The Measure of Economic Value

The assortment of the universe’s known principal phase-spaces, among the abiotic, the living, and noëtic processes, should be viewed from the vantage-point of the Plato’s Cave allegory, contrasting the shadow-world of sense-perception to the unseeable reality, the principled powers which generate the shadowy perceptions of sense-certainty. The relations among those three principal phase-spaces identified as representing the unseen reality, are to be considered in that light. In short, just as the principles of the abiotic domain do not “see,” but are affected by the principle of life, so the biologist qua biologist does not “see” the noëtic principle which produces cognitive behavior in a certain species of living organism, man.

I now introduce the matter of the underlying principles of economics to this review, with relevant comments on those distinctions in physical science which are the foundation for any competent economic, or national-income-accounting doctrine of practice.

As I have reported this fact earlier, the notable difference between my own and Vernadsky’s definition of a Noösphere, is threefold. This difference defines my concept governing the measurement of the relative value expressed by physical-economic processes. I now summarize that distinction, as follows.

First, we have phenomena which are produced without the attribution of either a principle of life, or of what Vernadsky terms a noëtic principle. The first set of phenomena are those we attribute to the abiotic domain.

It became customary, until now, to define the characteristic feature of the abiotic domain as what the Clausius, Grassmann, Kelvin, et al. tradition named entropy. The flaw of that assumption should be obvious; the associated notions of thermodynamic principles introduced by Clausius et al., incorporate an array of largely unstated, a priori assumptions. These assumptions include the error of empiricist mathematical dogma associated with the referenced common blunders-in-common of Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Cauchy, et al. These include the fallacy of “energy,” derived from the precedent of Plato’s famous philosophical adversary, Aristotle: as opposed to the notion of “power” associated with Plato’s notions of physical science.³³ Clausius et al. also include a general fallacy of composition to which I shall turn attention a short space ahead.

It were better to leave out the issue of the empiricist notion of entropy altogether, and to define the abiotic domain as the domain of actions (i.e., a Riemannian phase-space) from which the principled qualities of life and noësis are manifestly absent. I shall clarify the importance of, and basis for that negative definition a relevant short space ahead.

Second, and third, we have the sets of phenomena which are characteristic, respectively, of life and noësis. This points to the principles of life as a universal physical principle, and noësis is also a universal physical principle. By principles, we should understand power in the Platonic sense of Kepler’s discovery of gravitation as a representative of the existence of a specific quality of power. Life as a principle (power), is recognized as both an agency specific to living processes and their specific effects, and as also anti-entropic: as I have used the term anti-entropy.

The distinction among the notions of power respectively specific to the abiotic, life, and noësis, defined three distinct but multiply-connected Riemannian phase-spaces. All three phase-spaces are in operation throughout the universe at all times, as well-ordered Riemannian phase-spaces tend to be. Hence, the anti-entropic influences of life and noësis have always been present and operating in the universe. Thus, for example, the universe as a whole, the universe in which these three phase-spaces are multiply-connected, is anti-entropic, although most encountered textbook-style physics implicitly assumes the abiotic phase-space to be entropic in the sense of the argument by Clausius, Grassmann, Kelvin, Mach, and Boltzmann.³⁴

That negative definition of abiotic, may appear less shocking, if I now emphasize the following qualifications. Rather than saying that life as we usually agree to recognize the term “life,” as an act of pointing to certain experimental evidence, life, as expressing a universal physical principle, we must, as Vernadsky emphasizes, recognize it as a physical principle by its specific production of uniquely relevant physical effects. So, as Vernadsky also argues, the term noësis is also a way of pointing toward the existence of a universal physical principle. In neither case are we inferring that the principle appears only in the form of expression we associate with our first-impression notions of the terms “life” or noësis; we are inferring principles whose expression is usually recognized by us when expressed to us as a principle of life as Pasteur, Curie, et al. defined it, or, for noësis, as Socratic hypothesizing. The principle itself, in both cases, must have a broader and deeper quality of significance than we associate with conventional reference to such terms. From the standpoint of a science of physical economy, these principles, in their more general, underlying quality, permeate the universe, its astrophysics and microphysics included.³⁵

Ironically, our best knowledge of such a three-phase-space Riemannian manifold, comes from appropriate forms of study of the human mind, rather than abiotic physics or biology. This is, admittedly, contrary to the reductionist method; but, that is a virtue, not a fault. We must proceed from the top down, what we actually know about our own ability to make experimentally valid discoveries of principles, rather than the “ivory tower” methods of Euclid’s Elements and empiricism.

Plato’s Socratic method of experimentally oriented hypothesizing, is itself a great experiment by mankind. We have wonderful access to that experimental domain, because all of mankind’s progress in knowledge and power as a species, has depended absolutely on the efficient practice of those specifically human powers of hypothesizing. We are enabled to experience the interior of the noëtic processes directly, to observe them consciously, and to confirm those hypotheses experimentally. Our best knowledge of the universe as a whole, is experimental knowledge which we conquer through our consciousness of our sovereignly individual powers of hypothesizing what appropriate experiments show us to be, and to have been, universal physical principles.

Hence, all that we really know about man and the universe is knowledge produced by an understanding of a universal principle of hypothesizing, a higher order of hypothesizing: Plato’s concept of an higher hypothesis. What we know, is what we are enabled to know efficiently by aid of the cognitive processes of Platonic hypothesizing of the experimental domain. It is through those cognitive processes of the mind which set us, uniquely, apart from and above the beasts, that we are capable of actually knowing anything, including biology and abiotic physics. Thus, we can not claim to know anything, except through those processes of noësis as I have defined them, yet once again, in this present report.³⁶ It is by validating the functions attributable to those cognitive processes of hypothesizing, that we are authorized to claim any principled knowledge of anything, abiotics and biology included.

To restate the same point in slightly different way, we have the following.

All that we actually know of the universe with the equivalent of scientific certainty, is a product of the hypothesizing activity of the human mind, with its specific power of hypothesizing experimental truths. Where the empiricist attempts to explain the existence of the universe from the starting-point of reductionist notions of sense-perception per se, science knows the universe only through its power to change the shadow-world of sense-perception in ways contrary to reductionist presumptions, as Kepler did in discovering the principle of gravitation. The increase of the human species’ potential relative population-density, from the level of potential of millions, to billions of living specimens, should warn us that all we really know is nothing except that which is known experimentally from the standard of the practice of Plato’s method of Socratic hypothesizing.

Now, focussing that line of discussion of Vernadsky’s argument upon physical economy as such: How, by what universal principles, should we then measure the relative performance of societies as physical economies? Put that pencil and computer away! Before measuring, ask: What is your conception of that which you should desire to measure?

From what is written in the preceding pages of this report, the conception we must choose for measurement must be, in first approximation, the relative physical-economic power of society, as Plato, Leibniz, and Gauss define “power” in ways consistent with Gauss’s referenced 1799 report. We must then refine our definition, to think of measuring the changes in physical effects accomplished by application of the power presently being made available to society’s practice. We must then express those Kepler-like trajectories of projectable or ongoing changes in effect, in terms of increases (or, decreases) of potential relative population-densities per capita and per square kilometer of surface-area.

That said, now shift attention to focus on the content of the action by means of which these changes in trajectories are generated: the adoption of discovered universal physical principles for practice. This has the connotation of the idea of science-driven technological progress; but it also implies what is usually overlooked in the discussion of such scientific practice, the determining role of a special class of physically efficient social principles, principles typified by valid methods of composition and performance of Classical forms of plastic and non-plastic art, as opposed to the axiomatic irrationalism of Archaic, Romantic, and modern modes of art.

The point may be conveniently illustrated by focussing upon the dividing-line which separates the first establishment of modern European civilization, the modern sovereign nation-state, in opposition to the preceding feudal system. This qualitative change was the fruit of earlier work under feudalism, including the Augustinian harmonics, derived from Plato et al., expressed by the Chartres school of cathedral-building, and the impact of the work of, especially, Dante Alighieri and Petrarch. However, the shift itself was sharply defined in the Europe-wide impact of the internal history of the Fifteenth-century Italy-centered Renaissance.

To discover how measurement of these trajectories is to be made, we must now define the relevant features of that modern sovereign nation-state which first came into existence during Europe’s Fifteenth-century, Italy-centered Renaissance.

The Modern Nation-State

No political-economy existed prior to the pioneer models of France under Louis XI and England under Henry VII. Four principles point to the premises for that distinction.³⁷

First, the introduction of the Classical method, in place of the Romantic, as typified by Brunelleschi’s successful design of the cupola for the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral of Florence.

Second, the birth of modern experimental science, with Nicolaus of Cusa’s De docta ignorantia, as a revival of the Classical method of Plato.

Third, the birth of the modern nation-state, set into motion by Cusa’s Concordantia Catholica, the successor to, and supercessor of Dante’s De Monarchia.

Fourth, the crucial, commonly underlying feature of these revolutionary reforms, was the adoption of the principle of the anti-Roman, anti-feudalistic modern nation-state republic. In the modern republic, the political-moral authority of the sovereign depends absolutely upon efficient submission to the so-called commonwealth principle of the General Welfare (agape, common good) for both the entirety of the living population and, even more emphatically, its posterity. The supreme principle of the U.S. Federal Constitution’s Preamble, the sovereign authority and responsibility of the sovereign nation-state to promote not only the defense of that institution, but the General Welfare of the living and their posterity.³⁸

For these reasons, despite many corrupted models of elected government under which the U.S. has suffered, from time to time, the Federal Constitution of the U.S.A., especially when read as under the controlling principle stated in its Preamble, is the primary, historically existing example of a true sovereign nation-state today. The related problem which accounts for the defects of the systems of Europe and with other parts of Americas, has been, that even after the dissolution of the Habsburg tyrannies, the prevalent form of government and political-economy in Europe and the Americas today, is the form of parliamentary system, the Anglo-Dutch Liberal model, under which a Venice-like financier oligarchy, represented, typically by an “independent” central banking system, enjoys relative hegemony over the nation’s economic affairs and veto powers over its elected institutions of government. To that degree, whether under the Habsburgs/Hapsburgs or the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, the state does not exist for the benefit of mankind, but treats the majority of the subject populations as relatively human cattle, as Aeschylus’s Prometheus (and Goethe’s) denounces Zeus and the self-doomed Olympus on this account.

Thus, as I have emphasized above, and in many earlier published locations, the prevalent European economic model today, is that Anglo-Dutch Liberal model whose typical expression is the pro-slavery dogma of John Locke, in opposition to the anti-Locke principles of Gottfried Leibniz, whose influence was dominant in shaping the U.S. 1776 Declaration of Independence and the 1787-89 Preamble of the Federal Constitution. For example, in U.S. history to date, the Essex Junto, Jonathan Edwards and his grandson Aaron Burr, the pro-racist Nineteenth-century Democratic Party of Martin van Buren, Jackson, Polk, Pierce, Buchanan, Cleveland, and Wilson, and the Republican Party of Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Richard Nixon, and Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, represent the U.S.’s sometimes nearly fatal infection with the Anglo-Dutch Liberal virus of John Locke.

The domination of many nations, and other powerful institutions by the global power of that Venice style in financier oligarchies, which is typified by the so-called “independent” central banking system, distorts economic reality, by making that monetary and financial power peculiar to central banking systems the determinant of the corrupted political and legal meaning of the term “economics.” The control over “money” by an “independent” central banking system, is the most immediate source of all corruption of nation-state economies around the world today. This corruption, the substitution of largely fictitious money-systems, for physically efficient economic relations, is the chief factor generating the disasters of the world’s political-economic systems today.

Under what is known alternately as either the American System of political-economy (e.g., Hamilton) or the American System of National Economy (i.e., List), the republic is perfectly sovereign, including its authority over the monetary and financial systems of the nation. Under the sovereign republic, unlike states corrupted by the Anglo-Dutch Liberal model, the role of the Federal government as the only lawful creator of national debt and credit, demands a system of national banking, through which all banks either work, or by which their practices are regulated. In such a national-banking role, or, as under a President Abraham Lincoln or President Franklin Roosevelt, the true public interest, the General Welfare of the present population and its posterity, enjoys absolute preeminence over the influence of finance.

Consider, briefly, the absurdity inhering axiomatically, and also practically, in all monetarist doctrine and comparable practice. Then, consider the scientific alternative. Today, that contrast is being demonstrated by the currently accelerating economic collapse of the world monetary-financial system, a system which has failed, catastrophically, in precisely the way my “Triple Curve” argument presents the relevant evidence.

To restate the working point: All modern economies rely largely on the adopted role of money, as an instrument through which commerce and capital investment are conducted in the small. The difference is, that in the Venice or Anglo-Dutch Liberal model, the essentially fictitious value assigned to money per se is more or less absolute power, a power placed implicitly above the human right to life. Therefore, in the morally degenerate Liberal, financier dictatorships according to the neo-Venetian model of Locke et al., physical values in economy are judged by monetary processes. In the contrary case, the sovereign nation-state republic, money and its traffic are regulated, as President Franklin Roosevelt understood a gold-reserve system (as opposed to the wicked gold-standard system). The latter regulation is to be through aid of government, to the end of holding relative monetary values within the bounds of relative physical values.

The illustrations used above, and in other published locations, to describe the general lines of economic and moral degeneration of the Americas and Europe over the 1966-2002 interval, show the actual shifts in relative valuations of money, finance, and physical reality over this period, especially since the massive destruction of economy effected during the 1971-1981 interval. It is the fact, that these diverging trends among money, finance, and physical output, are characteristic of the policy-making trends under a radically monetarist form of rule by the Anglo-Dutch Liberal model, which has caused the present global economic collapse of the present world monetary-financial system, to be a systemic (e.g., terminal) process, rather than merely a cyclical one.

The world is presently gripped by an incurable bankruptcy of the existing central banking systems of the Americas, Europe, and many other locations. The effort to maintain these doomed systems would produce effects comparable to Europe’s mid-Fourteenth-century New Dark Age, dooming both the financier interest and the nations on which they prey. Only a process of state-directed bankruptcy reorganization of the system, could prevent the virtual doom of most, or even all of civilization for more than a generation to come. Under the urgently needed bankruptcy-reorganization of the ruined monetary and financial systems, the reorganization of national economy and world trade must follow, it will be indispensable to place the monetary and financial processes under the control of scientifically validatable forms of physical-economic determinations of relative values. On this account, much can be learned from U.S. economic history as a whole, the pluses and minuses of the 1933-1945 interval most notably.

The most critical political issue posed from the outset of such a now urgent reform, is that neo-manichean superstition associated with the misleading name of “free trade” which the modern European Physiocrats and Liberals adopted from wild-eyed gnostic cults of “the elect,” such as the Cathars. The superstitious cultist, such as Quesnay, Mandeville, Adam Smith, or marginal utilitarians, attributes the “secretion” of economic profit to some mystical agency, such as a magical power invoked by a title of nobility, or other form of property-title, or the bounty given to the undeserving louts of a Jonathan “Elmer Gantry” Edwards “revival meeting.”

In physical economy since Leibniz, the generation of gain of wealth produced over that consumed as a prerequisite, is attributable to the generation and application of improvements in human knowledge. The objective is to reverse the relationship among the trajectories of monetary, financial, and real growth, in directions exactly contrary to that illustrated by the set of “Triple Curves” shown above.

Without taking up, yet, those matters of principles of social relations addressed in the coming chapter, the principles of physical-economic profit, are defined in the following, Riemannian mode.

Relative physical-economic profit, as distinct from financial-accounting profit, is defined as the product of the accumulation of applied universal physical principles per capita and per square kilometer of relevant surface-area. This is relative to the improved or depleted condition of the environment in which the relevant activity occurs. To set the stage for the following summary argument, focus again on the most crucial evidence: That were man a higher ape, the living human population of the planet would not have exceeded some millions of individuals, whereas scientific-technological progress has made possible a population in the order of billions.

The discovery of universal physical principles by individual “free will,” as the legacy of Plato’s method best defines the notion of such principles, and the transmission of those discoveries into socialized practice of societies, is the category of events which accounts for mankind’s increasing power to exist, individually and as society, per capita and per square kilometer. The combined benefit is expressed in the form of an increase of the potential relative population-density of society, and also of the human species as a whole.

This process is expressible in the language of a Riemannian physical geometry. The accumulation of “revolutionary” discoveries of universal principles, as Gauss’s 1799 attack on the axiomatic fallacies of Euler’s and Lagrange’s method reflects this, is the action by means of which mankind makes possible an implicitly endless accumulation of successive increases in its potential relative population-density. To the degree that society transforms its practice in accord with such scientific progress, the per-capita power of the individual is increased in a way which is reflected as a gain in potential relative population-density.

Mathematically, such a progressive succession of changes has the quality of a change in the Riemannian physical geometry of mankind’s functional relationship to the universe. The change has the form of a transformation of a geometry of n universal physical principles, to one of n+1 principles. The change in the characteristic “curvature” of action within such a succession of changes in numbers of principles being intentionally applied by man, is the location of the increase of the relative physical profit of society per capita and per square kilometer.

The Role of Basic Economic Infrastructure

Consider briefly the most ironical feature of such a process, the effect of capital and related improvements in basic economic infrastructure.

The most relevant, and ironical of the typical cases of development of basic economic infrastructure, is that in which the productive powers of labor in agriculture and manufacturing are increased by improvements in basic economic infrastructure, without any relevant change internal to operations in agriculture and manufacturing itself. Such are the notable classes of benefits to production of, and quality of produced goods, the which are more or less entirely the benefit of improvements in such features of basic economic infrastructure as water management, transportation, production and distribution of power, urban physical infrastructure, education, and public health-care systems. These benefits from development and maintenance of basic economic infrastructure, have the form of improvements in the area and improvements in the general conditions of life of the population.

Making the deserts bloom, fostering the expansion of managed forestation, as well as the expansion of agriculture and adding new, more scientifically advanced forms of urban life, are typical of the essential elements featured in this example of the phase-relationship of public infrastructure to the productivity of private enterprise.

This is to be recognized as a leading example of the reasons why economic processes can not be understood from any standpoint but what I have summarized, above, as the essential role of a Riemannian physical geometry for understanding how economies actually work.

Under the constitutionally traditional American System of political-economy, as distinct from the folly of the recent decades “post-industrial” trends in philosophy of practice in the U.S.A., and among most of the parliamentary systems of Europe, approximately half of the total national economic outputs and inputs should be associated with the development and maintenance of government-regulated basic economic infrastructure. These activities should be a function of either direct investment and operation by Federal, state, county, or municipal government, or assigned to those government-regulated public utilities which are conducted, partially or entirely, as private enterprise. They complement the constitutional function of “Hamiltonian” national banking, as opposed to independent, or quasi-independent central banking systems, and general regulation of commerce, in defining the functional framework within which the nation functions as an integral national economy.

How, then, should the relationship of such degrees of public control of basic economic infrastructure to its effects on the productivity of labor in agriculture, manufacturing, et al., be conceptualized? The broad answer is: Think of infrastructure’s role in determining the “physical geometry” of the whole area and entire population to which particular firms are attached. Consider the following examples of that point.

The quality of public education determines the corresponding element of trends in productive powers of labor in the labor-force as a whole. Recent U.S. trends in public and higher education and popular entertainment culture, have been a monstrously costly abomination, on long-term economic trends, for such reasons. Public health affects productivity in a related way. Time lost in commuting is a loss of productivity in the economy as a whole, and thus in the enterprises in which persons are employed. Public policies governing real estate will worsen the economy of a region, by increasing physical-economic losses attributable to increased costs and inefficiencies of commuting.

Similarly, for related reasons, high rates of capital-intensive development in production and infrastructure generally, are essential costs of maintaining, as well as increasing productivity. Power-intensive modes are of similar significance. These changes are effected largely through the development of infrastructure, chiefly by government, or government-regulated private ownership of public utilities.

Where does private entrepreneurship fit in? This, among its other uses, answers the question: What went wrong with the Soviet economy, which is attributable to a so-called Marxist form of the pro-“Enlightenment” materialist misconception of man?³⁹ A comparison of the better quality of scientist with the entrepreneur who functions successfully as virtually sole controller of the internal policies of practice of his or her closely held enterprise, is the clinical case which points most efficiently to the roots of the characteristic intellectual, moral, and related failures of socialist organizations. Why does the all-too-typical management of the successor to such an entrepreneur lead the inherited enterprise to a relative disaster?

The general form of the answer to such crucial questions, appears as approximate answers to such other questions as the following: Why did U.S. corporations tend to degenerate, as they are falling like proverbial “ten pins” now, more or less as the civilian sector of the Soviet economy did, and for the same underlying causes? Why is the closely held private entrepreneurship, a relatively superior form of enterprise than the giant corporation? Indeed, why do typical examples of effective corporate manufacturing enterprises have a crucial dependency on their high-technology vendors from among relatively small, closely-held enterprises? Why is new management, as in the takeover of a private enterprise by the founder’s heirs, or by some hired agents of an absentee owner, so frequently a failure?

The general answer to such questions is the following.

The essential quality of the successful closely held, smaller entrepreneurship, typically of between several to a hundred or so employees, lies in the cognitive qualities of the mind of the individual entrepreneur, or the relative handful of entrepreneurs and some among their key associates. These qualities of mind are of the same broad class as those of leading physical scientists. Often, the crucial entrepreneur is either a scientist himself, or relies on one or more key associates who are.

The preferred such entrepreneur would heed warnings from his accountant, if only in matters where the accountant’s non-productive role should be heeded, but would not be such a fool as to allow his accountant, or a Harvard Business School product, to run his business operations.

The effective entrepreneur operates on the basis of an evolving sense of some special function his enterprise could, or does perform within the society. He asks himself repeatedly, “What is it that my firm does which makes a contribution to the vitality of the national and world economy?” That contribution is some action which expresses power, as Plato, Leibniz, and Gauss define power, contrary to the opinion of Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, and accountants alike. That is the core of what might be termed his, or her “strategy for management.” His pride in performing not only a useful function for society, but one of relatively unique importance, is the underlying basis for the best entrepreneur’s strategy of management. His successors are, unfortunately, more inclined to focus on “proven” accounting techniques of management, rather than protecting and developing the constantly changing function which makes the enterprise important to society. Often, as a result of that unfortunate shift, the enterprise fails, either only relatively, or absolutely. The successors are, all too often, would-be imitators of the “big boys,” the large corporations.

In the Soviet case, the contrasted performance of the military-scientific and civil-economic functions shows the same principle in a slightly different way. In earlier decades, when I worked as a management consultant, I was fascinated with the Soviet literature’s documentation of similarities of bureaucratic blunders in Soviet state-owned enterprises to the typical sources of fatal or near-fatal decadence in once-lively U.S. business enterprises. In the typical such case, the decadence of the enterprise reflected a cost-and-profit-conscious management’s desire to maintain profits by curtailing the costs of preventing technological attrition. The attrition took such forms as decadence in production technologies, in failing to adapt to qualitative technological changes in markets, or in failing to recognize that the enterprise must adapt to a new market, or new kind of market. Usually, it was the tragically Hamlet-like successors of the enterprise’s founder, and their accountants, who were more prone to such cost-conscious follies of bookkeeping.

The secret of competent entrepreneurship, is that what the entrepreneur risks is not his profits, but, rather, like the scientist in the frontier programs of the former Soviet scientific-military programs, puts himself on the line, staking his life on his ability to develop a technology, and to make it work.

From the beginnings of the U.S.A., the foundations of the U.S.’s economic and related resilience and its post-1861 development as the world’s leading model of economic power, focussed upon what I have just pointed out as the type of the true entrepreneur, especially the farmer and manufacturer. The development of basic economic infrastructure proceeded as Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s 1791 Report to the U.S. Congress On the Subject of Manufactures argued. The decline of the role of the science-oriented entrepreneur, focussed upon some function for the economy at large, and the replacement of that entrepreneur by the increasingly decadent large corporation and foreign “out-source” has been a crucial factor in transforming the world’s leading producer, into the presently ruined economy.

It has been the specific advantage of the U.S. Constitutional system of political economy, that we did four things which are of immediate bearing on this discussion of entrepreneurship.

We provided large-scale basic economic infrastructure, for the population, for the land-area’s development, and to create the preconditions of opportunity for private entrepreneurship.
We fostered useful inventions, and protected the inventor more than the invention itself.
We defended entrepreneurship against the inhering, predatory impulses of both financier interest and the giant corporation.
Under our Constitution, we banned the subversion of our nation’s sovereignty by the existence of so-called “independent” central banking systems, especially those of the Neo-Venetian Anglo-Dutch Liberal model.

We have too rarely lived up to those principles, but when we did, they served us well.

The structural features discussed in the preceding paragraphs, are all focussed upon an essential division between the role of the individual mind in discovering and deploying universal physical principles, and the development of both the general land-area and population in accord with the requirements of those expressions of scientific-technological progress which foster increases of the potential relative population-density of the combined land-area and population as a whole.

This set of relationships within policy-shaping, must be aimed to effect a Riemannian development of the creative mental powers of present and future generations. It is through the Riemannian anti-entropy represented by the accumulation of discovered and deployed universal physical principles, that true economic growth is made sustainable. That margin of physically defined growth is the only true measure of gains in national income, and, therefore, also in the profits expressed by the work of individual enterprises.

In this configuration for physical-economic growth, the general changes, as in public infrastructure, have the relatively greatest effect in increasing the productive powers of labor. The development of basic economic infrastructure to this intended effect, changes the physical geometry of the domain in which the private enterprise, and the individual person operates. That change in the physical geometry of that environment, effected largely through public maintenance of and improvements of infrastructures, is the principle source of increase of productivity within the society/economy as a whole. However, the continued success of that process relies upon the continuing contributions of individual minds of discoverers and upon private entrepreneurs who meet the standard implied by summary of the case here.

However, a word of warning must be added. We can not predict precisely how much benefit will be derived from the application of a newly discovered, or newly adopted universal physical principle. The gain in anti-entropy assumes what Riemannian physical geometry identifies as a characteristic curvature of the entire system which includes this added feature. That value can not be simply calculated a priori; as Riemann warned, it must be determined in practice, as is the case for all matters of real-life physical science. We know only, that things will go better. If the gain were less than we have hoped, then add a new discovery, and continue to add new such discoveries until the desired gain is realized experimentally.

2.
Social Systems: Prometheus
vs. Apollo and Dionysus

In the preceding chapter, we have focussed upon the situation defined by the role of the relationship between, on the one side, science and the individual thinker, and, on the other side, the changes needed for the development of society. Now, we shift the emphasis in our report, to the reciprocal functions associated with the social process of development of the thinking individual, to the subject of “Promethean man.” By “Promethean man,” we should signify winning the cause of man’s freedom from the inhuman tyranny characteristic of pantheistic oligarchies, such as that of the pagan gods of Olympus and the Pythian Apollo cult of Delphi; we defend, for example, the Mosaic, and also Christian principle of man in that image of the Creator of the universe.⁴⁰

Therefore, we also signify the topic of those self-inflicted follies by which corrupt societies degrade man to a condition which is less than himself, as, for example, in most contemporary U.S. education, and the recent several decades’ so-called “popular culture” generally.

In this report thus far, we have considered the nature of individual man as located, essentially, within what Gauss pointed out as that complex domain for which sense-perception is a world of shadows. In that portrait, we have considered each person as an individual possessed, potentially, with those cognitive powers of individual discovery, by means of which man’s power to exist within the universe are increased. That left more or less unstated the way in which a society might be enabled to govern itself according to that conscious awareness of the conception of cognitive man implicit in the physical geometry of Plato, Cusa, Leonardo, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann.

Now, we ask: How might society, as society, be enabled to see itself as a society of a Platonic form of cognitive species, rather than as if a species which includes some individually clever apes among, perhaps a Nashville Agrarian tribe of higher apes, a tribe which reacts, usually, as it were, as Frederick Engels’ species of sense-certainty-bound apes, or, as the existentialist Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger insisted? Or tribes which might have been, as the utopian circles of H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, et al. proposed, “thrown” into an alien universe as more or less feral creatures of no intrinsic morality, wretches like Heidegger’s cronies, Jaspers, Adorno, and Hannah Arendt, feral creatures with neither sense of, nor desire for knowable truth?⁴¹

How were it possible, that entire societies might consider themselves as that superior species Plato’s principle of hypothesis implies, and therefore act as such a species, rather than an ape-like clan with the advantage of a few egregiously clever individual intellects among them? In other words, how might social processes be developed, by means of which society, as society, reacts according to a shared conception of man as a cognitive being reigning over nature by means of the cognitive powers expressed by Gauss’s 1799 devastating attack on the incompetence shared among Euler, Lagrange, et al.?

Do there exist discoverable principles of social relations by means of which society might see itself, as society, as the minds of the greatest discoverers in physical science reveal see the true nature of man’s relation to the universe, as in their discovery of universal physical principles? Can society willfully control itself by the recognition that it is a society efficiently unified in its self-conception as the species of Promethean man? Given the great achievements of the Classical tradition of physical science, can society show a quality of insight into the nature of society itself comparable to that which the greatest individual scientific discoverers have shown toward the universe in which our species is situated? What are the faults which tend to lead us into the kinds of relative depravity and ruin which afflict society, most notably the U.S.A. itself, today? What is the cure of such faults?

For example. Few people today realize, that the acquired habits of modes of speaking and punctuation, which have become accepted among post-war generations of secondary-school and university graduates, like the induced fad of “up-talk,” cripple the victim’s ability to formulate the prose expression of important types of ideas. The relative suppression of the most essential, cognitive function of the comma from written speech, is typical of the virtual inability of the contemporary popular writer to express important classes of ideas in a rational way.⁴²

For this crippling of several post-war U.S. generations, the New York Times, like the literati among the Nashville Agrarians generally, must bear much of the blame. Often, in working even with people of the post-World War II generations who have developed reasonably good minds, I have seen that their ability to focus upon important classes of ideas, is crippled by their conditioning by speaking and writing habits which actually prevent them from formulating important classes of ideas which they were otherwise capable of comprehending.

Of this, it might be said: Illiteracy afflicting the intestine of speech backs up, and thus stops the digestive channels needed for expressing what Percy Shelley classed as “profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.” It is not the choice of rules of punctuation, and so forth, in and of themselves, which renders spoken or written speech literate; it is the submission of style to the requirements of cognitive forms of ideas being expressed, which imposes forms of effective communication of actual ideas upon whatever previously habituated customs had dictated. All communication of significant ideas depends absolutely on those violations of custom known by the names of irony and metaphor. Therefore, a person who thinks clearly, and has worthwhile new ideas to convey, will compose as Shakespeare composed, tending to punctuate effectively, but in apparent violation of sterile rules of style. A person who puts accustomed formal rules of style, such as punctuation, first, will suffer a corresponding loss of ability to think clearly about important ideas. On this account, the New York Times’ style book might be justly tried on charges of menticide.

Hence, it is the conventions of oral and written literary style and interpretation adopted by universities and other relevant institutions, which have virtually destroyed the ability of educated strata to compose, or write important poetry of a Classical quality. Thus, the modes of written and spoken style taught in leading universities, might be usefully classified as either “neo-archaic,” or the “fractured neo-archaic” typified by the advertising writer or rock-concert fan.

True literacy of spoken and written communication, is a right of every child which only a contemptible national culture would deny. As Frederick Douglass would agree, to speak of “democracy” and political “equality,” without providing all of the young mandatory access to true literacy, is a practice of slavery of the mind more valuable to tyrants than shackles on the slave’s hands.

Just as the reductionist methods which Gauss attacked in the follies of Euler and Lagrange, spoil the capacity for scientific insight into physical science, so the lack of insight into cognitively literate use of uttered poetry and prose, impairs the potential of nations and cultures to survive the kind of existential menace now threatening civilization.

The importance of these issues for political-economy today, can be recognized most immediately from recognizing certain broader implications of the way in which the same follies which Gauss exposed in the work of Euler and Lagrange, are at work: follies which cripple the cognitive powers of the mind in the communication of scientific professionals, and also the minds of political leaders today. The case of the addresses of Abraham Lincoln points to the contrast between his mind and the tragic loss of the power of communication of important classes of ideas today.

My recognition of the implications of this problem for a science of physical economy, has been a crucial aspect of all my successful contributions to the science of physical economy. A summary of the way in which I worked through these connections during the 1947-1953 interval, is therefore included as an unavoidable requirement in making the present report.

The Prometheus Theme: Brunelleschi’s Cupola

An extended period of convalescence, during 1953, gave me the enforced leisure which I devoted largely to a tying up and summing up, and also some debriding, of the work done, in scattered clumps, over the 1947-1952 interval. In addition to settling accounts with the relevant essentials of my references to the work of Riemann and Georg Cantor, I composed an argument on the theme of Percy Shelley’s “In Defence of Poetry,” a piece which, together with Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Shakespeare, I had already, since adolescence, regarded as expressing a world-outlook on the proper use of the English language, an outlook most closely akin to my own. Such reflections on the use of language had been brought into focus by a critical study, in 1947, of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, whose topics I examined critically against the related role of Classical music’s function in a more strict approach to the subtler, but crucial cognitive functions of English prosody. I am not a follower of Empson’s doctrine, but I owe him much for what he provoked in me.

During that 1953 concentration on these matters, I virtually completed that notion of the functional integration of the principles of so-called physical science and principles of anti-modernist Classical artistic composition, which has remained the kernel of my intellectual life and work since. That integration defines the systemic features of this present chapter. That integration defines my conception of “Promethean man,” as distinct from such explicitly asocial figures as either the legendary Cyclops, or the mis-beknighted “Sir” Alan Greenspan’s Ayn Rand.

The notable included result of that focus on the special cognitive functions of prosody in general, and poetry in particular, was a leading feature of my development of the second set of principled features of my discoveries in the science of physical economy.

In 1953, provoked partly by my still resonating anger against objectionable assertions made earlier by conductor Bruno Walter, in a broadcast radio interview, I crafted a case for the Promethean world-outlook in Classical artistic composition, against the contending, pro-existentialist view, expressed by Walter in that interview, that Brahms was an Apollonian and Beethoven, by contrast, a Dionysian.⁴³ What Walter had said in that interview, went against my whole being, so to speak; it rankled. I had correlated my reaction against Walter’s remarks with the ringing effects of my first hearing, in early 1946, of a recorded performance of Tchaikovsky, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, and also the experience, later, of a startling recorded performance, by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, of Brahms’ Vier Ernste Gesänge hymns. Both of these latter recorded musical performances corresponded to, and greatly improved my insight into the functions of prosody in the communication of a Platonic quality of ideas.

What I have meant, since 1947-1953, by “Promethean,” as defined afresh within this chapter, is already elaborated, if not by that name, within the preceding chapter of this report. As have said over these decades, in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, as in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the image of Prometheus, as the enemy of both the Pythian Apollo and Dionysus, signifies the Mosaic doctrine, of man and woman made equally in the image of the Creator, and thus endowed naturally with dominion (and corresponding responsibilities for care) over all else in the universe. It is the denial of man’s access to knowledge of and right to practice scientific-technological progress, as the infamous Roman Imperial code of Diocletian does implicitly, which is the satanic-like evil inhering in the tyranny by the Olympian gods. The conception of man as implicitly Promethean, expresses the conception of eternity, God, and man in the Gospel of John, and in Brahms’ presentation of the Christian Platonic conception of agape from 1 Corinthians 13, in the fourth of his Vier Ernste Gesänge.⁴⁴ A science of culture could not exist on any different basis than that definition of man’s nature and destiny as Promethean.

These and related considerations afforded me an insight into the proper apprehension of a principle of truth underlying all that is justly recognized as Classical principles of artistic composition. By this I mean truth in the same sense I have upheld the truthfulness of Gauss’s attacks on the falsehood intrinsic to the reductionist ideological method of Antonio Conti followers Euler and Lagrange. This is to point out, and emphasize, that the issue of truthfulness is even more an issue of method than of isolated particular facts.

One might say, for example: “The method is the man.” A man may be regarded as a liar, not merely on the basis of a list of his imitations of those displays of that reckless disregard for truth typical of our leading news and entertainment media. That man’s method is a lie, because it is a method which generates false conclusions. So, similarly, the existence of truth in art lies, essentially within the domain of method, in the same sense that the method of Leibniz, Gauss, Riemann, et al., is inherently truthful, whereas the reductionist method of Euler, Lagrange, et al., is inherently false.

This equivalence of the issue of truthful method, is related to factual truthfulness in a specifically crucial way: the issue of historical truth.

More simply seen, as in the contrast of Kepler to Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, and Galileo, a truthful method of mathematical physics, if done from the standpoint of the Socratic method of hypothesis, produces a truthful history of science, whereas a contrary method produces a falsified history of science.

The same is true, as I shall emphasize in this chapter, of the role of principles of Classical methods of composition in art. The same is as true of the method with which we speak, as much as what we say in particular. Thus, we may say that the properly identified Classical methods of composition in music, those which Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms derived chiefly from J.S. Bach, are truthful, whereas those Romantics who parodied the Classical more or less skillfully or badly, such as Liszt, Berlioz, and Wagner, produced untruthful art.

Once a self-disciplined, reflective individual mind, has considered the determining role of the individual’s progress in scientific progress on the development of the condition of society, the issue becomes that of the character of the available choices among social processes, choices which variously foster, delimit, or frustrate the realization of the benefits implied in scientific progress. The moral and physical decadence of the Americas and Europe, which was largely driven by the post-1964 eruption of Dionysian decadence of such forms as the “rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture,” is merely typical of the way in which once relatively healthy cultures plunge into self-inflicted slides toward ultimate, self-inflicted doom. Culturally, the “rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture” was an implicitly satanic orgy of degenerates who had chosen to live a lie.

Thus, the history of science becomes inseparable from its dependence upon the practice of a needed science of history. The only possible form of the required connection between the two, is to be found, as I shall now show once more, in the principles of Classical artistic composition. The question of truth in art, which can be found only in Classical art, and not Romantic or sundry varieties of “modernism,” becomes for us, then, the basis for comprehension of the history of science, and the science of social processes of society. It is essential for saving European civilization from today’s systemic collapse, that that case be argued, as I do here.

This connection is illustrated with exemplary appropriateness by a case I have often referenced since 1988, the lesson to be adduced from Brunelleschi’s successful construction of the famous cupola of the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral of Florence. I continue to emphasize that example, not merely because I succeeded, during 1987-88, in rediscovering a principle which Brunelleschi had used, with his foreknowledge of its success, in effecting a process of construction which had been thought physically impossible. The principle he used to secure that success, was the same catenary principle which Leibniz, more than two centuries later, was first to identify as the expression of the universal principle of physical least action. Here, art and science were the same principle. The otherwise impossible process of construction so effected, was a demonstration of the principle of truth expressed equally as a principle of truth in the triumph of Christian Platonic science and art, over the false, pantheonic tradition and symbols of Latin Romanticism.

Leibniz’s principle of least action, which is the basis for Leibniz’s discovery of natural logarithms, is expressed by the catenary function, which is the physical curve of “the hanging chain,” caused by physical action. This curve was reflected in ancient, pre-Roman Classical Greek sculpture as the principle of continuing motion caught in a midstream moment, as John Keats calls our attention to this equivalence of truth and beauty in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Once again: Truth is a matter of method! In this case, the cupola, truth as a method of art, and truth as uniquely a method of physical principle for successful construction, coincide. To succeed in sculpting a figure caught in mid-motion, the mind of the sculptor must feel the impact of what Leibniz defined as a universal physical principle of least action, just as Brunelleschi settled upon the use of the catenary, in the form of a hanging chain, a form of matter in motion even when it appears stilled, to enable the process of constructing the double wall of the cupola. The point was not that the finished cupola reflected the catenary form, but that the ability to construct those walls depended upon the principle of action expressed during each and every momentary phase of the ongoing process of construction of the still yet-to-be-completed cupola.

The distinction I have just emphasized for the case of Brunelleschi’s accomplishment, is the same as that between the unscientific astronomy of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, and Galileo, and the principle of gravitation which keeps the planet in its non-uniform-motion orbit during each interval of that trajectory. The principle was not a matter of static stability taken statistically from moment to moment, but of an intention rooted not in the sense-perceptual fantasies of empiricists’ “ivory tower” fantasies, but rooted in an intention acting efficiently, as a universal physical principle, from the unseen domain from which all universal physical principles exert their tyranny over the shadowy illusions of simple sense-certainty. In Classical art, as in physical science, a principle is an intention to move, a Platonic power, which governs the movement which it, acting as a universal principle from within the complex domain, effects as the result adumbrated as experienced in the domain of sense-perception.

Such are the Classical principles of truthful architecture, sculpture, and painting, as Leonardo da Vinci’s, Raphael Sanzio’s, and Rembrandt’s masterpieces attest. The same is true of J.S. Bach’s discovery of well-tempered counterpoint, which is the basis for all truthfully Classical composition and its performance. Thus, to shallow-minded thinkers, Classical art may appear to be merely a choice of entertainment. It is actually a kind of spiritual exercise, as Plato’s Socratic dialogues are, by aid of which the mind is rehearsed in the methods of effectively truthful communication of important ideas. Brunelleschi’s successful approach to constructing the cupola, as interchangeably a work of art and science at the same time, is an appropriate illustration of my point. So is Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound.

Prometheus and the Sublime

Friedrich Schiller has shown the difference between the tragic and the sublime, far more clearly than any other modern dramatist or historian. For that reason, during recent years, I have used the comparison of the cases of Schiller’s Jeanne d’Arc and Shakespeare’s Hamlet repeatedly, to point to the historical principle underlying the typical failures of leading political and other influential figures, most notably leading political figures of today. My repeated use of the case of Hamlet for this purpose, in lectures and writings, dates from Spring 1994. More recent acquisition of several among the documented histories of the Jeanne d’Arc case, gave me the confidence to employ a comparison of the historical Jeanne d’Arc to Shakespeare’s character of Hamlet, repeatedly, during recent years, as a better way of showing the nature of today’s real-life issue of the tragic principle versus the sublime.

The formulation of the concept I have illustrated by those references, date from my work done during the referenced 1952-1953 interval of convalescence. To indicate then the principle which I came to recognize much later as Schiller’s concept of the Sublime, my 1952-53 references were chiefly my critical view of Goethe’s Prometheus, and a study of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound from the vantage-point of Shelley’s In Defence of Poetry. So, during 1953, I situated “Promethean man” as a type within the kind of universe implied by Riemannian physical geometry.⁴⁵

If on no other grounds than the implications of Hamlet’s Third Act soliloquy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet should remain forever a foremost figure of reflection by present and future historians. Hamlet’s crucial fear, clearly stated there, is fear of immortality: not fear that there is no immortality, but terror of the thought that he might be confronted with its actuality. So, all existentialists and similar cowards, such as swashbuckling professional warriors, flee into the passion of the momentarily living present, mortal moment, and present popular opinion, hoping thus to dull the excruciatingly painful sensibility that death will not purge them of accountability for what they either do, or fail to do, in the present mortal moment.

Shakespeare concludes the drama with the corpse of Hamlet being borne off stage, while Fortinbras rallies the survivors to continue the same popular folly. Hamlet’s friend speaks his soliloquy to the English theater’s audience: let us pause, to learn the lesson of this catastrophe while the events leading to this catastrophe are fresh memory.

The lesson of this case is, you, as a living mortal person, are personally responsible for the future of mankind, something for which the future would justly hold memory of you accountable. You are also at least equally responsible, in the same manner and degree, for what you have failed to do as an act of justice toward the lives of earlier generations, the responsibility to make right now, what should have been made right then.

Take the case of Christ’s Crucifixion, but find the same principle expressed by the case of the simple farm girl, Jeanne d’Arc: her mission, which made possible the subsequent existence of the first sovereign nation-state, Louis XI’s France, and which was a source of inspiration to the Church and other forces of the Fifteenth-century Renaissance. Her devotion to immortality realized in that degree, the aspirations of those in France and elsewhere, who had suffered so much at the hands of Venice and its Norman-Plantagenet-Anjou tools, and contributed mightily to the existence of the modern nation-state founded under the leadership of Benjamin Franklin.

Contrast her nobility to the case of poor, contemptible Hamlet, who traded away his soul for the sake of service to the corrupt popular opinion among the ruling circles of legendary Denmark in that time. How many modern “Hamlets” are there among the would-be misleaders of our nation, and others, today?

These are noble notions from political history and Classical art, but they are also notions rooted in the notion of physical science associated with Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss’s 1799 paper, and Riemann’s physical geometry. Two points are thus implied. These are, in brief, as follows. First, these notions belong to a domain beyond a poor mere animal’s naive faith in simple sense-certainty; they lie in Gauss’s complex domain as I have addressed that subject, from a Platonic standpoint here. Second, as a consequence of man’s power for accumulating experimentally valid universal physical principles, social relations within the realm of humanity as a whole, humanity past, present, and future, are integrated into what some theologians have defined as “a simultaneity of eternity.” I explain this conception.

If we think of the history of man as ordered according to an accumulation of discovered universal physical principles, and think of this in terms of a Riemannian geometry like that I have described earlier in this report, we can grasp the universe as a whole, past, present, and future, as a physical space-time, as if instantaneously. All events within that space-time exist simultaneously. In place of clock-time, or the lock, we have a sense of direction, a notion we might subsume under the label of “development.” The notion of “development” is that of a Riemannian hyper-geometry so described.

In this physical-space-time, relations are not defined in terms of sense-impressions, but, rather, in terms of functional relations among universal physical principles. This is physical-space-time composed of three, multiply-connected phase-spaces, as I have reported above. We assume, as a matter of limiting ourselves to knowledge to date, that the total array of principles in the first abiotic phase-spaces is fixed, but that the development of subordinate universal principles is not fixed. When we add the universal physical principle which corresponds to life, the self-development of that phase-space acts upon the abiotic as well as internally upon itself. The introduction of the notion of a cognitive principle, Vernadsky’s noësis, operates similarly with respect to both the abiotic and living phase-spaces.

As I have underlined this point above, the discovery by mankind of any universal principle from any among the three phase-spaces, changes the universe by the discovery of a conscious principle of creative intervention into the whole universe by mankind.

In this wonderful simultaneity of eternity, with all such beautiful development under way, the mortal existence of each of us occupies an immortal place. In this eternity, we act within the relatively small place which is our mortal life; but, in the larger domain, that form of action associated with the discovery and development of universal physical principles reaches beyond mortality into the relative past and future of mankind.

We know this each time we re-enact the living thought of the first known discovery of a universal physical principle centuries or millennia ago. The scientist or Classical artist who relives such thoughts has an efficient personal relationship to the original discoverer, and the relevant original discoverer now acts upon the society of our own present time, on the basis of our cognitive relationship to them.

Pause here for a moment. Take the case of the contemporary musician who performs a composition by J.S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, or Brahms. For the purposes of this discussion, we should limit ourselves to the works of composers who have a thorough commitment to the kind of well-tempered counterpoint implicit in the application of a Florentine bel canto mode of expression for both human voice and other instruments, and whose intent is to compose works which represent the development of a single musical idea, from the breath a moment before the first tone is sounded, until the breath or two of silence following the final tone. In such a case, one can not play the score; once must perform the composition as an integrated process of development, and as nothing less, nor more. The object of the musician is to mediate the direct relationship between the creative mind of the composer and the minds of both performers and audience.

In Classical music, these connections are implicit in the ABC’s of a well-tempered counterpoint agreeable to the singer of a Florentine model of bel canto voice-training, and also to the instrumental performer who imposes the conception of the bel canto singing voice on the behavior of the instrument. When a work so composed in the mind of a Classical composer is copied to a score, something essential is lost in print, but not necessarily irreparably. The score must be, so to speak, “decoded,” to discover the original musical intent of the composer. Thus, the qualified performer relives, in one degree or another, the cognitive processes of discovery of the composer, and thus comes to know, at least approximately, the mind of the composer as if to relive his or her mind’s processes in the original composition.

This same point can, and should be made in a second way. In Classical poetry or music, the idea which generates the composition precedes the development of the composition. It were as if the entire composition burst into existence in the concentrated form of a single act of thought. After that, the composer is gripped by a relentless passion to elaborate that single burst of thought as a worked-out composition. The performer approaches a score attempting to evoke that “burst of thought” which had prompted and guided the elaboration of the relevant composition.

This principle, so illustrated here, is the characteristic feature of all forms of great Classical composition and of their intended relationship to contemporary and future audiences. This expresses the “spiritual” quality of all great Classical art; this strictly defines the meaning of Classical art.

This quality of relationship between the Classical composer and the audience typifies the concept associated with my use of the term Sublime. Great Classical art resembles Classical scientific discovery in that it pertains to those powers which exist behind the shadow-world of sense-perception. Classical scientific discovery is also social; but, the subject of science is, primarily, the relationship of the individual cognitive mind to the universe at large. With Classical art, the subject of the noëtic processes, is the relationship among cognitive powers of minds, as such.

To situate the subject of Prometheus, recall that the concept of Prometheus as a case of the Sublime, is primarily associated historically with the relevant dramas of Aeschylus and Shelley.

What Are Human Relations?

The elementary expression of human relations, is the process by which one person provokes, intentionally, in another, that act of (Platonic) hypothesizing, by means of which the other recreates the idea called an experimentally valid universal physical principle in his or her mind. On this account, there is but one significant distinction between Classical science and Classical art. In the first case, the subject of the transaction is a principle of man’s relationship to the abiotic domain and Biosphere. In the second case, the subject of the transaction is the act of hypothesizing among persons.

Classical drama is a suitable illustration of the second case. Tragedy, especially tragedy which situates the concept of the Sublime, is the most rigorous expression of Classical drama.

The characteristic subject of tragedy, is the self-destruction of a society at the hand of its own culture, as, for example, by its own prevalent popular opinion. The more typical tragedy is, like Schiller’s Don Carlos or Wallenstein, that in which the leading figures of the drama represent the common folly of the culture and those leaders who, in various ways, act out the situation in accord with that culture’s prevalent customs. These more typical cases are contrasted with the cases of Aeschylus’s and Shelley’s Prometheus, and the historical Jeanne d’Arc.

The importance of Classical tragedy for the study of the principles of history, arises from posing the challenge of hypothesis as a life-death issue for the nation or group of cultures considered. The quality of the playwright’s (and, also, the performing company’s delivery), is to be adduced from the degree to which the issue of the relevant hypothesis is presented to the audiences in ways which make the experiencing of the relevant paradoxes and hypotheses a moving one. As Schiller demanded: The spectators must depart the theater, at the conclusion of the performance, better people than had entered it.

Better does not mean learned, or reenforced obedience to some set of rules; rather, as in Paul’s 1 Corinthians 13, as for the Socrates of Plato’s Republic, better means agape (i.e., the General Welfare, the common good). So, the audience leaving the performances of the Wallenstein trilogy, should have a warm appreciation of the influence of France’s Cardinal Mazarin in bringing about that adoption of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The object of Classical drama is not “happy endings” for the characters in the play, but for the audience which grasps the hypothesis posed.

For related reasons, all great drama is based upon a valid conception of either a dramatic paradox posed by actual history, or a plausible legend which functions as a real history might.

All valid and important Classical poetry, and of Classical-musical setting of poetry to song, is governed by the same role of hypothesis. Good Classical prose aims for the same result.

To serve those same ends as great Classical tragedy, art must employ the same tools of irony and metaphor which are the essential features of hypothesizing in physical science. For example, on the stage, or delivery of Classical poetry, the methods of Florentine-modelled bel canto singing-voice training are essential, or, the methods used by conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. The element of surprise, as otherwise typified by irony and metaphor, must free the mind from a literal hearing of the passage, to hear the paradoxical elements on which the prompting of hypothesizing depends.

The subject of Classical art, is always the hypothesizing of human relations. By such art, a human cry can be heard across intervening millennia. The message is always the same: “We are all, in this way, essentially immortal.”

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Footnotes

33. Power equals work on that real universe which exists beyond the shadow domain of mere sense-perception.

34. The misreading, by Clausius et al., of the celebrated work of the Ecole Polytechnique’s Sadi Carnot, is the result of that practice of fallacy of composition of the evidence specific to the reductionist methods of the empiricists, including the positivists generally. After Fermat’s introduction of the concept of quickest pathway of action, rather than Euclidean shortest distance, that further work by Huyghens, Leibniz, Bernouilli, et al., leading to both Leibniz’s universal physical-geometric principle of least action, and the anti-Euclidean physical geometries of Gauss, Weber (for electromagnetism), Riemann, et al., we must regard the continued effort of any relevant professional to locate the elementary principles of action within implicitly Cartesian spaces, as tantamount to fraudulent recklessness. Thus, energetic effects are to be mapped as results of actions within that specific, anti-Euclidean physical-space-time geometry within which the supposedly elementary action occurs. Since this requirement was well known since the relevant work of Gauss, Weber, Dirichlet, and Riemann, there was no excuse for that purely arbitrary, ideological error of the reductionist which was typified by such collaborators of Kelvin as Clausius and Grassmann. As J. Clerk Maxwell conceded his own stubbornly intentional subscription to that “Cartesian” fallacy of composition, when challenged for his omission of his work’s debt to the preceding discoveries of Gauss, Weber, and Riemann, he replied that “we” have refused to acknowledge the existence of “any geometries but our own” Cartesian tradition. The false claims for Hermite and Lindemann of the discovery of the transcendental and the inclusion of “pi,” as by Felix Klein, typify the same ideologically motivated form of elementary disregard for truth. Notably those false claims by such reductionists were premised on the fraud of Euler’s ideological fanaticism, as expressed in Euler’s 1761 Letters to a German Princess. The lunatic Ernst Mach and such followers of Bertrand Russell as Wiener and von Neumann exhibit frauds born of those reductionists’ ideological fanaticism, but carried to an extreme.

35. It is unfortunate, that many teachers, and also students, fall victim to the purely neurotic reflex of insisting that the term they have just adopted is also the “last word” in scientific knowledge. So, the neurotic Lord Kaldor allowed himself to be so deluded by John von Neumann’s clever, but fraudulent claim to explain almost everything about economics, and legions of neurotic fools have been duped by the ostensible cleverness of Professor Norbert Wiener’s sophistry in arguing for “information theory.” “Oh, I know all about that,” is a typical symptom that we are dealing with neurotic fool, one who, perhaps, “just looked it up on the internet.” Knowledge is never a “final event” in a chain, but an ongoing process, a process which increases, rather than diminishes the number of questions yet to be answered.

36. This was the principle, of De docta ignorantia, on which modern experimental science was founded by Nicolaus of Cusa.

37. This distinction, as a broad distinction between the imperial tradition of, for example, Venice’s alliance with its Norman partners, and the sovereign nation-state, is implied by the referenced work of von der Heydte, and, to a lesser degree by others, but the scientific economic definition of the crucial historic change to actually sovereign nations, has been, chiefly, my own work.

38. Admittedly, both the Hapsburg systems of Spain and Austro-Hungary, and the parliamentary systems built according to the Anglo-Dutch Liberal paradigm, are in violation of, and hostile to these republican constitutional principles. Two central points are to be emphasized on this account. First, the post-Fifteenth-century Hapsburg institutions, and their like, existed within the historical setting of the modern European civilization they struggled to destroy, as through the religious and related warfare of the 1511-1648 interval, and, later, through the decline and fall of Prince Metternich’s Austro-Hungary. The role of the Habsburg’s chief rivals, France and the Anglo-Dutch Liberal model, was similarly situated. Second, the character of the globally extended influence of the modern European civilization set into motion by the Renaissance, is defined by the failure of the Habsburgs, and then the Anglo-Dutch Liberals so far, to crush the institutions of sovereignty and scientific-technological progress. The challenge of sovereign states’ resistance to the London-led form of utopian, heathen form of new Roman world empire according to the Venice financier-oligarchical model, still entraps the opponents of the modern state in a world defined by that which the heathen oligarchical followers of H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell are attempting to destroy, still today. Europe’s long toleration of obscenities such as the Habsburg/Hapsburg systems, and also the Venice-modelled Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, are illustrations of the principle of Classical tragedy. E.g., Shakespeare’s Hamlet “failed” for two reasons. Primarily the “rotten Denmark” depicted by Shakespeare, and, only secondly, the failure of Hamlet to reject the folly of that national culture. Hamlet’s specific folly, as expressed by the famous Third Act soliloquy, was his fear, not of death, but of what might come to him after he had “shuffled off the mortal coil,” his fear of immortality. So, Jeanne d’Arc was a sublime, rather than tragic figure, because she was capable of doing what was necessary to change her corrupt society without fear of immortality. Thus, overriding devotion to the effects one contributes to the future, as if in the image of Christ, is the mark of the sublime, the mark of the figure qualified to lead society, and to govern it. Solon would have agreed with that.

39. Typical, in the extreme, are the arguments of Frederick Engels, respecting “the horny hand of labor,” his ludicrously incompetent allusions to the “opposable thumb,” and his and Social Democrat Franz Mehring’s rabidly philistine hatred against the German Classical renaissance of Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, et al. Also typical of sources of incompetence similar to the follies of Engels, are the spread of anti-intellectual “workerist” cults within the Communist Party U.S.A. and the effect of Leon Trotsky’s pro-anarcho-syndicalist and pro-Benthamite leanings on the self-inflicted intellectual and moral decay of the Trotskyist movement internationally. The shallow superficiality and related intellectual dilettantism of these movements’ pompous leaders, led, more or less inevitably, to their political, as well as moral bankruptcy, and the subsequent easier takeover of such pathetic organizations by political-police agents, such as the U.S. FBI. In the case of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov’s passage from Hungary, via the connections to Cambridge’s Lord Kaldor, to head of the KGB and Soviet General Secretary, smug cleverness by philosophically shallow-minded, “what’s my line?” careerists, created the situation in which the Soviet system was incapable of saving itself from its own follies. When dogma becomes a substitute for science, the frequent result is an increasing labile flight from dogma to dogma, to doom.

40. According to the legend, Apollo came upon an ancient pagan grotto site, Delphi, which was then devoted to the worship of the Earth Mother and her son-lover, the snake-god Python. Apollo slew Python, chopped him into segments, and buried the remains; but, then, fell into a fit of remorse. Apollo apologized, presumably tearfully, to the Earth Mother, and established the grave-site of Python as the Temple of Apollo, in that international center of usury known as Delphi. On one side of the grave-site, sat a priestess, known by the title of Pythia, who, relative to the fee paid, would reply to questions put, by either plucking stones from an urn, or, for a higher price, babbled nonsensical riddles which were then interpreted, for a price, by the priests of Apollo seated in the first row of places for visitors, on the opposite side of the grave-site. Plutarch, dating from the time of the Roman Empire, is today the most famous of those priests of Apollo. (According to some certified accounts, the rape of the young priestess filling the role of Pythia, led to the prudent substitution of old crones for the role. A charming sort of religious worship was, obviously, being practiced there.) The British, in the footsteps of Lord Shelburne’s Gibbon, and kindred worshippers of the pantheon of the heathen Roman Empire, uphold the Apollo cult as their preference over Christianity, Judaism, and Islam today. Dionysus is a synonym for the cult of Python today. Hence, the efforts of decadent Romantic cultural currents of modern Europe to insist, as Bruno Walter did, upon the duality of Apollo-Dionysus today. The Christian complement to the Mosaic principle, is essentially that emphasized in the Gospel of John.

41. For a relevant confession of this bitter aversion to truthfulness by the existentialist cronies of Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arendt, et al., see Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950). The collection of persons in today’s U.S.A. who have embraced Arendt’s dogma, are among the most degenerate found among so-called “intellectual circles” in the U.S.A. today. The Hudson Institute’s presently resident “geek act,” Laurent Murawiec, linked through Marc Rich’s organized-crime circles to Lewis Libby, and thus to Vice-President Cheney’s office, is rather typical of persons of fragile, or non-existent moral qualities, all so easily transformed into a moral degenerate of this specific type of Heidegger-associated existentialists Adorno and Arendt.

42. The insertion of the comma, by interrupting the run-on mind-flow of babbling of written text, challenges the reader to regard the passage preceding the comma as the integral antecedent of that which follows. For example, Shakespeare’s use of “the which,” following a comma, is often abbreviated by writing “which” after the comma. This should have two effects on the mind of the reader. First, to utter the statement so composed within one’s mind, one must think of the written text as merely the shadow of the relevant prosody to be uttered by the mind of the reader. In the prose of actually literate, thinking writers, one must adduce the intent of the passage by mentally singing the prosody, in an approximation of the Florentine bel canto appropriate for uttering (as if singing) a literate form of that language. The principle is the same as for performance of the Florentine bel canto of Bach counterpoint, such as the Well-Tempered Klavier: the keyboard must sing as a chorus. Habits of speech of university graduates from among U.S. Baby Boomers, for example, tend, therefore to stultify the mind of the speaker, aborting, thus, the capacity for communications of “profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.”

43. Walter did not make up that egregious blunder. He was following the standard existentialist line on Nietzsche and the “Frankfurt School” which was also popularized in the aggressively decadent, post-Brahms Vienna of Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud. Walter’s conducting of the second movement of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, as to be contrasted with the famous recorded performance under Wilhelm Furtwängler, was also among my grievances against him dated from a half-century ago.

44. For me, the most agreeable service to Brahms’ intent is found in comparing the somewhat different approach employed by Fischer-Dieskau and my recently departed friend Gertrude Pitzinger. Conductor Furtwängler’s sometimes referenced use of “performing between the notes,” is of the utmost relevance. One should not perform the score, unless the composition is one not worthy to be performed; one must perform the composer’s intention, which lurks in the score of any musical composition in the Classical genre of J.S. Bach’s creation of the foundations for all Classical musical composition from Haydn through Brahms, as opposed to the Romantic parodies of Classical composition. One must think of honorable Classical musical composition as expressing, as the Bach defended by Kästner does, an essentially Riemannian (e.g., anti-Euclidean) view of the musical-artistic universe.

45. To avoid misinterpretations, I shall note the following. It was during that period of 1952-53, that my concept of Shelley as a Promethean figure came together with the notion of a Riemannian universe. The adoption of the theme of Prometheus, and the influence of Shelley and Keats were already fully in progress during 1947-48.

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