[...]n ideal --> (cold war) rationality: a finite well-defined set of rules that can be applied unambiguously in specified settings without recourse to the faculty of judgement

cold war: crystalline + generality + conclusivess could cope with a world on the brink
--> algorithmic rules as the core of rationality
--> sacrifice of [precious to philosophers] ‘insight’ and ‘understanding’ ascpects of reason
--> automatic: you don't need to understand them to execute them

*the posiblity of a mechanical mind*

Turing's [*]programming: constructing instruction tables

(1794 early French revolution) universal school for future French citizen with arithmetic [3 + 4 = 7] at its core --teach-> “exactitude of the mind” --> children are going to learn:
•the meaning of self evidence [of arithmetic propositions]
•the meaning of justified belief
•formation of ideas
•judgement
•reasoning
}--foundation--> quanitative science of a human realm

first reliable calculator --> 1850

rationality عقلانيت
•history of ever more sophisticated mechanical computers
•how rules themselves became increasingly identified with algorithms
•how algorithms became increasingly identified with mindlessness

Kant --> science as mechanical skill that can be mastered by diligence and determinate rules
tacit knowledge: a manul labor [styles of knowing] that cannot be captured by algorithms

---> go to Encyclopedie (Diderot)...

deskilling calculation ==> economic rationality (economic rationalization): you take the task, decompose it into simplest possible steps, you divide the labor, you hire the least skilled and cheapest labor possible ==Babbage==> increase the efficiency and the costs

•game theory
•rational choice theory


(memory + understanding + judgement + imagination)
*judgement (Daston) and imagination (Sina) are integral to the exercise of reason*

reason in rationality: algorithmic rule governed =/=
•passions اشتياق تعصب
•fantasy وسواس
•sloppy thinking درهم وبرهم
•ignorance بى خبرى
•superstition خرافه
•self-deception خود فريبى


the human factor
there is something about human that has always been in odds with reason

Nozick (~ Terminator) --> the rules of procedures that constitute rationality would be valid, would be efficacious, but algorithmic. executed by machine, but opaque to human understanding
~ Wittgenstein --> to follow a rule: a practice taught by example =/= precept
}--> *to understand rules in an algorithmic sense* =/= model, maxim, tacit knowledge


Daston --> there is no simple way, in which historical context determines the form and content of the thinkable. but (as in the case of algorithmic rules and cold war rationality) historical circumstances do light up some parts of the intellectual landscape and darken others

our current understanding of what it means to be rational owes a great deal to the power of place and time
•for Kant: judgement = highest faculties =/= for modern (us) judgement is problematic


...................................

[the horror of the contemporary German art:] to deliberate: کنکاش سنجیده و عمدی =/= Janina
(art of [ironic] deliberation =/= chaotic venture, Sina's lecture-performances)
deliberation: thinking then doing it =/= doing then thinking about what you have done (~= communication, intimacy)

...................................

metaphysics of natural law

Daston's rigor: trying to understand why is it so persistant (almost irresistible) that we **extract social and moral norms from nature** (rather than jumping up saying that it is a doomed idea)
[--> got to fable; ikhvano safa court of animals; panchatantra Kelile Demne]
•to merge natural and social orders together
•to make nature meaningful
•to invoke nature to buttress human values of: true, good, beautiful
•

devil = collective human imagination of chaos

formless and lawless
land of no promises
past is no guide to the future
at the mercy of chance

the axiom of modern thought: society =/= nature [of which trespassings are rife]

[#fable]
to extract some sort of politics from:
•beehive
•physics of liver
•evolutionary theory
•organic specialization [--Aristotle--> slavery]
•

1. how conceptions of natural order sustains specific norms & the model of any kind of norm <-- historical + empirical
2. appeal to nature capture something profound about values in general regardless of their specific context <-- philosophical

(the human) impulse to *make nature meaningful* --> psychological + epistemological + ethical necessity


(1)
(specific) [*]nature: the ontological identity card : that which makes a particular thing what it is (what makes skwerl a skwerl)
the idea of ***fixed natural kind ==inspire==> the ideal of justice***
--> the idea of organic specialization [organ: ‘tool’ in greek; for Aristotle: “injustice = violation of specialization” (of citizen's tools or honors) <-- an order of nature]

rose wanna be skwerl ---> go to bestiary
“good consist in each being striving to be the best of its kind not the best of all”

(2)
[*]nature: the will of God (~ edict of God) --Augustine--> “sodomy = crime against nature (~ against God: the author of nature)” [--> unnatural =/= sacrilege توهين به مقدسات]
•a Roman custom (and a Roman intuition): when you are in a place you try to adapt to the local ways of doing things <-- (with Augustine) we are preserved in a proverb [#integration] --grant--> nature with supreme authority as God's proxy


seeking norms in nature --Daston-->
•is this (examples) why we should stop it (at best nature authority is borrowed whether overtly from God or covertly from social conventions ==> it is redundent and we don't need it)
•it is a dangerous weapon in the arsenal of the most repressive and aggressive elements of society

content of norms =/= [*]normativity: a justificatoin that gives any and all norms their force : the quality of telling us what should be (=/= describing how things actually are)

“the starry heavens above ~/= the moral law within” --> Kant's awe: the regularity (of both human law and natural law)
حيرت awe [<==evoke== the cosmic: all encompassing order & exquisitely designed ornament] =/= horror [<==evoke== the unnatural (ajayeb)]

**the recognition of an order** --Daston--> the key to all kinds of norms (--> awe = wonder + fear + respect)


(ancient greek cosmopolitan traverler ethnographer) Herodotus's fable of ‘custom is king of all’ <-- داریوش perian king Darius's anthropological experiment: Greeks won't eat their father's dead body, they burn it =/= Indians won't burn their father's dead body, they eat it

•chaos: nature without order
•anarchy: society without order
}--> past is no guide to present and future : *there are no regularities (of human promises or natural cycles) to support either justice or knowledge*


why duplicate the moral order with an analogical natural order?
why turn to nature for your raw materials (to construct moral order for themselves)?
--> ...

are we now in the position to reclaim norms from nature?
--> yes <== nature exemplifies so many different kinds of order:
•order of the stars and plant =/= order of weather
•order of specific natures =/= order of universal natural laws
•order of local ecologies =/= order of cosmological unities of gravitation
•
which nature? --> any order of nature can be countered with examples of another order equally natural }--Daston--> [*]nature: repository (or wunderkammer) of all imaginable orders****

terror + randomness --> most effective weapon of dictators (you never know when it strikes again)
-horror of Kafka's bureaucracy: negation of regularity, destruction of order, institutionalized anarchy
-one of the most dehumanizing experiences: being completely subject to the will of another (~ slavery) [--> this is the most pleasurable experience in sex and sado masochism]

•nature never insults (its inhumanity)
•nature provides the raw material for meaning <-- *because we are embodied organisms we must incarnate our orders* (~ we must find a way to display them to ourselves)
•animals can feel terror, but only humans can feel horror: the emotion that registers a deep disruption of an order (no matter what kind, a two-headed baby [natural monster] or a mother who kills her two babies [moral monster])


...................................

[title]
itchy eyes

...................................

16th and 17th centuries
times of extraordinary religious, economic, and intellectual upheaval (Europe was deluged by novelties of all kinds: birds of paradise, armadillos, anomalies: solar eclipse, comet, narwhal tusk, etc.)
(Daston >) Bacon [standing on an extremely unstable scientific ground] used monsters and marvels (as a sort of intellectual hygiene) to jolt people out of their assumptions about the natural world
=/= Aristotelian natural philosophy
--> anomaly took center stage of scientific explanations ~= art's investment in the exceptional
==> curiosity becomes a virtue =/= vice
•nature is allowed to joke
•nature has the freedom to experiment =/= God
--> ended by:
•18th century's *division of labor*
•19th century's *institution of science*

(two-headed cat's) deformations --> terrifying + electrifying
[*]bestiary = Telegram media from God:
•sign of end
•sign of fecundity, creativity, variety of nature

.../horror/wonder/horror/wonder/horror/wonder/...

“everyone was trafficking in marvels in the 17th century”
Daston

... --> premodern sci --> age of wonder --> modern science --> ...

cabinets of curiosity
(Daston's) chambers of wonders
•to overwhelm you
•to impress the ambassador


for Aristotle, philosophy starts with wonder, but you make it disappear as soon as possible (“wonder = sign of ignorance” of the unlettered and illiterate)

genre of natural history involving the marvels of insects --> domesticate the emotion of wonder for things we can explain

Daston =/= (early 20th century) morose and elegiac discourse about the disenchantment of the world

...................................

pessimism ~= realism
(optimism ~= idealism)

...................................

(to move from) eternal truths --to--> eternal archives
(an aesthetic:) archival monuments

despite computer's hype and undeniable capacity and flexibility of computerize databases, the practices of collecting, inventorying, describing, image-making, collating, and publishing have remaining stable since the monumental projects of 19th century: corpus inscriptionum latinarum, carte du ciel, botanical gardens, etc. --> archival projects

...................................

popular and learned interest in monsters

(in the 16th century & 17th century Baconian scientific programm:) treatments of nature and natural history must have included (with rigorous selection) monsters (~ aberrations in the natural order: new, rare, and unusual nature, both exotic & domestic)
[*]nature: an ingenious craftsman --> [*]monster: nature's most artful work (--> they bridged the natural & the artificial)
•corresponded to the activities of nature =/= types of subject matter, methods of investigation
•interest in irregularities (=/= end of 17th century interest in nature's uniformity and order)
•

Lazarus exhibition, the parasitic twin (the italian conjoined twins who toured freak shows in 17th century europe)

(Daston --> a case study of) the changing relationship between popular & learned culture

legal status of monsters
infanticide in antiquity


earlier tradition of interest in monster:
•Aristotle --> Albertus Magnus
•divine sign --> Cicero, Augustine, Isidore of Sevill
•cosmographical & anthropologic --> Solinus


monsters in a context of a whole natural phenomen (bestiary):
earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, celestial apparitions, strange rains (of blood), stones, and miscellanea

(monsters --> shift from) signs of God's wrat --to--> signs of nature's fertility
(by the end of 17th century) --to--> comparative anatomy and embryology (teratology)
(from) اعجوبه prodigy --to--> examples of medical pathology

*peasant and professional had participated to a significant extent in a shared culture of intellectual and religious interest* --✕-->{
(literate culture evolved far more rapidly ==> sharpening of social boundaries of)
city dwellers =/= peasants
urban literate elite =/= unlettered day laboure
--> for the educated layman: (religious associations of) monsters = another manifestation of popular ignorance and superstition --fostering--> uncritical wonder =/= sober investigation of natural cause


prodigy --> contrary to nature --> attributable directly to God (divine displeasure)
-the sunne shal suddenly shine againe in the night, and the moone thre times a day. blood shal drop out of the wood, and the stone shal give his voyce [...] There shalbe a confusion in many places, and the fyre shal oft breake forthe, and the wilde beastes shal change their places, and menstruous women shal beare monstres[...]

•monstrum = prodigium ==> monstrat [monstro: i wonder --> i indict --> i teach, demonstrate] = god's will
•apocalyptic association --> world reformation, the overthrow of the wicked --> vindication of god's elect

(bestiaries were a lot commentaries)

various bestial parts...

bestial vices and errors (of...)

ephemeral literature
displayed and recited publicly
characteristically illustrated
appeal through spoken word & image to the illiterate


Pierre Boaistuau [<== Peucer, Lycosthenes, Swiss surgeon Jakob Rueff, naturalist Konrad Gesner, Pierre Belon]
histoire tragique
histoire prodigieuse (monster literature, bestiary?)
•two-headed woman seen in Bavaria in 1541
•three-legged Siamese twins from 1552
•calf without forelegs reported in 1556
•celebrated monster of Cracow
•
ghoulish tone, religious didacticism, erudite آموزنده, monsters as polemical weapons
“nature's wonder?” --> to “discovre the secret judgment and scourge of the ire of God”

The Scripture sayth, before the ende
Of all thinges shall appeare,
God will wounders straunge thinges send,
As some is sene this yeare.
The selye infantes, voyde of shape,
The calues and pygges so straunge,
With other mo of suche mishape,
Declareth this worldes chaunge.


...monsters began to lose their religious resonance
it was unlawful to “delight” in the undesirable
portentous meaning of monster

(from) fear --to--> delight
(from) prodigy --to--> wonder
(from) sermon --to--> table-talk
(from) horrible, terrible, effrayable, espouventable --to--> strange, wonderful, merveilleux (marvelous جالب)
(from) final cause --to--> proximate cause (physical explanations and the natural order)
}==> nature began to assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~> natural wonder



wonder literature ([lavishly illustrated bestiary, cosmography, travel literature, geological curiosa, herbal and astrological lore,] of later 16th and 17th century Daston) --> secularization of an interest in (monsters as) prodigies
--part-of--> the great body of common culture
--affinity--> popular 16th century genre of diverses lefons (selections from famous authors)

catalogues of strange instances or hidden properties of animals, vegetables and mineral
(middle class culture in elizabethan england)

prodigies denuded of their supernatural aura & (presented) to surprise and entertain the reader =/= to acquaint the reader with imminent apocalypse and judgeme

Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature

portentous events بد شگون

(crocodiles) to be granted honorary monstrous status by virtue of their rarit

many will reade them [monsters], heare them and haue profit by them, that otherwise whould neuer haue knowen them. For many (I suppose) will buye this Booke for the things whereto they are affectioned, that neuer coulde or would have bought, or looked on the bookes, wherein all they are. -Lupt[...]