Vienna, 18th of october
dear michael,
back from bella italia into wiener schnitzel!
I catch the snatches... but I do not leave these incriptions for later
generations!
you write: writing is frozen wind.
may I remember the platonic (and jewish as well as christian) background of
logos as life and wind (ruah) and the platonic criticisms on writing as well
as Derrida's objections on logocentrism.
Writing is frozen wind. It is not the (literally) warm wind of the spoken
word, being transmitted also for later generations but first, as Plato says,
in the soul of the listener according to his/her? specific level of
understanding. This 'according to' is precisely what cannot be done by
writing in the same way.
But spoken and written logos are, according to H., co-responding to the wind
of being or, better, according to Iain, to the draught (German: Zug in the
sense of Luftzug, but also, in the sense of Schluck, like a Schluck Bier or
Wein! remember Dionysos! and Plato's Symposion).
W e are standing in the wind of being as (electronic) information and atomic
energy which are both our inscriptions of Plato's ideas as drafts for future
generations? This is, again, the question we were discussing about the
'permanent' nature of knowledge in both senses you were demarcating as you
pointed out that 'bestaendiges Anwesen' does not mean primarily a
perduration in time but (as a condition for it?) a delimitation.
Prima facie the electronic wind seems to blur up all delimitations of the
frozend wind of Gutenberg's writing, but it looks just like this. The
permanent (!) circulation of information is based on its delimitation and
electronic fixation (just for a while). Maybe we have here an example where
we can see clearly the difference between delimitation and perduration in
time you were mentioning.
But at the same time, we are facing the consequences of an (almost) ever
lasting technology for which we need everlasting 'impressions'... It seems
as technology and metaphysics are ideed, as H. clearly saw, deeply
interrelated. I am using here the word 'technology' not in the sense of
including different types of machines, but in the Heideggerian sense of a
relationship between man and world (Weltverhaeltnis).
In the case of science we have been able to see (after the discussions
starting with the Wiener Kreis until Popper and Feyerabend), that good
science must not be dogmatic or ask for an absolute truth, but that on the
contrary, scientific knowledge should be able to be tested and refuted,
knowledge being always biased. Knowledge is provisional (vorlaeufig) not
only temporarily but with regard to its methodological delimitations and to
its contents (and contexts). At the same time Popper postulated a separate
world of knowledge as well as some kind of approximation to a ultimate
truth...
According to Vattimo post-Heideggerian thinking is 'weak thinking' (pensiero
debbole). It seems to me as if the draught of positivistic thinking provoked
a draft of 'weak thinking' and I ask myself whether the draught of
information technology and atomic energy could 'pro-voke' something similar,
that would be then 'weak technology' i.e. a technology that does not need an
'absolute master' (similar to the absolute truth) (in order no to become a
technology of death, instead of a 'mortal' technology)
Then the question is not, how are we going to be able to let future
generations know (on a temporal basis of 1000 years as far as nuclear wastes
are concerned! what about information wastes?!) what our draft was, but how
are we going to allow them to change our draft according to a new draught.
Writing is frozen wind. Electronic writing is melting ice. We are writing
our lives on fire and we expect to keep it frozen. Are we going to survive
this way? Who are 'we'? Cave people did not (probably) ask themselves this
kind of question as they painted their caves (Erik Champion). We hoped to
write a 'monumentum aere perennium' that was relying on (poetic) forms
(later on natural laws). Transmission seems to be the key issue now. Not
logos but 'angelia', a concept that, as I found some time ago, played a key
role in Greek thinking (particulary in Tragedy) until it was almost
completely 're-placed' by philosophy and its logos with its pecular
(horizontal) ways of transmission (I could find angelia only a few times in
Plato!). Logos has now become a kind of horizontal angelia, but vertical
power structures have not disappeared. But this is another story.
Prost
Rafael
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