by Joshua Cohen
Trithemius asserted that movable type was no substitute for solitary transcription, as the discipline of copying was a better guarantor of religious sensibility than the mundane acts of printing and reading. As evidence he offers the account of a Benedictine copyist, famed for his pious perspicuity, who had died, was buried by his brethren, then subsequently, though inexplicably, exhumed. According to Trithemius, the copyist’s corpus had decomposed but for three fingers of his composing hand: his right thumb, forefinger, and middle finger—relics, like manuscripture itself, of literary diligence.
* In 1862, Lipman sold his patent to one Joseph Reckendorfer, who sued pencil manufacturer Faber-Castell for infringement. In 1875, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Reckendorfer, and claimed the patent invalid: “It is evident that this manner of making or applying the instrument gives no aid to the patent. […] A handle in common, a joint handle, does not create a new or combined operation. The handle for the pencil does not create or aid the handle for the eraser. The handle for the eraser does not create or aid the handle for the pencil. Each has and each requires a handle the same as it had required, without reference to what is at the other end of the instrument, and the operation of the handle of and for each is precisely the same, whether the new article is or is not at the other end of it. […] The law requires more than a change of form, or juxtaposition of parts, or of the external arrangement of things, or of the order in which they are used, to give patentability.”
6. SCHISMS, DIVISIONS, MONADS, SPECIES
LEAVE THE MONKS TO SCRIBBLE their darkness, their scriptoria welters of fibers and bond weights, shades and delible densities. Return to the empire, Byzantine in every sense.
In 285, Diocletian split the imperium into eastern and western halves; the west was Rome, the east was established by Constantine I in 330, as Constantinople; Rome claimed that as the father and son were consubstantial, the spirit proceeded from them both; Constantinople claimed that as the son was of two natures, both human and divine, the spirit proceeded from the father alone; the filioque (“and from the son”) clause of the Nicene Creed became the theological investiture of political strife; compromise was not achieved and in 1054 the Pope of Rome excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, who, in turn, excommunicated the pope; in 1274, the Second Council of Lyons was convened to bridge the schism and reunite the churches; among the invited was Thomas Aquinas, who was to present his opuscule in defense of Rome, Contra errores graecorum (“Against the Errors of the Greeks”), but en route to the council, on donkeyback along the Appian Way, he smacked his head on a tree branch, and died.
The Nicene Creed began as a statement of principles in 325, and ended as a prayer with its incorporation into the Catholic mass in 1014; institutional discipline was assured by its spiration as personal duty. Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (1265–74) maintains that prayer has three effects: The first is “merit,” the second, “impetration,” or to obtain a grace by entreaty, and the third, “spiritual refreshment of mind” (for which Latin had developed a term since Augustine’s time: mentis). Attention, attentio, is not required for the first two; intention, intentio—or the inchoate impulse to pray, “which God considers above all else”—is enough. Intent, though, is not enough for the third and last. To be repristinated one must be in attendance. Later in the Summa, Aquinas divides attention into three categories of its own: One must attend to the pronouncing of the words, to the sense of the words, and to God—though he allows that true attention to God would obliterate the two preceding types, and that such a relationship is the triumph of intention, of visceral inwrought resolve.
The textual, the lexical, was the Catholic fixation, while the Byzantines were always externally focused, and tended to conceive of prayer in terms of its material surroundings: precious metals and jewels, coruscant altarpieces, icons, mosaics, melodies swirling like censer smoke. Books were for knowledge, or rather Trinitarian recondities; by contrast, the Eastern Orthodox cathedral was an immortal monument to “wisdom” (Sophia, in Greek), and so the terrestrial seat of the spirit. (That spirit would not be as effective as the papal armies in the fight against the Ottoman Turks, however, and so in 1439 at the Council of Florence, Byzantium reluctantly adopted the filioque. Laity and synods repudiated the concession; Constantinople fell in 1453.)
The empire’s ecclesiastical rift was doctrinal, dogmatic; its western linguistic fragmenting, vernacular. The troubadours and trouvères of the langues d’oc and langues d’oïl—Occitan/Provençal, Old Norman—sought not God but consistent patronage and sex, and were called after the vulgarized Latin tropare, “to find”; the Romance tongues were duly consummated. Latinate sapience became saber, gut “sense,” acquired not from canonical copywork but devotion to experience. Old French dealt with this change in conscius—con, “common,” scius, “knowledge”—by rendering its state into a faculty with “conscience,” a defiantly secular judgment; the Old German giwar, not yet modern “awareness,” hunted the inner self with prudence.
Curiously, it was English usage that retained at least a faint halo of religiosity. 1340, Richard Rolle of Hampole: “Thay may noghte flye to lufe and contemplacyone of God.” 1337, William Langland: “Lerne logyk and lawe and eke contemplacioun.” “Attention,” meanwhile, was represented by Chaucer in 1374 in a decidedly utile, apprehensive, or arresting sense: “After at she hadde gadred […] myn attencioun she seide us.” Which treatment continued through Shakespeare, sixteenth century: “The tongues of dying men / Inforce attention,” and Milton, seventeenth: “Attention held them mute.” Tellingly, the first overt definition in English, 1526, William Bonde, conflated the religious and secular:
Attencion or intencion for our purpose here
is onely the attendaunce
study & diligence that man or woman gyveth to their dede
as prayer
word or worke
whiche they be in doyng or about to do.
And after saynt Aquinas this attencion may be iii maner of ways
actuall
habituall or virtuall.
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THE 1600S, THE SEVENTEENTH century, the Age of Rationalism, the Era of Empiricism: The very notion that a period might have a character is what characterizes the period. It was Christoph Keller, called Cellarius (1638–1707), who created the division of history into Ancient, Medieval, and Modern rubrics. Further epochs ensued, both in future and in retrospect. Throughout this time, whatever its label, arguments evolved as to whether organization depended on identification, or identification on organization, or whether a codependence obtained. Only once you defined what something was would you be able to tell how it was different from something else, in language as in science; only once you differentiated among things would you be able to define a thing, in science as in language. Both approaches were attempts to attend.
“Many things we confirm and deny, only because the nature of words allows us to do so, though the nature of things does not”: concepts, minerals, plants, animals, human minds and bodies along with their functions and processes, had to be separated mathematically, as if numbers were a logical proxy for the illogic of letters. The author of that quotation might not have cared if you called him Blaise Pascal, René Descartes, or Baruch Spinoza—as long as you agreed with him.
Of the three, Pascal (1623–62) was the most profoundly religious; but though he’d been converted to Jansenism (a French version of Augustinism) by an appeal to the spirit, he sought to sway others to credence by reason alone: the famous wager of his Pensées, stating that there was more to be gained from believing in the existence of God than there was from not believing in it (atheism), and that it was precisely this potential for gain that rationalized religion. Likewise, when Pascal rhetoricized, “Philosophers who have mastered their passions—what matter would be capable of that?” the implication was that the key to such mastery was ratiocinatio
n, of which humanity was the only matter capable. To resist ratiocination was to resist divine grace and to lapse if not into perdition—Jansenists subscribed to predestination—then guilt.
Descartes (1596–1650), who was an acquaintance of Pascal’s, did not share his desire for faith, and applied logic not to prove the merit of a religious life, but rather to prove that the behaviors inculcated by religion could just as well be managed without it. His intention, in his Passions of the Soul, is “regulation”: “There is no soul so weak that better management would not allow it to acquire mastery over its passions.” To Descartes, the mind and body are separate, the body a type of technology whose metaphysical pulleys and levers are operated by “the passions”—note the innate “passivity”—which are not interiorly generated emotions, but the soul’s experience of exterior phenomena. Unlike burns or wounds, however, the passions cannot be localized, because the soul cannot be localized, though according to Descartes the source of its stimulation could be “the miniature gland in the middle of the brain”—the pineal.
Spinoza (1632–77), who’d been excommunicated by Amsterdam’s Jews, sought, instead, to define emotional experiences, which he called “affections,” as mere manifestations of a universalizing Substance, “that which exists in, and is conceived through, itself: in other words, that of which a concept can be formed independently of any other concept.” Spinoza’s Ethics proposes the existence of this Substance, an illimitable power possessed of “attributes”—“that which the intellect regards as constituting the essence of Substance”—which express themselves through “modes”—which are “the modifications of Substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself.” Spinoza’s organization is hierarchical; Descartes’s dual, though his mens and corpus are still haunted by the ghost of a soul. Neither philosopher fully addresses the ramifications of a distinction between existence and a consciousness-of-existence.
Instead it took the mid-seventeenth century to engineer this—in language, in a further contortion of “conscious.” While Thomas Hobbes hewed to the communal definition—“where two or more men know of one and the same fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another”—John Locke pursued a more individual definition: “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.” It’s as if a homonym were responsible for revolutionizing the political thinking of the Enlightenment to follow.
Before freedoms of speech and religion would be granted, every freedom—every feeling and act and thing—had to be categorized, classified, related, interrelated. The world was discovered and discovered round in the fifteenth century; the sixteenth century found nation-states expanding into empires and staking their claims in New Worlds unseen by most but imagined by all. The next and only frontier was smaller, equally unseen, but more unimaginable—the microscopic. Perception through language was radically changed when the constituent parts of an organism were made visible through glass.
Descartes was an optics theorist. Spinoza earned his living, and his death from silicosis, by tediously grinding and polishing lenses. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) founded the science of microbiology by sighting, through 500x magnifying microscopes of his own invention, the microorganisms he called “animalcules.” In 1674, he explored infusoria, or protists; in 1676, he set eyes on bacteria, selenomonads from the human mouth; and in 1677 he planted his flag in the fertile head of a spermatozoon (that flagellating squiggly initially suspected to be a worm, hence its name, “semen animal”). Larger organisms became seen as merely the sum of smaller organisms (the conspicuous justified by the concealed), and so life itself was viewed not as an independent entity, but as an interdependent cycle (a mechanism, a machine).
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OF ALL THE EXEMPLARS of the seventeenth century’s taxonomical drive, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is perhaps the most distinctive, and distinguished. His interest in what’s now called semiotics—the study of signs: the relationship between signifier (word) and signified (thing)—resulted in a new lingua franca: a categorical language, which would classify every other language. Some of Leibniz’s contemporaries sought to identify an Adamic, or Edenic, tongue; others experimented with artificial arrangements of prefixes, suffixes, and grapheme/phoneme (read/pronounced) roots, while Leibniz’s own ideal was to utilize characters only. His was a pasigraphic or alingual attempt at a characteristica universalis, a universal characterization, or alphabet, of all human knowledge:
Though studious men have immemorially conceived of some type of language or universal characteristic by which all concepts and things might be arranged in harmonious order, and with the help of which disparate peoples might communicate their wisdom and each read in his own language what another has written in his, no one has yet succeeded with a language or characteristic that also includes both the arts of designation and operation, that is, one whose signs and characters serve the same purpose that arithmetical signs serve for numbers, and algebraic signs for abstract quantities. (On the General Characteristic, 1679)
Leibniz’s wouldn’t just be a thinker’s language, but a thinking language, whose elements would be derived directly from the things it described in the very way those things were derived from their constituents—by the principle of recombinant units:
All derivative concepts arise from a combination of primitive ones, and those that are composite in a higher degree arise from a combination of composite concepts. (On Universal Synthesis and Analysis, 1679)
To Leibniz, all concepts were either primal or derivable, and while primitives could serve as their own symbols, derivatives had to be accorded designations more descriptive, or just more relatable, than any mere reduction or sum. It was this realization that inspired Leibniz’s development of binary notation—a system that could represent the infinitude of the universe with only two elements, or with one element, given that zero was a nullity.
The ciphering accomplished by these 1s (“unities”) and 0s (“nothing”)—in their alteration, or, in Leibniz’s phrase, ars combinatoria—was akin to God’s “creation of all things out of nothing,” as Leibniz wrote to his patron, the Duke of Brunswick, in 1697: “Because instead of there appearing no particular order or pattern, as in the common representation of numerals, here appears a beautiful order and harmony that cannot be improved upon.”*1
And so if 0 is 0, and 1 is 1, 2 will be 10, 3 will be 11; and 4, 100; 5, 101; 6, 110; 7, 111; 8, 1,000…This system, applied to the representation of ideas, allowed each to be symbolized by a character set that assimilated its full complement of relationships and referents. With this, any two concepts, and every stage of their compositing, might be evaluated, or equated, through logical operation.
In its most fundamental sense, Leibniz’s binary is a model of existence itself, with expanses of void, or 0s, intervening between solid masses, or 1s—elementary particles that Leibniz called “monads”: “nothing but a simple substance, which enters into compounds” (Monadology, 1714). Leibniz’s monad was among the most influential revivals of Antiquity’s atomism—the theory that the whole of life was but a coalescing of small parts. Though unlike other atomist units of the time—Descartes’s “vortices,” Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle’s “corpuscules”—Leibniz’s monad wasn’t solely physical or metaphysical, but mental as well, having been founded on the insight that both things and ideas tended to assume the properties of the mind that was perceiving them: the thing or idea in itself constituting its primitive essence, variously derived by observation.
Leibniz’s Monadology, like Spinoza’s Ethics, describes and prescribes simultaneously. Both tractates are written in the styles by which their respective authors sought to rewrite all of existence—disciplined (Spinoza wrote in Latin), direct (Leibniz, in French), with terminology that when it didn’t repeat, spawned relations in hypostatized genealogies. Though the tracts share common spirit, their methods
are opposed: Spinoza, working from intuition to perception, divided Substance into a posteriori expressions; Leibniz, working to intuition from perception, added and multiplied a priori substances toward an expression of the “highest degree.”
To Spinoza, everything about the sensory can only be derived; to Leibniz, however, anything that can be sensed is, in its essence, primal, though human engagement is not. Leibniz’s monadism is fundamentally a notation of that engagement—the way the brain arrays disparate sights and sounds and smells and tastes and touches into integrated experiences. In Leibniz’s formulation, all external phenomena exist as petites perceptions, “small perceptions” transmitted through the sensorium but registered, internally, only in combination—in their exceeding a certain threshold of combination—and so entering into what he calls “apperception,” or “conscious awareness.” Elemental phenomena cohere only through and as this compounding, at a threshold that changes with context: You—being familiar with this language—don’t have to read every letter to read this “word,” nor do you have to review etymology or grammar to comprehend this “sentence.”
For Leibniz, the sole facilitator of apperception is memory, which aggregates perceptions across time and space:
All attention requires memory, and often when we’re not scolded and told to take notice of our present perceptions, we let them pass without reflection, and even without observation, yet if someone directs our attention to something immediately after, and, for instance, bids us to recall a sound supposedly just made, we find not only that we can but also that we had some notion of the sound at the time. (New Essays, 1704)