FRANZ  &  KHALID CORRESPONDENCE

                (1998, CONTINUED)

Date:       Sun, 16 Aug. 1998 12:06:12 -0400
To:           khalid.ali@utoronto.ca
From:      lee@faces.ula.ve
Subject:   HUMAN BEING XXXV

 ( We excel )

My dearest Khalid,

The socio-economic problems of Venezuela have impeded us to continue with the regular rhythm of our lectures. The problems with CANTV (telephone), CADELA (electricity) and His
Excellency ZEUS (Central University Computer) are not solved as yet; nevertheless: la filosofía continua! And it will continue in formal-logical spatial-temporal terms, even then, long after the Patria or the very Planet would be no more, would not exist  anymore, and would have lost all its very "human" brilliance.
Let us continue with the existential elements of Thinking  a n d  Thought, and their relations to "Intellectual Labour" in the Patria.

Some Everyday Flowing Truths about Excellence

The problem is not that I or We say "Yes", say "No",
say "Neithernor"; not even that Parmenides stated Hen kai Pan, One and All, Unomnia; or that Hegel expounded SPIRIT and matter; or that Marx postulated MATTER and spirit, or that we favour Cosmos (Matter) a n d Einai (Spirit); pandemonium breaks out, when we insist to privatize and monopolize only ONE SINGLE ONE of them, and when we consequently, for millennia,  build a whole "philosophy" around this one and only Weltanschauung, when we give it a single method, formal logics, dialectics or Bezug, as its one and only life-thread! In this way, we sow mayhem everywhere and reap pandemonium nowhere! Philosophy has multiverses to gain, to lose its patrian unimensional, monolithic chains.

To Be Neither "Right" Nor "Wrong"   a n d   Not To Be "Absurd"!

This is exactly what nearly all patrian philosophers have done until "now"; Heracleitus defended his one and only Fire (Logos), so did Plato with his "Idea", so did Hegel with his "Weltgeist" (Absoluten Idee), so did Marx and Engels with their "historischen und dialektischen Materialismus", so did the Existentialists with their "Nihil", with "Nothingness". There is no problem in the fact to be only "right", also we need not cultivate bad feelings only because we are "wrong"; moreover, at any time green grass can grow over the fact that we are only "absurd"; all these are necessary logical identificationsof our state of thinking, in different circumstances; and they are all valid within the framework of these circumstances; elsewhere, they have no legitimacy! Furthermore, there is a logical difference between I am right, I am wrong, and I am absurd! The latter is a state of being neither "right" nor "wrong". And, such a state of affairs very often occurs in everyday life all across the globalized planet. To leave the formal-logical, melancholic, brooding state of mind of Hamlet, " to be, or , not to be?", "to live, or, to commit suicide", definitely, the first stepping-stone towards Historic, Emancipatory Excellence is:
To Be Neither "Right" Nor "Wrong"  a n d  Not To Be "Absurd"!

This is known as our Historic, Emancipatory Principle.
 

Knowledge: "I Know ... "; Belief: "I believe ..."

"I know", "I do not know", "I know  a n d   I do not know", "Neither do I know nor do I not know", etc., are all, each one for itself, and all of them for themselves, valid epistemological statements; it just depends on their specific Bezügen, on their respective relations, exactly which flowing truth they express. Stating "I know" is not yet a qualification to be a candidate
for an Oscar or for the next Nobel Peace Prize! Saying "I do not know" is already approximating an imminent and eminent Socratic decoration with the "Order of Wisdom", because this statement implies that truthfully "I know" what I am supposed to know,
a n d  that  in veritas  "I do not know"  t h a t  what I am supposed to know. I must first  k n o w  what I do not know, in order to state
that I really  d o  n o t  k n o w  it; otherwise, the expression  "I do not know" denotes sheer stupidity. Both "I know"  a n d   "I do not know" form part and parcel of any true philosophic theory of knowledge. "I believe..." belongs to the Credo, to Religion, to Revelation. Surely, if we could still avoid it, still afford it, if we think, before we utter or write " I believe ...", then we are already leaving the milky way towards the "promised land", and we are heading straight towards Historic Excellence.

"Beware of the Eyes of Mars!"

There is no scientific-philosophic reason why the statement "I know that the Earth is flat" (500 B.C.) should have greater epistemological value than "I do not know that the Earth is flat" (1500 A.D.) ; because what the latter "human being" "does know", in other words, "does know  a n d   does not know", is that "the Earth is a globe"; and the assertion "not flat" is not necessarily identical with "global"; it could also denote "square" or "mountainous"; and who really knows what "shape" the Earth really has, or in what shape it currently really finds itself, that is, if it has any "good shape" at all? Who knows, perhaps soon we will  state: "The Earth has the Shape of the Statue of Liberty" (2050 A.D.). Many things which our excellent great-great-grandfathers have told us have turned out to be mere "absolute truths",  sheer "gospel truths". Hence, "Beware of the Eyes of the Future!"

Everyday Patrian Excellence

Until now, ironically, psi-genes, fairy tales, superstition and religion
have made remarkable steps towards Excellence, towards Transcendence. Nobody, not even a child, a street kid, questions the excellence of time and space relations, of invisibility and invincibility, the allroundness and everywhereness of the "heroes" of Patrian "fantasy and imagination". No Christian ever had problems with the "Holy Trinity".

Old Trinity and Old Shatterhand  a n d  Giordano Bruno

Most Patrians, except Hegel and some other excellent "ivory-tower spectators", would send any student who "rabbles" about his own "I-Trinity" directly to go and see a good Western picture, where Old Trinity and Old Shatterhand first shoot and then ask questions.
Not because Giordano Bruno was "right", not because he was "wrong", not even because he was  right   a n d   wrong, he was burned on the stake; it simply happened because he was an excellent scientist-philosopher who with his "thinking  a n d  thought" threatened the very "absurd" foundation of the feudalist status quo! It was because his persecutioners, his executioners, feared him more than he feared them; this MORE is the decisive-incisive excellency of the event. The very same happened with other "excellentísimas",  like Che Guevara, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht or Leon Trotsky. The above is not a matter of being "right" or "wrong", or even of being "absurd", but of historic excellence.

Next time more excellent pondering!

Love,

Franz.

(continued)