A Doctorate on the Subject of the Questionable Hystory (and Unfathomable Mystery) in the Fyctional Arte, Philosophie and Writings of One Quintillius Quintillian, and Concerning the Forme and Substance of that which He Created.

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The research will examine and present a series of works identified as the oeuvre and personal collection of an artist, writer and Natural Philosopher who chose to go by the pen name Quintillius Quintillian, and although his official identity remains as yet unconfirmed, through his personal writings scholars have deduced that his status may have been as an émigré, who resided in England at various points, some time during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The researcher will access the archives of the Quintillianian Society, analysing and selecting works from the many paintings, objects, and writings (philosophical, fictional and poetical) housed there, and will collate writings and curate an exhibition, focussing on the paradigmatic and controversial shift in his thinking, away from what has been described as his Materially Materialist philosophy (a vehement defence of the right to pursue objectivity to its end point through Scientific investigation), towards what is now known as his Essentially Essentialist vision (a violent refutation of his former views, where he took refuge, for a time, in Roman Catholicism, convinced of the need to instead protect the mystery at the heart of existence, and preventing what he described “...The wanton cutting apart of the world for man’s own ends....lest Creation come apart in human hands.... then there will be nothing but a falling into the Ether, and with Nature split apart, man will be forced to forge and grasp the threads of his own Existence, his new found objectivity affording him complete awareness of himself, as he falls into the abyss...”). [1][2]

A significant work, through which he aimed to expose the errors and injustices of materialist philosophy and practice, is a manuscript, composed of fragments, titled, Midas Rex, et Fumorum et Vaporum. [3] It is a surprising text, comprising what might today be considered both experimental horror fiction and morality tale, exposing a society, headed by King Midas, whose lives and economy are based on the production of a pie, which in order to be produced leads to the poisoning of the land, air and sea, and the deaths of many, for the pursuit of gold, and despite the attempt to change things by a growing number of the population, further savage permutations are permitted due to the acceptance of materialism as a rational end to existence.[4]

The labyrinthine text, which plays with linguistic artifice and double meaning [5], has been termed a meta-murder mystery, whose fragmented and ambiguous structure reflects the unfathomable structures of a civilisation, which obfuscate the continual sacrifice of life deemed necessary for its continuation. The civilisation absolves itself of any responsibility, seeing that it is merely following the logic of a universe, based in those same cycles of destruction and regeneration.

The work is a kind of metaphysical whodunit, and the question of who is ultimately responsible for murder/death cannot be answered without also answering, who constructed the conditions in which murder/death is necessary or even possible? Through the ironic ambiguity of his prose and structure, the reader is unable to come to a final answer, and is forced to conclude that everyone and no one might in some way be considered both guilty and innocent (or even alive and murdered), and it is this paradox which constitutes the mystery at the heart of Quintillius Quintillian’s later thinking.[6]

Many of the paintings in the Quintillianian Society’s collection reflect his lasting obsession with the myth of Midas, though they are not simply illustrative of the text, but themselves play with meaning through the formal qualities of painting. Tonally they are very different to his writing, and appear to owe a debt to other artists of his time, (eg. Anthony Van Dyck, Artemiseia Gentileschi), and although the pictures at first glance seem to follow the conventions of still life, portrait, etc., on closer inspection, the subjects[7], together with their titles, assume another character, verging on the uncanny.[8]

The researcher will attempt to address the broad categories found in his work (economics, power, culture, ecology, food and the veracity of the text) through an exhibition which presents paintings and objects from his collection alongside the publication of an annotated version of his manuscript, exploring the complexity of the translation, and excavating the potential layers of meaning present in the different versions of the work.[9]

Through the prism of historical artefacts, philosophy as well as non contemporary images and writing, the research will aim to draw out Quintillian’s ideas about the shifting historical paradigm, where he posits that we create an image of life- through language, objects, designs and structures- in an attempt to conceal our reality. Its surface forms shift as we hide from the substance, which remains unchanged. [10]

The problem of the world, Quintillian shows us, rests in the problem of interpretation, and in order to see beyond the superficial, which cloaks reality, we need philosophy and art which assists us to surpass the simple facts (which align themselves with this perplexing surface) in the attempt to see how the surface corresponds to the substance and meaning of that which has been done over time.[11]

With this in mind, the researcher contends that it is not then the factual claims of the research by which it ought be judged, (including those relating to Quintillius Quintillian’s life, which remain obscure), but the ability of the works presented, and their interpretation, to convey to us essential aspects of our material paradigm that we do not ordinarily see.

Since the fact remains, that all facts are based on a foundation upon which we need to agree without proof [12], and being literally ‘made up’, etymologically, from facere to make or to do, we might instead focus on, for our purposes, the assertion which comes through in Quintillian’s works, that art and fiction are capable of opening a space through which one might get closer to the real, than those works which make direct claims to truth and reality. Thus the research, not wishing to be in contradiction to the work it makes claims for, will go to the lengths of mirroring this approach, through the doctorate itself, to hopefully offer a more complete way of looking beyond the surface of the forms and substances constitutive of our history, toward the basis of this “fractured Analogue of Life and Creation”[13].

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[1] Through piecing together fragments of his writing, scholars concur that this violent shift in his perspective is likely due to a trauma incurred, during a period of involvement with the Society of Material Matters, an organisation facilitating Alchemical experimentation, pursued intensively by QQ, until the time he began to suffer from episodic outbursts of lunacy, eventually leading to his involuntary internment in an Asylum. In his own words he describes finding himself “... in that caged pit of lost souls, ... fashioned by those men who themselves had transgressed the limits of human society,... those same men of Science who were guilty of perpetuating the crimes to which I had become party, and whose horrors I saw first hand.... what they termed my hysterical derangement was my lucidity... I saw that my task had to become the untangling of the threads which conflated material and immaterial...the mistake of the Alchemical endeavour, which aimed to fuse spirit with matter... to bind that most precious essence of life with the falsified Analogue of Creation that we call Existence....”

[2] Notes from an unpublished manuscript in the Quintillianian Society collection.

[3] The literal translation from the Latin is King Midas, the fumes and the vapours, although the most recent English translation we know of, titled the work The Stew and the Slew (and the Murder): A verytable hystory of the mystery of Kyng Midas and Hys Tymes.

[4] The work makes interesting predictions about the future of science, technology, and the potential dangers people face, and offers a counterpoint to a contemporary scientific materialist perspective which does not acknowledge these dangers or the potential harm to life through the pursuit of things such as biogenetics, robotics, geo-engineering. Indirectly, Quintillian argues for a philosophy which is able to go against the dominant tropes which led to logical positivism, foreseeing the absurdity which results from the attempt to pursue objectivity, at the expense of a perspective which acknowledges the complexity of life which includes human existence. Quintillian’s understanding that the acceptance of materialism as a rational end to existence, whether we open our eyes to it or not, was the acceptance of the horror and injustice at the base of the world, whereas the move to essentialism was the possibility of looking beyond materialism, towards a deep desire for forms which place life above utility, and such wishes were for Quintillian, more substantial than the material forms.

[5] He uses devices such as metaphor, metonymy and antanaclasis to play with the ambiguity and multiple possible interpretations. Some examples include using the cooking of the pie, which creates smoke, as a metaphor for a society which corrupts its own environment in order to feed itself and maintain the fiction of an economy. He also uses the words pie, pye, p_ye, pi, and p.i.e. (related by their sound) to designate different aspects of the same irrational system. The pie is at once, food, pay, a reference to medieval history, the number pi, and an abbreviation for proto-indo-european linguistic reconstruction.

[6] Language is used ironically, pointing back to itself as creator of the world the reader inhabits. Language is also, in a sense, used as a metaphor for matter, or that which existence is made out of. One cannot get to the bottom of it, without losing all sense of meaning, (since there is not just one but many meanings which co-exist) and in the same vein, one subtext of the book implies that reality itself ought not be unpicked (through science, or the objective men) without the danger of undoing the fabric of reality itself. Language is shown to be a prison- with the reader caught in the reality of its making- though by exposing itself as such, offers the reader a way to see outside of it. Through irony, language is turned on itself, offering a critique of materialism, which self consciously plays with the manipulations it criticises, opening the work up to a kind of liberation through black humour and the possibility to see where one is caught in the game of the text.

[7] The subject matter of one painting, on first glance, appears to be an ordinary still life, looked at more closely, we see some egg shells, oddly resting on fur, white gloves hanging on the side of the image, and a copper pan in the centre, which is filled with a white and pinkish substance, and together with the title The Making of the Flesch, entices one to consider the nature of the substances being mixed, and for what ends.

[8] In his later theological treatise, an alternate creation myth to the Fall of Adam and Eve, he posits that our substance became corrupted after the CUT or the Grand Scission, which led to our becoming flesh, though our original essence remains central to our being, and it is this which recognises the unnatural nature of the world. We see and feel the strangeness of existence, since we know that what we embody is not what we should be- and this dissonance is that which constitutes the unheimlich or uncanny, of which he wishes to remind us in his works.

[9] There is a dark humour which comes through strongly in the modern English version, whereas the original Latin seems to impart a weightier tone, and it might be interesting to consider, if language is indeed a prison house, or legislation, what kind of prison modern English is in relation to the Latin used by Quintillian in the 18th Century, though these questions are at present beyond the scope of this research.

[10] Quintillius Quintillian interprets history as a series of paradigms, or perspectives on reality which shift according to ‘new knowledge’, designs, objects. Our senses at a particular time match up with our contemporary beliefs and way of looking, and the time space of history that we inhabit. There is the idea that this paradigm might shift dependent upon that which we aim towards- since humans are capable of a dialogic relationship with nature, and that it is possible to imbue it with his own values as much as he can be influenced by it. The paradigm within which we find ourselves- or the forms and substance(s) of a particular epoch- are not set in stone, and that we are potentially able to shift the paradigm by choosing to place life above utility. Although historically our civilization has continually shifted its surface forms in order to not have to consider recognising its fundamental substance, which is the notion of sacrifice and subjugation of life it is based on.

[11] The work juxtaposes the dissonance between Quintillian’s notion of what it means to view the world- its forms and substances- through a materialist prism, or an essentialist one. In broad terms, the materialist approach to reality, posits that the material world may one day be fully knowable (and potentially controllable) in its entirety, and we are bound to accept, and take responsibility for, a life based in horror and perpetual sacrifice, deeming it to be a rational end to existence, and leading to the loss of all meaning. (Though we take control, we become devoid of agency). However, through an essentialist approach which acknowledges that life cannot simply be defined in material terms, that immaterial forms, such as friendship, care, love, are as real as matter, though cannot simply be defined physically, devoid of any intention- we are better able to see that the reality and value of our life is not simply based in materialism. We have to see that we are caught in structures not entirely of our own making, allowing us to recognise our innocence alongside our responsibility. The forms we choose to create and cultivate need not be dominated by ideas of survival and utilitarianism (which are the logical outcome of a materialist approach), but those which do not subjugate the real substance of life, which is not based in matter.

[12] The demonstration of infinite regression in Lewis Carroll’s “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles” (written in 1895 for the Philosophical Journal Mind) shows that the foundation of any logical argument, or fact, has a basis that needs to be proven, which goes on ad infinitum.

[13] The paradox is created by existence- after the CUT or Grand Scission- created Quintillian’s “falsified and fractured Analogue of Creation that we call Existence....”and this is the twisting (and breaking) of life creating a double image/ cracked mirror, which causes things to mean the opposite of what they mean. The impossible becomes possible: life and death can coexist-only they should not. Though, according to QQ we cannot simply unravel the knots keeping things together in this twisted reality, without risking us becoming even more lost-or imprisoned. The material is twisted and knotted and fractured, and layered, with some parts opaque. We are too caught up in the material, and paradoxically it is only through care for the material-not manipulating and controlling it- that we might hope to transcend it.