Franco Farinelli

This paper focuses on Anaximander's pinax, the first map according to Western tradition. Its aim is to demonstrate that it is only after the realization of the pinax that it was possible to distinguish between Being and beings in a Heideggerian sense, that is to pose the question of the ontological difference. Consequently, all the history of Western thought is nothing but the history of the raising of cartographical representation, and of reason here embodied, from the dark rigidity of death to the rarefied splendours of Pure Reason.

Today, we believe that the map is a copy of the Earth, without realizing that the opposite is true: in our culture the Earth has assumed the form of a map. In Blinding Polyphemus, Franco Farinelli elucidates the philosophical correlation between cultural evolution and shifting cartographies of modern society, giving readers an interdisciplinary study that attempts to understand and redefine the fundamental structures of cartography, architecture, and the notion of "space." Following the lessons of nineteenth-century critical German geography, this is a manual of geography without any map. To indicate where things are means already responding, in implicit and unreflective ways, to prior questions about their nature. Blinding Polyphemus not only takes account of the present state of the Earth and of human geography, it redefines the principal models we possess for the description of the world: the map, above all, as well as the landscape, subject, place, city, and space.

The essay focuses on the way our idea of the world changes according to the tools we use to measure and circumscribe its regions and provide its overall configuration. For example, with the voyage of Columbus, precisely as it is subordinated to a geographical image, the world takes on a new face, different from the previous one: it takes shape according to the scheme that man has in mind, and corresponds to the cartographic image of the world, to the map. It is now the world that has to adapt to the spherical model: with Kant, ‘reason discovers only what it produces according to its design’. The essay considers the consequences that historically derive from this approach, starting from the traces it left in the works of Hegel, Jules Verne and Leon Battista Alberti.