Dear Mr. Eco,

I’ve finally made up my mind writing to you after nearly a year of struggle against my busy study and the enrichment of my own thoughts.

When I’m a high school senior two years ago, I began to notice, with exhilaration and ecstasy, something curious about the things and conceptions floating around me and mingling in the conversation we took part in. That is, a profound similarity between the conceptions we are familiar with in our lives. It is not just similes, metaphors, analogies we are fed on to strengthen our understanding or simply for a joke, or bigger coated truth like that in the Truman Show as a witty deception. It is, in addition, the archetypes that came far from our subliminal realms, and which have generally been distorted and exaggerated by the inadequate interpretation and reiteration of languages and rituals. The time has come for us to organize the facts in different orders of similarity, by which I mean the degree of similarity, and grasp what they commonly possess as archetypes.

I would like to set an example for this:

Things related to “Repulsion” (an assumed archetype) include

Xenophobia,

The repulsion of the same electric charges,

Allergy,

Excommunication,

Vomit,

Trepidation,

Hatred,

Hermeticism/Anti-social,

Insulation,

Blindness/Deafness,

Waterproof,

Anorexia,

Pain,

Further, we classify these conception hierarchically and yields the following chart.

As you can see this chart is far yet complete, much more detailed subgenres are to be listed and linked to form the genealogy of variegated conceptions or the diverged aspects from a single archetype.

Thus a question may rise from the acceptance of shared archetypal images among groups of conceptions spanning the whole range of human knowledge, that is, whether those archetypes can be invented or can only be reinvented or rediscovered. Will the saying “Nothing comes from nothing” be proved or denounced? I found, later, in Popper’s <<Conjectures and Refutations>> that Plato had already assumed the recollection progress of human knowledge development, which is evidently in support of the saying, though a bit different from mine.

I wish you may lead a team of experts from different areas of human knowledge and set up an international project if you perceive something precious in my opinion. The aim of it should be to scrutinize the archetypes of knowledge and exhaust its established derivatives in all regions of human knowledge.

Waiting for good news and wish you sound and happy.

                                                                                                                        Your utmost sincerity

                                                                                                                                   Xian Rui

                                                                                                                               07.3.18 China