vilma

EN LT

2004-04-26

Zivile : input :

source_1
Alphonso Lingis. "The Community of those who have nothing in common"
Alphonso Lingis, "Dangerous Emotions"

source_2
Hannah Arendt. "Between Past and Future"

source_3
Remi Brague. "Eccentric Identity of Europe"

source_1
Alphonso Lingis. "The Community of those who have nothing in common", Indiana University Press, 1994, p.88-92.

We are necessary as efficient causes of new sentences, producers of new information formulated with old words. But in our particularities, our perspective points of view, and our distinctive capacities to issue and to receive meanings, we are part of the noise. The time it takes to formulate those sentences is a time filled with the opacity of our own voices. How transparent communication might be if there were not resistance in the channels that conduct it: no lilting, bombastic, stammering voice pronouncing it!
Yet is there not also a communication in the hearing of the noise in one another’s voices - the noise of another’s life that accompanies the harkening to the message? What kind of communication would that be? […]
It is not also false to suppose that only the meaning attached to words by a code, fixed or evolving, communicates? The rhythm, the tone, the periodicity, the stammerings, and the silences communicate. In the rush of the breathless voice, the tumult of events is conveyed; in the heavy silence that weights on the voice, the oppressive tedium of a place is communicated. “ ‘Prove it,’ demands the logocentric system that the art historian worships. ‘Prove that you still love me….’ ”Joanna Frueh, performance art critic, is saying it in different intonations, volumes, and crescendos - sparring with the voice of the academic demand, and circling around the male: “prove it…. Prove that you still love me….” “Prove that you still love me….” […]
As efficient causes of expressions that convey information, we are interchangeable. Our singularity and our indefinite discernibility is found in, and is heard in, our outcries and our murmurs, our laughter and our tears: the noise of life.

Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions, University of California Press, 2000, p. 114
Chance confounds the intellect, the reasoning, reckoning intellect that identifies possibilities on the basis of past regularities. Chance excites us, quickens the will. In pursuing actions that expose us to the blows of chance, we know in exhilaration what we have received by chance, what we are by chance.

source_2
Hannah Arendt. "Between Past and Future", Penguin Books, 1993, p. 94.

The undeniable loss of tradition in the modern word does not at all entail a loss of the past, for tradition and past are not the same, as the believers in tradition on one side and the believers in progress on the other would have us believe - whereby it makes little difference that the former deplore this state of affairs while the latter extend their congratulations. With the loss of tradition we have lost the thread which safely guided us through the vast realms of the past, but this thread was also the chain fettering each successive generation to a predetermined aspect of the past. It could be that only now will the past open up to us with unexpected freshness and tell us things no one has yet had ears to hear. But it cannot be denied that without a securely anchored tradition - and the loss of this security occurred several hundred years ago - the whole dimension of the past has also been endangered. We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion - quite apart from the contents themselves that could be lost - would mean that, humanly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence. For memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance.

source_3
Remi Brague. "Eccentric Identity of Europe", Aidai, 2001, p. 120, 126, 136.

As an entirety, European culture is an attempt to return to the past, which has never been its past, but from its point of view there has been an irreversible recession, a painful experience of estrangement. There is no necessity to linger over something what is artificial in this past vision. I’m not ignoring the fact, that something, what reached us from the Ancient Culture is the result of selection, done since the Alexander Epoch, and the image of its entirety we have now is too generalized, based on masterpieces and presuming that the whole Ancient World used to be at the same level. Yet I’m not ignoring the fact, that on the contrary, the existing of Ancient monuments and texts in European space and first of all in Italy, regardless of everything, vouched for at least minimum continuity. But what is most important to me - is to realize the situation. European understanding of their is situation is that they appeared quite late and they must get back to their roots, which are not and have never been us. […] Culture for a European cannot be something, what belongs to one and what constitutes one’s identity. On the contrary, that is something totally strange, and taking over it requires certain effort. Only going through something, what was earlier, and what is alien, a European can acquire something, what is characteristic to him. […] The content of Europe is namely to be a repository, being open to universality. To Europe, at the level of civilization it is as important as at the level of individual - proper names of those who live there. Our names in many cases are personal names. Exceptions occur seldom, for example, adjectives (Constant, Aimable etc.). In fact, here we face a specific result of secondary meaning in culture: proper Jewish and Pagan names, which could have meaning in Hebrew (John, etc.), Latin (Mark, etc.) or Germanic (Bernard, etc.) languages. Christians have taken over the names, but forgotten their primary meaning. In most civilizations names have meaning - of course, a priori praising, immediately referring to something what is expected from a child who is given that name. And to a European, his identity is - just empty frame, which one will have to fill.