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Date Posted: 14:38:17 11/04/07 Sun
Author: part 3
Subject: Re: November 4, 2007
In reply to: part 2 's message, "Re: November 4, 2007" on 14:34:03 11/04/07 Sun

- Prometheus Bound -
In Aeschylus' {{Prometheus Bound}}, Prometheus is condemned,
by the Olympian Zeus, to a long period of torture: to be tortured
while shackled for the alleged offense of making knowledge of the
use of fire available to mortal human beings. The type of
society which that Zeus represents, is what was known in ancient
Classical Greek times by the name of ``the oligarchical model''
of societies, such as the Persian Empire, and the practice of
helotry (slavery) by the Delphic tyranny of Lycurgus' Sparta.
This still-persisting, European model of tyrannical (e.g.,
oligarchical) rule, is made clear by examining the practices of
the Delphi cults, that of Gaea, Pythias-Pythia, and Apollo.
That is also the actually historical model of oligarchical
tyrannies, including that of Caesarian Rome, and as a persisting
pestilence in European culture from that period forward to the
present day. This, which was known in ancient Greek times of
Demosthenes as the ``Persian,'' or ``oligarchical'' model, has
been the model for all the approximately global forms of imperial
rule in European history since that time. These cases include the
Roman Empire, Byzantium, the Norman-Venetian medieval system of
the Crusades, and Anglo-Dutch Liberal financier form of
imperialism which menaces, and ravages our U.S. republic, and
other nations, today.
The characteristic clearly exhibited by all such
oligarchical models of tragedy, is the same expressed by the
Olympian Zeus' banning the spread of the knowledge of the use of
fire to mortal persons. Thus, by such banning of scientific and
technological progress, as by contemporary Liberalism's
empiricist and positivist cults, the majority of the population
is degraded to the mental and social status of something like
cattle: forbidden access to knowledge of forms of behavior
outside the range of what is prescribed for them by their
masters. Here, in this suppression of the scientific and related
creative powers of the human minds of the mass of the population,
lies the essence of {the principled force of tragedy}.
That, precisely that turn to so-called Liberal economic
policies, has been the chief general cause of the downfall of our
once-proud economy, and the increasingly savage loss of what were
formerly the constitutional rights of the lower eighty percentile
of our population's income-brackets.
In all competently composed Classical tragedy, there is a
silent, invisible power which herds the members of society, by
force of will, into a restricted range of allowed choices of
behavior. This is as reported, above, from the mouths of Cassius
and Casca, or from the mouth of Shakespeare's Hamlet, or reported
there by the allusion of Horatio's concluding remarks. The force
of tragedy expressed, is of that ``silent electric fence''
quality of control which is of the type expressed, implicitly, on
stage, by the devilishly fancied image of the phantom of Hamlet's
father.
So, as the victim of such control over his fears, or rages,
is induced to destroy himself, or herself; so, an entire nation,
like our own, may be driven, as recently, like a herd of maddened
cattle, as by the crafted terror of ``9@nd11,'' or Hermann
Goering's earlier, Cheney-like role in orchestrating the 1933
burning of the Reichstag, into destroying itself, even its entire
culture.
In the case of {{Prometheus Bound}}, the playwright has
brought what must have been, in reality, the terribly silent,
potent spirit, that Satan-like pagan god Zeus, with his Olympian
lackeys, on stage, where the craft of the playwright has forced
that Satanic Zeus and his lackeys to speak, and, by this device,
thus permits the audience to hear a creature, such as Zeus, who
was composed by the playwright as a talking substitute for the
performance of the same kind of dramatic function as the silent
ghost from {{Hamlet}}. In all great compositions of Classical
tragedy, such as those works of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, or
Schiller, the ghastly power appears on stage, as in the wars
crafted by the lying Cheney and Tony Blair now, to reveal the
awful truth of the tyranny which reigns over mortal mankind,
In real life, the force of great tragedy which may cast its
shadow on stage, or in real history, is never actually seen or
heard directly by the audience. It is expressed as a silent force
which moves, in drama, as might disembodied footprints across the
stage of the theater, or, in real life, footprints of an unseen,
awesome creature, or a dank, chill wisp of breeze cruelly
touching living cheek. It is said to be ``a spooky feeling.''
Yet, on stage, or in real life, it is that sense of a ghastly
prescience which often impels individuals, or entire societies,
to destroy themselves, as one another, as did the doomed
characters from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, or Macbeth, or
Hamlet.
Thus, the successful composition or performance of a great
work of artistic tragedy, impels the author, director, and
actors, to craft their movements and speech in such a way as to
impart that sense of the potent, but unseen, unheard, awful
presence of the force of tragic principle to the audience, to
create, in the mind of the audience, belief in the eerie
existence of the efficient presence: speaking, to chilling
effect, as through the voice of the drunk from Eugene O'Neill's
{{The Iceman Cometh}}: ``Hickey, you took the life out of the
booze!'' It is a belief which voicelessly bends the will, as if
by an invisible physical principle. The mind of the audience for
the drama must be compelled to feel that invisible, unheard
presence, which the drama shows must necessarily exist in the
guise of an invisible hand, like a silently whispered comma,
which controls the action and fate of the characters on stage.
Such as the requirements, and goal of the composition and
performance of true Classical tragedy. The final, added
requirement, is that that choice of unseen, efficient presence
must not be merely fanciful, but true.
As on the Classical stage, so it is in the ongoing real life
on the streets outside.
The source of the powerful effect which the able use of that
device is sufficient to place in the hands of the capable
Classical director and acting company, is no mere fantasy; it is
an expression of the same principle we encounter in great and
valid discoveries in physical science. Only the illiterate dolt
would deny this reality. To wit:

- The Footprint of Science & Art -
The principle toward which I have pointed, here, above, is
not a phantom of the theatrical stage. Its power to produce a
sensed effect, like that of physical blows, on stage, is the same
ontological quality of power we meet in the role of efficient
discovery of universal physical principles in experimental
science. Here lies the key to understanding the same principle's
efficiency on the Classical stage, or a poem such as Keats' {{Ode
to a Grecian Urn}}, or as presented in the concluding pages of
Shelley's {{In Defence of Poetry.}}
It is, unfortunately, customary, these days, to presume, as
empiricists do, that a principle of nature inheres in a
mathematical formulation, or, in art, a crude display of emotion,
or mere splatter. Actually, a mathematical formulation is,
at its best, a mere footprint; the principle is expressed, in
actual physical science of such as the Pythagorean Archytas'
doubling of the cube physically, Theaetetus' discovery of the
Platonic solids, or Kepler's uniquely original discovery of the
principle of gravitation, as in Classical tragedy, which appears
as if the uplifting experience of the action of the invisible
foot. Kepler's two principal discoveries of physical principle,
of gravitation, each as an expression of the organization of the
Solar system, are apt illustrations of this point for our
purposes here.
In Classical drama, as in the modern Riemannian astrophysics
of V.I. Vernadsky and Albert Einstein, the universe we inhabit is
a finite, self-bounded universe. There are no visible external
boundaries, but the self-boundedness of the relevant physical
space-time is clearly demonstrated in action, nonetheless.
So it is with those ghosts of well-composed Classical tragedy
which haunt the wills of the victims. It is those kinds of
boundaries, as typified by the infinitesimal of the
Leibniz-Bernouilli calculus, which are the silent and invisible,
but efficient ``footsteps'' of Classical tragedy.
This use of drama is not fantasy; it is the education of
insight into the true, underlying nature of the crucial challenge
of real life.

- The Case of The Diodorus Chronicle -
On this matter of the use of drama to inform the practice of
actually making history, the accounts of the Roman (Sicilian)
chronicler Diodorus Siculus, say that the Olympians were actually
the sons of a victim of parricide, sons, who having murdered
their father, set their mother, Olympia, no mere Speaker Pelosi,
up as ruler. Diodorus identifies them as representatives of a
transoceanic culture which had settled near what we call the
Strait of Gibraltar, and imposed their rule on a sedentary race
of Berbers. The account identifies the Olympians as, actually, a
sea-going culture which preyed upon the coasts and islands of the
Mediterranean, as part of those ``Peoples of the Sea'' whose
residual coastal cities and factories haunted the locales of the
Mediterranean coast during the several millennia preceding that
approximately 700 B.C. emergence of Mediterranean civilization
from a preceding dark age.
Out from these ancient mists where the real and fancied
intermingle, there had emerged a division within the ranks of
those we today refer to as ``ancient Greeks,'' a division between
the antecedents of the Olympian Delphic cult-faction and what
emerged as the Classical Greeks of such as Thales, Heracleitus,
Solon, the Pythagoreans, and the other circles of Socrates and
Plato. As Plato defines this conflict, in his letters and part of
his other locations, the essential struggle is twofold. There is
the conflict with the imperial, oligarchical forces of Babylon
and later Mesopotamia, and also the conflict of the legacy of
Solon of Athens marshalled against the oligarchical (Olympian)
forces of Lycurgus' Delphic Sparta. The summation of the issue of
this conflict, between Prometheus and the Olympian Zeus, is
presented by Aeschylus' {{Prometheus Bound}}.
Since that period of European history, the most essential
struggle within what we recognize as the history of European
culture, has been that between Prometheus and the Olympian Zeus
of Aeschylus' {{Prometheus}} trilogy: a struggle between man as
made in the image of the Creator (as in {{Genesis}} 1:26-31) and
the contrary, pro-Satanic Olympian Zeus, who relegates men and
women, as today's oligarchs still do, to the rank of virtual
cattle who live, as beasts do, steered through life less by
intellect, than by sight, sound, touch, and smell.
The invisible, but nonetheless efficient force of tragedy in
human existence generally, is that fear of something like
Aeschylus' Olympian Zeus, which bends the wills of men and women
into avoiding the feared displeasure of the powerful, Satanic
figure of the fictitious Zeus. It is the mechanism of that
induced submission--``But, I have to!''--which is the fateful
hand of tragedy, like the ghost from Hamlet, whose appearance
impels foolish Hamlet, and the others, wildly, to their
self-destruction, as the fools who crawl before the satanic whims
of Cheney today.
It is urgent that we stress, that the Zeus of the real-life
stage does not exist in that form we put him on stage in a
theater. Nor does the ghost which Hamlet seems to believe he sees
as his father. They are false faces which the victim's
imagination places, like masks, upon a very real, and, in this
case, evil force of destiny. These are, on the one side, phantoms
of the stage; but, they are very real, in the sense that it is
the manipulation of these phantoms of the stage which reflects
the way in which the superstitious mind is controlled on the
streets of real life, as in the U.S. Congress presently. So, by
mastering those crucial fantasies placed upon the stage of our
public life, we would be empowered to master ourselves.
Zeus, like the mask seen as Hamlet's father, actually exists
as a phantom of the mind, which one is imagined to hear speaking:
``Do as I say, or else!'' The entirety of the {{Iliad}} is
permeated with such stuff. ``The gods are displeased!'' ``You
will have bad luck!'' Sometimes the will of the victim is broken
into submission in such ways; sometimes, evil prefers to tease
the intended victim, by playing upon that victim's superstitions,
such that the victim himself, or herself, invents a terrible,
magical, fancied judgment upon himself, such that he might be
impelled to add the controlling force of a self-destructive
delusion adopted as a way to gain ``good luck,'' as the tragic
figure of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen seems to have chosen
today. Real life experience is filled with instances of such
pathetic behavior, even, as with Paulsen, among the highest ranks
of government and kindred places.
Such is {the force of tragedy} in its real-life
incarnations.
So, sometimes, the force of tragedy has been expressed by
those members of the U.S. Congress who cringe into submission
when the mask-likeness of Speaker Nancy Pelosi appears in their
imaginations.
Yet, although Zeus, like Hamlet's father, or Speaker
Pelosi's mask, are fantasies of the fearfully credulous, the
controlling impulse which such phantoms evoke, is very real.
Consider the way in which those who were the seemingly mighty are
fallen before the present of such fears.

- 1. Sea-Power: An Interlude -

As a working rule-of-thumb, we must allow the likelihood
that human culture, in the form of a social form of culture, has
possibly existed on this planet for as much as two millions
years. Nonetheless, the presently known pattern of recent
habitation of mankind on the planet, dates from less than 20,000
years ago, since, approximately, the onset of the general melting
of the glaciation which had dominated the northern hemisphere's
land-areas for about 200,000 years. (Although archeology has
shown that well-defined human cultures, in the modern sense of
cultures, had appeared in some exposed continental areas of
Europe, for example, before the great, more recent, net melt of
the previous long cycle of glaciation had begun.)
Nonetheless, the pattern of human habitation (and climates) of
the region of the land-mass north of the Equator, including some
from earlier than 20,000 years ago, does show us some extremely
important features of the way in which what has become modern
world culture had evolved during the recent 10,000 or more years.
There is no reasonable doubt, presently, of the validity of the
portrait of pre-history presented in Plato's {{Timaeus}}.
For example: One among the crucial events in this recent
history of planetary culture, was the massive breakthrough of
sea-water, via the Mediterranean, into what had been a great
fresh-water lake, now presented in the form of the Black Sea.
Thus, the time between the assumption of the existence of a
transoceanic, sea-going (maritime) culture, prior to the
developments of (very roughly) approximately 20,000 to 8,000
years ago, and the development of colonization, upstream, of
important rivers by branches of what had been maritime cultures,
is now one of the most important areas of strategic investigation
by anthropologists and historians. We are looking, thus, into the
origins of certain cultural archetypes from such periods of
relatively more accessible kinds of ancient traditions, the more
accessible archetypes deeply embedded. like fossil history, in
the roots of existing branches of cultures today.
There are some points of such investigations for which we do
have good answers, or, better said, very useful ones, speaking
pedagogically. The preceding references to certain matters of
what is to be fairly understood as ``pre-history,'' bring us
around to the bearing of this interlude on the matter of tragedy.
As follows:

- Dogs, Cats, People & Pre-History -
The issue here, in this intermezzo, is now language, that of
people as distinct from the utterances by domesticated household
pets such as cats and, most emphatically, dogs. The subject might
be better, and briefly, termed ``irony,'' meaning ``the
pre-history of irony.''
To wit:
MIT RLE's Chomsky and Minsky notwithstanding, there never
was, and never will be a higher ape which is human. What
fellows of that persuasion have never accepted, and, probably,
never will, is the fact that what we must distinguish as the
mental life of the human individual, and the social processes
generated by that distinction, have no basis in the internal
characteristics of any animal species. However, experience with
the distinction of domesticated animals, especially dogs raised
and kept as household pets, which I now reference in this
interlude, is most useful for study of the way in which such pets
do appear to attempt, and are, yet, unable to simulate actually
human behavior. This brings the implications of the 200,000 or
more recent years of the existence and activity of our human
species to the time before the close of the last ice age, that in
a way which is extremely relevant to the subject-matter within
which the indicated, pathological case of Speaker Pelosi presents
itself.
The background for this aspect of the report is, briefly, as
follows.
Probably, the most significant single outcome of the work of
that great Russian ``polymath,'' Academician V.I. Vernadsky, was
his use of his discovery of the hard proof of the existence of
the Biosphere, as a reference-point for the consequent, further
discovery, of the Noosphere. The latter, principled distinction
of man from beasts (Noosphere from Biosphere), forces our
attention, ever more emphatically, to a particular aspect and
implication of the same point which I have recently emphasized
afresh, respecting Johannes Kepler's discovery of the principle
of organization of the orbital pathways of the Solar system.
I emphasize here, as in relevant other locations, that the
effort to define the principles of the organization of the Solar
system (in particular) from the standpoint of a reductionist
mathematics, confronts us, as in the case of the harmonics of the
Solar system, with the proof that neither vision, nor hearing, by
itself, affords us a competent view of the universe which we
experience. The fact which I have emphasized, in those
locations, is that our respective senses, taken each one at a
time, do not provide us a reliable interpretation of the
experience of each sense-organ. Rather, we must regard our
sensory apparatus as akin, on this account, to the useful array
of artificial instrumentation which we craft and employ to afford
us a kind of ``sensory'' experience which is more or less
unreachable with the same degree of usefulness through reliance
on our native sensory apparatus alone. This, as I have emphasized
in relevant published locations, is exhibited most dramatically
in the case of the design of instruments required for
investigations of the type of which Bernhard Riemann has warned
us, into the so-called ``sub-atomic'' or astronomical
domains.
Experimental truth is accessed, in all cases, by the faculty
of human judgment, which must interpret the meaning of sense-, or
sense-like experience through cognitive powers specific to the
development of the human mind, not a literal reading of the
senses as such. This was shown, most dramatically, for all
competent modern physical science, by Johannes Kepler's uniquely
original discovery of the nested principles of universal
gravitation, and of the composition of the Solar system, and
related measurement of gravitation within it, as a whole.
This experimentally premised judgment on the subject of
human sense-perception's role, must be coupled with a unique fact
which sets the human species absolutely apart from all lower
forms of life. This is the situation in which the relationship of
pet dog to man comes in as a key to discovering the way in which
that crucial distinction functions.
The crucial statistical fact about the difference between
beast and man, even between dogs and their putatively
beloved-of-dog owners, is expressed by the categorical functional
distinction of the relatively fixed, relative potential
population-density of any animal species, as to be contrasted
with the willful increase of societies' relative potential
population-density. Man, unlike the beasts, is capable of
willfully increasing society's culturally heritable relative
potential population-density.
This difference between the characteristic determinations of
the relative potential population-densities of all species of
animals (e.g., the Biosphere), and that of mankind (the
Noosphere), must be traced, as Academician Vernadsky's work does,
to cognitive processes typical of the human individual (the
Noosphere), but categorically absent among all lower forms of
life.
Look, very carefully, at the manner in which this
distinction between man and beast is expressed within the loving
relationship between human members of ``the pack,'' and those
humans' moments of sometimes gripping anguish over the short
life-expectancies of their pet dogs. That said, the
relevant point of fact here, is the seeming expression of human
habits among pet household dogs, and the characteristic
distinctions between the members of the relationship's respective
species, especially when this comparison is traced over thousands
of years of relevant evidence, especially in the crucial matter
of language.
Many animal species present us with members of their type
which perform what might appear to the suggestible among us as
human traits, such as parrots, the talking crows with split
tongues, and so on. This acquired behavior can be ``trained,''
that to the effect that circus animals, and others of certain
species can appear to simulate elements of human behavior;
observers of this induced behavior by animals tend, romantically,
to project a human quality of intention behind the animal's
imitation of what seems to be a typically human act. Those
observers have blinded themselves to the most characteristic
difference between human beings and all animal species.
Reflection on the adducible history of human cultures'
development even during only the recent 20,000 years or longer,
shows us something which should have been obvious to us about the
essential difference between the actual mental powers of the
typical human individual and what are projected, rather
recklessly, as kindred mental powers of animal species.
The pathological trait which I am attacking here, at this
point, is those traits which are, implicitly, the effect of
presuming that the images imparted to us, as opinions, by our
particular sense-experiences, are literal images from the real
world, rather than being, as they are, in fact, only ``instrument
readings.'' The best selection of evidence for this fact, is the
case of Johannes Kepler's uniquely original discovery of the
principle of general gravitation within our Solar System, by his
contrasting the ironical juxtaposition of the faculty of vision
to the harmonics associated with the sense of musical hearing.
{If we trace the actual way in which that unique discovery
by Kepler was crafted, rather than the absurd, and frankly
fraudulent myth imposed by Galileo's radiated influence on the
silly Isaac Newton, we should have stumbled across the
fundamental difference between the minds of dog and of man in
that way. That brings us back to the lessons to be learned,
inclusively, from the emergence and development of European
culture during the course of the post-Ice-Age developments of the
recent, approximately 20,000 years.}

- Where Is Physical Space-Time? -
The commonplace error of popular opinion about physical
space-time, still today, is the assumption that matter, such as
objects, are floating in a Euclidean-like, infinitely vast space.
That ignorant, but popular opinion, is fostered by those who seek
to interpret astronomical space as being self-evidently Euclidean
space, whereas, in fact, no crucial, physical-experimental
evidence has ever actually been presented for the existence of
Euclidean space, or, Cartesian space-time. Rather, the idea of
specifically Euclidean space was a piece of, literally, what is
termed, technically, as Sophistry: as a Euclidean scheme
concocted decades after the death of the leading scientific minds
of ancient Greece, such as Plato. The argument of the Sophists
was, that the set of definitions, axioms, and postulates upon
which the entire edifice of Euclidean geometry was erected, was
not only submitted without proof, but premised on the assumption
that proof were neither required, nor desirable. Indeed! That
swindle persists, available from some in leading academic
circles, if at high prices to the student, still today.
As Johannes Kepler demonstrated, and as Albert Einstein
emphasized, Euclidean-like, infinitely extended space-time, never
actually existed. What we know, is that what we discover,
experimentally, to be universal physical principles, such as
universal gravitation, bound physical space-time, defining thus a
finite, rather than an infinite space, a physical space-time
which is self-bounded by what are discoverable, experimentally,
as principles, as Kepler proved gravitation, without allowance
for, or need of ``external' spatial boundaries: presenting us,
thus, with an implicitly expanding universe. This was already
implicit in the discoveries of Kepler, discoveries which,
essentially, echo ancient sources of scientific thought, such as
the Pythagoreans and their Egyptian forerunners.
Not only do we know this today, but the root of such
knowledge is traced to as far back as ancient calendars, from
tens of thousands or more years ago, including calendars whose
internal characteristic corresponds to the implied practice of
ocean-going maritime cultures of a type which might be
attributable to a time no later than the 200,000-year interval
when massive glaciation dominated most of northern Eurasia and
North America. That was a time which the oceans were about 400
feet lower than in modern times: a time of glaciation toward
which long-term climactic trends are pointing, again, for
today--unless we find some way to manage that long-term trend to
our advantage.
These conceptions which I have just so summarized, are not
accessible to the lower forms of life, nor to Sophists past or
present, but only to those with honorable standing within
mankind, and that only in the fashion which I have just
indicated. As the case of the antiquity of the Zodiac attests
most simply, mankind's increasing power of conception of the
universe, is a product of specifically human characteristics,
characteristics of the specifically human processes of cognition
which are entirely absent in the lower forms of life.

- The Indispensable Thesis -
The specifically characteristic increase of the relative
potential population-density of the human species, when
contrasted with the relatively fixed characteristic of the animal
species, has the effective form of equivalence to a
biologically-determined, characteristic up-shift of the
characteristic ``nature'' of a non-human species, the equivalent
of a change of species-nature in the evolution of among those
lower forms of life which are the animal species. {The typical
expression of this kind of up-shift within the bounds of a single
human species, is not merely cultural in form, but also a
distinction which is efficiently an expression of a fundamental
physical principle, in effect.}
The most notable among the corollary facts of this matter,
is that there are, in fact, no equivalents of human creative
behavior to be found among the animal species. It were fair to
suggest, that the best animal behavior, as among well-treated
dogs as household pets, does resemble, outwardly, superficially,
those aspects of human behavior which, apparently, have nothing
to do, functionally, with the actually creative powers of the
human individual mind. The distinction which must be enforced as
a matter of definition, on this account, is that which is
implicitly clear from Academician Vernadsky's distinction of the
Noosphere from the Biosphere. {In other words, human creative
powers have no discernible basis in the processes manifestly
specific to the animal brain. History, as I have treated it here,
points to the answer to the issues which I have, thereby, thus
posed.}
That point which I have just made, might bestir a frenzy
among some readers stricken with anxiety at this point, readers
who will not have thought through the crucial facts which I
present here. To assist such perplexed fellows, it were
sufficient for the purposes of my account thus far, that one
should think of the human individual's animal-like aspect as
``plugged into,'' as if by resonance, a higher principle within
what we may otherwise regard as the physical universe, and that
it is that ``connection,'' so to speak, which supplies the
``factor'' of the manifest higher qualities distinguishing the
human individual essentially from the beast.
On more familiar sorts of theological ground, we are dealing
here with the subject referred to as ``the human soul.'' The
commonplace problem of conception arises when we attempt to
equate a ``human soul'' with an ``animal soul.'' The more
appropriate way of approaching these issues, is to compare the
difference between the human and the ``animal ``soul,'' in terms
of reference to the differences of phase-spaces, among the
abiotic, Biosphere, and Noosphere, and to, thus, emphasize the
point, for purposes of comparison, that, contrary to the wilder
superstitions spawned in ``Silicon Valley,'' ``life'' itself has
never been shown to be an extension of the abiotic domain.
(I leave further treatment of that limited subject-matter to
the theologians; the cognitive exercise itself should do them
good, or plunge them into a frenzy.)
To restate that point with the relatively greatest economy
of utterance, we can state that the mortal body of the human
individual has manifestly predominant characteristics of an
animal-like body, excepting that relatively immortal aspect of
the human personality, such as discovery of universal physical
principles, or comparable discoveries in Classical modes of
artistic composition, which outlive {efficiently, as social
principles}, the decease of the mortal vehicle which that
creativity had formerly inhabited. {This creativity is not
manifest in any species of animal life}.
This provided the physical-experimental basis for
Academician Vernadsky's discovery of the Noosphere.
To prepare, now, to present the indispensable thesis of this
report, consider the following points, as restated here, made in
my relevant earlier reports.
The relevant, general, leading achievement of Academician
V.I. Vernadsky to be considered here, is that he defined a
principle which stands out from his own, and his associates'
study of that crucial distinction of universal physical
principle, which separates the chemistry of living processes and
their specific products from the chemistry of non-living
processes. This separation defined the Biosphere. On the
foundations of the discovery of the Biosphere, Vernadsky achieved
a second, comparable scientific revolution, the concept of the
Noosphere.
The discovery of the Noosphere requires a brief explanation,
as follows.
In defining the chemistry of the Biosphere, Vernadsky and
his collaborators referenced the distinction of the special
chemistry specific only to living processes and their products,
from chemical products which are already specific to the work of
non-living processes. Thus, the total mass of the Earth is
divided, first, between the percentile of that mass which is
termed as being ostensibly of pre-biotic origins, and that which
is represented either by the mass of living processes, or
peculiar to products of the chemistry specific to living
processes. So, in a comparable way, Vernadsky also took into
account the increasing percentile of the total mass of our planet
represented by products which are only of specifically human
noetic actions, relative to biomass.
{This divided the total mass of the planet among a
corresponding set of three preliminary categories: the abiotic,
the biotic, and the noetic. Among the three: biomass is never
generated by abiotic processes as such; the mass of products of
specifically human noetic creation, has never been shown to be
produced by any living process other than the human mind.}
This defines the universe as we know it empirically, as
composed of three distinct, {component} phase-spaces. However,
the noetic principle of human reason, as distinct from the
biological human individual, is also existent as, ontologically,
a universal, {a fact whose emergence defines an ontologically
fourth domain, that expressed as the higher order of phase-space,
a universal, all-encompassing, anti-entropic principle, which
subsumes that Noosphere to which the other three are subject}.
Hence, from this universal anti-entropic ordering of the universe
which our human experience inhabits, we have the obligatory
notion of the {willful} personality of {The Creator} as reported
in {{Genesis}}|1.
Therefore, as Nicholas of Cusa, Kepler, Fermat, and Leibniz
show, we know that the belief in ``universal entropy'' is worse
then merely absurd; that latter belief is inherent in empiricism
and its derivatives, inhering, for example, in that
intellectually and morally depraved, reductionist notion
associated with the arguments of Euclid, Claudius Ptolemy,
Galileo, de Moivre, D'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Cauchy,
Clausius. Grassmann, Kelvin, Maxwell, Ernst Mach, Boltzmann,
Bertrand Russell, et al.
From these considerations, certain poetically dramatic
conclusions of crucial historical importance for our nation's,
and the world's political life, must be drawn. This brings us to
the intended core of the subject of this report. {To wit}:

- 2. Oceans & the Heavens Above -

The existence of tragedy, or, better said, of {The Tragic
Principle}, is to be located, as to its source, in the
essentially underlying features of those specific, pathological
beliefs which have assumed the form of ostensibly traditional,
axiomatic assumptions, assumptions respecting the underlying
principles of organization of events in the universe generally,
or of certain societies and cultures specifically. As I shall
show in this present, concluding chapter of this report, the
origin of the existence of such paradoxical, even though
customary states of mind, can be brought to the surface by
putting our emphasis as we do here.
Therefore, here, we must emphasize the urgency of
discovering the necessity, for sake of the progress of cultures,
of precisely those inherently ambiguous features of Classical
irony, such as the ironies of Dante Alighieri's {{Commedia}}, of
the {{Decameron}}, of the life and works of Francois Rabelais, of
Cervantes' {{Don Quixote}}, the histories and tragedies of
Shakespeare, or works such as Jonathan Swift's {{Gulliver's
Travels}}, Percy Shelley's {{In Defence of Poetry}}, and the work
of Friedrich Schiller. These are cases which are inherent in the
need for driving forward of what might be termed the ``history''
of {the principled features of the evolution} of cultures. There
can be no truthful physical science without assigning the primary
role to the principle of Classical poetry.
There is neither truth, nor progress without irony. Irony is
the essence of creative genius, the essence of reason. A literal
mind is a littering mind.
I repeat now: as a matter of contrasts, the case for
physical science is presently a relatively simpler challenge than
the remainder of society's intellectual tasks. A competent
treatment of the subject of {The Tragic Principle} must begin
with a more difficult challenge: attention to implications of
what I have pointed out here earlier, as the essential
differences between the characteristics of our pet dogs and the
known characteristics of what is fairly termed the realities of
human ``cultural evolution.''
The recommended, most efficient approach to this
problematic, historical feature of cultural evolution in general,
is that path of investigation which begins, typically, with the
most essential implications of Plato's {{Timaeus}} and
{{Critias}}. The choice of that approach to Plato's arguments on
that account, here, is recommended for the specific reason of
{Plato's implicit emphasis which I have also already placed, in
the earlier chapters of this report, on the maritime-cultural
origins of European civilization}.
It is important to emphasize, that in order to ``get into''
a culture's mental life, it is virtually indispensable that we
find material evidence, comparable to the paradoxes which provoke
fundamental discoveries of principle in experimental physical
science, so-called. This approach lays open, and emphasizes the
crucially significant cases among the ironies of communication,
as in Classical poetry and drama, rather than the merely literal
assertions of some desiccated literary and associated record. As
has been said in other words, grammarians are often, essentially,
embalmers of the creative mind.
Therefore, there is the essential role of irony in conveying
the actual idea-content of important statements. The importance
of irony in communication, is the determining consideration on
which I am insisting here. Therefore, what may be fairly termed
``European culture'' for the purpose of this investigation,
begins approximately, as I have indicated, at about 700 B.C. In
other words, we choose a point of functional alliance, against
the ancient maritime tyranny of Tyre, by the maritime cultures of
Egypt (e.g., Cyrenaica), the Ionians, and the Etruscans. That is
a period to be considered in the light of those fabulously
ironical, standard bedside readings which are the Homeric
{{Iliad}} and {{Odyssey}}. However, although we must rely
chiefly on the ancient European and related history following
approximately 700 B.C., we must take into account certain special
features of still more ancient evidence, chiefly evidence bearing
on maritime cultures and the reflections of maritime cultures in
astronomy.

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