Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean

8. Cardinal Knowledge

c h a p t e r 8 Cardinal Knowledge Compasses and Navigation Books North: It rules from above. The place of cold and of the winter solstice, of industry that delays gratification because its flowers will blossom only with the heat. The place of austerity and of the ability to wait, of restraint and control over the world and oneself. It is discipline and planning; light that is scarce and precious; active and sturdy loneliness. Cold, duration, patience, industriousness, reason, rigor: a sea one can only hope to navigate , distant from sensual pleasure; revenge on the harshness of the environment ; cold and everyday epos against rhetoric and demagoguery; the order and repetition that relieve and free us; cleanliness, distance between bodies, precious and encircling light. The North is the place of constancy, faithfulness to one’s goals, emotional control and modesty, restraint and the neutrality of affections. The extreme North, the ‘‘Great North,’’ has its own balance and moderation , it knows the majestic force of Nature, the difficulties one encounters when trying to surpass its limits and power: Finland and Alaska, Canada and Siberia, are different among themselves, but they can never reach the point of thinking of nature just as a source and reservoir of production. The challenge heightens ingenuity, but the excess of technical power is something else. One can live in the artificially heated cities of 116 Cardinal Knowledge 117 Siberia, but outside, Nature remains ‘‘North.’’ There’s a tipping point, though, where the North transforms its harshness in lack of moderation: when, on the borders with the temperate climate zone, it becomes technological will to power, unbridled technology. Northern people, through their protestant ethics, make this discipline sacred and methodical, and they thrust themselves toward world hegemony. The opening onto oceans, onto the infinity of space and sea, gives value to and encourages this discipline, making it the form of life most prepared to dominate distances . The North joins the great Western adventure, and technology projects itself into space without fear. We should remember the appraisal that Paul Morand, Fouquet’s defender, gives of Colbert: ‘‘Marble man,’’ paralleling the one of Mme de Sévigné, ‘‘Colbert is the North’’; thus discipline , method, measurable perseverance, quantity.1 The North does not exhaust itself completely in its modern version, because there always lies in wait its most hidden and exoteric side, the one that speaks the higher language of gothic and magic. It is the world of mystics and of the poets of the deepest North, the one of the sagas, castles, and fairies; the romantic one of Kultur that stands in opposition to Zivilisation , of Gemeinschaft in opposition to Gesellschaft, the one that does not avenge itself on nature with discipline and work, but tries to dominate it through magic, with private access to the secrets of the world; the one that does not like to discuss, but poetize; the one that does not like to reason and know through experimentation, but owns other more direct, difficult, and impervious pathways to truth. It is the world of great forests and snow-covered expanses, of secluded castles, of steppes and of cold seas made of silver and ice scales, of shadows long as spires. This deep and magical North is the Northern side that seems completely antithetical to the other one: It remains savage, reserved, and hostile to every form of domestication. When its gaze rests on Greece, it chooses the Pre-Socratic philosophers because attracted to the mysterious and oracular side of that knowledge that, as it decayed, would become philosophy. It is the Northern side that does not makes itself universal, but remains tied to places; the one that has inside itself great chiaroscuro regions and suddenly reemerges even within modernity. There exist strong ties below the surface between these two seemingly antithetic Norths, though their being hidden does not make them less significant. The connection lies in their same passion for excess through the vertigo of Faust’s myth. Science would seem to be at the antipodes of magic, but is the most coherent fulfillment of the latter’s dream: It is a cold shamanism that makes human beings very powerful, but incapable of escaping their own game. Humanity gains through science a knowledge 118 Other Essays on the Mediterranean that exalts its will to power; but it cannot liberate itself from this knowledge because...