An Aphorism and an Apologue About the Primacy of Creativity
A metaphoric critique of rationalism
The following two sections are taken from my “apomary,” Creative Obsession — Philosophic Life in Broad Daylight, which is a mosaic of interrelated aphorisms, apologues, and apothegms that facilitates a brazenly literary and exceedingly concise explication of philosophy.
The Altar of Pythagoras is mostly a metaphoric critique of rationalism. Hard Science is a related, oblique “take” on Cartesianism, and a few other things. My leanings are strongly neopragmatic. My aim here (and throughout the apomary) is to illustrate the broad and quintessential cohesion of human interests, from haiku to physics. My aim is to ameliorate the “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy.
The Altar of Pythagoras
Of all the things we care about in life, we value most of all the consummate certainty of mathematical knowledge. Even as children, we were keenly aware of the inherent supremacy of mathematics. Its fabulously analytic properties and deductive, stepwise method were clearly the measure of every other science. That demonstrative abstractness and robust “non-actuality” had fathered such precise equations, and if nothing else, we learned to respect this mysterious chariot of Absolute Knowledge, this indispensable linchpin of the universe.
Real mathematicians lead lives of uncommon mental toil. In return, they enjoy an unequaled vision of rational perfection. Mathematicians are transfixed by the most glittering revelations of star-studded genius. They bask in an assortment of pleasant, refined, matho-mystical transcendental trips. Their obsession and inspiration is constantly revitalized as piece by piece, before their eyes, the greatest puzzle in creation is set firmly into place. (The laws enshrined. Numbers made flesh! The ordination of ordinals, the deification of formulae!) But they are also human, and in the end, the obsession wears thin, and the rewards dissolve like nullities into empty sets. It follows that mathematicians never perfect the art.
Hard Science
Oddly enough, the Great Mathematician perfected the art. Although at first, when he was finishing school, he was beginning to believe that he had fully mortgaged his faith in figures. Then he experienced a supreme moment of mathematical discovery.
Actually, he had just been in a bar fight the day before, and he was sitting in his boyfriend’s hot tub, nursing a fat lip. Suddenly, without warning, while mindlessly contemplating the bubbles in his beer, he was engulfed by a staggering, whirling host of astoundingly unconstrainable conceptions, unleashed by as many elusive leaps of shimmering, irrepressible intellect, those bright, billowing particles yet forming strange and crystalline apparitions! All through the evening and into the night, the Great Mathematician endured a relentless, full-scale eruption of a luxuriant, tumultuous, and fantastically focused creativity — ecstatically, and from out of a beer bubble, his scrupulous, incisive insight transfigured a torrent of realigning relations and ethereal impressions (barely intelligible, and still ingeniously cohesive), blazing an unbroken path to the ends of his most presumptuous, outrageous supposition: the mathematically mystifying Next Step! (A somewhat level-headed youth, he never would have anticipated such a brain-twisting, life-wrenching epiphany, although perhaps, within the shrouded chambers of his unconscious obsessions, he had prepared boldly, fervently, incessantly for this monumental breakthrough.) Throughout that flickering night, and until the dawn enticed him to sleep, the Great Mathematician embraced the hallowed splendor of a life devoted to lofty learning — an exacting scholar, naked and wet, and courting the irreversibly ridiculous, was abruptly consecrated by a very close encounter, by an unadulterated, uncontainable catharsis of lucid, frenetic imagery and sustained abduction. He brought to the airy, supersensible regions of his thrashed and churning head, from the dusty remnants of a thousand lost dreams, a once inconceivable a priori, an immutable realization, a radically original distillation of a mind-altering, world-shattering, more perfect method and genesis of analysis!
As soon as he woke up, the Great Mathematician set out to formalize and systematize his preposterously timeless, pristine discovery. Greatly inspired by the clarity and scope of his vision, he worked tirelessly, day and night, with unmatched professional dedication and with prodigious, distinguished skill. He sweated blood, lost his job, and completed his masterpiece in only thirteen years, his mind’s work impeccably put upon paper, expressed in the unassailable language of mathematics.
When it was time to publish his discovery, the Great Mathematician almost hesitated. With sadness and pride, however, he sent his sublime brainchild out into the world, his inner knowledge given up to science, dedicated forever to the common heritage of humankind. The Great Mathematician sorely missed his life’s inspiration.
The publication instantly set off fireworks galore! It made lots of money and secured lasting fame for the Great Mathematician. The top-dog mathematicians fell all over themselves, declaring that he was an exalted, Grand Poobah-in-waiting. But of course, they didn’t know, nor would the duly assembled fellows have cared (as dedicated specialists) about the explosion of mathematical knowledge, which took place that night in the hot tub. They praised him, as well they should have, for his exquisitely crafted work. They admired the elegant simplicity of his demonstrations, applauding with relief and delight as they recognized the ancient axioms and eternalistic theorems of mathematics lurking beneath the insurgent ideas. They reveled in their ability to comprehend this bedazzling, new paradigm of proof, flattered to confirm its validity (a self-levitating certainty!) for themselves and for all time. Once again, the Mighty Electors declared, the preeminence of mathematics was on display. Once again, it was opportune to scoff at all the “soft” sciences.
The Great Mathematician drew back from the accolades, and he canceled the European tour. He had come to believe that mathematics was no longer merely hard science. He could only conclude that his own discovery, if not the entire body of mathematical knowledge, perhaps all knowledge began as a strikingly stable, transgressive hypothesis (an organic process, conceived necessarily in pure synthesis), a palpable premonition of intra-phenomenal realities; in short, an unmediated, synergistic conflation of effect and idea (the very essence of mind) that no mathematical form of equivalence could even begin to assimilate. And still, it must be assimilated! This outlandish, vital process was surely the wellspring of his science, his beloved mathematics! The Great Mathematician was impatient for another supreme moment of discovery. Within weeks, his frustration had ripened into a feverish desperation.
The Great Mathematician began to think: These unremitting memories of streaming sensations, these neuro-coursing, arcing exabytes of data each day, were at each moment of life subjected to the unyielding mechanisms of psyche, logic, faith, and then by some further, immensely complex process, this inscrutable soup would be precipitously and involuntarily, consciously and unconsciously chopped, dissected, blended, and re-conglomerated into original knowledge (or conceivably, into original delusions) of probabilistic extrusions from a dimensionless reality, shaped by discoverable, heritable, and not-so-a-priori aesthetics, the describably sublime, hypothetically systemic substance of something-being-known, which informs the soul and reveals the engine of creative human thought, and ultimately of all thought, or at least of his thought, and this, of all the physiology, phenomena, and extension of mind upon cosmos, could not even supposedly be random — already, by means of the most brilliantly refined, abductive modes of contemplation, as yet untouched by science, this process could be imprecisely observable, indistinctly controllable and inexplicitly predictable, and that was what the Great Mathematician had to believe.
