Nathaniel Perrin

A summary of the opening chapter to Deleuze's magnum opus of metaphysics

Deleuze: Introduction to Difference and Repetition

*Giambattista Vico* Encyclopedia Britannica. [Source URL](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giambattista-Vico#/media/1/627497/201787).

Giambattista Vico is an often overlooked voice in the philosophy of history and politics. Though he enjoyed a brief revival via Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss, Vico remains outside the canonical limelight of early modern thought, though he remains an astute voice of the Counter-Enlightenment to this day.

Vico's *La Scienza Nuova* (1734) is a peculiar magnum opus which offers a idiosyncratic synthesis of abstract, universal historical principles with concrete examples grounded in Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, Egypt, etc. alongside philological analysis of the etymology of terms across ages and languages.

I was first introduced to Vico in 2015 via literary theory which snags an excerpt from this book where Vico describes the giants who lived around the time of the Flood and what it means for human history. I was indelibly struck by both how simultaneously outlandish and poignant his mode of thought was and have been an ardent admirer of Vico ever since.

I am now re-reading the book through Robert Miner's new translation, hoping that seven years have given me a keener eye to recognize more of its depth than when I first read him in full in college.

Among a panoply of insights into civilization and human nature, Vico breaks down the cycle of history into the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. Language, class structure, and even agrarian law reflects this tripartite division. Though we may not be able to access much if any of this first age of the gods, its vestiges live on in every human society.

Vico is a true humanist through and through, and this is deeply reflected in his project. The universal can only be understood in concrete human culture and language, driven particularly by the Greek and Roman heritage.

This emerges most clearly in his focused attention on the etymology of words. Centuries before Heidegger repopularized the practice, Vico takes many opportunities to analyze how the evolution and formation of concepts helps us understand their true meaning. As an example, the Greek term for theory emerges from those who gaze at the star and seek to understand their meaning, an abstraction from that which makes little immediate sense to us.

But beyond this, Vico was deeply committed to reacting to what he saw as the political atheism of Hobbes or Machivalli, those who believed that there was no intrinsically meaningful language but rather the mechanistic interaction of forces. Against this view, Vico was dedicated to developing an outlook which accounted for both natural law and language with arbitrary symbols, the interplay and evolution of social classes. How refinement emerges from a feral way of life, and how it can sink back into it.

The following is a list 114 axioms that Vico presents in Book I of the 1744 edition of *La Scienza Nuova*. In the vein of Spinoza and Hobbes, Vico believed these could be foundations for understanding all human affairs, much as certain axioms undergird the foundations of geometric knowledge, and give us certain access to truth.

Most of these are direct quotes from the Robert Miner translation (pp. 74-109) while others paraphrase for sake of clarity or brevity.

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# On the Elements

1744 edition, §119-329.

1. Man, on account of the indefinite nature of the human mind, whenever that mind is overthrown by ignorance, makes himself the measure of all things.
2. Whenever men are unable to make out some idea of things that are distant and unknown, they evalute them relative to things that are known and present.
3. Every nation has the vanity to consider itself earlier than all other nations in discovering the conveniences of human life and of preserving a memory of the things of their own back to the beginning of the world.
4. To this vanity of nations is joined the vanity of the learned who want what they know to be as ancient of the world.
5. Philosophy, so as to benefit humankind, must raise up and support fallen and weak man, not uproot nature or abandon him in his corruption.
6. Philosophy considers man as he ought to be and so cannot be fruitful except to the few who wish to live in an elevated society.
7. Lawgiving considers man as he is so as to make good use of him in human society, as from ferocity, avarice, and ambition--the three vices of humankind--from which it makes the military, the market, and the court.
8. Things outside their natural state do not adapt or persist there.
9. Men who do not know the truth of things take care to hold fast to the certain. If the intellect cannot be satisfied with knowledge (*scienza*), the will can at least repose in consciousness (*conscienza*).
10. Philosophy contemplates reason and is the science of the true. Philology observes authority in human choice which is consciousness of what is certain.
11. Human choice is by its nature most uncertain but can be given certainty and be made determinate by common sense concerning human necessity or advantage. These two are the sources of natural law of gentile peoples.
12. Common sense is a judgment without reflection sensed in common by a whole society or all of humankind.
13. If the same ideas emerge across peoples not in contact with each other, it provides a common impetus for its truth.
14. The nature of things is its coming into being (*nascimento*) at certain times in certain ways. These times and ways always belong to a particular way things must play out.
15. The intrinsic properties of subjects must be produced by the modifications or fashions by which the things come into being; it is through this that we are able to establish as true that the nature or coming into being of those things is of such a kind.
16. Folk traditions must have a public impetus for what is true which is why these traditions first came into being and are preserved by entire peoples over long periods of time.
17. Common ways of speaking should be thought to offer the weightiest of testimony about the ancient customs of peoples, which had currency at the time when their languages were formed.
18. The language of an ancient nation that preserves itself as regnant until it arrives at its perfection should be a great testimony about the customs of the earliest times of the world.
19. If the Law of the Twelve Tables (Rome) were the customs of the gentiles of Latium, then this law offers a great testimony about the ancient natural law of the gentiles of Latium.
20. If the poems of Homer are civil histories of the ancient Greek customs, then they are two treasures of the natural law of the gentile peoples of Greece.
21. The Greek philosophers hastened the natural course that their nation must make, progressing swiftly to the peak of refinement while simultaneously holding onto their mythical history of gods and heroes (unlike the Romans who lost their gods and only held onto their heroes).
22. It is necessary that in the nature of human things, a mental language common to all nations uniformly attends to the substance of things achievable within the sociability of human life and articulates that substance with as many different modifications as these things are able to have throughout their many different aspects. This is what we experience as true in proverbs.
23. Sacred history is more ancient than all the most ancient profane history. It speaks of the history of the state of nature in a familial state.
24. The Hebraic religion was founded by the true God upon a prohibition against divination. Divination is the root of all gentile nations.
25. The Universal Flood is demonstrated across the myths of all nations.
26. The giants possessed by their nature huge bodies from partly physical and partly moral causes rooted in the feral education of their children.
27. Greek history takes its beginning from the flood and from the giants.
28. Two great fragments from Egyptian antiquity: (1) The whole time can be divided into the three ages of gods, heroes, and men. (2) Each of these ages has its own spoken languages: the sacred (hieroglyphic), language of likenesses (symbolic), and language of conventional signs (vernacular).
29. In five passages, Homer alludes to the language of heroes.
30. Varro enumerated thirty thousand names of gods which correspond to all the needs of human life.
31. Whenever peoples have become so savage because of arms that human laws no longer have a place among them, only religion is powerful enough to tame them.
32. Men ignorant about natural causes who are unable to explain them will instead explain phenomena as happening according to their nature (the magnet is in love with the iron).
33. The physics of the ignorant is a commonplace metaphysics by which they render the causes of things they do not know to the will of God without considering how divine will actually operates.
34. *Mobiles ad superstitionem perculsae semel mentes* (Tacitus *Annals* 1.28.2). Minds struck by fear tend toward superstition.
35. Wonder is the daughter of ignorance, and the greater the effect admired, the more the wonder grows in proportion.
36. The more vigorous the imagination, the weaker reasoning is.
37. The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to things without sense, just as children imagine life in inanimate objects.
38. Idolatry originates in the human tendency to call someone a god either by their exemplary virtue or by the scope of their power.
39. Curiosity is a proper connatural to man, the daughter of ignorance who begets knowledge. Wonder makes our minds open, and curiosity takes its custom to think what such a wonder signifies.
40. Witches are replete with terrifying superstitions and are exceedingly savage and brutal.
41. For hundreds of years after the Universal Flood, the earth was too damp to emit the dry exhalations that generate lightning.
42. Jove flashes lightning and fells to the ground the giants. Every gentile nation has a Jove.
43. Every gentile nation has its own Hercules, the son of Jove.
44. The first wise men of the Greeks were the theological poets who flourished prior to the heroic poets. Just as Jove is father to Hercules.
45. Men naturally tend to preserve memories of the laws and of the orders which hold them within their own society.
46. All barbarian histories have mythical beginnings.
47. The human mind naturally tends to take delight in uniformity.
48. It is the nature of children that the first names and words they know are the foundation from which they come to know all other things.
49. As the Egyptians observed, all discoveries advantageous or necessary for human life to come from Hermes Trismegistus.
50. Memory is most vivacious and the imagination most lively in children.
51. Every faculty that man does not possess by nature may be acquired through persistent study of art. Except for poetry, which is only accessible to those who have the poetic faculty by nature.
52. Children mimic whatever they are capable of apprehending.
53. First, men sense without noticing. Then when they notice, it troubles them. Finally, they can reflect and understand it with a clear mind.
54. Men who are confronted by things they do not understand but which are pertinent to them, naturally interpret them in keeping with their own nature, that is with their passions and customs.
55. For the Egyptians as for other gentile peoples, the first theology is a history dressed up with myths. Subsequent generations then imbue these myths with mystical significance.
56. The first writers are the poets.
57. The mute explain themselves through gestures and objects which have a natural correspondence to the ideas they signify. (Hieroglyphics which give ways ot poetic imagery and metaphors).
58. The mute issue unformed sounds while signing.
59. Men vent great passion through song.
60. Languages start with monosyllabic words, just as children start in monosyllabic vocabulary.
61. Heroic verse is the most ancient of all. Spondaic verse is the slowest.
62. Iambic verse is the one most similar to prose.
63. The human mind is naturally inclined to see itself with the senses. Only with great difficulty can it come to understand itself in itself.
64. The order of ideas must proceed in accordance with the order of things.
65. The order of human things proceeds first from forests, to lodges, to villages, to cities, and finally to academies.
66. Men at first sense what is necessary then tarry with what is advantageous, then what is convenient, later delighting in what is pleasurable, then become dissolute in luxury, and lastly go mad in wasting their substance.
67. Nature of peoples follows this course: crude, strict, benign, refined, dissolute.
68. Within humankind, the huge and gullish are the first to arise. Then arise the magnaimous and haughty. Then the valorous and just. Then the morose and reflective. Lastly, the mad and the dissolute.
69. Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.
70. In a lawless world, only the very few form families and estates (the patriarchs). It is only later that the many come to occupy these cultivated estates.
71. Native custom does not change instantly but in stages and over long periods of time.
72. If all nations start from the worship of divinity, then the familial state must have depended upon divination and priests, and subsequently the kings who enforce divine law over families.
73. There is a folk tradition that the first to govern the world were kings.
74. There is another folk tradition that those worthiest by nature were created as the first kings.
75. There is a third folk tradition that the first kings were wise men.
76. There is a folk tradition that the first form of government in the world was monarchy.
77. Taking into account Axioms 64 and 67, the patriarchs exercised a monarchical power subject to God alone and unrestricted over all beneath them.
78. The families could not have been the original families except as derived from familial servants of the Fathers in the state of nature.
79. The earliest associates (*socii*) who were companions with a common advantage could only exist in seeking refuge from the patriarchs.
80. Men naturally come to a system of benefits when they discern that they might maintian or gain a good and great part of their advantage, the hopes of civil life.
81. Men of fortitude do not relinquish in idleness what they gained by virtue. They vield as little as possible and only through necessity and advantage.
82. All nations had some forms of clientship between vassals and fealty.
83. The first agrarian law of the world distinguishes the three kinds of persons and domains in civil life: the bonitary domain for plebeians, the quiritary domain for nobles, and eminent domain for the patriarchs.
84. As Aristotle observes, the heroic regime is a form of republic.
85. He also observes that ancient republics did not have laws for private punishment. Barbarism lacks domestication by private laws.
86. Yet again he observes that in ancient republics the nobles swore themselves to be the eternal enemies of the plebeians.
87. Aristocratic republics are extremely temperate about going to war so as to not train the multitude in warfare.
88. Aristocratic republics keep wealth among the nobility for wealth contributes to the power of this order.
89. Honor is the noblest stimulus to military valor.
90. People will necessarily conduct themselves heroically in war if they train themselves over honor in peacetime.
91. Sparring for equality with respect to justice, which trains the orders of the city is the most powerful means to aggrandize the republics.
92. The weak want laws, the powerful withhold them. The ambitious promote the laws to create a following among the weak. Princes protect the laws to make the powerful equal to the weak.
93. Honor is diluted in popular republics where the avaricious multitude can give decrees without value. The many pass decrees to enrich themselves, and thus these governments dissolve in civil war.
94. Natural liberty is fiercer as its good are connected to the body, and civil servitude binds with goods of fortune that are not necessary for life.
95. Men love to escape from subjection and desire equality. This is how aristocratic republics become popular republics. Later they are forced to surpass their equals. Finally, they put themselves above the laws as tyrants. It is at this point plebeians once again put themselves into submission under a monarch.
96. Because nobles were originally living in lawsless liberty, they were relucant to take on the burdens of law. However the balance of power with plebeians cause them to submit to laws. Finally, they tend toward subjection under a monarch to preserve their own power and life of convenience.
97. After the flood, the first men resided in the mountains then descended to the plains and finally came to the shores.
98. According to Plato, after the floods the sons of Polyphemus lived in mountainous caves, the earliest paterfamilias in the world. Later they descended to the plains and built Troy. Troy was then moved to the sea [and it was from the sea that it was conquered.]
99. There is another tradition that Tyre was also founded inland before moving to the sea.
100. Men cannot be induced to abandon their own lands except by what is ultimately necessary for life or by greed and covetousness.
101. The Phoenicians were the sailors fo the ancient world.
102. Barbaric nations were impenetrable and could only be broken out by war or commerce.
103. Some Greek colony was formed in Latium but was buried in the shadows of antiquity by the Romans.
104. What is customary is like a king, and the law is like a tyrant. What is customary is reasonable and the law is not necessarily animated by natural reason.
105. The natural law of the gentile peoples comes from the customs of nations which conform to a uniform human common sense. This common sense is arrived at without reflection or imitation of other nations.
106. Doctrines must start from when the matters which they treat start.
107. There are gentiles who had a start before the cities, these are the ancient noble households from whom Romulus composed the Senate. There are also noble households founded after the city which Junius Brutus used to form the new Senate after expelling the kings.
108. There is also this distinction between the gods. Gods of the greater gentiles pre-exist cities while there are gods of later peoples.
109. Men with limited ideas deem the law to be only as much as what is said expressly by its words.
110. Civil equity is a kind of probable reasoning not naturally familiar to all human beings but to those few who preeminent in practical wisdom, practice, or learning teach what is necessary for the preservation of human society. This is the reason of state.
111. The certain, as it pertains to laws, is an obscurity of reason sustained solely by an authority which we experience in practical application as harsh, but whose practical application is necessary so that the laws remain certain. The laws are individuated through application.
112. Men of intelligence deem the law to include the whole of what is called "equal advantages in cases".
113. The true as it pertains to laws is a certain light and splendor by which natural reason illuminates them, whence the same jurists used to say *verum est* for *aequum est*.
114. The natural equity of a human reason, fully expressed, is a practice of wisdom for the doing of what is advantageous (*faccende dell'utilità*).


Foundations for understanding humanity and its history

Vico: 114 axioms for the New Science

*Prometheus Chained* by Harold Parker, R.S.A. [Source URL](https://victorianweb.org/sculpture/parker/3.html).

It is a painful thing to grapple with the fixtures of our finitude.

To feel yourself bound in some body, perpetually condemned to wander a restricted zone of space and time. It seems brash foolishness to claim ourselves free when we are locked within temporal horizons of less than a century. How vast the corridors of history, and how small our permitted patrol.

Though the body itself is consigned to extensions of locality, the mind offers an escape through language and intuition.

The utterance of the lips breathes persistence into the past. Even as the spoken word wilts in the stilling and stilting of sound waves, the word enters the ear, and the mind. Here it is lost or stored with varying levels of alterations. But in this way does language slip the bonds of time through the communication of what was into the now. The oral tradition is the persistence of spoken pasts through the networks of minds who hold onto it. Myths, legends, and epics etched upon the ethnic scroll of a people's memory.

Writing too advances this form of historical transcendence. Transmission through sight from ledger to consciousness and back again. Writing is the means of not only conversing with the dead, but living their lives as well. A journey into the underworld.


But this prompts the question: what of the incongruity of temporal consciousness?

This paradigm of transmission and communication presupposes the equality of transmitting consciousness and the receptor consciousness. But time mutates all it touches. And those standing downstream from the original speaker will only hear the word through the reverbations of the Heraclitean river.

How then can we understand the original, standing where we are as we do?

Such is the problem of hermeneutics. Whether by Heidegger's pessimism or Gadamer's optimism, we must recognize our own positioning as beings of historicity. Not just in body, but in mind, and perhaps even in soul. We are historically effected consciousness.

Our minds are rendered partial and finite through their very nature. Our ideas and world will always be enclosed by the lack of what we do not know, and that layer surrounded by what we do not know that we do not know.

Those who stand a millennium, a century, or even one generation before us seem alien and strange to us. Why do they talk that way? What are their thought patterns that could give rise to such expressions? Miscommunication awakens us to the hermeneutic distance which gaps our understanding from theirs.

Our foundations, our innate prejudice, essentially prevents us from grasping them as they know themselves in their foundations. Thus, the impossibility of absolute or universal knowledge. Knowledge is built out of tribes. We only delude ourselves into the myth of universal, scientific knowledge through a tribe that has transformed itself into a world empire. We live under the tribal religion of Western science and culture, whose sprawl and ability to subsume all else allegedly gives warrant to its claim to be "universal". In our moment, one tribe rules over the rest, at least for now.


It is humbling to come to terms to these restrictions. That we may never know some things due to the nature of our birth. The technologies and cultures of our time limit the horizons of our understanding, as it does for all others.

Yet the sense that this limitation is tragic or negative in some sense is itself a presupposition, a prejudice of attitude. To think that knowledge can be formed *ex nihilo* without grounding. That a lever can exist without a fulcrum. It rests upon a mode of Western arrogance which believes that knowledge exists in itself without sociohistorical grounding or timing.

This is why Gadamer frames these limitations, restrictions, and horizons as positive markers. These are the building blocks of shared knowledge and understanding. Without our particularly instantiated language and culture, we would have no means or tools to build any knowledge at all. Gaps and absences, stripped of all positive historical content, cannot be used to build something enduring. A house of winds is no house at all.

His conclusion is that in some ways we can as historically effected consciousness transcend our particular time and place through transhistorical dialogue. As a classicist, Gadamer certainly had specific materials in mind for this. We cannot fully rise up out of our situation, so to speak. But one never could. But we can reach across the gap and thereby reach some shared understanding of the world, thus enriching ourselves and our knowledge while recognizing that we cannot become equal or identical to those on the other side of the gap.

It is a cheery image, but it is also a stark reminder of the cosmic inequality that we inhabit. For those on the quest for knowledge, we suffer such a profuse embarrassment of riches compared to those in pre-literate times, or even those scholars who spent countless years copying texts by hand or doing word counts. All labor that can be achieved digitally now within milliseconds. 

We must remember our fortune, even if we so rarely steward our fortune well. We do not know how long we will be able to keep it.

This is merely a first breath at wrestling with our historicity. Perhaps Gadamer's vision cracks under pressure and closer analysis. That we will have to see at some future time.

What it means to be human, bound in space and time

Wrestling with historicity

A translation of Bernhard Riemann's inaugural lecture

Riemann: 'On the Hypotheses which Lie at the Root of Geometry'


Self-improvement is the bread and butter of the American culture. A cultural strand that can be traced from our contemporary vloggers, through business executive self-help books, back through corny early twentieth century pamphlets, all the way to Ben Franklin's autobiography. To understand the American spirit, one must grapple with the entrepreneurial drive that underpins our culture, in both action and talk. The American mentality is tied up in a firm, concomitant belief that we are volitional selfs with both self-defining power as well as some capacity to will our destiny. This belief is not without its consequences, only one of which I will consider here.

To define self-improvement is difficult. It is an energy, a mindset. The onus is on you the individual to bring yourself forward, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. By sufficient application of willpower, many things (if not all things) are possible.

There is much to laud in such an optimistic temperament. But it is not without its dangers.

And few writers name this danger better than Byung Chul-Han who writes frequently on the burnout and depression endemic to the systems of self-improvement culture. In *Psychopolitics* particularly, he articulates a rather illuminating point on this topic.

Traditional Marxist theory is built on what can loosely be described as the employer-employee dichotomy. How the employer oppresses the work through arduous, menial, alientating labor. A story many are familiar with.

Byung Chul-Han believes that this analysis has become obsolete in reference to contemporary office culture. For the source of motivation to be more productive is no longer rooted in the boss but in ourselves. It is no longer so universally the case that the taskmaster applies the whip to the workers in order to make them more productive, we apply the whip to ourselves. The professional class is one that has automated oppression and alientation by casting such conditions upon ourselves through cultural drives.

One dominant cultural narrative of our day, the "you can do it" rhetoric, has inculcated a new impetus, particularly in millennials on down, that the rat race can be won if you apply enough grit and elbow grease. And if you don't win, well it's your fault.

In this model, bosses don't need to be over-demanding to get more work out of their employees. Rather the employees, driven on by a urgent mixture of guilt and lust for opportunity, feel the need to put in overtime or become better "contributors" so that they can be noticed, move up the ladder, be successful, etc. Ask not what your company can do for you, ask what you can do for your company.

And for the guilt-ridden, there is no limit of what can be asked of yourself. So long as you live in the gap between where you are and where you want to be (which is almost the entirely of our lives), there is always more to be done.

Thus we burn ourselves out in a manic frenzy to do enough so that we can succeed. Because the sky's the limit. If you don't get what you want, after all, it's only you to blame.

And as cultural streams often go, this mindset is not limited to the career sphere. It bleeds downstream, into other pools of life.

Self-improvement culture has slowly percolated outward to become, in the minds of some, a universally applicable dictum to all spheres of life. Nothing should escape the optimization mindset. A lot of this I believe is a bequeathment of Web 2.0, a necessary development out of the envy and desire that the new glut of luxury imagery produces. There are other contributors to this development, to be sure, but this particular swathe of tooling has certainly accelerated this particular evolution in our collective psychology.

One of the most evident cases of the expansion of self-improvement culture is its application to the body. Bodybuilding is deeply tied in with the self-improvement ethos, so much so, that the vast majority of traditional self-improvement programs are almost anchored in gym-going as the necessary condition to improve one's life. The discourse is rooted in the gym.

Between 2000 and 2019, gym memberships nearly doubled in the US from 32.8 to 64.2 million. In the next five years, fitness industry spending is expected to increase 171.54%.

These are extreme growth numbers, especially as the United States population is an aging one, and 60% of gym membership holders are below the age of 35.

It is speculation to tie these two as correlation, but let us suppose they are related. How are they then interconnected?

One evident reason is body image. This is readily observable in the public gyms of the past few years. All the selfies, the self-filming, the live-streaming, etc. Attention and validation. Broadcasting the body and its subjection to improvement.

There is one direction of our culture that reduces your value to your visually-presented physical condition. Because that is one facet that is presentable and communicable through photography and videography. It is possible to get traction through Instagram or TikTok through the immediate impression of the visual condition of your body. Physical athletics is one the most highly valuated forms of achievement now because it is immediately verifiable. By contrast, the most accomplished writer or mathematician in the world could hardly gain any such traction through such media focal points by the presentation of their accomplishments. The media shapes the message. And in this case the message is the person, i.e. the body. The medium can only convey the physical, and so the motivations of most people become increasingly and more stringently materially driven.

Hence the irony of the prized abdominal six-pack for men. A meretricious moniker of athleticism and strength. Although its achievement depends on self-starvation and often abandonment of muscle mass, cultural aesthetics have deemed it a laurel of strength. It is strange because of how unnatural it is. One need only read the anorexic routines male celebrities undergo to reach this look. And contrast that to the masculinity of older stars such as Bert Reynolds or Sean Connery. Hairy chests, firm guts, and strong men. Bulk often accompanies strength, but bulk is inadmissible in Hollywood imagery for a strongman starting in the mid 90s. (An interesting contrast is Robert De Niro in *Taxi Driver*. His body fat certainly dips sub twelve percent for that role, but his emaciation is presented as freakish rather than as beautiful or glorifiable.)

What it comes down to is that fat and hair are visual deterrents that subtract from conventional photographic appeal. Rather, we are told the most masculine men are those with baby-smooth chests and washboard tummies. Even when those who possess these feature may unfortunately tend to act more like fops or dandies than true masculine types.

(There is of course the female half of the equation, but I feel the point on body image sufficiently made here, the dots are easy to connect.)

In any case, this self-improvement ethos, in its increasing urgency over the years, has extended its reach to fitness, education, finances, real-estate investment, etc. You aren't enough if you aren't constantly improving. How are you convincing the shareholders of your psyche that you will be better next quarter, how you will do more. Convince them of your growth and your earnings.

And nearly universally in these mantras, it is driven purely by material factors.

The purported end goal of self-improvement is greater accessibility to wealth, power, sex, attention, and the other usual suspects which populate the common motivators for a material life.

In fact, this is baked into the very etymology of improvement which stems from the Latin term *prode* which translates as useful or profitable.

Self-improvement is to render yourself more useful for yourself and your goals.

---

That may sound all well and good to most.

But it is a fundamentally nihilist position.

More than just the egoism it entails, self-improvement is soulless.

Some may criticize the oppressive, hostile, enslaving nature of self-improvement culture. I will criticize it for its motives and results.

Self-improvement as a whole, because it is driven by material motives, is fundamentally boring. It produces boring people. Men and women, both.

The exclusive focus on externalities has also led to a neglect, if not outright abandonment, of the interior self.

Hence the general observation that some people use the gym as a replacement for having a personality. And it should not be too controversial to say the same goes for those chasing money, cars, bedroom delights, and other elements of the hedonistic package.

None of these self-improvement tips and tricks point to the cultivation of the soul. The reading of books, spiritual wonder, travel sans tourism, or anything that would make you a deeper, more interesting person. The kind of experinces which would make you capable of having complex emotions to wrestle through.

As a counterpoint, one may see transcendental meditation as a very popular practice which leads to internal cultivation. 

But frankly meditation is better proof of the exact opposite. In its consumerist forms, meditation is rooted in the ablution and destruction of thought. It is a denial of self, and this is not a good thing. By perverting important breathing habits to stifle and silence the thoughts that spark in the quiet stillness. 

Meditation becomes a crutch by which many seek to bypass internal development. To avoid thinking at all costs, even when such self-reflection may be beneficial. This is not internal cultivation, though it may be parried around as such.

Although it is boasted as a practice to root yourself, rid yourself of toxicity, or other slogans, meditation is a repeated practice to blot out and/or silence the inner self. It is directed toward an annihilation of the internal self.

That is not to say meditation cannot be helpful for those who spend too long wrestling in the interior corridors of their consciousness, but for those whose problems and thoughts are no more surreptitious than a child's, then there is an issue. We are meant to be more than blank mirrors, doing nothing more than reflecting what mass culture tells us to buy or look like.

The self-improvement package is based on the external aesthetics of consumerism, spoon-fed by marketing companies and other glitzy media. Tingling your dopamine with those fun sensations which keep you simple, and are purportedly supposed to keep you happy. Surface without depth. You become one of the Eloi.

But the truth is no amount of gym-time, work-time, bed-time, wealth, or even fame can ever stop you from being a thoroughly boring person.

What makes us distinctly human is our interior landscapes, where the mind and heart mesh in curious patterns, and we have thoughts and experiences that deviate from the monolithic norm handed down to us by centralized zeitgeists.

What self-improvement suffocates and leaves entirely untended are precisely these gardening tools of the soul: literature, philosophy, lepidopterology, and other quirky hobbies whether tactile or intellectual. The accumulation of experiences that can redeem your existence on the ledger of time.

The growth of the interior, that which is not reducible to material usefulness, that which is not presentable or communicable through social media, with the rare exception of those who have creatively subverted that medium.


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One should stand against self-improvement in the sense that is foisted on us as some one-size-fits-all *modus operandi* for encountering the world and ourselves.

Physical fitness, nutrition, and hard work all play their role. But they should never come at the cost of the cultivation of the soul. The increasing of wisdom and knowledge, and the development of true character. While our culture may eschew any sort of internal virtue in favor of all that which can be demonstrated externally, the truest people, and the most interesting ones, are those who hold internal convictions and values generated from within, rather than spoon-fed from without.

How boredom and leisure without a panoply of distractions can lead to true internal growth. How releasing the gas pedal of your career and going off into the wilderness by yourself may bring you to a spiritual epiphany that an over-optimized schedule could never otherwise experience?

Perhaps a new injunction is required to force people to be bored more often, to reject consumerist travel, to rejuvenate the life of the mind. A spiritual or intellectual diet as sparse and ascetic as the physical ones some nutritionists force on themselves.

That is one essential step to retrieving meaning in life and rejecting the nihilism that percolates in our cultural moment.

Admittedly, none of what has been said here clearly defines what are soul-cultivating habits versus those that are not. Aside from some blustery gestures to books. That ought be discussed elsewhere. This was merely to open the door, and to understand the ways in which self-improvement can lead to self-annihilation, and the dangers therein.


A new lens for the cultivation of the soul

Against self-improvement


A brief note in English for the confused. It was customary in medieval philosophical pedagogy to write notes and commentary on Peter Lombard's *Sentences*, as one transitioned from apprentice to journeyman, so to speak.

The *Sentences* (1150) are a compilation of patristic and medieval opinions on a wide variety of questions spread across four books. A prototype textbook, if you will.

Philosophical education today, benighted beyond any recognizable form, neglects to carry on this tradition. So I am taking it upon myself to self-inflict this exercise as a philosophical rite-of-passage. It will likely be an intermittent project, spread over years, and left incomplete. But it will be good fun.

For those who know better, please do forgive my underdeveloped Latin style, and the anachronistic smatterings of medieval and modern formulations.


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# Sententiarum libri IV
## Prologous

### Incipit Prologus.

Petrus Lombardi:

> 1. Cupientes aliquid de penuria ac tenuitate nostra cum paupercula in gazophylacium Domini mittere, ardua scandere, opus ultra vires nostras agere praesumpsimus, consummationis fiduciam laborisque mercedem in Samaritano statuentes, qui, prolatis in curationem semivivi duobus denariis, supereroganti cuncta reddere professus est. Delectat nos veritas pollicentis, sed terret immensitas laboris; desiderium hortatur proficiendi, sed dehortatur infirmitas deficiendi, quam vincit zelus domus Dei.

Desiderium finiti tendit ad infinitum. Sic homo ut ens finitum necessario nostrum Dominum ut infinitum creatorem omnium rerum cupere debet. Operam nostram tanquam sacrificum offerimus, etsi "terret immensitas laboris", enim hoc est nostrum propositum: glorificare Dominum. Hoc naturalissimum desiderium est.


> 2. Quo inardescentes, «fidem nostram adversus errores carnalium atque animalium hominum» Davidicae turris clypeis munire vel potius munitam ostendere, ac theologicarum inquisitionum abdita aperire, necnon et sacramentorum ecclesiasticorum pro modico intelligentiae nostrae notitiam tradere studuimus; «non valentes studiosorum fratrum votis iure resistere, eorum in Christo laudabilibus studiis lingua ac stylo nos servire flagitantium: quas bigas in nobis agitat Christi caritas».

Caritas Christi nobilissimum desiderium, vis lacerat quae pectus hominis velumque templi lacerat. Non est ullum maius mobile.

> 3. Quamvis non ambigamus «omnem humani eloquii sermonem calumniae atque contradictioni aemulorum semper fuisse obnoxium. Quia dissentientibus voluntatum motibus, dissentiens quoque fit animorum sensus, ut cum omne dictum veri ratione perfectum sit, tamen dum aliud aliis aut videtur aut complacet, veritati vel non intellectae vel offendenti impietatis error obnitatur ac voluntatis invidia resultet. Quam Deus huius saeculi operatur in illis diffidentiae filiis qui non rationi voluntatem subiciunt, nec doctrinae studium impendunt, sed his quae somniarunt sapientiae verba coaptare nituntur: non veri, sed placiti rationem sectantes. Quos iniqua voluntas non ad intelligentiam veritatis, sed ad defensionem placentium incitat: non desiderantes doceri veritatem, sed ab ea ad fabulas convertentes auditum. Quorum professio est magis placita quam docenda conquirere, nec docenda desiderare, sed desideratis doctrinam coaptare. Habent rationem sapientiae in superstitione, quia fidei defectionem sequitur hypocrisis mendax, ut sit vel in verbis pietas quam amiserit conscientia; ipsamque simulatam pietatem omni verborum mendacio impiam reddunt, falsae doctrinae institutis fidei sanctitatem corrumpere molientes, auriumque pruriginem sub novello sui desiderii dogmate aliis ingerentes. Qui contentioni studentes, contra veritatem sine foedere bellant. Inter veri namque assertionem et placiti defensionem pertinax pugna est, dum se et veritas tenet et se voluntas erroris tuetur».

Esse plus est differentiam habere, ita voluntate manifestata. Unitas Dei  quoque unitas voluntae. In hoc mundo, ratio voluntatem afflectur, ita opinio depravationi conformatur. Methodus dei huius saeculi est. Igitur, quidquid auditus est, radices suas in voluntatibus depravatis magis quam in divina veritate invenit. Sic Petrus Lombardi scripsit: "Inter veri namque assertionem et placiti defensionem pertinax pugna est, dum se et veritas tenet et se voluntas tuetur." Illa discordiam et voluntatis suae assertionem contra voluntatem Dei concupiscunt.

> 4. Horum igitur et Deo odibilem ecclesiam evertere atque ora oppilare, ne virus nequitiae in alios effundere queant, et lucernam veritatis in candelabro exaltare volentes, in labore multo ac sudore volumen Deo praestante compegimus ex testimoniis veritatis in aeternum fundatis, in quatuor libris distinctum. In quo maiorum exempla doctrinamque reperies; in quo per dominicae fidei sinceram professionem, vipereae doctrinae fraudulentiam prodidimus: aditum demonstrandae veritatis complexi, nec periculo impiae professionis inserti, temperato inter utrumque moderamine utentes. Sicubi vero parum vox nostra insonuit, non a paternis discessit limitibus.

Deus huius saeculi suam ecclesiam propriam--cathedralem dicere possit-- quae est organum suae erroris, suae cupiditatis ut seminare discordias habet, ubi nulla esse debent.

Magis nostra vox non discessere debet a paternis limitibus. Nam Deus fines secundum naturalem nostram finitatem determinavit.

> 5. «Non igitur debet hic labor cuiquam pigro vel multum docto videri superfluus, cum multis impigris multisque indoctis, inter quos etiam et mihi, sit necessarius», brevi volumine complicans Patrum sententias, appositis eorum testimoniis, ut non sit necesse quaerenti librorum numerositatem evolvere, cui brevitas collecta quod quaeritur offert sine labore. In hoc autem tractatu «non solum pium lectorem, sed etiam liberum correctorem desiderio, maxime ubi profunda versatur veritatis quaestio: quae utinam tot haberet inventores, quot habet contradictores!» Ut autem quod quaeritur facilius occurrat, titulos quibus singulorum librorum capitula distinguuntur praemisimus.

Magnum quidem studium numquam superfluus est, etiam doctis. Veritas iterum et iterum revocanda est, ut commemoramus occasiones per circulos festorum. Studere ritus est, non actus singularis.

### Explicit Prologus.

## Liber I - De Mysterio Trinitatis
### Distinctio I
#### Caput I - Omnis doctrina est vel de rebus vel de signis

> 1. Omnis doctrina est de rebus vel de signis. Veteris ac novae Legis continentiam diligenti indagine etiam atque etiam considerantibus nobis, praevia Dei gratia innotuit sacrae paginae tractatum circa res vel signa praecipue versari. Ut enim egregius doctor Augustinus ait in libro De Doctrina Christiana: «Omnis doctrina vel rerum est, vel signorum. Sed res etiam per signa discuntur. Proprie autem hic res appellantur, quae non ad significandum aliquid adhibentur; signa vero, quorum usus est in significando». – Eorum autem aliqua sunt quorum omnis usus est in significando, non in iustificando, id est, quibus non utimur nisi aliquid significandi gratia, ut aliqua sacramenta legalia; alia quae non solum significant, sed conferunt quod intus adiuvet, sicut evangelica sacramenta. – «Ex quo aperte intelligitur, quae hic appellentur signa, res illae videlicet quae ad significandum aliquid adhibentur. Omne igitur signum etiam res aliqua est: quod enim nulla res est, ut in eodem Augustinus ait, omnino nihil est; non autem e converso omnis res signum est», quia non adhibetur ad significandum aliquid.
2. Cumque his intenderit theologorum speculatio studiosa atque modesta, divinam Scripturam, formam praescriptam in doctrina tenere advertet.
3. De his ergo nobis, aditum ad res divinas aliquatenus intelligendas Deo duce aperire volentibus, disserendum est; et «primum de rebus, postea de signis disseremus».

Prima quaestio de rebus and signis est, prima non solum per philosophiam pertinet, sed etiam ad rectam Scripturae interpretationem. Interpretationem incipere debet ut occurrat omnibus rebus.

Doctrinae sunt factae de docente. Docere est ostendere. Res ostenduntur signis.

Sed quid signum est? Augustine dixit: "Proprie autem hic res appellantur, quae non ad significandum aliquid adhibentur; signa vero, quorum usus est in significando."

Si hoc verum est, tum videtur res sine signis existere non posse. Id quod est proprium rei, est modo negatio, i.e. non esse significari. De quibus signa propriora quam res sint. Hoc dicere licet?

Investigandum est quid sit res per se, signum per se (quantum fieri esse per se potest), et quomodo utrumque alteri sit dispositum. Quomodo stant et pertinent.



Commentarius viae philosophiae secundum morem scholasticorum

Deleuze: Introduction to Difference and Repetition

Vico: 114 axioms for the New Science

Wrestling with historicity

Riemann: 'On the Hypotheses which Lie at the Root of Geometry'

Against self-improvement

Scriptum super sententiis Petri Lombardi