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The Tragedy of U.S. Education


Shrunken Heads In America Today

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
March 25, 2001
Part II and footnotes

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Part I

Part II

Human Relation
s

In his work founding modern experimental physical science, De Docta Ignorantia, Nicholas of Cusa included report of his work correcting an error by Archimedes, in the matter of the quadrature of the circle (and, implicitly, the parabola). Cusa's report on that matter is the original discovery of a class of geometric numbers subsequently known as transcendental.[43] The further implications of this line of development, as to mathematics generally, were broadly settled by the continuing work of Gauss on the implications of bi-quadratic residues.

This case implicitly puts us into the middle of a process of the unfolding of the development of a plenum of cognitive ideas, from Thales and Pythagoras, through Plato, Eratosthenes, Archimedes, Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, and also including all the ideas implied in that succession of discovery. In any competent program of secondary and higher education, the pupils have, like the students John and Robert of our story, relived the cognitive act of original discovery of some of the crucial discoveries of universal physical principle, by each and all of these and comparable historical figures of scientific progress.

Moreover, these ideas are not ideas which exist in isolation from one another; there is a qualitative interdependency of the existence of the discovery of any idea, upon the situation presented by the accumulation of an ultimately enormous array of actual, or merely alleged cognitive discoveries of principle by predecessors. Some years ago, in a featured article, I compared such an array of predecessors to the historical figures assembled by Raphael Sanzio in his The School of Athens.[44]

Focus upon that historical class of ideas as subjects of the replication of the cognitive act of the historically original discovery, rather than merely learning. Compare the cognitive relationship to these discoverers, of any student who has successfully relived the experience of discovering those principles, principles known to the student by the name and historical setting of each of those earlier discoverers. Compare the relationship of the student to each of those discoverers to the relationship among John, Robert, and Archimedes, in the illustration provided above.

Look at Raphael's School of Athens. I propose that the reader work through the following exercise.

Make a list of each of the historical figures represented. Take a map of the relevant area of the Mediterranean and its littoral for the period from the time of Homer through the entirety of the Classical and Hellenistic phases of Greek and related culture. Locate the place and date of existence of each figure on that map. Then, identify the relationship among these figures in terms of those leading ideas which bear upon the irreconcilable dispute between the cognitive Plato and his opponent, the reductionist Aristotle. Ask yourself, is the gloomy figure in the foreground, perhaps the Classical Platonist Raphael's recognition of the Romantic tendencies in his contemporary, Michelangelo?

In this collection as a whole, there are sequences of time, and sequences of ideas, or beliefs, such as Aristotle's, substituted for ideas. In the painting, these figures are represented as contemporaries, as if the entire period represented by these figures' mortal lives, had been compacted into a kind of simultaneity of eternity. Yet, when one considers the medley of interacting ideas and other beliefs represented by the whole assembly, there is an order defined in terms of action among both kinds of notions treated as principles by the user, either ideas or substitutes for ideas, or a combination of both.

Ask: What is the meaning of Raphael's resort to such a portrayal of a simultaneity of eternity? Is it not the case, that that painting corresponds to the way in which a well-educated student's mind, even a graduate of a decent sort of secondary education, sees such figures from that period of history? His mind is a simultaneity of eternity, but there is also an ordering, in the sense of sequences, among the elements of that otherwise timeless eternity.

In other words, by introducing the notion of change as such, in the form of continuing, superseding generation of ideas, the time during which the changes unfold is collapsed into a relatively very short lapse of time within the bounds of what is otherwise a simultaneity of eternity.

Now, amplify this memory of history, to include virtually all that pertains to physical scientific knowledge, and to the known aspects of the history of cultures, and of the geography in which they dwelt. We will have then amplified Raphael's example, to approximate the functional elements of the memory of ideas by a well-educated individual mind of today. If that memory is organized around the efficient interaction among ideas defined in Platonic terms, we have imagined thus, the case which I wish to call to your attention here.

The relationship of the students John and Robert to Archimedes, in my pedagogical story, is to be recognized as an expression of the truly essential nature of human relations per se, as distinct from the quality of relationship among lower forms of animal life (as mimicked by such as the empiricist devotees of Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Quesnay, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Bertrand Russell, implicitly profess themselves to be). Truly human relations, are expressed as relations in terms of a Platonic notion of ideas.

To emphasize the crucial point here, when we shift the notion of events, from mere sense-experiences as such, to the development of ideas, everything believed about the nature of experience changes accordingly. We then contrast the relative clock-time associated with sense-experience as such, to the relative time expressed by the rate of progress in ideas, that relative to whatever physical process we are measuring in terms of rate of progress. We shift the notion of human relations, from the sensuality of mortal sense-experience, to the passion of the universe of cognitive transmission of development of ideas.[45]

Pause at this point, to reflect on the importance of naming discoverers, of naming the time and place in history in which each discovery is believed to have occurred for the first time. There is an essential function which requires naming ideas in that historical way, rather than the way in which the worst among today's textbooks and classroom instruction tend to do. As my story of John and Robert illustrates the point, the most essential feature of all ideas, is the historical relationship expressed in the communication of those ideas in the cognitive form they assumed as hypothesis.

This is the most essential principle of all competent educational policy of practice, as the Friedrich Schiller-Wilhelm von Humboldt program of Classical-humanist education typifies such competence.[46] Without that notion of the historically determined, functional relations among the discoveries and rediscoveries of ideas in their Platonic form, no scientific rigor can be achieved; worse, no rational comprehension of the existence of society is possible.

The way in which societies, such as the U.S. today, degrade the personalities of their individual members into an Orwellian condition like that of human cattle, is through the substitution of popular opinion, as Romantic tradition and Walter Lippmann have defined it, for truth. To this end, explanations of the type often referred to today as "spin," and outright, especially official and academic lies, as well as wicked fables and mythologies, are supplied to the credulous as a substitute for knowledge. The case of so-called "religious fundamentalist" beliefs, is among the best examples of the way official and quasi-official, lying mythologies, are used to control the minds and behavior of large strata of populations, "Big Brother" fashion.[47] Any well-educated person in study of history, recognizes the way in which synthetic religions and other mythologies have been used, as a principal method of effectively dictatorial control over large portions, even the virtual entirety of entire populations, even entire cultures.[48] Much of what passes for education in science and other matters, in today's universities and public schools, is of this degraded nature and wicked intent.[49]

The emphasis should be on the word "intent." The instant one challenges a fraudulent myth of academia, the banshees are unleashed against the offender. Pedants of what ordinarily appear to be of a mind most successfully detached from reality, fly into a mentally deranged state of rage against the violator of what passes for "the code." The phrase from Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh pops into mind: "Hickey, you took the life out of the booze!" Once the hypnotic spell of accepted mythology is broken, as by the mere mention of an embarrassing bit of truth, the enraged reaction to this from the thoroughly conditioned pedant, betrays the fact that the dogma being defended by the pedant is a device concocted to serve, and be enforced as a control mechanism over the minds of the credulous members of the student population. You are the target of his, or her rage, because you have unmasked the magician, and spoiled his magic: you have taken the life out of the booze he was intentionally dispensing for its intended effects.

The essence of what we should recognize today as Orwellian brainwashing of large populations for purposes set forth in Fabian ideologue Walter Lippmann's 1922 Public Opinion, is the total substitution of the claimed authority of arbitrary forms of mere belief for knowledge. I described such substitution of mere belief for knowledge, in my references, earlier in this report, to the kind of lying which I encountered as dominating opinion among family and school environments during my childhood and adolescence. The use of the modern mass media, notably an entertainment and news media which can no longer be strictly distinguished from one another, to orchestrate a synthetic vox populi better named vox pox, is exemplary of what we may recognize as the functions of the use of myths and fables for mass social control in former history.

The question posed by today's Orwellian practices to such effect, is, how could a population defend itself against control by the kind of mass-media and related methods of mind-manipulation rampant in the U.S.A. today?

The relevant difference between myth and truth, credulity and reason, is located in the way in which human relations are defined.

If the student has experienced each ancient and other discovery of validated universal physical principle, by means of reliving the historically situated act of original discovery of that principle, the student now knows personally that moment in the mind of the living original discoverer of relevance. There lies the pivotal distinction.

However, competent scientific knowledge is not a mere basketful of separately collected discoveries from the past. Usually, as in the case of the combined impact of the cognitively referenced discoveries by Kepler and Fermat, upon the minds and work of Christiaan Huyghens, Leibniz, et al., the Leibniz calculus, for example, was developed. Knowledge of universal principles, gained in this way, is a highly reticulated, highly interdependent lattice-work of an historical, ongoing process of continuing discovery and rediscovery of ideas of a Platonic form. We should say, that this is a multiply-connected lattice-work, as Riemann signifies by his use of "multiply-connected." The process of knowledge is an organic process, rooted in the principle of cognitive action.

A competent process of education, is organized and conducted according to that conception of the cognitive experiencing of the relevant lattice-work of validated discoveries of universal physical principles, up to the present time. That goal is accomplished, by limiting the core of all educational practices and related experiences, to the experiencing of the cognitive process of generating knowledge, rather than by means of learning. The primary intent of any good education, is to produce a graduate who embodies the most essential achievements of history, in that way, up to that moment.

3. 'Science and Culture'

A good education does not end with the subject of the discovery and application of universal physical principles as such. Although we must measure economic performance, and its demographic characteristics, in physical terms, and per capita and per square kilometer of a normalized cross-section of the Earth's surface, the individual does not act solely as an individual, but also as a product of, and functioning part of an entire society. When we consider a society's relationship to the planet on which it lives, it is the ordering of the social relations within the society, which determines the ability of the society to cooperate in ways which make the fostering of discovery of universal principles, and their application, effective, if they are to become, indeed, truly effective.

Stated in terms of the implications of a Riemannian physical geometry, the productive potential of the individual lies not entirely within himself, but in the relationship of his development to the characteristic "curvature" of the society and more immediate circumstances in which his function is situated.

This brings us, now, to the second principal aspect of a competent form of education, the role of Classical culture in determining the relative ability of a society to discover, and to utilize knowledge of validated universal physical principles.

The best way in which to define this second aspect of a Classical humanist education, is to focus, first, on the role of what is strictly definable as a Classical humanist species of artistic culture, as this is distinct from, and also the natural adversary of either Romantic forms of culture, or those so-called popular, modernist, and post-modernist novelties which a jaded Romanticism has concocted, apparently, at least in part, in its desire to escape from its boredom with its tedious self.

Situate what I have said in this report so far, in terms of the referenced discoveries reported by Vernadsky. See the place of human relations within a functional image of what Vernadsky defines as the noösphere.

In Vernadsky's imagery, we have three classes of what I have defined in this report as experimentally validated universal physical principles. I restate that argument now:

The first, is a set of such principles as might be assumed to be acting within and upon a non-living universe.

The second, is what Vernadsky defined as the biosphere, a principle of life, not derived from the physics of non-living processes, which is able to impose its intention, as Kepler uses the notion of "intention," to place the Earth under increasing domination of the effects of action by a principle of life as such, thus producing a biosphere.

The third, is the power of willful, cognitive ("noëtic") discovery, unique to the human species, by which mankind is able to impose its will to change the characteristic behavior of both non-living processes in general, and of the effects of the principle of life in general. This creates the noösphere.

These three classes of experimentally validated knowledge of universal physical principle, represent, combined, an implicitly Riemannian form of multiply-connected manifold of three distinct types of universal physical principles.

In the study of the efficient role of cognition within the context of the noösphere so conceived, what are those physically efficient forms of relations which define the cooperation upon which man's efficient role within the noösphere depends?

As is reflected most explicitly in the science of physical economy, the ultimate validation of the hypothetical principles governing efficient forms of cognitive relations among the members of society, lies in manifest physical effects produced, or what Vernadsky's argument defines as the natural products of cognitive ("noëtic") activity. That natural product is the increase of the potential relative population-density of the society, or human species as a whole. Since cause and effect express themselves over generations, this subject must be considered over a span of not less than several successive generations. Those changes in the organization of society and its physical economy, which determine such increases, represent the natural products of cognition, as defined in the way consistent with the way in which Vernadsky uses his general notion of natural products.

Thus, the view of a natural science of culture defined by the principle of the sovereign cognitive process of the individual mind, requires that we adduce the principles underlying cognitive relations within society, by a study of the relative superiority or inferiority of forms of culture, as adduced from long-range studies of those changes in culture which are empirically the most characteristic, relative features of multi-generational trends of change within the evolution of society in general.

Since the changes in culture introduced by the revolutionary establishment of the first modern sovereign form of nation-state, during Europe's Fifteenth Century, is, as measured by the standard of potential relative population-density, by far the most successful development in human culture known, we must proceed from a study of the relevant qualities of changes which that revolution has introduced to the preceding phases of both ancient and medieval European civilization. At the same time, we must focus upon those conflicts within European civilization which show us which cultural trends within modern European civilization are responsible for the improvements, and which, as Henry C. Carey showed for the case of slavery, detrimental in their effects upon the society's development as a whole.

In the later sections of the present section of this report, I shall emphasize those issues to be seen from the standpoint of the role of Classical humanist policies of education, in the struggle against slavery and its effects within the U.S.A. itself. In the subsequent section, I shall turn to the role of today's globally extended modern European civilization within the economy and culture of humanity as a whole.

Thus, we continue this section of the report, by beginning now with a restatement of an immediately crucial point.

Where mankind's discovery of universal physical principles of non-living and living processes as such, deals with the relationship of the individual human mind to the universe, the ability of the human species to accumulate, transmit, and use such knowledge, depends upon discovery of certain universal principles of the human mind, principles upon which society depends for the successful application of what are physical principles of nature, as the latter are considered apart from viewing the problems of individual and society in terms of the measurable effects of mankind's relationship to the universe at large. We must distinguish between the potential relative population-density of society, as measured from the standpoint of the physical universe outside us, and the manner in which society organizes its internal, social relations, to produce changes in society's voluntary relationship to the physical universe.

This involves a crucial point, and must be made clear, even if it costs a bit more effort to do so.

In the usages of Vernadsky, the effective increase of the potential relative population-density of mankind is a natural product of a cognition-driven progress in the practice of society, upon the biosphere which it inhabits. This is the form in which physical productivity of society can be measured for its relative success in improving its ability to exist in terms of the world around it.

The making of that natural product, occurs within a different dimension of the process. It occurs primarily as the cognitive production of valid discoveries (or enactments of discoveries) of universal physical principles; but, the fostering of those discoveries and their application, is a reflection of a social process, the process in which mankind defines relations within society.

So, those social processes, especially the social processes associated with the transmission and application of ideas as ideas, are themselves properly the subject of the same methods of investigation used for discovering universal physical principles in the domains of non-living and living processes in general.

To restate that point, we have the following. The cognitive work of scientific discovery must be continued, from the subject of mankind's effective physical relationship to the universe at large, to the subject of the principles governing the way in which man's ability to cooperate for the mastery of nature, is determined in terms of the relations among the cognitive processes of the individual members of society at large. Just as mankind must discover how better to order our species' physical relationship to the universe, the noösphere, in which we live, we must discover those principles needed to better order such task-oriented relations among ourselves.

This signifies that our programs of education, and related activities, must rise above the application of cognition to the narrower purpose of discovery of valid universal physical principles respecting man's direct mastery of the non-living universe and biosphere. We must broaden the inquiry, to focus upon the application of cognition to the discovery of the universal principles governing the efficient consequences of relevant, directly functional relations among the cognitive processes of persons. We must, so to speak, expand upon what is demonstrated as the cognitive relationship among the minds of John, Robert, and Archimedes, to include the generality of such cognitive relations within society.

This application of the principle of cognition to the subject of the functions of the cognitive relations within society, is best named Classical humanist culture. The clue leading to solutions to this problem, is study of the way in which self-conscious forms of cognitively creative social behavior in children, determine the possibility of healthy forms of functioning of adult society, or, in the alternative, how the lack of such cognitive development among the young, tends toward descent of the adult society into bestiality. The theme of such an inquiry, must be the subject of policies of education.

The essence of all competent forms of Classical artistic composition, is the principle of cognitive play. For example, the person who is not more or less effervescent in impulses for specifically cognitive forms of playfulness, as Wolfgang Mozart expresses that quality so beautifully, or J.S. Bach before him, has little or no capacity for sustained creative work in general, either scientific, or in Classical forms of artistic composition and performance in particular.

I have suggested, in earlier locations, that one might examine more closely the happier instances of play between a boy and his puppy, noting particularly the impulse of the mentally healthy boy for invention of harmless games, which the puppy then happily learns. In that combined symbiosis and difference between boy and beast, a principle of humanism is being demonstrated. Nicholas of Cusa, on this account, referenced the animal's participation in man, as parallelling man's participation in God the Creator. The morally healthy order among living creatures, is the participation of the lower species in the work of the higher.[50]

Perhaps the best way to describe the individual's impulse for cognitive play, is to regard this as the individual's impulse, at least implicity so, to play with the Creator, as the puppy desires to play with a boy who treats it well. I think that neither Cusa nor Friedrich Schiller would disagree with that. Plato's Socrates is a paradigm for such a playful individual; the dialogues are models of a quality of play which seeks to define forms of behavior which are cognitively pleasing, not only because of the need of the sane human individual to be cognitive, but the desire to choose games in which nothing sordid or unjust ensues.

The characteristic of such cognitive play, is the exercise and development of the powers of cognition themselves. This may be expressed, in approximation, either as the development of the individual powers to rally one's mental powers for making discoveries, which might be termed developing one's cognitive mental muscles, or may emphasize the specific capacities needed for cognitive undertakings in direct, explicitly cognitive modes of cooperation with others.

The study of these matters, from that standpoint, obliges us to focus attention on the relationship between productive forms of play in young children and the productive role of the more developed forms of play which are essential to the best performance of adults. The study of that connection is the proper definition of education.

Classical Drama As Science

So, ironically, but also insightfully, we also use the word "play" to describe what we may regard as a successful design for a drama. In the emergence of what became known as Classical Greece, the successive emergence of the Homeric epics, the Classical tragedy, and the Socratic dialogues of Plato, represent phases of development, in that form, of what is meaningfully identified as a notion of a Classical artistic principle of composition and performance for today.

From the New Testament, we have the parable of the talents. The impulse for cognitive play, is the talent which must be returned to the Creator enriched by the user. In other words, play as the work of generating anti-entropy for the sake of humanity. In what is called physical science and the practice of physical economy, such a return of the thus-increased talent, is manifest, as a natural product, as the increase of mankind's per-capita power in and over nature. In art, it is called play, signifying the importance of the quality of play, which Shakespeare's character Hamlet recognizes, but can not embrace, a Hamlet who is, like his nation, self-doomed by his fear of play, his fear of that realm from which he thinks no traveller might return.

A true Classical drama is never composed for the purpose of providing mere entertainment. Every great drama was composed with irrepressible playfulness, but also in deadly earnest, as were: Dante's Commedia; Bocaccio's Decameron, written as a commentary on the tragic siege of the Black Death, then raging among the leading wealthy families of Florence, across the river below; François Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel; and, Cervantes' portrayal of the tragedy dooming the Spain of Philip II, Don Quixote. Forms of play such as the Classical tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the Socratic dialogues of Plato, and the tragedies of Shakespeare and Schiller, were composed in deadly earnest, to provoke the cognitive processes of the actors and audiences, alike, to an awareness of urgently needed adoption of certain principles of statecraft, for the sake of the historically specific, successful solution, for an historically specific problem of that place and time: the successful continuation, and betterment, of the society represented by those audiences.

For example, Shakepeare's plays on English history, reflect the legacy of the studies of the overthrow of King Richard III, as passed down as a tradition through, chiefly, the work of the martyred figure of England's participation in the Golden Renaissance, Sir Thomas More. Thus, from the same vantage-point as that study of the transition from Richard III to Henry VII, Shakespeare composed a dramatic overview of two centuries of the history of England's place within Europe. This was put on stage as a series of dramas, from King John through Richard III. This series of dramas is devoted, throughout, to a single subject, the actual lessons to be adduced from the history of England, from the accession of the Plantagenet allies of imperial Venice, through the revolutionary change in statecraft established under Henry VII. Schiller's dramas, in most instances, addressed actual historical situations, and, on reflection on the actual history so selected, were accurate representations of the crucial issues of statecraft posed in the real-life history referenced by the stage.

In such great drama as that of Shakespeare and Schiller, the object is not the type of impulse to entertain the vulgar appetites for sensual exhibitions, such as those of the "night club," pagan Rome's Colosseum, or mass spectator sports, nor to provide a vehicle for the narcissistic impulses of the actors like Sir Lawrence Olivier, or the sado-masochistic, existentialist impulses of a director toward playwright, actors, and audience alike. The function of great drama, is to make the issues posed by a moment of real history, come to life with great force, within the cognitive processes of director, actors, and audience alike. The crux of such Classical artistic composition and its performance, is the evoking of the specific quality of passion unique to a state of cognitive insight. It is the same quality of passion experienced by one who is engaged in bringing forth a validatable cognitive discovery of a universal principle.

Compare this with the case of the profound superiority of the so-called Negro spiritual to the banality and superficiality of so-called "gospel" singing, to say nothing of that axiomatic contradiction in terms known as "Christian rock." I am not an expert in the Negro spiritual, but I have the advantage of being presented with the essence of the matter by experts who have demonstrated their argument to me most efficiently; the case they make has two aspects, both of which are relevant to the point I have just made, above, on the subject of Classical drama.

In its raw form, the Negro spiritual as I recognize it, expresses the historically specific situation and experience of the slave. On this account, a certain authenticity of presentation is essential for a convincing result. The singer must put himself, or herself inside that slave, and sing in a way which touches the quality which Friedrich Schiller defines as the sublime. I compare this quality of the spiritual to the expression of the sublime in Schiller's Joan of Arc.[51]

In the development of Classical drama, we must recognize chiefly two distinct levels of such drama. The relatively inferior form is typified by the Classical Greek tragedy. On this account, Plato was not only critical of the leading Classical Greek tragedians, but presented the alternative in the form of his intrinsically dramatic Socratic dialogues, which must be performed and heard as the drama they are, to master their cognitive content. With Plato's dialogues, we encounter a typification of the transition from Classical tragedy, to the higher principle of the sublime.

In reviewing the works of the world's greatest modern dramatists, Shakespeare and Schiller, in their respective entireties, we may trace an upward development in their work, from the level of tragedy, to the sublime. The case of Jeanne d'Arc illustrates the distinction.

In history, Jeanne d'Arc's passion contributes a crucial role to the subsequent freeing of France from the evils of the long reign and ruin under the alliance between Venice and its Norman-Plantagenet partners. Her sacrifice made the existence of a true nation of France possible; also, in fact, she contributed indirectly, but notably, to the proceedings leading into the great ecumenical Council of Florence, which was the central event of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. Jeanne d'Arc was not a tragic figure, neither in history, nor on Schiller's stage. Her sacrifice of herself for her mission, was not a tragedy, it was the achievement of the sublime, as Schiller does much to define and refine the notion of the sublime in history and in art. She rose to the sublime in the imitation of Christ crucified. She lived and died for all mankind, not only France, all this, as she insisted repeatedly, for His sake. In the drama, Schiller substitutes a fictional element for the crucial historical event which actually precedes her execution, but, otherwise, the drama is true to history in everything it claims to present.

The great achievement of the Classical tragedy, even as tragedy, is that it presents an historically specific moment of crisis in civilization, in which the fatal errors of the prevailing national cultures and leaders of the drama, are placed on stage in such a way that the audience may be induced to recognize the principled nature of the fatal error then reigning in that society and its relevant leading figures. However, although recognition of the moral unfitness to survive of both the culture of Hamlet's nation and Hamlet himself, is a great and useful improvement of the moral and intellectual qualities of the audience, it presents the sickness, but not the solution itself. Its usefulness, is that making the audience conscious of the fact that an avoidable error in moral character of a nation and its leaders was responsible for the catastrophe, inspires the audience with cultural optimism, with the hope that it might willfully free itself from such folly.

With Jeanne d'Arc, both in real life, and on Schiller's stage, she acts in a course, where she spends her life, but does not waste it; she returns her talent to God, enriched. Therefore, she is no tragic figure, but a representative of the principle of the sublime, just as the outcome of Plato's Socratic dialogues, notably Plato's treatment of the figure of the judicially murdered Socrates himself, exemplifies the principle of the sublime in science, statecraft generally, and artistic composition.

See a certain likeness in the slave represented by the Negro spiritual. Out of that condition, he affirms his humanity and his trust in God, and thus touches the sublime. It is always a song of humanity, of the humanity being crushed by servitude, but a cry of humanity which will not be stilled.

Classical Music As Science

In the first aspect of Classical art, as typified by great drama and poetry, the benefit of Classical art is more directly identified. Persons who have been civilized by saturation with the greatest examples of such artistic composition, have relatively superior powers for competence in statecraft and related matters.

This brings us to the second aspect of Classical art, in which the relationship to statecraft is, with certain exceptions, of a less obviously direct quality. Music typifies this second aspect.[52]

In this second aspect, as through the work of Harry Burleigh and others, as Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Dvorak applied the relevant principles of Bach's and Mozart's Classical contrapuntal composition to the folk-song of the British Isles and Germany, principally, the great composer employs his musical insight into the folk-song, or folk-song-like compositions, to polish the intention which needs to be released from the encumbering limitations of the original.

For comparison, consider the challenge posed by the attempt to perform either of J.S. Bach's two great passions, the earlier St. John Passion, and the later St. Matthew Passion. Both address a spiritual subject, the passion and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, as defined by the relevant Gospels. The object of the performance of each composition, is to inspire the participants to relive, with cognitive passion, the actual circumstances of the Crucifixion, as a cognitive experience of the sublime. The scores as written, recommend the participation of a musically qualified congregation in singing the parts obviously assigned to them, to such effect that they are not spectators for, but rather participants in the event.

How that functions, and what Wolfgang Mozart and others did, in adducing the principles of Classical contrapuntal thorough-composition of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms from Bach's discoveries in use of series of Lydian intervals, need not be examined in any depth in this location. What does need to be stressed, is that Classical composition, most notably that of Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms, as contrasted with their adversaries, the Romantics, such as Rameau, Liszt, Berlioz, and Wagner, and the hoaxsters Helmholtz and Ellis, was to define the means by which the use of well-tempered counterpoint brings out the quality of cognitive passion, and thus produces a composition which, if competently performed, represents a single unifying Platonic idea as the identity (e.g., the "monad") of the composition as an indivisible unit. In the best result, as typified by Beethoven's Opus 132 string quartet, or the last of Brahms' four hymns, the Four Serious Songs, is the achievement of a sense of the sublime.

The origin of this mode of musical composition, lies within ancient notions of Classical (sung) prosody used in poetry composition. It uses the natural well-tempering subsumed by the natural range of human speaking and singing voices, to derive a corresponding polyphony, and a principle of polyphonic development, derived from the principle of the Lydian interval as the pivot of a developmental feature of composition. The difference between Bach's well-tempering and those who seek to degrade it to equal tempering, is the same difference expressed by Kepler's exposure of the incompetence of the mechanistic, reductionist method of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe.

Similarly, in Classical plastic art-forms, the most important development, is that which existing evidence traces to the Classical Greek developments in sculpture, as distinct from the preceding Greek as well as Egyptian Archaic. Here, the subject is presented to the mind as in mid-motion, rather than as "tombstone" carvings. The revolution in perspective, established by Leonardo da Vinci, has a relationship to Classical Greek sculpture, but is a revolutionary scientific development in art effected during the course of the Fifteenth Century as continued into the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, and as echoed by Rembrandt.

Those background observations now supplied, the point to be made in this report, is that Classical artistic composition is defined as the development of methods for bringing the same cognitive principle required for generating a discovery of a valid universal physical principle, into its corresponding form of application to the study and representation of those social processes of cooperation among persons on which the successful promotion of physical-scientific progress depends.

In the literary non-plastic art-forms, notably Classical drama and poetry, the political side of the social function of Classical composition is explicit. Similarly, Leonardo's The Last Supper, and Raphael's The School of Athens and his Transfiguration, are examples of work which is purely Classical art, but also has a powerful political and scientific importance for statecraft, as I have indicated the general nature of that above.

A few more glances at the case of Classical musical composition, will round out that picture as much as is needed for this occasion.

The subject is now metaphor. The example chosen is Classical thorough-composed song, as typified by the new form of song-composition developed by Mozart, as expressed in his setting of a Goethe poem, Das Veilchen, as that new approach to song-composition was continued by Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms, most notably.[53]

Metaphor is the name, in literary composition and song, for a form of poetical irony which is termed Analysis Situs in mathematical physics. It is the immediate juxtaposition of two or more mutually inconsistent statements, or individual terms, to define an idea which exists outside the bounds of consistency within the medium of representation employed in communication: a dissonance. It is to be compared with the case of Fermat's counterposing a description of reflection to refraction in terms of the language intended for representing events in what is imagined to be a Euclidean space-time.

Fermat's exemplary, concise juxtaposition of those two contrasted statements, both in the same form of description, implicitly destroys the credibility of a so-called Euclidean mathematics of physical space-time. So, Kepler, asks, what is the Mind, the intention of the planet Mars which causes its orbit to lie in a pathway not calculable within the framework of the Aristotelean notions of space-time commonly used by Claudius Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe. To make that point, Kepler measures the orbit of Mars by means consistent with those of Euclidean mathematical statistics, and gains a result which is implicitly anti-Euclidean.

J.S. Bach approaches the issue of defining the proper tuning of musical instruments in a way which echoes Kepler's Harmony of the World. This comparison is demanded by a direct contrast of well-tempered values to those erroneous, so-called equal-tempered values, which a soulless mechanical man might estimate by use of an electronic hand-calculator. As I have already stressed here, the right value of the interval in a well-tempered composition, like the right value for the future velocity and position of a planet in its Keplerian orbit, can not be mechanically predicted as the systems of Copernicus and Brahe would suggest, or the methods of attempts at equal tempering.

The right value for well-tempering arises from the relations among what are called the natural register-shifts of each species of singing voice, among bel canto-trained groups representing the standard chest of human singing voices. In short, well-tempering is not defined from a so-called instrumental standpoint, but from the standpoint of certain ironies intrinsic to bel canto vocal polyphony.

To understand the problem, it is sufficient to throw out all notions of a theory of instrumental composition and performance, and recognize that the Classical performance of the musical instrument, must be an expression of the idea of the human singing voice, that musical instruments are intended to be echoes of the principles of the bel canto-trained human singing voice.

This brings us to Wolfgang Mozart's great discovery, as expressed in a series of compositions typified by the Köchel Number 475 keyboard Fantasy. This composition represents Mozart's reworking of a celebrated J.S. Bach composition, the so-called A Musical Offering. That Bach work, as complemented by the posthumously published The Art of the Fugue, is a concentrated expression of one of the most important revolutionary features of Bach's work. Mozart's intensive Vienna study of Bach's work, led him to a discovery which not only revolutionized all Classical musical composition after that, but which is the most frequently quoted musical idea within the work of all leading Classical composers after that; the kernel of the discovery is expressed by that playful K. 475 Fantasy. Mozart made explicit Bach's increasing reliance on a principle of musical composition, and play, associated with the term "Lydian interval."

To get directly to the essential point of relevance for this present report, focus upon the role of the method of Analysis Situs intrinsic to Bach's art of well-tempered counterpoint.

Take an interval of two tones, and now state that interval in an inverted order. State both of these juxtaposed intervals in the same key signature, and do so in a way which expresses the natural dissonance inhering in such a notion of inversion. If the development of that germ is successful, the attempt to resolve the counterpoint will lead inevitably toward a series of what are called "Lydian intervals," as Beethoven's famous Opus 132 ("Lydian") string quartet illustrates this, or the Brahms Fourth Symphony derived from a germ in the slow movement of Beethoven's Opus 106 "Hammerklavier" sonata.

The implicit dissonance in well-crafted choices of inversions, has the same effect as Fermat's resort, in counterposing reflection to refraction, to what Leibniz later named Analysis Situs. These metaphors, whether in mathematical physics or Classical artistic composition, define germ-ideas, as provoke that cognitive "energy" which requires the mind to make the cognitive leap from reductionist schemes, to discovering the cognitive principle which overcomes the apparently insoluble paradox so posed. That, in music, as in practice of mathematical physics, constitutes the identity of a Platonic form of idea.

When a great composer employs that principle of inversion, by such devices, to that purpose, his conscience requires him to do nothing which does not introduce and develop that idea in such a way, that the development of the entire composition reaches a conclusion which defines the idea which the composer has chosen to bring into being through the introduction of the root-metaphor generated through inversion. If the composition is well-crafted, then it becomes the performer's duty, to deliver the performance of the composition in a way which never spoils the indivisible unity of the idea embodied in the composer's intention. Such a principle of performance was sometimes termed by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, "playing between the notes."

Such was the stroke of genius expressed in Mozart's pioneering Das Veilchen. Instead of setting the poem to the natural prosody supplied by the custom of the language used, as J.F. Reichardt did, follow the advice of the poet Friedrich Schiller, apply the principle on which Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms agreed with Mozart and Schiller, contrary to the argument of Reichardt and Goethe: discover a single musical idea, which shall control the singing of the poem from beginning to end, and use the implications of the Lydian principle in composition, as a way of making the sung prosody march to the idea which the poem itself is intended to express.[54]

The same intention is found, and made undeniably obvious, in the great artist's performance of the Negro spiritual, even when the means used by the artist may differ, in a formal sense, from the German Classical Lied, for example.

Complement the argument I have just given for music, with frank assessment of the decadence in the art of speaking which usually contrasts literate English speakers of my generation, to the "up-talk" and comparable perversions in habits of speaking, or of reciting text induced by recent or current, immoral idiosyncrasies of public school and university instruction, especially in reciting prose passages or poetry aloud publicly, among those of the "Baby Boomer" or later generations. The loss of the habit of Classical poetry, the Classical dramatic stage, and Classical music, has been a crucial factor in the loss of ability to communicate ideas among comparable representatives of later generations.

The person who speaks in a literate Classical mode, speaks as one who can be heard actually thinking, rather than merely engaged in a more or less arbitrarily stylized recitation of what is either written, or memorized text, or a text the speaker is, in effect, writing as he goes along. The modern tendency is comparable to the case of the musician who is so busy interpreting the score itself, that he, while in that virtually schizophrenic state of mind, has no perceptible intellectual connection to the music which the composer intended.

The problem of speech typified by the increasingly illiteracy of manner of speaking among post-war U.S. generations of university graduates, in particular, is comparable as a problem to the case of the trained musical performer, who can play notes, without any understanding of music beyond the conventions which he or she recognizes almost as programmed instructions for note-playing. It is often worse than that; they "improve" the dish by putting tabasco sauce on the raspberry ice cream, so to speak. They read text in such idiosyncratic styles in text-reading; they do not oblige the prosodic utterance of the statement to conform to a process of development of ideas. Worse, they, as the Romantics do, add interpretation to text as such, without regard to the cognitive processes required by the clearly adducible intent of the text itself. They become functionally illiterates of that sort.

The same pathological state of mind is exhibited by the person who, when challenged to debate his, or her statement socratically, responds by repeating the statement more loudly, more angrily, perhaps adding the unsanitary proposal, "Read my lips." The victims of that perversion do this even in the case that the criticism itself exposes the statement being repeated as absurd. Why does that person exhibit such pathological behavior? The explanation is elementary: "It is my opinion!" and therefore has the attributed authority of the believer, of being self-evidently my opinion. One is reminded of the state of mind lurking behind the glaring eyeballs of that maniacal pre-middle-aged tail-gater, searching for her own shortcut to Hell, along the Maryland and Virginia highways of the greater Washington, D.C. region.

The relative impairment of the ability to communicate ideas, in the manner a Classical education and practice provide the relevant contrary standard, becomes a loss of the ability to think clearly, a loss of what the poet Shelley describes as the power of "imparting and receiving profound and important ideas respecting man and nature."

Culture As Education

As the case of Classical drama typifies this connection, all knowledge of statecraft is best developed through emphasis upon educating the young in both Classical approaches to physical science and Classical forms of artistic composition. The Classical form of study and practice of physical science, as I have indicated in this report, combined with a Classical artistic education, serves as the foundation for a competent grasp of the general problems and purposes of cooperation in general, and of matters of statecraft more narrowly. To complete the picture: the science of physical economy, properly bridges the roles of both science and Classical art.

The obligation of Classical humanist education, is to employ an historical approach to the cognitive apprehension of the history of scientific and Classical-artistic ideas, to the purpose of building up within the student's memory, his, or her own equivalent of the kind of sense of a simultaneity of eternity, as I outlined the case of Raphael's The School of Athens. The pupil should relive the history of ideas, historically and cognitively, to that effect.

The intended result, is that the student should locate himself, or herself in a great span of human history, as one in direct communication, cognitively, with the living minds of the greatest original thinkers of that past. The development of the personal character of the student, in this mode of education, tends to ensure a beneficial result which could be achieved in no other way. In brief: as the student defines the student's personal relationship, through the methods of the Socratic dialogue, to living notable persons long since deceased, so the student is impelled to come to see himself, or herself, in respect to those who have yet to be born. It is that manner of development of the moral character, so defined, of the pupil, which is the only proper central aim of education.

The motivation of the pupil must become, concern for the consequences which the present bequeaths to the future, a generation or more ahead. There is nothing arbitrary in this. To transform a newborn child into a young adult, requires approximately a quarter-century of development. During that quarter-century, the expenditure of effort and means on the development of the young individual, brings no net return on that expense. Important projects of development take years before reaching the point of yielding net economic fruit. Yet, what will happen a quarter-century ahead, will be determined, often, by the decisions chosen today. As in the case of Kepler's meticulous measurement of the orbit of Mars, the velocity and position occupied by that planet tomorrow, will not be determined by the statistical trend adduced from its recent movements. Science must always locate the long-term expression of the intention embedded in the process being considered.

It is not possible, except in an oppressively stagnating economic culture, and perpetually decadent society, such as that prescribed by the Code of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, to determine what a young person in school today should be doing a score of years ahead. The choices available then, will depend upon a combination of the decisions made beforehand and in between. What we can know with reasonable certainty, is the degree of general development, and related adaptability we should seek to build into the labor-force as a whole. Rather than training the person to fit the specific form of employment (which, by that time, should no longer exist), develop the economy to make use of the quality of labor-force we are working to develop.

It is the level of development which the present generation will make possible for its successors, which should be the determining consideration in economic policy today.

Beyond all other considerations, educational policies must be conditioned principally by the consideration, that the function of education, is to produce qualified citizens of a true republic, with no substitute for that allowed in defining educational policies of practice. The primary responsibility of the citizen, is not that of an employee, but, rather, a policy-maker for society as a whole. It is to that end, and no other, that goals for the education of the individual are to be chosen. Nothing less than the fulfillment of that goal shall be a minimum standard of education of the future adult member of society.

Once it is agreed, without exception, that that is the universal mission of all education, we can consider other things, but without eliminating, or depreciating any part of the obligation to serve education's primary mission-responsibility.

This does not place an excessive burden on the educational system. The presently practiced modes in education are immensely wasteful of the time and energy of the pupils. Heave out the popularized rubbish, to save time and energy for what is of more durable value.

As I have indicated here already, there are really two essential departments in required forms of education: 1.) Mankind's relationship to the universe, in physical terms; 2.) mankind's relationship to mankind, and person to person within society. Both departments are, and must be situated in history apprehended cognitively as a simultaneity of historical eternity, as this must be provoked into existence within the mind of the student. Stick to that business, and discard the clutter which is commonly substituted for education in today's educational institutions.

Take astronomy, for example. For many cognitive exercises a pedagogical laboratory capability is needed. Very little is required, by comparison, for an introduction to astronomy. The universe is there, an astrophysical reality which serves as a demonstration experiment relentlessly continuing its motion. It is that, the great demonstration experiment, up there, called astronomy, ocean navigation, geodesy, and so forth, upon which the most ancient of societies, whichever they were, first produced the rudiments of what we recognize as physical science today. "With your bare eyes and some sticks and stones, proceed to construct a calendar. Don't admire the stars; don't waste your time just mooning and gawking, when you might be engaged in beginning to construct a calendar. Don't look it up on the Internet; know what you are talking about; look up to the stars, instead."

Keep what I have identified as the principles of cognitive education in focus. The practice of learning must be superseded, to a relatively enormous degree, by a thoroughly cognitive, historical approach to education, as my references to the example of Raphael's The School of Athens typify the point. The historical, direct and personal link, through cognition, of the minds of the original discoverers from the past, to the students, must be the foundation of all pedagogy. The students must be engaged in the cognitive passions of an endless Socratic dialogue with all notable minds from the past. All knowledge is located in the importance of experimental validation of the hypotheses developed in response to the ontological quality of paradoxes expressed within the bounds of that realm of relative simultaneity of eternity.

On this account, the structure of public and university education must incorporate a relatively great emphasis on the facilities for, and activities of pedagogical proof-of-principle experiments. The notion that any hypothesis must be validated, and that in the direct cognitive experience of the students, must be the rule, whether the replication of a past discovery of universal principle, or testing of the mastery of the lessons of that experience, in pioneering into the experimental domains of fundamental research to the purpose of discovering new universal physical principles, and discovering new kinds of technologies which may be derived from those principles.

This also means a certain upper limit on average class-size, and the training and placement of teachers and other relevant specialists in the amount and quality needed for such a program. In the end, these changes in the program and its budget, will cost the U.S.A. (in particular) less than nothing. The increase of the harvest will vastly exceed the added costs of the program. The principle is, that the only source of increase of the average productive powers of labor in society, is the increase of the rate of production and assimilation of more advanced knowledge of universal physical principle, and of the new technologies spawned as offspring of such discoveries of principle.

This implies a sweeping recrafting of the entire primary and secondary curriculum, and correlated changes in programs for universities, too. That requires a great effort. That effort is not only worth the expenditure; it is now indispensable for the survival of civilization.

4. European Civilization

Up to the present day, we have no reasonable choice of dating available, for the first appearance of the human species on this planet. We can only estimate, that that must have begun in the order of millions of years ago. The best evidence to date, is fairly consistent with the general retrospective picture given by Plato's Timaeus, which points toward the conditions under which what we regard presently as historical times, emerged, during the closing, melting phase of the preceding 200,000 years or so of the most recent general glaciation of the land-mass of the Northern Hemisphere.

To supplement that information, we have cave paintings from scores of thousands of years before the present, which show a much higher level of culture than most current cultural anthropologist's standard mythologies would allow to exist, and we also have crucial evidence dating from some hundreds of thousands of years earlier than that, of a cognitive human individual, no mere higher ape, existing in Europe.[55]

On the deeper issues of scientific method posed by this subject, the implications of Vernadsky's case for the "historical" self-development of the biosphere and noösphere, respectively, give us some useful parameters. Two sets of observations to such effect, matters on which I have reported in earlier locations, should be sufficient to situate the way in which we should approach the subject of the recent approximately 2,500 years, since the emergence of European civilization on the foundations provided chiefly by the legacy of ancient Egypt. Look at the matter from this vantage-point, and then turn to the immediate political setting of U.S. education today, the matter of European civilization's development as so situated.

First, as to the existence of the human species as such.

To situate the existence of mankind with respect to the phenomena of both European civilization in general, and globally extended modern European civilization as well, let us box in the issue of the origins of human life, by aid of the following observations, once again, on the implications of the work of Vernadsky.

The issue of tracing the origins and development of human life on Earth, must begin with the fact that the uniquely cognitive form of life, mankind, exists. Not only must human existence have begun at some point in the development of the Earth's biosphere, but certain preconditions, within the biosphere as a whole process, had to have been satisfied for that emergence of man to have occurred.[56] Inevitably, for many, the most shocking, even stunning implication of Vernadsky's portrait of both the biosphere and the noösphere, is that what he cites as his experimental evidence, points implicitly to the appropriate dating of the occurrence of a principle of life, and also of a principle of cognition, as located in whatever might be considered the beginning of the existence of the universe.

To restate that crucial last point, if life is not derived, in fact, as by evolution or otherwise, from a universal physics of non-living processes, and if life is, as Vernadsky argues experimentally, a demonstrably efficient, universal physical principle in its own right, then, life always existed as a principle of our universe. The same kind of experimental proof applies to the principle of cognition, which, among all perceptible phenomena, was, from the beginning, unique to those human forms of life which emerged later.

Then, the appearance of the existence of a living species which is characteristically cognitive, the human species, signifies that the preconditions for the appearance of the already waiting principle of human life, had then been realized, that in a certain degree and quality of the development of the biosphere in general. It also indicates, that within the specific features of organization of that living process which is the human individual, there exists something to be discovered, which corresponds to the appropriateness of the human species for cognition, an appropriateness which is lacking in the higher apes.

Moreover, it follows from this, that since, as our national "melting-pot" experience in education exemplifies this, all human beings have the same kind of cognitive potential, then, on this account, it follows, that all human beings are of the same species, and, when defined by that specific cognitive distinction, are of the same race.

These distinctions, among three respectively unique classes of universal physical principles, are associated with the corresponding, specific ranges of relative anti-entropy, as expressed among each of those three classes of universal physical principles. This is demonstrated, with relative great emphasis, by the effect of human intervention in accelerating the anti-entropic development of the biosphere, as this is shown by including the human species and its specific activity as a biological part of that biosphere as a whole. This entails the consideration, that the durability of the existence of a species, depends upon its enjoying the level of rate of attributable relative anti-entropy associated with, and required for the perpetuation of its own existence.

In the case of the only known cognitive species, the human species, its superior anti-entropy is expressed by those cognitive aspects of formal and other education, which transmit accumulated discoveries of principle, as from the past, into the mental processes of the living.

Meanwhile, to understand what this anti-entropy represents, and to shape policies to the effect of promoting it, we must discard the Clausius-Kelvin mythology, respecting thermodynamics. We do this on the basis of what should be the obvious, conclusive epistemological evidence, that the root argument in support of their claims, does not actually reflect crucial scientific evidence as such. Rather, as the reductionist's axiomatic fallacies of Grassmann's and Boltzmann's mathematics illustrate the point, it reflects the superimposition upon the physical evidence, of the hereditary influence of purely arbitrary, reductionist types of axiomatic mathematical assumptions. They made the same hereditary type of reductionist error which Descartes perpetrated on the matter of vis viva, and Ptolemy in astronomy.

In that case, our view of what we regard as the non-living aspects of our universe, must define development in the alternative terms of the emergence of relatively higher orders of anti-entropic organization, as primary, and the phenomena of relative energy-flux density are to be judged as derived from a universal physical principle of organization, as Leibniz's principle of the monadology expresses this conception, rather than the ideological reductionists' insistence on interpreting the experimental evidence the other way around.[57]

In that latter case, the notion of universal entropy, is discarded into the black museum where all superstitions and other biological freaks should repose, there to warn future mankind against repeating such follies. Instead of axiomatically reductionist thermodynamics, we must regard as primary, the different orders of relative anti-entropy to be considered in assessing the relations and distinctions among apparently non-living universe, life, and cognition. In that case, the universe we inhabit, then becomes, to say the least, much more interesting.

So much for situating a discussion of the preconditions for human existence. Now, turn to the second point, as to the emergence of modern civilized forms of human life.

The earliest evidence of the existence of what we call scientific culture today, is passed down to us in the form of ancient astronomical calendars, such as those known to us from the period of the building of the so-called Great Pyramids of Egypt. The study of these calendars from the standpoint of modern science, shows that these include cycles which reflect cultures of far greater sophistication than can be explained as products of relevant known cultures dated from early within historical times. That is to say, that much of the astronomical and related traditions known from early within historical times, is, like the lunatic contemporary fads of astrology, demonstrably a vulgarized and superstition-ridden parody of actually scientific work from within earlier, so-called prehistoric times.[58]

We must not underestimate such scientific achievements from within the so-called prehistoric times of the last great ice-age on the northern hemisphere's land-mass, but we must not overrate the moral qualities of the cultures of those times, either.

As the case of ancient Greece attests, some ancient societies have contributed a rich legacy of intellectual contributions, at the same time they treated the majority of the related human population, as Sparta did, among others, as actually or virtually human cattle. Chattel slavery in modern European civilization, is but a specific expression of the bestiality of man to man which was characteristic, in more severe or relatively milder degree, of every historically known society from every part of the world. The myth of the "noble savage," or of the moral "beauty" of cultures which actually never existed outside classroom and other mythologies, must be relegated to the same black museums in which the existence of deadly diseases and past experience with oligarchs and biological freaks, is kept on record as a warning to future times.

For these reasons, combined with considerations I have addressed in earlier locations published in the course of decades, the earliest traceable civilizations are to be found among transoceanic maritime ("Peoples of the Sea") cultures, such as the Dravidian language-group's maritime culture, which introduced civilization, as its colony of Sumer, into lower Mesopotamia, and the trans-Atlantic cultures whose Indo-European language-group branch settled in post-glaciation Central Asia, and contributed its cultural legacy to areas including the Iran and Indian subcontinent of today.

During the latter phase of the melting of the great glaciation that had sat for so long upon much of the northern hemisphere's land-mass, the oceans had risen by 300-400 feet above their earlier levels, the great periods of devastating flooding had came to a close, and a process of civilizing parts of the more accessible coastal and major riparian areas then proceeded. As the maritime traits of certain calendars indicate, civilization did not move from inland to the oceans, but the reverse. Even to this day, as the condition of the so-called "Great American Desert," Central Asia, Africa, and the heart of South America attest, the process of making inland areas of continents as accessible to the development of physical economy as coastal and major riparian regions, has been far from completed.

Those two considerations, the one scientific, the other representing some relevant, broad-best estimates, situate the emergence of the history of civilization in a general way. However, one additional point must be heavily emphasized, before taking up the emergence of European civilization upon foundations which were supplied, to a large degree, from Egypt.

The Indomitable Human Spirit

The best examples of the Negro spiritual as such, express that essential quality of all mankind, on which a competent education policy must be premised, as if axiomatically. As long as mankind exists, the essence of human nature, the cognitive principle, can not be stilled. Thus, as history affirms Plato's calling attention, as in his Timaeus, to the verifiable fact of many cases of destruction, or self-destruction of cultures before his time, there has arisen, repeatedly, from within mankind, the force of that indomitable spirit of cognition, to give a new birth to the hope of achieving a durable civilization.

In fact, as Plato emphasizes, entire cultures have been swept away, either by natural catastrophes beyond mankind's control at that time, or by a tragic error embedded within the self-doomed culture itself. The case of the super-Krakatoa-like explosion which demolished ancient Thera, is but one example of natural catastrophes. The self-destruction of the Mesopotamian and Roman empires, typifies cultures which collapsed because they lacked the moral fitness to survive. Yet, after such catastrophes, the impulse to give society a new birth, has expressed itself somewhere, sooner or later, sometimes with manifest, if but partial success. To give the best examples of successful renewals of a failed culture, a scientific name, call these, exhibitions of the universal principle of the renaissance.

The Fifteenth-Century, Italy-centered Renaissance, which created a revolutionary new form of society, the modern sovereign nation-state premised upon the principle of the general welfare, is the most important example of the universality of the indomitable human spirit in action.

In history, there is usually an essential conflict between the influences welling up from the human spirit, and the contrary characteristic impulses of the culture which that population inhabits. The cognitive principle is a natural human impulse, naturally specific to the individual member of our species. It is the principle of goodness, the quality which defines all newborn persons as intrinsically, redeemably good by nature. However, in every form of society known, even within the U.S. today, for example, the prevalent tendency of the culture is that expressed by the degradation of a very large part of the population to the condition, and sense of personal identity, which is fairly described as characteristic of human cattle. There sits the principle of evil.

The innate goodness of the individual person, his, or her cognitive potential, is, generally speaking, always there, and will express itself if the cognitive impulse is not suppressed, or corrupted in other ways. From case to case, such spontaneous expression is more or less difficult. Some oligarchical cultures are less unfavorable to cognitive expression than others. Those poets and scientists who express the Classical approach to composition, rather than the opposing Romantic approach, or something like it, are a measure of the degree to which the spirit of freedom, otherwise called cognition, has found moments of escape from the oppression which otherwise prevails in that culture, that society.

The case of the development of Classical Greek culture, Plato and his Academy most notably, typifies the relatively happier developments to such effect.

Sometimes, all the noted evidence suggests, that some admirable piece of creative expression, such as the Negro spiritual composed amid the conditions of slavery, springs into being without any connection to the work of some earlier period of Renaissance. However, we know that no creative thinker works without a strong impulse to reach into the more or less distant past, or some distant place, in search of predecessors or contemporaries with which he might identify in a way akin to our John's and Robert's study of the discovery by Archimedes. So, ancient, medieval, and modern European civilization maintained connections of that sort to Classical Greece's legacy.

So seek in all distant and past places, likely spoor of the good, but also attempt to situate the place of the occurrence of that good in its appropriate, actual place in the historical process as a whole. This brings us to focus upon the unique global historical significance of the successive impact of the cultural revolution which occurred in Classical Greece, and, its successor in that Fifteenth-Century European Renaissance which gave birth to a revolutionary new kind of institution, the modern sovereign nation-state premised upon that principle of natural law called the general welfare.

In Plato's Socratic dialogues, and in the Christian view, the combat against that evil of oligarchism, is the imposition of what is properly called natural law upon government, to serve what is called by such names as "the common good," or "the general welfare." That Socratic principle, called agapé, was adopted from the Classical Greek of Plato by Christianity, as typified by the Apostle Paul's I Corinthians 13. Although that term, translated into Latin as caritas, and thence into English as "charity," is often degraded into the giving of kindnesses, such as forbearance, by the ruling oligarchs to the human cattle of society, such as British ladies teaching the Irish poor to hang lace curtains in their windows, Paul's contrary meaning of the term is clear, as is Plato's.

However, despite the principle of Christ and His Apostles, it was not until the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, that a putatively Christian western Europe acted to create a new form of state, the sovereign nation-state, under that rule of natural law known as the general welfare. Even then, the oligarchical faction in Europe, typified by the far-flung imperial maritime power of Venice and its instrument, the Habsburg oligarchy, drowned Europe in orchestrated religious warfare, during much of the 1511-1648 interval, in the effort to eradicate the pioneering forms of nation-state first introduced as that of France's Louis XI and England's Henry VII. Since the close of the Seventeenth Century, within globally extended modern European civilization, the newly established British monarchy and the legacy of the Habsburg faction, has continued its efforts to eradicate the principle of the general welfare, and to turn the world back, forever, to modern echoes of ancient and medieval oligarchical imperial models of world government, as over the course of the Twentieth Century, and still today.

In the U.S., past and present, the anglophile alliance of Manhattan-centered predatory finance-capital and the tradition of the Southern slaveholder interest, usually acting so in concert with the British monarchy, has maintained the oligarchical tradition to the degree it has been able to do so, both inside the U.S.A. and in our nation's foreign policy of practice. This continuing struggle between good and evil, the republican commitment to the general welfare, and the anglophile commitment to the evil of oligarchical interest, has been a dominant feature of educational policies and practice within the U.S.A. itself.

That is what must be changed. Reforms of the usual this or that will accomplish virtually nothing good in the end. The evil can not be tamed with meliorative reforms; it must be uprooted. To uproot it, we must impose an appropriate form of what is for today, a revolutionary change of governing principle in national educational policy of practice. To accomplish that, we must know what we are doing. That means that we must locate the unique significance of the modern sovereign form of anti-oligarchical nation-state, as summoned by the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, in history as a whole.

To understand that, we must know how good conspiracies work.

The Christening of the Idea

Nothing constructive in shaping history could be brought into being without a good conspiracy.

Among literate people, "conspiracy" means what a strict etymological-historical reading of the term suggests. People who agree to act in concert according to certain common axiomatic kinds of assumptions, are conspiring in the most literal meaning of the term. The U.S. Declaration of Independence and Preamble of the Federal Constitution define active conspiracies. However, be cautioned, that to agree to do an act, would be a crude and inelegant literary pretense, which would not, in and of itself, meet the standard for literate use of the term "conspiracy." The term should be used to signify the case in which people agree to cooperate, chiefly in actions yet to be determined by them, but in service of the realization of some set of axiomatic-like principles, such as those, once again, reflected in the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence and the 1789 Preamble of our most fundamental constitutional authority on law, the U.S. Federal Constitution, with its included "general welfare clause."

So defined, conspiracy as such is neither good nor bad, and may be either good or bad. There is nothing bad in conspiracy as such. Judges and prosecutors often conspire against defendants, for example, and sometimes, in cases well known to me from my studies, the defendant's attorney shares in that conspiracy. That is bad; but, conspiracy is also an indispensable way of bringing about all public good.

The most relevant historical example of a good conspiracy, is the manifest transformation in the image of man, which is traceable from the beginning of the Homeric epics, through the full-blown emergence of Classical Greek culture in the work of Plato and his Academy. The most significant changes are of an axiomatic quality, changes in the set of axioms expressed as ideas about man in the universe.

The most interesting phase of that process of change, begins some centuries before the judicial murder of Socrates by the Democratic Party of Athens, in the sponsorship of the Ionian Greeks and the Etruscans, as allies of Egypt's combat against the so-called Phoenicians. The long alliance of the Babylonian and Persian Empires with Tyre, against Egypt, the repeatedly unsuccessful efforts of the Persian Empire and Tyre to crush Greek civilization, and the destruction of both Tyre and the Persian Empire by forces led by Alexander the Great and his advisors from the Platonic Academy, are the pivot of a great conspiracy, on which the definition of the emergence of European civilization, as European civilization, depends.

Think of the emergence of European civilization as a prime example of a true conspiracy. This conspiracy does not take the form of the planned attempt to impose some "blueprint" upon reality, but like the Odyssey of Ulysses, expresses an impulse for a certain direction of successive changes in axiomatic assumptions of practice respecting man, his conception of the reigning gods, and his relationship to nature.

For the world as a whole today, the most interesting mythic figure of the ancient Greek epic as a whole, is the ironical role of a putatively Egyptian goddess imposed upon the Olympic pantheon as the figure of reason, Athena. The direction of those successive changes, approximately culminating in the establishment and work of Plato's Academy, is the emergence of the Classical humanist conception of man.

The impelling force of this process of change, was the insurgency of what I have identified as the indomitable, cognitive human spirit.

This was not a mere epiphenomenon of those we know retrospectively as the ancient Greek population. It was a conspiracy within that population, a conspiracy which was able to impose its mark on the ancient Greek heritage for later times with such force, that many people forget that those who introduced those changes were, like the circles of Benjamin Franklin, revolutionaries within their own times and among their own people. These changes were, like all truly good changes, revolutionaries of the type associated with the validated discovery of a universal physical principle by the initiative of an individual and the support for that by a relatively small group associated with the work of that individual. This is as appropriately a model of the best creative artists as of physical scientific discovery.

Great good conspiracies are of the type to be recognized in the relationship of Leibniz follower Abraham Kästner to his student and collaborator Gotthold Lessing, and the close collaboration of Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, as defenders of the work of both Leibniz and J.S. Bach, against the circles of Voltaire and Leonhard Euler of the Berlin Academy. The same is true of the continuation of the German Classic, as organized in that form by the initiatives of Kästner, Lessing, and Mendelssohn, which gave the world the German Classic of Goethe, Schiller, the Humboldts, Scharnhorst, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Heine, et al. These changes occurred within societies which were, otherwise, predominantly expressions of the anti-Classical Romanticism of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Novalis, et al., just as the evil, oligarchical Delphi cult of the Pythian Apollo, typified not only Lycurgan Sparta, but many among the contemporaries of Greece's greatest and noblest Classical figures.

The central feature of the centuries-long process leading into the establishment of Plato's Academy at Athens, was a struggle against, and within the grip of the existing pagan religious beliefs of that time and place. Two overlapping expressions of evil, are of the greatest relative importance: the cult of Olympus and the Delphi cult of the Pythian Apollo. It is important to capture a sense of the revolutionary character of the figures of both Ulysses and Athena, relative to the setting of the Olympian myths.

Like the mind of the majority of the U.S. electorate today, the minds of most of the populations of known societies have been controlled by the use of fraudulent kinds of religious superstitions. These have been superstitions of a frankly religious character, such as the Olympus cult and Apollo cult, or in ostensibly secular disguises for religious belief, such as British empiricism, existentialism, astrology, the escapist mystique of mass popular entertainment, and "the market." All taken together, they constitute a body of ideology. By ideology, I signify a system of belief which is adopted by learning or kindred, axiomatically irrational methods, such as the belief that humanity's fate is controlled by the whims of supposed gods of Olympus.

In conventional U.S. practice, ideology is expressed typically by a certain way of using the pronoun "they," as to signify some eerie "establishment," of which it is said, "they will always decide." Granted, as long as eighty percent or more of the U.S. population continues to behave in that superstitious way, as it has in recent general elections, for example, as virtual human cattle herded into the allotted pens, a relatively small number of people, operating through their lackeys, will rule the U.S. pretty much as the most pathetic true believers among the ancient Greeks believed in the absolute power of the ever-whimsical gods of Olympus. It is useful to see the U.S. population today, as exhibiting the most pathetic features of the subjects of the Iliad.

It is useful to compare the Iliad and Odyssey on this account, and to trace the changes in man's conception of himself as expressed by Solon's reforms at Athens, by the Classical tragedians, and by Plato's figure of Socrates. Such false gods rule only as long as the people allow this state of affairs to prevail, as long as the people fasten the shackles of humility toward such would-be, or even purely imaginary gods, such as "The Invisible Hand," upon themselves.

What emerges in this progression from the Homeric epics to Plato, is the shift to the concept of what becomes, in Plato, the idea, as the adduceable principle of Classical Greek sculpture's difference from the Archaic, presents the image of the idea as reflected in the language of stone, the idea of becoming-in-motion. The figure of Ulysses already introduces a willful evocation of an idea in the hearers of the song of the Odyssey.

The poem of Solon presents the idea of the idea with great force. The Classical tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles, are most notable. Plato and his figure of Socrates, represent the pinnacle of this Classical Greek achievement. The notion of agapé, as elaborated in the Republic, for example, goes to the heart of the matter.

Throughout the span from Homeric epics to Plato, there is an unfolding process at work, a process which returns always to the issues of justice and truthfulness, these as the alternative to credulous submission to belief in "they," the alternative to submission to "popular opinion," to submission to a reigning ideology. In the end, the work of the Socratic dialogue, in defining the Platonic form of ideas as the standard of justice and truthfulness, becomes, ever since, the quality which sets the emergence of European civilization apart as the birth of a distinct culture, and which provides the foundations for what became the characteristic distinctions of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance.

The destruction of the Persian Empire by the hand of Alexander the Great, established the leading position of the Platonic legacy within the Hellenistic culture of the eastern Mediterranean and its associated regions, which continued until the Romans had defeated the Greek states in Italy, and moved on to conquer, and largely enslave Greece itself.

Pagan Rome, which expressed both the legacy of the syncretizing cult of the Pythian Apollo and of ancient Babylon's oligarchical model, became the long nightmare of European civilization, from which Europe could escape only through an affirmation of the Classical Greek alternative to Romanticism. This affirmation occurred through the embedding of the Classical Greek legacy of Plato within Christianity, to an effect typified by the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance.

So, in the form of a continuing conflict, over thousands of years, between the Classical Greek and Romantic legacies, the continuity of European civilization has been established as of a distinct type, up to the present day. It is impossible to achieve any effective comprehension of the internal history of today's now globally extended European civilization, except from that standpoint. The Classical Greek legacy was thus christened to become the most powerful form of culture known to date, not merely by some standard of raw power, but on account of the power expressed by the use of the method of the Platonic idea.

The corollary is, that the world was fated to bear the burden, and the advantages, spilling over from the continuing, millennia-long, great conflict between the Classical and the Romantic within European civilization. Such has been the christening and the aftermath of the idea.

The Birth of the Sovereign Nation-State

Now, to sum up with the following crucial, concluding point.

To understand the now globally extended history of European civilization over the past two millennia, it is sufficient to begin by recognizing, that the terrible conflict within European civilization could be overcome, only by eliminating the oligarchical model. That means, today, uprooting the Venetian model of an imperial financier-oligarchical form, in which the reign of a policy sometimes called "shareholder value" degrades virtually all of mankind to the condition of herding, consuming, and culling, the great mass of the population as a human cattle, as has become the increasing practice inside the U.S.A. since the Richard Nixon "Southern Strategy" campaign of 1966-68.

For this end, of freeing humanity from an oligarchy's degradation of the mass of the population to the status of the virtual human cattle which the great majority of the U.S. population suffers today, it has been necessary to impose a specific principle of universal law which, by implication, outlaws oligarchical practices. That law has two features. First, that the authority to rule over a nation must be given only to sovereign governments of nation-states. Second, that no government has the moral authority to exist, except as it efficiently promotes the general welfare of all of the people and their posterity: the common good. In all matters, that principle of the general welfare must be accorded the authority of the highest law applicable to the case at hand.

This was the great change sought in the battles fought by the Emperor Frederick II against Venice and Venice's Plantagenet allies. This was the great end sought by Dante Alighieri's proposed reforms. This is the great fruit of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. This is the principle under which Louis XI's reform of France occurred, and Henry VII's uprooting of the evil represented by the Plantagenet legacy of Richard III. This is the source of the unique quality of the intention applied by Benjamin Franklin and his collaborators to the creation of the U.S.A. This reform is modern European civilization. This is the unfinished business, which we must bring to a conclusion.

In this unfinished business inside the U.S.A. itself, policies governing the general practice of education, form a leading, crucial part. For historic and related reasons, the policies of education and related perspectives for employment of our so-called African-American families are a kind of acid test. Often embittering, and bloody experience of our nation shows, that if we are either unwilling, or incapable, to bring about a reversal of the legacies of chattel slavery and so-called "Jim Crow," as it applies to education, the nation and most of its people will continue to walk, as they have done lately, like serfs or slaves, bearing their shrunken heads on their shoulders.

The power of a nation's real economy lies entirely in the combination of the development of the cognitive maturity of its people, and in the provision of those forms of organization and conditions of life and work, which are the circumstances required for production and for general life by any level of advancement of the scientific and technological capabilities of the minds of the individual members of the labor-force and their families. The higher the level of development, and latitude for expression of the cognitive powers of the individual, the greater the average power of the economy as a whole, the greater the rate of progress of the human condition.

Do not fit the development of the people to the perceived requirements of forms of employment deemed available. Rather, transform the policies of investment in employment, to set priorities on the utilization of the greatest feasible development of the labor-force and its family households.

Indeed, it was never the lack of opportunity to upgrade employment opportunities, which prompted racists to condemn African-Americans into tracking (of most among them) for menial employment and worse education. They were racists, because they were oligarchs, who understand that if a people is not stupefied in relevant ways, it will not endure rule by oligarchs. Therefore, the oligarchs prefer to keep people dumb and deluded, and also culled as much as is deemed convenient, even if that means a much poorer performance for the economy, because it is more important to them to be oligarchs, than to allow that far more successful form of economy, in which free, thinking men and women, will not tolerate being human cattle for oligarchs.

The object of sane economic policy, is to develop the cognitive powers of all the citizens to the highest possible level they are willing to achieve, and to compose the conditions of production and distribution to keep pace with the progress achieved through such policies of reliance on Classical humanist education for each and all.

We must give priority on this approach to education and employment prospects, and to developing the means to conduct such a policy of practice. Only when all means "all," in these terms, will the legacy of racism dwindle away. Only when we do this for ourselves, and reflect this in relations with other nations, will our nation's prolonged gut-pain of racism pass away.


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Footnotes


[43] Although, it should be clear that this is already implied in the treatment of the Plato Academy's proof of the uniqueness of the Platonic solids, as reflected and elaborated within Plato's Timaeus, and as this feature of the work of Cusa, Pacioli, and Leonardo occupies a central place in the work of Kepler.

[44] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "The Truth About Temporal Eternity," Fidelio, Summer 1994.

[45] It was the inherent inability of a thorough Aristotelean, such as Padua's Pietro Pomponazzi, to accept that distinction, which impelled him, and all of like persuasion, such as the empiricists, to see human existence in any but strictly mortalist terms. Only in the realm of cognitive processes, which, like life as such, does not exist in Aristotle's system of only animal life, of anima, does the mortal individual have an efficiently continuing relationship to a pre- and post-mortal past and future. Hence, the Christian, in contrast to Pomponazzi, makes a distinction between the mortal being and the cognitive being made in the image of the Creator, the soul.

[46] Friedrich Schiller wrote his seminal piece on education, Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man, during the several months in Jena, Germany, beginning in 1794, when he was in the almost daily company of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Schiller's On Grace and Dignity, begun in May 1793, is his first major published work to decisively criticize the perspective of Kant on aesthetics. Schiller's inaugural lecture at Jena University, "What Is, and to What End Do We Study, Universal History," delivered on May 26-27, 1789, shows what Schiller's philosophy was, as a teacher.

Von Humboldt captures Schiller's impact, in his essay "On Schiller and the Course of His Spiritual Development" (1830). Von Humboldt was appointed Privy Councillor and director of the Section for Ecclesiastical Affairs and Education in the Ministry of the Interior of Prussia in 1808, and remained there for 16 months. Two key memoranda, produced in this period, outline his philosophy of education: the "school plans" for Königsberg and Prussian Lithuania. Humboldt's ideas were put into practice in Prussia during his ministry, and continued to influence German education until the 1970s "reforms" of Willy Brandt's government. The founding of the University of Berlin, beginning in September 1807, was Humboldt's crowning achievement.

All the writings by Schiller and Humboldt referenced here are available in English translation from the Schiller Institute (www.schillerinstitute.org).

[47] There should be standards, akin to "pure food" criteria, or labels warning credulous consumers, against the acceptance of the claims of many curious sects, such as those of Rev. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, to the name of "Christianity." The crucial feature of the latter variety of pseudo-Christian cults, is that they claim that "God's intention is to be found in an ordinary individual's reading of the text of passages from the Bible," a variety of the same argument made by the wildly gnostic, self-avowed "textualist," U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. Typical of the point to be made, is the absurdity of any attempt to apply the "textualist" practice to I Corinthians 13, in which the Apostle Paul defines the meaning of Plato's conception of agapé according to a most essential Christian principle. Notably, the type of "Biblical fundamentalist" referenced has no agreement with the literal intent of such authorities as the Apostles John and Paul. Indeed, all such "fundamentalist" doctrines are the clearest examples of wild varieties of anti-Christian gnosticism, with clear affinities for the doctrine of the anti-Christian bogomil cult.

[48] Thus, a nation can be truly a democracy and also truly a dictatorship exerted by an oligarchy. Such is the nature of the degeneration of the U.S.A., especially since Richard Nixon's launching of his 1966-1968 campaign for the Presidency. The degeneration of the character of political parties as organizations of the citizenry, into a master-client relationship, instead, typifies the role of a pro-"Southern Strategy"-oriented, oligarchy-controlled mass media, in crushing the U.S. population into a condition of rule by "popular opinion," a condition akin to the status of the lower classes, plebeians and slaves, of ancient Rome.

[49] It is very much to the credit of author James D. Anderson, that, in the 1988 book I have referenced here, he stresses the conscious intention of Wall Street banker George F. Peabody, 1914 Woodrow Wilson appointee as Vice-Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, as typical of those who controlled much of so-called "black education" in the U.S. as an intended control mechanism directed immediately against the so-called African-American population. The same methods were used, by interests of the same Wall Street pedigree, to introduce into public schools and universities, mythologies intended to terminate the role of the ideas represented by Rev. Martin Luther King among so-called African-Americans, as in some propagandistic efforts to discredit the memory of Frederick Douglass.

[50] The boy, as usual, had hitched up his mule, and the day's ploughing was under way. A stallion and a donkey, watched from over the fence. Suddenly, the donkey began braying, ridiculing the mule. "What are you laughing at me?" said the mule. "Because, despite all your hard work, you will never have a child," the stallion intervened. The mule rejoined, "Who do you think is walking behind me?" From the mule's standpoint, it made perfect sense.

[51] Friedrich Schiller, "On the Sublime," in Friedrich Schiller, Poet of Freedom, Vol. III (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1990), p. 255.

[52] Notable exceptions include Giuseppe Verdi's operas, as only typified by those which are adopted from the tragedies of Shakespeare and Schiller. Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio, Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Magic Flute, and Clemenza di Tito, and Beethoven's Fidelio, are musical dramas which are purely musical, and yet also Classical drama of political relevance to the historical specifics of both the nominal setting of the drama and the audiences for which they were composed. The religious music of J.S. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven also typifies the integration of drama and music in an integrated way, not as a musical setting of text, but a qualitative, creative transformation of the delivery of the text to a higher dimension.

[53] John Sigerson and Kathy Wolfe, eds., A Manual on the Rudiments of Tuning and Registration, Book I (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1992).

[54] ibid., Chapter 11, "Artistic Beauty: Schiller versus Goethe," passim.

[55] See Renate Müller De Paoli, "Die Höhlenmalerei der Eiszeit," Neue Solidarität, Feb. 23, 2000; Hartmut Thieme, "Lower Paleolithic Hunting Spears from Germany," Nature, Feb. 27, 1997, pp. 807-810; Robin Dennell, "The World's Oldest Spears," Nature, Feb. 27, 1997, pp. 767-768.

[56] I do not mean evolution in the empiricist's sense. I mean the existence of man as a cognitive species, requires preconditions, knowledge of which has yet to be determined, within the biosphere as a whole process.

[57] In knowledge, as cognitive generation of the ideas of universal physical principle are generated, a paradox of the type of Analysis Situs always defines the fact of experience from which knowledge of universal principle is derived. When such knowledge is configured as Riemann's principle implicitly requires, physics, so defined, presents us with a multi-connected architecture of the universe, its organization as to matters of principle. It is the view of the universe as a self-organizing process, from this standpoint, which shows us what the evidence as such permits us to consider as "elementary," and what not. Hence, organization-as-such, so defined in principle, must replace notions of self-evident discrete magnitudes. Then, consider Planck's discovery as correlated with the notion of a monadology, rather than self-evidently elementary particles as the reductionists define them. Notably, as emphasized implicitly by Kepler's success over the reductionist methods of Claudius Ptolemy et al., the attempt to derive physical principles from within the bounds of a mathematics based upon reductionist assumptions, is the hereditary principle which separates all constructs in formal logic fatally from science.

[58] Typical is the case of the hoax perpetrated by the Roman Claudius Ptolemy, who fraudulently reworked the heliocentric constructions of his Classical Greek predecessors, in service of the method of Aristotle. Repeatedly, societies based upon the oligarchical model, perverted the results of earlier astronomy, as a matter of producing myths used as instruments of social control over the minds of the population.

Back to Part I

About the Author, Lyndon LaRouche

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