it is the moderns quasi-subjects (‘person’) who feel themselves to be **directly addressed,** (redressed and saved) ——> to exist
(what art suffers now, that i should directly address the modern subject, and other mode of subjectivity or other kinds of addressee and addressing is brutally criticized and irrelativized)
-(love’s type of address: ) addressed to us ==> make us exist ——> a person
(existing as person is the only way? no no no!) —— the emergence of persons is a local and historical phenomenon that we simply cannot extend to all collectives

there was a time (12th century——my favorite) when Avicenna was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in east and west corresponded to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was inseparable from its spiritual context. ——> think of the alchemists for whom the operation undertaken in the laboratory only attained its end if it was accompanied by an interior transmutation of the man——that is to say only if it effected the interior birth (of spiritual man)

(for Corbin) Modern / Western venture = application of the intelligence to the scientific investigation of a nature that has been desacralized, which must be violated in order to find out its laws (and to subject its forces to the human will)

Alcemist’s chemistry
Nicolas Oresme’s geometry
[out of history]
Descartes’ geometry is also out of history, discontinious