Author's Introduction
- We speak today of balanced performances, balanced tastes, balanced mental states, balances of power – the balance of nature itself. In all these cases, balance holds a valence so positive that it approaches an unquestioned ideal. The sense we have of its presence or absence in large measure determines our judgment of what is right or wrong, ordered or disordered, beneficial or destructive, safe or dangerous. Its opposite, imbalance, almost invariably signals sickness and malfunction. When we stop to think about it, we can recognise the enormous breadth of meaning we attach to our sense of balance, but we might also recognise, with some surprise, just how little we actually do think about it.
- The same was true for the Middle Ages. Despite the central place that the ideal of balance occupied in virtually every area of medieval thought, it was almost never questioned or problematised as a topic in itself. And this raises a question: why did it, and why is it still, almost invisible as a subject of historical analysis?
- I can suggest two reasons. The first is that our recognition of balance’s great importance to our psychological, intellectual and social life tends to encourage a biological and hence essentialist understanding of it. Balance is balance: we all know what we mean by it, we all trust our sense of it, we never imagine that this sense is changing, or even that it can change. For this reason, it is difficult for us to think of it in historical terms, as determined within specific cultural contexts, or as changing over time.
- The second, equally relevant, is that balance lies beneath the level of conscious awareness. It is tied to a generalised sense, a wordless awareness, a diffuse feeling for how things properly work together or fit together in the world, extending all the way down to our discomfort when we see a picture hanging unevenly on a wall.
- For this reason, I have argued that, rather than serving as the subject of thought, balance has traditionally served as the un-worded but pervasive ground of thought, exercising its great influence beneath the surface of conscious recognition. For the historian who has become aware of balance as an historical subject in itself, the first problem, then, is how to recognise the changes that have occurred to and within this un-worded sense over historical time. The second is how to uncover and reveal the profound intellectual effects these changes have made possible.
Excerpt
- These are the six most characteristic, impactful and historically important components of the new model of equilibrium:
- Where formerly balance had been viewed as a precondition of existence, whether instilled into Creation by an all-knowing and all-powerful God, or inherent to nature and ‘natural order’ as asserted in the writings of Aristotle, now the focus shifted to the visualisation and exploration of complex functioning systems in which balance/aequalitas was imagined as an aggregate product, resulting less from any pre-existent plan than from the interior interaction of their multiple moving parts.
- Within the newly conceived self-balancing system, values and natures formerly fixed in their place by God or by nature were now assumed to be fluid and changeable, ever-shifting in relation to their changing position and function within the systematic whole.
- As this occurred, in what represented a huge intellectual break with the medieval past, relativity replaced hierarchy as the key to comprehending order and identity in both nature and human society. The working system was reconceived as a fluid relational field, with no hierarchical top or bottom, beginning or end.
- In the new way of imagining the working system, expanding and contracting lines replaced points as the basis of structure and activity, and concern with the details of continuous motion and change (now amenable to geometric representation) replaced the traditional search for essences and perfections.
- Given the recognition of the system’s ever-moving and shifting parts, the goal of full knowledge was abandoned in favour of relying on estimations and approximations, which were now recognised as the only ways that entities undergoing continual change can be measured and known.
- The inescapable indeterminism of the new relational model opened the door to accepting the philosophical legitimacy of reasoning in terms of probabilities and applying these to comprehend the workings of nature and society.
Author's Conclusion
- How does the definition of what is ‘natural’ shift radically within an intellectual culture? How does the unthinkable become thinkable – the unimaginable imaginable? What is it that causes vital new questions to rise to the surface and potent new answers to be envisaged and argued? Each of these transformations (and more) appear in field after field of knowledge between 1250 and 1350, pioneered by those thinkers who shared in the intuition of the new model of equilibrium.
- This has led me to conclude that a focus on the history of balance, and a close analysis of the varying constellation of elements that constitute emerging models of balance, can become a potent new tool of historical study, particularly when addressed to major ideas that have proven to be exceptionally innovative and fruitful. And my strong supposition is that this is true not only for medieval intellectual culture, but for other cultures and other time periods as well, right into our present.
Author Narrative
- Joel Kaye is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at Barnard College, Columbia University. His books include Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (1998) and A History of Balance, 1250-1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and Its Impact on Thought (2014).
Notes
- Hmmm ... fair enough. The author seems to shift back and forth between the scientific applications of balance to the area he seems more sure of - that of economics.
- The medieval thought involved is all rather murky, involving an attempt to escape from erroneous church doctrine without incurring the charge of heresy.
- John Buridan's speculations on geology are just that (much like Democritus on atomism).
- The discussion of the escape from 'usury' into the fruitful use of capital was useful. It'd have been interesting to see some referance to modern day Islamic financial wangles to get round the same charge. See Wikipedia: Islamic banking and finance.
Comment:
- Sub-Title: "In the Middle Ages, a new sense of balance fundamentally altered our understanding of nature and society"
- For the full text see Aeon: Kaye - Reimagining balance.
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