The labyrinth of the mind

The weblike formation reveals to us our greatest fears, our internal contradictions and our limitless capacity for error

I’d like to discuss the subject of a recent article by Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari: The labyrinth. The concept of the labyrinth goes all the way back to the story of Theseus and Ariadne in Greek mythology and over time it has become a source of fascination in the worlds of art and, some would say, philosophy.

Labyrinths have inspired the designs of cathedral floors and grand gardens; and their influence even extends to the disquieting mazes in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, to M.C. Escher’s dizzying drawings and to Jorge Luis Borges’ labyrinthine fantasies.

But you couldn’t get lost in the labyrinth at Knossos — Theseus’ labyrinth. If you printed an aerial view of it and followed the path with a pencil, you couldn’t help but find both the centre and the exit. The labyrinth at Knossos is “unicursal”: If you could somehow unravel it, you would end up with a single straight line — just like the thread that Ariadne gives to Theseus to mark his path. What makes the labyrinth of Knossos dangerous is that the Minotaur lurks in its centre. Once you get rid of the Minotaur, getting out is easy.

Theseus’ problems, Scalfari reminds us, begin later, when he is forced to make other decisions that we might call “existential” (for example, choosing between Phaedra and Ariadne).

The classical imagination did not give form to the complicated web that awaits us outside the labyrinth because, at least until modern times, the model of the world was strictly geometric, made up of “closed” forms: concentric spheres; triangular hierarchies; and, from Marcus Vitruvius Pollio to Leonardo da Vinci, human figures enclosed within squares, circles or pentagons.

By the modern age, people began to suspect not only that the Earth was not at the centre of the universe, but that the universe was in fact infinite — or that an infinity of worlds might exist, and therefore that the universe could no longer be represented through geometry.

And so the labyrinth went from multicursal: At every step you must choose between two paths, and only one of them is right. You could get lost in a multicursal labyrinth.

If it were unravelled, there would be no single straight line, no thread, but a tree with a potentially infinite number of branches.

Any path could lead to a dead end, or to a series of twists and turns, leading you farther and farther away from the exit. And you can’t visualise the whole. All you can do is form a new hypothesis at every turn, in what the mathematician Pierre Rosenstiehl calls a “myopic algorithm”.

The situation gets more complex with a third form of the labyrinth, the network or web, where each point can be connected to any other, thereby giving rise to multiple paths. Imagine, for example, travelling from Rome to Paris and going through Berlin, Budapest and Madrid along the way.

A network cannot be unravelled. Unlike unicursal and multicursal labyrinths, which have both an interior and an exterior, this type of labyrinth has neither. And it can be extended to infinity.

Today, we understand that the structure of the universe is a web. But science has no need to fear it, because if one hypothesis proves false, there is always another one to test. (Fittingly, the motto of the Accademia del Cimento, an early Italian scientific society, was “Try and try again”.)

But as individuals, it’s not easy to give up our convictions. And even if we wanted to, we can’t reverse our course through the labyrinth. The web may be impervious to the passage of time, but we aren’t.

And so the weblike labyrinth reveals to us our greatest fears, our internal contradictions and our limitless capacity for error. We are, in the end, our own Minotaurs.

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Umberto Eco is author of the international best-sellers Baudolino, The Name of the Rose, and Foucault’s Pendulum, among others. Translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen.

The classical imagination did not give form to the complicated web that awaits us outside the labyrinth because, at least until modern times, the model of the world was strictly geometric, made up of “closed” forms: concentric spheres; triangular hierarchies ...