The Rise of the Sorcerers: Chapter Eight - IN SEARCH OF A WRITING OF THE ABSOLUTE
John Wilkins' "Invisible College." - The First Society scientist. - Is moon more expressive than moon? - The Universal Language of Wilkins. - The whole universe in letters. - "The celestial market of benevolent knowledge." - An idea that must be pursued. -The Myth of a Holy Scripture. - Our inscription in the yearbook of the galactic phone. - Heinlein's accelerated language and e1 of Freudenthal's Lincos. - For an earthly message. - The Word and the absolute structure. - On the usefulness of playing with fire.
Yes, what was the know-how? When We Dream in Scripture When we have lost time, the idea of a Great Language always comes back to our minds. original, comprehensive and expressive of knowledge, storehouse God'sencyclopedic is legendary.
A man who, three hundred years ago, dreamed of conquering the moon, he wanted to give his brothers a new Great Language.
Yes, what was the know-how? When We Dream in Scripture When we have lost time, the idea of a Great Language always comes back to our minds. original, comprehensive and expressive of knowledge, storehouse God'sencyclopedic is legendary.
A man who, three hundred years ago, dreamed of conquering the moon, he wanted to give his brothers a new Great Language.
His name was John Wilkins. Born in 1614 and died in 1672, Wilkins was the first secretary of the Royal Society of Sciences, of which he was a founder his friend Elias Ashmole. That Ashmole was a singular and stupendous who was also to bequeath to Oxford a museum rich in Documents on alchemy and on the origins of Freemasonry. A member of a Rosicrucian sect, he was a disciple of the alchemist William Backhouse.
We read in his Diary, dated May 13, 1653:
"My Master Backhouse, ill at his home in Fleet Street, and fearing that he might He was going to die, he revealed to me this day, at eleven o'clock at night, the the true secret of the philosopher's stone."
Backhouse didn't die that day day, but nine years later. I thought the time had come to transform a secret science into an open science. This attitude It was followed by Ashmole and Wilkins, and was to give rise to to the Royal Society, the engine of modern knowledge. Those men They had an extraordinary breadth of concepts and curiosity.
But this race is extinct, we will be told... Jorge Luis Borges, who made a penetrating study of Wilkins, cites, among the subjects that he was passionate about, theology, music, the manufacture of transparent hives for bee watching, existence of an invisible planet in the solar system, the construction of spacecraft for regular communications with the Luna, and, finally, the establishment of a universal language.
Chaplain to Prince Palatine Charles Louis, rector of the Wadham College Oxford, Wilkins had created in this city a group of researchers, the "Invisible College", which had among its members were such scholars as Sir Christopher Wren, Thomas Sydenham and Robert Boyle.
This "Invisible College" was incorporated into the Royal Society, which received its degree from King Charles II, in 1662, and which, devoted to experimental study, took as its motto a phrase from Horace: Nullius in verba. In 1666, Colbert, jealous of the advantages who would take England out of the work of the Royal Society, founded the Paris Academy of Sciences.
Wilkins also maintained a relationship with the members of the group Platonic of Cambridge, animated by Newton from 1670 to 1680. This group republished essential texts of alchemy, in a collection directed by Ashmole and entitled Teatrum Chimicum Britannicum. Around the same time, Robert Boyle published his work The sceptical chemist, in which he insisted on the need for a Experimental testing of theoretical claims. He was of the opinion that The four fundamental elements of the ancients – water, fire, Air and earth were not sufficient to describe matter, and that matter was It undoubtedly consisted of a large number of elements.
In the Today, we know of 108. Working with Transmutations according to alchemical teaching, he sent Newton projection powders. The members of the "Invisible College" united, with a knowledge deep in ancient secrets, a serious passion for control and experimentation, and the conviction of opening up to Humanity the path of new powers over Nature. In this atmosphere of enthusiasm and in an environment agitated by the idea that they were possible In the context of large undertakings, we must therefore situate Wilkins's linguistic work. Perhaps there was a Great Language. Maybe someday it would be found.
But it was also possible to undertake the task of creating it in a different way. new for the time and to offer men a universal language, descriptive of the reality of its laws. Wilkins worked for four years in this, from 1664 to 1668. His work, An Essay toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, published in 1668 and Composed of six hundred quarto pages, it remains today in the most complete oblivion.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his work Other Inquisitions, On the large language companies, he observes:
"All of us, at some point, have suffered those unappealable debates in which A lady, with a stock of interjections and anacolutes, swears that the The word moon is more (or less) expressive than the word moon. Outside of the obvious observation that the monosyllable moon is perhaps more apt to represent a very simple object that the bisyllabic word Luna, nothing is possible to contribute to such debates; discounting the compound words and derivations, all the languages of the world (not excluding Johann Martin Schleyer's volapük and Romanesque Peano's interlingual) are equally expressionless. There is no editing of the Grammar of the Royal Academy that does not ponder "the envied treasure of picturesque, happy and expressive voices of the richest language but it is a mere boast, without corroboration."
Wilkins's ambition was to create a universal language, each of which was whose words, defining itself, would provide a complete knowledge of the thing represented, and situates it in one of the the categories of the real. To do this, he began by dividing the Universe into forty categories or genera, subdivisible, in turn, into species. He assigned each gender a two-letter monosyllable; to each subgenus, a consonant, and for each species, a vowel.
Thus, de signifies an element; Deb is the first of the elements, Fire, and must be a fraction of fire, namely, a flame.
In the nineteenth century, in the utopian and generous atmosphere created by the Cabet's Ikaria and Fourier's The New World in Love, a linguist like Letellier had to remember Wilkins and continue his method, proposing a language in which a means animal; ab, mammal; abo, carnivore; aboj, feline; Aboje, cat; abi, herbivorous; abiv, equine; and so on.
Around 1850, the Spaniard Bonifacio Sotos Ochando tried something similar.
"The words of the The analytical language of John Wilkins, Borges observes, is not clumsy arbitrary symbols; Each of the letters that make it up is meaningful, as were those of Sacred Scripture for the Kabbalists."
Children could assimilate this language without knowing its language. artifice. Later, at school, they would gradually discover that, In addition to being a language, it is a universal key and an encyclopedia Secret. The word salmon doesn't tell us anything. In Wilkins' language, The word zana tells us that it is a scaly, fluvial and of reddish flesh.
"Theoretically," Borges continues, "it is not It is inconceivable to have a language in which the name of each being indicates all the the details of their destiny, past and future."
Léon Bloy wrote, in The Soul of Napoleon:
"There is no human being capable of Say who it is... No one knows what he's come to this world to do, what do their actions, their feelings, their ideas correspond to, and what is the His true and enduring name. Name entered in the register of light." Every thing and every being is, without our knowing its particular importance or insignificance, the quality of their play in the composition as a whole, such as a tilde or a period, a comma, a verse or an entire chapter of a great liturgical text, whose alphabet, vocabulary and grammar remain hidden from we. We are the verses, the words, or the letters of a magic book, and this never-ending book is the only thing that it exists in the world: more accurately, it is the world."
This great idea was no doubt bubbling up in Wilkins, though he had the a more modest, but also foolish, ambition to give us a writing that would convey the knowledge of each thing named, in relationship with our provisional knowledge of the Universe. Such an attempt naturally clashes with the difficulty of Divide all the elements of our universe into classes. Depends on well, from the idea we form of the world at a given moment, and This classification must necessarily be arbitrary and conjectural.
An Ancient Chinese Encyclopedia, The Select Market of benevolent knowledge, divides the animals into the form Next: Belonging to the Emperor, Tamed, Stirring like madmen, drawn with a very fine brush of camel-skin, They've just hatched, which from afar look like flies, and so on. Wilkins, as a man of science of his time, proposes a rational classification, but which today seems to us insufficient, Light.
Thus, in the eighth category, which is that of stones, distinguishes: common stones (flint, coarse sand, slate), moderately expensive (marble, amber, coral), precious (pearl, opal), transparent (amethyst, sapphire) and insoluble (coal, clay, arsenic). We have made great progress in the denomination and the ordination. But we've also learned that the more you fine-tune the knowledge of the real, the more ambiguities arise.
For example Should light be included in the wave category or in the corpuscle? However, we would like a Wilkins of our the attempt was resumed, and then this new language was submitted to the computer, which, by examining the whole of possible combinations, it would bring out the missing words. These last words would no doubt correspond to objects non-existent or impossible, such as a four-sided triangle, or gaps in the Universe, such as, for example, the stable element whose nucleus contained five particles.
We can also ask ourselves if The regularities of such a synthetic language would not correspond to some fundamental mystery of numbers and words. Anyway An elimination of concepts without information content would that the use of this language would be an entirely new gymnastics, profoundly transformative of thought and, in particular, of the political thought... But let's get back to our dear Wilkins. His prodigious effort is inscribed in the movement of the ideas of his century, a hinge between tradition and nascent science. It's a place of convergence of the intellectual currents of the time.
In a letter of November 1629, Descartes had observed since, by means of the decimal system of numbering, he could learn in a single day how to name all the quantities up to the and to write them in a new language, which is that of the Figures. He proposed the formation of an analogous, general, capable language to organize and embrace all human ideas. A project similar was the one that Wilkins would undertake, thirty-five years old after this letter.
The intellectual current that animated the "Invisible College" was nourished, simultaneously, by alchemy and modernism. I had to orient the research towards an established language by the wise for the wise, since Latin was insufficient. The universalist idea of the Renaissance, enriched by the at the same time by the influence of the Rosicrucian and by the rise of the scientific thought, made a true International of Men of knowledge and power, on the margins and above the States.
For the creation of such an International, it was necessary to A synthetic language, of encyclopedic value. Three more centuries Later, this International is still trying to form itself.
In short, Wilkins' enterprise has its roots in the religious concept of language. God speaks directly to men. It gives them to know, by word of mouth, their orders and their prohibitions. Then, superimposes on this idea that of a Holy Book, that of a Sacred Book. Writing.
It is a tenacious idea, which transferred from the mystical plane to the profane, makes Mallarmé say that,
"Everything exists in the world to lead to a book," provokes Flaubert to suffer passion and martyrdom. throws Joyce into the adventure of Ulysses and, currently, incites the writers to research based on the feeling that "the writing leads only to itself."
In the Muslim tradition, the Qur'an, Al Kitab, the Book, is one of the the attributes of God. The original text, or Mother of the Book, is keep in heaven.
"The Qur'an is copied into a book, pronounced with the tongue, he learns by heart, and yet he subsists in the center of God."
It is not a work of the Divinity, but partakes of its substance. The Jews went even further in the mystique of Scripture Sacred. According to Kabbalists, the magical virtue of God's command: "Let there be light!" comes from the lyrics themselves.
The The god of Israel created the universe using numbers between one and ten, and twenty-two letters of the alphabet.
"Twenty-two fundamental letters: God drew them, He recorded, combined them, swapped them, and produced with them everything that is and all that will be."
According to Christians, God wrote two books, the second of which is the Universe. According to Francis Bacon, Scripture reveals His will and the Universe to us; that is, the book of creatures reveals His power to us. And all creation is, Indeed, a book that we are asked to decipher, just like Sacred Scripture.
"We cannot understand it," Galileo writes, "without before having studied the language and the characters in which it is written. The language of this book is mathematics, and its characters are Triangles; circles and other figures."
Thus, the human mind continually harbors the idea that there is a the ultimate key of the language and a final key language; that the The Word was given to him to solve his own riddle and that of the world; of that the "word of the word" could come out of the modulations of the human breath of the absolute structure, and that our language, Even in its wise combinations, it is but the shadow, projected and distorted, of a Great Language buried or to come, or, perhaps, at the same time, buried and yet to come.
Wilkins's enterprise was the dream of a language of the totality of the real thing. But can't there be a language, not of the totality? but of the essentials? In other words, if it were a question of communicating with an intelligence in the Universe, whatever its support, Is there a Word by which the intellect here can To say "I am," to define his nature and the state of his life. knowledge, to be understood and to receive answers? A great language to communicate with the Infinite?
Wilkins's enterprise was the dream of a language of the totality of the real thing. But can't there be a language, not of the totality? but of the essentials? In other words, if it were a question of communicating with an intelligence in the Universe, whatever its support, Is there a Word by which the intellect here can To say "I am," to define his nature and the state of his life. knowledge, to be understood and to receive answers? A great language to communicate with the Infinite?
Maybe we learned it from the Visitors and then we forget about it. Today, we're looking for it. Wilkins that he did not suspect that men would one day reach the moon, he wanted to to provide them with a language that would allow them to inventory their own world, of a vocabulary that would be a universal encyclopedia. The the complete baggage of the earthling. Today we feel compelled to establish a language that allows the following message to be conveyed to The vastness of the heavens:
"Here is a Being, an Intelligence of this or that level. Respond."
We wonder, in short, what alphabet we have to use to get, as Fred Hoyle said in the Columbia University during the course of 1969, "our Registration in the Galactic Telephone Yearbook'. And so it continues, in On different planes, in different degrees of necessity and ambition, the search for a linguistic Grail, for a Scripture of the Absolute.
With sounding rockets, we communicate millions of miles in space. We receive signals from celestial objects that They are millions of light-years away. Maybe the time is coming when We will discover that there are systematic signals and operators of a star telegraph somewhere in the Great Ring of Intelligence that Efremov dreams of.
The Ancient Mystique of Sacred Scripture leads Kabbalist Adolf Grad to argue that the Hebrew language, in particular, It is the ultimate structure of all communication, whether it be whatever may be the forms of intelligence in the Cosmos. God save us from mockery. However, we prefer to pay attention to new attempts, to some stammering solutions, but in a certain way proposed by men of imagination and by scientific researchers.
So we will say a few words about three of these attempts: the accelerated language imagined by the writer Robert Heinlein; the Loglan, or logical language, proposed by a group of American semantics, and, finally, the Lincos, lingua The Dutch logician Hans Freudenthal tries to establish it.
In all three cases, it is an entirely artificial language, a logical set capable of expressing the essence of the intelligence. If intelligence is, properly speaking, what It happens when nothing prevents intelligence from functioning. to make it manifest itself, endowing it with an expression that does not act as a brake. All our languages are embarrassing systems.
Such is the Heinlein's first observation. The mind loses a large part of its substance when brushing against words. All expression is, in other words, small part, message of intelligence, and, for the most part, effect of the latter's struggle against obstacles. Heinlein imagines, Well, a vocabulary-music, reduced, but quick and subtle: accents and vowels that multiply the relatively limited number of sounds that can be made by the human throat; Something like a Musical composition based on the seven notes.
This language, at the same time, which he baptizes with the name of "Rapipalabra" (Speedtalk), would allow, by expressing ourselves more quickly, thinking more quickly, and, in particular, In short, to live longer, that is, to increase our conscious time. Four hundred to eight hundred percent, he says. One difference greater than that between the average reader and the reader. the prodigy reader, Bergier-type. This. language could be conveniently recorded by electronic machines, which would print the signs dictated by that acceleration.
In addition, Heinlein states, The "rapipalabra" would be a language without paradoxes, since they are born in the of the conflict that occurs between the infinitely agile mind, ductile and able to act on several planes, and structures linear and dualistic modes of expression, written and Spoken. It would be a language adapted to the real structure of the world and of the spirit, that, to take it from mathematics, speed and ductility, and music its infinity of modulations.
You can - compare Heinlein's sleep - to better understand its quality - to the works of Benjamin Lee Whorf, a chemist whose violin of Ingres It was linguistics and that he discovered an Indian tribe whose language It is conceived in terms of relativity and quanta, rather than quanta. time and space: This language has conjunctions that correspond to to a space-time event. Thus, a conjunction would have three modes, applied to the man-boat event. The mode of the when the event, a man in a boat, has been effectively observed.
The mode of the dream, when the narrator has lived the situation in dreams. The mode of the probable, when the The narrator has not seen the fact, but has been told about it, and he It has some degree of probability. Heinlein has been made the Remark Yes modulations its language of modulations presupposes an ear and a Perfect transmission instruments.
"If I don't, I have Mozart's ear, I run the risk of understanding conch shell when you say cosmonaut."
To which Heinlein replies, that he has content to dream this language that the mere fact of learning the "rapiword", and to be in a position to understand it without To be mistaken, would show that one already belongs to the homo novis that has to succeed homo sapiens. However, he clings to extraordinary tenacity to this dream, and his ideas have stimulated certain scientific media, such as the Loglan study group or Logical Language. This language, less revolutionary than that of Heinlein does not dispense with Latin and Anglo-Saxon roots; but It tends, in its construction, to eliminate as many of the Paradoxes.
Leaps into the imaginary or works of approximation, his ambition is Great and beautiful: a new language would create a new man. We observe, here, an echo of the Kabbalistic dream: the restoration of the A lost word would return man to his divine state. A once again, the sacred concept of the Creator Word of Being. This On the other hand, the traditional concern coincides with the more immediate concerns of knowledge.
In his inaugural lecture on the In 1967, Jacques Monod, Nobel laureate, declared that the Molecular Biology course at the Collège de Franco had the following to be done:
"The appearance of language preceded perhaps very distantly, to the emergence of the nervous system of the human species, and contributed in fact, and in fact, to the decisively, to the selection of the most suitable variants for use all of your resources. In other words, it would be language that would be the that man would have created, more than man would have created language."
From a new language, proper to activate the higher functions of the mind, we pass, with the logician Freudenthal, to a language capable of attaining Intelligence in galactic space. Endorsed by the presence of masters of mathematical logic such as Brouwer, Beth and Heyting, in the Studies in Logic series of monographs and the Foundations of Mathematics, where his work appeared on Professor Freudenthal published, in 1960, his first book on Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse.
The Lincos of Freudenthal's aim is, in fact, communication with the Cosmos, and implies a fundamental structure of intelligence, which would be universal, regardless of what supported this intelligence in the distant stars. His attempt is reminiscent of the Lovecraft's ambition: to create a myth "that is comprehensible, even for the vaporous brains of spiral nebulae."
The Logician The Dutch government is trying to establish a system of radio signals that, in turn, through the cosmic night and through mathematics, able to describe our world to the Intelligence, under three Forms: Time, Space, and Behavior.
Freudenthal writes:
"It's It is probable that my cosmic language already exists, that some beings do it. to communicate. I had thought that cosmic rays they could be the vehicle of such communications; But I've stopped Believe. It is possible that the waves used will be stopped by the Earth's atmosphere or the electrified layers that surround us. Is It is possible for a space outpost to detect these Cosmic conversations. But, if we know nothing about intelligent beings What can there be in common between them and us?"
The mathematical intelligence, Freudenthal presumes, and the notion of spacetime. The Lincos is based on long-wave emissions and Short; a whole vocabulary of signs that expresses the essence of the mathematics, the passage of time, and the nature of space in our celestial region. "What happens to you over time?" asked the Surrealists in a famous survey.
Now it's about To let known what happens with time in "the mind of the abysses cosmic." The most astonishing aspect of Freudenthal's work is refers to the search for an essential mathematical language, capable of To convey indications about what we, the earthlings, are: a community of truth-seeking beings, who can communicate more or less well with each other and who seek dialogue with the Universe. A quarter of the undertaking is a space treatise. of movement and mass: to tell the Others how we measure, distances and velocities, variations in mass as a function of of speed, the laws of gravitation.
These messages, flowing in the torrent of light-years, might, in the course of millennia, to let it be known that there is intelligence here, and to indicate our position.
"Maybe this will be a great day for Them," said a friend of ours. Unless they just quietly jot down in their files: "A civilization has just been discovered that 10,000 years ago the umpteenth galaxy.""
And continue your observations, with cold indifference whose reasons we do not understand; for the Universe is well it could be, as Carl Sagan suggests, "full of civilizations at the same time." listen, but they refrain from broadcasting." We don't get away with it easily from the terrors of the Infinite, from the dread of the immensity. Under the populated sky, the mind throws the protracted moaning of its limitations, like the dog howling at the moon.
But It is also possible that we are sought with love, that every intelligence look for another to grow with it and discover the deposit of one absolute structure. Should we do everything we can to call the attention? Will we discover the Enemy, or the universality of the divine creature, as Teilhard de Chardin and C. S. Lewis thought, is that is to say, an ultimate impulse and illumination of the spirit, common to every intelligent creature, whether man or "vaporous brains of man." the spiral nebulae"?
The impotence of language separates us from our essential nature, as it separates us from the nature of the world. Others in space, and so we seek the Great Language that will give us return communication with the being of Being, here below and in the Heavens.
No! No! Let's not look for this. It would be ungodly and dangerous, Arthur C. Clarke exclaims, in a moment of depression:
"We don't know what's on the Royal Galaxies Highway, and more It's okay not to know."
But you have to play with fire. Just playing with fire, man built his dwelling place on the earth.