Fifth-century BC marble relief, a physician treating a woman (Photo By DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini via [Getty Images](https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/09/GettyImages_122226872-799601e.jpg?quality=90&webp=true&fit=620,413))

Paul Stephenson's phenomenal, recent history *New Rome: The Empire in the East* (2022) is a salvo not to the political or demographics changes that underpinned the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as we know it in the West, but the seismic convolutions by which the Eastern Roman Empire morphed into a new beast that would live on for another millennium. It is a masterful work in its level of detail and its breadth in combining political and economic history with urban studies and theology and, interestingly enough, climate studies.

The opening chapter of his work is a meticulous exposition of the role of lead both in the climate and health of Late Antiquity, and a suitable teaser for the book at large.

It begins with the Sun.

Solar emissions vary over broad periods of time causing shifts in temperature which have shaped the course of history. Some are familiar with the "Little Ice Age" between 1645 and 1715, others with the 
"Medieval Climate Optimum" from 950 to 1250 which kicked off the ventures of the Vikings among others historical escapades. 

The Romans had their own such warm period, the "Roman Climate Optimum" between 250 BC and 400 AD. It was at the end of this period that the Mediterranean world began cooling, dramatically enough to be arguably a factor in the population decline of the period as less rain led to weaker agricultural output.

But turning from the cosmic impact of the stars upon human civilization on Earth, we can see conversely the impact of human civilization upon our earthly landscape.

Roman metallurgy was simply monstrous in its scope and volume. Arms, coins, infrastructure, smelted across the far-long reaches of Roman geography. The smoke exhaust of lead production is far from clean, and it a testament to how well-developed Roman industry was that metallic compound contamination can be found as far afield as untouched lake beds and bogs of Ireland, Sweden, and Iceland. Most remarkably, even in deep ice layers of Greenland, we have found lead traces whose origin can be traced to Spain, one such metallurgical hotspot in Late Antiquity.

Lead pollutants would rapidly decline by the fifth century, and it would not be until 1700 AD that lead pollution would reach the same levels again.

Lead is a remarkable compound in that "it is malleable and resists corrosion when in contact with air and water (12)". The heights of Rome's trademark engineering were in many ways rooted in lead construction, in columns, roofs, rain gutters, plumbing, and most especially piping.  Because of its extensive use in the artifacts and infrastructure of everyday life, we still find lead in regions of the Roman empire where no such mining or production occurred.

Yet as we know today lead is dangerous to the human organism.

The relationship between lead and the madness of Nero and Caligula has already entered popular funfactdom, but ironically the argument that Romans ingested lead through their pipes and drinking vessels is largely a myth (at least so Stephenson claims). Rather, it was intentionally mixed into sauces, medicines, and for sweetening wine. The lead pollution crept into the flora and fauna of the Roman landscape, and studies show that honey bees absorb twice as much lead as drones from the plants they harvest. The Romans loved their honey and children were most often weaned on it. Maternal lactation too transferred the lead-crusted calcium of their bones into the breast milk and consequently the bodies of their infants.

In a morbid twist, archeologists can use lead-heavy skeletons to identify Roman settlements across the world, such as in Dorset where other non-lead populations lived before and after.

The Romans of the Lead Age were remarkably shorter in stature and life span than the Romans who lived before them and the various peoples who lived after them. On average, men were 5'5" and women 5'0".

In the Eastern Roman Empire of the fifth century, life expectancy had dropped below thirty years and even in some locales as low as twenty-three. Neonatal mortality skyrocketed but was not nearly as high as those on young children who were weaned off their mothers' milk and onto lead-heavy nutrition, compounded by other poor nutritional and sanitation. In this period, up to 40% of those born would die before reaching the age of eighteen.

The bones themselves of the residents of this time speak to the various diseases and weaknesses that had defined the new standards and norms of health at this time as deformities continued to abound, skeletal and dental.

And yet they prayed for health, some resorting to magic, as life continued to get worse until a new era could slowly erase the accumulated toxins of lead, though such a process took centuries and generations.

One must consider when reading this chapter what we should think today if we were to replace the word "lead" for "plastic", how there is no intrinsic "nature will find a way" protection that will save us from poisoning ourselves to the brink of extinction, when we make our children too sickly, too weak, too decrepit to continue the human race, just because we want to feed our reckless luxuries.

The Lead Age: Climate Studies of Late Antiquity

Weber: The Vocation of Politics and Science

Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/williamcho-1724357/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=2060093">Sang Hyun Cho</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com//?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=2060093">Pixabay</a>

### Book Review
Gagarin, Michael. *Early Greek Law*. University of California Press: 1986.

> τόνδε γὰρ ἀνθρώποισι νόμον διέταξε Κρονίων
> ἰχθύσι μὲν καὶ θηρσὶ καὶ οἰωνοῖς πετεηνοῖς
> ἐσθέμεν ἀλλήλους, ἐπεὶ οὐ δίκη ἐστὶ μετ᾽ αὐτοῖς:
> ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἔδωκε δίκην, ἣ πολλὸν ἀρίστη
> γίγνεται:
>
> Hesiod's *Works and Days*, 276-280

### Summary

What is the nature of law in the world of classical Greece? Gagarin's monograph presents what could be considered a classicist's take on an anthropologist's question.

Classical Greece presents a unique case in the genesis of legal systems because its judiciary procedures evolved in conjunction with its writing systems, rather than before. This presents a new variant on the comparative anthrpologist's quest to abstract the development of law from oral custom, tribal observation, or purely archeological inference.

But to begin to answer this investigation, one must begin with the begged question: what is law?

H.L.A. Hart answered this by formulating an anthropological distinction between primary rules which impose obligations on the one hand and secondary rules on the other hand which govern the creation and operation of these primarily rules (most importantly rules of recognition).

This seems plausible but falls rather flat by Hart's own acknowledgement in the case of pre-literate societies. How can one speak of law in this case, especially when law often predates writing systems in many societies.

Gagarin would contend that preliterate law primarily originates in the peaceful settlement of disputes and establishing proper redress for violations between private parties.

This paradigm would solve the problem of how a law could be broken if it does not exist, as violations and suits can easily be brought against another party without some pre-established rule to govern the dispute.

This is further supported by legal realists such as Dworkin who point out that Hart's theory is based on a positivistic assumption that cases are universally determined on formalized laws, when it is clear that these laws may not exist.

And if this dispute resolution is understood as the basis of law, this does not consist of the peaceful resolution between two private parties exclusively but rather depends on the mediation of a third "public" figure to adjudicate between the two.

This suggests a three stage model in which originally no laws exist at all, then voluntary procedures were developed to provide conflict meditation, before finally compulsory rules were established to which all private parties are subject.


We can trace the beginnings of law in this sense to Herodotus 1.96-98 where he describes Deicoes the first king of the Medes.

Deioces allegedly was a zealous practitioner of justice (*dikaiosyne*) in the midst of lawlessness (*anomie*). Because of the turmoil among the Medes, Deioces was called upon to adjudicate in a wide range of disputes because of his profound reputation for relentlessly straight (*ithys*) and just (*dikaios*) rulings.

This was the nature of his kingship, as a judicial magistrate between voluntary disputants. By no means was Deicoes a lawgiver who recorded, implemented, and enforced legal codes but merely a decision maker in the settling of disputes.

Of course Herodotus "state of nature" story may in fact be more mythical than factual, but one finds convincingly strong parallels in Homer and Hesiod as well.

Hesiod remarks how one of the primary blessings of the Muses is the ability for a king to soothe conflict in the public agora (*Theogeny* 84-90). He also points to this as one of the distinguishing traits that elevates humans above beasts, the ability to have a law without crookedness (i.e. straight) that can rule fairly regardless of personal inclination or prejudice (*Works and Days* 27-39, 276-280).

In Homer, we see this in the famous *ekphrasis* of Achilles shield where two litigants submit their dispute for arbitration in a public forum (*Iliad* 18.497-508), in Minos' disputes over the dead (*Odyssey* 11.568-571), the contest over the arms of Achilles (*Odyssey* 11.543-551), and the chariot race dispute between Antilochus and Menelaus in *Iliad* 23.

Across these literary examples that look back upon previous generations, we see several common themes. The dispute is voluntarily submitted before a judge, generally holding a scepter. Each disputant believing themselves having a valid case accept the decision that will be made by this judge. The dispute is voiced publicly, and often redress of property and/or honor is expected in the settlement of this dispute.

What is key, as we see in Herodotus and Hesiod, is that the judge is known to be straight (*ithys*) in their decisions, not unfairly weighed by factors of blood, prestige, fear, or personal gain.

In the generations that followed, Aristotle describes how early *thesmothetai* recorded their judicial decisions as precedents that could be referenced in future disputes, though these magistrates maintained full authority to judge as they saw fit.

In the historical evidence, we see the emergence of written law across the city states by the mid seventh century BC, most notably by Zaleucus in Epizephyrian Locri around 662 BC and in Cretan Dreros a few decades after that.

These written laws were *public* inscriptions that are notably not privately guarded in secretive law codes as one may find in Mesopotamia but rather positioned in the public forum for all to see.

They certainly were not comprehensive legal codes in a modern sense which established moral codes of conduct nor a constitution (*politeia*) which defined the system of government, but were primarily legal procedures.

Draco established a new trends through his *axones* that did establish these rules in some sense which went one step beyond a record of decision (*thesmion*) which the earliest judges recorded, something Aristotle describes in *Athenian Politics* 16.10.

These laws generally fell into categories of (1) tort, such as Draco's homicide law, (2) family law which governed matters of marriage between relatives, inheritance, or adoption, (3) public law such as Solon's legislation which dealt with exports, land sales, and even who was required to dig their own private wells, and (4) procedural law which Gagarin argues is the lynchpin of the evolution of law as a whole.

To the last of these, we can turn to Solon specifically, and what Aristotle refers to as his three chief "democratic reforms" (*Athenian Politics* 9.1):

(1) the prohibition of debts as a surety on one's own body
(2) the right to seek legal redress on behalf of an injured party (even if someone else)
(3) the appeal (*ephesis*) to popular law courts as a decision maker

*Ephesis* is the method of prosecution by *graphe* an innovation which is unique in that it no longer requires that only the injured party may seek redress but allows any member of the polity to bring suit against an alleged perpretator for a crime.

Beyond what Aristotle describes, Gagarin also points to Solon's institution of the *dike exoules* as an important reform which attempted to respond to the problem of legal enforcement. Since Athens lacked a police force or other group that could enforce the legal decision on behalf of the *polis*, thus leaving enforcement up to private means, the *dike exoules* legitimated the doubling of a fine or redress by which the sum of the unpaid amount would also be owed to the public treasury, thus providing a mechanism for an injured party to seek help in acquiring the redress.

These written laws were not simply a recapitulation of unwritten traditional customs but true innovations that additionally also set fixed penalties for particular kinds of violations. By stipulating fixed punishments, this curtailed the sole discretionary power of the magistrates who could ostensibly abuse their position with overly punitive measures. Fixed penalties thus transitioned judiciary authority in part from magistrate authority to a written code that existed independent of figures like a Deioces.

This gradual restricting of magisterial authority seems to manifest itself also in the inscriptional evidence by which public inscriptions held magistrates accountable to a public code in their judicial decisions.

What could then ask what the early Greeks thought of justice (*dike*) in a practical, legal sense that is abstracted of the theological connotations of mythological poetry on the one hand and before it was imbued with philosophical significance by philosophers such as Plato on the other.

This generation of Greeks were not concerned with the question "What is justice?" but rather how justice operates.

And we perhaps see this best defined as the peaceful resolution of conflict between private parties.

Take for example the chariot race dispute in *Iliad* 23 where Antilochus pulls off a dangerous maneouvre to slip past Menelaus and thus acquire the second-place position in the race. Menelaus is offended because his horses are swifter and he is the better racer, so he feels that he should receive the second-place prize instead of the upstart Antilochus. It would be a stain upon Menelaus' honor (*arete*) to receive a lower ranked prize.

This contest is resolved by Antilochus' verbal acknowledgement that Menelaus truly is the better racer of the two who deserves second place, but he himself is granted the second-place prize. Both parties accept this as resolution of what could potentially devolve into a violent conflict.

A failure of this dispute resolution mechanism can be seen in the opening of the *Iliad* where Agamemnon and Achilles fail to have their dispute over Briseis resolved, though it does not escalate into a physical contest of violence. The implicit resolution of this conflict is that Achilles receives the greater honor for his role in the Trojan conflict through the poem whereas Agamemnon receives far less heroic a portrait in how the events play out.

This is not to say peaceful resolution was viewed as the exclusive option. Odysseus' vengeance on the suitors is a clear rejection of peaceful arbitration as his prerogative. But nonetheless, the Greeks did seem to prefer peaceful resolution to conflict over violent competition when possible, such as in the *Odyssey*'s negative assessment of the race of the Cyclopes as they had neither councils (*agorai*) nor judgments (*themistes*).

But at what point did a policy of voluntary legal arbitration transform into a compulsory, mandatory resolution for disputes? Gagarin argues Draco's homicide law was the gateway for this development.

Draco's law stipulated that once a murderer was identified by the victim's family, the murderer had three options. (1) They could choose to go live in exile and thus implicitly acknowledge guilt. (2) They could submit to trial and be provided with protection by the *polis* from private revenge parties. Or (3) they could ignore this proclamation of guilt which meant the victim's family or the *polis* had free license to kill or arrest (*apagoge*) the perpetrator, even in public or sacred spaces.

It is not clear if this law was carried out on these terms or enforced because it does seem rather complex, and Athens lacked a formal police force that could carry out an arrest.

However, this homicide law remains a significant innovation because it is the first formally codified mechanism whereby an individual could be compelled to be tried in a public, legal setting so as to avoid exile or death. A precedent which would only expand over the years.

Thus, *apagoge*, *graphe*, *eisangelia*, and *episkepsis* (the formal notification of intent to prosecute) provided new procedures by which access to legal courts were expanded to the broader public.

On the question of written law, scholars have offered several theories to explain how it developed, none of which Gagarin finds persuasive. One view contends that written law was a democratic innovation to prevent abuses by aristocratic governments, yet this would assume the people believed there was a prior, secret oral law that was already codified but merely needed to be transcribed to writing.

Another view in a similar vein argues this was intended as a check on tyrants. Yet there is little evidence to support this and it seems that many lawgivers who created these written laws were also tyrants. Even the tyrant Pisistratus inherited the laws of Solon and Draco without any indication of overturning them.

A third view contends that written law was a cultural import from the Near East. Yet Gagarin contests there is no evidence beyond coincidental timing to suggest any influence between the two, particularly as the two kinds of legal codes remain so structurally dissimilar. Furthermore, there is little else that seems to have been imported from the Near East.

A fourth view suggests written law was developed to support the needs of colonization and establish a law code common to both parent cities and their colonies. This seems logically plausible, but the historical evidence indicates that the earliest written laws were not developed in colonies at all, and when colonies did adopt written, it was far later than their parent cities.

Gagarin believes that the rapid growth of cities across the Greek peninsula created a considerable level of social and political friction, and written law was implemented as a solution to the requirements of scaling legal and judicial decisions.

As a result, these laws propagated by Solon and other reformers brought about a considerably increased level of political control over families and households. Whereas before all matters were sorted privately through mediation or violence, the *polis* became an orchestrating agent in offering a public space for those seeking conflict resolution.

This is a powerful tool to possess, and it is this set of legal protections which perhaps partially gave birth to the initial incentives of citizenship.

Some like Geoffrey Lloyd have argued that the Greek *polis* was so unique and fertile in its cultural, artistic, and scientific output because of the special nature of its political institutions which lend themselves to openness and democratization.

However this would not explain why despotic Greek governments were also so fruitful, and Gagarin would contend that it is rather the unique development of Greek jurisprudence and its mechanisms for peaceful conflict resolution which played such a crucial role.

Writing was not universally a tool for democratization nor for despotic oppression, as it served a variety of functions on a case-by-case basis across the Greek city-states. What can be generally said about written law is that it reduced the discretionary power of magistrates and increased the role of public forces and opinion in conflict resolution.

When interpretation of the written law and words and arguments play such a critical lynchpin in the functioning of the social order, it is no wonder that the Greek mind would be so uniquely fascinated with the investigation, exploration, and uncovering of all matter and phenomena.

### Thoughts

As an amateur classicist at best, I find Gagarin's study to be a richly original analysis with a fresh angle in an area of scholarship often bogged with scholarly perspectives so frequently repeated they grow stale and uninteresting.

The monograph itself may have problems with organization. The presentation alternates between a historical presentation of evidence at times on the one hand with a topical analysis on the other which leads to the uneven recapitulation of previous quotations and evidence.

The observations of the introduction and closing chapters don't quite align, and the depth of evidential analysis seems to level off considerably. For example, the Homeric Hymns and Aeschylus are cited once in the second chapter, yet Greek drama nor other facets of the larger Greek canon are mentioned again.

That being said, Gagarin's work does prove exceedingly useful in considering the general abstractions of "what is law?" within the historically concrete context of classical Greece. All the more so as the history of Western law tends to give almost exclusionary focus to Roman law as a starting point.

I was also deeply intrigued by the implications of the symbiotic relationship of writing and procedural law, particularly as a foundation for a broader analysis of the nature of the "public forum" in the Greek context.

Aside from that, I found it simultaneously intuitive and yet radically alien to frame the origin of law within the context of dispute resolution, something traced back to the very first book of the *Iliad*.

Perhaps this is due in part, as Marx has noted, to the general historical trend by which the state has expropriated power from the private family, most especially the right-to-violence.

Yet it also serves as a double reminder, both how a working legal system is a protection from unrelenting violence, but also how the surrendering of a right-to-violence entails a surrendering of one's fate to a court authority, no matter how hostile such judges may be to you as a litigant.

Hence the eternal risk of the show-trials which emerge in ages of heightened societal frenzy such as in the French Revolution or the Soviet era. A false parading of "public" due process that is only meant to certify predetermined outcomes and ill-will.

It is because of this that the neutrality of the judicial system is of the utmost importance, particularly in heavily legally-driven societies such as modern America.

And the key evaluation of such neutrality is, as Hesiod describes, straightness (*ithys*) of the judge's ruling. They do not rely on crooked words but establish a fair decision with full firmness. They are not turned to left or right by prejudice, ideology, personal incentives, or anything extraneous to the dispute at hand.

It is this trait alone in the Greek imagination that separates civilization from the feuding, barbarian hordes, or the beasts of the field. It is a fragile thing, this thing called justice, and we should not take it for granted in this age or any other, when law itself comes under question.

The Origins of Western Law: Early Greek Jurisprudence

Photo by [Rana Obaid](https://www.behance.net/robaid).

Science fiction is a genre with a unique capacity to encompass the wide panorama of the highs and lows of human writing. The most elaborate and imaginative scenarios on the one and and some of the flattest, most contrived characters and dialogue on the other, often within the same book. *Dune* being a classic example of this.

I had a science fiction phase in younger times, primarily characterized by H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov.

It is a phase I have long since departed, and my reading journeys have taken me to many places since then. Only recently have I returned to this genre which so pricked my interest as a child. First through Houellebecq a few years ago then through Liu Cixin's *Remembrance of Earth's Past* trilogy, one of the most thoughtful blendings of Clarke and Asimov's imagingings of the distant future.

Now as I read through Jack Vance's tetralogy *Tales of the Dying Earth*, I am rediscovering a new aspect to the world of science fiction.

One expects early-mid century science fiction to be rather pulpy, so I was quite astounded by the masterful quality of Vance's work, particularly his firm grasp of human nature and the cycles of history in his sharply paced prose. His psychological analysis is fathoms deeper than the engineer-brain characters of Asimov and those who primarily write people to be the levers of their logic puzzle stories with near-zero interiority.

Vance's outlook carries a heavy weight of cosmic dread that few writers can properly convey. The feeling that the world, or at least the human race is old and dying, that there is no future, at least one worth speaking of.

When each layer of the cosmos has been tarnished from the home to the village to the city to the kingdom to the world to the fields to the trees to the waters to the very air itself. When the human organism itself is disintegrating either through mental decay or reproductive sterility. The world itself is tired and weary.

These physical, tangible displays being symptoms of a deeper spiritual, world-bound sterility and lifelessness. That we are are all bound on a ship destined for annihilation within the next generation or two. 

This is dying earth literature. One may call it melancholic romanticism. The Germans aptly call the root of its feeling *Weltschmerz*. And it is this subgenre and a foray into its history that has compelled me to gather these thoughts here.


## Le Dernier Homme

A genealogy of dying Earth literature can take many paths. Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson, and H.G. Wells's *Time Machine* were certainly definitive shapers of the genre. But if you trace the strands further and further back, you arrive at the very first modern work of dying earth literature with Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's *Le dernier homme* (1805).

De Grainville (1746 - 1805) was not a professional writer, nor in fact do we have any other writings from him except the manuscript for *Le Dernier Homme* which he wrote after leaving the priesthood during the French Revolution and was only published after he committed suicide.

*Le Dernier Homme* takes its cue from Milton's cosmic epic *Paradise Lost*. As Milton explored the mythology of the first human couple Adam and Eve, de Grainville regaled a prose romance of the adventures of Omegarus and Syderie, the last human couple. It is a fascinating universe that blends Greek tragedy, biblical apocalypticism, and environmental despair.

## The Frame Narrative

The narrative opens in the (18th century) present day as the French explorer narrative explores a cavern of the dead in Syria. These ruins belong to the Palmyrene Empire, a clever little nod for the reader.

The Palmyrene Empire was a short-lived breakaway state that emerged and fell during the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284 AD), a political crisis which almost permanently disintegrated the Roman Empire. A proper analogue to the chaos of the French Revolutionary era as well as to this end of world scenario where the greatest empires of the world are crumbling into seeming oblivion.

Inside this cavern, the narrator is enraptured in a vision of the style of Revelation including graphic imagery such as an old man whose shoulders are mutilated and bloodied wings lie at his feet.

In this vision, the narrator is told that the last man will have no posterity to honor his sufferings, to sing of his trouble, to commemorate his spirit. The language of epic is deeply concerned with rendering proper honor to its subjects so that all descendants may properly honor the deeds of Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf et al.

The task of the epic's audience is to hear and remember these stories, and thus carry on the memory. But if there is no audience that lives after the hero, then who is there to remember his deeds?

Their deeds must be retrojected back into the past, through an apocalyptic vision of the future so that those in the past may remember what is to come. A vision in the style of Revelation.

And so as if speaking to a muse, the narrator invokes Omegarus and Syderie to inspire his spirit, so that he may sing of their lives.

## Punished Adam

The inner story begins with an extremely aged man head bowed low equally from age as from the suffering he endures. This ancient patriarch is none other than Adam himself who still lives. As punishment for his original sin, Adam is forced to stand and watch for millennia as every single one of his children enters the gaping mouth of Hell and witnesses the torment they must endure. 

Though Adam sings of the beauty of creation and the life of the world which after all these years has not grown lost on him, he simply cannot bear to witness the eternal torment of all his children.

It is a weight that has crushed his spirit so completely that he no longer even feels any desire, even for this punishment to end.

It is a punishment reminiscent of Prometheus or other Greek figures such as Sisyphus who must endure endless cycles of their particular torment through the end of time.

But at this moment the angel Ithuriel (an angel likely coined by Milton and only appears in Book IV of *Paradise Lost*) arrives and announces the end of Adam's punishment.

The Almighty Most High has ordained that the human race must be brought to an end, and as no more new humans can enter Hell, Adam will be released from his punishment, but so long as he can assist in God's mission to extinguish the human race.

Adam whose misery has been so great is grateful for the chance to assist in this annihilation as he has no wish to see any more of his children created only so that they may be bound to eternal torment, if this is the only way that both he and his race may be freed.

Ithuriel transports Adam to late France where Adam immediately observes how desolate the land has become. All greenery has been stripped to barren rock. The trees have degenerated into moribund, white bark. Though there are no clouds in sight, even the sun itself casts a pale, eerie light on the world as if it were a gloomy day. Though the season is summer, the landscapes looks worse than winter.

It is from this strikingly modern environmental despair that Adam receives interior inspiration (*lumière intérieure*) that he must start a global revolution that will annihilate the human race.

And so he sets off to visit Omegarus, as Ithuriel had directed him.

## The Tale of Omegarus

What Adam soon comes to learn is that the human race has already been bound toward destruction for many years now. He arrives at the palace of Omegarus and his young wife Syderie. Omegarus greets Adam lavishly and relates to him his own tale of the state of the world and how he found his own wife in these last years.

In this world, human fertility has dropped to zero and no one has been able to reproduce for decades now (the same scenario as in *Children of Men*). The earth grew deserted and depeopled. As Europe grew sterile, so too the climate degenerated, forcing people to live increasingly remote and separated as the land could only support a few in any given place.

Omegarus was born a miracle child to the king of France in this sterile world to the king of France. The first child in twenty years.

The whole realm celebrated Omegarus' birth with manic fervor, crowding the capital city, all hoping just to touch this messianic child. The Savior, the child who will be the father of a new race.

As Omegarus himself puts it, "I remained the only [unique] son in the agedness [vieillesse] of the Europeans."

France had reverted to a Greco-Roman style where classical temples had been erected to Yahweh and sacrifices made to restore the human race, to bring hope again. Some in these times were religiously seized by the hope that Omegarus would be God's instrument of this change, others had no hope or belief in God and wished merely to waste away in hedonism.

Still the faithful prayed.

But a young man cannot continue the race alone. Omegarus recounts his childhood, the training and education he received, how he had been prepared to lead and propagate a new human race.

But there was no woman for him.

"L’ennui me consumoit lentement, et ma jeunesse se fletrissoit". Ennui, that French term which cannot be reduced merely to boredom as it covers the feelings of isolation, dissatisfaction, loneliness, the sense that you simply do not belong, and there is nothing for you. This ennui slowly consumed Omegarus, and his youth withered. The seed slowly matured with no hope of fulfillment.

One day Omegarus is told he is must visit the sage Idamas who lives in the Rouen (the city where Joan of Arc died) who has had visions of the end of the world and where Omegarus may find a bride able to conceive.

Omegarus travels to Rouen, on the way hosted by Policlète et Céphise. Céphise is the second youngest human who remains, but who is now middle-aged. She recounts the birth of Omegarus when she herself was twenty years old, "You were to be, they said, the savior of the world". How all these years she has prayed for him How she holds on to a steadfast hope, even now as she herself enters the age of menopause, that Omegarus will save them all and found a new race.

The monologue is surprisingly touching and heartfelt, to see such genuine hope and tears for such a gripping world crisis. Especially for a generation such as ours so jaded and corroded by irony that it is unable to express itself as earnestly as we see here.

The sage Idamas himself lives in a "madness", gripped by a manic hope that the human race will be reborn, through his countless sleepless nights of prayer. He believes that God has spoken to him of the Earth's rejuvenation through his instrument Omegarus. 

He adjures Omegarus and his party to join him on a tour of the world, to find the chosen bride for God's mission.

They travel to the capital of Normandy where a great, golden airship awaits them for this voyage. A ship which can travel over any sea and trespass any mountain. An airships whose sides were painted with elaborate historical and apocalyptic scenes, so perfect "that all the characters seemed to live and breathe".

Image of earthquakes and abysses. Of the battles of legions of angels whose slaughter and carnage is so great that their blood has reddened the trees beneath this aeriel confrontation.

It is on this ship that Omegarus embarks to begin his journey.

To be continued...

Omegarus: The Last Man


Easter marks one of the two high points of the church calendar. As Christmas celebrates the advent and birth of the Messiah, so does Easter commemorate his death and resurrection. And yet Easter is one of those odd holidays that moves around each year seemingly by the arbitrary hand of some higher power.

What is not so commonly known today is that the date of Easter proved to be the subject of bitter, and sometimes violent debate in the history of the church, with implications both political and cultural.

## Etymology

But first an etymology.

As most know, Easter is the Christian reinvention of the Jewish holiday of Passover (פֶּסַח - Pesach). Passover was instituted in Exodus 12 at the culmination of the Ten Plagues in Egypt where the angel of death would pass over the households of Egypt and slaughter the firstborn of each household, except for those households of Israel who painted lamb's blood upon the doorway. This symbolizes not only the fulfillment of liberation of slavery but also protection from death through the blood of an innocent sacrifice.

The parallels with Christ's sacrifice are striking, and it is not without reason that it was ordained that Christ was tried and put to death on Passover weekend.

The Hebrew name of Pesach was thus used to refer to the celebration and for most Western languages continues to be used so today.

The Greeks transliterated it into Πάσχα and the Romans carried the name into Latin as *Pascha*.

This name for Easter is maintained in modern Romance languages as Pâques in French, Pascua in Spanish, and Pasqua in Italian.

Even many Germanic languages have maintained this name with Dutch using Pasen and Swedish using Påsk.

Strangely, English and German are the two outliers which do not use the same "Passover" name for Easter.

For English, we first see reference to this Easter name in the chronicler Bede's *De Temporum* (725) where Bede refers to the Saxon name for what we call April as "Eosturmonath". He claims that the name "Eostur" refers to the ancient Saxon goddess "Eostre". This seems plausible at first sight as so many of our months and day names come from Germanic pagan deities. However, there simply is no other reference to or mention of this goddess in any other literature or archeological sources. It is completely possible that Bede merely speculates on this.

Another possible explanation is that Easter occurs around the time of the spring equinox. Because spring equinox festivities generally focus on longer daylight hours and earlier sunrises, and the sun rises in the East, the name is merely a reference to this. Like how the date of Christmas is tied to winter solstice festivals. This idea can be corroborated with a comparison to German who call the holiday *Ostern* and East *Ost*, both from the High German word *ōstarun*. 

## The First Easter Controversy - Quartodecimanism

The first Easter controversy emerged very early on in the history of Christianity, during the apostolic generation, and was concerned with the question whether the celebration of Christ's death and resurrection should happen on the day of his death (the Passover) or on the Sunday of his resurrection. Those who pushed for the Passover date were referred to as Quartodecimanism, because Passover is celebrated on the fourteenth (*quarta decima*) of the Jewish month Nisan.

The very first mention of Easter as a holiday in fact comes from the 2nd century when Melito of Sardis wrote an essay "On the Pascha" arguing for this Passover celebration date. The Western tradition, the generation following the apostolic ministry of Peter and Paul tended toward the Sunday celebration while Eastern Christians following the Apostle John tended toward the Friday date.

It became such a tenuous issue that Eusebius attests (V.23-24) the early church father Polycarp traveled from Anatolia to Rome in part to hold discussions with his Western counterparts on this Easter date issue. However, at the time they decided to practice their customs separately but remain reconciled within a single faith.

At a high level, the issue boils down to questions of theme and identity.

The first few generations of Christianity struggled to establish itself as an independent faith not attached to Judaism. Many external writers of the time referred to Christianity as a Jewish sect (as there were many), and even within the first generation Christ-followers would attend synagogue in cities where there was no establish presence.

This led to an internal tension within Christian communities as to the degree to which Christianity should be a Jewish faith. This is a large theme in the Pauline epistles, as he strove to disconnect Christian practice from "Judaizing" influence which he argued re-introduced legalism that undermined the very core of Christian doctrine.

By celebrating Easter in the same way as the Jewish faith, Christianity seemed to merely be a subset of Judaism.

On the other hand, other Christians felt it extremely important to reclaim the theme of Passover and definitively state that Christ's death is a repetition of the original Jewish Passover tradition. To disconnect the holiday from this historic event was to undermine the definitive theological connection between the two and also to deny that Christ was reclaiming and reinventing the Passover tradition through the new covenant, as much of the Christian tradition frames itself as a new iteration against the old version of Judaism.

Eventually, this conflict came to a head by the close of the 2nd century as several synods were convened to rule on the question of the date of Easter. As Eusebius recounts, these synods ruled that Sunday would be the official day of Easter, placing greater emphasis on the resurrection of Christ and his triumph over death as the real essence of the holiday.

Those who remained stoutly in favor of Quartodecimanism such as Polycrates of Ephesus were briefly excommunicated by Pope Victor I until other Western bishops such as Irenaeus pressed the Pope to re-admit Quartodecimans. We have other testimonies of others like John Chrysostom simply denying Quartodecimans admittance to church at all. This was an issue not taken lightly.

What is not clear after is what point Christians all shifted to celebrating the Easter date on Sunday, though we do know this was very nearly universally adopted following the Council of Nicaea if not before then. However, Nicaea was itself concerned with another aspect of the Easter controversy.

## The Second Easter Controversy - Jewish or Roman Calendar

So it had been established by the end of the second century that doctrinally at least Easter should be celebrated on Sunday. But this did not quite settle the issue as there were different calendars at play here.

The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, consisting of 29-30 days each month, with an extra lunar month added each year to average out the days.

By contrast, the Julian calendar introudced by Julius Caesar is a purely solar calendar of 365 days with a leap day every fourth year.

So while Christians were agreed that Easter would fall upon the "Sunday" following Passover, it was not definitively clear whether this meant adherence to the Jewish calendar for reckoning the date of Passover or if some corollary date in the Roman calendar should be used.

This again sparked dispute and debate depending on the apostolic heritage of various church communities.

In fact, it was of such significance that it was a primary point of discussion during the first ecumenical council of Nicaea which is known today for "writing the book" on core Christian doctrine across various branches and denominations, with regard to the divine and human nature of Christ, and other key theological questions.

Emperor Constantine I took more executive action in this decision and ruled that the date of Easter simply could not be celebrated according to the Jewish calendar because that meant that there would be some years in the Roman calendar where Easter would be celebrated twice.

It was determined that Easter should be celebrated **on the first Sunday after the first full moon following spring equinox** and that decision in 325 AD is how we still determine the date of Easter today. This was based on the Alexandrian method of measuring years, as Alexandria was one of the largest scientific centers of the period and was seen as most precise in calculating time. This ensured that Easter would follow a 19-year cycle before it was celebrated on the same day again, as it continues to this day.


## The Third Easter Controversy - Ireland versus Rome

However, this did not mark the end of Easter's controversies, as trouble reared its head again a few centuries later.

This third one originates with St. Patrick, whose own festival is just now behind us. While we generally picture the spread of Christianity across early medieval Europe as the emanation of concentric circles going from France to England and Germany and from there to Scandinavia and Poland, etc. there are exceptions to this rule.

Ireland is one such exception as one extremely early adopter of Christianity for the region, especially as it was never occupied or controlled by the Romans. St. Patrick is notable for establishing one of the only centers of Christianity north of Mediterranean that was so completely independent of Rome.

Because Ireland was such as an early adopter, Irish missionaries would cross the Irish Sea to evangelize peoples of England. We even have the Irish monk Columbanus traveling to modern-day Belgium as a missionary and founding one of the most popular centers of monastic learning and teaching on the European continent, Luxeuil Abbey in France and Bobbio Abbey in Italy being among them.

On the other hand, we have the famous missionary St. Augustine (no connection to *Confessions* Augustine, the bishop of Hippo) who was sent from Rome to evangelize England. Because of this there were two separate Christian influences in Saxon England, the Celtic and the Roman strain.

This was not problematic earlier on as they shared the common goal of converting pagans on the British Isles to Christianity. However as paganism began to disappear from English shores, the cultural tensions between the Celtic and Roman variants became more pronounced, as is only natural when two cultures come in contact with one another.

Ironically, the one single issue which was the breaking point between these two Christian elements was the date of Easter.

Because Ireland never had a Roman presence, it never had adopted the Roman calendar. Irish monks at the isle of Iona had adopted the practice of celebrating Easter on an 84-year cycle which had been the general practice in Celtic Gaul and even for some Romans prior to the Council of Nicaea. However, this clashed with the 19-year cycle ruling established by the Council of Nicaea.

This proved one of the most politically significant disputes in the episodes of Easter controversies as bishops, priests, and even political appointees were chosen, passed over, dismissed, and even exiled based on their positions on this issue in medieval English lands.

The most notable of these situations involves the kingdom of Northumbria, in Northern England today. While Roman Christianity had gained a strong foothold in Northumbria, a man named Oswald gained the throne in 633, and he was incidentally educated and raised in part by Irish monks. Oswald invited many Irish monks to positions of prestige and influence in his kingdom, and he was one of the most proactive rulers of Northumbria to promote a general conversion to Christinaity.

Following Oswald's death, Oswiu came to power in Northumbria which had grown very largely divided between Celtic and Roman Christianity. The issue of the date of Easter was coming to a head not only because it proved logistically challenging for lords to arrange feast days in mixed communities, but also because it was an indicator of which side possessed true hegemony, and neither side wished to back down.

To resolve this, Oswiu called the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD to rule once and for all on this date of Easter question. The other prime issue of this synod was whether monks were to shave their heads (tonsure) in the Irish or Roman style. After long and tenuous debate, it was ruled that Northumbria would align itself with Roman Catholicism on both issues. By all accounts, Oswiu merely attended and presided over the synod without intervening directly, but this was also politically convenient for him to align himself with Roman Christianity as it gave him more leverage to wage war against the Britons to the West and the Scottish peoples of the North who were more Celtic than Roman.

In either case, this synod incidentally spelled the beginning of the end for Celtic Christianity as a cultural hegemon as the major English kingdom of Northumbria swung to the side of Rome, and over time all of the British Isles would slowly align themselves to Roman Catholicism for the following centuries until the Reformation came nearly a millennium following the Synod of Whitby.

## The Date of Easter Today

One would think the matter definitively settled by this age, considering how many controversies have existed over the date of Easter.

However, many Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate Easter on a different day than Western churches. Again this boils down to the divergence of calendars.

The Julian calendar was the universal Christian calendar for quite some time, but it is not the calendar we use today.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII, the central pope of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, also implemented a new reformed calendar that added precision to the Julian Calendar. This Gregorian Calendar added exceptions to leap years in order to keep the calendar better aligned with the solar cycle. For the Gregorian Calendar, leap years would be celebrated every four years except on a century year unless that century year was divisible by 400. So for example while 1600 and 2000 were leap years, the years 1800 and 1900 were not. 2100 will also not be a leap year.

The adoption of the Gregorian calendar was very gradual and unique to each country, but it was adopted across the British Empire in 1752 when a few days were "erased" from history. This also is one of the last British reforms to have taken root in colonial America before the American Revolution severed ties between the two states.

So while the Western world today celebrates Easter according to the Gregorian calendar, the Eastern Orthodox church uses the original Julian calendar and Alexandrian method as ruled by the Council of Nicaea. However, with the Western and Eastern churches already split by the time of this divergence, there was no need for further controversy.

--

One cannot help but reflect that this was certainly was one of Christ's chief concerns when he died on the cross and rose again, and one can only hope that Heaven is keeping its calendar in line with ours, lest there should prove to be a Fourth Easter Controversy when Christ returns and there is a calendar desync between the new heavens and new earth.

The Easter Controversy (x3)

[Photo by Sebastian Voortman.](https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-white-concrete-statues-covered-by-dust-566641/)

*I wrote this originally five years ago for a former iteration of this blog.*

> the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
> excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
> o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
> with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
> me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
> What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
> how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
> express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
> in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
> world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
> what is this quintessence of dust? - Hamlet

It is hard to write about a human condition. Single line platitudes invariably fall into some mixture of sentimental contrivance and egregious myopia. It just sounds repulsive to the modern ear. Perhaps this is due in part to advertising and its unrelenting recycling of banalities. Motivation taglines that reduce the universal human to a universal consumer.

But fortunately a phrase such as "quintessence of dust" has not yet been co-opted by the marketing machine. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Quintessential is a term that has fallen out of usage. To be quintessential is to be classic in some sense. The diner, for example, is quintessentially American.

But let's pick apart this term etymologically. "Quintessence" derives from the scholastic concept of *quinta essentia* which is recognizably translatable as the "fifth essence". It is a Latinization of a Greek term we recognize as "element".

These elements are, for Greek science, what we remember as fire, earth, water, and air.

There is something we have lost with our modern periodic table ranging across 200 distinct entities.

When you say something is elemental, something is essential to the very thing, there is a lot more meaning when you liken the heart to fire than to carbon or nitrogen. Something more visceral when you have four elements to choose from.

The entire cosmos from droplets of dew to the burning of the stars to the sinewing of the flesh to the rock formations torturously sundered into the face of the earth, all these are derived from four base elements.

The world cannot exist apart from these four. Or so it was told.

Then Aristotle comes along as he does, and he theorizes that fire, water, earth, and air don't quite capture the totality of the universe. There must be a fifth element out there: aether.

So he coined it. And so aether entered scientific discourse for a very long time. So long in fact that it was tossed around as a hypothetical until Einstein definitively put it to bed in 1905.

Aether as a concept is significantly older than gravity, electricity, waves, particles, fluids, and planets.

So what is aether?

Though it had a long shelf life in the scientific world, there was never quite a firm agreement on what aether is. Is it the force of life? Some light-bearing invisible substance that passes through the vacuum? 

This fifth element aether became a mysterious silhouette that coul potentially answer many leading scientific questions across disciplines such as optics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, and others.

It was the theoretical missing link that could potentially unify all of natural science.

So, if you will permit some creative reading for the sport of it, what if Hamlet's idea is taht the fifth essence of the universe--something on the level of aether--is dust. Dust as the missing link.

And not dust as we typically imagine it. But what we are. Humans, transmogrified from the dust.

Dust itself is a primary theme throughout the Hebraic telling of things. The word "עָפָר֙" appears over a hundred times across the Old Testament: it refers to lowliness as in the case of *Job*, ephemerality as in the case of *Ecclesiastes*, or as a metaphor of innumerable abundance as in the promise made to Abraham of his descendants.

It first appears in the Creation myth when God forms man out of dust and breathes life into him. While the rest of creation is spoken into being, the human race is culled out a pre-existing material substance. Dust.

Hence the cliche "From dust you came and to dust you will return" coined either by Kansas or *Ecclesiastes*, take your pick.

This image should give us pause. What it is to be made of dust.

Consider the last person you held in your arms, how they could simply evaporate into a sooty, powdery pile of dust through your fingers. In fact they will invariably end up this way.

Consider how much of your past self lies as sheets of dust under bed. The more you cast off of yourself, the more there is to haunt you. Dust as a specter, your past self as a voyeur of the future.

Consider old houses abandoned by dead relatives or strangers. Shelves and furniture and books caked in the flesh of the dead.

This is what dust is. This what you were, and this is what you will become.

We forget how appalling such an image should be. To call ourselves dust.

But that is not the end of the story. This isn't some ode to rejoice in the meaninglessness of life.

We are not mere dust but the quintessence of it.

We are not derivations but elevations. Whether as the Hebraic says by the breath of God or as the Hellenic says by the possession of *logos*. Or as others in the West have gone on to name as the soul or free will or consciousness. All of these as some label to distinguish the animating force that exalts us from the dust.

These various terms do not capture such a quintessence in its entirety. There is something indeterminable, ineffable about the human being that these concepts can barely taste.

It is because of this unnamed thing that we are raised from brute materialism to pure determinism.

With the assiduous encroachment of sciences social and physical into all spheres of lief, there is a strong temptation to parse out every single occurrence into a predetermined cause-and-effect. Genetics, economics, sociology, psychology, among other disciplines whose langauge games we widely employ to rationalize the problems of our lives. It is the tool of identitarianism (a term whose meaning also is revealed in etymology) to cast blame on the forces of determinism.

Those whose personal conceptual space is determined by political ideology are often guilty of this. Concocting general patterns and statistics as pre-emptive authorities over their own lives. To explain the crumble or enfetterment. 

This all depends upon a logic of determinism that all has been decided already in the lot of one's own life. That there is no free will or fate to fight for or overturn. A whole retinue of externalities has totalistic control over our personal lives.

Unfortunately, the extent to which someone assigns an aspect of themselves to this mode of thinking is an extent that has been cordoned off to mental slavery. Enslavement to ideas and thought patterns that increase learned helplessness, anxiety, misery, despair, and those factors. To give the perceived enemy more control and power than they probably even have.

To reject determinism is to recognize this little ineffable, quintessential blip and what it does for us, whatever this blip is. It allows us to strive and to overcome the problems set before us. To contest the roll of the dice. To play the game.

The unpredictable choreography of time, uncountable as dust swirling in a sunlit hallway. Too intricate and random for any finitude to calculate. 

Even in this age, human beings still possess this glint of spontaneous vitality, no matter how insistently other forces have tried to suffocate it. For two millennia, aged scientists with baggy eyes and an aversion to the real world have hunched over lifeless texts to try to determine and control the fifth element ether. To put it into a closed off box.

But vitality can never be captured by science. All you get is an ossified shadow. The residual glow of its power.

And for as long as there is a sliver of the human essence in us. Soemthing that can escape the constricting noose of scientific causality, there is hope. Hope that we are not thoroughly enslaved to external forces. That we do not need to subject ourselves to the prisons of the mind.

That our quintessence, as humble dust, is that we can never be fully determinable.

The quintessence of dust

*Fast Antiates Maiores* reconstructed. [Source URL](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_del_Teatro_Romano_de_Caesaraugusta.43.jpg).

The calendar occupies a strange place between man and cosmos. On the one hand it is a technology for the organization and division of time in the human reckoning of things. On the other a system for mapping the cycles of the stars and planets onto our terrestrial plane.

Our English rendering *calendar* flows down to us from old Roman custom. 

The Romans counted their months by dividing them between three principal days of the lunar cycle: the calends, the nones, and the ides.

The calends was the first day of the month and occurred when the first sliver of the moon appeared in a new moon cycle. Unlike other calendar systems built upon decentralized mathematical and scientific calculations, the Roman calends could only be dictated by the priesthood. When the priests determined it was the first day of the month from their vantage point on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, a priest would stand and call out (*calo*) and herald the coming of the new month.

One must remember that Rome has a long heritage of centralized, pontifical authority. Where persons and offices determine what is true *ex cathedra*, more true than individual observation or conviction.

The calends was noteworthy in the Roman world not merely for the cosmic alignment of moon, sun, and earth to form a new moon but also because it was the day of debts. On the first day of the month, debts could be collected. 

Our word "calendar" derives from *calendarium* which was the name given to this book of debts, an accounting ledger both in a cosmic and fiscal sense which marked how much was owed and by whom.

In the world of modern accounting, we maintain some downstream variation of this in our governmental tax structures, reckoning debts to the state at the level of the year, aligned with the cosmic revolution of the earth around the sun.

But this modern rendering is decoupled from the religious significance of such accounting. And this marks what perhaps is the deepest guilt of modern society, an obligatory truth we have forgotten.

To be born is to exist in debt.

Debt in contemporary vernacular usage has been constrained greatly in scope, often only to refer to fiscal or material forms of obligation.

But debt exists in a much broader scope as its Latin origin indicates. For the original word functions much like an English helping verb indicating that one *ought* to do something, one *should* do something, one *must* do something.

Debt in this sense is deeply tied to concepts of duty, the ethics of obligation.

And the calendar in this light is not just a table for the division of days, weeks, months, and years according to the ways of the gods and the ways of men. It is a cosmic ledger of our debts. The debt of our time.

This is a chief insight of Protestantism, as Weber observes. That our time is not our own. Nothing at all is our own in an absolute sense. All we have and are and will gain is due to God. We are merely borrowers of the thousand talents. One of modern conservatism's fundamental errors is to elevate the notion of property above all else, failing to recognize that all which is owned is also owed.

In the world of finance, we have finite sums that we may can spend or use. In the world of life, we have finite time that me way spend or use until our allocation is extinguished in the embrace of death.

This finite sum is a gift. And it is not one to be squandered.

Richard Baxter treated this theme most exhaustively in his sermon "The Redemption of Time". Much like our life has been redeemed by Christ, so too must we redeem our time, to make it of good use in service to the God who has granted us such time.

In one section, Baxter points to the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus teaches that we shall all on the day of judgment have to explain *every* useless (ᾱ̓ργός) word we have ever spoken. The Greek here is the antonym of ἔργον which is used to indicate any work, labor, deed, or task. The Twelves Labors of Hercules, Hesiod's *Works and Days*, etc. What we do with our lives in the short time we have been granted.

One can get a sense for the Puritan interpretation of time here by his reading:

Now then if there be an account to be given, and a reckoning to be made for these rubbish speeches, judge, if it be not a want of redeeming the time, to lay it out in such a thing as will bring a sore and heavy burden afterwards without repentance to cast it off; and judge if he which makes much of time had not need take much heed of this ill-spent breath. Not alone then wicked speak∣ing when one bel•heth forth lewd and filthy words, not slanderous and backbiting talk, (when one whispers of his neighbour's faults behind his back, uttering (perhaps) also lying reports, and fathering that upon him which he never did or meant;) but even vain, needless, and unprofitable words..."

Biblical ethics places great emphasis on the sins of the tongue, the words spoken and the things said. But there is a sense in the Puritan reading where the sin is not just a matter of the motives or consequences of the words, but the fact that they misuse the time granted us.

This may seem rather extreme in a contemporary lens, but it does make one wonder the exactitude to which God would judge us for redeeming the time. For as history shows time and again, the extremeness of a belief has little to do with its usefulness. Extreme views quite easily become mainstream and former commonplace wisdom can become taboo even within the space of a generation.

This uneasiness we feel toward the use or misuse of our time can be seen as the wellspring of guilt. It is no coincidence that the Germans use the one word *Schuld* for both guilt and debt.

We feel guilt at the theological debt owed.

And this brings us back to Rome.

The *calendarium* appears twice in Seneca's "De Beneficiis", a Stoic treatise on gifts, charitable services, essentially giving something without anything ostensibly being required in return.

The gift has taken on a new level of significance in 20th century philosophy as a central theme in Derrida and other postmodern writers who write on how even a "free" gift introduces social or psychological obligations that consequently mean the gifter actually is receiving something in return.

In simple terms, it is why ancient kings would give away lavish gifts or Caesars would give bread and circuses for the poor. Not out of charitable selflessness but rather as ostentatious display or politicking. One can readily see this in modern philanthropy and the tax exemption structures built around the nonprofit industrial complex which fund lucrative or desirable outcomes. This is a primary mode of dark liberalism which leverages capital to the benefit of the giver but behind the safety net of sanctimonious platitudes.

This idea was brought back to the forefront by Marcel Mauss in his famous seminal essay "The Gift", but it should be noted that this essay is itself deeply indebted to Seneca's work "De Beneficiis".

Seneca refers to calendars twice. In the first instance he writes, "Nemo beneficia in calendario scribit" (*De Beneficiis* I.2). In translation this can be rendered as "No one records gifts in the book of debts (calendar)".
This highlights the spontaneity of the gift as something falling outside the exact, deterministic ordering of time. At the same time, one does not record or remember a gift because as a gift it is not a debt to be owed. One does not remind the recipient of a debt to be collected.

In a later passage, Seneca is characterizing gold, silver, and iron as evils the gods buried beneath the earth but which we have dug up to inflict evil upon one another to satiate our vindictive greed. And then he writes,

"Et tamen adhuc ista aliquam materiam habent; est, in quo errorem oculorum animus subsequi possit. Video istic diplomata et syngraphas et cautiones, vacua habendi simulacra, umbracula avaritiae quaedam laborantis, per quae decipiat animum inanium opinione gaudentem. Quid enim ista sunt, quid fenus et calendarium et usura, nisi humanae cupiditatis extra naturam quaesita nomina?" (Ibid. VII.10 )

To paraphrase in translation: And yet even these things have some substance; there is something for the mind's eye is able to follow. I see bonds and contracts, securities, empty symbols (*simulacra*) of possession, some kind of shelter for laboring greed, through which the mind is deceived, rejoicing in the illusion of ownership. For what are these very things, what are interest and ledgers (*calendarium*) and loans, but names for human desire sought beyond nature.

Again, Seneca introduces the calendar as a nefarious force. One that constricts and confines us as tools of human greed. Taken on its own, this quote shows remarkable applicability for a global financial market which recently crashed from collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and once again chokes the middle class out of home ownership through real estate investment trusts (REITs). 

For time immemorial, financial systems and institutions have concocted a panoply of wizardry and fancy terminology to camouflage the unending extraction of wealth.

But moralisms aside, one should consider this from the viewpoint of temporal debt.

If God has granted us time, is it as a gift or as a loan?

The concept of "redeeming the time" runs the risk of casting God as a greedy lender who is waiting to pounce on his returns. We must not forget that Jesus also parables God as a generous master who forgives debts. How Pauline theology underscores Christ as a liberator who grants us freedom.

The guilt of debt lends itself to legalism. That life must be crushed in the grindstone to extract every kernel of worth.

If grace is given to us as a gift, then in what ways could we say that time is also a gift to us. To enjoy without use or end goal. And in enjoying this gift to thereby redeem it, perhaps.

It is a difficult question and one that cannot be answered here. Only posed. How we can balance the obligation we owe to the divine versus the freedom we have in what we have been granted.

And there are much broader investigations we could make. A structural comparison of how calendars ranging from the Mesoamerican to the Mesopotamian to the Chinese illustrate cultural or universal characterizations of the relation between man and cosmos, debt and time. This is only one strand.

It is perhaps most fruitful to reflect in closing on Christmas, a calendar holiday most associated with gift giving. How in the Christian understanding, Christ is the gift God gave to the world.

We commemorate this holiday not because God instructs us too, but rather, as is good etiquette for any recipient of a particularly lavish gift, we make sure to remember and express our gratitude for what we have been given. 

The calendar implication of Christmas is that we are marking our own accounting books to remember the debt that we paid in our sin. But one that we have been redeemed of. A transaction that has been zeroed out on our behalf. And to be freed from debt is something to rejoice in. As we augur a new year, a new cycle of time that we have been granted. To use in grace, not just for ourselves as some idea of property, but as something for the larger whole.


A quick reflection on the Roman and Christian implications of the calendar

Calendratics: debt and time

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

Wrestling with historicity

A translation of Bernhard Riemann's inaugural lecture

Riemann: 'On the Hypotheses which Lie at the Root of Geometry'


Self-improvement is the bread and butter of the American culture. A cultural strand that can be traced from our contemporary vloggers, through business executive self-help books, back through corny early twentieth century pamphlets, all the way to Ben Franklin's autobiography. To understand the American spirit, one must grapple with the entrepreneurial drive that underpins our culture, in both action and talk. The American mentality is tied up in a firm, concomitant belief that we are volitional selfs with both self-defining power as well as some capacity to will our destiny. This belief is not without its consequences, only one of which I will consider here.

To define self-improvement is difficult. It is an energy, a mindset. The onus is on you the individual to bring yourself forward, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. By sufficient application of willpower, many things (if not all things) are possible.

There is much to laud in such an optimistic temperament. But it is not without its dangers.

And few writers name this danger better than Byung Chul-Han who writes frequently on the burnout and depression endemic to the systems of self-improvement culture. In *Psychopolitics* particularly, he articulates a rather illuminating point on this topic.

Traditional Marxist theory is built on what can loosely be described as the employer-employee dichotomy. How the employer oppresses the work through arduous, menial, alientating labor. A story many are familiar with.

Byung Chul-Han believes that this analysis has become obsolete in reference to contemporary office culture. For the source of motivation to be more productive is no longer rooted in the boss but in ourselves. It is no longer so universally the case that the taskmaster applies the whip to the workers in order to make them more productive, we apply the whip to ourselves. The professional class is one that has automated oppression and alientation by casting such conditions upon ourselves through cultural drives.

One dominant cultural narrative of our day, the "you can do it" rhetoric, has inculcated a new impetus, particularly in millennials on down, that the rat race can be won if you apply enough grit and elbow grease. And if you don't win, well it's your fault.

In this model, bosses don't need to be over-demanding to get more work out of their employees. Rather the employees, driven on by a urgent mixture of guilt and lust for opportunity, feel the need to put in overtime or become better "contributors" so that they can be noticed, move up the ladder, be successful, etc. Ask not what your company can do for you, ask what you can do for your company.

And for the guilt-ridden, there is no limit of what can be asked of yourself. So long as you live in the gap between where you are and where you want to be (which is almost the entirely of our lives), there is always more to be done.

Thus we burn ourselves out in a manic frenzy to do enough so that we can succeed. Because the sky's the limit. If you don't get what you want, after all, it's only you to blame.

And as cultural streams often go, this mindset is not limited to the career sphere. It bleeds downstream, into other pools of life.

Self-improvement culture has slowly percolated outward to become, in the minds of some, a universally applicable dictum to all spheres of life. Nothing should escape the optimization mindset. A lot of this I believe is a bequeathment of Web 2.0, a necessary development out of the envy and desire that the new glut of luxury imagery produces. There are other contributors to this development, to be sure, but this particular swathe of tooling has certainly accelerated this particular evolution in our collective psychology.

One of the most evident cases of the expansion of self-improvement culture is its application to the body. Bodybuilding is deeply tied in with the self-improvement ethos, so much so, that the vast majority of traditional self-improvement programs are almost anchored in gym-going as the necessary condition to improve one's life. The discourse is rooted in the gym.

Between 2000 and 2019, gym memberships nearly doubled in the US from 32.8 to 64.2 million. In the next five years, fitness industry spending is expected to increase 171.54%.

These are extreme growth numbers, especially as the United States population is an aging one, and 60% of gym membership holders are below the age of 35.

It is speculation to tie these two as correlation, but let us suppose they are related. How are they then interconnected?

One evident reason is body image. This is readily observable in the public gyms of the past few years. All the selfies, the self-filming, the live-streaming, etc. Attention and validation. Broadcasting the body and its subjection to improvement.

There is one direction of our culture that reduces your value to your visually-presented physical condition. Because that is one facet that is presentable and communicable through photography and videography. It is possible to get traction through Instagram or TikTok through the immediate impression of the visual condition of your body. Physical athletics is one the most highly valuated forms of achievement now because it is immediately verifiable. By contrast, the most accomplished writer or mathematician in the world could hardly gain any such traction through such media focal points by the presentation of their accomplishments. The media shapes the message. And in this case the message is the person, i.e. the body. The medium can only convey the physical, and so the motivations of most people become increasingly and more stringently materially driven.

Hence the irony of the prized abdominal six-pack for men. A meretricious moniker of athleticism and strength. Although its achievement depends on self-starvation and often abandonment of muscle mass, cultural aesthetics have deemed it a laurel of strength. It is strange because of how unnatural it is. One need only read the anorexic routines male celebrities undergo to reach this look. And contrast that to the masculinity of older stars such as Bert Reynolds or Sean Connery. Hairy chests, firm guts, and strong men. Bulk often accompanies strength, but bulk is inadmissible in Hollywood imagery for a strongman starting in the mid 90s. (An interesting contrast is Robert De Niro in *Taxi Driver*. His body fat certainly dips sub twelve percent for that role, but his emaciation is presented as freakish rather than as beautiful or glorifiable.)

What it comes down to is that fat and hair are visual deterrents that subtract from conventional photographic appeal. Rather, we are told the most masculine men are those with baby-smooth chests and washboard tummies. Even when those who possess these feature may unfortunately tend to act more like fops or dandies than true masculine types.

(There is of course the female half of the equation, but I feel the point on body image sufficiently made here, the dots are easy to connect.)

In any case, this self-improvement ethos, in its increasing urgency over the years, has extended its reach to fitness, education, finances, real-estate investment, etc. You aren't enough if you aren't constantly improving. How are you convincing the shareholders of your psyche that you will be better next quarter, how you will do more. Convince them of your growth and your earnings.

And nearly universally in these mantras, it is driven purely by material factors.

The purported end goal of self-improvement is greater accessibility to wealth, power, sex, attention, and the other usual suspects which populate the common motivators for a material life.

In fact, this is baked into the very etymology of improvement which stems from the Latin term *prode* which translates as useful or profitable.

Self-improvement is to render yourself more useful for yourself and your goals.

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That may sound all well and good to most.

But it is a fundamentally nihilist position.

More than just the egoism it entails, self-improvement is soulless.

Some may criticize the oppressive, hostile, enslaving nature of self-improvement culture. I will criticize it for its motives and results.

Self-improvement as a whole, because it is driven by material motives, is fundamentally boring. It produces boring people. Men and women, both.

The exclusive focus on externalities has also led to a neglect, if not outright abandonment, of the interior self.

Hence the general observation that some people use the gym as a replacement for having a personality. And it should not be too controversial to say the same goes for those chasing money, cars, bedroom delights, and other elements of the hedonistic package.

None of these self-improvement tips and tricks point to the cultivation of the soul. The reading of books, spiritual wonder, travel sans tourism, or anything that would make you a deeper, more interesting person. The kind of experinces which would make you capable of having complex emotions to wrestle through.

As a counterpoint, one may see transcendental meditation as a very popular practice which leads to internal cultivation. 

But frankly meditation is better proof of the exact opposite. In its consumerist forms, meditation is rooted in the ablution and destruction of thought. It is a denial of self, and this is not a good thing. By perverting important breathing habits to stifle and silence the thoughts that spark in the quiet stillness. 

Meditation becomes a crutch by which many seek to bypass internal development. To avoid thinking at all costs, even when such self-reflection may be beneficial. This is not internal cultivation, though it may be parried around as such.

Although it is boasted as a practice to root yourself, rid yourself of toxicity, or other slogans, meditation is a repeated practice to blot out and/or silence the inner self. It is directed toward an annihilation of the internal self.

That is not to say meditation cannot be helpful for those who spend too long wrestling in the interior corridors of their consciousness, but for those whose problems and thoughts are no more surreptitious than a child's, then there is an issue. We are meant to be more than blank mirrors, doing nothing more than reflecting what mass culture tells us to buy or look like.

The self-improvement package is based on the external aesthetics of consumerism, spoon-fed by marketing companies and other glitzy media. Tingling your dopamine with those fun sensations which keep you simple, and are purportedly supposed to keep you happy. Surface without depth. You become one of the Eloi.

But the truth is no amount of gym-time, work-time, bed-time, wealth, or even fame can ever stop you from being a thoroughly boring person.

What makes us distinctly human is our interior landscapes, where the mind and heart mesh in curious patterns, and we have thoughts and experiences that deviate from the monolithic norm handed down to us by centralized zeitgeists.

What self-improvement suffocates and leaves entirely untended are precisely these gardening tools of the soul: literature, philosophy, lepidopterology, and other quirky hobbies whether tactile or intellectual. The accumulation of experiences that can redeem your existence on the ledger of time.

The growth of the interior, that which is not reducible to material usefulness, that which is not presentable or communicable through social media, with the rare exception of those who have creatively subverted that medium.


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One should stand against self-improvement in the sense that is foisted on us as some one-size-fits-all *modus operandi* for encountering the world and ourselves.

Physical fitness, nutrition, and hard work all play their role. But they should never come at the cost of the cultivation of the soul. The increasing of wisdom and knowledge, and the development of true character. While our culture may eschew any sort of internal virtue in favor of all that which can be demonstrated externally, the truest people, and the most interesting ones, are those who hold internal convictions and values generated from within, rather than spoon-fed from without.

How boredom and leisure without a panoply of distractions can lead to true internal growth. How releasing the gas pedal of your career and going off into the wilderness by yourself may bring you to a spiritual epiphany that an over-optimized schedule could never otherwise experience?

Perhaps a new injunction is required to force people to be bored more often, to reject consumerist travel, to rejuvenate the life of the mind. A spiritual or intellectual diet as sparse and ascetic as the physical ones some nutritionists force on themselves.

That is one essential step to retrieving meaning in life and rejecting the nihilism that percolates in our cultural moment.

Admittedly, none of what has been said here clearly defines what are soul-cultivating habits versus those that are not. Aside from some blustery gestures to books. That ought be discussed elsewhere. This was merely to open the door, and to understand the ways in which self-improvement can lead to self-annihilation, and the dangers therein.


A new lens for the cultivation of the soul

Against self-improvement


A brief note in English for the confused. It was customary in medieval philosophical pedagogy to write notes and commentary on Peter Lombard's *Sentences*, as one transitioned from apprentice to journeyman, so to speak.

The *Sentences* (1150) are a compilation of patristic and medieval opinions on a wide variety of questions spread across four books. A prototype textbook, if you will.

Philosophical education today, benighted beyond any recognizable form, neglects to carry on this tradition. So I am taking it upon myself to self-inflict this exercise as a philosophical rite-of-passage. It will likely be an intermittent project, spread over years, and left incomplete. But it will be good fun.

For those who know better, please do forgive my underdeveloped Latin style, and the anachronistic smatterings of medieval and modern formulations.


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# Sententiarum libri IV
## Prologous

### Incipit Prologus.

Petrus Lombardi:

> 1. Cupientes aliquid de penuria ac tenuitate nostra cum paupercula in gazophylacium Domini mittere, ardua scandere, opus ultra vires nostras agere praesumpsimus, consummationis fiduciam laborisque mercedem in Samaritano statuentes, qui, prolatis in curationem semivivi duobus denariis, supereroganti cuncta reddere professus est. Delectat nos veritas pollicentis, sed terret immensitas laboris; desiderium hortatur proficiendi, sed dehortatur infirmitas deficiendi, quam vincit zelus domus Dei.

Desiderium finiti tendit ad infinitum. Sic homo ut ens finitum necessario nostrum Dominum ut infinitum creatorem omnium rerum cupere debet. Operam nostram tanquam sacrificum offerimus, etsi "terret immensitas laboris", enim hoc est nostrum propositum: glorificare Dominum. Hoc naturalissimum desiderium est.


> 2. Quo inardescentes, «fidem nostram adversus errores carnalium atque animalium hominum» Davidicae turris clypeis munire vel potius munitam ostendere, ac theologicarum inquisitionum abdita aperire, necnon et sacramentorum ecclesiasticorum pro modico intelligentiae nostrae notitiam tradere studuimus; «non valentes studiosorum fratrum votis iure resistere, eorum in Christo laudabilibus studiis lingua ac stylo nos servire flagitantium: quas bigas in nobis agitat Christi caritas».

Caritas Christi nobilissimum desiderium, vis lacerat quae pectus hominis velumque templi lacerat. Non est ullum maius mobile.

> 3. Quamvis non ambigamus «omnem humani eloquii sermonem calumniae atque contradictioni aemulorum semper fuisse obnoxium. Quia dissentientibus voluntatum motibus, dissentiens quoque fit animorum sensus, ut cum omne dictum veri ratione perfectum sit, tamen dum aliud aliis aut videtur aut complacet, veritati vel non intellectae vel offendenti impietatis error obnitatur ac voluntatis invidia resultet. Quam Deus huius saeculi operatur in illis diffidentiae filiis qui non rationi voluntatem subiciunt, nec doctrinae studium impendunt, sed his quae somniarunt sapientiae verba coaptare nituntur: non veri, sed placiti rationem sectantes. Quos iniqua voluntas non ad intelligentiam veritatis, sed ad defensionem placentium incitat: non desiderantes doceri veritatem, sed ab ea ad fabulas convertentes auditum. Quorum professio est magis placita quam docenda conquirere, nec docenda desiderare, sed desideratis doctrinam coaptare. Habent rationem sapientiae in superstitione, quia fidei defectionem sequitur hypocrisis mendax, ut sit vel in verbis pietas quam amiserit conscientia; ipsamque simulatam pietatem omni verborum mendacio impiam reddunt, falsae doctrinae institutis fidei sanctitatem corrumpere molientes, auriumque pruriginem sub novello sui desiderii dogmate aliis ingerentes. Qui contentioni studentes, contra veritatem sine foedere bellant. Inter veri namque assertionem et placiti defensionem pertinax pugna est, dum se et veritas tenet et se voluntas erroris tuetur».

Esse plus est differentiam habere, ita voluntate manifestata. Unitas Dei  quoque unitas voluntae. In hoc mundo, ratio voluntatem afflectur, ita opinio depravationi conformatur. Methodus dei huius saeculi est. Igitur, quidquid auditus est, radices suas in voluntatibus depravatis magis quam in divina veritate invenit. Sic Petrus Lombardi scripsit: "Inter veri namque assertionem et placiti defensionem pertinax pugna est, dum se et veritas tenet et se voluntas tuetur." Illa discordiam et voluntatis suae assertionem contra voluntatem Dei concupiscunt.

> 4. Horum igitur et Deo odibilem ecclesiam evertere atque ora oppilare, ne virus nequitiae in alios effundere queant, et lucernam veritatis in candelabro exaltare volentes, in labore multo ac sudore volumen Deo praestante compegimus ex testimoniis veritatis in aeternum fundatis, in quatuor libris distinctum. In quo maiorum exempla doctrinamque reperies; in quo per dominicae fidei sinceram professionem, vipereae doctrinae fraudulentiam prodidimus: aditum demonstrandae veritatis complexi, nec periculo impiae professionis inserti, temperato inter utrumque moderamine utentes. Sicubi vero parum vox nostra insonuit, non a paternis discessit limitibus.

Deus huius saeculi suam ecclesiam propriam--cathedralem dicere possit-- quae est organum suae erroris, suae cupiditatis ut seminare discordias habet, ubi nulla esse debent.

Magis nostra vox non discessere debet a paternis limitibus. Nam Deus fines secundum naturalem nostram finitatem determinavit.

> 5. «Non igitur debet hic labor cuiquam pigro vel multum docto videri superfluus, cum multis impigris multisque indoctis, inter quos etiam et mihi, sit necessarius», brevi volumine complicans Patrum sententias, appositis eorum testimoniis, ut non sit necesse quaerenti librorum numerositatem evolvere, cui brevitas collecta quod quaeritur offert sine labore. In hoc autem tractatu «non solum pium lectorem, sed etiam liberum correctorem desiderio, maxime ubi profunda versatur veritatis quaestio: quae utinam tot haberet inventores, quot habet contradictores!» Ut autem quod quaeritur facilius occurrat, titulos quibus singulorum librorum capitula distinguuntur praemisimus.

Magnum quidem studium numquam superfluus est, etiam doctis. Veritas iterum et iterum revocanda est, ut commemoramus occasiones per circulos festorum. Studere ritus est, non actus singularis.

### Explicit Prologus.

## Liber I - De Mysterio Trinitatis
### Distinctio I
#### Caput I - Omnis doctrina est vel de rebus vel de signis

> 1. Omnis doctrina est de rebus vel de signis. Veteris ac novae Legis continentiam diligenti indagine etiam atque etiam considerantibus nobis, praevia Dei gratia innotuit sacrae paginae tractatum circa res vel signa praecipue versari. Ut enim egregius doctor Augustinus ait in libro De Doctrina Christiana: «Omnis doctrina vel rerum est, vel signorum. Sed res etiam per signa discuntur. Proprie autem hic res appellantur, quae non ad significandum aliquid adhibentur; signa vero, quorum usus est in significando». – Eorum autem aliqua sunt quorum omnis usus est in significando, non in iustificando, id est, quibus non utimur nisi aliquid significandi gratia, ut aliqua sacramenta legalia; alia quae non solum significant, sed conferunt quod intus adiuvet, sicut evangelica sacramenta. – «Ex quo aperte intelligitur, quae hic appellentur signa, res illae videlicet quae ad significandum aliquid adhibentur. Omne igitur signum etiam res aliqua est: quod enim nulla res est, ut in eodem Augustinus ait, omnino nihil est; non autem e converso omnis res signum est», quia non adhibetur ad significandum aliquid.
2. Cumque his intenderit theologorum speculatio studiosa atque modesta, divinam Scripturam, formam praescriptam in doctrina tenere advertet.
3. De his ergo nobis, aditum ad res divinas aliquatenus intelligendas Deo duce aperire volentibus, disserendum est; et «primum de rebus, postea de signis disseremus».

Prima quaestio de rebus and signis est, prima non solum per philosophiam pertinet, sed etiam ad rectam Scripturae interpretationem. Interpretationem incipere debet ut occurrat omnibus rebus.

Doctrinae sunt factae de docente. Docere est ostendere. Res ostenduntur signis.

Sed quid signum est? Augustine dixit: "Proprie autem hic res appellantur, quae non ad significandum aliquid adhibentur; signa vero, quorum usus est in significando."

Si hoc verum est, tum videtur res sine signis existere non posse. Id quod est proprium rei, est modo negatio, i.e. non esse significari. De quibus signa propriora quam res sint. Hoc dicere licet?

Investigandum est quid sit res per se, signum per se (quantum fieri esse per se potest), et quomodo utrumque alteri sit dispositum. Quomodo stant et pertinent.



Commentarius viae philosophiae secundum morem scholasticorum

Scriptum super sententiis Petri Lombardi

A summary of the appendix to World as Will and Representation Vol. 1

Schopenhauer's comprehensive critique of Kant's philosophy

Note - This review was originally written in 2018. This is a redraft. Also forgive the poorly formatted image, I will fix it, when I am not so lazy.

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To write a masterful monograph which applies a single disciplinary methodology flawlessly, that is a challenge. But to write a book steeped in elegant multidisciplinarity, rich in erudition, and spiced with some dry wit, that is a feat of its own.

As a student of the premier media ecologist Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong roots the sometime offputting frenetic energy of his mentor in a grounded, accessible style by crafting an analysis of that nebulous bridge period between the "medieval" and the "modern". Ong takes one individual as a particularly revelatory nexus of parallel historical developments, the educator Petrus Ramus (1515-1575). Across the chapters of this book, Ong he deftly navigates the development and the implications of Ramus' revolutionary approach to pedagogy, printing, humanism, and beyond. I will only briefly introduce some of these dimensions as a teaser of what a reader can find inside Ong's study.

#### The birth of methodology

One should not forget that in this time Aristotle was king. Ramus was decidedly anti-Aristotelian, as his polemics make no secret of. This rendered him a particularly controversial figure in his own day. The Western university curricula had been thoroughly rooted in Aristotle for several centuries by now, so Ramus' attempt to dethrone "The Philosopher" were not met with cheerful acceptance by the scholastic university system, as one might expect.

The Scholastics (a term Ong finds problematic though useful) decried Ramus for jettisoning Aristotle because it left him with a weak *methodus*, which can be defined as the way one proceeds through their subject matter.

Method had not been problematized in such a way before. What is a method and how does one arrive at it? This is the quintessential Cartesian or Bacon question (or whichever Enlightenment figure floats your boat). Ong contends that through his disruption of Aristotelian teaching, Ramus unintentionally prompted this modern question of method not just between humanists and scholastics but also within these two camps as well. A question that has haunted the natural and human sciences to this day.

#### Print and pedagogy

Print technology was still relatively new at this point in time. It had been used for Bibles and then weaponized for the Reformation, but the technological developments surrounding the book had not yet percolated into the realm of pedagogy, until Ramus. Ong argues that Ramus was the first to employ print diagrams and charts as he implemented them in his textbooks on rhetoric and dialectic. What medieval philosophy and logicians had taken page upon page, subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, to detail in a way that could only make sense to a reader with a remarkable scrutiny of effort, all this verboseness was easily displaced by the visual diagram. Abstruse concatenations of text gave way to clear, simple, visual diagrams which could make the meaning of a thousand words clear in one picture. A revolutionary achievement in the dissemination of knowledge and the circulation of teaching.

Furthermore, while before many writers perished under the suffocating weight of critics' rebuttals (if not snuffed out by the church), Ramus was remarkably proactive in utilizing print technology to respond to his adversaries. He rapidly and repeatedly printed new editions of his books with *corrigienda*, supplemental arguments, or refutations of counter-arguments. He incorporated his critics' points into his own work, thus strengthening his own presentation despite others' attempts to negate it.

The printing press also mobilized Ramus' ability to spread his ideas. Rather than being constrained to a network of universities as manuscript culture had been constrained to do, Ramus was an early figure in the transnational republic of letters, becoming a central figure for the Anglophone Puritan movement in England.

And this is not because Ramus possessed a prodigious degree of foresight, at least in Ong's view, but it is because he had particular reformist goals *contra* scholasticism and was placed at a rare intersection of historical circumstances which allowed him to utilize new scholarly tools in his endeavour.


#### Debunking Thomist Nostalgia

Ramus was a Huguenot. Ong was a Jesuit. And Ong makes no effort to conceal his preference for Catholicism throughout his work. That is fine for me though, for he also has absolutely zero sympathy for the neo-Thomist nostalgia movement which had pervaded twentieth century Catholicism. At the time for him this was Jacques Maritain, but it continues under various auspices via Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank, Charles Taylor, and most prominently for me personally in my undergraduate experience.

The basic premise of this Catholic metanarrative is that Thomas Aquinas came along and more or less solved philosophy with the perfect blending of Aristotle and Christianity. This was the ultimate fulfillment of the Western philosophical tradition. However, the innovations of John Duns Scotus corrupted this intellectual utopia and brought us an intellectual Fall called modernity. A simplistic retelling, yes, but that's the basic gist.

Ong has several remarks on this subject (I have several more but will refrain from interjecting here).

First, the idea that Thomism reigned as some supreme vogue tradition until it was displaced by Scotus or the Reformation, that has zero historical grounding. When Aquinas died, the University of Paris only felt it necessary to preserve a few of his commentaries and his treatise on aqueduct construction. More than that, teachings espoused by Aquinas were explicitly condemned as heretical in 1277, until this decision was somewhat discreetly reversed when he was canonized in 1322. Not many realize that Aquinas has a much more controversial reception history than his nostalgists often acknowledge.

Second, scholasticism was not institutionally built on faculties of theology. If one considers the hard numbers of what represented scholasticism, the vast majority of those at scholastic institutions were logicians, and Thomas was not a strong logician either. Theologians constituted a significantly smaller number of scholars than their counterparts in logic, and their voice in pedagogy was often unheard. Thomism was at best a marginal doctrine, even among the literate and educated, it was not a universally promulgated doctrine.

Another laudable observation from Ong is the problematic nature of using terms such as realism or nominalism to distinguish medieval thinkers. Such an anachronistic label is often used to bifurcate the Western philosophical tradition, but in Ong's view, this method of teaching the history of philosophy introduces more misconceptions than it does impress accurate ones. They ultimately misframe the conversations of medieval and Renaissance thought.


#### Media Ecology: Spatial Cognition

 Ong is foremost remembered as a media ecologist, as his predecessor Marshall McLuhan was. And this frame of observations is also prevalent in this work as well. One of the key arguments of this book is that the technology of the print book was part of a larger ongoing development of constructing and defining knowledge almost exclusively in visual and spatial terms. 
 
 Charts and diagrams are visual ways we construct, relate, delineate, and compartmentalize knowledge. For Ong, the wake of print technology ushers in semantic evolution as well. With more people reading instead of listening, philosophical vocabulary became increasingly visualistic as well (e.g. the word definition means the physical delimitation of space). 
 
 For Ramus, the true nature of things was not conveyed through oral dialogue or lectures but through the written word and its containment in visual spaces. Scholastic pedagogy featured the oral monologue of the professor while humanist pedagogy showcased the text as the primary instrument for truth and understanding. The humanists engaged in oral dialogue for the sake of discerning the more real truth contained (this, also being a spatial term) within the written/printed text.

#### Literary and Philosophical Impacts of Ramist Pedagogy

Ong also draws attention to a variety of ways that Ramism gave birth to the greatest minds of the Renaissance. He argues that it was only because education shifted from listening-only to dialogue and exercises that required the students to think and imagine more, that great thinkers and writers of the later Renaissance like Shakespeare were possible. This pedagogy made the minds of the next generation more synthestic, imaginative, and thus creative. He argues that the visualist typology of Ramus' works were an important precursor to the highly visual style of writers such as the English metaphysical poets.

 

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There are a wide variety of other historical, etymological, pedagogical, and philosophical arguments that Ong convincingly weaves into his narrative, and it is truly remarkable that he could cover so much ground in his studies (especially since he personally traveled around the world to track down thousands of various copies and editions of Ramus' works). This is truly a landmark study, a classic which is essential for anyone interested in intellectual history, methodology, media ecology, or the history of the book.

Review: Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason

Il Morazzone's (1573-1626) *Lotta di Giacobbe con l'angelo*

### Preface

For a denizen of antiquity, Augustine has a nearly unparalleled bulk of writing which have survived to our day.

Even so, not all of Augustine's oeuvre has been translated into English, [though that work is currently in progress](https://www.newcitypress.com/catalog/category/view/s/the-works-of-saint-augustine/id/24/).

As an exercise for myself, I took on a translation project for Augustine's *De agone christiano* which has only been translated once before in a collection by the Catholic University of America Press just under a hundred years ago.

*De agone christiano* (396) dates to Augustine's early mid period, roughly between *De doctrina christiana* and *Confessiones*. It is a short tract of about thirty pages which frames the earthly temporal struggle of Christian life as one of fighting the desires of the heart which are corralled by the devil to steer us into depravity.

From the perspective of the history of theology, I find this treatise is interesting as a sample case of how Augustine decisively and distinctly casts the terms of Christian spiritual ethics in light of an interior struggle. A war against desire, so long as we remain in this life. A framing with long lasting implications, not without controversy in the course of all Western history.

If you are interested in discovering other minor works by Augustine, you should check out [this bibliography here](https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/twayne/twaynebib.html).


I have translated most of this book (if not finished by the time you read this). I am still deciding what to do with it. If you are interested in reading more, feel free to [reach out](https://www.ngperrin.com/contact).

Note - Biblical references are generally taken from the ESV with minor alterations in translation.

 
---
 

### Chapter 1

 

The crown of victory is not promised to us except through struggle. However in the divine
Scriptures, we constantly find the crown to be promised to us, if we do overcome what we face. But, so as not to be overly verbose in drawing upon many different quotations, this can be seen most evidently in the writings of the Apostle Paul where he says:

”I have completed the work I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth
there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness.” (2 Tim. 4:7-8)

Therefore, if we are to be crowned, we must recognize who this very adversary is, whom we must overcome. For it is this very adversary which our Lord previously overcame,
so that we might also overcome him through perseverance in the Lord. And indeed by excellence and wisdom and the Word of God, the God through whom all things were made, who is the only Son of God always remains unchanging, above every creature. And since under him are even the creatures who do not sin, how much more under him is every sinful creature! Therefore since all the holy angels are under him, how much more under him are all the fallen angels, of whom the devil is ruler.

But due to the fact he had deceived our nature, the only begotten son of God deigned to take our very nature so that the devil might be overcome, whom he subjugated under himself, and even subjugating him under us. This is shown when Paul says, “The ruler of this world has been cast out”. (John 12:31)

Not because he was cast out of the world, like in the way certain heretics are punished,
but cast out from their souls, those who are united in the Word of God and do not
cherish this world, of which the devil is ruler, because he controls them, who cherish earthly goods, which are contained in this visible world, not because that very lord is of this world, but the ruler of their desires, through which things are craved, but which all pass away, that they are subjected to him, those who disregard the eternal God and cherish instability and the changeable. “For the root of every sin is desire: it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows.” (1 Tim. 6:10)

Through this desire the devil reigns in man and hold his heart. Such is the case for all
who cherish this world. However the devil is cast out, when the heart in its entirety
renounces the world. For in this way is the devil renounced, who is ruler of this world,
when he is renounced along with his corruptions and his pomp and his angels. And that
same Lord, already bearing the triumphant nature of man, says to us, “Take heart; I
have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

A new translation of the first chapter of De agone christiano

Augustine translation: The Christian Struggle

### Preface

Why Uexküll?

Many thinkers have unsung fathers. Forerunners who begot the ideas that their successors were celebrated for. (Who remembers Brunschvicg, Polanyi, or Henry of Ghent?) In this case, both Heidegger and Deleuze owe some of their thought to the good Baron Uexküll. 

Philosophers are often so distant from any concrete form of experience or work, their prestige garnished from verbal posturing and polemics, in a way sometimes no better than middle management. Not so with Uexküll: he was a biologist. A son of the Baltic, a German aristocrat living in what is present-day Estonia.

Uexküll's writings on the consciousness of animals, among other ideas, inspired developments in fields as wide ranging as phenomenology, semiotics, cybernetics, as well as in the biological sciences.

If this should not make him intriguing enough, Uexküll was highly critical of Darwinism from a theoretical standpoint. 

Grasping the bankruptcy of a scientific theory derived from liberal capitalism, Uexküll hoped to develop a new biological outlook as an alternative to Darwin's shallow theory. That biology is not at its root a sequence of individuals eliminated, or not. But instead a biology focused on the nexus of relationships between animals and the world, starting from the viewpoint that different species belong together and mutually determine each other.

Unfortunately, very little of Uexküll's work has been translated into English. The only full-length book I have been able to find is *A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning* which combines *Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen* with *Bedeutungslehre*.

Here I will present a translation of the introduction to one of his earliest publications, *Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere* (1909) which can be found [here for free](https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/15902#page/5/mode/1up). I translated this above as "The External and Internal Worlds of Animals" to reflect the dual natures of the world outside *Um-welt* and the world inside *Innen-welt*, but it should be noted that *Umwelt* is the German word for the "environment", that is the world all around us. One of those colorful forms of German wordplay that cannot be translated succinctly.


I will likely translate more of the book. If you are interested in fetching a draft copy, feel free to [reach out](https://www.ngperrin.com/contact).

 
---
 

### Introduction

 

These days, the word "science" is the subject of ridiculous fetishism. Therefore, it is probably appropriate to point out that science is nothing but the sum of the opinions of researchers alive today. As far as we record the opinions of older researchers, they also live on in science. As soon as an opinion is discarded or forgotten, it is dead to science.


Little by little, all opinions are forgotten, discarded, or modified. Therefore one can answer the question, "What is a scientific truth?" without exaggeration with: "The misconception of the day."

The question, whether there is progress in science, is therefore not quite as simple to answer as is generally assumed. We hope to progress from cruder to more refined errors, but whether we are really on the right track for biology is highly doubtful. The study of the living offers such an immense abundance of facts to the unbiased observer at every step that the mere registering of these facts would make any science impossible. Only the opinion of the researcher, which forcibly separates the studied into the essential and the unessential, gives rise to science. The prevailing opinion ruthlessly decides on what should be considered "essential". If it is overturned, thousands of diligent, painstaking, and excellent studies will fall into oblivion along with it as "unessential".

In biology, we are still under the fresh impression that the fall of Darwinism has produced in all of us. The achievements of half a century of restless work today seem insignificant to us.

No wonder that biologists now strive to give their work a firmer foundation than the doctrine of the perfection of living things had. 

The success of these efforts is not very encouraging. No agreement has yet been reached on the foundations upon which animal biology is to rise as a proud scientific house. And yet this agreement decides the fate of biology. If the question of the foundations remains undecided or subject to fashionable trends, there will be no progress, and everything that has been worked out with the greatest effort of mind by one generation will be discarded by the next.

Only when all hands work according to a shared plan to build a house on a firm foundation that something prosperous and lasting can come into being.

It is instructive and perhaps useful to be clear about the causes that have prevented agreement in modern animal biology so far.

Modern animal biology owes its existence to the introduction of physiological experimentation into the study of lower animals. The expectations that were attached to the expansion of the field of research from the physiological side were not fulfilled. One looked for a solution for the questions of the physiology of higher animals and found new problems instead. The dissolution of living phenomena into chemical and physical processes did not advance it one step. Thus experimental biology discredited itself of more rigorous observance in the eyes of the physiologists.

For all those researchers, however, who saw the essential content of biology in the life process itself and not in its reduction to chemistry, physics, and mathematics, the enormous wealth of experimentally solvable problems had to be a special incentive to turn to the lower animals. In a few years the abundance of the edited material has become so large that today the ordering of the material appears as the much more urgent task, vis-à-vis the always progressing new research. Building material is available in abundance to start the construction of science. One must only agree upon the construction plan.

The most natural thing to do would be to continue working with the old, long-standing construction plans. In the good old days, when anatomy and physiology still formed a unified biology, each animal was regarded as a functional unit. The anatomic structure and its physiological performances were studied simultaneously and considered to belong together.

It does not occur to anyone to introduce a division of labor into technology, and to train two classes of engineers, one for the study of structure, the other for the study of energy conversion in machines.

Technology, like engineering, would soon be ruined by this division. Biology, too, would have perished long ago from division into anatomy and physiology, if medicine with its practical requirements had not peremptorily demanded the union of the two sciences, at least for man. The latest work also owe its deep biological significance to this joining of the sciences. One need only remember the life work of Pavlov, or the great success of English physiologists like Langley and Sherrington.

Wherever physiology and anatomy proceeded separately, it did not turn out for their good. Comparative anatomy, which more and more neglected the merit of the organs, finally came to consider the structure of the living beings as a mere "formal unity". "Homology" became the basis of a completely new doctrine of the relationships of body types, while analogy was despised, and thus dead spatial relationships took the place of the living interaction of organs. Only in recent times does experimental embryology lead anatomical science back to the sources of the deepest problems of life. 

Likewise, general physiology increasingly lost the understanding that every living being is a "functional unity". In place of striving for knowledge of the structural plan of each living being, which can be deduced from anatomy and physiology alone, the one-sided study of the most isolated partial functions ever possible took place, in order to be able to handle these as purely physical or chemical problems.

This was the doom of the biology of higher animals. Quite strange was the fate of the biology of lower animals. Here anatomy and physiology did not go separate ways, but physiology was completely suppressed temporarily. This happened by Darwinism. Darwinism (not Darwin himself) regarded the capacities of anatomical structure as "unessential" in contrast to a problem: how the structure of higher animals had developed from that of lower ones.

One saw in the series of evolving animals the proof for a increasing perfection step-by-step from the simplest to the most multifaceted structure. Only one thing was forgotten, that the perfection of the structure cannot be derived from its multifaceted nature. No one will claim that an ironclad is more perfect than the modern rowboats of the international rowing clubs. Also, an ironclad would play a pitiable role in a rowing regatta. Likewise, a horse would fill the role of an earthworm only very imperfectly.

The question of a higher or lower degree of perfection of living beings can only be asked if one checks every blueprint with its execution and sees in which case the execution is most successful. In this question, there is no doubt the lower animals will win the prize, since they belong to the oldest creatures, because this rule seems to apply: the older the family, the better the performance.

One tries to discuss the problem of perfection by comparing the needs of the organisms with their blueprint, and thus asks, to what extent this blueprint corresponds to its needs. This has also been the question of Darwinism. Only from this does the assertion hold meaning that higher animals are more perfect.

For if the needs of man are regarded as the measure against which all the blueprints of animals are to be measured, then naturally the highest animals are the most perfect. But this is too evident an error to waste a word on it. After all, we have no other means at hand for the investigation of the needs of an animal other than its blueprint. That alone gives us information about the active and passive role which the animal is appointed to play in its environment. Therefore the whole question is meaningless.

But even the assertion that the varying individuals of a species are more or less well adapted to their environment is completely taken out of thin air. Every varying individual is different according to its modified blueprint but somehow also equally perfectly adapted to its environment. Because the blueprint on its own establishes the environment of the animal with wide limits.

This realization, which I intend to prove step by step, can alone be regarded as the permanent basis of biology. Only through this can we gain the correct understanding of how living beings order and control the chaos of the inorganic world. Every animal in its own place and its own way. Out of the immense diversity of the inorganic world, every animals chooses just that which suits it (i.e. it creates its own needs according to its design).

Only at a superficial glance does it appear as if all sea animals live in a shared homogeneous world. Closer study teaches us that each of these thousandfold varying life forms possesses an environment unique to it, which mutually conditions itself with the blueprint of the animal.

It is not surprising that the environment of an animal also includes other living beings. Thus this mutual conditioning also takes place between the animals themselves and results in a strange phenomenon that the predator fits to the prey just as well as the prey is fitted to the predator. Thus no only is the parasite adapted to the host, but also the host to the parasite.

The attempt to explain this mutual belonging togetherness of neighboring animals through gradual adaptation has failed miserably. It has also diverted interest from the nearest task, which is to first determine the environment of each animal.

This task is not as simple as the novice might believe. It is not difficult to observe any animal in its environment. But this in no way resolves the problem. The experimenter must try to determine which parts of this environment affect the animal and in what way.

Our anthropocentric way of looking at things must step back more and more, and the point of view of the animal must become the sole decisive one.

With that, everything which is considered natural to us disappears: the whole nature, the earth, the sky, the stars, yes all objects which surround us, and only those influences which exert an influence on the animal according to its blueprint remain as world-factors. Their number, their association is determined by the blueprint. If this connection of the blueprint with external factors is carefully investigated, then a new world, completely different from ours, is formed around each animal, as its environment.

It is just as objective as the factors of the environment are, the effects caused by them must also be acknowledged and regulated by the blueprint. Together they form the inner world of animals.

This inner world is the unadulterated fruit of objective research and is not to be clouded by psychological speculation. One may perhaps, to make the impression of such an inner world lifelike, raise the question, what would our soul do with such a limited inner world? But to paint and to spruce up this inner world with mental qualities (which we can neither prove nor deny) is no activity for serious researchers.

The blueprint stands above the inner world and the environment, dominating everything. In my opinion, the research of the blueprint alone can provide a healthy and secure basis for biology. It also brings anatomy and physiology together again for more fruitful interaction.

If the development of the blueprint for each animal species is placed at the center of research, then every newly discovered fact finds its natural place, where it receives meaning and significance.

The contents of the present book shall serve the purpose of demonstrating the importance of the blueprint as vividly as possible and to show by individual examples how environment and inner world are interrelated through the blueprint. A textbook of special biology is not offered here, but only the way is shown, by which one could arrive at one.

In the selection of present examples, I was determined above all by the desire to give pictures as systematically as possible. Of course, there are gaps everywhere, not only in the physiological but also in the anatomical material. On the other hand, since I could only use such anatomical material that was physiologically alive, the great mass of anatomical and zoological knowledge had to be omitted. Likewise all physiological results had to be neglected, which offer only physical or chemical interest. But even those structures whose capacities are well studied had to be disregarded if their complication made too great demands on the reader's imagination.

Finally I have limited myself to the invertebrates, because I am at home there myself, leaving the higher animals to the more qualified. From the invertebrates, bees and ants remained unconsidered, because detailed textbooks about them are already available.

I could now proceed to the content of the book, because the point of view, from which it is to be considered, is sufficiently stated. But it is unnecessary to go into those opinions that strive to give biology a different basis.

What can arise in the way just outlined is a special biology of all animal species. Such a biology would be very one-sided if it did without the aid of comparison. All animals perform their animalistic capacities with the help of tissues which remain very similar through the whole set of animals. Muscle tissue and nerve tissue show analogous capacities everywhere, no matter how differently they are combined in organs. This is of great importance for special biology, because the generally valid properties of muscle and nerves can be presupposed as valid also in those animals whose body constitution does not permit a physiological analysis down to the individual tissues. Therefore, the comparative physiology of the tissues will always remain a very necessary part of special biology, and there is nothing to be said against it, if the comparative tissue science precedes the discussion of the individual animals. I have refrained from doing this because I wanted to show in which animal species we can most easily reach more general conclusions for general tissue science.

The biology is completely different, if one makes the comparison the basis of the entire study. This has been done by Loeb, and in an extraordinarily original and interesting way.

The great majority of animal movements proceed as follows: An external stimulus acts on a receptive organ, which gives an excitation to the nervous system. Directed by the nervous system, the excitation finally reaches the muscle, which then contracts. This process is called a reflex. Loeb found that a large number of animals, when exposed to very elementary stimuli, such as light, gravity or simple chemical substances, always respond with an ordered movement, by which they either turn toward or away from the source of the stimulus. He saw in this an elementary process, which he called tropism, and depending on the direction taken by the movement, he spoke of positive or negative tropism.

Loeb himself admitted the possibility that many tropisms are not yet sufficiently analyzed reflexes. But certain tropisms, e.g. the phototropism, which occurs on one-sided exposure, he wants to be regarded as an elementary phenomenon to be equated with the physical phenomena. The light rays should be able to turn the animal body during their passage through it like a magnet turns iron filings. Animals which react to light in this way are called photopathic.

But there is no doubt that in many cases the light simply causes a reflex on the illuminated side of the animal, which must result in a unidirectional movement, since there is no reflex on the shaded side. The animals that react in this way against the light are called phototactic.

Photopathic phototropism is a physical process, whereas phototactic is a reflex.

Now Ms. Lee has been able to prove on unicellular animals that the photopathic explanation of their movements can very well be replaced by a phototactic one.

Recently Radl has tried to prove that light has the same directional effect on insects as gravity has on a floating body. On the other hand, G. Bohn has found that the undeniably directional effect of illuminated objects on snails and crabs depends on the physiological state of the animals.

One sees from this, how uncertain the interpretation of these processes is.

It seems tempting to attribute all movements of the animals to tropisms, because this relieves us of the task of treating the apparently simple processes as performances of a structure which is difficult to determine. But a certain basis is gained only by the study of the structure and the blueprint.

Already this view seems to gain more and more ground. But only some of the researchers turns to the study of the blueprint. Another part follows a new doctrine, which rejects the study of the blueprint and wants to regard the animals free from any analogy with the machines.

It is undeniable that determining the blueprint of the animals has only then a sense, if the structure of the animals is to be equated with the structure of the machines.

With this we approach the basis of all biology, which cannot be decided by speculation, but only by observation of the living substance, on which all living beings are built, while the machines consist of dead material-- we approach the protoplasm problem.

---

Translation completed with assistance from [DeepL](www.deepl.com).

The introduction from Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, in English for the first time

Uexküll translation: The External and Internal Worlds of Animals

Media supersaturation and a few effects on young folks

Tired before their time

Meeting notes of the 1922 encounter translated from the French, perhaps for the first time

The infamous Bergson-Einstein debate, translated

Figure 92. A diagram of the geometrical proof offered in the Greek fragment of Heron's *Catoptrica*. Taken from the critical edition *Herons von Alexandria Mechanik und Katoptrik* (Teuber, 1900), pg. 371. Schmidt himself notes his printed diagram is taken from Aldina (1551).

This is likely a reference to the [imprint belonging to the Venetian humanist Aldo Manuzio](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldina), as he published many Greek and Latin editions. However, it is not clear in which volume one would find this diagram, particularly because the imprint only published between 1495 and Manuzio's death in 1515, which is a few years short of 1551 (unless Schmidt is guilty of a numerical typo).

---

**As is my habit to release posts early and return to them often, the reader should be warned this one is still a "work in progress".**


## Introduction

An introduction. Heron of Alexandria was perhaps one of the most ingenious inventors of Western antiquity, if not all history. Living in the first century, his catalogue of inventions includes a prototype windmill, mechanical theater technology, a water fountain, syringes, and the first coin-based vending machine. More than this, Heron had detailed design notes for the first steam engine, a technology which would not resurface for another 1500 years. It is remarkable a man living in the same century as Augustus and Jesus would designed such technologies.

Heron is a remarkable demonstration of the fact that historical anachronism can be found in real life as well.

Many of Heron's works do not survive to this day, as is the case for much literature from antiquity. Some works such as the *Mechanica* come to us through Arabic translation. Not all of his extant works have been translated into English either. It was only in 2019, that [a PhD thesis translated](https://theses.gla.ac.uk/76774/) his *Automata* into English.

My interest in him comes from his original contributions to classical optics and thus the history of science.

His *Catoptrica*, one of the most significant works in the history of optics, has not yet made it into English. I will attempt to remedy this by starting with the single extant Greek fragment, and then proceeding through a translation of the entire Latin work into English in a subsequent post.

Comments and feedback are always appreciated, so long as they do not steer too deeply into the pedantic.

Let us begin.







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## The Text

The text is taken W. Schmidt's critical edition *Herons von Alexandria Mechanik und Katoptrik* published by Teuber in 1900, pages 368-373. I referred to the German translation in a few spots but will offer more analysis of it and textual variants in the forthcoming Commentary section.

ἐπειδὴ γὰρ τοῦτο ὡμολογημένον ἐστὶ παρὰ πᾶσιν, ὃτι οὐδὲν μάτην ἐργάζεται ἡ φύσις οὐδὲ ματαιοπονεῖ, ἐὰν μὴ δώσωμεν πρὸς ἲσας γωνὶας γὶνεσθαι τὴν ἀνάκλασιν, πρὸς ἀνὶσους ματαιοπονεῖ ἡ φύσις, καὶ ἀντὶ τοῦ διὰ βραχείας περιόδου φθάσαι τὸ ὁρώμενον τὴν ὂψιν, διὰ μακρᾶς περιόδου τοῦτο φανήσεται τὴν ὂψιν, διὰ μακρᾶς περιόδου τοῦτο φανήσεται καταλαμβάνουσα. εὑρεθήσονται γὰρ αἱ τὰς ἀνίσους γωνίας περιέχουσαι εὐθεῖαι, αἳτινες ἀπὸ τῆς ἀνὶσους γωνίας περιέχουσαι εὐθεῖαι, αἳτινες ἀπὸ τῆς ὂψεως \[περιέχουσαι\] φερομένας πρὸς τὸ κάτοπτρον κἀκεῖθεν πρὸς τὸ δρώμενον, μείζοντες οὖσαι τῶν τὰς ἲσας γωνίας περιεχουσῶν εὐθειῶν. καὶ ὃτι τοῦτο ἀληθές, δῆλον ἐντεῦθεν.

Ὑποκείσθω γὰρ τὸ κάτοπτρον εὐθεῖά τις ἡ ΑΒ, καὶ ἒστω τὸ μὲν ὁρῶν Γ, τὸ δ' ὁρώμενον τὸ Δ, τὸ δὲ Ε σημεῖον τοῦ κατόπτρου, ᾧ προςπίπτουσα ἡ ὂψις ἀνακλᾶται πρὸς τὸ ὁρώμενον, ἒστω, καὶ ἐπεζεύχθω ἡ ΓΕ, ΕΔ. λέγω ὃτι ἡ ὑπὸ ΑΕΓ γωνία ἲση ἐστὶ τῇ ὑπὸ ΔΕΒ. εἰ γὰρ μὴ ἒστιν ἲση, ἒστω ἓτερον σημεῑον τοῦ κατόπτρου, ἐν ᾧ προσπίπτουσα, ἡ ὂψις πρὸς ἀνίσους γωνίας περιέχουσιν ὑποκειμένης τῆς ΑΒ εὐθείας, μείζονές εἰσι τῶν ΓΕ, ΕΔ εὐθειῶν, αἳτινες τὰς ἲσας γωνἰας περιέρχουσι μετὰ τῆς ΑΒ. ἢχθω γὰρ κάθετος ἀπὸ τοῦ Δ ἐπὶ τὴν ΑΒ κατὰ τὸ Η σημεῖον (213) | καὶ ἐκβεβλήσθω ἐπ' εὐθείας ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ Θ. φανερὸν δὴ ὃτι αἱ πρὸς τῷ Η γωνίαι ἲσαι εἰσίν. ὀρθαὶ γάρ εἰσι. καὶ ἒστω ἡ ΔΗ τῇ ΗΘ ἲση, καὶ ἐπεζεύχθω ἡ ΘΖ καὶ ἡ ΘΕ. αὓτη μὲν ἡ κατασκευή. ἐπεὶ οὖν ἲση ἒστὶν ἡ ΔΗ τῇ ΗΘ, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἡ ὑπὸ ΔΗΕ γωνία τῇ ὑπὸ ΘΗΕ γωνίᾳ ἲση ἐστί, κοινὴ δὲ πλευρὰ τῶν δύο τριγώνων ἡ ΗΕ, καὶ βάσις ἡ ΘΕ βἀσει τῇ ΕΔ ἲση ἐστί, καὶ τὸ ΗΘΕ τρίγωνον τῷ ΔΗΕ τριγώνῳ ἲσον ἐστί, καὶ <αἱ> λοιπαὶ γωνίαι ταῖς λοιπαῖς γωνίαις εἰσὶν ἲσαι, ὑφ' ἃς αἱ ἲσαι πλευραὶ ὑποτείνουσιν. ἲση ἂρα ἡ ΘΕ τῇ ΕΔ. πάλιν ἐπειδὴ τῇ ΗΘ ἲση ἐστίν ἡ ΗΔ καὶ γωνία ἡ ὑπὸ ΔΗΖ γωνίᾳ τῇ ὑπὸ ΘΗΖ ἲση ἐστί, κοινὴ δὲ ἡ ΗΖ τῶν δύο τριγώνων τῶν ΔΗΖ καὶ ΘΗΖ, καὶ βὰσις ἂρα ἡ ΘΖ βἀσει τῇ ΖΔ ἲση ἒστί, καὶ τὸ ΖΗΔ τρίγωνον τῷ ΘΗΖ τριγὠνῳ ἲσον ἐστίν. ἲση ἂρα ἐστὶν ἡ ΘΖ τῇ ΖΔ. καὶ ἐπεὶ ἲση ἐστὶν ἡ ΘΕ τῇ ΕΔ, κοινὴ προσκείσθω ἡ ΕΓ. δύο ἂρα αἱ ΓΕ, ΕΔ δυσὶ ταῖς ΓΕ, ΕΘ ἲσαι εἰσίν. ὃλη ἂρα ἡ ΓΘ δυσὶ ταῖς ΓΕ, ΕΔ ἲση ἐστί. καὶ ἐπεὶ παντὸς τριγώνου αἱ δύο πλευραὶ τῆς λοιπῆς μείζονές εἰσι πάντῃ μεταλαμβανόμεναι, τριγώνου ἂρα τοῦ ΘΖΓ αἱ δύο πλευραὶ αἱ ΘΖ, ΖΓ μιᾶς τῆς ΓΘ μείζονές εἰσιν. ἀλλ'ἡ ΓΘ ἲση ἐστὶ ταῖς ΓΕ, ΕΔ. αἱ ΘΖ, ΖΓ ἂρα μείζονές εἰσι τῶν ΓΕ, ΕΔ. ἀλλ' ἡ ΘΖ τῇ ΖΔ ἐστὶν ἲση. αἱ ΖΓ, ΖΔ ἂρα τῶν ΓΕ, ΕΔ μείζονές εἰσι. καὶ εἰσιν αἱ ΓΖ, ΖΔ αἱ τὰς ἀνίσους γωνιάς περιέρχουσαι· αἱ ἂρα τὰς ἀνίσους γωνίας περιέχουσαι μείζονές εἰσι τῶν τὰς ἲσας γωνίας περιεχουσῶν.

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## The Translation
(This is a first draft of the translation. The English rendering will be tidied on the next passthrough.)

For since this is agreed upon by all, that in no way is nature employed fruitlessly nor does it do anything in vain, if we do not grant that the reflection occurs at equal angles, nature does work in vain at unequal ones, and instead of the ray striking the object of vision by a short line, it will appear to the vision to go by a long line, this detection appears through a long line. For it will be found that the \[rays\] of the straight lines contain unequal angles, whichever ones the straight lines contain from the unequal angles, whichever ones are bearing \[them\] to the mirror \[and\] from there to the object, being larger than the straight lines containing the equal angles. And seeing that this is true, the following is clear.

Let the mirror be a certain straight line (AB), and on the one hand let the viewer be Γ, and on the other hand Δ as the object of view, while E is the point of the mirror, which upon striking, the vision is bent back to the object of view, and let ΓΕ connect ΕΔ. I say that the angle under ΑΕΓ is equal to ΔΕΒ. For if it is not equal, let it then be the other point of the mirror, upon striking it, the vision contains the stretching of the line AB toward unequal angles, they are larger than the straight lines ΓΕ and ΕΔ, whichever ones contain the equal angles beyond AB. For let the perpendicular be drawn from Δ on AB according to the point Η.

 (213) And let it fall on the straight line just as on Θ. It is no doubt apparent that these angles are equal to H. For they are straight. And let ΔΗ be equal to ΗΘ, and let ΘΖ and ΘΕ be connected. This is the reasoning. Seeing that is the case therefore ΔΗ is equal to ΗΘ, but also the angle ΔΗΕ is equal to the angle ΘΗΕ, and the line of the triangle ΗΕ is shared between the two triangles, and the base ΘΕ is equal to the base ΕΔ, and the triangle ΗΘΕ is equal to the triangle ΔΗΕ, and these remaining angles are equal to the other remaining angles, the equal lines extend to those. Therefore ΘΕ is equal to ΕΔ. Again therefore ΗΘ is equal to ΗΔ and the angle along ΔΗΖ is equal to ΘΗΖ, and ΗΖ is shared between the two triangles ΔΗΖ and ΘΗΖ, and therefore ΘΖ is equal to ΖΔ. And consequently ΘΕ is equal to ΕΔ, let (the shared line) ΕΓ be attached. Therefore the two lines ΓΕ and ΕΔ are equal to the two lines ΓΕ and ΕΘ. Therefore the whole ΓΘ is equal to the two ΓΕ and ΕΔ. And therefore the two larger sides of the remaining one of every triangle are shared on every side, consequently the two sides ΘΖ and ΖΓ of triangle ΘΖΓ are larger than the one \[side\] ΓΘ. But ΓΘ is equal to ΓΕ and ΕΔ. Therefore the two sides ΘΖ and ΖΓ are larger than ΓΕ and ΕΔ. But ΘΖ is equal to ΖΔ. Consequently, ΖΓ and ΖΔ are larger than ΓΕ and ΕΔ. Also, ΓΖ and ΖΔ contain unequal angles; therefore the contained unequal angles are larger than unequal angles containing them.

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## The Commentary

Coming soon...


### Bibliography
For more reading, see:

Drachmann, Aage Gerhardt. *The Mechnical Technology of Greek and Roman Antiquity: A Study of the Literary Sources.* Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 1963.

Heath, Thomas. ["Mensuration: Heron of Alexandria"](https://archive.org/details/historyofgreekma029268mbp/page/298/mode/2up) in A Greek History of Mathematics, Vol. 2, 298-354. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1921.

An introductory exercise in translating Heron of Alexandria

Catoptrica: The Greek Fragment, translated

Reflections after reading through the works of Dostoyevky