We have a world to win. The Immutable, unite!
Author: Cleopatra1789
When my friend Gig asked me to participate in his vision and “The Immutable” project, I was honored and surprised. Gig is a man of incredible mind, broad education, powerful imagination and will, with extensive experience as a journalist in the crypto area. What I consider to be his most important qualities are children’s playfulness and perseverance, as well as ideals and values that are the foundation and the initiator of this valuable project.
I was amazed by the fact that Gig called for my cooperation as a professor of Latin language and Philosophy — areas that are increasingly considered superfluous in the modern world, due to the so-called uselessness in practical life (which is a global trend in relation to the humanities), and felt that what I have to say could be valuable and useful. What I will offer as my humble contribution has also emerged and been inspired through our many conversations (symposiums), where we have tried to reach together the beauty of truth and life. I thank him for his trust and friendship, and I hope I will not disappoint his expectations.
My reflections on the problems I will try to cover have no intention of giving definitive answers or solutions. They are a call for reflection and dialogue.
The title of my paper is a paraphrase of well known closing words of Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848), ‘the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. working men of all countries, unite!’. Since the proletarians have been sleeping for a long time without dreaming, Immutables as the remaining awake dreamers of a possible (= better world), are truly the best among us, guardians of the highest values and true meaning of knowledge as the common heritage of all people who want to be free.
Why it is important to preserve knowledge as the heritage of mankind?
´The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.´
— Elie Wiesel
The whole history of mankind (its human part) in the last few thousand years, of our cultural western culture, takes place through knowledge, progress in knowledge, progress in cognition. Our historical world survived only because we as humans have an innate and essential need to remember and pass on knowledge to future generations. The struggle to preserve knowledge throughout history has been extremely difficult, in that struggle libraries have burned, whole civilizations were destroyed, tyrannies fell. But the worst is oblivion, because as long as we remember, we exist as human beeings, as long we remember we have future. We are historical beings because we have a tradition of keeping and passing knowledge (Latin word trado, 3. means ˝to transmit, teach, relate to future generations˝).
Knowledge has a dual character: it is knowledge in the cognition of the world in the natural sciences and the technical sciences, and also in the social and spiritual sciences. There are two basic types of cognition from which all our knowledge arises: the cognition of the world given to us as nature and the cognition of the inner world as the spiritual world into which enters religion (contact with the sacred), art as creation or creativity (as the most authentic form of man’s holistic practice) and law (legal institutions, social institutions, etc.). Therefore, it is important to point out that the idea of knowledge in it’s entirety that must be in balance is in the foundations of the European tradition, and the part of that same tradition was the preservation of knowledge through the University (universitas is a Latin word meaning the whole, total, the universe, the world).
The whole corpus of knowledge must be present on several levels and necessarily in balance — balance as a dialogue between natural, spiritual, technical, legal, theological sciences and art as the highest expression of the human spirit. Unfortunately, today this balance is deeply disturbed (shaken).
What does balance mean? That means that only through the knowledge which is the synthesis=balance=harmony, man simultaneously understands, knows and produces the world as his own (historical) world. Only in this way does he have the world as a historical world (field of freedom and utopia) in opposite of the nature in which he finds himself. Creating his historical world he manifest his true (human) nature as a homo creator and overcomes the dichotomy of its nature. Man, in terms of humanity, is responsible for the entirety of the world. Man finds the contiguity in himself and outside himself, and with his creative activity which alway assumes the responsibility of man as rational being oriented towards the world, he transforms the nature he encounters in the world.
The relation towards knowledge and its preservation today is more than ever a decision for our survival as humanity. Freedom is man’s ontological possibility given to him precisely by advancing through knowledge which is a precondition of morality (a self-conscious being is a moral being, as we learn from Kant). What we are facing today as a dominant process is complete indifference to knowledge, banalization of knowledge and education, monopolization and reduction of knowledge to a purely practical or utilitarian purpose. Knowledge is no longer in balance, it’s not longer a spiritual reward and the satisfaction of man in his journey towards himself. Former custodians of knowledge in it’s entirety (Universities) have lost their authority (it should be emphasized through self-censorship and silence, which is always a matter of choice — qui tacet, consentire videtur!). Censorship and self-censorship have taken over all spheres of academic, media and social life. The question arises, is the transmission and preservation of knowledge as heritage of mankind endangered today?
Knowledge that is not in its entirety available to all, that is not passed as untouched by censorship to the free interpretation of new generations, their critical attitude, contextualization, questioning, collective and individual memory and creative practice, is always monopolized knowledge, stolen knowledge and lost knowledge.
There are many ways to destroy knowledge, sometimes oblivion is more destructive than books thrown into the fire. Leaving the monopoly and the whole of knowledge to the elites is the path to the self-destruction of humanity, the path to a transhuman (slave or feudal) society of technotronic capacity . We as human beings do not want that kind of reset. We want to remember, create, feel, love, hope, learn and breathe freely. That is the only way to live like humans who improve their life with technology, and are not slaves of technology.
Within the postmodern, techno-scientific system, a media (= political, ideological) unquestionable (= not subject to criticism) attitude (dogma) is imposed that technology is the essence of our sociability and life. I consider such a prevailing attitude, which in the public space should almost no longer be questioned, a dangerous substitution of theses. Technology is just one of the forms / tools / manifestations of human practice that should always aim at man and his spiritual and moral progress — the progress of man in his freedom.
Therefore, in the universal oblivion of our source and the utopian essence of our existence, the oblivion that stunned us paralyzed us in a state of sweet enslavement to inaction and thoughtlessness. The tool as an extension of its source (brain, soul and mind) must not be alienated from its own source, make its source superfluous and hostile.
It can be argued that technology is a part of man, but technology is not and can never be a substitute for the human essence. The cry of today’s man, trapped in the instrumentalized, censored, partial and narrow reality he swallows served like fast food, trash culture, “universal” truths (facts) approved by political institutions that have no democratic accountability anymore, should be:
Immutables of all countries, unite! And keep the knowledge, question, speak, remember, dream! It’s a matter of survival! I find Gig’s project “The Immutable” as one brave and important contribution to that struggle.
Cleopatra1789
14.08.2021
About the author: Cleopatra1789 is a doctor of philosophy and a classics professor. She advises The Immutable on matters pertaining to ethics and standards, and possesses an unwavering sense of justice. This is the first essay she has published in the English language.
