Felix wrote: ↑June 24th, 2019, 12:34 pm
GaryLouisSmith: "As for my ideas being disjointed, yes they are. Why are you uncomfortable with that?"
I'm not uncomfortable with it, heck, I like Cecil Taylor's music. It just makes it hard to follow - I mean, this is not a poetry forum.
GaryLouisSmith: "Yes, you are right about the Aristotelian Form. It emerges from Nature, or so it is said. The Platonic Form doesn't emerge, rather it comes from Transcendence."
I seems to me that the Transcendent is beyond forms, if you're still hung up on forms, you haven't left terra firma.
Let us say that it was Galileo who started the long process of mathematicizing the material world. In order to explain that let me draw a distinction between a mathematical form and matter. I will begin with Aristotle and first his view of matter and then with his view of the ideal of language, which at that ideal extreme becomes mathematics.
Matter is thick and dark stuff, in stillness and unconscious self-containment. Hyle. Far removed from that are the clear statements of an ideal language. By clear I mean thoroughly transparent. And by that I mean that the words of such clear statements do not call attention to themselves, absolutely do not present themselves as things to be viewed, but rather point beyond themselves to their meaning. Such thoroughly clear transparent sentences are the formula of mathematics. One could say that they are in the light of pure understanding. Sentences that do call attention to themselves are called poetry or poetic prose; they become literature. Literature is therefore opaque; it has a certain darkening or twilight feel. Literature is feeling, as opposed to the clear openness of scientific reason. Scientific statements ideally have no tendency to stop the movement of the mind and call attention to themselves.
The mathematicizing of the material world took the heaviness out of matter and substituted in its place mathematical formula. Light replaced darkness. The pure movement of transparent thought replaced inert dead stuff. Mathematics de-materialized the world.
I apologize for this somewhat literary presentation of things; I love the "feel" of the sentence. I love the rhythms of language. Therefore, I am more of the shadows. It turns out that I am more of a materialist that are the high-flying scientifically minded of today. I think maybe they are flying a little to close to the Sun. It seems to me that in addition to "pure" mathematical form, we also need thick matter for it to cling to. I am claiming an impure thing. And here, in such an unscientific fashion, I have called attention to myself. I have not served the Light of high abstract thought by disappearing into it. I am a tumescent thickness. This is an erotic writing.
Today the ideal is to completely transform the darkness into light. The material universe becomes the instantiation of mathematical formula. It becomes a book to be read, a book that has no hard cover or thick pages, no black ink, a book in which each sentence is as nothing of itself, sentences completely transparent pointing on to other sentences, of the ideal language, pure logic, pure mathematics. Light of light. A resplendent place. Aristotle's pure thought thinking of pure thought. These words are like the second person of the Trinity, the Logos, the Word, the self-effacing thing, the thing that completely yields to that First One. It is important to remember that, like that, a mathematical formula is literally nothing of itself.
And now the reversal, Aristotle's words are thus:
"Style to be good must be clear, as is proved by the fact that speech which fails to convey a plain meaning will fail to do just what speech has to do. … naturalness is persuasive, artificiality is the contrary; for our hearers are prejudiced and think we have some design against them, as if we were mixing their wines for them."
With that began the argument that has lasted for 2300 years. Style should not be noticed; style that shows, that is noticed, becomes the primal crime, the first act of immorality, deception!
The amazing thing is that Aristotle undoes what he says almost as soon as he said it. It concerns the word "naturalness". In Greek that is from phuein, meaning to grow, our word physical. And artificial is from plasso, plastic. The problem is that words and writings don't grow "naturally". And so Aristotle continues, "a writer must disguise his art and give the impression of speaking naturally and not artificially." The clarity, it turns must be noticed, but in a non-noticeable way.
And so it is with the pure mathematics of today's pure physics. I fear it is all artifice. Insidious style has crept into "physics talk", into "journalese", into hip "techno-speak". It has crept in unnoticed, as it should. That is partly because the writers and speakers of it have not wanted to learn about or believe in such things. Deception is not their game. Mathematical purity is the air in which they fly. They are, like the angels, clothed in radiant intellectual light. That turns them, of course, into the calm masculine ideal, far above the teeming emotions of dark feminine matter. In fact, they have become the distant governors of that lower world – until it is finally banished. Perhaps they want to turn themselves into the clear mathematical networking of artificial intelligence. Are they trying to make dark gray-matter, bodily ooze, yield to the control of pure form? They want to be the Mathematical, as translucent as the afternoon sky. In Sanskrit the word for sky is Dyaus, which in Greek is Zeus. A calm Apollonian state in which the drunken Dionysian revelry and butchery of Nature is overcome. But it's a trick. A natural artificiality, an artificial naturalness, is nothing at all.