How VW was rebuilt by a stubborn Englishman

[Michael Grove]

 There have been plenty of jokes about Volkswagen's origins in the Nazi era

 after news of its dodging emissions standards broke. But less well known

 [IS] the role a British officer played in saving the company directly after

 the Second World War.

 [IT] was August 1945 when Ivan Hirst – a 29-year-old major in the British

 Army - had been assigned the task of dismantling the factory by his

 military superiors. Germany was to have no industry worthy of the name,

 allied commanders had decided. But Hirst saw enough potential in the

 town and its sole source of income to try and save the plant.

 He had himself worked as an engineer during the war and had been 

 impressed by the Volkswagen cars that Allied troops had captured from 

 the Germans. So he found the best remaining version of the car left over

 from the Nazi period, painted it in camouflage, and presented it to his

 superiors as the solution to their urgent need to replace vehicles damaged

 during the war. The military hierarchy agreed and on August 22 work

 began on a contract for 20,000 Volkswagen, plus 500 trailers and 500

 military vehicles.

 [IT] was of course Ferdinand Piëch, the former chairman and chief executive

 of Volkswagen, who recently died aged 82, that was the grandson of

 Ferdinand Porsche, the designer of the VW Beetle, Adolf Hitler’s

 “Car for the People’’, and son of Volkswagenwerk’s wartime manager

 Anton Piëch; whom many saw Ferdinand as a chip off the old block.

 A brilliant engineer, early in his career in the 1960s Ferdinand Piëch helped

 to design the Porsche 906 and 917 racing cars. Moving to Audi, a

 Volkswagen subsidiary, he developed the 80 and 100 models, and helped  

 to engineer the celebrated • four-wheel-drive Quattro.

 As much as I was never able to aspire to ownership of an Audi Quattro,

 I was the very proud owner of a Triumph TR4A which was fitted with

 Laycock-de-Normanville Overdrive, before reverting to our family

 ownership of a VW 411 LE Estate, following my original conversion

 to the perfectly sensible IDEA of an air-cooled "BEETLE".  

.

[Michael Grove]

Why is Morin Interesting for Integral Theorists?


We sense that we are approaching a considerable revolution
(so considerable that perhaps it will not take place) in the great          paradigm of Western science. What affects a paradigm, that is, the vault key of a whole system of thought, affects the ontology, the methodology, the epistemology, the logic, and by consequence, the practices, the society, and the politics? The ontology of the West was founded on closed entities such as substance, identity, (linear) causality, subject, object. These entities do not communicate amongst themselves. Oppositions provoke repulsions or canceling of a concept by another (e.g., subject/object). “Reality” could be grasped by clear and distinct ideas. In this sense, scientific methodology was reductionist and quantitative. The logic of the West was a homeostatic logic and destined to maintain the equilibrium of the discourse by banning contradiction and deviation. Imagination, illumination, and creation, without which the progress of science would not have been possible, only entered science on the sly. They could not be logically identified, and were always epistemologically condemnable. They are spoken of in the biographies of great scientists, but never in manuals and treatises … it is obviously the whole structure of the system of thought that is finding itself thoroughly shaken and transformed.

(Morin, 2008, pp. 34-35)