Nathaniel Perrin

A translation of a challenge to not submit

Étienne de La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

[Photo by Sebastian Voortman.](https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-white-concrete-statues-covered-by-dust-566641/)

*I wrote this originally five years ago for a former iteration of this blog.*

> the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
> excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
> o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
> with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
> me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
> What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
> how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
> express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
> in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
> world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
> what is this quintessence of dust? - Hamlet

It is hard to write about a human condition. Single line platitudes invariably fall into some mixture of sentimental contrivance and egregious myopia. It just sounds repulsive to the modern ear. Perhaps this is due in part to advertising and its unrelenting recycling of banalities. Motivation taglines that reduce the universal human to a universal consumer.

But fortunately a phrase such as "quintessence of dust" has not yet been co-opted by the marketing machine. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Quintessential is a term that has fallen out of usage. To be quintessential is to be classic in some sense. The diner, for example, is quintessentially American.

But let's pick apart this term etymologically. "Quintessence" derives from the scholastic concept of *quinta essentia* which is recognizably translatable as the "fifth essence". It is a Latinization of a Greek term we recognize as "element".

These elements are, for Greek science, what we remember as fire, earth, water, and air.

There is something we have lost with our modern periodic table ranging across 200 distinct entities.

When you say something is elemental, something is essential to the very thing, there is a lot more meaning when you liken the heart to fire than to carbon or nitrogen. Something more visceral when you have four elements to choose from.

The entire cosmos from droplets of dew to the burning of the stars to the sinewing of the flesh to the rock formations torturously sundered into the face of the earth, all these are derived from four base elements.

The world cannot exist apart from these four. Or so it was told.

Then Aristotle comes along as he does, and he theorizes that fire, water, earth, and air don't quite capture the totality of the universe. There must be a fifth element out there: aether.

So he coined it. And so aether entered scientific discourse for a very long time. So long in fact that it was tossed around as a hypothetical until Einstein definitively put it to bed in 1905.

Aether as a concept is significantly older than gravity, electricity, waves, particles, fluids, and planets.

So what is aether?

Though it had a long shelf life in the scientific world, there was never quite a firm agreement on what aether is. Is it the force of life? Some light-bearing invisible substance that passes through the vacuum? 

This fifth element aether became a mysterious silhouette that coul potentially answer many leading scientific questions across disciplines such as optics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, and others.

It was the theoretical missing link that could potentially unify all of natural science.

So, if you will permit some creative reading for the sport of it, what if Hamlet's idea is taht the fifth essence of the universe--something on the level of aether--is dust. Dust as the missing link.

And not dust as we typically imagine it. But what we are. Humans, transmogrified from the dust.

Dust itself is a primary theme throughout the Hebraic telling of things. The word "עָפָר֙" appears over a hundred times across the Old Testament: it refers to lowliness as in the case of *Job*, ephemerality as in the case of *Ecclesiastes*, or as a metaphor of innumerable abundance as in the promise made to Abraham of his descendants.

It first appears in the Creation myth when God forms man out of dust and breathes life into him. While the rest of creation is spoken into being, the human race is culled out a pre-existing material substance. Dust.

Hence the cliche "From dust you came and to dust you will return" coined either by Kansas or *Ecclesiastes*, take your pick.

This image should give us pause. What it is to be made of dust.

Consider the last person you held in your arms, how they could simply evaporate into a sooty, powdery pile of dust through your fingers. In fact they will invariably end up this way.

Consider how much of your past self lies as sheets of dust under bed. The more you cast off of yourself, the more there is to haunt you. Dust as a specter, your past self as a voyeur of the future.

Consider old houses abandoned by dead relatives or strangers. Shelves and furniture and books caked in the flesh of the dead.

This is what dust is. This what you were, and this is what you will become.

We forget how appalling such an image should be. To call ourselves dust.

But that is not the end of the story. This isn't some ode to rejoice in the meaninglessness of life.

We are not mere dust but the quintessence of it.

We are not derivations but elevations. Whether as the Hebraic says by the breath of God or as the Hellenic says by the possession of *logos*. Or as others in the West have gone on to name as the soul or free will or consciousness. All of these as some label to distinguish the animating force that exalts us from the dust.

These various terms do not capture such a quintessence in its entirety. There is something indeterminable, ineffable about the human being that these concepts can barely taste.

It is because of this unnamed thing that we are raised from brute materialism to pure determinism.

With the assiduous encroachment of sciences social and physical into all spheres of lief, there is a strong temptation to parse out every single occurrence into a predetermined cause-and-effect. Genetics, economics, sociology, psychology, among other disciplines whose langauge games we widely employ to rationalize the problems of our lives. It is the tool of identitarianism (a term whose meaning also is revealed in etymology) to cast blame on the forces of determinism.

Those whose personal conceptual space is determined by political ideology are often guilty of this. Concocting general patterns and statistics as pre-emptive authorities over their own lives. To explain the crumble or enfetterment. 

This all depends upon a logic of determinism that all has been decided already in the lot of one's own life. That there is no free will or fate to fight for or overturn. A whole retinue of externalities has totalistic control over our personal lives.

Unfortunately, the extent to which someone assigns an aspect of themselves to this mode of thinking is an extent that has been cordoned off to mental slavery. Enslavement to ideas and thought patterns that increase learned helplessness, anxiety, misery, despair, and those factors. To give the perceived enemy more control and power than they probably even have.

To reject determinism is to recognize this little ineffable, quintessential blip and what it does for us, whatever this blip is. It allows us to strive and to overcome the problems set before us. To contest the roll of the dice. To play the game.

The unpredictable choreography of time, uncountable as dust swirling in a sunlit hallway. Too intricate and random for any finitude to calculate. 

Even in this age, human beings still possess this glint of spontaneous vitality, no matter how insistently other forces have tried to suffocate it. For two millennia, aged scientists with baggy eyes and an aversion to the real world have hunched over lifeless texts to try to determine and control the fifth element ether. To put it into a closed off box.

But vitality can never be captured by science. All you get is an ossified shadow. The residual glow of its power.

And for as long as there is a sliver of the human essence in us. Soemthing that can escape the constricting noose of scientific causality, there is hope. Hope that we are not thoroughly enslaved to external forces. That we do not need to subject ourselves to the prisons of the mind.

That our quintessence, as humble dust, is that we can never be fully determinable.

The quintessence of dust

*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.

---

# 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

Étienne de La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

The quintessence of dust

Vico: 114 axioms for the New Science

Wrestling with historicity