The Strange Turn

In the Renaissance period one of the basic epistemological presupposition was that the world is a divine book where all God’s mysteries are encoded and inscribed in steady symbols. The effort of the thinker was then to decipher the secret and sacred code, which would open all worldly mysteries flat. In a way, this belief implied the hope that the subject is able to take a divine position, the position of the writer of the Book, the one who possesses all codes of mystery. The world was perceived as an analogy of microcosmic-macrocosmic structure, in an implicit hope that the final decipherment of the World, or of the Book, would reveal the ultimate analogical resemblance between all things. The word was taken as that which it signified. There was no perceptual distinction between the word and the experience. Knowledge needed no certainty and proof; it was necessarily incomplete.

In terms of values it was subordinated to the more emotional and subjective faith. In this search for the final code, the goal was pre-given: God was the origin and the ever-escaping master signifier of “the end of the game,” so that the work of the excellent minds was to find and draw the pre-existent similitudes between things, and thus to prove the divine presence in the world. The mystics and the synthesists, (William Blake being close to them), who were discovering the cyclical rhythms of the world and opposed the Hebrew linear time, were caught up in finding endless repetition of Sameness, with no alteration between cycles. To understand this period, it is important to note that the notions of “progress” and “evolution” did not exist until the scientific revolution of the 18th c.

Slowly the word moved away from the world of things. Literature, pre-scientific, artistic and miscellaneous, was forming a reality of its own and as such acquired power to affect back the reality that created it. In the 16th and 17th c. radical changes in physics, astronomy, and mathematics introduced a new scientific paradigm, which opened way to a different episteme. The gap between the maps and the territories was opening wider. Thought ceased to be validated in terms of resemblance. Similitude and semblance became a sign of deceit, illusion and error. Human senses were distrusted as deceiving to the knowing of reality or of the assumed transcendental essence. During the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, the subjective world was separated from objective “facts.”

This split stemmed from the mechanistic worldview and empowered it to a level of a civilizational paradigm. Galileo Galilei established quantity as a metrical system of scientific truth and excluded the particular qualitative value from science, restricting the latter to the study of phenomena that could be measured and quantified. Along with the senses, esthetics, ethics, sensitivity, values, and all non-physical factors were either examined with quantifying methods or were simply ignored in the domain of science.

Rene Descartes introduced the method of analytic thinking, which consists of breaking up complex phenomena into functional pieces, in order to understand the behavior of the whole from the properties of its parts. The Cartesian split of mind and body remained deeply enrooted in the Enlightenment paradigm to nowadays. Processes were taken as external to matter and the analytic observer was a separate entity observing physical systems without being part of it. Thus, the medieval worldview of an organic, mysterious, and theological universe was replaced with the mechanistic world, with the metaphor of the machine (first the clock, and then in 20th c. the computer) dominating the lens of the modern era. Within this episteme, any resemblance had to be subjected to proof by comparison: it would not be accepted until “its identity and the series of its differences have been discovered by means of measurement with a common unit or by its position in an order.” (3)

(3) Foucault, in “Archeology of Knowledge,” brilliantly describes the legislative criteria of truth and their changes through the ages.

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