Earlier to Later Heaven: Fugue VI Beyond Descartes - Part 1

(continued from here)

In this post we take a short detour within our current central topic, that of relationship of Earlier Heaven and Later Heaven arrangements of the trigrams. The new material included here grew out of ruminations on the aforesaid primary topic though,  and is actually not so much a detour as a preparing the way for what I hope will be the eventual solution of our problem at hand.

Mandalic geometry, as we’ve seen, is fully commensurate with the coordinate system of Descartes, but its principal forebears lie elsewhere. It is derived largely from Taoist and pre-Taoist thought structures, most importantly the I Ching,  the earliest strata of which were formed before the separation of rational and irrational thought in the history of human cognition. As a result it is capable of far exceeding the possibilities of the Cartesian coordinate system, a product of the Enlightenment and Age of Rationalism. It offers geometry the possibility of a structural fluidity and a functional variability that Cartesian geometry lacks.^[1]

From the very beginning of this project I’ve been much puzzled by the lack in traditional Chinese thought  of a symbol corresponding to the zero of the Western number line and number theory.^[2] Traditional Asian thought does not uniformly lack a zero symbol.^[3] And yet the I Ching and Taoism manage well enough without one, electing to base their numerical relationships instead entirely on combinatorics involving permutations of yinandyang – what we in the West call  negativeandpositive – through multiple dimensions. It is an entirely different perspective arising out of a very different worldview.^[4]

What Taoism invented in the process was a unique,  thoroughly self-consistent brilliant system of logic/geometry/combinatorics which has been masquerading, all these many centuries,  as “just a method of divination.”^[5]  In essence, Chinese thought invented a discrete number system and geometry, one based on vectors rather than scalars, a vector geometry that can be extrapolated to any desired number of dimensions. The I Ching settles for just six,  the first whole number multiple of three. That is complicated enough.^[6][7]

(continuedhere)

Notes

[1] For one example of the advantages such variability and fluidity offer, in this particular case in creating  dynamic,  phase-shifting forms of nanomaterials,  see here.

[2] For a short history of the concept of zeroseeWho Invented Zero?

[3] The West, after all, derived its zero symbol ultimately via India.

[4] One might well speculate whether the significant root difference in world view between traditional Indian and Chinese thought lay in the fact that Indian mathematicians could have created a Zero out of nothingness (Śūnyatā),  a key term in Mahayana Buddhism and also some schools of Hindu philosophy while Taoist thought did not include a concept of nothingness. Instead it conceived of a formlessness prior to manifestation. In Taoist cosmology Taiji is a term for the “Supreme Ultimate” state of undifferentiated absolute and infinite potential,  the oneness before duality,  from which  yinandyang  originate.  So it might be that lacking a concept of nothingness forestalled invention of a zero symbol.  Still, it also allowed creation of an original,  unique holistic philosophy of reality, found perhaps nowhere else.

[5] The Russian philosopher, mathematician and authorPeter D. Ouspensky (1878-1947)  relates an apocryphal legend regarding the origin of the Tarot,  the moral of which has significance also to the history of the I Ching.

[6] In its emphasis on vector analysis and primacy of dimension the philosophy which underlies the I Ching and mandalic geometry  shares some characteristics of Clifford algebra.

[7] One of the important things with respect to physics I hope to show with mandalic geometry is that it is possible to construct an integrated geometrical / logical system which is self-sufficient and self-consistent, capable of modeling interactions of subatomic particles of the Standard Model and then some.  This goal is,  I believe,  approximated in mandalic geometry by meticulous coupling of the methodologies of composite dimension and trigram toggling,  although it quickly becomes apparent that a system based upon what is after all a relatively small number of dimensions - six in the case in point - becomes vastly complex and difficult to follow, at least initially.  One can’t help wondering how physics will be able to correlate all the intricate data resulting from its countless particle accelerator collisions and combine it into a consistent whole without some very fancy mental acrobatics on the part of theoretical physicists.  Without a suitable logical scaffold that might take an inordinately long time to achieve.

© 2015 Martin Hauser

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-Page 277-

As a very serious adult, with a respectable career and life, and a healthy ability to let petty shit slide, I spent much too much time last week arguing with strangers on the internet who believe in the myth of the Dark Ages.

The arguments in question focused on a massively inaccurate meme, which some observers of the group pointed out was originally supposed to be about knowledge loss after the burning of the Library of Alexandria, but which some very cool EDGE LORD had changed to be about ‘The Christian Dark Ages’. Please feast your eyes on it in all it’s massive wrongness:

This is, pretty obviously, a bunch of honkey bullshit and also massively incorrect, as many important scholars have noted. As a result, I spent hours of my life – which I will never get back -  pointing out repeatedly that the ‘graph’ in question has nothing to do with reality, and arguing with non-experts about the medieval period.

For the most part – these people were well-meaning. Many pointed out that this was a very Euro-centric world view, and that Asia, Africa, and the Arab world were all making huge advancements in scientific and medical theory at this time. That is absolutely true. White people have never been the entire world. The Chinese had a massively advanced scientific culture by this time, for example, and had been holding it down with hermetically sealed research laboratories since the third century BCE. The Arab world, meanwhile was compiling treatises on eye surgery. Scientific advancement was something that was happening in this period. Europe is not the centre of the world.

Having said that, while it is important to acknowledge that the-rest-of-the-world was making huge strides in scientific advancement during this time, and that Europe and white people are not the entire world, nor responsible for all of human advancement, there was no such thing as the Dark Ages in Europe either.

While everything about the idea of the Dark Ages is incorrect, lets start off with the way the term was meant to be used. The totally ignorant graph above, unsurprisingly, is completely fucking off. Hilariously, the idea of the ‘Dark Ages’ actually originated in the medieval period itself. Petrarch – the poet laureate of fourteenth-century Rome - was actually the originator of the idea that there was a period of stagnation that Europe was moving out of. Petrarch had a political axe to grind. He considered that any point at which Rome – where he lived and worked and had considerable sway – did not completely dominate the world was a BAD TIME. This is not an unbiased assessment of world history.

The actual phrase ‘Dark Ages’ itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, which Caesar Baronius – a cardinal and Church historian - came up with around 1602. He applied the term exclusively to the tenth and eleventh centuries.  However, and very significantly in his use of the term, Baronius was not decrying a state of scientific malaise, or a particularly turbulent political period – he’s talking about a lack of sources surviving from that time.  Indeed, Baronius sees the cut off point for the dark ages to be the Gregorian reforms of 1046, following which we see a massive increase in surviving documentation. Witness an actual useful chart:

When we move into a period where there are more texts to be considered, Baronius argues, Europe moved out of the period of darkness and into a ‘new age’.*

Now this is some real talk. As you can tell from that graph, during the Carolingian Renaissance of the ninth century, we see a flurry of Latin writers emerge, and a lot of text copying. This drops off again until what we term the Twelfth-Century Renaissance – home to this blog’s favourite philosopher/proto-Kanye –  Abelard. (Shout out to my boy.) However, when people use the term ‘Dark Ages’ now, they usually use it to talk about the entire millennium of the Medieval period, and they aren’t talking about source survival.  They aren’t thinking ‘dark’ as in ‘occluded’, they are thinking ‘dark’ as in pejorative.

We can thank the Enlightenment historiography for the expansion of the idea that the medieval period was a bad dark time. KantandVoltaire in particular liked to see themselves as a part of an ‘Age of Reason’ as opposed to what they saw as the ‘Age of Faith’ of the medieval period. To their way of thinking, any time that the Church was in power was a time of regressive thinking. The Middle Ages, then, was a dark time because it was so dominated by religion. 

The first push back against the term dark ages began with the Romantics. After the, um, unpleasantness of the Reign of Terror, and the major cultural and environmental upheavals of the Industrial Revolution it became fashionable to look at the medieval period as a time of spiritual focus, and environmental purity. Obviously this is a super-biased way of looking at the period – just like it was biased for Enlightenment thinkers to take one look at the primacy of the Church and declare an entire millennium to be bad. I mean, really what the Romantics were doing was just casting shade on the Enlightenment historiography because they felt like it inevitably led to the guillotine. But what can you do?

By the twentieth century historians had moved on from the idea pretty much completely. If you take the time to actually, you know, study the medieval period, it becomes very apparent very quickly that there was a tremendous amount of intensive thought happening. This is the era of Thomas Aquinas – a bad ass philosopher who will think you under the fucking table. Of Hildegard of Bingen – who basically founded scientific natural history in the German speaking lands. Hell, like we talked about last week Rogerius and Giles of Corbeil were throwing it down for major medical advancement. There was a lot going on. On the real, without the contributions of medieval thinkers you would not get Galileo, Newton, or the Scientific Revolution. The medieval period was not a period of stagnation, it was a time of progress.

But it’s not just that the idea of a ‘Dark Ages’ makes no sense when you look at what incredible advancement was happening at the time, it also makes no sense because it implies that stuff was going really well under the Romans. We estimate that somewhere between thirty to forty percent of the population of Italian Rome were slaves. The Romans had total bans on human dissection, meaning that there was no real way for medicine to progress any further than it had by the time of collapse – a problem that medieval people didn’t have. I mean even if you just want to make it about religion - the Roman Empire was Christian at the time of its collapse and had its heads of state worshipped as LITERAL GODS during the pagan era. Somehow every edgy motherfucker with a fedora is totally cool with this and thinks it is super reasonable though. Because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The Romans were not a bunch of really awesome people living a life of idealised rationality any more than medieval people were all ignorant savages living in fear of God.

Is there a time that historians use the term ‘Dark Ages’? Yeah, we do use it to talk about source survival rates. It’s not a term we use as a value judgment, however. We just mean that we don’t have a lot of evidence to go off of. By the same token – if we somehow move on to another electronic format without converting the way things are stored now, we could be moving into a theoretical Digital Dark Age, where historians in the future won’t be able to study what we are writing now. (And that would be a tragedy, because legit, I would killto be a historian working on Donald Trump’s tweets in the year 2717.)

We’re now moving away from using the term Dark Ages at all, however, because of the frequency with which it is misinterpreted. I mean, if every basic motherfucker out there who never bothered to read God’s Philosophers (hat tip to James Hamman – this book is amazing) will insist on willfully misinterpreting us, we just ain’t gonna give them the ammo.

What it comes down to is that the medieval period was as vibrant as any other period of history. If you’re going to player hate, go ahead, but please don’t act like you know anything about either medieval or ancient history when you do. There is no period of rational supermen followed by ignorant monsters. There are just people doing their best in the circumstances.

* Caesar Baronius, Annales Ecclesiastici Vol. X. (Rome, 1602), p. 647. “Novum incohatur saeculum quod, sua asperitate ac boni sterilitate ferreum, malique exudantis deformitate plumbeum, atque inopia scriptorum, appellari consuevit obscurum.”

The History of Philosophy From the Perspective of Chicken Enchiladas