CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSÄCKER, THE GREAT THINKER OF THE WHOLE
Ilke ANGELA MARECHAL, writer, journalist and translator is located at the borders between science, art and knowledge (see PLASTIR n°5). She produces a series of radiophonic talks (Epectase) on Aligre FM which are now diffused on her Art & Science blog and organized cultural events in sciences and arts. As an author, she published “Sciences and Imaginary” (Albin Michel, 1994) and translated reference books such as that of Marie-Louise Von Franz « Matter and Psyche » (Albin Michel, 2002). She has recently founded the multilingual AnimaViva Publishing House and prepare a translation and a book of a part of the immense work of the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker from which some extracts are delivered exclusively for PLASTIR ! Indeed, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, a world-known specialist of theoretical and nuclear physics, but also a German philosopher (1912-2007), tried throughout his life to think in a philosophical way of the new « Weltanschauung » which resulted from the revolution in quantum physics in which he had personally taken part. His aim was to achieve a description of the wholeness and the Unity of Nature. In order to do so, he had to delve into the roots of sciences, philosophies and spiritualities. As a friend and pupil of W. Heisenberg and N. Bohr, he wanted to bravely conceptualize the so called ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’, and in doing so he construed his very own « Hypothesis of the theory of URE ». Although he belonged to the group of scientists that was supposed to get the atomic bomb ready during the Second World War, he was asked in the sixties, due to his reputation as a tireless worker for peace, to stand for the presidency of the Federal Republic (which he refused to do). But he accepted the task to prepare a « Council for Peace » having brought together all the churches (a pre-Assisi like move). He received the highest distinction possible concerning religion: the « Templeton Prize ». In the concrete world, he accepted to direct the « Max Planck Institute » for the research into the conditions of life in our modern world. For him, Introspection, Reflection as well as Action were never separated items.
REGINE DETAMBEL is a writer, poet and author of more than forty books, among which “The closed Garden” (1994), “The Canopy” (1996), “Pandemonium” (2006), novels published at Gallimard, or “Small praise of the skin” (Folio, 2007). She published at the beginning of the year “ Our mother of the Seven Pains” at Gallimard editions and a book entitled ”The Syndrome of Diogène – praise of old ages” at Actes Sud editions. Its work being inhabited by the figure of the bodies (above mentioned books, one is published at J-M place editions in 2007 on “the epithelial poet” about the poet Bernard Christmas and an assay “Tremor to write” to be published at Actes Sud in 2009), she let us discover a very original text about the “verbo-engines” or on what drives “the body of the author”, the author walker (Nietzsche), the sick author (Queneau, Bernhard, Michaux), the drunk or doped author, but always the body of the writing author and not his hand, his head (Mallarmé, Guyotat)”. She introduces by this metric skew poetry, a direct sensory relationship between the foot of the writer-walkers articulated by the most remote axons from the order intimated by their high conscience and this magic tread which give birth to dynamic texts, projecting ahead. Thus, its own writing is introduced into an article published on January 11, 2008 into le Monde: “With the hand or the machine ? Keyboard or paper ? The morning or the evening ? ” Nobody still asked me whether I worked rather squatted or lying on the side, or drawn up on the formed tripod of my shoulders and my nape of the neck, upside down and calves crossed, like a yogi. Since the experiment of the school desk, all seem convinced that one cannot think and write sat. One hardly takes account of the body of the author, brought back to the posture of the pupil raise softened. However Nietzsche and Giono were walkers and not sat at table. They maintained a hearth movement in the area of the legs”. To know more about the author: consult her blog.
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIETY : ETHICAL STAKES
Mariana THIERIOT LOISEL, philosopher, Ubiratan D’AMBROSIO, emeritus professor of mathematics & Marc-Williams DEBONO, neurobiologist present to you a second text written jointly after that published in Plastir n°8. This one stresses the problematization of the knowledge transmitted by the philosophers, the pedagogues and the teachers. How to connect the knowledge effectively ? How metaphorically not to compare the disciplinary fields to cages which one could escape only by means of a translation (D’Ambrosio) ? Textual translation with the image of the tertium or of the degree zero shown by Barthes; creative translation like the sculptures of Giacometti which according to him are the representation of another thing that themselves, the object even of the knowledge; disciplinary translation calling a third included according to Camus and Nicolescu; maieutic translation finally where the otherness plays the part of the obstetrician of the poet in perdition. Other alternatives exist to avoid the trap of the monologue or the cage. To draw up a negative report with the power (idiorythmy of Barthes), to support the co-emergence of the knowledge or the natural understanding of the thought (Hannah Arendt), the fundamentals of the speech and its double (Derrida). All these exit doors indicate the prevalence of the dialogue and the need for a true contract of teaching nature (Thieriot). A contract which does not oppose philosophical and pedagogues, but wants “to develop the art to pose enigmas, to circumscribe the mystery, to erotise knowledge” according to the subversive attempt of Philippe Meirieu. A contract which includes dialectics in the direction of an exorcism and see the metamorphoses of the subject as the objects of the knowledge taking place. It is only at this price that another course can take place according to Derrida, a course where the society will be able to live the teaching contract rather than being prisoner of these paradoxes and consume with excess the social fracture (Filloux). A contract, not moralist, but endorsing prerogatives of the subject by naturally including him in the plasticity of the world (Debono), by opening singular between-two-ways where he acquires the knowledge while being modelled by himself, while knowing, by binding in an inextricable way his affects to the joint project of the humanity whose ethical stakes remain crucial for our future.
HENRI BOSCO, STORYTELLER « OF PROVENCE AND OF THE WORLD »
Roger BUIS is professor emeritus into biomathematics of the university of Toulouse and faithful member of PSA. The article that he proposes to us follows a first paper on the storyteller Henri Bosco published in the n°2 of Plastir where he traced us the main literary trends of the poet from Provence through works like Malicroix or the Farmhouse Théotime. He presents to us here a second shutter of the biography of Bosco and of these two works under a more intimist point of view, almost psychoanalytical where one follows the history of the characters who seek themselves at the same time in introspection and in the glance that Bosco relates on “the souls and the world”. Roger Buis thus makes us discover Bosco still ignored which exceeds the borders of Provence by far and makes us penetrate the mysteries of the writing through the tale. Tale that weaves an insoluble bond between the poet and us, who seems to be a daydream and shows the symbolism of the large archetypes of our imaginary, such as those existing between the writer Henri Bosco and the philosopher of sciences Gaston Bachelard (The man of the poem and of the theorem)” dixit the author. For more information, see the Bosco’s website.