[NetBehaviour] Walter Pater, Diaphaneity, Network Intelligence

[Max Herman]

In 1864, Walter Pater published his first essay "Diaphaneitè."
During the US Civil War.  The year after the Gettysburg Address.
https://www.laits.utexas.edu/farrell/documents/DIAPHANEITI.pdf
Trying to move literature and society beyond, out of, Victorianism to something new and better.
Something other than "saint, artist, speculative thinker."  (Beatrice)
Enough of it would "regenerate the world."

Five years later in 1869, the same year as War and Peace and "A Spider Sewed at Night," he wrote about Leonardo.
"The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters" exhibits the character of Diaphaneitè as experience.
https://archive.org/stream/renaissance034976mbp/renaissance034976mbp_djvu.txt

Four years later in 1873 he published The Renaissance.
Comparing comparing the present to antiquity to antiquity to inform the present.
Something before but once removed, plus the optional new.
Birthed Aestheticism and Modernism.
"Art for its own sake" which was, arguably, distorted.  Very controversial.
Influenced Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Wilde, Yeats.

      "Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself,
      is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to
      us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in
      them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses?"
      https://archive.org/stream/renaissance034976mbp/renaissance034976mbp_djvu.txt

Twelve years later in 1885 he published Marius the Epicurean to clarify and defend his philosophy of Experience.
Even further back into antiquity, an antiquity which was itself in search of its own forgotten roots and its own lost time.
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4057/pg4057-images.html
https://gutenberg.org/files/4058/4058-h/4058-h.htm

Melville: Looming.  1851.

Tokarczuk: "the world as...a loose, organic network structure."  2022
https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2022-06/ognosia-olga-tokarczuk-jennifer-croft/


Dante: esperienza "with extraordinary overtones."
Trasumanar (hapax legomenon) and "TransHuman Saunter" new collaborative artwork.

"Trasumanar significar per verba
Non si poria, pero l'essemplo basti
A cui esperienza grazia serba."

"esperïenza, se già mai la provi,
ch’esser suol fonte ai rivi di vostr’ arti."


(Contra Machiavelli)


"Of the Cruelty of Man" by Leonardo: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci

      Animals will be seen on the earth who will always be fighting against each other with the greatest loss and frequent deaths on each side. And there will be no end to their malignity; by their       strong limbs we shall see a great portion of the trees of the vast forests laid low throughout the universe; and, when they are filled with food the satisfaction of their desires will be to deal death       and grief and labour and wars and fury to every living thing; and from their immoderate pride they will desire to rise towards heaven, but the too great weight of their limbs will keep them       down. Nothing will remain on earth, or under the earth or in the waters which will not be persecuted, disturbed and spoiled, and those of one country removed into another. And their bodies       will become the sepulture and means of transit of all they have killed.

      O Earth! why dost thou not open and engulf them in the fissures of thy vast abyss and caverns, and no longer display in the sight of heaven such a cruel and horrible monster.

And: "my works are the issue of pure and simple experience, who is the one true maestra."


Ecalle, Resurgence Math and the Bridge equation (2022):

"These functions have the fantastic property of being ‘of one piece’ – if you
know a little chunk, you know the whole thing. A truly magic quality, that infuses
them with life, and turns them into natural similes for this eternal theme:
the Whole in each of its Parts; the Macrocosm in the Microcosm; etc. We can
find echoes of this everywhere – in Oriental or Hermetic Philosophy; in Biology
(the full genome is encoded in each cell of a living organism); and, at an almost
literal level, in Newtonian physics: if space were truly analytic, then by knowing
the gravitational potential in a cubic inch of space to infinite accuracy, we could
in theory infer the position of all massive particles in the world, and to that
extent “know everything”. Taken literally, this is nonsense, of course, and we
should carefully avoid mistaking symbols for explanatory mechanisms. But this
in no way detracts from their evocative power or their vivifying potency for the
soul, not least the creative scientific soul."
https://www.quantamagazine.org/alien-calculus-could-save-particle-physics-from-infinities-20230406/
https://www.imo.universite-paris-saclay.fr/~jean.ecalle/fichiersweb/WEB_tour_resur.pdf


Hamilton (1788): “Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries.”


Fifteen decades after Pater launched his secret message may be too late for it to help, or may not be.


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