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From Marco Polo to Leibniz: Stories of Intercultural Misunderstanding

A lecture presented by Umberto Eco

December 10, 1996


In the course of my last lecture I dealt with the long-lasting dream of a perfect and universal language. This evening I shall on the contrary deal with some misunderstandings that took place when people were unable to understand that different cultures have different languages and world-visions. The fact that - by serendipity - also those mistakes provided some new discoveries only means (as I stressed in my last lecture) that even errors can produce interesting side-effects. When two different cultures meet each other, there is a shock due to their reciprocal diversity. At this point there are, in general, three possibilities: Conquest: The members of culture A cannot recognize the members of culture B as normal human beings (and vice versa) and define them as "barbarians" - that is, etymologically, nonspeaking beings, and therefore non-human or sub-human beings - and there are only two further possibilities, either to civilize them (that is, to transform people B into acceptable copies of people A) or to destroy them - or both. Cultural pillage: The members of culture A recognize the members of culture B as the bearers of an unknown wisdom; it can happen that culture A tries to submit politically and militarily the members of culture B, but at the same time they respect their exotic culture, try to understand it, to translate its elements into their own. The Greek civilization resulted in transforming Egypt into a Hellenistic kingdom, but the Greek culture highly admired Egyptian wisdom since the times of Pythagoras, and tried - so to speak - to steal the secret of Egyptian mathematics, alchemy, magic or religion - and such a curiosity, admiration and respect for the Egyptian wisdom reappeared in the modern European culture, from the Renaissance until our days. Exchange, that is, a sort of 'two ways' process of mutual influence and respect. This is certainly what happened with the early contacts between Europe and China. From the times of Marco Polo, but certainly at the times of father Matteo Ricci, these two cultures were exchanging their secrets, the Chinese accepted form the Jesuit missionaries many aspects of the European science and the Jesuits brought to Europe many aspects of the Chinese civilization (at such an extent that nowadays Italians and Chinese are still debating who invented spaghetti - before the New Yorkers damaged the whole thing by inventing spaghetti with meatballs). Conquest, cultural pillage and exchange are naturally abstract models. In reality we can find a variety of cases in which these three attitudes can be merged. But what I want to stress today is that there are two other ways of interaction between cultures. I am not interested in the first, which is exoticism, by which a given culture invents by misinterpretation and aesthetic bricolage an ideal image of a far and idealized culture, such as the past chinoisieries, Gauguin's Polynesia, the Siddharta syndrome for hippies, the Paris of Vincente Minnelli, or New York as viewed from xenophile Italians who cross the Ocean to buy here Italian but Hong-Kong-made jackets at some

famous English store. The phenomenon I am interested in is more difficult to label, and let me to use for the moment being a tentative definition. We (in the sense of human beings), travel and explore the world bringing with us some "background books." It is not indispensable that we bring them with us physically; I mean that we travel having a previous notion of the world, received by our cultural tradition. In a very curious sense we travel by already knowing what we are on the verge of discovering, because some previous books told us what we were supposed to discover. The influence of these "background books" is such that, irrespectively of what the traveler discovers and sees, everything will be interpreted and explained in terms of them. The whole of the medieval tradition convinced Europeans that there existed unicorns, that is, animals that looked as gentle and slender as white horses, with a horn on their nose. Since it was more and more difficult to meet unicorns in Europe (it seems, according to analytic philosophers, that they do not exist, even though I am not so sure of that) the tradition decided that unicorns were living in exotic countries, like the kingdom of Prester John in Ethiopia. Prester John's kingdom did not exist, but if by chance it existed, it would have hosted unicorns. Since counterfactual statements are, in force of the Truth Tables, always true, this was a good solution. When Marco Polo traveled to China, he was obviously looking for unicorns. Marco Polo was a merchant, not an intellectual, and moreover he was to young, when he started traveling, to have read too many books. But he certainly knew all the legends that at his time were circulating about exotic countries, so he was prepared to meet unicorns, and he looked for them. So, in his way back, in Java, he saw certain animals that looked like unicorns, because they had a single horn upon their nose. Since an entire tradition prepared him to see unicorns, he identified them with unicorns. But since he was naive and honest, he could not refrain from telling the truth. And the truth was that the unicorns he saw were very different from those represented by a millinery tradition. What a horror! They were not white, but black. They had the hair of a buffalo, and their hoof was big as that of an elephant. Their horn was not white but black, their tongue was thorny, their head looked as that of a wild boar. As a matter of fact what Marco Polo saw were rhinoceroses. We cannot say that Marco Polo lied. He told the bare truth, that is, that unicorns were not so gentle as people believed. But he was unable to say that he had met new and uncommon animals: instinctively he tried to identify them with a well known image. In cognitive sciences we would say today that he was determined by a cognitive model. He was unable to speak about the unknown making references to what he already knew and expected to meet. He was a victim of his background books. Let me consider now another story. As I said in my previous lecture, for a long time European theologians, grammarians and philosophers dreamt of rediscovering the lost language of the first man, Adam, since - according to the Bible - God confused the languages of mankind to punish the pride of those who wanted to build the Babel Tower. The Adamic Language had to be perfect because its names showed a direct analogy with the nature of things, and for a long time it was universally maintained that such a perfect language corresponded to the original Hebrew. Two centuries after Marco Polo, at the beginning of the XV century, the European culture rediscovered the Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Their code was irremediably lost (and it was rediscovered only in the XIX century by Champollion), but at that time it was introduced into Italy, in Florence, a Greek manuscript, the Hieroglyphica of Horus Apollon or Horapollus. Today we know that sometimes the hieroglyphs stood for the thing of which they were an image, but more frequently they had acquired a phonetic value. On the contrary, following the fabulous interpretation of Horapollus, the scholars of the XV, XVI and XVII century believed that they signified mysterious and mystical truths, understandable only by initiates. They were divine

symbols, able to communicate not the mere name or the form of the thing but its very essence, its true and deeply mysterious meaning. In this sense they were considered the first instance of perfect language. Horapollo's booklet looked as a Greek translation of more ancient Egyptian text: it was divided into short chapters in which it was explained, for example, that the Egyptians represented age by depicting the sun and the moon, or the month by a palm branch. There follows in each case a brief description of the symbolic meaning of each figure, and in many cases its polysemic value: for example, the vulture is said to signify mother, sight, the end of a thing, knowledge of the future, year, sky, mercy, Minerva, Juno, or two drachmas. Sometimes the hieroglyphic sign is a number: pleasure, for example, is denoted by the number 16, because (allegedly) sexual activity begins at the age of sixteen. Since it takes two to have an intercourse, however, this is denoted by two sixteen's. We now know that this text is a late Hellenistic compilation, dating from as late as the fifth century A.D.. Although certain passages indicate that the author did possess exact information about Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Hieroglyphica seem to be based on some texts written few centuries before. Horapollo was describing a writing system whose last example is on the Theodosius temple (394 A.D.). Even if these inscriptions were still similar to those elaborated three thousand years before, the Egyptian language in the V century had radically changed. Thus, when Horapollo wrote his text, the key to understanding hieroglyphs had long been lost. The hieroglyphic writing is - as everybody knows - undoubtedly composed, in part, of iconic signs: some are easily recognizable, such as eagle, owl, bull, snake, eye, foot, man seated with cup in hand; others are stylized-- the hoisted sail, the almond-like shape for a mouth, the serrated line for water. Some other signs, at least to the untrained eye, seem to bear only the remotest resemblance to the things that they are supposed to represent-- for instance a little square that stands for a seat, or a semicircle represents bread. All these signs are ideograms , which work by a sort of rhetorical substitution: thus an inflated sail serves to represent the wind; a man seated with a cup means "to drink"; a cow's ear means to understand.

Since not everything can be represented ideographically, ancient Egyptians turned their ideograms into simple phonograms . Thus, to represent a certain sound they put the image of a thing whose name sounded similar. To take an example from Champollion's first decipherment

(Lettre Dacier p. 11-12), the mouth, in Egyptian ro , was chosen to represent the Greek consonant ro . The eagle represented a, the broken line for water represented n, and so on. As you know, the necessary premise for the decipherment of hieroglyphs was a stroke of pure fortune, when a Napoleon's soldier discovered a three-lingual text, the famous Rosetta stone, which bore an inscription in hieroglyphic, in demotic (a cursive, administrative script elaborated about 1,000 B.C.), and in Greek. But the Rosetta stone was unknown both at the times of Horapollo and when Horapollo's book was read by the Western World.

However Horapollo was not totally wrong in attributing mystic significance to those images. From the early Christian ages Egypt had already abandoned many of its ancient traditions, but knowledge of sacred writing was still preserved and practiced only by priests living within the sacred enclosures of the ancient temples. Since the sacred writing no longer served any practical use, but initiatory purposes, these last priests began to introduce complexities into it, playing with the ambiguities inherent in a form of writing that could be differently read either phonetically or ideographically. The discovery that by combining different hieroglyphs, evocative visual emblems might be created, inspired these last scribes to experiment with increasingly complicated and abstruse combinations: these scribes began to formulate a sort of Kabbalistic play, based, however, on images rather than on letters. Thus their formed a halo of visual connotations and secondary senses around the term represented by phonetic signs, a sort of basso ostinato of associated meanings which served to amplify the original semantic range of the term. Horapollo, incapable of reading the hieroglyphs, received only imprecise information about their symbolic interpretation. Therefore he transmitted to the Western world only vague remarks about their symbolic reading, and the Western world was very happy to receive such a revelation: the hieroglyphs were regarded as the work of the great Hermes Trismegistos himself, and therefore as a source of inexhaustible wisdom. However this mistake, fully comprehensible, was not that simple. The second part of Hieroglyphica is probably the work of the Greek translator, Philippos, and it is there that appear a number of clear references to the late Hellenistic tradition of the Physiologus and other bestiaries, herbariums, and lapidaries that derive from it. We can look for this in the case of the stork. When the Hieroglyphica reaches the stork, it recites:

How [do you represent] he who loves the father If they wish to denote he who loves the father, they depict a stork. In fact, this beast, nourished by its parents, never separates itself from them, but remains with them until their old age, repaying them with piety and deference. The Hieroglyphica was certainly one of the sources for the Emblemata of Andrea Alciati in 1531. Thus, it is not surprising to find here a reference to the stork, who, as the text explains, nourishes its offspring by bringing them pleasing gifts, while bearing on its shoulders the worn-out bodies of its parents, offering them food from its own mouth. The image that accompanies this description in the 1531 edition is of bird which flies bearing another on its back. In subsequent editions, such as the one from 1621, for this is substituted the image of a bird that flies with a worm in its beak for its offspring, waiting open-mouthed in the nest.

Alciati's commentary refers to the passage describing the stork in the Hieroglyphica. Yet we have just seen that there is no reference either to the feeding of the young or to the transport of the parents. These features are however mentioned in a fourth-century A.D. text, the Hexaemeron of Basil (VIII, 5). In other words, the information contained in the Hieroglyphica was already at the disposition of European culture. A search for the traces of the stork from the Renaissance backwards is filled with pleasant surprises. In the Cambridge Bestiary (twelfth century), we read that storks nourish their young with exemplary affection, and that "they incubate their nests so tirelessly that they lose their own feathers. What is more, when they have moulted in this way, they in turn are looked after by the babies, for a time corresponding in length to the time which they themselves have spent in bringing up and cherishing their offspring" (The Bestiary, ed. by T.H. White, New York, Putnam's Sons, 1960, pp. 117-118). The accompanying image shows a stork who carries a frog in its beak, obviously a dainty morsel for its young.

The Cambridge Bestiary has taken this idea from Isidore of Seville who, in the Etymologiarum (XII, vii), tells more or less the same. Who then are Isidore's sources? Saint Basil we have already seen; there was Saint Ambrose as well (Hexaemeron V, 16, 53), and possibly also Celsus (cited in Origen, Contra Celsum IV, 98), and Porphyry (De abstinentia III, 23, 1). These, in their turn, used the Pliny's Naturalis Historia (X, 32) as their source.

Pliny, of course, could have been drawing on an Egyptian tradition, if Aelian, in the 2nd-3rd century A.D., could claim (though without citing Pliny by name) that "Storks are venerated among the Egyptians because the nourish and honour their parents when they grow old" (De animalium natura X, 16). But the idea can be traced back even further. The same notion is to be found in Plutarch (De solertia animalium 4), Cicero (De finibus bonorum et malorum II, 110), Aristotle (Historia animalium, IX, 7, 612b, 35), Plato (Alcibiades 135 E), Aristophanes (The Birds 1355), finally in Sophocles (Electra 1058). There is nothing to prevent us from imagining that Sophocles himself was drawing on ancient Egyptian tradition; but, even if he were, it is evident that the story of the stork has been part of occidental culture for as long as we care to trace. It follows that Horapollo did not reveal anything hot. Moreover, the origin of this symbol seems to have been Semitic, given that, in Hebrew, the word for stork means "the one who has filial piety". Read by anyone familiar with medieval and classical culture, the booklet of Horapollo seems to differ very little from the bestiaries current in the preceding centuries. Its merely adds some information about specifically Egyptian animals, such as the ibis and the scarab, and neglects to make certain of the standard moralizing comments or biblical references. This was clear even to the Renaissance. In his Hieroglyphica sive de sacris Aegyptorum aliarumque gentium literis of 1556, Pierio Valeriano never tired of employing his vast stock of knowledge of classical and Christian sources to note the occasions where the assertions of Horapollo might be confirmed. Yet instead of reading Horapollo in the light of a previous tradition, he revisits this whole tradition in the light of Horapollo. We are speaking of the "re-reading" of a text (or of a network of texts) which had not been changed during the centuries. So what has changed? We are here witnessing a semiotic incident which, as paradoxical as some of its effects may have been, was, in terms of it own dynamic, quite easy to explain. Horapollo's text (qua text) differs but little from other similar writings, which were previously known. Nonetheless, the Humanists read it as a series of unprecedented statements. The reason is simply that the readers of the fifteenth century saw it as coming from a different Author. The text had not changed, but the "voice" supposed to utter it was endowed with a different charisma. This changed the way in which the text was received and the way in which it was consequently interpreted. If at the beginning of this lecture I spoke of old background books which pulled people to see the unknown on the light of the already known, here we are witnessing an opposite case: something already knows is reconsidered in a new and uncanny way on the light of an as yet unknown book. Thus, as old and familiar as these images were, the moment they appeared as transmitted not by the familiar Christian and pagan sources, but by the ancient Egyptian divinities themselves, they took on a fresh, and radically different, meaning. For the missing scriptural commentaries there were substituted allusions to vague religious mysteries. The success of the book was due to its polisemy. Hieroglyphs were regarded as initiatory symbols This is the way in which the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were considered by one of the most learned man of the XVII century, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, mainly in his monumental Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-54). Kircher firmly believed that the ancient Egyptian was the perfect Adamic language, according to the 'hermetic' tradition he identified the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistos with Moses, and said that hieroglyphs were Symbols, that is, expressions that referred to an occult, unknown and ambivalent content. Kircher defined a symbol as "a nota significativa of mysteries, that is to say, that it is the nature of a symbol to lead our minds, by means of certain similarities, to the understanding of things vastly different from the things that are offered to our external senses, and whose property it is to appear hidden under the veil of an obscure expression. [...] Symbols cannot be translated by words, but expressed only by marks, characters, and figures" ( Obeliscus Pamphilius II, 5 p. 114-120).

These symbols were initiatory, because the allure of Egyptian culture was given by the promise of a knowledge that was wrapped in an impenetrable and indecipherable enigma so as to protect it from the idle curiosity of the vulgar multitudes. Kircher did not base his work on Horapollo's fantastic bestiary; instead, he studied and made copies of the real hieroglyphic inscriptions - and. his reconstructions, reproduced in sumptuous tables, have an artistic fascination all of their own. Into these reconstruction Kircher poured elements of his own fantasy, frequently re-portraying the stylized hieroglyphs in curvaceous Baroque forms. When Kircher set out to decipher hieroglyphics in the seventeenth century, there was no Rosetta stone to guide him. This explains his double mistake, namely that hieroglyphs had only symbolic meaning and the fact that he identified their meaning in an absolutely fanciful way. At times, Kircher seemed to approach the intuition that certain of the hieroglyphs had a phonetic value. He even constructed a rather fanciful alphabet of 21 hieroglyphs, from whose forms he derives, through progressive abstractions, the letters of the Greek alphabet. But it was this conviction that, in the end, hieroglyphs all showed something about the natural world that prevented Kircher from ever finding the right track.

Thus on page 557 of his Obeliscus Pamphylius, figures 20 through 24 reproduce the images of a cartouche to which Kircher gives the following reading: "the originator of all fecundity and vegetation is Osiris whose generative power bears from heaven to his kingdom the Sacred Mophtha". This same image was deciphered by Champollion ( Lettre Dacier p. 29) who used Kircher's own reproductions as " (Autocrat or Emperor) sun of the son and sovereign of the crown, (Caesar Domitian Augustus)". The difference is, to say the least, notable, especially as regards the mysterious Mophtha, figured as a lion, over which Kircher expended pages and pages of mystic exegesis listing its numerous properties, while for Champollion the lion simply stands for the Greek letter Lambda. In the same way, on page 187 of the third volume of the Oedipus there is long analysis of a cartouche that appears on the Lateran obelisk. Kircher reads here a long argument concerning the necessity of attracting the benefits of the divine Osiris and of the Nile by means of sacred ceremonies activating the Chain of Genies, tied to the signs of the zodiac. Egyptologists today read it as simply the name of the pharaoh Apries. Kircher was then madfully wrong. Notwithstanding its eventual failure, Kircher is still the father of Egyptology, though in the same way that Ptolemy is the father of astronomy, in spite of the fact that his main hypothesis was wrong. In any case, following a false hypothesis he collected real archeological material an Champollion (more than one hundred fifty years later) lacking the opportunity for direct observation, used Kircher's reconstructions for his study of the obelisk standing in Rome's Piazza Navona. Since we have started speaking of China, let us see what Kercher, insatiable in his lunatic curiosity, did with China. Egyptian was an original language certainly more perfect than Hebrew, and certainly more ancient, too. Why not to look for other more venerable linguistic ancestors? Toward the end of the XVI century the Western world started to know something more about China, now visited not only by merchants or explorer, as it had happened at the times of Marco Polo. In 1569 the Dominican Gaspar da Cruz published a first description of the Chinese writing (in his Tractado en quem se contan muito por extenso as cousas de la China), revealing that the ideograms did not represent sounds but directly things, or ideas of those things, at such an extent that they were understood by different people like Chinese, Cochincinese and Japanese, even they pronounced them in a different way. These revelations reappeared in a book by Juan

Gonzalez de Mendoza ( Historia del gran reyno de la China, 1585), who repeated that even though different oriental people were speaking different languages they could understand each other by writing ideograms, which represented the same idea for all of them. When in 1615 the diaries of Father Matteo Ricci were published, those ideas became a matter of common knowledge and one of the authors of the most important project for a universal philosophical language, John Wilkins, wrote in his Mercury (1641) that "though (peoples) of China and Japan doe as much differ in their language, as the Hebrew and the Dutch, yet either of them can, by this help of a common character, as well understand the books and letters of the others, as if they were only their own" (p. 106-7). The first European scholar to speak of a "universal character" was Francis Bacon ( De dignitate and augmentis scientiarum, 1623, vi, 1) and, in order to prove its possibility, he quoted the Chinese writing. Curiously enough, neither Bacon nor Wilkins understood the iconic origin of ideograms, and took them as purely conventional devices: in any case the ideograms looked as endowed with the double property of being universal and able to establish a direct contact between the character and the idea. The impact of the discovery of Chinese ideograms had an enormous influence on the development of the research for a Universal Philosophical Language in Europe, but it is not this the point that interests us today.

As you can realize, he tries to see the original ideograms as hieroglyphics. Obviously, according to his theory, Cham brought to China the Egyptian writing, and there was by consequence a strict connection between hierogliphics and ideograms ( Oedipus, III, p. 11, and China). Naturally Kircher understood, as Bacon and other had done, that ideograms were universal characters referring to ideas and not, alphabetically, to sounds. But at this point he takes a curious position. While the hierogliphics were divine in their origins because they depicted the unknown and misterious essence of things, the Chinese ideograms referred clearly and unambiguously to precise ideas. In this sense they were corrupted hierogliphics which had lost their divine power and had become mere practical tools. As Kircher said, when a hieroglyphic represents an animal which in its turn represents the Sun, one should not only intend the virtues and operations of the Sun as a celestial body but also and primarily the Sun as a spiritual Archetype and its secret virtues in the spiritual word. ( China, p. 311). Unfortunately, Chinese ideograms referred to the Sun as such, and that was a pity. In the following century, in an atmosphere of neo-pagan sinophilism, the rationalistic criticism of Rousseau, Warburton and the Encyclopedie of Diderot and D'Alembert put the entire matter upside down: the Chinese ideogram were better than the Egyptian hierogliphics because the former were clear, precise and unambiguous, while the latter were vague and imprecise. But for

Kircher such a vagueness, the multi-interpretability of hierogliphics was a proof of their divine origin, while the human precision of the ideogram was the proof that the true Egyptian wisdom (of which the Christian wisdom was considered the direct heritage) when coming to China was corrupted by the Devil. In order to better understand the position of Kircher we have to tell another story, concerning the first description of the newly discovered lands of America, in particular the Mexican Maya and Aztec Civilizations. In 1590 it was published a Historia natural y moral de las Indias by father Jos de Acosta who tried to demonstrate that the inhabitants of America had a cultural tradition and outstanding intellectual abilities, and to prove that he described the pictographic nature of the Mexican writing showing that it had the same nature as the Chinese one. It was a courageous position because other authors had insisted on the sub-human nature of the Amerindians and a Relacin de las cosa de Yucatan by Diego de Landa showed the diabolical nature of their writing. Now it happens that Kircher (in Oedypus) shared the opinion of Diego da Landa and provided a proof of the inferiority of the Mexican writing. They were not hieroglyphs because, contrary to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, they did not refer to sacred mysteries; but they were not even ideograms in the Chinese sense, because they were not referring to general ideas, but to singular facts; they were mere pictograms and they were not an example of universal language, because images referring - as a mnemonic device - to single facts can be understood only by those who already know these facts. Recent researches have proved that the Ameridians pictograms were in fact an instance of a very flexible pictorial language, able to express abstract ideas, too. It is really a pity that our Western scholars have finally discovered that only some centuries after we have destroyed those civilizations on the grounds of their semeiotical inferiority. But this is not only a case of new discoveries influenced by background books: it is a disquieting instance of the influence of political and economical motivations upon the reading of newly discovered books. The ancient Egypt had disappeared and its whole wisdom had become part of the Christian civilization (at least, according to the Kircherian utopia): its writing was so considered sacred and magic. Amerindians were people to be colonized; their religion had to be destroyed as well as their political system (and as a matter of fact at the times Kircher was writing, both had been already destroyed): to justify such a violent transformation of a country and of a culture it was useful to demonstrate that their writing had no philosophical interest. On the contrary China was a powerful empire with a developed culture; at least at that time the European states had no intention to submit it. However China Illustrata appeared under the auspices of the Emperor Leopold I whose dominions faced eastwards and to whom Christian communities of the Asiatic near East looked for protection (for instance, to please the Armenians it was suggested that the Holy Roman Emperor had a mission to rebuild the fabled but decaying temple of King Cyrus). Austria was considering itself the great light of the Eastern Christianity. In some way the great empire of China had to involved in such an ambitious project, and many of the Jesuit missionaries, such as Grueber and Martini, came from Central Europe. Thus Kircher who played a crucial part in this Utopia - constructed a whole spiritual history of China in which Christianity is claimed as an abiding force there since the early centuries A.D. (R. J. Evans, The making of Habsburg Monarchy 1500-1700, Oxford, 1985, pp. 430 ffg). We can say that even the connection he posited between China and Egypt were part of that imperial dream. China was presented not as an unknown barbarian to be defeated but as a "prodigal son" who had to come back to the home of the common Father.

Thus the problem was to deal with Chinese, to establish not a Conquest but at least an Exchange relationship, an exchange in which however Europe had to play a major role, since it was the bearer of the true religion. Mexican, with their diabolical way of writing, had to be converted against their will; Chinese, whose writing was neither as venerable as the Egyptian one, nor as diabolical as the Mexican one, had to be peacefully and rationally persuaded of the superiority of Western thought. Thus the Kircherian classification of hierogliphics, ideograms and pictograms mirrored the difference between two ways of interacting with exotic civilizations. I quoted the whole story because it seems to me that, once again, Kircher was going ideally to China not to discover something different but to find again and again what he already knew and what was told him by a series of background books. More than trying to understand differences Kircher looked for identities. Naturally everything depends on one's background books and on what one is looking for. Let me finish with another story. At the end of the XVII century Leibniz was still looking for a universal language. But he was no more pursuing the utopia of a perfect mystical tongue. He looked for a sort of mathematical language by virtue of which scholars, when debating a problem, could sit around a table, to implement some logical calculuses, and find a common truth. To make it short, he was a forerunner, or better the founder, of the contemporary formal logic. His background books were different from those of Kircher, but his way to interpret a different culture was not so different. Remark that he was profoundly fascinated by China and devoted to that subject many writings. He thought that "by a singular will of the destiny " the two greatest civilizations of humanity were located at the two extremities of the Eurasian continent, and were Europe and China. He said that China was challenging Europe in the fight for the primacy and that battle was won once by one and once by the other of the two rivals: China was better than Europe as far as the elegance of life and the principles of Ethics and Politics were concerned, while Europe had got the primacy in abstract mathematical sciences and Metaphysics. You see that we have here a man who certainly did not conceive thoughts of political conquest or religious conversion, but on the contrary was inspired by ideals of a loyal and respectful mutual exchange of experiences. After Leibniz had published a collection of documents on China ( Novissima Sinica, 1697), father Joachim Bouvet, just coming back from China, wrote to him a letter in which he describes the I Ching, the nowadays too famous Chinese book on which many New Age fans are implementing Olympic games of free and irresponsible deconstruction. Father Bouvet thought that this book contained the fundamental principles of Chinese tradition. At the same time Leibniz was working on binary calculus, that is that mathematical calculus which proceeds by 0 and 1 and which is still used today for programming computers. Leibniz was convinced that such a calculus had metaphysical foundation because it reflects the dialectic between God and Nothingness. Bouvet thought that the binary calculus was perfectly represented by the structure of the hesagrams which appeared in the I Ching, and sent to Leibniz a reproduction of the system. Now, in the I Ching the hesagrams follow this order (called Weng Wang order) - to be read horizontally from right to left.

However Bouvet sent to Leibniz a different representation (the Fu-hsi order), that is, the one reproduced in the central square part of this image.

It was easy for Leibniz, reading them horizontally, (but from left to right!) to recognize in these representation a diagrammatic reproduction of the progression of natural numbers in binary digits, as he demonstrated in his Explication de l'aritmetique binaire (1705).

Thus - following Leibniz - we could say today that the I Ching contains the principles of the Boolean algebra. This is another case in which one discovers something different and tries to see it as absolutely analogous to what one already knows. The I Ching were important for their divinatory contents, but for Leibniz they become a further evidence for proving the universal value of his formal calculus (and in a letter to Father Bouvet he suggests that their inventor was Hermes Trismegistos - as a matter of fact Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the hexagrams, had the same characteristic of Hermes, in so far as he was considered to be the father of all inventions). You know what it is meant by "serendipity": one discovers something right because of a mistake, as it happened to Christopher Columbus who intended to reach India navigating westwards and, because of his miscalculation, found America. I think that both the cases of Kircher and Leibniz were cases of serendipity: both misunderstood Chinese writing, but the former, looking for the China of his Hermetic dream, contributed to a future understanding of Chinese writing; the latter, looking for the mathematical awareness of Fu Hsi, contributed to development of modern logic. But if we can be happy for every case of serendipity, we cannot forget that Columbus did miscalculated the size of Earth, and that both Kircher and Leibniz did not follow the golden rule of a good cultural anthropology. But what does it mean a good cultural anthropology? I do not rank among those who believe that there are no rules for interpretation, since even a programmatic misinterpretation requires some rules: I believe that there are at least intersubjective criteria in order to tell if an interpretation is a bad one - in the very sense in which we are sure that Kircher misinterpreted something of the Egyptian or Chinese culture, and that Marco Polo did not really see unicorns. However the real problem is not so much concerning the rules: it rather concerns our eternal drive to think that our ones are the golden ones. The real problem of a critique of our own cultural models is to ask, when we see a unicorn, if by chance it is not a rhinoceros.

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