Author Archives: Olaf Simons

About Olaf Simons

Born in 1961, Neumünster, Schleswig-Holstein, studied German and English literatures and philosophy at the universities of Munich and Canterbury. 1998 PhD on the early modern European market of fiction. 1999-2002: Coauthor of the report on Bertelsmann’s role as a publisher in Nazi Germany. 2006-2009: Lecturer at the faculty of English at the University of Oldenburg. Presently research grant at the Forschungszentrum Gotha. Book project on the history of the book market and the concept of literature.

From the Twitter Stream

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[Gotha, Germany] This short tweet surprised me in its sharpness

I opened a twitter account for our website (as I had never understood why anyone would love to communicate in 140 character messages). Its quite unlike facebook, quite another game. Facebook is more exclusive with its system of mutual friendships and more authoritative with the feature of designed official pages you can run in order to send messages to fans and supply them with items they might “like” to spread. The regular facebook item is bigger: is an image with a message or an album of images. Facebook inspires the visualisation of messages.

Twitter is coincidental. Start with the search function. You can do “hashtag searches” – searches with a # at the #beginning of a #word, and you will find the community’s agreements on ongoing discourses to which new messages are supposed to belong. You can just as well search any word you like. Here the searches for positivism or positivist, and you will get far beyond the intended discourse, into the ongoing usage of the word.

You can interfere in ongoing exchanges, quite indecent but funny. You can “retweet” a message you find funny among your followers, you can “favourite” it, but you can also address those who were involved in this exchange by pressing the reply button. Suddenly you are in their talk. They can block you of course, but they might allow you to be part of the party. Someone said something, like the person next to you at the ship’s railing looking into the same distance, you respond and are in a debate. Here a fragment of a morning of thought with Egyptian born actress Amanda Azim whose scattered remarks about ethics and the sciences had startled me:

Most tweets that mention positivism are of the post-1950s evangelical type. People all around the world love to begin their days with the simple tweet #positivism! And voilá, its a wonderful day, here you are! I had an intriguing discussion about the historical usages of the word and its differentiations with Cascokid and can’t agree more:

well, the dead ones are not really talkative I’ve heard.

PS
If you have not got a twitter account you can follow these twitter exhanges here on our website http://positivists.org/2.html

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Auguste Comte on the relativity of scientific knowledge

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Jules Verne defying Gravitation

Jules Verne defying Gravitation


[Gotha, Germany] What puzzles me is the question how much of Mach’s positivism, or even Wittgenstein’s neo-positivism (if both allow me these categorisations) is actually inherent in Comte’s explicit positivism. I used to think: not much. Yet whenever I read fragments of Comte, I see it there, strikingly developed (though difficult to accept from such a voice of authority). One should take a look at Comte on matter, Comte on theory and the interpretation of facts (rather than the exploration of matter) and one should get a clearer understanding of this sociological turn that almost secures him from running into the explorations of (eventually personal) perception and potential solipsism Mach so much enjoys.

What is most striking on all these accounts? Probably Comte’s readiness to declare all scientific knowledge merely relative. Even Newton’s laws of gravitation should not be overestimated in this respect. In a historical perspective they will prove relative. In future debates we will handle quite another theoretical frame, Comte feels entitled to proclaim.

Here is the passage from his Cours de philosophie positive (1830-1842) the English 19th-century edition — The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. “Freely translated and Condensed by Harriet Martineau”, the three volume edition of 1896 with a preface by Frederic Harrison, London: George Bell and Sons, vol. 1, p.198-99:

It must be understood that I advocate simply a suspension of judgment where there is no ground for either affirmation or denial. I merely desire to keep in view that all our positive knowledge is relative; and, in my dread of our resting in notions of anything absolute, I would venture to say that I can conceive of such a thing as even our theory of gravitation being hereafter superseded. I do not think it probable; and the fact will ever remain that it answers completely to our present needs. It sustains us, up to the last point of precision that we can attain. If a future generation should reach a greater, and feel, in consequence, a need to construct a new law of gravitation, it will be as true as it now is that the Newtonian theory is, in the midst of inevitable variations, stable enough to give steadiness and confidence to our understandings. It will appear hereafter how inestimable this theory is in the interpretation of the phenomena of the interior of our system. We already see how much we owe to it, apart from all specific knowledge which it has given us, in the advancement of our philosophical progress, and of the general education of human reason. Descartes could not rise to a mechanical conception of general phenomena without occupying himself with a baseless hypothesis about their mode of production. This was, doubtless, a necessary process of transition from the old notions of the absolute to the positive view; but too long a continuance in this stage would have seriously impeded human progress. The Newtonian discovery set us forward in the true positive direction. It retains Descartes’ fundamental idea of a Mechanism, but casts aside all inquiry into its origin and mode of production. It shows practically how, without attempting to penetrate into the essence of phenomena, we may connect and assimilate them, so as to attain, with precision and certainty, the true end of our studies,—that exact prevision of events which à priori conceptions are necessarily unable to supply. [link Internet Arcive]

“If a future generation should reach a greater, and feel, in consequence, a need to construct a new law of gravitation, it will be as true as it now is that the Newtonian theory is, in the midst of inevitable variations, stable enough to give steadiness and confidence to our understandings” — that is far reaching. This seems to be a consideration under the premise that we are getting closer and closer to the truth, and yet it is more. Is it a step into pragmatism? into knowledge as a social convention? History becomes the greater continuum in which one has to explain the theory (Comte did that in the preceding chapters with a perspective on how Newton got rid of the mechanical concepts his predecessors had still been using). Difficult to tell. Comte will eventually step from mathematics to sociology as the highest science.

Seems they are still teaching Newton’s gravitation though — this MIT Prof. Walter Lewin explaining it to his students [Source Wikimedia Commons].

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Ernst Mach on Going Viral

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[Gotha, Germany] Is Ernst Mach a positivist? (linking back to this)

“Matter” is among the concepts he rejects – as a positivist or as a strict empiricist. In the preface to the fourth edition of his Analysis of Sensations (1902) he is happy about the company of those philosophers who have developed much the same views during the past 35 years — “positivists, critical empiricists, adherents of the philosophy of immanence, and certain isolated scientists as well.”

We do not experience matter, so Mach. The very idea of constancy (required by matter as soon as it is suppoesd to be elementary and irreducible) cannot become part of our perceptions. We are dealing with perceptions, and we create models which might involve the construction of space and of objects occupying this space. The physicist should, however, so Mach, leave the question of substance open:

Really unconditioned constancy does not exist, as will be evident from the preceding considerations. We attain to the idea of absolute constancy only as we overlook or underrate conditions, or as we regard them as always given, or as we deliberately disregard them. There is only one sort of constancy, which embraces all the cases that occur, namely, constancy of connexion or of relation. Substance, again, or matter, is not anything unconditionally constant. What we call matter is a combination of the elements or sensations according to certain laws. The sensations connected with the different sense-organs of a particular man are dependent on one another according to laws, as are the sensations of different men. It is in this that matter consists. The older generation, especially the physicists and chemists, will be alarmed by this proposal not to treat matter as something absolutely constant, but to take as constant, instead, a fixed law of connexion among elements which in themselves seem extremely unstable. Even younger minds may find this conception difficult; but the view is inevitable, though I myself at one time went through a great struggle in order to arrive at it. We shall have to make up our minds to some such radical change in the method of our thought, if we want to escape the alternative of perpetually recurring helplessness in the face of these questions.

There can be no question of abolishing from ordinary everyday use the vulgar conception of matter which has been instinctively developed for this purpose. Moreover, all our concepts of physical measurement can be maintained, only receiving such critical elucidation as I have tried to carry out for mechanics, heat, electricity, etc. Purely empirical concepts here take the place of metaphysical. But science suffers no loss when a “matter,” which is a rigid, sterile, constant, unknown Something, is replaced by a constant law, of which the details are still capable of further explanation by means of physico-physiological research. In doing this our object is not to create a new philosophy or metaphysics, but to promote the efforts, which the positive sciences are at this moment making, towards mutual accommodation. [link into the book]

Mach is opening doors with such statements – doors into 20th- and 21st-century research. He is ready to lead into modern quantum field theory, into statements as Sean Carroll makes them in this YouTube-video in which he considers that “really the world isn’t made of particles” (but of fields that gain values at every point in space).

Mach’s readiness to go back to subjective and personal perceptions and to reduce his personal thought to elementary combinations of sensations is mindboggeling. Can he hope to define these elementary perceptions? We interpret, so Mach, tactile, visual, and acoustic sensations, we see correlations between elements of such sensations. What exactly is such an “element”? Not the individual nerve impulse, for I do not perceive that electric impulse as such.

Even our will is, so his sensation, a sensation, a perception. He looks back on a stroke he suffered in 1898. While paralysed he tried to move his arm. To be precise about this, he adds, that he could not actually get a feeling for this “will” he needed to perform the movement. The sensation of the will to move the arm had gone with the ability to move it, or was it part of that ability or part of the very movements? The perception of the will was, so it turned out, connected to the operations he would perform and lost with the ability to perform. [link into the text passage]

Do we dream our will, our impulses to move, in dreams in which we run? Is that will-sensation in the dream not as much a sensation that dream is made of as the visual field we experience while running in the dream? What is cause and consequence in all these combinations of sensations? Do we smile because we are happy? Or do we become happy when we smile? The latter, so Mach, thinking about the connections of his sensations (or persuaded much rather by the contemporary psychological debate?).

Some of the connections we draw in our interpretations of sensations seem to be preconditioned by how our brains and our sense organs are tuned to work — useful defaults of the biological evolution. Some interpretations seem, however, to be much rather cultural constructs. On the one hand we have to do much to overcome the limitations these modes of biological and cultural interpretation impose on us. On the other hand we should feel privileged and able to construct views and to transmit concepts and thoughts if not complex clusters of sensations. Connections we create live on after our deaths and Mach is ready to appreciate this afterlife. The ego that is threatetend by death has to be better understood as nothing but an interpretation and wants to be overcome as a concept of dreadful limitations:

The primary fact is not the ego, but the elements (sensations). What was said on p. 21 as to the term ” sensation ” must be borne in mind. The elements constitute the I.  I have the sensation green, signifies that the element green occurs in a given complex of other elements (sensations, memories). When I cease to have the sensation green, when I die, then the elements no longer occur in the ordinary, familiar association. That is all. Only an ideal mental-economical unity, not a real unity, has ceased to exist. The ego is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity. None of these attributes are important; for all vary even within the sphere of individual life; in fact their alteration is even sought after by the individual. Continuity alone is important. This view accords admirably with the position which Weismann has reached by biological investigations. (“Zur Frage der Unsterblichkeit der Einzelligen,” Biolog Centralbl., Vol. IV., Nos. 21, 22; compare especially pages 654 and 655, where the scission of the individual into two equal halves is spoken of.) But continuity is only a means of preparing and conserving what is contained in the ego. This content, and not the ego, is the principal thing. This content, however, is not confined to the individual. With the exception of some insignificant and valueless personal memories, it remains presented in others even after the death of the individual. The elements that make up the consciousness of a given individual are firmly connected with one another, but with those of another individual they are only feebly connected, and the connexion is only casually apparent. Contents of consciousness, however, that are of universal significance, break through these limits of the individual, and, attached of course to individuals again, can enjoy a continued existence of an impersonal, superpersonal kind, independently of the personality by means of which they were developed. To contribute to this is the greatest happiness of the artist, the scientist, the inventor, the social reformer, etc.

The ego must be given up. It is partly the perception of this fact, partly the fear of it, that has given rise to the many extravagances of pessimism and optimism, and to numerous religious, ascetic, and philosophical absurdities. In the long run we shall not be able to close our eyes to this simple truth, which is the immediate outcome of psychological analysis. We shall then no longer place so high a value upon the ego, which even during the individual life greatly changes, and which, in sleep or during absorption in some idea, just in our very happiest moments, may be partially or wholly absent. We shall then be willing to renounce individual immortality,’ and not place more value upon the subsidiary elements than upon the principal ones. In this way we shall arrive at a freer and more enlightened view of life, which will preclude the disregard of other egos and the overestimation of our own. The ethical ideal founded on this view of life will be equally far removed from the ideal of the ascetic, which is not biologically tenable for whoever practises it, and vanishes at once with his disappearance, and from the ideal of an overweening Nietzschean “superman,” who cannot, and I hope will not be tolerated by his fellow-men. [link into the book]

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What You See Is Real

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[Gotha, Germany] “What you see is real” – an interesting statement made on Chen Wenling’s web page; one might ask: what else should it be? I took this screenshot, before the message will disappear into the world of unstable web artefacts, klick at it to get the full resolution:

Screenshot from Chen Wenling’s website 陈文令 – 陈文令工作室
http://www.chenwenling.com/

One might be tempted to dismiss any such claim with the assistance Kant can offer, who stated that we could never see more than an image of the thing – that real “thing itself” out there. And the image we see? is, so the complaint since Plato, all too often distorted, illusionary, everything but the real thing.

Ernst Mach took the opposite stance at the end of the 19th century when stated – both with and against Kant – that we will indeed never see that mysterious “thing itself”; and that we sould hence rather not call that thing part of our reality. The “external reality” is as much as any “internal reality”, so Mach, nothing but a construct – an interesting and constructive interpretation of what we feel “we see”. All we actually have as primary reality is perceptions, sensual elements we categorise as “visual“, “acoustic”, “tactile”… and bring into a useful order (so the positivistc backbone of “empiriocriticism”). The world of “things out there” is, so Mach, a useful construct designed to allow certain predictions of how things will behave, yet really nothing more. Things as we see them behave as if they were three-dimensional objects. The attempt to prove that their world “exists” is, so Mach, philosophically futile, a step into the world of metaphysics.

And if all these perceptions were illusionary, a dream? It would not make a difference, so Mach. In this dream, we would say, that things behave as if they existed as “solid objects” that could actually hurt “us”. We try to make sense of this field of observation, our perceptions. That “arm” I claim to be “my arm” deserves this claim only because of its special relationship to other perceptions like the perception that I can move it quite unlike the window over there. I give the same interpretations to sensual data whether I “dream” them or whether I assume I “see” them.

What I see is not only real — It is the only reality I have. My interpretations are less real, are questionable, are arbitrary, stand in need of revisions (as for example, when I feel “I am waking up”).

May be Chen Wenling is a kind of neo-empiriocriticist. Can also be he wants to say that his objects are real stuff one can buy on the international art market – objects that will eventually be as real as the chilly world out there. How can I tell?

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100 Facebook Likes

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Our facebook pageThat is not exactly a number to celebrate, rather one to examine – in facebook terms it is a rather modest number.

I opened the facbook page of global positivism on March 15, 2012 with a bit of curiosity about the new features facebook was to give to “pages”. The project itself eventually developed with the features facebook introduced – and under their influence.

Open a facebook page, not a personal one but one for a company or organisation, and facebook will inspire you to develop an entire program for that page. Create a slogan! – “Secular, Social, Scientific”, now that was easy. When did your project start? 1830? Accepted. What is your mission? – Progress, definitely. And your product? Modernity, in that case. Did you get any awards? Not that I would remember – funny, why did not we get an award? I must check this.

Create a “timeline” reaching back to 1830 – that is a nice project. And then start posting.

Posting required a couple of further thoughts. Basically I wanted to use this page for short messages, which are far easier to post on facebook than on our own webpage. So I filled the facebook stream into our news page. Still, the question remained: what did we want to post?

Secular, Social, Scientific? – There should not be a lack of topics, especially since everything would eventually, so Comte in yesterday’s blog entry, find art as the wider platform.

Who were we going to address? Those who search for positivism on facebook. You typed in the first letters into the search box? …and you are already offered all kinds of targets such as: “Positively Positive” with 1.3 million likes, now that is a competitor.

Our true competitors had to be pages that would propagate “rational thought”, “the sciences” and in that case often: “atheism”. We were, after all, heading towards the US-presidential elections, and the United States are presently divided into a block of conservative creationists and atheists fighting them – this is at least the facebook world of your competitors once you write English.

Actually atheists perform extremely well these days. “Welsh Atheists (anffyddwyr Cymru)“, for instance, started on July 14, that is four month after us, they are half our age, yet they overtook us within a week and stand now at 346 likes. And they are but small and exotic. The big players of the atheist world have thousands of subscribers who get their daily share of propaganda pics.

Positivism – needed a somewhat deeper consideration. We are rather promoting a philosophy of facts, a philosophy that moves the god question into the far more uncanny region of fake problems. Positivists handle data, they are interested in interpreting these data. Data visualisations became an interesting topic here – leading again immediately into the social sphere and into the sciences. Art, Comte said, would be central. I began throw out different links to see how the audience would respond: art that touched the social sphere, art with a secular dimension, art that used the sciences and modern technologies. The “managers” can see how each individual posting is received. You throw pebbles into a basin and take a look at the waves they create; and facebook is very specific here: You learn how many viewers you addressed in the first turn (not all your fans are online every day and ready to see what you posted). And you learn what they did with your posting: Did they “like” it? Did they “share” it, and if they shared it, did it get more viewers as it “went viral”?

Our most successful posting appeared on May 28: the man who guarded the moon in the late 19th century museum. The posting was re-posted by others and turned viral. More than 470 people have seen it, and quite a number of them converted to positivism in the event.
I have, by the way, no idea who posted this image. I had by that time already begun to invite fans to act as site managers with me. The page had thus accumulated its own sociodynamics. Theoretically the new managers could have kicked me out. Thus far they did not. Facebook eventually realized that it would be interesting to offer deeper hierarchies of page-makers from contributors and authors up to top level responsible people. Presently we have 100 likes. Of these 16 are “managers” and 2 “content contributors”. Contact me if you want move into the inner circle. Positivism should be a social thing.

Who are these 100 people? We get specific statistics: Two thirds are male, one third is female. I have seen similar statistics on the pages for atheism (who published their statistics). Most of our fans are in the 35–44 years age group. Click the thumbnail to see the exact numbers. Facebook even shows you where you live, statistically, and that is where we are truly special. Brazil, the old center of positivism, has its own fan community. Germans are strong (probably because they are the country of order and progress). Turkey, another historical heartland of positivism, has its own fan community.

If you wonder who you could reach through this community – facebook again will tell you. These are just the data for the last month. Brazil leads here with 184 people reached. The US and Germany follow with 30 each. The gender ratio is now more equal: 45/54 (fe/male); which shows that women are just less likely to confess their secular leanings.

All this is, of course, supposed to turn you into your own project’s addict: post and see how many people you can reach with that particular posting. Post and see how many fans you can create per week and per month. “I bet we can get one million people to say they are proud to be an Atheist” is one of the competing pages. As a true addict you should live through your ups and downs, and facebook, as a true designer drug, has an easy handle to create these illusionary ups and downs. You get a daily show of statistics: How many people did you reach, and how far did they spread your messages? And as with any designer drug you should be careful with the statistics you get.


Facebook offers you data exports (if you are among the page’s “managers”), and as they pop up as Excel files you can now generate your own statistics. The following one is more specific. It shows the number of views individual postings have received between July 23 and October 10. Each number is the accumulate number of views within the first 28 days of the particular posting (that is why I ended about 28 days ago). As we gained more and more likes every week the graph should have risen gradually with them – yet something peculiar happened between September 13 and the next posting three days later.

In the month before this particular weekend we spread 87 postings. The average number of viewers per posting was 74. The next month had 91 postings, so more or less the same service to our audience. Each of these postings would now, however, receive but an average 31 views within its next 28 days. The drop between these numbers is sharp: all postings of the 13th range in the 70s. All postings of the 16th are on the new level. Facebook is obviously able to throttle the page views – after all it’s they who create the daily mixture of postings you as the audience receive.

Other facebook pages have started to campaign and requested their subscribers to give their postings a “like’ or “share” every now and then, so that the audience remains more than a nominal number. Facebook’s aim is, of course, that one of these days one of us pushes the pay button that will lead him or her to the price list: Pay between 10 dollars and 1k and get the thousands of viewers and “likes” you are dreaming of. Well, positivists seem to be a sober gang, nothing harmful has happened thus far.

As a “manager” you can see who has personally “liked” you page, and that has become my personal inspiration. Most of our fans show exquisite tastes, interests and views. I began to make (facebook) friends within the imaginary community and love the perspectives of their personal postings.

May be that should be the next step: that some of our facebook fans jump from the facebook page to this site, our blog, with the intention to offer more of their perceptions here… this is an open project in the end.

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My bet against it: No Kurdish state in the next 4 years

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[Gotha, Germany] What a task to bet against you, Mustafa! – especially since I love the idea of small states (as long as they are ready to enjoy a relative position in something larger like the EU) (I would actually invite all the world to become EU-States).

As to your specific prognosis. It somehow contradicts the satires that went through the web and that already foresaw Iraq divided by international oil companies.

Re-mapping the middle east is a sport at the moment. Some see Turkey expanding into Iraq’s Kurdistan (I do not think that this is what the Kurds on either side of the border would like to see).

Kurdistan Turkish

Some see, with Bernard Lewis and the plan he sketched in the late 1970s the entire Middle Eastern map rearranged under borders that pay more respect to the ethnic and religious division lines.

The Bernard Lewis Plan for the Middle East

A Kurdish state on the map would create major problems – especially since it would be to the profit of one of the major oil reserves without helping anyone else in the region. Turkish Kurds would not profit from their rich neighbour, if they were kept apart. The rest of Iraq would simply suffer from the loss. And the export of oil – is a bad nation builder. I, at least, would not expect a second Norway to rise in the Middle East. These are the numbers al Jazeera gives:

Iraq Oil Production

So, yes, let me bet against you. It would need a wide civil war to justify the separation in a necessary solution of a problem. It would need something as big as an attack of greater Iraq against the Kurds to justify that new Kurdistan in an ethnic rescue plan – I do not see this happen.

Eventually I do not know whether a plan like the Bernard Lewis’ plan would be all that bad – if a greater union could become a pleasant roof above these states, which is another thing I do not believe to happen.

Too many wishes run through such a prediction

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dOCUMENTA (13), first day, first images

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Website: http://d13.documenta.de/de/
Place: Kassel
When: June 9 till September 16, 2012

Yan Lei, Limited Art Project

Yan Lei, Limited Art Project



CHAOS IS USEFUL

CHAOS IS USEFUL

documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955. [...] The first documenta featured many artists who are generally considered to have had a significant influence on modern art (such as Picasso and Kandinsky). The more recent documentas feature art from all continents; nonetheless most of it is site-specific. (Wikipedia)

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On the Temples of Atheism

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[Gotha] Ah, Paul, I am not quite sure about what to think of the present hype surrounding atheism (and humanism following closey in its wake). It’s turning into something that enjoys a peculiarly mixed support wherever we hope for an agency to defeat Christian fundamentalism and its appendage of bible-belt tea-party creationism. Richard Dawkins is appearing in how many youtube videos? The Christian front is all over the place with videos of debates in university halls where they claim to have defeated atheists in splendid confrontations. I have gone through some of these confrontations and was not a little surprised about the cheap victories celebrated in them. We get arguments for and against the existence of God with a neo-scholastic impetus, all with the usual challenges: “if God was good – why did he allow all the misery that happened in his name?” and we get the usual answers with their variously refracted echos of the Leibnizian Theodicee plus an extra bit of 20th century existentialism. My atheist friends are delighted to be so prominent all of a sudden. Here and there we see someone leaving such a confrontation with intellectual bruises, yet most certainly with the wish to return to the fray at next soonest opportunity. This is after all an intellectual chess game. One can study standard openings, necessary moves and try to anticipate all the mistakes one’s specific opponent is likely to make.

Alain de Botton’s website is so white and smooth. Click into the CV section and you see him sitting on his bed, a hotel guest in his own life – the new image of the intellectual who is ready to challenge the religions of the world with all their inquisitional obscurantism. The adjoining navigation offers the shop-link. The prolific writer is selling his books. There is definitely a market out there and the man is fully prepared to tap into it.

And London’s upcoming temple of atheism? The British Newspapers eagerly embraced this idea. After the atheist bus this is a nice thing to be shocked about. A picture is circulating with the news (Pillar of wisdom? … The Temple to Perspective, right foreground, proposed by Alain de Botton and collaborators Tom Greenall and Jordan Hodgson. Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson). It shows a black and white London skyline with an Orwellian John Hancock Centre casting its sinister shadow onto the elevated observer’s eye. This is the vertical Kaaba. Atheists will love it – so runs the message – and it will turn London into a futuristic nightmare.

Let me confess my piece of good old positivism (that will not surprise you here). I neither believe that all this is more than an exploitation of the present news climate, nor do I -

But haven’t positivists actually built such temples dedicated to an atheist religion of humanism? Yes, of course. And I confess, I love them. South America still has some of them left and they have become part of a cultural heritage we should cherish (just as we cherish Liverpool’s neo-gothic cathedral, one of the objects that appear in my most compelling nightmares). We should preserve them carefully – they are rare manifestations of that stream of thought that eventually led to Brazil’s capital Brasília (the capital designed by Matt Jefferies, the very man who would later on do the design for the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) and who had designed the Citroën DS a couple of years before in 1955 in the rare cooperation with a literary critic, Roland Barthes). Have I dared to read Auguste Comte’s Catechism of the Positive Religion? Yes and was fascinated (again as a historian).

Which all was not the main argument that brought me into the far wider field of positivism. I read Heinrich Hertz’s Principles of Mechanics in my last school year – with the feeling that this was turning into an intricate answer to Kant. What fascinated me? That all this was designed to go far beyond both atheism and agnosticism. Hertz and Mach did not waste any time on the question of whether or not God existed. Their topic was how we should handle positive data as derived from experiments – and this question was asked with a clarity that allowed the reader to anticipate that God would not become a problem here. The very decisions Hertz and Mach considered moved God out of the zone in which he posed a problem. We would not interpret data (on the basis of Comte’s philosophy) in a way that could bring the transcendental into the game.

Put an object on a platform and begin to tilt it – when will it fall? This is the answer you will learn in statics: The tower falls as soon as its center of mass is no longer over its base.

Where would you like to see God in this statement? “God makes the block turn over, but he will wait with his final push until he sees the center of gravity having left the area of the base…”? Architects will not be particularly enamoured of this statement (for what happens if God changes his mind? How can we influence him in this law), nor will theologians be very appreciative at the thought of God entering the engineering classes with such sentences. (For what kind of god is this who will not bend his will to allow more fun in architecture?)

The sciences have moved into an area in which God will not enter their equations. As a historian, I am left to deal with Him as in my present research on the French general who felt that God had commissioned him to start the apocalypse in 1716. I read my General’s  publications, read them against the subtext of his private diary and analysed the extent to which Calvinist prophecies can be seen to have entered his thoughts. Not even theologians will expect me to give an additional answer on the question of whether I think God exists or not. The natural sciences and the humanities have left the arena of that debate and turned positivist. Sociologists will try to find out why some people believe in God and others not, without touching the problem itself.

To return to the question of whether the temples of atheism are to be feared or welcomed.

I feel that those discussed by Alain de Botton are simply empty projects – serving only those who enter these debates. If you really want such temples, then support the last of those still surviving. Take care of the positivist temples and the Chapels of Humanity in Paris and Rio and where ever else they are left, and promote their addition to the list of World Heritage Sites.

And as a further thought added in hindsight. Comte’s idea was belated in the 1840s and 1850s. The wave of truly secular and atheistic temples had by that time swept through the catholic and protestant Europe.

This is what Munich’s central area looked like in the 1790s and what it eventually looked like a generation later. On the image above you see the court’s city palace next to the area of the old city monasteries.

In 1802 the (Christian and Catholic) court decided to demolish the neighbouring monasteries, and to seize and secularize their possessions. Space was created for a new palace front and the National Theatre. Building started on October 26, 1811 – inspired by the model of a Greek temple. God did not seem to like it, a fire destroyed what stood there by 1817, but the construction was resumed. The theatre opened in 1818 only to be flattened to the ground by a struck of lightening and an ensuing fire on January 14, 1823 – which did not change the authorities’ determination to have it built. Visit the 19th-century part of their palace. The interior reflects the determination at work outside with a visual program far more problematic than the one Comte proposed. We get fictional scenes from German plays, poems and novels on the upper floor and the medieval epic of the Nibelungen on the ground floor with scenes of horror and violence, all fully secular and designed to create new room for interpretation, sense and identity on the grounds of the destroyed clerical.

Compared with all these temples I do love the positivist temples as part of a heritage we see with a far greater distance, even with humor – no, honestly, I quite like them.

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The man who might become Germany’s next president

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Titlecover of the German 'Stern' news magazineReturning from a few days in Amsterdam I see Germany’s media embracing Joachim Gauck on his way to become the nation’s next president. An undercurrent of hidden fears is part of this embrace.

The last president has just resigned. Even if he never gave anything in return, it was clear that he stood at the mercy of those whose “friendship”, “help”, and “gifts” he had accepted.

Gauck turns out to be an uncomfortable candidate. The ruling CDU opposed him in his first run. He had led the agency that granted access to documents of the oppressive GDR’s surveillance. He had also been a Lutheran minister. On both accounts he should have been the very man Christian Democrats had to accept; yet he had remained the man the opposition had nominated.

The uncomfortable thing about Gauck is, that he is suddenly no longer the candidate left wingers can wholeheartedly support. Quotations have surfaced and given the blogosphere headlines like:

“Ein politisch-kultureller Super Gau(ck) – Antisemitismus erhält Einzug ins Schloss Bellevue”

“The political and cultural worst case scenario – Antisemitism to enter Bellevue Palace“

Germany’s political consensus is built on the agreement that the Holocaust will always remain a crime Germany will not come to terms with. Gauck, however, in 2006 questions the logic behind this consensus:

“Unübersehbar gibt es eine Tendenz der Entweltlichung des Holocaust. Das geschieht dann, wenn das Geschehen des deutschen Judenmordes in eine Einzigartigkeit überhöht wird, die letztlich dem Verstehen und der Analyse entzogen ist. Offensichtlich suchen bestimmte Milieus postreligiöser Gesellschaften nach der Dimension der Absolutheit, nach dem Element des Erschauerns vor dem Unsagbaren. Da dem Nichtreligiösen das Summum Bonum – Gott – fehlt, tritt an dessen Stelle das absolute Böse, das den Betrachter erschauern lässt. Das ist paradoxerweise ein psychischer Gewinn, der zudem noch einen weiteren Vorteil hat: Wer das Koordinatensystem religiöser Sinngebung verloren hat und unter einer gewissen Orientierungslosigkeit der Moderne litt, der gewann mit der Orientierung auf den Holocaust so etwas wie einen negativen Tiefpunkt, auf dem – so die unbewusste Hoffnung – so etwas wie ein Koordinatensystem errichtet werden konnte. Das aber wirkt »tröstlich« angesichts einer verstörend ungeordneten Moderne. Würde der Holocaust aber in einer unheiligen Sakralität auf eine quasi-religiöse Ebene entschwinden, wäre er vom Betrachter nur noch zu verdammen und zu verfluchen, nicht aber zu analysieren, zu erkennen und zu beschreiben.”

“Undeniably there is a tendency to de-secularise the Holocaust. We see it wherever the German extermination of Jews is styled as unique, as an incident we will never be able to fully understand and analyse. It is apparent that certain milieus within our postreligious societies are looking for a dimension of the absolute here, something to keep us in awe, something unexpressible. As the non-religious have to live without a summum bonum – God –, they opt for an absolute evil in order to keep the observer in awe. This is, paradoxically, a psychological win – and has an added advantage: Whoever has lost his coordinates of a higher religious meaning and suffers from a lack of orientation in these modern times can gain new securities here: The Holocaust was the worst thing mankind has ever committed. One could use this truth as the basis for building a new system of values. Something deeply consoling is stated here in the centre of modernism. Yet if the Holocaust was to disappear into a sphere of unholy quasi-religious sacrality, the observer could be expected to simply damn and curse it – instead of having to analyze, understand and describe it.”

For a future president – Germany has filled this ceremonial office with men like Heinrich Lübke who could address the crowd in Liberia with “Ladies and Gentlemen, dear Negroes…” – this is said on uncommonly high level of reflection.

Does history as we write it, so Gauck’s question, serve in our secular societies as a new religious sub-text? Do we write this text according to moral needs we openly deny? And is this secular religion of the humanities essentially a religion of negativity?

As a historian I feel tempted to concede the first statements – critical of the role our guild can play in our societies. Those who have read Auguste Comte will not see this interpretation of the work of modern historians as a revelation anyway.

The question is then: Will we return to the religion of the summum bonum? (I had not seen such a religion on the market before, but that is another question). This would be a possibility, if only historical processes could be reversed. If we cannot get back, Gauck’s statement might just as well be read as a call to secularise the humanities where they have silently begun to substitute the religious sub-text – or at least to play this game openly and with self criticism.

Seems we will have more complex discussions with Gauck.

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