Laws of Form - Resonances in Religion, Philosophy, and Science

Resonances in Religion, Philosophy, and Science

The mathematical and logical content of LoF is wholly consistent with a secular point of view. Nevertheless, LoF's "first distinction", and the Notes to its chapter 12, bring to mind the following landmarks in religious belief, and in philosophical and scientific reasoning, presented in rough historical order:

• Vedic, Hindu and Buddhist: Related ideas can be noted in the ancient Vedic Upanishads, which form the monastic foundations of Hinduism and later Buddhism. As stated in the Aitareya Upanishad ("The Microcosm of Man"), the Supreme Atman manifests itself as the objective Universe from one side, and as the subjective individual from the other side. In this process, things which are effects of God's creation become causes of our perceptions, by a reversal of the process. In the Svetasvatara Upanishad, the core concept of Vedicism and Monism is "Thou art That."
• Taoism, (Chinese Traditional Religion): "...The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth..." (Tao Te Ching).
• Zoroastrianism: "This I ask Thee, tell me truly, Ahura. What artist made light and darkness?" (Gathas 44.5)
• Judaism (from the Tanakh, called Old Testament by Christians): "In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void... Then God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light. ...God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.

"...And God said, 'Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.' So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome.

"...And God said, 'Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.' ...God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas.

"...And God said, 'Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night...' God made the two great lights... to separate the light from the darkness." (Genesis 1:1-18; Revised Standard Version, emphasis added).

"And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech." (Genesis 11:1; emphasis added).

"I am; that is who I am." (Exodus 3:14)

• Confucianism: Confucius claimed that he sought "a unity all pervading" (Analects XV.3) and that there was "one single thread binding my way together." (Ana. IV.15). The Analects also contain the following remarkable passage on how the social, moral, and aesthetic orders are grounded in right language, grounded in turn in the ability to "rectify names," i.e., to make correct distinctions: "Zilu said, 'What would be master's priority?" The master replied, "Rectifying names! ...If names are not rectified then language will not flow. If language does not flow, then affairs cannot be completed. If affairs are not completed, ritual and music will not flourish. If ritual and music do not flourish, punishments and penalties will miss their mark. When punishments and penalties miss their mark, people lack the wherewithal to control hand and foot." (Ana. XIII.3)
• Heraclitus: Pre-socratic philosopher, credited with forming the idea of logos. "He who hears not me but the logos will say: All is one." Further: "I am as I am not."
• Parmenides: Argued that the every-day perception of reality of the physical world is mistaken, and that the reality of the world is 'One Being': an unchanging, ungenerated, indestructible whole.
• Plato: Logos is also a fundamental technical term in the Platonic worldview.
• Christianity: "In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1). "Word" translates logos in the koine original. "If you do not believe that I am, you will die in your sins." (John 8:24). "The Father and I are one." (John 10:30). "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may also be one in us: that the world may believe that thou has sent me." (John 17:21). (emphases added)
• Object relations theory, psychodynamics: The primary separation experienced by infants between self and other objects, distinguishing of reality from phantasy.
• Islamic philosophy distinguishes essence (Dhat) from attribute (Sifat), which are neither identical nor separate.
• Leibniz: "All creatures derive from God and from nothingness. Their self-being is of God, their nonbeing is of nothing. Numbers too show this in a wonderful way, and the essences of things are like numbers. No creature can be without nonbeing; otherwise it would be God... The only self-knowledge is to distinguish well between our self-being and our nonbeing... Within our selfbeing there lies an infinity, a footprint or reflection of the omniscience and omnipresence of God."
• Josiah Royce: "Without negation, there is no inference. Without inference, there is no order, in the strictly logical sense of the word. The fundamentally significant position of the idea of negation in determining and controlling our idea of the orderliness of both the natural and the spiritual order, becomes, in the light of all these considerations, as momentous as it is, in our ordinary popular views of this subject, neglected. ...From this point of view, negation appears as one of the most significant. ideas that lie at the base of all the exact sciences. By virtue of the idea of negation we are able to define processes of inference-processes which, in their abstract form, the purely mathematical sciences illustrate, and which, in their natural expression, the laws of the physical world, as known to our inductive science, exemplify."

"When logically analyzed, order turns out to be something that would be inconceivable and incomprehensible to us unless we had the idea which is expressed by the term 'negation'. Thus it is that negation, which is always also something intensely positive, not only aids us in giving order to life, and in finding order in the world, but logically determines the very essence of order."

Returning to the Bible, the injunction "Let there be light" conveys:

• "... and there was light" — the light itself;
• "... called the light Day" — the manifestation of the light;
• "... morning and evening" — the boundaries of the light.

A Cross denotes a distinction made, and the absence of a Cross means that no distinction has been made. In the Biblical example, light is distinct from the void – the absence of light. The Cross and the Void are, of course, the two primitive values of the Laws of Form.