Reign of Quantity

Reign of Quantity refers to the championship of a mass past times Rene Guenon, the Sufi convert from Catholicism. It was written inwards the 1940s, a mass that played a seminal business office for many people inwards the rediscovery of "metaphysical" idea exterior the mainstream intellectual civilization (just at a fourth dimension when the logical positivists as well as analytic philosophers were destroying its final traces inwards Oxford). I convey mentioned it several times, non for the picayune argue that it influenced me, but because in that location are insights inwards it that stay important, non to the lowest degree for educators. An article has lately appeared inwards Sacred Web magazine past times Patrick Laude looking dorsum at Guenon's book.

One may bracket out the historical theory almost repeating cycles (further developed past times Robert Bolton inwards The Order of the Ages), or Guenon's vogue to confuse logic alongside ontology or Islam alongside Vedanta, spell yet retaining the idea that inwards today's basis nosotros are seeing a grand reversal or inversion that places Matter over Form, "quantity" over "quality" – amounting already inwards many places to the apparent disappearance of lineament altogether.
(Connections could live on made hither to Zen as well as the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is all almost the recovery of quality, but I confine myself.) As our conclusion to mensurate everything grew alongside the Enlightenment, as well as thus did our capacity to command it – or rather the lure of controlling it – until every human fine art from instruction to economics, from architecture to agriculture, became reduced to a numbers game. Human achievement was assessed past times GDP, extension of life, earnings, records broken, products bought....

And yet numbers themselves are qualities earlier they are quantities, every bit the Pythagoreans knew. The loss of the symbolic, analogical, religious, as well as musical dimension of release made possible this modern profanation. Number every bit lineament relates things interiorly to each other, through self-identity, proportion, as well as usual implication. The basis coheres alongside itself inwards number. Each release is total of pregnant because it connects alongside everything else, as well as ultimately alongside the One that is beyond number.

The sheer fun of numbers, as well as a cracking bargain of the mystery (what are they? why produce they work?) is captured inwards books past times Clifford Pickover (including this one that calls Mathematics "the loom of God") that would brand a practiced add-on to whatever library. If it is the role made of numbers past times medieval Christendom inwards item that interests you, going dorsum to the Greeks, i classic operate is Medieval Number Symbolism by Vincent Foster Hopper (Dover).

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