Philosophers From Germany

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"From a 2002 interview. Quoted in Winkler, Robert A. ""Alle Apparate abschalten." Conceiving Love and Technology with Heidegger And Kittler." (2020)."

"I cannot stand on American soil with much pleasure. In fact, my antipathy to America is one of the main reasons why I often avoid talking about the military-industrial complex since for me to talk about the devil is to talk with the devil. As a good friend of mine said to me lately, we in Germany should not say a word about America’s war on Iraq ... we should talk about love in Europe."

"whether or not we personally ever use the typewriter is not important. What is important is that all of us are thrown into the age of typewriting, whether we like it or not. Of course, Heidegger himself preferred to continue his work in his own handwriting."

"I do not believe that human beings are becoming cyborgs. Indeed, for me, the development of the Internet has much more to do with human beings becoming a reflection of their technologies, of reacting or responding to the demands of the machine. After all, it is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us... pursuing the cyborgian vision would have also meant that the incredible speed of Moore’s Law, that computing power doubles every 18 months or so, would have been impossible to accomplish. So, in my view, the computing industry is less interested in the development of cyborgs than it is in the development of software."

"Computer technology is an alliance of hardware and software, of physics and logic, which has taken the place of the gods who have fled far away. Zeus, as you know, was at once the mighty brightness of the Greek sky and ‘the lightning that guides everything’. Only gods and computers are in the position of predicting today whether blue skies or rainstorms will be the weather tomorrow."

"Brilliant, controversial and cantankerous. In his penetrating examination of our increasingly militarised and 'mediatised' existence that, he argued, replaced human agency, Kittler outlined with great energy the post-human historical condition. Perhaps his greatest academic transgression was to have such an emphatic sense of technology's triumph over the delusions of human agency, articulated in his writings on war and speed, mathematics and cryptography, in addition to the style of his claims, sculpted like a series of steps of military escalation, in imitative performance of the computerised world of total militarisation and technologisation that he portrayed."

"The end of media is a situation in which the computer subsumes all other media. The machine subject appears as a sort of minimalist inhuman subjectivity wrought by recursion. It operates beyond or below the phenomenological capacities of humans, does not employ natural language, and does not think in terms of meaning. Myriad machine subjects are networked to form a loop of absolute knowledge. This loop excludes humanity which is functionally unable to participate therein. Within the loop, the machines cognize somehow in an asemantic logic and antagonistically evolve away from any semblance of humanity."

"Kittler's speciality is the creatively enhanced misquotation... all the ameliorative sloppiness that Kittler the analyst attributes to authors of the “Discourse Network 1800” such as Goethe and Hegel, who kept bungling their quotations in highly creative self-serving ways."

"In the case of Marshall McLuhan, you can prove that every fifth sentence is wrong and every tenth is funny and very ingenious. And Harold Innis never managed to get into technical details."

"quoted in Kittler and the Sirens|url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/november/kittler-and-the-sirens|access-date=2024-06-30|website=LRB Blog|language=en}}"

"‘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."

"What is at stake is that we finally—and in the interest of Europe—go back to the Greeks in order to provide Europe with a viable foundation of thought."

"Take the ongoing attempts to use the human brain as a point of departure for constructing the world. To me that’s nonsense. I believe that human brains only exist within language. Neurophysiologists are aware of this, yet they deny it with every single statement they utter."

"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.""

"For Kittler, [Geisteswissenschaften, "humanities", but more literally "spirit sciences"] to be taken to its hard core: sciences stand at the centre of arts and humanities in the age of technical media... media are not only the mass media of television, newspapers and such, but a technical constellation that at its core is based on scientific principles of coding, channeling and decoding of signals... Man is a temporary solution, a crossroad in the complex practices and epistemologies of knowledge that might (has?) proved to be not so useful anymore when media can communicated to each other without human intervention. Ask your plugged-in Ethernet cable, it knows the amount of data that goes through it without you pushing even a single key."

"Many controversial aspects of his work—including war, women, and a strange continental provincialism that increased with age—were already apparent back then. Kittler was ahead of his time, but he invested considerable energy into informing others that they were behind. He was an inspiring teacher, yet he was prone to seek out the danger zone where instruction turns into seduction, education becomes a form of contamination, and the pedagogue takes on the trappings of the demagogue."

"... collapse of traditional edifices of meaning accompanied by the corresponding emergence of hitherto obscured materialities of communication and inscription. I certainly did not grasp the finer points, but I came to understand that taking apart my Saba VS2160 amplifier or intently listening to scratches on old Yes or Tubes LPs constituted a genuine act of theory."

"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"."

"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."

"Kittler wanted to establish a real computer literacy. And our group was both the justifying nucleus of this demand and his evidence of possibility."

"It's always difficult to find the first sentence. And with "Discourse Networks" where everything was at stake, namely my profession, it was more difficult than ever. So I rolled a joint and wrote the first chapter, about Goethe's "Faust", mildly stoned."

"Storing information and transmitting information without having to employ such obscure instances as the human ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’: such is the very definition of media."

"When meanings come down to sentences, sentences to words, and words to letters, there is no software at all... the so-called philosophy of the computer community tends to systematically obscure hardware by software, electronic signifiers by interfaces between formal and everyday languages... This ongoing triumph of software is a strange reversal of Turing's proof that there can be no mathematically computable problem a simple machine would not solve. ... software successfully occupied the empty place and profited from its obscurity. The ever-growing hierarchy of high-level programming languages works exactly the same way as one-way functions in recent mathematical cryptography."

"Politics is applied biology."

"... It is a well-known fact that among all the recent investigations of none have yielded such grand and surprising results as the s which we owe to the English naturalists, , , , and others. While, twenty years ago, the depths of the ocean were supposed to be devoid of life, and an universally accepted dogma asserted that organic life ceased at a depth of two thousand s below the surface of the sea, the brilliant researches of English voyagers during the last ten years have proved the contrary. It has been found that the bottom of the sea, as far down as it could be investigated—to a depth of twenty-seven thousand feet— is thickly peopled with animals of various orders; for the most part with creatures hitherto unknown to science, and corresponding to that of the ."

"I established the opposite view, that this history of the embryo (ontogeny) must be completed by a second, equally valuable, and closely connected branch of thought - the history of race (phylogeny). Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation... 'ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis, determined by the physiological functions of heredity (generation) and adaptation (maintenance)."

"The tragedy of man is that of somebody who is starving and sitting at a richly laden table but does not reach out with his hand, because he cannot see what is right in front of him. For the real world has inexhaustible splendour, the real life is full of meaning and abundance, where we grasp it, it is full of miracles and glory."

"The reactionary's reading of history is as superficial as the conservative's is profound. The reactionary sees the world as he has known it; the conservative sees it as it has been and will always be. He distinguishes the transitory from the eternal. Exactly what has been, can never be again. But what the world has once brought forth she can bring forth again."

"There have been peoples who flourished under democracy; there have been peoples who perished under democracy. Democracy may imply stoicism, republicanism and inexorable severity; or it may imply liberalism, parliamentary chatter and self-indulgence."

"Revolutions are only interludes in history. Marx called them the steam engines of history. We might rather call them the collisions of history: immense railway accidents which take their toll of sacrifice; which may be pregnant of consequences, but which have something of the banality of accidental catastrophes. [...] At best catastrophes have the virtue of calling attention with a terrible emphasis to existing faults, to which custom and stupidity and self-sufficiency have blinded us. The necessary salvage work after a revolution must, however, be handed over to some experienced person conversant with the whole administration who can set the wrecked, overturned engine in motion again. Life of its own weight resumes its equilibrium, and the conservative principle on which all life is based is vindicated."

"All this was hailed as progress: but it spelt decay. The same process continues: the disciples of reason, the apostles of enlightenment, the heralds of progress are usually in the first generation great idealists, high-principled men, convinced of the importance of their discoveries and of the benefit these confer on man. But no later than the second generation the peculiar and unholy connection betrays itself which exists between materialist philosophy and nihilist interpretation. As at the touch of a conjuror's wand the scientific theory of the atom reduces society to atoms."

"Liberalism was the ruin of Greece. The decay of hellenic freedom was preceded by the rise of the liberal. He was begotten of Greek 'enlightenment.' From the philosophers' theory of the atom, the sophist drew the inference of the individual. Protagoras, the Sophist, was the founder of individualism and also the apostle of relativity. He proclaimed that: "Opposite propositions are equally true." Nothing immoral was intended. He meant that there are no general but only particular truths: according to the standpoint of the perceiver. But what happens when the same man has two standpoints? When he is ready to shift his standpoint as his advantage may dictate? This same Protagoras proclaimed that rhetoric could make the weaker cause victorious. Still nothing immoral was intended. He meant that the better cause was sometimes the weaker and should then be helped to victory. But the practice soon arose of using rhetoric to make the worse cause victorious. It is no accident that the sophists were the first Greek philosophers to accept pay, and were the most highly paid. A materialist outlook leads always to a materialist mode of thought."

"Amongst the discoveries which reason made, the most fateful was this: that man is not free. It might well have seemed the most obviously reasonable thing to hedge this unfree man about with state conventions. Instead, the liberals demanded that this man-who was biologically unfree-should have perfect individual and political freedom."

"Our enemies have their present success. The moment is in their favour, but everything else is against them. The secret, however, must not be revealed before its time. What we can, however, already detect is a regrouping of men and nations. All anti-liberal forces are combining against everything that is liberal. We are living in the time of this transition. The change is taking place most logically from below and attacking the enemy where his power began. There is a revolt against the age of reason."

"Who is the liberal chameleon: democracy? Who is this Moloch who devours the masses and the classes and the trades and the professions and all human distinctions? Who is this Leviathan? We must not let either the rhetoric or the bonhomie of the democrat deceive us about the true nature of the monster."

"A Policy may be reversed: History cannot."

"The revolutionary concludes overhastily that the world will now for all time be guided by the political principles which governed him in overthrowing it. The reactionary takes the diametrically opposite line: he seriously considers it possible to delete the Revolution from the page of history as if it had never been. The revolutionary is soon cured of his error. The very day that sees the old moulds of life shattered, brings home to him the urgent necessity of casting it into new moulds. [...] The reactionary on the other hand imagines that we need only revert to the old moulds in order to have everything again exactly "as it was before." He has no inclination to compromise with the new."

"The liberal professes to do all he does for the sake of the people; but he dl'stroys the sense of community that should bind outstanding men to the people from which they spring. The prnple should J1aturally regard the outstanding man, not as an enemy bul as a representative sample of themselves. Liberalism is the party of upstarts who have insinuated Liberalism is the party of upstarts who have insinuated themselves IJclwecn the people and its big men. Liberals feel themselves as isolated individuals, responsible to nobody. They do not share the nation's traditions, they are indifferent to its pasl and have no ambition for its future. They seek only their own personal advantage in the present. Their dream is the great International, in which the differences of peoples and languages, races and cultures will be obliterated. To promote this they are willing to make use, now of nationalism, now of pacificism, now of militarism, according to the expediency of the moment. Sceptically they ask: "What are we living for?" Cynically they answer: Just for the sake of living!"

"The liberal is inspired by the ambition of the would-be great man who does not want to take the lower seat, the anxiety of the inadequate person to miss nothing. Jealousy of power explains this hate of genius, of anyone who is great, who does, singlehanded, things which can never be done by the many. Jealousy of power explains this hate of the dynasties with their hereditary prestige and privilege; this hate of the Papacy with its traditional authority transmitted to the wearer of the tiara; the hostility to Louis XIV's and to Pius IX's doctrines of infallibility. This jealousy of power explains no less that passion for constitutions which make power dependent on elections; this craze for parliaments to take control of the state; this mania for republics in which the parties divide the power and party leaders draw the pay and the electors enjoy the party patronage; or the preference for a limited monarchy that has resigned all real power but still lays claim to grace."

"The liberal has flourished at all periods. The nobody is always eager to imagine himself a somebody. The man who is a misfit in his own society is always a liberal out of amour propre. The disinterestedness of the conservative cherishes the sacredness of a cause that shall not die with him; the liberal says: Après moi, le déluge. Conservatism is rooted in the strength of man; liberalism battens on his weakness. The liberal's conjuring trick consists in turning others' weakness to his own account, living at other men's expense, and concealing his art with patter about ideals. This is the accusation against him. He has always been a source of gravest danger."

"The English always talked of freedom. They always sought their own freedom at the expense of everyone else's. They early developed a peculiar mode of thought based on a confusion of ideas, which gave precedence not to a cause for its own sake but to the advantage they themselves derived from it. There was no hypocrisy in this: though it looked like hypocrisy. It was merely an incredible naivete combined with a natural brutality of approach. The English were perfectly unconscious of these things. Their trump card was their stupidity, and in their stupidity lay their highest shrewdness."

"The population problem is THE problem of Germany: a socialist problem if you will, but more exactly a German problem. Since access to the outer world is forbidden us we must look for its solution within our own borders; and since it cannot there be solved, a day must come when we shall burst our frontiers and seek and find it outside. [...]The victors have no population problems. Their countries give a home to all who speak their tongue. In addition they possess other lands to which their people may migrate. They have divided up the globe between them. Since the word 'annexation' has acquired an ugly ring, and 'sphere of influence' is no less suspect, they have invented the idea of the mandate and conferred it on themselves through the League of Nations. They have now not enough people to take possession of these countries and administer them to full advantage, or to bring them up to that level of progress which they consider it their peculiar privilege to promote. The population problem of the victors is that of declining populations."

"The morning's dollar level became the substitute for morning prayer. We are still thinking of nothing but the miseries of to-day: the capitalist and proletarian think of nothing else. We have sunk to a depth which man never reached before: the materialist conception of history has reached its zenithCan this last for ever? We know that it cannot. Disgust at materialism, at ourselves, has seized us. Reaction has set in, a reaction against socialism itself. Socialism can only help if it can purge itself of its materialism, its rationalism andwhat has been the most fatal thing of all-its liberalism."