Great thinkers on the structure of the world
From Pythagoras and Plato through Kepler and Newton to Planck and Dürr. How scientists thought about the order of the world.
Many great thinkers appear scattered through the other chapters. Here they are gathered together, each with the idea that matters for the tetractys.
Pythagoras and Philolaus
All is number. The world is ordered by ratios of numbers, and to know is to count. The decad is the beginning and guide of all life. See The ancient sources.
Plato
In the Timaeus the world is built of geometric solids, and the world soul is ordered by the number series of the lambdoma. Over the entrance to his Academy there is said to have stood the warning that no one ignorant of geometry should enter. Plato is said to have bought the writings of Philolaus and taken them into the Timaeus.
Johannes Kepler
Geometry, music and astronomy are at heart one. The geometric archetypes are thoughts of God, according to which music and the cosmos are built. Kepler had himself portrayed with a pair of compasses in his hand, so important was the study of geometry to him. See Harmony of the spheres and Gap-free filling of space.
Isaac Newton
The physicist engaged at least as intensively with alchemy, Kabbalah and Rosicrucianism as with mechanics. The translator Ed Dellian, who re-edited Newton’s original Latin writings, sees the geometric fourfold proportion, a tetractys, as the key to understanding Newton’s actual theory of motion.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
He described the rhythm of six, 6n ± 1, in which the primes lie, and took up the combinatorics of Ramon Llull, from which his idea of a universal language of signs and mathematical logic emerged.
Max Planck
In an often-quoted lecture the founder of quantum physics took the view that there is no matter as such. All matter, he said, arises and exists only through a force behind which stands a conscious, intelligent mind. Not visible, perishable matter is the real, but the invisible spirit.
Hans-Peter Dürr
The physicist distinguished knowledge for use, which asks what one can do with something, from knowledge for orientation, which asks what the world is and how we stand in it. See Number theory + geometry = philosophy.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
In The Beginning of Philosophy the Heidelberg philosopher studied the Presocratics. He observed that ancient biographies present almost every early thinker, from Anaximander to Parmenides, as a follower of Pythagoras. For him this shows that Pythagoras united the great basic motifs in himself: the riddle of numbers and the riddle of the soul. See Death and reincarnation.