from marco polo to leibniz: stories of intercultural misunderstanding

7/22/2019 From Marco Polo to Leibniz: Stories of Intercultural Misunderstanding

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From Marco Polo to Leibniz:Stories of Intercultural Misunderstanding

A lecture presented by Umberto Eco

December 10, 1996In 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 placewhen 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. Atthis point there are, in general, three possibilities:

Conquest: The members of culture A cannot recognize the members of culture B as normalhuman beings (and vice versa) and define them as "barbarians" - that is, etymologically, non-

speaking beings, and therefore non-human or sub-human beings - and there are only two furtherpossibilities, 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 ofan 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 ofPythagoras, and tried - so to speak - to steal the secret of Egyptian mathematics, alchemy, magicor 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 certainlywhat 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 theirsecrets, 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 anextent 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 avariety 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 bricolagean 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


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famous English store. The phenomenon I am interested in is more difficult to label, and let me touse 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 bringthem with us physically; I mean that we travel having a previous notion of the world, received byour 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 wasmore 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 unicornswere 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. Sincecounterfactual 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 amerchant, 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 aboutexotic countries, so he was prepared to meet unicorns, and he looked for them. So, in his wayback, in Java, he saw certain animals that lookedlike unicorns, because they had a single hornupon their nose. Since an entire tradition prepared him to see unicorns, he identified them withunicorns. 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 millinerytradition.

What a horror! They were not white, but black. They had the hair of a buffalo, and their hoof wasbig 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 uncommonanimals: 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 theunknown 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 Europeantheologians, grammarians and philosophers dreamt of rediscovering the lost language of the firstman, 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 perfectbecause 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 culturerediscovered the Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Their code was irremediably lost (and it was rediscoveredonly in the XIX century by Champollion), but at that time it was introduced into Italy, in Florence, a

Greek manuscript, the Hieroglyphicaof 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 theysignified mysterious and mystical truths, understandable only by initiates. They were divine


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symbols, able to communicate not the mere name or the form of the thing but its very essence, itstrue 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 dividedinto 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 abrief 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 anumber: pleasure, for example, is denoted by the number 16, because (allegedly) sexual activitybegins 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 centuryA.D.. Although certain passages indicate that the author did possess exact information aboutEgyptian hieroglyphs, the Hieroglyphica seem to be based on some texts written few centuriesbefore. 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, whenHorapollo 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 inhand; 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 remotestresemblance 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 bya 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 theirideograms into simplephonograms . Thus, to represent a certain sound they put the image of athing whose name sounded similar. To take an example from Champollion's first decipherment


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(Lettre Dacier p. 11-12), the mouth, in Egyptian ro , was chosen to represent the Greekconsonant 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 purefortune, 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 ofHorapollo and when Horapollo's book was read by the Western World.

However Horapollo was not totally wrong in attributing mystic significance to those images. Fromthe 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 practicaluse, 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 orideographically. The discovery that by combining different hieroglyphs, evocative visual emblems

might be created, inspired these last scribes to experiment with increasingly complicated andabstruse 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 andsecondary senses around the term represented by phonetic signs, a sort of basso ostinatoof

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 symbolicinterpretation. Therefore he transmitted to the Western world only vague remarks about theirsymbolic 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 Hieroglyphicais probably the work of the Greek translator, Philippos, and it isthere 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 Hieroglyphicareaches the stork, it recites:


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How [do you represent] he who loves the fatherIf 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 pietyand deference.

The Hieroglyphicawas certainly one of the sources for the Emblemataof Andrea Alciati in 1531.Thus, it is not surprising to find here a reference to the stork, who, as the text explains, nourishesits offspring by bringing them pleasing gifts, while bearing on its shoulders the worn-out bodies ofits parents, offering them food from its own mouth. The image that accompanies this descriptionin the 1531 edition is of bird which flies bearing another on its back. In subsequent editions, suchas 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 havejust 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 ofBasil (VIII, 5). In other words, the information contained in the Hieroglyphicawas already at the

disposition of European culture. A search for the traces of the stork from the Renaissancebackwards is filled with pleasant surprises. In the Cambridge Bestiary (twelfth century), we readthat storks nourish their young with exemplary affection, and that "they incubate their nests sotirelessly 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 whichthey themselves have spent in bringing up and cherishing their offspring" (The Bestiary, ed. byT.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 havealready 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, intheir turn, used the Pliny's Naturalis Historia (X, 32) as their source.


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Pliny, of course, could have been drawing on an Egyptian tradition, if Aelian, in the 2nd-3rdcentury A.D., could claim (though without citing Pliny by name) that "Storks are venerated amongthe 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 inPlutarch (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 Sophocleshimself 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 thatHorapollo did not reveal anything hot. Moreover, the origin of this symbol seems to have beenSemitic, 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 verylittle 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 certainof the standard moralizing comments or biblical references.

This was clear even to the Renaissance. In his Hieroglyphicasive de sacris Aegyptorumaliarumque gentium literis of 1556, Pierio Valeriano never tired of employing his vast stock ofknowledge 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 beenchanged 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 unprecedentedstatements. The reason is simply that the readers of the fifteenth century saw it as coming from adifferent Author. The text had not changed, but the "voice" supposed to utter it was endowed witha 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 theunknown on the light of the already known, here we are witnessing an opposite case: somethingalready 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 bythe familiar Christian and pagan sources, but by the ancient Egyptian divinities themselves, theytook on a fresh, and radically different, meaning. For the missing scriptural commentaries therewere 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 mostlearned 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 perfectAdamic language, according to the 'hermetic' tradition he identified the Egyptian Hermes

Trismegistos with Moses, and said that hieroglyphs were Symbols, that is, expressions thatreferred to an occult, unknown and ambivalent content. Kircher defined a symbol as "a notasignificativa 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 thatare offered to our external senses, and whose property it is to appear hidden under the veil of anobscure expression. [...] Symbols cannot be translated by words, but expressed only by marks,

characters, and figures" (Obeliscus PamphiliusII, 5 p. 114-120).


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These symbols were initiatory, because the allure of Egyptian culture was given by the promise ofa 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 madecopies of the real hieroglyphic inscriptions - and. his reconstructions, reproduced in sumptuous

tables, have an artistic fascination all of their own. Into these reconstruction Kircher pouredelements 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, therewas 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 fancifulway.

At times, Kircher seemed to approach the intuition that certain of the hieroglyphs had a phoneticvalue. 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 thisconviction that, in the end, hieroglyphs all showedsomething about the natural world that

prevented Kircher from ever finding the right track.


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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 andvegetation is Osiris whose generative power bears from heaven to his kingdom the Sacred

Mophtha". This same image was deciphered by Champollion (Lettre Dacierp. 29) who usedKircher'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 asregards 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 simplystands for the Greek letter Lambda.

In the same way, on page 187 of the third volume of the Oedipusthere is long analysis of acartouche that appears on the Lateran obelisk. Kircher reads here a long argument concerningthe necessity of attracting the benefits of the divine Osiris and of the Nile by means of sacredceremonies 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 ofEgyptology, though in the same way that Ptolemy is the father of astronomy, in spite of the factthat 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 theopportunity 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 lunaticcuriosity, 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 aboutChina, 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 hisTractado 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 extentthat 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


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Kircher such a vagueness, the multi-interpretability of hierogliphics was a proof of their divineorigin, 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 wascorrupted 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 andAztec Civilizations.

In 1590 it was published a Historia natural y moral de las Indiasby father Jos de Acosta whotried 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 writingshowing that it had the same nature as the Chinese one. It was a courageous position becauseother authors had insisted on the sub-human nature of the Amerindians and a Relacin de las

cosa de Yucatanby 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 aproof of the inferiority of the Mexican writing. They were not hieroglyphs because, contrary to theEgyptian 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; theywere 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 alreadyknow these facts.

Recent researches have proved that the Ameridians pictograms were in fact an instance of a veryflexible 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 thosecivilizations on the grounds of their semeiotical inferiority.

But this is not only a case of new discoveries influenced by background books: it is a disquietinginstance 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 Christiancivilization (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 astheir political system (and as a matter of fact at the times Kircher was writing, both had beenalready 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 theEuropean states had no intention to submit it. However China Illustrataappeared under the

auspices of the Emperor Leopold I whose dominions faced eastwards and to whom Christiancommunities of the Asiatic near East looked for protection (for instance, to please the Armeniansit 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. Insome 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 whichChristianity is claimed as an abiding force there since the early centuries A.D. (R. J. Evans, Themaking 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 waspresented 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.


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Thus the problem was to deal with Chinese, to establish not a Conquest but at least an Exchangerelationship, an exchange in which however Europe had to play a major role, since it was thebearer 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 asdiabolical as the Mexican one, had to be peacefully and rationally persuaded of the superiority ofWestern 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 toChina not to discover something different but to find again and again what he already knew andwhat 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 mefinish 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 asort 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 differentculture 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 greatestcivilizations of humanity were located at the two extremities of the Eurasian continent, and wereEurope and China. He said that China was challenging Europe in the fight for the primacy andthat battle was won once by one and once by the other of the two rivals: China was better thanEurope 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 orreligious 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), fatherJoachim 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 implementingOlympic 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 workingon 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 hadmetaphysical foundation because it reflects the dialectic between God and Nothingness. Bouvet

thought that the binary calculus was perfectly represented by the structure of the hesagramswhich appeared in the I Ching, and sent to Leibniz a reproduction of the system.

Now, in the I Chingthe hesagrams follow this order (called Weng Wang order) - to be read

horizontally from right to left.


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

It was easy for Leibniz, reading them horizontally, (but from left to right!) to recognize in theserepresentation a diagrammatic reproduction of the progression of natural numbers in binary digits,

as he demonstrated in his Explication de l'aritmetique binaire(1705).


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Thus - following Leibniz - we could say today that the I Chingcontains the principles of the

Boolean algebra.

This is another case in which one discovers something different and tries to see it as absolutelyanalogous to what one already knows. The I Chingwere important for their divinatory contents,

but for Leibniz they become a further evidence for proving the universal value of his formalcalculus (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 samecharacteristic 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 Leibnizwere 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 didmiscalculated 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 thatthere are no rules for interpretation, since even a programmatic misinterpretation requires somerules: 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 theEgyptian 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 bychance it is not a rhinoceros.

from marco polo to leibniz: stories of intercultural misunderstanding

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