Libraries of the mind
Libraries of the Mind
William Marx #book/Libraries of the Mind# bookends://sonnysoftware.com/ref/Library1/282057 Marx, William 2025 Libraries of the Mind Literary Criticism 282057 Book 2025 FN classification
In DDC, 020.1 = Philosophy & theory of library and information science. UDC: 02.01 02 = Library science & librarianship .01 = Philosophy and theory (a common auxiliary used across UDC)
This simple inversion of philosophy and religion underscores the secular nature of the classification.
This inversion to the secular there is a beginning of claiming secularism as important. Question is why? The renaissance, the scientific mind? OR the aversion of the past and church history. Think about how profound this change was. How did the secular mind tak hold?
"Read the text," the teacher says to the pupil, and it is in the act of readingwhether audibly or silently-that the text actually becomes a mental form. The text itself is not this mental form; it is merely the condition for it, preexisting it. Strictly speaking, it is only a series of commands whose realization through reading will enable the constitution of an object of thought. Mental forms emerge indifferently from written or spoken language. When I hear a text read aloud, what
p.11 "Read the text," the teacher says to the pupil, and it is in the act of readingwhether audibly or silently🔴-that the text actually becomes a mental form. The text itself is not this mental form; it is merely the condition for it, preexisting it. Strictly speaking, it is only a series of commands whose realization through reading will enable the constitution of an object of thought. Mental forms emerge indifferently from written or spoken language.
p. 13 A poem, any poem, or any literary " work" belongs not to the realm of material objects but to what the German philosopher Gottlob Frege called the "third realm, " that of abstract objects.' While these objects may be abstract, they are nonetheless real, albeit of a different kind of reality than the table I am writing on at the moment. The poem or the work exists as an invisible reality: invisible because we cannot touch it with our fingertips, yet real because we can all agree on the meaning and effects of this or that work or poem. Hans-Georg Gadamer made it very clear: "🟡The understanding of something written is not a repetition of something past but the sharing of a present meaning. "10 The existence of literary works cannot be separated from the minds in which they take their substance. "The work of the mind exists only in act,"
p.15
Such intangible libraries cannot survive the suppression or transformation of the social organization on which they depend unless they are first duplicated onto a written medium. This happened with the Homeric poems and the Vedas. But 🟡how many other purely immaterial libraries, without any written medium, have been lost over the centuries? This question opens up a dizzying abyss in our history.
p. 20 Works are images or mental representations of language objects. These representations can include precise linguistic elements, such as quotations or memories of extracts, but not necessarily. Works are primarily objects of meaning, knowledge, and emotion. We could transpose these concepts to museums and speak of invisible museums, similar to André Malraux's "imaginary museums" or "museums without walls" (musées imaginaires), which are made up of images of art objects. However, not every mental image notion borrowed from philosophy and cognitive psychology—necessarily includes a visual dimension, especially with texts. For libraries, language is the starting point, where the mental image originates.
p. 22 It is well known that books can be life-changing events, sometimes even more impactful than the events we experience personally or witness in the lives of those close to us. 🟡Art objects, and literary works in particular, possess a unique power, capable of endowing them with a significance equal to, or even greater than, real-life events. These objects have a capacity to imprint themselves on the psyche in a stable, recurrent, and lasting way. This is the essence of art: the creation of objects with such powerful and enduring impact. Valéry compared the poet to an engineer building a locomotive, and indeed, there are poems with the mentalprojection power of a locomotive.
p. 27 Besides, what do we mean by direct knowledge of the work? There are so many ways of reading, depending on circumstances, age, and habits. Is a single reading enough? Do we know a country because we have been there once? A single reading is certainly enough to form an image of the work, but it gives only one image, and one image only, which is necessarily reductive. Subsequent readings can refine and modify it.
As we have seen, the mental image of works is not independent of the material text. It derives either directly or indirectly from it. What can be said of those works that make up invisible libraries also applies, 🔴mutatis mutandis, to invisible libraries themselves, albeit on a purely analogical level. The relationship of works to their text is etiological-the text is a cause ...
p. 29 Scrolls represent an incompressible time-space: you have to unroll them entirely to reach the end, experiencing all intermediate stages, whereas codices allow almost instantaneous navigation from one part of the book to another. 🟡Scrolls perfectly embody oral discourse with its inherent temporality: you must wait until the end of the speech to know the conclusion. You cannot short-circuit the time of a speech or the length of a scroll. Only memory and rote knowledge enable instantaneous navigation through the text; in the world of scrolls, memory played a crucial role. Conversely, codices materialize the regime of reading for reference, where the written word holds the full authority of the master: there is no longer a need to memorize, as any passage in the book is immediately accessible. There are intermediaries between the scroll and the codex. In Japan, the scroll is unrolled and then accordion-folded to produce an orihon (a folded book), traditionally used for Buddhist texts. Again, the aim is to facilitate navigation through a reference text. Papvrus scrolls were stored in piles, one on top of the other in two dimensional space.
p. 30 serial continuity. The linear series of codices imposes a precise order unknown to readers of rolls. 🔴Farewell to the mobile world of circles, and welcome to the empire of rectangles and squares!