Medieval Nature: Class 9 – Marius and Dialectic of Enlightenment

Marius's table of elemental combinations, looking like a table of gospel comparisons — Cotton Galba E. IV, 195r

Mere calculation is the enemy! So declares the first chapter of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. To keep the Enlightenment from carrying on eating its tail, we need to do more than try to get things right. As things stand, instrumental reason dominates us just as much as it does nature. We have chased animism and myth from the stage and now all that remains is “mere immediacy” (20), that is, an uncritical apprehension of what’s at hand and how it might further be put to use.^[1] Reason wants nothing more than correctness. When “the equation of mind and world is finally resolved,” cancelling out both mind and world (21), thought itself ends.^[2]

What a pickle we’re now in. When we did all this to ourselves proves a bit hard to determine. For H and A turn up the thought-destroying action of Enlightenment Rationality long before the Enlightenment proper, wherever there’s a written record. Ancient Greece, especially. In their attempt to ground existence in some fundamental substance – fire, water, whatever — the presocratics already split thought from “the mythic vision” (3). Odysseus tied to the mast, their deservedly famous allegorical interpretation – and indeed, aren’t most literary interpretations in some fundamental sense allegorical? – makes even this mythic journal an image of worker and thinker and art lover constrained by our present disaster of rational optimization, as if we are all Odysseuses and Oarsmen unable to follow the Sirens to whatever drenching may be on the Enlightenment’s other side. What they have to offer for hope are historical specters: the “earliest stages of humanity” (10), “preanimism” (11), “nomadic savages,” all mythic wills-o-the wisp. Nothing identifiable escapes pessimism. The imp of history has always squatted on us. Enlightenment science has given us the means to free ourselves from nature and fear (30); but if we are to get there, we need critical theory (33). Maybe so!

Marius’s On the Elements may be a perfect laboratory for testing the limits of H and A. It does feel as if it’s yet another work of “demythologizing,’ mastery, and calculation. Marius retells the first Genesis creation story, scientifically: “God created a certain body, and He created it simple and devoid of any accident” (76) and so forth, or, even more sharply, “in the beginning,” in principio, surely the most Biblical of phrases, beginning as it does Genesis and the Gospel of John, “in principio, the Lord created “ not the Heaven and Earth, but “all things from the four elements.”

Underlying the elements is substance, potentially any element, but regardless of change, always “remain[ing] the same” (76). In rational calculability, we have “universal fungability” (DE 7), and “the identity of everything with everything … bought at the cost that nothing can at the same time be identical to itself” (DE 8). We have here a reduction to a universal principle of exchange, which in the end is a principle of substitutability – this equals this equals this, the universal parataxis, the and and and of rationalized calculation – which leaves nothing outside (DE 11). Barring the rational soul (about which more later), everything is potentially anything else, and, in a fundamental sense, everything is the same.

We might think that the tables of elemental conjunctions are as much a match for H and A. Math, H and A, ends thought (13); within calculability, everything is familiar before it’s even encountered (18); thought ceases to be thought and becomes just a machine (19). Marius certainly likes to count! But I’m struck that the charts are not fixed (DE 16) and complete. Though they look complete, the Disciple feels compelled to raise the question of “almost innumerable kinds of composite bodies” (132), far more than the 145 the Master charts. The Master agrees here: the number of possible conjunctions can be extended by “increasing or decreasing the parts” (132). Though we can, with some difficulty, resolve any given thing into its four constituent elements, and thereby posit the substance underlying all that, in the actual encounter with things – milk, for example, or gems, or fruit – we’re only with some difficulty in the world of calculation. There’s always a bit more. To me, the efforts feel more aesthetic than masterful. More speculative than calculative. There’s a joy in pattern recognition,^[3] but it’s a different kind of activity than making things. We get a sense from Marius of God’s recipes, as it were, but not how we ourselves might go about making an apple.

Recall how much work the world gets up to on its own. We might think of the potter primarily as someone who makes useful objects. But at least here, Marius thinks of the potter as someone who makes a kind of glass, which might be made transparent if it were cooked longer or at higher temperatures (140). Opaque common stones likewise fall short of being glass (140). Gems are the result of more sustained forces (142). This isn’t mastery. It’s power, up to its own business. Heat is among the powers that temporarily fix substance as this element or the other and from thence this thing or the other. Likewise with trees: “The only reason man plants trees (instead of depending on wild ones) is so he may enjoy the convenience of the fruit more quickly” (164): there’s a story that could be told here about agriculture and control that’s not told here at all. Pottery is heat; agriculture is just growth, made convenient.

I am, of course, captivated by the oysters (172, 174) – immobile, but not plants, because sensitive – and I’m sure many of you were struck by Marius admitting that plants have “a certain kind of sentience” (162-4). Most of all, I’m captivated by his final account of rational humanity. Like so many attempts to account for us, it feels desperate.

I don’t want to belabor the point. Briefly: nothing he lists about us is subject to the degree of analysis he deploys on, say, milk. He says humans merit a rational soul because we are have the most temperate skin, because we can eat contrary substances, and because we are the most attractive of beings. The latter claim is both subjective and tautological: decentissime, the Latin, might just be translated as most suitable, fitting, or proper. To be the most proper is to be a concept that feeds on itself. Begging the question. As for the rational soul, it is made of an “incorporeal” (180) “substance that does not perish” (178).

It’s for this reason, incorporeality, that Marius devotes so little attention here to human beings. His treatise on the Elements is a treatise on bodies that is, au fond, a treatise on a single shared, always mobile body: substance. In one crucial manner, unexplained here, humans stand outside of that. We have to ask, though, how much of its operations the incorporeal substance shares with the corporeal: does the rational soul allow for individual differentiation, since the corporeal substance, finally, doesn’t really allow for individual differentiation except in time, that is to say, temporarily? That’s a problem, though, that requires the efforts of ibn Rushd (or Averroes, as he was known to the Latins) and his great disputer, Aquinas.