#the enlightenment

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-

“Although I cannot say that John, in Switzerland, met François Voltaire, who lived near Geneva, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was Swiss-born, I suspect he may have read their works or at least encountered their followers. Whatever the source, John Laurens returned to America from Europe in April 1777 possessed with a remarkably broad mind.”

– Slaves in the Family, by Edward Ball

Why did John Laurens have the beliefs he did about the distribution of wealth? It’s something I wonder about a lot. My best guess for a while was simply that Laurens felt guilty about having so much when others had so little. And that still may be party or completely true. But I want to talk about another possibility in this post: that Laurens’s beliefs about wealth equalization were inspired by the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

For background: Rousseau was a philosopher with fairly unique beliefs about wealth. He wrote, “no citizen should be so rich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself.” He believed that a government should seek to bring about freedom and equality, and that the will of the people was most important. His preferred form of government was a direct democracy.

(Note that I am by no means an expert on Rousseau, but I have done some research on his philosophy for this post. If anyone wants to add or correct, feel free to do so.)

Rousseau argued that wealth inequality and a society in which one was constantly trying to have more than others was a recipe for unhappiness and conflict.

In the book Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War of Independence, the author Alan Gilbert stresses that Laurens’s abolitionist beliefs were inspired by Rousseau:

“In 1771, fifteen years after Rousseau published Du Contrat Social(The Social Contract), John Laurens had studied law in Geneva. In courts, debate clubs, and taverns, he was surrounded by advocates, with varying levels of comprehension, of the Rousseauian view. But Laurens really did understand it.”

Not only was Rousseau born in Geneva, but his beliefs were apparently still popular there. Alan Gilbert also states:

“If the people retained their ‘virtues,’ Laurens insisted, America ‘will abound with great characters.’ Trade with the mother country, and riches, however, could destroy this possibility. It would lead to what republicans called a corruption of the common good, the domination of government by the wealthy, and its use against the poor: Americans ‘would have advanced to a corrupt state with no intermediate maturity.’

Emulating Rousseau, Laurens would ‘never regret poverty and the loss of trade if there can be established, either with or without Great Britain, a government that will conduce to the good of the whole.’”

Rousseau had a lot of beliefs that lined up with Laurens, and it is certainly worth noting that only after Laurens went to Geneva (and therefore, after he was exposed to Rousseauian philosophy) did Laurens vocalize abolitionist and wealth-equalization views.

Part of Rousseau’s philosophy around wealth was that wealth equalization was bad in part because it made people unhappy. This belief is echoed in a letter from John Laurens to Francis Kinloch: “a Happiness which Riches cannot give, results to the Individual, and Strength and Grandeur are ensur’d to the State, I agree with you that it is required in the Government to which I give the preference…”

And speaking of this letter, guess who Laurens specifically names in it? None other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He tells Kinloch, 

“these Rewards I grant you are not calculated to enrich the Individual and introduce all the odious and destructive Consequences of Riches_ but they are fully satisfactory to a Virtuous Mind_ surely no virtuous philosophic Mind will take Offence that the useful industrious part of the Community, should have their persons and properties equally protected with those of the most enlighten’d Men_ nor think it unreasonable, that they should choose Men whom they judge worthy of the important Trust of Governing_ I will not repeat here the Maxims respecting Government, which have been established by a Sidney, a Locke, a Rousseau, and which strike Unison with the Sentiments of every manly Breast_” 

I post about how this letter has a lot of wealth-equality beliefshere, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that Laurens names Rousseau after his declaration of “the odious and destructive Consequences of Riches.”

Though I don’t think there is a way to prove that Laurens’s remarkably enlightened beliefs about the distribution of wealth came from Rousseau, it seems like the most likely explanation.

If this is true, it also offers more insight to Laurens’s beliefs about government as a whole, and how Laurens might have influenced the American republic.