“In the middle of the journey of our life,” Dante writes in the opening sentence of The Inferno, “I came to myself in a dark forest, where the direct way was lost.” The comma separating the first clause of this sentence from the second is the placeholder for a momentous “event,” the one that reduced the two worlds of classical metaphysics to the one world of modern metaphysics. This ”event,” which I will be calling the Great Metaphysical Transfer, is man’s (wishful) arrogation to himself of the attributes that he has previously imputed to an otherworldly demiurge: a sovereign intentionality, the capacity to create ex nihilo, singularity and an utter self-coincidence.
But Dante cannot even utter the words “come to myself” without imagining himself falling off a precipice akin to the one provided by Gustave Doré in his illustrated version of The Inferno (link). After taking one bite from the apple of individuality, he casts it away, and rushes back to the Great Chain of Being, to which the imaginary geography of The Divine Comedy closely adheres. I would like to think that he returns to it because he isn’t willing to replace the plural version of the first person possessive pronoun for the singular, or the new places to which the remainder of the “journey of our life” might lead for the dead-end of the self. I know, however, that these deviations from the standard narrative were probably made possible by Dante’s Neoplatonism, which—by introducing Platonism into medieval Christianity--tempered its severity, allowing the chain to function as the ladder through which his narrator ascends to the lower reaches of the Paradiso.
The opening sentence of The Inferno is also exceptional because it acknowledges the social cost of the Cartesian turn. This makes the “our” in the opening line of The Inferno the first footprint left in the sand of western history by “all of the people.”
(The question, “Where are all of the people?,” which was posed to Silverman by a reader of World Spectators, serves as the point of departure for The Three-Person Picture. Please cite kajasilverman.com when reproducing this passage.)