Salvador Pániker

Retroprogressive Essays

Original title:

Ensayos retroprogresivos.

About the book:

Retroprogressive Essays

These days days there is much talk of post-modernism, the new paradigm, and the information society. Prigogine, quantum physics, Eastern cultures, high tec, are all fashionable topics. Determinism, chance,  artificial intelligence, educational reform, change, are much debated issues.

Does anyone really know what this is about? What needs to be done with science? What is the “real” change? How does this change influence our everyday lives? 

In the present book, written in a brilliant style, syncopated and synthesised, we tackle the most fascinating topics of our age from a multi-disciplinary perspective and seeking, above all, a new stimulus for living. Following up on a previous work (Aproximación al origen) the author makes his ideas still more explicit, applying  them to specific questions and providing the main guidelines of what he calls “a retroprogressive philosophy”. 

We take a closer look at the age of complexity and uncertainty, and see the need to “separate off the bonus-value of creativity”, to adapt oneself and survive. But there is no creativity if there is not sureness or security, and in the final analysis ontological security.  Hence the ambivalence of retroprogression. The technical-scientific revolution is all but unstoppable. What is necessary is to advance simultaneously toward the specialised languages of the future and toward the transcendental origin of things.  This double movement has to generate an authentic “New Man”, both mystic and mentally agile, able to enjoy what is difficult, possessed of a new freedom.

About the author:

Salvador Paniker, has a doctorate in industrial engineering and a degree in philosophy, and is the author of, amongst other books, Las signos y las cosas (The signs and things) La dificultad de ser español (The difficulty of being Spanish), Segunda memoria (Second memory), Filosofía y mística (Philosophy and mysticism) and Cuaderno amarillo (Yellow notebook) and Variaciones 95 (Variations 95).