Sunday, October 22, 2006

Liu Hsieh's Grammatology

Again, hallucinating phono-logocentrism in Chinese and Western traditions

First, Han-Liang Chan’s reading of Liu Hsieh
Second, my comments on Liu Hsieh
Third, Florian Coulmas’ Writing Systems
(For technical reasons, again)


Liu Hsieh (465 – 522)

When the mind is at work,
speech is uttered.


When speech is uttered,
writing is produced.


The Tao inspires writing

and
Writing illuminates the Tao.

What in mind is idea

when expressed in speech is poetry.


Isn't this what we are doing

when dashing off writing to record reality?


Writing originated

when drawing of bird trace

replaced string knitting.


P'ien Wen
"The revolt against imitative writing was also expressed in a 5th-century style called "pure conversation", an intellectual discussion on lofty matters. Some of these were recorded in a collection of anecdotes entitled `Sayings of the World'. In the 6th century the first book of literary criticism, `Carving of the Literary Dragon', was published by Liu Hsieh (465-522). It was written in the p'ien wen, or parallel prose, style."

Liu Hsieh's stile and strategy of writing, the P'ien-wen, has an antithetic, parallel and chiastic structure which easily can be seen in the "poetic" presentation of the text.


Han-Liang Chan’s Hallucinations about Liu Hsieh

"However, this kind of mimesis is not different from what traditional Chinese scholars believe. The Chinese version of logocentrism can be glimpsed from the following statements of the sixth-century Liu Hsieh, the first and probably the only systematic literary critic in classical and medieval China.
When the mind is at work, speech is uttered. When speech is uttered, writing is produced. The Tao inspires writing and writing illuminates the Tao. What in mind is idea when expressed in speech is poetry. Isn’t this what we are doing when dashing off writing to record reality? Writing originated when drawing of bird trace replaced string knitting. (13-17)
These statements from Liu Hsieh, which have been so influential, represent different, and sometimes conflicting, theories regarding the origin of writing and its relation to speech. But they share the same belief in an ultimate, transcendental, undifferentiated, and unmediated reality, be it Tao or nature. In some sense, the metaphysics behind such statements is indeed naive and can be deconstructed by a rereading of the Chinese written character. But there is no fundamental difference between it and the Western logocentric metaphysics, which Derrida sets out to dismantle. There is no reason why Derrida’s deconstruction of Western mimesis cannot be done to its Chinese counterpart. Thus I am tempted to ask:
isn’t Derrida, like Leibniz before him, suffering from the same “European hallucination”
that China is of necessity exempt from logocentrism? [...] Under the tyranny of logocentrism, writing is rendered as secondary and subordinate. In Aristotle’s celebrated phrasing which opens

On Interpretation:
“Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words” (qtd. in Gelb, 13).
This formulation, which Derrida criticizes in The Margins of Philosophy as psychologism, is almost a verbatim paraphrase of Liu Hsieh:
“When the mind is at work, speech is uttered. When speech is uttered, writing is produced.”
Thus in both China and the West, at least in the Aristotelian and Confucian traditions, the category of writing is inscribed only in relation to speech and to the subject of writing.
It is, as Derrida puts it in “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” “pneumatological” rather than “grammatological” writing (1976, 17). This primacy granted to speech is open to deconstruction. Therefore, Derrida proposes that writing be shifted to the space of arche-writing (trace, différance)."


Complexity and Chiasm of Speech/Script/World

“When the mind is at work, speech is uttered. When speech is uttered, writing is produced.”
This, obviously sounds quite familiar, i.e. Aristotelian.

But the holistic principle of Chinese thinking demands to read the text or paragraph as a whole. I have not to be a sinologist to perceive a fundamental difference between Platonian/Aristotelian phono-logocentrism and Liu Hsieh’s conception.
The Aristotelian concept is hierarchic:
things –> soul –> spoken word –> written word.
"Words spoken are symbols of affections or impressions of the soul; written words are symbols of words spoken. And just as letters are not the same for all men, sounds are not the same either, although the affections directly expressed by these indications are the same for everyone, as are the things of which these impressions are images." Aristotle
Micro-structure of the asymmetry
A more detailed reading of Liu Hsieh shows that the conception he describes is different in, at least, four ways:
1. it is circular : "The Tao inspires writing and writing illuminates the Tao.",
2. it is co-creative: "writing illuminates the Tao" and
3. it is parallel: "What in mind is idea when expressed in speech is poetry./writing to record reality"
4. it is evocative: "Isn’t this what we are doing when dashing off writing to record reality?"

These four properties are corresponding to the general ontology or world-view of Chinese thinking:
1. dynamism: things in the world are changing (circular, chiastic, co-creative)
2. grid and networking: things are complex and interrelated (parallelism, concurrency).
3. holism: situational, all parts have to be considered which are constituting a pattern.
4. interactional/reflectional: the text involves a reader who is addressed in a persuasive, evocative mode.
But it is also self-referential: "what we are doing?"
The circularity is chiastic, not simply repetitive.

Between "writing illuminates" and "Tao inspires writing" exists a qualitative difference depending on the two involved positions: Tao, writer. And "idea in mind" vs. "poetry in speech" vs. "dashing off writing/recording reality".
There is also a historical comment involved.

As a result we can resume that the Chinese model of language is containing the classic Western model as a part of its complexity, and it seems that the Chinese model is more close to (post)modern scientific models of language than to Western philosophical models of language.

Chiasm of writing
Writing as illuminating (acting),
Writing as being inspired (conceiving),
Reality as inspiring,
Reality as being illuminated.
Reality as reality
Writing as writing
Writing as counter-part to reality
Reality as counter-part to writing.

Patterns of distribution
It doesn’t seem a too wild speculation to mention that the Chinese characters are placed in a way that they configure as a pattern. In such a configuration the intertextuality of the characters is of importance. For the eye, interconnections between the characters are perceivable. It is not depending on the listening of the linear ordered words and sentences but on the visual collection of the placed glyphs. Such situations are well known, also in the West, in modern poetry. A further analysis would have to involve the Chinese writing in concreto, with its glyphs and the "etymology" of the glyphs.

Han-Liang Chan’s statement:
"But they share the same belief in an ultimate, transcendental, undifferentiated, and unmediated reality, be it Tao or nature."
seems not to be confirmed by the co-creative interaction of writing in relation to the Tao (reality). The Tao is changing under the action of writing, thus it is not in a simple metaphysical way "ultimate, transcendental, undifferentiated, and unmediated reality".

Hence, the situation is unorthodoxically complex.
Han-Liang Chan’s question
"isn’t Derrida, [...], suffering from the same "Europaen hallucination" that China is of necessity exempt from logocentrism?"

Has no easy answer. As far as logocentrism can be seen as a part of the Chinese model, the answer is yes. As far as the Chinese model is taken in its full complexity, the answer is no.


Again, Han-Liang Chan’s interpretation may be in the tradition of the historic understanding of the Chinese model, but this interpretation is not confirmed by Liu Hsieh’s text.
Thus, the translation of Tao might then not be logos (ultimate, absolute) but change.

Florian Coulmas’ Confirmation

Interestingly, I found a direct confirmation of my "laicist" reading of Liu Hsieh.
The author of "Writing Systems" Florian Coulmas writes:

"It bears resemblance to Aristotle’s, but upon closer inspection also differs in important respects. In his celebrated essay ‘Carving of the Literary Dragon’ writer and philosopher Liu Hsieh (465–522) states:
"When the mind is at work, speech is uttered. When speech is uttered, writing is produced. The Tao inspires writing and writing illuminates the Tao. What in mind is idea when expressed in speech is poetry. Isn’t this what we are doing when dashing off writing to record reality? Writing originated when drawing of bird trace replaced string knitting." (1983: 13–17)
This definition shares a number of elements with Aristotle’s.
A mind at work is what Aristotle calls ‘affections of the soul’. It produces speech that in turn generates writing. The Tao corresponds to nature, that is, things about which ideas are formed in the mind.
However, Liu Hsieh’s statement also contains an element that lacks a counterpart in Aristotle’s definition.
Writing is credited with a creative analytic potential:
it illuminates the Tao.
Moreover, the Tao inspires writing, apparently unmediated by speech.
An idea in the mind is expressed in speech, but also in writing that is employed ‘to record reality’.

While Aristotle unambiguously places speech between ideas and written words, Liu Hsieh seems to concede the possibility that ideas are expressed poetically in speech or in writing, where the relationship between the two is not necessarily unidirectional.
This does not imply that, unlike the Greek philosopher, the Chinese denied that writing was bound up with language, but from his account of the relationship between ideas, speech and writing it cannot be concluded that he conceived of writing as a mere substitute for speech.[...]
Linguistic orthodoxy happily concurs with Ferdinand de Saussure’s apodictic statement that made Aristotelian surrogationalism a cornerstone of modern linguistics:
"Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first. The linguistic object is not both the written and the spoken forms of words; the spoken forms alone constitute the object." (Saussure 1959: 23)
Following this prescriptive instruction, most introductory textbooks of linguistics simply exclude the problematic of writing or make do with a cursory review of a number of writing systems in the final chapter.
Notice in passing that this is quite different in the Eastern tradition of the scientific study of language. The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Chinese Linguistics (1991–2), for example, treats writing systems as its first topic at great length.

A noble and widely accepted reason for ignoring writing or treating it lightly in the West is that all human languages are thought to be equal in the sense that they are expressions of the same inborn faculty of language."

Hidden Heterodoxy in the Hierarchy Thesis

After all, the question of Chinese phonologocentrism has lost its innocence and simplicity; it has to be involved in a complex ’hermeneutic’ and grammatological game of change with its hierarchic/heterarchic, dynamic/co-creative, direct/concurrent aspects.
It turns out to be more interesting to hallucinate on the base of proper reading.
But the Western tradition isn’t as simple as described, too.
A critical reading of the original manuscripts of Plato and de Saussure confronts interpretation with some anti-traditional surprises. But we have to accept that the hierarchic model has dominated the history of western thinking and technology. It was the only paradigm with a manageable operativity. Plato’s approach was too archaic, and de Saussure’s wasn’t even published properly at his time. Today, the hierarchy starts with the narrative of innate basic patterns.
A similar situation to the complex model of speech and writing we will discover in the relationship between polycontextural logic (negative languages) and morphogrammatics.

Hallucinations never end
Leibniz was hallucinating Chinese scriptural culture, Derrida was hallucinating Chinese script, Han-Liang Chan is hallucination Liu Hsieh and Derrida, Florian Coulmas is hallucinating on hallucinations of Ferdinand de Saussure's students, Gotthard Gunther is hallucinating the Chinese asymmetry in favor of his "negative language", I am hallucinating the hallucinations of writing and reading in favor of a hallucinated Chinese Challenge.

Asymmetry/polycontextural logic
From the point of view of the profound asymmetry between spoken and written Chinese language, as Gunther mentioned in his letter, we have not to go too much into further linguistic details of analysis.
However, the asymmetry is not a simple inversion of the hierarchy of spoken and written language but is involved in the complex interactivity between speech/script/world as it was suggested by the thoughts of Liu Hsieh.
It has, further more, to include script as numbers and mathematics.
In Aristotelian philosophy of language/writing there is no asymmetry between the magnitude of language and writing but a hierarchy of relevance. First is spoken language, then written language.
In the Chinese paradigm there is a complex dynamism between spoken/written language and reality.
"That is, in holding to the ideograms, lies an unconscious insight of a massive asymmetry between spoken and written language. It is the written language, on which a main culture rests. It possesses an identity strength, which stands out clearly against the identity weakness of the spoken word." Gunther
Gunther’s conception of a "negative language" (polycontextural logic) is emphasizing the asymmetry between spoken and written language in respect to formal languages. His negative language is a formal language surpassing traditional formal logic, and thus, strictly not a language but a complex

Today, the Aristotelian hierarchy is still at work in computer science and technology. It is mainly based on Viennese positivism and analytical philosophy and comes as the hierarchy of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Thus, it has a cultural and economic impact.
The same happens for the Web. The Web is syntactically structured, based on ID numbers, organized in a central administration. The new movement, Semantic Web, tries to add some semantics to it. Computer science is strictly following the narrow path of formal logic.

For China, there are no epistemological barriers produced by the complex scripture to fully assimilate Western logic and scientifity. Simply because the Western hierarchic paradigm of thinking appears as a part of the holistic and heterarchic Chinese paradigm of writing and thinking.

Imperialism of phonetization and Unicode
"In spite of his own European hallucination, which can be deconstructed in and by itself, Derrida’s concept of writing is existential urgency to the Chinese as users of script. Ever since the seventeenth century, the Chinese writing system has been challenged of the curious joint forces of Leibnizian admiration and Hegelian scorn.
Specifically, it has had to meet the continued challenge of, in Derrida’s words, the imperialism of phoneticization, which has been aggravated since the Opium War by the religious, political, and technological encroachments of Western powers. This language-or more precisely, script-crisis has never been sufficiently addressed.
Among notable projects of language imperialism are the numerous attempts at Latinizing the script and the on-going debate on the so-called “monosyllabic myth.”
Recently, Stephen A. Tyler has proposed a postmodern ethnography by questioning the ethnographer’s very medium of writing for his text and suggesting as an alternative the native’s participatory voice. But I am afraid that in the case of representing China’s essentially script culture, the native’s “voice” has to be silenced in the first place."
Attempts to phonetization comes in a pedagogical desguise. It would be much easier for human beings to learn Chinese if it could be reduced to an as simple system as Western alphabets. But this, again, is a Western myth as comparative studies of educational systems have shown. This trend is not aware about the Chinese history which always had the possibility to change the base, but for good reasons, didn’t. Now, a new candidate is learning Chinese, our computers. And surprisingly, instead of denying the complexity of the Chinese characters to feed computers, the contrary happened. Thanks to codification, Chinese characters can be represented in Unicode. And are therefore accessible for electronic writing and printing.

Codification as a protection: Unicode
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.

"With the help of the four-byte coding technology, people can easily type in 70,000 characters in any computer installed with a coordinated database, Wang said, adding that the original two-byte coding could only deal with 20,000 characters.
The Kangxi Dictionary, a famous Chinese dictionary compiled during the reign of Kangxi Emperor of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), is now under the publishing process with the help of four-byte coding. The dictionary was best known for including the most rare characters in the Chinese language.
"Apart from its own meaning, one character also embodies the culture and history of the user", Feng said, "We should better preserve and protect our Chinese characters by using advanced technology."
Representing Chinese characters by numbers in the process of codification in Unicode is not reducing Chinese writing to the linearity of alphabetism. Alphabetism would be another kind of writing, Unicode is not another kind of writing but a codification of Chinese writing. Writing is not coding.

But nevertheless, Unicode is mapping codified characters onto the linearity of natural numbers. In Gunther’s wording, it is a mapping onto a positive language, that is, onto the arithmetic of a positive language which is an uni-dimensional arithmetic. A negative language, and Gunther considered the Chinese script, because of its complexity, a historical negative language. A negative language then would ask for a pluri-dimensional arithmetics and a complex polycontextural logic. And a codification then would have an other function, it would be rather a formalization then a codification.

Saturday, October 21, 2006

New Enlightenments in the Orbit?

1 Towards a Metaphor of Togetherness

Time is coming that we have to learn to live together at the same place without any chances of excluding each other.

Earlieron we solved this problem of living together with the help of the operation of separation and exclusion. Nobody had to live at the exact same place as someone else. The separation of two beings has given the space and possibility for interaction and cooperation between these entities. The separation was the fundamental condition for the possibility of interaction (cooperation, communication, co-creation, etc.).

Now it seems that we have reached the point that we have to develop a concept of living together in which we have to take place together simultaneously at the exact same place.

It will turn out that this way of living together is prior to any separation and therefore to any form of interaction and cooperation.

In classical terms two objects must be identical if they are not different. They are different if it is possible to separate them.

How could togetherness be thought and conceptualized whithout the assumptions of identity and distinctness and the procedures of identification and separation?

How could this be possible? First of all, it isn’t possible at all on the premises of the traditional concepts of place, space, object, time, state, separation and interaction. The reason is obvious, all these concepts are fundamentally rooted in the ontological and logical principle of identity.

In technical terms, how could it be possible that two different states of a computation could occupy the very same place in the computing space of their machine?

Obviously this is not possible at all. It isn’t possible neither from the point of view of the machine nor of the basic concepts of the programming languages. It is impossible for logical and physical reasons.

Simply take the example of the definition of EQ in the programming language LISP:

EQxy =def if (eval x) = (eval y) then true
else false

The equality EQ of x and y is strict, it is fulfilled or it is not – tertium non datur. The logic which is ruling these conditions is strictly binary. It is in whatever form a two-valued logical system which is ruling the conditions of equality. All in all, there are three levels of equality involved ruling this definition: the definitional (=def), the defined (EQ) and the defining (=).

There is also no chance on the level of implementation on a more physical level of a machine. Two states are equal if they have the same address, and if they have the same address they have the identical physical realization which is the equality (=).

It seems that there is no chance to escape this situation.

2 America wants it all - life, the Universe and everything

Again:

"In technical terms, how could it be possible that two different states of a computation could occupy the very same place in the computing space of their machine?
Obviously this is not possible at all."

We can paraphrase this statement into a more accessible terminology.

In political and military strategies, how could it be possible that two different states of this planet could occupy the very same place in the power space of their hegemony?
Obviously this is not possible at all.

I surely always thought that such paraphrases would "automatically" happen in the mind of the readers of my texts.

Obviously this is not the case at all.

OK, restart reading, or enjoy DERRIDA'S MACHINES.

Therefore I will give some hints in this Blog which, in my opinion, are unnecessary, because of their self-evidence. To study, say ancient Chinese and Pythagorean Number Theory and Logic, is not a lost academic game and also not a "brainfuck" at all, but of enormous help to surpass today’s dilemma of digitalism and its self-destruction. My hope is, that with such studies we will be better “weaponed” to “fight” the “conflicts” on the way through to a development of polycontextural logic and morphogrammatics, as first steps beyond contemporary global madness.

There is nothing shiny in morphogrammatics, nor is there a masters voice to follow.

But first I will deal with the (high)lights of enlightened reason.

Keywords:

light, lighting, lightening, enlightenment, laser beam, Lichtung, blind, blinding, blenden (germ.).

To make a rest (Feierabend), enlight your cigarette, then go and visit Paul Feyerabend

And now, let’s learn the News from America!

"The Bush administration has staked an aggressive new claim to dominate space - rejecting any new treaties that seek to limit the United States' extraterrestrial activities and warning that it will oppose any nations that try to get in its way."

Obviously, again, these logocentristics at the Pentagon have forgotten the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors, probably not actually on the way yet.

America wants it all - life, the Universe and everything

"The United States considers space capabilities -- including the ground and space segments and supporting links -- vital to its national interests," the policy said.

"Consistent with this policy, the United States will: preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space; dissuade or deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so; take those actions necessary to protect its space capabilities; respond to interference; and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests."

The White House said the policy does not call for the development or deployment of weapons in space.


Cartoon from Tony Auth

"This policy emphasizes that the United States is committed to peaceful uses of space by all nations and that space systems enjoy the right of free passage," National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones said.

He said the United States maintains the right of self-defense and the protection of its interests and assets in space.

"Protection of space assets does not imply some sort of forceful action," he said. "There is a broad range of ways to protect our space capabilities" such as system hardening, encryption, maneuvering and other methods.

"The new policy is consistent with previous national space policies in this regard," he said.

Jones said the challenges and threats facing the United States have changed in the decade since the space policy was last updated.

"Technology advances have increased the importance of and use of space," he said. "Now,, we depend on space capabilities for things like: ATMs, personal navigation, package tracking, radio services, and cell phone use."

The new policy was first reported by The Washington Post.

Here it is:

UNCLASSIFIED

U.S. National Space Policy

The President authorized a new national space policy on August 31, 2006 that establishes overarching national policy that governs the conduct of U.S. space activities. This policy supersedes Presidential Decision Directive/NSC-49/NSTC-8, National Space Policy, dated September 14, 1996.

1. Background

[...]

For five decades, the United States has led the world in space exploration and use and has developed a solid civil, commercial, and national security space foundation. Space activities have improved life in the United States and around the world, enhancing security, protecting lives and the environment, speeding information flow, serving as an engine for economic growth, and revolutionizing the way people view their place in the world and the cosmos. Space has become a place that is increasingly used by a host of nations, consortia, businesses, and entrepreneurs.

In this new century, those who effectively utilize space will enjoy added prosperity and security and will hold a substantial advantage over those who do not. Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power. In order to increase knowledge, discovery, economic prosperity, and to enhance the national security, the United States must have robust, effective, and efficient space capabilities.

2. Principles

The conduct of U.S. space programs and activities shall be a top priority, guided by the following principles:

  • The United States is committed to the exploration and use of outer space by allnations for peaceful purposes, and for the benefit of all humanity. Consistent with this principle, “peaceful purposes” allow U.S. defense and intelligence-related activities in pursuit of national interests;
  • The United States rejects any claims to sovereignty by any nation over outer spaceor celestial bodies, or any portion thereof, and rejects any limitations on the fundamental right of the United States to operate in and acquire data from space;
  • The United States will seek to cooperate with other nations in the peaceful use ofouter space to extend the benefits of space, enhance space exploration, and to protect and promote freedom around the world;
  • The United States considers space systems to have the rights of passage throughand operations in space without interference. Consistent with this principle, the United States will view purposeful interference with its space systems as an infringement on its rights;
  • The United States considers space capabilities -- including the ground and spacesegments and supporting links -- vital to its national interests. Consistent with this policy, the United States will: preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space; dissuade or deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so; take those actions necessary to protect its space capabilities; respond to interference; and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests;

• The United States will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other re-strictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space. Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduct research, development, testing, and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interests; and

• The United States is committed to encouraging and facilitating a growing and en-trepreneurial U.S. commercial space sector. Toward that end, the United States Government will use U.S. commercial space capabilities to the maximum practical extent, consistent with national security.

3. United States Space Policy Goals

The fundamental goals of this policy are to:

  • Strengthen the nation’s space leadership and ensure that space capabilities areavailable in time to further U.S. national security, homeland security, and foreign policy objectives;
  • Enable unhindered U.S. operations in and through space to defend our intereststhere;
  • Implement and sustain an innovative human and robotic exploration program withthe objective of extending human presence across the solar system;
  • Increase the benefits of civil exploration, scientific discovery, and environmentalactivities;
  • Enable a dynamic, globally competitive domestic commercial space sector in orderto promote innovation, strengthen U.S. leadership, and protect national, homeland, and economic security;
  • Enable a robust science and technology base supporting national security, home-land security, and civil space activities; and
  • Encourage international cooperation with foreign nations and/or consortia onspace activities that are of mutual benefit and that further the peaceful exploration and use of space, as well as to advance national security, homeland security, and foreign policy objectives.
  • http://www.ostp.gov/html/US%20National%20Space%20Policy.pdf

Bush Sets Defense As Space Priority
U.S. Says Shift Is Not A Step Toward Arms; Experts Say It Could Be

3 And what is the Chinese Challenge in this Space Game?

United States concern as China targets spy satellite with laser beam

Andrea Shalal-es

“CHINA has beamed a ground-based laser at American spy satellites over its territory, the US defence deparment has said.”

"Space is a much bigger part of our military posture than it used to be, so any effort by the Chinese or anybody else to jam our satellites is potentially a big deal," said Loren Thompson, a defence analyst at the Lexington Institute."

Discussions:

http://digg.com/tech_news/Chinese_Lasers_vs_US_Satellites
http://www.spacedebate.org/argument/1343
http://www.spacedebate.org/blog/

Beijing secretly fires lasers to disable US satellites

By Francis Harris in Washington

The document said that China could blind American satellites with a ground-based laser firing a beam of light to prevent spy photography as they pass over China. According to senior American officials: "China not only has the capability, but has exercised it." American satellites like the giant Keyhole craft have come under attack "several times" in recent years. Although the Chinese tests do not aim to destroy American satellites, the laser attacks could make them useless over Chinese territory. The American military has been so alarmed by the Chinese activity that it has begun test attacks against its own satellites to determine the severity of the threat. Satellites are especially vulnerable to attack because they have predetermined orbits, allowing an enemy to know where they will appear.

"The Chinese are very strategically minded and are extremely active in this arena. They really believe all the stuff written in the 1980s about the high frontier," said one senior former Pentagon official."


“If U.S. military weapons planners have learned anything from the varied conflicts of the past quarter century, it is that the challenges are not getting any more predictable. With the nature and capabilities of U.S. opponents changing on practically an engagement-by-engagement basis, deciding which new weapon technologies will best serve soldiers in the battle theaters of the future remains a high-stakes guessing game.”
“The enemy is no longer necessarily a nation; it can be a terrorist cell. The enemy may not possess high-tech weaponry yet still pose a threat--by exploding truck bombs on suicide missions or by firing hand-launched missiles against F/A-22 fighter jets. Nor, despite the absolute technological supremacy of the U.S. military today, can strategists afford to ignore the possibility that a nation that has developed advanced weaponry might come to pose a threat in a nightmare future.”

Dialectics of Ligthing and Blinding

Where there is too much light we need some blinds. Because too much light is blinding your sight. A Blender (germ.) is a blender (dazzler, engl.), but a Blinder is not a necessarily a Blender.

Blinding is the opposite of lighting. Both are forming together the system of “en-ligth(en)ment”. If light is used to spy then the defence to blind with light is not only enlightened but the start of a first round in the spiral of reflection too. Hegel would call this reflectional game “schlechte Unendlichkeit” (bad infinity), because it runs into an infinite regress. He would also call the first step of the game, the spying, a factum brutum. And nobody reflected has to accept such a factum brutum.

In the epoch of digitalism with its binary logic it seems we have to live with it.

Or we can try to surpass the madness, say with a neither-nor rejection of both at once.

I remember vagely an Ancient Mongolian story about far-sightedness and blindness. At the end of a competition about far-sightedness, one guy says, my friend can see much more than all of your guys together. Also he has only one eye; and on this eye he is blind. But if he sees, he sees three-times more far than all of you together. Try it!


4 Lichtung: "Anchors aweigh!" and the New Enlightenment?

Introduction to and Discussion Summary of Wang Hui's

Humanism as the Theme of Chinese Modernity

ABSTRACT by WANG HUI

"By examining humanist and Enlightenment discourse in reference to China and to the West, this essay reopens the question of how modern Chinese intellectuals assimilated Western ideas and applied them in their own social practice. It indicates the historical conceptions that underlie Western humanism and traces the evolution of Chinese humanist discourses in terms of their media of dissemination, their impact on the organization of knowledge, and their relationship to Marxist concepts of the mode of production."

Lichtung as clearance, clearing, glade and to unanchor

Martin Heidegger: Wahrheit als die DIE LICHTUNG DES SEINS.

Darling look, The Future is Bright!

“ONCE again, science fiction has predicted science fact. Remember those movies where the hero (or villain) uses a beam from a compact laser to blow a rocket out of the sky?”

Meeting the Challenges

The SSHCL delivered to White Sands for testing last September has an amplifier composed of nine disks of neodymium-doped glass (Nd:glass). In this prototype, an electrical source powers flashlamps, which in turn pump the disks, which then release the energy in pulses of laser light. The average output power of the SSHCL is 10 kilowatts, and it can deliver 500-joule pulses at 20 hertz in 10-second bursts—essentially vaporizing metal. The prototype requires 1 megawatt of input power to produce a 13-kilowatt laser beam. ..."

The former Pentagon official put it more bluntly.
“The Air Force is trying to put a happy face on this,” he said. “It’s not that they don’t know what do. It’s that they don’t have the money in their space budget. It’s that simple.” (DefenseNews.com)


5 LICHTUNG: Beyond Belichtung

Heidegger’s Lichtung (clearing) as glade.

“In Heidegger we find a meditation on what he calls the ”clearing” (Lichtung) or truth as aletheia, the first openness that is the precondition for all other intentional structues, and that has a special and privileged relation the artwork as the opening of a world."
"Lichtung: As an open field of sense-making relations, the world is an "opening" that "clears" things, i.e., makes them in-telligible-as aletheia. To "clear" somethi
ng means to free it from dumb lethic "thereness" by relating it to human purposes. In that capacity the world is called Lichtung, not the "lighting process" but the synthetic-differential "clearing" that opensthings-up-as. Lichtung erbringt Anwesen: By rendering things intelligible-as, the clearing gives being."

Beiträge and later works make it clear that Ereignis is not an "event" in any usual sense of the term (i.e., Vorkommnis und Geschehnis: SD 21.27) and that what Heidegger meant by Ereignis is not
primarily "appropriation" or "enowning." In the forthcoming GA 71 (Das Ereignis, 1941-42) Heidegger shows that the original etymon of Ereignis is not eigen ("own," parallel to the Latin proprium, from which derive "appropriation" and "enowning") but rather eräugen/ereugen, "bringing something out into view." Heidegger got much of this from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.14 More importantly, however, in GA 71 (section "Das Ereignis," sub-section "Er-eigen -- Er-eignen," ms. 100a), Heidegger annotated the Grimm etymologies, thereby providing his own understanding of Ereignis.
The noun Ereignis ("event, occurrence") points back to the reflexive verb sich ereignen, "to happen, occur."

Alter Hohlweg, Voßbruch

Beyond Lighting and Blinding

"Heidegger likewise accepts that the primary meaning of sich ereignen is "to come into view, to appear, to be brought forth and revealed":

Er-eigen: er-eugen - er-äugen - ostendere, monstrare,
in die Augen, Blick, Anblick
fallen - erscheinen
sich offenbaren, zu-tragen,
be-geben.
Most significantly, he glosses all this with a verb that does not appear in the Grimms' etymology. In apposition to Grimms' erweisen and erzeigen Heidegger places lichten, "to disencumber and free up, to open up or clear":

"lichten - erweisen - erzeigen.

Thus, in the reflexive, sich erweisen and sich erzeigen ("to show up or appear as what one is") mean the same as sich lichten, "to be opened up and cleared." Sich ereignen ("to occur") means that something is brought out into the open, comes into the clear:

"in die Lichtung einbeziehen."

Heidegger reinforces this when he states that das Er-eigen
(which he glosses as Er-äugen) has the transitive sense of "lichtend - weisen" -- "to show by opening up" (in the reflexive: "to appear by having been opened up").

Thomas Sheehan, A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research


New Enlight(en)ments in Glasgow? The Scottish Enlightenment

Scotland not only had an importand time in the development of laser technology but even more widely known a vibrant epoch of cultural enligthenment.

“The "Scottish Enlightenment" stretched roughly from 1740 to 1790. Unlike in France, many of its protagonists were academics. Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and John Millar were professors at the University of Glasgow. Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart and William Robertson were at the University of Edinburgh. The universities of Aberdeen and St. Andrews were dominated by their students. But there were also some important figures outside the academy who influenced the course of the dialogue, including Lord Kames, Sir James Steuart, Dr. James Anderson and, above everybody else, the towering figure of David Hume. [...] The efforts of the Scottish school led Voltaire to note that "we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilization"."

Picture Ron Stirling, Dennistoun, Glasgow

Finished writting during the Big FireWorks of Eid, Celebration of Light and Enlightenment, Glasgow 2006

Eid ul-Fitr (Arabic: عيد الفطر), is an Islamic holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting.

New Enlightenments in the Orbit? (PDF)