[...]br /> 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 and'>& 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 and'>& 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 and'>& 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 and'>& domestic)
[*]nature: an ingenious craftsman --> [*]monster: nature's most artful work (--> they bridged the natural and'>& 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 and'>& 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 and'>& 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 wr[...]