superstition and its trace

“D.C. who, in his village in Romania, wrote his reminiscences of his childhood, having told his neighbor, a peasant named Coman, that he would not be forgotten in his book, the latter came to see him early the next day and said: “I know that I am not worth much, but even so I don’t think I have sunk so low as to be talked about in a book!”

The oral world, how superior it was to our own! Beings (I mean, the people) only lived in the true as long as they had a horror of writing. As soon as they caught the prejudice, they entered into the false, they lost their ancient superstitions in order to acquire a new one, worse than all the other ones combined.” - Cioran

LI has been madly pursuing a small point in Vico, from which we would like to grow a larger point about the belief system of the culture of the limited good. But we don’t ourselves quite understand our point, since it concerns a separation between the significance of ‘creation’ and that of ‘nature’ that may seem too thread subtle to make a real difference, or too idealistic to describe the real change in the routines of work and passion that lead us ever onward towards the Eldorado of all the young dudes, Synthetica.

Changes in the weave, changes in the sewing. We pick up our pins and needles from their allotted paths in the forest, we set to work.

In a 1971 article about the tense of popular belief by Nicole Belmont, The Function of Belief, Belmont remarks about a persistent connection in stories about popular belief between belief, practice, and the authority of the past. Often, when asked about the truth of this or that belief, the anthropologist is given a story about the past – either embodied in old people (the old people know about such and such a belief and its expression in practice) or in a story about some founding hero or god. It is in relation to this theme that Belmont cites a passage in Emile Beneveniste concerning superstition that I want to translate here, and comment upon in another post:

Beliefs are often given the pejorative name of superstitions which, curiously, leads etymologically to this question of projection (rejet) into the past. It has been studied by E. Benveniste, who sees in superstitio the abstract correspondent to superstes, “survivor”, and which thus signifies survival: “Superstitio indicated thus a ‘remnant’ of an old belief which, in the age in which is it envisioned, appears superfluous.” Benveniste sees there a historical countersense: we loan to the ancients an attitude taken from the modern mindset and the capacity to discern in religion the survivals of a distant epoch. But this is not a very credible objection: the ancient Romans could very well distinguish, in their religion, diverse strata of belief and ritual. The proof is in the existence of the terms religio and superstitio.

“Super” – Beneviste notes – “signifies not only above, but also beyond: superstare is to keep oneself beyond, subsist above… he who has gone through a danger, a test, a difficult period, who has survived it, is superstes. Another sense thus branches out: he who has subsisted beyond an event and become the witness of it.”

One thus sees clearly the double character attributed to popular beliefs: they are present, but in the guise of witnesses of a past. Why this ambivalence?”

a small displacement...

And so LI moved to Paris…

Lucretius might have been a hard taskmaster when it came to superstition, calling upon man to surpass the “flaming limits of the world” and not to piss himself before the vain phantom of the angry gods – but he did have a fearful appreciation of the power of love, with its invisible, hounding movement. “Hence into the heart distilled the drop/Of Venus’ sweetness, and numbing heartache followed./For if what you love is absent, none the less/ Its images are there, and the sweet name/Sounds in your ears.”

Amen to that! Lucretius, drawing an ascetic’s conclusion from the naturalist stance, taught us to resist the drop of Venus’ sweetness – or so some claim. LI, however, drew the opposite conclusion – we have had more than enough of numbing heartache in our life, and so we didn’t hesitate to follow A. to Paris, merrily throwing away clothes and books, giving away our paltry possessions, and in general reducing the hurly burly of our, shall we say, middle aged existence to the order of two packed suitcases, plus a laptop in a knapsack purchased from Target for thirty nine dollars.

And so the city I have imagined, the exemplum of the artificial paradise, Baudelaire’s cite des reves en plein jour, is a place I casually get ripped off in, purchasing meatballs from the Italian deli down the street.

It is here, I hope, that I will get much more done on the Human Limit, as well as making a superhuman effort to edit many many more papers and books – for the prices of Paris truly are beyond the flaming limits of the world.

On the other hand, what price could possibly be attached to biking, on a lovely autumn afternoon, with my love through the streets up to Paris-Bercy and the BN – observing the absurd names that are attached to things (Simone de Beauvoir’s passerelle, Josephine Baker’s piscine – heartbreakingly, some restaurant that calls itself Jules et Jim (o the exploitation!) in a complex of cinemas, MK2.

And so I have arrived...

Our logical leaps: monkey shines in the artificial paradise

The Lynn White thesis, advanced in his 1967 article, The Historical roots of our Ecological Crisis, is that Christianity provided a paradigm that allowed the “West” to develop the kind of mechanical technologies that subordinated the whole of nature to man. This isn’t an original thesis, nor does White claim it as such. The young Hegelians present a similar picture of the historical meaning of Christianity. What was original with White is the thesis that this subordination is at the root of our present ecological crisis.

LI has already put his fork and knife into this article, as it doesn’t accord with our sense of before and after. We locate the shift of the human limit in the early modern era. And we maintain that the ‘subordination’ of creation to man and is different in kind from the subordination of nature to man.

Here is Lynn White:

Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century both Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God shaped Adam he was foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the Second Adam. Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions (except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.

At the level of the common people this worked out in an interesting way. In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible
to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their
ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook,
it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation,
and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it
possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural
objects.”

LI’s discussion of Vico’s doctrine that verum est factum gives us a hold on what is missing in Lynn White’s rather romantic historiography. For Vico’s modern anti-modernism is precisely concerned with the conflation between mechanical and real understanding. Now, this may seem like almost nothing, but it has roots in a much greater thing, the main thing, the thing so casually overlooked in White’s hedging phrase that man shares “in great measure’ God’s transcendence of nature. In fact, the word "nature" avoids the word, the non-scholarly word, ‘creation” – which is the historically interesting word, here. It is part of the creation of the non-Western other that the West is the home of the nature/culture divide, and the other is the home of a groovier monism. Philippe Descola, for instance, has made much of the idea that there is no divide between society and nature for the Jivaro among whom he did his fieldwork. That, instead, the Jivaro “consider the plants and the animals like persons with whom one can communicate in certain circumstances.” And this simple insight has led to further insights about the lack of a certain structure – totemism – in the Western world.

This is, on one level, true. On another level, however, it fails to penetrate the sheath of the modern, the womb of the artificial paradise in which our ethnographic fieldworkers have their breathe and bodies. LI would contend that the famed modern ideology critic – that God is made by man in his image, in some unconscious moment of ilynx that occurs throughout the premodern era in universal history – imports into that era an idea of the made, the mechanically made, that significantly distorts the idea of creation. It might seem that Vico’s idea that there is a special, interior understanding in making is part of the White mythology – that man takes, once again, a transcendental distance from nature in a symmetry that can never really be sustained, and produces, infinitely, its supplements. But I think this ignores the way in which Vico’s critique of the geometric method and the appeal to God the maker go together. Vico is not urging their synthesis – not leading us to the world of models and bullet pointed instruction sheets. Rather, he is pointing to the transcendental blind spot that makes man’s participation in making essentially different from God’s, not quantitatively – we just need better science and tools – but qualitatively. Dominion is not and can never be making, and the creatures made by man – fire, wheel, telescope and automaton – are not made in the same way, with the same gesture, as is inherent in divine making.

verum and factum

LI lept, in our last post, upon Vico’s passage concerning the material transmission of the masterpieces. As I pointed out, it is an odder passage than it might at first appear. Consider – it sounds themes – notably, the warning that mechanization works against authenticity – which are distinctly post-revolutionary. Furthermore, the man writing this is the son of a bookstore owner, who – one can say, literally – owes his bodily being to the printing press. Furthermore, the chance to study came to him from a chance conversation in a bookstore with a Bishop, carefully recorded and placed in the autobiography.

The ancients versus the moderns was a battle of the books, as Swift puts it (at about the same time as Vico), but it is the making of books as well as their content that concern our man. While it may seem that the analysis of mechanization is far removed from Vico’s protest against the geometric method, in fact, it is part of the same problem of exteriority. Just as the deductive method, in philosophy and physics, is nothing more than a baroque ornament, expressing no intrinsic truth about philosophy or physics, the printing press is the extrinsic mechanism that gives us no information about the quality of the rhetoric and themes of the books it produces, as it deviates from the track of the word – the special art of Hermes. To put oneself, by copying, in the track of the writer is a form of ‘magical’ materialism, one that is hard – and perhaps impossible? – to entirely give up. LI, ever your man for tracks and paths, backwards and forwards, would link Vico’s words about copying with a more famous Viconian theme that is given to us a year later in his essay, “The wisdom of the ancient Italians. This is a passage translated from Michelet’s French translation:


The words verum and facturm, the true and the fact, are put in a relation one for the other by the Latins as inter-convertible, as the schoolmen say. For the latins, intelligere, understand, is the same thing as to read clearly and to know with evidence. They call cogitare what, in Italian, is called pensare et andar raccogliendo (ratio reason) designating among them a collection of numeric elements, and this gift proper to the human, distinguishing him from the beasts and constituting his superiority, which is why they call man an animal who participates in reason - rationis particeps – and who, consequently, doesn’t possess it entirely. Just as words are the signs of ideas, ideas are the signs and representations of things. Thus, as to read, legere, is to gather together the elements of writing out of which words are formed, intelligence, intelligere, consists in assembling all the elements of a thing from out of which emerges the perfect idea.

One is able thus to conjecture that the ancient Italians admitted the following doctrine on the true: the true is the fact (the made) itself, and by consequence God is the first truth because he is the first maker (factor), the infinite truth because he made all things and the absolute truth because he represents all the elements of things, external as well as internal, for he contains them. To know is to assemble the elements of things, from which it follows that the thought cogitatio is proper to the human spirit and intelligence to the divine spirit, for God unites all the elements of things, external as well as internal, since he contains them, and he disposes of them, while the human spirit is limited as it is, and outside of all of what is not of it can relate to the external points, but can never unite everything in such a way that it can think about things, but not understand them – this is why he participates in reason, but does not possess it.”

In the background, outside of the window of a bookstore in Naples, on the branch of a figtree, two birds have settled from the Rg Veda, “one of the twain eats the sweet Figtree’s fruitage; the other eating not regardeth only.”

the gay science

Thanks to printing, books are published everywhere; this is why, with the moderns, those are so numerous who, not content to know one or two authors, have an erudition which depends upon abundant, varied, and almost infinite reading. And finally we have universities, which are institutions organized in view of the study of all kinds of sciences and arts, thanks to which intelligence, esprit and language are carried to their perfection. And in almost all these studies a single end is aimed at today: the truth. To the point that if I undertook to make a speech in praise of the truth, I would deserve the fact that one would respond to me, with stupor: But who has ever thought to dispraise it? - Vico.

Foucault revivied Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the cultural causes and consequences of the Will to Truth in the sixties; the diagnosis has rapidly penetrated to every sphere of the discourses devoted to the social sciences, and to the humanities. One hundred fifty years before Nietzsche, Vico was expressing his own discomfort with truth as the ‘single end’ of study, for reasons that reappear in Nietzsche’s account. It is a protest, on Vico’s part, that is almost wholly prophetic – for though, as Fontenelle wrote, the new mechanical ingenuity was appearing under the very noses of the poets and philosophers, in trades and shops, without the poets and the philosophers being aware of it, certainly the great European metropoles – London, Paris, Naples – had not yet been wholly caught up in the great transformation that instituted monetized commodity markets and industry on a mass scale, the concomitants of the artificial paradise. Fontenelle, Nietzsche justly wrote in a passage in The gay science (a Viconian book), ‘grew after death” – ‘Those small, bold words over moral things, that Fontenelle threw out in his immortal eloges, seemed to his time to be paradoxes and games of a not inoffensive wit; even the highest judges of taste and reason didn’t see anything else in them – yes, including Fontenelle himself, perhaps. Now something unbelievable has happened: these thoughts become truths! Science proves them! The game becomes serious! And we read these dialogues with another feeling than that with which Voltaire and Helvetius read them, and lift their progenitor into another and highter rank of intellects, as these did – justly? Unjustly?”

Vico’s examination of the “method” of the ancients versus the moderns is, on its face, an examination of the most modern of methods, that of science- as we find it in Descartes – with the ancients. But there is another face of his essay. Perhaps the best way to approach it is to look at what Vico says about printing. Remember that Vico, in the smallest of parentheses in his autobiography, tells us that his father owned a bookshop. Remember that the great encounter in Vico’s life – with the Bishop of Ischia – occurred in another bookshop (Michelet mistranslates this as a ‘library”), where Vico seemed to charm the Bishop with his knowledge of canon law, and his latin. Vico’s autobiography mentions several incidences concerning finding books, which was of course the bookseller’s trade. LI could, if you like, find something a bit Oedipal, then, in Vico’s remarks about printing, and the preference for the quill – for copying.
At the same time, it is important to note the conjunction of the intellectual and the material here. Vico sees that matter is a matter of routine.
A long citation, and then to bed.

In fact, when books were written by hand, the copyists, in order to make their labors worth the pain, only transcribed authors who had a well established reputation, and, as they sold their copies dearly, the amateurs were sometimes constrained to copy them with their own hand. What admirable profit one takes from this kind of exercise! We better meditate a text that we write, and chiefly that we write in calmness, without precipitation, peacefully, and in always following the order. Thus is established between us and the authors not a tie of superficial acquaintance, but a long habit by which we finish purely and simply by identifying with them. It is for this reason that the bad authors, when one copied them by hand, knew disfavor, and the goood saw their works diffused for the great benefit of all. Bacon made proof of more cleverness than good sense when he remarked that, in the influx of barbarians, the authors with the most weight sank to the bottom, while the light ones swam on the surface. In all genres, the most important, the best authors have come down to us, thanks to writing, and if this or that author has disappeared, one must attribute it to chance. When I question my memory (I wrote this when I was still not an old man) I perceive that I have seen writers who enjoyed while alive such glory that their works had been printed twelve times or more, and who are now disdained and even held in contempt. Others, remaining too long in obscurity and indifference, now see their name celebrated by a change in circumstance by the greatest experts.”

Vico and the failure of the revolution of 1799

The Gnostic historian, like the universal historian, has a strong sense of epochs – which, as Bossuet pointed out in his essay on universal history, are stopping points, still moments that frame a sequence. They are in history and not in history. They are signaled by royal deaths, falls of empires, the rising of the son of god from the clutches of death, etc. Instead of the grand events that punctuate the march of universal history, however, the gnostic’s epochs happen in corner conversations, or in a glance at a sign in a window, or in the lyrics of a popular song. Herzen had a nose for these things – in his writing, one finds moments in which suddenly, the forces at dialectical play, usually disguised in a thousand blind intentions, suddenly become naked and twofold, under a harsh and unforgiving stage light. In his beautiful essay on Owen, the proto-socialist English radical, Herzen reports on a conversation Owen had with Gentz, in Herzen’s words, “the literary sycophant of Metternich”, who said to him, about his scheme for a socialist utopia at New Lanark:

“Suppose you had been successful, what would have been the outcome of it?”
“It’s very simple,’ Owen answered. ‘The outcome would have been that every man would have had enough to eat, would have been properly clothed, and would have been given a sensible education.”
“But that’s just what we don’t want,’ observed the Cicero of the Congress of Vienna. Gentz was frank, if nothing else.”

In one sense, this has a satisfying Voltarian sound – in the struggle of the ancients and the moderns, the ancients – representing the ancien regime – want to impose poverty and ignorance on the masses to uphold their hierarchy, and the moderns want to burst through these tired integuments, made of superstition and irrationality, to produce dignity and culture for every man – plus dinner.

In another sense, though, dinner and high culture are not really correlates. Herzen, in his letters to Turgenev, emphasized this point. Raymond Williams, in contrasting Burke and Cobbett in Culture and Society, makes the point that judging our usual political dualities (left or right, ancien regime or modernity) under the Enlightenment program is a more difficult game than it seems when we approach the matter simply by letting certain books talk. The books talk and talk, a cartoon bubble forms, and it fills with theory. Meanwhile, cartoon bubbles were everywhere coming out of the mouths of speculators in drained Fenland and alehouse keepers, lazzaroni and dairy maids. The moderns were of course busy imposing the benefits of a beneficient system on the people, and tearing up the texture of popular belief, for good and ill. This is really a post about Vico and his consideration of the competition between the ancients and the moderns, or rather, as is the way of LI, a flirtation with a topic that always seems to recede from out of the clumsy grasp of my paragraphs, but I want to get to him via these nineteenth century anecdotes – and, for instance, via his radical/conservative reader, Vincenzo Cuoco, who, in exile from the collapse of the revolutionary Parthenopean Republic of Naples, looked back at the mistakes of the Jacobins of 1799 and stressed their disconnect from the people. Cuoco’s history – about which I will have more to say later – has often been linked to the reaction in Europe – to Burke, or to Gentz. About the leader of the Jacobins, the Neapolitan radical Pagano, for instance, Cucio writes:

You wouldn’t say that the families of the Serras, the Colonnes, and of the Pignatellis were obscure, or that Pagano, Cirillo, Conforti were men without a name, but they had a name among the wise who do not make revolutions, and they were unknown to the people, without whom they are not made, because they were too superior. Paggio, the head of the Lazzaroni of the market, was without doubt a contemptible man in all respects, yet however it was Paggio and not Pagano who was loved by the people – the people who always insult those who are above their intelligence.”

But what looks like a standard, Gentzian account of the mob is, in fact, a more subtle critique of the men of theory who do not come out of the crowd – and who, out of an ignorance deriving from that part of knowledge that William James named acquaintance, are all the more ready to reduce all knowledge to what is demonstrable and can be driven to the sole standard of the true or the false. A standard that requires the atomization of culture to a vast mass of independent decision pairs.

But I’ll leave Cuoco and start with Vico – in the next post.

Vico and l'esprit geometrique

In the preface to his translation of Vico’s Le Méthode des études de notre temps, Alain Pons notices that Vico, in contrast to his opponent Descartes, recognizes the distinct cognitive and cultural and philosophical status of childhood and youth.

“. It is doubtlessly in their respective attitude to childhood that best reveals the depths that separate Vico from Descartes. Descartes could not console himself from the fact that “we have all been children before being men, from which it is almost impossible that our judgments are as pure and solid as they could have been, if we had had the entire use of our reason from the instant of our birth and had never been led but by it. The Research of the Truth is even more explicit: “One of the principle causes why we have so much pain in knowing” is that, with the child, “the best comes last, which is understanding”, and that before this, for years, we remain given to the senses, “which see nothing beyond the most vulgar and common of things,” to our natural inclination, which is “completely corrupted”, and to “impertinent nurses”. Vico, on the contrary, could be defined as the philosopher of childhood, of the world of the child as the childhood of the world. From his first inaugural discourse, he declares to the students, “Quivis vestrum puer maximo praelusit philosopho” – every child is the prelude to a great philosopher, because in him is spontaneously amassed a treasury of theoretical and practical wisdom that the speculative knowledge would have to “explain”, to deploy rationally. The child is not infans, he speaks, one must know how to listen to him. Vico reports, in the De Constantia philologiae, the phrase of one of his sons: My heart is always talking to me, and what a lot of things it tells me!” “

Pons is right to elevate the child – that evidence that maturity is, itself, but a phase – to the emblem of what Vico saw as the cultural decadence spread by the geometric spirit. He wrote his small tract on method at almost the same time Fontenelle was writing his on the utility of mathematics. It is a good contrast, since Fontenelle was resolutely on the side of the moderns, and Vico wanted to have his say about this quarrel. LI sees him as one of the primogenitive advocates of the imagination – leading the power of ingenium against a fundamental shift in the human limit. A shift that leads us, in the 19th century, into the building of the artificial paradise.

Pons quotes a letter Vico wrote to a friend concerning the education of the young man of his time: “It [Cartesianism] has filled their heads, Vico will say in a letter of 1729, “with such great words as ‘demonstrations’, ‘evidences’, ‘demonstrated truths’, thus preparing them to enter in a world of men who are composed of lines, of numbers, and of algebraic signs.”

That is our world now, of course, and we are ruled by those men.