Quote of the Day

[timelets]

“The human face, from afar, emulates the sky, and just as man's intellect is an imperfect reflection of God's wisdom, so his two eyes, with their limited brightness, are a reflection of the vast illumination spread across the sky by sun and moon; the mouth is Venus, since it gives passage to kisses and words of love; the nose provides an image in miniature of Jove's sceptre and Mercury's staff[6]. The relation of emulation enables things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity: by duplicating itself in a mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it; in this way it overcomes the place alloted to each thing.”
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This reversibility and this polyvalency endow analogy with a universal field of application.

Through it, all the figures in the whole universe can be drawn together.

--- Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences.”

This is both positive and negative sides of analogy: we can illuminate and obscure concepts, by bringing them together in the mind.