How Hobbes’ Mathematics Misshaped Modern History

Fidelio, Vol.V ,No, 1. Spring 1996

Continued from Part I

The Clash of Future and Present

Examine this relationship between Good and Becoming once more. We have presented a summary of the relationship. This time, walk through the details of the process. This time, observe that valid ideas could not be generated in any other way, than coming to know an idea through this process.

The kernel of the Parmenides, is what is termed an ontological paradox: “Is primitive physical reality that which we locate primarily in that which corresponds to the images of sense-perceptions, isolated facts; or, is the efficient ordering of physical reality located in that which corresponds to an idea in the form of a Good?” True ideas are never built, brick by brick, on a deductive accumulation of facts. In collections of the type presented in the Parmenides, the mind forms an idea by considering the array of particulars, the “Many,” in a series. It experiences the collection to be considered, over a lapse of time. The idea which is developed respecting that collection—the “Many”—in its entirety, occurs within the place that the mind concludes the lapse of time employed for the scansion of the array.

Consider the case, that in the process of scanning an array of this type, the mind experiences no different reaction to the array as a whole, than it does to the first several examples within the collection. There is no experienced inconsistency, no change of valuation, no intellectual tension, in passing from the first several cases, to cases considered later. There is no indication that an idea must be generated; nothing appears to contradict the preestablished opinion respecting such subject-matters. It is the encounter with change, the proverbial, stubborn undeniability of the crucial-experimental “exception to the rule,” in passing among the terms of the collection, in lapsed-time succession, which demands the cognitive action leading toward the generation of a new idea. In this latter case, the situation is analogous to what we have summarily described for the case of a Classical strophic poem or comparable Classical musical composition.

The point being illustrated thus, is, that without the cognitive counterpoint of the Good and Becoming, no valid idea is generated. It is the intersection of the relative future, the relative Good, with the past, the relative Becoming in the process of Becoming the present, that the mind generates and recognizes those ideas which satisfy the quality of knowledge. It is the cognitive collision of future (Good) with past (Becoming), which defines that formal discontinuity, that singularity, which corresponds to a Platonic idea. It is that collision, that determination of a singularity, which marks a Platonic idea as an individual idea.

Remember that crucial point. Since a Platonic idea (e.g., a metaphor) comes into being without being bounded by reference to an individual sense-perception, how could a Platonic idea, lacking a particular sense-object of reference, have well-defined individuality? The notion of a horse, cow, leaf, dish, and so on, has individuality, because it pertains to, is assigned axiomatic correspondence with a sense-perception which has individuality. How is individuality achieved for ideas which have no such ties to individual sense-perceptions?

Remember, that this is no empty speculation, no marginal issue. Platonic ideas express the absolute difference which sets the individual member of the human species⁴⁰ absolutely apart from, and above all inferior species.

Were Platonic ideas not the controlling agency of opinion among intelligent, civilized persons, the human species would never have surpassed population-levels of several millions living individuals, nor life-expectancies much above adolescence, if that. Human existence depends upon classes of ideas—Platonic ideas—which are outside, above mere sense-perceptions. It is man's successful, revolutionary changes in that implicit hypothesis underlying any established patterns of behavioral responses, which enables mankind to improve the life-expectancy, and related demographic features of society, while also increasing man's physical power over nature, per capita, per household, and per square kilometer of our planet's surface.

It is the generation of increasingly powerful Platonic ideas, which is the characteristic distinction of the human species, of human society. The difference between the savage's perception of a rock, and civilized man's perception of the same object as “ore,” is not a difference in our sense-apparatus, but reflects the superiority of the creative cognitive powers of the human individual over the mere opinions of his, or her sense-perceptual apparatus. It is the development of the Platonic powers of ideas in the cultivated, creative mind, which instructs the mind in interpreting the stimulation of the senses. Even had an individual no senses at all, it were possible, in principle, for him, or her, to function efficiently in society as a genius.⁴¹

The idea of individuality itself exists, not as a locale within a continuum, but as the singularity generated where future embraces past, and that with tension. That individuality is not located in a “Euclidean point.” It is the characteristic of a region of physical space-time, in which the intervention of the future presently imposes a momentary discontinuity upon the past.

The significant question thus posed, is: How far into the past and future, does this region of individuality extend?

What I know, or anyone else, is the sum-total of those Platonic ideas I have either generated, as valid original discoveries of principle, or those Platonic ideas which I have regenerated as replications of the act of original discovery by others before me. My debt on account of the discoveries which I have explicitly relived reaches far back into history, to a time much earlier than Homer, Thales, Solon, Aeschylos, Socrates, and Plato. That far, my indebtedness for what I am today reaches deep into mankind's past. Each of us reaches forward in time, through the impact of the Platonic ideas we merely replicate and transmit, in addition to such valid original discoveries of principle as we have also contributed to our posterity. If our actions help society to survive, our actions reach far, far into the future of mankind's existence.

If the mortal limits of our existence reach so far into past and future, alike, in this way, how big are we? How might each of us estimate the breadth of that region of physical space-time which any one among us happens to occupy? Is there some “final judgment” of our historical existence, to be delivered at some future time, when the skein of our having existed might run out?

Forget infinity! It does not exist! Nor, is there a beginning of time, nor an end of it! Think of one's life as one might think of a Classical work of poetry or music. Our efficient individual existence is a metaphor, in the form of the Good; what the existence produces, as metaphor, is the timeless alpha and omega of our individual existence, as is the case for any great poem or musical composition. Just as a great discoverer's work of creative reason defines what we know of his, or her having lived, or a great creative artist, so it is for all of us. The lesson to be learned, is to enjoy the immortal Good of one's mortal life, and let that Good shape the developments which are the process of our becoming.

Goodness does not lie outside the world of physical space-time. Rather, the meaning of our brief, mortal, individual life is to convey the influence of Goodness into the process of development of physical space-time. That is the spirit, the underlying idea and motivation, of Classical art, and of science.

Classical music

Music can not be understood competently in any other way than its relationship to Classical forms of strophic poetry. On this account, we must find the following question exemplary.

Since Friedrich Schiller was the poet who moved Beethoven the most, why is Schiller's poetry not the more frequent subject of Beethoven's songs? Franz Schubert's views on music, like those of Beethoven, were shaped most significantly by Schiller's writings;⁴² why was he, relatively speaking, so unsuccessful in treating Schiller's poetry as subjects for his songs? To similar effect, Brahms, in his instructions to Jenner, advises Jenner to select strophic poems from relatively less powerful poets.⁴³ When the question was posed to Beethoven, he replied to the effect that the musicality of Schiller's poetry left little for the musical composer to do, that poetry whose musicality needed improvement by song were therefore more appropriate subject-matters. Hence, although Beethoven and Schubert regarded Bettina's Johann Goethe as a relatively inferior poet, and personality —relative to Schiller, it was from Goethe's poems, that Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert set some among their celebrated songs. Goethe's pathetic rejection of the musical settings of his poems by Mozart and Beethoven is brightly illustrative of the point; that case, thus, completes the picture.

The crux of the matter is this. The musicality of a poem is indispensable counterpoint to the metaphorical development of the verse's text. As Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert have demonstrated for the case of Goethe, few poets, even good ones, such as Goethe or P.B. Shelley, are entirely satisfactory on this account. Classical music is derived from this musicality of poetry, beginning as “songs without words,” and proceeding to pure counterpoint within the domain of musicality as such. Therefore, let it be understood, that one should not look for a symbolic or dramatic “meaning” in Classical musical compositions; look only for a musical meaning. This does not mean that Classical music lacks ideas; it signifies, that the ideas encountered are expressed as musical ideas, not mere translations of verbal ones into music.⁴⁴ Motivic thorough-composition is a relatively distilled expression of this principle of musicality.

For the purpose of this report, the following is sufficient explication of everything, on the subject of music, which needs to be added to our preceding review of poetry.

A musical motive by Mozart, Beethoven, or Brahms, is located in a germ composed of a pair of intervals. Many things may be said of this. Here, we need be occupied only with the strophic implications of the derivation of all essential material within a composition from such a pair of intervals. The purpose of rigorous regularity in art, is to provide for the unambiguous generation of a paradoxical anomaly, the paradox which demands the synthesis of a new hypothesis. That we might see the foolishness of existing order, we must expose the disorder inhering in its ruling principle; that our minds might distinguish such disorder, such irregularity, clearly, it must be set within the rigorous development of regularity. In music, this has been best accomplished by using a motivic pair of intervals to the same general purpose a series of strophes is the the commonest form of Classical poetry. By driving the motivic unfolding of counterpoint to its limits, and opening up new dimensionalities of consonant composition through resolution of the paradoxes so generated, the greatest relative density of musical ideas is achieved.

The characteristic feature of Classical music is great beauty blended with extreme intensity. This sense of beauty is associated with a quality which the New Testament's original Greek identifies by Agape, otherwise identified as that quality of Christian love emphasized by Paul's I Corinthians 13. It should not be difficult to recognize the significance of this quality of Agape from the play of happy children (usually, unfortunately, of pre-school age). Creative reason is not logical; it is loving; but, to balance matters off, logic is incapable of creative reason.⁴⁵ It is not uncommon among us, to speak of a moment of valid insight into a new principle (whether original to ourselves, or the reexperience of a discovery made by another), as like a “light turning on in the mind.” This experience advises us, that there is an affective quality to creative reason, a quality absent in formal logic.

This affective quality is more readily placed, by comparing the experience of valid creative discoveries, to the love which parents experience through sharing the child's elation in successful insight, into a principle of constructive play (for example). Similarly, Christians sometimes identify agapic love by reference to God's love for mankind. True nurture of the children by the parents is rooted in the shared experience of Agape, which is, therefore, the parent's nurture of this agapic quality in themselves, as much as it is for their children.

Here, in Agape, the poet John Keats' truth and beauty are joined as one. The emotion, the motive of Classical music, especially the Motivführung of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, is this Agape. That agapic principle, is the Good of all Classical composition, that of J.S. Bach, and of all motivic thorough-composition of the great artists. It is that which supplies a religious quality to all Classical compositions in music. It is that agapic principle, the agapic idea of beauty, which guides both the great composer and the performer of his works. It is from that same principle that the spirit of science is derived.

So, does modern civilization depend upon the contributions of great Classical musical composition. Without it, for example, our churches would degenerate into centers for the paganism of dionysiac rock entertainment, and, as a modern Cotton Mather might write, our decadent contemporary civilization would disintegrate into a New (“Dark”) Age of virtual Nothing.

Science and Public Policy

In this light, consider briefly, in succession, three topics bearing on the determining impact of the academically popular, but pathetic ideas of continuity and causality upon the shaping of, and toleration of public policy: first, how the action of memory defines a scientific principle; second, the notion of scientific lawfulness as retrospection's insight into the future; and, third, memory as the source of our sense of responsibility toward our posterity. We have examined the proposition, that, not only is natural science Riemannian—in the sense of Riemann's habilitation dissertation, but that all Classical art is also premised upon the same principle. Now, consider these notions of the shared axiomatics of science and art as keys to the way in which societies choose the pathway to progress, or self-induced doom.

First, whenever an ineradicable singularity appears in a series of events, to the effect that the preexisting, relevant axiomatic assumptions are shown to be in error, the valid solution to that manifest error is a new hypothesis. In that moment, everything respecting the class of events represented by that series, must be reconsidered. The effect is analogous to the case in which the Classical performer realized that he had been shaping his performances of a certain composition by the wrong choice of metaphor; the entire composition must now be performed in a new way, according to a notion of the relevant Good consistent with the validated new discovery of principle. It is the same for natural science.

Second, in each instance of such a valid discovery of new axiomatic principle, we must consider not only the immediate paradox which the principle remedies. We must also consider all relatively valid discoveries of principle leading up to the point at which a crucial-experimental inconsistency required the discovery of the added, new principle.

If we trace a line of Classical natural science, from Thales, through Plato, Archimedes, Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, we should not describe any among the crucial discoveries of principle developed by these figures as an “error,” merely because more recent, crucial-experimental evidence superseded some of that. Each of those past discoveries (in that line of succession) was relatively valid at the time, and for the circumstances in which it was presented. It was necessarily correct, at least in a relative sense, but was not eternally sufficient.

From the present writer's standpoint, as identified above, or, alternately, elaborated in one or more of the references supplied here, no discovery should be described as “in error,” if it increased mankind's potential relative population-density.

There is another vantage-point from which to examine the crucial point being addressed, that of the student who has reexperienced the valid fundamental discoveries of principle by numerous, long-deceased, original scientific thinkers. Unfortunately during most recent generations' classrooms, that is not generally the method of science and related education; but, all among us who have acquired much knowledge did so chiefly outside the domain of the classroom and textbook, through reworking a combination of primary and secondary sources.⁴⁶ For most of us, at best, the classroom and textbook provided some stimulus, and much more provocation; the principal parts of our learning came through working matters through outside the classroom, coming to know the original thinkers of the past as our friends and teachers, and, as the onlookers, from within our memories, who served as our scientific conscience.

Think of the historical accumulation of relatively valid discoveries of principle, as a Riemann series of hypotheses, of the (n+1)/n type. Shift from the formal image of each of those discoveries, to the emotional experience of reliving the original act of discovery. That repeatedly relived, agapic act of rediscovery by the student, or former student, and, perhaps an original discovery or two of one's own,⁴⁷ forms a series cohering with the formal series of the (n+1)/n type, and in correspondence to it. This repeated, agapic action of combined rediscovery and original discovery, is the key to an higher hypothesis; once one has added an original valid discovery of principle, to the repeated reexperiencing of the original discoveries of others, a higher level of scientific thinking comes into view. A shift in outlook is made, beyond the notion of the act of discovery of valid principle, to the notion of a method of repeated discovery of valid principles. This is the Platonic method; this is the principle of higher hypothesis.

Thus, from this vantage-point, man's knowledge of the universe is not limited to what science has learned from its latest, crucial-experimental-based discovery of a new principle. Our knowledge of the lawfulness of the universe as a whole is derived from hypothesizing the principle of higher hypothesis. It is the proneness of the universe to submit to the will of demonstrable principle of higher hypothesis, which defines natural law, even in advance of new discoveries of principle yet to be attained. The efficiency of that principle of higher hypothesis, respecting man's increasing power to command the universe, has the import of a corresponding principle of design of the universe.

Third, thus, that much do we know respecting the future. That knowledge provides the basis for defining our efficient accountability to our posterity. Since we know that much respecting the future, we are morally obliged to act accordingly, to impose that knowledge respecting the future, upon our present policy-shaping. This we have just summarized, is the notion of Reason in Plato, Kepler, and Leibniz. This is also the principle of law embedded in the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution, which is, on that account, the best constitution yet designed.⁴⁸

In contrast, consider once more the relevant excerpt we have frequently quoted from so-called “economist” Adam Smith's 1759 The Theory of the Moral Sentiments:

The administration of the great system of the universe ... the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension; the care of his own happiness, and of his family, his friends, his country ... . But though we are endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has been intrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, love of pleasure, and dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficient ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them. [emphasis added-LHL]⁴⁹

This quoted argument by the manifestly evil Smith, is a faithful copy of that defense of libertarian immorality presented by the Bernard de Mandeville, in the latter's pro-Satanist, 1714 Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits.⁵⁰ The argument, of both Mandeville and Smith, is formally derived from Hobbes' kinematic model of society. The same argument arises, under the rubric of laissez-faire, in the celebrated doctrine of the Physiocrat Dr. François Quesnay; Quesnay, was, together with the notorious Voltaire, one of the philosophes promoted by Venice Abbot Antonio Conti's Europe-wide network of salons. Although Quesnay's Gingrich-like argument for laissez-faire was supplied in the service of the Anglophile Fronde tradition among France's landed aristocracy, during Adam Smith's post-1763 assignments in France, as an anti-American-colonies, British East India Company agent, Smith copied much of the dogma of the Physiocrats, into the foundations of his argument within the 1776 Wealth of Nations. Just as Smith's apology for the British East India Company's international drug-pushing was copied from the dogma of Satanist Mandeville, “free trade”—while consistent with Mandeville's dogma—was an English translation of Quesnay's laissez-faire.

Mandeville, Quesnay, Adam Smith, together with the founder of the British monarchy's present-day foreign service, Jeremy Bentham,⁵¹ typify the axiomatic kernel of all empiricist and positivist social doctrine, including, as we have noted here, the doctrines of modern language and its literature. That collection presently includes the “freedom-to-be-a-fascist” varieties of economic dogmas of John Von Neumann, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other witches, wizards, and warlocks of the Mont Pelerin Society's hagiolatry.⁵² Smith's particular significance for all of modern empiricist social theory, of which most taught university economics is a mere variety, is that he marks the transition in practice of all empiricist social theory, toward the “hedonistic calculus” of Maupertuis, Ortes, and Bentham. It is out of this, that modern university social doctrine has derived the popularized positivist strain of pseudo-scientific, statistical method, the presently prevailing characteristic of the teaching and practice of the so-called social sciences.

Limiting our attention here to bare essentials, the development of those present-day statistical doctrines, has the following highlights. The development begins with the “kinematic” social doctrine of Galileo-trained mathematician Hobbes. The next notable development is the work of the Seventeenth century's Sir William Petty, a forerunner of the libertarian dogma of Mandeville and Adam Smith, and one of the sources for Smith's 1776 Wealth of Nations. The Eighteenth-century development of statistical social doctrine occurred under the direction of Venice's Abbot Antonio Conti, the man who engineered the modern apotheosis of black-magic devotee Isaac Newton, through a Europe-wide network of salons constituted for this purpose.⁵³ Two of Conti's assets, Pierre-Louis Maupertuis and Giammaria Ortes, jointly launched the effort to create a mathematical “Newtonian social theory,” as echoed by Bentham's hedonistic calculus.⁵⁴ Out of this came the developments leading through the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and Mill's godson, Bertrand Russell. John Von Neumann's social and brain dogmas are an outgrowth of this same current.⁵⁵ All of this is fairly placed under the common rubric of “Hobbesian behaviorist social theory.”

Formally, that Hobbesian social theory can be reduced to a matter of comparative degrees of attraction, or repulsion among arrays of selected, pairwise options. E.g., “Which attracts him more, or less than ...,” and “Which repels him more, or less than ... .” For each case, attraction or repulsion, there are seven rough degrees of comparison: absolutely less, much less than, less than, equal, more than, much more than, absolutely more. That structure yields fourteen available degrees of comparative distinction for each pairwise selection in the total array. There are other sets of constraints available, but the principle remains the same as that in the example given. The model provided by Von Neumann and Morgenstern, is such an alternative set of constraints. This is the model for introduction of the empiricist notion of quantifiable “causality” into every branch of liberal-arts teaching and related practice, including a perverse but hegemonic doctrine of criminal law.⁵⁶ In other words, a statistical calculus upon which a “Newtonian social theory” may be based.

Although the differentia specifica of Sarpi's strategy are centered in the emphasis upon the application of the indicated mathematical axioms to every branch of learning and public-policy shaping, one can not comprehend the implications of Sarpi's design, without taking into account that ideology which Sarpi's innovations revised. To that purpose, consider, if but summarily, the most crucial features of the Venetian tradition which Sarpi revised in this way.

The Tragic Birth of the Modern Nation-State

Although the modern nation-state first came into existence during the 1461-1483 monarchy of France's Louis XI,⁵⁷ the roots of the modern conflict within European civilization, between the modern nation-state and its feudalist adversary, date from the time of the celebrated constitutional reformer Solon of Athens.⁵⁸ The European effort to build a form of society fit for the human species, is known to us from the Ionian constitutional city-state republics of the time of Thales. Then and now, the adversary which need be overcome, to accomplish that, was what was known then as oligarchism.

Then, the adversary was the form of oligarchism endemic to Mesopotamia and Canaanite Tyre. The first was the oligarchy of the Babylonian satrapal empire, both as the Babylon of Belshazzar's Feast, and under the Achaemenid dynasty. It also occurred, secondly, in the thalassiarchical oligarchism of the evil Canaanite city of Tyre, as Venice later. It was known, in the time of both Plato and his adversary, the sophist Isocrates,⁵⁹ as the “oligarchical model,” a term which then signified the social systems of the Persian empire and Tyre. In medieval and modern European history, oligarchism is represented by the rival institutions of a feudal landed aristocracy and the Phoenician, “bourgeois,” maritime form of financial oligarchism, as typified by the Phanariot merchants of Byzantium and, later, the financial aristocracy of the “New Phoenicia,” Venice.

To understand today's worldwide European civilization, it is obligatory that we pick up the track of European history at the beginning, in Classical Greece. To that purpose, turn to some most relevant crucial work of the Classical tragedian Aeschylos.

In keeping with the fact, that this report addresses the role of culture in shaping the physical fate of civilizations, turn attention directly upon the intellectual model of oligarchism, as known to the ancient Greeks. The relevant model for oligarchism as known to the ancient Greeks, is the image of god and man commonly underlying the pagan religious mythology of the Phrygian Cybele-Dionysos, the legendary Gods of Olympos, and the Delphi cult of Gaia, Python-Dionysos, and Apollo. To this point, see the Gods of Olympos on the stage, as depicted in the tragedian Aeschylos' famous Prometheus fragment.

So far, we have considered poetry, music, and science. Now, in addressing the subject of oligarchism, consider the way in which the same principle of composition is expressed, in Classical drama, of which the highest form is tragedy.

The simplest, one might say the purest model of Classical tragedy in particular, and Classical drama in general, is the surviving fragment of Aeschylos' Prometheus. Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Dr. Faustus, are to be understood from the standpoint of this view of Aeschylos' art. Shakespeare's tragedies, too, and, the tragedies of the greatest master of them all, the poet and historian, Schiller, as well. None of these could be understood, except from the standpoint of the principle of metaphor, as we have described that for Classical poetry, music, and Riemann's overview of natural science. That Prometheus fragment addresses the central issue of all history—to the present day; except from that standpoint, nothing of real history, real politics, or global strategy could be competently understood.

The historical setting of the Prometheus is the fact, that until the first establishment, by Louis XI's France, of that modern nation-state which the U.S. Federal Constitution of 1789 came to exemplify, more than ninety-five percent of all mankind, in all cultures, in all parts of the world, were condemned to the bestialization of humanity typified by slavery, serfdom, or even much worse.⁶⁰ These were ruled, in the fashion of human cattle, by less than five percent of the total population. At the top of this top stratum was a relative handful of powerful families, an oligarchy, which ruled over human subjects reduced chiefly to the status of human cattle. The rule was accomplished by aid of strata of virtual lackies of this oligarchy: military commanders, priesthood, merchants, and other appendages of the oligarchical overlords.

The ruling oligarchy is typified, in every crucial respect, by the Prometheus drama's gods of Olympos. This role of those gods, is not mere fictional entertainment, not merely dramatic symbolism. Zeus's reign there contains all of the characteristics of oligarchies, down through the oligarchy which rules over the Commonwealth guise of the British empire at the present time.⁶¹ Witness the manner in which Aeschylos presents the gods of Olympos to us, as nothing more than an apotheosis, as myth, of the real-life, hubristically insolent oligarchy of the Mesopotamian or Canaanite type.

Aeschylos' Prometheus references a legend of those People of the Sea whom populations other than themselves came to know as “Greeks.” The legend references, according to Plato and other sources, a time approximately 9,000 years before the Age of Pericles, when the ancestors of the Greeks had sailed in from the Atlantic, in their ships, to establish a colony in an area of present-day Morocco, near the straits of Gibraltar, among those history knows as the Berbers. In the course of time, the Sea-Peoples' ruler of that place was overthrown in a coup organized by the children of his concubine, named Olympia. The leader of this coup was called Zeus. Once Zeus had siezed power, he proposed to crush the people over whom he ruled. In that circumstance, one Prometheus (whose name means “fore-thought”), acted to defend the people against the murderous tyranny of oligarchs who had set themselves up as the Olympian gods. Prometheus brought them scientific knowledge; through these efforts of Prometheus, the people were enabled to rescue themselves from the murderous fate whch Zeus had intended for them. For this, Zeus and his oligarchy condemned Prometheus to a terrible punishment.

This is the setting for the opening of Aeschylos' tragedy.⁶²

Prometheus is no Hamlet. It soon appears, that the tragic figure of the drama is Zeus himself. Prometheus confides to Chorus:

Prometheus: Verily, the day shall yet come, when, though I be thus tortured in stubborn fetters, the Prince of the Blessed [Zeus] shall have need of me to reveal the new design, and by whom he shall be stripped of his sceptre and his dignities. Not by persuasion's honied enchantments shall he charm me; and, never will I, cowering before his dire threats, divulge this secret, until he shall release me from my cruel bonds and desire to proffer satisfaction from this outrage. [emphasis added—LHL]⁶³

and, later, Prometheus expains to Chorus both the nature of his offense to Zeus and why he, Prometheus, must keep the cause of Zeus' doom secret:

Prometheus: Nay, impute it not to pride nor yet to wilfilness that I am silent [on the secret of Zeus' doom—LHL]. Painful thoughts devour my heart as I behold myself maltreated thus. And, yet, who but I definitely assigned their prerogatives to these upstart gods? But, of this I speak not; for my tale would tell you naught, save what ye know. But, hearken to the miseries that beset mankind—how they were witless erst, and I made them to have sense and be endowed with reason. Not will I speak to upbraid mankind, but to set forth the friendly purpose that inspired my boons.

First of all, though they had eyes to see, they saw to no avail; they had ears, but understood not; but, like to shapes in dreams, throughout their length of days, without purpose they wrought all things in confusion. Knowledge had they neither of house built of bricks and turned to face the sun, not yet of work in wood; but, dwelt beneath the ground like swarming ants, in sunless caves. They had no sign, either of winter or of flowery spring, or of fruitful summer, whereon they could depend, but in everything they wrought without judgment, until such time as I taught them to discern the risings of the stars and their settings, ere this ill distinguishable.

Aye, and numbers too, chiefest of sciences, I invented for them, and the combining of letters, creative mother of the Muses' arts, wherewith to hold all things in memory. I, too, first brought brute beasts beneath the yoke, to be subject to the collar and the pack-saddle, that they might bear in men's stead the heaviest burdens; and, to the chariot, I harnessed horses, and made them obedient to the rein, to be an adornment of wealth and luxury. 'Twas I, and no one else that contrived the mariner's flaxen-winged car, to roam the sea.

Wretched that I am—such are the inventions I devised for mankind, yet have myself no cunning wherewith to rid me of my present suffering ... . Hear the sum of the matter in the compass of one brief word—every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.⁶⁴

A warning must be supplied to the reader, respecting the last sentence of the immediately foregoing excerpt. One would misread the personal character of Aeschylos' Prometheus entirely, if one committed the blunder of seeing this sentence from Prometheus' mouth as an extravagant boast. The Classical Greeks took their puns very seriously. “Prometheus” signifies “forethought:” Prometheus is saying, thus, “Every art possessed by man comes from forethought.” “Forethought” is to be read here exactly as the preceding portions of the utterance indicates, as a synonym for creative scientific discovery of principle.

The issue of what we today would recognize by the term “plea-bargaining” comes up at several points. Chorus does not propose such “plea-bargaining,” but poses a related issue:

Chorus: Do not, then, benefit mortals beyond due measure, and yet be heedless of thine own distress ... .

Prometheus: When I have been bent by pangs and tortures infinite, thus only am I able to escape my bondage. Art is feebler than necessity....

Chorus: Can it be that Zeus hath lesser power than they?

Prometheus: Aye, in that, at least, he cannot escape what is foredoomed.

Chorus: Why, what is foredoomed for Zeus, save to hold eternal sway?

Prometheus: This thou must not learn as yet; be not importunate.⁶⁵

Later, in the dialogue with Zeus's victim, Io, Prometheus identifies the tragic principle underlying Zeus' doom. Io, delighted by Prometheus' intimation of Zeus' coming loss, asks:

Io: By whom shall he be despoiled of the sceptre of his sovereignty?

Prometheus: By himself and his own empty-headed purposes.⁶⁶

Later, as Zeus' messenger, Hermes, is seen approaching, Prometheus says to Chorus, “... for Zeus, I care less than naught. Let him do his will; let him hold his power for his little day—since, not for long shall he bear sway over the gods. But, stay! For, yonder, I behold his lackey, the servitor of our new lord and master. Assuredly, he hath come to harbinger some news.”⁶⁷

Indeed, Hermes comes to propose a plea-bargain: “Bend thy will, perverse fool. Oh, bend thy will at last, to wisdom, in face of thy present sufferings!”⁶⁸

So, in the lost, latter portions of Aeschylos' drama, Zeus is destroyed.

Three points are demonstrated by Aeschylos' Prometheus.

First, the common features of all Classical tragedy, from Aeschylos through Shakespeare and Schiller: that mankind's survival depends upon discovering solution-principles outside the the domain of that theorem-lattice which corresponds to the present axiomatics of behavior. The initial presumptions of Chorus and Io are in error, and Hermes, representing Zeus, is doomed by refusal to consider the need to correct their erroneous presumptions respecting the way the universe is presumed to work. The solution for, and, therefore, the reality of Prometheus' predicament, lie outside the domain of all conventional assumptions. Zeus is foredoomed by Fate, but the source of that doom lies in Zeus's inability to remedy the defect of personal character which is inherent in the theorem-lattice-analogous, present nature of being Zeus.

Second, that all human knowledge is generated by the same means that Prometheus is enabled to forsee the ultimate solution to his predicament.

Third, we are given a relevant insight into the mind of ancient Greece's culture: both the oligarchical mind, as depicted most nakedly by the lackey Hermes, and the kind of Greek intellect which could foresee an ultimate liberation of mankind from oligarchism.

Now consider, briefly, the commonality of principle of Classical poetry, Classical music, and Classical tragedy.

None of these three are to be classed under “fiction,” at least not as the term “fiction” is commonly understood in university and related usages today. That is also to say, that none of the three, when properly accomplished, might be regarded as a fictional tale which illustrates a precept. All three are premised, not upon fiction, but upon presenting truthful knowledge. All proceed, as art, in the manner of science. All are governed by the same principled device encountered in Riemann's habilitation dissertation, the principle of scientific discovery. All are addressed to the type of problem addressed in this report: how the axiomatical quality of precepts generally accepted in today's culture, or some significant part of it, foredoom the victims of those axiomatic beliefs to self-destruction—unless they abandon those beliefs of practice in time to avoid that doom.

In Aeschylos, the threatened doom of the Greeks lay in the precepts of the popular forms of religious belief, as the real-life trial of Socrates demonstrates the manner in which Athens condemned itself ultimately to doom through the folly of its religious belief in an apotheosis of the same oligarchical principles which were served by Plato's sophistical adversary, Aristotle. The matrix of the oligarchical form of religious mythology, is typified in Greek history by the Delphi cult of Gaia, Python-Dionysos, and Apollo.

All of the pagan religions of that period, and later, have the same general practical import as the adoption of the pagan Gaia cult by the founders and leaders of the World Wildlife Fund, such as HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, today. The zero-technological growth code of the Emperor Diocletian, illustrates the common oligarchical connection among the cults of Shakti-Siva, Ishtar-Baal, Isis-Osiris, Cybele-Dionysos, Gaia-Python, and Prince Philip's “man as higher ape.” This intelligence should not be read to imply that Prince Philip is a satanic influence over the British ruling oligarchy, but rather that Prince Philip has learned to express the satanic quality which has always been what Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin knew to be the historically determined, satanic—i.e., Venetian—essence of that British oligarchy, since the days of the First Duke of Marlborough, Walpole, and the Hell-Fire Clubs.

The “sin” which Prometheus perpetrated against the satanic Zeus, was to deprive man of his innocence, through evoking in man the powers of artistic and scientific knowledge, through evoking thus those creative powers of reason which underlie the transfinite higher hypothesis of Riemann's (n+1)/n series of hypotheses, the principle of metaphor so hated by the satanic Thomas Hobbes, and by the founder of virtually all taught university subject-matters today, the satanic Paolo Sarpi, Father of the Enlightenment, and true apostle of the Father of Lies.

Prior to the 1439-1440 sessions of the Council of Florence, and the ensuing 1461-1483 monarchy of France's Louis XI, approximately ninety-five percent of mankind, in every culture, in all parts of the world, lived in the depraved conditions of serfs, slaves, or worse. It was the establishment of the modern form of nation-state republic, based on the Classical forms of educational fostering, among the orphans and other children of the poor, of the creative powers of discovery of valid new principle, which brought man within reach of man's normal condition, as that condition is defined implicitly, by Genesis 1:26-30, and by such New Testament texts as the Gospel of John and Epistles of Paul. The essence of that process, by which the modern European nation-state uplifted the formerly oppressed ninety-five percent of mankind toward the truly human estate prescribed by those referenced Biblical texts, is the practice of the principle we know as metaphor, the discovery of those valid new principles of nature which corresponds to the universe's proneness, by design, to bend to the will of man's power of higher hypothesis, man's power of valid metaphor.

The axiomatical notions of mathematical continuity, and counterposing to metaphorical Reason the axioms of mechanistic causality, has rotted out the interior of that which is usually transmitted among us as knowledge. By poisoning the intellect, against man's creative nature, in this anti-scientific manner, the British oligarchy and its co-thinkers have brought the decadent rulers and general population, alike, of this planet to the brink of a self-induced doom today.

It is not coincidental, that the apocalyptic danger immediately before us, should be expressed most clearly within the domain of economic practice. The essence of economy is that which sets mankind apart from and above the beasts, a quality which is expressed most directly and simply by the impact of scientific and technological progress upon the productive powers of labor. That scientific and technological progress depends, in turn, upon the cultivated practice of those methods of discovery we recognize most simply in the fruits of modern science, a science which is, in turn, the fruit of nothing other than the principle of higher hypothesis, the principle of metaphor common to Classical art and science. It were sufficient to turn away from those principles of metaphor, to bring about the general destruction of civilization, a destruction most simply traced in the spiralling collapse of economy which has been in progress since Robert Theobald's 1964 proclamation of that New Age delusion which bears such names as “Triple Revolution,” and perhaps also the name of Satan himself.

Through the influence of the evil Sarpi's Venetian legacy, the Enlightenment of Galileo, Hobbes, and their followers, mankind as a whole has been induced to lead itself to the brink of a global new dark age, in which condition the human population would be collapsed rapidly toward a yahoo-like moral and cultural condition, and global population levels and demographic characteristics worse than prevailed throughout this planet prior to Europe's Fifteenth century. That doom may be escaped, but only if we recognize, as William Shakespeare might observe, the fault within ourselves, the folly of the oligarchical method of thinking, the empiricist way of thinking otherwise known as British philosophical liberalism.

The escape to freedom requires that we recognize that those axioms of continuity of causality, which all branches of generally taught knowledge and even ignorant popular opinion have borrowed from the corrupt mathematics of Sarpi-Galileo-Hobbes, are the flaw within our culture by means of which our self-destruction is being brought upon us.

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