david spooner

DECIPHERING THE COSMIC NUMBER by Arthur I. Miller is the most illuminating theoretical book to be published in recent years. It centers on the mental and personal battles of the Nobel prize-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli. Working together with Jung, he surmises there is an almost manichean war in the cosmos and in human psychology between the numbers 3 and 4. As Pauli put it:
"Modern quantum physics has come closer to the quaternary point of view, which was so violently opposed to the natural science that was germinating in the 17th century." Miller comments -"the archetype of the wholeness of man - depicted with the symbol of fourness, the quaternity - is the emotional dynamic that drives all of science."

It was the result of Pauli`s intuitive adherence to the quaternal that enabled him to conclude that each electron in an atom required 4 not 3 quantum numbers, and that no two electrons in an atom could have the same 4 quantum numbers. It was this so-called Exclusion Principle that was to earn Pauli the Nobel prize over two decades later in 1945. This discovery sidelined Bohr`s mini-solar system picture of the momentum of the electron around the core of the atom. And indeed it was a significant advance in the history of ideas for "it was a step into the unknown, into a world without visual images."

Miller speculates that Pauli had tapped into something beyond science, something touching on one of Niels Bohr`s favorite quotations from Schiller:
"Only fullness leads to clarity
And truth lies in the abyss."
There was no Dantesque pilgrim to lead the scientists who undertook this journey of discovery which effectively confronted, in the abstractions of physics, the dissociation of sensibility as T.S. Eliot termed the 17th century crisis of fractured thinking. So Pauli believed that in the interests of maintaining his own equilibrium he must continue to nurture elements of scientist and mystic within himself:
"that I carry `Kepler` as well as `Fludd` in myself and that it is for me a necessity to arrive at a synthesis of this pair of opposites, as best I can." [Robert Fludd it was, who railing against Kepler`s trinity had exclaimed "you force me to defend the dignity of the quaternity."]

From his intellectual exchanges with Pauli, Jung was able to draw out of the abyss this dramatic insight:
How could the quaternity arise in the unconscious? There must be something in the psyche adhering to a fourfold world of individual realization. This he saw as the source of "the existence of an archetypal God-image" in the human mind.
The re-association of sensibility, the achievment of true balance in the individual, can only be accomplished through the continuous battle to fuse science and the arts.

Reading the TLS for September 11th, 2009, it was depressing to find repeated in a review of a recent John Deathridge book by David Schiff what have become the contemporary cliched attacks on so-called Absolute Music. Wagner`s Tristan and Isolde is the main target, and justifiably so. Clara Schumann made the definitive criticism finding (more…)

August 4, 2009

Tags: Novalis to Norman O. Brown

Novalis saw fiction and poetry as a substitute for the failure of philosophy to understand the modern individual, or person.Fichte`s inability to expose der Grund of humanity had left Novalis in a dilemma, and in turning away from the search for the grounding of the individual, he theorized the substitution of the very act of art as the answer.
Walter Benjamin understood the aesthetic implications of the Jena school impasse: "form is no longer the expression of beauty but an expression of art as the idea itself." Having found itself incapable of reproducing beauty, most art and indeed music today has made a virtue of ugliness. Alongside this has gone the new finicky puritanism (`correctness`) along with more militant puritanism (post-Khomeini) Islam.
We have not moved on theoretically since the 1790`s and early 1800`s despite the hectares of print. My correspondence with Norman O. Brown (now in the University of California`s Santa Cruz Special Collections library) was part of the attempt to move forward. Norman Brown had - and still does in death - pioneered a way forward in his Life Against Death and Love`s Body. The challenge for the contemporary intellectual world remains undiminished. (more…)

J.F.M. Clark`s "Bugs and the Victorians" offers a conspectus of the evolution of entomology in the nineteenth century.
Following Darwin who called himself a "decayed entomologist," Clark concentrates his attention on the social insects- bees, wasps and ants. The advantage of this to a writer who includes a chapter `The Politics of Insects` is that kings, queens, soldiers and workers are to the forefront, and homilies are the order of the day. The need to pontificate on every nuance of sociological significance is eagerly taken by the author as he books himself a place within the pious establishment of academia. This has now replaced the old Church of England hierarchy, itself the playground for Rowan Williams`s aspiration as littérateur.
The most serious error of J.F.M. Clark arises when he characterizes insect morphology as "utterly alien" which offers "no analogical or homological points of comparison for humans." My quartet of books published over the past 15 years argues precisely the opposite, that the "human" cannot be defined without going beyond the historical fact of evolution from the great apes to take in the way insect processes have defined the shapes of the great works of literature and music. Clark uses morphology in the superficial sense of `external structure` whereas the OED defines it as "that branch of biology that deals with the form of animals and plants, and the structures, homologies, and METAMORPHOSES which govern or influence that form."
The pedantry that is the Achilles heel of the one-dimensional fact-gathering taxonomists here fails the author. A richer line of evolution proceeds from the so-called `philosophical biologists` like E.B. Poulton.
(more…)

One thing was clear from the London G20 meeting.
The banks and the investors have plundered the people big-time. The British and American governments have renewed their determination to fine the public for disasters occasioned by the politicians and banks. News coverage has attained new heights of euphoria and hyped hope, now redoubled by the presentation of the Iraq pull-outs as a measure of success in a week where over 300 have died in sectarian car-bombings.
Governments continue to act like flesh-flies around the bloated corpses of the banks instead of becoming the real deal - the burying beetle - and finishing them off in
their present form. Businesses die by the hundreds weekly and jobs seep away everywhere. (more…)

The remarkable Hyatt Carter has now shared stations along the way of his intellectual experiences in his "Thinking is the Best Way to Travel: essays along the journey." With the bedrock of his intellect in Alfred North Whitehead, he makes continual leaps of the imagination via the writings of Ken Wilber and Charles Hartshorne among many others. Carter is that rare creature, an independent polymath, the scarcity of which in the epoch of specialization has severely scarred contemporary life. There are dabblers aplenty and no lack of what ordinary folk title `clever dicks`, but the polymath in full flow is an exciting phenomenon.

My good friend of many years, the poet Jeffrey Wainwright, has recently brought out a Collection entitled "Clarity or Death" and he has defined the razor edge choice. For without genuine clarity, there is indeed the thousand deaths that academia trudges through year by year in pursuit of the shimmering mountain top - the Pension.

But here in Carter`s book, the author elucidates Hartshorne`s "prosaic fallacy". Early on Hyatt Carter urges "May the fours be with you!" and with this in one`s pouch or sporran, the reader proceeds. Quadratic equations of the spirit tumble forth one after the other, each driving the flow forward. As related particles echo across the universe by some mysterious process, so the fourfold reaches epic proportions in Carter`s writing.

Small wonder it`s recently been revealed that in the basic early Stone Age of language, `three` and `five` were around, but no `four`. The evolution of the quaternal, with its metamorphoses in process, has been a hidden key to words becoming identical to the transforming object. There need be no distinction between science and art, or between language and reality. However complex the organisms or quanta being unravelled, human language and number remain the medium. So the specialists, the scientists, had to raid the work of James Joyce for the definition of one of their discoveries in the world of the infinitessimal - the quark.

{please post any comments on the Discussion section of my website via - members.authorsguild.net/davidspooner/} (more…)

I`ve been reading Steve Jones`s just-published "Darwin`s Island," and amid the incredible set of evolutionary sequences - butterflies for example are related to lobsters - one fact stands out. Whatever Dawkins and Jones may argue, natural selection does rupture a human`s sense of wonder at the biosphere. "As Steve Jones puts it: "inelegant, (more…)