Frederick David Abraham©
www.blueberry-brain.org
There are two principal ways in which reflective human
beings try, by placing their lives in a larger context, to give sense to those
lives. The first is by telling the story of their contributions to a community.
. . The second way is to describe themselves as standing in immediate relation
to a nonhuman reality. . . I shall say that stories of the former kind
exemplify the desire for solidarity, and that stories of the latter kind
exemplify the desire for objectivity. . . the search for Truth (Rorty, 1985, 3).
Precisely without claiming mastery, philosophical hermeneutics, with its stress on dialogue rather than system, is filling the void left by philosophy’s foundational project¾its attempt to establish an unshakeable ground of certain knowledge, now for the most part abandoned. In the absence of ultimates and absolutes, we are left with what Gadamer, echoing the German poet Hölderin, called ‘the conversation that we ourselves are’ (1989, 378) (Crucius, 1991, 8).
Might these quotes be saying, among other things, that philosophy is personal, and as tentative conversation, represents our continual efforts to transform ourselves? Would being personal imply that the rational and the emotional are interactive, inseparable aspects of being and philosophy? Do they imply, as Gadamer says, that “understanding is being” (Gadamer, 1967 49); and as Crusius says, that philosophy is “topoi, the generative commonplaces of its thinking?” (Crusius, 1991, 11)
There have been apparently oppositional trends of searching for absolute knowledge (the Eleatics, Plato, Confucius) versus searching for knowledge about diversity and change (Heraclitus, Gorgias, Protagoras, Lao Tzu). I shan’t attempt a review of this history here. The subject is too vast, being involved in almost every philosophy from the Greek cosmologists to the contemporary postmodern and gender-oriented literatures. Could the distinction be partly true and partly false? Many have tried to reconcile them. Xenophanes, was probably the first to try, viewing them as problems of being and becoming[2], and of rest and motion. Due to my interest in nonlinear dynamics, I have viewed them aspects of stability and instability (change). The stage for this distinction was really set by
Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 544-484 B.C.) [who] argued that the entire substance of the world is in a ceaseless process of change, while the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides (c. 540-470) held to the opposing theory that the ultimate substance (Being) is unchanging and unchangeable, permanent (Sahakian, 1968, 6).
Postmodernism and critical theory are heavily concerned with the relationship between emancipation and theory into which the concepts of truth become imbedded (Dennard, 1997; Poster, 1989):
[Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard claim] that the quest
for certain truth and the claim of having attained it are the greater dangers.
The logocentric philosophical tradition, with its strong assertions about
truth, is complicit, for them, in the disasters and abominations of the
twentieth-century Western history. On this difficult, even tragic issue of the
relation of politics to truth, poststructuralists in general strive for a
cosmopolitan position that makes every effort to recognize differences, even
uncomfortable or disagreeable ones, and for a theory of truth that is wary of
patriarchal and ethnocentric tendencies that hide behind a defense of reason as
certain, closed, totalized. Above all, poststructuralists want to avoid forms
of political oppression that are legitimized by resorts to reason, as this kind
of legitimation has been, in their view, one of the paradoxical and lamentable
developments of recent history (Poster,
1989, 16).
William Irwin Thompson (1996), speaking of cultural transformations (using bifurcation metaphors from chaos theory), was also speaking about personal transformations by implication from the life of LaoTzu and its effect in turn on his own life. He contrasts the rigid approaches of Confucius to the “flow of the Tao and the anarchic wisdom of Taoism”.
Loa Tzu’s celebration of ‘the mysterious female’ is in
direct opposition to the dominant culture of his time. The world around Lao Tzu
is the patriarchal world of warriorship, of hierarchy and of geometrical order.
. .
Nativistic movements are revitalization movements that
seek to take a culture back to its roots in a mythically recreated past. When a
traditional culture is at the edge of extinction, then a mystery school springs
up that seeks to go back to the ways of the ancestors as a way of avoiding the
decadence of the moderns. . .
The nativistic movement is a universal phenomenon.
When a traditional culture is at the edge of extinction, and when a new
technological civilization is consolidating its conquest and dominance, then
the last light of the old flares up. Most often the nativistic leader is the
divided man who in his own parentage feels the intense conflict between the
dominant culture of the father and the ancient culture of the mother (Thompson, 1996, 248-250).
However, could revitalizations paradoxically, in seeking a personal sense of topoi and self, not simply revert to an old order, but incorporate new ideas and desires along with traditional elements in a forward evolution? The myth presented below is an example of a “mythically recreated past”, generated from the tensions of new scientific ideas impinging on a hegemonic religious institution (the Catholic Church). I stumbled on it when searching for roots of science before Galileo, whose own fascinating story reveals similar dynamics. Going back to Roger Bacon I was startled to discover that teaching Aristotle in Paris had been banned by the Pope, the very opposite of the problem with Galileo. This paradox took me back another century, from the 13th to the 12th, when a book that simply jumped off a library shelf onto my cart when researching Bacon. Galileo was condemned for, among other things, the challenge his finding presented to Aristotelian notions. Bacon was brought from Oxford to Paris to teach Aristotle as the Church began to realize that Aristotle might be employed to their purposes rather than presenting a threat, a realization that had been growing over the past century. [Why is left as an exercise for the reader.]
There were at least three threads of intellectual concepts at the early 12th century. The traditional scholastic approach of Augustine, the NeoPlatonic ideas of Plotinus, and the scientific ideas perhaps best expressed by William of Auvergne. These three threads are not independent. Now, I want to share my preliminary explorations of the little book that jumped off the shelf on
Increased contact with the Arabic and Judaic world led to an explosion of translation of Greek texts into the world of Latin, scholastic Europe. These and other cultural and technical changes led to profound impacts on intellectual developments.
The twelfth century was a turning point in medieval
civilization; so marked was the transformation that took place in the material
conditions of life that it has been possible to speak of a ‘technological
revolution.’ Encouraged by the breakup of the feudal monopoly of the soil, by
the economic and political emancipation of urban artisans organized into
guilds, and by the active mobility of men and goods in a market economy, the
use and spread of new techniques of production and commerce profoundly altered
not only the material side of life but also the modes of perception,
sensibility, and representation that pertain to the life of the spirit. Did not
Aristotle base his analysis of change and becoming upon the analogy of the
artisan and his work? (M.-D Chenu,
1968, 39; quoted in Stock, 5).
Scientific
ideas [in the Middle Ages] frequently underwent evolution within the framework
of myth and appeared less often as total revolutions in world-view than as
internal, structural changes within the myths themselves. In this sense, the Cosmographia
was the introduction of a relatively new myth of the creation of the world and
of man into European philosophical literature. (3)
During the early twelfth century when it was written,
certain intellectual developments took place which, by general historical
agreement facilitated the emergence of a scientific sensibility. Owing to the
translation of hitherto unavailable doctrines like the Aristotelian physics and
Ptolemaic astronomy, a new emphasis was placed on the quadrivium[5],
while, within the European intellectual tradition itself, interest in logical
rationalism and in mathematics helped to lay the groundwork for a scientific
methodology. At the same time a number of important technological innovations
were made, particularly in agriculture and in warfare [and in commerce, urbanization,
educational institutions, etc]. These served to increase man’s control over the
natural environment and, as a result, to alter his perception of his place in
the natural order. More generally, there was a growth within medieval culture
as a whole of a certain existential naturalism, a this-worldliness which
balanced the tendency towards mysticism in the Augustinian tradition. This
sensibility makes its appearance in literature, in cathedral sculpture, and
indirectly in intellectual debates” (3-4).
“One perspective through which these intellectual
changes may profitably be viewed is that of tradition and innovation, of
classical form adapting to the new naturalism. On the one hand, there was a
purely classical revival, affecting not only literature but law, theology, and
the various sciences. On the other hand, the interest in the visible,
empirically definable world insured that naturalism interpenetrated the
classical revival in numerous ways. One finds the new relation to antiquity
expressed in commentaries on the bible and classical authors; in encyclopedias
designed to embrace the accumulated knowledge of centuries but now including a
higher degree of information about the real world; in monumental sculpture, in
which the saints and the heroes of antiquity are not eternal archetypes, models
of wisdom and of action, but begin to resemble the citizens of medieval towns. (6).
Not . . . a radical break with tradition as in the
Renaissance—the classical debate on myth and science, which had really begun
with Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s Timaeus, was reopened in a new
context. The question, first of all, was whether the intellectual forms
inherited in tradition could any longer serve as a useful foundation for a
scientific understanding of the universe.
The responses varied greatly. The tendency towards conservatism in
literary format insured that most authors expressed their new ideas in
discourses which possessed recognizable links with antiquity. A great many
literary forms from the classical and, in particular the late Latin world were
revived for the purpose: the dialogue, the satura (or prosimetrum),
the encyclopedia, the commentary, and more rarely, the epic and the myth
itself. (6-7).
Yet beneath the use of such classical formats for
uniting traditional and original ideas lay a deeper problem: whether science,
or the individual sciences, would not have to evolve languages which suited
their own internal requirements. In particular, as rational modes of thought
became more familiar, and as the natural-philosophic corpus, swelled by
translations, increased in size, new approaches began to be made to the chief
problem between myth and science: the creation of the world and of man. . .
Historical genesis emphasized the role of an omnipotent creator in whose
beneficent image both the world and man were created [e.g., the book of
Genesis]; structural[6]
genesis, while not denying the existence of the creator, emphasized the
creational modalities of the existing world, its laws and principles of procreation
[e.g., Timaeus]. (7-8).
Perhaps Stock understates at this point some elements of the contextual dynamics. One of these is the extent to which tensions between conservative and liberal elements in the church led to the use of myth, metaphor, and allegory to hide the full impact of the innovations being deployed, as he later discusses. This may have been even more important than in not having new language communities developed or accepted to present the new scientific ideas. Another contextual dynamic might have been the extent to which personality factors, as mentioned above and which feature heavily in postmodern literature which in turn leans heavily on psychoanalytic concepts of unconscious motivation, leads one to the predisposition to particular social, philosophical, and religious beliefs. Current nonlinear systems thinking and nonlinear approaches in the arts and humanities implicates the interdependence of all these factors. The limits of the application of systems’ approaches to understanding social processes was debated by Luhmann (1984/1995) and Habermas (Habermas, 1985/1987c), which is well reviewed by Bausch (2001).
Bernard’s own preface states,
in the first book, called Megacosmus,
Natura [a goddess] complains in tears to Noys, God’s providence, about the
confusion of hyle[7]
or prime matter and implores that the worldly order be brought to a more
attractive conclusion. (Quoted in
Stock, 14-15).
This is an astounding statement, because it implies that the creation of the world is not necessarily a single historical project, but can be a recreation, and in fact, that a succession of recreations may be possible. Stock also refers to this as “matter longing for form.” (22). Already we are encountering self-organization in emergence.
The synopsis continues with quotes and paraphrases of Stock with occasional interlinear glosses of my own.
i.1[8]:
“consists of Nature’s complaint: it describes in vivid detail the turmoil of chaos before the harmonious
stability of the four elements is established. (hexameter) (15).
i2: Noys “agrees in principal to fulfill the request,
theorizes about her relation to God, then turns to the practical business of
creation, separating the four elements and molding them into a stable structure
for the world's body. After a digression in which Noys, never modest,
discourses on her own powers, the world-soul, endelichia, descends in
emanation from the heavens. The union of body and soul takes place under
Noyes’s guidance.” (prose) (15).
i.3: “Once the body and soul of the universe are
‘married,’ its contents unfold before the reader in elegeics[9].
Noys, who is presumably presiding over this event as
well, is nonetheless mentioned in the catalog of all things in the world. The
reader is thus given the impression¾maintained throughout the Cosmographia¾of astrological determinism operating in
co-existence with a certain amount of free will. Bernard sets forth the nine orders of angels, the zodiac, the divisions of the
earth, and its contents, including mountains, rivers, trees, fruit, spices,
paradises, domestic vegatables, flowers, fish, and birds. (15).
The dual position of Noys as both
creator in heaven and created object in the catalog of things in the world are
likewise astounding: they represent self-organizational interaction between the
world and the heavens and thus imply free will. Many if not most, creation
myths involve this paradox of the self-created creator.
i.4: “When this little encyclopedia is finished, he
presents an explanation of how the universe runs. The cosmic globe possesses an
eternal source of life giving power which flows down from the heavens in the
form of heat and light. The cosmos itself is eternal, a notion which he defends
by uniting, not altogether successfully, material from a number of different
sources. In the hierarchy of genii or numina that transmit ideas,
principles, and life forces from above, primacy of place is given to Noys. Then
follows mundus, the living creature of the world itself, endelichia,
the world-soul, Natura, and imarmene, fate. These are all interralated
in a syncretistic fashion. (15-16).
Book one may thus be divided into three sections: i.1
and i.2, on creation itself; i.3, on the contents of the universe; and i.4, on the
quasi-scientific processes by which the cosmos
functions. (16).
In Microcosmus,
book two, Noys promises to create man as the summation of her work. In ii.3,
she first bids Natura seek out two other goddesses whose help will be
indispensable: Urania and Physis. Natura searches for Urania in the heavens and
finds her, not too surprisingly indulging in astrology. Urania agrees to
cooperate and explains to Natura some of the difficulties which the individual
soul will encounter, as well as the diverse properties it will acquire, in
descending to inhabit temporarily the human frame. In ii.5-9, Urania leads
Natura on a long journey through the stars. After visiting a mysterious,
neoplatonic palace called Tugaton, they descend to earth through the planetary
spheres. At ii.9, just below the lunar sphere, they pause at a place called
Granusion, where they encounter Physis with her two daughters, Theory and
Practice. While Physis conducts what appear to be experiments into the natures
and causes of phenomena, Noys arrives on the scene. After delivering an oration
on the dignity of man (ii.10), she proceeds to supervise the work of the other
three goddesses in creating man as a microcosm (ii.11-12). Physis, now raised
to an important role in the drama, first complains about the inherent
difficulty of making man from the leftover elements; then, aided by Urania and
Natura, she puts man together rather like a mechanical fabrication. In
ii.13-14, man, the fabrica Nature primipotentis, is described in detail,
thus providing a literary balance to the poetic unfolding of the megacosmus
in 1.3. (16-17)
In general, then, book two may be divided into two
major acts, dealing respectively with the astral journey and the creation of
man. It is also possible to divide the last act into two scenes, one treating
man’s actual formation from the elements, the other the manner in which he
functions. (17).
Bernard’s main source was Plato’s Timaeus (Chalcidius’ late third century translation) both for many specific details and for the method of imbedding in myth. There are, according to Stock, “two senses of myth” [in both Bernard and Plato]. (17)
[In the first place,] no account of the material world
can ever amount to an exact and self-consistent statement of unchangeable
truth. In the second place, the cosmology is cast in the form of a cosmogony, a
‘story’ of events spread out in time. Plato chooses to describe the universe,
not by taking it to pieces in an analysis, but by constructing it and making it
grow under our eyes. (Cornford, 1937,
28; quoted by Stock, 17-18).
The first, the basic rift between the Pre-Socratics and Plato as mentioned previously for Heraclitus versus Parmenides, occurs throughout history and even now continues to be a basic philosophic issue. This rift is a major feature within the philosophy of science, especially as exposed in the logical positivist and operationist foundation of the unified encyclopedic project (Neurath, 1937). Operationists were clear in stating the limits of science, and the requirements for arriving at scientific statements. Many of their contemporary critics, I feel, miss the point of the limits they were trying to establish, and blaming them for the excesses of a modern science as it became conscripted to certain social goals as distinct from the quest for understanding the nature of the universe and its inhabitants. Within the movement, there were strict operationists, like P. Bridgman (1936) and B F. Skinner (1938) who held that no theorizing was possible that possessed scientific credibility. They held the only reality were the functional relationships observed between observable variables; and even these were subject to probabilistic considerations, and had to meet certain tests of linguistic and observational conditions. There were others who permitted theoretical statements about unobserved variables as long as these were tied to observable variables. These came in two flavors, those suggesting that these variables were not ‘real’ and were called ‘intervening variables’, and those which were reified and were called ‘hypothetical constructs’ (MacCorquodale & Meehl, 1948; Tolman, 1936).
On this crucial issue, Stock further quotes Cornford:
Bernard did not entirely assume, as did Plato, that “the world is only a likeness of the real”, but he did clearly support the view that “any account of it can be no more than a ‘likely’ story.” (Stock, 17; his quotes of Cornford, 28).
Bernard was obviously aware of the past, present, and the future of his philosophy of science. I believe he was correct, that there is more to reality than we can know, or more than likely, ever know. But a belief in a hidden reality does not imply an adherence to Plato’s ontos or eidos, that the basic reality is a fixed, immutable, ideal, another aspect very likely beyond our ever knowing.
There are other similarities to Plato’s Timaeus: a beneficent creator, vicegerents who were also gods, genesis that is a result of Intelligence (Noys) and Necessity (Natura, Urania, Physis, etc.), and themes of man as microcosm; an interrelation of motion, time, and eternity; and the notion that the soul gets educated before entering the body, parallels of configuration of world and man. (18).
There are also differences from Timaeus: Bernard depended on Chalcidius, whose translation was incomplete. Chalcidius was also analytic (deconstructive) rather than constructive, a different form of literary demythologization. Nonetheless, Bernard was constructive, evolutionary, as previously noted. But Bernard was unable to separate the views of Plato from those of his interpreters. (19)
Bernard’s other sources were all encyclopedic, and also structural, explaining things in scientific terms. Mythologizing and demythologizing were two resonating parts of a whole, but for Bernard, encylopedica may have been more important than mythos: “Bernard incorporated both the idea of a mythical cosmology and that of a commentary on it.” (20).
Certain assumptions are made about the division of the
sciences or the theory of knowledge. The real world is seen to possess a
rational design, the result of cosmogony, which the encyclopedia imitates
through the ordering of its facts. The world is not primarily apprehended in
its naturalistic diversity ― although this is
often a strong undercurrent ― but as a logical pattern, a harmonious arrangement of
discrete elements. (20).
His other mythic sources from antiquity to the neoplatonists
included Hesiod, Genesis, Ovid, Pliny, Apuleius, Isidore of Bede, Macrobius on
Cicero, Matianus Capella (20)
“. . . on the seven liberal arts (in which the
encyclopeia is presented in allegory as in the Cosmographia); and, perhaps as
well, works like the Premmon Phuysicon of
Nemesius of Emesia, in the eleventh century translation of Alphanus of
Salerno, and even the Periphyseon ofJohn Scouttus Eriugena. In its general
pattern, however, the Cosmographia reembles most closely the structural
encyclopedias . . . (20)
such as those by Honorius, Adelard of Bath, and William of Conches, whose Philosophia Mundi is highly similar in many ways to Cosmographia. The Cosmographia is a composite literary form, mythic, encyclopedic in its presentation of the results of a creation story, and scientific, reflecting “the growing natural-philosophic interests of the period in many ways.” (20-23).
In justifying this scientific aspect, Stock offers five ways that Bernard is scientific. First is that most of the personae represent natural forces (e.g., Physis); second, “Natura, in addition to symbolizing the natural forces that guide fatalistic causality, clearly represents ratio scientiam quaerens, reason seeking out knowledge”; third, is the classical idea of physical as opposed to moral allegory (sun, moon, and stars are divine; astrological figures guide the universe), “thus the abstractions at the center of the work are not moral but philosophical truths; fourth, an interest “in the real, empirically definable world for its own sake”, the “same balance between an ideal order and a sensuous experience that one finds so vividly expressed in Romanesque and Gothic sculpture”; (23) and fifth,
The structuring of the myth,
its reworking of traditional materials, held certain important implications for
natural philosophy. For Bernard, the intellectual advances of his own day were
a source of great optimism. In his mind the dusk of the late antique gods
signified the rise of rational science.” (23-24).
I meant to skip these last five points because the inclusion of science seemed obvious enough, but there are some issues within them that invite commentary.
Up to this point we have seen the Cosmographia as a creation, or self-recreation, story, updated with the scientific sensibility of the 12th century. The scientific sensibility seemed more a recounting of new views of the universe and humanity (encyclopedic fact and theories) than a discourse on discovery and curiosity and methods employed to satisfy these needs (empirical science). But here we see Natura representing “reason seeking out knowledge”, and that Bernard is interested in the real world “for its own sake”.
It is curious to note why there are even three major “enlightenments”, of myth giving way to reason and science: the 6-4th century BCE Greek enlightenment, the 12-13th centuries’ one represented by Bernard, William of Conches, William of Auvergne, Roger Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, et al., which was albeit not as dramatic that of 17-18th centuries (Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Francis Bacon, et al.) This consideration prompts two further inquires: the first, did religious hegemonic institutions (e.g., Catholic) focus on the mythic to solidify their institutionalization making resistance to science even greater than that which confronted the earlier Greek enlightenment? We won’t argue or weigh evidence on this point, but mainly raise this as a puzzling issue.
The second inquiry regards what motivates science and what are the similarities between what motivates science and myth. The program of the Enlightenment was establishing reason and science as the heart of the search for truth and that the deployment of reason and science would provide a stable base of knowledge that would prove emancipative (from the forces of nature, myth, and social institutions). Francis Bacon, its chief spokesperson, mentioned among its concerns, fear of the unknown as a motivation for acquiring knowledge, which is apparently different from my own inheritance from the Enlightenment, the motivation of curiosity and joy in learning new knowledge, new closer approximations to “the truth” about cosmological, biological, psychological, and social processes. Bacon also mentioned some of the cultural advantages of this emancipation. In discussing that “knowledge is power” he mentioned three areas of culture, accomplished before the enlightenment, more by chance, that would be better accomplished by the application of knowledge. He indicates that the mythicism of the past have made for
Knowledge that tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as
a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation. . . what
is the true end, scope, or office of knowledge, what I have set down to consist
not in any plausible, delectable, reverend or admired discourse, or an
satisfactory arguments, but in effecting and working, and in discovery of
particulars not revealed before, for the better endowment and help of man’s
life. (Bacon, 1825b, 281).
The Frankfurt School itself, it could be argued,
preceded poststructuralists in the critique of the Enlightenment. In the dark
days of the 1940s the forces of science and reason appeared to promote, not to
dissipate, domination. There are no more fitting testimonies to the Nietzschean
critique of reason than the technical rationality in the organization of
Auschwitz and the scientific creativity of the Manhattan Project. (Poster, 1989, 21-22).
So how do you get from “pure reason” to Auschwitz? Philosophically it lies in the establishing of reason itself as a logocentric. Even if science were not tied to the weaknesses of fear and control this could be considered a possibility, although I do not consider it a result of a properly framed science. Horkheimer and Adorno indict the deployment of reason from Xenophanes to the positivists:
The disenchantment of the world is the extirpation of
animism. Xenophanes derides the multitude of deities because they are but
replicas of the men who produced them, together with all that is contingent and
evil in mankind; and the most recent school of logic denounces—for the
impressions they bear—the words of language, holding them to be false coins
better replaced by neutral counters. The world becomes chaos, and synthesis
salvation. . . On the road to modern science, men renounce any claim to
meaning. They substitute formula for concept, rule and probability for cause
and motive. . . the latest secularization of the creative principle. (Horkheimer & Adorno, 194772, 5).
Horgan conducted interviews for Scientific American. Certain questions he kept posing to the leading scientists of our time. Penrose had just replied to a question about superstring theory, to the effect that
It’s
[superstring theory] just not the way I’d expect the answer to be.
Horgan ponders the answer thusly:
I began to realize, as Penrose spoke, that to him ‘the
answer’ was more than a mere theory of physics, a way of organizing data and
predicting events. He was talking about The Answer: the secret of life,
the solution to the riddle of the universe.
Penrose is an admitted Platonist. Scientists do not
invent the truth; they discover it. Genuine truths exude a beauty, a rightness,
a self-evident quality that gives them the power of revelation. (Horgan,
1996, 2; Horgan’s italics).
The episodes tell of danger, cunning, and escape, and
of the self-imposed renunciation by which the ego, learning to master danger,
gains its own identity and takes leave of the bliss of archaic union with
internal and external nature. . . This figure of human beings shaping their
identity by learning to dominate external nature at the cost of repressing
their internal nature supplies the model for a description under which the
process of enlightenment reveals it Janus-face: the price of renunciation, of
self-concealment, of interrupted communication between the ego and its own
nature (now anonymous as the id) is construed as a consequence of the
introversion of sacrifice. (Habermas,
1987a, 109).
The history of psychology has frequently distinguished cognitive from motivational factors: e.g., id/ego/superego (Freud, 1933), habit strength vs. drive (Hull, 1943) and so on. It is clear, just from a consideration of the complex organization of the brain (Davidson et al., 1999), that these domains share common attractors that are a result of the tensions of their interaction. That is, the attractor is the thing; the domains themselves are pretty much fictions (or oversimplifications).
In the initial scene, Natura complains to Noys about
the unpleasant state of chaos in the world and Noys, rebuking her gently,
promises to do what she can to make the universe a more harmonious order.
[While Natura had previously existed in medieval poetry] Bernard’s introduction
of Natura into medieval Latin literature as an allegorical goddess presiding
over the creation of the world and of man was something of an innovation. . .
Natura in the Cosmographia is not only a revived classical idea, she
personifies notions and even sentiments current the twelfth century. (Stock, 61-62).
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[1] A sense of home, place, being.
[2] Note that ‘topoi and tranformation’ are similar to ‘being and becoming’.
[3] Alternative title: De Mundi Universitate libri duo sive Megacosmos et Microcosmos
[4] The major source for this presentation of Cosmographia is Brian Stock’s Myth & Science in the Twelfth Century, A Study of Bernard Silvester, Princeton: Princeton. His scholarship is impressive. Any quotes and pages specified are to this work unless otherwise specified; what is not quoted may be presumed to be in large part a précis of Stock except where I note that I speak in my own voice. While I felt more at home in the exploration of Galileo, the 12th century presented a mind-set quite unfamiliar to me.
[5] The medieval course of study [the seven liberal arts] was divided into the elementary trivium and the more advanced quadrivium. The trivium comprised grammar, which included the study of literature; dialectic or logic; and rhetoric, which also covered the study of law. Completion of the trivium entitled the student to a bachelor's degree. The quadrivium comprised arithmetic; geometry, which included geography and natural history; astronomy, to which astrology was often added; and music, chiefly that of the church. Once the quadrivium had been completed, the student was awarded a master of arts. (Microsoft Encarta 2000.)
[6] I would say ‘dynamical’.
[7] Recall hylozoism, introduced by Thales, the first of the Ionian physicists (c. 624-546 bce).
[8] This notation refers to parts of Cosmographia.
[9] Distichs: couplets in hexameter.
[10] The compass.
[11] It is ironic that as I write this on September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were made on two of these institutions: that of the second, the military (the US Pentagon), and of the third, on commerce (the World Trade Center in New York).
[12] Kristeva (1986) in T. Moi (ed.), p. 93. And also see M. Surap (1993), p. 124.
[13] See introductory quotes.