Saturday, June 28, 2003

Ron,

 

Lanny, when he hears that your question is out there, will probably provide his own translation of "phaneronoemikon", but:

 

The first half, "phanero-", could've been obvious to you from Sappho's best-known poem, often left titled in the Greek even with English translations, the "Phainetai moi". Liddell and Scott's Lexicon gives "phanero-", the root of that title, as recognized Greek, as used in Aristotle's "phaneromisos", "openly hating." "phanero-"/"phaneros" means "open to sight, visible, manifest, evident"; it has the sense of "it appears (to)".

 

I've always — I think mistakenly, now that you call closer attention to the Quarles — thought the last half of it was "-oemikon"; I thought his "pun" was on the "-oemikon" one sees at the end of the Gk. for "economy," so it would've been a sort of "economy of appearances."

 

— But, now that you're brought it under the microscope, I see that I'd blind-spotted the "-n-" in the middle; and now the "-noemikon" half of it looks like a derivative of "noema", in Liddell as "that which is perceived, a perception, thought," "a thought, purpose, design," "like . . . understanding", and I realize, I think, that it should've been familiar to me from Husserl's famous terms, the "noema" and "the noemata."

 

The final "-ikon" suffix seems to be the same sort used in Susan Howe's "Eikon Basilikon", for a large work on a subject (with some trace of icon, perhaps).

 

— So, that yields something like "the appearance of thoughts".