Log24

Monday, January 29, 2024

Self as Imago Dei:  Hofstadter vs. Valéry

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:41 am
 

Google search result:

Imago Dei  in Thomas Aquinas

Saint Anselm College

https://www.anselm.edu › Documents › Brown

PDF

by M Brown · 2014 · Cited by 14 — Thomas insists that the image of God exists most perfectly in the acts of the soul, for the soul is that which is most perfect in us and so best images God, and …

11 pages

For a Douglas Hofstadter version of the Imago Dei , see the
"Gödel, Escher, Bach" illustration in the Jan. 15 screenshot below —

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Imago, Imago, Imago
 

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 11:07 am

Recommended— an online book—

Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory,
by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990.

See in particular

Valéry and the Discourse On His Method.

Pages 156-157—

Valéry saw the mind as essentially a relational system whose operation he attempted to describe in the language of group mathematics. “Every act of understanding is based on a group,” he says (C, 1:331). “My specialty—reducing everything to the study of a system closed on itself and finite” (C, 19: 645). The transformation model came into play, too. At each moment of mental life the mind is like a group, or relational system, but since mental life is continuous over time, one “group” undergoes a “transformation” and becomes a different group in the next moment. If the mind is constantly being transformed, how do we account for the continuity of the self? Simple; by invoking the notion of the invariant. And so we find passages like this one: “The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it’s a functional property of consciousness” (C, 15:170 [2: 315]). Just as in transformational geometry, something remains fixed in all the projective transformations of the mind’s momentary systems, and that something is the Self (le Moi, or just M, as Valéry notates it so that it will look like an algebraic variable). Transformation theory is all over the place. “Mathematical science . . . reduced to algebra, that is, to the analysis of the transformations of a purely differential being made up of homogeneous elements, is the most faithful document of the properties of grouping, disjunction, and variation in the mind” (O, 1:36). “Psychology is a theory of transformations, we just need to isolate the invariants and the groups” (C, 1:915). “Man is a system that transforms itself” (C, 2:896).

Notes:

  Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60)

C   Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61)

Compare Jung’s image in Aion  of the Self as a four-diamond figure:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-JungImago.gif

and Cullinane’s purely geometric four-diamond figure:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-FourD.gif

For a natural group of 322,560 transformations acting on the latter figure, see the diamond theorem.

What remains fixed (globally, not pointwise) under these transformations is the system  of points and hyperplanes from the diamond theorem.

Friday, September 23, 2022

Raiders of the Lost Archive … The Jung Genizah

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:41 am

Jung’s four-diamond figure from
Aion — a symbol of the self –

Jung's four-diamond figure showing transformations of the self as Imago Dei

     For those who prefer the Ed Wood approach —

Friday, September 16, 2011

Art, Jung, Toronto

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:29 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110916-ArtJungToronto-NYT.jpg

Related art—

Midnight's Icons,

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110915-Jung-FourDiamonds.gif

Faust in Toronto,

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110916-NYT-Faust.jpg

and…

McLuhan 'tetrad' figure with four diamonds surrounding a fifth, the medium

McLuhan and the Four Diamonds

(Wikipedia figure)

"Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as
 four diamonds forming an X…."

" X never, ever, marks the spot."

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Imago Creationis

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 6:00 pm

Image-- The Four-Diamond Tesseract

In the above view, four of the tesseract's 16
vertices are overlaid by other vertices.
For views that are more complete and
moveable, see Smith's tesseract page.

Four-Part Tesseract Divisions

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100619-TesseractAnd4x4.gif

The above figure shows how four-part partitions
of the 16 vertices  of a tesseract in an infinite
Euclidean  space are related to four-part partitions
of the 16 points  in a finite Galois  space

Euclidean spaces versus Galois spaces
in a larger context—

 

 


Infinite versus Finite

The central aim of Western religion —

"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
                 masculine and feminine,
                      life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist  (1998)

The central aim of Western philosophy —

              Dualities of Pythagoras
              as reconstructed by Aristotle:
                 Limited     Unlimited
                     Odd     Even
                    Male     Female
                   Light      Dark
                Straight    Curved
                  ... and so on ....

"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy."
— Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres  (1993)

Another picture related to philosophy and religion—

Jung's Four-Diamond Figure from Aion

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-JungImago.gif

This figure was devised by Jung
to represent the Self. Compare the
remarks of Paul Valéry on the Self—

Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory, by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990, pages 156-157—

 

 

Valéry saw the mind as essentially a relational system whose operation he attempted to describe in the language of group mathematics. "Every act of understanding is based on a group," he says (C, 1:331). "My specialty— reducing everything to the study of a system closed on itself and finite" (C, 19: 645). The transformation model came into play, too. At each moment of mental life the mind is like a group, or relational system, but since mental life is continuous over time, one "group" undergoes a "transformation" and becomes a different group in the next moment. If the mind is constantly being transformed, how do we account for the continuity of the self? Simple; by invoking the notion of the invariant. And so we find passages like this one: "The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it's a functional property of consciousness" (C, 15:170 [2:315]). Just as in transformational geometry, something remains fixed in all the projective transformations of the mind's momentary systems, and that something is the Self (le Moi, or just M, as Valéry notates it so that it will look like an algebraic variable). Transformation theory is all over the place. "Mathematical science…  reduced to algebra, that is, to the analysis of the transformations of a purely differential being made up of homogeneous elements, is the most faithful document of the properties of grouping, disjunction, and variation in the mind" (O, 1:36). "Psychology is a theory of transformations, we just need to isolate the invariants and the groups" (C, 1:915). "Man is a system that transforms itself" (C, 2:896).

Notes:

  Paul Valéry, Oeuvres  (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60)

C   Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61)

Note also the remarks of George David Birkhoff at Rice University
in 1940 (pdf) on Galois's theory of groups and the related
"theory of ambiguity" in Galois's testamentary letter—

… metaphysical reasoning always relies on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and… the true meaning of this Principle is to be found in the “Theory of Ambiguity” and in the associated mathematical “Theory of Groups.”

If I were a Leibnizian mystic, believing in his “preestablished harmony,” and the “best possible world” so satirized by Voltaire in “Candide,” I would say that the metaphysical importance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the cognate Theory of Groups arises from the fact that God thinks multi-dimensionally* whereas men can only think in linear syllogistic series, and the Theory of Groups is the appropriate instrument of thought to remedy our deficiency in this respect.

* That is, uses multi-dimensional symbols beyond our grasp.

Related material:

Imago Creationis

A medal designed by Leibniz to show how
binary arithmetic mirrors the creation by God
of something (1) from nothing (0).

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100618-LeibnizMedaille.jpg

Another array of 16 strings of 0's and 1's, this time
regarded as coordinates rather than binary numbers—

Frame of Reference

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100619-ReferenceFrame.gif

The Diamond Theorem

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100619-Dtheorem.gif

Some context by a British mathematician —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100619-Cameron.gif

Imago

by Wallace Stevens

Who can pick up the weight of Britain, 
Who can move the German load 
Or say to the French here is France again? 
Imago. Imago. Imago. 

It is nothing, no great thing, nor man 
Of ten brilliancies of battered gold 
And fortunate stone. It moves its parade 
Of motions in the mind and heart, 

A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man 
In February hears the imagination's hymns 
And sees its images, its motions 
And multitudes of motions 

And feels the imagination's mercies, 
In a season more than sun and south wind, 
Something returning from a deeper quarter, 
A glacier running through delirium, 

Making this heavy rock a place, 
Which is not of our lives composed . . . 
Lightly and lightly, O my land, 
Move lightly through the air again.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Imago, Imago, Imago

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 11:07 am

Recommended— an online book—

Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory,
by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990.

See in particular

Valéry and the Discourse On His Method.

Pages 156-157—

Valéry saw the mind as essentially a relational system whose operation he attempted to describe in the language of group mathematics. “Every act of understanding is based on a group,” he says (C, 1:331). “My specialty—reducing everything to the study of a system closed on itself and finite” (C, 19: 645). The transformation model came into play, too. At each moment of mental life the mind is like a group, or relational system, but since mental life is continuous over time, one “group” undergoes a “transformation” and becomes a different group in the next moment. If the mind is constantly being transformed, how do we account for the continuity of the self? Simple; by invoking the notion of the invariant. And so we find passages like this one: “The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it’s a functional property of consciousness” (C, 15:170 [2: 315]). Just as in transformational geometry, something remains fixed in all the projective transformations of the mind’s momentary systems, and that something is the Self (le Moi, or just M, as Valéry notates it so that it will look like an algebraic variable). Transformation theory is all over the place. “Mathematical science . . . reduced to algebra, that is, to the analysis of the transformations of a purely differential being made up of homogeneous elements, is the most faithful document of the properties of grouping, disjunction, and variation in the mind” (O, 1:36). “Psychology is a theory of transformations, we just need to isolate the invariants and the groups” (C, 1:915). “Man is a system that transforms itself” (C, 2:896).

Notes:

  Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60)

C   Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61)

Compare Jung’s image in Aion  of the Self as a four-diamond figure:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-JungImago.gif

and Cullinane’s purely geometric four-diamond figure:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-FourD.gif

For a natural group of 322,560 transformations acting on the latter figure, see the diamond theorem.

What remains fixed (globally, not pointwise) under these transformations is the system  of points and hyperplanes from the diamond theorem. This system was depicted by artist Josefine Lyche in her installation “Theme and Variations” in Oslo in 2009.  Lyche titled this part of her installation “The Smallest Perfect Universe,” a phrase used earlier by Burkard Polster to describe the projective 3-space PG(3,2) that contains these points (at right below) and hyperplanes (at left below).

Image-- Josefine Lyche's combination of Polster's phrase with<br /> Cullinane's images in her gallery show, Oslo, 2009-- 'The Smallest<br /> Perfect Universe -- Points and Hyperplanes'

Although the system of points (at right above) and hyperplanes (at left above) exemplifies Valéry’s notion of invariant, it seems unlikely to be the sort of thing he had in mind as an image of the Self.

Monday, February 17, 2020

Universal Beauty

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:38 pm

Remarks by Rosalind Krauss in the previous post suggest a look at

Then there is the universal beauty of oneself :

Jung's Four-Diamond Figure from Aion

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-JungImago.gif

This figure was devised by Jung
to represent the Self.

Monday, July 1, 2019

Inside the Exploded Cube

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:15 pm
 

Metaphysical conceit | literature | Britannica.com

https://www.britannica.com/art/metaphysical-conceit

The metaphysical conceit, associated with the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century, is a more intricate and intellectual device. It usually sets up an analogy between one entity's spiritual qualities and an object in the physical world and sometimes controls the whole structure of the poem.…

This post's title refers to a metaphysical conceit 
in the previous post, Desperately Seeking Clarity.

Related material —

The source of the above mystical octahedron —

'Becoming Whole,' by Leslie Stein

      See also Jung's Imago Dei  in this journal.

Saturday, June 1, 2019

Crystals for Dabblers

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:47 am

The title was suggested by the "Crystal Cult" installations
of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche and by a post of May 30 —

Thursday, May 30, 2019

Dabbling

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:02 PM Edit This

Jeff Nichols, director of Midnight Special  (2016) —

"When asked about the film's similarities to
the 2015 Disney movie Tomorrowland , which
also posits a futuristic world that exists in an
alternative dimension, Nichols sighed.
'I was a little bummed, I guess,' he said of
when he first learned about the project. . . . 
'Our die was cast. Sometimes this kind of 
collective unconscious that we're all dabbling in,
sometimes you're not the first one out of the gate.' "

See also Jung's four-diamond figure and the previous post.

Writers of fiction are, of course, also dabblers in the collective unconscious.
For instance . . .

A 1971 British paperback edition of The Dreaming Jewels,  
a story by Theodore Sturgeon (first version published in 1950):

The above book cover, together with the Death Valley location
Zabriskie Point, suggests . . .

Those less enchanted by the collective unconscious may prefer a
different weblog's remarks on the same date as the above Borax post . . .

Thursday, May 30, 2019

Dabbling

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:02 pm

Jeff Nichols, director of Midnight Special  (2016) —

"When asked about the film's similarities to the 2015 Disney
movie Tomorrowland , which also posits a futuristic world
that exists in an alternative dimension, Nichols sighed.
'I was a little bummed, I guess,' he said of when he first
learned about the project. . . . 'Our die was cast.
Sometimes this kind of collective unconscious that
we're all dabbling in, sometimes you're not the first one
out of the gate.' "

See also Jung's four-diamond figure and the previous post.

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Dueling Formulas

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 12:35 pm

Continued from the previous post and from posts
now tagged Dueling Formulas

The four-diamond formula of Jung and
the four-dot "as" of Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Simplified versions of the diamonds and the dots
 

The Ring of the Diamond Theorem          ::

I prefer Jung. For those who prefer Lévi-Strauss —

     First edition, Cornell University Press, 1970.

A related tale — "A Meaning, Like."

Sunday, July 23, 2017

The Partitioned Self

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:00 am

Jung's self-symbol

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-JungImago.gif

A meditation on Jung's self-symbol

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Elementary Art

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

The above cycle may have influenced the design
of Carl Jung's symbol of the self —

Jung's Self-Symbol

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110915-FourDiamondsIcon.gif

Related art by
Steven H. Cullinane

See also Levi-Strauss Formula in this journal.

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Kulturkampf

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:27 am

From a check tonight of The New York Review of Books

These NYRB  stories from May 15 and May 13 suggest a
review of images on Ratner's Star  and on the Eye of God.

IMAGE- 'Ratner's Star,' by Don DeLillo (1976)

Above image reposted from Jan. 10, 2014

I. The structures in the Diamond Puzzle

Adam and God (Sistine Chapel), with Jungian Self-Symbol and Ojo de Dios (The Diamond Puzzle)

Click on image for Jungian background.

II: The structure on a recent cover of Semiotica

'Semiotica' cover and article by Solomon Marcus on Levi-Strauss's 'canonic formula' of myth

Above images reposted from May 5, 2016

Related material:  The previous post, Dueling Formulas.

Thursday, May 5, 2016

Solomon’s Seal

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 pm

Excerpt from a post of November 4, 2009

I. The structures in the Diamond Puzzle

Adam and God (Sistine Chapel), with Jungian Self-Symbol and Ojo de Dios (The Diamond Puzzle)

Click on image for Jungian background.

II: The structure on a recent cover of Semiotica

'Semiotica' cover and article by Solomon Marcus on Levi-Strauss's 'canonic formula' of myth

For some related material, see a search 
for Solomon Marcus in this  journal.

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Church for Rebecca

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:48 am

"Remember, Genesis IS Skynet."

Adam and God (Sistine Chapel), with Jungian Self-Symbol and Ojo de Dios (The Diamond Puzzle)

Bloomberg News today:

Why 2015 Was a Breakthrough Year in Artificial Intelligence

"Computers are 'starting to open their eyes,' said a senior fellow at Google."

 

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Quality

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am

"William Tell’s weapon of choice has become
the symbol of Switzerland, a sign of sovereignty
and a guarantee of Swiss quality. On the eve of
the Second World War, these values seemed
especially important and necessary to the Swiss.
This five-centime green stamp was issued for
the 1939 national exhibition."

Related material in this journal:  Basel.

See also Jung + Imago.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Icons

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:00 am

Background: Jung's Aion in this journal discusses this
figure from finite geometry's diamond theorem

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110915-FourDiamondsIcon.gif

Fig. A

This resembles a figure that served Jung
as a schema of the Self

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110915-Jung-FourDiamonds.gif

Fig. B

Fig. A, with color variations, serves as the core
of many automatically generated Identicons
a different sort of self-symbol.

Examples from Sept. 6 at MathOverflow

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110915-ChuangGravatar.png     http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110915-JacobLurieGravatar.png

A user wanting to custom-tailor his self-symbol should consider
the following from the identicon service Gravatar

1. User Submissions.  " you hereby do and shall grant to Automattic a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable (including rights to sublicense) right to perform the Services (e.g., to use, modify, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, perform, and otherwise fully exercise and exploit all intellectual property, publicity, and moral rights with respect to any User Submissions, and to allow others to do so)."

Sounds rather Faustian.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

For Saint Peter

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 10:30 am

… and Arthur Koestler

The theme of the January 2010 issue of the
Notices of the American Mathematical Society
was “Mathematics and the Arts.”

 

Related material:

Adam and God (Sistine Chapel), with Jungian Self-Symbol and Ojo de Dios (The Diamond Puzzle)

 

See also two posts from the day Peter Jennings died—

Presbyterian Justice and Religious Symbolism at Harvard.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Annals of Philosophy

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

The Medium is the Message

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100222-McLuhan.jpg
Marshall McLuhan

From the Wikipedia article
on Marshall McLuhan–

McLuhan 'tetrad' figure with four diamonds surrounding a fifth, the medium

From yesterday

(Click images for some background.)

Ian McKellen at 'Neverwas' diamond windows

Related material:

Feast of St. Louis, 2003,

a web page on McLuhan's
student Walter J. Ong, S. J.,

and Jung and the Imago Dei

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

To Apollo

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:00 am

Yesterday's post may, if one likes, be regarded
  as a nod to Dionysus, god of tragedy.

Here is a complementary passage:

Nietzsche on Heraclitus and the 'play of fire with itself'

Related material:
Jung and the Imago Dei

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Fearful Symmetry

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:12 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/091230-Koestlerr-NYRB19641217.gif

Arthur Koestler by David Levine,
New York Review of Books,
December 17, 1964

A Jesuit at the
Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive
:

‘Bisociation’: The Act of Creation

Koestler’s concept of ‘bisociation’… enters into the very ‘act of creation.’ In every such act, writes Koestler, the creator ‘bisociates,’ that is, combines, two ‘matrices’– two diverse patterns of knowing or perceiving– in a new way. As each matrix carries its own images, concepts, values, and ‘codes,’ the creative person brings together– ‘bisociates’– two diverse matrices not normally connected.

— Joseph J. Feeney, S.J.

See also December 9, 2009:

The theme of the January 2010 issue of the
Notices of the American Mathematical Society
is “Mathematics and the Arts.”

Related material:

Adam and God (Sistine Chapel), with Jungian Self-Symbol and Ojo de Dios (The Diamond Puzzle)

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

2010 AMS Notices

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:00 pm

The theme of the January 2010 issue of the
Notices of the American Mathematical Society
is "Mathematics and the Arts."

Related material:

Adam and God (Sistine Chapel), with Jungian Self-Symbol and Ojo de Dios (The Diamond Puzzle)

The Diamond Puzzle
may be downloaded by
  viewing it in Internet Explorer
and saving it in the
"web archive" (*.mht) format.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Holiday Book

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:00 pm

Time and Chance, continued…

NY Lottery numbers today–
Midday 401, Evening 717  

_________________________________________________

From this journal on 4/01, 2009:

The Cruelest Month

Fictional Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon, as portrayed by Tom Hanks

"Langdon sensed she was
      toying with him…."

Dan Brown

___________________________________________

From this journal on 7/17, 2008:

Jung’s four-diamond figure from
Aiona symbol of the self

Jung's four-diamond figure showing transformations of the self as Imago Dei

Jung’s Map of the Soul,
by Murray Stein:

“… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self….”

For related dynamic movements,
see the Diamond 16 Puzzle
and the diamond theorem.

______________________________________________
 
A piece related to both of the above posts–
 
"The Symbologist," a review, respectful despite the editor's sarcastic title, of Jung's Red Book in the December 6th New York Times Book Review.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Sinner or Saint?

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:31 am

As noted here yesterday, Claude Levi-Strauss may have died on Devil's Night, on Halloween, or on All Saints' Day. He was apparently a myth-transformer to the end.

The Independent says today he died on Sunday, All Saints' Day. Its eulogy, by Adam Kuper, is well-written, noting that linguist Roman Jakobson was a source of Levi-Strauss's theory of oppositions in myth, and observing that

"… binary oppositions tend to accumulate to form structures…."

Yes, they do. Examples:

I. The structures in the Diamond Puzzle

Adam and God (Sistine Chapel), with Jungian Self-Symbol and Ojo de Dios (The Diamond Puzzle)

Click on image for Jungian background.

II: The structure on a recent cover of Semiotica

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/091103-SemioticaSm.jpg

Click to enlarge.

The Semiotica article by mathematical linguist Solomon Marcus is a defense of the Levi-Strauss canonic formula mentioned here yesterday.

It is available online for $40.

A less expensive, and possibly more informative, look at oppositions in linguistics is available for free online in a 1984 master's thesis (pdf, 8+ mb)–

"Language, Linguistics, and Philosophy: A Comparison of the Work of Roman Jakobson and the Later Wittgenstein, with Some Attention to the Philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce," by Miles Spencer Kimball.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Thursday June 25, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Apocatastasis

“… T. S. Eliot tried to recompose,
   in Four Quartets, the fragments
   he had grieved over
    in The Waste Land.”

— “Beauty and Desecration,”
   Roger Scruton
 (link at aldaily.com today)

The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness….”

— Carl G. Jung in Aion

Related material:
this journal
one year ago today.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Saturday March 28, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:07 pm

The Rest
of the Story

Today's previous entry discussed the hermeneutics of the midday NY and PA lottery numbers.

The rest of the story:
 

The Revelation Game
(continued from 7/26, 2008)

 
Lotteries
on Reba's
birthday,
2009
Pennsylvania
(No revelation)
New York
(Revelation)
Mid-day
(No belief)
No belief,
no revelation

726
Revelation
without belief

378
Evening
(Belief)
Belief without
revelation

006
Belief and
revelation

091

Interpretations of the evening numbers–

The PA evening number, 006, may be viewed as a followup to the PA midday 726 (or 7/26, the birthday of Kate Beckinsale and Carl Jung). Here 006 is the prestigious "00" number assigned to Beckinsale.
 

Will: Do you like apples?     
Clark: Yeah.                       
Will: Well, I got her number.
 How do you like them apples?

— "Good Will Hunting

Kate Beckinsale in 'Underworld: Evolution'

The NY evening number, 091, may be viewed as a followup to the NY midday 378 (the number of pages in The Innermost Kernel by Suzanne Gieser, published by Springer, 2005)–

Page 91: The entire page is devoted to the title of the book's Part 3– "The Copenhagen School and Psychology"–
 

Page 91 of 'The Innermost Kernel' by Suzanne Gieser, Springer 2005

The next page begins: "With the crisis of physics, interest in epistemological and psychological questions grew among many theoretical physicists. This interest was particularly marked in the circle around Niels Bohr."
 

A particularly
marked circle
 from March 15:

Diamond Theory version of 'The Square Inch Space' with yin-yang symbol for comparison

The circle above is
marked with a version of
the classic Chinese symbol
adopted as a personal emblem
by Danish physicist Niels Bohr,
leader of the Copenhagen School.

"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."

-- Wallace Stevens,
  "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
   Canto IV of "It Must Change"

The square above is marked
with a graphic design
related to the four-diamond
figure of Jung's Aion.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Friday February 20, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:01 pm
Emblematizing
 the Modern
 

The following meditation was
inspired by the recent fictional
recovery, by Mira Sorvino
in "The Last Templar,"

of a Greek Cross —
"the Cross of Constantine"–
and by the discovery, by
art historian Rosalind Krauss,
of a Greek Cross in the
art of Ad Reinhardt.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090220-CrossOfDescartes.jpg

The Cross of Descartes  

Note that in applications, the vertical axis
of the Cross of Descartes often symbolizes
the timeless (money, temperature, etc.)
while the horizontal axis often symbolizes time.


T.S. Eliot:

"Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint…."


There is a reason, apart from her ethnic origins, that Rosalind Krauss (cf. 9/13/06) rejects, with a shudder, the cross as a key to "the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it." The rejection occurs in the context of her attempt to establish not the cross, but the grid, as a religious symbol:
 

"In suggesting that the success [1] of the grid
is somehow connected to its structure as myth,
I may of course be accused of stretching a point
beyond the limits of common sense, since myths
are stories, and like all narratives they unravel
through time, whereas grids are not only spatial
to start with, they are visual structures
that explicitly reject a narrative
or sequential reading of any kind.

[1] Success here refers to
three things at once:
a sheerly quantitative success,
involving the number of artists
in this century who have used grids;
a qualitative success through which
the grid has become the medium
for some of the greatest works
of modernism; and an ideological
success, in that the grid is able–
in a work of whatever quality–
to emblematize the Modern."

— Rosalind Krauss, "Grids" (1979)

Related material:

Time Fold and Weyl on
objectivity and frames of reference.

See also Stambaugh on
The Formless Self
as well as
A Study in Art Education
and
Jung and the Imago Dei.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Monday February 9, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:12 pm
The Vision Thing

The British Academy Awards last night showed two Paul Newman clips:

"Sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand."

"Boy, I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals."

Related material: This journal, September 2008.

As for bifocals…

 

Ben Franklin
 
Pennsylvania Lottery
 
PA Lottery Feb. 8, 2009-- Midday 017, Evening 717
Versus
7/17:

 

Aion
A symbol
   of the self

Four-diamond symbol of the self from Jung's 'Aion'

 

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Thursday January 8, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:07 pm
Report of Arrival

A PBS broadcast of Cyrano de Bergerac was shown yesterday nationally and this evening, a day late, by WNED TV, Buffalo.

From the translation by Anthony Burgess:

Cyrano speaks of falling leaves–

They fall well. With a sort of panache.
They plume down in their last
Loveliness, disguising their fear
Of being dried and pounded to ash
To mix with the common dust.
They go in grace, making their fall appear
Like flying.
ROXANE  You’re melancholy today.
CYRANO  Never. I’m not the melancholy sort.
ROXANE  Very well, then. We’ll let
The leaves of the fall fall while you
Turn the leaves of my gazette.
What’s new at court?
CYRANO … There have been some scandals
To do with witches. A bishop went to heaven,
Or so it’s believed: there’s been as yet no report
Of his arrival….”

Later….

CYRANO … See it there, a white plume
Over the battle– A diamond in the ash
Of the ultimate combustion–
My panache.”

Related material:

Today’s previous entry
and the Epiphany
link to the
four-diamond symbol
in Jung’s Aion
with an epigraph by
Gerard Manley Hopkins:

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire…

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Tuesday January 6, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 am
Archetypes, Synchronicity,
and Dyson on Jung

The current (Feb. 2009) Notices of the American Mathematical Society has a written version of Freeman Dyson’s 2008 Einstein Lecture, which was to have been given in October but had to be canceled. Dyson paraphrases a mathematician on Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes:

“… we do not need to accept Jung’s theory as true in order to find it illuminating.”

The same is true of Jung’s remarks on synchronicity.

For example —

Yesterday’s entry, “A Wealth of Algebraic Structure,” lists two articles– each, as it happens, related to Jung’s four-diamond figure from Aion as well as to my own Notes on Finite Geometry. The articles were placed online recently by Cambridge University Press on the following dates:

R. T. Curtis’s 1974 article defining his Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) was published online on Oct. 24, 2008.

Curtis’s 1987 article on geometry and algebraic structure in the MOG was published online on Dec. 19, 2008.

On these dates, the entries in this journal discussed…

Oct. 24:
Cube Space, 1984-2003

Material related to that entry:

Dec. 19:
Art and Religion: Inside the White Cube

That entry discusses a book by Mark C. Taylor:

The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (U. of Chicago Press, 1999).

In Chapter 3, “Sutures of Structures,” Taylor asks —

“What, then, is a frame, and what is frame work?”

One possible answer —

Hermann Weyl on the relativity problem in the context of the 4×4 “frame of reference” found in the above Cambridge University Press articles.

“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.”
— Vladimir Nabokov 

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Thursday July 17, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:28 pm
CHANGE
 FEW CAN BELIEVE IN

Continued from June 18.

Jungian Symbols

of the Self —

User icons (identicons) from Secret Blogging Seminar
Compare and contrast:

Jung's four-diamond figure from
Aiona symbol of the self

Jung's four-diamond figure showing transformations of the self as Imago Dei

Jung's Map of the Soul,
by Murray Stein:

"… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self…."


For related dynamic movements,
see the Diamond 16 Puzzle
and the diamond theorem.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Wednesday June 25, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:20 pm
The Cycle of
the Elements

John Baez, Week 266
(June 20, 2008):

“The Renaissance thinkers liked to
organize the four elements using
a chain of analogies running
from light to heavy:

fire : air :: air : water :: water : earth

They also organized them
in a diamond, like this:”

Diamond of the four ancient elements, figure by John Baez

This figure of Baez
is related to a saying
attributed to Heraclitus:

Diamond  showing transformation of the four ancient elements

For related thoughts by Jung,
see Aion, which contains the
following diagram:

Jung's four-diamond figure showing transformations of the self as Imago Dei

“The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula repeats the ancient alchemical tetrameria, which is implicit in the fourfold structure of unity.”

— Carl Gustav Jung

That the words Maximus of Tyre (second century A.D.) attributed to Heraclitus imply a cycle of the elements (analogous to the rotation in Jung’s diagram) is not a new concept. For further details, see “The Rotation of the Elements,” a 1995 webpage by one  “John Opsopaus.”

Related material:

Log24 entries of June 9, 2008, and

Quintessence: A Glass Bead Game,”
by Charles Cameron.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Friday August 10, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:31 am

The Ring of Gyges

10:31:32 AM ET

Commentary by Richard Wilhelm
on I Ching Hexagram 32:

“Duration is… not a state of rest, for mere standstill is regression.
Duration is rather the self-contained and therefore self-renewing
movement of an organized, firmly integrated whole, taking place in
accordance with immutable laws and beginning anew at every ending.”

Related material

The Ring of the Diamond Theorem

Jung and the Imago Dei

Log24 on June 10, 2007: 

WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? some people ask. I never ask. —Joan Didion

Iago states that he is not who he is. —Mark F. Frisch

“Not Being There,”
by Christopher Caldwell
,
from next Sunday’s
New York Times Magazine:

“The chance to try on fresh identities was the great boon that life online was supposed to afford us. Multiuser role-playing games and discussion groups would be venues for living out fantasies. Shielded by anonymity, everyone could now pass a ‘second life’ online as Thor the Motorcycle Sex God or the Sage of Wherever. Some warned, though, that there were other possibilities. The Stanford Internet expert Lawrence Lessig likened online anonymity to the ring of invisibility that surrounds the shepherd Gyges in one of Plato’s dialogues. Under such circumstances, Plato feared, no one is ‘of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice.’Time, along with a string of sock-puppet scandals, has proved Lessig and Plato right.”

“The Boy Who Lived,”
by Christopher Hitchens
,
from next Sunday’s
New York Times Book Review:

On the conclusion of the Harry Potter series:”The toys have been put firmly back in the box, the wand has been folded up, and the conjuror is discreetly accepting payment while the children clamor for fresh entertainments. (I recommend that they graduate to Philip Pullman, whose daemon scheme is finer than any patronus.)”

I, on the other hand,
recommend Tolkien…
or, for those who are
already familiar with
Tolkien, Plato– to whom
The Ring of Gyges” may
serve as an introduction.

“It’s all in Plato, all in Plato:
bless me, what do they
teach them at these schools!”
C. S. Lewis

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Thursday June 21, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:30 pm

Schopenhauer on the Kernel of Eternity

Philos Website

“Ich aber, hier auf dem objektiven Wege, bin jetzt bemüht, das Positive der Sache nachzuweisen, daß nämlich das Ding an sich von der Zeit und Dem, was nur durch sie möglich ist, dem Entstehen und Vergehen, unberührt bleibt, und daß die Erscheinungen in der Zeit sogar jenes rastlos flüchtige, dem Nichts zunächst stehende Dasein nicht haben könnten, wenn nicht in ihnen ein Kern aus der Ewigkeit* wäre. Die Ewigkeit ist freilich ein Begriff, dem keine Anschauung zum Grunde liegt: er ist auch deshalb bloß negativen Inhalts, besagt nämlich ein zeitloses Dasein. Die Zeit ist demnach ein bloßes Bild der Ewigkeit, ho chronos eikôn tou aiônos,** wie es Plotinus*** hat: und ebenso ist unser zeitliches Dasein das bloße Bild unsers Wesens an sich. Dieses muß in der Ewigkeit liegen, eben weil die Zeit nur die Form unsers Erkennens ist: vermöge dieser allein aber erkennen wir unser und aller Dinge Wesen als vergänglich, endlich und der Vernichtung anheimgefallen.”

*    “a kernel of eternity
**  “Time is the image of eternity.”
*** “wie es Plotinus hat”–
       Actually, not Plotinus, but Plato,
       according to Diogenes Laertius.

Related material:

Time Fold,

J. N. Darby,
On the Greek Words for
Eternity and Eternal

(aion and aionios),”

Carl Gustav Jung, Aion,
which contains the following
four-diamond figure,

Jung's four-diamond figure

and Jung and the Imago Dei.

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Tuesday April 3, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 10:10 pm

Our Judeo-Christian
Heritage –
 
Lottery
Hermeneutics

Part I: Judeo

The Lottery 12/9/06 Mid-day Evening
New York 036

See

The Quest
for the 36

331

See 3/31

“square crystal” and “the symbolism could not have been more perfect.”

Pennsylvania 602

See 6/02

Walter Benjamin
on
“Adamic language.”

111

See 1/11

“Related material:
Jung’s Imago and Solomon’s Cube.”

 

Part II: Christian

The Lottery 4/3/07 Mid-day Evening
New York 115

See 1/15

Inscape

017

See

The image “Primitive roots modulo 17

Pennsylvania 604

See
6/04

Death Valley and the Fisher King

714

See
7/14

Happy Birthday, Esther Dyson

Part III:
Imago Dei

Jung's Four-Diamonds Figure


Click on picture
for details.

 

Related material:

It is perhaps relevant to
this Holy Week that the
date 6/04 (2006) above
refers to both the Christian
holy day of Pentecost and
to the day of the
facetious baccalaureate
of the Class of 2006 in
the University Chapel
at Princeton.

For further context for the
Log24 remarks of that same
date, see June 1-15, 2006.

Sunday, January 7, 2007

Sunday January 7, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:00 am
Birthday Greetings
to Nicolas Cage
from Marxists.org

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Various forms of “the modern movement” that include “… the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalised and canonised in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted…” —marxists.org:

“One of the primary critiques of modernism that Learning from Las Vegas was engaged in, as Frederic [sic] Jameson clearly noted, was the dialectic between inside and outside and the assumption that the outside expressed the interior.* Let’s call this the modernist drive for ‘expressive transparency.'”

Aron Vinegar of Ohio State U., “Skepticism and the Ordinary: From Burnt Norton to Las Vegas

* Jameson, Frederic [sic]. 1988. “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology.” The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986. Volume 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 59.

Steven Helmling, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson, SUNY Press, 2001, p. 54–

Jameson “figures the inside/outside problem in the metaphor of the ‘prison-house of language’….”

      
      Jung and the Imago Dei:

 “… Jung presents a diagram  
    to illustrate the dynamic
      movements of the self….”

…the movement of
a self in the rock…

Stevens, The Rock, and Piranesi's Prisons

Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate
,
by Harold Bloom,
Cornell U. Press, 1977

“Welcome to The Rock.”
— Sean Connery

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070107-Bridge.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
“… just as God defeats the devil:
this bridge exists….”
Andre Weil

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070107-Magneto2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The bridge illustration
is thanks to Magneto.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Sunday December 10, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:00 am
The Matrix:

Time and Chance
on the 90th Birthday
of Kirk Douglas,
star of
The Garden of Allah

The Lottery 12/9/06 Mid-day Evening
New York 036

See

The Quest
for the 36

331

See 3/31

“square crystal” and “the symbolism could not have been more perfect.”

Pennsylvania 602

See 6/02

Walter Benjamin
on
“Adamic language.”

111

See 1/11

“Related material:
Jung’s Imago and Solomon’s Cube.”

See also

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051209-Douglas1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Diamonds

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/JungDiamonds.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Wednesday September 20, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:00 am

Public Space

"… the Danish cartoons crisis last March showed 'two world views colliding in public space with no common point of reference.'"

George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002, quoted in today's London Times.

Related material:

Geometry and Christianity
   (Google search yielding
    "about 1,540,000" results)

Geometry and Islam
   (Google search yielding
    "about 1,580,000" results)

MySpace.com/affine

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060828-Cube.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A Public Space

 

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060920-Motto.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

— Motto of 
Plato's Academy

Background from
Log24 on Feb. 15, 2006:

Hellmut Wilhelm on the Tao
 
If we replace the Chinese word "I" (change, transformation) with the word "permutation," the relevance of Western mathematics (which some might call "the Logos") to the I Ching ("Changes Classic") beomes apparent.

For the relevance of Plato to
Islam, see David Wade's
Pattern in Islamic Art
and a Google search on
Plato and Islam
("about 1,680,000" results).

"We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each had a private intelligence of his own."

Heraclitus of Ephesus, about 500 B.C.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Saturday August 26, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:00 pm
Philosopher's Rock
 
(continued from  

previous entry)

"Alcatraz, Spanish for pelican, was named Isla de los Alcatraces after the birds that were the island's only inhabitants." —Bay City Guide

Related material

Thomas Kuhn's "Pelican Brief":

"… the Philosopher’s Stone was a psychic rather than a physical product.  It symbolized one’s Self…."

Philosopher's Pelican:

"The formula presents a symbol of the self…."

Jung and the Imago Dei:

"… Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self…."

…the movement of
a self in the rock…

Stevens, The Rock, and Piranesi's Prisons

Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate
,
by Harold Bloom,
Cornell U. Press, 1977

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Saturday April 22, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 pm
Finis
Coronat
Opus

continued

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060422-FinisCoronat.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

See the essay
by Ana Marie Cox
on the final page
of this week's
TIME magazine.

Related material:

Jung and the Imago Dei,
Log24 entries of Feb. 20, 2004,
Space, Time, and Scarlett, and
Crystal's Sweet Sixteen
(Saturday Night Live sketch
starring Scarlett Johansson–
also featured as the clerk in
"Once in a Lifetime Jewelers"–
broadcast on Jan. 14, 2006.)

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060422-Johansson1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"Her wall is filled with pictures,
She gets 'em one by one."

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Wednesday February 15, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:07 am
Anthony Hopkins
Writes Screenplay
About God, Life & Death

These topics may be illuminated
by a study of the Chinese classics.

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/GF64-63cycleA495.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The image “http://www.log24.com/images/IChing/WilhelmHellmut.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

If we replace the Chinese word "I"
(change, transformation) with the
word "permutation," the relevance
of Western mathematics (which
some might call "the Logos") to
the I Ching ("Changes Classic")
beomes apparent.

Related material:

Hitler's Still Point,
Jung's Imago,
Solomon's Cube,
Geometry of the I Ching,
and Globe Award.

Yesterday's Valentine
may also have some relevance.

Friday, January 20, 2006

Friday January 20, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Fourstone Parable

"Wherefore let it hardly… be… thought that the prisoner… was at his best a onestone parable
for… pathetically few… cared… to doubt… the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract."

Finnegans Wake, page 100, abridged

"… we have forgotten that we were angels and painted ourselves into a corner
of resource extraction and commodification of ourselves."

— A discussion, in a draft of a paper (rtf) attributed to Josh Schultz, 
of the poem "Diamond" by Attila Jozsef

Commodification of
the name Cullinane:

See the logos at
cullinane.com,
a design firm with
the motto

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060120-Motto.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(Note the 4Cs theme.)

To adapt a phrase from
Finnegans Wake, the
"fourstone parable" below
is an attempt to
decommodify my name.

Fourstone Parable:

(See also yesterday's "Logos."
The "communicate" logo is taken from
an online library at Calvin College;
the "connect" logo is a commonly
available picture of a tesseract
(Coxeter, Regular Polytopes, p. 123),
and the other two logos
are more or less original.)

For a more elegant
four-diamond figure, see
Jung and the Imago Dei.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Wednesday January 11, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:30 pm

Time in the Rock

"a world of selves trying to remember the self
before the idea of self is lost–

Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk,
speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble
of all these syllables a single word
before the purpose of speech is gone."

— Conrad Aiken, "Prelude" (1932),
    later part of "Time in the Rock,
    or Preludes to Definition, XIX" (1936),
    in Selected Poems, Oxford U. Press
    paperback, 2003, page 156

"The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A
In a perspective that begins again

At B: the origin of the mango's rind.
It is the rock where tranquil must adduce
Its tranquil self, the main of things, the mind,

The starting point of the human and the end,
That in which space itself is contained, the gate
To the enclosure, day, the things illumined

By day, night and that which night illumines,
Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,
Night's hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep."

— Wallace Stevens in The Rock (1954)

"Poetry is an illumination of a surface,
  the movement of a self in the rock."
— Wallace Stevens, introduction to
    The Necessary Angel, 1951
 

Related material:
Jung's Imago and Solomon's Cube.

 

The following may help illuminate the previous entry:

"I want, as a man of the imagination, to write poetry with all the power of a monster equal in strength to that of the monster about whom I write.  I want man's imagination to be completely adequate in the face of reality."

— Wallace Stevens, 1953 (Letters 790)

The "monster" of the previous entry is of course not Reese Witherspoon, but rather Vox Populi itself.

Thursday, December 8, 2005

Thursday December 8, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:56 pm
Aion Flux

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire…
— Poem title, Gerard Manley Hopkins  

From Jung’s Map of the Soul, by Murray Stein:

“… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self….”

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/JungDiamonds.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a stable quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process.  In the same way, the ancients saw the imago Dei in man not as a mere imprint, as a sort of lifeless, stereotyped impression, but as an active force…. The four transformations represent a process of restoration or rejuvenation taking place, as it were, inside the self….”

“The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula repeats the ancient alchemical tetrameria, which is implicit in the fourfold structure of unity. 

What the formula can only hint at, however, is the higher plane that is reached through the process of transformation and integration. The ‘sublimation’ or progress or qualitative change consists in an unfolding of totality into four parts four times, which means nothing less than its becoming conscious. When psychic contents are split up into four aspects, it means that they have been subjected to discrimination by the four orienting functions of consciousness. Only the production of these four aspects makes a total description possible. The process depicted by our formula changes the originally unconscious totality into a conscious one.” 

— Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 2, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951) 

Related material: 

  The diamond theorem

“Although ‘wholeness’ seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of  spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical recods of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology.  What at first looks like an abstract idea stands in reality for something that exists and can be experienced, that demonstrates its a priori presence spontaneously. Wholeness is thus an objective factor that confronts the subject independently of him… Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality.”

— Jung, Aion, as quoted in
Carl Jung and Thomas Merton

Saturday, July 20, 2002

Saturday July 20, 2002

 

ABSTRACT: Finite projective geometry explains the surprising symmetry properties of some simple graphic designs– found, for instance, in quilts. Links are provided for applications to sporadic simple groups (via the "Miracle Octad Generator" of R. T. Curtis), to the connection between orthogonal Latin squares and projective spreads, and to symmetry of Walsh functions.

We regard the four-diamond figure D above as a 4×4 array of two-color diagonally-divided square tiles.

Let G be the group of 322,560 permutations of these 16 tiles generated by arbitrarily mixing random permutations of rows and of columns with random permutations of the four 2×2 quadrants.

THEOREM: Every G-image of D (as at right, below) has some ordinary or color-interchange symmetry.

Example:


For an animated version, click here.

Remarks:

Some of the patterns resulting from the action of G on D have been known for thousands of years. (See Jablan, Symmetry and Ornament, Ch. 2.6.) It is perhaps surprising that the patterns' interrelationships and symmetries can be explained fully only by using mathematics discovered just recently (relative to the patterns' age)– in particular, the theory of automorphism groups of finite geometries.

Using this theory, we can summarize the patterns' properties by saying that G is isomorphic to the affine group A on the linear 4-space over GF(2) and that the 35 structures of the 840 = 35 x 24 G-images of D are isomorphic to the 35 lines in the 3-dimensional projective space over GF(2).

This can be seen by viewing the 35 structures as three-sets of line diagrams, based on the three partitions of the four-set of square two-color tiles into two two-sets, and indicating the locations of these two-sets of tiles within the 4×4 patterns. The lines of the line diagrams may be added in a binary fashion (i.e., 1+1=0). Each three-set of line diagrams sums to zero– i.e., each diagram in a three-set is the binary sum of the other two diagrams in the set. Thus, the 35 three-sets of line diagrams correspond to the 35 three-point lines of the finite projective 3-space PG(3,2).

For example, here are the line diagrams for the figures above:

 
Shown below are the 15 possible line diagrams resulting from row/column/quadrant permutations. These 15 diagrams may, as noted above, be regarded as the 15 points of the projective 3-space PG(3,2).


The symmetry of the line diagrams accounts for the symmetry of the two-color patterns. (A proof shows that a 2nx2n two-color triangular half-squares pattern with such line diagrams must have a 2×2 center with a symmetry, and that this symmetry must be shared by the entire pattern.)

Among the 35 structures of the 840 4×4 arrays of tiles, orthogonality (in the sense of Latin-square orthogonality) corresponds to skewness of lines in the finite projective space PG(3,2). This was stated by the author in a 1978 note. (The note apparently had little effect. A quarter-century later, P. Govaerts, D. Jungnickel, L. Storme, and J. A. Thas wrote that skew (i.e., nonintersecting) lines in a projective space seem "at first sight not at all related" to orthogonal Latin squares.)

We can define sums and products so that the G-images of D generate an ideal (1024 patterns characterized by all horizontal or vertical "cuts" being uninterrupted) of a ring of 4096 symmetric patterns. There is an infinite family of such "diamond" rings, isomorphic to rings of matrices over GF(4).

The proof uses a decomposition technique for functions into a finite field that might be of more general use.

The underlying geometry of the 4×4 patterns is closely related to the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis– used in the construction of the Steiner system S(5,8,24)– and hence is also related to the Leech lattice, which, as Walter Feit has remarked, "is a blown up version of S(5,8,24)."

For a movable JavaScript version of these 4×4 patterns, see The Diamond 16 Puzzle.

The above is an expanded version of Abstract 79T-A37, "Symmetry invariance in a diamond ring," by Steven H. Cullinane, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, February 1979, pages A-193, 194.

For a discussion of other cases of the theorem, click here.

Related pages:

The Diamond 16 Puzzle

Diamond Theory in 1937:
A Brief Historical Note

Notes on Finite Geometry

Geometry of the 4×4 Square

Binary Coordinate Systems

The 35 Lines of PG(3,2)

Map Systems:
Function Decomposition over a Finite Field

The Diamond Theorem–
The 2×2, the 2x2x2, the 4×4, and the 4x4x4 Cases

Diamond Theory

Latin-Square Geometry

Walsh Functions

Inscapes

The Diamond Theory of Truth

Geometry of the I Ching

Solomon's Cube and The Eightfold Way

Crystal and Dragon in Diamond Theory

The Form, the Pattern

The Grid of Time

Block Designs

Finite Relativity

Theme and Variations

Models of Finite Geometries

Quilt Geometry

Pattern Groups

The Fano Plane Revisualized,
or the Eightfold Cube

The Miracle Octad Generator

Kaleidoscope

Visualizing GL(2,p)

Jung's Imago

Author's home page

AMS Mathematics Subject Classification:

20B25 (Group theory and generalizations :: Permutation groups :: Finite automorphism groups of algebraic, geometric, or combinatorial structures)

05B25 (Combinatorics :: Designs and configurations :: Finite geometries)

51E20 (Geometry :: Finite geometry and special incidence structures :: Combinatorial structures in finite projective spaces)



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Initial Xanga entry.  Updated Nov. 18, 2006.

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