Philosophers From Germany

"...the days of intellectual charlatanry in Europe seem to be numbered."

"Human religiosity can go far astray, when it is [articulated in the form of] a church."

"Koeppen’s Buddha was a revolutionary; indeed, the author argues: “‘There is really no question that if the Indian people had not already been completely stripped of their religion and robbed of all courage and zeal for life by theological-priestly vampirism and earthly despotism, the call of liberation and the preaching of the equality of all men which Cakjamuni [Buddha] unleashed would necessarily have led to a rebellion of the lowest classes just as Luther’s preaching of Christian freedom [led to] the peasant revolts.”"

"Military necessity does not admit of cruelty – that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions. It does not admit of the use of poison in any way, nor of the wanton devastation of a district. It admits of deception, but disclaims acts of perfidy; and, in general, military necessity does not include any act of hostility which makes the return to peace unnecessarily difficult."

"The law of nations knows of no distinction of color, and if an enemy of the United States should enslave and sell any captured persons of their Army, it would be a case for the severest retaliation, if not redressed upon complaint."

"Military necessity admits of all direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies, and of other persons whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable in the armed contests of the war; it allows of the capturing of every armed enemy, and every enemy of importance to the hostile government, or of peculiar danger to the captor; it allows of all destruction of property, and obstruction of the ways and channels of traffic, travel, or communication, and of all withholding of sustenance or means of life from the enemy; of the appropriation of whatever an enemy's country affords necessary for the subsistence and safety of the Army, and of such deception as does not involve the breaking of good faith either positively pledged, regarding agreements entered into during the war, or supposed by the modern law of war to exist. Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God."

"Military necessity, as understood by modern civilized nations, consists in the necessity of those measures which are indispensable for securing the ends of the war, and which are lawful according to the modern law and usages of war."

"When sitting on the German federal ethics committee for autonomous driving, I had a lot of discussions with representatives from automotive companies who felt the same way about this kind of technology: They were equally looking for academia and government to help them address ethical problems. There are some problems a single company – or even industry as a whole – cannot address on their own: These range from questions like how to organize AI accountability issues to very fundamental philosophical problems such as: How much dependence on certain technologies are we willing to accept as a society?"

"First, I always state that there are no obligations whatsoever towards Facebook. The new institute is an independent research institute, which will also have an independent Advisory Board with no members of Facebook sitting on it. The money comes as a gift for research. It will be used to help make AI systems more ethical, not just by putting together some abstract principles, but by working on concrete issues, like algorithms, systems, robots or screening technologies, for example. Therefore, if the money from Facebook can be employed for advancing ethics and bringing (ethical) benefits to the users of AI (which we all either soon will be or already are), it will be beneficial for all sides."

"If innovation is considerably stifled, it cannot bring about its ethical potential."

"There is still a lot of critical discussion on the GDPR in Europe, and there are some valid arguments in it. I believe however that on the overall, the GDPR can become a tool for improving trust in digital technologies without putting the brakes on them. It could become a sort of blueprint for other regions of the world, as it sets a relatively clear regulatory framework for people to sell their data. This issue is certainly seen in a more liberal way in the US, where the use of data is not considered per se as problematic as in Germany, in particular. But still, there are a lot of critics in the US too, and a – revised and refined – GDPR could address these."

"This is a very unique opportunity to work on ethical issues in a new technology on such a scale. It comes at a point in time when AI is on the forefront of a large number of both scientific and public debates. We have the chance to work on AI ethics issues in detail, and not just by doing research behind closed doors, but with an outreach to civil society, politics, and the corporate world."

"The digital world is a mirror of society in many ways. Of course, there are a lot of activities going on which people would not openly admit to, some of them illegal, certainly. However, I am not sure that privacy (and in particular, privacy with respect to illegal activities) has increased when compared to the non-digital world. Was it not worse in a time when dictatorships around the world could shield their citizens from information from the outside or when companies could hide their activities easily without having to worry about the power of social networks? So in this regard, I believe we cannot complain about too much privacy in the digital world – in some ways at least, we had more privacy in the old days, with bad consequences sometimes. Still, I agree of course that disclosure of information is essential in many digital contexts and too much privacy can have bad consequences too."

"This is not a simple yes or no question. In general however, I believe regulation should be approached with caution at this point. The digitech markets are still very dynamic, and that has to be taken into account. It should also be clear beforehand that specific regulation would achieve the goals it aims at and not be counterproductive: if innovation is considerably stifled, it cannot bring about its ethical potential. Therefore, I favor an approach that relies on ethical guidelines first, and in which all parts of society participate."

"Man cannot be conceived outside of the state."

"Man is endowed with a thousandfold desires and infinite longings, and thus has been sent into a world that would be rich enough to grant even more than he can demand. Every glow of the heart finds its shadow, every thirst its wave, every longing its distance, and countless hidden, well-protected refuges are prepared for the soul that strives for safety and peace."

"Müller was a man of great and versatile talents, an excellent orator, and a suggestive writer."

"An artist who forgets the world over his work will never speak to the world through the work, may perhaps tear the work dead from himself, but will never be able to close it into its own free and necessary life."

"The reconciliation of science and art and of their noblest ideas with serious political life was the purpose of my larger works."

"A poem is a whole, complete 'made' world: a fiction is a half, incomplete, poorly made piece of world."

"When the world of the senses and the world of the spirit appear absolutely separated, then sin is at its peak: it has systematized and completed itself."

"The state is [...] an alliance of past generations with the following ones, and vice versa. It is an alliance not only of contemporaries, but also of 'spatial contemporaries'; [...] The state is not merely the union of many 'living side by side', but also of many 'succeeding one another' families."

"[...] the soul feels, in contemplation of the landscape, a gentle being-carried, a movement as if by an invisible spirit, through which lingering on the charming details first gains its appeal."

"I too have often dreamed of a union of that greater nation to which we belong, as a branch belongs to the trunk, expecting revolutions, heroes, and various changes in the sentiments of nations, which should come and favor the dream. The great federalism of European peoples, which will one day come, as surely as we live, will also bear German colors; for everything great, profound, and eternal in all European institutions is German – that is the certainty that has remained to me among all those hopes. Who can still separate the German element out of Europe?"

"It is the snowdrop on the hard German snow. It announces the German spring. It is a real consolation to every German who was ready to doubt whether the German soul would ever escape from the enchantment in which its pursuit of Power seemed to have inextricably involved it. That, in the midst of anger and hatred, misery and despair, this German flower could bloom is not only a glad hope for those to whom true Germanism is their spiritual home, but for other countries which feared that the de-Germanised German had come to stay."

"Evangelicals are unbelievably dogmatic and conservative, even extremely conservative, on issues like abortion and homosexuality... At the same time, on questions of world trade, poverty reduction, and multicultural togetherness, they tick more to the left."

"how are culture and politics going to react to the slow demotion of their power? For both are predicated upon everyday speech and the normal human nervous system, which are both slow. However, neither speech nor the nervous system can be handled any more without machines preparing, assisting, and, in the end, even assuming some of their decision-making processes."

"These programs are called "daemons"... You never see them, and yet they're constantly doing something for you, like the angel in the medieval Angelo Loci... we should slowly let go of that old dream of sociologists, the one that says that society is by nature made up only of human beings. Today — and tomorrow — the term "society" should include people and programs."

"[Students today] should at least know some arithmetic, the integral function, the sine function - everything about signs and functions. They should also know at least two software languages. Then they'll be able to say something about what culture is at the moment... Cultural studies refers to and examines the most important sign systems."

"At best, the Internet will remain a space of freedom for a year or two, but, within a few years, it will most probably have fallen into the hands of big capital, and then the controls will be put in place. The other danger is that, along with the control mechanisms, the informational bureaucracies — precisely in order to avoid an information Chernobyl — will also expand. Thus, together, big capital and the informational bureaucracies may well simply scuttle the liberalisation of information."

"Culture is not the accumulation of concert reviews, a bit of science and a literary journal. But that is very difficult to change... Our parents were so ashamed after the war that they didn't want to touch technology anymore. Then Adorno flew in and his student Habermas announced the separation of communicative and instrumental reason."

"I don't believe in the old thesis that the media are protheses of the body, which amounts to saying, in the beginning was the body, then came the glasses, then suddenly television, and from the television, the computer... it would be better to work, like Luhmann, systematically from the independent histories of the technological media... A history like this doesn't need individual bodies or a subject that expands in and through the media... the media, including books and the written word, develop independently from the body."

"But why people - and I include myself here — would rather sit in front of a computer than do other things such as have a conversation is difficult to explain. Perhaps it is a fascination with power. For example, in earlier times, some people directed their love away from their wives and families and directed it instead towards an image of Jesus or Mary."

"Take the concept of media from there – in a step also beyond McLuhan – to where it is most at home: the field of physics in general and telecommunications in particular"

"Nietzsche, as proud of the publication of his mechanization as any philosopher, changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style. That is precisely what is meant by the sentence "our writing tools are also working on our thoughts". Malling Hansen's writing ball, with its operating difficulties, made Nietzsche into a laconic."

"And when Liesegang edited his Contributions to the Problem of Electrical Television in 1899, thus naming the medium, the principle had already been converted into a basic circuit. Television was and is not a desire of so-called humans, but rather it is largely a civilian byproduct of military electronics. That much should be clear."

"It has become clear that real wars are fought not for people or fatherlands, but take place between different media, information technologies, data flows."

"The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface. Sense and the senses turn into eyewash. Their media-produced glamor will survive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs. Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound or voice ... With numbers, everything goes ... a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of media. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop."

"The day is not far off when signal processing will reach the physical limits of feasibility. This absolute limit is where the history of communication technologies will literally come to an end.. the history of communication technologies as a series of strategic escalations. Without reference to the individual or to mankind, communication technologies will have overhauled each other until finally an artificial intelligence proceeds to the interception of possible intelligences in space."

"a few far-seeing scientists say ... nature is not a computer ... the only rational hope I have that we have not arrived at the end of history. Because if the digital calculators did not have a kind of internal limitation, they would truly bring world history to an end, in all the aspects that you have mentioned: time would no longer be human time, space would no longer be human space, but merely a corridor within the circuits of these wonderful little machines."

"‘Derrida of the digital age’ whose vision combined the circuitry of Lacan’s models for the psyche, and Foucault’s archaeological conception of all knowledge and its systems, with the material hardware of technological transcription and recording: typewriters, tape recorders, film projectors and their non-analogue offspring."

"Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt. [Only that which is switchable, exists.]"

"Here was someone who – at last! – had charted the genealogy, or transmission lines, of writing’s interface with bodies, from Sade to Kafka, Marinetti to Pynchon. Most exciting of all, he lucidly and irrefutably articulated something I’d been trying ineptly to persuade people of for years: that Dracula is a book about the Dictaphone."

"[Discourse network is ] The network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data."

"Riding together in a taxi from some airport Kittler tried to explain to Luhmann that in contrast to social systems, switching circuits cannot exist without input and output. "Herr Kittler, it was like that already in Babylonia. A messenger rides through the city gate. Some [like me] ask, what kind of message he brings. Others [like you] ask what kind of horse he rides.""

"Unlike Foucault, or indeed other leading media theorists such as Jean Baudrillard or Paul Virilio, Kittler steeped himself in physics, engineering, optics, the science of fibre-optic cables, and even wrote computer code – arguably gaining a more profound insight into media than his contemporaries."

"Technologies that not only subvert writing, but engulf it and carry it off along with so-called Man, render their own description im­possible. Increasingly, data flows once confined to books and later to records and films are disappearing into black holes and boxes that, as ar­tificial intelligences, are bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands. In this situation we are left only with reminiscences, that is to say, with stories."

"Media determine our situation."

"What remains of people is what media can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so-called souls for the duration of the technological era, but rather (and in strict accordance to McLuhan) their circuits, the very schematism of their perceptibility."

"Kittler's project was to trace "not the triumphal emergence of humanity into freedom, but our exit from the fulsome enjoyment of our taste for ourselves that assigns humanity a place to which it has no right"."