The confession quoted above by way of introduction reveals with tragic sincerity the fatal passion of an overly avid reader, unlimited in curiosity certainly but fully conscious of the demanding finality of the work he had to accomplish: the scientific critique of an international system of social organization, “in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and scornful being” (1844). Cultivating poetry and philosophy in a world felt to be unlivable meant becoming an accomplice of those individuals and institutions principally responsible for the barbarity called modern civilization. But to combat this, it was necessary to scour the murky historical horizon issued from a distant past where only great social revolutions marked the stages of a progression seen as ambiguous because realized by means of unspeakable phenomena of regression. Only one revolution took place under the contradictory sign of an emancipation with universal ambitions and of a decline with indelible consequences: the French Revolution. Conclusion as well as beginning, it was studied by Marx as a unique event, both in relation to its antecedents as well as its liberating promises. Although it is true that Marx “never wrote a history of the ancien régime”, a hardly significant remark, it is no less true that he studied and compiled, with the eagerness of a schoolboy enthralled by history, an enormous mass of documentation that can “help understand how (the ancien regime) gave birth to the Revolution”, despite what François Furet might think (Marx et la Révolution française, Paris, 1986, p. 79). Moreover, the author of Das Kapital drew from the revolutionary history of France the inspiration for a “poetry of the future” in which the following vision was designed:

“The old bourgeois society, with its classes and its class antagonism, gave way to an association in which the free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of the whole” (1848).

The day is one of the fundamental experiences of our natural existence. The obvious cycle of the sun, the alternation of sleep and being awake provide a link between the life of the body and the great regularity that assigns their successive moments to light and to darkness. Only a simplified abstraction allows us to consider time lived as an homogeneous flow. Our existence, in its proper substance and in its larger environment, is dominated by the rhythm of days and nights. Our very experience of the reality of objects is subject to it: the universe of things depends on the light of day that reveals it. It shrivels and becomes uncertain when night falls, with terror and dreams taking its place. The evidence that appears with the clarity of day is not of the same order as apparitions that arise from the depth of darkness.

For thousands of years communication has functioned principally by means of linguistic and iconic messages. In the first case linguistic symbols serve as intermediaries; in the second, images or, more broadly, representations. In order to be transmitted, linguistic and/or iconic symbols need to be re-produced, re-presented, vocally, through writing, painting, sculpture or any other means of re-production. But re-production requires a space that, through use of an appropriate material, serves as its medium; forms to occupy it; rules to control it, and a certain stability. In other words representation is impossible without a certain fixity of the message that alone can ensure its duration, whether short or long being unimportant, but which it needs precisely in order to function as a message.

Even in scientific usage there are terms that we believe we understand and when we try to pinpoint what they refer to we notice that these terms do not have a precise meaning. This applies, in linguistics, to the term Indo-European. Mostly, when used as an adjective, it seems to apply to those languages that derive, hypothetically, from a disappeared idiom which some scholars for nearly two hundred years have been trying to reconstruct. Thus, it is said that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin are Indo-European languages. When this epithet is applied to French it causes surprise. From a comparative viewpoint, French is usually seen as a Romance language and only Romance languages taken together or, better said, Latin from which they derive, seem to merit the epithet. When used as a noun, “Indo-European” may designate the disappeared language itself. But serious scholars give it a precision in this case like commun in French, proto in English or Ur- in German. Does this imply that we may designate as Indo-European the sum of the individual languages of this family, whether they still exist or have disappeared? One may indeed take a chance and do it, but not without startling or even shocking one's public.

Chemical structures are among the trademarks of our profession, as surely chemical as flasks, beakers and distillation columns. When someone sees one of us busily scribbling formulas or structures, he or she has no trouble identifying a chemist. Yet these familiar objects, which accompany our work from start to end, from the initial doodlings (Fig. I) to the final polished artwork in a publication (Fig. II), are deceptively simple. They raise interesting and difficult questions about representation. It is the intent of this article to reflect upon molecular graphics.

Up until today, the term linguistics has never figured in the title of any chair in the Collège de France. However, those having a rapport with language have not been lacking, among them those of “language and literature,” “history and philology” of various cultures, philology, although it does not study language itself, having recourse to it. There are four personalities to be kept in mind in the twentieth century: Abbé Rousselot, whose teaching of phonetics, although briefly, left a permanent mark on his listeners; Mario Roques, who gave a course in the “Histoire du vocabulaire français” from 1937 to 1946; Roland Barthes, who rendered “Sémiologie littéraire” illustrious from 1976 to 1980; and M. Zemb, who two years ago was the first linguist in the modern sense to enter the Collège, with a chair of “Grammaire et pensée allemandes.”

In the History of Philosophy, the atomistic physics of Epicurus and of Democritus have been considered as very similar. Contrary to the more conventional view, Marx considers this similarity as only apparent. He indicates that as an analysis becomes more fundamental and specific, a basic difference becomes clearer. At the end of his analysis Marx indicates that there is an inner contradiction in each of those theories. Marx also intended to explain the reasons for this contradiction but, regrettably, his explanation has not been found among his writings. This paper must be considered as an attempt to reconstruct Marx's own philosophical presuppositions in his efforts to interpret ancient atomistic philosophy and to throw light on the beginnings of his critical method.

One does not have to be a specialist in religious history or the science of symbols in order to yield to the fascinating variations on the meanings of the Holy Grail. This strange vessel was undoubtedly already imbued with secret traditions when from the end of the 12th century to the end of the 13th century it was briefly resplendent with all the glory conferred by legend, before disappearing into the semi-darkness of mystery until Wagner's Parsifal brought it back to light by drawing from it the redemption of the suffering inflicted by Schopenhauer's world.

Literary criticism much too often ignores the contributions of the sociology of religions. And yet it would benefit from understanding that all culture has its source in a religious relationship to the world, even a negative one, and proceeds from a separation of the visible from the invisible. Such, in fact, is the principal characteristic of the religious element that Dilthey, for example, emphasizes. “Everywhere we encounter something that bears the name religion, its distinctive mark is its dealing with the visible”.

For eighteen centuries the Christian church believed that the fourth gospel was drawn up by the son of Zebedee, John, when the latter lived in Ephesus in his old age. As Clement of Alexandria suggests (II-III century) the beloved disciple wanted to emphasize the divine nature of the Son of which the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke had marked the historical insertion and the human nature.

It follows from the temporal nature of mind—the main concern of this essay—that mind functions are not localized in brain space.“ Time is extendedness, probably of the mind itself”, concludes Saint Augustine in Book XI of his Confessions (26.33), and, in our days, this extendedness can be made visible through an oscilloscopic “line” or trace of slow potentials. These graded, additive (not all-or-none) autorhythmic and seemingly self-generating potentials are primary events recorded at synapses. Autorhythmic brain structures (Zabara, 1973) appear to be the source of time frames, while a change in time frames (as reflected in the EEG) leads to synchronization and desynchronization of brain structures respectively. Synchronization forms a homogeneous time domain, such as obtained during rhythmic exercises, chanting, listening to music and mental processes that are the hallmark of religious practices (Rogers, 1973). Desynchronization of brain structures on the other hand marks a functional independence of neuronal elements with each element available for separate channels of data processing, for example, during hallucinogenic drug-induced central sympathetic arousal, that is, a waking dream state (Fischer, 1979).

My work is concerned mainly with an abstract subject: the problem of human knowledge and, in particular, of scientific knowledge.

I am an optimist. I am an optimist in a world where among the intelligentsia it has become a strict rule that one must be a pessimist if one wants to be “in”. But I do believe that our age is not so bad as is generally maintained; I do believe that it is better and more beautiful than its reputation. A quarter of a century ago, I gave a lecture, the title of which sounds today even more provocative than it did then: “The History of our Time: An Optimist's View”.

To talk about leadership in our times evokes the spectre of those leaders in the thirties and forties who led their nation to disaster, without any consideration for the cost in human suffering and moral degradation which their course involved. Yet, despite the distasteful association, we talk about the need for leadership in various domains of life—education, business, politics—and we look for individuals who are capable of providing such leadership also in civilizations which are committed to the principles of liberalism and democracy. Obviously, there is more than one sort of leader and more than one kind of leadership.

Every civilized society treasures through its folk tales and folk myths the elements of its native tribal life as points of cultural reference. The tribe not only acts as a foil to our culture, but also sustains its very being and gauges the degree of progress and change in the civilization that we uphold. This interdependence has a vital force: insofar as civilized societies define themselves by the distance they have built up between themselves and their respective primitive societies, a civilized culture without its indigenous tribal past risks the authenticity of its process of change to challenge and doubt. Hence, our adulation of distance in both time and space between ourselves and our tribal forefathers, and our eagerness to recognize, maintain, and even glorify our tribes—a necessary syllogism in our postulation of a self-preserving argument. In a peculiarly chiastic way, we thrive on our existential reliance on the very primitiveness that we seek to repudiate as characteristic of a world past. We celebrate our present by eulogizing our past, and to fit the tribes in the large scheme of our self-definition we iconize them. These idealized images hide a creative mask through which we embrace the romantic myths of our respective origins and progress; the parades we arrange for our tribal history—through performance on our streets, or through semantics in our literature—subtly embody this dependence.

Parallogic models the relationship between mind and context. It, as does the excerpt above, suggests that systems of logic are context specific and therefore parallel. This model points out that perceived departures in mental process, reasoning, may be more apparent than real. It also suggests a new way to conceive of mental illness by separating breakdowns in mental process from shifts in mental process.

With the earliest known reference to angling with a fly dating from the Chou Dynasty, more than 2,300 years ago, it should come as no surprise that when asked to justify their passionate devotion to fly fishing, many anglers will refer to the rich and venerable literature the sport has generated. Ranging from Plutarch's references to Nile fishing in the Life of Antonius, to Pliny the Elder's Historia Naturalis, to the fifteenth century classic, Dame Julian Berner's The Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, to the sport's bible, the 17th century The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton, to literary treatments in the work of authors such as John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway, the wealth of literature devoted to fly fishing appears to be out of proportion to what is, ultimately, just a way of seducing an animal with a brain the size of a pea into inhaling a hook upon which some feathers, furs and tinsels have been lashed. What then, one may legitimately ask, is it about this sport that creates fanatical devotion on the part of its practitioners, who tend to regard it with such zeal and passion as is commonly reserved for art and religion?

The question of what is philosophy, leads, it would seem, inevitably to diverse and conflicting, if not at times contradictory, answers. It is not only a matter of different philosophic perspectives, but also of fundamentally opposed conceptions of philosophy. Varying philosophic intentions and aims underlie what is taken to be the nature of philosophy and disagreement abounds. Philosophies then tend to differ not so much in terms of what they disagree about but what they consider philosophically sound and important. Phenomenology may share some concerns about basic philosophic problems, like intentionality, with ordinary language philosophy. But they diverge again sharply about the question of what philosophy should accomplish for, and what difference it makes to, human knowledge and understanding. The one sees intentionality as the pervasive structure of human consciousness and reality, and the other sees it as simply part of the various ways in which the uses of language can explain, and thus do away with, philosophical questions on perplexity. This difference about what philosophy should accomplish, its purpose, is not resolvable. It is what on each approach must be considered the very nature of philosophy and its primary task.

Using this bit of dialogue from Oscar Wilde as introduction, we propose to demonstrate the pertinence of the hostess’ remark and to show that the “Fin de siècle” really did mark a certain “Fin du globe”, connoting as it does the decline of art, the end of an era and of the eras in which artistic experience, and even experience of the world, was realized in a specific style. It was indeed the end of what we will here call “globe style”.

For a long time the notion of style had a very general significance. The origin of the word can no doubt be traced back to the term stilus, designating the punch that monks used for writing, and also probably an Egyptian etymon signifying a pillar. Through metonymic extensions the name of the instrument (an instrument, nevertheless, used in a highly intellectual activity) and the name of the individual work (but a work of cultural and artistic nature) have been subject to generalization and ultimately designate the specific quality of a phenomenon. Obviously it was necessary that this phenomenon be confirmed and made official through imitation and tradition. As for generalization of the phenomenon of style, its scope has become almost unlimited, taking in all forms of creative activity whether artistic or not, and ultimately almost all beings as long as they have assumed a form hallowed by tradition.

In so far as the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu are life-philosophies, they are philosophies of solitude. My aim in the following pages is to explain and defend this claim, clarifying the distinctive kind of solitude that is taught by Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.

No doubt all are familiar with the story of Abraham, of whom God demanded the sacrifice of his son, Isaac, and who, at the last minute, received from this same God the order not to touch the child since it was by then certain that Abraham would not refuse to do so. Ultimately, as the Bible itself seems to say, was this not simply a test in those remote times when, after all, sacrifice was a common occurrence? And so, perhaps, we might think this is all there is to this story, simply a matter of fear. Nevertheless, how can we not be amazed by the seeming gratuity of such an ordeal? Was not Abraham, and already since a very long time, the chosen one of God? Can we not, then, ask if a more attentive reading of the texts will provide a more substantial message?