An impression that stack to my mind while listening Latour's talk in Aarhus University

The talk: http://cas.au.dk/en/currently/events/the-futures-lectures-series/bruno-latour/

In Latour's drawing the spatial element is pronounced and thought about. But time seems to be "sliced":
"We" are now facing a situation and "we" need to decide. It seems that "we" , who come together "now" to decide, can split time between the past and the future.
So although space seems quite complicated time seems a continuous thread.

I thought. What about our ancestors? The ancestors whose voices go through us. Is their judgment, their wisdom, their intuition allowed to arrive to our hearts? When we insist on something, not because we can prove it, but because we feel sensitive to these old voices and waiting for responses that cannot be foreseen "objectively", are we just stubborn?

In my tradition I think of the church gathering the saints, the angels, us living now. One may also think of those indians smoking their pipes in special houses

So let us make another picture, similar to the one with the Globe

I think that here too there is a third attractor which I called the house of history (I do not mean Whigg history)

I think also of Ricoeur in “What make us think?”
“pg 268. the idea of being preceded in one’s capacity for speech by the word of another is for me the point of origin, the point of departure, and , in the last resort, the ultimate source of religious authority”

And feel: We need to draw sactity from somewhere. This is not the case of "risky creativity of our own future". Something more solemn is at stake.

A short prayer

AIME tends to have a very "conservative" influence on me.

Here is an example

Rethink Modernity! - audiences

There are some audiences that I wonder how they would "take" Reset Modernity! Perhpas they are already comming in. It would be nice to get something of their feedback on twitter or in the blog

Bakhtin Latour Vygotsky

I should know more about Bakhtin. As it happens I got to have a better understanding of his work while searching for interesting articles refering to the "Inquiry in the MOE" book in google scholar. I fell on the article
Cooren, F., & Sandler, S. (2014). Polyphony, ventriloquism, and constitution: In dialogue with Bakhtin. Communication Theory, 24(3), 225-244.

which I found very interesting. Francois Cooren was a mediator in the AIME project so I guess is a great person to comment on the similarities between Latour and Bakhtin (in a sense the voices of Bakhtin are very similar to the modes of Latour, it seems to me. As if the whole world is a big "discussion")

Through another way I fell on a very interesting exchange refering to Vigotsky and Bakhtin (much closer to education now) :
Matusov, E. (2011). Irreconcilable differences in Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s approaches to the social and the individual: An educational perspective.Culture & Psychology, 17(1), 99-119.
and
Cornejo, C. (2012). Contrasting Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s approaches to consciousness. Culture & Psychology, 18(1), 109-120.


Bakhtin Vygotsky Latour. For all of them  consciousness seems stepping in “from the outside”. Moreover they are all very sensitive to litterature.

In what follows I have put excerpts from these three articles. I think that they are interesting from the point of view of the discussion in AIME

Cooren, F., & Sandler, S. (2014). Polyphony, ventriloquism, and constitution: In dialogue with Bakhtin. Communication Theory, 24(3), 225-244.

“Advocating a communicative constitution of reality thus means not only that various aspects of reality speak to us (and through us, to each other, making of us both actors and passers), but that these acts of speaking or communicating are constitutive of these very aspects. In other words, communication participates in their modes of existence. For sure, if they speak to us, it is also because we know/learned how to make them say things, that is, we actively participate in this activity of ventriloquism. This relational/dialogical ontology, thus enjoins us, as analysts, to resist naive forms
of constructivism and realism.”

“In other words, we have to think dialogically or relationally, that is, we need to acknowledge that Jack and Harry are both passers and actors in this scene. Passers because multiple facets of their context express themselves through their turns of talk (in which case, these facets can be considered the ventriloquists and Jack and Harry the figures). Actors because Jack and Harry are not transparently conveying these facets, but are selecting what counts or matters and how it should count or matter (in which case, Jack and Harry can be considered the ventriloquists and the facets the figures). Claiming that communication is constitutive of reality thus amounts to noticing that the mode of existence of its figures includes the way they express themselves in this kind of situation. It is therefore a form of constructivist realism.”

“we believe that we do not necessarily need to take the human beings as the absolute startingpoint
inour analyses,but thatwe can, on the contrary, showtowhat extent humans are themselves led to recognizewhat should matter or count through their experiences and conversations.”

“Echoing Bakhtin, we want to leave open the possibility of eventfulness, creativity, and discovery (McNamee & Shotter, 2004), that is, the possibility of a world where things start to express and ventriloquize themselves even if they might not have counted or mattered to us before. It is therefore a world that (through its various incarnations and embodiments, i.e., its figures) also comes to speak to and for itself, a world, again, where humans are both actors and passers. If this world is indeed ours (because it preoccupies or even haunts us and our discussions), it is also because we belong to it, that is, we are its.”


Matusov, E. (2011). Irreconcilable differences in Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s approaches to the social and the individual: An educational perspective.Culture & Psychology, 17(1), 99-119.

“For both Vygotsky and Bakhtin, human consciousness was the central issue of their investigation.”

“According to Vygotsky, in my interpretation of course, mutual understanding, along with successes in goal-directed activities, provides the objectivity of human consciousness. A fully developed person has high-level self-control, self-determination, and independence. People need each other to 1) achieve goals and 2) be fully understood. In the extreme, the perfectly developed person does not need other people at all”

"As a psychologist, Vygotsky viewed the individual as a container of self-contained higher mental functions."

"There is not a true meeting of two consciousnesses in Vygotsky’s developmental paradigm.”

"For Bakhtin, in my interpretation of course, a gap in the mutual understanding between people is a necessary condition for dialogic, humane communication, and for the entire human relationship."

"For dialogue to occur, the participants should not only expect to be surprised by each other (dialogic interaddressivity) but also have to share a focus on a common subject that is both interesting and problematic for all. The problematic aspect(s) of the common topic – a particular issue (i.e., subjectivity) – can be different for different participants. I call this second requirement interproblematicity."

"For my discussion here, the most important point that differentiates Vygotsky from Bakhtin is the mono-consciousness of Vygotsky’s approach to discourse."

"Vygotsky did not raise the issue of dialogic interaddressivity between I and me in inner
speech…. For Vygotsky, inner speech is a special type of mediation for better mastery of self-control"

"[for Bakhtin] Transparency and oneness of the consciousness preserves tasks and goals but
kills communication and relationship."

"The participants’ orientation of dialogic interaddressivity – expecting that each participant
contributes something new, interesting, and important – is necessary in dialogic pedagogy for deep learning as well as the participants’ ontological engagement in the joint problem."


Cornejo, C. (2012). Contrasting Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s approaches to consciousness. Culture & Psychology, 18(1), 109-120.

“Vygotsky’s approach is much more multifaceted than we usually think.”

“The Vygotskyan motto is rather ‘‘no consciousness without language’’… More than a tool, the word is a ‘‘microcosm of consciousness, related to consciousness as a living cell is related to an organism, as an atom is related to the cosmos’’.”

“The sense [in Vygotsky] is a dynamic, fluid, complex and unstable wholeness. It is, in brief, the phenomenologically experienced meaning, in contrast to the abstract, clear-cut and literal meaning
of scientific linguistics…. The temporality, vividness and dynamicity of human consciousness come into focus, rendering static concepts useless. By putting the socially determined meaning within the conscious experience, Vygotsky is subordinating objective meaning to subjective meaning. That is, he is doing exactly the reverse of what he proposed previously”

“While in Matusov’s view Vygotsky sustains a monological conception, Bakhtin promotes a dialogical one. Understood dialogically, consciousness emerges in the permanent gap between voices; every position in the inner speech of a person is an answer to the previous voice as the motive for
a new position. There is no way to fill such a gap: its presence is precisely the source of the dynamicity of consciousness. For Bakhtin, thinking is ontologically dialogical; for Vygotsky, in Matusov’s interpretation, thinking is instrumentally dialogical."

“Bakhtin’s theory is not about persons; it is about the development of ideas. Regarding that this development cannot take place outside the materiality of language, the ideas are embodied in a material human voice.”

“Bakhtin is trying to capture the socio-semiotic concatenation of ideas materialized in words and signs—in his case, in living voices. This kind of semiosis exceeds by far the limits of the individual mind or consciousness. The voiceideas happen to live in dialogical interchanges—including the inner speech of human consciousness. Dialogue, according to Bakhtin, draw into the minds of persons. Therefore, a ‘‘voice’’ does not correspond to a ‘‘person.’’ Voices are the embodiment of socially available ideas, something quite different from the beings we call people: ‘‘As such, they [all the languages of heteroglossia] encounter one another and co-exist in the consciousness of real people—first and foremost, in the creative consciousness of people who write novels’’ (Bakhtin,
1981, p. 292).”

“Distinguishing between persons and voices is not merely an academic exercise of conceptual precision; the differentiation helps to clarify the very unit of analysis in Bakhtin’s theory…. By contrast, when the voice displays the role of basic unit of analysis, personal agency and subjective selfhood are dispensable—if not simply epiphenomena…. As a matter of fact, Bakhtin wrote that voices-ideas have meaning, that they are living expressions of themes, and that they can be drawn
into human minds.”

“He ]Bakhtin] perceived that Dostoevsky produced not only a perspicuous and highly sensitive
description of inter-human dialogue, but also unknowingly offered a subtle model of human consciousness. Due to this transposition, we owe Bakhtin fine insights about the nuances of inner speech. … that every inner language usage entails the adoption of a position to a previous (internal) interpellation; that verbal thinking is not the neutral manipulation of static information units, but rather the creation of living utterances; that every utterances shows a myriad of meaning aspects depending on the voices that resound in it; that in human conscious experience many voices permanently coexist; that not all of the voices of inner speech are logically consistent. Like the characters of the Dostoevky’s novels, who deploy their personal features by way of encountering others and entering into dialogues with them, the inner speech of persons involves a multiplicity of social voices. Each voice addresses the other, requesting with this position another answer, and so on in an endless process.”

“It is important to note that Bakhtin does not directly address consciousness, but rather voices in the consciousness.  … But it is less adequate when we ask how language is lived from the perspective of the thinking person. Consciousness is not synonymous of language—either monological or dialogical. Dialogism may be an essential dimension of it, but it is not the unique dimension. Nor is consciousness the same as a collection of voices. Then consciousness is purely linguistic or dialogic only when you are observing it from the outside. Bakhtin’s concept of voice is a description from a viewpoint external to my own; it is a portrayal of my voice, not my voice. At this point we arrive to the general conclusion that Bakhtin creates a sociological theory of consciousness, not a psychological one”

“He adopts a sort of third-person perspective with respect to meaningful constructions that characterize a variety of hermeneutic approaches. It may be the case that the internal dialogue is composed of concatenated interactions ‘‘filled with struggle.’’ But from this description it does not
follow that the person lives an internal struggle as such. If a person is in fact adopting this or that voice, usually she does not experience this social voice as an alien entity.”

“The very connection between the social, external voice and the self is what is conspicuously absent in Bakhtin’s model. Vygotsky filled this void with his concept of ‘‘internalization.’’”

“For him,[Vygotsky] internalized social relations configure tools for the ulterior subjectivity. Signs are also social in origin, but became part of the self. The social language becomes my language, allowing my own expressiveness. Bakhtin’s theory lacks an equivalent concept to bridge the social voices with personal selfhood. In his model, this question does not even exist, precisely because selfhood is not the kind of dimension that can be inquired about in discursive or sociological terms”

“Vygotsky and Bakhtin… differ in how much freedom they admit the person has.”

“Here, linguistic tools are ‘‘stones in the edifice of sense,’’ ‘‘potentialities’’ of real speech. As argued above, this sensitivity situates Vygotsky right in the phenomenological spirit, where language ‘‘lives for and by this constant aspiration to say the inexpressible, to capture the elusive’’ (De Leo, 2009, p. 180). Conversely, in Bakhtin the inexpressible cannot exist since every idea is a voice-idea. What is
thinkable has to be linguistically constituted. As a dialogue deploys appealing new voices to get involved in it, it is by definition an unfinished process. Transposing this feature to the person, the unfinalizability of the individual self follows. But note again that it is the dialogue that strives for its completion, not the person. There is no such a thing as a personal Self attempting to reach a complete and definitive position.”

“Although one is more psychologist and the other more sociologist, they have common beliefs with respect to the social constitution of the mind, the objective nature of language, and the materiality of ideas by means of the latter.”

Why distinguish quasi subjects fron quasi objects?

Quasi objects vs Quasi subjects seems to be something quite important in AIME. It is an axis that splits the first three modes from all the others and organizes at least nine modes in triads.

1. Yet with all this attention to symmetries one may ask: Why do we distinguish quasi subjects from quasi objects? Why have three modes that form quasi- subjects and three modes that form quasi-objects and not  six modes forming quasi-whatevers?

pg 428

"What is an object? The set of quasi subjects that are attached to it. What is a subject? The set of quasi objects that are attached to it."

pg425

"There is no better definition of any existent whatsoever beyond this list of the other beings through which it must, it can, it seeks to pass."

2. But I also read

pg 372

"This is what semiotics identified so clearly with its theory of enunciation. This is what allowed us never to begin our analysis with acting, thinking, speaking human beings, humans capable of “creating technologies,” “imagining works,” or “producing objective knowledge.” To put it in the shorthand terms of anthropogenesis: humanoids became humans—thinking, speaking humans—by dint of association with the beings of technology, fiction, and reference. They became skillful, imaginative, capable of objective knowledge, by dint of grappling with these modes of existence. This is why we have reused the expression “quasi objects” to designate both the advent of these beings (they are truly objects) and the still-empty place of the subjects that might come later (they are only quasi  objects)."

and

"Now, the three modes grouped together here are distinguished by the fact that they come to fill, as it were, the still-empty form of the implicit enunciator. They are not subjects (we know that the subject has been unmoored; we arrive at the subject without starting from the subject), but these beings are nevertheless offers of subjectivity, of critical importance for the definition of our anthropology. They are thus in fact quasi subjects. To sum up the originality of this third group in an overhasty sentence, let us say that, while following along the political Circle, humans become capable of opining and of articulating positions in a collective—they become free and autonomous citizens; by being attached to the forms of law, they become capable of continuity in time and space—they become assured, attributable selves responsible for their acts; by receiving the religious Word, they become capable of salvation and perdition—they are now persons, recognized, loved, and sometimes saved."

So what am I to make of it. Two things:
a) First there is a kind of arrow of the course of action. It probably has to do with what is called in AIME "the presence of a plane of enounciation" which distinguishes a source and a target. In the case of quasi-objects, the modes concentrate on communities that are realized on the target side: the community of works of art with their elaborate relations, the community of technological objects with their elaborate relations, the community of "objective entities" with their elaborate relations. In the case of quasi-subjects, the modes concentrate on communities in the source side of the motion: the community of believers, the community of politically active people, the community of legal persons

b) this situation strongly reminds me of the notion of duality in mathematics. (once more category theory as a training camp for philosophy! )

Now one may ask : There are courses of action in the case of [REP], [HAB], [MET]. How come there is no distinction for them and then suddenly this crucial distinction comes into existence? (Crucial also for [ATT], [MOR], [ORG])
I have no clue. Perhaps the idea that  quasi-subjects and quasi-objects do not exist for the first three modes is wrong. (What kind of trial determines wether what I say here is true or not? Discussion by a community, isn't it so? )

Thinking on [MOR]

1.  I find Chapter 16 moving and revealing.  I feel as if observing somebody (a modern) who is asked to do something very difficult: to abandon his/her high moral ground. The Grand calculation of the common good has at this point something very pleasing for the modern: it works like a Cornucopia that produces a constant flow of goods towards the modern nations (as far as care is taken so that the Cornucopia continues to function). What can be the motive to abandon this pleasant arangement? (Would I , who say I am a semi-modern, have the courage to do this?). How difficult it is when the alternative arrangement proposed in AIME demands strong conceptual change (which means that intially it may be incoprehensible)? Why work hard to understand something that makes me more vulnerable?

It seems that the consequences of the current Grand calculation, the one that works on indisputable facts, are disastrous for the Earth and therefore for all of us too. But there are many ways to go about it. Perhaps some modern values have to go to sleep for a while. Perhaps negotiations can start after a period of war (as is often the case): a war among humans mediated by the crumbling of the biosphere.
Are the moderns not getting used already to the idea that it was wrong to set the exchange value of humans in an one to one base-no matter where they were comming from-  (something that gets accute now because moderns know now much more and are way stronger, in the extent of the projects that they can undertake , than 40-50 years ago?) ? Don't we (the others) feel that there is gradually built a measuring device (using our memes, our beliefs, our learning prowness, our habits) that measures our humanness, our lives' worth (measured in units of "life of one modern")? That a member of a "companion species" in the proper setting  may have much more worth than a human"wrongly composed" somewhere far away?

So there is this other option. Why would moderns go for the way of AIME? Or of Reset Modernity? (though I am nor sure if I do  not misrepresent the AIME project here. It seems that there are so many people that feel beyond "humanity" in Western Europe today). As a semi-modern I can only imagine a spiritual reason.
To me it seems that  the present situation pushes a devide amongst  the moderns themselves. There are people who will go for utility (even if they try to be humane etc) and there are people who will risk the way  that various spiritual traditions point to.

2.  In AIME "the supreme duty" of every being, and therefore the ground of morality, is at the same time the ground of existence: "[Every existent has a supreme duty, which also defines its existence and "substance"] to explore through what other beings it must pass to subsist, to earn its subsistence, [to be Articulated]".(pg 454)The main duty, the sign of existing, the bond between all existens, is Articulation. Which is not a broadcast towards the void, like us sending a message for possible extraterestials, but it consists of alteration. "Is" and "ought to be" are summoned together in "[counting] how many beings an existent needs to pass through and how many alterations it must learn to adapt to in order to continue to exist".
It is tempting to read the last sentence as soaked by sweat, as a kind of war movie where the hero manages to kill the enemies and find himself in some safe heaven. "Life in the favela". But this misrepresents the splendor of this motion. (Now I am religiously influenced. For me every such aspect of moving alone is a participation in a dialogue with God: though in what I say, "is" is not separated from "being in koinonia")

3. pg 454 "If I exist through the other, which of us is the end and which the means? I, who have to pass by way of it, am I its means or is it mine? Am I the end or is it my end?"
But this is exactly a question that the societies of the moderns do not pose. They are my resources, they are my recruits. They are not my ends!!!

If we consider how modernization comes to us, traditional civilizations, then it comes in two steps:
a) all relations are considered power relations between individual agents and
b) I, the listener of the call of modernity, am called forth to consider others as my means. To be obidient to tradition is the cardinal crime, a dehumanizing act.

Long time

Inquiry into modes of existence pg 418
"The fact that there are no more servants in that seven-story Haussmannian building in Paris doesn’t
mean that Balmain’s script (the architect’s name is inscribed on the façade) won’t keep operating. Balmain decided in 1904 that the elevator for the owners would only go up as far as the sixth floor. Today, all the students who have to climb the back stairs find themselves “under” a script so dispersed in time that to be “above” it one would have to go back to the Balmain agency in 1904, or else spend a fortune on technology"

This is a quote that brings to my mind sociobiology. If instread of thinking the time region till 1904  we go quite back (on top of [REF] time), at the times of the savana and then we imagine the repetitive music of birth and death, with slight or bigger variations, played on living meat, that gets coordinated with other living meat and other beings at different levels of organization (seen again thorugh the forms that populate [REF]), until behavior and emotions and potentialities that just spring forth today can travel back in time, changing on the way until they find their seed-form into probability judgements about far away "worlds" that we can collectively agree on today.

It is as if we construct a poem of the past,  a peculiar form of art , respecting [REF] requirements, which is able to make a possible history for all those relevant beings, housing them into a common church.

Then science too, with its own repetition, from generation of scientists to generation of scientists , sensitive to new interpretations and theories,  sensitive to new concerns and politics, is like another evolutionary march that casts and recasts the poem of the past 

the quantum feel of the modes of existence

(when I talk about quantum mechanics below I am talking about a quite elementary level of quantum mechanics. I was trained as an experimental physicist and my knowledge of quantum filed theory etc is very very very superficial. I have in mind QM as in the 3rd Volume of Feynman's lectures in Physics and the first chapters of "Feynman, R. P., Hibbs, A. R., & Styer, D. (2010). Quantum mechanics and path integrals. Dover Publications.")

Pg 298

"There is no other world—but there are worlds differently altered by each mode."

And here I was, walking in my city Volos, wandering about the presence of the modes of existence. And as I walked, I saw the flowers that the major has put next to the pavement, in long lines. A major that is quite a contested figure here.

So the experience of this meeting with the flower could also be perceived as a starting point along different trajectories, each defined by their own [PRE]-vector: There it was an existent going along its unique path of life [REP], an ever chaning existant [MET],  meeting that was a case of [HAB] to be possibly retracted from its smooth ways, a part of a technical project [TEC] (the irrigation pipe was clear next to it, not mentioning the pavement and the way the flower was brought forth for such uses), an object for artistic contemplation [FIC], a scientific species [REF], a contested matter of politics [POL] (who was selected so that these plants were baught from), a legal issue [LAW] (what if I step on them?) , a religious message [REL] (Is somebody talking to me?), a part of my life in Volos [ATT], a matter of disciplinary movement [ORG] (drivers don' tdare to step on them), a part of broader concerns [MOR] (are flowers the priority at this point?).

It is like an explosion, like me and the flowers are scattered in a future of potentialities, like an image of multiple worlds, only that the dimensions are not the dimensions of string theory , but the dimensions defined by [PRE].

I could imagine that my "I" is distanced far away and sees from beyond the multiverse of the modes and then "I" ( a model of myself) is seen too and "comprehended". But this would be a new kind of bifurcatory move. I can abstain from it and prefer to stray within a space of discourses and fleeting subjectivities and objectivities. It is probably better.

Now what comes to my mind quantum-mechanically (though I propose one to avoid the "sight from beyond") is the beautiful presentation of Feymnan of the unfolding of an electron's future, each time splitting in different directions (trajectories), having different "weights".  It is the picture in "Quantum mechanics and path integrals". Then one may pose a question. And the big "tree" of potentialities provides a (probabilistic ) answer. Similarly we humans seem to "pose questions" by existing in our ways. Or maybe we register meetings/witnessings .

I am now thinking that one does not have to see the elaborate mathematical construction of the paths in QMs and the functions that accompany them as something "that has to be out there". It is a poem, and it is so beautifully constructed that the world is moved by it (as we are moved by poems). It is so beautifully constructed that uppon a question been formed in us, it responds with a probabilistic oracle which reality respects.

What is an institution in ΑΙΜΕ?

In AIME it is difficult to comprehend what an institution is called to be. My problem is that we are given many examples of  (old-style) institutions that betray their values but not much in the positive side of institutions that are faithful to their values.

I gather some comments from the AIME site:

"We will say of an institution that it is well established when it knows how to present the value proper to each mode without at the same time being obliged to devalue other values."

"The institution would define its values differently if, instead of basing them on transcendence, it agreed to establish them based on the reprise of a trajectory - the narrow path of mini-transcendence.

"How different science would be were it to recognize its fragility and say, “Be tolerant with me because I know how fragile the maintenance of my sort of truth is"; other institutions, might perhaps, by this token, be made more tolerant in turn..."

I wander: what kind of "animals" are these new "Institutions"? Since we are to recognise their presence in each mode, it must belong to the terminology of [PRE] (not [ORG] ). But I have no "good example" to think about.

Then I read in the MOE book:
pg 90

"The following argument ought to be advanced with more diplomacy than we are capable of for the moment, but the category mistake would be to believe that the world before the invention of knowledge was already made of “objective knowledge.” This does not keep us from saying (on the contrary, it is what allows us to say) that after chains of reference have been set up and gradually charged with reality, yes, undeniably, there is objective reality and there are scientist subjects

capable of thinking it."

This leads me to some thoughts that help me:

1. The "institution" of "natural science documentaries" produces and distributes a kind of "democratic" objectivity: "Objectivity for all", as a product to be distributed. 

2.It helps me think of Eucharist to understand the contrast between what Latour says and what happens in the documentaries. In the case of [REF] we could have something like the Eucharist of Objectivity.

3.The case of the usual documentaries is like people going to the Eucharist and "doing the moves". Something is distributed to them, they gain some satisfaction and that's it. In the case of what Latour proposed, what comes to my mind is participating to the mystery of objectivity, in a similar way that we participate to the mystery of Eucharist.

4. Perhaps this is generalizable. Each institution that is going to house a value has a similar dimension of mystery (I use the term in the religioys sense not in the detective stories sense). We are called to participate in the articulation of the value (which again and again in the book is presented as if it is a paradox), not to develop a consumer relation with it.

5. So these institutions bring to my mind also what I have heard ( I know next to nothing about) about the concept of Li (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(Confucianism)) in Confucianism, and they are fragile.