The topic of this article is the self-less self (selbst-lose Selbst) and more particularly this self in its connection with the problem of language. There exists a movement of the self-less self from itself toward itself. This movement also occurs as the liberation from language toward language; language reaches into the core of being self because our understanding of self and of the world is linguistically constituted. Similarly the fundamental conversion - as the occurence of the breakthrough (by means of the I-am-myself) to the truth of the self - is nothing else than an original word event. The self-less, the true self says at this moment: “I am myself by not being myself (Ich bin, indem ich nicht ich bin, ich).” In order to gain a better understanding we now start from the problem of language.

This issue of Diogenes is devoted to questions of bioethics. This subject was chosen not because bioethics is fashionable but rather because the purpose of this journal is to explore the timely and timeless questions of our era in order to understand what is at stake and to share this knowledge with our readers.

I have chosen to call my piece “Bioethics: Between the Plausible and the Thinkable” to highlight at least three themes that are taken up either directly or indirectly in the articles that follow.

I borrow this title from an English mystical text written at the end of the fourteenth century, The Veil of Unknowledge, which has long been part of my life. The explicit aim of the book is to tear away this veil of unknowledge, or to give us the means to do it ourselves. The image of the veil invites a reciprocal gesture of raising, tearing, piercing. The desire that motivates this act goes beyond the veil, toward Isis and the truth, the naked figure we're endeavoring to know. Once we have cleared away the obstacles and gained a clear view of her, we—and she—are transformed.

Who would have thought twenty-five years ago that the term “bioethics,” a neologism coined by an American biologist, would have met with such success, becoming one of the cornerstones of philosophical and juridical reflection at the end of the twentieth century? For it was in 1970 that the biologist and oncologist Van Rensalear Potter published his book, Bioethics, Science of Survival.

For more than forty years, Diogenes has been striving, with the limited resources at its disposal, to mark the progress of the human sciences around the world. The journal emerged from the encounter between an institution and a person. The institution was the Conseil international de la philosophie et des sciences humaines (CIPSH) that was founded under the auspices and on the initiative of UNESCO with the aim of regrouping a variety of different international associations in the field of Geisteswissenschaften; the person was Roger Caillois, then an international civil servant with UNESCO. The CIPSH wanted to equip itself with an organ of international scholarly communication that was capable of serving as a bond and link between its various member associations.

Linguistic magic can be divided into three major categories: the fiatic, the Orphic and the talismanic. The first category includes the creation of the signified by its signifier, the best example being the creation of the world by divine words. The Orphic category assumes the possibility of enchanting an already existing entity by means of vocal material. Last but not least is the talismanic, based on the drawing of energy by means of language, in order to use this energy for magical purposes. While the fiatic view assumes the complete superiority of the creator over the created object, the Orphic presupposes a certain similarity between the subject-magician and its object, whose role is to understand and follow the instructions of the magician. In these two categories meaning seems to be a crucial part of the magical linguistic activities. In the third category, the talismanic, linguistic powers are used in order summon higher powers which then descend to take possession of it. By talismanic I refer to the inherent ability of an entity, material, a moment in time, or a human act to draw upon these powers. Unlike amulets, which are usually taken to be objects that protect their possessor, the talisman is able to add power.

Individual humans as well as human communities interact in a great variety of ways and, in essence, Unesco's Silk Roads Major Project endeavors to shed light on the cultural interactions along the trade routes linking various Eurasian civilizations. The term Silk Road or Roads conjures up visions of caravans laden with rare goods, carrying them from the distant, perhaps even the so-called “mysterious”, East towards the Western World. This general impression is partially created by the word “silk”, name of a commodity generally and correctly linked with China where it was first produced. It is good to remember that a “Silk Road” is a historic fiction, invented in the nineteenth century by the German geographer von Richthofen to call attention to the existence of, first and foremost, commercial contacts between China and the Roman Empire. Silk was but one of the many goods circulating all along the many roads criss-crossing the great Eurasian space. This short essay will provide some information on the languages used along the land arteries of communication between East and West.

Even though the languages that are spoken and written in the territories crossed by commercial and cultural routes between Asia and Europe - the “Silk Roads” - have been the object of research for many decades, the popular notion of “languages along the Silk Road” is of fairly recent origin. It is worth giving some thought to the problem of whether, or to what extent, it is actually possible and practical to continue with linguistic research in the context of the “Silk Roads.”

Guilt and fear today have developed an unexpected quality: they contribute powerfully to the survival of humanity. The feeling of guilt proceeds from an elementary awareness: although the unequaled progress of science and technology in the twentieth century has undoubtedly ameliorated the conditions of human life, it also has given rise to an infernal logic of genocide and crimes against humanity, in which almost all nations, directly or indirectly, have participated and participate still. This awareness is joined to another, which is itself accompanied by a primordial fear: for the first time in history, science and technology have endowed humanity with the power to destroy itself and the planet, without furnishing humans with the means of escaping their destined role as sorcerer's apprentice, for no science can tell us what to do with science. It is this double feeling of guilt and fear that pushes contemporary man to search feverishly for ethical foundations capable of furnishing discreet regulatory principles to underpin decisions and actions. From the point of view of contemporary humanity, ethics must be able to confer meaning and perspective on an existence which apparently has neither: “Now,” writes Hans Jonas, “we shiver in the nakedness of nihilism in which near-omnipotence is paired with near-emptiness, greatest capacity with knowing least for what ends to use it.”

Why are we holding UNESCO's Philosophical Encounters and why have we chosen the question “What do we not know?” as the topic of the first one of these meetings? It is in order to respond to these two questions that Judith Schlanger has asked me to write a few lines. She added—for the record. What record, I then thought to myself, if—as I am sending her these pages—nothing has taken place yet? Unless it was the intention, the idea so to speak, that was to be recorded. What seemed to me to be premature, then appeared to come rather late, i.e. to explain, after the event, as if going backwards, the reasons for the creation of the Philosophical Encounters and the choice of their first theme. We know that in the legal profession the summaries of the discussions that precede the adoption of a law allow us to understand its spirit; on this basis, could one not imagine a chronicle of ideas kept by whoever that would illuminate the life of the organization? Perhaps something similar is lacking in the history of an institution like UNESCO. Everything is being preserved in it, as if in a gigantic, impenetrable memory, because it never fell to anyone to preserve the thread of the original intentions. Whatever fate the future may have reserved for UNESCO's Philosophical Encounters, given their experimental nature, I will attempt here to describe the intentions. For whatever purpose if may serve!

The power of the word should be at its height when the spoken word is deemed authoritative, when speech is the master of discourse. This authority can be no greater than when the word derives from what the Greeks called “the more powerful (than us),” (hoi kreittones) or even, in monotheistic religions, from He who can be called – to use a term that avoids confusion – “the Almighty.” The mighty word is the divine word. The power of this word is a result of its divine origin.

By Portuguese myths we mean several kinds of narratives, all of which actualize fundamental aspects of the Portuguese national imagination. Some are foundation narratives (Sâo Mamede, Ourique); others are historical facts that were sung so often over the years by Portuguese and foreign poets that they came to signify basic schemes of the human imagination (Inês de Castro's pure love, whose realization was frustrated by a fight between two men, father and son); other so-called Portuguese myths, on the contrary, are built around concepts that give metaphysical shape to supposed characteristics that define the national soul (saudosismo, the doctrine of nostalgia, which attempts to define the Portuguese national soul as the search for a mythical initial unity that would create a wholeness in which contraries would be abolished; the Fifth Empire as its realization on Earth); other Portuguese myths express the supposed divine predestination of the people and of the Portuguese Man, based upon divine intervention in the founding of the nation in Ourique (the Fifth Empire that would be the Age of Spirit announced by Joachim de Fiore); still others are based on historically negative facts (King Sebastian and the defeat at Alcazarquibir) but transformed through archetypal elements to show the capacity for renewal out of the defeat, a renewal that goes beyond real historical renewal to include spiritual renewal of the Portuguese Man and his fatherland, which should produce the Fifth Empire conceived either in earthly or spiritual terms. To these myths I will add a legend preceding the formation of the nation, King Roderick's Legend, because it attempts to justify the loss of Visigothic Spain to the Arabs.

The Silk Road, which began operating more than two thousand years ago, constituted certainly for many centuries the main cultural and linguistic highway between peoples of the East and peoples of the West, and to an even greater extent between the peoples of the East or West and those living along the Silk Road in Central Asia. This is reflected by the many loan words transmitted along the Silk Road from one end to the other, especially those connected with the textile trade.

Our subject is what we do not know; and this is a meeting under the auspices of philosophy—a meeting, indeed, designed to advance UNESCO's programme in philosophy. The conjunction of this subject and these auspices already confronts us with certain questions. How is philosophy related to ignorance?

The somewhat disturbing success of bioethics as a discipline is probably due to the unique nature of its subject matter. Indeed what is it that happens when scientific interest, with its particular resources and language, turns toward the study of the human body? Can this body be instrumentalized like any other object, or do the sciences have to give way here before a taboo subject? Have the sciences not, without their knowing it, taken on an unprecedented signification? The truly prodigious growth of new fields of biological knowledge has thrust biology into the public arena. Extending more than ever beyond the status of narrowly scientific knowledge, these new fields have taken on a mythological and normative character in the social imagination.

In the convent of San Domenico in Florence, Fra Angelico painted a miracle of topical interest. In it, we see a monk's cell and the holy surgeons Como and Damien who are attaching a healthy leg onto the body of an amputee. The progress of science has made it possible to realize bold dreams that have been expressed in the myths of seemingly antithetical cultures. Insofar as transplants can now be carried out on all the vital organs of the body, except the brain, modern medicine holds what would seem to be almost a promise of immortality, thus flattering human desire. How then can we explain the fact that, after a period of enthusiasm created by surgical feats, the anticipated spread of the operation has been frustrated by a marked reticence concerning organ donation? This phenomenon, widespread in the Western countries in which most transplants take place, indicates a “malaise of civilization.”

Tsvetan Todorov, in his book Us and Them. French Thinking on Human Diversity, asked the following question: “How does one, how should one relate to those who do not belong to the same community as we do?” This question has been posed somewhat differently by intellectuals of the Americas anxious to develop paradigms of identity that will contribute to the successful construction of a society whose aim is to integrate heterogeneous ethnic groups: “How does one, how should one relate to those who are members of our new society but who live either on its margins or who are frequently considered as different?” The mixed-race (métissage) approach, applied to the Latin Americas situation, was in part a response to this question. Here the “us” did not designate metropolitan Europeans engaged in thinking about the “others,” that is to say non-Europeans, but Latin Americans thinking about relations among various dominant groups and the varying “others” within their own society, since the “others” were part of “us.” The meaning of “us” is equally problematic when applied to North America. “What happens when words like ‘community’ and ‘us’ cease to have the clear and immediate meaning that Todorov seems to ascribe to them?” Sherry Simon recently asked. Although offering a general critique of the monological conception of culture and identity – a critique based on Bakhtin's work on polyphony and dialogism, on James Snead's investigation of the hybrid nature of several texts belonging to the European canon (such as The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy), and on the studies of Angelo Ara and Claudio Magris in regard to the heterogeneity of Trieste – she nevertheless begins her essay on a personal note, describing life in the multicultural city of Montreal, where “many children come out of mixed or immigrant marriages, some going to French schools, some to English,” and who can not “define themselves as products of a single culture” (pp. 15-16). Although I agree with Sherry Simon that the “us” of culture is never a given (it should be mentioned that Todorov himself writes that we must “give up basing our thinking on such a distinction” [between us and them] p. 421), it is essential here to emphasize the special ambiguity of the conception of “us” in the ex-colonies of the New World, where the “collision of cultures” implied not only, on the one hand, a confrontation among Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French colonists, but also between the colonists and the African slaves as well as with the immigrants who arrived after independence. Todorov's conception of nationhood (p. 422) as “a more or less perfect (although never total) coincidence of a State and a culture” - which he toned down a bit by adding that a culture is often identified with a particular region, a group of countries, or even a stratum of the population (pp. 424-425) - is even less applicable to the new societies of America than it is to Europe. Not only are we talking about hybrid societies (and what society isn't, to some degree?), but of societies conceived as hybrid, either multicultural (Canada) or mixed-race (Latin America). If, as Ernest Renan insisted at the end of the XIXth century, the idea of the modern nation is based on a conscious disregard for our diverse ethnic origins, the concepts of identity of the societies of the New World have often been based on an explicit symbolization of their heterogeneity.

Whatever our profession we are all engulfed in daily life and in the obscurity and density of the mental world. Who is this “I” that finds expression in such a wide variety of societies, in the convictions of the group and temperament of the individual self, in all that I perceive imperfectly and that makes me me? What does this sometimes slippery, sometimes thorny “I” say about the various attitudes towards knowing: the things I desperately want to know, things I believe myself capable of dispensing with, those I fear knowing?

This inquiry will be limited to an analysis of Turkic borrowings that have been attested in inscriptions found in Mongolia and southern Siberia in the period beginning around the year 700 A.D., as well as in Turkic-Uighur manuscripts, beginning around the year 900 A.D., conserved in northern Tarim (especially in the Turfan region) and in Dunhuang, which is a Chinese outpost on the main road of the silk trade. We will look only at borrowings that predate Islamization, a process that developed rapidly during the eleventh century and of which some borrowings are still part of the language of the Islamic Turkish world. Although most of our study will concentrate on pre-Islamic borrowings that were fully assimilated into written words, we will will also investigate some transcriptions of foreign terms that are mentioned in various manuscripts of a theological bent (most notably of Indian, Iranian, Chinese, and Syriac origin and found in Buddhist, Manichaean, and Nestorian Christian texts) as well as words of a very technical nature. We will also look at more contemporary terms that are derived from several major semantic fields.