JOHN HOLGATE The Hermesian Paradigm

A Mythological Perspective on Rafael Capurro’s Angeletics and its Ramifications for the Information Society

It is not only the written tradition that is es- tranged and in need of new and more vital assimilation; everything that is no longer immediately situated in a world – that is, all tradition, whether art or the other spiri- tual creations of the past: law, religion, philosophy, and so forth – is estranged and depends on the unlocking and motivating spirit that we, like the Greeks, name after Hermes: the messenger of the gods. (Hans- Georg Gadamer 2004)

Introduction

Angeletics is the cornerstone of a nascent anthropology of messengers and messaging. The discipline (from the Greek angelos, messenger) has been de- veloped by Rafael Capurro (2003, 2003a, 2003b) over the past decade to pro- vide a culturally rich approach to the science of messages. Capurro’s work (2009) on the historical development of the concept of information (infor- matio) complements his analysis of the message, angelia. His insights are to be understood from within the framework of hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadamer) – a word derived from the Greek god Hermes – phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger), Luhmann’s theory of communicative action and espe- cially Vilém Flusser’s ideas on dialogue and discourse (communicology). While Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication focused on the transmission of physical signals Capurro tends to explore the complex interface between the sender and the receiver of a message. In this article I will explore future transdisciplinary pathways for angeletics or Messaging Theory (MT) within the context of the Information Society and its conceptual framework Information and Communication Technology (ICT). 86 JOHN HOLGATE

1. Hermes the Messenger

Hermes was the great grandfather (through Autolycus) of Jason and Odysseus – the great narrative journeyers and searchers of antiquity. He intervened to save the body of Priam’s son from Achilles in Homer’s Illiad and to rescue his own great grandson Ulysses from Circe in The Odyssey. The link between the god of creativity, travel, information and language and the birth of the Ho- meric literary narrative becomes clear. His daughter Angelia was a bearer of tidings and his mother Maia gave her name to the word ‘maieutics’ – the So- cratic dialectic method of eliciting the truth. Capurro (1997) analysed the rise of the Platonic hermeneutike as the art of heralds, messengers and interpreters of the will of the gods and its demise with the ‘semantic by-pass’ from angelia to logos: There is one chapter in the history of Western thought that concerns the passage from the vertical structure of the messages (Greek: angelia) of the gods transmit- ted by poets and priests to the horizontal structure of logos in the sense of phi- losophical truth-seeking. This by-pass can be interpreted as the search for stable or true knowledge that would reach through dia-logue, i.e., through a critical ex- change of logoi, the objects of knowledge, instead of being the mediator and re- ceiver of an unstable message based on the uncertain will of the gods. (Capurro 1997, 3) He provided (1999) a detailed historical perspective on the concept of angelos and related it to modern philosophy and sociology, particularly to the work of Gadamer, Krippendorff, Vattimo and Luhmann. Karl Kerenyi’s “Hermes Guide of Souls – the mythologem of the masculine source of life” (1976) provides fascinating insights into the character of Her- mes. The work was partly a result of his correspondence with Thomas Mann (Hermes was his favourite god in Greek mythology, which is evident in “The Magic Mountain”). Kerenyi – who was a major influence on Carl Jung’s the- ory of archetypes – here describes the birth of a Hermesian Paradigm (rather than the hermetic paradigm of alchemy) which links Capurro’s concepts of in- formatio and angelia and provides a mythological perspective on ICT practice. According to Kerenyi Hermes occupies a soul-realm that is a middle world be- tween being and non-being and also a basis for his ambassadorial office: The primordial mediator and messenger moves between the absolute “no” and the absolute “yes” or, more correctly between two “no’s” that are lined up against each other, between two enemies, between woman and man. In this he stands on ground that is no ground, and there he creates the way. From out of a trackless world-unrestricted, flowing ghostlike – he conjures up the new crea- tion. (Kerenyi 1976, 77)

The Kaberoi cleansed the angelos on the shores of Lake Acheruse and made her a Goddess of the realm of souls. Out of his relation to the Kabeirian nature