Life, time and language (1508-1510): “… because they vary continually from century to century, and in one country and another, through the intermingling of the peoples, who by wars or other mischances are continuously becoming mixed with each other...” (Windsor, R.L. 19045v–K/P 50v)
italiano

Fabio Frosini
Senior Research Fellow in the History of Philosphy at the University of Urbino

Saturday 17 April 2010, 10.30am
Vinci, Biblioteca Leonardiana

Starting from the passage on the tongue, languages and the eternity of the world, the aim of the lecture is to test the fruitfulness of an approach to the Leonardian ‘multiverse’ in which its multiple aspects are organized around time as a dimension that is at once objective and subjective, human and natural, qualitative and quantitative. An attempt will be made to show how in the ‘movement’ that takes place in that folio from the ‘tongue’ as muscle to spoken languages, and by analogy from the ‘simples’ produced by nature to the ‘accidental’ compounds resulting from human ingenuity, the flow of time is the indispensable heuristic prop, shifting attention from the plane in which differences are essential (and the forms are blocked) to the one – infinite distance given by an infinite quantity of time – where they appear to be relative and ultimately equivalent (and the forms mutually ‘transposable’).

Thanks to that sharp dilation of the gaze, which plunges the observer into the plane of the immense quantity of time, it becomes possible to distinguish the relatively constant but therefore ‘empty’ elements produced by nature from the succession of human inventions, which are transient and mortal but are also the only way in which things can acquire some kind of ‘sense’. This sense may be perverted in the ‘lies’ of alchemy and necromancy, but it is impossible to evade it: good and evil, just and unjust, true and false, rise (and set) in the realm of human inventiveness alone.

The structural interweaving of life and death (evidenced, amongst other places, on the recto of f. 19045, the magnificent passage about the candle flame) is not, for Leonardo, a metaphysical screen on which to project and render futile the human condition. The interrelationship between life and death redefines life from within, constraining one to rethink it as a dynamic, instable, transient flux, just as names and meanings, monuments and civilizations are transient and mortal. Life is traversed by death, the temporal is troubled by the eternal, the fullness of volumes and outlines is undone by the artful cutting out performed by nothing. From anatomy the gaze widens and plunges into the structure of reality. The folios on the ‘existence of nothing’ date to the same years, and can perhaps be reread in the light of this concern: what counts is not the immobile unity of opposites, nor the fixing of a pole at the expense of its antagonist, but that which, making conscious use of an anachronism, I will call the practice of the boundary.

(The lecture will be given in Italian)