Interval 1
Presented on: Saturday, March 28, 2015
Presented by: Roger Weir
The Future and The New Past
Presentation 13 of 52
Interval 1
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Transcript:
Let's come to the 13th presentation of this year of The Future and the New Past. A, a continuity of presence that recalibrates the partitioning of time from the tyranny of a present now into a past which is gone and dead, and a future which is not yet and negotiable. This is a well-known conundrum and has been addressed a number of times in civilization. And again, today here, not now, but currently. This is an ongoing inquiry. And this ongoing has the nature of a continuum, which is a process of ongoing, which pairs itself in symmetry with reality.
One of the great writers of logical precision in an encyclopedic presentation of it was Alfred North Whitehead. Who with Bertrand Russell writing laboriously assiduously the Big three volume Principia Mathematica, published by Cambridge University Press duly the turn of the 20th century.
While Bertrand Russell as several times I pointed out, recoiled from that. Recoiled from Principia Mathematica, which was to displace the Principia Mathematica of Sir Isaac Newton, had come to the understanding complexly that logic and mathematics were two sides of the same coin. But for Whitehead, more than for Russell Whitehead realized that there was, in that metaphor, the truth, that there was no coin. That the structure of mathematics and the structure of logic were indeed faces that looked out as if one was the past and one was the future. The past of the structures of logic where we have come from and how we got here. And mathematics where from here we go into literally the phrase unspoken at that time would have been into eternity. From here to eternity. So that mathematics was the future and logic was the past.
Whitehead wrote a classic book so complex that it was missed set in type for generations before it was corrected. And the book was Process and Reality. Whitehead, in fact, was so radical that he left England. He left the Cambridge. He left the British Empire and moved to America, to the United States. He went to Harvard. And there one of his prized students was Susanne Langer, who also was studying under Ernst Cassirer at Yale.
And it was Susanne Langer who put together the genius of Whitehead and Cassirer when she, in 1945, came out, published by Harvard with one of the great books of the 20th century Philosophy in a New Key. Using as a scalar history, the philosophy of music to give a new key to the composition of the love of wisdom inquiry, philosophy. Which led her eventually into understanding from Cassirer that symbols were an epitome of language, especially written language. But from Whitehead that there is a process in reality and that one needs to be able to understand that there is something where, yes, there is a form, but there also is feeling.
And so, the sequel to Philosophy in a New Key was Feeling and Form, published by Scribner in New York. A book of philosophy of art, which was extremely important and made her more than Philosophy in the New Key, a celebrity retrospectively. And Philosophy in the New Key went through edition after edition. One of the popular, uh, mentor books, the classics version of Signet books, uh, was the publication of Philosophy in the New Key and was reprinted many, many times is today available in a Dover paperback reprint. The Harvard edition in paperback is the one that gives us the deepest insight through the different traditions.
And it is a quality of looking at Alfred North Whitehead because his Process and Reality when corrected additions, taking all the typos, all of the misprints and miscues out, becomes a great double chiral swirl of high intelligence. And one takes a look at Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas to realize that he was like a precursor of the way in which the 20th century would come to terms with the struggle to understand why it was that the 19th century that began with revolutionary resolve, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, becoming a United States of America, etc., um, and that the 19th century revolutionary beginnings progressively during the 19th century dissolved. Dissolved the world until in the late years with the discovery of electrons and x rays as we have talked about, H.G. Wells is The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, all of a sudden, everything was up for grabs and Principia Mathematica by Whitehead and Russell was one of the last attempts to pin down, to tack down, the veracity of what we know and where we can go. And that knowing and going in powers our present now-ness with capacity, with facility. The capacity to master the past and the facility to predict and plan the future. And thus, all meaning all power is commandeered in the hubris of the now the present present. You can't vote unless you're present. You can't earn unless you're present, etc.
Susanne Langer realized that she had uncovered a conundrum in Feeling and Form and spent the rest of her life writing a series that turned out to be three volumes, a trilogy. And its overall title is Mind an Essay on Feeling.
Like Hannah Arendt who had studied under Heidegger and Jaspers and sought to bring together the Heidegger Jaspers disparateness. Heidegger's insistence that Dasein being is the arbiter in its nowness. And Jasper's with the progressive existential psycho therapeutic application. Became able to finally to realize that there is such a thing as time forms of civilization. And that the pivots of time forms in civilization are indeed beginnings of ages. And those ages are what really give the quality and meaning and thematic, uh, structuring to man. And that one of the most powerful things that has been singled out to us is the Renaissance. But to Jaspers, who was much more learned, not only philosophically but psychologically. His textbook on psychotherapy, published about 1902, was the first in the world that was a textbook of that. Already, as a young man, he was brilliant.
But he became increasingly, after the Second World War, after the First World War, the interlude of the twenties and thirties. The Second World War, he became more and more interested before there was a Renaissance for us there was another Renaissance before that. And he called that the Axial Age. Axial in the sense that it is not like the axis of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan with, uh, Mussolini, fascist Italy as the in-between bar. Not that axis. The other axis. The vertical, the rooted ascendant verticality of time. That the one that axis is an axis of power, which evil thinks this is the scaler upon which we measure our success and your failure. The very essence of evil.
But Jaspers, in investigating the Axial Age of 500 B.C., some 2000 years before our Renaissance, found that it was an age of superior genius that was recovered in our renaissance. Rediscovered. Rebirthed. But very little had been original in the Renaissance. Its genius was the rediscovery, the rebirthing of the Axial Age. And so, Jaspers wrote a four-volume set eventually of essays on the Axial Age. And his great translator for out of his exquisite but complex German for much of that was Hannah Arendt.
Just like Susanne Langer was one of the great translators of Ernst Cassirer. She found that the epitome of Cassirer's language of symbolic forms, classically in three volumes, a fourth volume was rediscovered generations later, about the same time that the corrections to Whitehead's Process and Reality made the first edition publishable ever of that book and its actuality so that one could understand. Difficult though it is, it is understandable. Not continuously in puzzling as additions of Process and Reality had been for generations. Several of us here tried to read it as, uh, uh, undergraduate students and university half a century ago and failed course.
Cassirer's epitome to Susanne Langer was a, an essay that was republished as a little thin book called Language and Myth. Myth and Language. It's reprinted for almost half a century now as a Dover paperback. Very Thin. It's the way in which a mythic horizon of feeling toned images constituting the flow of experience gets its current in that flow from language, from spoken language. A spoken language that can become more and more interestingly filigreed and layered and thus complex, complexified. So that finally when it has a transformation to a written language, the oral language of the mythos becomes the written language of the symbolic forms.
When it does that an archetypal problem occurs. Raises its challenge. And if you're going to be an Ahab about it, it looks like Moby Dick. And you're going to go down with your ship, your shipmates and everything. Except somebody who didn't believe in it afloat in the wreckage. Like an orphan. Like Ishmael. The quality is not to become an Ahab about it. Nor to cling so that one becomes an Ishmael being the lone survivor. But to obviate that conundrum completely by a recalibration where time becomes the continuity. Becomes a continuum. A scalar in a continuum that is able to move deftly from zero to infinity with all of the movements of a dance of meaning alive. Not in between, but in full view of the continuity.
Such forms amazingly have a word to give them some meaning was invented about 50 some years ago by Buckminster Fuller. He called that structure one that stands in its form in the midst of the current and flow of change, and that that quality is 1070. We get the root of that word from the very way in which we describe spoken language in terms of its delivery and time. We say that language then has a structure which has tenses, which means that it has tense equity. In mathematics it resurfaces as a very interesting word idea application called a tensor. When he managed to master tensor calculus, Einstein was able to do his work.
Roger Penrose was able just a few years ago to publish a 1000-page classic book. It's called The Road to Reality. A book club The Scientific American Book Club put out an edition of The Road to Reality. Its headline was The Road to Reality a Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. In 34 chapters. The headline was Get Groundbreaking Scientific Insights By Now. Physics and mathematics addressed the biggest questions of the universe. How did the universe begin? Why is it the way it is? What came before and what will happen at the end? Beginning, middle, end. Which is a mythic structure.
When you get complex in a mythic structure like that beginning, middle and end, you get into a narrative. You get into the structure of storying. And one of the peculiarities about structure is that it complexifies and the structure becomes more and more arcane. The telling of the story requires such a complexity, not only of structure like in syntax or vocabulary. Or many other qualities that can be enumerated as parts of the subject. But becomes downright mysterious in a pair of waves.
The first of that pair of waves classically was called the lesser mysteries. The other chirality. The other kind. The other type. The other one with quotation marks, is the greater mysteries. And those lesser mysteries were a preparation, the Greek word for preparation in this case is, uh myasis (sp.?).
Uh, one of the wonderful ways in which all of this was, uh, put into language and then translated out of the German into, uh, English by Carl Kerényi Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. The twin, the two, the paired goddesses, mother and daughter. When the Bollingen series published this, uh, English translation of Eleusis, they put five volumes into Belgian Series 65. And its whole title was Archetypal Images in Greek Religion. Archetypal images that have feeling tones. That give this particular myasis, in its major qualities of manifestation, the power to deliver not just types but archetypes. Not just types, which we have because we figured it out, but archetypes, which we haven't figured out which have us.
As far as psychology could go, in 1921 was Carl Jung's publication of a classic called The Psychology of Types. And written in German. And even though he was Swiss, Jung was very well read in classical German philosophy alas, he did not read Heidegger or Jaspers. He did not read Cassirer or Whitehead. But he did read Schiller and Goethe. And the whole just of the seed, out of which Jung's 1921 Psychology of Types was generated was Schiller's Theory of Types some, um, 120, um years before.
Schiller, who had understood. He had honed the sharpness of his blade of discernment in extensive conversations and correspondence, written conversations with Goethe. Their conversations, uh, Schiller, and Goethe. Two thick volumes, understood by Schiller not in Goethe 's methos magnificence like a Faust, but in Schiller's poetic, his poesis, to create the refinement to see that the structure was not dead but living. And because it was alive, it had to have a life cycle.
This was something that Jaspers had understood when he began to investigate the Axial Age of 500 B.C. He began to understand the great enlightenment inheritance of the Renaissance in our ages and was able to see that Schiller had looked not at the writing on the wall but had looked through a window. And through that, transparency had come to understand something completely mystical that had happened back in the Axial Age. And had that **inaudible word** pair. It had a lesser mysteries that were a preparation. It had a greater mysteries that were, uh, the Greek word for it, uh, is those who see, uh, the Greek word is **inaudible word**. The ability to the lesser mysteries were a closing, a closing like of the eye. You have seen. You're prepared. The greater mysteries are that your eyes open. You are in seeing-ness. There is nothing that can be said. So, the greater mysteries were always accompanied by a sacred silence. Whereas the lesser mysteries were always enclosed in a secret. Uh, the Greek, uh, as, uh, **inaudible name** points out, he says,
For my myasis comes from the verb myeio, which denotes the action. The simpler, simpler verb myeo, from which the noun derives, implies the element of secrecy. It means nothing other than to close, as after the eyes do after seeing.
You have seen the preparation is complete because you have seen in the lesser mysteries. When you make the progression, along with other pilgrims holding a staff just like other pilgrims on the way. No one holds up a, a scepter, a rod, like a magician on stage. Uhhh, the wand, abracadabra. Or a royal saying, I rule. I have the scepter. Oh, really? Really?
One is a preparation of secrecy. The other is a beholding of sacredness.
Let's take a little break and we'll come right back.
END OF SIDE ONE
Let's come back. Let's come back. Let's come back to the presence of a continuity. We're avoiding being present. We don't want to make a duality out of time, which is a fiction.
Let's come back to Roger Penrose. Let's come back to his magnum opus, The Road to Reality. Just a few years ago. Penrose is one of the world's, uh, greatest mathematicians. One of his students is Stephen Hawking.
In the 34 chapters of The Road to Reality, a classic structure is by triads. Generally, it is thought by those that are mythically conditioned that 33 would be the end. But there are 34 chapters in The Road to Reality. Well, should it be at the very end of the 33, well, that throws the whole thing off. Well, throwing the whole thing off is exactly what Penrose delights in. So, after Chapter 11, which is the first third, he has Chapter 12, and that is the 34th chapter, really. Sandwiched in between, after the first third and the beginning of the second third. It has ancient pre-mythic origins, actually.
In the high Paleolithic when we were hunters, we learned that to pierce the hide of the game, you had to have a very strong throw to your javelin. And the strongest Paleolithic throw was to hold the javelin two thirds back from the front. One third into its axial structure. And with that power throw you could throw a spear through the hide and bring your game down. And if you had a group of half a dozen men able to hunt together with this technique shared, multiple spears could bring down very large game.
In the 1950's classical film King Solomon's Mines it opens with a scene of hunting elephants and uh, two game hunters from Europe are dabbling into game hunting. And Alan Quartermain, played by Stuart Grainger, is, uh, the guide. And what happens is, is that one of the hunters wounds his elephant and it goes off now rogue into the savannah scrub and the other is brought down. And Alan Quartermain says to the other years, don't shoot a new one yours is injured. We'll go for it later. Wait until we reconnoiter this one. But the hunter impetuously goes to find his game. Finish him off. And, um, the rogue elephant now having the energy of a rogue charges to kill him. And of course, he experiences fear. Not the hunter, but the hunted instantly, that he has the image that he's being hunted to the death now. He runs, whereas the native guide with his long sphere goes back to his Paleolithic origins, and with his last cast, he throws the spear. It does pierce the elephant's hide, but he is a guard and has to be brought down by Quartermain, rushing across the savannah, and firing two shots from elephant gun. They're very powerful. The **inaudible word or two** down and dies, of course.
But it's the throwing of that spear that is the African ancient response still alive. Still alive when Rider Haggard and the end towards the end of the 19th century wrote his not only Allan Quartermain Series but wrote She, the last immortal woman of secret vision that sacredly keeps alive the mysteries of eternal life.
Chapter 12 is entitled Manifolds of End Dimensions. The Chapter 13 that begins after that the second third is Symmetry Groups. There's always this quality of understanding that one really needs to be circumspect. There is a tremendous, uh, complexity happening. And, uh, one needs to really understand, uh, where all of this is going. The quality that he shows in Manifolds of End Dimensions is that there is a math of how to deal with seeming duality of vectoring and to make sure that one does not fall into the conundrums of such neophyte, uh **inaudible word or two**.
He writes later on in discussing 12.7 volume element summation convention, what one begins to use effectively on The Road to Reality with this higher mass of Manifolds of End Dimensions,
Some people might prefer to incorporate a factor of an exclamation mark, parentheses subscript minus one, into this, into the discussion, because now we're dealing not only with negatives where we're dealing with a peculiarity mathematically because this is really advanced. Where one can parenthetically described space-time in four dimensions at this high math as a plus comma, minus comma, minus comma, minus parentheses. That space is obviated in the sense that it is now in this math at this point, missing. Empty. Gone. Only time occurs.
Because time is the first dimension, not the fourth.
Later on, he says, "I shall not concern myself with the various awkward factorials that arise here as they distract from the main ideas." What are the main ideas? "We are reading the road signs to reality. We can use the quantity," and then he gives a short math subscript here, which is algebraic. It's actually called tensor algebra, "to convert a family of components." And more tenser algebra. "Which we do this by taking advantage of the operations of tensor algebra, which we will come to more fully in the next section."
Later on, he will say that "This algebra enables us to glue the parentheses and minus p parentheses vector into the family of components of a P form. We do this by taking advantage of the operations of tensor algebra." And little later, "The gluing operation comes in. Here is what is referred to as tensor contraction or transfection." Or in molecular DNA genomic structure, a transposition, or a translation. A transposon or RNA messaging of various kinds. One of the strongest of the RNAs is mitochondrial DNA. Passed only on by women. By the female of any species. Animal, plant, living forms that have a cellular structure.
He concludes, "the gluing operation is a tensor contraction or transfection, and it enables each upper index to be paired off, paired off with a corresponding lower index." One begins to see that there is a fraction because one can not only write one, one can write one as one over one. One gets very interesting qualities when you get into fractions. Like later on, when the equation signals differentially indefinite fractions, you get fractals, which repeat with perfect cloning indefinitely.
One of Penrose great triumphs are little, tiny studies. This one is Techniques of Differential Topology and Relativity. Towards the end of his preface, this is published in 1972. A little monograph in a series. And then a series that is not scientific, but a society for industrial and applied mathematics. Because you can apply all of this on an industrial scale by the late 20th century, that in the 21st century is on a mega scale. His conclusion in the preface
Although we shall be concerned primarily with the case of a four-dimensional space-time hyperbolic normal signature parentheses plus comma, minus comma, minus comma, minus parentheses. The entire discussion applies equally well to space-times. All in quotation marks. Space hyphen times with any positive number of space dimensions. For space to be computable, it must be measurable. When space is empty, it is not measurable. You can't compute with it. What remains is time.
One of the great poets of the mid early to mid-20th century was Wallace Stevens. Wallace Stevens was the vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Insurance Company in Connecticut. He, um, commuted each day on a commuter train into New York. And when he was commuting because of his, um, reality, he would compose in his creative imagining, in his visionary remembering, the poem for the day. And when he would get to his office, he would dictate to his informed, expectant executive secretary the poem of the day, and she would type it up.
This one is entitled Asides on the Oboe. The oboe is a musical instrument that has a particular deep tone. That has an overtone of contemplation and has an undertone that this is not threatening, but mysterious. It's not cheering nor threatening, but mysterious. It is a contemplation on mysteriousness. And to hear it the first time when you can really hear it is a lesser mystery. And when you can read it freely, it's the greater mystery.
The prologues are over. It is a question now, of final belief. So, say that final belief must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. That obsolete fiction of the wide river in an empty land. The gods that Boucher killed.
Boucher was a French painter in the mannerist Baroque era that made, uh, pretty puffy, cute goddesses and nice little chubby, uh, fairies and beautifully muscular, plump men. Gods and goddesses. "The gods that Boucher killed and the metal heroes that time granulates." The industrial steel robot culture. This is by the 1930's already. "And the metal heroes that time graduates. The philosophers man alone still walks in dew, still by the sea-side mutters milky lines concerning an immaculate imagery." And goes on there to complete the first. And then there's a second. And then, of course, there's a third section to the poem.
That triad is the earliest stable form in space. A triangle as a two-dimensional presentation of it, as a case in point. Before there is a triangle if you have just the line, it is said to occur within a plane. It has a beginning. It has this extent as an end. That line is mythic. Though it can suffice to express a geometry beginning to a mathematic until one goes to the high school textbook for the last 2300 years. Euclid's plain geometry. And Euclid being a good, um, about a fifth generation Pythagorean, begins his classic textbook in geometry with a point which he defines Pythagorean wise. Wisely. A point is a locus of no dimensions, parentheses, minus comma, minus comma, minus comma, minus parentheses. That's the Zen of it.
Which is someone like D.T. Suzuki, A Zen Life. Here he is. He lived to be about 97. Yeah. The first book I ever bought by him was this volume, edited by William Barrett in an old anchor paperback. It was originally published in 1956. I bought a copy after I dropped out of electrical engineering at the beginning of 1959. The university co-op bookstore and have had it well used ever since.
Suzuki is, uh, famous because in the late 1920's, starting in 1927 with Essays on Zen Buddhism into the 1930's, The Third Essays on Zen Buddhism came out in 1933, 33-34.
He also published a little succinct Manual of Zen Buddhism in which he gives the origin of a special paramita like time as the first dimension there is a first paramita. A para is beyond. A meta measurable. What is beyond measure? If there is a completion, isn't that complete? Yes. Is that all there is? No. Why? Well, to begin with, there are always refinements to completion. And they accrue through resonances that are punctuated by their harmonics. Hence, there's a mathematics well developed by now called Harmonic Analysis. There's an aesthetic called art, which is really refined. So refined that it has been forgotten for several generations. Out of sight, out of mind. No seeing, no thinking.
The paramitas are six. They form a symmetry of a pair of triangles, of triads. There are three that have this quality of a beginning which fans out to a vase. And it's complemented by a bass that rises to an apex. Curiously enough, later, some almost 2000 years ago, when the idea occurred to a struggling rabbinic Judaism, about 90 A.D. decided that the old menorah of seven candles was not sophisticated enough, that one had to have something. Ahh, let's have what they called the Shield of David. The star of David. That six-pointed star of the double triangles. That this indeed is stronger than the seven lights of a menorah. That signals a quality of refinement which is eternal.
Later in the very thrust of the Renaissance turning into an expressive genius towards the end of the 1500's and the beginning of the 1600's, it was recognized mathematically by a very poignant seer that that hexagonal shape is indeed a puzzling, eternal actuality in nature in the form of a snowflake. His name was Kepler. And he wrote a little monograph on snowflakes. And he said that the hexagonal structure of any snowflake is unique and that nowhere else on Earth are there two snowflakes that are alike. Infinite variety. If there is infinite variety, it means then that the structuring also takes form within a continuity that has tensegrity. That nature really exemplifies this. And if we need to listen up and look wide, listen better, and look wider.
The quality of triads came to a repository of a motto which in later Europe, the Europe of Kepler's time. He died in 1631. And by that time there are already groups seeking religious freedom from all over Europe, especially from Germany, which was diced up into 30 years wars, indefinite little Kingdoms, Prince, Princelings and so forth. And from England. Some from France. Some from what is today, the Czech Republic. Some from Italy. Scandinavia. Most poignantly from Germany. The motto in that triad of stability of human life refinement was of faith, hope and charity. Primal to that was faith. Faith, hope, and charity is that base.
In the classic India influenced by classic Central Asia, some 3500 years ago already understood that there really is a double triad. From Central Asia, from the language written down for the first time called Avesta by Zarathustra about almost 4000 years ago. By 2000 years ago. By zero. If we go back to 4000 years ago, we come to 2000 B.C. and about 1925 B.C., age 75, Zarathustra wrote down his Gothas. His four great Gothas as a structure, as a parenthesis of space-time in a wisdom perfection. And there were Holy Spirit helpers for man, six of them in three triads. Or in a triple pairing. Can be either way. It is double chiral, so that the symmetry holds in that magneto electric energy very well.
The first of the way in which faith was expressed classically was initially not faith but was patience. Just like it was in India. Patience. So that the paramita of patience in Sanskrit is Kshanti. K-s-h-a-n-t-i. Kshanti. It's only in a Manual of Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki that one finds recounted in a European language for the first time.
The origins of that first paramita patience. Which generates hope and charity in Sanskrit, Selah, and Donah. He writes that there was a high dharma dialogue between the Buddha and a Boddhisatva figure Subh?ti. And in this dialogue, like a super hyper Platonic dialogue.
At that time Subh?ti said to the Buddha world, honored one, what will this sutra be called? How shall we hold it? The Buddha said to Subh?ti, this sutra will be called the vajra prajna paramita sutra paramita.
Vajra meaning diamond. The diamond. Vajra. Projna being wisdom. The diamond wisdom. Paramita means perfection going to, not its closure, but to its beyond ness.
One of the epithets in the high Dharma for the Buddha was one who was well gone. He referred to himself as tathagata which actually is tath?t? to gata. Gata in Sanskrit is gone. tath?t? means subtleness. It means this speaker speaks from suchness gone. From a space-time that is empty of an identification. There is no one measurable there or anywhere where there could be. Nor where time could occur. Yet is speaking and we are hearing. Which means that we have the word used at the time at which this was first being talked about in the 19th century was a transcendental.
The Buddha tells of a time where he was a rishi who was dedicated to helping others, regardless of how many lifetimes it would take into how many world ages without limit. And his name was Kshanti. His name was patience. The very last way in which that was expressed in ancient Alexandria was the composition of the Book of Job. Job's patience is that patience of Kshanti as a paramita.
And when we come next week, we'll talk about the other two, hope and charity. Shei
Selah and Donah. As completing that triad. That triangle. Which invites a higher harmonic of those three, which does occur. And that all of those together help us to any extent needed or not even known as needed. Even when someone obviates space and time itself.
Next week.
END OF RECORDING