Llullian Method and Interpretation in Humanities Computing

When, according to one legend, the leaves of the lentiscus plants on the highest mountain of Majorca became marked with strange alphabets, Raimundus Lullus understood his divine charge: the creation of a Great—and symbolic—Art. Llull’s Ars Magna, developed in the latter decades of the thirteenth century, has been recognized as a precursor both to computer science (in its emphasis on a mechanical calculus) and the philosophy of language (in its use of symbols and semantic fields). Ramon Llull’s colorful and quixotic life (from the episode in which he rode a horse into a cathedral to his near-suicidal martyrdom in North Africa) has served to detract attention from the seriousness of his project. The associations of his Great Art with alchemy, Kabbalism, and clashes between Muslims and Christians (in fact, the Ars Magna was designed to convert the infidel not through faith or grace but by means of irrefutable logic) sometimes make it difficult for us to extract Llull’s methodology and the machines he designed to support it from an entangling network of rhetoric and myth. Who was Llull, and what was his Great Art? More importantly, how should we understand the Llullian method in the context of our own work in humanities computing? This overview of Llull’s generative and logical systems emphasizes their relevance to questions of interpretative practice, visual thinking, and algorithmic or constraints-based methodology in humanities computing today. Llullian procedure was played out within a body of rules, designed to be as universal and eternal as possible and meant to be followed strictly, as they encoded a logic of interpretation. But the Ars Magna was not merely an abstract methodology; instead, Llull designed a logic of questioning and answering supported by mechanical systems—the first on record. Llull’s Art constituted a text-based mechanism and a procedure for using and interpreting the results of textual manipulations. Llull’s primary device was system of interlocking, independently-mobile wheels, on which, in compartments or camerae, were inscribed letters symbolic of theological concepts. These represented the smallest principles of faith. For example, a small wheel might contain the scholastic transcendentals of unum (the one), verum (the truth), and bonum (the good)—an embodiment of the idea that nothing can exist without exhibiting unity, truth, and goodness. A more complex wheel might contain letters symbolizing the sixteen divine attributes: goodness (B), greatness (C), eternity (D), and so forth. Connecting lines drawn in specified patterns among the letters of such a wheel yield dozens of simple combinations, which Llull interpreted as revelatory (and yet logical) truths about the Divinity. We therefore see that the goodness of God is great (BC) and eternal (BD), or that the greatness of God is good (CB). The permutations, especially in more articulated wheels, some of which encode the objects of knowledge (angels, man, heaven, the imagination, stones, flames, plants) and rhetoric (what, whence, why, when, whether, where, how?), become exceedingly complex and allow for scientific as well as theological questioning: Where does the flame go when a candle is extinguished? Why does rue strengthen the eyes while onion weakens them? Llull demonstrated the use of his Art for posing and examining difficult philosophical problems that had been taken up in other medieval contexts, such as: Can a fallen angel repent? Could God damn Peter and save Judas? Will the unborn child of a martyr be saved through a baptism of blood? In the books accompanying his charts and diagrams, Llull sometimes offered full arguments and commentaries on such questions, sometimes outlined the combinatorial process by which the questions could be answered using his wheels, and sometimes simply showed that such sophisticated questioning could be generated by means of the Ars Magna. In each of these cases, Llull’s emphasis is as much on the interpretive interface between the machine and its user as on the embedded and generative logic of the wheels. The ostensible purpose of the Great Art was to justify the Christian faith through mechanical, logical, and algorithmic analysis. This work, like the machines that supported it, was self-testing in the sense that the execution of iterative combinatorial motions was only carried out until contradictions emerged. At that point, the wheels themselves could be examined and reconfigured. In this way, Llull’s Art was both a generative and autopoietic mechanism. Llull was interested not only in proving, through his logical visual grammar, the validity of old beliefs, but also in watching new truths and refined systems emerge. Few among us would be comfortable suggesting that there are eternal truths in humanities computing or the disciplines to which it is applied, but a workable method for placing and analyzing old ideas in new combinations is always welcome. To this degree—and most especially because Llull’s algorithms and machines all bend toward hermeneutic ends—it is interesting to consider their possible connection to problems of interpretation in humanities computing. Are there currently established rules for producing and interpreting the results of humanities
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computing practice? Is it desirable to formalize the unwritten rules and obscured components and principles of our hermeneutic work? How might thinking formally (and perhaps visually) about our methodology help to clarify what we do to our students, our colleagues, and ourselves? The example of Llull could prompt us to go a step further: can we imagine combinatorial, generative, algorithmic, and autopoietic systems that could enliven our thinking about the objects, methods, and aims of humanities computing? A method which once felt charged with the grandeur of God might now—in the aftermath of generative aesthetics, OuLiPian composition, ars combinatoria, deformance, and ’pataphysical speculations—seem to be infused with an attractive and experimental ludic spirit. Are there new uses for Llull’s old machines?
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