Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Time 2020-10-09 12:03:58

Web Name: Justin Erik Halldór Smith

WebSite: http://www.jehsmith.com

ID:75888

Keywords:

Erik,Justin,Smith,

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As you know, over the past 15 years I have regularly posted long-form essays on art, culture, politics, history, and philosophy here on my website (if you need your memory refreshed, here is a small sample of some of my essays from the past years: on algorithms, on cultural appropriation, on whether trees exist, on the harmony of languages, on the social history of beavers). Like many people, I am trying to keep up with new developments in media and technology, and I have finally decided to move from the open blog to the newsletter format, a new sort of platform that, I believe, offers a number of advantages for writers who wish to cultivate and maintain an intimate and organic relationship with readers, as opposed to what often feels like the message-in-a-bottle experience of the blog. To this end I am inviting you to subscribe to my new Substack newsletter, “The Hinternet”. You may do so simply by clicking here:https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/coming-soon?r=i9rd utm_campaign=post utm_medium=web utm_source=copySome additional comments are in order, though I ll try to be brief.Most importantly, this subscription is entirely free of charge. Nonetheless, you have the option of purchasing a paid subscription if you wish to do so. I confess this is part of the reason why I am switching over to the newsletter format. I am ever on the lookout for new ways to do work that is luciferous and luchriferous at once. This is a hard thing to achieve in our low world. Over the years I have found it particularly tiring to write articles for magazines and newspapers, dealing with editors who are often more interested in clickability than in ideas expressed truthfully and elegantly, only then to spend the next several months harassing their billing departments with invoices for what is in the end rather small change.Moving to the newsletter format, withdrawing somewhat from the structures of traditional media, I and many others have come to hope, may be a way out of that dreary old predicament.So, I will write whatever I wish to write in my newsletter --as I have long done here-- and my readers will pay me whatever they wish to pay me. If you find this arrangement suitable, please do sign up for a subscription, and please also share the news with your friends and acquaintances. New readers! Subscribe to my Substack newsletter: justinehsmith.substack.com.I recently published a short piece on cultural appropriation in Persuasion. Some of my fears about its reception quickly came true. Within hours of its posting, I had the singular misfortune of being linked approvingly by the odious cornball Ben Shapiro. In no time at all I was being followed by all manner of know-nothing right-wing riff-raff, people I do not respect and do not at all wish to affirm in their flimsy little construction of a belief system. This made me think it would be worthwhile to dilate somewhat more longwindedly on the topic here, in the hope of making it clear to those people the many respects in which I am not one of them, and also in the aim of reflecting a bit on how it is that we have arrived at this strange conjuncture, where defense of cultural appropriation is interpreted as a right-wing talking point, and on why I still believe it is essential to win it back from them.I’ll say in passing, before getting to the main part of my reflection, that in part I blame the structures of information-flow, in which we are all forced to (pretend to) communicate today, for the automatic channeling of this topic to the side of the right. The algorithms on which the social-media parody of a public sphere operate are dichotomous in nature, and every statement has to be channeled in the one direction or the other. You can fight against these structural constraints, speaking your mind as your conscience dictates, etc., but all the forces are against you. Persuasion is itself an effort to defy the dichotomy, and so far, from what I have seen, it is maintaining a rather delicate balancing act. As for me, I find that my conscience comes through most clearly when I am writing on my own website— but this is only because it stands somewhat further apart from the structures that support all media interventions in the proper sense. Which is to say that the only way for me to say what I really mean, and not to be misunderstood, is to accept that I will be read by far fewer people.But on to more pressing matters. I have been thinking a great deal recently about the intellectual debt that I owe to a generation of scholars who were formed in the sensibilities of the 1960s. I have many debts, of course, but this is the one that I have recently come to feel it is important to call by name, to draw out into the light, and to defend against the currently prevailing tendencies in humanities scholarship. I am thinking in particular of a cluster of scholars, working in various disciplines, all of whom share some significant family resemblances, including: Walter Burkert, Hans Peter Duerr, Johannes Fabian, Carlo Ginzburg, Frits Staal, R. Gordon Wasson, and --the true heroine of today s story-- Wendy Doniger. From an earlier generation, one might also mention E. R. Dodds, Mircea Eliade, and Aby Warburg, whose disciples continued to promote at least some of their aims and interests into the 1960s and beyond.Now, one thing that those in the know might quickly point out is that this cluster of thinkers leans pretty far toward the crackpot side of the spectrum. They are all real scholars, there is no question about that, but in at least two or three of the cases my guys went dangerously far in the direction of self-delegitimisation through flirtation with forms of thought that render the scholarly project meaningless: forms of thought, namely, that may be described as “mystical experience” or as “higher states of consciousness”, that part ways with the normal state of consciousness in which, by common agreement, a typical reader of a scholarly publication is expected to remain.Note that I exclude from this list certain figures, such as Carlos Castaneda or C. G. Jung, who veered so far to the crackpot side of the spectrum as to no longer feel any responsibility to account for their veering. Not that there is anything wrong with that: Castaneda and Jung are surely powerful sources of inspiration for contributions to the creative arts, and some scholars, notably Gilles Deleuze, have shown themselves able to go dreamwalking with Castaneda s Yaqui shaman, for example, and subsequently to come back and still be taken seriously by at least some sober-minded people, even if most today try to skip over all the zany errancies that may be written off to the intensity of the early post- 68 moment. Of course one should not skip over such things. The excesses of the 1960s counterculture, and the way these seeped into scholarship, are just as much part of the historical record now, just as deserving of study, as anything else. But anyhow, here, in attending more narrowly to the cluster of scholars I identified above, I am trying to stay focused on scholarship that may still be recognised as such today, even if it belongs as indisputably to a bygone era as, say, the fin-de-siècle Viennese sexology of Richard von Ebbing-Kraft. Some of the scholars I ve listed (e.g., Ginzburg, Burkert) were never particularly countercultural to begin with. But one thing that they all have in common, and that clearly comes to them as part of a broad cultural inheritance from the psychedelic turn of the 1960s, is an abiding interest in the question of ecstasy. I mean this term literally, as the experience of getting outside of one’s self. Different thinkers pursued this topic in different ways. Some studied ancient mystery cults, others the anthropology of witchcraft and vestiges of paganism in early modern Europe, others tantric sex rituals, others the role of hallucinogenic drugs in premodern societies, others the cosmic disruption of the shedding of animal blood compensated by the ritual of sacrifice. While they often focused on records from antiquity and early modernity, there was a broad interest in forming hypotheses about human experience extending back to the Paleolithic, and in this connection many set themselves up, among other things, as prehistorians.There was, moreover, a general commitment to the belief that ethnographic or ethnohistorical data drawn from one cultural setting was just as useful for drawing general conclusions about the human predicament as any other. Thus in his delirious 1978 magnum opus, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, Duerr moves freely back and forth within the first few chapters between proverbs of Nietzsche, Bantu songs, Sepik proverbs, classical Greek mythology, court documents from early modern witch trials, and his own autobiographical reminiscences of talking to a Hopi man at a Greyhound station in Albuquerque: all in the course of explaining to us why native cultures (some of them European) in all times and places have conceptualised caves as “the vagina of the earth”. Even in its era Duerr s work was seen as over the top, yet it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and triggered considerable scholarly debate and criticism over the course of the early-to-mid-1980s. There is simply nothing remotely comparable happening today. Now to the extent that we think about it all, we are used to thinking of this psychedelic quest for ecstasy, this desire to get outside of one s own body and one s own quotidian state of mind, as primarily a desire to take drugs and make everything “go kablooey”, as Jerry Garcia memorably put it, perhaps to commune with djinns or angels or God himself thanks to the entheogenic properties of the ingested substances, and then perhaps to recap it all later with one s psychonaut peers.But in the extension of that era s broad quest for ecstasy that I am attempting here, it has recently come to seem to me that an equally important, or perhaps even more important, dimension of the effort to get out of one s own head was, precisely, seeking out cross-cultural experiences that, at least to some extent and at least temporarily, permitted a person to transcend his or her own cultural origins, the mere contingencies of birth, in favour of an experience that was universally human.Of course, often, the two sorts of ecstasy were combined: one went looking into other cultures precisely because of the belief, justified or not, that those cultures had preserved more powerful forms of self-transcendence, through ritual and ethnobotanical knowledge and so on, that the modern west had lost. But in any case appropriating other cultures, in the literal sense of making them one s own, was central to the goal of ecstasy as I have identified it. And to account for the loss of this interest in ecstasy as a motor of scholarship is also to tell at least part of the story of the current dismal state of the humanities, which makes it so hard to make oneself properly understood when one declares today that what are generally bracketed off as “other people’s cultures” are very much one’s own business too.***The thinkers I have invoked are all roughly my parents’ age, so I am far too young to claim membership in their generational cohort. I was born in 1972, which means that even if I am too young to be one of them, I am at least old enough to possess a living memory of the era when their idea of humanistic inquiry floated around in the air. It helps in this connection that I grew up in California, which is in many respects the spiritual homeland of the sensibility I am attempting to describe. A single visit to a used bookstore on Telegraph Avenue at the age of ten may have done more to shape me, or to damage me if that is how you see things, than all my subsequent years of graduate school.I have previously described myself as an “ecstatic rationalist”. I will not rehash here the basic commitments this entails, other than to note the one that is most relevant to the present matter, namely and again, the belief that other people’s cultures are my business, and that the prime directive as it were of humanistic inquiry is to undertake the hard work of thinking your way into forms of life that are not, in the narrowest and dullest sense, your own.While acknowledging what is obviously true of standpoint epistemology in concrete examples where it is invoked (e.g., police officers who commute into inner cities from the suburbs are less likely to have a sympathetic understanding of the life-world of the people they are policing than officers who are from the same community), nonetheless as a principle that governs and limits what it is that we should be trying to do in relation to others, I reject standpoint epistemology utterly. It is not just a failure of the imagination to suppose without effort that you cannot really know what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes, but a failure of conscience. You think you can’t know what it’s like to be, say, in a refugee camp? Standpoint epistemology lets you off the hook; ecstatic rationalism tells you you’re just not imagining hard enough.***Those of us who resented the field known as “cultural studies”, as it developed over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, did not know how to appreciate what in retrospect appear to be its charms. Notwithstanding its excessive preoccupation with the ephemera of life under late capitalism, and its corresponding lack of interest in the sort of ecstatic experiences sought out by the generation of scholars with whom we began, it is interesting, now, to look back and note the positive celebration of appropriation within cultural-studies scholarship.While earlier theoretical engagement with culture maintained a barrier between high and low that blocked any real understanding of what we may call culture s “flow” (think for example of Theodor Adorno on jazz, or, far worse, Allan Bloom s mandarin dismay at the peacock-like “strutting” of Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson), cultural studies sought to track the way pop-cultural signifiers move out from their points of origin and eventually are taken up and given new life and new purpose by communities that have no legal or financial power over the production and management of commercial icons.Thus Disney-oid characters show up in some sorry dilapidated theme park in the Balkans, and Calvin (of comic-strip fame) ends up on some enormous Ford pick-up truck s mudflaps, except now his face bears a malign expression and he appears to be urinating on a Chevy logo, something Bill Watterson surely would never have condoned. When we see such symbolic migrations, the cultural-studies pioneers argued, we should sooner celebrate than condemn the inexhaustible creative power of the people to make of our cultural detritus what they will. We never agreed to live in a world in which we are bombarded from birth by trademarked figures, of Garfield or Mickey Mouse, so who dares to tell me I cannot reach up out of my cradle, grab whatever anthropomorphised mascot happens to be dangling from the mobile, and claim it as my own?Nor is it only commercial ephemera that impose themselves in this way. This is also the basic operation of pop-art, as when Jasper Johns reclaims a symbol as ubiquitous and overbearing as the American flag. And it is also in evidence when the outlaw bikers and anarchist punks take up the swastika, that most charged and untouchable symbol of the twentieth century, and make it their own.In a strange inversion of the hierarchies so important to Enlightenment thinkers, many today believe that it is the power differential that dictates when a certain instance of appropriation is acceptable or not. The Balkan theme park with the knock-off Mickeys and Donalds is engaging in acceptable appropriation, according to this calculus, since a multinational corporation has more power than a scrappy post-Yugoslav nation-state. By contrast the European who takes an interest in Native American art forms is in a position of relatively greater power, on this line of thinking, and so is engaging in impermissible appropriation.But power is many-headed, and defies simplistic calculi. Though Euro-American hegemony on the North American continent is as undeniable as it is lamentable, Native American recitative art may still have powers unknown to European poetry. If I may be blunt, it is my considered view that in general the art forms of the Europeans are today sickly and withered, gasping for breath, for something really worthwhile to do, in the aftermath of the past century s various crises and horrors: the famous “No poetry after Auschwitz” problem. Yet there is still the possibility in the poetic forms of the Seneca, as I attempted to suggest in the Persuasion piece with the story of my friend Jerry Rothenberg s “summoning of the animals”, of speaking in the voice of a bear. And if that is not real power, I do not know what is. What hope do the Europeans have of achieving something nearly as great, if they are prohibited even from learning to speak in the voice of their fellow human beings? It is in relation to this question of power that the idea of ecstasy, as I have explained it, proves particularly useful, and also affords us an opportunity to retrospectively discover at least something of a shared spirit with the academic discipline of cultural studies as it was pursued in the 1980s and 90s. The early modern Inquisition was powerful. But old women who anoint themselves in psychoactive salves and undertake an ambulatio animae are powerful too: they have the power to experience something their pious persecutors will never know in their own sad little lives. Those who are ever looking for ways to get out of their heads --whether through summoning animals, ingesting a witch s brew, or simply reading and learning about the life-worlds of other people-- have hidden superpowers that the apparatuses of discipline and control will never know, and will never be able to fully suppress.***Speaking of pious persecutors, my principal contention in these further remarks on cultural appropriation, what I hope you will experience as the “kicker”, is this: first (for it is a double kick), the enemies of cultural appropriation, the people who believe that it is an expression of moral uprightness to discipline others into “staying in their lanes”, are the latter-day descendants of the persecutors of witches (imagined or real); what remains the same across the centuries is the perceived need to suppress ecstasy. Second, what permits these persecutors to rise up at particular moments is the opportunity to grab for some power. Today that opportunity has been opened up by the neoliberal devastation of universities, and their consequent abnegation of the role of preservers of the mission of humanistic inquiry as this had been conceived since the Renaissance.When I taught in Montreal, in an underfunded philosophy department, the upper administration told us at one point we should try to follow the model of the new “Irish-Canadian Studies” department down the hall, which had recently received a large gift from an association of Irish-Canadian businessmen. But philosophy is not an ethnicity, and there simply was no Philosopher-Canadian business community to which we might turn. And so we remained, for the remainder of my time there, in the dean s dog-house.Later I was on a committee to evaluate a newly launched MA program in “East-West philosophy” at an American university. The program was to involve a strong component of Indian philosophy, and it did not take much questioning before I learned that it was being backed by a local Indian-American financier with a pronounced fondness for Narendra Modi s populist BJP party. I would subsequently learn that it is in fact very difficult to study Sanskrit or classical Indian civilisation in the English-speaking world without sooner or later coming into contact with diaspora representatives of Hindutva ideology, always happy to find non-Indians who will testify to the broader world of the singular greatness of India.There was a time when to follow a course of study in, say, Sanskrit philology, or Norse philology or whatever, required the cultivation of a distanced attitude to the object of study. There was a high scholarly premium placed on understanding the object of one s study in global and comparative context. But the more money that filters into American universities from the largesse of Indian businessmen with ideological agendas, or indeed the greater the presence the Confucius Institute is able to establish in the same setting, the more we will find students undertaking degrees with a focus on, say, India or China, and coming out the other end speaking in a way that suits the ideology of the governing regimes in these countries: affirming that there is evidence in the Vedas of a mastery of aviation technology by the ancient Indians, to cite one particularly egregious claim that any aspiring Indologist will encounter soon enough.These days what we might fairly call the populist model of the human sciences reigns in universities: you study a particular culture in order to have confirmed for you the greatness of that culture, and you are invited to think about that culture as if it alone existed in the world, or at least as if every other culture is locked in a zero-sum battle for attention with it, rather than being a reflection of the same underlying human capabilities that give shape and meaning to every other culture. This zero-sum battle, moreover, is part of the same all-encompassing war that pits academic units against one another in competition for dwindling perks.And it is the same, too, as the one that pits newly minted identity groups against one another online. We have witnessed a Cambrian explosion of new social kinds over the past few years --our species now has more genders than a slime mold, for example--, and the way their members cultivate their own self-understanding and fight for recognition, in the parody of a public sphere that is social media, is substantially the same as the way that ethnonational groups, some of which have been around for millennia, advocate for their own collective interests under neoliberal austerity.***Consider in this connection the deplorable twist in Wendy Doniger s late career. A reputed scholar of Hinduism since the 1960s, a specialist in the history of tantrism, Doniger always had a particular knack for drawing out jaw-dropping anecdotes from the civilisation she studied, such as that of the Vedic ogress Dirgha-Jihva, who sprouted vaginas all over her body, in a sort of genital arms race with her many-penised lover. Everything I have read suggests to me that Doniger sincerely loves what we may call, for shorthand, “Indian culture”, and knows a great deal about it. Over this past dark decade, her love and dedication have not proven sufficient to keep her safe from censorship and death threats issued by extremist Hindu nationalists, who do not like to see a non-Indian, and a woman at that, enjoying the delightful excesses that Indian history has at certain (happier) moments shown itself capable of generating.This is where the suppression of what Americans are now calling “cultural appropriation” inevitably ends up. There is nothing progressive or liberatory about the campaign against it. This campaign is, on the contrary, one local modulation of the same global sickness that we are perfectly able to recognise as reactionary when it is happening far away. Whatever country you are in, whatever century, beware the enemies of ecstasy. Antinomy is when, of two things, both can’t be right.Antimony is mostly found in sulfide mineral stibnite.A big difference indeed, but still not quite antonymy,Nor yet, like bank and bank, bark and bark, homonymy:As also when we learn, That coke is something that you burn,And coke is something that you drink and something that you snort,And Edward Coke sollicited before the English court. Parsimony is, like, when you say no more words than suit,Persimmony’s the essence of a common Asian fruit. Possum is Latin for whatever I can do,Opossum with an o entails things I can’t do too,Like playing dead, or tonic immobility (synonymy),Among the other features of this noble beast’s zoonomy. These are the opening lines of Модун Эр Соҕотох, a now-canonical poem in the Sakha oral epic tradition known as Olonχo. The canonical version is based on a recording made in 1982 of a recitation by the olonχosut bard V. O. Karataev (1926-1990). For my previous translation of the opening lines of the Кыыс Дэбилийэ, another epic in the same tradition, go here. Far beyondThe highest peakOf my former years,Way beyondThe repellent ridgeOf my previous years,Quite beyond the borderOf the cold windy daysOf my bygone years,Beyond the rangeOf perilous ridgesOf my outrun years,My tribe of men,Still unacquainted, began to speak,My tribe of Yakuts began to converse,Not yet knowing each other,My uraangkhai* YakutsDressed in coats like urasas**With words flowing like water,With soles flat on the groundWhen they metNot yet talking of this or that,My seers in the fleshWith stained bone,Shamans of my tribeNot yet auguring the future,My lady Mother Earth,Still the size of a grey squirrel s clawSpreading out and stretching,Generating and growing,Like the suede of the earOf my two-year-old doeTurned inside out,Spreading out and growing,Gradually outspreading: so it happened, they say.(Hey!)And so,If you push her, she does not flinch,If you press her, she does not bend,So sturdy she became,My dark black bedrock of soil,Growing strong, she was born: so it happened.My dark black bedrock of soil,Surrounded by indestructible cliffs,The Araat Sea swelling,The unsubsiding sea boundingWith seven walls,With seven beams,Mother Earth, my land,Thus was she born: so it happened.(Hey!) This Mother Earth, land of mine,Connected by roots,Fortified by grass,Entangled by woods,Where the fulvous bear digs his den,Where the wide black taiga spreads,Where the elk grazes And the black taiga spreads out in all directions:This is how they foundedMy Mother Earth, my land: so it happened. And so,With the trees, having fallen, perishing, With the waters, having subsided, going quiet,With the cuckoo, having sung itself out, returning,With the fish, having thought the better of it, returning,With the needles, having faded, returning, With the cattle, having dwindled, returning:This is how they founded the bedrockOf my my middle land, my Mother Earth,In this way everDid they make and found her: so it happened. (Hey!) So that my wide resounding skyWith its unattainable secret,Having fractured, should not fall, They filled it with the Pleiades as its lord.So that, having cracked, it should not fall,They wedged into it our lord the moon. So that, having fragmented, it should not fall, They added our lord the sun, like a wheel.For its setting sun they made The fledgling bird to count the hours.For its rising sun They made the lark to be its attendant. So that those with crooked bonesAnd black eyesShould not suffer from eye sickness,They made the night dark: so it happened. (Hey!) With the game straps of forty boreal owls,With the harnesses of grey hares,With the dark grey night falling,They made the dark descend: so it happened. (Hey!) So that those plunged in good thoughts,With the eyes of prophetsIn the land of the sun,Should live and thrive,They made the day blazeWith radiant light: so it happened. (Hey!) And so,With eight walls, With conflict and worry,With luxuriant beauty,This is how they founded My dear fatherland,Just so, from the beginning: so it happened. With seven walls,With seven beams, They drove along and guidedMother Earth, land of mine,Bounded by seven dry seas: so it happened;(Hey!) With nine walls,With nine beams, Bounded by nine unfrozen seas,In this way they put downMy dark black bedrock of soil: so it happened.*Быстар мындаатынБыдан ынараа өттүгэр,Урукку дьылымОхсуһуулаах уорҕатынОтой аннараа өттүгэр,Ааспыт дьылымАнысханнаах айдааннаах күнүнАдьас анараа таһаатыгар,Куоппут дьылымКудулҕаннаах кудан өлүү уорҕатынКуоһаралаах хоҥноҕорКиһи аймаҕымКэпсэтэн билсэ илигинэ,Саха аймаҕымСаҥарсан дьааһыйа илигинэ,Урааҥхай сахам,Ураһа соннооҕум,Уу ньамаан тыллааҕым,Уһаты уллуҥахтааҕым,Утарыта көрсөн,Ол-бу дии илигинэ,Ичээн эттээҕим,Куодалаах уҥуохтаахтарым,Ойуун аймахтарымОдуулаан көрө иликтэринэ,Сир ийэ хотунумСиэрэй тииҥ тиҥилэҕин саҕаттанТэнийэн-тэрбэйэн,Үүнэн-үөскээн,Сачарыы табамТуруу чоҕой хара буорум Туруу дьааҥынан тулаланан, Араат байҕалынан арҕастанан, Уолбат муоранан улаҕаланан [испит] Сэттэ иилээх-саҕалаах, Сэттэ биттэхтээх Сир ийэ-аан дойдум Сити курдук үөскээн испит эбит. (Ноо!) Бу Сир ийэ аан дойдубун Силиһинэн силбиэһиннээннэр, Отунан оскуомалааннар, Маһынан бааччыйаннар, Хардаҥ эһэ арҕах хастар Халыҥ хара тыалааннар, Анабы тайах арҕастар Адаар хара тыалааннар, Аан ийэ дойдубун сол курдук Айан испиттэр эбит. Ол курдук Охтон баранар мастаах, Уолан суоруйар уулаах, Хараан төннөр кэҕэлээх, Ханчылаан төннөр балыктаах, Хагдарыйан төннөр мутукчалаах, Олкураҥнаан төннөр сүөһүлээх, Ороһулаан төрүүр киһилээх Орто туруу аан ийэ дойдубун Сол курдук Оҥорон-тутан испиттэр эбит. (Ноо!) Кистэлэҥэ биллибэт Киҥкиниир киэҥ халлааммын Үллэн-тохтон түһүө диэннэр, Үргэл тойонунан өһүөлээбиттэр. Ыллан-хайдан түһүө диэннэр, Ый тойонунан ытаһалааннар, Көллөн-тохтон түһүө диэннэр, Күн тойонунан көлөһөлөөннөр, Тахсар күммүн Далбарай чыычааҕынан чаһыылааннар, Киирэр күммүн Күөрэгэй чыычааҕынан дьөһүөлдьүттээннэр, Хардастыгас уҥуохтаахтар, Хара харахтаахтар Харах ыарыһах буолуохтара диэннэр, Хараҥа түүннээбиттэр эбит. (Ноо!) Түөрдуон түлүрбэх көтөр төргүүлээх, Бороҥ куобах болбуоттаах Бороҥой хараҥа түүннээн Боруорсубуттар эбит. (Ноо!) Көрүлүөс күргүөм санаалаахтар, Көрбүөччү харахтаахтар Күн сиригэр Көччүйэн үөскээтиннэр диэн, Күндү күлүмнэс сырдыктаан, Күнүстээбиттэр эбит. (Ноо!) Ол курдук Аҕыс иилээх-саҕалаах, Атааннаах-мөҥүөннээх, Айгырдаах-силиктээх Аҕа бараан дойдубун Аан бастаан соҕурдук Айан испиттэр эбит; Сэттэ иилээх-садалаах, Сэттэ биттэхтээх Сир ийэ аан дойдубун Сэттэ сиикэй муоранан сиксиктээннэр Ситэрэн-ханаран испиттэр эбит.--*uraangkhai - an archaic endonym, used in an honorific register to mean “our people”. **urasa - a traditional summer dwelling, constructed somewhat like a Native North American tipi, and covered in deer hide. This is a translation of some of the opening lines of theКыыс дэбилийэ, an epic poem in the Sakha oral epic tradition known as Olonkho. It was recited by an olonkhosut bard named Nikolai Petrovich Burnashev in 1941, and was transcribed by S. K. D iakonovyï.Beyond the distant daysOf dread and sorrowIn ancient times,Beyond theWar and bloodshed Of a bygone age,
Beyond the invisible boundary Of the terrible griefOf yesteryear, aSakha man s mindSees not nor discovers how theSecret unattainableSky, effulgent-white, like aSuede deerhide coat,Falling from above,Expanding and spreading,Was, it appears, created --For the people of the three tribes Of goodly constitution,Their thrice-radiant gazeTurned upwards, Attentively searching, Are unable to make out Its four walls, nor limn its edges--;How, it appears, such a crisp bold white sky,Like the skis of an Evenk man s sled,Bending downward, Surging forth radiant, began. Beneath this originalLucent and limpid sky, Where the two-legged ones,Familiars of war and strife,With their mortal bodies And hollow bones,With their wounded brainsAnd trembling souls,Must multiply and spread;With the cool wind of the western sky,With the soothing eastern sky,With the greedy southern sky,With the spinning vortex of the northern sky;With the swelling surface of the sea, With the heaving bottom of the sea, With the surging depth of the sea, With the swirling axis of the sea, With the seething shores of the sea;With the venerable aiyy* protecting, With the solar aiyy shepherding;With abundant yellow nectar**,With abundant white nectar;With the multitude of stars,With the innumerable herd of stars,With the signs of rare planets among the stars,With the full moon escorting,With the bright sun accompanying,With the purifying roar of thunder,With the cracking knout of lightning,With the moistening cloud-bursts of rain,With the vital heat of the breath,With the drying out and again the replenishing of waters,With the falling down and again the growing up of trees,With inexhaustible generous gifts,With the girding of the low-pitched mountains,With the gardens of the earthen mountains,With the hot beneficent summer,With the spinning axis of the center,With the four convergent sides:With such a high firmament,Where you tread will not give way;With such unencompassable space,What you rattle will not break;With such unfathomable expanse,What you press will not bend;With eight chambers and eight sides, With six circles,With troubles and worry,With luxurious ornament,Serenely peaceful,Always-existing Mother Earth Came shining forth, it appears,Like a silver buckleOn a horned hat with a feather.*Былыргы дьылБылдьаһыктааҕын-быһылааннааҕынБыдан анараа өттүгэр,Урукку күнОхсуһуулааҕын-оһоллооҕунУлаҕа өттүгэр,Ааспыт дьылАлдьархайдааҕын-арасхааттааҕынАнараа таһаатыгарСаха киһиСанаата тиийэнСабаҕалаан көрбөтөхСарыал маҥан халлаана диэн,Сарыы таҥалай курдук,Таҥнары тардыллан,Тараадыйан-тарҕанан,Айыллыбыт эбит;Үүттээх-үүчээн эттээхҮс биис ууһа,Үс өргөстөөҕүнэнӨрө көрөн туран,Өйдөөн-дьүүллээн көрбүтүн да иһин,Түөрт эркинин бүдүүлээбэтэх,Түгэҕин-төрдүн билбэтэхДьулусханнаах добун маҥан халлаана диэн, Тоҥус киһи туут хайыһарын курдук,Таҥнары иэҕиллэн түһэн,Дуйданан долгуйан үөскээбит эбит.Бу айыллыбытАрылы халлаан алын өттүгэрКуордаах эттээх,Куодаһыннаах уҥуохтаах,Оһол-охсуһуу доҕордоох,Иирээн-илбис энээрдээх,Ириҥэ мэйиилээх,Иһэгэй куттаах,Икки атахтаах үөскээн тэнийдин диэн,Анысханнаах арҕаа халлааннаах, Иэйиэхситтээх илин халлааннаах, Соллоҥноох соҕуруу халлааннаах, Холоруктаах хоту халлааннаах, Үллэр муора үрүттээх, Түллэр муора түгэхтээх,Аллар муора арыннаах,Эргичийэр муора иэрчэхтээх,Дэбилийэр муора сиксиктээх,Ахтар айыы араҥаччылаах,Күн айыы күрүөһүлээх,Араҥас илгэ быйаҥнаах,Үрүҥ илгэ үктэллээх,Элбэх сулус эркиннээх,Үгүс сулус үрбэлээх,Дьэллэҥэ сулус бэлиэлээх,Туолбут ый доҕуһуоллаах,Аламай күн аргыстаах,Дорҕоон этиҥ арчылаах,Тоһуттар чаҕылҕан кымньыылаах,Ахсым ардах ыһыахтаах,Сугул куйаас тыыннаах,Уолан угуттуур уулаах,Охтон үүнэр мастаах,Уһун уйгу кэһиилээх,Сытар хайа сындыыстаах,Буор хайа модьоҕолоох,Итии сайын эркиннээх,Эргичийэр эрэһэ кииннээх,Төгүрүйэр түөрт тулумнаах,Үктүөлээтэр өҕүллүбэтҮрдүк мындаалаах,Кэбиэлээтэр кэйбэлдьийбэтКэтит киэлилээх,Баттыалаатар маталдьыйбатБаараҕай таһаалаах,Аҕыс иилээх-саҕалаахАлта киспэлээх,Атааннаах-мөҥүөннээх,Айгырастаах-силиктээх,Алыгыр-налыгырАан-ийэ дойду диэн Муостаах-нуоҕайдаах бэртэһэТуоһахтатын курдук,Туналыйан тупсан үөскээбит эбит.--*aiyy (айыы) - benevolent nature divinities.** nectar - илгэ, a divine drink, comparable to Greek ambrosia, which in this instance seems to be assimilated to milk, which in turn is conceived as the substance of the white bodies of the sky. This is a slightly modified version of a talk delivered to the Department of History and Civilisation, European University Institute, Florence, on May 21, 2020.*A question, to begin: What would intellectual history look like if its pedigree were traced back not to G. W. F. Hegel, but to G. W. Leibniz?Peter Gordon has observed that “German nationalist historians of the nineteenth century tended to believe that history is first and foremost a study of political narrative.” They thus modeled themselves on the ideal of historical Wissenschaft as national-historical narration. No author embodies this approach more fully than Hegel. For him, the home of history is in Europe, as history is nothing other than the coming-into-self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit. Hegel thinks it is the work of European philosophers to help Spirit along, to birth it, while European states are for him, as it were, the armed wing of philosophy. Beyond the boundaries of Europe, what we find in terms of statecraft is either its absence, or some species of more or less eternal and unchanging despotism, while in terms of philosophy what we find is its admixture into, and vitiation by, mythology and other expressions of culture. For Hegel, the Greek miracle lay in the separating out of mythology and philosophy, so that the articulation of questions about, say, the nature of time, could be addressed in a universal idiom that would not presuppose the existence of Chronos as a divine personification of time. For the ancient Persians, by contrast, to use Hegel s own example, reflection on the nature of time could only proceed through culturally embedded narratives inseparable from religion and lore.Thus for Hegel only those expressions of philosophy that descend from the Greeks have any claim to universality, and thus only these expressions deserve to be exported from their place of origin throughout the world. This 19th-century Europeanisation of philosophy witnessed the destruction of millennia-old disciplinary divisions in India and China, notably, as newly subjugated institutions of learning rushed to model their curricula on those of European universities, creating neologisms for “philosophy” where these had not existed before. Thus, to note one striking example from China, the cultivation of wisdom was separated from the perfection of calligraphic technique.This disruption of intellectual traditions throughout the world is just one of the many measurable shockwaves of imperialism. Hegel s articulation of it is not surprising, yet it is a far cry from the common view among European philosophers of barely more than a century prior, where we find, for example, Leibniz calling for a “commerce of light”, a bidirectional exchange of wisdom that would piggy-back upon the commerce of goods between Europe and Asia. Nor, for Leibniz, would this exchange be limited to the textual traditions of literate non-Western “civilisations”; it would also extend to the oral traditions and natural languages of Indigenous peoples. Thus Leibniz writes in 1704, thatWhen the Latins, Greeks, Hebrews and Arabs shall someday be exhausted, the Chinese, supplied also with ancient books, will enter the lists and furnish matter for the curiosity of our critics. Not to speak of some old books of the Persians, Armenians, and Brahmins... And when there is no longer any ancient book to examine, languages will take the place of books, as they are the most ancient monuments of mankind.In time, Leibniz thinks,all the languages of the world will be recorded and placed in the dictionaries and grammars, and compared together; this will be of very great use both for the knowledge of things, since names often correspond to their properties (as is seen by the names of plants among different peoples), and for the knowledge of our mind and the wonderful varieties of its operations.The fruit of such research, Leibniz thinks, will be a sort of mirror of the rational order of nature itself; it would amount to a sort of global survey of human reason, differently inflected according to circumstances, but nonetheless unified and universal.In what follows I would like to look at three complexly intertwined cases of transregional philosophical encounter in the early modern period, each of which illustrates in its own way the challenges, for us, of studying the history of philosophy across borders, and the challenges, for the people we are studying, of understanding one another.1.Hegel s view is not without precedent in the early modern period, and it should not be surprising that its clearest expressions come from figures we may fairly associate with the “radical Enlightenment”: materialists, crypto-atheists, neo-Epicureans. François Bernier, to turn to our first of three case studies, furnishes a vivid example of this incipient tendency.A devotee of the French Epicurean philosopher Pierre Gassendi, and a physician by training, Bernier found himself working as a doctor in Shiraz for six years, where, according to his own claim, he passed his time translating Descartes and Gassendi into Persian. Subsequently he was assigned in 1658 as the court physician to the Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb, in Delhi, where he befriended the Persian prince and philosopher Dara Shikoh.A Muslim keenly interested in “interfaith dialogue,” Dara Shikoh nonetheless understands this in a very different way than today s multiculturalist. For him, the possibility of finding truth in the Brahminic faith is premised on the conviction that the Upaniṣads, properly understood, reflect and confirm the fundamental, revealed truth of the Qur’ān. He has translated large portions of the Sanskrit text into Persian, thus working towards the same target language as Bernier, but is doing so within an intellectual framework that calls to mind nothing so much as Jesuit figurism, as for example in Athanasius Kircher s interpretation of Chinese sources, which buys the harmony of traditions at the expense of understanding foreign traditions on their own terms: figurism, that is, argues that, properly understood, the claims of foreign wisdom traditions corroborate and deepen the truth of our own.Bernier himself is far less ecumenical; he tends to understand Sanskrit learning as the crystallization of Indian folk tradition. In this judgment, Bernier is in part importing battles he has already long been fighting in Europe. In effect he is disappointed to see Indian popular tradition unwittingly favoring the world-view of Gassendi’s adversaries, such as Robert Fludd, particularly in their interpretation of a recent eclipse as a harbinger of supernatural wrath, rather than as a natural phenomenon “of the same nature with so many others that had preceded without mischief.” Bernier believes that his Muslim interlocutors are better disposed to appreciate the force of his own rigorously naturalistic philosophical views. He discerns a spirit of toleration in the political order of the Mughal empire that he himself would not support in Europe, describing the emperor, “though he be a Muslim,” as “suffer[ing] these Heathens to go on in these old superstitions,” simply for the sake of maintaining social harmony.When for his part Bernier listens to the pandits, he hears only “tales”, that is, articulations that, whether they contain any philosophical insight or not, are so vitiated by local cultural forms as to make the philosophy unrecoverable. He writes that when he grew weary of explaining to his Muslim host “those late discoveries of Harvey and Pecquet in Anatomy, and of discoursing with him of the Philosophy of Gassendi and Descartes,” the two of them would turn to the Hindu pandit in their midst, and beseech him “to discourse and to relate unto us his stories, which he delivered seriously and without ever smiling... At last we were so much disgusted with his tales and uncouth reasonings, that we scarce had patience left to hear them.”Bernier listens attentively enough to be able subsequently to recall from memory, and more or less accurately, the six schools of āstika philosophy. He also correctly identifies Buddhism as a nāstika school, whose members are despised by the pandits “as a company of irreligious and atheistical people.” He is simultaneously attentive and dismissive, curious and contemptuous, and his negative judgments flow from his status as a libertine materialist philosopher in the battle against superstition back home in Europe. Bernier does recognize tendencies that bring certain Indian traditions closer to his view than others, traditions for example “which approach the opinions of Democritus and Epicurus.”At one point Bernier relates a remarkable, indeed absurd, effort he had made, during a particularly tense interfaith dialogue session, to give an impromptu lesson in physiology by cutting open a live goat and thereby displaying the truth of Harvey s theory of the circulation of the blood. The image of Bernier sacrificing an animal in front of an audience of horrified Brahmins could very well serve as an emblem of the difficulties of communication between intellectual traditions.2.Some decades later, another noteworthy philosophical encounter took place in an aristocratic court after a long voyage. This time, however, the court was in Germany, and the voyager, when he arrived in 1706, was still a small boy. Anton Wilhelm Amo, who first came on a Dutch West Indies galley ship from Guinea to Amsterdam, and was sent from there to work at the court of the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, was baptized into the local faith, Lutheran Christianity, in 1707. He soon began learning Latin, and it is likely that as a boy he also conversed with Leibniz on the philosopher s frequent visits to the Wolfenbüttel Hof. In 1727 Amo is sent to the University of Halle to study, first law, then philosophy. He produces two philosophical dissertations, and one lengthy treatise on logic. His patron Duke Anton Ulrich dies in 1731, initiating several years of financial hardship partially mitigated by precarious employment at the Universities of Halle, Wittenberg, and Jena. In 1746 Amo writes a letter to the Dutch West Indies Company, requesting transit on a slave ship back from Amsterdam to Guinea, and he departs in January of the next year. If the somewhat unclear circumstances of Amo s arrival in Europe are anything like those of his fellow Ghanaian Jacobus Capitein, the author of a 1741 work entitled Slavery, Not Incompatible with Christianity, it was likely with the intention of training Amo up as a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church and sending him back to Africa to lead an orphanage school that he made the initial voyage. How he ended up in Germany instead of stopping in the Netherlands, and how he passed from theology to philosophy, are questions we are still seeking to understand.I have read every known word written by Amo, and I can report that nowhere in his writing does he mention even once his identity as an African, let alone does he speak as a representative of any native African tradition. Unlike Bernier, Amo arrives in the foreign court still too young and pliable to see it as his mission to mediate between traditions, to represent one tradition while witnessing another. Amo is, therefore, I maintain, a German philosopher, the author of a handful of minor works in the Lutheran academic tradition of the early 18th century.It may or may not be surprising, however, to learn that Amo has been posthumously taken up and restyled as, precisely, an African philosopher. The founder of the Republic of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, for example, gives significant space to Amo in his 1964 philosophical treatise, Consciencism, depicting Amo as a materialist thinker and thus as an embodiment of traditional African thought s anticipation of Marxism-Leninism. Nkrumah s speculation is interesting in its own right as a matter of intellectual history. What interests me more, however, is to determine what significance the case of Amo might have for our understanding of the global context of early modern intellectual history, even in the absence of any explicit engagement with the question of cross-cultural encounter in Amo s work?Part of the answer to this difficult question lies in the history of institutions, and the way German universities came to conceive their mission in the early 18th century. Halle, in particular, from its origins deeply symbiotic with the Pietist Orphanage in the same city, had an academic mission that was inseparable from missions in the narrow sense. It is to the Halle Pietists that Leibniz turned with his vision for a Protestant emulation of the Jesuit missions to Asia. It is also to Halle that, for a time, scholars from Europe and beyond would turn to study the Orient, conceived broadly as the cultures and languages reaching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Kamchatka peninsula. The learning was, as Leibniz always insisted it must be, bidirectional, with missionaries heading out, and young students coming in: Salomon Negri from Syria, a certain Ahmet Gül from Rajasthan, a handful of Jewish students (a first in Germany), and Anton Wilhelm Amo-Afer of Guinea, via Wolfenbüttel.In his elogious afterword to Amo s 1734 dissertation, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind, the rector of Halle Johannes Gottfried Kraus appears to mistakenly identify Amo s place of origin is not Axim, in West Africa, but Axum, the ancient Ethiopian city associated with the antiquity of African Christianity. In this way and many others, Amo was a representative of Africa, and of African learning, whether he wrote of it or not.But Amo, who spent the last part of his life back in Africa, represents the Leibnizian bidirectionality of which we have spoken in surprising ways, in ways that might confound our expectation of the respective intellectual goods that Europe and Africa have to bring, as it were, to the exchange. Two fragmentary but revealing documents may illustrate this. The first is a description from the archives of the University of Jena, for a course Amo was to offer in the Michaelmas term of 1736. He promises to cover for his students “parts of the more elegant and curious philosophy,” including:physiognomy; chiromancy; geomancy, commonly known as the art of divination; purely natural astrology; ... dechifratory, or the art of deciphering, which is opposed to the superstitions of the common people.For any philosophy professor who complains today that curricular standards are slipping, it might help to remind them that in the early 18th century you could teach palm-reading in a philosophy classroom. We also see, as with Bernier, a concern to disavow superstition, and an identification of superstition with the beliefs of the benighted masses. However, the boundaries as to what ought to count as superstition are drawn differently in the two cases.This document is mirrored in a curious way by the final documentary testimony of Amo s life recorded in 1753 by the Swiss traveler Henri David Gallandat, who met the philosopher in Axim after his return home. We learn from Gallandat that in Africa Amo “lived as a hermit, and was reputed to be a soothsayer. He spoke various languages, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, High and Low German, was very learned in astrology and astronomy, and was a great philosopher.” This description suggests that Amo had taken up a social role in his late life in Africa that was in some respects analogous to that of a philosopher in Europe. It also suggests that he had acquired or re-acquired the Nzema language to which he would have been exposed in early childhood, as he would not have been able to gain the reputation ascribed to him without the ability to communicate with local people.Together with the Jena course description, it also suggests that Amo s restyling of himself for a local audience might not have been as radical an overhaul as some may imagine. Bernier had expressed his disdain for Brahminical superstition by comparison to those of the common people of Europe; Amo, whether in Europe or Africa, was more adaptable to the interests of the common people, whether first-generation university students in Jena, or, we may suppose, African merchants operating in the liminal trade zones between Africa and Europe. It is of course possible that Amo had not only adapted his soothsaying to the local idiom, but was also helping to promote the bidirectionality of the exchange of ideas, and just as Bernier had translated Gassendi into Persian, Amo may have been busily discoursing, between or during his fortune-telling sessions in Africa, on Leibnizian preestablished harmony in Nzema. This remains a matter of pure speculation, but is somewhat more grounded in plausibility than Nkrumah s transformation of Amo into a proto-Marxist.3.But let us move back now to the path carved from Halle to Russia. We know, incidentally, from a 1736 letter discovered by my student Dwight Lewis in an Estonian archive, that Amo himself had sought to go down this path, writing to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and requesting a research position there. His letter goes unanswered, and a few months later he will begin his Michaelmas course at Jena. If he had made it to the new Russian capital, he might have been swept up in some capacity, like so many other former Halle students, in the Great Kamchatka expedition that was currently under way. As I have shown elsewhere, this expedition might justly be seen as the systematic, institutionally backed mise-en-oeuvre of a vision of science that Leibniz had spelled out to Peter the Great some decades before, beginning from their first encounter in Hannover in 1698.The list is long of desiderata that Leibniz, before his death in 1716, spelled out to Peter and his advisors, for an eventual scientific mission across the eastern reaches of the Empire. These desiderata included the determination of whether northeast Asia and northwest North America are connected by a land bridge; the establishment of research stations at fixed intervals for the measurement of magnetic variation; the collection of unknown plant species, pressed dry in books; and the collection, as well, of samples of unknown languages, also pressed into books, in the form of short translations of the Lord s Prayer or the Apostle s Creed in the indigenous languages of North Asia. The choice of canonical prayers as the standard unit of such samples was part of Leibniz s thoroughgoing commitment to bidirectionality: we European researchers get a fragment of Samoyed or Yakut, the Samoyeds and Yakuts get access, by the same gest, to an article of Christian faith. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that, throughout the 18th century, Leibniz would be principally known as a Sprachmeister, that is, as a collector and classifier of language samples. He received many such samples from the Dutch naval architect and voyager Nicolaes Witsen, corresponding from Moscow. Witsen sent him not only indigenous languages of the polyglot Russian empire, but others he had collected from his own global network of Dutch seafarers. One such sample sent to Leibniz from Moscow was a bilingual transcription of the Lord s Prayer in Dutch and “Hottentot”, which is to say a Khoi-San language of Southern Africa. I have found as late as 1809, demotic editions of polyglot prayer manuals would include the Hottentot prayer with the notice: ex Leibnitio.Leibniz never made it to Russia himself, let alone to Siberia, though he became a Privy Councillor to the Tsar in 1712, and like Amo he spent some years petitioning to relocate to the new Russian capital. If Leibniz came to have the posthumous reputation of a language-prospector, this is in large part thanks to his many proxies working in the field to realize his vision. No one demonstrates this relationship more clearly than the Swedish officer, geographer, and linguist Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, the author of the 1730 work Das Nord und Ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia. Like many Swedish officers, Strahlenberg had been taken prisoner in the 1709 Battle of Poltava, which ended Swedish military ascendancy, and yielded the first wave of prisoners to be “sent to Siberia”, with all the connotations that phrase would come to have. Like many generations of intellectuals who suffered a similar fate, Strahlenberg passed his time studying the region and the peoples around him, distinguishing himself in particular as a pioneer of Yakutology and thus of comparative Turkic linguistics.At several points in his 1730 work, Strahlenberg explicitly cites Leibniz as his guide and director in the collection of language samples. The Swedish author has read and internalized a set of instructions that Leibniz had decades earlier sent to Giovanni Batista Podestà, interpreter at the court of Vienna and author of a 1677 trilingual Ottoman-Persian-Arabic dictionary. Podestà had been in charge of an expdition into “deepest Tartary”, which is to say to the region of the Caspian Sea, and Leibniz took this opportunity to send the Italian dipomat a list of queries pertaining, particularly, to the diversity of the Tatar language subfamily: which region do the speakers of Karakalpak inhabit? What of the Tatars of Cathay, whom we today know as Uighurs? And so on. This list of queries was published in the first posthumous edition of Leibniz s writing, in 1718, a miscellaneous compendium of Leibniz s notes and letters principally on linguistic questions.We know with certainty that Strahlenberg read Leibniz s vocabulary list, because it is substantially the same list that appears as a fold-out appendix to Strahlenberg s book, to which he gives the title “Tabula Polyglotta Harmoniae Linguarum”: The “Polyglot Table of the Harmony of Languages”. The invocation of “harmony” is also explicity Leibnizian, and it shows that Strahlenberg followed Leibniz not just in practical matters, but in philosophical commitments as well. For Strahlenberg, the study of comparative linguistics reveals the preestablished harmony between the different perspectives or points of view that rational beings have on one and the same world. Languages, like monads, are mirrors of the rational order of nature.Like Dara Shikoh, Strahlenberg presupposes the unity of human reason, but he discerns this unity not at the level of textual traditions, but rather of natural language. Unlike Dara Shikoh, he does not suppose that any of these “monuments” has any pride of place alongside the others, as the Persian prince had supposed the Qur’ān stands in relation to the Upaniṣads. Stripped of their canonical texts, every society stands naked with its bare words, and is seen to be substantially the same as every other. This, as Han F. Vermeulen has also remarked, is the key conviction that underlies the newly emerging science of ethnography, which Leibniz did so much to stimulate. It is also the central commitment of the communitarianism of Johann Gottfried Herder, which we might fairly describe as a “monadological egalitarianism”. It is also, finally, the ideal to which the Soviet model of the autonomy of ethnic groups often sought to adhere: the union of socialist republics and oblasts as a sort of imaginary museum of folk costumes and songs and traditions, each with its own room and none primus inter pares.Except that of course Russia was always de facto first among equals. This is inscribed in the first lines of the anthem of the USSR; and it is detectable too in Leibniz s earliest explanations to Peter of the value of a comprehensive linguistic survey of the empire: Leibniz is no friend of, say, Samoyed nationalism, but rather believes that knowledge of ethnolinguistic diversity brings into relief the magnitude of the empire and thereby glorifies its sovereign. Here, then, we may reach a limit of the cosmopolitan aspiration of Leibniz s thought: our equality as rational beings does not translate into an imperative for political equality. And yet, as an alternative to the project, as exemplified notably by Immanuel Kant and others, of bringing indigenous peoples within the fold of reason by expanding the boundaries of European historical agency, the Leibnizian alternative, and its reverberations in Herderian communitarianism and elsewhere, continues to hold out some attraction as we negotiate, in the 21st century, the delicate balance between the preservation of dwindling Indigenous communities, on the one hand, and on the other the universal claim to basic rights, such as to education or to medical care, that in some cases only the homogenising apparatus of the modern state is capable of furnishing.*But to conclude, in this talk I have, by way of a tour of some case studies, attempted to convey an idea of what intellectual history may look like when it is decisively decoupled from national narratives. I have effected this decoupling by shifting the point of anchorage of the tradition of intellectual history from Hegel, often taken as the tradition s patron saint, to Leibniz, seldom if ever considered for such a role. I have taken the history of philosophy, against the protectionist interests of those who study this history from within academic departments of philosophy, as itself an appropriate, indeed ideal, focus of intellectual history. I have shown that with such a focus, when we depart from the history of political philosophy narrowly conceived, and consider also the history of natural philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics, we do not so much abandon the political as rather enhance our capacity to discern its contours.Finally, in showing some of the ways in which early modern European philosophy was implicated in the commerce of both goods and light with the world beyond its borders (and here I emphasise only some of the ways, for I have not even mentioned America and the conceptual revolutions unleashed by the Columbian exchange): in showing some of these ways, I have shown that, far from Western philosophy being the unfolding of Absolute Spirit, it was all along, but particularly from the early modern period on, much sooner an enfolding of foreign spirits, faintly discerned, generally misunderstood, often held in contempt by the voyagers who first encountered them and by the philosophers who got reports of them, but nonetheless fundamental for the emerging shape and character of modern European thought. In English, there are two voices, active and passive, and a given verb may occur in either of these two. For example, “He ate” and “He was eaten” both employ the verb “to eat” in one of its forms. In Yakut, by contrast, there are five principal voices, as well as other voice-like verb forms, and in general a given verb is used in only one of the voices. A verb in a given voice is identified by characteristic endings, and is usually related in meaning to, though different from, similar verbs with different characteristic endings belonging to different voices. Related verbs in different voices, in other words, have a relation less like that between “to eat” and “to be eaten”, and more like that between, say, “to respond” and “to correspond”, or between “to speak” and “to bespeak”.1. The fundamental voice (основной залог) or “zero form” (нульевая форма)2. The incentive voice (побудительный залог / дьаһайар туһаайыы)This voice signifies that the real action expressed by the verb in question “is conceived as being effected not by the grammatical subject, but by another agent, in relation to which the former is the person impelling or inciting the action, or is its reason”. Two subjects are thus assumed, e.g.: аах = to read (zero form) : аахтар = to make read; тик = to sew : тиктэр = to make sew; бас = to scoop (e.g., water, soil) : бастар = to make scoop.Compare the middle verb in English: to fall (zero form): to fell (i.e., to cause to fall).Учуутал оҕолорго кинигэ аахтарар - “The teacher is having the children read.”Харахпын эмтэтэбин - “I am healing my eyes” (compare the French, which follows the form of the Yakut more closely: “Je me fais guérir les yeux”).Like the middle verb in English, the incentive voice also has a passive-incentive sense (consider, e.g., the verb “to eat” in the middle form: “This soup eats like a meal”):Куобах айаҕа таптарбыт - “The hare got itself trapped.”Бу киһи харчытын уордарбыт. - “That man got himself robbed.”In Yakut the incentive voice is formed by means of the affixes -т, -тар, -ар, -нар: санат = to cause to think; кэпсэт = to make talk; холбот = to cause to unify; балыктат = to cause to catch fish, to make someone go fishing; төкүнүт = to cause to spin; сүүрт = to cause to run; буллар = to cause to find; кырыттар = to cause to cut.The particular structure of the sentence that is characteristic for the incentive voice corresponds to the semantic particularities of this voice. The persons in the sentence who incite and who are the focus of incitement may be expressed by distinct words or may be implied by context:Эн бу кыыска уута бастар - “You, scoop some water for that girl!”Аккын тургэннык хаамтар - “Get your horse to walk faster.”3. The reflexive voice (возвратный залог)The reflexive voice indicates the return of the action upon the person or thing who produced the action, signifying the concentration or confinement of the action in the subject itself.In Yakut reflexive verbs are formed by means of the affix -н (-ын): анан = to nominate oneself; дэн = to speak of oneself; ылын/ылылын = to take upon oneself; кырын = to cut oneself; and so on.The object of the action is the grammatical subject in the fundamental (i.e., nominative) case:Мин тымныы уунан суунабын - “I wash (myself) with cold water.”Мин бэйэбин көмүскэнэбин - “I m defending myself.”With the help of the affix -н (-ын) one may also form verbs in the reflexive voice from verbs in the impelent voice: буһарын = to cook for oneself; оргутун = to boil (something) for oneself; сойутун = to cool (something) for oneself; and so on.4. The passive voice (страдательный залог / атынтан туохтур)Verbs in the passive voice indicate that the action is directed at the subject. The verb indicates that its subject undergoes an action of another agent:Ынах ыанар - “The cow is being milked”.Кинигэ аагыллыбыт - “The book has been read”.The Yakut passive voice is formed with the help of the affix -н, -ылын: сабылын, тигилин, сотулун, баайылын, тэрилин.A verb in the passive voice indicates an action that is conceived to be directed at the grammatical subject from outside. To this extent the logical subject of the external action remaines unspecified: Сурук сурулунна - “The letter was written”. Here it remains unknown who wrote the letter.5. The mutual-reciprocal (совместно-взаимный залог / холбуу туһаайыы)An action is called mutual when it is realized collectively through the participation of two or more persons, who are the subjects. The relationship of such an action to all of the subjects is conceived as being identical with respect to its orientation and its general character:Фирмаҕа үлэлэһэбин - “I m working with a company”.Кини уолун кытта оттоһор - “He is preparing the grain with his son”.A reciprocal action is one that is realized by its subjects together:Оҕолор хаарынан бырахсаллар - “The children throw snow at one another”.The meaning of mutuality is conveyed with the affix -с (-ыс): Сууйсабын - “I am helping with the wash”; Хаамсаллар - “They are walking together”; быһыс - to help cut; бииргэ үлэһэлэр - “He works on an equal basis [with the others]”.The meaning of reciprocity of action (realized by two or more subjects) is conveyed in the third-person plural: Билистилэр - “They got acquainted”; Суруйсаллар - “They are corresponding”; Бэристилэр - “They exchanged gifts”.A significant number of verbs involving reciprocal action are formed with the help of the affixes -лас (-тас, -дас): доҕордос = to make friends; эйэлэс = to make peace, to reconcile.In Yakut, depending on the character of the lexical meaning and conditions of its use, this general meaning of the voice in question may be realised in one or both of the following two basic meanings:The object-reflexive meaning - when the action realised by the grammatical subject is conceived as directed immediately or mediately toward the person who, or the thing that, produced the action. This meaning of the verb is considered the more productive and widely used. In this meaning we may distinguish two nuances of the voice: the directly reflexive and the indirectly reflexive.A. In the directly reflexive meaning the person who is himself immediately acting, or the thing that is itself immediately acting, is conceived as the object of a reciprocal action: холбон = to unite; хайҕан = to boast; суун = to wash (oneself); көрүн = to look, to appear. In fact it is formed from a limited number of verbs, the meaning of which is conceived as an action realized by the subject in relation to himself, herself, or itself.B. In the indirectly reflexive meaning of the verb, it is not the person who himself is acting, or the thing that itself is acting, that appears as the direct object of a given action, but rather another object clsely connected with it in meaning, but gramatically formed in a distinct way: От тиэнэллэр - “They are bringing in some grain for themselves”. The reciprocal form of the verb remains semantically derived from the acting person. These verbs are much more widely used in the contemporary language.Verbs in the objectless-reflexive meaning signify primarily the various transformations in the external or internal condition of the grammatical subject: сиргэн = to abhor; махтан = to thank; өһүргэн = to get angry; айгыһын = to act important, to linger; кыбыһын = to get shy, to grow confused; and so on.*In addition, there are what may be informally called the various verbal “forms”, which give a particular meaning to a verb stem by means of an affix, but which are not considered grammatical voices. For example:1. The repetitive form (многократная форма)тэп = to kick (zero form): тэбиэлээ = to kick repeatedlyсүүр = to run: сүүрэкэлээ = to run around2. Equal-multiple form (?) (равная-кратная форма (?))ыгдаҥнаа = to shrug (zero form): ыгдай = to shrug and shake the headньолой = to have a very long, narrow head: ньолоҥноо = to display a very long, narrow headлэппэй = to be thickset: лэппэҥнээ = to move sluggishlyNote: I am not sure I have correctly deciphered the Russian abbreviation (равн.-кратн.) identifying this form in the few occurrences I have found of it, and so also cannot be sure I am giving the correct name for it in English. The meanings of the few verbs I have found of this sort do not help us solve the question, as they do not significantly differ in meaning from the zero form. Help in resolving this question will be appreciated.3. Accelerating form (ускорительная форма)See examples in table below.Sometimes the difference in meaning from one voice or form of a verb to another voice or form of the related zero-form verb is very subtle, with the result that verbs in different voices or forms will require translation by one and the same word or phrase when translating into English (or, e.g., Russian or French).*In learning Yakut verbs it is useful to identify the zero form of a verb, and then to chart all the different occurrences of the same verbal stem in different voices and roots. The following table presents some paradigmatic examples, some of which are common and some of which are quite rare, of the various voices and forms. Until our current quarantine began, the last time I had intentionally watched a TV show was when TV sets had knobs, and TV signals came down into them straight from the ether.I was never one of those self-righteous prigs who boasted of not having a TV. I liked TV very much when I was a kid; it constituted, I would even say, the canon of my first education. I knew it was bad, but it was bad in a way that always seemed to me honest and true, never pretending it was something it wasn’t. It offered, through its obvious artifices, enough truth to impart to a child a fairly good idea of what the world of adults is like: the opera buffa of Jack Tripper’s ruses and Mr. Furley’s exophthalmic fits; little Tattoo, the island, the eternal return of the plane.I never renounced TV, I mean. It abandoned me, with its ever more complex boxes and wires and remotes, with the subscriptions and customised services that were now obligatory, when TV as I had known it, as I had been born into it, had been an ambient force all around us like the air, always ready to appear in human form to anyone who summons it.Now when I check into hotel rooms I see the flat screen on the wall, and I know if I turn it on I’ll find some complex textual instructions that will cause my life-long situational illiteracy to kick in. If I happen to guess at the right buttons and get past this part, I will enter an unexplored world of further options, all of which will seem to straddle the strange boundary between the entertainment part of the technology and the revenue-seeking part, and will make me think of ridiculous, foreign Professor Pnin looking in dismay at an unwieldy American newspaper of a Sunday morning, and declaring: “I do not know what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.”Let us agree for the sake of argument that Breaking Bad and The Wire and the other vaunted representatives of the new golden age of television excel in what is called “raw realism”. Even if this is consistently so, the techniques in question might still be said to bear somewhat the same relation to true dramatic art that recent photographic hyperrealism in painting bears to the Dutch masters. You do not automatically arrive closer to the ideal of an art form by ramping up the verisimilitude. What you get, usually, is the gratuitous display of talent, talent without style, talent wasted: talent, most importantly, that is subordinated to impressive new technologies.Often in the history of art, what appears at first natural, instinctive, “artless” turns out only to have appeared so in view of its novelty. Give it a few more decades, and I m willing to bet that the current fashion for naturalism in television will appear as stylised as Chinese opera. And apart from the question whether it is naturalistic, we may also ask whether it is self-evident that naturalism is something for art to aspire to. It is, after all, a curious thing for art to aim for artlessness -- not that it never should, just that the imperative to do so should not be taken for granted. For every Renaissance Italian painting exhibiting all the hot new techniques of perspective and lifelikeness, there is a highly schematic, rigidly two-dimensional Eastern Orthodox icon that, seen in the right way, is just as capable of inducing profound admiration, and experience of life, as its supposedly more naturalistic Western competitor. The great genius of Eugène Green s films lies in his total abandonment of the aspiration to eliminate artifice. Of course people don t use Molièrean diction on the streets of twenty-first-century Paris. If you want to hear people talking the way people talk in Paris today, then go take a walk in Paris! If you want to see the transfiguration of the commonplace through the cinematic art, go watch an Eugène Green film. Anyhow the talk of realism and naturalism in the new critically acclaimed television series is more confusing than anything else. I saw an episode of Better Call Saul, and the Mexican drug-dealer toughs had to my eyes all the verisimilitude of the comically caricatural extras knocked off by Charles Bronson in the Death Wish franchise. I saw an episode of Unorthodox, and the group of musician friends Esty falls in with in Berlin was as two-dimensional as anything I ever saw on an ABC after-school special. I saw an episode of House of Cards, and its sex scene recalled nothing so much as Red Shoe Diaries, that wonderful softcore series on Showtime from the stone age of subscription television, back when it knew how bad it was. What, I kept wondering as I surveyed all of this golden-age output, was the source of all the critical effusions? Why was so much space being given over to it in august venues that used to engage with, say, literature? My real problem, anyhow, is not just that it is mostly schlock. My problem is that even when it is well-executed, the adjective one naturally reaches for is not “great”, or even “good”, but only, at most, “successful”. It succeeds on its own terms, but what are those terms? Even when it is technically virtuosic in a way that suffices in the current critical context to earn glowing praise, the question still comes back: to what end? What would the pay-off be for sitting through this? Is there any shred of a possibility of any trace of moral growth, cultivation of one’s sensibilities, expansion of one’s sense of self? Of course there isn’t.This is not a defense of some pristine art form, “cinema” over low entertainment. For one thing, nominally big-screen movies, even the “serious” ones, have for the most part been pulled down to the same level as the content made for streaming. Natalie Portman’s supposedly high-minded production of A Tale of Love and Darkness (bearing a genealogical relation to, but sharing in none of the same spirit as, the Amos Oz novel of the same name) was, visually and technically, very much like an episode of The Spanish Princess or The Outlander. Circa 1966 you could chart the trickle-down effect from, say, Nouvelle Vague films to the televised Batman series; today by contrast there is a clear and unmistakable evaporation-up, or spilling-across, or just a general moldy spread from television to the movies.To the extent that this distinction can still be made at all. The closest thing I’ve seen to an entertainment made in the past few years with a passable film-like quality was an episode of L’amica geniale. It was pretty good, as middle-high respectable melodrama with a fair dose of Neorealist nostalgia. (Producer Paolo Sorrentino s La grande bellezza was, similarly, a pretty good ode to La Dolce Vita, while La Dolce Vita was not an ode to anything but to Fellini s own singular vision.) But the merciful thing about Natalie Portman’s movie is that it unfolds within a closed universe: when it’s over, it’s over, and the absence of an internal need to drive the potential binge-watcher ever forward means that it was made without the same algorithmic dopamine-enhancing tricks by which our social-media feeds are also custom-designed to sap us of our humanity. Portman’s film, I mean, in being mercifully self-contained, is also mercifully humane, in the way that cinema has always been, at bottom, humane, while television has always been, at bottom, an exploitation.The boundary between the forms —the cinematic and the televisual, art and entertainment— is also compromised by the franchises that are increasingly making the experience of movies a serial experience: The Fast and the Furious, or the never-ending additions to the Marvel comics “universe”. Full-grown adults, some of them even my age, have exchanged their dignity in order to live in this universe as eternal children; I even read recently of a newlywed couple that repaired straight from the wedding back to their home to celebrate... by watching a Marvel movie. To say that the passion they are indulging is “as bad as television” does not get anywhere near the bottom of the moral and aesthetic abyss this wedding announcement invites us to sound.I see the smart young people on Twitter sitting in what I imagine are their extremely expensive, extremely crowded apartments in Brooklyn, tweeting about Game of Thrones, or whatever came after it to instantaneously fill its void, and I think to myself: what did you go to the trouble to move to New York for, to brave all the challenges of life in the capital, when you could have stayed in your parents’s suburban home outside Columbus and watched these same dumb shows with them? What’s the difference where you are if your life is still anchored to substantially the same cultural touchstones as the lives of the people you thought you had to get away from in order to create yourself anew? I understand you don t have a lot of money left over after rent is due. But there are webcams turned on the inside of beaver dams streaming live on the internet, right now, and to watch costs less than your Netflix subscription, and the rewards are infinitely greater. Take a street-view tour of Yakutsk. Watch the cargo-ship GPS trackers, the global wind maps. There s an amazing world out there.My feeling, after this recent tour d’horizon of the recent wave of critically acclaimed television, is this: if it’s not Hee Haw or The Gong Show or some other ridiculous farce from our pre-internet past, then leave me alone about it. You say the medium has developed of late into an art form? Roy Clark’s fiddling is an art form. Effin’-and-hambone is an art form. That moment when Gene Gene the Dancing Machine’s signature song begins to play and Chuck Barris soars into ecstasy? We arrive with him at the very summit of the artistic sublime.To despise the unfounded conceits of the middle-brow, of which Emily Nussbaum et al. are the dutiful cataloguers, is not the same thing as to proclaim the superiority of the high-brow. I still love Hee Haw. I wish there were still television being made that could be appreciated in that register. The problem is that today TV is made to be appreciated with the same serious face we were supposed to put on a few years back when Marina Abramović convinced Jay-Z to rap at us under the banner of performance art. It’s the idiot face of people too easily convinced, by other people with lots of financial capital translated too easily into cultural capital, to take something more seriously than it deserves to be taken. If there is anything that preserves the spirit of the Gong Show, it is of course not on television, but on Twitter and TikTok. Those are venues for the true creative genius of humanity (almost exclusively very young humanity), and it is a corollary of this fact that no one mistakes these venues for the sort of place where you have to put on your reverential art-appreciation face.Lauren Oyler, one of the few lucid truth-tellers among the critics who came up in the generation of new media, has said that while it is wrong to follow fashions in books and visual art, it is acceptable to do so with, say, television and cookery: the idea being that, where nothing is really at stake, there is no harm in going along with the chattering crowd. Her priorities are right, I think. Yet one still must express disdain, not towards those who follow what is not important --where is the harm in that?--, but towards those who seek to artificially inflate the importance of the thing followed. I usually regret expressing my disdain, and revert back to my usual quietism after an occasional outburst such as this one. But if I were truly righteous I would never shut up about it: the content vendors deserve to be driven from the temple of art. Two thoughts have long come unbidden to my mind whenever I hear people talking about doing their family trees, or, more recently, getting their DNA done. The first is of Bruce Willis’s character in Pulp Fiction, the boxer Butch Coolidge in the back of the taxi, who, when asked by his South American driver what his name means, replies, “I’m an American, baby, our names don’t mean shit.” The other is of Seneca, who wrote in his Moral Letters to Lucilius: “If there is any good in philosophy, it is this, -- that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods.”To be an American is to bear a name with no historical resonance, or at least none worth looking into, to orient oneself in the world without regard for lineage. To be a philosopher is to know consciously what the American feels by instinct: that the reason lineages are not worth looking into is the same for all of us, namely, that we all derive from the same divine source.But I am, or like to think of myself as, an American philosopher, and so of course I always scoffed when my late father --who did not share my sensibility, did not see being American in the same way-- used to come home with all sorts of vital-statistics records from Utah and Arkansas, with genealogical scrolls stretching back to Olde England. I always got a vague whiff of prejudice moreover from those family-history buffs more extreme than my father ever was, displaying with pride their ancestors’ tartan patterns above the fireplace, or hanging up a coat-of-arms and explaining with pride why the stag is rampant as opposed to statant, say, or offering an embroidered pillow with some implausible sentiment about Irish or Polish or Swedish superiority. No, I always thought, to hell with all that. I come from nowhere. I come from no one but the gods.And yet, I am also among other things a scholar of the history of the concept of race, and I know full well that this is the same thing as the history of genealogy. To put it very succinctly, “race” in its Latinate variants first appeared in the sixteenth century in the context of animal husbandry: paying attention to which horse, pigeon, or dog should be coupled with which other of its own kind in order to artificially create a better “breed” (that is to say, in Italian, razza; in Spanish, raza; in French, race) of creature. Eventually, as Marx would later caustically point out, it came to be understood that “the key to aristocracy is zoology,” and by the mid-seventeenth century it was common to speak of the “race” of the Plantagenets, the “race” of the Carolingians, and so on. The real revolution in the history of the concept came not with the virus-like leap from animals to monarchs, but from monarchs to the nations over which they reigned. G. W. Leibniz, who was in his professional capacity for many years the court genealogist to the Elector of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, came to understand that some of his methods for discovering the medieval marriages of the ancestors of his employer could be extended to the study of ethnohistory in general, and so from writing about the “race” of the Guelf-Este lineage he came to write about the “race” of the Germans, and how it slowly separated out into the Bavarians, the Dutch, the Danes, the Crimean Goths, and so on. And in 1686, in turn, François Bernier asked why we should stop at “nations”, and proposed that it might be more useful still to divide the entire world into a handful of supranational continent-spanning “races” of mankind. For good measure he proposed to colour-code them: the “black” people, the “white” people, and so on. We know the rest of the story. We re still living it.So, given the strange balance between what I have said in the preceding paragraphs, the history of my thinking about ancestry took a strange twist when I recently began corresponding with Henry Louis Gates, who among other things hosts the PBS series, Finding Your Roots (and who knows from my books about my interest in genealogy and race as a topic of research, but had not previously known anything of my distaste for autogenealogy). When I mentioned to him that I am against DNA testing as a matter of principle (both because I am descended from no one but the gods, etc., but also because the companies spearheading it are engaged in a project of mass-data collection that makes Facebook’s surveillance methods look tame by comparison), he told me that I might be surprised at my emotional reaction if I were ever to give it a try, and that he’d be happy to have his producers send me a DNA test kit here in Brooklyn. You don’t just tell Skip Gates you have a principled opposition to discovering your ancestry, and expect that that will be that.One thing I didn’t tell Skip is that I am at the outset in a very favoured position among roots-seekers, with or without DNA analysis: I am a Mormon. Well, sort of. My grandfather fled Utah in the 1930s and never spoke of it to his wife and children. But my father, who was born in 1940, found out anyway, and was able to take advantage of the tremendous resources the Latter Day Saints have made available for genealogical research. The Mormons, among other noteworthy points of dogma, believe that a person’s soul can be saved retroactively, and thus that one’s dead non-Mormon ancestors, once posthumously baptised, will suddenly undergo an unexpected promotion in the ranks of the afterlife. So they keep records, good records, and if you are, by their standards anyhow, one of them, they can tell you quite a bit about your roots without first collecting a saliva sample.So the kit arrived, and I spit in it (if there’s anything to which I’m more committed than my principles, it’s seizing the opportunity to tell a good story) and mailed it off to the lab. I’m still waiting for the results, but in the meantime I found myself wondering what I could learn from the paper records of the LDS in advance of the history that was in the course of being unwoven from my DNA.I had memories of a few of the things my father, who died in 2016, told me about his own discoveries when he was most intensely engaged in family history in, I believe, the late 1980s. And I had a living memory of my grandparents, and their stories of their parents, but little beyond that. I knew on my mother’s side (for which the Mormons have no records) that my grandfather was born in Minnesota to Norwegian immigrants, and my grandmother in Minnesota to Swedish immigrants.I knew my paternal grandfather was a Mormon, as I have said, and that his grandfather had come from England at some time in the nineteenth century. As for my paternal grandmother, I knew she was from Arkansas, and I believed that her ancestors were forever lost in the dark abyss of time, too insignificant to leave even a trace in the vital-statistics records.They were rumoured to be “part Cherokee”, as many Americans who don’t know their ancestors are. Partial absorption of Indigenous blood was thought necessary for the successful appropriation of the continent, as Thomas Jefferson already understood in his Notes on the State of Virginia, which also means that one of the unique traits of the American strain of white-supremacist ideology is that white identity is compatible with, even enhanced by, a certain degree of mestizaje, real or imagined. The mestizo component of my family lineage was always suspected, vaguely, to lie on the side of my paternal grandmother. That was also by far the most truly American segment at the family get-togethers, the ones with the Arkansas accents, the ones with the baked mac-and-cheese and candied yams, the ones with beat-up Chrysler Le Barons and tales of debt and downtroddenness that seemed to go all the way back to the Fall. Within five minutes of searching on the LDS genealogy website, after entering the barest information on my grandfather (Von Harris Smith, born Sugar City, Idaho, 1912), I was led to this biographical-information page from the LDS Missionary Database on his grandfather, my great-great grandfather, James Smith (born 1838, Oakley, England, died 1922, Utah).I confess Skip Gates’s prediction was correct: this discovery moved me. For one thing, I see the family resemblance between James Smith and me, which has the power to cut across time and create the appearance of familiarity. I recall the chapters on passing through Utah Territory in Mark Twain’s Roughing It, and all the bemused mockery of those strange frontier utopians that this voyage provided him. At the time James Smith was out there proselytising, the Mormons still hoped to prevail in a long and sometimes violent stand-off with the US army, which would have transformed Utah into a breakaway theocracy, the last and most radical strain of the wave of radical Protestant sects that emerged in England two hundred years earlier. James Smith made me feel, truly, a part of that legacy.But that was just the beginning, and as it would turn out it was my paternal grandmother’s side that had the deeper and much more surprising connection to radical Protestantism. Through Bertie Mae Cruce (born in Monticello, Arkansas in 1918), I am a direct descendant of Elder William Brewster and his wife Mary, who arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, as passengers on the Mayflower. (It’s all there on the LDS website, with every official document duly scanned, from Bertie’s birth certificate to the arrival logs of the Pilgrims’ ship, spanning nine generations in 298 years). The Brewsters had daughters named Patience and Fear, and sons named Wrestling and Love, but I am descended from the one called Jonathan. Elder William Brewster wrote a Treatise of the Ministery of the Church of England, which I’ve now read and will perhaps write about on another occasion. His motto was drawn from Psalms 39: Hebel est omnia Adam. There is an Elder William Brewster Society, open to all who can prove their descent from him. (I will not join.)A few comments are in order about the special way in which this discovery hits me. A first is that one should not really be so surprised. An estimated 12% of Americans are directly descended from a Mayflower passenger, and the LDS records on my family, reaching back as far as the eighth century, attest to the presence of countless Lords and Ladies of Cornwall, Normandy, Brabant. Droit de seigneur and a host of complicated statistical factors I m not sure I fully understand mean that virtually everyone is descended from nobility. A significant number of Americans are descended from Mayflower passengers, as I ve said; it is just that much of the early formation of my identity and orientation in the world involved assuming that I could not have been one of them.I can recall the lessons on the Mayflower and the Pilgrims in my elementary-school history classes, and I clearly remember thinking: this doesn’t concern me. My people were the little people, nés pour le petit pain, as the Québecois would say: the people whose ancestry does not raise them up, the people whose ancestry is not worth writing down. This is in particular a prejudice that I had formed largely from exposure to the Arkansas wing of my family, which included my grandmother and her siblings and some of their spouses. The irony, though, that she was the one linking me to a sort of American nobility without my realising it, also contains a lesson about American history: somewhere in the generations between the Plymouth Colony and my grandmother’s birth, at least one line of descent from Elder William Brewster experienced what we might call “indigenisation”. This is the same process that Henry David Thoreau observes of the Québecois: whether they are born of métissage or not, the French settlers, unlike the English, took to the forests and came to truly inhabit the continent.My ancestors did not linger in Brewster, Massachusetts, practicing a strain of Protestantism that would come to be as “mainline” as the original Puritanism had been radical, thriving through hard work and Puritan virtue in prosperous and level-headed New England. They went south, became Baptists, impoverished themselves, learned to embrace desperation as a mode of being. They remained “white” (as far as I can tell from the scanned records, though perhaps the DNA results will confute this), but did so in a way that made them feel as if they must hypothesise an impurity of the blood somewhere in there, in order to make sense of the kind of Americans they were: white trash, to cautiously utter the slur I know I’m not supposed to use, but which seems necessary in order to get to the heart of the matter.The existence of this class of people is part of America’s success and its tragic failure. It is through them that Jefferson’s hope was realised: the expropriation of the continent and the near-total annihilation of its Indigenous people. But this process also degraded the people who carried it out, and part of the degradation was a sort of forgetfulness, a loss of an orientation to the world through an idea of the ancestors that can ennoble a person even without proper nobility in the political and economic sense, a nobility the Americans rejected from the outset, even if they did not hesitate to set up societies for the descendants of the Mayflower, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and so on. And at the end of several generations, it yields up someone like me, who spends his life insisting he is descended from no one at all. This insistence is born of a sort of pride, and its results in their Senecan inflections are perhaps valuable, but it also conceals, and poorly, a history of violence (both enacted and received) and loss.“But at least you get to be white,” will be the refrain from both the white-supremacists and the identitarians of the left. In the history lessons on the Pilgrims, it is true, my inchoate thought was not simply that this does not concern me, but that while it does not directly concern me I might at least get to be included among the descendants of the Mayflower par courtoisie. And this is where I think the lesson of the history of race, as it makes its leap from horses to kings to nations to “races” in the current sense of essentialised biogeographical populations, may be of particular value to our thinking about ancestry and identity in the American context. When Leibniz extends genealogy from families to nations, he is enfolding great masses of people, from different social classes, into the same dynasty, and so into the same great narrative of the origins of the body politic, even if only, again, par courtoisie. This surely served to delegitimise the hereditary forms of sovereignty his work was meant to glorify, and to tip early modern Europe that much closer to the republican revolutions that grounded sovereignty in the people. It also served, though he could not have seen this coming, to contribute to the racialisation of political communities, a process that would eventually mutate into such an absurd, contradictory, and destructive form as we still know in the United States today.Race is, politically, a dead end. Courtesy is --literally, etymologically-- a courtly virtue, and is useless as the glue that binds democratic citizens together. For a ten-year-old American to feel, inchoately but surely, that it is only this courtesy that binds him to the Mayflower, but that this courtesy at the same time is one that is extended only on racial grounds, is the disgrace of American history in a single exemplum.I suppose I’d rather be truly descended from the Mayflower than be enabled to behave as if I were on the basis of racial identity alone. But the discovery of true descent is not a simple one. I cannot claim any American simulacrum of nobility, as some of the Brewster descendants in New England seem to enjoy doing. The indigenisation process is irreversible: I am, in the sense already described, white trash. I certainly cannot buy into the form of political community that the public-school curriculum-setters hoped to install, which would have had me experience community with Elder William Brewster simply in virtue of our shared whiteness: to be white trash in the sense I have in mind is to be able to smell the artifice and lies that make the fiction of universal whiteness work in the service of power. Nor, finally, can I deny that I am moved, as Skip Gates predicted I would be, by the discovery of my descent from a Mayflower passenger.I am moved, and then in my motion I am soon swung back around, and recalled to my former way of being American, the way that harmonises with Seneca’s vision of philosophy’s divine origins. We all share a genealogy, hidden in plain sight, that no church archive, no royal court, no DNA test, can ever discern.Still, for the sake of the story, and to come good on my acceptance of Skip Gates s offer, it makes sense that I should divulge the results of the test, and my reaction to them, in a follow-up post, in due time... I ve been keeping a Quarantine Diary, in Sakha/Yakut, in the aim of both improving my Yakut composition skills, and of recording a bit of my day-to-day experiences under lockdown. I ll be adding to it periodically.*Муус устар үһүс күнэБүгүн харантыын сүүрбэ төрдүс күнэ буолар. Мин бу саҥа ситуацияҕа үөрэнэн хааллым. Мин сөптөөх физическэй эрчиллии оҥорор кыаҕым суох, диэн саамай улахан аһыйыым буолар. Үгэс курдук мин күн аайы уон километр кэриҥэ сатыы хаамааччым. Бу мин кыра квартирабар биллэн турар кыаллыбат. Биһиэхэ саҥа сиэр баар: киэһэ уон сэттэ чаас кэннэ коронавирус туһунан сонун ааҕар сатаммат. Киэһэ биһиги киинэ көрөбүт, арамаан ааҕабыт, киэһээҥи аһылыгы бэлэмниибит. Күнүс мин үлэлиибин: суруйабын, тылбаастыыбын, виртуальнай семинардарга кыттыыны ылабын. Харантыыҥҥа мин өссө саҥа дьарыктаахпын. Биһиги Нью-Йоркка олорор квартирабытыгар икки кэрэ гитара буллубут (кинилэр бас билээччилэрэ билигин Парижка сылдьар). Мин муусуканы бэрт таптыыбын, ол эрээри хаһан да олохпор мин инструмеҥҥа оонньуу үөрэммэтэҕим. Карантиҥҥа маны гынар мин балай эмэ бириэмэлээхпин. Муус устар төрдүс күнэБүгүн харантыын сүүрбэ бэһис күнэ буолар. Нью-Йорк куоракка бакалейнай маҕаһыыннар дьиэҕэ илдьэн биэрэри тохтоттулар. Ол иһин биһиги маҕаһыыҥҥа барарга тиийбиппит. Бэйэтэ авантюра! Манна өссө дьиҥнээх медицинскэй мааскалары булар киһи сатаан булбат. Онон биһиги саарпыгы икки гына кырыйан бэйэ оҥоһуута мааскалары оҥорорго кыһанныбыт. Биһиги соччо табыллыбатыбыт. Мин мааскам сирэйбиттэн сулбуруйан түстэ. Маны саҥалыы кэтэ сатаан, мин биллэн турар сирэйбин тарбахтарбынан тыыттым. Тиһэҕэр тиийэн мин мааскабын уһуллум. Дьоҥҥун улууссаҕа тумна сылдьар бэрт ыарахан, кыратык футбольнай матчка сылдьар курдук. (Ол эрээри райоҥҥа дьон бары бэрт эйэҕэс, бэл диэтэр ичигэс сыһыаннаах, буоллулар.) Маҕаһыын иһигэр мин бэрт куттанным, тоҕо диэтэр онно дьону тумна сылдьар сатаммат этэ. Ол эрээри таһырдьа тахсан мин кэргэним олус дьоллонно. Кини сааскы сибэккилэниини мастарга көрөн үөрдэ. Бу экскурсия кыра кутталы, ол эрээри улахан дьолу, аҕалла. Муус устар сэттис күнэБүгүн сүүрбэ харантыын ахсыс күнэ буолар. Мин оптуорунньук аайы виртуальнай семинарбар Иммануил Кант Өйдөөһүн критикатын туһунан үөрэтэбин. Семинарга отут кэриҥэ үөрэнээччилэр кытталлар. Кинилэр тус­-туспа дойдулартан кэлэллэр, холобур Колумбияттан, Болгарияттан уонна Индияттан. Сорохтор мин урукку студеннарым буоллаллар, сорохтор эмиэ мин курдук университет профессордара. Кыттааччылар аҥардара миигин бэйэбин билэллэр, атын аҥара (мин сабаҕалыырбынан) мин кыра биллэриибин социальнай ситимҥэ (Твиттергэ) буллулар. Биһиги сүрүн сыалбыт кыһалҕаттан аралдьыйарбыт буоллар диэн мин кыттааччыларга маҥнайгы семинарга быһаардым. Философия бэйэтэ иккис суолталаах. Бу кинигэҕэ Кант искусство уонна айылҕа сыһыаннаһыытын интэриэһиргиир. Кини санаатыгар бу икки сфералар сыаллаах буолуунан уратыланаллар. Ол эрээри киһи бу сыаллаах буолууну өйдөөһүҥҥэ булар кыаҕа суох. Онон искусство кэрэтэ уонна айылҕа телеологията өйдөөһүн торумнара (Кант өйдөбүлүнэн) буолбаттар, регулятивнай идеялар буолаллар. Муус устар отутус күнэБүгүн харантыын биэс уон биирис күнэ буолар. Биһиги квартирабыт мин олохпор саамай кыра квартира, диэн мин бу сарсыарда өйдөөтүм. Кини ленинградскай уопсай дьиэм хоһунааҕар кыра. Кини бэл диэтэр нью-йоркскай стандартынан кыра. Мин бу квартира иһин бэйэм биэс тарбаҕым курдук билэбин. Мин кэргэмминиин олус кыараҕастык олоробут. Бэйэ-бэйэни тумна сылдьар сатаммат. Биһиги бэйэ-бэйэни биллэн турар таптыыбыт, ол эрээри “Харахтан ыраах, сүрэххэ чугас”, диэн өс хоһооно этэр. Күнүс мин кэргэним утуйар хоско үлэлиир, мин дьыбааҥҥа атын хоско үлэлиибин. Кини диссертациятын суруйар уонна билиҥҥи грек тылын үөрэтэр (мин античнай грек тылын өрдөөҕүтэ үөрэппитим, билиҥҥи грек тыла миэхэ биир тэҥҥэ билэр уонна дьикти курдук көстөр). Бэҕэһээ мин Ютубка үчүгэй саха киинэтин буллум, Дмитрий Давыдов Ийэкээмин диэн (нууччалыы аата Нет бога кроме меня). Бу киинэ кыра бөһүөлэктэн сылдьар эр киһи туһунан. Кини ийэтэ деменциялаах, онон эр киһи ийэтин Дьокуускай куоракка көмө була аҕалар. Сүрүн оруолга Пётр Саводников оонньоото, кини наһаа үчүгэй буолла. Мин бу киинэни булан олус үөрдүм. Мин сорох атын саха киинэлэрин, судургу комедияларын, көрөн бардым, оттон чиэһинэйдик эттэххэ кинилэр наһаа үчүгэй буолбатылар. I think I m finally ready to come out as a Voynich scholar. I ve been studying hi-res scans of the manuscript off and on for four years or so, and I ve been reading the so-called secondary literature for about a year. What compels me to come out is the discovery over this past year that for the most part commentators really do not know what they are doing. They divide roughly into two camps: the cryptographers and information scientists, on the one hand (the “quants”, as we say), and on the other hand the ravers and enthusiasts, the people who do not know how to distinguish between gut feelings and real evidence. There seem to be very few proper palaeographers writing about this text: that is, people who know how to attend to handwriting and codicological evidence until plausible patterns of intention begin to emerge. It may be that such people are scared away by the ravers; one need only briefly glance at a list of all the time-travel, Illuminati, and UFOlogical theories the manuscript has inspired to see that it is a real intellectual danger zone. For me it is however a wonderful case study and autoexperiment in the use of abductive inference. I do not yet think I know anything with certainty that no other researcher has established before me. But over time a picture is emerging that leads me to lend significant credence to some explanations over others.I am, say, 85-90% certain that the manuscript is not a hoax, or, if it is a hoax, it is one that was perpetuated long before the manuscript came into Wilfrid Voynich s possession in 1912. I am attracted to the idea that, if it is a hoax, this was a hoax perpetuated on Athanasius Kircher, the one-time owner of the manuscript who was known to hastily claim to have cracked other codes (e.g., Egyptian hieroglyphics), and whom his contemporaries may have wanted to expose in his rashness by sending him a nonsense text to interpret. But this is a low-probability explanation. I am, say, 80-90% certain that the text was in the possession of a German, Dutch, or Flemish scholar who knew Latin, but that the manuscript itself is not written in any of these languages. As others have pointed out, the script of the main body of the text gives no indication of any regular repetitions of inflected word endings, of the sort that exist in all Indo-European and Finno-Ugric languages (e.g., the -s and -ed that are attached to plural nouns and passive participles respectively in English). It is plausible, based on quantitative analysis of the script, that it is written in a Sino-Tibetan or other East Asian language, perhaps by a European traveller (e.g., a German Jesuit such as Kircher himself) in Asia. But the lack of any distinctly Asian visual elements in the illustrations weakens this conjecture. The lack of any success so far in identifying any of the numerous botanical illustrations speaks strongly, in fact, in favour of the view that the work is a hoax, or at least a description of fantastical entities coming from nowhere in particular. The calendrical pages however strongly suggest a European provenance, and the illustrations of women bathing strongly suggest that the work is concerned with distinctly European traditions of balearic treatment of illnesses, which, in the early modern period, became a topic of scientific research for iatrochemists and other naturalists working at the intersection of medicine, chemistry, and natural history. Almost all of the manuscript is written in an unknown script in an unknown language. There are however a few very small exceptions to this: the final page (f116v) features handwriting in Latin and what appears to be German, as well as two words in the “Voynichese” script. The calendrical pages (f70v-f73v) also feature the names of the months, from March to December, in some neo-Latin or Romance variant. The page f66r features, at the bottom, next to an illustration of a man (or perhaps a woman), what appear to be the German words, or partial words: der mus del. Thus:I do not wish to concentrate on f66r today, other than to note that analysis of the handwriting makes it nearly certain that the same person who wrote these apparently German words is also the author of the Latin/German text on f116v, to which I now turn. The reader will have to look at the text in a hi-res version in order to discern some of the elements I will be discussing, but here is an image of the text sufficiently zoomed-out to see all of the elements on the page:I am not prepared today to discuss the first line of text. The first word may be pox or vox; the second word may be leben or lebet. I have no conjectures, for now, for the next two words, and would rather move straightaway to the main body of the text. I am using blue to indicate words for which I am very confident in my transcription, green for words for which I am moderately confident, and red for words for which I am not at all confident. The repeated v s at the beginning of the third line indicate the two words that are written in Voynichese script, and that therefore have never been reliably transcribed by anyone:I next list plausible alternative readings, and where appropriate provide further commentary.anchiton = michiton. This is the most common reading, in fact, to the extent that some people have described this text as being written in “Michitonese”. But the initial part of the conjectured letter m looks much more like the other a s in the text (e.g., in ola) than like the other m s (e.g., in maria). ola dabas = oladabas. There certainly does not seem to be any break between the a and the d, but separating the two has the advantage of giving us a meaningful Latin word (dabas = “you gave”). This in turn leaves us with the problem that ola has no meaning in Latin, and certainly is not in the feminine singular accusative, as one would expect if this ola, whatever it is, is the thing that “you gave”. So perhaps oladabas is a proper noun. It is possible, but not likely given the differences in word-length, that anchiton oladabas in line one corresponds to the Voynichese vvv vvvv in line three.ceve = ??. Note here that the author began by crossing something out before beginning to write the word that remains. We can extract a Latin meaning out of this word, but only with difficulty: it could be the singular imperative form of a verb that means “to swivel” or “to walk lewdly or effeminately”. fi[x] = si[x]. I m reading the initial letter as an f only because it preserves the possibility of a concrete meaning in Latin, namely, the singular imperative of “to do” or “to make”. ubren = obren, uhren. The advantage of my rendering, and of the first alternative, is that it preserves the possibility of referring to “the above”, which presumably in context would be the Latin text above, on which the author is now commenting in German.gas = gar. This latter has been the more common reading in the scholarship, and it is better at conveying a plausible meaning in German (“So take even me” or “So take me quite [fully or completely]”. But what I take to be the long s is simply too much unlike the other r s in the text (e.g., in ubren) to be plausibly read as one. Here moreover there are other, holistic considerations that militate in favour of gas, to which I now turn. One thing to note, first of all, is the overall form of these three lines: the first two are in Latin, and the words are generally concatenated by a + sign; the last is in Voynichese and German, and seems to be an attempt at rendering a meaning in a full sentence of natural language. One thing that other scholars have not noticed is that in the second line in Latin, the x that follows the first four of the six words is not an element of the words themselves, but seems to serve an ordering or registering function in the same way the + sign does. Once we remove it, we have four perfectly meaningful Latin words; as long as it is still there, we have four Latin-seeming nonsense words. So, as a rough stab at a translation, we have something like this:+ anchiton ola [you] gave + many + you + * swivel + doors + n +make + maria + move + by force + alka[line] + ma+ria +vvv vvvv false above so gas take me.Don t ask me what this means; I m not working at the level of comprehensive translation, yet. However, a few comments may help us to make sense out of it all. One is that the appearance of the word “false” (valsch, a Low German variant of falsch which strongly suggests a proximity to Flanders or Holland, rather than, say, a Central European origin) makes plausible the interpretation according to which this inscription is itself an effort to crack the code of the manuscript as a whole, and thus that it is superadded at a later date (like the German on f66v as well). If the manuscript does originate in the early 15th century, as carbon-dating indicates, then there could be no mention of “gas”, which is a neologism invented by Francis Mercury van Helmont (of Flemish origin) in his 1648 Ortus medicinae. There could however be mention of alkaline waters, which would have been an important part of balearic therapies and of treatises thereupon already in the Renaissance. So, I conjecture that the first two lines are someone s notes towards a decipherment of the contents of the manuscript word for word, and the final line is some sort of comment on the meaning suggested by this concatenation of words. I suspect that whoever this was knew more about the contents of the work than we do today, and that he rightly understood the Voynichese text to be dealing with the subject of medicinal spa therapies. I suspect that this person was writing after 1648, with a now-expanded vocabulary for describing the chemical properties of bath waters and, now, “gases” as well. See here for example Nicolaus Steno s 1660 treatise, composed in Amsterdam, Dissertatio physica de thermis [Physical Dissertation on Thermal Baths], in which the author develops his earlier notion of “chaos” (from which Van Helmont coined the term gas), understood as the maximum unstructuredness of particulate matter, to describe the effects of steam on the human body. I suspect that the author of the Latin/German text has read Van Helmont, and is writing broadly speaking in the intellectual context of northern European iatrochemistry. How long have dinosaurs been around? There is one obvious sense in which they ceased to exist 66 million years ago. There is another sense in which they began to exist only around the middle of the 19th century, when Richard Owen identified a “distinct tribe... of Saurian Reptiles” in 1842. Most animals have a long history of social salience before science comes along to tell us exactly where they belong in the order of nature. Not so with dinosaurs: they didn t have any place in society at all until science informed us of their past existence, and from that point on their salience has been entirely wrapped up in cultural representations. These representations are anchored in something real, in a way that those of unicorns are not, but the fact that we have fossilised skulls and vertebrae to point to in the case of dinosaurs, while we do not have equine skulls with a horn in the middle to point to in the case of unicorns, only makes it more difficult, not less, to understand what we may expect the folk-categorical term “dinosaur” to do. At first glance it may seem surprising that there should be a folk-category filled by representations of a class of beings that we (the “folk”) only know to exist at all thanks to what science tells us. But the folk are particularly adept at taking the austere information science delivers, and filling it in with fantasy. This is why black holes figure so prominently in science-fiction scenarios about cosmic consciousness. Yet in the case of palaeontology the people making the discoveries and fleshing out the dry bones with their imaginations, are often much closer to the folk than is generally the case of, say, black-hole cosmologists. And so the original image we have of dinosaurs as “terrible lizards”, an image that never really fit all the available evidence (even if at least some of them had large teeth), is one that was produced by field scientists who were simultaneously making the discoveries and letting these discoveries fuel their imaginations. And from the starter dough of their early imaginings, cultural representations begin to ferment and grow on their own.As Claudine Cohen has vividly shown, these representations have been very different in different cultural settings. Nowhere did the dinosaur take on a more iconic status than in the United States, in the early 20th century, and this had to do largely with the political-geographical project of incorporating western frontier territories into the economic life-blood of the country through the extraction of natural resources from them; and from the 1910s or so no natural resource was more important than the stuff that was to fuel automobiles. Of course the vast majority of organic matter that goes into the slow subterranean generation of “fossil fuels” comes from algae, and not from dinosaurs, but this did not prevent the Sinclair Oil Co. from using the image of a diminutive brontosaurus on its corporate logo beginning in 1933, marking out gas stations across the Arizona desert for American families assaying the length of their nation s territory in a station wagon. Keychains and other souvenirs were available for purchase.In the generations that followed, the cartoon representation of the dinosaur, often with a caveman on its back, would come to be as familiar as the “exotic” megafauna of Africa. By the 1970s there emerged however a pedagogical current, with which I m very familiar from first-hand experience, that encouraged elementary-school children to uphold a certain standard of correctness in the way they spoke of dinosaurs: to insist on not placing a prosauropod of the Triassic next to a Cretaceous triceratops in a diorama, for example, let alone next to a Neanderthal. This new standard of correctness as a value emerged simultaneously in American history with a countercurrent that deviated radically from more or less everything the accumulating evidence was telling us about the history of life on earth: namely, so-called “creation science”, a movement that appears --though I won t try to argue this today-- to exist not only in tension, but also in dialectical interdependence, with the pretence of science and its volunteers from among the folk to be getting the earth s distant past definitively right.It is against the background of these parallel developments --both the new premium on correctness as a value among the folk, as well as the rise of a prominent ideological countercurrent that flagrantly rejects this value-- that we must begin to reflect not just on the recent claim that birds are dinosaurs, but also on the implicit normative force of that claim. That is, it is not just that birds are dinosaurs, but also that you, fellow members of the folk, must affirm that they are. Now, in phylogenetic terms, a dinosaur is: (i) either a modern bird, or (ii) a triceratops (which went extinct 66 million years ago), or, finally, (iii) any member of any species descended from the last common ancestor of both birds and triceratops. So this excludes crocodiles, because the last common ancestor of birds and crocodiles occurs earlier than the last common ancestor of birds and triceratops, even though crocodiles are the closest living relative of all members of class Aves. This definition has the virtue of being clear, and permitting us to avoid the difficulty of setting up an arbitrary boundary as we move forward in time, between the last dinosaur survivor of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed triceratops and most other dinosaur species, on the one hand, and on the other the first so to speak post-dinosaur, descended from the so-called feathered dinosaurs, but now just too morphologically distinct to be considered a dinosaur itself.But fear of an arbitrary boundary, at least at the closer end of the temporal range of the dinosaur, seems to force the basic distinction such a boundary would have permitted to make its entrance under a new guise, namely, the distinction within this temporal range between the “avian” and the “non-avian” dinosaurs. It is not hard to find other cases in which the expansion of a classificatory term forces new distinctions within the space opened up by the expansion. For example, from the moment the American census began to distinguish between “racial” groups such as “black” and “white”, on the one hand, and overlapping “non-racial” identity groups such as “Hispanic” on the other (here, emphatically, I am using US census terminology, and not my own), we unsurprisingly began to hear the phrase “non-Hispanic white” with much greater frequency. “Non-avian dinosaur” seems to work the same way: there is a group we often find ourselves wanting to talk about, that is defined more broadly than it was in the past; but in many contexts we still want to talk about the group as it was defined in the past, so we construct a negative phrase that indicates we are subtracting a subset of it.“White” is a folk category par excellence, and no respectable person today looks to it in the expectation that there is an underlying metaphysics forcing it upon us. The same is not generally thought to be true of “dinosaur”, though, and so the ease with which the folk revert to the phrase “non-avian dinosaur” upon being told that birds are dinosaurs, signals that there is a strong tension between the folk category and the phylogenetic definition. What should we make of this? Are the folk simply mistaken? The claim that birds are dinosaurs is a claim among other things that phylogeny trumps morphology, that is to say that to be a dinosaur is to have a dinosaur s lineage, no matter what you look like, or how much you deviate from the most paradigmatic representation of, say, a quadrupedal, somewhat tortoise-like, lumbering sauropod. And here it is curious, and worthy of pause, that we play this trump card in a case where the paradigmatic members of the kind are long extinct.Compare the case of whales and fish. John Dupré has compellingly shown that “fish” is yet another folk category par excellence; when we try to delimit it precisely, we find that the very task of drawing precise boundaries generates new problems in its wake. One problem is that many species that most folk and most scientists would be willing to call “fish” do not meet the standard definition of “gill-breathing craniate animal”. Consider the tellingly named “lungfish”, class Dipnomorpha, which is both capable of breathing air, and is the currently extant species closest to the ancestor of the first land-dwelling tetrapods, which emerged around 400 million years ago, and from which dinosaurs and mammals, including ourselves, and indeed including whales, would eventually evolve. That is, there is a species of fish, or “fish” in scare quotes if you re not ready to commit, that is more closely related to whales (and to human beings) than it is to ray-finned fishes (class Actinopterygii) such as tuna or cod. In other words there is no meaningful phylogenetic basis for putting lobe-finned fish such as Dipnomorpha or coelacanths together with tuna and not with whales, even though whales have the curious distinction of having evolved from land-dwelling animals that themselves evolved from sea-dwelling animals (they have this in common with numerous species of sea snakes too). Phylogeny, I mean, seems to be invoked inconsistently, with no clear rule that could explain when paraphyletic classes might be legitimately admitted into our system of carving things up. Now in the case of lungfish, tuna, and whales, we are dealing with species all of which are today extant, even though of course part of our consideration of where they stand (or swim) in relation to one another has to do with other species long extinct. But when we turn our attention to avian and non-avian dinosaurs, by contrast, we are faced with two different classes of beings in very different ontological predicaments: the ones exist, and the others no longer do. One might suppose on first consideration that this shouldn t make a difference, that the present has no special status in our taxonomical efforts. This would be true, except that the present happens to be the moment in which we are making these taxonomical efforts. We have no choice but to work outward from it, and we find in this work that we have a different sort of epistemic access, for living species than for extinct species, to the criteria for classification that interest us. This is a problem that has been perceived by palaeontologists at least since Georges Cuvier sought to classify the enormous “saurians” excavated from the gypsum mines at Montmartre in 1798. Having more or less passively adapted the Buffonian conception of species, as that which is held together by the “unity of reproduction”, Cuvier was struck, as one cannot fail to be, by the fact that fossils do not reproduce, and so if the species you are trying to classify only exist in fossil form, you are not ever going to be able to apply the criterion by which they are marked off from one another. It is in part for this reason that Cuvier s program of comparative anatomy veers into a structuralist project of establishing anatomical similarities across species, without any regard, or at least explicit regard, for what these similarities might imply about kinship or shared lineage.This difficulty would be addressed directly in George Gaylord Simpson s important 1951 article, “The Species Concept”. Simpson is responding here to the so-called “Biological Species Concept” proposed by Ernst Mayr, which defines a species as a group of potentially interfertile individuals: thus a definition showing significant continuity with the Buffonian idea of a species as that which is held together by the “reproductive power”. What Simpson calls “typological definition” of a taxonomic group by contrast is the establishment of the group on the basis of its correspondence “with an abstract or ideal morphological pattern.” He notes that typological classification is “pre-evolutionary and non-evolutionary.” Yet prima facie it would seem that palaeontology leaves us no other choice than to revert to it. Simpson is interested in interrogating the notion of species in particular as deployed in palaeontology, whereas both “dinosaur” and “bird” are significantly higher taxa than this. But we may nonetheless learn something from his observations. He maintains that “[t]he palaeontologist... uses the designation species for two sorts of entities which are radically and fundamentally incongruent.” One possible approach to paleontological species classification, for Simpson, is, starting from morphological features, “to recognise central lines as species and to distinguish branches as other species, ... even though their delimitation is genetically arbitrary at the point of branching.” Thus:“Another possible approach,” Simpson goes on, “is to recognise each evolutionary lineage as a unitary species until it divides and then to consider the descendent branches as species distinct from each other and from the single ancestral line.” Thus:As for the first possibility, as represented by B (we are leaving some out here), Simpson notes that “the only reasonable criterion of choice would be designation of certain terminal branches as more important, or somehow definitive, than others.” Intriguingly, he mentions a view that he attributes to “a philosopher,” a certain H. Miller (as we learn only from the bibliography), in the long-out-of-print book, The Community of Man, published in 1949. According to an extreme formulation of this view, as Simpson summarises it, one might “take Homo sapiens as the supreme species, and consider its ancestry, from the beginning of life (or even before) as the main line, not specifically separable from H. sapiens... Taxonomists will surely agree that this result and the whole procedure involved are impractical if not absurd.” Again with the caveat that Simpson is speaking of species while birds and non-avian dinosaurs are both enormous clades, could it be that the contention that birds are dinosaurs resembles the absurdity Simpson has identified here? Suppose the meteor had not hit the earth, and that triceratops and all of its Cretaceous contemporaries had survived and evolved into new forms, differing at least as much from the ceratopsians as, say, the sparrow differs from the archaeopteryx. Suppose some of these descendants of Cretaceous dinosaurs eventually returned to the sea, like the ancestors of whales did, and, like the whales, evolved an outer morphology similar to that of fish. It seems unlikely that any taxonomist trying to make sense of such a scene of biodiversity would think to insist much on the fact that those ceratopsian-descended sea animals, on the one hand, and the birds on the other (let s stipulate that they evolved in the meteor-free world more or less in the same way as in this one, which is naturally impossible, of course, but not logically impossible), are members of the same category of beings, even if it were known that they have a common ancestor (again, whales and lungfish, or if you prefer, humans and lungfish, also have a common ancestor). This thought experiment suggests that perhaps the insistence that birds are dinosaurs is conditioned in part by a conviction among those who promote it that birds are somehow definitive of the branch that reaches back to the common ancestor of birds and triceratops. This would not be in the way that “the philosopher” seems to imagine Homo sapiens to be definitive of the lineage that led to it -- that is, in a way that strongly implies teleologically guided evolution. Rather, birds perhaps present themselves as the suitable end of the lineage in part because there is the appearance of some need at the present moment, some sense-making exigency, to argue that the dinosaurs survived after all, that in spite of what we had previously thought, they are still with us. Before we venture any suggestions as to what the source of this felt need might be, it is worth noting that in general efforts to shorten the gap between the folk conception of birds and the folk conception of dinosaurs has involved as it were the avianisation of the latter, rather than the dinosaurisation of the former. From particular discoveries of filament-like layers protecting the outer surface of the bodies of many dinosaur species, the conclusion is quickly reached that these filaments must have been feathers; new artist s renditions are hastily drawn up, and on occasion they have to be retracted when it is learned that they went further in the avian direction than the evidence permitted. Overcorrection from the Godzilla template for the tyrannosaurus rex has on occasion made the tyrant king of the lizards into a sort of chicken. Thus:There will always be corrections, and overcorrections, and renegotiations of our representations of the past. That is normal, and it is good that over the past several decades T. rex has been made more gracile, less like an upright Gila monster. But again, what is at stake in the particular direction in which our most recent overcorrections are sending us? Even if we are prepared to admit that birds are a branch of dinosaurs, we may still ask: Why must dinosaurs in turn be birds? I am not going to venture an answer to this second question today, except to say that it seems to fit a general pattern of revisionism in science education over the past decades that compels us to revisit whatever had previously been marked as “terrible”, and to discover that it was actually rather gentle or even cultured: the same pattern has been evidenced in cases as seemingly far apart as whales (perhaps the first trailblazer in this transformation), bats, sharks, and Neanderthals.As to the particular need that I ve already identified however, to have the dinosaurs surviving the great extinction event and into the present day, a few tentative remarks may be in order. Contrary to what some people s intuitions here might be, it does not seem to me that these newly discovered (or newly legislated) survivors of the Cretaceous-Paleogene die-off have something to do with the current climate of ecological crisis, in which, after all, the prevailing sentiment is that nobody gets to survive a major extinction event, let alone come out the other side even more gentle and cute than before.It may have something more to do with the dialectical relationship, to which I ve already alluded, in which the public presentation of evolution is constantly formed and deformed by the political forces of evolution denialism. In this context, creationists have for decades weaponised the rather healthy skepticism that philosophers of science have brought to empirical claims about a distant unrepeatable past, and transformed it into a sort of universal denial of the possibility of having a science of the past at all. If dinosaurs were entirely a thing of the past, such skepticism could perhaps be seen as having more of a foothold than in a world in which dinosaurs are in fact well represented in the present. That s all I ll say about that for now, in order by way of conclusion to return to our guiding question: are birds dinosaurs, or aren t they? Even if we agree with Dupré, as I think I do, that whales were fish until the mid-19th century, and then ceased to be so as a result of new taxonomical legislation (which, as D. Graham Burnett has nicely shown, was itself influenced by actual legislation concerning the importation of whale blubber into the early United States: should it be taxed as fish oil? Or is there perhaps a way to get around that?): even if we agree with Dupré about this mid-19th-century adjustment, I was saying, it is not at all clear that a similar adjustment has yet been successfully carried out in the early 21st century as concerns the status of birds. Folk categories are not determined by fiat, but by actual usage among the folk. In certain scientific matters (say, geocentrism), the folk can be shown to be wrong over time, and gradually correct themselves. But in taxonomy it s generally the case that the folk do no worse than the scientists: how can they, when any classificatory scheme is relative to the initial concerns of the classifier? Whales became non-fish, and then they became gentle wise ones of the sea, not just because of science, but because of a pervasive trust in scientific authority to reveal to us the true natures of things, and a fairly active post-whaling propaganda campaign on the part of scientific and political bodies to convince people to revise their conception of whales.The political landscape is very different today, and not surprisingly what we see in response to the question whether birds are dinosaurs, as we see almost everywhere else, is a rift and a stalemate. Some people adopt the new ordering with pride and with a supercilious commitment to the correction of their peers who are still getting it wrong, while others hold back, somewhat suspicious but often unable to articulate the nature of this suspicion, and if you show them a sparrow they ll say: “That just doesn t look like a dinosaur to me.”Whether in the end these people cross over, and the 21st century proves to be the one in which the status of birds as dinosaurs is consolidated, depends much more on the calibration between scientific authority, the propagandistic aims of science education, and popular sentiment, than on working out any further finer points of phylogenetics. There are lessons here for many other debates about social kinds that are currently on people s minds, some of which touch on questions of biology too, but I ll leave those for another day. I received some criticism of my post yesterday on the value of studying indigenous languages, to the effect that I was confusing denotation and connotation in my discussion of the difficulty of translating paradigm sentences used in Anglophone philosophy of language. I assure you, I know the difference. It is my argument however that what we pick out as capable of being denoted --cats, mats, floors, vixens-- is determined entirely by what is of interest to us in a connotative way. If this is true, it of course means that there is no hope of ever finding any settled analytic truths (at least as concerns the natural world). “Gold ist ein gelbes Metall,” to take Kant’s classic example, can’t even be translated from German into English in a way that is satisfying to anyone: gold isn’t ‘yellow’. It’s golden! Setting that problem aside, Kant’s definition also entails that a blind --or even just a colourblind-- person could never really know gold. Nor did Kant know about atomic numbers, which I think it is fair to say have rightly displaced superficial features of chemical elements such as colour (in a certain light, to a certain optical system) in getting at the true and proper definition of, for example, gold. Such questions have been beaten to death by now, and I’m not here to revive them, exactly. But I do think that Williamson s shift from ‘gold’ to ‘vixen’ as a paradigmatic example of an analytic truth is peculiar in that it moves us onto less solid ground, whereas one would think that in the weakening of antiquated examples of analytic truths drawn from chemistry that comes with the improvement of chemical knowledge, we would do well to not go looking for new examples in a far less stable domain of human knowledge such as zoology. With gold as with vixens, what is going to strike a given person as analytic depends on what they already know (e.g., again, if you do not know post-Mendeleevian chemistry, ‘Gold is atomic number 79’ is not going to strike you as a statement with full equivalency between subject and predicate). But still, gold is something I think we all think we know about. Not so with vixens, which are rather far from our current urban reality (unless perhaps you are in London). Most of us today do not pay attention to the breeding habits of vulpines, and in large part for this reason, I suspect, the majority of occurrences of the word ‘vixen’ in recent English are metaphorical, describing some perceived feature of a human female; and probably not just metaphorical, but also ironic, signalling that while one knows the metaphorical meaning of the term, one is not actually the sort of person who would use it in that way. Many words are like this: the use of them has become detached from the thing they were supposed to denote, and is now largely use by extension. Many such words, moreover, are what we may call ‘precious’, and their use is not just metaphorical, but also a sort of display of mastery on the part of the user. ‘Vixen’ is a borderline case, but consider, for example, the (purported) term for a group of crows. I strongly suspect that at least 95% of occurrences of the phrase ‘a murder of crows’ are found in sentences like, “Did you know that a group of crows is called a ‘murder of crows’?” With this in mind, it can’t really be correct to say that a group of crows is a murder; the preponderance of occurrences of the term in sentences of the sort I just gave means that, in the other 5%, the ones where English-speakers say things like, “Look at that murder of crows,” what is in fact happening is that the speaker is drawing attention to the fact that he or she has mastered this precious bit of vocabulary. The focus of the proposition, in other words, is the speaker, and not the crows. The more attentive you are to questions of style in language, the more you become attuned to the fact that a great deal of it works in this way. As far as I can tell no one actually uses the word ‘temblor’; it is a hack synonym for journalists to throw in when they have already used the word ‘earthquake’ too many times, and need to show a capacity for variety. I’ve long suspected that people almost never use certain anatomical orthophemisms in a way that faithfully focuses the listener’s attention on the denotation of the term, but instead that whenever we hear ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’, what we’re actually hearing is a sort of performance of the speaker’s maturity. (As I’ve pointed out before, both of these, as well as ‘anus’, have their origins in Latin euphemisms: tail , sheath , and ring , respectively). I never use these words anyway, but always talk around them, aware that they pose an objective and irresolvable problem to anyone who cares about language, and understands that real mastery of language is not just about getting things right, but calibrating one’s expression of what is right so as to allow its performative aspect to be evident only as much as one wishes. A hack by contrast is someone who uses words like ‘temblor’ or ‘penis’, or phrases like ‘to tamp down’, and thinks they’re getting away with it.In the end I fear there is no clear boundary between these words that seem performative and therefore fake’ to me — ‘vixen’, ‘temblor’, ‘murder’ ‘penis’— on the one hand, and the nouns we take to be most solid and certain and uncontroversial on the other — ‘cat’, ‘mat’, ‘gold’, and so on. It is not just that the analytic/synthetic distinction is untenable, as I think Quine decisively showed in the middle of the last century; it is not just that any sentence will potentially contain different information in the predicate than what was contained in the subject in a way that depends on what you already knew; but that before we even get to the predicate, the subjects of our propositions are all, inescapably, charged up with so much strange energy, so much power of implicit revelation about the speaker or writer, as to doom from the start the search for a neutral sample sentence that focuses our minds only upon the clearly and unambiguously denoted objects. “Vixens are female foxes,” or “The cat is on the mat”, anyhow, are not going to serve the purpose monolingual Anglophone philosophers want them to serve, and this becomes painfully clear the minute we try to translate them into other languages, particularly indigenous languages, noticing as we do so all the approximations and half-measures we are compelled to make and take. What might serve then as an example of a sentence whose meaning is uncontroversial? There is no such thing. For a postscript to this post, go here.I believe there is much to be learned philosophically from the study of languages that are spoken by only a small number of people, who lack a high degree of political self-determination and are relatively powerless to impose their conception of history, society, and nature on their neighbours; and who also lack much in the way of a textual literary tradition or formal and recognisably modern institutions of knowledge transmission: which for present purposes we may call “indigenous” languages.This is of course going to be a hard sell, given that the great majority of Anglophone philosophers do not even recognize the value of learning German, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, or Chinese, and believe that they can penetrate as deeply as one might possibly go into fundamental philosophical questions from a standpoint of monolingualism. German, Latin, and the others are cosmopolitan languages, and historically all cosmopolitan languages, rightly or wrongly, have functioned as vehicles of what most discerning people are prepared to recognise as philosophy. But there is a significant difference even among the five cosmopolitan languages I’ve listed, which can begin to point us towards the even greater difference between all five of these, on the one hand, and, say, Yanomami, Ainu, Ket, or Sámi on the other: the first three cosmopolitan languages may be grouped together, as having a long legacy of shared and standardised terminology such that problems of translation between them are relatively small; by contrast, while there is to some extent a legacy of translation from Sanskrit towards Chinese, often via Tibetan, for the most part philosophical terminology has developed in these languages independently and without any felt need to establish cross-linguistic equivalencies.Now, Yanomami, Ainu, Ket, and Sámi are generally held to be non-philosophical languages, languages from which one must depart if one wishes to start doing philosophy, and one of my contentions is that this judgment of them goes together with their status as non-cosmopolitan languages: that is, philosophy, throughout its long history and very much still today, is presumed to be an activity that may be pursued only in languages that may pretend to universality. What is it like to speak a language that may not pretend to universality? Most philosophers in the English-speaking world have never considered this question. There are of course degrees of cosmopolitanness and indigeneity, and if over the past, say, two centuries, Arabic and Chinese speakers have been compelled to think somewhat more about the relative non-universality of their languages compared to English (as illustrated for example by the fact that if you want to operate at the highest institutional levels in global academia, you must do so in English), they nonetheless have a foundation and an orientation in native languages that in the past have been, and perhaps in the future will be, deemed adequate for expression of any philosophical idea whatsoever.The same is not true of Yanomami, Ainu, Ket, and Sámi. From the very first moment of these languages’ contact with the cosmopolitan or imperial languages of the dominant cultures that engulf or abut them (Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and Scandinavian respectively), there is an immediate and total separation between the sort of things that can and should be expressed in the indigenous language, and the sort that can and should be expressed in the cosmopolitan language. I myself have been studying Sakha, a Turkic language of Northeast Asia, for the past two years, and have occasionally written about my progress here. Before starting to learn Sakha, I had studied, with varying degrees of success: French, German, Russian, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Old Church Slavonic, and Turkish (as well as dabbling in many other languages while making no real progress). All of these languages are paradigmatically cosmopolitan (and all but one are Indo-European). Never, before beginning to study Sakha, did I have much insight into the way contingent features of the natural languages we are using condition the manner in which we enter into and seek to resolve philosophical questions.Sakha presents a complicated case, and much could be said, and disputed, as to its indigenous, non-cosmopolitan status. I would call it ‘relatively non-cosmopolitan’: if you are a native Yukaghir speaker in the Sakha Republic, you will likely have to learn both Russian and Sakha in order to make your way through the world, and in this respect from a certain linguistic starting point Sakha has the quality of a lingua franca. Unlike a paleo-Siberian isolate such as Yukaghir moreover, Sakha is a geographically remote fragment of a major world language family that also includes the lingue franche of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Turkish Republic. And it is a language that was significantly conditioned by past interactions with the Mongol Empire, and, since the 16th century, with the Russian Empire (and this latter is an empire in its Asian extension, even if few people today think to question the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Russian Federation: this is the virtue of pursuing your colonial expansion without an ocean separating the metropole from the colonies). I mean to say that there are other languages that are much more local and non-cosmopolitan than Sakha; I chose Sakha in part because the majority of the world’s languages lack resources for self-directed learning; if I wanted to learn Yukaghir, in contrast with Sakha I wouldn’t have the option of learning from news reports or ingenious music videos such as this on YouTube. But still, the relative non-cosmopolitanness of Sakha is sufficient to reveal to me an enormous epistemic inequality between the languages in which philosophy is by default conducted, on the one hand, and the great majority of the world’s languages on the other. This inequality, I believe, generates a bias so enormous that all other concerns about the lack of diversity in philosophy seem trivial by comparison. The deepest failure to incorporate diverse philosophical viewpoints is the failure to notice the existence of indigenous life-worlds, and to pay attention to what distinguishes them epistemically from the cosmopolitan ones. Let me try to work my way into why this is so important with a few examples that might appear mundane. It was recently pointed out that Timothy Williamson --whom I take, perhaps unfairly, to be an example of an Anglophone philosopher who does not even recognise that you would do well to know German and Latin, let alone Sanskrit and Chinese, let alone, in turn, Yanomami and Ainu, in order to do philosophy better-- considers the sentence ‘Vixens are female foxes’ to be a paradigmatic analytic truth. In part prompted by examples such as these, I recently wrote a short post explaining why gendered animal terms in fact require complicated knowledge of the social saliency of domestic breeding, which is something that only pertains to a limited number of animal species, and to different species in different human cultures. Given this social dimension to such terms, it is by no means a simple fact of the world outside us, I argued, that ‘vixen’ denotes the female of the various members of the Vulpes genus. So let us try to find a truly non-controversial example of a truth-claim, expressed in English, about the world. We may as well turn, as a first stab, to that old staple of analytic philosophy: The cat is on the mat. I’m not sure who first used this example, though I’m sure this would be easy to find out, but I know I saw it written on countless chalkboards throughout my time in graduate school. It is not an analytic proposition, like ‘Vixens are female foxes’, but is rather deployed in discussions of denoting: “The cat is on the mat” is a claim that seems to involve at a minimum existential commitment to a particular cat and a particular mat. But let’s leave aside though the problem of the definite articles, which not every language has (Sakha does not have them, and neither does Latin or Russian: I once saw a funny translation of Bertrand Russell’s “On Denoting” into the latter language, in which his nuanced philosophical analysis of the definite article simply left the English word ‘the’ untranslated. What other choice did the translator have?). Leaving aside the ‘the’ problem, this sentence, chosen as paradigmatic in view of its supposedly non-controversial character, in fact becomes laden with problems the further we stray from the language in which it was first deployed as an example, most likely by a monolingual Anglophone philosopher. In order for this sentence to begin to make sense, for one thing, presuming that by ‘mat’ we mean ‘doormat’ (as I’ve always understood it), we must suppose that its speaker or hearer is someone who lives in a culture whose members wear their shoes when they enter into a house, and must therefore wipe the soil off of them as they enter. But a comparative anthropological perspective reveals to us that this is in fact a very strange and deviant thing to do, not quite as rare as, say, communal defecation, but up there in the general neighbourhood. Now we might translate with the English word ‘mat’ a given word in another language for something that has the bare form of a Euro-American ‘doormat’, but we will almost certainly find that its range of functions in the culture from which the word comes would strongly compel us to simply retain the native word, if we did not wish to allow our understanding of the object in question to be distorted by all the connotations we allow to attach to the English word in question. Now it might sound like I’m being facetious with this example, but the only way I know to defend against that accusation is to double down, and to continue to draw out this paradigm sentence’s further problems. We’ve already problematised mats, so what about cats? A first thing to note is that the Sakha word for ‘cat’, куоска / kuoska, is not like the Sakha word for ‘horse’ (ат / at) (of Turkic origin), ‘dog’ (ыт / yt) (Turkic), or ‘deer’ (таба / taba) (Tungusic). Куоска is rather a Yakutized form of the Russian кошка / koshka, which is cognate to countless other Indo-European words for felines, such as chat, gato, Katze, and cat. While horses, dogs, and deer constitute central features of Sakha social reality from the very beginning of their existence as a culture, quasi-domestic felines only arrived in Northeastern Asia with the arrival of Russian colonists, and so the word for ‘cat’ marks in Sakha a moment in the history of this culture’s political subjugation. The Sakha translation of this paradigm sentence, then, is (perhaps):Куоска муоста тэлгэҕигэр баар.Kuoska muosta telgeğiger baar. Cat floor[ s] mat(on) is. Not bad, for a start. We have, here, a quasi-domestic mammalian species spatially located on top of a human-made artefact, much like what is meant by the English sentence, “The cat is on the mat.” This quasi-domestic species however is an invasive one, and goes by a foreign name; it has not traditionally been subject to spaying and neutering, and so (unlike dogs, horses, and domestic reindeer), reproduces as it pleases, and often to the detriment of human food supplies. And it is sitting on top of something, a ‘mat’ as we have attempted to render it, the name of which implies woven grass, and thus something far closer to the natural world than a ‘mat’ made out of, say, petroleum by-products. Муоста тэлгэҕигэр is a compound phrase in the possessive dative (which is how we get the cat onto it); if we change this back into a nominative possessive, we have муоста тэлгэҕэ, ‘mat of the floor’ or, as we would say in English, ‘floor’s mat’, or, more usually, ‘floor-mat’ or ‘floor mat’ or even ‘floormat’. Муоста by itself also means ‘bridge’, and in this meaning it is also a borrowing from Russian, namely the word мост. I am not sure --and my authoritative Sakha-Russian dictionary, by the great Russian linguist E K. Pekarskiï, does not say-- whether in its meaning as ‘floor’ the word муоста is a simple homonym of муоста as ‘bridge’ (like ‘bark’ and ‘bark’ in English), or whether in its meaning as ‘floor’ муоста also comes from the Russian мост. If Sakha had to borrow a word for ‘bridge’, it is possible that it also had to borrow a word for ‘floor’ in the special sense that this conveys in the broader Slavic and Indo-European world. Even something so apparently basic as a floor is not a pre-given feature of external reality; it is something that takes shape as a result of the way we live, and of the way we conceptualise our habitations and what lies beyond them. The Sakha ‘equivalent’ of “The cat is on the mat,” then, involves at least one, maybe two, entities that are imported from another linguistic reality, while a third entity, the ‘mat’ without any special reference to the floor, bears a much closer relationship to nature than the pure artefact denoted by the English ‘mat’. There is, again, no way to reproduce the occurrences of the English ‘the’, and so in the end it is only context in Sakha that will tell us whether the speaker does not in fact mean that a cat is on a mat (but, again this is a problem we also have in Russian and Latin). And there is no preposition ‘on’, either, so instead we deal with that by means of nominal case endings. And as for ‘is’ being captured by the Sakha баар (cognate with the Turkish var, which is often described as functioning more as an existential quantifier than as a verb), well, that’s another enormous question I am not even going to touch. Instead I want to dwell on the difficulties inherent in the search only for cross-linguistic equivalences in nouns. Of course, many words in many languages, even in cosmopolitan ones, have a similar legacy, and it is obviously no mark of the subaltern status of the United States relative to Italy that we refer to its form of government as ‘republican’, even though res publica may be traced back to the Italian peninsula. But in Sakha the lexical dependency on the language of a still-existing external political hegemon for any dimension of language dealing with politics, science, technology, economics, business, extraterritorial zoology and botany, global popular culture, and so on, and so on, makes the situation very different from one such as that of English, which shows the historical marks of past domination (by, e.g., Romans, and then Normans), without there being any pervasive awareness in the use of modern American English that we are relying on words derived from other empires. My point here is not a simple reheating of Sapir and Whorff. It is not, or not just, that different social realities will make different features of the world salient enough to be captured in words, and thus that one culture will have a thousand words for different qualities of snow, and so on. Sapir and Whorff (not to mention Quine) were not particularly interested in the political dimensions of untranslatability, and did not spend much time reflecting on the vast difference between the political orders served by English and Inuktitut respectively, nor on the way this service shapes the sense of what may be said in these languages. It is well known that a core feature of modern nationalisms, beginning in Europe in the 18th century and radiating out through the 19th and 20th centuries, was to raise up national languages, by means of dictionaries, academies, and the often artificial elevation of revered national poets, into the vehicles of expression of any thought a human being is capable of having, that is, into languages that may pretend to universality. Thus in the 14th century one could not describe military strategy or the immortality of the soul in Lithuanian, but by the 19th century, one could. Yet this has mostly been a failed project, as today, notice, again, that one cannot really enter the global discussion of, say, genetic engineering or the sovereign debt crisis, in Lithuanian. In the case of Sakha, there was a brief efflorescence of top-down, imported Soviet linguistic modernisation, in which attempts were made to create a Sakha-language version of the Homo sovieticus complete with daily newspapers and dull socialist-realist novels and plays. But returned mostly to the forces of global market ideology and official indifference to matters of culture, the future vitality of sub-state, nominally “autonomous” national languages such as Sakha within the former Soviet Union is very much in doubt. And Lithuanian and Sakha are doing pretty well, relatively speaking. The vast majority of languages in the world are such that their native speakers must switch to another language in order to talk about any of the things that interest the sort of people who pass through airports, have credit cards, or go to philosophy conferences. And this is the default form of linguistic competency in the world, and has been ever since ancient empires arose and put some people s cultures under the political domination of others. To have to reach outside of your native linguistic resources in order to engage with ideas that are supposed to be accessible in a linguistically neutral way is an effort that English speakers par excellence, and speakers of any cosmopolitan language to a somewhat lesser degree, do not have to make. And the lack of any need to do so makes them systematically unaware of the cost of having to do so.Language is not neutral, and “The cat is on the mat” is not a claim whose meaning is by any means obvious. This is one, and only one, of the lessons that the study of indigenous languages affords: to expose the unconsciously provincial character of philosophy done in languages that have the luxury of taking themselves for universal. I should perhaps begin with a clarificatory point about the title of this paper. I am not concerned here with Anne Conway and the Monadology, referring to a particular well-known work of 1714 by G. W. Leibniz. Nor am I concerned, exactly, with Conway s monadology. Rather, I am concerned with the position she occupies, as a transmitter and developer of the idea that unity and being are identical, that to be is to be one, and that anything that is composite must therefore be metaphysically grounded in unities.It might be somewhat non-traditional to include this final point about composition in a list of the typical aims of monadology. But monadology does not deny composite entities. Rather it explains them in terms of unity, or, to use Leibniz s well-known phrase, in terms of diversity compensated by identity. [1] There are multiple currents flowing into this idea, perhaps the most influential among them being certain interpretations of the Neoplatonic tradition. Another important current is what is often called Christianized kabbalism, and more generally the Hebraizing tendency in 17th-century philosophy, particularly in Germany. The influence of this tradition on Leibniz has been studied in detail in a series of important works by Allison Coudert, and most notably her 1995 book, Leibniz and the Kabbalah.[2] Coudert positions her own view against that of Carolyn Merchant, who in a 1979 article[3] argued that Anne Conway was the principal transmitter of the concept of monad to Leibniz, while for her part Coudert considers that the most important source of the concept, and of the ensemble of kabbalistic ideas that go along with it, was the man Matthew Arnold would immortalize as the Scholar Gipsy in an 1853 poem of that name: the alchemist, occultist, and all-around man of mystery, Francis Mercury van Helmont.The hunt for the sources of Leibniz s core ideas, and the debate over whether they can be traced to Conway or not, has somewhat overshadowed the study of the development of Conway s own thought. It would be an understatement to observe that the kabbalist background to Conway has not been given adequate attention. In fact, in some instances it has been positively suppressed. In his abridged edition of Conway s posthumously published 1690 work, the Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy,[4] for example, Jonathan Bennett simply edits out all the references to kabbalah, or at least all that he believes he can edit out without obviously distorting or destroying Conway s arguments. But this is in truth an impossible task, for the Principles, taken at face value, could rightly be described as a commentary on Christian Knorr von Rosenroth s Kabbala denudata, a massive pastiche of a work published in two separate volumes, the first in 1677 in Sulzbach, and the second in Frankfurt in 1684.[5] But if serious scholarship has preferred to ignore Knorr von Rosenroth s contributions to the history of philosophy, the principal consequence of this negligence has been to embolden unserious scholars, spirit-seers as Kant would have called them, to consider it as their own text. To this day the most common English edition of The Kabbalah Unveiled is published by the Theosophical Society in an English translation by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, the founder in 1891 of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.[6] He was preceded in his enthusiasm for Knorr von Rosenroth by the prominent 19th-century French adept of black magic, Éliphas Lévi.[7]I am not proposing to take it back today, not exactly, though I am proposing that Conway was, herself, taken in by it, like it or not, just as Lévi and the theosophists were, and through Conway some of the core features of what we know as monadology found their way to Leibniz. In this paper I would in particular like to consider why it is that Conway adopts certain views that will later be associated with Leibniz s theory of monads. I will take it for granted that this theory holds not only that being is unity, but also that there is unity in diversity. The former aspect of monadology is generally emphasized in what is anachronistically called the idealist interpretation of Leibniz, while the latter aspect has pride of place in realist renderings of his philosophy. To say that Leibniz is a realist in this sense is to say that he is committed to a metaphysics of corporeal substance . I have said as much in several other places, and have also provided arguments in those places that I will not repeat here.[8] What I will argue here is that, while the doctrine of the equivalence of being and unity has a plainly Platonic-Pythagorean pedigree, the theory of corporeal substance --which is again, not an alternative to the monadology, but rather a dimension of it-- may be traced in large part to authors associated with both Jewish and Christian kabbalism. It is this dimension of monadology that seems more plainly present in Conway, who may in turn have served as one of the sources for Leibniz s mature model of corporeal substance.But what, to begin, is kabbalah? The short answer to this difficult question is that it is the tradition based on a supposed esoteric revelation that accompanied the exoteric revelation given by God to Moses.[9] The tradition has its roots as early as late antiquity, with the Sefir Yezirah or Book of Formation written sometime between the third and the sixth centuries. The Zohar or Book of Splendor would be composed in the 13th century, but would be commonly attributed to ancient authors. Kabbalism as a tradition entered its modern phase in the 16th century, with the work of Isaac Luria, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Jerusalem in 1534. The Lurianic Kabbalah, principally an interpretation of the Zohar, offered a philosophical, if cryptic, account of the creation of the world, of the personae of God, of the nature of man, of the reincarnation and immortality of the soul, among other, often heretical doctrines. It was via Luria that kabbalah made its entry into Christian thought in the following century. Luria incorporated elements of Gnosticism, particularly the view that each soul is a sort of spark or flame and that its embodiment is the result of imprisonment or exile. He was also, as Coudert emphasises, what might be called an animist . There was nothing dead and devoid of soul in the Lurianic universe, she explains, Souls were in everything, including stones. [10]The Christian appropriation of kabbalah has a history as intricate and multifaceted as kabbalah s Jewish origins. In part it resulted from a rise in millenarianism in both Judaism and Christianity in the century that saw tremendous sectarian violence in Western Europe as well as a shifting role, in Southeastern Europe and in the Levant, for Ottoman power. Thus the self-proclaimed messiah from Smyrna, Sabbatai Zevi both learned kabbalah from Lurianic sources, and took an interest in radical Protestant millenarian movements as far away as England.[11] And in fact this hybridism worked in both directions, with radical Protestant sects, most notably the Quakers (soon to be joined by both Conway and van Helmont) seeing Hebrew learning and Jewish theology as properly among the core concerns of a new, distinctly modern and consciously philosophical articulation of Christian faith.[12] Kabbalism was but one element of a broader Hebraizing tendency in 17th-century erudite circles, which variously saw Hebrew as the ideal language in its proximity to the original Adamic one (now lost), or saw it as the basis of an emerging discipline of Orientalist philology that would ground scriptural study in rigorous historical fact.Christian Hebraizers were not necessarily philo-Semites. Many took a broadly typological approach to Jewish textual traditions, interpreting events of the Hebrew Bible as prefigurations of the Gospels. The prophetic powers of Old Testament personages also offered a way of incorporating pagan philosophers into the widened circle of Christianity. Thus in his Conjectura cabbalistica of 1653 Henry More declares that it is generally acknowledged by Christians, that [Pythagoras and Plato] both had their philosophy from Moses.[13] More is fairly uninterested in Hebrew learning; he wrote his Cabbala precisely as a conjecture, and seems to have done so mostly under pressure from Conway. For him kabbalah is nothing other than an interpretation given to the first chapters of Genesis . More thus has his own kabbalah simply as a result of the application of his hermeneutic abilities to the text, but this is acknowledged to be something different from the Jewish Cabbala , which is conceived to be a Traditional Doctrine or Exposition of the Pentateuch which Moses received from the mouth of God. It may in part have been More s casual kabbalism that drove his closest intellectual peer, Anne Conway, to seek a deeper knowledge of it through a deepened association with van Helmont the younger, who would be invited to live in her home at Ragley Hall from 1671 until her death in 1679.[14] In a 1667 text entitled Short Sketch of the True Natural Alphabet of the Sacred Language,[15] the Flemish author acknowledges Henry More s philosophical and moral Cabbala based on an interpretation of the first three books of Moses. One could stop with such an approach, he observes, if the entire nature of all things did not at once signal to me and desire of for me her own sake to make it known that no other language in the world agrees with it so exactly as this one [biblical Hebrew]. Nothing shows this better, van Helmont adds, than the example of our first father Adam, in giving the names to all the animals. [16]More s interest in kabbalah is eclectic and fleeting, a bit sloppy, while van Helmont s is that of a passionate adept. Leibniz for his part would later synthesise the two of these, by bringing to bear the same rigorous eclecticism we are familiar with from so many of his areas of interest. Leibniz meets van Helmont for the first time in 1671, who in turn introduces him to Knorr von Rosenroth. A quarter century later and many years after Conway s death, Leibniz will spend significant time with van Helmont, in March and April, 1696, when the latter visits Hanover and discusses philosophy with Leibniz and the Electress every morning at nine o clock. [17] On Coudert s view, van Helmont had come to Hanover enthused by an idea he was calling by the name of monads , which were something like the primordial seeds of things. But, she claims, Helmont s monadology remained little more than a metaphysical poem and it was Leibnitz s ambition to solve its many inherent contradictions. [18]The general perception among Leibniz scholars has been that the philosopher took over the concept of monad --perhaps from a reading of Conway s work, perhaps from conversation with van Helmont-- without much regard for the more obscure or mystical dimensions of the cocncept s origins. Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil expresses this view clearly when he writes that kabbalah was only an object of curiosity for [Leibniz], like many other imaginary curiosities of his time or of past centuries... This energetic thinker reduced all these doctrines to his own system, he only took what agreed with his own thought. [19] Coudert, as we have seen, argues that the influence of kabbalah on Leibniz is in fact significant, coming principally from his consultations with van Helmont at Hanover. Merchant, by contrast, sees van Helmont s friend and patroness, Lady Anne Conway, as the real source of inspiration... [S]he argues that Leibniz derived the term monad not from van Helmont but from reading Anne Conway s one published book, The Principles. [20] The excluded possibility that Coudert does not seem to recognise here is that she and Merchant may both be partially correct: Leibniz may have been influenced by kabbalah, but may have got all he needed of it from Conway s book. After all, again, the Principles, unabridged, might well be described as a commentary on Knorr von Rosenroth s Kabbala denudata.Leibniz describes both Conway and van Helmont in a telling fashion in the New Essays concerning Human Understanding of 1704. He is not speaking explicitly of kabbalah, but rather of the doctrine of pananimism, which he supports but would like to see transformed into a rational and rigorous doctrine, and which, as we have seen and will see again, has at least partially a kabbalist pedigree. It is necessary, Leibniz writes, to explain rationally those who have lodged life and perception in all things, as Cardan, Campanella, and better than they, the late Countess of Connaway, a Platonist, and our friend, the late Francis Mercury van Helmont (although elsewhere bristling with unintelligible paradoxes), with his friend the late Mr. Henry More. [21] Thus Conway gets pride of place among Leibniz s contemporaries as a defender of the pananimist doctrine; van Helmont deserves mention too, but also a slight reproach; Henry More, meanwhile, tags along. Elsewhere, in a letter to Thomas Burnett of 1697, Leibniz miantains that his own philosophical views approach somewhat closely those of the late Countess of Conway, in view of the fact that they hold a middle position between Plato and Democritus, because I hold that all things take place mechanically as Democritus and Descartes contend against the views of Henry More and his followers, and hold too, nevertheless, that everything takes place according to a living principle and according to final causes-- all things are full of life and consciousness, contrary to the views of the Atomists. [22] Leibniz does not explicitly address kabbalah in either of these passages. But could his invocation of the view that there is life and perception in all things itself be an implicit acknowledgement of a broad debt to dimensions of kabbalistic thought as propounded by Conway?The Kabbala denudata is referenced in seven of the nine chapters of Conway s treatise. It is cited as the authoritative source for the first sentence of the first chapter, that God is a spirit, Light, and Life, infinitely Wise, Good, Just, Mighty, Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent, Creator and Maker of all things, visible and invisible. [23] After this opening claim, Conway s reliance on Knorr von Rosenroth, as the principal source of authority for her own claims, does not let up. One thing worth noting here is that Conway did not need to cite a kabbalist source for a very general claim such as this one, which is something we might just as easily find in the Divine Names tradition, or in any number of other Christian authors. This gratuitous invocation of the Kabbala denudata strongly suggests that Conway s straightforward purpose in the Principles is to signal her affiliation with Christian kabbalism, not as an eclectic borrower from this tradition among others (as, say, Leibniz would be), but as a partisan.Many other of Conway s references to the Kabbala denudata in fact concern features of that work that are distinct and specific to kabbalistic thought. These are often flagged by a contrast between what is generally held, and what the Hebrews by contrast think, usually with at least an implicit affirmation of the latter. Thus in the Eighth Annotation to Chapter 1 she introduces the special Hebrew understanding of person , which she holds does not mean a singular Suppositum, but a Conception only, or kind of Representation, or Method of Consideration. [24] This philosophical understanding of person reflects the broad view, whose genealogy Carlos Fraenkel has recently traced from the time of the Church Fathers through Spinoza, that Jesus Christ may be thought of as a person without necessarily being a human person, and may be assimilated to the all-pervading logos or reason of the perceptible world.[25] Conway for her part adopts the Christianized kabbalist view that the Adam Kadmon or primordial man of the Hebrews is identical to Christ. This Son of God, she writes in Chapter 2,“the First Begotten of all Creatures, to wit, this Heavenly Adam, and Great Priest, as the Jewish Doctors call him, is properly a Medium between God and the Creatures. And that there is such a Middle Being, is as demonstrable as that there is a God; where is meant such a Being, which in its own Nature is indeed less than God, and yet greater and more excellent than all other Creatures; whence also for his Excellency he is properly called the Son of God. ... [T]his Son of God... is called by the Jews, Adam Kadmon.”[26]It is this rationalisation of Christ, and the supposed basis of this move in Jewish tradition, that undergirds Conway s commitment to toleration, her view that Jews and Turks have access to the same divine truths as do Christians, even if it is Christianity that gives these truths their clearest articulation.It would not be mistaken to discern here a common spirit with Leibniz, who seems to have believed that there are no real disagreements, but only different manners of formulating commitment to the same truths: resolution of conflicts is really only ever disambiguation of terms. Yet it would be difficult to account in this way for the difference between Leibniz and Conway in their respective accounts of the concept of monad. Conway mentions monads only once in her treatise, and, when she does, what she has in mind are Physical Monades , which is to say what results from the physical division of things into their least parts.[27] Yet nothing can be more certain than that, for Leibniz, there are no least parts of things. There are only primordial elements from which things result, not in the way that houses result from bricks, but somewhat more in the way that illumination results from a flame. This difference speaks strongly in favor of Coudert s view, then, against Merchant, that Leibniz does not borrow the term directly from Conway, but presumably instead from his 9:00 AM philosophical dialogues with van Helmont at Hanover. If Leibniz had first encountered the term monad in Conway s rendering of it, he would have rejected it outright.Yet, again, we might do better to look for the roots of Conway s monadology not in her use of the term monad , but rather in that other dimension of the theory as we have come to know it in Leibniz s philosophy: the manner in which unity grounds diversity. In Chapter 7 of the Principles Conway writes that the Body, sc. of a Man or Beast, is nothing else but an innumerable multitude of Bodies, compacted together in to one, and disposed into a certain order. This composite nature of the body is in turn reflected at the level of spirit: “the Spirit of a Man, or Beast,” she writes, “is a certain innumerable multitude of Spirits united together in the said Body, which have their Order and Government so, that there is one Captain, or Chief Governor, another a Lieutenant, and another hath a certain kind of Government under him, and so through the whole, as it is wont to be in an Army of Soldiers.”The figure of the army (or, alternatively, the flock) is of course Leibniz s preferred metaphor for describing the true nature of the animal body. But Conway supplements this fairly obvious comparison by a significant biblical reference, in this case to the New Testament: a man or beast is multiple, just as the Devil which possessed the Man was called Legion, because there were many of them; so that every Man; yea, every Creature, consists of many Spirits and Bodies. This is a reference to Christ s exorcism of the demons, most familiar from Mark 5:1-13, where he sends them out of the body of a Gerasene man and into a flock of pigs, which then rush away, jump in a lake, and drown.Much could be said about the demonological and anthropological significance of the composite devil s response to Christ s question, Who are you? To reply, Legion, for we are many, is at once to play with grammar, to move jauntily from the first-person singular to the plural, and is also, perhaps, to suggest that in ancient Near Eastern cultures the internal experience of multiplicity was seen as pathological and experienced as a form of demonic possession. But it was also a way of expressing the demon s (or demons ) power: Legio was a common term for a Roman military formation. One way of understanding the metaphysics of composite substance, as eventually adopted by Leibniz, is that being legion is simply the normal condition of beings, and that it is in virtue of this condition that beings derive their active power. Conway, as is her habit, supplements the reference to the Gospels with mention of a term used by the Hebrews , namely, Nizzuzoth, or Sparks . Just as the legion of beings constituting a composite may be thought of as soldiers in an army, they may also be thought of as a multitude of sparks all scintillating out of a common flame. Here Conway cites a component treatise of the Kabbala denudata entitled Tractatus de revolutionibus animarum [ Treatise on the Revolutions of Souls ], attributed by Knorr von Rosenroth to Jitzchak Lorjensis Germanus , i.e., Isaac Luria, but in fact written by the Syrian kabbalist Hayyim ben Joseph Vital (1542-1620). The author begins by describing the fates of various soul sparks as a result of different sorts of transgression. If indeed [the spark] revolves on account of some crime and misdeed, he writes,“then it is necessary that it should revolve with a certain other concurrent spark and that it should be restituted by that spark. If indeed the first spark has sinned in doing those things on account of which bodies are wasted and pass away in death, so that no resurrection comes to pass out of death, then this spark, seeing that its body has perished, revolves on its own in a certain second body, which rises again in the resurrection of the dead with all the parts of the spark of the first body: indeed the first body perishes.”Next the author goes on to explain that sparks that are in some sort of active relation with one another must arise from a common root [radix]:“As moreover was explained above, many souls cannot revolve in one body unless they are from a single root. Now indeed you should know that although all the sparks from this root are able to revolve as one, nevertheless this revolution does not happen at once, but rather the nearer and more similar sparks come together with one another by turns... In the species moreover, if this perfect spark is within, it can arise that in it revolve the souls of its root: and according to the proportion of its perfection... There are moreover some sparks that are very close to the human, others that are more remote from it; others surround it from far off; and others surround the human more closely and clothe it. And all these things occur according to the works of this human.”[28]A human being is clothed by scintillating souls, and these are both the reflection of that human being s action and the phenomenal manifestation of his or her body. This, again, is the passage of the Kabbala denudata that Conway finds most useful in elucidating her own conception of the nature of composite substance.Without wishing to hand out laurels or withhold them, it seems that while Conway and Leibniz both find inspiration in the image of nodes of spiritual activity coming together to form a single being, the English philosopher did little to remove this image from the realm of metaphor, while the German made it the central task of his philosophical project to systematically spell out how it is that composite substances are grounded in simple ones, in nodes of perception: which is to say in monads. Conway draws on kabbalism to imagine multiple souls as coming together in one, but she does little more to ground this view than to make observations on entities and processes given in sensory experience that seem to provide a model for how the metaphysics of composition might work: fire, water, alcohol, and so on. Nor does she see such composition, like Leibniz soon will, as grounded in monads, since what she thinks of as monads are not really monadic at all: they are, to use Leibniz s distinction, not really the atoms of substance or metaphysical atoms, but only the least parts of matter, and thus physical atoms in the traditional sense.The composition of unified composite beings from subordinate individuals beings was at the center of a number of philosophical discussions in the 17th century. It shows up in political philosophy, for example, in the frontispiece to Hobbes s Leviathan. We see it imagined in the proto-science fiction of the era, as in Cyrano de Bergerac s vision of a composite creature that lives on the surface of the sun, coming together from the swarming of countless small birds, in his Les états et empires du Soleil of 1665. In debates about the metaphysics of individual substances, rather than of states or of fantastical creatures, there was considerable resistance to the possibility of several beings yielding up a single one. Thus in his True Intellectual System of the Universe of 1678, Ralph Cudworth complains that “to make every man and animal to be a multitude or commonwealth of percipients, and persons, as it were, clubbing together, is a thing so absurd and ridiculous, that one would wonder the hylozoists should not rather choose to recant that their fundamental error of the life of matter, than endeavour to seek shelter and sanctuary for the same, under such a pretence.”[29]The intense disdain Cudworth expresses here testifies to the endurance of a much stronger default theory throughout the history of philosophy, associated perhaps most commonly, rightly or wrongly, with Aristotle, according to which one body should normally be expected to host no more than one substance. This might be a deep-seated folk-belief in Western thought, which would explain for example why colony organisms such as siphonophores are so commonly perceived even today to violate some unspoken rule of how nature is supposed to work.In the 17th century the alternative view seems to have run as a sort of undercurrent, charged with some degree of danger and associated most closely with the tradition of chemical philosophy, as well as with mystical movements such as kabbalah. Paracelsus imagined that every organ has its own subordinate soul: the heart its cardianax, the stomach its gastrianax, and so on.[30] As William R. Newman has shown, a subterranean tradition of pluralism existed alongside classical unitism , extending back to Arabic chemical sources, which appealed to subordinate and dominant forms as a way of accounting for the possibility of chemical processes such as the solution and reextraction of silver.[31] In these and sundry other cases, things aren t, or aren t only,what they appear to be: they contain multitudes, to speak with the self-contradicting poet, and both are and are not what they are.In this paper I have attempted to isolate and focus on a particular chapter in the long history of thinking about nested individuals that extends, so to speak, from the Gospel of Mark to Walt Whitman. In the Bible this condition is represented as the very paradigm of abnormality: demonic possession; in the poet, it is our shared and universal condition. Conway and Leibniz stand at a pivotal moment in this history. Conway, emboldened by her reading of Christianized kabbalistic texts, embraced this pluralism and in so doing rejected a core commitment of mainstream philosophy. Leibniz, in turn, embraced the same view, and applied his rigor as best he could to make it mainstream. We still find siphonophores strange, but in the end we know there is no more well-founded metaphysical model of substance to tell us why such creatures should not exist. Natural beings, as a rule, contain multitudes. The recognition of this basic fact about the world is something that Conway helped to open up, mediating between the allusive mysticism of the kabbalah and the more systematic philosophical model of composite substance developed by Leibniz. It is here, in the study of the diversity within unity, that Leibniz s debt to Conway may be the greatest, rather than in his reception of the idea of the bare monad as an absolutely simple node of perception. This is a conception of the monad Conway did not have, and so could not share. Works citedStuart Brown, Leibniz and More s Cabbalistic Circle, in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687), 77-96.Anne Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, Amsterdam and London: M. Brown, 1692 [1690].Allison Coudert, A Quaker-Kabbalist Controversy: George Fox s Reaction to Francis Mercury Van Helmont, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976): 171-189.Allison Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1985.Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the 17th Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999.Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil, Leibniz, la philosophie juive et la Cabale. Trois lectures à l Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Paris: Auguste Durand, 1861.Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.Alan Gabbey, Anne Conway et Henry More, Archives de Philosophie 40 (1977): 379-404.M. B. V. Hellmont [Francis Mercury van Helmont], Kurtzer Entwurff des eigentlichen Natur-Alphabets der heiligen Sprache: Nach dessen Anleitung man auch Taubgebohrne verstehend und redend machen kan, Sulzbach: Abraham Lichtenthaler, 1667.Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution, New York: Penguin Books, 1991.Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687): Tercentenary Studies, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990.Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, seu Doctrina hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque theologica, Sulzbach and Frankfurt: J. D. Zunneri, vol. 1, 1677; vol. 2, 1684.Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata: The Kaballah Unveiled, S. L. MacGregor Mathers (ed. and tr.), New York: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1912.G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1849-60.G. W. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (later Berlin-Brandenburger Akademie der Wissenschaften): Berlin, 1923--.Éliphas Lévi, Le livre des splendeurs contenant le soleil judaïque, la gloire chrétienne et l étoile flamboyante, Paris: Chamuel, 1894.Carolyn Merchant, The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz s Concept of the Monad, Journal of the History of Philosophy 17, 3 (July, 1979): 255-269.Henry More, Conjectura cabbalistica, Or, A Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the Mind of Moses, According to a Threefold Cabbala: Viz. Literal, Philosophical, Mysitical, or, Divinely Moral, J. Flesher: Cambridge, 1653.William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.Richard H. Popkin, Three English Tellings of the Sabbatai Zevi Story, Jewish History 8 (1994): 43-54.Richard H. Popkin, The Spiritualistic Cosmologies of Henry More and Anne Conway, in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687), 97-114.Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, tr. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, Meridian, 1978.Justin E. H. Smith, Spirit Is a Stomach : The Iatrochemical Roots of Leibniz s Theory of Corporeal Substance, in Gideon Manning (ed.), Matter and Form in Early Modern Science and Philosophy, Brill, 2012, 203-224.Justin E. H. Smith Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.--[1] G. W. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (later Berlin-Brandenburger Akademie der Wissenschaften): Berlin, 1923--, Reihe 6, Band 2, 283.[2] Allison Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995. See also Allison Coudert, A Quaker-Kabbalist Controversy: George Fox s Reaction to Francis Mercury Van Helmont, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976): 171-189; Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the 17th Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999.[3] See Carolyn Merchant, The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz s Concept of the Monad, Journal of the History of Philosophy 17, 3 (July, 1979): 255-269.[4] Anne Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, Amsterdam and London: M. Brown, 1692 [1690].[5] Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, seu Doctrina hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque theologica, Sulzbach and Frankfurt: J. D. Zunneri, vol. 1, 1677; vol. 2, 1684.[6] Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata: The Kaballah Unveiled, S. L. MacGregor Mathers (ed. and tr.), New York: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1912.[7] Éliphas Lévi, Le livre des splendeurs contenant le soleil judaïque, la gloire chrétienne et l étoile flamboyante, Paris: Chamuel, 1894.[8] See in particular Justin E. H. Smith Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.[9] See in particular Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, Meridian, 1978.[10] Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah.[11] See Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, tr. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973; Richard H. Popkin, Three English Tellings of the Sabbatai Zevi Story, Jewish History 8 (1994): 43-54.[12] See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution, New York: Penguin Books, 1991.[13] Henry More, Conjectura cabbalistica, Or, A Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the Mind of Moses, According to a Threefold Cabbala: Viz. Literal, Philosophical, Mystical, or, Divinely Moral, J. Flesher: Cambridge, 1653, Preface, no page numbers. See also Stuart Brown, Leibniz and More s Cabbalistic Circle, in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687), 77-96; Alan Gabbey, Anne Conway et Henry More, Archives de Philosophie 40 (1977): 379-404; Richard H. Popkin, The Spiritualistic Cosmologies of Henry More and Anne Conway, in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687), 97-114.[14] See Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.[15] F. M. B. V. Hellmont [Francis Mercury van Helmont], Kurtzer Entwurff des eigentlichen Natur-Alphabets der heiligen Sprache: Nach dessen Anleitung man auch Taubgebohrne verstehend und redend machen kan, Sulzbach: Abraham Lichtenthaler, 1667.[16] Hellmont, Kurtzer Entwurff, no page numbers.[17] Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, 38, 80.[18] Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, ..[19] Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil, Leibniz, la philosophie juive et la Cabale. Trois lectures à l Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Paris: Auguste Durand, 1861.[20] Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, ...[21] Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l entendement humain, ...[22] G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1849-60, vol. 3, 217.[23] Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae, ch. 2, 6-7.[24] Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae, ch. 23.[25] See Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.[26] Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata I, 1: 28, 30; 2: 33, 37; 3: 31-64, 37-38; Kabbala denudata II, 2: 244.[27] Conway, Principles, Chapter 3, 9; Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata I, 2, 310.[28] Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, Tractatus de revolutionibus animarum, §§ 19-24, pgs. 267-68. [29] Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, London: Thomas Tegg, 1845 [1678], vol. 3, 406.[30] See Justin E. H. Smith, Spirit Is a Stomach : The Iatrochemical Roots of Leibniz s Theory of Corporeal Substance, in Gideon Manning (ed.), Matter and Form in Early Modern Science and Philosophy, Brill, 2012, 203-224.[31] William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Last summer I posted here my English translation of the first half of L. N. Kharitonov s Russian-language Sakha textbook, the Самоучитель якутского языка (Third Edition, 1969). I have finally completed the translation of the second half (Lessons 41-80), and so am posting here a single pdf file of the entire thing. I am also posting, in a separate pdf file, the solutions for all of the exercises in the textbook. Finally, I am posting a third file, a significantly expanded Sakha-English dictionary, based on the vocabulary in Kharitonov s book, but also including many other helpful words compiled from other sources. 1. L. N. Kharitonov, A Self-Study Manual of the Yakut Language, Parts I and II (translated from Russian).2. Solutions to all exercises in the manual.3. A Sakha-English DictionaryAs I continued in my work through Kharitonov s texts and exercises, I became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of his approach (though for better or worse it is still almost certainly the best that exists, in a very small field of competitors). For one thing, Kharitonov is the very model of the Homo sovieticus, and the range of topics he covers is not at all adequate for dealing with texts and themes either from the 21st-century realities of the Sakha Republic, or from the profound and complex Sakha oral-literary tradition that precedes the Soviet period by several centuries (even if it only began to be written down toward the end of the 19th century). There is no introduction to traditional Sakha beliefs, no Ysyakh festival, there are no representations of the cosmos or nature, nor of the interiority of human life. There is just work on the sovkhoz, and more work, and occasionally a hunting trip or a planning meeting of the regional Soviet. The volume is also frustratingly and strangely quick with certain rather difficult grammatical features of the language, while belabouring other features that seem, at least to me, obvious and easy to master. For example, so-called service verbs are only introduced in Lesson 79, i.e., the penultimate lesson of the whole book. Having gone on to work with more advanced sources, I have learned that service verbs are not some rare frill in the language: they occur in nearly every sentence of standard Sakha-language texts, such as you will find in a daily newspaper or a folk tale or a school-child s composition exercise. Yet they are not to be found until the tail-end of Kharitonov s work. He also gives very few comprehensive tables of grammatical forms; for example, nowhere in the work is there an exhaustive listing of all the different case-endings a noun can take in the possessive form. In noting these shortcomings I in no way mean to disparage Kharitonov s work, which, again, is unsurpassed in the field of Sakha didactics. It is just that when learning a relatively non-cosmopolitan language such as Sakha (and this would be all the more the case if one were learning, say, Ket or Yukaghir), one must scrape together whatever resources one can find, and treat all of them as a sort of composite textbook. One must of course also seek out native speakers and learn directly from the source.I have made a table of nominal case-endings in the possessive form, using the model noun ат (horse), which fills at least one of the gaps in Kharitonov s work:Possessive declension: singularIn the coming months I hope to come up with more such tables and schematic learning aides for Sakha, as well as expanding the English-Sakha dictionary I ve started, a version of which I ve posted above. One immediate query I have for other linguists concerns my identification of the туттуу case as “instrumental”. Russian-language sources, and not only Kharitonov, identify this case not as the творительный падеж, but rather as the орудный падеж. Its functions, however, seem to overlap fairly well with the Russian instrumental. For what it s worth, the only other languages I have been able to find which Russian-language sources identify as having an орудный падеж are Japanese and Buryat. There are two very different essays I’ve been meaning to write, both of which equally merit the title of the present one.The one would address the special meaning of ‘existence’ as distinct from ‘being’ in the Heideggerian tradition, and would ask whether that special meaning applies to trees. Heidegger had dismissed even animals as merely being rather than existing, to the extent that they are ‘poor-in-world’ and therefore do not have that special and rare power human beings supposedly have of standing outside of being, ex-isting as Heidegger the etymologist emphasises, and beholding being rather than simply being whisked along by it as everything else is. A fortiori, it is usually assumed, the world of plants must be even poorer, and thus trees are taken as exemplary instances of being without existing.Looking at the hanging branches of Louisiana oaks though, as I am at present, reaching down to the bayou in search of something they want, I wonder if this is true, and it seems to me, at least fleetingly, that I can imagine what it is like to be a tree, that there is something it is like, and that it is weltreich indeed. If it is difficult to grasp this, this may only be because we are limited in our sympathy by the radical difference of time scale that separates their experience from ours. I am fairly certain that if this difference were removed, we would see that trees too have projects, and experience feelings of accomplishment, defeat, joy, pensiveness, and wistfulness.But that s not what I m writing about here. The other essay that may be called, “Do Trees Exist?”, i.e., the present one, concerns not phenomenology, but taxonomy, and the inexhaustible debate in the philosophy of science about social construction. It is my opening contention that trees exist somewhat in the way, say, long-legged animals do. That is, there are such beasts, but together they do not constitute a natural kind. There is no taxon, based on any meaningful criteria, that would group together giraffes and Japanese spider crabs, but not giraffes and hyraxes. There is moreover no way of fixing a meaning of “long” that is not based on pure convention.A tree is a perennial plant, as are many bushes, shrubs, subshrubs, lianas, and so on. Its specific differentium is supposed to be its trunk. But what is a trunk? Well, it’s a long stem. And what is it that all long-stemmed perennial plants have in common, other than the length of their stem, that separates them from non-long-stemmed plants? And, again, what counts as long? The answers are, respectively: “Nothing”; and, “No one knows”. Fig. 1. Encephalartos feroxPhylogenetically, a pine tree is far closer to a cycad (see fig. 1), than it is to a pin oak (see fig. 2). Both of the former are gymnosperms, a relatively more ancient sort of plant that offers its seeds up to the wind through a loose and exposed structure such as a cone. Oaks are angiosperms, whose seed is enclosed in a fruiting structure, and usually requires the activity of animals to be broken out and transferred to the soil where it might grow to adulthood. This is a difference in the basic mechanics of reproduction that is at least as great as that between egg-laying and live birth in animals, and it is not surprising that there should be such a difference, given that gymnosperms evolved and colonised much of the earth s terrestrial surface around 280 million years ago in the Permian era, while angiosperms did not appear until the Cretaceous, roughly 140 million years later.Angiosperm reproduction is highly specialised, and, if you pause to think about it, no less strange than the multi-species reproductive strategies we observe in the animal kingdom, for example when female Sacculina barnacles insert themselves during the larval stage in the bodies of adult green crabs, and use their hosts to attract male mates. Flowering plants required, in order to evolve, pre-existing animals --insects, mostly-- that would be attracted to the sight and smell of them; flowers and fruits are an adaptation that makes no functional sense considered in isolation. Insects existed for hundreds of millions of years before plants came up with this way to take advantage of them. Indeed flowering plants are so young in evolutionary time that there was even a period, not so long ago, when not just insects, but mammals as well already existed, while flowers did not.Gymnosperms are in this sense the surviving prehistoric cousins of the new, young, and dynamic species that have colonised much of the world since the Cretaceous, and must appear to an apple or cherry tree in magnificent bloom something like a primitive coelacanth appears to us. Neither in their evolutionary histories nor in their perceptible adaptive functions are the pine and the oak more like each other than are the pine and the cycad. But the bare morphology of the pine and the oak --the fact that they both have trunks-- overwhelms any other consideration and forces the folk-category of tree before our minds, blocking from view the stout and ground-hugging cycad. Fig. 2. Quercus palustrisAll this should matter for anyone concerned with the way folk-taxonomy and science match up. It is noteworthy that such a solid member of our folk-taxonomy as the tree —that is, a kind that is commonly and reflexively adduced whenever we wish to enumerate a short list of examples of the various things there are in the world— should so obviously turn out to have no secure place in any viable scientific taxonomy. We are, it seems, compelled to speak of a broad spectrum of plant species as if they formed a real kind, in view of our natural attunement to morphology and habitat. But we have long been insistent, to the point of superciliousness, on the irrelevance of morphology and habitat for the classification of many other biological kinds: observe for example the strong reactions you’ll get if you claim today that whales are fish, and note that it is no help at all, in making the case for this claim, to point out that whales and fish have the same general body type and live in the same environment. Why is there no parallel pressure to adhere to standards of botanical correctness? It seems that trunks are just too much a part of our social reality to treat the life forms that have them otherwise than as belonging to a real class of beings. Morphology is trumped by phylogenetics in the history of marine mammals, so that ‘cetacean fish’ is now a contradiction, while a phylogenetic argument against the existence of trees appears, for now, as unnecessary trouble-making. We take the possession of a trunk to be not just the certain marker of membership in an ontologically secure kind, “tree”, but also to be the certain marker of individuality. Yet a bit of digging often reveals that every trunk in an entire grove, such as the colony of quaking aspen known as “Pando”, is genetically identical to every other, and connected to every other by an underground network of roots. Even when they are not connected, genetic identity among trees is common. Every weeping blue Atlas cedar (Fig. 3) in Europe descends from a specimen at the Vallée-aux-Loups arboretum just south of Paris; or, to put this another way, there is a weeping blue Atlas cedar south of Paris, parts of which have now spread throughout Europe. Fig. 3. Cedrus atlanticaAt the outer limits of the folk-taxon in question (“tree”), we find far more problem cases than we do when asked to close our eyes and “think of a tree”. Our imagination pulls up a paradigm instance, a species with a large, solid, and singular shaft rising like a pole: a proud sequoia or spruce (though I suppose that adjective starts to bring us back to the other essay, the one I didn’t write). But nature also gives us the Quercus virginianus or Southern live oak, whose trunk often, though not always begins to branch in several directions often as soon as it emerges from the ground, some growing out diagonally, some curving back down towards a body of water, and some jutting out perfectly parallel to the earth. If it were smaller, the live oak would plainly be counted a shrub. This is very different from the Quercus ilex of the Mediterranean, with its much more paradigmatic and simple trunk structure, even though, obviously, any two Quercus species are phylogenetically much closer to one another than, say, the Quercus virginianus is to a rhododendron. Quercus is among the genera notable for the frequent appearance of “knees” or pneumatophores, roots that grow up out of the ground, often forming colonies of lumps that, if one did not investigate, might easily be taken to be independent of the larger trunk standing somewhere in their vicinity. As their scientific name and their exposure to the atmosphere indicate, their function is breathing, or something akin to that (Figs. 4 and 5).Fig. 4. Quercus virginianus Fig. 5. Quercus virginianus (pneumatophores)Early modern aesthetics, as, notably, the work of Shaftesbury, was preoccupied with such things as the unfathomable complexity of a bed of moss. This preoccupation is expressed systematically in Leibniz s analysis of organic bodies as having structure within structure in infinitum, and endures even in Kant s treatment in the 1790 Critique of the Faculty of Judgment of those features of organised beings (the example he chooses in his discussion is, interestingly, a tree) that distinguish them from artefacts and aggregates. Yet in European romantic landscape painting in the following century, the dynamic sublime --the apprehension of the power of nature as manifested by precipices, the ocean, skies black with clouds, and so on--, as depicted most famously in the work of Caspar David Friedrich, would take precedence over an earlier preoccupation with instances of the mathematical sublime, where imagination strains to take in what reason tells us must advance to infinity and must therefore surpass it.At the same moment in history, forestry was emerging as a rigorous science that involved, among other things, censusing the trees in a given region of Europe as if they were its citizens, treating trees, politically and administratively, as paradigmatic individuals (see, on the history of forestry and its place in the emergence of the modern administrative state, James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1999). Yet when we turn to the colonial experience, we see that the dynamic sublime is still very much at the centre of painterly preoccupations, and that, while colonial administrators were trying hard to impose order on new landscapes for which Europeans often lacked an adequate vocabulary, artists were undermining this project simply by rendering in honest strokes what they perceived. Thus in Henry Chapman Ford s “Water Lilies and Spanish Moss” (Fig. 6) of 1874, an oil painting capturing a typical scene of the Louisiana bayou, we discern a world that manifestly refuses to let us tally up the number of individual vegetal beings within it:Fig. 6. Henry Chapman Ford, “Water Lilies and Spanish Moss” (1874)It is not just the ubiquitous Spanish moss that makes the counting task impossible, but also the features of the oaks themselves that the moss enshrouds. Thus in a detail from the lower right corner, we see Ford s careful attention to the colony of “knees” next to an oak:Fig. 7. “Water Lilies and Spanish Moss” (detail)Ford seems to have understood that the pneumatophores are at least as worthy of representation, and of an attempt at tallying, as the trunks of the oaks of which they form a vital part. It is difficult indeed to observe the totality of strange excrescences and protrusions that the bayou yields up, and to continue to believe that any segment of it is more worthy of representation than any other.In the 19th century European critics sometimes said of American landscape painters depictions of the bayou that these should not count as landscape painting at all, since it is the very essence of the bayou to evade easy determination of where the land leaves off and the water begins. Government surveyors were hard at work trying to create passably accurate maps of the region, delineating the boundaries of land and water, while in parallel painters, some of whom were also employed by the government as surveyors, consistently undermined this effort simply by showing the world as they observed it. In this respect some American landscape painting, depending on the landscape in question, represents an alternative trajectory that had been abandoned in the singular focus of the European romantic painters on the dynamic sublime. The fact that we commonly take, as handy go-to examples of what there is, entities that are so easily shown by science to be “more complicated than that”, and the fact that we take to be countable entities par excellence the very same entities that a certain tradition of aesthetic reflection takes to be most resistant to our will to tally things up, should tell us something about how both folk-categories and scientific categories work. There are no such things as trees, yet many political, industrial, colonial, and other social considerations compel us to speak and act as though there are. Many other considerations, notably of aesthetic reflection and artistic creation, compel us to acknowledge that there are not. John Stuart Mill did as good a job as any ever could when he proposed that a natural kind is one in which we discover ever new properties beyond the initial property that motivated us to group a cluster of things together under a single name. By this reasoning, flowering plants (some of which are folk-categorically held to be trees) constitute a natural kind, while trees do not. Yet trees are not going to go away any time soon, as we will continually find ourselves in social situations in which it makes sense to speak of them (e.g., when an acquaintance slams his car into one of them, or when we sit in their shade or protest attempts to cut them down), while it is hard to imagine a comparable social need for any single unifying term that unites all long-legged animals. An encounter with a Japanese spider crab is just too different from an encounter with a giraffe to be placed under the same heading. Social salience is, in short, really important. No amount of botanical reeducation can train out of us the sense that trees ought to make it onto the list of what there is. Here then we have a case where folk knowledge is plainly preferable to its scientific alternative. So, I take back what I said earlier. Trees exist.Or maybe they don t. I don t know. It depends on what you mean. Plainly, anyhow, whichever side we take on this issue, we will never generate the sort of heated controversy we see when certain other examples (e.g., “man”, “woman”) are chosen. This casuistic difference strongly compels the conclusion that, in general, side-taking in debates about social construction has little to do with theoretical conviction, and much more to do with specific attachment to a particular socially salient kind, and with a sort of faith that this attachment, in order to be worthy of us, must be rooted as it were in deepest ontology. --Lafayette, Louisiana, December 29 2019 My post last month on gendered terms for animal species has been widely, but poorly, read. That in itself is no surprise. But unlike the usual tendency of readers to scan quickly for something to disagree with and then to rush to denounce both the piece as well as the moral character and intellectual ability of the author, for some reason this time readers have rushed to express their agreement with what I ve said, and to claim it as support for what they themselves believe. Readers have done this who themselves uphold opposing and irreconcilable views relative to one another. I suppose it is a sort of triumph to win the favor of people in opposite camps, to puzzle them so much that they end up reading the text like a Rorschach blot and just seeing what they want to see. But anyone who has read me in the past on the metaphysics and semantics of natural kinds in general, and on the question of sexual and gender identity in particular, will know that, while I find “AHF” less secure than Byrne does, this is not because I have any commitment to the falsity of “AHF”. I am not committed to “TW”, and I do not at all think that philosophers such as Kathleen Stock are “transphobes” for their defense of “AHF”.Let me therefore try to be clear about some relevant points in my note on Byrne s article, and also about what is not contained in or implied by my note. In it I attempted to show that specialised terminology for the males and females of various animal species, including human beings, reflects an interest in their reproductive function. I acknowledged that it is certainly possible for us to have an interest in the reproductive function of a species at one time in history, and not at another time. This change is in principle possible even in our thinking about human beings.But if we were to come to think about human beings without any interest in their reproductive function, we would effectively have to achieve the sort of indifference to and ignorance of our own species that we currently have in relation to, e.g., jellyfish. The only way we could achieve such a thing, I suggested, is by radical biotechnological intervention in human reproduction.Some readers, remarkably, seemed to think that I myself look forward to a future condition of such indifference and ignorance.I do not look forward to this. I think it would be bad. I also think it is the only scenario in which the social salience of a specialized term for adult human females would disappear. Unlike Byrne, moreover, I think it could come about.No one wants to be “defeatist”. No one wants to be foolish either, yet in contemporary academic philosophy fear of the one is much more common than caution about the other. Unlike many philosophers, I am not engaged qua philosopher in any ameliorative project, and if I envision a particular future scenario, it is not necessarily because I want to see it become reality.Outsourcing our reproduction to machines and laboratories would entail such a radical denaturing, such an abandonment of our basic human and animal good, as to not even count as a Pyrrhic victory. Human beings, if I may imitate the style of Aristotle, are to be classed among the copulative animals. I also think human beings are basically bipedal, and basically diurnal, even if it is possible to get around otherwise than on two legs, and even if it is possible to stay up all night and sleep in the day. I think we will be better off if we stick to this arrangement, more or less, even if we do have the option, through technology and cultural inventiveness, to live differently.I suppose this makes me a ‘conservative’, in at least one of the senses of this term. It is not that I believe that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are written into the order of the cosmos, as one might have supposed in Renaissance European astrology and as we see vestigially in popular books about men’s Martian and women’s Vesuvian origins. It is not that I think sexual difference is what ‘keeps the stars apart’, that it is a structuring principle much beyond a relatively small class of biological beings. Even here on earth, it does not structure the lives of various archaeota or cyanobacteria, who vastly outnumber all sexually reproducing beings combined, if we are counting, and who hold their own against the biomass of humans, krill, cattle, and plants, if we are weighing. But it does structure the lives of many, many species of plants and animals, and to the extent that a species plays a salient role in human society, the sex roles of its individual members will be known.It is a tautology to point out that human beings play a salient role in human society. This leaves us (again, in the absence of biotechnological intervention) with a certain rather strong attunement to the existence of men and women, for better or worse, just like steppe nomads were attuned to the existence of mares and stallions, and Nuer herdsmen can still tell the difference between bulls and heifers at a glance. Again for better or worse, these social categories are anchored in the gonads. I take this to be just obvious, and I take anyone who denies that it is obvious to be under the sway of an illusion.Sorry if I m disappointing anyone who read the original piece and thought they agreed with me. But honestly, you should read more carefully. I was very sorry to learn that Heinrich Schepers has died. He was one of the most influential and supportive people in my graduate studies and early career. He had been for many decades the director of the Leibniz-Forschungsstelle in Münster, and probably knew Leibniz s manuscripts better than anyone else in the world.He welcomed me at the research center when I came with a DAAD fellowship to stay for a year, in 1997-98. He took me to lunch once, and I learned a few things I can still remember. He was born in 1925 in Germany, but spent much of his childhood in Argentina. His family returned to Germany at some point, though I am not sure when. He was conscripted into Hitler s army, but spent most of his time as a soldier in an Allied prisoner of war camp. When the war ended, the medieval city center of Münster had been reduced to rubble, and Schepers was among the people who helped to reconstruct it, stone by stone. His career was motivated in large part by a principled commitment to securing Franco-German friendship in the post-war period, for which he rightly saw Leibniz as a model and so to speak a patron saint. He bemoaned the enduring popularity of Heidegger in German philosophy, both in view of the political resonances of Heideggerianism, but also because of what he took to be Heidegger s misunderstanding of the principle of sufficient reason, now Germanized as der Satz vom Grund: the one thing Heidegger seems to have wanted to take up from Leibniz and use for his own purposes. Schepers is the only Leibniz scholar I have met in all these years who seems to have been, philosophically speaking, an actual Leibnizian.I saw him ten or so more times in the past twenty years: every five years at the International Leibniz Congress, as well as on occasional visits to Münster. In 2016 I pushed him in his wheelchair around the basement of the Hannover Rathaus, searching in vain for an elevator. Schepers was held to be a sort of Socratic figure, in that his reputation as a towering intellect was secured not by publication of his own theoretical work, but by action and interaction. In his case, “action” meant doing his part in the production of the Academy Edition of Leibniz s collected writings. This task has been ongoing since 1923, and is still not close to being finished. Schepers dragged out for several years longer than had been expected the publication of Series 6, volume 4, of the Academy Edition, Leibniz s philosophical writings through 1690. He was famously exacting in his editorial standards, and preoccupied with achieving maximum fidelity in editing to what Leibniz had put down on paper by his own hand, and to developing a critical apparatus that in turn gets us even closer to what was in Leibniz s mind at the moment of writing. Schepers thus provides, for me, a model of the ideal combination of wisdom and modesty, demonstrating how one can spend a valuable and influential career as a scholar devoted narrowly to what from the outside might look like the least of things: getting what someone else said a long time ago exactly right. In 2014, when he was almost 90, Schepers published his first book, which was a collection of occasional pieces, and sometimes fairly informal notes composed over the course of the many years of his work on the edition. I wrote a short review of it for the German Quarterly. I realise now that I never saw it in its print version, but I ll post the text of it here. *Heinrich Schepers, Leibniz. Wege zu seiner reifen Metaphysik, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 2014. Justin E. H. SmithIn the Preface to this volume Heinrich Schepers avers: Direct reference to the manuscripts and their treatment in the Academy Edition caused engagement with the secondary literature to retreat into the background, for which I hereby ask for understanding. This is an omission that a younger scholar could not of course make, but when Schepers s request is not hard to grant. In remaining directly and constantly attuned to the primary sources, this volume approaches something like a direct communion with Leibniz s thought, a dialogue with him across the centuries.The volume collects a number of Schepers s papers, reaching back more than half a century (the first dates from 1962). Together they provide a compelling record of the author s longstanding concerns, most important among these the precise meaning of Leibniz s rationalism-- in what sense he may be called a rationalist, and how his rationalism informs all of his other philosophical commitments.A number of the chapters also testify to Schepers s crucial contribution over many decades to the edition of Leibniz s writings, and moreover to the theoretical reflection on the method and meaning of scholarly edition. As the long-time director of the Leibniz-Forschungsstelle in Münster, Schepers was witness to, and an active promoter of, the introduction of digital tools into textual edition. At the same time, as one of the world s foremost living experts on Leibniz s manuscripts, Schepers is aware of the ways in which any edition invariably transforms, and thus distorts, the handwritten text at its source. Edition thus requires a sensitivity and a psychological attunement to the mind of the author, in order to preserve and to convey as much as possible of the intentions that went into the creation of the original text.This attunement is clearly on display in chapter 7 of the present volume, Gedanken zu den Philosophischen Schriften (AA VI, 4). The abbreviation in parentheses refers, as all Leibniz scholars will know, to volume 4 of series 6 of the Academy Edition of Leibniz, to the completion of which Schepers and the small group of editors in Münster devoted many years, often releasing preliminary drafts under the name of Vorauseditionen, so that the research community might have access to these texts, even as the definitive version of their edition remained a mere future projection. This work was finally completed in 1999, and it would be no exaggeration to say that its release, and the new accessibility of some of Leibniz s most important philosophical reflections, has brought about a revolution in Leibniz scholarship.Schepers offers a classical, which is to say, among other things, a non-revisionist, interpretation of Leibniz s philosophy. For him, Leibniz is a conceptualist, a phenomenalist, an optimist, an irenist, and, first and foremost, a metaphysician. For Schepers s Leibniz, to say that he is first and foremost a metaphysician is to say that, for one thing, his engagement with the empirical sciences, such as microscopy, cannot be determinative for the content of his philosophical views. It is also to say that metaphysics comes before, well before, epistemology. He does not spend much time worrying about how we know the rational order of the world; he is too busy telling us what this rational order is, and what the basic principles underlying it are.Leibniz is also a rationalist, or, to use Schepers s preferred qualifier, a strong rationalist. But if he is not first and foremost an epistemologist, it cannot be that Schepers conceives Leibniz s strong rationalism in terms of the sources of knowledge, in terms of the debate between those who hold that knowledge is built on innate ideas, on the one hand, and on the other those who hold that all knowledge derives from experience. Rather, for Schepers, Leibniz is a rationalist to the extent that he, trusting the power of reason, sets down principles, establishes definitions, and does not accept the validity of anything that does not follow from these (219).To believe in the power of reason, moreover, is to presume that the human mind has access to the rational order of nature, that is, that human reason is well adapted to, or in harmony with, the divine reason that underlies creation. Thus the power of reason enables us to set down principles that concern, most importantly, the nature of substance, and the way in which substances give rise to natural phenomena. The most foundational principle of Leibniz s rationalism for Schepers is the Principle of Sufficient Reason (which, particularly since Heidegger, has a different ring to it in the German rendering, der Satz vom Grund). And Schepers insists: The Principle of Reason (Satz vom Grund) is not a principle of the theory of knowledge. It is not asked, whether and how the grounds can be known, but rather it is claimed, that there are such grounds (223).Schepers s insistence on strong rationalism contrasts with the soft rationalism defended by Marcelo Dascal and a few others, not least at a memorable conference that took place in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in 2005, entitled Leibniz: What Kind of Rationalist? The soft rationalist reading would transform Leibniz into a somewhat more supple, somewhat more quasi-pragmatist thinker. But Schepers is not having it. Everything must follow from basic principles, with logical necessity and in metaphysical rigor. To backtrack at all from this commitment is to allow everything that is distinctive about Leibniz s philosophy to slip away. Schepers defends the hard line , he has been unflinching and constant in his long career of interpreting Leibniz. This approach might appear to have something to do with the vice of inflexibility, were it not for the fact that he is, by the evidence of the texts he knows so well, correct. I read with some interest Alex Byrne s recent paper, forthcoming in Philosophical Studies, “Are Women Adult Human Females?” Of particular note to me was his discussion of the semantics of gendered terms for non-human animal species.“Someone who wants to deny AHF [i.e., the view that women are adult human females],” Byrne writes, “needs to explain why [the] pattern of gendered animal words leaves us out.” But whether defending or denying AHF, one would also do well to explain why this pattern of gendered animal words extends only as far as it does: to sows, does, hens, and so on, but not to adult female lizards, anglerfish, or cnidarians. There is no special word for the adult females of these biological kinds, and the obvious explanation of the difference is that pigs, deer, and chickens enter into human social life in a sufficiently salient way to warrant specialised terminology.“Cow”, one might dare say, is political at least to the extent “woman” is: it designates a special category of being, with a role that is circumscribed and dirempted by political and economic forces from what would naturally be required for its thriving, within the broader zoopolis, to speak with Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, that contains all of human political reality. But there are many, many biological kinds that are not included within this zoopolis, or at least only wander through it without being as it were censused or noted in its official registers. Consider: within each of the three kinds mentioned above as examples of less socially salient animals, there is wide variation in the ways “male” and “female” manifest themselves. Some species of jellyfish do not separate into male and female at all, and in others the gonads that warrant classification within the one or the other sex can only be detected, with difficulty, under a microscope. In some species of anglerfish, at the other extreme, the female is thirty times larger than the male, who for his part is little more than a tiny floating sperm sac. And even so --even with such extreme sexual dimorphism-- no specialised term for an adult female anglerfish exists in English or in any other language.By contrast, with domesticated animals (leaving out for now semi-domesticate cervids, elephants, and other species that enter into human society, but that have generally defied human efforts to control their breeding), there seems to be a process whereby the specialised breeding function of the female forces the corresponding specialised term for the female into center stage, and often causes it to stand metonymically for the species as a whole. ‘Cow’ is now the default generic term for domestic bovines in English, while ‘bull’ designates something much more specialised and rare. This might have something to do with the fact that most male bovines are removed from the breeding process when they are forced by human artifice to become steers, but we also find the males occupying the marked semantic category in the case of, e.g., ‘rooster’, ‘gander’, ‘tomcat’, and so on. For at least three of the four most common large domestic animals in Eurasia, the Indo-European root originally designating the kind in general passes into English to designate only the female: thus *owi-, (‘sheep’) gives us ovis in Latin but ‘ewe’ in English; *su- (‘pig’) gives us sus in Latin but ‘sow’ in English; and *gwo- (‘bovine animal’) gives us bos in Latin but ‘cow’ in English.This suggests that where breeding is overwhelmingly salient, perhaps even to the exclusion of all other roles, in the political life of a female animal, the specialised term for the female of the kind can easily come to push out or replace the generic term. Where breeding is not the exclusive or central element of the existence in human society of an animal kind, but nonetheless sex difference within that kind remains socially salient, specialised terms will be used, but not in a way that threatens to push out and replace the original kind terms, and often in a way that seems derivative or an afterthought: thus for example male bears are (sometimes) called ‘boars’ and female bears ‘sows’; male elephants are ‘bulls’ and female elephants are ‘cows’, and the same for giraffes and many other species, in a way that clearly proceeds by analogy from sex-specific terms used for species over whose breeding we often have more direct control.Where then does ‘woman’ stand in comparison with these other terms? Curiously, it is most like ‘doe’, or any other specialised term for the female of a socially salient animal species whose breeding human beings do not generally control. Unlike ‘cow’ or ‘goose’, ‘woman’ is the marked term in the ‘man’/‘woman’ pair, and it shows no signs of threatening to push out ‘man’ in order to designate the human species as a whole. This does not mean that women are never reduced to their breeding role within human society --alas, they often are--, but it at least suggests that we do not take the function of the human species as a whole to be exhausted by husbandry, as we evidently do with domesticated animals. All of this is relevant to assessing the strength of Byrne s defense of the view that a woman is an adult human female. He maintains that the semantics of specialised sex-specific terms for members of animal kinds “are not remotely controversial,” and that the consideration of such terms is “perhaps the most compelling” of all the reasons available to accept AHF. He acknowledges that specialised terms such as “peahen” generally designate “socially significant” categories, but he insists that it is a mistake to suppose that simply because a category is socially significant it is therefore a “social category,” which is to say “merely social” as opposed to biological.But one wonders how much this distinction matters in the end. There are countlessly many biological distinctions we could make, but do not, because there is no social need to do so. For example, something we now take to be a basic biological fact about the order of nature --that whales are not fish-- arose out of the particular circumstances of the whale s social and economic role in the 19th century. These circumstances prompted taxonomic debates about what a cetacean really is, in itself, yet they were quite obviously motivated by the new social salience that commercial whaling had imposed on this order of mammals. (If whaling is not political, I don t know what is.) As John Dupré has compellingly shown, nothing about the world prior to the 19th century gives us any reason to think that its inhabitants were in error in supposing that whales are a variety of fish: the taxonomic adjustment of 150 years or so ago simply specified that no fish can give live birth (though of course many selachian fish are viviparous), produce milk (though what counts as “milk” is a biological question that is getting more and more complicated as more and more comparable cases are being found in taxa very distant from mammals), etc. But there is nothing in nature itself that necessitates this adjustment; we could have preserved a broader category, “fish”, that contains both mammalian fusiform aquatic vertebrates and gill-bearing aquatic vertebrates. There are real biological differences between whales and tuna, but I am prepared to say that the fact that we note these differences in language is a social fact, and I see no way to allow biology to “speak for itself” such that we might know when the way the world is requires us to take note of a given distinction, and when we are free to come up with a new distinction, or at least not in error to do so.While “sow” does not strike us as controversial, to the extent that there are no opposed camps of humans arguing for and against the view that a sow is an adult female suidian, “sow” is controversial in the sense that it is subject to constant renegotiation and drift. Just a few thousand years ago, the ancestor term that would give us the English “sow” did not mean “adult female suidian”; it meant, simply, “suidian”. “Bitch” for female dog seems controversial in both senses, and this plainly has something to do with the exceptionally intimate integration of Canis familiaris into human society. “Doe” is interesting, in that it appears to be a fairly stable historical designator of the female of a wide number of silent, docile, herbivorous animal species: not just deer, but also, e.g., hares, rabbits, and mice. Yet it pertains to deer paradigmatically, and seems to be extended analogically to other species. But this is exactly what we would expect, given that as a generic non-sex-specific term “deer” is paradigmatic for all silent, docile, herbivorous wild animals; thus it is cognate with the German Tier (“animal”), and into the early modern period could be used in English, modified by “small”, to desigate, e.g., rabbits. Thus the deer is the paradigmatic non-predatorial wild animal, and the doe is the paradigmatic non-predatorial wild female animal. These are species whose sex differences matter to us (unlike, usually, those of jellyfish), but over which we do not generally exercise control (unlike, usually, those of pigs and cows); rabbits, in fact, stand symbolically in many cultures for reproduction that has gone out of control (“to breed like rabbits,” etc.), a situation that is generally imagined with horror, the very emblem of anarchy.Byrne also acknowledges the reality of semantic drift, so that he would be perfectly able to accommodate, and likely also ready to appreciate, the observations I have made here on terms such as “sow” and their ancestors. But one thing the discussion of the semantics of animal kinds shows us is that it is not necessarily the case that, when a term drifts into a new semantic role, another term must come along to play the role that has been vacated by the previous one. In our ever-increasing estrangement from the rural existence of our recent ancestors, most of us are becoming ever less proficient in the correct use of specialised sex-specific terminology for domestically bred animals. In the near future, the decline of factory farming and the rise of widespread insectivorism might lead to a condition where none of us knows the term for “male bovine,” yet we have highly specialised vocabulary for the different sex roles of roaches.And similarly with “woman”. “A woman is an adult human female” would seem to be a case, if there ever was one, in which biology speaks for itself, but again there are countless adult females of countless species for which I do not have a specialised term, and there are countless species of which I m not even sure at all whether they include males and females, or not. It is perfectly possible that the reproductive function that has underlain sex-specific language about our own species (and that has been at the root of gender inequality and oppression) will continue to decline in social salience, at which point we might well expect that “woman” will no longer mean “adult human female,” a possibility that Byrne acknowledges, and, moreover, a possibility he does not acknowledge, that no other term moves in to do the same work that “woman” continues to do, under some strain, for now. If it were to come to this, we would find ourselves regarding our own species somewhat as we now regard all those distant species whose reproductive function we generally take to be no business of ours: again, for many, many species of animal, I have no idea whether they reproduce sexually at all, and I do not even know how to go about examining representative members of these species in order to find an answer.Yet the fact that I am ignorant in this regard seems to go together, almost by definition, with the fact that I recognize no zoopolitical concitoyenneté with jellyfish and worms, very much in contrast with the case of horses and dogs. Politics, one fears, is in the end nothing other than the control of breeding, even if among humans, at the most elementary level, it does not look like politics at all, but only “kinship”. This is why animal domestication develops as an institution in parallel with the state in human history. And this is what Karl Marx had in mind when, observing the importance for the preservation of powerful dynasties of getting the right royals to copulate, he noted with wonderful acerbity that “the secret of aristocracy is zoology.” And this is why, finally, a future in which sex-specific terms for members of socially salient kinds --including that most socially salient kind of all, the human-- fall away, and “woman” comes to designate something other than “adult human female” without being replaced by another term that will do that old job, appears either as a future of anarchic disorder, or a post-political utopia of the sort that Byrne is for the most part not prepared to imagine: in which, with the significant aid of biotechnology, we begin to bud like polyps.

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