“ — And thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest” — De Quincy
In the 76th axiom of his La Scienza Nuova Vico writes “According to a popular tradition, the first form of government in the world was a monarchy” and that monarchies are an emulation of the family system because “governments must conform to the nature of the people governed”.
The obsession with ‘universals’ and the inborn — and therefore unjustifiable — allure of ‘possibility’, the stubbornness of the ‘hidden’, the impressiveness of the ‘not-so-obvious’, the ‘marginal’, the ‘rare’ stuff, lies wholly within the domain of what we call philosophy, a word that has in it ‘infinity’, and endlessness etc… They leave us with the impression that the universe, which the last century has broken up and torn into confused fragments in the ironic attempt to reconstruct it, has a definite structure, and not an arbitrary one as that which modern materialist philosophers (aka scientists) preach.
It is a ‘great chain of being’, a system, sort of like a ‘society’, or, in its most primitive (not to say ‘inferior’ or ‘lesser) ‘Monarchy’, and the fact that we can ‘make out’ — if only vaguely — the silhouette of its impeccable design in those priceless moments of ‘understanding’ (for what is ‘understanding’ anyways?) is what keeps us going back to the ancients, to whom this universe is more than a just a cosmic sneeze, or a fortuitous concourse of imaginary substances — -atoms, and life more than a just a Heraclitean river, or a Kafkaesque episode. It’s, as Cassirer put it, the “thing to which thought holds fast and which it seems unable to relinquish without destroying its own form”, but which also “eludes cognition”.
To philosophers, or at least Plato, ‘life’ is the consort of fixed (that is to say, eternal) motifs, and ‘history’ can be said to be their comportment i.e — an animation of these fixed and finite components, roles played and replayed, they have a way of “reasserting themselves in exotic settings” to borrow Toynbee’s words A Study Of History (chp13: challange & response), for said ‘comportment’ itself is only possible in the wake of such limitation (Motifs), those motifs are to ‘comportment’ what letters are to language, or what numeral signs are to arithmetics, or ‘tones’ are to music. The scarcity of active components drives ‘behaviour’, and this is not confined to those few examples, but are everywhere, or in the eloquent ways of Borges “It may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors” (Pascal’s Fearful Sphere). Toynbee was certainly onto something when his study of civilization brought him into (as had many philosophers of history) relinquishing the lifeless paradigm of cause and effect in favor of ‘challange & response’, in a way acknowledging the impressive complexity of the human affairs, the ‘probability’ aspect that (paradoxically, or, ironically) codifies the notion of comportment.
“When I attempted to apply my findings to the cultural sciences, it generally became clear to me that general epistemology with its traditional form and limitations, does not provide an adequate methodological basis for the cultural sciences” — Ernst Cassirer (Praface to Philosophy Of Symbolic Forms; Vol1)
This ‘relinquishment’ that we frequently encounter in the works of philosphers of history (Toynbee, Spengler, Hagel, Schleiermacher, Kant even, Cassirer and many others) is, I’m compelled to say as this point, an admission that the universe is governed at a level much higher than that which the scientific method which deals with physical nature governs; a ‘level’ that we’re already familiar with and are already steeped in, a realm to which we unconsciously return when we use ‘examples’ or deploy ‘analogies’ and ‘similes’ and ‘stereotypes’, but which ‘routes’ are seldom taken (consciously) just as this ‘relinquishment’ is seldom seen as a ‘transcending’ of nature, or an admission of her inadequacy.
It’s those same motifs that the awfully misunderstood Nietzche had in mind when thought up the doctrine of eternal recurrence, as well as the occultic justification of Mill’s fear that all variations and musical combinations will one day be exhausted, and therefore ‘repeated’ — i.e, the ‘death’ of originality, often analogized as the ‘death of the author’. Borges ‘A Note On (Towards) Bernard Shaw’ dubbed this — as I happen to do — as ‘the exaggeration of a common propension’. We can name it the ‘antithesis of ‘pragmatism’, it’s similar, if not indistinguishable from what’s called ‘aestheticism’, but there’s something more essential there which ceasing at ‘aesthetic’ would have us short of grasping — the ‘Absence’ of Telos; the ascendency of ‘mechanism’, the ‘thing in/of itself’, the tool becoming more significant than its purpose.
Before Heidegger coined the term ‘thrownness’, Droysen set the precedence with his formula “moral spheres”. We’re ‘thrown’, as it were, into these so-called moral spheres where our moral actions, or contributions — however infinitesimal — are no less significant, teleologically speaking, than the whole in which they’re realized. ‘Teleologically’ here might as well be replaced with ‘grammatically’, because language rules and those intricate social systems we create — which we hardly think could be traced back to the phenomena of syntax and the conceptual categories of the languages we speak — are fundamentally the same (however captious or negligible this detail may be).
There’s nothing ‘potential’ in language, everything is ‘entelechial’ — conclusive. In this sense, every word is a term, and every term is a proposition, since the term houses the ‘notion’, insomuch as ‘language’ is the ‘house’ of being to once more quote Heidegger. (See Frege’s ‘principle of compositionality’)
Monarchic or anarchic?
‘Monarchy’ is more or less a synecdoche. When we come across the word, our immediate thought is a ‘society’; a sophisticated, hierarchically organized system with complex laws and regulations, the word ‘monarchy’, or any alternative words that seek to designate, as it were, or formalize society in so manner, are a way of summarizing, in few contrived syllables, the details of a considerable idea. One must have had to step out of the frame, so to speak, to see it in its true form. The word (monarchy) as do words like ‘roof’, abbreviates — whilst somehow successfully preserving — the idea of this considerable social apparatus without appearing reductive or functioning as such. Our vocabulary is packed full of such terms, or — if reflection takes us far enough — is entirely made up of such words.
Droysen writes that a severed hand is no longer a hand (Outline Of The Principles Of History, 55), the same might be said with regards to a word, or — if reflection permits us to go farther — the statement (Droysen’s) is simply a grammatical projection! (as figures like Humboldt, Hamann, Whorf and others are known to have speculated) so much so, that one’s lead to believe that language and the imagination are so tied up that no product of the mind, no image or thought, however inconsequential, leaves — entirely — the radius of what’s called syntax. A language that we’re born speaking is, in this very true sense, just as much a facticity as are the circumstances (moral spheres) and particular social setting that we’re ‘thrown’ into.
How vast a distance, how huge a leap is it really to go from ‘letters’ or ‘syllables’; basic and indivisible units of speech, to atoms; basic indivisible units of matter?, or can it even be described as a leap?. There are — for instance — astounding parallels between Hesiod’s mythical theogony and the modern cosmogonical account (the ‘big bang’ & singularity), the two accounts are so ‘alike’ that you’d think one (the modern conception) is a plagiarizing the other — only sold in the self-conscious diction of science; in a language that tries so hard to exclude the human observant (or, as the title of William James’ book on pragmatism goes ‘A new name for the old ways of thinking’).
This is a huge dilemma for science, and something that it must clarify, for it’s either a ‘coincidence’, in which case it confirms the theories of Humboldts, Hamman and Wharf, or intentional, in which case philosophy ascends, or rather, science descends to a level plane field (or is reunited with) philosophy, either way, the question arises whether the blare of ‘scientific progress’ that we’ve been hearing for a century isn’t partially echoing age-old ideas long thought to have been ‘outgrown’.
So have we (after all) been running in place?, did we (afterall) ‘know’ it all, and that all that has ‘changed’ is simply the way in which we ‘package’ our thoughts?.
“ — For the essence of language never resides in those elements isolated by abstraction (words and syntax), but solely in the spirit’s eternally repeated endeavor to make the articulated sound an expression of thoughts” Cassirer ‘Philosophy of Symbolic Forms’ (Vol1, p160)
