<Cesar>If people learn what they want to know (referring to phenomenological notion of intentionality) than everything is subject to their good will, their desires and fears. As we have seen, the context generates desires and fears, and it is possi- ble to understand a global tendency and sketch how people build their perception of the world accordingly. Artistic production is often depicted as a mirror of the society; the current state of philosophy informs as much as it shapes everybody’s life and understanding of the world, may you be conscious of it or not as an individual. I want to illustrate a stereotypical individual mind in the philosophical history perspective using architectural metaphors. Western contemporary knowledge is organised, in library for instance, in what we call the Universal Decimal Classification UDC based on a mixed belief on science and religions. 0 generalities 1 philosophy, psychology 2 religion, theology 3 social sciences 4 vacant 5 natural sciences 6 technology 7 the arts 8 language, linguistics, literature 9 geography, biography, history We access knowledge via generalities, than philoso- phy and religion are supposed to offer a ‘bigger picture’ of the world, than we have social sciences that condition the happening of supposingly “dry sciences”, and as we climb up it gets very messy with natural sciences, so we vainly try to organise this with technology, entertain and criticize with the art by producing expressive “data”, poetry, stories, interpretations of reality, the History and eventually wrap all this up in the physical geographic world again, that is constantly changing out of control. Roughly the western isolationist approach make us journey from the organised abstraction to the messy tangible, an inverted pyramid standing on a narrow base... Unstable. We are relying on what we have invented, not what we observe; intellectual not sensual. On the other hand the eastern or traditional ap- proach is (still) “grounded” : you might access to the mystery and altar of Tawhid via the infinite cues nature offers. For the ancient Greek (Aristotle and Pyrrho), men are at the bottom of knowledge, they gen- erate all they know toward the understanding of god. God is the central force that organises radially all the universe. But rationalism (Descartes) with its metaphysic doubt gave equal responsibility to both humans and god at each end of knowledge, a diamond sitting on its spike, very unstable, very stimulat- ing. The empiricists (Bacon, Locke, Hume, Mill) suggested everything arises from experience, therefore man and god got together the uncom- fortable equivalent responsibility in holding the construction of knowing and organising the universe. Then phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger) claimed a state of purity, an irrational human made support of a rational knowledge, god-god started to fade for god-science. Then the existentialists (Sartre) just said ‘there no god!’, we are totally responsible for every- thing, Hiroshima. And deconstructivists said ‘oh no, we can’t do it’, they realised we are too weak, and every- thing collapsed, Chernobyl. So this is about where we are now : in a new Renacimiento powered by communi- cation technologies, where everything could be back to “human centered design”. Google proposes to organize the universe of data according to statistics and popularity. An election of knowledge, with man and his desires and fears at the center. When you google something, you get the most popular answer, not the truth. What is popular becomes de facto “The Answer”, the democratic election of truth by the majority. Now we don’t organise, we search and find immediately. Today’s technology allows a greater complexity, democracy must go under radical changes. With Wikipedia.org and the web 2.0, we have entered an age of proactive col- laborative architecture of knowledge, also competitive and unfair, a wild open market of knowledge. Our generation is the second generation of idealists, we have seen our parents try- ing. We may have quite similar perspectives, we are secret activists. Now, we can decide to let machines sort our world, or remain in control of the nitty-gritty. As citizen consumers, we can choose to have major private companies leading on a global scale, or actively support local grassroots public initiatives. Our irrepressible desire for speed is making the decision. |