Academics From Germany

"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."

"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."

"The comprehensive picture of ancient Indian civilization that he was able to give meant that the Indians were now finally and "fully accepted" into the circle of ancient cultural peoples that were significant for the history of mankind and, as such, could be included in historical comparisons. The expansion of the historical-geographical horizon that Lassen's four volumes made possible was a very important step in the process of overcoming the old biblical view of history - after all, just twenty years earlier, like for Peter von Bohlen in his History of the Ancient World, only the old biblically relevant cultures of Egypt, Israel, Persia, Greece and Rome had been considered the roots of human culture."

"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."

"It was already in the middle of the former century that Christian Lassen qualified the opposition of arya and dasyu or dasa as a contrast between different religions expressed by the age-old symbolism of black opposed to white and not as a contrast of darkcomplexioned to white coloured men."

"there are no such things as thoughts. There are only words."

"In spite of his copious studies on the Mahābhārata, however, Lassen’s work was not especially innovative: once laid down, his basic views on the epic remained unchanged for nearly a quarter century. Later studies amplified and provided additional “ethnographic” evidence for views he had already articulated in his 1837 article, but they did not in any way question or otherwise critically illuminate the basis for these views. Regardless, Lassen’s pedantic, self-assured tone and the confidence with which he put forth speculative assertions about ancient India as established fact greatly impressed a generation of scholars. Albrecht Weber, Theodor Goldstücker, and Adolf Holtzmann Jr. all accepted his reconstructions of ancient Indian history and ethnography."

"Of Christian Lassen, it was said as early as 1890 [Oldenberg 1890:27] that “the sagacity of philological thought is wanting in him”. Need we say more?"

"The result of this inquiry, which is presented here, is that Arja in part in itself, in part in forms derived from it, is proven to be the ancient, indigenous, honorable designation of the Iranian peoples and lands in its widest extension, as it also [designates] the three higher Indian casts and the Brahmanical constitution and the Sanskrit rhetoric of the Indian lands. It shows us the sense in which we are to differentiate the Aryan Indians from the rest. For the name seems not to apply to other peoples of the Indogerman family.’"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Printed laments over the death of Man or the subject always arrive too late."

"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"."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"If one compares the fate and acceptance of Johannes Hertel's "Aryan research" with what was said above about Zimmer and Schroeder, one can hardly find a better illustration of the complicated situation that an Indologist who was interested in Aryan antiquity could get into with the gradual institutionalization of the National Socialist idea and the seizure of political power by the NSDAP. While Heinrich Zimmer's scientific work is still highly valued today and Leopold von Schroeder is also respected as a Veda researcher, the judgment on Johannes Hertel with regard to his "Aryan research" is, to put it mildly, somewhat uncertain."

"The poet in this hymn supplies Indra to give support to those who drive away the evil and spread the light throughout the World (i.e. to the Aryan.) This spreading of light is a frequent motif in Rgvedic hymns ... Here, too, light is the antithesis to darkness. Soma, after all, is often called ‘shining golden, white, bright, goldencoloured {suklavarna) or ‘bringer of light’... (By the way, only at this place dasyu and krsna tvac really occur together in one sentence)."

"One does more justice to the way of thinking of the poets of the Rgveda and the nature of this text if one places the term krsnä tvac in RV 1.130.8 in the context of the ideas of the "skin" or the "black skin" that are common elsewhere and thus assigns it to the vocabulary of Rgvedic mythology, especially since the equation of the Dasyu and Dasa with the non-Aryan population of northwest India can be doubted with good reason."

"However, if one looks at the passages more closely, the context and sentence or verse construction also allow for a different interpretation, especially since tvac - more on this below - is used much more frequently in the meaning "fur, blanket" than in the meaning "(human) skin"."

"And so a gap is definitely apparent: there is a lack of a scientific history of the term “Aryan” that would illuminate the entire breadth of meaning that the term has been given since its inception, and it is the classical Indologists familiar with the field of research who are in demand here."

"There are a whole series of standard opinions in the Indological literature, which are regarded as expressions of proven research results and are adopted in this capacity from one book to another to this day, without anyone believing that they need to be checked again against the source material and/or in the context of newer research and hypotheses. One of these standard opinions is the view that the population that the Arya encountered when they immigrated to India was radically different from them, especially in terms of their external appearance. They were dark-skinned and flat-nosed and spoke a different language - so says the Rgveda."

"It is a victory of light, of the sun, of wide space over darkness, narrowness or distress, which is equated or compared with the victory of day over night. Light, sunbeams or fire are also the means by which Indra overcomes evil and its representations, and again the boundary between the human and the supernatural sphere is quite fluid. The ancient symbolism of black and white also serves to depict the all-dominating polarity of good and evil, light and darkness. Bright, golden, shiny, white is everything that symbolizes light, that brings it to power or is otherwise connected to it: the sun, the soma drops, the day, Indra's dun horses, etc. m. Bright, shining, white is accordingly the color of those on whose side and for whose benefit Indra fights ."

"This spreading of light is a frequent motif in Rgvedic hymns. The motif is worked out by the poets on two different levels, the human, and the super-human. On the human level it is the succour Indra lends to his adorants (the drya or dryavarm) in their combats against the non-vedic dasa-or dasyu tribes. On the super- human level, Indra’s (and the Aryan’s adversaries are evil-doing, demonical beings like Susna, Pipru, Vrtra, Vala, Sambara or the above-mentioned Arsasana. They also are called dasa or dasyu, their symbol is darkness, night, the depth, the lowest region of the world."

"Here, too, light is the antithesis to darkness. Soma, after all, is often called ‘shining golden, white, bright, goldencoloured {sukla- varnay or ‘bringer of light’."

"Considering context and construction of the verses the term cited ‘dark skin’ should not merely be taken as a reference to the complexion of certain non-vedic people but as a quantity of its own, a symbolic expression for the darkness, the embodiment of the forces impairing the well-being of the Aryan tribes. As such, it fits into a complex of mythological motifs centered on the polarity of evil and good which plays an important role in the world-view of the Vedic tribes. Criterion for the qualification of a phenomenon as good was the relation to .society, religion and cult of the Vedic Aryan. As good the Rgvedic hymns classify the light, bright, goldencolourcd, the sun, heaven and large space, well-being and security, the right (religio-rnoral) norms and behaviour [suvrala), the arya or aryavarna Indra. Soma and their adoration by sacrificing to them, to the sphere of evil belong darkness, the night, the black colour, the unbelieving and non-sacrificing (to Indra and Soma) people, the dilsa, the dasyu, a bad or no vrata at all {apa- anya or avrata), the ‘black skin’, the depth, danger, narrowness. It was already in the middle of the former century that Christian Lassen qualified the opposition of arya and dasyu or dasa as a contrast between different religions expressed by the age-old symbolism of black opposed to white and not as a contrast of dark- complexioned to white coloured men."

"Krsna tvac as a metaphor for darkness in the RV yet is no abstract idea, but in the minds of Rgvedic man a real part of the world, of the cosmological scheme. The poets describe it eventually as a cloth a cover which could spread over the earth. Darkness is related to the ‘depth’, the lowest region of the trinominal concept of the world-structure, being at the same time the home of the waters. Two verses give a vivid picture of this. In RV 4. 13. 4 the poet adresses Surya who drove away the nig'ht ...Definitely the verse means the night, the “black cloth” lying over the earth, not the symbolical darkness. But in the minds of the poets the bounds between real and symbolic darkness were fluent, as RV 4. 17. 14 — 15 suggests... If at the three above cited passages krsna tvac is translated with ‘dark cloth, dark cover’ but not with ‘dark skin’ in the sense of ‘dark complexion’ it fits better into the habits of thinking of the Rgvedic poets, than the rather trivial translation current up till now. Assumedly the Rgvedic hymns are mythological poetry not in the first line depicting real events but out of these events creating myths — myths as models for reality. The fight against enemies dominating the life of the Aryan immigrants, this theme presented itself to be an excellent (and necessary) subject for mythologization."

"[a]s regards all that refers to fields and gardens, the growing of flowers is the most recent conquest of European humanity. The pragmatism of prehistoric people had prevented them from discovering the attraction of these objects, so cherished by ladies and poets, in the same way that their ears remained deaf to the song of the lark and the nightingale. This only changed when flower scented perfumes from the East reached Europe and when man’s relationship with nature, at least in the upper echelons of society, began to become sentimental. (I, p. 151)"

"For hundreds of years before Buddha's time, movements were in progress in Indian thought which prepared the way for Buddhism."

"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)."

"... 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 ."

"Politics is applied biology."

"As a philologist, I lack the archaeological knowledge to tackle the problem in all its aspects."

"Sir Mortimer's theory is sustained by no literary evidence, it must rest entirely on archaeological facts and their interpretations."

"... in 1949, a paper appeared by a German mathematician Hans Maass, which raised some rather interesting problems. You see, earlier the automorphic functions and forms — one had essentially thought of functions that were often called holomorphic, analytical. And Maass started studying functions that were not of that nature, but were instead solutions of a certain eigenvalue problem, which had a certain type of behavior with respect to the discrete group which corresponds to the modular forms. Maass also worked essentially just on the modular group and its subgroups, not on general groups."

"The investigations of Siegel on discrete groups of motions of the with a fundamental region of finite volume ... make possible a simple characterization of groups conjugate to the modular group by a minimal condition."

"Contrary to popular scholarly opinion, the genealogies found in the Puranas, which list over a hundred and twenty kings in one Vedic dynasty alone, fit into the new model of ancient Indian history. The Puranic records are far more trustworthy than has hitherto been assumed. They are the distillate of countless generations of remembered knowledge, especially knowledge concerning the vicissitudes of royal houses. They date back to the third millennium B.C.E. and earlier. Greek accounts point to the existence of Indian royal lists (perhaps coinciding with those of the Puranas) that are reported to go back to the seventh millennium B.C.E."

"In the past couple of centuries, these ideas and other India-derived notions have inspired many great schol­ars, scientists, and literary figures: Hegel, Fichte, Schlegel, Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Shelley, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Thoreau, Emerson, Tennyson, Yeats, A. E. Russell, Edwin Arnold, E. M. Forster, Blavatsky, Romain Rolland, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, C. F. von Weizsäcker, Robert Oppenheimer, David Bohm, and others."

"In his India days, Rajneesh was a voracious reader, and he is known to have devoured all of Gurdjieff’s and Ouspensky’s books. In fact, Gurdjieff seems to have served him as a kind of role model in his interaction with devotees."

"The Aitareya-Aranyaka, which is more than three thousand years old, clearly refers to writing. Several Upanishads describe various aspects of the alphabet... Panini himself mentions a number of grammatical works prior to his date."

"On the whole, while many parts of the Koran undoubtedly have considerable rhetorical power, even over an unbelieving reader, the book, æsthetically considered, is by no means a first-rate performance... Mohammed, in short, is not in any sense a master of style. This opinion will be endorsed by any European who reads through the book with an impartial spirit and some knowledge of the language, without taking into account the tiresome effect of its endless iterations. But in the ears of every pious Moslem such a judgment will sound almost as shocking as downright atheism or polytheism. Among the Moslems, the Koran has always been looked on as the most perfect model of style and language. This feature of it is in their dogmatic the greatest of all miracles, the incontestable proof of its divine origin. Such a view on the part of men who knew Arabic infinitely better than the most accomplished European Arabist will ever do, may well startle us. In fact, the Koran boldly challenged its opponents to produce ten súras, or even a single one, like those of the sacred book, and they never did so. That, to be sure, on calm reflection, is not so very surprising. Revelations of the kind which Mohammed uttered, no unbeliever could produce without making himself a laughing-stock."

"The latter standpoint is my own. I am, in truth, earnestly convinced that Christianity, not in respect of its various historical accidental characteristics, which are disputable in manifold ways, but rather, in terms of its specific ideal content, in terms of its highly individual, typically characterized unique spirit [Sondergeiste] is decisively superior to the other particular forms of religion. . . ."