ANALOGICAL THINKING
From an anthropological perspective, analogy is a way of thinking that assumes that things, people and events are reflected in each other. For analogical thinking, knowledge is the decoding of similarities; analogy reveals a world of secret connections underlying reality, and creates a “cosmic sense in which order, symmetry, perfection triumph”, a closed world (Gadoffre & al. 1980, p. 50); thus conceived, analogy is the foundation of gnosis. From the perspective of the history of ideas, this way of thinking culminated in the Renaissance, when our “sublunary » world was mapped by analogy with the celestial spheres, and with the divine world i.n general
In one of its manifestations, the doctrine of analogical correspondences validates the following type of argument:
Data: This plant looks like this or that part of the human body.
Conclusion: This plant has a hidden virtue, that is effective in curing the ills that affect the corresponding part of the body.
Guarantee: If the shape of a plant is like a part of the body, then it cures diseases that affect that part of the body.
Support: This is a divine arrangement.
This form of analogical thinking postulates that plants have hidden medicinal properties. The plant carries a divine signature, that is a representation of the human body part that it can heal. This signature or “analogical sympathy” is a motivated signifier, a similarity or “resemblance” of the given body part. God, in His benevolence, has given this signature to certain plants in order to make them useful to us. Thus, a plant that resembles the eyes, could cure eye irritation.
Since the skin of the quince is covered with small hairs, it bears the “signature” of the hair, and eating the quince can make your hair grow. In the words of Oswald Crollius [1609]:
Data: ‘This downy hair that grows around quinces […] represents hair in some way.” (id., p. 41)
Conclusion: “So, their decoction makes hair grow back, that has fallen out because of smallpox or some similar disease.” (ibid.)
Rationale: The healing power of plants « can be more easily recognized by the signature or analogous and mutual sympathy with the members of the human body with these plants than by anything else. » (ibid., p. 8)
Support: “ »God has given each plant an interpreter so that its natural virtue (but hidden in its silence) may be recognized and discovered. This interpreter can be nothing other than an external signature, that is, a resemblance of form and shape, true indications of its goodness, essence and perfection. » (id., p. 23)
Oswald Crollius, [Treatise on Signatures, or the True and Living Anatomy of the Great and Small Worlds]; [1609] [1]
From this doctrine derives a research programme o research for “those who wish to acquire the true and perfect science of medicine, » « they should devote all their efforts to the knowledge of signatures, hieroglyphics and characters” (ibid., p. 20). The training will enable them to recognise “at first sight, on the surface of the plants, the capacities with which they are endowed” (ibid., p. 9).
Knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants is acquired by learning how to read and understand the “discourse of nature,” that is , by mastering the signs scattered throughout the world. Such an analogical reading of the world is opposed to empirical causal investigation, which consists of observation and experience, practising dissection or prescribing a remedy to the patient and then finding out whether he or she is better, dead, or neither better nor worse. Analogical knowledge is a specific way of thinking, constitutive of magical thinking, which replaces causal knowledge with mysterious correspondences that convey influences, and bypasses the hierarchical system of categories organised according to genus and species, for which it replaces a network of similarities
[1] Quoted from Oswald Crollius, Traicté des Signatures ou Vraye et Vive Anatomie du Grand et Petit Monde. Milan: Archè, 1976.
[Treatise on Signatures or True and Lively Anatomy of the Large and Small Worlds.