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The world's a book in folio, printed allWith God's great works in letters capital:
Each creature is a page; and each effect
A fair character, void of all defect.
–Francis Quarles, Emblems
Metaphysics has often revealed itself to us tobe metaphorics taken at its word.
–Hans Blumenberg
I. The Prose of the World
In a memorable passage from The Order of Things, Michel Foucault suggests that modern thought begins when only madmen and poets continue to read the world as if it were a book. The reference is to the ancient trope of the "Book of Nature," the notion that the world itself is a text in which the divine will is communicated to human beings. Although the idea that God authored two "books" for the instruction of mankind—the "Book of Books" or Bible and the "Book of Nature" or Creation—dates back to Augustine (Nobis 1: 957), the image of nature as a "layman's Bible" containing important knowledge experienced a resurgence in the twelfth century. From then until the end of the Renaissance, Foucault argues, knowledge in the West was characterized by a faith in "the prose of the world" (19), by the conviction that nature, like the books that told of it, consisted of so many signs to be identified and interpreted by human beings. But since the onset around 1600 of what Foucault terms the Classical Era, "the erudition that once read nature and books alike as parts of a single text has been relegated to the same category as its own chimeras […]. The written word and things no longer resemble one another" (48).
In the context of Foucault's bravura reading of Don Quixote, as the satirical tale of a madman who tries to re-find the world of his books in the book of the world and ends up overreading, the claim is compelling. As a generalization concerning the last 400 years of intellectual history, however, it is somewhat underdeveloped: how much do we know about how scholars read nature—or, for that matter, how they read books? If the implication is that after the Renaissance the natural world ceased to be understood through analogies to linguistic structures, then how is Foucault to explain generations of French...