MDDM 65: Mathesis

[jbor]

on 21/7/02 2:55 AM, Samuel Moyer at smoyer at satx.rr.com wrote:

> 630-7 "And what may that slender Blade of Planetary Surface they took away,
> not be concealing?...the eight immortals, Victory over Death.  called into
> being by Mathesis alone.
> 
> Webster's : Mathesis = acquisition of knowledge   Archaic: Science, Learning:
> Mental discipline, esp. Mathematics.
> 
> Any math people out there?  I find that the Leibniz was somehow involved in
> something called Mathesis Universalism...  Leibniz was a contemporary of
> Newton's.
> 
> Not easy to find much on the Internet on Leibniz... some interesting little
> bits to make one wonder:

An odd, crypto-nationalist article I found and posted once before on Leibniz
and the American Revolution here:

http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/leiblock.htm

And, re. Zhang's rant about "this Priest-tainted three-sixty" (630.15) cf.
also Pynchon's 1969 letter to Thomas F. Hirsch wherein he talks about

"a unified concept of creation, which shows up in religions all around the
world, Christianity being a glaring exception. And German Christianity being
perhaps the most perfect expression of the whole/Western/analytic/
"linear"/alienated shtick. It is  no accident that Leibniz was co-inventor
of calculus, trying to cope with change by stopping it dead, chopping it up
into infinitesimals, going in to look at it, the cannonball frozen in
midflight, little piece by little piece [...]"

The letter is reprinted as an Appendix in David Seed's _The Fictional
Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon_ (London, MacMillan, 1988, pp 240-243):

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=53981&keywords=hirsch

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=54003&keywords=hirsch

best

> 
> We are thus permitted, according to Leibniz, to consider other possible worlds
> in which different things come to pass, as God did when he chose to create
> this world rather than all the other possibilities.  Thus we can talk of a
> world where there is a being which is very much like myself but did not go for
> a walk on a day which was very much like yesterday on our world, or of a world
> where there is a being very much like myself but is genetically different from
> me by one insignificant chromosome.
> http://freepages.pavilion.net/pjb/essay142.htm
> 
> and then:
> 
> Metaphysics is the anticipation of the future. This is why it is not dead.
> Again, Leibniz anticipated the present with communication theory, computation
> and so on. But it was impossible for him, in the seventeenth–century, to
> anticipate scientific thought with rigorousness. So he wrote about
> metaphysics. Just as we have to write about metaphysics now and for the same
> reason. 
> 
> CDGA: Leibniz had an intuitive idea of what constituted mechanism. In the
> Monadology he describes the body not as a machine but as the machine of
> machines where each part is itself a machine. It’s interesting to read Leibniz
> beside someone like Alan Turing and related discussions on artificial
> intelligence. It is as if Leibniz has articulated exactly that which cannot be
> thought within the confines of artificial intelligence.
> 
> MS: Did you know that Leibniz was in correspondence with Jesuit priests in
> Beijing, China? The Jesuits wrote to Leibniz about ancient Chinese symbolism.
> And when Leibniz was translating this ancient language he discovered binary
> arithmetic. After that, this became the language of the machine. But also,
> because the definition of life in Leibniz is the implication of an infinity of
> machines, is the involvement and implication of an infinity of machines, it is
> extremely apposite to contemporary discussions concerning evolution and
> cybernetics. 
> 
> http://www.thepander.co.nz/culture/mserres6.php
> 
> Again, if there are any math / philosophy people with some background...   It
> appears that Zhang suggests another world can exist, perhaps in this blade of
> planetary surface, ...can exist... does exist, simply because it is a
> possibility??? 
> 
> Sam
> 
>