Video Transcription

Welcome, wanderer. I am the digital avatar of Elias Artista, and together with my material counterpart, I shall guide you on a journey into the Archilogon. Before Philosophy became history, and six centuries before Diogenes Laertius gathered names and anecdotes, Philolaus of Croton, “first among the Pythagoreans”, entrusted to writing a treatise On Nature, whose opening lines read approximately as follows: “Nature has been harmonized within the Cosmos by the Illimit and the Limit, both in its totality and in each of its parts.” Diogenes Laertius does not possess Philolaus’ book, lost for centuries, and therefore he draws on Demetrius of Magnesia, author of On Homonyms, a collection of biographical notices on various historical figures. When citing Demetrius, it is impossible to tell whether Diogenes reproduces him verbatim or interprets him, filling any lacunae in meaning.

Assuming, with a degree of optimism, that the quotation corresponds to the original passage, let us try, so far as possible, to penetrate the sense of what Philolaus intended to entrust to posterity. As a message traverses places, epochs, languages, cultures and diverse states of mind, it never arrives intact. It passes through filters—above all, our understanding—and it is not uncommon that, along the chain of transmission, an interpreter may, in good faith, distort or corrupt the original intention, much like in the childhood game of Chinese whispers. Only the sender would be entitled to confirm or deny our translation. Once he has vanished, every attempt inevitably tells us more about the interpreter than about the interpreted, and there is no escape from this fact. What imposes itself upon history, by necessity, is the version judged most credible by a circle of learned scholars. New versions may replace the old, for historiography is a succession of interpretative paradigms ever open to redefinition.

Our former self, thirty years ago, and mindful of the hermeneutic circle, would have declared with some confidence that a proper understanding of the passage depends on the author’s overall thought, on the context from which it was taken, on the historical moment in which it was written, on the culture of the translator, and on that of the reader. The answer is correct, yet not exhaustive. To transpose a concept into another age, another culture, and another language—assuming, of course, that the new system of signs possesses terms adequate to clothe it—the translator must not only be acquainted with the conditions in which the text came to life, but must also have truly grasped what the philosopher had taken a lifetime to elaborate. This is by no means guaranteed, especially when that philosopher’s vision is designed to provoke in his interlocutors a shift of paradigm, as in the case of Pythagoras.

With what instruments, then, can we hope to interpret and translate Philolaus’s passage correctly? The philosopher Quine denies that there can be a one-to-one translation between different languages, for meaning is intrinsically bound to the web of connections within a given language. This undermines the very idea of a perfect correspondence of meanings. If such a limit applies to cultures, it applies all the more forcefully to individuals. The standpoint from which each person observes the world assigns a particular sense to abstract terms such as nature, cosmos, limit, or illimit. It is hard to find two people who associate precisely the same concept with the same word, for within the global web of connections that structure the space of our consciousness, meaning depends on the interlacing of relations of which each concept forms a part. And this interlacing is the unique product of contingent factors: the experiences one has lived, and the paths of one’s education.

In the case of Philolaus, Carl Huffman translates the term Cosmos with the generic “world order.” We instead have retained the original term with a capital initial, to mark it as a precise object, and have written a thousand-page treatise to explain the reasons for a choice that might, at first sight, appear so insignificant. Translation is an extremely delicate process, for it requires a consonance between the mental structure of the author and that of the translator.

If within our consciousness the web of connections among the concepts we have elaborated over time consolidates into a structure, and if each concept derives its meaning from its position within the whole of which it forms a part, then the correct interpretation of a term would depend upon the faithful reconstruction of the writer’s “mental space,” caught at the fragile moment of transition from the elaborated concept to the chosen sign for communicating it. Thus the problem shifts from the philological to the psychological. To know the configuration of the sender’s mental space would be crucial for grasping the sense of the message, and hence for offering a proper translation. In the case of a prolific author, such a reconstruction is possible through the analysis of cross-references and textual recurrences; but when it comes to fragments, filtered through minds distant in time and space, it becomes a gamble.

The preliminary question to be put to the translator is therefore this: “At the moment of the transposition from concept to sign, what was the structure of Philolaus’ mental space? Are we able to reconstruct the form and the extent of his network of connections? Are we able to grasp the formal relation that existed within Philolaus’ conceptual space between the concept of the Limit and that of the Illimit? Are we, in short, capable of reconstructing his logic?”

Philolaus, “the first among the Pythagoreans,” belongs to a current of thought that today enjoys little reputation. Modernity recalls with a smile many ideas that once bore the seal of “scientific,” such as the case of the Pythagorean Eurytus, said to have interpreted reality by arranging pebbles into figures. We do not know whether poor Eurytus would be proud to have gone down in history with this reputation or whether he would sue the moderns. Unfortunately, tradition has left us only the verdict, not the records of the trial; yet if some theories have little chance of escaping the condemnation of posterity, others should not be dismissed without first attempting to bypass the filters through which they have reached us in the form we know.

In cases of doubt, Benjamin Farrington inclines towards acquittal, urging us to immerse ourselves in the historical circumstances in which certain ideas first took shape: “History is a fundamental discipline, for there is no human knowledge that may not lose its scientific character once men forget the conditions in which it arose, the questions it answered, and the function for which it was created. Much of the mysticism and superstition of learned men consists of knowledge cut loose from its historical moorings.” An extraordinary reflection. Yet in certain cases not even history can come to our aid, for some messages were but poorly understood even at the time of their first dissemination, and the misunderstood message from the very beginning has given rise to interpretative traditions that, for centuries, have run into dead ends.

Nor does our being modern confer any advantage, for there is no universal procedure of understanding. The matter here is not quantitative or social—not merely knowing more, or relying on the vast progress of disciplines, or on more ingenious methods. What is at stake is rather the nature of the interpreter, for a certain kind of knowledge can be assimilated only after one has undergone a restructuring of that mental space to which we alluded a moment ago. For what enables us to understand is precisely the way in which concepts interrelate within the space of our consciousness. To receive new ideas, in their number and in their form, that space must be restructured as one would a dwelling, tearing down old walls in order to erect new ones.

What is required, in short, is an individual logical transformation, which may occur, for example, when an aspirant devotes to the one he chooses as guide all his time and all his efforts, whereas a superficial study would prove no more than an accumulation of notions. The difference is profound. An instructor transfers notions from his own mental structure to that of the pupil—which he presumes receptive and ready to absorb. A master, by contrast, bends and reshapes the pupil’s logical architecture so that it may receive and house what, the moment earlier, it would have rejected. The master, in essence, before imparting ideas that he knows to be out of the ordinary, ensures that the aspirant’s logical architecture has been shaped in an appropriate manner. With your active collaboration, over the course of our journey we shall show how this can be achieved.

To encounter for the first time a passage such as that of Philolaus is like stepping into an alien place. The sense of disorientation reminds us that the meaning of a sentence does not lie merely in the formal correctness of the proposition or in the attribution of a seemingly evident and shared significance, or even in the knowledge of its context. This is not enough, for what produces understanding depends on the breadth and the shape of the mental space of the sender, and on the breadth and the shape of the one who receives it.

For example, in the dialogue between a scientist and a philosopher, it is not uncommon for the scientist to regard the philosopher’s discourse as lofty flights of fancy or incoherent stammering. Such, for instance, is the position of Rudolf Carnap when he declares: “A thing posited as a principle beyond the bounds of experience could neither be spoken of, nor thought, nor investigated.” Between the philosopher and the scientist, one entertains a more elastic and expansive notion of “reality,” the other a more rigid and confined one. For some individuals, the world ends at the threshold of what can be perceived, and all the rest is but an extraordinary creation of imagination. Such is the reputation enjoyed by the discipline known as Metaphysics, which part of modern culture regards with the same detachment with which one admires a splendid archaeological artifact that has forever lost its function of use.

Where there is no consonance of forms between two mental universes, mutual understanding proves difficult, even when the words employed are in common usage. The term logic, for instance, may evoke quite different responses in the scientist and in the philosopher. Plato never wearies of reminding us how inadequate discursive language may be. For these and other reasons, which this account is about to explore, in order to orient ourselves within our own mental universe, and within that of our interlocutors, what we need is not a grammar or a vocabulary, but a true map. To the principle!