communication.
**Jen* is the all-embracing source. It is through *jen* that the particular virtue becomes truth. And *jen* is the source of the absolute untainted with expedience - The ethical man puts the difficulty first and the reward last.
In youth when the vital forces are not yet developed, guard against sensuality; in manhood, when the vital forces have attained their full strength, against quarrelsomeness; in old age, when the forces are on the wane, against avarice.
Only the highest wise men and the lowest fools are unchangeable.
Truth and reality are one. The mere idea is as nothing. The root of human salvation lies in the "knowledge that influences reality", that is, in the truth of ideas that are translated into an inner, transforming action.
When he does not understand something, the superior man is reticent.
When Lao-tzu taught that one should repay hostility with good deeds, Master K answered - With what then shall we reward good deeds? No, reward hostility with justice, and good deeds with good deeds.
Those who are capable of self-mastery, who have learned to do what is good and to know what they are doing, will always be few. The people, on the other hand, can be led to follow something; they cannot be led to understand it.
When asked "What is the first thing to be done in order to promote a renewal in disastrous circumstances?" Master K gave a remarkable answer - Words must be set aright. What inheres in words should be brought out. The prince should be a prince, the father a father, the man a man.
Master K refrains from all direct statement on metaphysical questions. Though such an attitude may be put down as agnosticism, it does not signify indifference to the unknowable, but rather a reverence which is unwilling to transform intimation into pseudo-knowledge or lose it in words.
**3 Death offers no ground for emotion, it is not situated in any field of essential meaning. He can indeed lament premature death - That some things germinate but do not flower; that some things flower that do not mature - alas, that happens. But - To die at nightfall, that is not bad. Death has no terrors - When a bird is dying, his song is mournful; when a man is dying, his speech is good.
Master K could lament - The superior man suffers that he must leave the world and that his name is not mentioned. My way is not followed. Whereby shall I be known to posterity? Ah, no one knows me! - But he quickly consoles himself - I do not grumble against heaven, I am not angry with men. I have searched here below and I am in communication with heaven. Heaven knows me. - He contents himself with his lot - To learn and unceasingly practice, does that not give satisfaction? And if companions come to you from far away, is not that too a ground for rejoicing? And not to grow embittered if men do not know you, is not that noble too? - I will not grieve that men do not know me; I should grieve only if I did not know the others.
The one thing over which a man is master is his own heart. Good or ill fortune is no yardstick of a man's value.
Zilu said: 'If the Lord of Wei were waiting for you to run the government, what would you give priority to?' The Master said: 'What is necessary is to rectify names, is it not?' Zilu said: 'If this were to take place, it would surely be an aberration of yours. Why should they be rectified?' The Master said: 'How uncivilised you are. With regard to what he does not understand the gentleman is urely somewhat reluctant to offer an opinion. If names are not rectified, then words are not appropriate. If words are not appropriate, then deeds are not accomplished. If deeds are not accomplished, then the rites and music do not flourish. If the rites and music do not flourish, then punishments do not hit the mark. If punishments do not hit the mark, then the people have nowhere to put hand and foot. So when gentleman names something, the name can definitely be used in speech; and when he says something, it can definitely be put into practice. In his utterances the gentleman is definitely not casual about anything.'
Master K did not turn away from the world to concentrate on himself. He devised no economic institutions, no legislation, no special form of government; he was passionately concerned with something that cannot be directly willed but only fostered indirectly, something on which everything else depends: the spirit of the whole in the ethical-political state and the inner make-up of every individual man as a part of the whole. He had no fundamental religious experience, no revelation; he achieved no inner rebirth, he was not a mystic. But neither was he a rationalist; in his thinking, rather, he was guided by the idea of an encompassing community, through which man becomes man. His passion was for beauty, order, truthfulness, and happiness in the world. And all these are grounded in something that is not made meaningless by failure and death.
What did Master K do? Unlike Lao-Tzu, he entered into the business of the world, driven by the idea that he was called to improve human conditions. He founded a school for future statesmen. He edited the classics. But still more significant: In China, Master K was the first great flaring up of reason in all its breadth and potentiality - and this in a man of the people.
Without learning, all other virtues are obscured as though by a fog and degenerate: without learning, frankness becomes vulgarity; bravery, disobedience; firmness, eccentricity; humanity, stupidity; wisdom, flightiness; sincerity, a plague.
Manners and music are fundamental. The essential is to shape men's nature, not to quench it. The ethos is fashioned in men's association with each other and in government.
A nation can be guided only by custom, not by knowledge.
A man is awakened by the Odes, strengthened by the *li* [imperatives of conduct], perfected by music. - Mere form, like mere knowledge, has no value without the originality that fulfils it, without the humanity that is enacted in it.
Confucius advocates self-mastery, not asceticism. Nature requires to be shaped, but violence can only harm it. Even hatred and anger have their place. The good man can love and hate in the right way. For example - He hates those who themselves are base and slander those who are above them; he hates the bold who know no morality; he hates the reckless, bigoted fanatic.
**What makes a place beautiful is the humanity that dwells there. He who is able to choose and does not settle among humane people is not wise.
Towards friends - Take no friends who are not at least as good as yourself. Loyalty is the foundation. Friends should - loyally admonish one another and tactfully set one another right. Friends can be relied on - Even if the season be cold, we know that pines and cypresses are evergreen.
When an appeal is made to the laws, it means that something is not in order. - When it comes to hearing complaints, I am no better than anyone else, says Master K. What interests me is to see that no complaints arise.
Do nothing overhastily; that will not succeed. Do not consider the small advantage, for no great work can prosper in this way.
**The political conditions must be such as to make effective action possible. Where the prevailing state of mind leaves no room for effective action, the true statesman remains in hiding.
All goodness, truth, beauty are combined in the ideal of the superior man (gentleman, chün-tzu). Noble in birth and endowment, he has the manners of a gentleman and the wisdom of a sage.
The character, cast of thought, gestures of the superior man are described. He is contrasted with the inferior man. The superior man is concerned with justice, the inferior man with profit. The superior man is quiet and serene, the inferior man is always full of anxiety. The superior man is congenial though never stooping to vulgarity; the inferior man is vulgar without being congenial. The superior man is dignified without arrogance; the inferior man is arrogant without dignity. The superior man is steadfast in distress; the inferior man in distress loses all control of himself. The superior man goes searching in himself; the inferior man goes searching in others. The superior man strives upward; the inferior man strives downward. The superior man is independent. He can endure long misfortune as well as long prosperity, and he lives free from fear. He suffers from his own inability, not from others' failure to understand him. He avoids all competition, but if it must be, then only in archery. He is slow in words and quick in action. He is careful not to let his words outshine his deeds: first act, then speak accordingly.
Master K is conscious of facing a great alternative: to retire into solitude or to live in the world and try to shape it. His decision is unequivocal - A man cannot live with the birds and beasts. If I do not live with men, with whom shall I live? And - he who is concerned only with the purity of his own life ruins the great human relations.
In their private lives these two hermits found purity; in their retirement they found what the circumstances demanded. I am different. For me there is nothing that is possible or impossible under all circumstances.
The nature of man is called *jen*. *Jen* is humanity and morality in one. The ideogram means "man" and "two," that is to say: to be human means to be in communication.
**Jen* is the all-embracing source. It is through *jen* that the particular virtue becomes truth. And *jen* is the source of the absolute untainted with expedience - The ethical man puts the difficulty first and the reward last.
In youth when the vital forces are not yet developed, guard against sensuality; in manhood, when the vital forces have attained their full strength, against quarrelsomeness; in old age, when the forces are on the wane, against avarice.
Only the highest wise men and the lowest fools are unchangeable.
Truth and reality are one. The mere idea is as nothing. The root of human salvation lies in the "knowledge that influences reality", that is, in the truth of ideas that are translated into an inner, transforming action.
When he does not understand something, the superior man is reticent.
When Lao-tzu taught that one should repay hostility with good deeds, Master K answered - With what then shall we reward good deeds? No, reward hostility with justice, and good deeds with good deeds.
Those who are capable of self-mastery, who have learned to do what is good and to know what they are doing, will always be few. The people, on the other hand, can be led to follow something; they cannot be led to understand it.
When asked "What is the first thing to be done in order to promote a renewal in disastrous circumstances?" Master K gave a remarkable answer - Words must be set aright. What inheres in words should be brought out. The prince should be a prince, the father a father, the man a man.
Master K refrains from all direct statement on metaphysical questions. Though such an attitude may be put down as agnosticism, it does not signify indifference to the unknowable, but rather a reverence which is unwilling to transform intimation into pseudo-knowledge or lose it in words.
**3 Death offers no ground for emotion, it is not situated in any field of essential meaning. He can indeed lament premature death - That some things germinate but do not flower; that some things flower that do not mature - alas, that happens. But - To die at nightfall, that is not bad. Death has no terrors - When a bird is dying, his song is mournful; when a man is dying, his speech is good.
Master K could lament - The superior man suffers that he must leave the world and that his name is not mentioned. My way is not followed. Whereby shall I be known to posterity? Ah, no one knows me! - But he quickly consoles himself - I do not grumble against heaven, I am not angry with men. I have searched here below and I am in communication with heaven. Heaven knows me. - He contents himself with his lot - To learn and unceasingly practice, does that not give satisfaction? And if companions come to you from far away, is not that too a ground for rejoicing? And not to grow embittered if men do not know you, is not that noble too? - I will not grieve that men do not know me; I should grieve only if I did not know the others.
The one thing over which a man is master is his own heart. Good or ill fortune is no yardstick of a man's value.
Zilu said: 'If the Lord of Wei were waiting for you to run the government, what would you give priority to?' The Master said: 'What is necessary is to rectify names, is it not?' Zilu said: 'If this were to take place, it would surely be an aberration of yours. Why should they be rectified?' The Master said: 'How uncivilised you are. With regard to what he does not understand the gentleman is urely somewhat reluctant to offer an opinion. If names are not rectified, then words are not appropriate. If words are not appropriate, then deeds are not accomplished. If deeds are not accomplished, then the rites and music do not flourish. If the rites and music do not flourish, then punishments do not hit the mark. If punishments do not hit the mark, then the people have nowhere to put hand and foot. So when gentleman names something, the name can definitely be used in speech; and when he says something, it can definitely be put into practice. In his utterances the gentleman is definitely not casual about anything.'
Master K did not turn away from the world to concentrate on himself. He devised no economic institutions, no legislation, no special form of government; he was passionately concerned with something that cannot be directly willed but only fostered indirectly, something on which everything else depends: the spirit of the whole in the ethical-political state and the inner make-up of every individual man as a part of the whole. He had no fundamental religious experience, no revelation; he achieved no inner rebirth, he was not a mystic. But neither was he a rationalist; in his thinking, rather, he was guided by the idea of an encompassing community, through which man becomes man. His passion was for beauty, order, truthfulness, and happiness in the world. And all these are grounded in something that is not made meaningless by failure and death.
What did Master K do? Unlike Lao-Tzu, he entered into the business of the world, driven by the idea that he was called to improve human conditions. He founded a school for future statesmen. He edited the classics. But still more significant: In China, Master K was the first great flaring up of reason in all its breadth and potentiality - and this in a man of the people.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Ancient Aphorisms (1998)
One or two of you seem to be finding my junior aphoristic scribblings a little bit entertaining (edifying?), so here are some of the earliest ones. The model back in the strange days of the mid- to late-90's was La Rochefoucauld - hence the antiquarian references to "virtue/s" (not sexual purity, but "excellence/s"), to measures of human greatness and to artists' "gifts". Hence too the slight overuse of the royally meditative, lyrico-didactic first person plural pronoun so characteristic of the bonzai philosophy I've criticised others for cultivating in their inner suburban gardens.
***
It is in bad taste nowadays to point out what is bad taste.
Unless given direction as well as impetus, unless they are as it were held out before their owners for them to fix their gaze on, talents are bound to bite their owners on the back at a later date. About half the talent in the world ceases to exist before it so much as comes to light.
If your only virtue is that you are impossible to dislike then all but run-of-the-mill human beings are going to find you a bore.
Even in great people, hypocrisy casts a pall over almost all things.
The all-time most venomous human beings are those who discover their talents much too late in life, when their lives are trickling away and what is left of their talents is even less than a trickle.
Once breaking taboos for its own sake ceases to be entertaining and fashionable (as it is now) it will become boring; and the end of it will be that human beings' lives will be more shapeless and miserable than ever before.
There is a certain sort of human being who sees in himself the aggregate of every possible weakness. None of this however prevents him from conceiving of himself heroically.
Even the meekest are capable of the most ingenious simulation and dissimulation when things go incontrovertibly against them.
Timid people are liable to go through life without ever understanding that the urge to humiliate people plays an important part in the emotional economy of others, most especially those others who are their arch-tormentors and rivals.
We use the word "boring" to denigrate those who are fighting the same fight as we, but whose characters counsel more reserve than we ourselves possess or whose tactics in the fight are more subtle. We use nastier epithets to distinguish those who attach less value to victory but are nevertheless fighting with the same vehemence as ourselves.
How many exceptional human beings have been stunned into stupor by the specious argument that by championing the exception they thereby wanted to denigrate the rule?
Style, simultaneously an expression of esprit and an outlet for one’s highest ideals, is also a matter of self-concealment.
The tragedy ends. After the tragedy, questions of personal agency become more urgent and obscure.
The History of Art is a process of revolutionising taste (for example, over the past two centuries this has quite understandably often involved scandalising the bourgeoisie), which is precisely why it must be suspected that the History of Art, if not Art itself, has come to an end, viz. because taste has become something increasingly less substantial, less embodied by actual forms of life, a cultural surface phenomenon, incorporated increasingly into a meta-taste, the taste for - revolutionising taste for its own sake, actually no taste at all. We have realised that the impulse to make it new has been completely subsumed by the society-wide push to fabricate new things to turf out, but making it old is unfortunately no refuge where the little bit of purism about us can still be given its due.
In addition to the small number of individuals rebelling against existent things must be taken into account the large number rebelling against what is palpably non-existent, against conditions, institutions, “certainties”, systems of “certainties” which had their day long ago, not to mention the even larger number perfectly content to remain perfectly obsolescent. The Twentieth Century, in which the speed of social and cultural transformation has increased, is unique among the centuries for having produced so many historical misfits, so many throwbacks to past decades and centuries. (Everyone indeed is a misfit in some not insignificant sense.) What we have here is a dynamic "spirit of the times" which everyone is behind, a spirit of the times with no one to represent it.
Too few people know how to read. Even the best of us carry on as readers like "idlers in the garden of knowledge". To read actively is to experience each sentence as an accusation or a challenge.
There are certain people who despise us because we see through them, whom we despise because they too see through us. While the fact of seeing-through and being-seen-through is something perfectly normal and desirable, it is nevertheless actively concealed by most. Under normal circumstances, this makes mutual recognitions of this sort doubly abnormal and repellent. On occasions they also lead to friendship; bursting through the social veil from opposite directions you come across another human being - which can be such a novelty and such a gigantic relief that the result is a lasting alliance.
The first effect of the death of outstanding individuals is to make the quotidian look like a monstrous bad joke.
Death, nevertheless, is something about which an incomparable number of disingenuous things have been said, - something around which a greater dustheap of ill-conceived anti-psychological prejudice could hardly have amassed. The fact that it is the occasion for so much cliché, false sentiment and superstition, not its chimeric imponderability, sets it apart as something remarkable.
It is not merely the presence of paradox which is the signpost to philosophical problems, but also the absence of these things, the garden-variety clichés and platitudes, with all their accompanying mental and psychological dross.
Poetry or Philosophy. Poetry, fairly and unfairly, has been viewed as mankind's crowning cultural achievement because poetry, when practiced by its various masters, seemed in comparison to philosophy to say things more richly and appositely. Das, was die Philosophie pedantisch vor uns stellt, raunt das Gedicht uns zu - what philosophy pedantically sets before us the poet whispers or shows us with a sign. The discoveries of the philosophers who were most like poets still seem to go about with leaden feet in comparison.
Spirit of reverence. Perhaps one of the highest talents anyone can cultivate in an age in which conviction curdles, belief rings untrue and the proclamation of mysteries is a sacrilege is the talent for undisillusioned appreciation. Such a person doesn't so much set him or herself against the world, re-situating all prime values somewhere else in history, as discover a fine reason for averting his or her gaze from present surroundings.
To look on - in sad fascination. To remain silent - even if it be forever. To carry oneself as if this life were a tragedy into which one is born to play the leading role. Such attitudes remain the worthiest things which a certain calibre of human being can aspire to, most especially in ages lacking in naive self-confidence.
There are educated people who are largely incapable of enjoying art or writing until it is explained, until the vagaries of art or writing get turned into a pseudo-conceptual critical game of some variety. No doubt they would come to a better understanding of the field if they could get their heads round the idea that artists and writers are more often than not worse-read, worse-educated, altogether less objective than they. Among educated people education is nothing less than a point of honour, among artists it is often regarded as not much more than a point of reference and a weapon with which to fight for certain ideas they have about themselves.
Nietzsche in conversation. Tell obtuse people who are puzzling earnestly over aesthetic questions that are too difficult for them that the writer or artist in question was a Nietzschean without knowing it.
Nothingness yawns twice as contentedly in Australia.
Sydney is full of people who dream of going to the gym in the morning. Melbourne is full of people whose profoundest instinct is to reach for the self-help shelves in the afternoon gloom.
Forbesian. Sydney-siders behave as if Sydney were the Venice of the South Pacific, the best place on earth to confuse "good" with "sexy". Melbournians behave as if they invented stylised gloom - as if making looking miserable look snappy but also a little edifying were a service to humanity. To the Sydney-sider of seasoned experience Melbourne is like some bad-taste Europe, Europe the Art-lined purgatory where you're constantly reminded how lucky you were to escape Melbourne's hell. Overburdened with imagination and conscience, Melbournians of course finds Sydney - heaven.
We listen to the advice of others as a matter of form, not as a matter of policy. To the advice of friends we generally give half a thought - then disregard it. To that of people who leave us indifferent - we give no thought at all. To the advice of people whose sphere of experience could not conceivably encompass the dilemma or sticky situation we find ourselves in - we also give no thought at all, though we do give more than a little thought to ways of revenging ourselves for their willingness to give advice.
The scourge of those who want to know things well and yet are sincerely sceptical: the self-regard of the sincerely ignorant.
Almost all intellectual errors, misinterpretations and the like are a result of mistaking the level at which something is said.
Upbraiding others when we recognise in them weaknesses similar to our own is more often than not as close as we get to upbraiding ourselves for our weaknesses.
Sincerity is not a mark of freedom and Democritus stood things very nearly on their heads in claiming that it is. Sincerity is commonly also a mark of solid self-satisfaction and only to be esteemed when combined with notions of level and depth. The sincerity of a human being who wades about in the shallows is a phenomenon that calls to be seen through. (More fairly:- it is only to be gauged accurately when listened to against the background noise of his or her whole way of life and the ways of life of his or her world.)
The only intelligent modern-day contributions to classical wisdom are ironic ones.
The only half-tolerable patriotism is the sort that loves its country and thinks that the best thing it can do for its country is send up its country.
It is the task of the philosopher to comment upon what we subtly allow ourselves to say and disallow ourselves from saying.
Aphorisms are an advantageous way of philosophising. They express, though not at the level of what is being said, the idea that no philosophical system can encompass the length and breadth of the world. A collection of aphorisms is a halfway house between a philosophy and a chaotic assortment of metaphor; the individual metaphors are the basic element, but each points equally in the direction of philosophy, which is the endeavour to speak the whole in the knowledge that it neither can nor necessarily should be spoken.
How to explain this? A proposition which stands in a relationship of logical contradiction to another proposition can equally stand in a relationship of metaphorical complementarity to the same proposition. Philosophically however the two simply stand side by side. Philosophy in this sense is perspectival - it privileges neither the standpoint of logic (where things stand opposite their contraries) nor that of metaphor (where things can leap over as far as their contraries). Objectivity pertains to it - precisely insofar as it gives individual propositions full subjective weight.
If a vaguely rigorous "theory of value systems" could be extrapolated from Wittgenstein's many riffs on the theme of language-games then one would have a ready means with which to disassemble so many of the pseudo-problems of moral philosophy and aesthetics. The absence of the even vaguely rigorous is perhaps the distinguishing feature of what today goes under names like "Continental Philosophy" and "Theory". Whereas an abundance of rigour and a terror of any deep-seated theory of value systems is the distinguishing feature of all “Analytic Philosophy”. Its delicious air of mystagoguery is what makes the former so attractive, the whiff of fear and soldiery what makes the latter unfashionable.
An ability to discern what goes on in the heads of others is perfectly compatible with a perfect inability to discern what is going on inside your own head. (And vice versa.) The sphere of all your self-perception and the sphere of your perception of others are incommensurable.
Women in the age of plastic exaltation. The women who are lauded with attention in this age of better things for better living through technology - the stalkers on the cat-walks and the sugarloaves in the soapies (those monumental fantasy figures of bourgeois morality writ small) - are never beautiful, though many of them are attractive. In what does this attractiveness consist? Well, if La Rochefoucauld is right when he says that attractiveness, as distinct from beauty, is a mysterious harmony between a person's features and the person's general bearing - then today's plastic-women are attractive in the sense that their regular plastic features are in harmony with the vapidity of their general bearing.
An interesting coincidence: that at about the age strong-minded women start seeing ghosts (c.60) their weak-minded husbands start behaving like ghosts.
People with an abundance of very particular habits who aren't trying to keep their niggardliness in check or to themselves must be suspected of inventing these habits as a means of attracting attention to themselves.
Physique is less important than mystique - once inside the bedroom.
Poetry, whose basis is incantation, whose origins are ritualistic, depends for its effect on the mystique of saying something eloquent. It should come as no surprise to those who have taken pause to mark the demise of religious feeling in the West over the past 150 years that poetry is becoming increasingly impossible if not downright absurd.
The exceptional talents of a large number of men and women never get recognized, not even so much as by themselves, because they spend their whole lives in insipid or unexceptional company. These people are simply never presented with their own mirror image, the brilliant man or woman in whom talent has crystallized as a sense of purpose - the only thing that might ever have led them to think more highly of themselves. It seems amazing - no one with great gifts crosses their path in the whole of a lifetime.
***
It is in bad taste nowadays to point out what is bad taste.
Unless given direction as well as impetus, unless they are as it were held out before their owners for them to fix their gaze on, talents are bound to bite their owners on the back at a later date. About half the talent in the world ceases to exist before it so much as comes to light.
If your only virtue is that you are impossible to dislike then all but run-of-the-mill human beings are going to find you a bore.
Even in great people, hypocrisy casts a pall over almost all things.
The all-time most venomous human beings are those who discover their talents much too late in life, when their lives are trickling away and what is left of their talents is even less than a trickle.
Once breaking taboos for its own sake ceases to be entertaining and fashionable (as it is now) it will become boring; and the end of it will be that human beings' lives will be more shapeless and miserable than ever before.
There is a certain sort of human being who sees in himself the aggregate of every possible weakness. None of this however prevents him from conceiving of himself heroically.
Even the meekest are capable of the most ingenious simulation and dissimulation when things go incontrovertibly against them.
Timid people are liable to go through life without ever understanding that the urge to humiliate people plays an important part in the emotional economy of others, most especially those others who are their arch-tormentors and rivals.
We use the word "boring" to denigrate those who are fighting the same fight as we, but whose characters counsel more reserve than we ourselves possess or whose tactics in the fight are more subtle. We use nastier epithets to distinguish those who attach less value to victory but are nevertheless fighting with the same vehemence as ourselves.
How many exceptional human beings have been stunned into stupor by the specious argument that by championing the exception they thereby wanted to denigrate the rule?
Style, simultaneously an expression of esprit and an outlet for one’s highest ideals, is also a matter of self-concealment.
The tragedy ends. After the tragedy, questions of personal agency become more urgent and obscure.
The History of Art is a process of revolutionising taste (for example, over the past two centuries this has quite understandably often involved scandalising the bourgeoisie), which is precisely why it must be suspected that the History of Art, if not Art itself, has come to an end, viz. because taste has become something increasingly less substantial, less embodied by actual forms of life, a cultural surface phenomenon, incorporated increasingly into a meta-taste, the taste for - revolutionising taste for its own sake, actually no taste at all. We have realised that the impulse to make it new has been completely subsumed by the society-wide push to fabricate new things to turf out, but making it old is unfortunately no refuge where the little bit of purism about us can still be given its due.
In addition to the small number of individuals rebelling against existent things must be taken into account the large number rebelling against what is palpably non-existent, against conditions, institutions, “certainties”, systems of “certainties” which had their day long ago, not to mention the even larger number perfectly content to remain perfectly obsolescent. The Twentieth Century, in which the speed of social and cultural transformation has increased, is unique among the centuries for having produced so many historical misfits, so many throwbacks to past decades and centuries. (Everyone indeed is a misfit in some not insignificant sense.) What we have here is a dynamic "spirit of the times" which everyone is behind, a spirit of the times with no one to represent it.
Too few people know how to read. Even the best of us carry on as readers like "idlers in the garden of knowledge". To read actively is to experience each sentence as an accusation or a challenge.
There are certain people who despise us because we see through them, whom we despise because they too see through us. While the fact of seeing-through and being-seen-through is something perfectly normal and desirable, it is nevertheless actively concealed by most. Under normal circumstances, this makes mutual recognitions of this sort doubly abnormal and repellent. On occasions they also lead to friendship; bursting through the social veil from opposite directions you come across another human being - which can be such a novelty and such a gigantic relief that the result is a lasting alliance.
The first effect of the death of outstanding individuals is to make the quotidian look like a monstrous bad joke.
Death, nevertheless, is something about which an incomparable number of disingenuous things have been said, - something around which a greater dustheap of ill-conceived anti-psychological prejudice could hardly have amassed. The fact that it is the occasion for so much cliché, false sentiment and superstition, not its chimeric imponderability, sets it apart as something remarkable.
It is not merely the presence of paradox which is the signpost to philosophical problems, but also the absence of these things, the garden-variety clichés and platitudes, with all their accompanying mental and psychological dross.
Poetry or Philosophy. Poetry, fairly and unfairly, has been viewed as mankind's crowning cultural achievement because poetry, when practiced by its various masters, seemed in comparison to philosophy to say things more richly and appositely. Das, was die Philosophie pedantisch vor uns stellt, raunt das Gedicht uns zu - what philosophy pedantically sets before us the poet whispers or shows us with a sign. The discoveries of the philosophers who were most like poets still seem to go about with leaden feet in comparison.
Spirit of reverence. Perhaps one of the highest talents anyone can cultivate in an age in which conviction curdles, belief rings untrue and the proclamation of mysteries is a sacrilege is the talent for undisillusioned appreciation. Such a person doesn't so much set him or herself against the world, re-situating all prime values somewhere else in history, as discover a fine reason for averting his or her gaze from present surroundings.
To look on - in sad fascination. To remain silent - even if it be forever. To carry oneself as if this life were a tragedy into which one is born to play the leading role. Such attitudes remain the worthiest things which a certain calibre of human being can aspire to, most especially in ages lacking in naive self-confidence.
There are educated people who are largely incapable of enjoying art or writing until it is explained, until the vagaries of art or writing get turned into a pseudo-conceptual critical game of some variety. No doubt they would come to a better understanding of the field if they could get their heads round the idea that artists and writers are more often than not worse-read, worse-educated, altogether less objective than they. Among educated people education is nothing less than a point of honour, among artists it is often regarded as not much more than a point of reference and a weapon with which to fight for certain ideas they have about themselves.
Nietzsche in conversation. Tell obtuse people who are puzzling earnestly over aesthetic questions that are too difficult for them that the writer or artist in question was a Nietzschean without knowing it.
Nothingness yawns twice as contentedly in Australia.
Sydney is full of people who dream of going to the gym in the morning. Melbourne is full of people whose profoundest instinct is to reach for the self-help shelves in the afternoon gloom.
Forbesian. Sydney-siders behave as if Sydney were the Venice of the South Pacific, the best place on earth to confuse "good" with "sexy". Melbournians behave as if they invented stylised gloom - as if making looking miserable look snappy but also a little edifying were a service to humanity. To the Sydney-sider of seasoned experience Melbourne is like some bad-taste Europe, Europe the Art-lined purgatory where you're constantly reminded how lucky you were to escape Melbourne's hell. Overburdened with imagination and conscience, Melbournians of course finds Sydney - heaven.
We listen to the advice of others as a matter of form, not as a matter of policy. To the advice of friends we generally give half a thought - then disregard it. To that of people who leave us indifferent - we give no thought at all. To the advice of people whose sphere of experience could not conceivably encompass the dilemma or sticky situation we find ourselves in - we also give no thought at all, though we do give more than a little thought to ways of revenging ourselves for their willingness to give advice.
The scourge of those who want to know things well and yet are sincerely sceptical: the self-regard of the sincerely ignorant.
Almost all intellectual errors, misinterpretations and the like are a result of mistaking the level at which something is said.
Upbraiding others when we recognise in them weaknesses similar to our own is more often than not as close as we get to upbraiding ourselves for our weaknesses.
Sincerity is not a mark of freedom and Democritus stood things very nearly on their heads in claiming that it is. Sincerity is commonly also a mark of solid self-satisfaction and only to be esteemed when combined with notions of level and depth. The sincerity of a human being who wades about in the shallows is a phenomenon that calls to be seen through. (More fairly:- it is only to be gauged accurately when listened to against the background noise of his or her whole way of life and the ways of life of his or her world.)
The only intelligent modern-day contributions to classical wisdom are ironic ones.
The only half-tolerable patriotism is the sort that loves its country and thinks that the best thing it can do for its country is send up its country.
It is the task of the philosopher to comment upon what we subtly allow ourselves to say and disallow ourselves from saying.
Aphorisms are an advantageous way of philosophising. They express, though not at the level of what is being said, the idea that no philosophical system can encompass the length and breadth of the world. A collection of aphorisms is a halfway house between a philosophy and a chaotic assortment of metaphor; the individual metaphors are the basic element, but each points equally in the direction of philosophy, which is the endeavour to speak the whole in the knowledge that it neither can nor necessarily should be spoken.
How to explain this? A proposition which stands in a relationship of logical contradiction to another proposition can equally stand in a relationship of metaphorical complementarity to the same proposition. Philosophically however the two simply stand side by side. Philosophy in this sense is perspectival - it privileges neither the standpoint of logic (where things stand opposite their contraries) nor that of metaphor (where things can leap over as far as their contraries). Objectivity pertains to it - precisely insofar as it gives individual propositions full subjective weight.
If a vaguely rigorous "theory of value systems" could be extrapolated from Wittgenstein's many riffs on the theme of language-games then one would have a ready means with which to disassemble so many of the pseudo-problems of moral philosophy and aesthetics. The absence of the even vaguely rigorous is perhaps the distinguishing feature of what today goes under names like "Continental Philosophy" and "Theory". Whereas an abundance of rigour and a terror of any deep-seated theory of value systems is the distinguishing feature of all “Analytic Philosophy”. Its delicious air of mystagoguery is what makes the former so attractive, the whiff of fear and soldiery what makes the latter unfashionable.
An ability to discern what goes on in the heads of others is perfectly compatible with a perfect inability to discern what is going on inside your own head. (And vice versa.) The sphere of all your self-perception and the sphere of your perception of others are incommensurable.
Women in the age of plastic exaltation. The women who are lauded with attention in this age of better things for better living through technology - the stalkers on the cat-walks and the sugarloaves in the soapies (those monumental fantasy figures of bourgeois morality writ small) - are never beautiful, though many of them are attractive. In what does this attractiveness consist? Well, if La Rochefoucauld is right when he says that attractiveness, as distinct from beauty, is a mysterious harmony between a person's features and the person's general bearing - then today's plastic-women are attractive in the sense that their regular plastic features are in harmony with the vapidity of their general bearing.
An interesting coincidence: that at about the age strong-minded women start seeing ghosts (c.60) their weak-minded husbands start behaving like ghosts.
People with an abundance of very particular habits who aren't trying to keep their niggardliness in check or to themselves must be suspected of inventing these habits as a means of attracting attention to themselves.
Physique is less important than mystique - once inside the bedroom.
Poetry, whose basis is incantation, whose origins are ritualistic, depends for its effect on the mystique of saying something eloquent. It should come as no surprise to those who have taken pause to mark the demise of religious feeling in the West over the past 150 years that poetry is becoming increasingly impossible if not downright absurd.
The exceptional talents of a large number of men and women never get recognized, not even so much as by themselves, because they spend their whole lives in insipid or unexceptional company. These people are simply never presented with their own mirror image, the brilliant man or woman in whom talent has crystallized as a sense of purpose - the only thing that might ever have led them to think more highly of themselves. It seems amazing - no one with great gifts crosses their path in the whole of a lifetime.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Gernot Böhme: The End of the Baconian Age
For anyone looking for a little more in explanation of one of the claims in my recent Böhme translation, a rough English version of the opening page and half of B's The End of the Baconian Age (Am Ende des Baconschen Zeitalters, 1993):
The Baconian Faith, The Baconian Programme
We are in the habit of giving names to eras only once we are bidding them farewell. It is only then that a particular characteristic of the age becomes noticeable as a fully-fledged characteristic mark - in the past we hardly noticed it at all because we took it as an unquestionable given of our existence in the world. If today we have reason to call the age of modern science the Baconian era, this is because a given of our existence has vanished - the basic conviction that scientific and technological progress amount to the same thing as human progress. In its time this basic conviction came into the world through Francis Bacon. We might call it the opening of the age of modern science.
The belief that techno-scientific progress was the same thing as human progress was not a given of the age that preceded Bacon: the notion of progress was quite foreign to antiquity, while in the Christian Middle Ages human progress was to be found on the path of religious salvation; it was certainly not what men and women looked to worldly sciences to provide. Bacon himself was highly conscious of the fact that his conviction was by no means something he could assume ordinary people shared. His entire output as a writer was a single propaganda campaign in support of this his guiding idea. In particular his object was to convince political authority - England's reigning queen and then its king - of the "dignity and progress of the sciences" - to persuade them, in short, to give science their financial and institutional backing. His programme of large-scale renewal (instauratio magna) was shaped by a notion that had been voiced by many - the call for the religious reformation that had been set in motion to be expanded into a general reformation of the entire world. What distinguished Bacon from the other reformers - those whose names are writ large in the figures of Cromwell and Comenius - was that he set his hopes for human progress on the development of science and technology rather than on political revolution or educational reforms. As he put it in the justly famous Aphorism 129 of the first volume of his Novum Organon:
"For the benefits of discoveries may extend to the whole race of man, civil benefits only to particular places; the latter last not beyond a few ages, the former through all time. Moreover, the reformation of a state in civil matters is seldom brought in without violence and confusion; but discoveries carry blessings with them, and confer benefits without causing harm or sorrow to any."
Here we find the consisest answer to the question what the Baconian programme consisted in - in short, in organising science into an enterprise devoted specifically to new inventions and in forming science into a social institution capable of transforming its discoveries for the benefit of humanity at large. . .
The Baconian Faith, The Baconian Programme
We are in the habit of giving names to eras only once we are bidding them farewell. It is only then that a particular characteristic of the age becomes noticeable as a fully-fledged characteristic mark - in the past we hardly noticed it at all because we took it as an unquestionable given of our existence in the world. If today we have reason to call the age of modern science the Baconian era, this is because a given of our existence has vanished - the basic conviction that scientific and technological progress amount to the same thing as human progress. In its time this basic conviction came into the world through Francis Bacon. We might call it the opening of the age of modern science.
The belief that techno-scientific progress was the same thing as human progress was not a given of the age that preceded Bacon: the notion of progress was quite foreign to antiquity, while in the Christian Middle Ages human progress was to be found on the path of religious salvation; it was certainly not what men and women looked to worldly sciences to provide. Bacon himself was highly conscious of the fact that his conviction was by no means something he could assume ordinary people shared. His entire output as a writer was a single propaganda campaign in support of this his guiding idea. In particular his object was to convince political authority - England's reigning queen and then its king - of the "dignity and progress of the sciences" - to persuade them, in short, to give science their financial and institutional backing. His programme of large-scale renewal (instauratio magna) was shaped by a notion that had been voiced by many - the call for the religious reformation that had been set in motion to be expanded into a general reformation of the entire world. What distinguished Bacon from the other reformers - those whose names are writ large in the figures of Cromwell and Comenius - was that he set his hopes for human progress on the development of science and technology rather than on political revolution or educational reforms. As he put it in the justly famous Aphorism 129 of the first volume of his Novum Organon:
"For the benefits of discoveries may extend to the whole race of man, civil benefits only to particular places; the latter last not beyond a few ages, the former through all time. Moreover, the reformation of a state in civil matters is seldom brought in without violence and confusion; but discoveries carry blessings with them, and confer benefits without causing harm or sorrow to any."
Here we find the consisest answer to the question what the Baconian programme consisted in - in short, in organising science into an enterprise devoted specifically to new inventions and in forming science into a social institution capable of transforming its discoveries for the benefit of humanity at large. . .
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Gernot Böhme: Techno-Philosophy, Techno-Criticism - Sample No. 1
Invasive Technification - Introduction (from the German by CS)
1. Deep within the Brain
Not long ago, a book about an illness achieved the notable feat of making it onto German best-seller lists. Could it have been something to do with the way the account managed to move the reader to participate in the story? There are, after all, a plethora of medical narratives that aim to mobilise or strengthen our affective powers. Could it have been simply that this account was well written - that it displayed an authorial frankness placing it squarely in the tradition of European confessional literature? My suspicion is that the breadth and depth of public response has to do more with the content of the account - a content that triggers a sort of metaphysical terror in the reader.
The book is Deep within the Brain and in it sociology professor Helmut Dubiel tells the story of his experiences with Parkinson's Disease. The decisive point of his account - what makes it stand out from many a biographical account of illness - is when the progress of Dubiel's malady can no longer be kept in check with medication and he is having to come to terms with public humiliations because of ever more noticeable symptoms - at which stage he has a technically state-of-the-art implant inserted into his brain. The implant creates an electrical stimulus that regulates the interaction of brain hormones. (The latter gets out of balance in the absence of dopamine - the root cause of Parkinson's Disease.) Yet although artificial regulation does indeed result in a notable improvement of typical Parkinson's symptoms such as shaking and reduced motor functions, in some cases, like Dubiel's, it has extremely severe side-effects. The stimulus to the interior of the brain interferes seriously with the speech capacity of the patient - a catastrophic impairment for an academic with a lecturing position at a university.
Dubiel could thus not but view the medical intervention subjectively as a mistake and objectively as a failure. In his case the medical world had hit on a form of treatment that in a certain sense seems macabre - Dubiel reported in a newspaper interview, for example, that to other people he sometimes comes across as a sort of zombie: he can switch off the implanted pacemaker which stimulates the relevant region deep in the brain using a hand-held remote-control. This allows him to speak again without any trouble, however his Parkinson's symptoms recur, meaning for example that he can no longer walk. When he switches the device on again, he can walk and carry out deliberate bodily movements, however his speech capacity is again impaired - so much so for example that he can no longer give a lecture.
Dubiel's case gives dramatic proof of where society stands today vis-a'-vis new possibilities of highly technified medicine. When Dubiel talks about being able to switch himself on and off, what is fundamentally at issue is the meaning of this selfhood. Is he the human being who can move about in well co-ordinated fashion or the human being who can form proper sentences? Or is he perhaps the human being who has the subjective experience of switching on and off? The implant seems to have brought about a deep-seated dissociation of Dubiel's psycho-physical unity. The medical technology, viewed already by medical practitioners as invasive - that is, as intruding deeply and permanently into the body rather than merely supporting or supplementing bodily functions - can also be called invasive in a wider sense: in cases like Dubiel's it has failed to restore a human life damaged by illness or to allow such a life to be lived half-way normally again, and instead changed what life fundamentally is for the patient - changed, one could even say, what he or she is as a human being.
Today especially, developments are afoot in medicine that give good reason to critically apply the medical concept of the invasive to the technification of human relationships and of social relations across the board. It is true that the concept has military connotations - an invasion is of course a violent act of intrusion. Yet much medical technology has to be viewed as such too; it is viewed as such by the patients affected by it, it seems indeed to be sensed bodily as such - in the depths of our organic being.
The decisive question though is whether technification merely improves or extends an already existing form of human action or already existing human relations, or whether it fundamentally alters them. Clearly it is possible to object that technologies have always brought about fundamental changes to human life. Thus with the invention of writing - a communication technology - human society, and indeed what it was to be human, was fundamentally changed. Yet obviously up till now we have had little reason to see technological change in the problematic light we do today. Technology has instead been viewed almost totally from the point of view of means and ends - a way of looking at things that takes the ends wholly for granted. The result is that the ethics of technology - including medical ethics - have been almost exclusively utilitarian; problematic situations have been thought to demand a weighing up costs vs. benefits or expectations vs. risks. What has been overlooked is that the application of a new technology can change the pre-conditions of application, and that means also the very purposes and ends of application. The utilitarian approach to technology no longer suffices in light of the experiences medical technology confronts us with today. The question has to be asked: what does technology mean when it takes the form of invasive technification of the conditions of human life?
2. The Iron Cage
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sociologist Max Weber asserted famously that modern man was in the process of confining himself to an iron cage. What he had in mind were the constraints human beings have to impose on themselves to make the rationalisation of social life possible - at work and on the street in traffic, in business and in private life. A characteristic example is punctuality - a virtue without which the worlds of modern transport and work would simply be unthinkable. According to Weber, the detachment vis-a'-vis one's own feelings and moods necessary to operate technical equipment is radical. Human behaviour necessarily becomes cooler, more matter-of-fact.
By technology or technique (Technik) Weber understands the thorough-going rational organisation of activity for the purposes of increased efficiency. In this sense we speak not only of power generation technology, but of techniques of playing the piano as well. The concept of technology/technique involved here marks the rationalisation of the conditions of human life as a kind of technification. For Weber, feats of individual moral self-control form the background to the rational arrangement of social life with a view to efficiency, above all feats of inner discipline, worldly asceticism - industriousness, reliability, punctuality, matter-of-factness, in short the prime values associated with the puritan ethic that made the modern world possible. So for Weber the problem of the iron cage is the social problem of technical efficiency on the one hand and its ethical preconditions on the other. In 1954 Jacques Ellul drew together both sides of Weber's analysis under the rubric of technological society.
Today the Weberian metaphor of the iron cage makes a curious impression. For Weber is not thinking here of any physical structure, say the rail network that in his day was imprinting a new spatial order on the landscape; nor is he thinking of the steel and reinforced concrete structures that became the physical home of working and business life and in the form of warehouses helped to transform luxury consumption into mass consumption. Quite the opposite - the iron cage is for Weber precisely a metaphor for an inner state, for inner ethical or at most abstract social constraints.
A generation after Weber the growth of such constraints since early modern times was to be described by another sociologist, Norbert Elias, as the civilising process in a work with precisely that title. The notable point about Elias' study however is that in the very period of its inception, viz. the 1930's, the process itself was veering round 180 degrees - something that is easy to guage in the sole passage where Elias addresses the issue of modern technology. It is worth citing in full:
"Man denke an die holprigen, ungepflasterten, von Regen und Wind verwüstbaren Landstraßen einer einfachen, natural wirtschaftenden Krieger-Gesellschaft. Der Verkehr ist, von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen, ganz gering; die Hauptgefahr, die hier der Mensch für den Menschen darstellt, hat die Form des kriegerischen oder räuberischen Überfalls. Wenn die Menschen um sich blicken, wenn sie mit dem Auge Bäume and Hügel absuchen oder auf der Straße selbst entlang sehen, dann geschiegt es in erster Linie, weil sie immer gewärtig sein müssen, mit der Waffe in der Hand angegriffen zu warden, und erst in zweiter oder dritter Linie, weil sie irgend jemandem auszuweichen haben. Das Leben auf den großen Straßen dieser Gesellschaft verlangt eine ständige Bereitschaft zu kämpfen und die Leidenschaften in Verteidigung seines Lebens oder seines Besitzes gegen einen körperlichen Angriff spielen zu lassen. Der Verkehr auf den Hauptstraßen einer großen Stadt in der differenzierteren Gesellschaft unserer Zeit verlangt eine ganz andere Modellierung des psychischen Apparats. Hier ist die Gefahr eines räuberischen oder kriegerischen Überfalls auf ein Minimum beschränkt. Automobile fahren in Eile hierhin and dorthin; Fußgänger und Radfahrer suchen sich durch das Gewühl der Wagen hindurchzuwinden; Schutzleute stehen an den großen Straßenkreuzungen, um es mit mehr oder weniger Glück zu regulieren. Aber die äußere Regulierung ist von Grund auf darauf abgestimmt, daß jeder Einzelne sein Verhalten entsprechend den Notwendigkeiten dieser Verflechtung aufs genaueste selbst reguliert. Die Hauptgefahr, die hier der Mensch für den Menschen bedeutet, entsteht dadurch, daß irgend jemand inmitten dieses Getriebes seine Selbstknotrolle verliert. Eine beständige Selbstüberwachung, eine höchst differenzierte Selbstregelung des Verhaltens ist notwendig, damit der Einzelne sich durch dieses Gewühl hindurchzusteuern vermag. Es genügt, daß die Anspannung, die diese stete Selbstregulierung erfordert, für einen Einzelnen zu groß wird, um ihn selbst und Andere in Todesgefahr zu bringen." [English forthcoming]
Elias of course makes the comparison between the street in a traditional warrior society and the street of a modern metropolis in order to illustrate his thesis that the move from external constraint to self-constraint plays a key role in shaping the behaviour of individuals in transit and the sort of attention they pay to potential dangers. However because he describes a scene involving technologically regulated traffic, it becomes clear that in twentieth century modernity a shift back to external constraints has already taken place: the behaviour of modern human beings dealing with street traffic may indeed be disciplined, however it doesn't rest on self-constraint, at least not in the moral sense, but on technical constraints and technified methods of regulating traffic. The penalties for deviating from regulations are again external and are factored into one's expectations as such: deviations from appropriate matter-of-fact behaviour lead to accidents.
The external pre-conditions of everyday life, transformed over time into technical pre-conditions, have such a powerful effect on behaviour that individuals can progressively feel themselves absolved of ethical constraints. This leads subsequently - in tandem with a growing luxury economy - to a waning of the puritan ethic and a substitution of technical norms for moral norms. Cases in point are the replacement of traditional handicraft ethics and business ethics by quality control and obligatory declarations on the one hand and by government supervision on the other. A further case in point is the obsolescence of virtues such as thrift on the part of consumers. The standard example of technical norms taking the place of their ethical forerunners is the redundance of traditional sexual morality as a result of industrialised provision of effective means of birth-control.
3. Material Substitution
In the course of recent history, technology has come to have a civilisation-defining significance, not only in Weber's sense (viz. as a system of rules geared towards efficiency), but as a system of material means. In everything from our society's technical infrastructure (e.g. railways and more recently the internet) through to the pharmacological means for regulating the way we function physically and mentally, it is the technical conditions of life that determine how life is lived. In the process the metaphor of the iron cage is now taking on a different hue of ambivalence. Taken at face value, the metaphor of the cage implies that technology is something external to our actions and social relations. Yet the technology that governs human life today is no longer external. On the contrary, modern technology has penetrated deeply into social activity; technological systems are bringing about the technical regulation of human life in the very depths of our organic being. In the contemporary world, technology, in short, is not a cage in which human life can carry on protected and unchanged; it has instead become something like the skeleton of human life, abstractly put - a sort of infrastructure of life. The human all-too-human side of existence has thereby been reduced to a phenotype - what appears to wear all the bright colours of human individuality is little more than the game permitted by technical pre-conditions and their associated structures. In principle, everyone is in the same position. Individuality becomes a surface phenomenon.
1. Deep within the Brain
Not long ago, a book about an illness achieved the notable feat of making it onto German best-seller lists. Could it have been something to do with the way the account managed to move the reader to participate in the story? There are, after all, a plethora of medical narratives that aim to mobilise or strengthen our affective powers. Could it have been simply that this account was well written - that it displayed an authorial frankness placing it squarely in the tradition of European confessional literature? My suspicion is that the breadth and depth of public response has to do more with the content of the account - a content that triggers a sort of metaphysical terror in the reader.
The book is Deep within the Brain and in it sociology professor Helmut Dubiel tells the story of his experiences with Parkinson's Disease. The decisive point of his account - what makes it stand out from many a biographical account of illness - is when the progress of Dubiel's malady can no longer be kept in check with medication and he is having to come to terms with public humiliations because of ever more noticeable symptoms - at which stage he has a technically state-of-the-art implant inserted into his brain. The implant creates an electrical stimulus that regulates the interaction of brain hormones. (The latter gets out of balance in the absence of dopamine - the root cause of Parkinson's Disease.) Yet although artificial regulation does indeed result in a notable improvement of typical Parkinson's symptoms such as shaking and reduced motor functions, in some cases, like Dubiel's, it has extremely severe side-effects. The stimulus to the interior of the brain interferes seriously with the speech capacity of the patient - a catastrophic impairment for an academic with a lecturing position at a university.
Dubiel could thus not but view the medical intervention subjectively as a mistake and objectively as a failure. In his case the medical world had hit on a form of treatment that in a certain sense seems macabre - Dubiel reported in a newspaper interview, for example, that to other people he sometimes comes across as a sort of zombie: he can switch off the implanted pacemaker which stimulates the relevant region deep in the brain using a hand-held remote-control. This allows him to speak again without any trouble, however his Parkinson's symptoms recur, meaning for example that he can no longer walk. When he switches the device on again, he can walk and carry out deliberate bodily movements, however his speech capacity is again impaired - so much so for example that he can no longer give a lecture.
Dubiel's case gives dramatic proof of where society stands today vis-a'-vis new possibilities of highly technified medicine. When Dubiel talks about being able to switch himself on and off, what is fundamentally at issue is the meaning of this selfhood. Is he the human being who can move about in well co-ordinated fashion or the human being who can form proper sentences? Or is he perhaps the human being who has the subjective experience of switching on and off? The implant seems to have brought about a deep-seated dissociation of Dubiel's psycho-physical unity. The medical technology, viewed already by medical practitioners as invasive - that is, as intruding deeply and permanently into the body rather than merely supporting or supplementing bodily functions - can also be called invasive in a wider sense: in cases like Dubiel's it has failed to restore a human life damaged by illness or to allow such a life to be lived half-way normally again, and instead changed what life fundamentally is for the patient - changed, one could even say, what he or she is as a human being.
Today especially, developments are afoot in medicine that give good reason to critically apply the medical concept of the invasive to the technification of human relationships and of social relations across the board. It is true that the concept has military connotations - an invasion is of course a violent act of intrusion. Yet much medical technology has to be viewed as such too; it is viewed as such by the patients affected by it, it seems indeed to be sensed bodily as such - in the depths of our organic being.
The decisive question though is whether technification merely improves or extends an already existing form of human action or already existing human relations, or whether it fundamentally alters them. Clearly it is possible to object that technologies have always brought about fundamental changes to human life. Thus with the invention of writing - a communication technology - human society, and indeed what it was to be human, was fundamentally changed. Yet obviously up till now we have had little reason to see technological change in the problematic light we do today. Technology has instead been viewed almost totally from the point of view of means and ends - a way of looking at things that takes the ends wholly for granted. The result is that the ethics of technology - including medical ethics - have been almost exclusively utilitarian; problematic situations have been thought to demand a weighing up costs vs. benefits or expectations vs. risks. What has been overlooked is that the application of a new technology can change the pre-conditions of application, and that means also the very purposes and ends of application. The utilitarian approach to technology no longer suffices in light of the experiences medical technology confronts us with today. The question has to be asked: what does technology mean when it takes the form of invasive technification of the conditions of human life?
2. The Iron Cage
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sociologist Max Weber asserted famously that modern man was in the process of confining himself to an iron cage. What he had in mind were the constraints human beings have to impose on themselves to make the rationalisation of social life possible - at work and on the street in traffic, in business and in private life. A characteristic example is punctuality - a virtue without which the worlds of modern transport and work would simply be unthinkable. According to Weber, the detachment vis-a'-vis one's own feelings and moods necessary to operate technical equipment is radical. Human behaviour necessarily becomes cooler, more matter-of-fact.
By technology or technique (Technik) Weber understands the thorough-going rational organisation of activity for the purposes of increased efficiency. In this sense we speak not only of power generation technology, but of techniques of playing the piano as well. The concept of technology/technique involved here marks the rationalisation of the conditions of human life as a kind of technification. For Weber, feats of individual moral self-control form the background to the rational arrangement of social life with a view to efficiency, above all feats of inner discipline, worldly asceticism - industriousness, reliability, punctuality, matter-of-factness, in short the prime values associated with the puritan ethic that made the modern world possible. So for Weber the problem of the iron cage is the social problem of technical efficiency on the one hand and its ethical preconditions on the other. In 1954 Jacques Ellul drew together both sides of Weber's analysis under the rubric of technological society.
Today the Weberian metaphor of the iron cage makes a curious impression. For Weber is not thinking here of any physical structure, say the rail network that in his day was imprinting a new spatial order on the landscape; nor is he thinking of the steel and reinforced concrete structures that became the physical home of working and business life and in the form of warehouses helped to transform luxury consumption into mass consumption. Quite the opposite - the iron cage is for Weber precisely a metaphor for an inner state, for inner ethical or at most abstract social constraints.
A generation after Weber the growth of such constraints since early modern times was to be described by another sociologist, Norbert Elias, as the civilising process in a work with precisely that title. The notable point about Elias' study however is that in the very period of its inception, viz. the 1930's, the process itself was veering round 180 degrees - something that is easy to guage in the sole passage where Elias addresses the issue of modern technology. It is worth citing in full:
"Man denke an die holprigen, ungepflasterten, von Regen und Wind verwüstbaren Landstraßen einer einfachen, natural wirtschaftenden Krieger-Gesellschaft. Der Verkehr ist, von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen, ganz gering; die Hauptgefahr, die hier der Mensch für den Menschen darstellt, hat die Form des kriegerischen oder räuberischen Überfalls. Wenn die Menschen um sich blicken, wenn sie mit dem Auge Bäume and Hügel absuchen oder auf der Straße selbst entlang sehen, dann geschiegt es in erster Linie, weil sie immer gewärtig sein müssen, mit der Waffe in der Hand angegriffen zu warden, und erst in zweiter oder dritter Linie, weil sie irgend jemandem auszuweichen haben. Das Leben auf den großen Straßen dieser Gesellschaft verlangt eine ständige Bereitschaft zu kämpfen und die Leidenschaften in Verteidigung seines Lebens oder seines Besitzes gegen einen körperlichen Angriff spielen zu lassen. Der Verkehr auf den Hauptstraßen einer großen Stadt in der differenzierteren Gesellschaft unserer Zeit verlangt eine ganz andere Modellierung des psychischen Apparats. Hier ist die Gefahr eines räuberischen oder kriegerischen Überfalls auf ein Minimum beschränkt. Automobile fahren in Eile hierhin and dorthin; Fußgänger und Radfahrer suchen sich durch das Gewühl der Wagen hindurchzuwinden; Schutzleute stehen an den großen Straßenkreuzungen, um es mit mehr oder weniger Glück zu regulieren. Aber die äußere Regulierung ist von Grund auf darauf abgestimmt, daß jeder Einzelne sein Verhalten entsprechend den Notwendigkeiten dieser Verflechtung aufs genaueste selbst reguliert. Die Hauptgefahr, die hier der Mensch für den Menschen bedeutet, entsteht dadurch, daß irgend jemand inmitten dieses Getriebes seine Selbstknotrolle verliert. Eine beständige Selbstüberwachung, eine höchst differenzierte Selbstregelung des Verhaltens ist notwendig, damit der Einzelne sich durch dieses Gewühl hindurchzusteuern vermag. Es genügt, daß die Anspannung, die diese stete Selbstregulierung erfordert, für einen Einzelnen zu groß wird, um ihn selbst und Andere in Todesgefahr zu bringen." [English forthcoming]
Elias of course makes the comparison between the street in a traditional warrior society and the street of a modern metropolis in order to illustrate his thesis that the move from external constraint to self-constraint plays a key role in shaping the behaviour of individuals in transit and the sort of attention they pay to potential dangers. However because he describes a scene involving technologically regulated traffic, it becomes clear that in twentieth century modernity a shift back to external constraints has already taken place: the behaviour of modern human beings dealing with street traffic may indeed be disciplined, however it doesn't rest on self-constraint, at least not in the moral sense, but on technical constraints and technified methods of regulating traffic. The penalties for deviating from regulations are again external and are factored into one's expectations as such: deviations from appropriate matter-of-fact behaviour lead to accidents.
The external pre-conditions of everyday life, transformed over time into technical pre-conditions, have such a powerful effect on behaviour that individuals can progressively feel themselves absolved of ethical constraints. This leads subsequently - in tandem with a growing luxury economy - to a waning of the puritan ethic and a substitution of technical norms for moral norms. Cases in point are the replacement of traditional handicraft ethics and business ethics by quality control and obligatory declarations on the one hand and by government supervision on the other. A further case in point is the obsolescence of virtues such as thrift on the part of consumers. The standard example of technical norms taking the place of their ethical forerunners is the redundance of traditional sexual morality as a result of industrialised provision of effective means of birth-control.
3. Material Substitution
In the course of recent history, technology has come to have a civilisation-defining significance, not only in Weber's sense (viz. as a system of rules geared towards efficiency), but as a system of material means. In everything from our society's technical infrastructure (e.g. railways and more recently the internet) through to the pharmacological means for regulating the way we function physically and mentally, it is the technical conditions of life that determine how life is lived. In the process the metaphor of the iron cage is now taking on a different hue of ambivalence. Taken at face value, the metaphor of the cage implies that technology is something external to our actions and social relations. Yet the technology that governs human life today is no longer external. On the contrary, modern technology has penetrated deeply into social activity; technological systems are bringing about the technical regulation of human life in the very depths of our organic being. In the contemporary world, technology, in short, is not a cage in which human life can carry on protected and unchanged; it has instead become something like the skeleton of human life, abstractly put - a sort of infrastructure of life. The human all-too-human side of existence has thereby been reduced to a phenotype - what appears to wear all the bright colours of human individuality is little more than the game permitted by technical pre-conditions and their associated structures. In principle, everyone is in the same position. Individuality becomes a surface phenomenon.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Gernot Böhme: Techno-Philosophy, Techno-Criticism - Sample No. 2
The Philosophy of Technology
1. Paradigms
The question is why a philosophy of technology should exist in the first place - in any case something that is to be more than philosophy in the trivial sense in which one might speak of a philosophy of skiing or a philosophy of flower-arrangement. Why should there also be a specific discipline known as the philosophy of technology taking its place alongside other philosophical disciplines such as ethics, aesthetics, logic, metaphysics and the philosophy of nature? What gives rise to the question is the paradoxical situation that, on the one hand, the philosophy of technology exists in point of fact (viz. in the form of publications, curricula and professorial chairs), while on the other hand no convincing paradigm of a philosophy of technology has appeared in the field. That may be because philosophy, in any case contemporary philosophy, belongs squarely among the humanities and researchers in the humanities on the whole have only a very superficial knowledge of technology - because few in any case have sought to see the phenomena of technology from the inside. Could this also be why their results have been paltry and in some cases downright dull?
Though it must be said that this assessment is not quite accurate. Enumerating philosophy's subdisciplines already suggests a place for a philosophy of technology under the rubric of the philosophy of nature. When Aristotle for instance divides being-in-general into what exists of its own natural accord and what exists by virtue of technology (phusei on, technē on) in his Physics, this indeed suggests the possibility of developing a philosophy of technology alongside the philosophy of nature; indeed, in light of the proliferation of technology in today's world, the need to do so is urgent. What mode of being could technical devices and objects be assimilated to? The question itself implies that the philosophy of technology would have to be an ontology of technological entities. With his notion of Zeug (material, "stuff"), the Martin Heidegger of Being and Time might provide a pointer: being of a technical nature is "material", Zeug, with the existential character of being ready-to-hand. The latter consists in the usefulness of technological objects. In general they fit inconspicuously into a field of meaning, only becoming noticeable if they cease to be useful, in which case they fall back into a different existential mode - that of being merely present-to-hand. Yet as illuminating as Heidegger's approach is, it really only suits traditional technology, handicraft technology; modern technology is another matter. Heidegger obviously saw the limitation himself and in his later philosophy went on to sketch a philosophy of technology that oversteps all limits.
Moreover, it is not true that the philosophy of technology is altogether lacking in paradigms. Beside the ontological paradigm that derives essentially from Aristotle and Heidegger, we must at least make mention of the paradigms whose roots lie in anthropology and the philosophy of history. The anthropological paradigm goes back to the sophist Protagoras, or rather to Plato, who ascribes it to Protagoras in his dialogue of the same name. On this interpretation of technology, the guiding question is "What is a human being?" Technology is a humanum, a human competence with the help of which human beings compensate for insufficient natural endowments or indeed become capable of getting by in the first place. Technology thus belongs to the essence of being human. Human beings are by nature deficient beings - as Gehlen was to put it in the twentieth century. They are what they are only insofar as they also develop culture. For Plato/Protagoras, social or political skill is part of the picture, not just physical equipment. In Plato the capacity for politics also comes under the heading of technology; it is the technē politike.
The negative estimate of technology implicit in this concept (technology for Plato is merely a makeshift of necessity) already elicited a strong response in antiquity; in its modern re-formulation in the work of Gehlen it is radically re-valued; for Gehlen, technology is no longer a sign of a limitation that animals are not subject to, but a mark of distinction, a capacity through which human beings surpass other animals. Using technology human beings can be free of the given conditions of life, they can emanciplate themselves from the world of nature. Through technology, humanity creates an environment that suits it; technology becomes second nature to it - an idea already to be found in the work of Marx. Admittedly, examples of the use of technology among animals were now identified too - dam-building among beavers and the like; however, even if we assume that the use of technology is in the end something natural to animals, viz. a genetically inherited pattern of behaviour, the difference between the technological worlds of humans and animals nonetheless remains spectacular. Leaving inventors of the ancient world like Daedelus, Heron and Archimedes to one side, since the advent of the modern world technological discovery has come to have a dynamism that connects it in an essential sense with ingenuity (Lat. ingenium). The paradigmatic technologist on this conception is not actually the craftsman but the engineer. In modernity, technology is no longer simply a means of survival, but a means of substantially enhancing life.
This is already to flag the transition to another of our paradigms, this one deriving from the philosophy of history. The anthropological paradigm might be said to take for granted an unchanging relation between human beings and technology; it fails to allow for historical change, even on the technological side of the ledger. Yet the history of technology is a sort of history unto itself and in relating it we can identify the major epochs in the relationship between human beings and technology. The most notable work to do so is not actually a work of philosophy, but a cultural history of nature, Serge Moscovici's Human History of Nature. Though one might not guess from the title, the book is also a cultural history of technology in the sense that it sets out the epochal differences in the characteristic relationship between forms of labour and concepts of nature. Handicraft work here corresponds to nature conceived according to the notions of matter and form, engineering is aligned with nature considered as an interconnected field of force and cybernetics with nature considered synthetically or as a construct. We can also talk here of the epoch of one or another dominant technology - thus of epochs dominated successively by form-giving handicraft technology, by mechanics and industrial technology as organising forces and by the controlling and ordering functions of Information Technology.
An interpretation of technology from the standpoint of the philosophy of history is actually to be found in the first philosophy of technology to explicitly identify itself as such. Ernst Kapp's philosophy of technology could also be subsumed under the anthropological paradigm, viz. insofar as Kapp seeks to interpret various technologies as projections of human bodily organs. In doing so he amplifies the Aristotelian notion of technology (that it imitates nature) by assuming that in technology human beings give external form to the structure of the human organism itself. Yet while the load-bearing structures of bridges may indeed resemble the lamella-structure of the human femur - and while the telephone network can certainly be interpreted as a sort of nervous system - it is of course easy to point to technologies that have no counterpart in the human body (the wheel for one). To be sure, there are grounds for interpreting technology as an imitation of nature. Nature's technical solutions prove time and again to be exemplary in terms of simplicity and efficiency: consider the stability of blades of grass from the structural point of view, the body-shape of the dolphin from the point of view of fluid mechanics, the capacity of the brain to store and process information. Yet imitation, especially today, is by no means unconscious. Rather, it is something based on research, viz. in the field of bionics.
The decisive point of Kapp's philosophy of technology however lies in his integration of technological development into the history of human consciousness. His magnum opus, the Principles of a Philosophy of Technology, is in effect the materialist counterpart to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Just as Hegel tracks the way spirit comes to consciousness of itself in the objective forms of its own works, so Kapp describes the way humans become conscious of themselves as embodied beings in their technological creations. The conceptual figure in Hegel and Kapp is one and the same: self-consciousness is attained by making the implicit explicit. According to Kapp, "self-consciousness thus proves to be the result of a process whereby knowledge of something external is converted into something internal." Just as Hegel thinks that in his very philosophy the world of spirit finally comes full circle, so Kapp thinks human beings achieve true self-consciousness in his Principles of a Philosophy of Technology. In Kapp's quasi-prophetic world-historical terms "the conscious creation of technology might shine brightly in the foreground of human achievement; it remains nothing more than a reflection of the depths of the unconscious, the elaboration of a consciousness that was first redeemed by rudimentary tools."
While Kapp's philosophy of technology is hardly known outside specialist circles, Martin Heidegger's later philosophy of technology has had considerable influence in the history of ideas. What makes this all the more astonishing is that Heidegger consciously positioned himself at a considerable distance from all matters technological both in life and thought. Yet it was probably for just this reason that he hit a raw nerve among those of his contemporaries who were disquieted by technological development. His compact Die Frage nach der Technik (The Question concerning Technology) can be read as a radical criticism of modern technology - on Heidegger's picture a technology that reduces nature to a mere resource, destroys traditional forms of life (and thereby traditional forms of technology too) and in the end turns human beings themselves into mere raw material. Heidegger paints into his highly stylised picture of Geschick ("destining") everything that for the individual appears overwhelming about modern technological developments - everything, indeed, that might be soberly described in terms of the emergence in modernity of a third cultural super-structure alongside the state and the market economy. Under the rubric of Gestell ("enframing"), technology itself becomes an epoch in the history of Being; it is the epoch when Being discloses itself through a technical Herausforderung ("challenging-forth") and thereby withdraws all the more decisively. Yet in the process the role of human beings in maintaining the openness of Being, indeed in maintaining truth itself, becomes open to view - and it is here that Heidegger detects the possibility of deliverance. It is impossible today to go along either with the subtly sanctimonious formula Heidegger borrows from Hölderlin:
"Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst
Das Rettende auch."
("Where the danger is, there too//The saving power grows.")
or his associative style of presentation, haunted as it is by obscure readings of Greek and German etymology. Yet something remains of Heidegger's philosophy of technology that is significant - a view of technology that, like the entire ontological paradigm, goes back to Aristotle. However, here we can speak of a further paradigm, viz. an epistemological paradigmatic model.
In his Nichmochean Ethics, Aristotle enumerates a series of types of knowledge, forms of aletheia. Reason, wisdom, science and ethical insight are on the list, but so too is technology. The high regard for technology as an independent form of knowledge is all the more impressive in that technology doesn't even appear on the graded scale of types of knowledge Plato sets out in the so-called "analogy of the divided line" in The Republic. Though one should not draw the conclusion that Plato's attitude to technology is therefore contemptuous - for example that it involves looking down on artisans as too banausic. On the contrary, it was the expertise of craftsmen that best met Socrates' challenge to his contemporaries' claims to knowledge. Likewise Plato's thorough-going rationalisation of all forms of public activity called for the development of a specific technique - a technike - appropriate to each activity.
In Aristotle technology is characterised as a form of knowledge that guides the fabrication of things. Making things (poiesis) for Aristotle is a form of human action to be distinguished from praxis - the (self-contained) fulfilment of life's activities. Making has its aim in a product or work, whereas the goal of praxis lies in itself.
This is the late Heideggerian point of departure; for Heidegger thinks that with the advent of modern science, all forms of knowledge have come under the domination of the technical model of knowledge. Since Galileo, indeed, it has been in technical contexts, through experimentation and measurement, that nature has been an object of knowledge; according to Descartes' maxim, we should seek to understand nature as the expert craftsman understands the products of his craft: to know something means knowing how it can be fabricated. Science thus becomes an exercise in technically reproducing nature: that at least would be the identifiable meaning of Heidegger's speculations about the history of Being. The epistemological model of technology implicit in the technologist's view of the world becomes the dominant form of knowledge in modernity. The critical potential of Heidegger's philosophy of technology is hence essentially a critique of the modern world-view - a critique of science similar to what we find in Goethe's Theory of Colour and continuing all the way through to Habermas' Science and Technology as "Ideology" and the phenomenology of the present-day. Goethe and the phenomenologists object to the technical model of knowledge by opposing it to a knowledge that establishes a personally meaningful subjectively coloured orientation with the help of a systematic description of phenomena. Critical Theory on the other hand objects to the technical model of knowledge on the grounds that it is technocratic. What Aristotle calls poiesis and praxis has its place in a critical theorist such as Habermas under the rubric of purposive-rational action or interaction. In opposition to technocratic knowledge, critical theory posits a form of knowledge capable of effecting practical change through critical reflection about existing social circumstances - reflection that is guided through and through by what Horkheimer called "an interest in rational conditions."
1. Paradigms
The question is why a philosophy of technology should exist in the first place - in any case something that is to be more than philosophy in the trivial sense in which one might speak of a philosophy of skiing or a philosophy of flower-arrangement. Why should there also be a specific discipline known as the philosophy of technology taking its place alongside other philosophical disciplines such as ethics, aesthetics, logic, metaphysics and the philosophy of nature? What gives rise to the question is the paradoxical situation that, on the one hand, the philosophy of technology exists in point of fact (viz. in the form of publications, curricula and professorial chairs), while on the other hand no convincing paradigm of a philosophy of technology has appeared in the field. That may be because philosophy, in any case contemporary philosophy, belongs squarely among the humanities and researchers in the humanities on the whole have only a very superficial knowledge of technology - because few in any case have sought to see the phenomena of technology from the inside. Could this also be why their results have been paltry and in some cases downright dull?
Though it must be said that this assessment is not quite accurate. Enumerating philosophy's subdisciplines already suggests a place for a philosophy of technology under the rubric of the philosophy of nature. When Aristotle for instance divides being-in-general into what exists of its own natural accord and what exists by virtue of technology (phusei on, technē on) in his Physics, this indeed suggests the possibility of developing a philosophy of technology alongside the philosophy of nature; indeed, in light of the proliferation of technology in today's world, the need to do so is urgent. What mode of being could technical devices and objects be assimilated to? The question itself implies that the philosophy of technology would have to be an ontology of technological entities. With his notion of Zeug (material, "stuff"), the Martin Heidegger of Being and Time might provide a pointer: being of a technical nature is "material", Zeug, with the existential character of being ready-to-hand. The latter consists in the usefulness of technological objects. In general they fit inconspicuously into a field of meaning, only becoming noticeable if they cease to be useful, in which case they fall back into a different existential mode - that of being merely present-to-hand. Yet as illuminating as Heidegger's approach is, it really only suits traditional technology, handicraft technology; modern technology is another matter. Heidegger obviously saw the limitation himself and in his later philosophy went on to sketch a philosophy of technology that oversteps all limits.
Moreover, it is not true that the philosophy of technology is altogether lacking in paradigms. Beside the ontological paradigm that derives essentially from Aristotle and Heidegger, we must at least make mention of the paradigms whose roots lie in anthropology and the philosophy of history. The anthropological paradigm goes back to the sophist Protagoras, or rather to Plato, who ascribes it to Protagoras in his dialogue of the same name. On this interpretation of technology, the guiding question is "What is a human being?" Technology is a humanum, a human competence with the help of which human beings compensate for insufficient natural endowments or indeed become capable of getting by in the first place. Technology thus belongs to the essence of being human. Human beings are by nature deficient beings - as Gehlen was to put it in the twentieth century. They are what they are only insofar as they also develop culture. For Plato/Protagoras, social or political skill is part of the picture, not just physical equipment. In Plato the capacity for politics also comes under the heading of technology; it is the technē politike.
The negative estimate of technology implicit in this concept (technology for Plato is merely a makeshift of necessity) already elicited a strong response in antiquity; in its modern re-formulation in the work of Gehlen it is radically re-valued; for Gehlen, technology is no longer a sign of a limitation that animals are not subject to, but a mark of distinction, a capacity through which human beings surpass other animals. Using technology human beings can be free of the given conditions of life, they can emanciplate themselves from the world of nature. Through technology, humanity creates an environment that suits it; technology becomes second nature to it - an idea already to be found in the work of Marx. Admittedly, examples of the use of technology among animals were now identified too - dam-building among beavers and the like; however, even if we assume that the use of technology is in the end something natural to animals, viz. a genetically inherited pattern of behaviour, the difference between the technological worlds of humans and animals nonetheless remains spectacular. Leaving inventors of the ancient world like Daedelus, Heron and Archimedes to one side, since the advent of the modern world technological discovery has come to have a dynamism that connects it in an essential sense with ingenuity (Lat. ingenium). The paradigmatic technologist on this conception is not actually the craftsman but the engineer. In modernity, technology is no longer simply a means of survival, but a means of substantially enhancing life.
This is already to flag the transition to another of our paradigms, this one deriving from the philosophy of history. The anthropological paradigm might be said to take for granted an unchanging relation between human beings and technology; it fails to allow for historical change, even on the technological side of the ledger. Yet the history of technology is a sort of history unto itself and in relating it we can identify the major epochs in the relationship between human beings and technology. The most notable work to do so is not actually a work of philosophy, but a cultural history of nature, Serge Moscovici's Human History of Nature. Though one might not guess from the title, the book is also a cultural history of technology in the sense that it sets out the epochal differences in the characteristic relationship between forms of labour and concepts of nature. Handicraft work here corresponds to nature conceived according to the notions of matter and form, engineering is aligned with nature considered as an interconnected field of force and cybernetics with nature considered synthetically or as a construct. We can also talk here of the epoch of one or another dominant technology - thus of epochs dominated successively by form-giving handicraft technology, by mechanics and industrial technology as organising forces and by the controlling and ordering functions of Information Technology.
An interpretation of technology from the standpoint of the philosophy of history is actually to be found in the first philosophy of technology to explicitly identify itself as such. Ernst Kapp's philosophy of technology could also be subsumed under the anthropological paradigm, viz. insofar as Kapp seeks to interpret various technologies as projections of human bodily organs. In doing so he amplifies the Aristotelian notion of technology (that it imitates nature) by assuming that in technology human beings give external form to the structure of the human organism itself. Yet while the load-bearing structures of bridges may indeed resemble the lamella-structure of the human femur - and while the telephone network can certainly be interpreted as a sort of nervous system - it is of course easy to point to technologies that have no counterpart in the human body (the wheel for one). To be sure, there are grounds for interpreting technology as an imitation of nature. Nature's technical solutions prove time and again to be exemplary in terms of simplicity and efficiency: consider the stability of blades of grass from the structural point of view, the body-shape of the dolphin from the point of view of fluid mechanics, the capacity of the brain to store and process information. Yet imitation, especially today, is by no means unconscious. Rather, it is something based on research, viz. in the field of bionics.
The decisive point of Kapp's philosophy of technology however lies in his integration of technological development into the history of human consciousness. His magnum opus, the Principles of a Philosophy of Technology, is in effect the materialist counterpart to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Just as Hegel tracks the way spirit comes to consciousness of itself in the objective forms of its own works, so Kapp describes the way humans become conscious of themselves as embodied beings in their technological creations. The conceptual figure in Hegel and Kapp is one and the same: self-consciousness is attained by making the implicit explicit. According to Kapp, "self-consciousness thus proves to be the result of a process whereby knowledge of something external is converted into something internal." Just as Hegel thinks that in his very philosophy the world of spirit finally comes full circle, so Kapp thinks human beings achieve true self-consciousness in his Principles of a Philosophy of Technology. In Kapp's quasi-prophetic world-historical terms "the conscious creation of technology might shine brightly in the foreground of human achievement; it remains nothing more than a reflection of the depths of the unconscious, the elaboration of a consciousness that was first redeemed by rudimentary tools."
While Kapp's philosophy of technology is hardly known outside specialist circles, Martin Heidegger's later philosophy of technology has had considerable influence in the history of ideas. What makes this all the more astonishing is that Heidegger consciously positioned himself at a considerable distance from all matters technological both in life and thought. Yet it was probably for just this reason that he hit a raw nerve among those of his contemporaries who were disquieted by technological development. His compact Die Frage nach der Technik (The Question concerning Technology) can be read as a radical criticism of modern technology - on Heidegger's picture a technology that reduces nature to a mere resource, destroys traditional forms of life (and thereby traditional forms of technology too) and in the end turns human beings themselves into mere raw material. Heidegger paints into his highly stylised picture of Geschick ("destining") everything that for the individual appears overwhelming about modern technological developments - everything, indeed, that might be soberly described in terms of the emergence in modernity of a third cultural super-structure alongside the state and the market economy. Under the rubric of Gestell ("enframing"), technology itself becomes an epoch in the history of Being; it is the epoch when Being discloses itself through a technical Herausforderung ("challenging-forth") and thereby withdraws all the more decisively. Yet in the process the role of human beings in maintaining the openness of Being, indeed in maintaining truth itself, becomes open to view - and it is here that Heidegger detects the possibility of deliverance. It is impossible today to go along either with the subtly sanctimonious formula Heidegger borrows from Hölderlin:
"Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst
Das Rettende auch."
("Where the danger is, there too//The saving power grows.")
or his associative style of presentation, haunted as it is by obscure readings of Greek and German etymology. Yet something remains of Heidegger's philosophy of technology that is significant - a view of technology that, like the entire ontological paradigm, goes back to Aristotle. However, here we can speak of a further paradigm, viz. an epistemological paradigmatic model.
In his Nichmochean Ethics, Aristotle enumerates a series of types of knowledge, forms of aletheia. Reason, wisdom, science and ethical insight are on the list, but so too is technology. The high regard for technology as an independent form of knowledge is all the more impressive in that technology doesn't even appear on the graded scale of types of knowledge Plato sets out in the so-called "analogy of the divided line" in The Republic. Though one should not draw the conclusion that Plato's attitude to technology is therefore contemptuous - for example that it involves looking down on artisans as too banausic. On the contrary, it was the expertise of craftsmen that best met Socrates' challenge to his contemporaries' claims to knowledge. Likewise Plato's thorough-going rationalisation of all forms of public activity called for the development of a specific technique - a technike - appropriate to each activity.
In Aristotle technology is characterised as a form of knowledge that guides the fabrication of things. Making things (poiesis) for Aristotle is a form of human action to be distinguished from praxis - the (self-contained) fulfilment of life's activities. Making has its aim in a product or work, whereas the goal of praxis lies in itself.
This is the late Heideggerian point of departure; for Heidegger thinks that with the advent of modern science, all forms of knowledge have come under the domination of the technical model of knowledge. Since Galileo, indeed, it has been in technical contexts, through experimentation and measurement, that nature has been an object of knowledge; according to Descartes' maxim, we should seek to understand nature as the expert craftsman understands the products of his craft: to know something means knowing how it can be fabricated. Science thus becomes an exercise in technically reproducing nature: that at least would be the identifiable meaning of Heidegger's speculations about the history of Being. The epistemological model of technology implicit in the technologist's view of the world becomes the dominant form of knowledge in modernity. The critical potential of Heidegger's philosophy of technology is hence essentially a critique of the modern world-view - a critique of science similar to what we find in Goethe's Theory of Colour and continuing all the way through to Habermas' Science and Technology as "Ideology" and the phenomenology of the present-day. Goethe and the phenomenologists object to the technical model of knowledge by opposing it to a knowledge that establishes a personally meaningful subjectively coloured orientation with the help of a systematic description of phenomena. Critical Theory on the other hand objects to the technical model of knowledge on the grounds that it is technocratic. What Aristotle calls poiesis and praxis has its place in a critical theorist such as Habermas under the rubric of purposive-rational action or interaction. In opposition to technocratic knowledge, critical theory posits a form of knowledge capable of effecting practical change through critical reflection about existing social circumstances - reflection that is guided through and through by what Horkheimer called "an interest in rational conditions."
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