Nathaniel Perrin

Notes on Gadamer's Truth and Method

[Image Credit](https://www.istockphoto.com/portfolio/style-photography?mediatype=photography)

Medicine is rooted in the notion of *vis medicatrix naturae*. Nature is the healer. We merely aid or inhibit its process.

An organism possesses an internal equilibrium which exists in relation to an external equilibrium of its environment. Given water of a suitable composition and temperature, a fish may survive with an internal equilibrium through metabolic, circulatory, and other physiological systems.

Disease is the disruption of such internal equilibrium, whether from internal or external causes.

Medicine is the corrective process which seeks to re-establish this homeostasis of the organism.

For the history of our species, humanity has existed with a relative homeostasis compatible with many different climates and biomes, often through the medicinal adjustments of clothing and shelter for more extreme weather conditions.

However this relative environmental stability has come under threat in recent centuries with the advent of industrial technologies and its ecological impacts.

Many attribute simple phenomena changes such as regional temperature fluctuations to this through the rhetoric of climate change. Perhaps a helpful phrase but unfortunately excessively reductionistic.

Consideration of ecological change should not be restricted to temperature or vague symbology of pollution. Prudence requires more targeted investigation of the causes and effects industrial civilization makes upon human ecology and consequently physiology.

One such pollutative phenomenon which is only beginning to gain widespread notice is the effect of plastics and its radical metabolic impacts on animal and human populations. There are others to be sure, but these are not to be documented here.

Humans now suffer internal disequilibrium as part of the fruits of industrialism and man's war on both God and nature. The external environment has been poisoned against us by our own machinations.

Unfortunately, the instruments of power do not lie with us to holistically and cohesively revert external ecologies to a more suitable equilibrium.

This means that medicine has acquired in our time an additional responsibility: to protect our internal equilibrium against the poisons invading us from industrial society.

We must counter-act the damages wrought upon our bodies by sedentary lifestyles, the screens, the pharmaceuticals, the various electrical and chemical alterations flooding through us, the stressors baked into modern life.

To return to pre-industrial cortisol baselines, we unfortunately do require the use of medication.

This I view as the first object of the science of nootropics. To correct and counteract the technological miasma pervading us and slowly corrupting and degenerating the human organism. Rather than a transhumanist project, it should fundamentally be a humanist one.

We cannot in total prevent industrial society from poisoning our bodies, but we can certainly mitigate it. That is where the fight begins. The fight for life, vitality.

Brief thoughts on self-medication

[Daniel Boone](https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/daniel-boone-american-pioneer-an-illustrated-scene-gm1286950756-383303148)

### Neural Sociology

One way to consider the current state of affairs is this. The average human being exists as a neuron within a larger cranial complex, one whose neural networks are the vehicle for the transfer of two fundamental entities: financial assets and political consent. Both could fall under umbrella labels such as capital or consumerism, but they are also irreducible to each other.

Just as electricity operates as the currency of exchange and communication within the physiology of the brain, so too do money and ideology operate as two corollary vehicles of flux in this parallel model of network exchange. Neurons respond to stimuli. With regard to consumerism, marketing and sales are the technical disciplines directed to stimulate the human node for the sake of eliciting very precise responses of the purchase, the upsell, and the product referral. Some marketing and sales teams are sophisticated enough that they have been able to remold some human nodes as self-stimulating (i.e. addicted) through phone brain and other means. This is how the consumerist sciences can optimize the human nodes. To minimize the financial stimulus (ad spend) required to produce the maximal amount of transferred financial assets. 

What must also be considered are the network effects of consumerism. How various nodes are better positioned to influence others into the same kind of consumerist responsiveness. Which is why the consumerist sciences place considerable weight on securing access to influencer nodes as they can have considerable, even exponential downstream effects.

The techniques and processes of the science of material consumerism have been applied with relative success to its sister phenomenon: political consumerism.

A pure democratic system could be said to also operate on this neural model where localized nodes receive ideological stimulus and secrete or effuse ideological output which manifests occasionally in votes but more often in the politics that lies outside the election cycle through discourse, leveraging, and other means. This is why centralized democracy in both monopolistic and oligopolistic flavors tends to instantiate and cultivate ideology factories that aim toward the near constant if not omnipresent informing of political neurons. 

Thus the procedure of political information depends on the twofold goal of (1) determining what the political neuron should think about this given here-and-now event as well as (2) cultivating the right kind of responsivity that the neuron will be able to produce the desired kind of opinion in response to future events without external stimulus. More so than even the case in material consumerism, the node should believe themselves the originator of these opinions, interpretations, and ideologies, or at the very least incapable of framing the situation in such a way so as to realize how their thoughts are merely the product of systems of mass consent manufacturing.

Both neural models may be decentralized in that no intent, will, or intelligence is attempting to guide the patterns of stimuli and response across the network.

There may also exist models in which certain agents may have directed ends or goals they wish to meet and possess the tools with which to slowly and gradually transform the stimuli-response patterns of material and political consumers toward certain aligned patterns. This may be called social engineering. To enact social engineering on entire human populations requires both considerable technological, financial, and political resources and is a painstakingly slow and often erroneous evolutionary progression. 

What further complicates understanding Intelligent Design in social engineering is that even if a few clusters of agents are pulling the levers so to speak, their goals are often at odds with one another so they may be engaged in tactical neural warfare, or they may simply be incompetent at influencing outcomes so the changes they gradually introduce into the social neural ecosystem is not aligned with their goals or objectives.

One could go on to consider how demography, jurisprudence, religion, and other factors influence the behavior of human nodes, but this is a general lay of the land.

The end result of a neural system where human intent is at play is that the human being is framed as a clinical subject to be completely and fully enclosed within a purely controlled environment. Each node's material and political choices are controlled by upstream factors and levers to produce the desired outcomes for whoever's jurisdiction they fall under. A covert feudalism where lords operate from shadows to leverage mass populations to enact the goals of the few.

It is a world where the masses are subject to the machinations of graph theory. Consensus is coaxed if not coerced. And much of this would have been impossible merely a century ago, but with the advent of many technologies of "colossalism", it is now possible to centrally manage or distribute control both over a wider range of human entities and at an exponentially deeper level than would have been possible before. 

Where before it would have required immense effort to track the geographic region and financial resources of even a few individuals, now even the eyeball movements of entire populations can be safely computed and tracked. Generative AI provides immense opportunities for enshrouding each individual within an abundance of custom-tailored content to meld and shape the clinical subject as desired.

---

### Responses to Totalistic Consumerism

This model is not novel. It can be described as post-human or anti-human. For it completely eschews human agency. But one should also wonder, if there are such systems of social engineering at play, would they not also be directed toward whittling down and reducing human agency as much as it can? Receptors are more useful than agents. The degree to which such machinery is able to modify the extent or grip of the human will is a question beyond consideration here.

One thing of material consideration here is the trajectory of such a reshaped neurology. What does it converge to?

This is perhaps best described as the hyperreal.

What in our lifetimes we have taken to be authoritative disbursers of knowledge may become so radically and pervasively (and clumsily) manipulated, that many register a certain degree of mistrust toward any of these instruments of media in both the material and political flavors of consumerism. And while many of us are used to being lied to through such instruments, there are few things as offputting as being lied to poorly. And when the lies upcrank in frequency, it certainly does not mend matters.

And one resoundingly common instrument in this supposed program of manipulation is the Internet.

There will always be many either without the sense or will to recognize the ideological zoos they have been born and bred in. Others may see the zoo for what it is but acquiesce for they understand that significant opportunities for advancement often accompany participating in the exhibition. A dolphin that dances for the masters will get more fish than the grump in the corner. These cynics buy in and do the circus show for the rewards it entails. If needed, forgetting what they give up in the process. They engage in the proxy wars of the hyperreal as the various conumerist-politico wings engage in their endless neural dance.

A third class may also exist of those who feel on some instinctive level the dissonance between the hyperreal of social engineering and the other real world which existed before the Internet. They may sense something is off, but their dopamine triggers are so deeply ensnared and entangled within a neural system, they lack the necessary wherewithal to do anything about it. They remain passive, despondent like animals consigned to experimentation. The roll of dice to decide how things turn out for them.

As often happens, people will not necessarily fall under one single class but have a certain mixture of the different ones to varying degree.

What is likely to happen is the continued growth and perhaps ascension of a fourth class: the offline.

The offline can be described as those who live primarily analog lifestyles that are disconnected the neural machinery of social engineering.

Their senses are not constantly bombarded with ads or digital content, so they have no need to resist or fight the urges and impulses a phone may implant in them.

They are not subscribed to the everyday cycle of news outrage, so their cortisol levels are not inflammed to the same extent the enplugged may be with the ongoing stream of news events.

What an offline lifestyle looks like may vary. Those old enough to be pre-boomer may still persist in this lifestyle (though even these are often subject to network television, even when they do not use the Internet). Those who live in the rural recesses of society often have a greater propensity to live in this degree of disconnection. We have always had the Amish, embedded within American jurisdiction but disconnected from it.

---

### The Offliner

Utopianism emerges in waves, ever since the foundings of America. Here we have a new wave. One digital symptom of this is the effusive growth in the DIY and homesteader genres across many regions and both genders. As digital cynicism deepens so too does a desire for an "off the grid" lifestyle.

But desire does not always produce change. Many dreams are craved for, and few are realized. And in fact pro-offliner content remains still an instrument of the digital. It can be a psychological facade by which the influencers of the genre broadcast how offline they are through online means. And those who spend hours reading DIY content or basking in homesteader images remain engaged in a form of digital consumerism rather than developing the habits by which they become offliners.

To be offline is not to be completely disconnected from the Internet in total. But rather to have one's agency unimpaired and unimpacted by the dual tweezers of smartphone and Internet. They do not subconsciously crave the tingle of haptic feedback or social media viewership. They use the tool without the tool using them.

This community will become more self-aware and well-defined as time goes on.

Perhaps it entails hamlets and communes disconnected from the Internet. Intertribal communication conducted through physical mail and private couriers. Encylopedias and manuals in physical rather than digital form. A return of artisanal apprenticeship for metallurgy, carpentry, etc. The boundary between analogue and digital is not firmly fixed (where does the fax reside?), and it will likely be up to each respective community to develop and ordain the proper restrictions on technology as the Amish do.

In the next decade or two, we will most likely see an upsurge in the popularity of the "offliner" as a concept in the digital sphere. Homestead literature will abound. New forms of courtship that are decidedly post-dating, a return perhaps to practical marriage in response to the current digital burnout. Starter kits and perhaps financing plans for those seeking to go offline. These are not trends that will take over society wholesale, but rather subgroups among the more conservative-minded who want to reject the digital politics of global Internet cosmopolitanism. Those enamored with recapturing the frontier aesthetic as it existed in the American grain. 

This of course presuming that regulatory or other action does not directly or indirectly block these neurons from cutting themselves out of the network equation.

There are aspects of this offliner future that reflect trends already underway across the West.

First, a disinterest in anything happening outside the physical community or region, much in the same way of a medieval peasant. Events happening halfway across the world will hold no interest for the offline. The more remote or vast an election, the more likely they are to say, "Who cares?"

This self-enclosure would also entail a greater distrust of the outsider. Not just in the physical presence of visitors but an epistemic xenophobia as we have already seen in the Covid era. Intense skepticism toward knowledge or expertise presented by centralized governmental or scientific bodies, and perhaps a general rejection of "scientific truths" that have been deemed valid for at least a century. Instead, the offliners may depend on local "clerics". Those who live with them who are deemed learned and have expressed their opinion on certain manners. Much in the way medieval ecclesiastical servants would have functioned, though without even a Rome to pay lip service to. Congregationally-approved experts then, and the politics that all entails.

And because these systems will invariably evolve into tribal political entities, federal and state governments may proactively block these developments, but that remains to be seen. There is only so much one can do to force consumer to be plugged in before there are compulsory pleasure pods.

Again, the offliner way of life will not predominate American society. This is merely the emergence of dual lifestyles. The hyperreal urbanite versus the post-digital offliner. The two will likely live in relative antagonism toward each other. The offliner will seek independence from a cosmopolitan system which depends in part on the comprehensive totality of its enforcement. In David Fischer's view, this was the fundamental ideological divide underneath the Civil War. But this all remains to be seen.

The offliner will be a new kind of person, a novel atavism. What more this could look like would need to be the subject of future investigation and speculation.




A future is offline

A summary of the opening chapter to Deleuze's magnum opus of metaphysics

Deleuze: Introduction to Difference and Repetition

*Giambattista Vico* Encyclopedia Britannica. [Source URL](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giambattista-Vico#/media/1/627497/201787).

Giambattista Vico is an often overlooked voice in the philosophy of history and politics. Though he enjoyed a brief revival via Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss, Vico remains outside the canonical limelight of early modern thought, though he remains an astute voice of the Counter-Enlightenment to this day.

Vico's *La Scienza Nuova* (1734) is a peculiar magnum opus which offers a idiosyncratic synthesis of abstract, universal historical principles with concrete examples grounded in Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, Egypt, etc. alongside philological analysis of the etymology of terms across ages and languages.

I was first introduced to Vico in 2015 via literary theory which snags an excerpt from this book where Vico describes the giants who lived around the time of the Flood and what it means for human history. I was indelibly struck by both how simultaneously outlandish and poignant his mode of thought was and have been an ardent admirer of Vico ever since.

I am now re-reading the book through Robert Miner's new translation, hoping that seven years have given me a keener eye to recognize more of its depth than when I first read him in full in college.

Among a panoply of insights into civilization and human nature, Vico breaks down the cycle of history into the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. Language, class structure, and even agrarian law reflects this tripartite division. Though we may not be able to access much if any of this first age of the gods, its vestiges live on in every human society.

Vico is a true humanist through and through, and this is deeply reflected in his project. The universal can only be understood in concrete human culture and language, driven particularly by the Greek and Roman heritage.

This emerges most clearly in his focused attention on the etymology of words. Centuries before Heidegger repopularized the practice, Vico takes many opportunities to analyze how the evolution and formation of concepts helps us understand their true meaning. As an example, the Greek term for theory emerges from those who gaze at the star and seek to understand their meaning, an abstraction from that which makes little immediate sense to us.

But beyond this, Vico was deeply committed to reacting to what he saw as the political atheism of Hobbes or Machivalli, those who believed that there was no intrinsically meaningful language but rather the mechanistic interaction of forces. Against this view, Vico was dedicated to developing an outlook which accounted for both natural law and language with arbitrary symbols, the interplay and evolution of social classes. How refinement emerges from a feral way of life, and how it can sink back into it.

The following is a list 114 axioms that Vico presents in Book I of the 1744 edition of *La Scienza Nuova*. In the vein of Spinoza and Hobbes, Vico believed these could be foundations for understanding all human affairs, much as certain axioms undergird the foundations of geometric knowledge, and give us certain access to truth.

Most of these are direct quotes from the Robert Miner translation (pp. 74-109) while others paraphrase for sake of clarity or brevity.

---

# On the Elements

1744 edition, §119-329.

1. Man, on account of the indefinite nature of the human mind, whenever that mind is overthrown by ignorance, makes himself the measure of all things.
2. Whenever men are unable to make out some idea of things that are distant and unknown, they evalute them relative to things that are known and present.
3. Every nation has the vanity to consider itself earlier than all other nations in discovering the conveniences of human life and of preserving a memory of the things of their own back to the beginning of the world.
4. To this vanity of nations is joined the vanity of the learned who want what they know to be as ancient of the world.
5. Philosophy, so as to benefit humankind, must raise up and support fallen and weak man, not uproot nature or abandon him in his corruption.
6. Philosophy considers man as he ought to be and so cannot be fruitful except to the few who wish to live in an elevated society.
7. Lawgiving considers man as he is so as to make good use of him in human society, as from ferocity, avarice, and ambition--the three vices of humankind--from which it makes the military, the market, and the court.
8. Things outside their natural state do not adapt or persist there.
9. Men who do not know the truth of things take care to hold fast to the certain. If the intellect cannot be satisfied with knowledge (*scienza*), the will can at least repose in consciousness (*conscienza*).
10. Philosophy contemplates reason and is the science of the true. Philology observes authority in human choice which is consciousness of what is certain.
11. Human choice is by its nature most uncertain but can be given certainty and be made determinate by common sense concerning human necessity or advantage. These two are the sources of natural law of gentile peoples.
12. Common sense is a judgment without reflection sensed in common by a whole society or all of humankind.
13. If the same ideas emerge across peoples not in contact with each other, it provides a common impetus for its truth.
14. The nature of things is its coming into being (*nascimento*) at certain times in certain ways. These times and ways always belong to a particular way things must play out.
15. The intrinsic properties of subjects must be produced by the modifications or fashions by which the things come into being; it is through this that we are able to establish as true that the nature or coming into being of those things is of such a kind.
16. Folk traditions must have a public impetus for what is true which is why these traditions first came into being and are preserved by entire peoples over long periods of time.
17. Common ways of speaking should be thought to offer the weightiest of testimony about the ancient customs of peoples, which had currency at the time when their languages were formed.
18. The language of an ancient nation that preserves itself as regnant until it arrives at its perfection should be a great testimony about the customs of the earliest times of the world.
19. If the Law of the Twelve Tables (Rome) were the customs of the gentiles of Latium, then this law offers a great testimony about the ancient natural law of the gentiles of Latium.
20. If the poems of Homer are civil histories of the ancient Greek customs, then they are two treasures of the natural law of the gentile peoples of Greece.
21. The Greek philosophers hastened the natural course that their nation must make, progressing swiftly to the peak of refinement while simultaneously holding onto their mythical history of gods and heroes (unlike the Romans who lost their gods and only held onto their heroes).
22. It is necessary that in the nature of human things, a mental language common to all nations uniformly attends to the substance of things achievable within the sociability of human life and articulates that substance with as many different modifications as these things are able to have throughout their many different aspects. This is what we experience as true in proverbs.
23. Sacred history is more ancient than all the most ancient profane history. It speaks of the history of the state of nature in a familial state.
24. The Hebraic religion was founded by the true God upon a prohibition against divination. Divination is the root of all gentile nations.
25. The Universal Flood is demonstrated across the myths of all nations.
26. The giants possessed by their nature huge bodies from partly physical and partly moral causes rooted in the feral education of their children.
27. Greek history takes its beginning from the flood and from the giants.
28. Two great fragments from Egyptian antiquity: (1) The whole time can be divided into the three ages of gods, heroes, and men. (2) Each of these ages has its own spoken languages: the sacred (hieroglyphic), language of likenesses (symbolic), and language of conventional signs (vernacular).
29. In five passages, Homer alludes to the language of heroes.
30. Varro enumerated thirty thousand names of gods which correspond to all the needs of human life.
31. Whenever peoples have become so savage because of arms that human laws no longer have a place among them, only religion is powerful enough to tame them.
32. Men ignorant about natural causes who are unable to explain them will instead explain phenomena as happening according to their nature (the magnet is in love with the iron).
33. The physics of the ignorant is a commonplace metaphysics by which they render the causes of things they do not know to the will of God without considering how divine will actually operates.
34. *Mobiles ad superstitionem perculsae semel mentes* (Tacitus *Annals* 1.28.2). Minds struck by fear tend toward superstition.
35. Wonder is the daughter of ignorance, and the greater the effect admired, the more the wonder grows in proportion.
36. The more vigorous the imagination, the weaker reasoning is.
37. The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to things without sense, just as children imagine life in inanimate objects.
38. Idolatry originates in the human tendency to call someone a god either by their exemplary virtue or by the scope of their power.
39. Curiosity is a proper connatural to man, the daughter of ignorance who begets knowledge. Wonder makes our minds open, and curiosity takes its custom to think what such a wonder signifies.
40. Witches are replete with terrifying superstitions and are exceedingly savage and brutal.
41. For hundreds of years after the Universal Flood, the earth was too damp to emit the dry exhalations that generate lightning.
42. Jove flashes lightning and fells to the ground the giants. Every gentile nation has a Jove.
43. Every gentile nation has its own Hercules, the son of Jove.
44. The first wise men of the Greeks were the theological poets who flourished prior to the heroic poets. Just as Jove is father to Hercules.
45. Men naturally tend to preserve memories of the laws and of the orders which hold them within their own society.
46. All barbarian histories have mythical beginnings.
47. The human mind naturally tends to take delight in uniformity.
48. It is the nature of children that the first names and words they know are the foundation from which they come to know all other things.
49. As the Egyptians observed, all discoveries advantageous or necessary for human life to come from Hermes Trismegistus.
50. Memory is most vivacious and the imagination most lively in children.
51. Every faculty that man does not possess by nature may be acquired through persistent study of art. Except for poetry, which is only accessible to those who have the poetic faculty by nature.
52. Children mimic whatever they are capable of apprehending.
53. First, men sense without noticing. Then when they notice, it troubles them. Finally, they can reflect and understand it with a clear mind.
54. Men who are confronted by things they do not understand but which are pertinent to them, naturally interpret them in keeping with their own nature, that is with their passions and customs.
55. For the Egyptians as for other gentile peoples, the first theology is a history dressed up with myths. Subsequent generations then imbue these myths with mystical significance.
56. The first writers are the poets.
57. The mute explain themselves through gestures and objects which have a natural correspondence to the ideas they signify. (Hieroglyphics which give ways ot poetic imagery and metaphors).
58. The mute issue unformed sounds while signing.
59. Men vent great passion through song.
60. Languages start with monosyllabic words, just as children start in monosyllabic vocabulary.
61. Heroic verse is the most ancient of all. Spondaic verse is the slowest.
62. Iambic verse is the one most similar to prose.
63. The human mind is naturally inclined to see itself with the senses. Only with great difficulty can it come to understand itself in itself.
64. The order of ideas must proceed in accordance with the order of things.
65. The order of human things proceeds first from forests, to lodges, to villages, to cities, and finally to academies.
66. Men at first sense what is necessary then tarry with what is advantageous, then what is convenient, later delighting in what is pleasurable, then become dissolute in luxury, and lastly go mad in wasting their substance.
67. Nature of peoples follows this course: crude, strict, benign, refined, dissolute.
68. Within humankind, the huge and gullish are the first to arise. Then arise the magnaimous and haughty. Then the valorous and just. Then the morose and reflective. Lastly, the mad and the dissolute.
69. Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.
70. In a lawless world, only the very few form families and estates (the patriarchs). It is only later that the many come to occupy these cultivated estates.
71. Native custom does not change instantly but in stages and over long periods of time.
72. If all nations start from the worship of divinity, then the familial state must have depended upon divination and priests, and subsequently the kings who enforce divine law over families.
73. There is a folk tradition that the first to govern the world were kings.
74. There is another folk tradition that those worthiest by nature were created as the first kings.
75. There is a third folk tradition that the first kings were wise men.
76. There is a folk tradition that the first form of government in the world was monarchy.
77. Taking into account Axioms 64 and 67, the patriarchs exercised a monarchical power subject to God alone and unrestricted over all beneath them.
78. The families could not have been the original families except as derived from familial servants of the Fathers in the state of nature.
79. The earliest associates (*socii*) who were companions with a common advantage could only exist in seeking refuge from the patriarchs.
80. Men naturally come to a system of benefits when they discern that they might maintian or gain a good and great part of their advantage, the hopes of civil life.
81. Men of fortitude do not relinquish in idleness what they gained by virtue. They vield as little as possible and only through necessity and advantage.
82. All nations had some forms of clientship between vassals and fealty.
83. The first agrarian law of the world distinguishes the three kinds of persons and domains in civil life: the bonitary domain for plebeians, the quiritary domain for nobles, and eminent domain for the patriarchs.
84. As Aristotle observes, the heroic regime is a form of republic.
85. He also observes that ancient republics did not have laws for private punishment. Barbarism lacks domestication by private laws.
86. Yet again he observes that in ancient republics the nobles swore themselves to be the eternal enemies of the plebeians.
87. Aristocratic republics are extremely temperate about going to war so as to not train the multitude in warfare.
88. Aristocratic republics keep wealth among the nobility for wealth contributes to the power of this order.
89. Honor is the noblest stimulus to military valor.
90. People will necessarily conduct themselves heroically in war if they train themselves over honor in peacetime.
91. Sparring for equality with respect to justice, which trains the orders of the city is the most powerful means to aggrandize the republics.
92. The weak want laws, the powerful withhold them. The ambitious promote the laws to create a following among the weak. Princes protect the laws to make the powerful equal to the weak.
93. Honor is diluted in popular republics where the avaricious multitude can give decrees without value. The many pass decrees to enrich themselves, and thus these governments dissolve in civil war.
94. Natural liberty is fiercer as its good are connected to the body, and civil servitude binds with goods of fortune that are not necessary for life.
95. Men love to escape from subjection and desire equality. This is how aristocratic republics become popular republics. Later they are forced to surpass their equals. Finally, they put themselves above the laws as tyrants. It is at this point plebeians once again put themselves into submission under a monarch.
96. Because nobles were originally living in lawsless liberty, they were relucant to take on the burdens of law. However the balance of power with plebeians cause them to submit to laws. Finally, they tend toward subjection under a monarch to preserve their own power and life of convenience.
97. After the flood, the first men resided in the mountains then descended to the plains and finally came to the shores.
98. According to Plato, after the floods the sons of Polyphemus lived in mountainous caves, the earliest paterfamilias in the world. Later they descended to the plains and built Troy. Troy was then moved to the sea [and it was from the sea that it was conquered.]
99. There is another tradition that Tyre was also founded inland before moving to the sea.
100. Men cannot be induced to abandon their own lands except by what is ultimately necessary for life or by greed and covetousness.
101. The Phoenicians were the sailors fo the ancient world.
102. Barbaric nations were impenetrable and could only be broken out by war or commerce.
103. Some Greek colony was formed in Latium but was buried in the shadows of antiquity by the Romans.
104. What is customary is like a king, and the law is like a tyrant. What is customary is reasonable and the law is not necessarily animated by natural reason.
105. The natural law of the gentile peoples comes from the customs of nations which conform to a uniform human common sense. This common sense is arrived at without reflection or imitation of other nations.
106. Doctrines must start from when the matters which they treat start.
107. There are gentiles who had a start before the cities, these are the ancient noble households from whom Romulus composed the Senate. There are also noble households founded after the city which Junius Brutus used to form the new Senate after expelling the kings.
108. There is also this distinction between the gods. Gods of the greater gentiles pre-exist cities while there are gods of later peoples.
109. Men with limited ideas deem the law to be only as much as what is said expressly by its words.
110. Civil equity is a kind of probable reasoning not naturally familiar to all human beings but to those few who preeminent in practical wisdom, practice, or learning teach what is necessary for the preservation of human society. This is the reason of state.
111. The certain, as it pertains to laws, is an obscurity of reason sustained solely by an authority which we experience in practical application as harsh, but whose practical application is necessary so that the laws remain certain. The laws are individuated through application.
112. Men of intelligence deem the law to include the whole of what is called "equal advantages in cases".
113. The true as it pertains to laws is a certain light and splendor by which natural reason illuminates them, whence the same jurists used to say *verum est* for *aequum est*.
114. The natural equity of a human reason, fully expressed, is a practice of wisdom for the doing of what is advantageous (*faccende dell'utilità*).


Foundations for understanding humanity and its history

Vico: 114 axioms for the New Science

*Prometheus Chained* by Harold Parker, R.S.A. [Source URL](https://victorianweb.org/sculpture/parker/3.html).

It is a painful thing to grapple with the fixtures of our finitude.

To feel yourself bound in some body, perpetually condemned to wander a restricted zone of space and time. It seems brash foolishness to claim ourselves free when we are locked within temporal horizons of less than a century. How vast the corridors of history, and how small our permitted patrol.

Though the body itself is consigned to extensions of locality, the mind offers an escape through language and intuition.

The utterance of the lips breathes persistence into the past. Even as the spoken word wilts in the stilling and stilting of sound waves, the word enters the ear, and the mind. Here it is lost or stored with varying levels of alterations. But in this way does language slip the bonds of time through the communication of what was into the now. The oral tradition is the persistence of spoken pasts through the networks of minds who hold onto it. Myths, legends, and epics etched upon the ethnic scroll of a people's memory.

Writing too advances this form of historical transcendence. Transmission through sight from ledger to consciousness and back again. Writing is the means of not only conversing with the dead, but living their lives as well. A journey into the underworld.


But this prompts the question: what of the incongruity of temporal consciousness?

This paradigm of transmission and communication presupposes the equality of transmitting consciousness and the receptor consciousness. But time mutates all it touches. And those standing downstream from the original speaker will only hear the word through the reverbations of the Heraclitean river.

How then can we understand the original, standing where we are as we do?

Such is the problem of hermeneutics. Whether by Heidegger's pessimism or Gadamer's optimism, we must recognize our own positioning as beings of historicity. Not just in body, but in mind, and perhaps even in soul. We are historically effected consciousness.

Our minds are rendered partial and finite through their very nature. Our ideas and world will always be enclosed by the lack of what we do not know, and that layer surrounded by what we do not know that we do not know.

Those who stand a millennium, a century, or even one generation before us seem alien and strange to us. Why do they talk that way? What are their thought patterns that could give rise to such expressions? Miscommunication awakens us to the hermeneutic distance which gaps our understanding from theirs.

Our foundations, our innate prejudice, essentially prevents us from grasping them as they know themselves in their foundations. Thus, the impossibility of absolute or universal knowledge. Knowledge is built out of tribes. We only delude ourselves into the myth of universal, scientific knowledge through a tribe that has transformed itself into a world empire. We live under the tribal religion of Western science and culture, whose sprawl and ability to subsume all else allegedly gives warrant to its claim to be "universal". In our moment, one tribe rules over the rest, at least for now.


It is humbling to come to terms to these restrictions. That we may never know some things due to the nature of our birth. The technologies and cultures of our time limit the horizons of our understanding, as it does for all others.

Yet the sense that this limitation is tragic or negative in some sense is itself a presupposition, a prejudice of attitude. To think that knowledge can be formed *ex nihilo* without grounding. That a lever can exist without a fulcrum. It rests upon a mode of Western arrogance which believes that knowledge exists in itself without sociohistorical grounding or timing.

This is why Gadamer frames these limitations, restrictions, and horizons as positive markers. These are the building blocks of shared knowledge and understanding. Without our particularly instantiated language and culture, we would have no means or tools to build any knowledge at all. Gaps and absences, stripped of all positive historical content, cannot be used to build something enduring. A house of winds is no house at all.

His conclusion is that in some ways we can as historically effected consciousness transcend our particular time and place through transhistorical dialogue. As a classicist, Gadamer certainly had specific materials in mind for this. We cannot fully rise up out of our situation, so to speak. But one never could. But we can reach across the gap and thereby reach some shared understanding of the world, thus enriching ourselves and our knowledge while recognizing that we cannot become equal or identical to those on the other side of the gap.

It is a cheery image, but it is also a stark reminder of the cosmic inequality that we inhabit. For those on the quest for knowledge, we suffer such a profuse embarrassment of riches compared to those in pre-literate times, or even those scholars who spent countless years copying texts by hand or doing word counts. All labor that can be achieved digitally now within milliseconds. 

We must remember our fortune, even if we so rarely steward our fortune well. We do not know how long we will be able to keep it.

This is merely a first breath at wrestling with our historicity. Perhaps Gadamer's vision cracks under pressure and closer analysis. That we will have to see at some future time.

What it means to be human, bound in space and time

Notes on Gadamer's Truth and Method

Brief thoughts on self-medication

A future is offline

Deleuze: Introduction to Difference and Repetition

Vico: 114 axioms for the New Science

Wrestling with historicity