“The Thinking Eye” and “The Open Sky:” Developing a Framework of an Environmental View of Security

Dr. Helen MARGARITOU-ANDRIANESSI

University of Athens

Abstract: Discussion of security integration began with discussion of the threatened local time-frame of our existence and preferred forms of behavior. We examine strategic requirements and stances toward environmental security, because the “gestalt thinking and ontology” and the “reflective cast of mind” influence our experience of security procedures in order to evaluate successful modes of interventions in ecosystem, changes in politics and security exchanges. The goal is a multi-criterion optimization problem which we suggest to bring to a single criterion one: to embrace more gestalt relations in order to reproduce the basic elements of the concept of security and common strategies.

Keywords: spatial thinking, accident time, geospatial security, economic and social development, security integration.

1. 1. PERFORMING MATRICES OF SECURITY

Paul Klee1 produced compositions by elaborating the “ever-present” (cosmic simultaneities) according to the laws of organic qualities of living forms2. Our interests regard his engagement with the most fundamental problem of localizing and controlling space. We can “meet” Klee’s spirit in his Creative Credo3, a work about genesis; “The Thinking Eye4 open in Chaos”, Klee writes, “as an antithesis is not complete and utter chaos5, but a locally determined concept relating to the concept of the cosmos”. The pedagogical meaning6 (Pedagogical Sketch-Book, 1925) of the “ act of creation”, or of the “art of living organism”, concerns in the “secured interrelationships” of the parts of creation considered as a being-in-motion in relation to the motion of the “others”, or moving from counterpart to counterpart. Klee pursued his interest in a world transparent and began to replace the regular constructive forms by organic pieces of a total life considered as fullness of life by gaining a greater identity7 (Spinoza’s integrity)8.

  “Organic nature is one of Klee’s favorite subjects for study. He always emphasizes the “pure pictorial relations” from which they can construct the whole world. Klee warns the student that his forms, like nuns and monks, may live cloistered next door to each other but no progeny will result”9.

Paul Virilio describes the results of a closed “virtual” reality in L’insécurité du territoire:

“he offers one such argument that takes the visible and the invisible to a “virtual” conclusion. It is an argument that confronts a social world that has been permanently altered. This, of course, is the world of digital life where that subset of light in its electronic format powers, the New World.[ …] It is more difficult to catch the algorithm by which this culture spreads and remakes the human social”10.

Digital seductive reality could be retrofitted in order to secure both individual reality and political reality. Virilio provides an enigmatic utopian world where the real is confused with the unreal and the results of paranoia, namely ideas (i.e. Freud’s ferocious, violent ctitics), become the basic “ingredients” in the actual content of the everyday language, namely “accidents” of an accelerated and dangerous culture. Everything is co-present: the events through the media signify the collapse of time, the reversal of time, the simultaneity of all times.

”Beyond utopian “places” Virilio lies the politics of “Real Time” in order to secure the properties of forms of dimensions of our experiences and choices from their illusive representations[…]When space changes from security of one’s “dwelling place” to political or artificial or literary space, space becomes a question of conflict and insecurity. The insecurity must come from a “threat” that emerges from unreasonable beliefs, insurance policy, political fragility and accidental damages” 11.

The commonplace also stands as the essence of liberty in much the same way that “original” thinking (see Paul Klee’s Thinking Eye) is by its nature free in order to secure the rights and freedoms of citizens against political disruption or terrorism12. We can apply the principles of the environmental security13 as a basis for understanding the geospatial patterns of terrorism corresponding to the “end of the space” (or an end of geography)14 of our planet in the age of the politics of disappearance considered as system of “Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)” between East and West.

To avoid this, we must provide the basis of spatial thinking in an uncertain world for the development of geospatial security models: Klee in Accident and Virilio in L’inertie polaire present forms of life out of space, forms analyzed into simple units and opposing geometric shapes, namely they interpret modern aspects of fragility of life, although the laws and the same orderliness in the geometrical balanced fields of Paul Klee in his Ebene Landschaft increase the sense of security by analogy with balanced environmental, economic and social development15 against concentrationary/totalitarian terror.

We must find the relations between politics and terrorism under the prism of concentrationary memory and aesthetics of “evil”. Giorgio Agamben and Paul Virilio consider concentrationary imaginaries after Holocaust and wars, as matrices of “cultural resistance to the threat” 16. When the “vision machine” (the virtual reality and the threatened by cyberspace and instantaneity, local time-frame of our existences) replaces the “thinking eye” (an understanding of relations between facts and values, “I” and “not-I”, between ideas, subjects etc.), human beings focus on a spatial analysis of the intervals between and amongst objects, and with an appearance of reality (only phenomena), they intend to blur the margin between them with a short-sighted attitude (the lost evidence of the explicit and the implicit) because objects lose their structural aspects of forms(we abandon the profound analysis of reality).

The “real aim” of a gimlet-eyed theorist (immediate awareness) is the “actual content” by filling the interval with perceptual knowledge, feelings and dialogue that create the “consistency” of vision considered as reflection on what happens outside the “concrete presence”. The real time of contemplation secures a form perceived by eye movement in accident time17.

As we have already seen, condensed time secures a stereo-reality of space (inferential models of perception for a secure place to live), made up on the one hand of the actual content-reality of immediate appearances and, on the other, of the virtual reality of media trans-appearances and contextual connotations18, in order to understand the matrices of intentions and influences against egocentrism.

1. 2. “CAST OF MIND” AND SECURITY EXCHANGES

Our evolution history (biological and cultural) ensures communicative practices of all persons and gives a new meaning to the principles appropriate to a cooperative community19. Prudence, the idea of a virtuous circle (based on the assurance received from effective collaborations), individual responsibility, express consent and toleration of difference mature the capacity to reach the principles (the same for everyone) of common cultural learning process: particular interests are in progress in social, economic and technopolitical structures and they correspond to common interests (“transmission belt” that interacts with both private and public).

“The“same way” to improve intelligence, education, associations and interests, regards sameness as basic structure of common action in which the Ego relates both to itself and to external world. This procedure secures the private and public autonomy of subjects in the sense of intersubjective relations that enhance legitimation of overlapping-interests and they explain how particular sense of words, peculiar features, special and significant parts of languages in literature, stand at the center of our vision, in order to be fully appreciated as paradigms, situations, choices, values, concerns and common-sense approach to education”20 .

Cast of mind means insignts into the way we process language, forms of our activity and valid principles (idiosyncratically and commonly). People can choose a spatial layout (i.e. fields of research of communications and economic relations by endorsing correlative duties and rights) of “timestream”121.

“This process involves models of understanding ourselves and others: the model of Virtues associated with the meaning of total life; the model of human activity-mixing with nature’s forces that performs appropriation of goods22; struggles for supremacy reconstruct patterns of historical successions, transitions and duration; law’s central role through self-interested strategic stances towards other persons; particular interests and value-orientations; internal (ideology, natural language) and external sources οf political participation or artificial language”23.

We can secure preferred forms of behavior and competencies for conventional interactions among groups which are under threat, by exploring multidimensional identities (modern sociopolitical construction of identity through the interplay of individual and environment), and developing democratic institutions24.

1. 3. ALTERNATIVE “CAST OF MIND” VERSUS “QUICK-FIX” SOLUTIONS. CONTRIBUTIONS TO POLITICAL APPROACH

Human beings elaborate politics of security in a world that faces by disaster and by contemplating ontological relations and diversities: the comprehensive formulations of culture of technology and social interests correspond to a synthetic view of lifestyle and political choices, ensuring that concrete procedures of political participation and communication produce laws acceptable to all who might be deeply affected by them.

Philosophers and scientists believed contemplative could develop a mode of life related to firm actions needed to keep security dilemma (in interstate and intrastate situations) from getting out of control. Our interests to build security systems depend on practical perspectives of realizing a constructive ontology analogous to our articulated experience of total life (cosmos). Ontological comparison considered as humanity’s relation to nature is infused with many meanings: concrete and abstract qualities of being are the actual contents of a chain of formulated entities, but not of an isolated being or thing.

The actual contents regard logical, emotional and ethical values as measures and evaluative standards of relations and differences, i.e. active support, collective practices, participations, choices etc. When actual contents of beings are secure against deterioration and devastations, they guarantee the intrinsic values of total life; Arne Naess discovered inner relations between mountains and mountain people (“a concentration upon what is essential, a self-sufficiency” and the possibility of modesty about active security roles in linking beings with nature).

Rosmini, Naess, Rawls, Dworkin, Honohan, Berlin, Macintyre, Nozick elaborated theories that lead human beings to understand the meaning of “symbiosis” and to secure common intuitions of natural, social and political values in the sense of establishment of the levels for dialogue regarding both urban Micro-level and Macro-level of pluralistic modes of life25. Naess’s theory have been motivated by what he considers as need for decentralization, self-realisation, energy conservation, apperceptive “gestalt”, interventions in ecosystems, and change in politics. His welfare theory is developing by connecting human values and obligation principle with nature protection26.

Naess delves deep into the roots of humanity’s ethical choices towards total life (cosmos) as a plan of protection of the integrity of the whole of existence (“spinozism”27). Rosminian28 concept of security comes as a consequence of careful attitude by trying to avoid risks; His celebrated “judicial security” regards the fundamental laws of a Federal Security Agency and civil happiness.

Rawls promotes a kind of incomplete overlapping consensus that helps to establish a procedure for determining how we are to be ruled29. Dworkin’ s increased interest on equality of welfare means alternative measures for securing equal satisfaction of needs and choices and constant interventions30 by acting in conditions of freedom.

Iseult Honohan’s civic republicanism involves the conditions of necessary interdependence of human beings through political participation31 by securing liberal expression. Isaiah Berlin secures human ability to develop forces of positive liberty by analyzing plural forms of morality32. Alasdair Macintyre delves into individual virtues (courage, charity, justice etc.) and examines interpersonal relations in order to secure consequences33 of human moral choices. Robert Nozick’s work concerns historical phenomena (i.e. the state of nature, the needs, and obligations) intertwined with sufficient moral and political properties, in order to secure the necessary conditions of a «minimal state»34 and collective activities.

Security Studies lead in two directions; their complementary contributions are integrated with one another: Scientists35 develop basic arguments about standards of living reality and politicians, activists and artists work towards a “common place” of all views in order to support the normative values of a defensive realism (i.e. preparation to put up a “stubborn” defense against threatening attitudes during a crisis). While the two directions have increasing use of technology36, they are also associated at the same time with just Rules of Engagement (i.e. the strategy of engagement and cooperation with developing countries) in order to secure collective responsibility for the environment and “gestalt” understanding against limited interests of safety. We must share multifaceted dimensions of realizing coexistence and socialization against “dystopias” by determining negative dimensions of self-. “Dystopia” regards dystopic models like Orwell’s totalitarian picture in 1984 and A. Huxley’s Brave New World. This implies that Environmental education, intervention and strategies could help overcome “dystopic” imagines and visions of political life and solve disagreements about physical and human rights abuses.

A defensive basis for action is provided by realistic views of natural, cultural and ethical diversities that depend rather on principles and paradigms than on exclusive privileges of social circles. These defensive principles produce mechanism applied to self-reliance considered as participation, political function and security integration:

”1) The politicization of conservation, 2) The three poles of the political triangle – the blue, the red, and the green, 3) Politics of pollution/resources/population (for human and non-human beings), 4) Designing ecopolitical areas, 5) Strengthening the local and the global, 6) Direct action (on the level of nonviolence in the movements), and 7) The rich and the poor countries: from exploitation to mutual aid”37.

Human beings aim to control the paradox of conflictual elements and incompatible ideological positions inherent with the terms of coexistence and peace in order to secure the cessation of violence and so to encourage people to change forms of civilizational conflicts38 by investigating modes of “peace-keeping” and “peace-building”.

1. 4. BETWEEN ECOCENTRISM AND TECHNOCENTRISM: 
   LIFEWORLD AND INTERVENTIONS

Lifeworld interactions and interventions considered as application of the legitimate use of forces, secure Biorights and Environmental managers: “we are intricately implicated in a system which guarantees short-term well-being in a small part of the world through destructive increases in material affluence”39; a state will secure public legitimacy and interventions by acquiring competence in new areas. Interventions implemented in a multi-agency way restore degraded land, secure local productivity40 and gradually form ethical reflection on responsibility41.

The decentralized character42 of global system concerns an integrated security regarding collaborations, rules, practices, channels of communications etc., in order to encourage competitions with surrounding countries43 and control “welfare migrations”44, and “increased/decreased benefits”. Political inequalities and diversities (ethnic, cultural, economic) involve the necessity of decentralization and power dividing mechanisms that ensure standards of living (necessary training to do job well, job security, considerable advantages, employer obligation and contract behavior45). Under the motto “The war for talent” persons and companies make plans and provide services and new ergonomic designs in order to secure good consequences of interventions46, and an increased reliance on private actors could consolidate public peace and security. A state can give part of its power/function to Institutions to promote peace against class antagonism and conflicts, to control deforestation, to ensure citizenry and possible interoperability, because it lacks a unifying constitutional framework through which a reformed system of governance would secure the preconditions for an emerging world society. Protection of valuable informations, building their application with security in mind and expanding New Markets offer security in a world of forces by adding values to functional advantages and informations47.

Practical argumentations about “coordination” are based on “steering media” under political control and requirements of justice and equality through taxation revenue in order to secure the good society. Permanent obligation depends on relations of our life to other surrounding things/organisms as always assuming/supporting that something has to be accepted as true for something else to be true.

1. 5. CONCLUSIONS

We must involve decisive actions in conflict resolution48 and clear guidelines to help all living creatures to establish and secure potentialities for life: to have a home, to belong, to live, to raise children. Unity of life means unity-plurality in the sense of development of the interconnectedness of every thing with respect to human beings: we must design the unfolding of our potential and at the same time the maintenance of international peace and security. All established decision-making institutions have to be used in the protection of life: a higher order means a higher unit.

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