THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

An American official recently visiting Paris had raised
the problem in another form by asking «if democracy and
liberty have been preserved... what are we managing to do
with them?» 24 Attempting to answer this question himself,.
Otlet was emphatic:
In the public sphere one word characterises the use to be made of
peace: progress, conceived of as an expansion and perfecting of life
in all its aspects. This idea can be a powerful motivator and a powerful
regulator. Combined with co-operative and federalist notions, it
can give the world a principle of direction it now lacks. 25
Without the mobilisation of the forces of the intellect the
progress of Humanity would, he believed, be slow and erratic.
Mobilisation could occur only through the organisation of the
international associations in which for him were vested, in the
widest sense, the production and dissemination of man's
knowledge.
The notion of an international center was at the heart
of Otlet's theories, for upon it he focused and limited the
otherwise unconfined abstraction of his thought. It held his
ideas together, and gave some semblance of order to their
shifting levels of generality. It could be studied, he said,
from three points of view, as an idea, an institution and a
material body. As an idea, the following explanation
accounted for it:
All that exists, despite its infinite diversity, is one in relation to the
knowledge we can have of it, in relation to the repercussions of the
activities of all that exists. But this unity which is real, concrete, can
be unorganised, amorphous, massive, if there is no effort to co-ordinate
it. It is necessary, therefore, that by intelligence we achieve
a Science, an encyclopedic synthesis, a science of the universal, embracing
everything we know, uniting one thing with another in explanations
ever more general, displaying them by methods ever more
simple. It is necessary, therefore, through our endlessly developing
possibilities, that we achieve an organisation for relations between
men, and for their relations with things, an organisation which should
be oriented towards synegetic action, which takes into account at one
and the same time and as a whole, all men, all countries, all relations:
the Earth, Life, Humanity. 26
The institution which would embody the idea, Otlet
believed, would be realised through a great «confederation»,
what he described as «an organised effort of co-operation and
co-ordination...», which would «group in a triple, federalised
hierarchy, international associations, national associations
and groups and individuals*, the international associations retaining
overall control. «At the World Center all of the organisations
and institutions which have been born in the course of
successive civilisations, will be... amplified in an extraordinary
way in their power on the mind, because all aspects of
their agency will have been combined to function each with
the other.» 27 281'