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Islandology

Geography, Rhetoric, Politics

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Defining Islands and Isolating Definitions

DEFINITION

Horizon ... f[rom] horos, [meaning] boundary, limit.

—OED, s.v. "horizon"

Generally speaking, a scholarly work begins (or should begin) with asking whether its subject can be defined—and, if so, whether it should be defined overtly—and, if so, whether the definition should be at the beginning, middle, and/or end of the scholarly work or should suffuse it. Most studies avoid defining definition itself, as if they feared becoming bogged down in terminology even before the journey starts.

Thus Islandology cannot afford to avoid defining definition. It is already inescapably concerned, from the beginning, with the "coast"—a term understood in this context as the "cut" where one kind of thing is supposed to begin and another kind is supposed to end (finir ). This cut, or limit—Hamlet calls it a bourn, meaning "horizon" —is crucial to any definition ofisland. The commonsense understanding of island as "insulet"—meaning "land circumferentially bordered or insulated by water and entirely defined horizontally by its shoreline" —already raises questions about definition.

The logician John Venn, originator of the Venn diagram ("a group of circles that may or may not intersect according as the logical sets they represent have or have not elements in common"), has something to say about such questions of definitional islandness. In his Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic (1889), Venn considers the debate between John Stuart Mill and William Whewell about whether the "discovery" of the elliptical orbit of the planet Mars circumnavigating the sun was a case of induction or deduction. He brings up the parallel case where "a navigator sail[s] round an island and then pronounce[s] it to be an island." If circumnavigation alone makes a "land" an "island," says Venn, then the eighteen members of Ferdinand Magellan's crew who made it back to Portugal after their three-year voyage should have concluded that the planet Earth was an island. Richard Eden, in the preface to his translation of Sebastian Münster's Treatise of the Newe India (1553), writes, "The [w]hole globe of the world ... hath been sayled aboute." One thinks of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1873, with its nicely named character Passepartout.

The meanings of most words, not only island, often seem to dissipate a bit around the edges. In Methods of Logic (1952), the philosopher Willard V. Quine claims that the "whiteness of a region in a Venn diagram means nothing but lack of information." A concept, writes the logician Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege in Foundations of Arithmetic (1884),

must have a sharp boundary. If we represent concepts in extension by areas on a plane, this is admittedly a picture that can be used only with caution, but here it can do us good service. To a concept without sharp boundary there would correspond an area that had not a sharp boundary-line all around, but in places just vaguely faded into the background. This would not really be an area at all; and likewise a concept that is not sharply defined is wrongly termed a concept.

Of this viewpoint of isolation, Ludwig Wittgenstein makes a critique in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953).

This way of speaking about groups obtains as well for nations as for words. Thus Johann Gottfried von Herder envisions a nation as a closed autonomous island, each corresponding to a people's territorial area and linguistic extent—or so such recent works as Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World (1999) seek to envision his thought. In fact, Herder knows well that many cultures exist on small islands. He often contrasts the cultural uniformity of large islands with the cultural diversity of small ones. Whether the word island represents a particularly telling locus of thought—where parts become wholes and wholes become parts—is an ancient question. Plato raises the problem of the potential link between islandic geography and thinking when he discusses the waters of the Euripus Strait, the narrows that eventually took Aristotle's life.

Consider, then, how a Venn diagram presents the cut between a finite group of parts and their wholes (see Illustration 1). Venn illustrates set theory in terms of geographic regionalism. An archipelagic logic shows islands of the British Empire (including the "British Isles") seeming to match up to islands of meaning (see Illustration 2)—an appearance that informs both his essay "On the Employment of Geometrical Diagrams for the Sensible Representation of Logical Propositions" (1880) and his bookSymbolic Logic (1881). Here the geographer's task of separating island from mainland and one island from another precedes the philosopher's dialectical ambition to define parts and wholes. It is no wonder that twenty-firstcentury school-teachers still use a Venn diagram to compare the Sargasso Sea—"a sea within a sea," "the sea with no shores," "a sea without a coastline" —with the fictional Sargasso Sea of Jules Verne's science fiction novel Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870).

If islands constitute an instigating and typical case for philosophical definition, then philosophy and geography are probably interrelated in such a way as to raise questions. Might it turn out to be more than a "mere metaphor" that John Robert Ross, in Constraints on Variables in Syntax (1967), with his Chomskyan generative, focuses on the "marooned," or insulated, location of wh words in languages? Is it an "accident" that Benoit Mandelbrot poses his question, "How Long Is the Coast of Great Britain?" (1967), in terms of the fiction of measurable circumambulation of islands? After all, Mandelbrot's Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982) links mathematical forms with natural objects in the way of geography, as in his argument that "clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." Does Venn's having hailed from the Humber—the estuary on the North Sea where the tidal rivers Ouse and Trent daily reveal and conceal mudflat islands—suggest how biography can become of formative significance? Or are there other concerns at work in delimiting the intersection of island thinking with thinking in general?

Venn's work was attractive to a Victorian empire then ruling over a great part of the Earth: the British Empire, as he knew it, was the largest in world history. Writes Carl Schmitt, a Nazi opportunist who set himself up as that empire's enemy: "It was only by turning into an island, in a new sense previously unknown, that England could succeed in conquering the oceans and win the first round of the planetary spatial revolution."

According to the ideology of the "scepter'd isle" that was summarized for British readers in Shakespeare's Richard II, the English "nation" followed a foreign policy of "splendid isolation." That is what First Lord of the Admiralty Lord Goschen called British policy in 1896. Goschen was echoing sentiments from colonial New Brunswick in the "New World," where people had long regarded Britain as the "Empress Island." The inhabitants of other island-based empires such as Venice and Hormuz did likewise.

John Venn "mapped out" sometimes overlapping logical relations between finite collections of sets in much the same way that his contemporaries mapped out aggregations of imperial holdings. Leonhard Euler put forward the first planar graph theorem and laid the groundwork for developments in topology when he solved a mathematical problem represented in terms of bridging islands in the Pregel River at Königsberg, the hometown of Immanuel Kant, who set the terms for modern philosophy.

EPISTEMOLOGY

An Enlightenment philosopher, Kant helped found the modern discipline of geography. From his chair on the island of Kneiphof in the Pregel, he offered lectures in geography and its human implications for forty years, more than he offered in any other subject. Most of the times he taught this course, his Diktattext and announcement pamphlet listed the second module as "History of Lands and Islands."

In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant writes that the realm of possible truth is a domain within which we can know something but which is surrounded by matters that we can never know. What follows next in theCritique of Pure Reason sounds like an island metaphor, so to speak, although islandology, in its consideration of the rhetoric of islands, eventually shows that it is more than that. "This domain [of possible truth]," writes Kant, "is an island [Dieses Land aber ist eine Insel] enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits."

Earlier in his career, when he wrote Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), Kant followed the view of Thomas Wright, in An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750), and the view of William Herschel, in Construction of the Heavens (1785), that a planet or galaxy is like an island. In the Critique of Pure Reason, however, he is talking about one island—the territory whose boundaries define the limits of possible objectively knowable experience. (Invisible spirits, for example, necessarily fall outside those boundaries without necessarily being impossible as such, in the way that a square circle is impossible—that is, intrinsically contradictory.) The Critique of Pure Reason is, simply put, human reason's way of judging its own claims to knowledge with a view to laying out the limits, or horizons, of what it can legitimately claim to know. Everything that falls outside those limits is a kind of ocean filled with fog banks and melting icebergs into which reason, prior to the Critique of Pure Reason, was inclined to stray. Kant calls this ocean "the region of illusion," a description that turns out to be fair warning to future generations.

A major goal of the Critique of Pure Reason is to reinterpret the indubitable tendency of human reason to overreach itself as an indication of our moral vocation. We cannot know whether (or not) human beings are free in an ultimate sense, for example. All our claims to knowledge, to the extent that they are justified, rest on the assumption that every event has a determinate cause. But because the "island," as Kant uses the term, merely defines the limits of things as they appear to us (and not as they are "in themselves"), the limits of objective knowledge do not preclude the possibility that we are ultimately free "in ourselves." Because morality requires that we think this (that we are free), we have permission to do so, given that there is no contradiction between saying that the world, as it appears to us, is necessarily determined and saying that the world, as it is, is free or might consist of free beings. The big questions—God, Freedom, Immortality—lie beyond the island of possible objective knowledge and thus define an ideal "noumenal" world, which can be understood as the world as it really is (but which cannot be known by human beings), as the world that we project for our own moral purposes, or as both. One seeks not only to define the limits of the island, as Kant does. One seeks also to extend them, perhaps limitlessly, as Kant warns against, in such a way as to include the dark sea itself, as Nietzsche puts it in The Gay Science (1882): "The horizon seems clear" and then "the sea, our sea, lies open again."

Some later thinkers ally Kant's use of the word island with his use of the term nation-state. (Just so, the politically definitive Treaty of Westphalia [1648] articulates the idea of single states.) Such thinkers tend to believe that the end of modern empires and nation-states will match up with the end of "island thinking" and hence, they hope, bring a certain political liberation. They call for "archipelagic thinking," as if an archipelago—with the various "bridges" between its islands, as Richard Rorty puts it—does not already have precisely the same geographic limit or definition that an island has.

Kant, though, is also concerned with defining the boundaries of certain disciplines, mainly for moral reasons. If a rationally accessible morality should guide theology—rather than theology dictating what is morally right and wrong, for example—then it becomes necessary to lay out distinct disciplinary boundaries between "theology" and "philosophy." If we have to obey the law as it is and at the same time be guided by and strive to reform the law in light of a rationally established ideal of justice, then it is important to lay out the boundaries between "law" and "philosophy." That obligation, however, is a local matter primarily connected with the practices of the German university in the late eighteenth century. Here, too, many postmoderns, seeking out interdisciplinarity in "education," want archipelagic thinking, often in the antiuniversalist spirit of Jean-François Lyotard in The Differend (1983).

The metaphorical use of island in the preceding paragraph follows Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, or On Education (1762), the third book of which contains a famous reading of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), with its isolated hero. Because Crusoe is "on his island, alone, deprived of all the arts," he must figure out what he can know and what he cannot. Said Archimedes, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth." No wonder, then, that Emile was the one volume that Kant carried with him wherever he went in Königsberg.

For Jacques Derrida, the Robinsonade query "Qu'est-ce qu'une île?" (What is an island?) turns easily into the political query "Qu'est une il?" (What is a he?).

DIALECTIC

Thesis

The English term island includes two meanings in apparent disagreement with each other. The first, which I call a thesis, is the French-influenced meaning as something like "insulet." This involves the separation, or "cutting" off, of land from water at the coast. The French definition, taken on its own as "land insulated by and defined against a surrounding terminus (fin)," even provides one model, albeit tendentious, for understanding the idea of definition itself in terms of how some words make for de-finable "islands of meaning" that intersect or overlap with the "shorelines" of other words—and perhaps how some words do not. This meaning of island makes real sense, as we will see, only if we consider it together with its antithesis.

Antithesis

The other meaning of island, which I call an antithesis, is historically prior. It is of Norse origin: "water-land." This notion stresses that the noun is (the first part of the word) properly means "water" and indicates the mixture of water and land at the limiting, or defining, "coast." Even as the biblical God separates water from earth (thesis), the Bible represents an earlier, even original, identity between earth and water (antithesis) that suggestsmarshland, muck, mud, muskeg, bog, spunge—the sort of malleable, ever-changing humid material, or clay (adam), familiar to coastal cultures, from which the biblical God made the first human being (adam).

Synthesis

These two meanings, taken together, suggest a complex definition of island variably at work in speaking about islands and in the logic of speaking about them.

Thesis and antithesis combined provide a third meaning more comprehensive than either has separately. Some persons might call this third meaning, which seesaws between identity and difference, "dialectical" in the Hegelian sense: a thesis and an antithesis, in apparent polar opposition to each other, are conjoined by a synthesis that cancels them out; at the same time, this synthesis incorporates and transcends them. It is not so much that Hegel was influenced by his vacations on the island of Rügen in the shattering way that his contemporaries were, although he probably was. It is more that the dialecticians on whom he relied, Heraclitus and Plato, were influenced by the interactions of earth and water.

Hegel, who often visited Rügen, comes around to discussing islands in Philosophy of History (1821). Evincing a penchant for geographic determinism, he links coastlines with a particular stage in the development of the "World Spirit." Relevant here is the old philosophical controversy between Plato, for whom "both are two but each is one," and Heraclitus, for whom "water lives the death of earth and earth lives the death of water." Whether or not the Heraclitean view is like that of modern physics, as Werner Heisenberg avers, it nevertheless links the physical universe with the human mind in much the same way.

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Excerpted from Islandology by Marc Shell. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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