4 Abbreviations

AG The Abbreviation AG is used as short for "the present author".

[AG: ... ] This is used for a comment by AG within a quotation.

[[ ... ]] This is used when AG makes a longer comment or footnote, because within an .htm text footnotes are cumbersome and result in excessive clicking. In the www-lingo, there is a very common misuse called "click baiting". For serious contributors, this should be avoided.

Sloterdijk Literature Abbreviations

The writings of Sloterdijk are referenced with these Abbreviations:

Sloterdijk, Peter:

Eurotaoismus, Ed. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (2018), orig. 1989, abk. "Eurotao"

Sphären Band I, Blasen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt (1998), abk. "Blasen".

Sphären Band II, Globen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt (1999), abk. "Globen".

Sphären Band III, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt (2004), abk. "Schäume".

"Im Welt-Innenraum des Kapitals. Zu einer philosophischen Geschichte der terrestrischen Globalisierung". Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-518-45814-0. abk. WIKA

"Zorn und Zeit. Politisch-psychologischer Versuch. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (2006), ISBN 3-518-41840-8, abk. Z&Z.

"Gottes Eifer", Verlag der Weltreligionen (2007), abk. "Eifer".

"Du mußt dein Leben ändern. Über Anthropotechnik". Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (2009), ISBN 978-3-518-41995-3, abk. DMDL

"Kritik der zynischen Vernunft". 2 Bände. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (1983), ISBN 3-518-11099-3.

abk. "ZynV"

"Was geschah im 20. Jahrhundert? Unterwegs zu einer Kritik der extremistischen Vernunft". Suhrkamp, Berlin (2016), ISBN 978-3-518-42507-7, abk. "20JH".

5 The Science of Morphology

The Science of Morphology is the scientific study of forms (morphae). All forms change, some very slowly, like in Geology, some very fast like waves in water. The study of the change of forms is sometimes called Meta-Morphology, with the special term Meta-Morphosis. In the Insect world we have a good example of Meta-Morphosis: From a caterpillar through a stage called chrysalis, to a creature that can take to the airs, a butterfly. So much is very well known in scientific circles. Morphology is mostly associated with Goethe's work, who called his scientific studies Morphology. And he practically did the Morphology of about everything: Plants, Insects, the Cosmos, the Clouds in the Sky, the Forms of the Waves in Water, even the Morphology of Geology, of Stones and Minerals. Goethe was interested in everything of the large and wide world. Even if he was dabbling and an amateur in so many fields. But the idea of Morphology has stuck. There exists the concept of Morphology in many sciences, even if there is not much connection to the Morphology of Goethe. The Goethe-kind morphology tradition is mostly forgotten now, I had made list of that tradition in my Dissertation and then something more about Goethe.

This is a more theoretical discussion of Morphology:

http://www.noologie.de/desn17.htm

This is a discussion if Whitehead's "Process and Reality"

http://www.noologie.de/desn16.htm#Heading58

This is a more theoretical discussion of Meta-Morphology:

http://www.noologie.de/desn09.htm

This is about the Morphology in Goethe's Faust:

http://www.noologie.de/faust.htm

This is somewhat similar to faust.htm

http://www.noologie.de/desn08.htm

This is somewhat similar to faust.htm

http://www.noologie.de/desn27.htm

5.1 Some History of Morphology

On the following www-pages of Noologie we find some more of the theoretical foundations of Morphology or Cultural Morphology which I have written in some earlier years.

The design.htm files are from my dissertation of 1999.

http://www.noologie.de/desn24.htm#Heading130

http://www.noologie.de/desn09.htm#Heading32

http://www.noologie.de/desn17.htm

http://www.noologie.de/faust.htm

http://www.noologie.de/morph.pdf

I have been working on Morphology since about 1980. I first picked up Spengler and Goethe and I unterstood something of their thinking. I had already known the work of Joseph Campbell and I had read extensively the works of the Indian Advaita Vedanta philosophy of Shankara, then the Buddhist tradition like the works of Nagarjuna, which I consider the highest achievement that the Buddhist tradition could ever come up with. I like clear, cold Logic the most, and this is the Nagarjuna Style. No embellishments, no superfluous rituals or prescriptions for lifestyle, praying, and doing offerings etc. pp. And the other Scriptures that all what those different Buddhist schools had produced, were not so much to my liking. Like the Mahayana Buddhism or even the Tantrayana of the Tibetans. The Dalai Lama belongs to one of these schools. But these are more or less the Tibetan Bon traditions with a veneer of Buddhism on top of it. It is pretty much like the Japanese Shinto, like the Yamabushi who morphed into Shingon Buddhists. Beneath that veneer of Buddhism there always remained the Shinto. And since the Japanese are very pragmatic about religion they couldn't care less what kind of name that religion called itself.

https://studybuddhism.com/en/advanced-studies/history-culture/buddhism-in-tibet/the-origin-of-the-yellow-hat

https://stallman.org/articles/yellow-hat.html

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dalai-Lama

http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat6/sub34/item221.html

14th Dalai Lama and 17th Karmapa historic discussion on Four Sects of Tibetan Buddhism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FTkJyN5M_o

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelug

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon

http://www.spiritwiki.de/w/B%C3%B6n

Introduction to Bon Tradition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhm1vSWwFYw

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche on Bon Buddhism - Interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF1VkSdXmVI

5.2 The Definition of Expounding

I just give the definition of expounding again: You pound on something so long and so hard until it becomes Ex. "Ex arachaes hoti proton genet auton", as the good Hesiodos and the good Homeros used to say. The quotes are identical in both works. So someone must have cribbed something from the other one. I have no idea to whom the copyright belongs, since at those olden times, there existed no copyright. It was very privileged knowledge that had been totally lost to the sages of the Library of Alexandria around 300-200 BCE, when they morphed that into the common language of the Hellenistic Empires which was the Koinae.

5.3 A Morphology Writer named Oswald Spengler

One other Morphology writer, who is very in-famous by now, was Oswald Spengler. He claimed that he knew the Morphology of history, which is a pretty strong claim to make. Because history is only that which we know about history. And there is quite a lot of history that we don't know anything about. Because the records are irretrievably lost.

[A particularly bad case of lost records are those of the early times of the religions of Christianity and Islam. This is very strange indeed, and there must have been some records. And they are gone, with the wind as one may say. I have just a little suspicion that they didn't vanish by themselves. Someone must have helped them in vanishing, this I believe in my naive mind. For example the earliest written records of the Hadith, the sayings of Mohammed, were produced a few 100 years after his death (c 632). (Muhammad al-Bukhari c. 864)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_hadith

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_al-Bukhari

]

History is just in the eye of the beholder, or better this is what the rulers told the historians (or palace writers) what they had to write and record about, and for whom it should serve. History is almost always written by the victors, and the rulers. Sometimes there is a different spelling: His-Story, since the rulers were mostly male. And as many historians as you have, so many histories you get. Which proves that history is in the eye of the beholder. And this is the deeper reason why Spengler's attempt was destined to utterly fail.

But at least he had tried. And he still has made some good contributions to Morphology, when you ignore his faulty historical work. I have written about that in my article below. Then there is Peter Sloterdijk who in his "Sphären" also wrote about Morphology, this time about some round objects, which are called Spheres, Bubbles, Globes, Bullets, and something like that, and even Footballs, when he did an exegesis of the "Ludo Globi" by Cusanus. And he really did a good job at describing the cultural history of all that is connected to round objects. At this he was more successful than poor Spengler. I have written more about this here:

http://www.noologie.de/morph.pdf

http://www.noologie.de/morph.htm

Now, as I have stated in my above article, since Morphology is not an established academic domain, there are as many Morphologies as there are Morphology thinkers. The problem with a form (or Morphae) is that is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Now there are some more or less universally accepted kinds of form, like the form of Mount Everest. And in science, we have also certain established kinds of form, like the outlay of all the vertebrate animals with a spine, four legs, a head, an intestine, sometimes a tail, sometimes not. In the bird class the front legs are converted into wings, but that doesn't contradict the overall pattern, since the wings are morphed front legs. So here we can see that forms have their own Meta-Morphosis. But when it comes to less defined classes of forms, the situation is different. There everyone concocts his/her own sort of Morphology. This is why the academic establishment doesn't recognize Morphology per se as academic at all. So here I am also doing my own kind of Morphology. And I concentrate more on Meta-Morphology, the scientific study of morphing. And this is a little distinct from other approaches to Morphology. Since morphing is a process. As I spell this out in greater detail, this is the Heraklitean approch. Everything is flowing, and there is, in the long run, nothing that is stable, even if that process takes a few couple of billion years. There will always be change. This is also the core of Buddhist thinking. Which is called in the Pali language: Paticca Samuppada. In Sanskrit it is called Pratityasamutpada. I have enlarged this in the following section of my dissertation:

http://www.noologie.de/desn16.htm#Heading60

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da

Unfortunately this URL doesn't fit into word.

So one has to call the google to search for Pratityasamutpada.

5.4 Some kinds of Morphology: Meta-Morphosis, and Meta-Noia

Now there are two more important terms about Morphology: Meta-Morphosis, and Meta-Noia. Meta-Morphosis is the description of the time-span when someting is morphing. Now this can be very short, like a Second, or it can be very long, like a few billion years. Meta-Noia is the case when an intelligent being, like a human, has a sudden change of mind. So the mind itself is morphing. And the personality with it. One has been this kind of person at one instant, and then, suddenly the next instant, one becomes another person. This doesn't happen very often, and most often in an accident, which is mostly bad. But there are cases when the Meta-Noia occurs for the better when one gets hit on the head. I know of one case when a pretty derelict man and alcoholic, was hit on the head, and then he became a very famous painter. I don't know the exact literature for this. But there is always a good place to look for that kind of things: Oliver Sacks.

https://www.oliversacks.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Sacks

http://sajtichek.narod.ru/books/without_translation/wife_hat.pdf

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and other clinical tales.

In other more productive cases Meta-Noia is called Enlightenment. There is a whole lot of literature about this, especially in the Eastern traditions, like Samadhi (Yoga), or Satori (Zen). But we also have a good example in the history of Christianity. This was the Meta-Noia of Saulus into St. Paulus. This was one of the most important Meta-Noia's in the whole history of humanity. I will go into more detail on this case in a later passage. When one looks at the spiritual literature of the West, we can find a whole lot of such Meta-Noia's. It is mostly called sudden conversion, or seeing the Holy Virgin Maria, or something like that. Also the philosophical Western tradition knows this phenomenon. Platon had described this in his 7th letter:

Denn es steht damit nicht so, wie mit anderen Lehrgegenständen: es läßt sich nicht in Worte fassen, sondern aus lange Zeit fortgesetztem, dem Gegenstande gewidmetem wissenschaftlichen Verkehr und aus entsprechender Lebensgemeinschaft tritt es plötzlich in der Seele hervor wie ein durch einen abspringenden Funken entzündetes Licht und nährt sich dann durch sich selbst.

5.5 Meta-Morphology and Morpheus

There is an interesting correspondence between Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep and dreams, and Meta-Morphology. Because the dreams are these mental images that have a perpetual morphing. We experience it all, when some forms and themes of a dream chance imperceptibly from one to the other. Dreams have a quality that is also called Protean, from Proteus, another Greek god who constantly changed forms. And in Indian Vedic mythology, there are the Asuras, who also constantly changed forms. This makes it also very difficult to do dream-analysis, since the waking consciousness that tries to remember a dream can follow only one dream-track that makes some sense to it. And the dream is multi-dimensional, as I write it in some other text. The dream has a quite holographic quality. Only in ancient times, it seems that the dreams of people were easier to follow for the people. I also give a few explanations why that could happen in ancient times but not any more in present-day civilizations.

5.6 Peter Sloterdijk on Traumdeutung

Peter Sloterdijk has made an interesting discussion of dreams and dream-interpretation in 20JH, "Derridas Traumdeutung", p. 137++. Here he mentions the "philosophische Anthropologie" on p. 139 as his viewpoint. There is also the comparison of living and death and the dream-images that connect both, and this is also a quite familiar theme for the present work on Meta-Morphology. The dream consciousness resembles in many aspects the Tibetan Bardo Thodol imagery. Sloterdijk even mentions some themes of the "Einprägungen" (p. 144) which are called imprints by Aby Warburg. But Warburg is never mentioned by Sloterdijk anywhere as far as I could not find anything in all his works (and I have read most of them). Because of the lack of an index it is not possible to verify this. But he mentions also the "Semiodynamik" and "Somatodynamik" on this page. So there are obvious connections between the psychoanalysis of Freud and modo Derrida, and the analysis of mythology by Aby Warburg. He also talks about "Freudianismus, diesem verwelkten Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts" on p. 145. His term "Binarismen" is just another, more logical expression for Dualism. On p. 146 he mentions "die Zukunft des psychologischen Wissens vom Menschen und der Kulturen". The theme of Tri-Polarity or is also central to Meta-Morphology. "Derrida ein Ägypter" is a quite fitting expression since it encapsulates all the Dream-Time knowledge of the ancients, which I also expound in the Dream of Nabuchandosor. Derrida could of course also rely on the knowledge of his Hebrew ancestry which was preserved in the Talmud. Here is the quote (p. 146-148) where Sloterdijk mentions exactly the themes that are also expounded in the Meta-Morphology:

...Türen zu öffnen, die in die Zukunft des psychologischen Wissens vom Menschen und der Kulturen führen. Es sind die gleichen Türen oder zumindest benachbarte Türen, durch die im vergangenen Jahrhundert Denker wie Ernst Bloch, Gotthard Günther, Jean Baudrillard und Niklas Luhmann, in unserer Zeit forschende Geister wie Bruno Latour, Peter Galison, Heiner Mühlmann und Roberto Esposito - um unter einer Vielzahl von Kollegen nur sie zu nennen - gegangen sind und zu gehen nicht aufhören. Was diese Denker bei all ihrer Heterogenität verbindet, ist die gemeinsame Suche nach einer komplexen Begriffskultur, in der die herkömmlichen Binarismen der metaphysischen, politischen und wissenschaftlichen Vokabulare überwunden wären - ob es nun um die alte Entgegensetzung von Geist und Materie geht oder um die von Menschen und Dingen oder die von Natur und Gesellschaft und was dergleichen altehrwürdige Paar-Formeln mehr sind. ...

Ich hatte mich seinerzeit entschlossen, nicht in direktem Modus über Derridas Werk und über den Wortlaut seiner Schriften zu sprechen, sondern mich einer Methode-der indirekten Spiegelung zu bedienen - eines Verfahrens, das man in einem anderen Kontext als »Konstellationsforschung« bezeichnet hat.' In

P. 147

dem kleinen Essay, der den Titel Derrida ein Ägypter trägt, ging es darum, einige Grundfiguren des dekonstruktiven Denkens durch ihre Versetzung in die nähere oder fernere Nachbarschaft mit analogen geistigen Gebilden zu »illustrieren« - die Systemtheorie Niklas Luhmanns, die Freudsche Psychoanalyse, die humanistische Mythologie Thomas Manns, die Kulturtheorie Franz Borkenaus, die Mediologie von Regis Debray, die Zeichentheorie Hegels und die Archiv- und Museumstheorie von Boris Groys. Weil all diese Anmerkungen umständehalber eher flüchtig als gründlich geraten mussten und mehr der Anregung als der gelehrten Vertiefung dienten, bin ich froh, mit dem heutigen Vortrag wenigstens an einer Stelle für etwas mehr Ausführlichkeit sorgen zu können. Ich gebe zu, daß dies bedenklicherweise die am meisten spekulative und am weitesten von Derridas eigenem Text wegführende Passage meiner Pariser Kommentare betrifft.

Ich beziehe mir hier auf den Passus, den ich unter der Überschrift »Thomas Mann und Derrida« präsentierte. Dort wurde suggeriert, der große Romancier habe, als er seine Josephs-Tetralogie verfaßte, in gewisser Weise das Phänomen Derrida poetisch vorweggenommen, indem er in der bezaubernden Figur des jungen Joseph den Typus des hochbegabten Außenseiters portraitierte, dem es dank ungewöhnlicher Talente gelingt, von der Peripherie eines Imperiums aus ins Innerste der Zentralmacht vorzudringen, um sich dort als Traumdeuter, als Ratgeber, ja als das bessere Selbst des Herrschers, im aktuellen Fall des Pharaos, unentbehrlich zu machen. Ich nannte diese Struktur bzw. diese Position den » Josephismus« und wollte damit eine kulturdynamisch brisante Konfiguration bezeichnen, die in der Moderne zu großer Bedeutung gelangte. Ich behaupte, daß sich ohne Rücksicht auf sie das Drama der Kämpfe um die Interpretationshoheit in der westlichen Zivilisation seit

p. 148

dem späteren 19. Jahrhundert unmöglich verständlich machen läßt.

Die Unwiderstehlichkeit der josephistischen Position ergibt sich aus dem Umstand, daß sie es ihrem Agenten erlaubt, gewissermaßen ins »Zentrum, des Zentrums« vorzustoßen und dabei eine neuartige exzentrische Interpretation der Zentralität zu erzeugen, eine Interpretation, die für die Inhaber der Zentrumspositionen selbst von hoher Attraktivität sein kann, sich aber auch nicht selten als subversiv gefährlich erweist. Die Prozedur, die an den problematischen Ort führt, den ich das Zentrum des Zentrums nenne, kann - wie die von Thomas Mann phantastisch erweiterte biblische Geschichte zeigt - keine andere als die Traumdeutung sein. In den Träumen der Mitte nämlich wird erst deutlich, daß die Mitte nie wirklich die Mitte ihrer selbst sein kann. Damit die Dinge von Anfang an deutlich werden, füge ich hinzu, daß es hierbei nicht um die Deutung von) edermanns Träumen geht, sondern geradewegs um die Deutung der Träume der hohen Herren, mehr noch, der Träume, die der Herr der Herren, der Pharao in höchsteigener Person, träumt und die, wenn auch auf vorerst dunkle Weise, von den Schicksalen des Reiches und des Thrones handeln.

Thomas Mann hat diese Situation in einer grandiosen erzählerischen Sequenz beschworen: Der Pharao hatte also die bekannten Träume geträumt, in denen die mageren Kühe die fetten verschlangen, und hatte seine Hoftraumdeuter befragt, was denn von diesen Visionen zu halten sei. Unzufrieden mit deren Antworten, greift er bereitwillig das Gerücht auf, ein junger Jude, der in einem Gefängnis im Süden des Reichs eine Strafe verbüße, weil er, der Sklave, mit der Frau eines hohen Beamten ein Verhältnis gehabt haben soll, besäße die Gabe der Traumauslegung in einem wunderbaren Maß. Der Pharao läßt ein Schiff

über den Nil entsenden, um den jungen Mann an seinen Hof zu holen, damit er ihm

eine Probe seiner Kunst gebe - der Rest ist bekannt. Was weniger bekannt ist, dürfte die Tatsache sein, daß seither viele Hermeneutiker, die große Texte deuten, ihrerseits von einem nach Deutung rufenden Traum heimgesucht werden.

5.7 Derrida and the Sephardic Knowledge

This article gives some in-depth information about the thought structure of the Sephardic Jews (of the ancient Moorish empire of Spain) who are called Marannes in French. Derrida was of Algerian Jewish ancestry and as the article says, his father was the chief Rabbi of the synagoge of Algiers. I have written more on the history of the school of Toledo in the Appendix where it connects to "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco.

https://www.cairn.info/revue-rue-descartes-2014-2-page-102.htm#

Dans une des scènes du film de Safaa Fathy, D’ailleurs, Derrida, ce dernier est à Tolède, filmé dans la synagogue Santa Maria la Blanca dont l’architecture est celle d’une mosquée. Cette synagogue qui, ainsi que toutes les mosquées de Tolède, était redevenue une église après l’Inquisition, est aujourd’hui un musée. Santa Maria la Blanca suscite en Derrida l’évocation d’une autre synagogue, celle d’Alger où son père l’amenait, enfant, avec son frère, les jours de grandes fêtes; la synagogue d’Alger est aussi une ancienne mosquée et elle l’est redevenue après la décolonisation. L’énoncé de cette succession d’attributions renvoie bien sûr à une histoire « coloniale et précoloniale » violente, telle que « tous les lieux de culte (ont été) appropriés, expropriés, rappropriés, désaffectés, réaffectés », et ce jusque dans la période post-coloniale. En même temps, une telle succession de réappropriations et de détournements fragilise toute prétention d’un culte à la propriété d’un lieu. Aucune installation nouvelle n’échappe au fantôme des anciens propriétaires, chaque nouveau culte est toujours hanté par la mémoire de l’autre. Les synagogues, les mosquées et les églises sont ici des « lieux de passage » à l’identité précaire. Derrida aime ce type de lieu, comme s’il était plus propice que d’autres à accueillir sa propre situation « d’émigré ou de migrant », de celui qui traverse, qui passe par des lieux sans en être, sans qu’aucun de leurs noms ne le qualifie jamais. Celui qui traverse ou passe n’est cependant pas sans qualificatif, dans la mesure où « à partir » de l’expérience du traverser ou du passer, certaines possibilités surgissent. Cet « à partir de » n’est pas un lieu, mais, dans la mesure où il rend possible quelque chose, Derrida le nomme une « situation », mot qu’il corrige pour lui préférer celui de « site », de « site sans lieu ». Le mot Tolède possède pourtant pour lui un pouvoir évocateur spécifique que le qualificatif d’émigré ou de migrant ne recouvre pas tout à fait. Tolède c’est l’Andalousie, l’Inquisition et le phénomène marrane, nom de ces Juifs extérieurement convertis au catholicisme mais qui perpétuaient et transmettaient le judaïsme en secret, et dont un grand nombre quitta la péninsule ibérique pour se réfugier en Afrique du Nord. Aussi Derrida ne se qualifie-t-il pas seulement de migrant mais encore de « marrane clandestin », un marrane moderne cependant car indissociable non seulement d’une « certaine histoire des colonies françaises » mais aussi de ce qu’il nomme ici la « postcolonialité [1]

[1]Toutes les citations qui précèdent, sont tirées de la… ».

Certes « marrane » n’est pas le seul qualificatif que Derrida s’attribue, il peut aussi parler de lui comme d’un « franco-maghrébin [2]

[2]Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse… » ou du « dernier des Juifs [3]

[3]J. Derrida, « Un témoignage donné », in Questions au judaïsme.… », et il nuance souvent cette qualification en précisant qu’il n’est qu’« une sorte de marrane [4]

[4]J. Derrida, « Circonfession », in G. Bennington et J. Derrida,… ». Le mot « marrane » exerce cependant sur lui une fascination particulière, comme il l’indique un peu plus loin dans le film de Safaa Fathy :3

Si je suis tombé amoureux (du mot « marrane ») qui est devenu comme une sorte d’obsession qui réapparait dans tous mes textes ces dernières années, c’est parce qu’il renvoie à ces origines supposées judéo-espagnoles, mais aussi parce qu’il dit quelque chose d’une culture du secret et naturellement la question du secret m’a toujours beaucoup occupé indépendamment de ma question juive [5]

[5]D’ailleurs, Derrida, op. cit.. 4

« Marrane », mais on pourrait dire aussi « migration », ne sont pas des concepts, ce sont des mots chargés d’un pouvoir d’évocation, de renvoi à des sites qui sont des sites de l’entre (les pays, les religions). De tels mots font naître des figures qui donnent forme à ce qu’on pourrait nommer des motifs de pensée, à des thèmes susceptibles d’une pluralité de modulations. Entre ces motifs et ces sites, Derrida parle de rapport d’« affinité [6]

[6]« Je suis une sorte de produit colonial ou postcolonial.… ». Dans le film comme dans d’autres textes, il est remarquable que, pour dire ce rapport d’affinité, Derrida en passe par un mode d’« anamnèse autobiographique » qui raconte par bribes « l’enfance d’un petit Juif français doublé d’un petit Juif indigène d’Algérie [7]

[7]J. Derrida, « Abraham, l’autre », in Judéités. Questions pour… ». Une telle anamnèse ne présuppose pas l’identité « mais un processus interminable, indéfiniment phantasmatique d’identification [8]

[8]J. Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, op. cit., p. 31. ».

5.8 On Multi-Valued Logic and the OODA-Loop

In the work of Sloterdijk quote we also find Gotthard Günther who had devoted his life's work to a non-dualistic / non-binary logic, meaning at least Tri-Polar and then multi-valued logic. All of Gotthard Günther's works are found on the vordenker.de www site. Of course there exist quite a few applications of multi-valued logic in practical use. But they are not formal, and more episodic. The most developed is the logic of war, because war is always a multi-valued enterprise. But normally philosophers are not too concerned with the logics of war. This is especially the case with the German Geisteswissenschaften after WWII, since the Germans didn't want to be reminded at all about warfare. The only towering exception of a western philosophy of war is Xenophon, who knew all about this, from hard-won personal experience. Clausewitz comes in close second place. But he died too early to add some more importand chapters on the philosophical aspects of warfare. Also Spengler had some knowledge of this, but he had never known the practical sides. He had spent WWI in his study, reading all the history books of the Münchner Staatsbibliothek. And of course the military academies of Sandhurst (British) and West Point (USA) know all about this. There is the famous principle of the OODA loop of the US Air Force Colonel John Boyd. But this is practically unknown outside of the military circles. So there is some room for augmentations beyond the theses of Peter Sloterdijk. Even Heiner Mühlmann doesn't mention this essential part of the logics of war in his book "Die Natur der Kulturen". And one of the foremost strategists of the logics of warfare was John v.Neumann. And the relevance of his work is practically unknown except some insiders. Because he had formulated the US strategy of the cold war against the USSR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

The OODA loop is the cycle observe–orient–decide–act, developed by military strategist and United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. Boyd applied the concept to the combat operations process, often at the operational level during military campaigns. It is now also often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The approach explains how agility can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents. It is especially applicable to cyber security and cyberwarfare ^[1]

https://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/

https://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/gg_theorie-mehrwert-logik.pdf

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_G%C3%BCnther

5.9 The five Skandhas

Then there is an appropriate quote from the Buddhist Wisdom: The five Skandhas.

Hier, O Sariputra, Form (rupa) ist Leere (shunyata) und gerade die Leere ist Form; Leere ist nicht verschieden von Form, und Form ist nicht verschieden von Leere; was auch immer Form ist, das ist Leere, was auch immer Leere ist, das ist Form, und dasselbe betrifft Gefühle (vedana), Sinneswahrnehmungen (samjna), Impulse (samskara), und Aufmerksamkeit (vijnana).

http://www.noologie.de/shunya01.htm

http://www.noologie.de/shunya01.htm#Heading30

This is very deep indeed. And this gives us ample occasion to meditate upon. This is about the deepest thought that was ever uttered in the spiritual history of mankind. I will refer to this, when I am speaking about the Kenoma and the Pleroma in Greek and Christian thought further down. Because Kenoma is identical to Shunyata. And this is VERY DIFFERENT from the Gnostic idea of this.

6 On Mirror Structures

6.1 The (Self-) Reflection and Narcissism

On mirror structures, and the (Self-) Reflection and Narcissism... And the genius of Diego Velasquez.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez^[a] (Spanish: [ˈdjeɣo βeˈlaθkeθ]; baptized June 6, 1599 – August 6, 1660) was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV, and one of the most important painters of the Spanish Golden Age. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period. He painted initially in a precise tenebrist style, but later developed a free manner characterized by bold brushwork that produced an illusion of form only when viewed at a suitable distance. In addition to numerous renditions of scenes of historical and cultural significance, he painted scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family, other notable European figures, and commoners, culminating in the production of his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656).

From the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Velázquez's artwork was a model for the realist and impressionist painters, in particular Édouard Manet. Since that time, famous modern artists, including Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon, have paid tribute to Velázquez by recreating several of his most famous works.

The production of his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez#Las_Meninas

Las Meninas

One of the infantas, Margaret Theresa, the eldest daughter of the new Queen, appears to be the subject of Las Meninas (1656, English: The Maids of Honour), Velázquez's magnum opus. However, in looking at the various viewpoints of the painting it is unclear as to who or what is the true subject.^[17] Is it the royal daughter, or perhaps the painter himself? The answer may lie in the image on the back wall, depicting the King and Queen. Is this image a mirror, in which case the King and Queen are standing where the spectator stands? Are they the subject of Velázquez's work? Or is the work simply a court painting?

Created four years before his death, it serves as an outstanding example of European baroque art. An apotheosis of the work has been effected since its creation; Luca Giordano, a contemporary Italian painter, referred to it as the "theology of painting",^[18] and in the eighteenth century the Englishman Thomas Lawrence cited it as the "philosophy of art", so decidedly capable of producing its desired effect. That effect has been variously interpreted; Dale Brown points out an interpretation that, in inserting within the work a faded portrait of the king and queen hanging on the back wall, Velázquez has ingeniously prognosticated the fall of the Spanish Empire that was to gain momentum following his death. Another interpretation is that the portrait is in fact a mirror, and that the painting itself is in the perspective of the King and Queen, hence their reflection can be seen in the mirror on the back wall.

Las Meninas (1656). This is a true masterpiece in the whole history of art, since it shows something quite unprecedenced. It shows in the background a mirror image of the king and his queen. And it shows the painter himself on the left side, and the canvas that he was just painting, of the left border... It was some kind of multiple reflexion, pretty much the same as I am doing with Reflexion Theory. So the poor author of the wikipedia article didn't quite understand it so well. There was no subject per se. It was the mirroring process itself which was the subject. All the other things in the painting are just paraphernalia. Now this was in the year 1656. To have come up with this piece of Self- and Other- (auto- and hetero- and allo-) Reflexion was something quite good for those times. I just needed about 363 years of thinking until I arrived at the same kind of Reflexion Theory. This seens like a pretty long time that one needs to re-think in Logics what Diego Velasquez had already done in his painting. There is nothing new under the sun, I would say. The phenomenology of mirroring is quite phenomenal. Because there is so much neuronal processing involved, before one is able to understand that what one has in front of himself, is a mirror image of oneself. There are so many animal experiments dealing with what animal can comprehend that it is looking at a mirror image of itself. Some fish, for example continue endlessly to battle their own mirror image, believing that it is a rival. So those poor fish are classified as minor intelligence. I have read all the literature about this, but at the moment, I don't have the time to google it all. Actually googling it is quite easy. But it takes time. Most of the higher animals, like apes and elephants, and I believe also ravens and crows are able to recognize that they are just confronted with their own mirror image. So to be able to do this, is a sign of intelligence. And of course humans are able to do multiple mirrorings. Like when we call it Reflexion Theory, which is the Theory of Mirroring on many levels at once.

6.2 Mirror Cabinets

There are many works of art or not so art, where we have mirror cabinets.

One is The Man with the Golden Gun:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_with_the_Golden_Gun_(film)

Another, more art-like is Hermann Hesse: Steppenwolf

https://www.zeit.de/1980/09/der-steppenwolf

https://www.inhaltsangabe.de/hesse/der-steppenwolf/

6.3 Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand

"Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand, wer ist die Schönste im Ganzen Land?" This is the Magic Mirror from the fairy tale Snow White. Aber der Spiegel war erbarmungslos. (The mirror had no mercy on the poor queen.) He told this poor queen something like that: You are just an ugly old hag. And you should not try to be beautiful. At your age you should better try to be wise. But the Queen in her own Narcissism, she was not so satis-factioned (I can't get no sätis-fäck'schun'. If you remember that story). So the the Queen in her own Narcissism, and so on... We all know the story so I don't need to repeat it. This is what the fairy tales are for. They are there to make an excursion into your Unterbewusstsein (Sub-Unconscious, which is even deeper thant the Unconscious), and so deep deep down, the not-so-conscious, rather the Verdrängungs- Conscious (The right English expression for this... maybe repression) ... it is always something that you would be very ashamed of, if anyone of your friends knew about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Mirror_(Snow_White)

The Magic Mirror is a mystical object that is featured in the story of Snow White, depicted as either a hand mirror or a wall-mounted mirror it is used by the Evil Queen in order to find out who is the "fairest in the land", each time the Evil Queen asks this question the mirror states "My Queen, you are the fairest in the land.", up until it states that Snow White is in fact more fair. Which results in the Evil Queen hiring a huntsman to kill Snow White in the contemporary version of the fairy tale.

6.4 Mirroring as a Deep Psychological and Neuronal Phenomenon

The process of mirroring is a very deep psychological phenomenon. Because in Neuro-Science, there exists a type of Neuron, which is called Mirror-Neuron or Spiegel-Neuron in German. Now since we have the mirroring on a phenomenological level, we have it also on the Neuronal level. This becomes a very deep philosophical question to ponder. What is so special about a mirror on the phenomenological level?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron

We all know the sad story of the Narcissos, who fell so much in love with his own mirror image in the pond, and he became so enchanted with the beauty of his mirror image, that he lost his balance, and plunged into the pond. Since he couldn't swim, the poor fellow he was, he just drowned. So much for suicide because of self-admiration. This is a pretty interesting kind of suicicide, for all those psychiatrists to meditate upon. The other version is that he was so transfixed by his image but he could never reach it, and so he sat there in the same place, until he died of starvation. Not a much better solution to the problem of Narcissism.

http://www.gottwein.de/Lat/ov/ovmet03339.php

https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/metamorphosen-4723/19

https://www.fachdidaktik.klassphil.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/seminarertraege/ovid_met/metamorphosen_archiv/referat_br_hopp.pdf

https://www.greekmyths-greekmythology.com/narcissus-myth-echo/

https://psychcentral.com/lib/narcissus-and-echo-the-myth-and-tragedy-of-relationships-with-narcissists/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_and_Narcissus

Narcissus and Echo were tragic Greek characters in a story told by the Roman poet Ovid in Metamorphoses. This poignant myth crystallizes the tragic problem of relationships with narcissists. Sadly, both partners are locked into a painful drama, where neither feel satisfied or sufficiently loved. Although it’s anguish for them both, the narcissist blames the cause on his or her partner, and sees him or herself as irreproachable, and too often his or her partner readily agrees.

6.5 The Myth of Narcissus and Echo

https://psychcentral.com/lib/narcissus-and-echo-the-myth-and-tragedy-of-relationships-with-narcissists/

Narcissus was a handsome hunter who broke the hearts of the many women. Despite their love, he remained aloof and arrogant. Pridefully, he held them in disdain.

Meanwhile, the beautiful forest nymph Echo had incurred the ire of the goddess Juno, who punished Echo for talking too much by depriving her of free expression. From then on, she could only repeat the last words of others. Echo spotted Narcissus and became infatuated. She longed for his attention, but he was fixated on himself. She tried to call out to him, yet couldn’t.

One day, Narcissus became separated from his hunting companions and called out, “Is anyone there?” Echo could only repeat his words. Startled, he said, “Come here,” which Echo repeated. Echo jubilantly rushed to Narcissus, but he spurned her, saying, “Hands off! May I die before you enjoy my body.” Humiliated and rejected, Echo fled in shame. Nevertheless, her love for Narcissus grew.

To punish Narcissus for his arrogance, Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, put a spell on him. When Narcissus next noticed his reflection in a pool of water, love overtook him. He believed that he’d finally found someone worthy of his love and became entirely absorbed with his own beautiful image, not realizing it was actually himself.

Unable to get Narcissus’ attention, Echo’s obsession and depression grew. As the years passed, she lost her youth and beauty pining away for unattainable Narcissus until she wasted away, only leaving behind her echoing voice. He eventually committed suicide, consumed by his impossible love, leaving a flower in his place.

I have off-loaded more discussion of Narcissism to another section. There it is under:

"On the Invention of Narcissism. No it wasn't the Narcissos. It was someone else".

http://www.noologie.de/noo.htm

http://www.noologie.de/desn.htm

6.6 The Circular Structure is also an Architectonic

And the circular structure (of the Rosary) is also an Architectonic in the Kantian sense. It is not an Aggregate, and Heidegger had said the same about his S&Z. [S. 182: Die Ganzheit des Strukturganzen ist phänomenal nicht zu erreichen durch ein Zusammenbauen der Elemente.]

It is just a circular Architectonic, which means that there are no primary foundations on which we may build it up in a vertical manner to reach the highest conclusion. In a crircular reflexive structure, all the elements are intermeshed and there is no hierarchy of ideas. As one goes around the rosary of the last metaphor, reflexions build up, and they become more and more intermeshed. We can apply a metaphor from Whitehead who talked about the nexus. A nexus has con-nexions, so the con-nexions build up to form a spider web like structure. And a spider web is also not built up from bottom to top, if that metaphor helps us to understand the process of building a spider web.

[As a little aside thought: I even believe that the title The Name of the Rose, has also something to do with the Rosary. But also with the Rosicrucians, and the Rosslyn Chapel. Oh dear Dan Brown please have pity on me! Rember the Lord's prayer:

and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us

and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

That you may never read a Dan Brown novel.

Amen.]

https://www.rosslynchapel.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosslyn_Chapel

https://www.rosslynchapel.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/explore-the-mystery2a.jpg

6.7 The Structure of the "Rundgesang"

I have mentioned the "Rundgesang" of Nietzsche at the beginning of this text. Now I will do some enlarging of the concept of the "Rundgesang". As I had said, the "Rundgesang" also implies the "Rundtanz" which I have also dealt with in depth in the chapter from "Gold im Wachs". And the structure of the text of Meta-Morphology is more like a "Rundgesang" in the terminology of Nietzsche, meaning it is also similar to a "Rundtanz", but of course in a text one cannot make a "Rundtanz". In consequence, this text is NOT LINEAR AND GOAL-ORIENTED like maybe a scientific text, where you can write an abstract in front of it, then do some discussion of the subject, and then come to some conclusion, to finally make a management summary, to present it to your boss or your professor or at a conference. Unfortunately with the subject matter at hand this is impossible. As a "Rundgesang", the (morphological) structure of Meta-Morphology is similar to "Sein und Zeit" (S&Z) by Heidegger, who (in my view) also did some Existential-Philosophy.

6.8 About Contemplation, Reflexion, and Refraction

In my morphological method one does it like this: One contemplates the Subject Matter from as many angles as one can come up with. Since I am using metaphors a lot, we can find some metaphors here also: So we can look at the Subject matter like one may look at a diamond and turning it around at so many angles to see all the reflections or better the refractions it can produce. But since this is just a metaphor, we don't need to get into the business of reflection and refraction theory too deeply. Reflection is everything connected with physical rays of light as they are mirrored on a water or polished metal or mercury surface. Metal mirrors can have a property that is difficult with water to achieve: They can be curved. Spherically or A-Spherically, convex or concave. In Astronomy this is put to good use. When you take a round trough filled with mercury, and you turn it around on a turntable, you can have some pretty interesting phenomena of mirroring. Because of the turning and because of centrifugal force, the mercury forms a perfect parabola, but in 3-d. One could also call this the phenomenology of mirroring. This is quite an interesting philosophical subject in itelf. So we can come to the Metaphysics of Mirrors. And the picture Las Meninas above is a piece of the Metaphysics of Mirrors.

Refraction is everything connected with physical rays of light as they are broken in a suitable substance like a diamond. A diamond has the highest Refraction index of all materials. I have written more about the business of refraction in a diamond in my work:

http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm

There is in the Appendix "Die Diamant-Metapher der Noologie" some more enlargement where I go further into the details.

http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#_Toc512641928

Reflexion is something one does in the mInd. Therefore I am careful to write it like this, not to confuse it with Reflection. Meaning that the Thinking is Reflexed onto itself. And I don't under any circumstance mean the Geist. As I say it everywhere, there is noch such thing as "the" or "a" Geist. This is all Ghostly business, in which I don't want to partake at all. To do Reflexion, one needs to have memory. Because one reflects on the thing that one has in memory, and that what you are thinking right now.

6.9 Rosary and Reflexion

Another metaphor for Reflexion is a Rosary. A Rosary is a circular structure and while one is praying the Rosary, with each completion of one round of the chain, one begins at the start again. But this time one has in one's mind a memory of the last time around. And so the second time around, there is a reflexion. What one had done and experienced the first round, is now overlaid with the new experience of the same thing, the rosary bead. But it is now "Overloaded" or "Superpositioned" with the memory. (It is difficult to find the right term for this). So this means re-thinking what one has thought the last time, and then reflexing on it. In Philosophy this is called Reflexion Theory. And the more rounds you go, the more Reflexions build up. [Of course the Religious Rosary is not intended for such use, there one just reiterates, like when you go to confession and the priest tells you: Do the Rosary five times, and each time you have to find a new way to atone for your sins.] So what I am doing here is some kind of philosophical Rosary and I think that this is a very good method for actually doing Reflexion Theory with your hands. Because the hands are also quite useful for doing a proper Reflexion (Manipulare). I have written about this some more in the main text.

https://www.stjohnpaul.org/rosary-meditations/

http://www.how-to-pray-the-rosary-everyday.com/meditations-on-the-rosary.html

https://udayton.edu/imri/mary/r/rosary-mystery-reflections.php

https://www.ecatholic2000.com/cts/untitled-284.shtml

https://www.loyolapress.com/our-catholic-faith/prayer/personal-prayer-life/different-ways-to-pray/the-rosary-as-a-tool-for-meditation-by-liz-kelly

6.10 The Rosary and Reflexion Theory

So the method of the philosophical Rosary is my way of doing Reflexion Theory. And mInd it: I do not do the reflexion in my Rational / Language Processor, but in my Associative Processor. I have off-loaded all this work of memory and reminiscence (see the Aristoteles book by this title) into the Associative Processor. So my Rational / Language Processor is not too overloaded with handling too much memory business. The Associative Processor works simultaneously and in parallel with the Rational / Language Processor. So I don't even need to think consciously about all those many reflexions that I mentioned above, or keep them in my conscious mInd. The Associative Processor does its work, and then re-mInds me, where I have to do some more reflexion. And this works very well.

6.11 Zettelkasten and Memory

We find something like this in the Hegelian Reflexion Theory (as I think), but here I do it with a different metaphor and a completely different angle of approach. The philosophers of the olden times had their Zettelkasten (chit box). Hegel was a master of the Zettelkasten. Niklas Luhmann was also a master at this. Then there was Arno Schmidt who was also completely Ver-Zettelt.

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/medien/arte-doku-ueber-arno-schmidt-blick-in-den-zettelkasten/9332112.html

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten

https://www.morgenpost.de/kultur/article205785937/Arno-Schmidt-Ordnung-bringen-in-den-Zettelkasten.html

https://www.zvab.com/buch-suchen/titel/arno-schmidt-zettelkasten/

https://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/radiothema/zettelkasten-zu-zettels-traum-100.html

https://das-blaettchen.de/2007/01/gehirntier-isoliert-im-zettelkasten-14462.html

http://www2.gs.uni-heidelberg.de/kvv/vz_imperia_show_item_pdf.php?vid=958

http://ds.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/viewer/ppnresolver?id=ZKLuhm

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/niklas-luhmann-archiv-der-blick-in-den-zettelkasten-ist.2156.de.html?dram:article_id=445878

http://ds.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/viewer/ppnresolver?id=ZKLuhm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4veq2i3teVk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMo0cU2HUvg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIztPpFqCBw

http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/about.php?abs=1

https://zettelkasten.de/book/de/

https://auratikum.de/blog/von-der-zettelwirtschaft-zum-zettelkasten/

7 Words and Morphological Meaning

Here I give some Definitions of words in the Morphological and the Meta-Morphological Meaning which are at some times or more often, most of the times... Quite different from the common usage in the High-Quality Mainstream Media, like in the US: The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, just to mention some of the best-known of them. And in Germany, the "spiegel.de", the "welt.de", the "zeit.de" and the "sueddeutsche.de". As I said it with a touch of Ambrose Bierce: The "spiegel.de" is like a Spiegel-Ei, but without the Ei. This is unfortunately not translatable into English. The google translator translates this faithfully as: fried egg, sunnyside up (Amer.) [COOK.] das Spiegelei pl.: die Spiegeleier. But the double-think meaning of Spiegel in German meaning a Mirror, cannot be translated into English so it is difficult to translate. One could say the German word "Spiegel-Ei" also means "A Mirror-Egg". So some of the word-plays of the German language are not accessible to all the other more Latinized languages of Europe. This is one reason why Heidegger came up with his quip (witzeln) that there are only two languages suitable for proper Philosph'izing: German and Classical Greek. Latin was not so usable at all. And since all the other languages of Europe were more or less Latinized, this is not possible in those languages. This was because the ancient Romans who didn't know Greek in and out, couldn't properly translate the original Semantic Fields of Classical Greek. There very few Romans who knew Greek to such a level of Depth Semantic Fields, since they had their Greek Slaves as tutors for their children, and as Librarians, who did all that work for them.

7.1 The Morphology of Bildung

I will now cover a subject that goes into the depths of the Morphological Meanings and Spritual Character of the Morphology of Semantics, and the Psychology, which I also call Meta-Noia in a different context. The Meta-Noia is usually a quite sudden experience, and this is quite related to the Kata-Strophae in the postive sense of the word, meaning the sudden about-turning of one's World View and especially of one's Spiritual View. Here we get to the deep structures of the Tropia or Tropos, meaning the Turining in Itself, like one turns a glove in-itself. It is not the literal turning around when a car turns around a corner. And this can only be described in the Terminology of Meta-Morphology. There is a Mathematical Discipline of Topology, which is quite related to that. But there is as yet no Mathematical Science of Transformation of Psychical Topology. If it would exist, this would be synonymous to Meta-Morphology and Meta-Noia.

Bildung is a typical German word that is hard to translate into other latinized languages, with its full Semantic Network. It derives from some very old images (imago, imagination) of Bild, Bildung, Ein-Bildung, Aus-Bildung, Ab-Bildung, and das Ur-Bild. These are all related to originally Greek philosophical and mythological concepts of the Bild [Ikonos]. Somehow, the Ancient Greek mental imageries of Ikonos existed in the Old Nordic languages also. But there is very little documentation left of the old Nordic Mythological Imagery, except what was preserved mostly in Iceland, in the Eddas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetic_Edda

https://www.islit.is/en/promotion-and-translations/icelandic-literature/the-edda-and-the-sagas-of-the-icelanders/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Edda

http://www.noologie.de/wagner1.htm

http://www.noologie.de/wagner1.pdf

The Meaning of Ikonos and the Meta-Morphology

The Meaning of Ikon(os) [like Ikone in the Orthodox Greek Spiritual Art] Ikonos, Eikonos, Ikonik, Idea, Eidotos, and then some more terms which we find in the philosophy of Platon. In Latin we have the imago and the imagination, so we can draw some parallel philosophical tracks between Latin and Greek. And this all refers to Dream Images, on which I do a lengthy discussion in the present text. As I have stated it somewhere, the Dreams are the forgotten Language of God. See especially my interpretation of the Dream interpretaion of Daniel, when he decrypted the Dream of Nabochondosor. And I did some more Meta-Morphology with this Dream. And I had stated it also in some passage: The Meta-Morphology of Dreams is quite the same as the Meta-Morphology of Foam. Because in the German Language one says: Träume sind Schäume. Dreams are like Foam. They are infinitely Morphable. So this kind of Meta-Morphology leans heavily on the Morphology of our Dreams. I have done some in-depth discussion on the powers and applications of the Dream-Time Processor in the present work.

The Bildungsreise

The complemetarity of Meta-Noia is this: Die Bildungsreise is more something of a more leisurely manner to make slow process what one could call the Aus-Bildung of the Character, meaning the Formation of a Mature Character. As one travels around, either in some parts of the Geography and the Cultural Landscape of the Planet Earth, one gains Bildung. Because one gets a lot of impressions of some very different cultures and climates on the way. So when one is able to do this with a Multi-Stage Reflexion process, one gains Bildung. The Bildungsreise is an Age-Old process which was ever present in all the Spiritual Journeys of humanity. It was also called the Pilgrimage, or Pilgrim's Process, and the Grand Tour of the Sons of the British'ers Elites. After completing their reading of the Classics at Oxford or Cambridge, like reading Homer, Odysee and Illias, and doing some memorizing a few Greek words from those Classics, and then reading some works of Shakespeare, and of Bunyan and of Tennyson, and some more of the famous British'er Literature. When they had finished their studies, the wealthy families of these students sent them on the Grand Tour as it was called. See also: Pilgrim's Progress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses

So they went to the places of the Classics that they had read all about in their Seminars at the University, but now they got the images, the smells, the sounds, and the tastes of these fabulous lands where the Ancients had concocted their Poetry and their Mythologies: Italy, Greece, and Egypt. Some even went to India which was very easy at those times since India was a colony of the Mighty British'er Empire of the Queen Victoria. And everything there was exotic, but with a veneer of British'ness so there was really no Culture Shock.

The Bildungsreise of the Germans

An Excerpt from the Handbook for the Native Tourist Guides who catered to German Tourists:

Mein Herr, hat das Essen Ihnen gut geschmocken?

The Bildungsreise also existed for the Germans, like the travels of Goethe to Italy, or the travels of Schopenhauer in Europe. Or the travels of Alexander v. Humboldt to South America. The only small problem was that Germany was quite poor in the 1700's up to 1870, and so the Germans couldn't travel so far and long with the limited money they had. The best tales about German Tourism at these times were those of the "Fromme Helene" by Wilhelm Busch, who went to Heidelberg on honey moon with her newly wed husband, and the story goes like this.

http://www.wilhelm-busch-seiten.de/werke/helene/

In der frommen Helene beleuchtet Wilhelm Busch satirisch religiöse Heuchelei und zwielichtige Bürgermoral:

„Ein guter Mensch gibt gerne acht,

Ob auch der andre was Böses macht;

Und strebt durch häufige Belehrung

Nach seiner Beß’rung und Bekehrung“

http://www.wilhelm-busch-seiten.de/werke/helene/kapitel09.html

Ruinen machen vielen Spaß. -

Auch sieht man gern das große Faß.

Und - alle Ehrfurcht! - muß ich sagen.

Alsbald, so sitzt man froh im Wagen

Und sieht das Panorama schnelle

Vorüberziehn bis zum Hotelle;

Denn Spargel, Schinken, Koteletts

Sind doch mitunter auch was Nett's.

»Pist! Kellner! Stell'n Sie eine kalt!

Und, Kellner! Aber möglichst bald!«

Der Kellner hört des Fremden Wort.

Es saust der Frack. Schon eilt er fort.

Wie lieb und luftig perlt die Blase

Der Witwe Klicko in dem Glase. -

Gelobt seist du viel tausendmal!

Helene blättert im Journal.

»Pist! Kellner! Noch einmal so eine!« -

Helenen ihre Uhr ist neune.

Der Kellner hört des Fremden Wort.

Es saust der Frack. Schon eilt er fort.

Wie lieb und luftig perlt die Blase

Der Witwe Klicko in dem Glase.

»Pist! Kellner! Noch so was von den!« -

Helenen ihre Uhr ist zehn. -

Schon eilt der Kellner emsig fort. -

Helene spricht ein ernstes Wort. -

Der Kellner leuchtet auf der Stiegen.

Der fremde Herr ist voll Vergnügen.

Pitsch! - Siehe da! Er löscht das Licht.

Plums! Liegt er da und rührt sich nicht.

http://www.wilhelm-busch-seiten.de/werke/helene/kapitel12.html

The pilgrimage of the fromme Helene is equally hilarious.

Some other works by Busch on pilgrimages are also very instructive:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Busch#Werke

http://www.noologie.de/Wallfahrt.htm

I have added some humoristic comments to the work, since it would be senseless if I had just copied it.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_heilige_Antonius_von_Padua

Der heilige Antonius von Padua[1] ist eine der frühen geschlossenen Bildergeschichten des humoristischen Zeichners und Dichters Wilhelm Busch aus dem Jahr 1864, veröffentlicht 1870. Ähnlich wie Die fromme Helene (1872) und Pater Filucius (1872) ist die Bildergeschichte von der antiklerikalen Haltung Wilhelm Buschs geprägt.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knopp-Trilogie

Die Knopp-Trilogie ist nach Max und Moritz eines der bekanntesten Werke von Wilhelm Busch. Der Zweizeiler Vater werden ist nicht schwer / Vater sein dagegen sehr stammt aus dieser Trilogie.

Die Trilogie besteht aus drei Teilen: Abenteuer eines Junggesellen war der erste Teil, deren Fortsetzungen als Herr und Frau Knopp 1876 und Julchen 1877 erschien. Erstmals ist hier der Bürger nicht Opfer handlungsstarker Plagegeister, wie es in Max und Moritz oder Hans Huckebein, der Unglücksrabe der Fall war, sondern durchgängig die handelnde Hauptperson.^[1]

The Bildungsreise of Immanuel Kant

The most egregious example of the Bildungsreise in the mInd was Kant, who had never left Köngisberg at all. But he astounded his erudite visitors who had themselves travelled to all those exotic places. Kant had read all the travel books that he could get, and he had memorized them all down to the details. And Kant was able to tell them every detail of every Monument, every Temple, and then some Public Buildings. He had such an excellent eidetic mInd that he could visualize all those places. The only thing that he could not visualize was what the Prostitues did in those places, and especially their prices. Or what it was to be ripped off by some natives when they wanted to show the German tourist the best Restaurants and the best Hotels, and the best Public Spectacles. Because this was just the business of the Tourism Industry of all Places and of all Times. Those friendly Tourist Guides always got some good Kickbacks from those Restaurants and Hotels, on top of the meagre Bakshish that they got from the Tourists. And since the good German Tourists knew nothing at all about the local customs they always got ripped off very expertly. The natives knew full well that the Germans were the most gullible and naive Tourists of them all. And somehow I have the impression that when you see some present-day German tourists in all the Antiquities Markets between Tangiers and Abu Simbel, that the conditions had not changed at all in those 200 years or so. So there was a wholesale market in Egypt of this time when the Egyptian Antiquities Forgers came up with so many historical relics of Ancient Egypt that they had out-produced the Ancient Egyptians by about an order of magnitude. We will never know how many of those "really original" antique pieces of Egypt in the German Museums are fakes. My informed guess that it is about half of them. But when one doesn't want to know, one doesn't ask. And it would be quite a shame for the good German Museum directors if one would have found out about all this fakery. So they also never allowed any physicists to make any age tests with their precious exhibits.

Beware! fake Egyptian antiques

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvUm5MeNBTk

Fakes in the art world - The mystery conman | DW Documentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lNSXB4i4fE

Forged Egyptian Antiquities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRs3cfBoHGM

Sadigh Gallery - Seller in fake antiquities!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVqzyAf8pIc

Then there was the good Hegel, who also never got to go anywere except Stuttgart and then some environs...

and then straight to Berlin where he became Professor of Philosophy.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/environ

As a little side note we may mention Karl May, who also did a Bildungsreise, in the friendly Library of the Prison where he was just serving time in. Fortunately this Prison had a very good library of books about Travels into Far-Far-Away contries, so the good Karl May could do his Bildungsreise entirely while sitting in his cell in this Prison, and since he had such a good phantasy, he was able to do the whole Bildungsreise in his mInd. So this proves that one can do a Bildungsreise and not leave your little nice cosy Prison Cell at all.

https://www.tlz.de/kinder/detail/-/specific/Winnetou-Erfinder-Karl-May-musste-mehrmals-ins-Gefaengnis-290979179

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_May

https://www.bild.de/lifestyle/kultur/kultur/winnetou-skurrile-fakten-ueber-karl-may-57754312.bild.html

http://karl-may-wiki.de/index.php/Bibliothek_der_Strafanstalt_Schloss_Osterstein

Die Gefangenenbibliothek

Verwaltet wurde die Bibliothek 1867 von Katechet Carl Leberecht Reinhold Hohlfeld. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt bestand die Bibliothek aus 4.289 Bänden. Diese unterteilten sich in 250 Exemplare Neues Testament/Heilige Schrift, 1.041 Gesangbücher, 222 Bände Lutherische Katechismen und Spruchbücher sowie 2.776 anderweitige Bücher belehrenden Inhalts. Für die Zellengefangenen war eine besondere Bibliothek abgezweigt, die exklusive der Neuen Testamente, Gesangbücher und Katechismen 699 Bände der als anderweitige Bücher ausgewiesenen Werke enthielt.

Die 2.077 "anderweitigen" Bände der Kollektivhaft wurden 1867 26.086 mal ausgeliehen, die 699 Bände der Isolierhaft 3.831 mal.

Für die katholischen Detinierten gab es eine eigene "ziemlich reichhaltige" Bibliothek, die unter der Verwaltung des katholischen Geistlichen stand.^[2]

And the Germans had another difficulty. Since in the whole of the British'er Empire, which comprised the better part of the Planet, the Lingua Franca was English, so every Beduin in Egypt knew some English, equally every Ricksha driver in India and China. [I just liked this Indiana Jones movie temple of Doom. There the Ricksha driver has a prominent role.] So the good English'man could be sure to get some friendly help from "the natives" who were of course eager to get some "Bakshish" from the always quite wealthy English'er Traveller, who was surely rich when compared to the income of "the natives". We may also note a quote by Wilhelm Busch:

https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/plisch-und-plum-4189/27

< Kapitel 27>

Zugereist in diese Gegend, Noch viel mehr als sehr vermögend, In der Hand das Perspektiv, Kam ein Mister namens Pief. "Warum soll ich nicht beim Gehen" -Sprach er - "in die Ferne sehen? Schön ist es auch anderswo, Und hier bin ich sowieso." Hierbei aber stolpert er In den Teich und sieht nichts mehr. "Paul und Peter, meine Lieben, Wo ist denn der Herr geblieben?" Fragte Fittig, der mit ihnen Hier spazieren geht im Grünen. Doch wo der geblieben war, Wird ihm ohne dieses klar. Ohne Perspektiv und Hut Steigt er ruhig aus der Flut. "Alleh, Plisch und Plum, apport!" Tönte das Kommandowort.

[Alleh -> Allez vous, Enfants de la Patrie. Wilhelm Busch surely didn't like Napolium.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Temple_of_Doom

In 1935, Indiana Jones narrowly escapes the clutches of Lao Che, a crime boss in Shanghai, China. With his 11-year-old Chinese sidekick Short Round and the nightclub singer Willie Scott in tow, Indy flees Shanghai on an airplane that, unbeknownst to them, is owned by Lao Che. While the three of them are asleep on the plane, the pilots dump the fuel and parachute out, leaving the plane to crash over the Himalayas. Indy, Shorty, and Willie discover the sabotage and narrowly manage to escape by jumping out of the plane on an inflatable raft. They ride down the mountain slopes and fall into a raging river, eventually arriving at the village of Mayapore in northern India. The impoverished villagers believe the three to have been sent by Shiva to retrieve the sacred lingam stone stolen from their shrine, as well as the community's missing children, from evil forces in the nearby Pankot Palace. During the journey to Pankot, Indy hypothesizes that the stone may be one of the five fabled Sankara stones that promise fortune and glory.

The trio receive a warm welcome from the Prime Minister of Pankot Palace, Chattar Lal. The visitors are allowed to stay the night as guests, during which they attend a lavish but grotesque banquet given by the young Maharaja, Zalim Singh. Lal rebuffs Indy's questions about the villagers' claims and his theory that the ancient Thuggee cult is responsible for their troubles. Later that night, Indy is attacked by an assassin, leading Indy, Willie, and Shorty to believe that something is amiss. After Indy kills the assassin, they discover a series of tunnels hidden behind a statue in Willie's room and set out to explore them, overcoming a number of booby-traps along the way.

The trio eventually reach an underground temple where the Thugs worship Kali with human sacrifice. They watch as the Thugs chain one of their victims in a cage and slowly lower him into a ceremonial lava pit, burning him alive. They discover that the Thugs, led by their high priest Mola Ram, are in possession of three of the five Sankara stones, and have enslaved the children to mine for the last two. As Indy tries to retrieve the stones, he, Willie, and Shorty are captured and separated. Indy is whipped and forced to drink a potion called the Blood of Kali, causing him to enter a trance-like state and mindlessly serve the Thugs. Willie is prepared for sacrifice, while Shorty is whipped and put to work in the mines alongside the children. Shorty breaks free and escapes back into the temple, where he burns Indy with a torch to bring him back to his senses. After fighting off the guards and defeating Lal, Indy stops Willie's cage and cranks it out of the pit just in time to save her from the fire, while Mola Ram escapes. Indy retrieves the Sankara stones, and the three return to the mines to free the children. As Indy fights a hulking overseer, Singh—also under Mola Ram's control—tries to cripple him with a voodoo doll. Shorty knocks the doll away and burns him to break the trance, and a restored Indy escapes and leaves the overseer to die in a rock crusher.

The trio escape from the temple in a mine cart, pursued by Thugs, while Mola Ram orders a water cistern dumped in an attempt to flood them out. After barely escaping the deluge, they are again cornered by Mola Ram and his henchmen on a rope bridge high above a crocodile-infested river. Indy cuts the bridge in half with one man's sword, leaving everyone to hang on for their lives. As he and Mola Ram struggle over the stones, he invokes the name of Shiva, causing them to glow white-hot. Mola Ram burns his hand on the stones, causing him to lose his grip and fall to his death; Indy catches the last one safely and climbs up as a company of British Indian Army riflemen, summoned by Singh, arrive and open fire on the Thuggee archers trying to shoot him. Indy, Willie, and Shorty return to Mayapore with the children and give the missing stone back to the villagers.

Bildung is a typical German Word

Bildung is a typical German word that is hard to translate into other latinized languages, since it derives from some very old images (imago) of Bild, Bildung, Abbild, and Urbild, which are derived from originally Greek philosophical concepts of the Bild. Meaning Ikon [like Ikone in the Orthodox Greek Spiritual Art] Ikonos, Eikonos, Ikonik, Idea, Eidotos, and then some more terms which we find in the philosophy of Platon. In Latin we have the imago and the imagination, so we can draw some parallel philosophical tracks between Latin and Greek. And this all refers to Dream Images, on which I do a lengthy discussion in the present text. As I have stated it somewhere, the Dreams are the forgotten Language of God. See especially my interpretation of the Dream interpretaion of Daniel, when he decrypted the Dream of Nabochondosor. And I did some more Meta-Morphology with this Dream. And I had stated it also in some passage: The Meta-Morphology of Dreams is quite the same as The Meta-Morphology of Foam. Because in the German Language one says: Träume sind Schäume. Dreams are like Foam. They are infinitely Morphable. So this kind of Meta-Morphology leans heavily on the Morphology of our Dreams. I have done some in-depth discussion on the powers and applications of the Dream-Time Processor in the present work.

7.2 Samuel Johnson

I will also refer to the diciontary of Samuel Johnson, who came up with his famous work on 15 April 1755. I would call his dictionary a precursor of my own Meta-Morphological work on Language, Linguistics, Neurolinguistic Reframing of words and concepts, and also the deep structures of Sermantics and Semiotics. See also the work of Umberto Eco who was one of the Grand Masters of Semiotics, next to Peirce, Lotman... I have done extensive stories on Semiotics, and I will include some of that work later on. I have also made some studies on the business of Dis-Information using the techniques of Bowdler'izing and Euphemism. On can subsume the latter Dis-Information techniques under the general heading of Neurolinguistic Reframing, as was so well documented in a recent project of the ARD (Deutsches Nationales Qualitäts-Fernsehen).

https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13692982.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language

Published on 15 April 1755^[1] and written by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language.

OPULENCE

Wealth; riches; affluence

"There in full opulence a banker dwelt,

Who all the joys and pangs of riches felt;

His sideboard glitter'd with imagin'd plate,

And his proud fancy held a vast estate."

-- Jonathan Swift

There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London booksellers contracted Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of 1,500 guineas (£1,575), equivalent to about £240,000 in 2019.^[2] Johnson took seven years to complete the work, although he had claimed he could finish it in three. He did so single-handedly, with only clerical assistance to copy the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson produced several revised editions during his life.

Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 173 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent English dictionary. According to Walter Jackson Bate, the Dictionary "easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who laboured under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time".^[3]

...

Unlike most modern lexicographers, Johnson introduced humour or prejudice into quite a number of his definitions. Among the best-known are:

"Excise: a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid"^[11]

"Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words"^[12]

"Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland [it] supports the people"^[13]

A much less well-known example is:

"Monsieur: a term of reproach for a Frenchman"^[14]

He included whimsical little-known words, such as:

"Writative – A word of Pope's, not to be imitated: "Increase of years makes men more talkative but less writative; to that degree I now write letters but of plain how d'ey's.""^[15]

7.3 Ambrose Bierce : The Devil's Dictionary

I also make good use of The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. My favorite philosophical definition is the one on Descartes. Ambrose Bierce had a very keen understanding of all the nonsense that the good Descartes had concocted in his... Well er, I wouldn't call this philosophy at all, because this is exactly a case of very sophisticated Philosophical Schizophrenia. It may be very sophisticated, but it still is Schizophrenia. Meaning a split, this time of mInd and the Body, or the Soma and the Spirit. This insanity was consequently enlarged upon and driven into the ultimate logical Suprematization of Insanity [See: Sloterdijk: Gottes Eifer] by the good Hegel and his School of Insanity, er I mean The School of German Idealism. The good Hegel and his school carried the split just a little further into the lofty heights of the Logics of Impossibility and of Vacuosity, meaning the Vacuum that forms in the mInd of a German Idealist Philosopher, instead of any usable idea: The Split of Leib und Geist, or Körper und Geist, or Materie und Geist. By the same token, one can also call it The School of German Schizophrenia. But it all came about by the initial [or original sin] of the system of Descartes. But we can trace that bad idea back throughout all the ages to the good Platon, who came up with the bad idea of the idea, and this was the beginning of all the pitfalls of human thinking. As Whitehead had stated it quite succinctly: Most of the history of Western Philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Platon.

CARTESIAN, adj.

Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum -- whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

BRAHMA, n.

He who created the Hindoos, who are preserved by Vishnu and destroyed by Siva -- a rather neater division of labor than is found among the deities of some other nations. The Abracadabranese, for example, are created by Sin, maintained by Theft and destroyed by Folly. The priests of Brahma, like those of the Abracadabranese, are holy and learned men who are never naughty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil%27s_Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary is a satirical dictionary written by American Civil War soldier, journalist, and writer Ambrose Bierce consisting of common words followed by humorous and satirical definitions. The lexicon was written over three decades as a series of installments for magazines and newspapers. Bierce's witty definitions were imitated and plagiarized for years before he gathered them into books, first as The Cynic's Word Book in 1906 and then in a more complete version as The Devil's Dictionary in 1911.

Initial reception of the book versions was mixed. In the decades following, however, the stature of The Devil's Dictionary grew. It has been widely quoted, frequently translated, and often imitated, earning a global reputation. In the 1970s, The Devil's Dictionary was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.^[1] It has been called "howlingly funny"^[2], and Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig wrote that The Devil's Dictionary is "probably the most brilliant work of satire written in America. And maybe one of the greatest in all of world literature."^[3]

7.4 Sample definitions

Cannon

(n.) An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

Conservative

(n.) A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.^[33]

Cynic

(n.) A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.^[34]

Egotist

(n.) A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Faith

(n.) Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Lawyer

(n.) One skilled in circumvention of the law.^[35]

Love

(n.) A temporary insanity curable by marriage...

Marriage

(n.) A household consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.

Positive

(a.) Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Religion

(n.) A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Youth

(n.) The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer.

Youth is the true Saturnian Reign, the Golden Age on earth again, when figs are grown on thistles, and pigs betailed with whistles and, wearing silken bristles, live ever in clover, and cows fly over, delivering milk at every door, and Justice is never heard to snore, and every assassin is made a ghost and, howling, is cast into Baltimost! —Polydore Smith^[36]

Under the entry "leonine", meaning a single line of poetry with an internal rhyming scheme, Bierce included an apocryphal couplet written by the fictitious "Bella Peeler Silcox" (i.e. Ella Wheeler Wilcox) in which an internal rhyme is achieved in both lines only by mispronouncing the rhyming words:

The electric light invades the dunnest deep of Hades.
Cries Pluto, 'twixt his snores: "O tempora! O mores!"

7.5 Mark Twain

Even though Mark Twain didn't provide a dictionary, one can extract from his works may interesting entries of the Meta-Morphing of words and concepts.

7.6 Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels

Even though Jonathan Swift didn't provide a dictionary, one can extract from his works may interesting entries of the Meta-Morphing of words and concepts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver%27s_Travels

Gulliver's Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships is a prose satire^[1]^[2] of 1726 by the Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, satirising both human nature and the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature. Swift claimed that he wrote Gulliver's Travels "to vex the world rather than divert it".

The book was an immediate success. John Gay remarked "It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery."^[3]

Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput

Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag

Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan

Part IV: A Voyage to the Land of the Houyhnhnms

Gulliver's Travels has been the recipient of several designations: from Menippean satire to a children's story, from proto-science fiction to a forerunner of the modern novel.

[It] has three themes:

A satirical view of the state of European government, and of petty differences between religions

An inquiry into whether men are inherently corrupt or whether they become corrupted

A restatement of the older "ancients versus moderns" controversy previously addressed by Swift in The Battle of the Books

A possible reason for the book's classic status is that it can be seen as many things to many different people. Broadly, the book has three themes:

A satirical view of the state of European government, and of petty differences between religions

An inquiry into whether men are inherently corrupt or whether they become corrupted

A restatement of the older "ancients versus moderns" controversy previously addressed by Swift in The Battle of the Books

In storytelling and construction the parts follow a pattern:

The causes of Gulliver's misadventures become more malignant as time goes on—he is first shipwrecked, then abandoned, then attacked by strangers, then attacked by his own crew.

Gulliver's attitude hardens as the book progresses—he is genuinely surprised by the viciousness and politicking of the Lilliputians but finds the behaviour of the Yahoos in the fourth part reflective of the behaviour of people.

Each part is the reverse of the preceding part—Gulliver is big/small/wise/ignorant, the countries are complex/simple/scientific/natural, and the forms of government are worse/better/worse/better than Britain's.

Gulliver's viewpoint between parts is mirrored by that of his antagonists in the contrasting part—Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being vicious and unscrupulous, and then the king of Brobdingnag sees Europe in exactly the same light; Gulliver sees the Laputians as unreasonable, and his Houyhnhnm master sees humanity as equally so.

No form of government is ideal — the simplistic Brobdingnagians enjoy public executions and have streets infested with beggars, the honest and upright Houyhnhnms who have no word for lying are happy to suppress the true nature of Gulliver as a Yahoo and are equally unconcerned about his reaction to being expelled.

Specific individuals may be good even where the race is bad—Gulliver finds a friend in each of his travels and, despite Gulliver's rejection and horror toward all Yahoos, is treated very well by the Portuguese captain, Don Pedro, who returns him to England at the novel's end.

7.7 Voltaire Candide: Also a Bildungsreise

This is also a masterpiece of Voltaire's satirical thinking where he rips apart the Theodicee of Leibniz. The Morphological similarity with Gulliver's travels is quite apparent, since this is also a Bildungsroman in the Goethe'an sense.

It means that the character of Candide in his travels together with Professor Pangloss [This is Leibniz] undergoes some transformation of character leading to some sort of Purification or Des-Illusionment. This is again an Age-Old Theme, because it starts out with the Odyssee.

[I always do the spelling in the original word of Ancient Greek, and not in the corrupted latinized Version of Corrupt English which tends to distort the Semantic Network.]

The Bildungsroman is mostly the Bildungsreise meaning the Spritual Travel or Pilgrimage by which one reaches Spiritual Maturity. So we can extend this genre to the Don Quixote by Cervantes, the Travels of Dante into the many tiers of Hell, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and then many many more. The Pilgrimage to Compostela is one of the better known Spritual Travels and there is quite a good book by Hape Kerkeling where he describes his inner spiritual experience but with a lot of humor, as we are accustomed from the humoristic masterpieces of Hape Kerkeling.

7.8 Hape Kerkeling: Ich bin dann mal weg

Of course the good Hape Kerkeling did a little word-play here. I am quite absolutely sure, that no-one in Germany noticed the word-play: It means "Ich bin gerade mal auf dem Pilger-Weg".

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_dann_mal_weg

Ich bin dann mal weg – Meine Reise auf dem Jakobsweg ist ein am 22. Mai 2006 als Buch erschienener Reisebericht des deutschen Entertainers Hape Kerkeling. Er war 103 Wochen lang in den Jahren 2006 bis 2008 auf dem Platz 1 der Spiegel-Bestsellerliste.

Inhalt

Kerkeling beschreibt die Erlebnisse seiner Pilgerreise nach Santiago de Compostela im Jahr 2001. Auslöser für die Entscheidung, den Jakobsweg zu gehen, war ein Hörsturz sowie die Entfernung seiner Gallenblase. Er beschäftigte sich zudem mit Shirley MacLaines Buch Der Jakobsweg: eine spirituelle Reise, in dem die Schauspielerin von ihren bisherigen „Reinkarnationen“ berichtet und ihre Reise mit zahlreichen Erlebnissen ausschmückt. Das Buch sowie ein Wanderführer waren auf der Wallfahrt seine einzige Lektüre.

Kerkeling wählte für seine Wanderung den Camino Francés und musste sich wie alle Pilger mit den physischen und psychischen Anforderungen einer solchen Reise auseinandersetzen. Er lernte dabei nicht nur sich selbst und seinen Glauben, – Zitat – „Buddhist mit christlichem Überbau“, besser kennen, sondern traf auch auf die verschiedensten Menschen, deren Charaktere er sehr plastisch beschreibt. Im amüsant plaudernden Ton schildert Kerkeling seine Erfahrungen, die an manchen Stellen tiefsinnig werden, und reflektiert über den Sinn des Lebens. Mit dem „klassischen“ christlichen Pilger suchte er keinen Kontakt, er schätzt sie als „nicht lernfähig“ ein (Zitat: „Die werden als die gleichen Menschen die Reise beenden, als die sie sie begonnen haben…“). Stattdessen ziehen ihn „Sonderlinge und Exoten“ an, er macht unter anderem Erfahrungen mit einer heiratswilligen Südamerikanerin, einem sexlüsternen Mitwanderer, Spießern, Kirchenkritikern, Esoterikern und Spiritisten.

Camino de Santiago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_de_Santiago

The Camino de Santiago (Latin: Peregrinatio Compostellana, "Pilgrimage of Compostela"; Galician: O Camiño de Santiago),^[1] known in English as the Way of Saint James among other names,^[2]^[3]^[4] is a network of pilgrims' ways or pilgrimages leading to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain, where tradition has it that the remains of the saint are buried. Many follow its routes as a form of spiritual path or retreat for their spiritual growth. It's also popular with hiking and cycling enthusiasts and organized tour groups.

The French Way (Camino Francés) and the Routes of Northern Spain are the courses listed in the World Heritage List by UNESCO.

Enlightenment Era

During the war of American Independence, John Adams (who would become the second American president) was ordered by Congress to go to Paris to obtain funds for the cause. His ship started leaking and he disembarked with his two sons at Finisterre in 1779. From there he proceeded to follow the Way of St. James in the reverse direction of the pilgrims' route, in order to get to Paris overland. He did not stop to visit Santiago, which he later came to regret. In his autobiography, Adams described the customs and lodgings afforded to St. James's pilgrims in the 18th century and he recounted the legend as he learned it:^[22]

I have always regretted that We could not find time to make a Pilgrimage to Saintiago de Compostella. We were informed, ... that the Original of this Shrine and Temple of St. Iago was this. A certain Shepherd saw a bright Light there in the night. Afterwards it was revealed to an Archbishop that St. James was buried there. This laid the Foundation of a Church, and they have built an Altar on the Spot where the Shepherd saw the Light. In the time of the Moors, the People made a Vow, that if the Moors should be driven from this Country, they would give a certain portion of the Income of their Lands to Saint James. The Moors were defeated and expelled and it was reported and believed, that Saint James was in the Battle and fought with a drawn Sword at the head of the Spanish Troops, on Horseback. The People, believing that they owed the Victory to the Saint, very cheerfully fulfilled their Vows by paying the Tribute. ...Upon the Supposition that this is the place of the Sepulchre of Saint James, there are great numbers of Pilgrims, who visit it, every Year, from France, Spain, Italy and other parts of Europe, many of them on foot.

Adams' great-grandson, the historian Henry Adams, visited Leon among other Spanish cities during his trip through Europe as a youth, although he did not follow the entire pilgrimage route.^[23] Another Enlightenment-era traveler on the pilgrimage route was the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.

The Pilgrim's Progress from This World

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilgrim%27s_Progress

The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come is a 1678 Christian allegory written by John Bunyan. It is regarded as one of the most significant works of religious English literature,^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] has been translated into more than 200 languages, and has never been out of print.^[5]^[6] It has also been cited as the first novel written in English.^[7]

Bunyan began his work while in the Bedfordshire county prison for violations of the Conventicle Act of 1664, which prohibited the holding of religious services outside the auspices of the established Church of England. Early Bunyan scholars such as John Brown believed The Pilgrim's Progress was begun in Bunyan's second, shorter imprisonment for six months in 1675,^[8] but more recent scholars such as Roger Sharrock believe that it was begun during Bunyan's initial, more lengthy imprisonment from 1660 to 1672 right after he had written his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.^[9]

The English text comprises 108,260 words and is divided into two parts, each reading as a continuous narrative with no chapter divisions. The first part was completed in 1677 and entered into the Stationers' Register on 22 December 1677. It was licensed and entered in the "Term Catalogue" on 18 February 1678, which is looked upon as the date of first publication.^[10] After the first edition of the first part in 1678, an expanded edition, with additions written after Bunyan was freed, appeared in 1679. The Second Part appeared in 1684. There were eleven editions of the first part in John Bunyan's lifetime, published in successive years from 1678 to 1685 and in 1688, and there were two editions of the second part, published in 1684 and 1686.

The entire book is presented as a dream sequence narrated by an omniscient narrator. The allegory's protagonist, Christian, is an everyman character, and the plot centres on his journey from his hometown, the "City of Destruction" ("this world"), to the "Celestial City" ("that which is to come": Heaven) atop Mount Zion. Christian is weighed down by a great burden—the knowledge of his sin—which he believed came from his reading "the book in his hand" (the Bible). This burden, which would cause him to sink into Hell, is so unbearable that Christian must seek deliverance. He meets Evangelist as he is walking out in the fields, who directs him to the "Wicket Gate" for deliverance. Since Christian cannot see the "Wicket Gate" in the distance, Evangelist directs him to go to a "shining light," which Christian thinks he sees.^[11] Christian leaves his home, his wife, and children to save himself: he cannot persuade them to accompany him. Obstinate and Pliable go after Christian to bring him back, but Christian refuses. Obstinate returns disgusted, but Pliable is persuaded to go with Christian, hoping to take advantage of the Paradise that Christian claims lies at the end of his journey. Pliable's journey with Christian is cut short when the two of them fall into the Slough of Despond, a boggy mire-like swamp where pilgrims' doubts, fears, temptations, lusts, shames, guilts, and sins of their present condition of being a sinner are used to sink them into the mud of the swamp. It is there in that bog where Pliable abandons Christian after getting himself out. After struggling to the other side of the slough, Christian is pulled out by Help, who has heard his cries and tells him the swamp is made out of the decadence, scum, and filth of sin, but the ground is good at the narrow Wicket Gate.

Tennyson, Ulysses

There is a very good poem, the Ulysses by Tennyson, which fits in quite nicely in the present context. So I just include it here.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Gargantua and Pantagruel

The French had considerably less of the famous British'er humour of Samuel Johnson and the others mentioned above. But they also had some good ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantua_and_Pantagruel

The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (French: La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais, which tells of the adventures of two giants, Gargantua (/ɡɑːrˈɡæntjuə/; French: [ɡaʁɡɑ̃tya]) and his son Pantagruel (/pænˈtæɡruɛl, -əl, ˌpæntəˈɡruːəl/; French: [pɑ̃taɡʁyɛl]). The text is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, and features much crudity, scatological humor, and violence (lists of explicit or vulgar insults fill several chapters).

The censors of the Collège de la Sorbonne stigmatized it as obscene,^[1] and in a social climate of increasing religious oppression in a lead up to the French Wars of Religion, it was treated with suspicion, and contemporaries avoided mentioning it.^[2] According to Rabelais, the philosophy of his giant Pantagruel, "Pantagruelism", is rooted in "a certain gaiety of mind pickled in the scorn of fortuitous things" (French: une certaine gaîté d'esprit confite dans le mépris des choses fortuites).

Rabelais had studied Ancient Greek and he applied it in inventing hundreds of new words in the text, some of which became part of the French language.^[3] Wordplay and risqué humor abound in his writing.

Cognitive Dissonance

https://www.linguee.com/english-german/translation/cognitive+dissonance.html

given by Leon Festinger in which he argued, based on cognitive dissonance research,

for the incompatibility of intrinsic and...

Leon Feistinger, in dem er aufgrund von Forschung zu kognitiver Dissonanz die Unverträglichkeit

intrinsischer und extrinsischer Motivationsquellen darlegte.

On Incommensurability

There is also a related expression called Incommensurability. It just means that when one doesn't realize that when any two concepts / or moral / or ethical / or law&order ideas are Incommensurable, there arises a Cognitive Dissonance. And that means in turn that especially very moral and very principled people have a tendency to entertain at the same time some Incommensurable concepts and ideas, and there must be by necessity be the Cognitive Dissonance because as we all know, people cannot live by those highly abstract ideas. The only person in the intellectual history of humanity who was able to do this was Immanuel Kant. He almost lived perfectly according to his ethical principles. But that had a cost. He could not marry because that would contradict his high ethical standards. And he could almost not do anything practical at all. He probably was, besides Platon, the foremost and highest life-negating philosopher in the whole intellectual history of mankind. For all the practical matters he had his servant. And we all know his nice dictum about marriage: "Marriage is a "bürgerlicher Vertrag" (meaning a Law&Order pact or contract of the burgeois society of his time and place of the center of the Prussian Empire) for the reciprocal use of the genitalia". And I believe that he really meant that in all seriousness. Of course he never mentioned the concept of "consensual" which didn't exist in his philosophical world. Because consense can also have the meaning of con-sensual. And Kant had no idea whatsoever what "sensual" could mean. His other famous dictum was: Sapere Aude. Also in this dictum, Kant had forgotten that sapere also means to taste (the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge). As such, I like Kant very much for his theoretical philosophy, about as much as I like Platon. They were both "birds of the same feather". But just like birds in the sky, they knew nothing at all what it is like to live (and breed of course). So when it comes to Practical Philosophy, I rather stick to the good Xenophon. He was for all of eternity the best Practical Philosopher who had ever existed.

incommensurable adjective

inkommensurabel adj

unvergleichbar adj

less common:

unvereinbar adj / unvergleichlich adj / nicht vergleichbar adj / nicht messbar adj /nicht zu vereinbaren

On the Tributes

In those earlier times of statehood, the taxes were called tributes.

https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/tribute

1 An act, statement, or gift that is intended to show gratitude, respect, or admiration.

‘the video is a tribute to the musicals of the 40s’

mass noun ‘a symposium organized to pay tribute to Darwin’

1.1 in singular Something resulting from a particular quality or feature and indicating its worth.

‘his victory in the championship was a tribute to his persistence’

1.2 as modifier Denoting or relating to a group or musician that performs the music of a more famous one and typically imitates them in appearance and style of performance.

‘an Abba tribute band’

‘a tribute show’

2historical mass noun Payment made periodically by one state or ruler to another, especially as a sign of dependence.

‘the king had at his disposal plunder and tribute amassed through warfare’

3historical A proportion of ore or its equivalent, paid to a miner for his work, or to the

Origin

Late Middle English (in tribute (sense 2)): from Latin tributum, neuter past participle (used as a noun) of tribuere ‘assign’ (originally ‘divide between tribes’), from tribus ‘tribe’.

8 Peter Sloterdijk Special

Spoiler Alert! I don't want to spoil anyone's fun,

but the following text contains some material which some people

may find Offensive, and even Politically Incorrect.

But this is Anthropological Material.

Any further Reading here is wholly on your Own Responsibility!!!

8.1 Introduction to Peter Sloterdijk's Work

Peter Sloterdijk is in Germany a popular writer on philosophical subjects wo has among the highest number of books sold to a large public who have some intellectual aspirations... That is, compared to other famous philosophical authors. We can mention a few contenders in popularity: Rüdiger Safranski and Richard David Precht. Of course there is quite a difference between "philosophy" in the US-Brit sense and the German akademik sense. So we could make a sub-classification between "serious" or "akademik" philosophy on one side, and "pop philosophy" in the US-Brit sense on the other side. There can even be a "philosophy" of hamburger cooking. This was developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his theory of "flow":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

The experience of "flow" is strikingly reminiscent of Zhuangzi’s description of "great skill" achieved by Daoist sages such as carpenter P’ien and butcher Ting, the latter finding bliss in the art of chopping up ox carcasses by "going along with the Dao" of the ox. It is no coincidence that these blue-collar sages are situated on the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy. They discover the Dao much more readily than Confucian scholars, who, according to Zhuangzi, are studying the "dregs of wisdom" in lifeless books and have lost touch with the world of concrete affairs.

https://ze.tt/zum-angeben-diese-werke-praegen-die-philosophie/

https://www.buchreport.de/news/ratgeber-bestsellerliste-philosophie/?utm_source=buchreport&utm_medium=link&0=utm_campaign&1=lp-gesehen&2=utm_content&3=Denker+im+Wettstreit

https://www.buchreport.de/bestseller/buch/isbn/9783442155286.htm/

https://www.buchreport.de/news/verkaufsliste-als-spiegel-des-zeitgeistes/

Richard David Precht etwa, der mit 3 Titeln unter den Top 5 die Themenbestseller dominiert, hat mit seinen Büchern seine Verdienste für die Popularisierung der Philosophie, aber für die fachphilosophische Diskussion eher keine Impulse geliefert.

One can safely state a quite obvious general rule: The more success a "philosopher" has on the pop philosophy market, the more he will be seriously criticized by the "akademik" philosophy establishment. Such is quite decidedly the case with Peter Sloterdijk's works. Exactly what his style of writing and thinking makes it so popular to a wider readership is of course a source of criticism by the more akademik oriented part of the Mainstream Philosophical community. And there is especially a faction which draws its intellectual orientation on the Frankfurter Schule which talks in the most vicious and adverse terms about Sloterdijk. I don't want to get too embroiled in those very polemical discussions of a climate of quite violently flaring tempers that are showing up there. It is, as Sloterdijk sometimes expresses it: There is no "Streitkultur" in the German Intelligenzia, but rather more an un-culture of vicious ideological defamation and ad hominem attacks. See 20JH, p. 262-263, where he becomes quite explicit: "... wobei auffällt, dass es in Deutschland zwar das Wort für die Sache gibt, die Sache selbst aber fehlt, weil bei uns anstelle von Streitkultur eine Hetzkultur, eine Denunziationskultur, eine Herabsetzungskultur entstanden ist, in der die Dinge vorentschieden sind"... I don't think that there can be a more poignant expression than this one.

The Viewpoint of the visiting Anthropologist from Mars

I personally rather like to view this scenario from the viewpoint of an anthropologist. Possibly I would even like to take the position of a visting anthropologist from another very distant interstellar civilization who has chosen to study the wheelings and dealings of the humanoid inhabitants of the planet Earth from the stance of a distanced and impartial observer. Or as Popper (1962) once expressed it: As a visiting Anthropologist doing field research on the "Totems and Tabus of the natives of the mostly white races of north-western Europe and North America". In one of my more pointed definitions of what an anthropologist should consider his main task, is that to study all those things that the normal "civilized" humans would never admit that they are doing, despite their overt laws&order and rules&regulations and their moral&ethical pro-fessions. A famous saying about puritanism illustrates the point: "Puritanism means that you can do anything whatsoever, as long as you don't enjoy it". We can conduct an anthropological criticism of the ethics and moral rule systems of "higher" civilizations which mostly mean verbal-written-rational-legal codes. As opposed to the mostly unwritten "oral tradition" of the unwritten and often unspoken "Totems and Taboos" of the more "indigenous" oriented societies.

The Kantian Ethics are a good example for this. Also we find the Roman system of law as written out in the Justinian corpus which has more or less become the foundation of all European Law systems. And in a further development, we find the code of Napoleon. Because of all those rules&regulations there is a French way of thinking about law, and one can state it about like this: "For every exception there must also be a rule or law from which the exception is derived". And in this context we can quote Sloterdijk's infamous works on "Menschenpark" and his essay on the "Self-Domestication" of humanity. See 20JH p. 44-69. The arguments that Sloterdijk gives are mostly derived from the Neo-Spencerian work by Heiner Mühlmann "Die Natur der Kulturen". This is based on the "maximal stress cooperation" MSC theory derived from warfare. He also quotes Arnold Gehlen on p. 49 in 20JH. Also it should be noted that these theories can be traced back to the ideas of Hobbes in "Leviathan". Sloterdijk also references Bazon Brock's ideas of "Selbst-Fesselung" meaning that it is a social-sanitary precaution that one should not try to comptletely fill out the limits of expression, be this the artistic expression, or the political and law expression, or the power potential of science and technology. In any case, the work 20JH sums up a lot of Sloterdijk's earlier works in shorter chapters and with less excessive metaphors and ruminations. One could call it a "Reader's Digest" of the Sloterdijk oevre, which comes in fitting that it also marks the end of his Akademik career as the Principal of the Karlsruhe "Hochschule für Gestaltung".

The Anthropological View of Akademik Philosophy

The anthropological view of akademik philosophy notes that it has its more or less explicit rules of discourse and conduct, meaning that it should be rational in the western philosophical definition of rationality. Clearly the controversy around Sloterdijk's work is going far beyond or better beneath rationality. There can be an Anthropology of Philosophy but not a Philosophy of Anthropology. Sloterdijk expresses this a similar vein, when he says that the theologians seek ever higher suprematizations of their god, whereas the god of the Morphologians goes into ever more profound depths. And I include here the observation that theology is a human philosophical endeavor, and in my view, the Morphologians are also Anthropologists. And the Philosophical Anthropology must by needs be more profound than the mostly eurocentric western Philosophy, since it must encompass the whole of humanity and not just its Western European offshoots. And Anthropology has in its scope a very much wider view of humanity than the verbal-alphabetic-centric writing culture that is at the base of Western philosophy. I may make a short reference of Semiotics, because the endless superposition of textual interpretation is another way to express a sort of "nearly infinite regress" that is possible when we construct "almost infinite levels" of contexturalization. They reach as far as the human spirit can go, and end only when the human energy or mental power is completely exhausted.

And there is a point to make that the ancient Greek Sophist way of argument orignally depended entirely on the spoken word, it was still an oral culture. Also the Roman legal system was initially purely oral-verbal. The art of the Orator was highly evolved, and we may cite the works of Cicero in this context. Also the work of Augustinus is based mainly on his ability as Orator and Lawyer. And so it is no suprise that Augustinus is also the author of one of the must inquisitive studies of The Art of Memory, but this time with a Christian "modulation" as one could say. From the antique tradition derive these many "Arts of Memory" that were re-discovered in the Renaissance. The Warburg Library holds one of the largest data bases on this. Giordano Bruno was one of the last Grand Masters of the art, and Frances Yates is most famous for her work on that subject. The work of Umberto Eco and the Semioticians derives at least some of their materials from these sources.

My personal view of Sloterdijk's work is pretty much in the vein of Nietzsche's famous dictum: "Thou shalt not only love thyne enemyes, but thou shalt also loathe thyne friends." And surely, Peter Sloterdijk is no friend of mine. So I quote one of mye owne favourythe Byble verse, Matthew 5:44

But I say'eth unto thou, thou shalt Love thy enemyes, bless theym that curse thou, doe goode to thym that loathe thy, and praye'the for thym why despitefully use thy, and persycuthe thy.

8.2 Some Aspects of the Controversy around Sloterdijk's Work

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/jubilaeum-wechselseitiger-schuettelverkehr-1.3559872

https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/was-ist-ein-philosophieboom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sloterdijk

https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-14022505.html

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kritik_der_zynischen_Vernunft

Die Kritik der zynischen Vernunft ist ein 1983 erschienenes zweibändiges Werk des deutschen Philosophen Peter Sloterdijk. Das Werk behandelt den Kynismus/Zynismus als gesellschaftliches Phänomen der europäischen Geschichte.

Bunt wie ein Paradiesvogel

https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-14022505.html

AG: Da der Spiegel wie immer schreibt, wenn er einige Schreiberlinge nicht mag, so mag diese Spiegel-Schreiberei als Beispiel dafür gelten, was herauskommt, wenn man das Spiegel-Ei ohne Ei serviert bekommt:

13.06.1983 / Imperiale Gebärde, rasante Gedanken

Reinhard Merkel über Peter Sloterdijks Kultbuch „Kritik der zynischen Vernunft“ ....

Die „FAZ“ hat den Autor mit Schopenhauer verglichen. - Reinhard Merkel, 33, arbeitet am Institut für Rechtsphilosophie der Universität München.

Ein großer bunter Luftballon steigt auf, und in der Atmosphäre beginnt es zu klingen. Eine philosophische Flaumfeder, leicht und schön, tanzt hoch über den ausgestorbenen Fluren aller Dagewesenheiten, und ein vielstimmiger Chorus hebt an: Gepriesen sei der Name des Herrn. 200 Jahre nach der "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" deutet einer im Pantheon der Kultur auf den leeren Platz neben Immanuel Kant und sagt, wenn auch mit feinem Lächeln: meiner!

Sloterdijks erstaunliche Phantasie vollzieht eine danteske geistige Fahrt durch die Geschichte der abendländischen Vernunft. Aber es ist eine umgekehrte Göttliche Komödie: der Weg führt aus dem Paradiso durch eine Art De-Purgatorio zum Inferno, an dessen historischem Rand im Jahre 1933 Sloterdijks Diabolische Komödie abbricht. Der Blick des Autors ermißt eine 2500jährige Distanz zwischen zwei Gelächtern:

Jenem anekdotisch berühmten der thrakischen Magd, die dem beim Sternegucken in eine Grube gefallenen Thales von Milet zurief, wie er glauben könne, den Himmel zu erkennen, wenn er nicht einmal die Löcher in der Erde sehe;

[AG: The story of Thales of Milet goes a little differently: Thales did astronomical observations from the bottom of a well, since this was in antiquity the way to observe something in the sky without interference from other objects. The difference between the observations of the sun's position at differenct latitudes allowed to calculate the circumference of the earth.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/thales/#H8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

He is best known for being the first person to calculate the circumference of the Earth, which he did by comparing angles of the mid-day Sun at two places, a known North-South distance apart.^[2] His calculation was remarkably accurate. He was also the first to calculate the tilt of the Earth's axis, again with remarkable accuracy.^[3] Additionally, he may have accurately calculated the distance from the Earth to the Sun and invented the leap day.^[4] He created the first global projection of the world, incorporating parallels and meridians based on the available geographic knowledge of his era.

]

Bunt wie ein Paradiesvogel entfaltet die Phantasie des Buches ihre Flügel, die sie in pulsierender Bewegung über einen weiten Horizont von Themen, Assoziationen und Symbolen tragen: zwei Begriffe, mobil genug für solche Dynamik - "Zynismus" und "Kynismus". "Zynismus ist das aufgeklärte falsche Bewußtsein - das unglückliche Bewußtsein in modernisierter Form", ein Bewußtsein, das seine Fähigkeiten mit dem Verlust seiner Moral bezahlt, seine herrische Verfügungsmacht über die Außenwelt mit dem Orientierungsverlust seiner Innenwelt. ...

Mit der Wunderkerze einer funkelnden, manchmal begeisternden Sprache leuchtet Sloterdijk diesen riesenhaften gedanklichen und geschichtlichen Horizont aus. Aus dem Zwielicht des diffusen Zynismus tauchen Gesichter auf. Philosophen und Henker, Dichter und Feldherren, auch Masken und Lemuren, Lügen und Kunstwerke. Im Sturmschritt seiner Diktion durchläuft Sloterdijk das Szenarium, erhellend, was seine Phantasie zu fassen bekommt: die Aufklärung. ...

Ein Herr Schütte, der sich auszukennen meint, hat Sloterdijks 1000-Seiten-Tat in der "Frankfurter Rundschau" als einen "Schlag ins verstaubte Kontor unseres zeitgenössischen Philosophierens" gefeiert. Tatsächlich hat Sloterdijks empfindliches Gemüt einen seit Jahren in der Kulturkulisse summenden Ton, ein schlechtes Geräusch aus vernunftfeindlicher An-sich-Klugheit, habitueller Ironie und neuer Weinerlichkeit aufgefangen und auf seinen blankpolierten Begriff gebracht. Ein epidemisch grassierender Gehirnzustand, oszillierend zwischen Orakel und Grille, also etwa zwischen Nouveaux Philosophes und Bhagwan, dürfte hier die theoretische Platt-Form finden für jenen sanften Bewußtseinsimperialismus, der nicht "kynisch" ist, sondern ein Selbstmordmotiv.

https://www.zeit.de/1985/31/ein-unbeschriebenes-blatt/komplettansicht

https://www.zeit.de/2009/40/Sloterdijk-Blasen/komplettansicht

https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/35-jahre-nach-der-kritik-der-zynischen-vernunft-peter-sloterdijk-analysiert-das-zynische-bewusstsein-zu-beginn-des-21-jahrhunderts-ld.1447498

About German "Sprachblasen"

There is a quite interesting field of German "Sprachblasen" (language bubbles) which is almost in-translatable into other languages. This may be an intellectual art form of over-reaching, over-boarding, and otherwise misplaced metaphors that seems to thrive and flourish in the hydroponic beds of German Intellectualism. I include some of these "Sprachblasen" just for the sake of documentation. They don't have any meaning for me, and probably nothing useful at all for all the rest of the world.

https://www.fr.de/kultur/literatur/kunstvolle-zerreibung-einer-welterzaehlung-11732960.html

Die Erzählbegabung: fast geschenkt. Wer käme da heute als Denk-Prosaist (nicht nur im deutschen Sprachraum) Sloterdijk gleich? Allenfalls Slavoj Zizek, ein freilich noch vagabundierenderer Geist, unsteter in seinen Anknüpfungspunkten, mit schöner Schlagseite zu Trivialitätsphänomenen vom Konsumfilm bis zur Popkultur. Derlei erledigt Sloterdijk eher nebenbei. Er liebt mehr die Höhenluft. Versteht sich als Urenkel Nietzsches. ...

Ein Gedanke, den die bis vor kurzem unumstößlich scheinende Fortschrittsapologie perhorreszierte wie nichts sonst. Sloterdijk propagiert mitnichten die "zyklischen" Weltbilder konservativer Konsistenz, wenn er auch aus seiner Fortschritts-Skepsis keinen Hehl macht. Seinen philosophischen Rundbau errichtet er indes nicht in der steinernen Massivität eines abgeschlossenen Systems. Kein Weltgeist tönt aus hoher Kuppel. Eher siedelt Sloterdijks Geist in beweglichen, zur Verflüssigung tendierenden Raumgestalten. In Fruchtblasen eben oder Globus-Imaginationen, dehnfähig und aufnehmbar für alle erdenklichen Erweiterungen, auch im Sinne des aktuellen Modells "Globalisierung". ...

Deren Fixierung an den Zeitpfeil war vor allem in der marxistischen Denktradition eher optimistisch grundiert - so stellt sich Ernst Blochs Prinzip Hoffnung vor allem als imposante Zeitreise durch eine bis heute andauernde "Vorgeschichte" des aus der Latenz sich herausentwickelnden Humanum dar. Von Blochs Gläubigkeit ist Sloterdijk äonenweit entfernt, aber von der Abenteuerlichkeit seiner Spurensuche ist er, seinerseits ein Abenteuerschriftsteller, nach wie vor begeistert. ...

... dass derartiger philosophischer Rückenwind für die "westlichen Werte", im Gegensatz sowohl zu Adornos (oder Benjamins) Grauen vor den dunklen Seiten der Moderne als auch zu Heideggers düsterem Existenz-Heroismus, etwas Hausbackenes, Philiströses ausstrahlt. Dem allzu offensichtlichen Anschein pausbäckiger Affirmation entgeht Sloterdijks so und durch mitunter herrenreiterhaft snobistische Attituden und, bei aller Mitteilsamkeit, oft auch einen Hang zu eskapistischer sprachkombinatorischer Hermetik. ...

Nur, dass er die von ihm hergestellten Räume dann auch wieder zerstört oder gelassen zusieht, wie sie sich nach ihrer Bildung, Ein- oder Ausbildung, im Fortschreiten der Analyse auch wieder auflösen. Am kompaktesten gibt sich, im ersten Kapitel (dem eine immense, ein Drittel des Bandes ausmachende Einleitung vorausgeht), die neunfache Aufteilung "anthropogener Inseln" in Chirotop, Phonotop, Uterotop, Thermotop, Erototop, Ergotop, Alethotop, Thanatotop und Nomotop. Ein wenig flüchtig übersetzt: Berührungswelt, Klangsphäre, Weltbrutkästen, Wärmeraum, Begehrens- und Eifersuchtsfelder, Kampf- und Anstrengungszusammenhang, Wissensraum, Transzendenz, Gesetzes- und Verfassungskontext.

The Shape of Things By Sam Han on the Sphäeren by Sloterdijk

This discussion of Sloterdijk's work is just a little less polemical than what the German Intelligenzia could come up with. And I also postulate it that someone who doesn't know German and Classical Greek in-and-out is in no position to understand the finer subtleties of Heidegger's philosophy. His is a totally different mode of thinking and that sets him apart from all the Romanized and Latinized thinkers of the European tradition. So it is of no use at all when one quotes a lot of French intellectuals in order to set something straight about Heidegger. And even though Nietzsche didn't like the German way of thinking at all, he was so deeply steeped in the Greek modes of thinking that he didn't realize how these two languages and thinking systems were "morphologically identical". Of course in my own version of Morphology. And Nietzsche had only Goethe as his "Spiritus Rector" to lean on. Even Schopenhauer was not in the same class of Greek thinking, since Sch. had been in fierce opposition to Hegel's Idealism. And so Schopenhauer was much more used to think the British'er Empirism way. And it was Whitehead who managed to bridge all those mental / philosophical abysses.

http://reviewsinculture.com/2013/06/15/the-shape-of-things/

Issue 4.1 | June 15, 2013

Peter Sloterdijk. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Trans. Wieland Hoban.

Semiotext(e), 2011. 664pp.

For anyone even remotely interested in philosophy, when a figure sets out to “correct” Heidegger, you want to pay attention. This is not necessarily out of admiration for the author of Being and Time, or his ideas, but rather out of a genuine curiosity made up of equal parts amazement and horror. The interest would be compulsory, akin to intellectual rubbernecking, for it is more than likely that he or she, the subject of such an utterance, will, like Heidegger, be vulnerable to intense scrutiny and interpretation. Therefore, when MIT Press describes the much-anticipated Spheres trilogy by Peter Sloterdijk as “the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger’s Being and Time,” there is reasonable expectation for it to be disastrous.

Ever since the English translation of his The Critique of Cynical Reason in 1988, Sloterdijk has been known in English-speaking intellectual circles as somewhat of a mercurial figure. Not much, still, is known about him. From where, that is, what intellectual milieu or tradition, did he emerge? Is he a Frankfurt guy? Is he a Luhmannite? Is he Heideggerian? The rather out-of-nowhere character of Sloterdijk’s work, as well as the inconsistent reception of his work outside a handful of watchers of developments in continental philosophy and social theory, placed Sloterdijk in the category of “heard of him” (otherwise known as “oh right, he wrote that one thing”) in North American cultural theory.

But Sloterdijk’s trajectory differed tremendously in his native Germany. When copies of Cynical Reason started leaving the shelves at a rapid pace upon its release, the then-journalist was boosted into the highbrow German intellectual scene traditionally filled with academics. [AG: he forgets that Sloterdijk had a Dr. of philosophy.]

Today, we can count Sloterdijk among the country’s public intellectuals, a group that also includes luminaries like Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth (more on these two later). Sloterdijk is also host to a show called “Das Philosophische Quartett” (The Philosophical Quartet), which airs on ZDF, the German equivalent to PBS in the United States or NHK in Japan. It features Sloterdijk alongside guests of various intellectual pedigrees, from academics to journalists.

More recently, Sloterdijk has made himself known among the wider American reading public for a controversy involving welfare state politics, class, ressentiment and Axel Honneth. As a blog post on the Global Post summarizes:

According to an article published this past summer in one of Germany’s most widely read newspapers, the country’s welfare state is a “fiscal kleptocracy” that has transformed the country into a “swamp of resentment” and degraded its citizens into “mystified subjects of tax law.” The text, by philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, goes on in that vein for some 3,000 words[…]

Among the country's intellectual class, the article has served as kindling for a fiercely fought and wide-ranging conversation about the national economy that, six months on, still shows little sign of abating. (Abadi)

The article, entitled “Die Revolution der gebenden Hand” (“The Revolution of the Grasping Hand”), ...

[[AG: I must correct some things right here and now. It is exactly the opposite mis-translation. "Die gebende Hand" is the giving hand. The hand of the tax collector is the Grasping Hand. And as an Anthropologist, I must also correct those poor Intelligenzia-Intellectuals: Because the system of honor taxes was very widespread and very successful in almost all "indigenous" or paleo-historic societies. It was written about in so many stories like Marcel Mauss, and the system of Potlatch, and the "Feast of the Pigs". Only the poor US- & European Intelligenzia-Intellectuals didn't know anything about that. Philosophical Anthropology has had at least some chances to step aside from the purely eurocentric (alphabet-centric) ways of intellectualizing, but they nover bothered to do so.

I also should mention Leslie White here, since he had been an antagonist of Franz Boas. This didn't serve him well, even though he was at some time the president of the American Anthropological Association. There were also some quite fierce ideological battles in American Anthropology, but the Americans had the advantage that they could not be suspected of being "Crypto-Nazi". They were just more or less openly "Herbert Spencerians". The latter one is remembered for his dictum "the survival of the fittest". There was just one slight problem with that interpretation. In the Darwinistic sense, being fit means to fit. And there is no grammatical suprematization of being "fit". No-one of his followers had understood that "fittest" is a grammatical oxymoron. You can just take a key and a lock as example. The key that opens the lock, is fitting. But there can be no more "fitting" key. This is logically impossible. And we can turn the argument on its head when we study the Paleontology of Natural History. It were always the "most fitting" species that died out first. Because the Climate and the Biospheric conditions change all the time over periods of x* 100.000 or 1.000.000 years. So whenever there was a slight change in the Biospheric conditions, those "fittest" organisms died out first. Only the non-specific or not-so-fitting organisms survived. So it came to pass that the humans as the most egregiously "not-so-fitting" species of the whole Biosphere came to dominate all the rest of it. Because in the distant past when the dinosaurians ruled, our precursors and very distant ancestors were just some shrews. They could only take over when the atmospheric conditions had changed sufficiently. After the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, the earth atmosphere became much thinner, and only suitable for present life-forms.

Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(book)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_White

Leslie Alvin White (January 19, 1900, Salida, Colorado – March 31, 1975, Lone Pine, California) was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of theories of cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. He was president of the American Anthropological Association (1964).

]]

...must be read as a polemic. While it includes some semblance of genealogical (in the Foucauldian sense) analysis of the modern democratic welfare state, its primary purpose is to offend. He begins with a meditation on the birth of the democratic state as the compromise between classical liberalism and anarchism, each of which was amenable to the declining significance of the state. For liberalism, the state needed to be minimal and imperceptible to its subjects, the citizens. For anarchism, the state needed to be destroyed. Hence, the “modern democratic state gradually transformed into the debtor state, within the space of a century metastasizing into a colossal monster—one that breathes and spits out money” (Sloterdijk, “The Grasping Hand”). For a Europe that is currently under much economic turmoil, and with a Germany that is currently embroiled in a national debate, hinging in large part on a parochial stance toward Southern Europe as fiscally irresponsible debtees, about whether to “bail out” Greece and Spain, this article, for many of its critics, amounted basically to “piling on.” Further, according to its critics, it preyed on extant, albeit latent, nationalist sentiment, which culminated in the infamous book by Thilo Sarrazin, which all but placed the entirety of Germany's economic woes on its immigrants.

This was the context for the retort by Honneth, one of the last remaining flag bearers of the Frankfurt School. There he accused Sloterdijk of, among many things, being an ideological mouthpiece for advanced capitalism, “a mystical or speculative [interpreter] of history and the world,” and, rather strangely, a reader of Michel Foucault.[1] The gist of Honneth's critique, which I cannot fully assess in this space, is that Sloterdijk has taken ressentiment as “first psychology” of the lower classes and has attempted to pull the rug from up under the very foundations of European liberal democracy—the welfare state—by criticizing it. I bring up Honneth’s public spat with Sloterdijk in order to portray a picture of the latter that presents not only his prominence in the German intellectual scene but also his embattled public image. While Sloterdijk may only recently be gaining mass recognition in North America, he has, in Europe, at least, been a visible presence for the past two decades or so.

For Sloterdijk, the problematic of inhabitation is that which courses through the veins of Western metaphysics and philosophy. The “old cosmology of ancient Europe,” as he calls it, “that rested on equating the house and home with the world,” can be seen in even the disparate philosophies of Hegel and Heidegger. Humans in this view were “inhabitants in a crowded building called cosmos”(Sloterdijk, “Spheres Theory”). As it was for his most obvious predecessor, Gaston Bachelard, the motif of the house—signifying order, unity and certainty—is one that unduly holds too much purchase in the West. For Sloterdijk, the Enlightenment should have dispelled the need for a “universal house in order to find the world a place worthy of inhabiting” (Ibid.). Yet, it remains, thanks in part to philosophers such as Heidegger, whose self-proclaimed task to “end metaphysics” as such did not do away with the, if we can call it something, the “metaphysics of the universal house.” Sloterdijk’s project, therefore, in his three-volume study called Spheres, is to forge a path beyond Heidegger, by providing a general theory of “associations.”

For Heidegger, the overarching question of metaphysics was temporal—with the keywords “being” and “becoming.” For Sloterdijk, it is spatial; the keyword is “world.” While it is the case that Sloterdijk views Heidegger to have been wrong all along, there is something about the current technological, socio-political moment that has occasioned a particular response. Sloterdijk writes:

It's the final stage of a process that began in the epoch of Greek philosophical cosmology, and whose present vectors are rapid transportation as well as ultra-high-speed telecommunication. At the same time, it's the product of a radical disappointment, whereby human beings had to abandon the privilege of inhabiting a real cosmos—which is to say, a closed and comforting world. The cosmos, such as the Greeks conceived it, was the totality of being imagined under the form of a great, perfectly symmetrical bubble. Aristotle and his followers were responsible for this idea of a cosmos composed of concentric, celestial spheres of increasing diameters, the majority of which consisted of a hypothetical material they called ether. For us, this model of the world is obviously no longer operational. (Sloterdijk, “Foreword to the Theory of Spheres” 223)

In response to this “inoperability,”[2] Sloterdijk offers a “spherology,” beginning from the micro, which is the subject of volume I of Spheres entitled Bubbles, all the way to the macro, the subject of volume III, entitled Foams. Sphere, for Sloterdijk, does not assume a totality or finality as the phenomenologically inflected “lifeworld” or “world” entails. As he puts it rather paradoxically, “the primordial existential sphere is created every time a moment of inter-psychic space happens” (Sloterdijk, “Foreword to the Theory of Spheres” 223–224). Against the weight of “existence,” Sloterdijk puts forth a succession of events, of happenings, wherein meaningful and significant connections are made but do not suffocate. Hence, the microspherology he presents in Bubbles, the volume under review, is, at root, a theory of “atmosphere” or as he likes to say, of “air.” He chooses these ethereal metaphors as he believes that spheres, the closest Heideggerian cognate being Stimmung (more on this later), “never speak but…brings everything together and makes everything possible…a treasure that that allowed human beings to realize the fact that they’re always already immersed in something almost imperceptible and yet very real, and that this space of immersion dominates the changing states of the soul down to its most intimate modifications” (Sloterdijk, “Foreword to the Theory of Spheres” 225).

The development of this “spatial vocabulary” is necessary, therefore, because the concept of “world” is simply too bulky to do anything analytically. “Sphere” works better for several reasons. For one, it is more in tune with the development of modernity, which is characterized by “the increasing removal of safety structures from the traditional theological and cosmological narratives” (Sloterdijk, Bubbles 25) that used to provide human subjectivity with a degree of ontological security by providing human beings a place in the world, which was fixed, identifiable and orientating. Yet, these “safety structures” in the form of “worlds,” according to Sloterdijk, remained. While the emergence of the Figure of Man, allowed for humans to become the subject and object of knowledge, the “empirico-transcendental” as Foucault so rightly put it, it did not mean the complete “end of metaphysics.” It just diverted the sublimated energy. “People,” Sloterdijk precisely notes, “no longer wanted to receive their inspired ideas from embarrassing heavens”(Sloterdijk, Bubbles 28). Instead of God, these ideas came from within, so to speak, albeit mediated via technology, which reflected the “distance between what God was capable of in illo tempore and what humans will, in time, themselves be capable of” (37). Hence, supposedly secular models of subjectivity that emerged in the wake of the scientific revolutions of Galileo, Copernicus and later Newton, nonetheless remained closely tied to the imago Dei. The image of man as God simply shifted the flow of power from one end to another. It did not reconstitute the very elements of the prior cosmological system. The shape of the world, even after the emergence of the Figure of Man, did not much change.

But it was not just the shape of the system that did not budge, but rather the way things in it related to one another. While Sloterdijk takes much care to provide various illustrations having to do with the contours of what he is describing, he is in fact attempting to describe relationality. One could even go so far as to say that for him the way in which certain elements in a system relate—let us call this the “relational quantum”—gives the system itself shape. Thus to call something “foam,” “bubble,” or “sphere” is really an attempt by Sloterdijk to theorize a “connecting force.” Spheres, then, are “the original product of human coexistence.” In other words, spheres form out of the relations of certain existing ontological objects, or as Sloterdijk tends to call them, “nobjects.” Spheres therefore are unlike environments. “Environment,” while certainly a milieu for the facilitation of elements in action therein, is nevertheless a top-down way of thinking about social forms. Environments are determinants and causes, though perhaps not linear or direct ones. They are, still, somehow initiators. Spheres are more “atmospheric-symbolic places.” They are like “air” or even “air-conditioning systems in whose construction and calibration, for those living in real coexistence . . . is out of the question not to participate” (46). “Living in spheres” is indeed a condition, a structure but one which is dynamic and ethereal. It “means inhabiting a shared subtlety” (46. Emphasis added).

Bubbles, the first volume of the project, is a “theory of the shared inside” (542). The bubble is the first step, the most elemental, the smallest unit of sphere. The question, of course, is what kind of bubble are we talking about here? In describing it, Sloterdijk references a variety of illustrations, including vaginas, wombs and soap. Stranger still is Sloterdijk’s embrace of the term “soul,” not the Cartesian variety but the Platonic one. Spheres are a form of “soul expansion” that would have previously been associated with “spirit,” although Sloterdijk claims that what was “meant was always inspired spatial communities” (19). But today, there is no thinking about spatial communities without thinking of networks, which has triggered “a general space crisis,” or what Paul Virilio calls “the annihilation of space.” This complicates, in particular, age-old ideas about subjectivity.

According to Sloterdijk, the annihilation of space finally reveals the myth of individual autonomy, which he describes as the “basic neurosis of Western culture,” that is, “to dream of a subject that watches, names and owns everything, without letting anything contain, appoint or own it, not even if the discreetest God offered himself as an observer, container and client” (86). The Enlightenment emphasized and augmented loneliness as the default setting of the human being. This is the case not only with the ancients but also with Hegel and Heidgger in particular. To the contrary, for Sloterdijk, there is, what we can call, a primary “intimacy” between beings. Even phenomenological conceptions of “intersubjectivity” took as its quantum the individual, perceiving subject—a point made loud and clear most acutely by post-structuralist critics. But more to the point, the Modern Age too easily discarded the primacy of, what Sloterdijk describes as a magolological and erotological tendency. He writes:

Among humans, fascination is the rule and disenchantment the exception. As desiring and imitating begins, humans constantly experience that they not only hold a lonely potential for desiring the other within themselves, but also that they manage, in an opaque and non-trivial manner, to infect the objects of their desire with their own longing for them; at the same time, individuals imitate the other's longing for a third element as if under some infectious compulsion…Where philosophy of the early Modern Age mentions such effects of resonance and infection, it spontaneously draws on the vocabulary of magological traditions. As easy as antiquity, it was reflection on affective causalities of the magical type that initiated the clarification of the interpersonal or inter demonic concert, which, from Plato's time on, was interpreted as a work of eros. (208)

Tracing this genealogy magolological of relation from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age allows for Sloterdijk to contrast the spheres’ model of relationality to that of subjectivity, which he, after Lacan, refers to as the psychoanalytic model. In large part, he does this to tie it to Judeo-Christian understandings of The Law, which “does not encourage merging, but constantly makes the case for constructive separations; its focus is not intimate fusion, but rather the discretion of the subject in relation to the other” (217). The Law model of subjectivity, we can argue, is the basis for so many of the recent theories of the subject that are no doubt derivative of Lacan and Althusser. In the Althusserian version, which I think Sloterdijk has in mind although he more explicitly takes aim at Lacan, the subject is the subject of ideology, constituted in and through the ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses) that have surrounded the subject’s entire identity through various layers of institutional identity formation and recognition. Thus, when the police officer hails you, the subject was always already interpellated, as evidenced by the subject's assumption that it is he that office is addressing. Put in juxtaposition to Sloterdijk, this model seems to be top-down in that there is no theory of “bindability” beyond the superstructural notion of “ideology.” This amounts to sacrificing the “relationships between things” for “being-in-itself” (220). Put differently, Sloterdijk identifies in this model of subjectivity an overemphasis on the ontic.

The question of the ontic most certainly leads to questions around notions of thinghood and objects. Especially nowadays, there has been a flurry of philosophical interest in ideas of object-oriented ontology. “Things” or objects are a subject of serious theoretical inquiry. Sloterdijk, hardly a source for many of the thinkers associated with OOO and speculative realism, nevertheless shares these analytic concerns.[3] Subjectivity is but one rather convenient level for him to begin. It is a point of entry, not his primary intellectual concern. Nevertheless, the importance of relationality brings Sloterdijk to theorize objects, those very entities whose relations he expresses such profound interest in. In large part, he use the term “nobject” from Thomas Macho, a German cultural theorist whose work has not quite reached the English-speaking theory world quite yet.[4] In Sloterdijk’s rendering, nobjects are “things, media or persons that fulfill the function of the living genius or intimate augmenter for subjects” (467). They are “objects that…are not objects because they have no subject-like counterpart” (294). His examples of “nobjects” include air as well as placental blood. Air, he writes, “possesses unmistakable nobject properties as it affords the incipient subject a first chance at self-activity in respiratory autonomy, but without ever appearing as a thing with which to have a relationship” (295). Placental blood is one of the many images of the gynecological register that Sloterdijk draws from throughout the work. The womb is of particular importance to Sloterdijk as it functions to counter the assumed importance of “primary narcissism” (320). Instead, he says that there is a primary duality, which is born out not only in art (a privileged area of evidence for Sloterdjik) but also in mythology.

This leads him to venture into some rather odd places. For instance, in a chapter on what he calls “the primal companion,” he spends a lot of space on what he calls the “sanitization of afterbirth.” There, he argues that the importance of afterbirth which subsequently suffered from a “bourgeois-individualist” attempt to retroactively isolate the subject. He even goes so far as to offer a periodization. He notes that “modern individualism could only enter its intense phase in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the general clinical and cultural excommunication of the placenta began” (384). Thus the “lonely modern subject” is a “fission product from the informal separation of birth and afterbirth. Its positively willful being is tainted by a fault to which it will never admit: that it rests on the elimination of its most intimate pre-object” (386). Hence, the Modern Age can be thought of as defined by “placental nihilism.”

Undoubtedly this is stylization taken to the nth degree. But there is something to Sloterdijk's overuse of the metaphor. He views the maternal relationship as the proto-type for his theory of relationality in spheres—“proto-subjectivity.” “[I]ntimacy is a transmission relationship . . . not taken from the symmetrical alliance between twins or like-minded parties, where each mirrors the other, but from the irresolvable asymmetrical communion between the maternal voice and the fetal ear” (511). While one could not blame any reader for being fed up with Sloterdijk’s “illustrative” method, there is, in my mind at least, a method, that is, a clear intention on the part of Sloterdijk. The imagistic aspect of his illustrative method is born out in not only the dearth of examples that he uses, but in the countless photographs and illustrations that Sloterdijk includes in Bubbles.

But returning to the issue of spheres and proto-subjectivity, Sloterdijk does not necessarily spend all of his efforts in a nostalgic explication for a time where ontological thinking was not devoid of magolological or erotological elements. Instead, he suggests that “modern mass culture” already exhibits this sort of reality of spheres as it “offers new, direct ways of fulfilling the desire for homeostatic communion.” He goes on to argue that “pop music and its derivatives” allow for the “possibility of diving into a body of rhythmic noise in which critical ego functions become temporarily dispensable” (527). These sorts of communions share in common with religious communions the opportunity for “absorption,” as he calls it. The most telling of examples he provides is that of the Love Parade, held in Berlin for a long time but later moved to other cities in Germany. Up until its recent cancellation, the Love Parade was characterized by its particularly EDM (electronic dance music)-heavy focus, exhibitionist ethos, and the sheer number of attendees with figures (though disputed) reported to be in the hundreds of thousands. Of this festival, Sloterdijk writes:

…[T]hey could easily be called “Truth Parades,” as their aim is to absorb large numbers of people, all of whom value the attributes of their individuality, into happy, symbiotic reversible and thus “true” sonospheres. These communions with the audio gods or the rhythmic juggernauts are based on the same truth model as post-Freudian psychoanalysis—with the difference that the latter recommends that its clients develop a strict individual rhetoric of mourning for the lost primal object, while integristic music therapy in the streets relies on drug-assisted group euphorias that may advance flirtation with absorption into a spheric primal body in the short term, but yield little profit for the participants’ media competence in the sobering periods that follow (527–528).

It is in this unlikely example of the Love Parade, where I believe the key to Sloterdijk’s “theory of the shared inside” lies. By viewing this music festival as “communion,” and thus employing a religious register, Sloterdijk arguably betrays, what I view to be, his true intellectual concerns—theology. In showing that “life is always a life-in-the-midst-of-lives, Being-in, then, should be conceived as the togetherness of something with something in something” (542), Sloterdijk ends up using the theological concept of “perichoresis,” which the Protestant German theologian Jürgen Moltmann in his God in Creation describes as “the principle of mutual interpenetration.”

In Moltmann's theology, all relationships “are analogous to God.” This is characterized by a “primal, reciprocal indwelling and mutual interpenetration,” which in theological terms is called perichoresis: “God in the world and the world in God; heaven and earth in the kingdom of God, pervaded by his glory.” This mutual interpenetration disabuses the notion of a solitary life. Against a panpsychic Leibnizian monadology, which sees ontologically individual beings that coordinate with another through a divine pre-established harmony, Moltmann describes the principle of mutual interpenetration as all living things “[living] in another and with one another, from one another and for one another”(Moltmann 17). This is analogous to Sloterdijk's “onto-theology.”

Yet, no matter how novel Sloterdijk's overall argument, and mode of argument, in the end, it is rather familiar because it is, even according to him, a corrective. Bubbles, and the Spheres trilogy generally, is an attempt to demystify, a tact nearly identical to the theoretical methods of Rudolf Bultmann but also—surprisingly—the Frankfurt school, especially Adorno and Horkheimer. To demythologize is to suggest that if we simply understood the proper genealogy of a particular concept at the root of contemporary metaphysics, it would make for a better world. For Sloterdijk, it is “sphere,” whereas for the Frankfurt School, it was “mass culture.” For all of their public back-and-forths regarding the German welfare state, it seems that Sloterdijk and Honneth, the current director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, have more in common than previously imagined.

Works Cited

Abadi, Cameron. “Germany’s Welfare State Under Fire.” GlobalPost 9 Jan. 2010. Web. 24 May 2012.

Bogost, Ian. “What Is Object-Oriented Ontology?” IAN BOGOST – VIDEOGAME THEORY, CRITICISM, DESIGN 8 Dec. 2009. Web. 26 Sept. 2012.

Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. re.press, 2011. Print.

Gregersen, Thomas. “Axel Honneth Versus Peter Sloterdijk.” Political Theory – Habermas and Rawls 26 Sept. 2009. Web. 25 Sept. 2012.

Harman, Graham. Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures. O Books, 2010. Print.

Moltmann, Jurgen. God in Creation. 1st Fortress Press ed. Fortress Press, 1993. Print.

—. God in Creation. Fortress Press, 1993. Print.

Salam, Reihan. “The Peter Sloterdijk Controversy.” The Agenda 12 Jan. 2010. Web. 24 May 2012.

Shingleton, Cameron. “The Great Stage: Axel Honneth: Against Sloterdijk (Die Zeit, 24 September, 2009).” The Great Stage 11 Feb. 2010. Web. 25 Sept. 2012.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e), 2011. Print.

—. Derrida, an Egyptian. 1st ed. Polity, 2009. Print.

—. “Foreword to the Theory of Spheres.” Cosmograms (2005): 223–240. Print.

—. “Spheres Theory: Talking to Myself About the Poetics of Space.” Harvard Design Magazine 2009: n. pag. Print.

—. “The Grasping Hand.” City Journal Winter 2010. Web. 24 May 2012.

Virilio, Paul. Polar Inertia. Sage, 2000. Print.

—. The Information Bomb. Verso Books, 2000. Print.

—. The Vision Machine. Indiana University Press, 1994. Print.

Notes

[1] While most of this exchange never made it to English-language publications, much of it has been chronicled on blogs. See Gregersen, Thomas. “Axel Honneth Versus Peter Sloterdijk.” Political Theory – Habermas and Rawls. 26 Sept. 2009. Web. 25 Sept. 2012; Shingleton, Cameron. “The Great Stage: Axel Honneth: Against Sloterdijk (Die Zeit, 24 September, 2009).” The Great Stage. 11 Feb. 2010. 25 Sept. 2012.

[2] One cannot but help to think of the continual resonance between Sloterdijk’s project and the recent work of Jean-Luc Nancy. This is the case not only with the recent work by Nancy on religious themes and globalization but also his earlier work on “communality” and “singular plurality.”

[3] There are many books and other writings, mostly on the World Wide Web, on object-oriented ontology. The best definition of OOO has come from videogame theorist Ian Bogost. That can be found at: Bogost, Ian. “What Is Object-Oriented Ontology?” IAN BOGOST – VIDEOGAME THEORY, CRITICISM, DESIGN 8 Dec. 2009. Web. 26 Sept. 2012. Of the books, the following anthologies provide suitable introductions. Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. re.press, 2011. Harman, Graham. Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures. O Books, 2010.

[4] There seems to be almost nothing of Macho’s translated into English. He does, however, have a web site. http://www.culture.hu-berlin.de/tm/

Sam Han is a Seoul-born, New York City-raised interdisciplinary social scientist, working in the areas of social and cultural theory, new media, religion, globalization, and race/ethnicity. He is author of Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2011), Navigating Technomedia: Caught in the Web (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and editor (with Daniel Chaffee) of The Race of Time: A Charles Lemert Reader (Paradigm Publishers, 2009). He is at work on two projects on digital religions in the United States and in Asia. He is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore.

He can be found at: sam-han.org.

8.2.1 Andreas Platthaus

Andreas Platthaus. Verantwortlicher Redakteur für Literatur und literarisches Leben. FAZ

Rezensionen peter-sloterdijk-du-musst-dein-leben-aendern-der-
dreizehnkampfrekordhalter

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensionen/sachbuch/peter-sloterdijk-du-musst-dein-leben-aendern-der-dreizehnkampfrekordhalter-1926899.html

Für einen Denker wie Peter Sloterdijk ist die höchste sportliche Herausforderung gerade recht und die natürliche Überlegenheit des Dezimalsystems kein Maßstab. Also ist ihm der Zehnkampf noch zu wenig als Muster für die Disziplinen, die es im Ideenwettkampf zu bewältigen gilt. Stattdessen proklamiert er einen Dreizehnkampf jenes intellektuellen Bemühens, das er als „Allgemeine Disziplinik“ bezeichnet. Zu bedenken und selbstverständlich auch denkend zu bewältigen gilt es demnach die Fragen von Akrobatik und Ästhetik, Athletik, Rhetorik, medizinischer Therapeutik, Epistemik, Berufe-Kunde, Technik-Kunde, Administrativik, Meditation, Ritualistik, Sexualpraxiskunde, Gastronomik und schließlich – weil dreizehn Disziplinen ja doch nicht genügen – eine „offenen Liste kultivierungsfähiger Aktivitäten, deren Offenheit die Unabschließbarkeit des disziplinenbildenden und damit Subjektivierungen ermöglichenden Feldes selbst bedeutet“.

Das klingt kompliziert, aber an dieser letzten Formulierung kann man nicht vorbei, weil sie umreißt, was das Thema von Sloterdijks heute erscheinendem neuen Buch ist. Es heißt „Du musst dein Leben ändern“, nach dem Schluss von Rilkes Sonett „Archaïscher Torso Apollos“, und als Adressaten des Titels darf man gewiss auch die eigenen Kollegen identifizieren, denn der in Karlsruhe lehrende Philosoph hat sich nicht weniger vorgenommen als die Umstürzung aller Bewertungen. Was die westliche Zivilisation an metaphysischen Maßstäben vor allem in der Neuzeit herausgebildet haben, ist hinfällig, weil die wichtigste Bezugsgröße auf einem Irrtum beruhte: der Religion. Die gibt es gar nicht, stellt Sloterdijk mit einem verbalen Donnerschlag bereits in der Einleitung fest, wir haben sie uns selbst ausgedacht: als Missverständnis einer anthropologischen Konstante, die Sloterdijk unter dem Begriff der „Übung“ fasst.

Üben als zentrale Praktik

Ihr Prinzip beruht auf der „immunitären Verfassung des Menschenwesens“, also dessen Bestreben, sich materiell, symbolisch und rituell zu perfektionieren, um damit individuelle Schutzgewebe zu schaffen. In der Immunisierung sieht Sloterdijk den Beginn aller Systembildung: der biologischen, die sich in Lebewesen artikuliert, und der kulturellen, die ihren Ausdruck in Praktiken findet. Eine dieser Praktiken – und zwar die zentrale – ist die Übung. Und damit werden Wettkämpfe vorbereitet – im agonalen Sinne der Antike, also nicht im neuzeitlichen Verständnis der Konkurrenz.

Die Disziplinen von Sloterdijks intellektuellem Dreizehnkampf sollen sich allen Werkzeugen widmen, mit denen Menschen an ihren Schutzgeweben arbeiten. Als bisherigen Rekordhalter identifiziert Sloterdijk den Kollegen Foucault, der sich immerhin auf sieben der Denkaufgaben eingelassen habe, während die meisten Philosophen sich allein an die Epistemik als ihr eigentliches Fach und bestenfalls noch an drei weitere gewagt hätten. Aber natürlich musste erst Sloterdijk selbst kommen, um es mit der ganzen wilden Dreizehn aufzunehmen.

Akrobatik, Ästhetik, Athletik

Das passiert nicht in „Du musst dein Leben ändern“ allein. Bestmmte Fragenkomplexe finden sich bereits in anderen Büchern Sloterdijks angesprochen, so vor allem in der „Sphären“-Trilogie die Bereiche der Therapeutik, Technik-Kunde oder Sexualpraxiskunde, und in „Der Weltinnenraum des Kapitals“ Teile von Administrativik, Rhetorik und Ritualistik. Im neuen Werk sind es nun vor allem die ersten beiden Disziplinen, in denen Sloterdijk sich übt: Akrobatik und Ästhetik sowie Athletik. Denn in dem Maße, wie das Üben zum neuen Schlüsselbegriff Sloterdijks geworden ist, rückt auch der Begriff der Leistung in den Vordergrund – nicht nur als sportliche Wettkampfmetaphorik. Doch es wäre, wie bereits angedeutet, für Sloterdijk ein Unding, wenn man darin Leistungen im Sinne des neuzeitlichen Gesellschaftssystems erkennen würde, dem er völlige Verirrung deshalb attestiert, weil es die Übungskultur umgemünzt habe zu Training, Ausbildung und Arbeit – also zu Übungen, die nicht länger spirituell-individuelle Ziele verfolgen, sondern einem reibungslosen Teamgeist dienen sollen, der die moderne Arbeitsteilung erst ermöglicht. Was Sloterdijk dagegen zum Ideal erhebt, ist eine Übungskultur, die in der Askese ihre Methode findet.

8.3 Critique by Axel Honneth

https://www.zeit.de/2009/40/Sloterdijk-Blasen/komplettansicht

AG: This really "remarkable" (be-denkens-wert) if you know what the Frankfurter Schule is, and why they have such a liking for Peter Sloterdijk and vice versa. To understand this better, one should also know the nice professor Habermas, who is probably behind the scenes of this whole theater. Habermas and Sloterdijk really loved to hate each other. As much as an arch-enemy can love his arch-enemy. Because without the enemy one would have nothing serious to think of. As I have said this in my chapter on the friendly enemy, and why the enemy is good for the intelligence. When I read the article by Axel Honneth, I am reminded of the General Law of German philosophy, that a serious scholar should be careful never to write a sentence shorter than 4 to 7 lines of text. This is just to ensure that every reader recognizes the superior erudition and intelligence of the writer. This traditon was especially pioneered by Kant and Hegel, and has since then been the Gold Standard of German philosophical writing. Any philosopher who writes sentences shorter than that is viewed with the suspicion that he may be a writer of popular entertainment.

https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Auch-eine-Geschichte-der-Oeffentlichkeit-Habermas-und-der-Maulwurf-der-Vernunft-4453432.html

https://www.spiegel.de/plus/juergen-habermas-90-geburtstag-der-zwanglose-zwang-des-besseren-arguments-a-00000000-0002-0001-0000-000164523797

8.4 Nietzsche, Zarathustra: Ihr Einsamen von heute, ihr Ausscheidenden

I think that this passage is very good for an introduction because "Ausscheidenden" has a double meaning in German. It also means "to excrete", as above so below, we could say.

Wahrlich, ich rathe euch: geht fort von mir und wehrt euch gegen

Zarathustra! Und besser noch: schämt euch seiner! Vielleicht betrog er euch.

Der Mensch der Erkenntniss muss nicht nur seine Feinde lieben, sondern

auch seine Freunde hassen können.

Man vergilt einem Lehrer schlecht, wenn man immer nur der Schüler

bleibt.

...

Ihr sagt, ihr glaubt an Zarathustra? Aber was liegt an Zarathustra!

Ihr seid meine Gläubigen: aber was liegt an allen Gläubigen!

Ihr hattet euch noch nicht gesucht: da fandet ihr mich. So thun alle

Gläubigen; darum ist es so wenig mit allem Glauben.

Nun heisse ich euch, mich verlieren und euch finden; und erst, wenn

ihr mich Alle verleugnet habt, will ich euch wiederkehren.

8.5 Professor für Philosophie Axel Honneth

https://www.zeit.de/2009/40/Sloterdijk-Blasen/komplettansicht

Er ist Professor für Philosophie an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main und seit 2001 Direktor des dortigen Instituts für Sozialforschung, der in den zwanziger Jahren gegründeten »Geburtsstätte« der Kritischen Theorie. Einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit bekannt wurde Honneth mit seinem Buch »Kampf um Anerkennung« (Suhrkamp Verlag), das an den jungen Hegel und den amerikanischen Pragmatisten George Herbert Mead anknüpft. Honneths Philosophie zielt auf eine Kritik an den sozialen Verwerfungen moderner Gesellschaften; ihre Themen sind »Entfremdung«, »Verdinglichung« und »Anerkennungsvergessenheit«. Axel Honneth veröffentlichte zuletzt (zusammen mit Beate Rössler) die Studie »Von Person zu Person. Zur Moralität persönlicher Beziehungen«. Zu seinem 60. Geburtstag (ZEIT Nr. 30/09) erschien – ebenfalls bei Suhrkamp – eine 700 Seiten starke Festschrift mit Beiträgen unter anderem von Nancy Fraser, Eva Illouz, Luc Boltanski, Charles Taylor und Michael Walzer.

8.5.1 Die dreibändigen Sphären waren des Umfangs zu viel...

Hier ist das Zitat:

Gewiss, die dreibändigen Sphären waren des Umfangs zu viel, um sie sich Seite für Seite auch nur zur Ansicht zu bringen; hier reichte die Kenntnisnahme der schwermütigen These, dass wir alle schon im intrauterinen Zustand ein Gefühl der räumlichen Geborgenheit entwickeln, für welche wir, einmal zur Welt gebracht, dann keinen hinreichenden Ersatz mehr finden. Dieser poetische Philosoph war unzufrieden mit den Umständen in anderer Weise, als es die schnöde Gesellschaftskritik der Alten gewesen war; der kritische Einwand galt nicht der institutionellen Einrichtung unseres Gemeinwesens, nicht dem Mangel an sozialer Gerechtigkeit, sondern der Dürftigkeit einer ganzen Kultur, die den harten Gegebenheiten unseres Daseins nicht ins Angesicht zu schauen wagte. Der methodische Zugang, den sich Sloterdijk zu diesen Tatsachen des sozialen Lebens verschaffte, war allerdings alles andere als von philosophischer Raffinesse; so, als habe es Foucaults Einwand gegen den anthropologischen Essenzialismus nie gegeben, so, als seien alle Warnungen vor der Behauptung kultureller Universalien und menschlicher Invarianten in den Wind zu schlagen, ging Sloterdijk schlicht davon aus, dass es bei genauerem Hinsehen eine Reihe von unvermeidlichen Triebkräften im zivilisatorischen Geschehen zu entdecken gäbe. Auf seinem Weg ins Verheißung suchende Milieu schien der Autor alles vergessen zu haben, was er ursprünglich, etwa in einem frühen, glänzenden Aufsatz zu Foucault, selbst einmal geschrieben und gedacht hatte, sodass er nun frei war, eine Art von intuitiver Wesensschau zu betreiben. Um die Schriften des Autors hatte sich in nur wenigen Jahren ein Kokon aus Verehrung, Faszination und schelmischer Sympathie gelegt, an dem vom postmodernen Rundfunkredakteur bis zum alternden Goethe-Instituts-Direktor viele munter webten: Endlich war da jemand der argumentativ überpeniblen, in sich selbst kreisenden Sozialkritik entgegengetreten, hatte deren Fixierung auf die nur mediokren Werte der Gleichheit oder Gerechtigkeit bloßgestellt und uns einen ersten Eindruck von den viel tiefer liegenden, wahrhaften Kräften geschichtlicher Zusammenstöße vermittelt.

Allerdings waren auch nach dieser ersten Staffel von Schriften die erlösenden Worte, auf die das zum Meister hochblickende Milieu so begierig wartete, noch nicht gefallen. Sloterdijk hatte in seiner Wesensschau zwar inzwischen die unterschiedlichsten Sachverhalte zutage gefördert, war unerschrocken dem heimlichen Sinn all unseres gentechnischen Experimentierens auf die Schliche gekommen und der ehernen Triebökonomie des Politischen nachgegangen, aber der unter den Nägeln brennenden Frage nach dem sozialen Antagonismus unserer Tage hatte er seine Aufmerksamkeit noch nicht gewidmet. Wie als könne er sein Publikum nicht länger dürsten lassen, machte sich Sloterdijk daher bald nach der Jahrhundertwende daran, unter dem wuchtigen Titel Zorn und Zeit ( Suhrkamp Verlag ) eine "politisch-psychologische" Analyse der Kämpfe im gegenwärtigen Zeitalter zu verfassen. Wieder ist der methodologische Leichtsinn, mit dem dabei verfahren wird, atemberaubend, eine bloße Rückerinnerung an die angebliche Trieblehre der Antike soll ausreichen, um uns mit dem notwendigen Rüstzeug einer solchen Gegenwartsdiagnose auszustatten.

Der psychologischen Auffassung der Griechen zufolge, so will uns Sloterdijk ohne jede Kenntnisnahme der neueren Forschungsliteratur weismachen, sei der Mensch neben seinem erotischen Verlangen mindestens ebenso stark von einem "Streben nach Erfolg, Ansehen, Selbstachtung" beherrscht; diese "thymotischen Energien", von der Neuzeit mit der Ausnahme einiger großer Denker ignoriert und von der Psychoanalyse endgültig aus unserem Selbstverständnis verbannt, bildeten den eigentlichen Grundstoff aller politischen Zusammenstöße, weil es in ihnen letztlich nämlich immer um die kollektive Rückeroberung von "Stolz" und "Ehre" ginge. Man will gar nicht erst beginnen, schon hier auf eine gewisse begriffliche Differenzierung zu drängen, besteht doch ein großer Unterschied darin, ob jenes Verlangen auf die Zustimmung des Gegenübers zielt oder sich gerade darüber hinwegsetzen will, also nach intersubjektiver Anerkennung oder nach vermittlungsloser Selbstermächtigung strebt; auch scheint es wenig ergiebig, an dieser Stelle darauf hinzuweisen, dass so unterschiedliche Theoretiker wie George Sorel oder Barrington Moore schon viel früher auf die Schlüsselrolle der "Ehre" in der Motivierung politischer Bewegungen aufmerksam gemacht haben. Alles das schert Sloterdijk wenig, denn er will auf Wichtigeres hinaus, etwas, das uns in unserem gegenwärtigen Selbstverständnis elementar erschüttert. Wir lernen weiter, dass das Gegenstück zum Stolz, über den die im "Kampf um Anerkennung" (Sloterdijk) Überlegenen verfügen, das Ressentiment derjenigen ist, die von nun an einen untergeordneten Rangplatz in der gesellschaftlichen Statushierarchie einnehmen müssen; um die Schmach dieser Subordination abzuschütteln, werden von hier unten aus moralische Werte der Selbstbeschränkung und der Gleichbehandlung in die Welt gesetzt, in deren Licht die Mitglieder der zum Erfolg gelangten Schichten als Versager dastehen müssen. Insofern besteht das zivilisatorische Geschehen, wie es in bloßer Wiederholung von Nietzsche heißt, in nichts anderem als den immer gleichen Auseinandersetzungen zwischen lebensbejahenden und lebensfeindlichen Gruppierungen, zwischen Kollektiven, die in Stolz ihr Dasein genießen, und solchen, die jenen ihre Vitalität zu verleiden versuchen.

Die einzig originelle Wendung, die Sloterdijk dieser altbekannten Doktrin verleiht, ergibt sich nun aus dem gegen Nietzsche gerichteten Gedanken, dass in den vergangenen zweihundert Jahren die christliche Ethik den Schwachen gerade nicht ein Instrument ihres Ressentiments und Rachefeldzugs habe sein können; denn die im jüngeren Christentum überlieferten Werte und Normen seien von einer derart "humanitär-übersinnlichen" Art gewesen, dass sie den Ansatzpunkt für eine ideelle Attacke gegen die Privilegierten und Begüterten keinesfalls hätten bieten können. Also bedarf es nach Sloterdijks Auffassung einer "noch tiefer ansetzenden Reflexion", um aus dem verschwommenen Dunkel der vergangenen Kämpfe erfolgreich die Werte ans Licht zu zerren, die den "Ressentimentbewegungen" des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts tatsächlich als Mittel ihrer verschlagenen Revanche haben dienen können – und man ahnt schon, dass jetzt die Schlüsselparole nicht mehr allzu fern ist, auf die die deutungshungrige Gemeinde schon so lange wartete.

Um es kurz zu machen: Nach Sloterdijk sind diese moralischen Werte und Normen diejenigen, die sich die Gleichheitsfanatiker der unterschiedlichsten Couleur auf die Fahnen geschrieben haben, um mit deren Hilfe die Massen zur Attacke auf die bestehenden Verhältnisse zu bewegen. Was hier unter solchen Gleichheitsforderungen verstanden werden soll, bleibt im Ganzen ziemlich unklar, gemeint sind im historischen Prozess aber alle "nationalistischen" und "internationalistischen" Bewegungen, nur dass die ersten soziale Gleichheit ausschließlich für die jeweils nationale Bevölkerung eingeklagt haben, während sie die zweiten für alle Erdenbürger und -bürgerinnen zu reklamieren versuchten. Von hier aus ist es nicht weit zu der Behauptung, dass die weltgeschichtlichen Katastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts durch den Aufstand von zwei "Zornkollektiven" angezettelt wurden, in denen Intellektuelle, die neuen "Weltgeistlichen des Hasses", den aus Beschämung und Geringschätzung entstandenen Zorn der Massen durch moralisch-humanistische Parolen gegen die Eliten zu organisieren wussten. Irgendwie meint man das alles schon zu kennen, glaubt, ein Amalgam aus Gehlen und Ernst Nolte vor sich zu haben, nur dass die Gleichsetzung von Faschismus und Sozialismus und deren gemeinsame Rückführung auf Motive der Gier und des Ressentiments hier hemdsärmeliger, ja protziger daherkommt.

Selten wohl ist vergangenes Gedankengut, das schon zu seiner Zeit nur dumpfe Ängste und Abwehrhaltungen verriet, mit so viel Aplomb wieder aufgefrischt worden, um es als neuestes Stichwort zur geistig-politischen Lage der Gegenwart auszugeben. Gegen Gehlens Moral und Hypermoral , aus der einige der zentralen Verbindungsglieder in Sloterdijks Argumentation zu stammen scheinen, ist schon vor vierzig Jahren eingewandt worden, dass die Gleichsetzung einer um Werte der nationalen Ehre und Solidarität kristallisierten Binnenmoral mit dem moralischen Universalismus des "Internationalismus" übersieht, mit welch unterschiedlicher Absicht sich jeweils auf "Gleichheit" berufen wurde: Während dort die im Inneren erstrebte Egalität aller Angehörigen derselben nationalen Herkunft nur die moralische Kehrseite der nach außen gerichteten Bekämpfung des gemeinsamen Feindes war, fällt hier zumindest der Idee nach jeder polemische Bezug auf eine äußere Gruppierung weg, weil alle Mitglieder der Menschheit in den Genuss gleicher Rechte kommen sollen. Die Wertsysteme des Nationalismus und des Internationalismus stellen daher nicht, wie Sloterdijk uns mit Gehlen glauben machen möchte, zwei Seiten ein und desselben humanistischen Gleichheitsideals dar, sondern bilden unterschiedliche Stufen in der Entwicklung der Sozialmoral.

Nicht besser ist es um Sloterdijks These bestellt, derzufolge die moralische Wut und Empörung der sozial benachteiligten Massen nur mit Motiven eines gegen die Privilegierten gerichteten Ressentiments zu erklären seien; hier fragt man sich, warum der Umweg über eine solche Trivialpsychologie genommen werden muss, wenn doch die politischen Verfassungen westlicher Demokratien die Betroffenen geradezu dazu auffordern, von dem begründeten Anspruch auf rechtliche Gleichbehandlung Gebrauch zu machen. Im Kampf gegen soziale Diskriminierung und ökonomische Benachteiligung versuchen die jeweiligen Akteure nur umzusetzen, was ihnen die moralischen Prinzipien des modernen Rechtsstaates versprechen; dazu ist keine Gier nötig, kein Neid und kein Ressentiment. Natürlich steht es jedem Autor frei, beliebig auf Gedankenmotive der Vergangenheit zurückzugreifen. Aber es bedeutet, Normen der intellektuellen Redlichkeit zu verletzen, wenn dabei das Alte als das Allerneueste ausgegeben wird, nur um sich die Diskussion der längst vorgebrachten Gegenargumente zu ersparen.

Nun stellen die bislang wiedergegebenen Spekulationen für unseren Autor offenbar nur philosophische Lockerungsübungen dar, die jenen politischen Faustschlag vorbereiten helfen sollten, zu dem er dann am 10. Juni 2009 in der FAZ endlich ausgeholt hat. Aus der "politisch-psychologischen" Einsicht in die ewige Wiederkehr des Kampfes zwischen den zu Recht Privilegierten und den neidvoll Schlechtergestellten muss doch irgendwann einmal die Konsequenz gezogen werden, das ungute Treiben wenigstens für einen historischen Augenblick lang stillzustellen; dafür kann es nach geschichtsphilosophischem Maß nur die Lösung geben, den Bessergestellten endlich das zu geben, was sie wirklich verdienen, um ihnen derart die Chance zu stolzen, freiwilligen Geschenken nach unten zu gewähren. Die politische Parole für dieses Programm lautet, man glaubt es kaum, "Steuerstreik".

Aus einsamer Höhe verkündet Sloterdijk die lang ersehnten Parolen zur politischen Gestaltung der Zukunft, Parolen, in denen dem rührseligen Traum vom Sozialstaat endlich der Garaus gemacht wird. Sloterdijk knüpft an einige Überlegungen an, die er schon in Zorn und Zeit angestellt hatte, um aus der Lehre von den unserer Zivilisation zugrunde liegenden Energien des Stolzes und der Selbstachtung die Konsequenzen für eine Neuorganisation unserer kapitalistischen Wirtschaft zu ziehen; unter dunkler Berufung auf Georges Bataille war dort die Rede davon gewesen, dass die Reichen und Begüterten nur dann die ihnen kulturell auferlegte "Selbstverachtung" abschütteln könnten, wenn sie in einer "Ökonomie des Stolzes" ihr Vermögen in "schönen Handlungen" der freiwilligen Beschenkung nach unten an die Bedürftigen verteilen würden. Das sollte im Klartext so viel heißen wie, dass jede staatliche Pflicht zur Abgabe vom eigenen Reichtum diesen Besitzern nur eine Kränkung des Gefühls wohlverdienten Erfolgs bereite, während dessen souveräne Verausgabung bei den Mitgliedern jener Schichten eine Empfindung beglückender Großherzigkeit auslöse. Hier machte sich jemand, so viel ist klar, sehr ernsthaft Gedanken darüber, wie es in Zeiten einer wachsenden Schere zwischen Arm und Reich um die von der "miserabilistischen" Linken vernachlässigte Seite bestellt ist; genug der Klage über die wachsende Zahl der Arbeitslosen, genug auch der trostlosen Beschäftigung mit dem Leben da unten, ist es nicht viel erbärmlicher und schmachvoller, auf Teile seines selbst verdienten Vermögens unter sozialstaatlichem Zwang verzichten zu müssen!

Diese unausgegorenen Überlegungen, in denen an keiner Stelle geklärt wird, warum ein etwa durch Vererbung oder finanzielle Spekulationen erworbenes Vermögen im Sinne irgendeiner Leistung rechtmäßig "verdient" sein soll, liefern Sloterdijk in seinem Artikel nun die Grundlage für eine politische Programmatik revolutionären Zuschnitts. Mit dem Mut des Freidenkers prüft Sloterdijk, mit welchen Mitteln die historischen Gewinner, die Reichen und Vermögenden, dem grausamen Spiel der stets wachsenden Beschämung ihrer Leistungen ein Ende setzen könnten; das Ergebnis dieses In-sich-Gehens des Autors stellt der Artikel Die Revolution der gebenden Hand dar.

Schon der Titel des kurzen Beitrags soll deutlich machen, dass hier jemand über nichts Geringeres nachdenkt als über einen Umsturz all unserer herkömmlichen Werte und Gepflogenheiten; mit einer bloßen Reparatur der gegebenen Gesellschaftsordnung ist es für Sloterdijk nicht getan, wenn so Großes auf dem Spiel steht wie die elende Lage der herrschenden Klassen. Diese könnten sich ihrer beschämenden Situation nur erwehren, so argumentiert Peter Sloterdijk, wenn sie zu politischen Mitteln der Gegenwehr griffen, die den Grund ihrer Beschämung aus dem Weg zu räumen vermöchten; und dieser Grund, die Wurzel allen Übels ist, wie wir weiter lesen, in nichts anderem zu vermuten als der bloßen Existenz des Sozialstaates, jener gigantischen Wohlfahrtseinrichtung, mit deren Hilfe sich die Benachteiligten im Schulterschluss mit den moralisierenden Intellektuellen an den Vermögenden schadlos hielten – so zentral ist Sloterdijk diese Einsicht, so wichtig das damit verknüpfte Anliegen, dass er den "Steuerstaat" ein wenig zusammenhanglos auch in seinem neusten Buch Du musst dein Leben ändern ( Suhrkamp Verlag) wieder zur Erwähnung bringt, wo er unter Verweis auf Friedrich August von Hayek als "real existierender liberal-fiskalischer Semi-Sozialismus" bezeichnet wird.

Man muss auch das damit angedeutete Argument erst mehrmals in Augenschein nehmen, bevor einem dämmert, welche verschrobene These da mit Nonchalance in die Welt gesetzt wird: der Sozialstaat, in Deutschland das Produkt der von oben durchgeführten Reformen Bismarcks, in England oder Frankreich das Resultat erbitterter Kämpfe der Arbeiterbewegung, soll nichts anderes hervorbringen als eine institutionalisierte "Kleptokratie", eine politische Einrichtung also, die die Schlechtergestellten erfolgreich hätten etablieren können, um sich von den Vermögenden finanziell anzueignen, was sie in blindem Ressentiment für unrechtmäßig erworben hielten. Eine kleine Rückerinnerung reicht aus, um die damit entwickelte Behauptung als baren Unsinn zu erkennen, der sich einer Mischung aus historischer Ignoranz und theoretischer Chuzpe verdankt.

Bei ihren kollektiven Bemühungen, Maßnahmen der ökonomischen Umverteilung durchzusetzen und auf diesem Weg soziale Rechte zu erkämpfen, konnten sich die wirtschaftlich schlechter gestellten Schichten während der kapitalistischen Industrialisierung von Anfang an auf zwei verschiedene Quellen der moralischen Legitimierung stützen: Zum einen sprang ins Auge, dass das rasch wachsende Geldvermögen von Teilen der bürgerlichen Klasse nur in geringem Umfang mit eigenen Leistungen und Anstrengungen, in viel größerem Maße aber mit dem Zufall der familialen Herkunft und den enormen Erträgen aus unproduktivem Eigentum zu tun hatte; warum aber sollte es denjenigen, die bloß glückliche Umstände in die Lage zur Vermehrung ihres Reichtums versetzt hatten, so viel besser gehen als den Schichten, deren Mitglieder mit produktiver Arbeit tagtäglich zur Erhöhung des Volkseinkommens beitrugen? War es somit auf der einen Seite die Berufung auf das vom Bürgertum selbst propagierte Leistungsprinzip, was den lohnabhängigen, häufig verarmten Schichten als moralische Grundlage ihres Kampfes für Umverteilungen dienen konnte, so auf der anderen Seite die konsequente Auslegung der in den demokratischen Verfassungen verbrieften Bürgerrechte: War darin nicht allen Mitgliedern der neu entstehenden Gesellschaften zugesichert worden, als Gleiche unter Gleichen angesehen und behandelt zu werden, sodass mit Fug und Recht solche sozialen Bedingungen erstritten werden durften, unter denen jeder Bürger die gleichen Chancen zur Teilnahme am gesellschaftlichen Leben besitzen würden?

Kein Ressentiment war hier nötig, um es zu wiederholen, kein Neid und keine Gier, um die Angehörigen der schlechter gestellten Schichten dazu zu motivieren, sich für eine ökonomische Umverteilung von oben nach unten einzusetzen; einzig eine resolute Applizierung der bereits etablierten, vom Bürgertum mitvertretenen Prinzipien auf die herrschenden Umstände war erforderlich, um die Konzentration von ökonomischen Vermögen in den Händen weniger als "Unrecht" zu erfahren und sich dementsprechend zu einer moralischen Gegenwehr aufgefordert zu sehen. Die ganze Idee, dass es dazu erst noch des zusätzlichen Anstoßes durch ein Gefühl des Ressentiments bedurft habe, war von Anfang an die intellektuelle Ausgeburt eines Klassenkampfs von oben. Sie wird nicht besser dadurch, dass sie in Zeiten verschärfter Sozialkonflikte regelmäßig wiederholt wird, und auch dann nicht glaubwürdiger, wenn ihr willfährige Intellektuelle wie Sloterdijk wortmächtig den Segen erteilen.

Mit der Charakterisierung des Sozialstaats als einer institutionalisierten "Kleptokratie" ist Sloterdijk jedenfalls an den Punkt seiner Argumentation gelangt, an dem er nun glaubt, erste politische Handlungsanweisungen geben zu können. Wenn der Sozialstaat als ein reines Instrument des Neids der unteren Klassen von den "produktiven Schichten" immer mehr an steuerlichen Abgaben verlange, wenn er sich gar, wie in den letzten Jahrzehnten, zu einem "geldsaugenden und geldspeienden Ungeheuer" entwickelt habe, dann sei es Sloterdijk zufolge an der Zeit, die Angehörigen der derart ausgebeuteten Eliten zur Überwindung ihrer andressierten Selbstverachtung aufzufordern; und also ergeht über unser Land der Schlachtruf an die Vermögenden und Reichen, endlich zu den ihnen zu Gebote stehenden Waffen zu greifen und einen "antifiskalischen Bürgerkrieg" zu eröffnen, um wieder zu einem Leben in Stolz und beglückender Selbstachtung zurückzufinden.

Dem befreienden Lachen, das eine solche Kampfparole aufgrund ihres Aberwitzes, ihres geradezu atemberaubenden Leichtsinns auslösen könnte, steht nur der Gedanke entgegen, dass es sich dabei um die Sätze eines von den Medien geliebten, von der politischen Öffentlichkeit verehrten und von den Akademien hochdekorierten Intellektuellen handelt. Es fällt einem wieder ein, dass sich ein SPD-, nicht ein FDP-Landesverband noch vor Kurzem mit einem Vortrag dieses Autors schmückte, es kommt einem in den Sinn, dass er im ZDF eine "philosophische" Diskussionsrunde moderiert – nur wenige mag es geben, die da nicht in ein Grübeln darüber verfallen, ob unsere demokratische Kultur nicht inzwischen einen Grad an Verspieltheit, an Ernstlosigkeit und Verquatschtheit erreicht hat, der ihren eigenen Ansprüchen Abbruch tut.

8.6 Peter Sloterdijk and Computer Assisted Philosophy

It comes to my mind that Peter Sloterdijk was the first pioneering Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftler who started using a computer for doing multi medial work back in the 1980's. This was "Die Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, of 1983". He did something quite unprecedented, because he included a lot of pictures in his work. At those times it was pretty hard in terms of computer resources to do this. I know this myself, what a struggle it was with the personal computers of the time, to integrate text and pictures. So he was quite a pioneer in the field. Contrarily most of the Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftler's always abhorred to put pictures in their work. Especially the philosophers would never have to do with pictures, this was and still is something of a dogma that a philosopher may never use a picture. This is like the Gottseibeiuns of the Philosophy business. Sloterdijk was therefore something like an iconoclast. This is something of an irony in itself because he included iconos (or pictures) in his work. And the conventional philosophers consequently abhorred the method of Sloterdijk, and made him persona non grata in the philosophical circles. Such are the ironies in the history of the Deutsche Philosophie. And consequently no-one in the Deutsche Philosophie ever noticed what a pioneering work he had done. The Deutsche Philosophers just bickered so much that the style of writing and thinking of the Sloterdijk was not to their liking. Fortunately he managed to get the post of director at the University (or rather Hochschule) of Art and Design in Karlsruhe. This was the only institution in Germany where there was a "sort of" fusion of art and technology. And I must say this with emphasis.

[I had seen some similar works in the USA from around the same time, where it was called "Geometry and Art", Calter, Paul. Dartmouth College. Retrieved 13 August 2009.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_art

Calter, Paul. "Geometry and Art Unit 1". Dartmouth College.

]

This was an institution of Art, and not of Philosophy. There he had a small circle of people like Peter Weibel, Bruno Latour, and Bazon Brock. And here he could develop his works and theories. So Sloterdijk couldn't care less what the Deutsche Philosophers thought of him. And he made so much money from his books, which was on top of his salary at the Hochschule, that he was probably the richest Philosopher in all of Deutschland.

https://www.hfg-karlsruhe.de/personen/peter-sloterdijk

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Weibel_(K%C3%BCnstler)

Peter Weibel entwickelte diese Überlegungen ab 1969 konsequent in seinen Videobändern sowie -installationen weiter. Mit seinen Fernsehaktionen, den teleaktionen, die das Österreichische Fernsehen (ORF) 1972 im Rahmen der Sendung Impulse ausstrahlte, überschritt er die Grenzen des Galerieraumes und untersuchte die Videotechnik in ihrer Anwendung im Massenmedium Fernsehen.

Am 7. Juni 1968 nahm Weibel an der Aktion „Kunst und Revolution“ in einem Hörsaal der Universität Wien teil, wo er mit einem brennenden Handschuh einen Vortrag (Schimpftirade) gegen die damalige Regierung hielt. Der Vortrag trug den Titel Was tun?, in Anlehnung an die berühmte Lenin-Schrift Was tun?. Die Aktion war einer der Höhepunkte der Studentenbewegung 1968 in Österreich.

8.7 Bazon Brock

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazon_Brock

Bazon Brock^{[1] (eigentlich Jürgen
Johannes Hermann Brock}^{[2]; * 2. Juni 1936 in Stolp in
Pommern) ist emeritierterProfessor für Ästhetik und
Kulturvermittlung an der Bergischen Universität Wuppertal,
Künstler und Kunsttheoretiker. Brock gilt als Vertreter der Fluxus-Bewegung.}^[3]

Brocks Arbeitsschwerpunkte liegen auch nach seiner Emeritierung vor allem in der Neuronalen Ästhetik und „Imaging Sciences“ am Fachbereich „Architektur, Kunst, Design, Musik“, wo er lange Jahre Dekan war und im Besonderen als Fachdozent das Fach für „Nicht-normative Ästhetik“ betreut.

Er ist Mitglied der „Forscher-Familie bildende Wissenschaften“. Diese „fruchtbringende Gesellschaft“ beschäftigt sich vorrangig mit der Kulturgenetik, um Konzepte zur Zivilisierung der Kulturen auszuarbeiten. Die Ergebnisse werden in der Reihe „Ästhetik und Naturwissenschaften“ im Springer-Verlag Wien/New York veröffentlicht.

Bazon Brock wurde am 21. November 1992 der Ehrendoktor der Technischen Wissenschaften von der Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule Zürich verliehen. Er ist Mitglied im P.E.N.-Club Liechtenstein, einem Zentrum der internationalen Schriftstellervereinigung P.E.N.

Neuronale Ästhetik

Im Oktober 1978 präsentierte Bazon Brock im Rahmen des Steirischen Herbstes in Graz „Die neurophysiologischen Grundlagen jeder Ästhetik“. 1993 fand in Bonn das von Olaf Breidbach, Bazon Brock und Detlef B. Linke organisierte Symposion „Neuronale Ästhetik – Hirnbilder und Menschenbilder“ statt.

„Mit der ‚Neuronalen Ästhetik‘ soll der Versuch gekennzeichnet werden, die begriffliche Fassung neuronaler Prozesse selber als ästhetische Operation zu entfalten und über korrespondierende Analogien zwischen ‚natürlichen‘, alltäglichen, jedermann von Natur aus beherrschbaren Aktivierungen seines Weltbildapparates und den weltbildkonstituierenden Operationen der Wissenschaftler und Künstler, die ja auch nur über denselben Apparat wie jedermann verfügen, erweiterte und modifizierte Konfrontationen des Geistes und des Prinzips Leben mit ihren Verkörperungsformen zu schaffen.“

– Bazon Brock[10][11]

8.7.1 Mathematics and Art

The wikipedia article gives a quite lengthy and thorough overview of the connection of Mathematics and Art. I believe that this is a way of doing mathematics that would be to the liking of many people who are mathematically inclined, but they don't care less about the formalisms and idiosyncracies of present-day Akademik Mathematics. I would say that if humanity had developed a more art-like kind of mathematics then we would not need any more any professor's of mathematics. Because everyone would be able to do higher level visual transformational ana-grammatics and polynomics and topology of mathematics just by visualizing it. And the worst perpetrators of the present-day quagmire of mathematics were, of course, Descartes and Leibniz. And then come the close second-places: Newton and Galileo and finally the good Euklid who had started all that nonsense. One should have never alpha-bêtize'd (like the bêtise in French) the mathematics. And all this is because the mathematicians have a special taste for what they call "elegant" formalisms, or even the "beauty" of mathematical formalisms. I have the intuition that those folks would also call the Bavarian "Wolpertinger" as the highest ideal of representing "Natural Beauty in its Purest Form". Such is the state of Mathematical Aisthaetiks (derives from Ais-Thaesis).

8.7.2 Wikipedia: Mathematics and Art

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_art

Mathematics and art are related in a variety of ways. Mathematics has itself been described as an art motivated by beauty. Mathematics can be discerned in arts such as music, dance, painting, architecture, sculpture, and textiles. This article focuses, however, on mathematics in the visual arts.

Mathematics and art have a long historical relationship. Artists have used mathematics since the 4th century BC when the Greek sculptor Polykleitos wrote his Canon, prescribing proportions based on the ratio 1:√2 for the ideal male nude. Persistent popular claims have been made for the use of the golden ratio in ancient art and architecture, without reliable evidence. In the Italian Renaissance, Luca Pacioli wrote the influential treatise De Divina Proportione (1509), illustrated with woodcuts by Leonardo da Vinci, on the use of the golden ratio in art. Another Italian painter, Piero della Francesca, developed Euclid's ideas on perspective in treatises such as De Prospectiva Pingendi, and in his paintings. The engraver Albrecht Dürer made many references to mathematics in his work Melencolia I. In modern times, the graphic artist M. C. Escher made intensive use of tessellation and hyperbolic geometry, with the help of the mathematician H. S. M. Coxeter, while the De Stijl movement led by Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian explicitly embraced geometrical forms. Mathematics has inspired textile arts such as quilting, knitting, cross-stitch, crochet, embroidery, weaving, Turkish and other carpet-making, as well as kilim. In Islamic art, symmetries are evident in forms as varied as Persian girih and Moroccan zellige tilework, Mughal jali pierced stone screens, and widespread muqarnas vaulting.

Mathematics has directly influenced art with conceptual tools such as linear perspective, the analysis of symmetry, and mathematical objects such as polyhedra and the Möbius strip. Magnus Wenninger creates colourful stellated polyhedra, originally as models for teaching. Mathematical concepts such as recursion and logical paradox can be seen in paintings by Rene Magritte and in engravings by M. C. Escher. Computer art often makes use of fractals including the Mandelbrot set, and sometimes explores other mathematical objects such as cellular automata. Controversially, the artist David Hockney has argued that artists from the Renaissance onwards made use of the camera lucida to draw precise representations of scenes; the architect Philip Steadman similarly argued that Vermeer used the camera obscura in his distinctively observed paintings.

Other relationships include the algorithmic analysis of artworks by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, the finding that traditional batiks from different regions of Java have distinct fractal dimensions, and stimuli to mathematics research, especially Filippo Brunelleschi's theory of perspective, which eventually led to Girard Desargues's projective geometry. A persistent view, based ultimately on the Pythagorean notion of harmony in music, holds that everything was arranged by Number, that God is the geometer of the world, and that therefore the world's geometry is sacred, as seen in artworks such as William Blake's The Ancient of Days.

...

As early as the 15th century, curvilinear perspective found its way into paintings by artists interested in image distortions. Jan van Eyck's 1434 Arnolfini Portrait contains a convex mirror with reflections of the people in the scene,^[36] while Parmigianino's Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, c. 1523–1524, shows the artist's largely undistorted face at the centre, with a strongly curved background and artist's hand around the edge.^[37]

Three-dimensional space can be represented convincingly in art, as in technical drawing, by means other than perspective. Oblique projections, including cavalier perspective (used by French military artists to depict fortifications in the 18th century), were used continuously and ubiquitously by Chinese artists from the first or second centuries until the 18th century. The Chinese acquired the technique from India, which acquired it from Ancient Rome. Oblique projection is seen in Japanese art, such as in the Ukiyo-e paintings of Torii Kiyonaga (1752–1815).^[38]

...

The Platonic solids and other polyhedra are a recurring theme in Western art. They are found, for instance, in a marble mosaic featuring the small stellated dodecahedron, attributed to Paolo Uccello, in the floor of the San Marco Basilica in Venice;^[13] in Leonardo da Vinci's diagrams of regular polyhedra drawn as illustrations for Luca Pacioli's 1509 book The Divine Proportion;^[13] as a glass rhombicuboctahedron in Jacopo de Barbari's portrait of Pacioli, painted in 1495;^[13] in the truncated polyhedron (and various other mathematical objects) in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I;^[13] and in Salvador Dalí's painting The Last Supper in which Christ and his disciples are pictured inside a giant dodecahedron.

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a German Renaissance printmaker who made important contributions to polyhedral literature in his 1525 book, Underweysung der Messung (Education on Measurement), meant to teach the subjects of linear perspective, geometry in architecture, Platonic solids, and regular polygons. Dürer was likely influenced by the works of Luca Pacioli and Piero della Francesca during his trips to Italy.^[75] While the examples of perspective in Underweysung der Messung are underdeveloped and contain inaccuracies, there is a detailed discussion of polyhedra. Dürer is also the first to introduce in text the idea of polyhedral nets, polyhedra unfolded to lie flat for printing.^[76] Dürer published another influential book on human proportions called Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion (Four Books on Human

Proportion) in 1528.^[77]

8.8 Noologie: A Comparison with Peter Sloterdijk's Morphology

In his work Sphären I, II, and III (1998-2004), Peter Sloterdijk had developed an approach to morphology that is in some ways similar to the Meta-Morphology of the present project. I had developed my own version of morphology from about 1990 onwards in the project "Noologie" and related works. I didn't know of Sloterdijk's Sphären project until about 2010. So we were at the same time developing some similar ideas without knowing of each other's work. In my dissertation (1999) I gave a general outline of the morphological method that I was developing.

Design Und Zeit: Kultur Im Spannungsfeld Von Entropie, Transmission, Und Gestaltung

http://www.bib.uni-wuppertal.de/elpub/fb05/diss1999/goppold/

http://www.noologie.de/desn.htm

http://www.noologie.de/ag-dis.pdf

The Dissertation project was intended from the beginning as a dual-form project:

1) In form of a printable book, and

2) in form of a www-Hypertext with many links into the www.

It also has an automatically generated Hypertext-index to give a complete reference of all basic points with the direct Hypertext jumps to the appropriate text passages. The inspiration for this form was the idea of the "Pyramidal Book" by Robert Darnton. The morphology of Noologie was developed mainly along the lines of Goethe's work, then Spengler, Nietzsche, Ruth Benedict, and with the German Gestalt Psychology and Ethnologie developments between Adolf Bastian and Hertha v. Dechend. There is also some additional material from Gregory Bateson, Whitehead and Buddhist Tradition.

http://www.noologie.de/desn09.htm

http://www.noologie.de/desn13.htm

http://www.noologie.de/desn17.htm

The similarities between "Design Und Zeit" and "Sphären" can be summed up with the references to Goethe and Spengler, whom Sloterdijk mentions in a few passages in "Blasen", like p. 77 - 79. There he comments shortly on Spengler: P. 78: "Der erste Versuch, nach dem Scheitern von Oswald Spenglers sogenannter Morphologie... wieder einem Formbegriff eine höchstrangige Stellung in einer... kulturtheoretischen Untersuchung zuzuweisen". But many of the concepts presented in the "Sphären" can be originally traced back to Spengler, and are only re-worded slightly: P. 58: "Ethnotechniken, die Generationen überspannen", p. 59: "Ethnopoietische Prozesse", p. 60: "Die Semiosphärische Glocke". These concepts were also developed in "Design Und Zeit". Especially the issue of Trans-Generational Continuity, or Innovation vs. Preservation vs. Stability and Stasis of a culture. It may also be noted that Sloterdijk's work was criticised for leaning heavily on Spengler's ideas, meaning some kind of pseudo-fascist ideology. Morphology is today not deemed worthy as a scholarly or akademik subject. Also it should be noted that Sloterdijk writes in a style of novel [aka. Bildungsroman], with many quite extravagant metaphors [eine sehr blumige Sprache], and very little bibliographical information. An index is completely missing. These are reasons for a scholarly critique. But it has to be noted that the lack of an index is mostly for economic reasons of the publishing houses. An index just costs too much for a book that is aimed at a non-scholarly readership who would never consult an index at all. As a positive aspect of Sloterdijk's work it is to be noted that his rich illustrations included in his books clarify many of the ideas presented there. As an Art historian he makes good use of the principle that a picture is (sometimes) better than 1000 words.

8.8.1 Sloterdijk's Habit of Name-Dropping

Something quite disconcerting is Sloterdijk's habit of name-dropping of the most diverse philosophical and spiritual traditions. In "Eurotao", he mentions on p. 91 all the traditions of Asia, as if he were an accomplished expert of those. This kind of cursory short shrift treatment smacks of a "Überflieger" in the German expression. I seriously doubt that he has understood these traditions down to the necessary depth and backgrounds. Especially revealing is his remark on p. 83 of Eurotao that Japan had committed a "formvollendete Selbstliquidierung ... und ein Seppuku zugunsten von Industrie und Geschichte", and further: "Wahrscheinlich wird das alte Asien im Zuge einer epochalen Selbstkolonialisation eines Tages vom Erdboden verschwunden sein". Since Eurotao appeared first in 1989, Sloterdijk can be excused that he could not forsee the almost irresistable rise of Asian mentality in the form of the awaking giant China to global power in the last 30 years. The ancient (Confucian) Asian mentalities are just doing their own Meta-Morphosis in ways that the Western intelligenzia could not have dreamed of. And the Shinto traditions in Japan are also quite alive and kicking. In the present work on dynamic cultural traditions

(http://www.noologie.de/extra-verb.htm / http://www.noologie.de/extra-verb.pdf )

it is to show that Thomas Immoos and his successors had a grasp of an essence that the Western intelligenzia just was not able to understand because of their logocentrism. And this logocentrism is based on a quite distorted understanding of the "Logos", as was discussed by Heidegger in WHD. The "Logos" of Heraklitos is quite different from the "Ratio" of the Latin Roman tradition of philosophy.

As I am expounding in the work on dynamic cultural traditions, the kineticism or Movement Gestalt (Kata) of the Japanese Shinto movement rituals is to be understood in quite a different way. Meaning completely different from what Sloterdijk writes about Kinetiks in Eurotao. And I make it very clear there that there is a "world beyond words" in the Asiatic traditions. And there it is understood very well, that words are more or less vexing verbal shells, that change in a Protean manner, or as I express it in Morphological terms: Words and Concepts are doing a Meta-Morphosis all the time. There is no solid ground on which verbal concepts can rest. One reason for this different understanding is the Chinese writing which neatly separates the verbal concept and the visual "idea" or the mental image behind the graphical symbol. But this is not an idea in the Platonic sense. Ideas don't have an existence in some metaphysical heaven, but they are entities of the Semiosphere, as I have expounded in "Design und Zeit". They "live" in the semantic sphere of a "culture". This is what Sloterdijk calls "Die Semiosphärische Glocke" above. Unfortunately I have not found any other reference of this concept in his works, for lack of an index. The Semiosphere is a concept developed by Lotman and other Semioticians, and they all refer to the works of Vernadsky. We should also remember that Platon in his Phaidros used a subtle distinction between grammata for written words and stoichaea for spoken (only) words. This was rarely noticed by the translators of this work. And this distinction is well understood not only in Asia but also in all world-wide intellectual traditions that are not so completely based on verbal written alphabetic language. This was expounded very expertly by Platon in Phaidros and his 7th letter. And Western Philosophy is based on a specific kind of logocentrism, meaning that everything can adequately be expressed and described in words. [In anthropology this is considered a parochial opinion/ position/ myopia.] And this idea of an "idea" is a fallacy. Therefore an adequate criticism of Sloterdijk's work should not be made on the grounds of Western Philosophy. And so my criticism of Sloterdijk is extra-philosophical.

So the Morphology of Project "Noologie" and the work on dynamic cultural traditions is also quite different from that of Sloterdijk. The crucial deviation from "Sphären" is the interpretation of the morphological aspects of Foam (Schäume) in Vol III of the "Sphären" (p. 13-71). These are taken up in the project Noologie Vol III especially in:

http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm

Here the morphological issue of Foam is developed along a completely different avenue of thought: The Mathematical Fractal. The Self-Similarity of Foam and Fractals is another morphological method which is further developed in Noologie Vol III.

http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#foam_unversal

http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#hermeneut_selbst

http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#morpho_sloterdijk

http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#morpho_wirbel

http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#hermeneut_selbst

http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#fraktal_prinzip

http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#fraktal_schnee

http://www.noologie.de/diadenk.htm#fraktal_denk_prinzip

http://www.noologie.de/morph.htm

The project on dynamic cultural traditions seeks to lay an entirely new groundwork for the concepts of "Form" and "Inhalt" that orients itself heavily on the work of Nagarjuna, and the ancient Greek understanding of "Morphae", "Meta-Morphology", "Meta-Noia/Noiaesis", "Tropäe", "Strophae", "Kata-Strophae" and "Polytropos", "Kenoma" and "Pleroma". The words "Polytropos" and "Polymechanos" are also discussed by Sloterdijk who gives it some interesting treatment in "20JH". This is his discussion of Odysseus as the prototypical "Polytropos" and "Polymechanos" in pages 253-290. It is needless to say that my treatment in Meta-Morphology goes into a totally different direction than Sloterdijk. The ability to lie (Lügen = Herein-Legen) is one of the most important foundations of intelligence [or vice versa], or inter-ligence, which can also mean Legere-Between-The-Lines. And Legere and Legein are completely different "ideas" even if they sound so much alike. The Logos has nothing at all to do with the most common meaning of legere = reading. See the famous dictum of Augustinus: "Tolle lege!" It means: Take it and read. He had never said anything about "understanding it". This is not what he had on his mInd.

http://latindictionary.wikidot.com/verb:legere

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legere

https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/the-meaning-of/latin-word-cdd7906424f7a69a45fdeb07f0ede0badcf8997c.html

1) to read

2) understand, interpret, explain, translate, expound

3) intercept, recite, quote, forestall, gather untimely

9 Ode to the Honor and the Memory of the Tax Collector

I will place some succinct notes on top, to do a Meta-Morphology of the history of all the states and all the Tax Collectors in all of human history. From the very beginning, the states could not have come into existence at all, if there had been no taxes. So Statehood is Morphologically equivalent to Taxe-hood. [Somehow when I gave this word to the Google translator it always came up with Robin Hood.]

I have just invented this word since It doesn't apparently exist in the dictionary of the English language. Or in other words: Rulership is equivalent to Taxation-Ship.

[The google translator gave me back the nice word "Steuerschiff" in German which is also a quite humorous contribution by our nice friends from the google.]

One may also note that there has been quite some Neurolinguistic Reframing of the word Tax Collection between the German and English languages. The German word "Steuern Eintreiben" and the English to "Collect Taxes" contains quite a bit of Semantic Cognitive Dissonance. The German word "Eintreiben" means to get some taxes by at least threatening to apply some force if not using force directly. And it is well known in all the civilized lands that when you don't pay your taxes, this is a quite sure way to land in prison. Now to "Collect Taxes" is really a nice kind of Neurolinguistic Reframing, as if the taxes were just lying around in the open and the nice Tax Collector just came around and picked them up. Which had probably never been the occurrence in all the history of Staatehood and of Taxation-hood. Whenever if give the Google Translator the word Taxation-hood, it faithfully comes up with Robin Hood. I have no idea how it does this. (This is a joke).

9.1.1 About Tribes and Tributes

In the Beginning of Hu-man-ity there was Egaliarian'ism. Until some-one who was quite smart, invented the nice Neurolingustic Reframing Trick to invent the "more egaliarian than the egaliarian's. Meaning the advent of stratified political power structure. And this is the very moment when his-story began as a serious business of rulership.

In those earlier times of statehood, the taxes were called tributes. Because the tribes were tribus in Latin. And the Tribal System and later the Feudal System always worked in a similar manner. It was structured in a Top-Down Hierarchy. Each tribe had its own Head-Honcho (and some time even a Head-Honcha). Or sometimes there was just a Head-Honcho who was only elected for some period of time in an emergency, when the need arose for communal action for the whole tribe to form a unity, like in a war or a catastrophe. Those were the more egalitarian tribes like the Gallics and the Nordics, er I mean the Germanics. When there was a permanent power structure, there were the Head-Honchos and they had their Sub-Head-Honchos in every village. This was about the tribal structure of the Indians of the plains in North America. And of course the definition of power was quite varied as you compare different tribes. The Head-Honchos of the North American Indians were very limited in their powers. They were mostly leaders when an emergency arose. As I recall, the North Eastern tribes even were quite democratic and they had a general assembly of the representatives of the Sub-Tribes who made all the important political decisions. And the ceremonial Head-Honcho was more or less like the Speaker of the House in the English parliament. So the social political structures of the tribes was very varied. So there came the times and the locations where the states consolidated. Then there was a Super Head-Honcho, who put him self on top of the Head-Honcho's of many different tribes, and he became their Over-Lord. This was the Feudal Structure of almost all of the so-called Antiquity. And to maintain that Super-Structure with the Over-Lord Head-Honcho, one had to ensure that the logistical structure of that motley collection of many-tribes didn't just pull itself apart. Because all those sub-tribes mostly didn't like each other because of Competition Reasons. Such was the incessant warfare of all the Amerind tribes in the vastness of the USA plains. It was not at all love and peace in those times of the Indians of the Plains. As Karl May would be very kind to tell you all about it. Of course Winnetou was his favorite Hero and all the others were just the bad guys. In realtiy it was quite a bit otherwise.

So to come back to the Feudal Power and Politics Structure. The tributes were necessary to manage the upkeep of this motely bag of not-so-united single tribes. And therefore the tributes had to be invented. So the local Head-Honcho collected some tributes from his local area of rule, then he kept some of these tributes for himself, and he sent what was left over from this, to the Super-Head-Honcho or the Over-Lord. Such was the structure everywere. And a pretty good example of this was ancient Japan.

https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/tribute

historical mass noun Payment made periodically by one state or ruler to another, especially as a sign of dependence.

‘the king had at his disposal plunder and tribute amassed through warfare’

3 historical A proportion of ore or its equivalent, paid to a miner for his work, or to the

Origin

Late Middle English (in tribute (sense 2)): from Latin tributum, neuter past participle (used as a noun) of tribuere ‘assign’ (originally ‘divide between tribes’), from tribus ‘tribe’.

9.1.2 The Evolution of the Taxes

So it came to pass that the first Empires arose, with their Super-Super Head-Honcho's. A good example is the King of Kings of Persia who had coined this very good political expression. Then there arose the need for a special adminstrator class of Tribute Supervisors, who at the start were the Priests, since they had invented some form of book-keeping and even writing. So they were the experts at tributes, and the tributes did a slow morphing into taxes. And this process took place in the areas of the first Empires. China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, some time later in Persia, and in the Americas the precursors of the Inca, the Mayans and the Aztecs. Apparently the North Amerinds never got around to form Empires for one reason or another.

Now these power structures were very delicate and difficult to maintain. The change of ownership of the title of Super-Super Head-Honcho was often sudden and surprising. This was also the story that the good Lev Gumilev told when he described his parable of those Astronaut observers of the Empires on planet Earth that constantly did the most egregious Meta-Morphoses. Just that Gumilev didn't call it Meta-Morphoses. But it can be rightly called such, because the change of Power Structure is a sort of Meta-Morphosis. A simple Morphosis is when a power structure just evolves over time and differentiates a bit or does some fossilization and some de-generation, as always happens with such Power Structures. The Meta-Morphosis is when there will be fundamental changes in the power structure. So mostly this is war, conquest, genocide, and rebellion and revolution. And some times widespread Kata-Strophae, like big floods, desiccation, over-salination, rivers that change their course into where there was just a big city in the way, a rise of sea level, erratic patterns of the Monsoon, or the Nile floods. There are many kinds and sizes of Kata-Strophae, of which Jared Diamond did some writing about. The Ecological history of Civilizations, which means more often than not, that they did their own undoing by ruining their Ecology. The prime example is Mesopotamia. They just over-salted their arable land because of heavy irrigation which left a few megatons of salt on the land over the period of a couple millennia. He described this more in-depth in: Collapse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed#Synopsis

So there always was a see-saw of power structures in Ancient Times. And Mesopotamia was one of the worst see-saw's. In Mesopotamia, there were ALWAYS some Outside Invaders. These were appropriately called the Hill people. The ancient Sumerian Script was exactly a picture of a mountain to symbolize the Hill People. Most of the times the Hill People were a reservoir of slaves. For this the ancient Sumerian Script had the same symbol for slaves, the same mountain. But at other times the Hill People thought that it was their turn to invade the plains, and so they did. Thus came to pass the succession of so many Over-Lord'ships in about 7000 years of Mesopotamian rulers. And this hasn't stopped ever since, because the war in Mesopotamia is the rule, and not the exception. So the invaders and there were quite a few of them, one way they succeeded with their Invasions, was mostly because the local peasants had had enough of their present Overlords, and they just wanted a little change of Overlords. But they knew full well, that the next Generation of Overlords was not so much better than their present ones, whom they already knew, and they had always devised some ways to evade the Taxes or to bribe the Tax Collectors. It is always the same with the taxes. One intelligent man had said: There are two things in life which are inevitable: Death and Taxes. So it came to pass, at some time in deep Antiquity, there came a new Generation of Overlords, and they brought with them a very hideous device, for the Tax Collectors to facilitate their Business of Tax Collection. And this was called Accounting. We know all this from the studies of Ancient Mesopotamia. These were Clay tablets engraved with a stylus that produced characteristic marks called Cuneiform. So after a few hundred years or so of so much more effective Tax Collection, and some more effective Oppression and Extraction of Wealth from the Local Populace, one bright mInd came up with the bright Idea, that those cuneiform were also usable for other things than just accounting. So it came to pass that the invention of writing, one of the most important inventions of humanity besides the wheel, was given to us by the Tax Collectors. So we are forever indebted to the Tax Collectors of humanity and when we build the Monuments for the Great Kings and Emperors about 10 meters high, then we should construct an even Greater Monument, of about 30-100 meters high, for the unknown Tax Collectors of humanity, who had come up with this idea in the First Place. Because all those Great Empires would have never existed if it had not been for the Tax Collectors. Honor to who Deserves Honor. Thankfulness for those to whom thanks are due. Taxes for those to whom Taxes are due.!!!

See my special material on the Cun(n)eiform Script:

http://www.noologie.de/cunni.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_taxes_(idiom)

Death and taxes is a common reference to the famous quotation:^[1]

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

— Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789

However, Franklin’s letter is not the origin of the phrase, which appeared earlier in Daniel Defoe’s The Political History of the Devil.^[2]

Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believ’d.

— Daniel Defoe, The Political History of the Devil, 1726.

And in The Cobbler of Preston by Christopher Bullock (1716)

’Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_garden

The Paradise garden

The paradise garden is a form of garden of Old Iranian origin, specifically Achaemenid. Originally denominated by a single noun denoting "a walled-in compound or garden", from "pairi" ("around") and "daeza" or "diz" ("wall", "brick", or "shape"), Xenophon Grecized the Persian phrase "pairi-daeza" into "paradeisos".^[1]The idea of the enclosed garden is often referred to as the paradise garden because of additional Indo-European connotations of "paradise".^[^which?^]

Qualities

The essential qualities of the paradise garden derive from its original, arid or semi-arid homeland. The fundamental quality is enclosure of the cultivated area, which excludes the wildness of nature and includes cultivated and irrigated greenery, providing privacy and security. The most common design of the perimeter walls is that of a rectangle, and this forms one of its primary qualities.

Another common quality is the elaborate use of water, often in canals, ponds, or rills, sometimes in fountains, and less often in waterfalls. The rectangular or rectilinear design is often extended to the water features, which typically quarter the garden. This design derives from or is echoed in that of the Garden of Eden, which in Genesis is described as having a central spring that feeds four rivers, which each flow out into the world beyond.

Much of the use and symbolism of the paradise garden is derived from the Garden of Eden. It was designed to symbolize eternal life. A tree with a spring issuing from its roots especially symbolises this. Additionally, the contrast of a formal garden design with the informality of freely growing plants is a recurring theme in many paradise gardens. Odor and fruit are important elements of this garden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_River

The Yellow River or Huang He (Huang Ho) is the second longest river in China, after the Yangtze River, and the sixth longest river system in the world at the estimated length of 5,464 km (3,395 mi).[1] Originating in the Bayan Har Mountains in Qinghai province of Western China, it flows through nine provinces, and it empties into the Bohai Sea near the city of Dongying in Shandongprovince. The Yellow River basin has an east–west extent of about 1,900 kilometers (1,180 mi) and a north–south extent of about 1,100 km (680 mi). Its total drainage area is about 752,546 square kilometers (290,560 sq mi).

Its basin was the birthplace of ancient Chinese civilization, and it was the most prosperous region in early Chinese history. There are frequent devastating floods and course changes produced by the continual elevation of the river bed, sometimes above the level of its surrounding farm fields.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze

The Yangtze or Yangzi (English: /ˈjæŋtsi/ or /ˈjɑːŋtsi/) is the longest river in Asia, the third-longestin the world and the longest in the world to flow entirely within one country. Its source is in the northern part of the Tibetan Plateau and it flows 6,300 km (3,900 mi) in a generally eastern direction to the East China Sea. It is the sixth-largest river by discharge volume in the world. Its drainage basin comprises one-fifth of the land area of China, and is home to nearly one-third of the country's population.[7]

The Yangtze has played a major role in the history, culture and economy of China. For thousands of years, the river has been used for water, irrigation, sanitation, transportation, industry, boundary-marking and war. The prosperous Yangtze River Delta generates as much as 20% of the PRC's GDP. The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze is the largest hydro-electric power station in the world.[8][9] In mid-2014, the Chinese government announced it was building a multi-tier transport network, comprising railways, roads and airports, to create a new economic belt alongside the river.[10]

The Yangtze flows through a wide array of ecosystems and is habitat to several endemic and endangered species including the Chinese alligator, the narrow-ridged finless porpoise, the Chinese paddlefish, the (extinct) Yangtze River dolphin or baiji, and the Yangtze sturgeon. In recent years, the river has suffered from industrial pollution, plastic pollution,[11] agricultural run-off, siltation, and loss of wetland and lakes, which exacerbates seasonal flooding. Some sections of the river are now protected as nature reserves. A stretch of the upstream Yangtze flowing through deep gorges in western Yunnan is part of the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

https://www.christiantruthcenter.com/nebuchadnezzars-dream/

But there is a God in heaven that reveals secrets, and makes known to the king Nebuchadnezzar what shall be in the latter days (Dan 2:28).

We can look and see what has already being fulfilled and what has not. Here is the dream;

Dan 2:31-35: Thou, O king, saw, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. Thou saw till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and broke them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.

King Nebuchadnezzar dream image

The image represents the world time-line entirely from that time of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon to the coming of Jesus Christ (the last coming of Christ to judge the world). The four metals in the image are regressing or diminishing in value; gold is valuable than silver, silver than brass, brass than iron and iron than clay.

These four metals speak of four kingdoms, governments or empires who will rule the world in their order respectively. Know that the four kingdoms, governments or empires are those who have or had a direct bearing to the Nation of Israel. Apart from having a direct impart to the Nation of Israel, the four governments rule the entire world in their times.

The power, strength and glory of the four governments diminish from the first to the last accordingly as seeing in the diminishing in value of the four metals from gold to clay. Their power, strength and glory diminishes in comparison with the latter power not in comparison to any world power at their times.

In times of their reign, the four governments rule the entire world and they are the most powerful, strongest with the highest glory as compared to any other world governments but not as powerful as the latter mentioned government.

Daniel interpretation of King Nebuchadnezzar

The head of Gold

Dan 2:37-38: Thou, O king, art a king of kings: for the God of heaven has given you a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory. And where-so-ever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven has he given into your hand, and has made you ruler over them all. Thou art this head of gold.

Nebuchadnezzar was the ruler, the king, of the Babylon Empire. The Babylon Empire was an absolute monarchy and the most powerful, strong, superior empire there ever was in the world. It had an absolute effect and rule on the entire world than any other empire there ever was in the world and Nebuchadnezzar was the ruler of the empire thus the head of gold.

Breast and arms of silver

Dan 2:39: And after you shall arise another kingdom inferior to you,…

In 530 BC the Medes and the Persians overthrew the Babylon Empire. Reason there are two arms of silver in the image; one arm representing Medes and the other representing the Persians. The Empire of Medes and Persians was inferior to the Babylon Empire but they overthrew the Babylon Empire.

They were not as great as the Empire of Babylon neither in scope nor rulers, and they were a constitutional monarchy not an absolute monarchy as the Babylon Empire.

The vision of overthrow of the Babylon Empire and giving it to the Medes and the Persians was also presented to King Belshazzar who was a son of the former Babylon king, King Nebuchadnezzar, and we see this in Daniel chapter 5. A hand wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace, ‘MENE, MENE, TEKEL and UPHARSIN’.

In interpreting the writings of the hand to the wall to King Belshazzar, Daniel told him, ‘Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians’ (Dan 5:28). It is during the reign of King Belshazzar when Babylon Empire was given to the Medes and Persians. The Medes and Persians were not as powerful and strong as the Babylon Empire thus being of silver as seeing in the image.

Belly and thighs of brass

…and another third kingdom of brass (Dan 2:39)

The Medes and Persians were overthrown in 330 BC by the Grecians (Greece). Alexander the great conquered the whole world including the Medes and Persians when He was about33 years old. After conquering the whole world, Alexander the great cried and said, ‘is there are no more worlds for me to conquer’.

The Grecians, led by Alexander the great, were less powerful and strong than the Babylon Empire and the Medes and Persians thus being the belly of brass in the image. Brass is less in value than silver and gold.

Legs of iron

Dan 2:40: And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaks in pieces and subdues all things: and as iron that breaks all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise.

The Grecian Empire was overthrown by the Roman Empire being represented by the two legs of iron in the image. Two legs because the Roman Empire split into two; East and west Rome. Iron because it was a brutal empire which crashed every person and government to submission even the Grecian Empire.

The empire was less powerful and strong than the Grecian Empire, the Medes and Persians and the Babylon Empire thus being of iron as seeing from the image. Iron is less in value than brass, silver and gold.

In the reign of the Roman Empire, in 70 AD the Romans come down into Israel, destroyed the temple, slaughtered many people, raped women, wiped out everything and every person and all Jews were scattered all over the world.

This was a fulfillment of Jesus prophecy holding the Jews accountable for not knowing prophesies as you have seeing in the fulfilled weeks of Daniel seventy weeks and ignorance of prophecies.

Israel is God’s time piece as revealed in the article; the church in Daniel 70 weeks. After the Romans come down, destroyed and wiped out the Jews, Israel ceased to be a sovereign nation and God clock stopped.

In 1948 AD, immediately after the end of world war 11 a miracle happened. Israel was proclaimed a nation and in May 19th 1948 AD, Israel became a sovereign nation.

See that Israel ceased to be a nation in 70 AD until 1948 AD.

Feet part of iron and part of clay

Dan 2:41: And whereas you saw the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou saw the iron mixed with miry clay. And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken. And whereas thou saw iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.

The foot of the image has ten toes partly of iron and partly of clay. Immediately Israel became a nation in May 19th 1948 AD, in May 9th 1950 AD, six nations come together in the City of Rome, formed the Treaty of Rome and started a new resurrected Roman empire.

9.2 Statistics and one more Ode to the Honor of the Tax Collector

It has been said quite rightly so, that the French administrators and especially the tax collectors were at all times much better at collecting taxes than doing some work to improve in the first place the ability of the people to pay the taxes, ie. to generate some income in the first place so that the people could live off the money that was left after they had paid their taxes. This has always since times immemorial been a problem for the administration of the state, since the Tax Ministery (Finanzministerium) and the Ministery to increase the Income-Generating capability of the populace (Wirtschaftsministerium) traditionally knew nothing about each other. They might as well be on different planets.

Some of the greatest scientists of La Belle France had been Tax Collectors who had become rich enough to pay for all their laboratory and equipment and all the staff to work the equipment. Like Lavoisier. And mind you, no proper French Scientist would ever touch his laboratory equipment with a 1-meter long stick. This was there for all his staff for the work of the equipment. We even find some of this in Goethe's Faust. The good Dottore Faustus would also never touch such a dirty piece like Laboratory Equipment. And in the Great Britain of those Merry Olden Ages, it was just the other way 'round. Because the Great Newton was also Head of the Royal Mint. This is the Inverse of the Taxes, even though it is the same, if you can think the Inverse, and at the same time, the Real Royal Thing. Because who has the Royal Mint has so much money as one can print. Therefore The Mint is in the Print. Er, the Bank of England, which is the Royal Bank of the Rothschild's. It makes no Differance at all, as the good Jacques Derrida would have said.

Now it is quite logical that when the Economy was good, meaning there was a lot of income in the populace, there would also be a proportionaly high potential for generating tax revenue, so that the state could re-invest that into infrastructure, schools, universities and so on, and so on. This is a system that every Theorist of National Economy would try to implement as good as possible if this Theorist of National Economy would ever be invited by both those abovementioned Ministeries. Unfortunately that happened only very rarely in the Financial History of humanity. Only the British'ers in the heyday of their Victorian Empire managed to come up with such a thing. That was the Great Innovation of the British'ers which was their foundation of the Rule of the World.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom

History of taxation in the United Kingdom includes the history of all collections by governme

7.3 Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary

7.8 Hape Kerkeling: Ich bin dann mal weg

On Incommensurability

The Shape of Things By Sam Han on the Sphäeren by Sloterdijk

8.2.1 Andreas Platthaus

8.7 Bazon Brock

8.8 Noologie: A Comparison with Peter Sloterdijk's Morphology

9 Ode to the Honor and the Memory of the Tax Collector

9.1.1 About Tribes and Tributes

9.2 Statistics and one more Ode to the Honor of the Tax Collector

7.3 Ambrose Bierce : The Devil's Dictionary