TIMÆUS

Embedded within Plato's Timaeus are conceptions of physical hypothesis as advanced as those of modern Riemannian relativistic physics. Yet, as other features of the Timaeus point out most forcefully, civilization has progressed a long way in details of knowledge and technology, and in features of culture correlate with advancements of technological practice. If this contradictory set of facts is viewed properly, the evidence of that comparison provides the clue to a new, rigorous comprehension of the lawful ordering of human history. It is from that standpoint of emphasis that we now introduce a new, corrected English translation of the Timaeus.

Although the Timaeus is not as popularized a writing of Plato's as the Apology or the Republic, it has exerted a more direct influence on the fundamentals of European thought than perhaps any other of those writings. This point is easily demonstrated in terms of key writings of Christian patristics, a point which is more or less axiomatic among relevant specialist historians. For special reasons, an approximately equal degree of influence on the development of scientific method is less recognized today. For reason of such profound influences, this work serves as a most appropriate benchmark for the historiographical studies we have indicated above.

The student's difficulty with the Timaeus is that it must appear to him as extraordinarily "sophisticated" to use a commonplace term of American bureaucratese. At least, it must appear so to the student who has begun to discover what richness lies embedded in the writing. This difficulty would persist even were the student using an acceptable quality of translation from Plato's Greek.

The general character of these difficulties is twofold.

As Criton Zoakos has emphasized, Plato's correspondence includes a statement of policy concerning those writings he composed for publication. Never, Plato insists, has he or will he write his own views in his own name in works composed for publication. There are obvious reasons for this decision, and they do account for a secondary aspect of the difficulties Plato's writings represent to the student today.

Contrary to the myth of Plato the merely contemplative speculator, Plato was the leader of the most active and far-flung political-intelligence operations organization of the city-builders' faction of the fourth century B.C. His efforts to organize a coup d'etat in Syracuse are at least well known to have been conducted, if the details are obscured. It was Plato's Academy that prepared Alexander the Great's coup d'etat, and policies and intelligence developed through the work of the Academy's networks that guided Alexander's victorious campaigns, and that substantially shaped the policies Alexander was initiating at the time of his assassination.

Plato had excellent reason to put very little of his activity into writing, and nothing explicitly autobiographical into his published work.

We can identify aspects of Plato's published work that must be attributed to his political caution. In chief, this possibility depends on accounting first for the other features which the student will tend initially to find obscure. What remains after accounting for this second factor proves to fit the category of political caution.

The student's principal difficulty with the works Plato composed for publication is that these works were constructed according to principles which Renaissance and some later writers identify as the "poetic principle." The Platonic ideas which are the principal content, the subject, of Plato's compositions are of the same order which the nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor identifies with his notion of "transfinite." What that signifies we shall make clearer below; for the moment, we focus on the mere fact of such a source of student's difficulty. For this reason, the student is looking at the matter of difficulty in the right fashion when he uses the term "sophisticated." Plato is never truly obscure in presenting ideas. The chief formal problem in studying Plato is that of "getting the hang of" his employment of the poetic principle.

Once the poetic principle is grasped, not only does one begin to discover Plato to be an extraordinarily lucid writer. One is able to account directly for the reasons certain features of Plato's work are a match for the most advanced conceptions of physical scientific knowledge t0day--whereas other features of Plato's text represent an archaic state of detailed scientific knowledge of twenty-three centuries past.

Platonic ideas, properly so termed, take as their subject the characteristic features of the mental processes by which hypotheses concerning empirical scientific knowledge are formed. It is therefore such Platonic ideas which rightly appear very modern to informed readers today. Yet Plato is presenting these insights into the lawful processes of hypothesis in terms of the empirical scientific knowledge of his own period. What is relatively timeless in Plato's work is his conception of the principles of scientific hypothesis; what is archaic in his work for today's reader is the collection of empirical scientific knowledge he achieved (with aid of application of his method of hypothesis to then existing empirical knowledge).

Instantly this is recognized, the student's admiration for Plato's method must increase. Had Plato confined himself to a prosaic argument for his particular theories respecting empirical scientific knowledge of his own time, he could not have become more than a great scientific thinker of his own 'time. By deemphasizing the particular scientific knowledge of his time, by making that knowledge merely a means for demonstrating the method of hypothesis, Plato defined ideas of a relatively timeless quality, ideas which survive many successive revolutionary advances in empirical scientific knowledge in particular.

The use of the poetic principle as the basis of organization of his published compositions is readily seen as indispensable to achieving that timeless merit. It is only by methods of composition which force the reader's attention away from primary emphasis on prosaic facts of the ephemeral here and now that the reader's attention is directed to the relative transfinite, subsuming successive transformations of knowledge in the ephemeral here and now.

We, today, must pursue the same method if we are to arrive, at last, at abstraction of sets of principles which account for the ordered course of the history of civilization in the past, and into the future. Here is the practical importance of historiography to every citizen, whether a public official or an individual man or woman lacking any conspicuous status in public affairs. What we do--or fail to do--in the present, in our here and now, determines how we and others shall live in our own personal future and in the future of our posterity. Our actions do not entirely determine such consequences; others, present and future, will also shape the course of history.

What the future will be can be adduced implicitly from the characteristic features of those assumptions which are variously explicitly and unwittingly embedded in the prevailing weight of individual decisions. If we are not to play roulette with the fate of present and future generations, if we are to give assured meaning to our individual living and having lived, we must know that we have discovered and are self-governed by efficient knowledge of the sets of principles which do in fact govern the historical process. It is so to determine the present and future that we devote ourselves to rigorous study of the past. We cannot adduce efficient principles from the idiosyncrasies of the social order as defined by the here and now. We cannot attribute wisdom to mere prevailing opinions of the present, whether scholarly or vulgar. We must know those principles which transcend all "heres and nows," an achievement which can be effected by no other method than the poetic principles employed by Plato.

The chief further difficulty the student confronts in taking up Plato is the weight of that ignorance and libel which attempts to explain away Platonic ideas as some sort of mysticism. Such falsehoods are, admittedly, made to appear plausible to the student often enough. The fact that Plato appears difficult, that his argument does not admit of prosaic simple paraphrases, is used to dupe the student into attributing much of Plato's conception to something "otherworldly." The English editions, commentaries, and glosses that are in accredited use in our universities aggravate this problem. Although most translators do not go to such extremes of blatant fraud as the notorious Cornford, each of the Oxford, Cambridge, and Warburg Institute editions deliberately mistranslates Plato's writings to the effect of attempting to save the appearances of fraudulent representations of Plato as a "mystic."

The belief that Plato is a mystic belongs formally to the same category of social phenomena as the inability of some primitive cultures to count beyond "one, two, heap." At the point the mental capabilities of the ignorant collapse in exhaustion, the term "heap" appears in the counting process, or "mystic" in the study of Plato. The mind stops functioning, and consoles its threatened self-esteem by the sort of "reaction formation which substitutes "his mysticism" for the lazy mind's own "ignorance."

Granted, Platonic ideas are extremely advanced, profound conceptions by today's educational standards. Therefore, some effort, time, and assistance are rerequired to aid the student in mastering the subject--just as a student requires assistance to progress from seventh-grade algebra to competent grasp of the essential conceptions of plasma physics. It is not the student's labors in the educational process which represent ignorance, but halting the process of development, and explaining away what has not been mastered as "mysticism."

The importance of the Timaeus prescribes that an acceptable English edition must, at last, be produced. That would suffice to account for an International Caucus of Labor Committees effort to prompt some qualified person or group to produce such an edition. It does not fully explain why an ICLC team undertook that task.

If the task were defined merely as one of a competent rendering of words and phrases, we probably would not have undertaken it. It happens that Uwe Parpart reported an exciting discovery from his studies of the characteristic flaws of the English editions.

Many scholars have listed criticism of the Jowett translation, for example. If lists of particular errors had been the extent of the problem, then the problems of extant editions could have been defined as the cumulative effect of such errors in detail. Parpart reported something more fundamental. Plato's Greek relies on certain key grammatical features of the language. Two of these are essential. One is the way pronouns are used to embody the transfinite conception associated with an entire passage, or even a section, as a particle-term within a statement of a conception on a yet higher order of abstraction. The second is the conjoined use of the available moods to express a conception self-consciously. This latter is a way of thinking about the process of formation of a hypothesis. Unless these two features are efficiently replicated in the translation, the flow of the argument in Plato is disrupted--and replaced by a kind of psychological Schwärmerei.

This being identified as a crucial problem for the translator, another, second problem was identified. The translator himself must be sufficiently a master of Plato's dialectical method to recognize the expression of such methods both in Greek and in English-language forms of expression.

This problem demonstrated that mere competence in Greek plus competence in translation of terms of specialized usage would not be adequate equipment. An additional set of special qualifications is clearly essential to the required result. So, where other specialists might perform the detailed, terminological features of some aspects of the translation better than our own Greek-language specialists, respecting the most essential requirement of the translation our own translators were qualitatively better suited. Our purpose is not to produce the final improvement in English editions of Timaeus, but only the first of such competent translations.

Those preliminary points made, we shall now turn, for the remainder of this introduction, to focus on two sets of points. First, we shall summarize the principles of the Platonic dialogue as a method, rather than a procedure for contrasting opinions. Second, we shall expose the fraudulent implications of the generally accepted characterization of Plato as an "idealist." If one attributed a very special, rigorous meaning to the term "idealism," Plato could be so described; that is not the connotation of the term in any general usage over the past century,

In undertaking the second topical area, we shall employ the essential principles of the Platonic dialogue, although without employing the dialogue form in a literal sense. We shall address our remarks on the subject of Plato's alleged idealism to a hypothetical Soviet audience, permitting the reader to look over our shoulder, so to speak, imagining the internal mental processes of the Soviet audience as the address is made.

The Platonic Dialogue

If the reader were adequately informed of the work of Giordano Bruno, and otherwise informed of crucial features of English Tudor history, it would be an easy matter to demonstrate conclusively to the reader that the greatness of Shakespeare's plays is derived from the mastery of the principles of the Platonic dialogue among the circle of Tudor Neoplatonists associated with the Dudleys, and centered around Walsingham and John Dee in the pre-1590 to 1593 phase of development of the Tudor Secret Intelligence Service. A play of Bruno's from that period serves as a kind of Rosetta stone for tracing the direct role of the Platonic dialogue in determining the principles on which Shakespeare's plays are constructed.

Among the profitable byproducts of such knowledge, the reader would be able to prove from the internal evidence of the Shakespeare plays that the virulently anti-Platonic and pederastic sodomist Francis Bacon could not have had any hand in creating such plays. More important, the reader would begin to comprehend the richness of those plays, the scintillating, multifaceted historical ironies which proliferate throughout--ironies which a certain knighted, contemporary British actor clearly ignored, and could not have comprehended.

Hamlet, for example, is predominantly Queen Elizabeth I. He is, ironically, many actual and hypothetical personages as well as the just-deceased queen of the time of the play's initial appearance. To the sensitive members of the audience of that time, Hamlet not only identified the follies of the deceased Queen's reign, but combined the Queen Elizabeth metaphor in the personality of Hamlet with other images. Shakespeare thus created a conception of a transfinite, for which the deceased queen's case was but one predicate. In this way, he made the principle of her follies comprehensible as a principle, rather than leaving her follies as the perceived idiosyncrasies of a single monarch.

Friedrich Schiller aids us to the same effect. As one of the greatest historians of his time or afterward, Schiller's plays were essentially Platonic dialogues in which the author abstracted a principle of history from the massive researches associated with the studies on which the drama was based. Although Schiller is a far greater and broader figure than Shakespeare, on this cited point the traditional likening of Shakespeare and Schiller to one another as playwrights is a well-grounded and useful comparison.

The classic Renaissance work to be compared with both Shakespeare and Schiller on this point is the Commedia of Dante Alighieri. Nearly everything in this Commedia is Plato as viewed through Neoplatonic eyes. If one is not a credulous glutton for the usual sort of scholarly edifying nonsense written about the work, one also knows that this was no "mere work of art," but a political document which played a leading part in shaping the political history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The ideas communicated through the Commedia armed the political intelligence of the Augustinian networks associated with Petrarch and others, and changed the history of Europe.

We briefly summarize the organization of the Commedia, pointing out to the reader what he or she must bear in mind as most crucial for understanding the deeper implications of that work.

The Commedia (later called "The Divine Comedy," after Dante's death) is organized into three sections of thirty-three successive cantos each. The term "successive" is crucial. In each section, the ordering of the successive cantos reflects an ordering-principle. This ordering-principle is properly termed a transfinite in the most rigorous sense of Cantor's intent. Each section is ordered by a different transfinite ordering-principle, each differing essentially from the other two. The succession of sections represents a third ordering-principle, that which is relatively transfinite in respect to the subsumed three as predicates of this higher-order transfinite. However, the ordering-principle (conception) embodied in the thirty-third canto of the final section, the "Empyreal," is in agreement with the higher-order transfinite ordering the three sections as a whole. That agreement defines the proper conclusion of the successive development the entire composition.

The configuration is strictly Platonic in all essential features of organization--although the details are, of course, not precisely in agreement with Plato.

In the first section, the "Inferno," the ordering of cantos leads us into the pit. This is, of course, an unsatisfactory conclusion of progress to all but the most degraded, masochistic Dionysians. The reaching of the pit demonstrates that the characteristic ordering-principle of the "Inferno" is not acceptable for mankind. The principle to be superseded is that of heteronomic, irrationalist forms of egoistical sensuality.

One case, that of Count Ugolino, is worth citing here. Ugolino, thrown into prison by persecutors, survives for a while by eating his children, for which he is condemned to pass eternity perpetually gnawing on a skull. Egoistical, heteronomic sensuality superseded all reason or even rational morality in Ugolino. So, like one of the "bronze souls" of the "Phoenician myths" in Plato's Republic, Ugolino lives in the hell of perpetually being what he is.

Today, such moral degenerates, like other denizens of the "Inferno," are known euphemistically as "political pragmatists." The wretched fate their impulses produce in the world--whether in international relations, national policy, or personal affairs--is the only consequence of the successful realization of their irrational, greedy impulses for heteronomically motivated advantage.

This principle must be rejected, negated, as a whole. That discovery is embodied in the first canto of the next section, "Purgatory." With this higher ordering principle, that of greed, of sensual appetites informed by logical forms of knowledge, one proceeds to a second dead end, "Earthly Paradise." This is neither hell nor is it the end humanity requires, Purgatory's ordering principle is superseded through a turn to the first canto of the final section, "Paradise." The achievement of the "Empyreal" through that ordering-principle brings us to the desired condition of human existence, the agreement of thought and practice with the higher ordering-principle which is demonstrated by the overall course of progress from infantile sensuality to reason. The fact that the conception coincides with that higher ordering-principle demonstrates sufficient reason, that we have reached the proper condition of human willful governance of human conduct.

The Commedia thus presents itself to the knowledgeable reader as a perfect Platonic dialogue.

The same principles are brilliantly realized in another of the greatest works of literary composition, the Don Quixote of Miguel Cervantes. The subject of the book is the effort to develop Sancho Panza, a bestial peasant predominantly occupied with stuffing his fat paunch (Panza), to the point that Sancho is qualified to govern a province, or, the same thing, an island. Or, how to bring the Spanish people out of rural imbecility in moral outlook, so that those people might become qualified to govern themselves. This book is organized on three levels: Don Quixote the character, the Moor who is the fictionally attributed author, and Cervantes himself.

Beethoven's sole opera, Fidelio, is organized conceptually according to the same Platonic-dialogue principles. More important, the entire development of the well-tempered system of counterpoint in music, identified by John Bull, Sweelinck, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven (notably), has its origins in Plato's musical faction, and was mediated into Europe through al-Farabi.

Thus, today, in many branches of art we are confronted with worthless productions called "art," whose attributed value depends upon ignorant, misplaced plausible explanations for the actual artistic productions of some earlier period.

For example, the so-called modernists in music could not survive in reputation as artists for long if informed taste were knowledgeable of the determining considerations in the development of well-tempered counterpoint. The twelve-tone doctrine, for example, would not be tolerated in any musical circles which actually comprehended the way music had developed through Bach into Beethoven.

For example, in literary productions and dramas, acceptable forms today are rationalized by crude, pragmatic abstractions. These abstracted rules, or conventions, are assumed to delimit "what will work" from things which will probably be excluded from consideration out of hand. It is assumed that a provocative, appealing effect, adapted to such conventions, is the essence of the matter.

The result is that vulgar forms of popular entertainment are tolerable on condition one accepts the fact of the banality of the mental level of the authors, directors, actors, and so forth. Let the same authors, directors, and actors attempt to escape from the banal entertainments at which they succeed, let them essay to produce a "truly serious work of art," and the banality of their souls simply bores us most painfully. There is admittedly the problem that audiences are conditioned to the effect of disinterest in the real creative features of great artistic work. If a great work of art were produced, it would admittedly have difficulty in securing an economically adequate audience. The problem today, in respect to the attempts at serious works of art, is not located originally in the audiences, but in the professed artists. They are incapable of creating a serious work of art, but merely confuse one or another form of conceptually banal psychic peek-a-boo, National Enquirer-like "pornographic" psychoanalytical "revelations," with an artistic effect. They have no true sense of variation, of irony.

In the organization of the section to follow this, you will be engaged in simultaneously watching the argument of the writer and the inferred mental processes of the hypothetical Soviet audience. We have not elaborated that process in the way a formal Platonic dialogue prescribes, but all the elements are present by implication. Keeping that section of this introduction in view for purposes of reference, we now outline the essential principles of the Platonic dialogue.　

How will your mental processes organize themselves for this circumstance? You will, of course, attempt to simulate your projected estimate of the Soviet mental processes within an aspect of your own mental processes. You will also attempt to simulate your best estimate of the writer's processes in still another facet of your own mental processes. All the while, you will be watching both with still another facet of your mental processes. That is not yet the end of the matter. You will compare by setting up in one part of your mind another facet of the mental processes, to represent your own reactions to both the Soviet reactions and to the writer's argument.

In this manner, you induce yourself to become self-conscious of your own mental processes. One part of your mental processes studies the manner and method in which your mental processes ordinarily function. A situation has been created in which crucial features of your ordinary conscious behavior are brought to your conscious attention. Instead of treating your ideas, impulses, and so forth as eruptions which simply happen to you, instead of permitting your consciousness to merely react to stimulations, you have introduced another element of consciousness: self-consciousness. Now, you peer into the processes by which you formulate opinions, by which certain stimuli evoke impulses into your consciousness, and so forth.

The function of such self-conscious activity is not merely to observe, but to correct the manner in which you form judgments. The watching part of your consciousness is not merely observing passively, it is acting. The object of the dialogue is to induce you to develop one yet-higher level, which activity is what I am doing now: to look at these four facets of your mental processes through yet another facet of your mental processes. That accomplished, you are examining the way in which your first-level self-consciousness intervenes into the processes of your simple consciousness.

The initial object is to study and to correct the way in which your first-level self-consciousness corrects perceived errors of assumption and method in your simple-conscious processes of judgment.

Is this, then, some approximation of Freudian psychoanalysis? Freudian psychoanalysis depends upon aspects of just those capabilities of the mind we have indicated here. But this is by no means so crude an instrument, so intrinsically flawed an instrument as Freudian psychoanalysis.

How do we determine what is and is not error in judgment? How do we determine which assumptions and methods of conscious judgment are in error? This is not a formal question, a psychological question as such. It is a question of empirical knowledge of social practice.

To turn the potentialities we have outlined into a process which is applied to fruitful results, we must select a topic of inquiry which is specially suited to our purposes. The typical such topic is a matter of scientific hypothesis, selecting a problem in formulation of hypothesis which admits of empirical verification. We require not just one problem of this sort, but a range of such problems, covering relevant cases of proven and disproven, provable and disprovable hypotheses from past and present practice.

Ignorant opinion concerning scientific education assumes that students progress by mastering proven theories, procedures, and so forth--something analogous to stuffing programs into a digital computer system. This is not the case. Students learn scientific method through successes and failures in problem solving. They "guess" answers to problems from the launching point of knowledge already given to them; those guesses which lead to successful solutions then serve as the basis for the mind's informing itself of what kinds of assumptions and methods lead to successful hypotheses in the associated class of cases. By also learning why assumptions and methods producing successful hypotheses in one case do not work in other classes of cases, where other assumptions and methods do succeed, the student develops the ability to guess answers to problems effectively over the entire field mastered in this way.

A good school or a good teacher never builds a course around memorizing "facts." Such methods of instruction literally destroy the mental capabilities of the student in that field, possibly creating a more or less permanent blockage, such that the student may thereafter never become able to perform competent judgments in that field in later life. A "multiple choice" examination is sometimes permissible pedagogy, under the right conditions and design of testing. Good education always focuses on development of the student's ability to develop and test hypothetical solutions to a previously unknown problem. Good education focuses on developing the student's power to create and test soundly developed hypotheses for problems of a sort never before encountered in the student's experience.

This does not mean that the student should not learn facts. It means that the assimilation of facts must probe a subordinate feature of the process of education. It is the additional facts which make a successful hypothesis possible, the additional facts which test a hypothesis decisively, which the well-directed student prizes--and gobbles up as coherently assimilated facts--in consequence of their importance to his hypothesis-forming and -testing powers.

A good teacher asks the student, "What led you to make that error?" rather than simply asserting, "Your answer is wrong." That does not mean that teachers should not expedite matters in classrooms, and so forth, by such simple declarative statements of error by a student. The class--and life must proceed.

The student who has learned to inquire, "What misassumptions caused me to err in making that hypothesis?" will automatically respond to the knowledge of an error he or she has made by conducting self-examination independently. The good teacher cultivates that practice among the students.

"Why is that wrong?" The question, properly assessed, ought to mean: what misassumptions produced the wrong hypothesis?

This is the function of the Platonic dialogue. Whether as a dramatic presentation, or as an implicit drama of the sort we have outlined above, the purpose of Plato's (or my own) communicating to you in these terms of reference is to facilitate our mutual discussion of our respective methods of forming hypothesis. We are using the Platonic dialogue and derived forms as a medium, through which my second-order self-consciousness can establish a basis for mediated, efficient communication with your second-order self-consciousness. By laying out the social relationships in such a manner that they correspond to the simulated mental processes we each have simultaneously constructed within our respective mental processes, we can now refer to the hypothesis-generating functions of thought as the subject of our communication.

The question is not the psychoanalyst's problem of sorting out the noise associated with carried-over grudges from childhood. The purpose is to bring the processes of guessing within the mind into agreement with the lawful ordering of the universe. The purpose is to refine one's hypothesis-generating processes, with aid of error-correction, to the effect that the way in which one guesses at the consequences of an action will closely parallel, with increasing precision and range of implications conceptualized, the actual causal relations realized by such action within the universe outside the mind.

If you desperately insist on making such an analogy, you are using a sophisticated error-correcting procedure for making your mental processes a useful "analog computer" in respect to the lawful ordering of the universe apart from those mental processes as such.

There are two general levels on which the method of the Platonic dialogue operates. The first is that of ordinary hypothesis; the second is termed the level of the higher hypothesis.

Ordinary hypothesis--let us confine our attention for the moment to physical-scientific hypothesis--is simulated in good secondary-school pedagogy (for example) whenever the teacher presents the students with a problem to solve on a slightly higher level of educational development than the students have so far achieved. We wish to illustrate the point by assuming that the solution required cannot be effected through deductive methods on the basis of preceding education. Some small degree of genuine creative scientific hypothesizing is demanded.

That illustration helps us to reach agreement on the notion of a range of quality of the knowledge a society has achieved at any point in the here and now of general progress of civilization. This coincides with the kind of knowledge to which misguided persons refer when they wrongly propose that existing scientific knowledge is based on laws which correspond efficiently to the actual lawful ordering of our universe.

That sort of fallacious assumption has been made apparently by misguided, educated persons during every age. In due course, new advances in scientific knowledge, a new age, shows that such persons were indeed misguided. So, mere schoolchildren of each age ridicule the archaic ignorance and foolish presumptions of many learned figures of the ages preceding their own.

What, then, does our existing scientific knowledge represent? It is better than that of the nineteenth century--in respect to the technology of practice to which it corresponds. It is more appropriate, more adequate, more powerful than knowledge of earlier ages. Yet those earlier forms of scientific knowledge had a similar authority for their own age, and justly so. We say that our present knowledge is less inadequate than any which has preceded it. We know, and we have conclusive empirical proof of this fact, that our own scientific knowledge is devastatingly inadequate by the standard of any effort to pose the requirements of a finished, adequate such knowledge.

Ordinarily, by hypothesis we mean those methods of scientific guessing which can be relied upon to produce a usually fruitful result in empirical practice. As we compare the methods of forming simple hypothesis over successive ages, in respect to the particular body of scientific knowledge of each age, we discover that the principles of simple hypothesis undergo a necessary change as scientific knowledge progresses.

This historical view of the problem of hypothesis provides us the empirical basis for studying the higher functions of our own mental processes. The fact that the secular course of progress in scientific knowledge for practice corresponds to an increasing negentropy in social productive practice demonstrates that the progress in hypothesis-making methods represents an ordered progress in the power of hypothesis-making methods.

This fact, abstracted as a fact from that historical evidence, now becomes the primary subject of our further inquiry. We are now confronted with the task of defining and proving a hypothesis which accounts for advances in general hypothesis-making powers. This hypothesis concerning an orderable advancement in hypothesis-making powers of entire societies is what Plato terms the higher hypothesis.

It is that higher hypothesis which is the subject of the Timaeus.

Plato's treatments of astronomical data, of matters such as the circulation of the blood, the distribution of food through the blood, the carrying away of waste matter by the blood--almost two millennia before Harvey!--has the underlined purpose not of presenting a science of metabolism, but of abstracting the method of hypothesis in terms of then existing scientific knowledge.

The various treatments of what is now archaic scientific knowledge, taken all together, have the purpose of giving empirical reference over a range of different subject matters, for the discussion of hypothesis in general, and hence of the higher hypothesis.

This is the essential feature of the poetic principle.

In true poetry, the subject of the poem is never explicitly located in the lines. As the stretto in the form of Platonic dialogue known as the fugue, a key line may have the same function as the last canto of Dante's Commedia. It may identify agreement with the subject of the composition in such a way that the reader is aided to recognize that the true subject is the subject. So, the stretto in the fugue assures us that we and the composer are of the same mind concerning the true subject of the fugue, its process of development taken as a whole. The last canto of the Commedia, the same. Such coded elements of parts of a composition so noted, the true subject of a poetic composition is the subject which is never mentioned in a literal way in any line. The subject is that which corresponds not only to the configuration of the lines (as a transfinite corresponds to subsumed, lower-order numbers), but to the process of development that configuration of successive lines represents.

The reader of Timaeus must fight against missing the forest for the trees. That configuration of those trees is necessary to give us that forest, but it is the forest which is the subject, just as the individual man is no mere intellectual construct of his biological parts.

The principal subject of Timaeus, the higher hypothesis, is that self-developing (self-improving) form of the higher hypothesis which corresponds to the increasing power of man to willfully command the lawful ordering of the universe. What, the dialogue implicitly inquires, are the assumptions of guessing which efficiently correspond to such self-developing increasing power? The principal subject of Timaeus is not the fulsome explication of the development of such assumptions. The principal subject is the implications of the result of such a successful inquiry, of such a successful perfection of man's power to form the higher hypothesis.

It is on that point that Plato's realism (often termed "idealism") hangs.

The Platonic Dialectic

Excepting the anti-Plato bowdlerizing ofTimaeus, etc. in the Peripatetic writings conventionally attributed to Aristotle's authorship, the name dialectical method refers to the formulation of that method through the dialogues of Plato. Whence, then, one asks, do Soviet proponents of diamat--"dialectical materialism"--purport to represent themselves as proponents of a dialectical method?

It is possible to reduce conventional retorts to that challenge to variations on the following basic formulation.

The respondent, perhaps a manifestly indignant respondent, will insist, "Soviet diamat and histomat are chiefly derived from a corrected body of secondary sources, which, in turn, were chiefly informed on this matter by the writings of Friedrich Engels, who, in turn, shared the views of Karl Marx on this matter. It is to be admitted," they will continue, "that Marx, in turn, acknowledged his own considerable debt to G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind and Science of Logic are among the works most useful for reference on this connection. However, Marx 'turned Hegel on his head and made him a materialist.' The defect of Hegel was that he was an 'idealist' in much the same sense as Plato. We concede that Plato made a contribution to the development of dialectical method, but he was an idealist, and quite possibly an antidemocratic reactionary as well."

Our representation is essentially a fair one. The response to our characterization fully corroborates the characterization to which the response was given. It is unthinkable to use the term "dialectical method" and to also insist that Plato was an "idealist" contemplative philosopher, who essentially reflected the world-outlook of a slave-owning form of society. Such blunders suffice to demonstrate that the respondents lack competent knowledge of either Plato or the dialectical method.

This we shall show to be the case.

What is the importance of addressing a Soviet audience on this matter? Assuming the characterization of diamat to be an accurate one, why bring it up--why not overlook it as a point of avoidable disagreements?

First, the best leading currents of Soviet outlook have no agreement in practice with diamat, however much ritual lip service they may offer in support of it on standard sorts of ceremonial occasions. Although these currents are not, to date at least, professed, conscious Neoplatonists or Platonists, their world-outlook converges in effect on that of Neoplatonism. Would it not be better for the world if one of the most powerful nations of the world had a conscious command of a theory which agrees with its proper "organic impulses," rather than one which does not?

Second, the agreements reached between Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and President Leonid Brezhnev at their May 1978 meeting are directly articulations of the "Grand Design" policies earlier associated with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Henry IV of France, among others. These policies are Neoplatonic policies, which depend for their determination and conscious, efficient implementation on conscious mastery of corresponding aspects of Neoplatonic principles.

Third, the possibility of the May 1978 agreements flows to a considerable degree out of not only the Vatican's so-called Ostpolitik, but also Paul VI's 1967 Populorum Progressio, both of these flowing from Vatican II. The ecumenical principle consciously governing the Vatican's approach to these matters is far more explicitly Neoplatonic than the conscious motivations of the May 1978 agreements.

It comes full circle. It was the Soviet "organic impulses" convergent upon Neoplatonic principles which made the latter two processes possible, on the side of Chancellor Schmidt and the Vatican. As Brezhnev, Schmidt, President Giscard d'Estaing, and leading forces of the Vatican concur, the policies of coherent East-West and North-South economic and political cooperation are the only hope for avoiding an otherwise virtually certain general thermonuclear war.

For such reasons, it is of great practical urgency to all of us, including the Soviet leadership, that better knowledge of the dialectical method be rapidly developed.

Before proceeding to the kernel of the matter, we must pause to interpolate a bench mark of reference. Notably, where does Karl Marx himself actually stand in respect to the quality of dialectical method reflected in such works as the Timaeus?

In this matter, we shall state the essential points of our previously documented knowledge of the contradictory features of Marx's method.

Marx's secondary-school essay of 1835, written as an assignment for the Trier Gymnasium director, John Hugo Wyttenbach, affords us a point of insight into Marx's character. Wyttenbach, elected to head the Gymnasium during the 1790s, was a Neoplatonist by inclination, elected to that post as the teacher best qualified to represent the world-outlook of both Benjamin Franklin and Immanuel Kant. Some later writings of Wyttenbach, some years following Marx's graduation, emphasize continued development of his Neoplatonic outlook.

This same Neoplatonic influence is reflected in Marx's work on Democritus--although with other elements included and is expressed in the most concentrated way in both his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach and another writing of the same year, the "Feuerbach" section of The German Ideology. The latter are writings which some official Soviet circles--partially as a reflection of a British intelligence "Right Opposition" operation involving Karl Korsch, Eduard Bernstein, and Sidney Hook--were induced to characterize as Marx's "idealist" youthful writings.

It is most inconvenient for the Soviet and other British proponents of the "young" versus "mature" Marx that the concluding section of Capital Volume III emphasizes the same methodological outlook as the 1845 items. This is most notable in the development of the notions of necessity and freedom in that section of Capital.

It is correct to say that Marx's essential character to the end of his life was predominantly that of a Neoplatonic. The problem was that Marx was otherwise variously ignorant and disinformed in crucial respects on such topics as the French Revolution, the history of medieval and modern Europe, and the factional history of the development of European science.

This ignorance and disinformation centered around Marx's misguided obsession that nineteenth-century Great Britain represented the model-of-reference for the development of capitalism, and that the British and French empiricists (the "materialists") represented a development in ideas which correlated with the development of capitalism as a more advanced form of society.

Of the two collaborators, Friedrich Engels was targeted earlier for influencing and containment by British intelligence. Marx himself was later massively disinformed through such operatives as David Urquhart. Among the hideous personal operations deployed against Marx, representative is the case of Edward Aveling, general scoundrel and womanizer, who left the embrace of his cultist mistress, Annie Besant, to seduce Marx's most talented child, Eleanor, dragging her through degradation to a premature death.

If one understands the hideous circumstances in which Marx lived and worked--the fact that the entire "radical" movement of continental Europe and England was controlled top down by British intelligence networks throughout Marx's life--this controlled environment, plus operations such as the Urquhart British-intelligence operation, account for the circumstances under which Marx's ignorance and error were cultivated on various important issues.

One ought to have compassion and admiration for what Marx represented and did in fact accomplish under these circumstances, and thus inter his errors with his bones.

It is not Marx who is responsible for the hideous concoctions known as diamat and histomat. There is the case of Karl Korsch, the British agent and associate of British intelligence's evil Bertrand Russell. There is N. Bukharin, Vienna-trained subagent of Royal Dutch Shell's Alexander Helphand (Parvus). There is "ultra-leftist" G. Riazanov, another subagent of Parvus's from Vienna, who later turned up in the British intelligence-controlled "Right Opposition." There is British intelligence operative J.B.S. Haldane, associated with the order of the same cult of "The Golden Dawn" which produced Hitler, and various other British elements. It was British agents in Moscow who revived Edward Aveling's hoax, the effort to have Capital dedicated to Charles Darwin. It was British agents such as these who made histomat and diamat the Mandarin-like babbling and gibberish they represent in quasiofficial edifications on those subjects.

Then, happily, there is Lenin. "Spiritually," V.I. Lenin was the heir of Marx in the best sense. Lenin's inclination by pedigree was toward the Neoplatonic Russian currents identified in art by the novelist Chernyshevsky, the author of the Cervantes-emulating novel What Is To Be Done?, the novel whose title Lenin coopted with well-aimed irony for one of his own major, self-defining booklets.

The "organic" Neoplatonic tendency in the Soviet leadership and nation is, our Soviet discussion partners will be somewhat consoled to hear, historically determined, with V. I. Lenin key to the realization of that determination into today. Lenin's political dedication from the earliest role of political leadership combined two elements. One element of policy was identical with that of Czar Alexander II, Chernyshevsky, and Count Sergei Witte: the industrial development of Russia, to lift Russia out of the bestiality of rural life. The other, distinguishing element was his commitment to the development of the Russian working class as an independent political force. As an independent political force, that working class must either bring a policy of capitalist industrial transformation into being, or, should the capitalists fail to accept such a dedication, that independent political force must undertake the transformation without capitalism. This was not only Lenin's outlook prior to World War I; it was the conceptual basis which subsumed his strategic "Rapallo" policy of the early 1920s.

It is a nominalist's fraud by the Mensheviks and their claques to insist that they were dedicated to a capitalist transformation of Russia in 1917. They were for a British-capitalist transformation of Russia, which meant, in effect, very little industrialization at all. They were committed to defending City of London-centered financier interests in the form of feudal rural estates in Russia, and to facilitating the Milner-Parvus version of what later became known as Haushofer's geopolitical strategy for dismembering the "Eurasian heartland" in British interest.

In brief, Lenin was no Trotskyist.

The heritage of Lenin's influences and Lenin's institutions in Soviet life today does involve a dedication to socialist transformation of society globally, although not in the form of Red Army occupations or anything of that sort. In practice, the primary movement of history for the Leninist currents of Soviet life is not socialism, but a principle of progress otherwise consistent with the Neoplatonic view of the necessity for generalized scientific, technological, and cultural progress. Whatever means serve that purpose are but ephemerals of this moment of history, the necessary mediation of a process of progress in terms of means actually at hand. The means are not a miraculous, instantaneous transformation of the world to a state of socialist homogeneity; the means are whatever practice actually serves the process of progress.

Our Soviet discussion partners must accept this formulation. Certain features of it will sit unpleasantly in their minds at first hearing, but they cannot seriously argue against it. The end is not some utopian goal. The end is the continuation and, preferably, the acceleration of progress. The means and the end are one and the same. The Soviets define the Soviet Union as a state characterized by a socialist constitution. In that, they are right. But Leninist socialism is not a state, but a means, a method, a course of action, which under certain circumstances produces (determines) a socialist state. The ultimate Soviet objection to a capitalist Russia is essentially an objection to the means (and social forces) by which such a capitalist Russia would be established. It is not static conditions that are essential; static conditions are merely historical ephemerals. It is a specific quality of movement that is primary; it is direction, it is quality of movement in the required direction. With this proposition our Soviet discussion partners could find no defensible difference.

What continues to pain them in the discussion so far is essentially that this writer is saying this. What pains them is the fact that this writer, to whom they have accorded no corresponding titles of authority on these matters, should be passing judgment on the judgment of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and so forth. Behind every form of objection, provided we trace it to its source, we will find the ad hominem argument I have just identified.

That noted, we focus on the crux of the matter: the basis for arguing that the proof for the higher hypothesis is also a proof that the ontological quality of the universe is also dialectical. This is, of course, the point toward which Karl Marx and all serious elements among his professed successors have been working in their efforts along these lines. Vis-a-vis our Soviet discussion partners, our point is to show them why the official diamat intrinsically leads to absurdities on this point, whereas the Platonic approach not only avoids such absurdities, but produces empirically corroborated results of exactly the sort Soviet specialists have sought in this respect.

In the forthcoming book edition of the new translation of the Timaeus, an introductory article by Dr. Steven Bardwell elaborates the matters of physical theory per se from the vantage point of contemporary plasma physics. Here we will concentrate on the crucial points this writer has adopted as his specific responsibility.

Economics and Epistemology

The writer's very special qualifications in writing this introduction flow from his successful breakthrough in solving the hitherto unsolved but crucial problem of theoretical and applied economics. It happens, as the point is outlined within the writer's Theory of the European Monetary Fund, that this solution was developed as a correction to a crucial, systematic failure in Marx's Capital, the notorious issue of the concluding chapter of Engels's edition of Capital Volume II. Although Marx's conception of economic processes paralleled the work of Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, and Henry C. Carey, among others, in locating the source of all wealth in increases of the productive powers of labor through technological progress, Marx, like all others attempting to solve this problem, was unable to construct a deterministic model of an economy based on the principle of a constant transformation through technological progress. With aid of Georg Cantor and Riemann, the writer first discovered the solution to this problem during 1952.

Although use has been made by others of subsumed features of Bernard Riemann's discoveries in relativistic physics, the essential breakthrough, represented in Riemann's famous 1854 habilitation paper on fundamental physical hypothesis, has not been generally comprehended. Exemplary of that lack of comprehension is the case of Albert Einstein and his collaborator Hermann Weyl, who mistakenly regarded the Einstein general relativity program as "Riemannian." In fact, the Einstein program deals only with one alternative, degenerate case of the kind of universe specified by Riemann's notion of fundamental physical hypothesis.

Through aid of Cantor's development of his own notion of the transfinite, it was made clear to the writer that the n+1 generative principle of the Riemannian conception corresponded to the generation of successive transfinite orderings, and not anything like an increase in the number of degrees of freedom in the ordinary sense of aprioristic varieties of non-Euclidean physical geometries. The recognition of this implication of Riemann's work encouraged the writer to adopt a similar approach to solution of the problem of deterministic economic models.

This has two direct implications for fuller appreciation of the Platonic conception of both the higher hypothesis and the dialectical ontology which flows from the higher hypothesis. First, Riemann's notion of fundamental physical hypothesis is a partial reaffirmation of the Platonic conception for physics. Conversely, the difficulties which have attended generally failed efforts to comprehend Riemann are the result of educational and related indoctrination of physicists in an anti-Platonic epistemological world-outlook. Second, it is, as we shall summarize the proof for this, only in a proper approach to economics studies that man is able to prove the relative truth or falsehood of scientific conceptions in general.

The first point is more easily set forth if we consider the second point beforehand.

The fallacy of all economic doctrines existing prior to the present writer's post-1952 elaboration of his own discovery is that the effort to define deterministic models for policymaking takes either monetary data or other particulars as if they were self-evident data. Models, either simultaneous linear equations or equivalent procedures, are constructed on the basis of these assumptions. A basic model is constructed on the assumption of no significant technological transformation of the system described. Then, at best, an effort is made to account for the effects of introducing technological transformations to such models. The fallacy of this procedure ought to be obvious.

As Alexander Hamilton proved, in principle, in his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures to the U.S. Congress, the sole possible source of continuing wealth of a society is increases of the productive powers of labor. It is that increase, and that increase alone, which

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is the source of wealth; therefore, that increase must be the primary datum of any economic model. In other words, only a phase-space datum of an economy can yield a nonparadoxical accounting of the economy.

Conversely, the effort to debate matters concerning technological progress in terms of accounting-oriented models is absurd, and can yield only absurd answers.

The development of the Neoplatonic outlook, as focused in the analysis given by Plotinus, occurred in direct connection with the Timaeus. The consubstantiality of the divine and man in Christ was defined as the unity of the necessary being with mortal (ephemeral) man brought to maturity of perfection. The consubstantiality of the Trinity was the unity of the necessary being, the higher hypothesis, and the perfected particular man.

The further, crucial point was that of the church as the embodiment of the living Christ. The body of the church, a continuity superseding the ephemeral existence of the individual communicants, was defined as a process of perfection toward agreement with the higher hypothesis (atonement). The "New Jerusalem" in the Revelations of St. John the Divine bear most directly on this matter.

This is readily proven to be the case.

As man develops beyond a beast-like form of hunting and gathering, he does so through technological innovations, with each stratum of social practice so defined, there is an associated definition of what are ostensibly man-altered primary resources for the society in that technological stratum. In this way, every society encounters a marginal-resources social-cost factor, which bounding condition is of no governing significance except with respect to that and more primitive levels of technology.

Examining this process in terms of the thermodynamic characteristics of various levels of technological progress since the old Stone Age cultures, we are able to show that the succession of cultures has the following thermodynamical characteristics. At first gridding of the data, we observe a rise in the per capita throughput of useful energy for production, and hence also consumption, with a finer gridding, we adduce an exponential tendency (secularly) for rise in this rate of increase of per capita energy densities.

There is a further, crucial consideration.

Examining the process more closely, we note that the total energy throughput of production has two aspects. One aspect is the energy per capita consumed ostensibly in merely maintaining the society and its associated mode of production as if in a fixed technological mode on the same scale of production. The

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other aspect is the "free energy" component per capita. This is the margin of energy which increases the "reducing potential" of the society (and production), enabling overcoming of marginal-resource limitations, and is the margin of throughput on which expansion and qualitative development of the society and its mode of production depends.

As society advances (secularly), this ratio of “free energy" to total energy must increase. However, the per capita throughput merely to maintain individuals and the mode of production also increases as we progress from lower to higher technologies. The combined increase of this base-line throughput with higher ratios of "free energy" to total energy throughput we term negentropy. We restrict the usage of negentropy in our further discussions to that definition.

Although it is the negentropy which we treat as the parameter correlative with technological progress, it is not merely the application of increased energy flows to society which produce the advancement. Rather, the increased negentropy, in terms of energy flows, is in the form of a requirement, not a sufficient cause for progress. Whence comes the possibility for increased energy throughputs?

The source is innovations contributed by individuals and assimilated for social practice by other individuals as well as the individual innovator. The generalization of the innovations which provide the rising negentropy is what we term generalized scientific and technological progress. In respect to this, scientific knowledge is the generalized expression for advancement in the creative-mental potentialities of individuals both to generate and assimilate those discoveries.

Thus, the fact that a certain "world-line" of development of scientific progress correlates with negentropy of social existence and practice is the only source of conclusive proof of scientific knowledge.

Wealth, in turn, is defined primarily as negentropy, as the mediation of a rise from one condition of negentropy to a higher condition. Wealth is that total spectrum of all production and consumption through which the development of the minds of persons mediates a continuing advancement in the potential and realized negentropy of society.

Each product, and every other isolable particular feature within an economy, is but a transient value, an ephemeral. It is not accounting constructs of these particularities which determine value, but the change in negentropic values which determines the value of particulars such as individual products, prices, units of labor time, and so forth.

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The "world-line" which scientific knowledge describes in the outlined process is the empirical correlative of the self-development of hypothesis associated with Plato's notion of the higher hypothesis. It is this view of the history of scientific knowledge which enables us to attribute empirical authority to scientific knowledge in any field. It is, as we noted, a proper application of economics which provides us with the sole basis of empirical proof that scientific knowledge is not some delusion, some chimera.

If we then apply this overview of science to the most fundamental sort of empirical knowledge we presently command concerning the development of our own planet, the following, decisive results are obtained.

The history of our planet begins, according to present knowledge, as a matter of inorganic physics. Out of this emerges organic physics, the (negentropically) self-developing biosphere. Out of organic physics emerges man, reason. Reason cannot be accounted for as merely an extension of organic physics as such physics is defined for knowledge. However, reason, knowing itself through knowledge of the higher hypothesis, has comprehension of that ostensibly immanent, creative principle which is already embedded as a self-developing principle within the inorganic domain, which, through its self-development, elaborates the organic domain and then the domain of reason. The parallel to the organization of Dante's Commedia is exact and is not merely coincidental.

We have just now stated the essential notion of Riemann's habilitation paper.

The empiricist critic objects; he insists that reason is a nonmaterial, and therefore mystical, existence in our account. Just the reverse is the case. The fact that we exist as a species whose existence is ordered by the negentropy that is in turn ordered according to the higher hypothesis proves that the materiality of the universe is not as pathetic, as paradoxically mystical as vulgar forms of inorganic-physics doctrines assume it to be. Otherwise, the critic--should he deny this argument--is placed in the interesting predicament of asserting that he himself cannot possibly exist. One presumes that the utterance vanishes with the utterer; hence the critic's argument, if true, never existed and need not be considered further.

This, incidentally, is the basis for the Riemannian notion of multiply connected manifolds.

We live in a universe whose essential nature, whose lawful ordering, is such that we, with our negentropic existence, are an integral part of that universe. The fundamental lawful ordering of the

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universe therefore corresponds to those aspects of human behavior which correspond directly to the principles reflected in comprehension of the higher hypothesis.

There is one further, crucial point to be made on this immediate basis.

Since every stratum of extant scientific knowledge is but an ephemeral in the process of self-development of knowledge, no particular such body of knowledge can be considered to be in more than adequate, pragmatic correspondence with the actual lawful ordering of the universe. However, the higher hypothesis is. Since the higher hypothesis is that aspect of human knowledge which correlates with an increasing negentropy of social practice, and thus represents directed increasingly willful power over the lawful ordering of the universe, it is the higher hypothesis which, uniquely, corresponds to natural law.

Hence, the ontology of the universe must necessarily be defined in agreement with the higher hypothesis. The fundamental "stuff" of the universe can not be other than that for human practice. This "stuff" is termed the necessary being--the necessary "stuff"-- to distinguish it from ephemeral and otherwise inadequately defined notions of materiality.

That is the principled solution to the so-called unified field problem.

That is the notion of the interconnection of higher hypothesis and necessary being, which is the principal subject of Plato's Timaeus.

In this overview, the particular, the relative ephemeral is determined, and real. Particular existence mediates the self-development of the whole process. The particular comes into being by action of the whole process, and in turn mediates the whole processes's self-development through the action associated with the existence of the created particularity.

To account for the development of such conceptions in Plato, the potentialities for such discoveries are adequately identified by studying the development of Ionian and Eleatic thought from Thales of Miletus through Parmenides, Heraclitus, Democritus, and so forth. The combining of three qualities of existence through the addition of reason (Logos) to the hylozoic overview of nature apart from man is the key point of reference.

Hence, the significance of triads in Platonic and Neoplatonic thought. They are not arbitrary or mystical. It happens that there are three distinguishable qualities of knowledge--inorganic physics, organic physics, reason--and that these have a definite correlation with the succession of maturity of knowledge in the developed individual: egoistical-infantile-sensual ("bronze souls"), sensual infantilism educated to

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logical rationality (Kantian "understanding," or "silver souls"), and the actually mature human being of reason ("higher hypothesis," Kantian "pure reason," "golden souls"). There is nothing at all mystical about any of it.

The mystification occurs only as persons on one of the two inferior levels of maturation attempt to either account for the universe generally, or attempt to interpret the conceptions of matured minds from the standpoint of their own inferior development of mental processes.

Riemann's own published writings, as corroborated (to date) by a preliminary investigation of his unpublished literary remains, show that his own mental development, his own approach to the issues of the fundamental hypotheses of physics, emulated the Platonic-Neoplatonic outlook, and that the approach taken by Riemann reflected the extent to which he had been informed through the Neoplatonic influences perpetuated into his own time and education.

Neoplatonic Christianity

The Soviet attitude toward Plato and Neoplatonism is conditioned by a simplistic form of atheism, and also by the powerful association of Neoplatonism with the first centuries of Christianity's defining itself more rigorously against the problems represented by various pseudo-Christian cults. Consequently, predominant Soviet views on Christianity (in particular) are essentially incompetent, incompetent views of Christianity which spill over into the attacks on Neoplatonism, and are reflected in Soviet susceptibility to British-style frauds concerning Plato's "idealism."

The best way for the Soviet reader (for example) to understand the Christianity of the apostles, of the Council of Nicea, of Origen, of St. Augustine is to look at the conflicts between the apostles and patristics on the one side, and various pseudo-Christian cultist "heresies" on the other. What is the issue between Philo of Alexandria and the Sadducees? What is the issue between Simon Magus, the first prominent pseudo-Christian cultist, and both Philo and St. Peter in Rome? What is the issue between the apostles and patristics, on the one side, and the gnostics and other forms of monophysites on the other? What was the issue of Manicheanism, the latter the belief of Winston Churchill's "Henry Kissinger," Arnold Toynbee? What was the issue of Arianism, of Donatism?

Reduced to essentials, these struggles against pseudo-Christian cults centered around the consubstantiality of the divine and man in Jesus Christ and the consubstantiality of the Trinity. The latter was defined in opposition to the effort to introduce a thinly

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disguised trinity of the Ptolemaic cult of Isis (Isis, Osiris, and Horus) as a pseudo-Christian trinity, giving Isis the name of the Virgin Mary, and shamelessly renaming the existing icons of Isis to this effect.

The development of the Neoplatonic outlook, as focused in the analysis given by Plotinus, occurred in direct connection with the Timaeus. The consubstantiality of the divine and man in Christ was defined as the unity of the necessary being with mortal (ephemeral) man brought to maturity of perfection. The consubstantiality of the Trinity was the unity of the necessary being, the higher hypothesis, and the perfected particular man.

The further, crucial point was that of the church as the embodiment of the living Christ. The body of the church, a continuity superseding the ephemeral existence of the individual communicants, was defined as a process of perfection toward agreement with the higher hypothesis (atonement). The "New Jerusalem" in the Revelations of St. John the Divine bear most directly on this matter.

There are, of course, deviations from so coherent a view among the leading patristics and others. Nonetheless, in each combat against the cultists Christianity was obliged to search more deeply, once again, to define the crucial form of the issues; leading figures, working with material inherited from their predecessors, worked consistently in the same direction--the direction which echoes the Timaeus, a directedness which defines the patristic church as essentially Neoplatonic.

The crux of Neoplatonic Christianity from the vantage point afforded by the Timaeus is this. The divine corresponds to an agreement among necessary being, the higher hypothesis perfected, and man matured to perfected agreement in method of judgment and motives of practice with the prescriptions of the perfected higher hypothesis. The ontological definition of the universal, necessary being as a self-subsisting creative principle consubstantial with the universe is deified as God.

With this kernel of knowledge, one can cut through all the confusion with which the history of Christian doctrines otherwise confronts us.

This occurs most clearly in surviving literature of Islam in the Metaphysics of ibn-Sina, in the definition of the "Necessary Existent." The most rigorous statement of the same notion during the Renaissance is given by Cusa's exposition on the "Non-Other."

These principles of the divine in Christianity are extended as a doctrine of practice according to the three levels of maturation of the human mind and sense (and motivations) of personal identity. The soul is empirically identified by those phenomena of the creative-mental potentialities of man which fundamentally distinguish species-man, through realized

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self-development, from all the beasts. This is the active potentiality within the individual, which, developed to comprehension of the higher hypothesis, corresponds to reason. It is the development of man, of individuals, through the three degrees of maturation of such souls, which is the analytical basis of reference for defining the tasks of Christianity. It is the issue of ordering society under conditions that most such souls are on the two lower orders of maturation which completes the basic outline of the problem.

This overview of Christianity from the standpoint defined by the subject of the Timaeus is the first step toward removing the delusion that Christianity represents a collection of myths, irrationalities, and so forth, or is a trick by which ruling classes keep the sheep more readily in willing subjugation. Exactly the contrary to the latter is true, as will be clear as we turn more directly to examine the class content of the pseudo-Christian cults.

The second set of facts to be considered, to remove the fraudulent characterization of Christianity as myth-ridden, is that the documented history of Christianity is authoritative and verifiable. In addition to the New Testament itself, the most relevant principal sources are the writings of Philo of Alexandria, the documents surrounding the Council of Nicea, the writings of Origen, the history given by Eusebius, the writings of Plotinus, and the Confessions and City of God of St. Augustine. Through most of the first century after Christ, the church was held together by St. John, "who knew Christ," and after that, into the larger part of the second century, by John's successors, "who had known John, who had known Christ."

Although, admittedly, we have only the witness of the apostles and some others to the resurrection of Christ; every other essential fact concerning early Christianity is verified--without revelation to the point that this aspect of that period, from apostolic, patristic, and related sources, is, in respect of depth, one of the best-known aspects of the entire history of the period.

What is mythical is the account of history which attempts to explain the barbarian invasions of the western portion of the Roman Empire without taking into account the controlling role of the Arian cults, controlled from Byzantium. Similarly, it is absurd to attempt to explain "Mongol hordes" later in terms of "population pressures" and so forth. The total Mongol male population of that period, man and boy, did not exceed one million! If one notes that the Mongol invasion was coordinated with forces centered among the "black nobility" of Rome, the silly myths told to credulous children concerning the "Mongol hordes" are dispelled, and the more hideous truth of the matter

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comes to light. What is mythical is the customary fairy tales concerning the reasons for the Albigensian crusades, or the mythical version of the fall of Constantinople.

The emergence of Christianity intersects and intervenes in an age-old, continuing struggle between the two principal factions of civilization. There are, on the one side, the "city-builders," the current typified by city-builder Thales of Miletus, by Plato. On the opposite side, there is the faction known in Plato and Alexander the Great's time as the "Persian model" faction, or, generically from then to the present day, the oligarchical faction.

During the span of history which represents a literary continuity, as history, for us today, we begin near the beginning of the first millennium B.C. During this period, the center of evil, of the oligarchical faction, was the Babylonian priesthood--together with some very nasty, similar social formations in Egypt. During the period of the Attic Greek civilization, the Babylonian priesthood, "the magicians," were represented throughout the Mediterranean littoral through the Delphic cult of Apollo (the immediate adversary of Plato's Academy at Athens), which was the master of that oligarchist and Delphi agent, Aristotle the poisoner.

The last great political consequence of the direct organizing work of the Academy at Athens was the coup d'etat which brought the antioligarchist Alexander the Great to power in Macedonia. The fragility of Alexander's conquest, that the antioligarchist forces depended upon a relatively small circle of power gathered chiefly around one individual, made the assassination of Alexander a catastrophic defeat for humanity for an entire period.

Contrary to all the frauds, the Roman republic was dominated by the cult of Apollo throughout its literary-historical period. Meanwhile, the cult of Apollo, apart from dominating the Mediterranean more freely after the death of Alexander, created a new form of the cult of Isis in Ptolemaic Egypt, and also synthesized the Stoic cult. The Roman republic became increasingly degraded, and was transformed into the Roman empire and its fascist forms of existing by cannibalizing conquered cultures,

It was during this period that Philo of Alexandria contributed to reawaken humanity, through his campaign against the Sadducees and their Pharisee allies among the Jews. It was during the course of the fight launched by Philo that Christianity emerged among the Jews, and, there is no doubt, around the existent personality of Jesus Christ. It is also clear that there was no essential modification of Christianity from the apostles and St. Paul's writings to the patristic tradition of Christianity of today. Although the elaboration

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of the doctrine was extended after the death of St. John, notably from the standpoint of the Timaeus as an agreeable methodological point of reference, there was no change in the essential doctrine. Rather, as we have noted, the elaboration was extended to the purpose of sharpening the distinctions of thought and practice between Christianity and the pseudo-Christian cults.

The issue between the Christians and the pseudo-Christian cults is made most clear by examining the issues in nonreligious terms. This presents us with the additional advantage of showing what is really to be understood whenever one hears the argument that "platonic idealism leads toward religious outlooks."

Man's nature, the potential for creative-mental development which distinguishes him from the beasts, demands a form of society in which that nature is made the practical basis for the personal identity of the individual person. This occurs only under those conditions in which the development of the productive powers of labor is emphasized. Man condemned to live in the same mode of production and existence as his father, grandfather, and his father before him, is a man whose lack of experience of development degrades him to circumstances analogous to those of mere cattle. Deprived of the basis for making an essential distinction in practice between himself and some talking beast, man prizes himself for his mere cattle-like biological existence, his egoistical-sensual appetites and impulses. Man becomes degraded into a beast-likeness in his morality and self-image.

The rise of humanity has been urban-centered. It has been centers of trade and culture through which technological advances were radiated into the countryside. Hence, the fight for humanity, for progress, is properly associated with the city-builders, with those forces which lift mankind out of the "idiocy of rural life," out of the moral imbecility of social relations which degrade men to a kind of talking cattle.

Since Babylon, the enemies of humanity have been clearly defined. The oligarchical faction, as a social class, has been based on feudalist forms of land-owning aristocracy, allied with mercantilist rentier-financier aristocratic families. The coordinating instrument for this ruling oligarchical class was the sort of priesthood typified by the Babylonian magicians, the priests of Apollo, the priests of Isis, and so forth, into the Isis cultists of the Scottish Rite of Freemasony, of Oxford and Cambridge, and the British-centered oligarchical cultists of the Order of Malta. It is British intelligence today, as the center of this combined cult and political-intelligence network, which replicates the traditions of belief and practice of the ancient oligarchical and Roman imperial priesthoods.

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This is the key to the fight between Christianity and the Roman Empire. It was a struggle, on behalf of the ruling strata of Rome, to maintain the oligarchical world order which the Empire had instituted. At first, the Roman imperial reaction was hideous repression. The Sadducee-allied faction of Jews in Rome proposed to the Emperor Nero that he slaughter the Christians, providing a scapegoat for his own incendiarism. Repression was complemented by other, subversive methods: the pseudo-Christian cults. One begins, properly, with the case of the alliance of St. Peter and Philo against the pseudo-Christian Roman cult of the magician Simon Magus, and continues in the history of the business through the principal cult manufactures such as gnosticism, Arianism, Manicheanism, Donatism, and the various disguised Isis cults, such as the cult of Our Lady of Fatima today.

In manufacturing these cults, the priesthood of the cult of Isis and the Stoics understood exactly the way in which to parody a humanist body of scientific knowledge or religious belief, imitating certain appearances of what was parodied, but totally reversing the direction of outlook for practice. This knowledge, the principles of cult syncretization, was developed as the priesthood's accumulated knowledge of centuries of practice.

The essential methods for cult manufacture in this way are sometimes identified, currently, as the "Delphi Principle." These are the methods which the authors of the writings attributed to Aristotle employed in their efforts to simultaneously co-opt and destroy Platonic knowledge. Just as the apostles and patristics used methods paralleling Plato's to defend Christianity against the pseudo-Christian cults, so the methods of Plato's adversary, Aristotle, were used as the fundamental body of method and procedure for designing pseudo-Christian cults.

The significance of Aristotle in this respect is summarily the following. He was a member of an established oligarchist family, and an agent of the cult of Apollo at Delphi from not later than his apprenticeship as an intelligence operative (i.e., Macedonian-Persian spy) for the cult at Isocrates' Athenian school of rhetoric. Although the Babylonian priesthood, in particular, had perfected methods of cult syncretization as a psychological science over centuries, the concentration of scientific knowledge embodied in Plato's Academy at Athens represented, for Delphi and Babylon, the most deadly potential danger the oligarchical faction had faced. Plato's consolidation and advancement of Greek science represented a new quality of foe. Just as the entire civilized world depended on Greek methods of warfare--for nations whose military policy was not totally suicidal--so the Babylonians depended upon Greek agents of Delphi,

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most notably the Peripatetics led by Aristotle, to apply ancient cult methods to the task of attempting to neutralize the more powerful quality of knowledge represented by Plato's Academy.

Aristotle, after his own initial training under Isocrates, was assigned to penetrate the Academy, and remained there for an extended period as a Delphi penetration agent and Persian spy. By developing the ancient cult-syncretizing methods of the oligarchical priesthood into a weapon adapted to cultist practices against Platonism, the oligarchists brought their cult-syncretizing methods to the relatively highest degree of development. In principle, from that period down into Oxford University and the Ashmoleon Museum or Tavistock Institute of today, the British monarchy and its predecessors have effected no principled advances in cultist methods of psychological warfare over the methods associated with the Peripatetic subgroup of the cult of Apollo.

It should be interpolated here, out of courtesy to our Soviet discussion partners, that in this matter of Neoplatonism the advantage, relative to Moscow, is not entirely on the side of today's Catholic Church. There are three most commonly recurring sticking points in the tradition of the Catholic Church's postpatristic history which Catholic leaders of the apostolic tradition have attempted to circumvent, but have not so far mustered the courage and insight to extirpate directly. Aristotle and Aristotelian methods are the common denominator of this problem.

These three sticking points--which correlate with every other expression of the same difficulty--are the seizure of control of the papacy by the Pierleoni converted-Jewish bankers of Rome during the eleventh century, Bernard of Clairvaux's doctrine of cultist irrationalism (against Abelard of Paris) during the twelfth century, and the case of St. Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century (against Roger Bacon et al.). The case of Thomas Aquinas is central.

The Catholic leaders of the apostolic tradition circumvent the difficulties associated with Aquinas's commentaries on Aristotle essentially by defining Aquinas as an Augustinian who commented upon Aristotle--rather than the radical-pagan view of Aristotle, adopted by the Anglican Jesuits of today, which defines Aquinas as an Aristotelian. By defining Aquinas as an Augustinian which has an emphatic historical basis in Aquinas's repudiation of his earlier work toward the close of his life--the apostolic traditionalists concerned to save Aquinas's position argue essentially as follows.

They argue that Neoplatonism is essential to comprehension of all essential matters, but that the Aristotelian method is useful for lower-order concerns.

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The analogy in Soviet practice is the case in which the Anglo-Dutch agent of influence N. Bukharin were to be "rehabilitated"--as the British demand today. The effort to falsify Soviet history in such a way as to allow "some merit" to the enemies, N. Bukharin and G. Riazanov, would provide a most useful cover for the deployment of all sorts of British-Zionist penetration agents into relatively high levels of the Soviet party and state.

It may be the case that V. I. Lenin tolerated the wretched Bukharin, just as he tolerated the wretched Karl Radek. If one knows the facts--what an agglomeration of variously outright agents and muddleheads even the Bolshevik leadership of 1917 represented--one better appreciates the magnitude of Lenin's role during that and the following years, and also the virtual impossibility of cleansing the Bolshevik leadership of all figures who had dirty pedigrees as agents of various police and other intelligence services in their past. Were Lenin alive, so that he and I might discuss the matter today, he would entirely agree with my view on this point.

The same Aristotelian method is manifest as the

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controlling, "Delphi" principle in the deliberate falsification of translations of Plato by Oxford and Cambridge specialists clown to the present date. The case of Benjamin Jowett is illustrative of translators who have apparently used every opportunity to mistranslate specific terms of (for example) the Timaeus in such a way as to mystify clear argument through superimposition of Anglican-religious terminology.

In each of the pseudo-Christian cults, the Delphi principle is key. The first, large-scale pseudo-Christian cult problem centered around gnosticism. Gnosticism, overall, attempted to adapt Christianity to the form of the authorized Roman Empire pantheon, describing Christianity as analogous to the inner beliefs of the cult of Isis, as a "mystery religion." More crucial in this package were the alternative versions of monophysitism, the one arguing that Christ was merely of a mortal nature or, the opposing monophysite doctrine, that Christ had no mortal nature.

Granted, the man in the street might not comprehend the implications of his assimilating either variant of the monophysite views. The arguments might

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appear--and did appear plausible to many persons, and because of that plausibility drew such persons into cults and into the hideous practices which flowed, as potentialities, from such indoctrination. From the vantage point of the Timaeus, the practical implications of the various monophysite dogmas quickly become clear. The consubstantiality of the divine and mortal for the doctrine of the imitation of Christ is seen as crucial.

The cosmographical essence of religious cultism is as follows. First, the universe is separated into two domains, the domain of mortality, and a higher, independent domain of some deus ex machina. The higher domain has power over the world, a power which is either irrationalist (such as the standard Greek pantheon) or is governed by some fixed principle. Both variations argue that reason is unknowable to man, or that reason simply does not exist (irrationalism), and insist, in the same way, that the lawful principles governing the ordering of the universe either do not exist (irrationalism), or are inaccessible to human knowledge.

The cultist cosmography is either merely irrationalist (for example, Bernard of Clairvaux), or argues that a deus ex machina created the world at a certain point, with built-in fixed laws of the Aristotelian sort. Either case both denies the accessibility of reason for man, and, by that implication, denies that man is accountable to knowledge of the ordering of the universe as accessed through reason. Once these arguments are adopted as religious beliefs, the victim of such superstitions is open to belief in some arbitrary, mystical principle.

The consistent view of apostolic and patristic Christianity is most clearly emphasized in the way in which Christianity characterized itself in clarifying its own world-outlook against the views associated with cult syncretization based on the ontological assumptions we have just summarized.

The standpoint of Christianity was, at each point, the ontological standpoint of consubstantiality. God is, they argued, one and the same with the self-elaborating positive, self-subsisting principle and substance which is manifest in the self-elaboration of the universe according to the lawful ordering expressing the self-subsisting positive. The universe as a whole, taken as a self-subsisting positive creative principle of self-elaboration, is God.

Christianity was not "rationalist" in the sense associated with the French Enlightenment and the cosmogony of Lagrange, Lalande, and Laplace. Christianity was "rationalist" strictly in the sense of reason as given by Plato, reason as defined in respect to the higher hypothesis.

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French Enlightenment rationalism would insist-- if it accepted the proof of the higher hypothesis we have outlined in respect to Riemannian hypothesis--that perhaps the mastery of this quality of knowledge by man is possible--at least, ultimately. However, the French Enlightenment spokesman would view this acquisition of knowledge as an augmented power of the quality of man associated with French Enlightenment moral outlooks. Thus, a person working in the tradition of the French Enlightenment would miss the crucial point of Christianity. In the transformation of man through knowledge, from the man of Dante's "Purgatory" toward the higher quality of man, of the "Empyreal," there is not merely an increase in the knowledge at man's disposal, there is also a transformation in the moral character of man.

Enlightenment man is motivated by his egoistical knowable sensual appetites and impulses. He is, admittedly, qualitatively separated from the ignorant, brutish sansculotte who irrationally follows those infantile impulses. He takes account of the logical consequences of his actions and inactions, according to a certain degree of universalized formal-scientific knowledge of social practice and physical lawfulness. He is of the same quality of Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason, in the "Dialectic of Practical Reason." He has negated those impulses which are prohibited to him because of his own or society's judgment of the intolerable consequences of actions governed by such impulses. Yet his essential motivation has not changed. His motivation is a rationalist modification superimposed upon his infantile-egoistical sensuality, his greediness, his bestial manner of lusting, and so forth.

His inner nature must be transformed. His sense of personal identity must be relocated from the infantile, here-and-now reference point defined by a sensually motivated simple consciousness, must be relocated in the quality of consciousness associated with knowledge of the higher hypothesis. In psychological terms, his sense of personal, acting identity in the universe must be relocated in those higher aspects of what is termed his "preconscious" thinking processes, the aspects we have identified with conscious knowledge of the higher hypothesis, with the level of knowledge required to comprehend the principal subject of the Timaeus.

This does not produce a monastic withdrawal from the world. It is a view entirely hostile to mysticism and mystification. The transformed person is very much in the world of practice. The transformation involves the different manner in which he defines his individual identity, the way his sense of identity determines his judgment and motivations for social

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practice. He now views himself as a particular intelligence, partaking of the divine quality of that universal reason reflected through perfecting knowledge of the higher hypothesis. He acts as an individual for a universal purpose according to that divine knowledge.

In Riemannian physics terminology, the purpose is that of individually mediating the negentropic development of the human species' condition, of willful command over the lawful ordering of the universe.

The quality of the characteristic acts of the transformed individual is exemplified by the case of a fundamental scientific discovery. This discovery advances the quality of knowledge possessed by the human species, and, if assimilated for practice, advances the human condition generally in such a manner as to contribute to the possibility of new qualitative advances in knowledge and practice. So, science, realized in that way through generalized social practice, is science at the level of the higher hypothesis, is a self-developing positive knowledge, which mediates its development as knowledge through transformations which negentropically advance human practice.

Karl Marx summarily poses the crucial problems of modern knowledge, pointing in precisely this direction, in his Theses on Feuerbach, and in the "Feuerbach" section of The German Ideology. The "dirty-judaical" quality of the object of contemplation must be superseded by that view which recognizes the ephemeral quality of the particularity, and which locates actual human knowledge in a self-advancing body of revolutionary social practice.

The inadequacy of the isolable fundamental scientiflc discovery is that such discoveries may be effected (and usually are) by persons whose sense of identity and outlook is not otherwise more advanced than that condition outlined by Kant in the "Dialectic of Practical Reason." There is a disagreement between their immortal actions in scientific discovery (laying a higher foundation in the universality of human knowledge for laying yet higher foundations yet to be added), and their personal world-outlook as individuals. There is a qualitative disagreement between that aspect of them which produces fundamental discoveries (immortal acts) and those aspects of their personal lives and conduct which are governed by vestigially infantile, egoistical motivations.

The transformation occurs, for example, if the scientist ceases to view his identity as that of an ordinary sort of greedy person who also makes discoveries, if he, instead, accepts the reality that he is an individuation of the divine intelligence, whose acts

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are universal acts, are the conscious mediation of the negentropy of human existence.

The society whose morality must be transformed desires scientific knowledge merely as power in behalf of its egotistical desires. The transformed personality pursues the same power over the lawful ordering of the universe because this realization of the divine is the necessary activity of the human species and its individual member. The transformed person does not cease to eat, to make love, to utilize material prerequisites of work, leisure, and living, to feed his children, to work to gain the means for these things. The transformed man does these things under the governance of a relocation of his sense of personal identity in that aspect of his consciousness which is occupied with perfecting knowledge for practice of the higher hypothesis.

A second principle issue of Christian combat against pseudo-Christian cultism pins down the point being argued here. This point is the significance of the consubstantiality of the Trinity. The Christian view defines God, the Holy Spirit, and Christ according to the principles of the Timaeus: the universal necessary being, the universal lawfulness expressed by the perfected higher hypothesis, and perfected man. This is the coherent oneness of the universal, self of subsisting ontological reality as a oneness, the lawful ordering this embodies in itself, and the individual intelligence, embodied with the knowledge of the higher hypothesis, the ephemeral particular existence, whose immortality lies in its efficient mediation of the self-development of the universe according to the lawful principles of the perfected higher hypothesis. Christianity essentially prescribes the necessity of ordering human affairs according to the acceptance of the necessity for perfection (atonement) in this universal ordering.

Once the deification of the Necessary Being is grasped, there are no mysteries in Christianity as such. The problem is that persons on the two lower levels of existence are incapable of comprehending these matters, and they are therefore mystified, not because the reality is mystical, but because of the mystification flowing from their relative bestialization.

The cult emerges whenever mystification is substituted for the scientific Neoplatonism we have outlined here. The oligarchist priesthood exploits the mystification of the persons on lower orders of development as their potential credulousness for what is actually mysticism.

In the case of the Christian Trinity, the cult-maker substitutes Osiris, Isis, and Horus, by redefining the Trinity as God, the Virgin Mary, and Mary and God's son. This substitution, which the

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evangelically trained Ludwig Feuerbach introduced into the middle chapters of his Essence of Christianity, is combined with the cosmography of the monophysite doctrine and that latter's implicit derivatives. The result is either weird monophysite forms of mysticism as such, or a dualistic cosmogony, modeled on the Greek and Roman pantheons. In the dualistic universe, capricious deities and mystical principles intervene, deus ex machina, to reorder the events in the world.

A particular, hideous form of such cultist mystification is given by the case of Manicheanism. Here, starting from an Aristotelian misconception of reality, the mystic exploits the problem Leibniz noted in the cosmogony of Isaac Newton. In Newton's universe, someone must, deus ex machina, periodically wind up the run-down contrivance again, and yet once again. The Manichean solves this problem by introducing the necessity of evil--to keep the world moving. This was the doctrine of Arnold Toynbee, and is the doctrine the Rothschilds' London Economist

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employs to argue in effect for the coming time of Satan's turn at a period of rule.

The purposes of motivating the cult-syncretizers are quite earthly. The cult-makers are agencies of the oligarchical social classes.

The oligarchical faction, the "Persian model" faction for which Aristotle worked against Plato, and later against Alexander the Great, is based on the goal of subjugating the world to what might be described approximately as a feudalist order. Its notion of political economy is essentially physiocratic, in the sense of the British and French Physiocrats, apologists for the parasitical landed aristocracy during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. In this aspect, the parasitical land-owning-oriented aristocracy is the emphasized social element of oligarchism. The complementary element is the financial aristocracy, mercantilist rentier finance, which is associated with a tax-farming orientation. It augments its appropriation of social wealth at the expense of the relatively stagnant mode of production on which the financier

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parasite feeds. The rentier aristocrat of finance is "physiocratic" in his doctrine--whenever he troubles himself to make himself conscious in that way of his swinish practices.

The priesthood--or the modern controlling centers of the British-dominated, British-centered intelligence networks--is the executive agency for the oligarchical classes and class interest.

As a minority within society, the oligarchical class--the three identified components--is obliged to find ways in which to accomplish two things. It must propagate ideologies which prompt masses of people to submit themselves to bestialized forms of "zero-growth" existence. It must develop mass battering rams for deployment against the city-builders' factions.

The two objectives are served by the same cult-making means. Therefore, we may concentrate on the second feature, the deployment of battering rams against city-builder forces. We discover the evil reality of what Christianity was combating in opposing gnosticism, Arianism, Manicheanism, Donatism, and so forth.

The essential requirement of an oligarchist's cult is a social force which is opposed to technological change, opposed to scientific and technological progress as a generalized social policy. These susceptibilities are found most readily in three strata of the population of society: primitive and rural populations, slum elements, and adolescent youth. The first are incited to "defend our traditional ways." The second are easily recruited to various forms of immorality. The last is susceptible to the psychological conditioning modeled on the Orphic-Dionysian cults. In all three cases, the psychological principles of cult manufacture and indoctrination are based on the relative bestialization of the world-outlook of the recruits. In the case of adolescent youth, the indoctrination over the ages has combined forms of music and dancing like modern rock styles, eroticism moving through sodomy into human and or animal sacrifices as sexual rituals, and the introduction of psychedelic substances. The youth are brainwashed into becoming participants in terrorist-death cultism by playing upon the infantile aspect of the conflict between the infantile impulses and demands of adult maturity; this conflict is expressed in a special form of susceptibility to cultism among adolescents.

The various pseudo-Christian cults, or the kinds of syncretic cults fostered since the early nineteenth century around Oxford University (and more recently, Tavistock) as a center, can be psychologically interpreted as reaction formations prepared in advance for introduction to a population conditioned

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into a state of psychosis. In terms of Dante's Commedia as a point of reference, the cults are based on exploiting the susceptibility of the cultist to be drawn into the pit of the Inferno, through the equivalent of group masturbational rites--and not excluding such rites as such. The biological individuality, and the infantile-egoistical evaluation of one's own sensual appetites and impulses, is excited through rituals of alternating gratification and denial. The soul, as Christianity defines it, is destroyed. (The victim of this degradation is now qualified to become an Anglican priest.)

Contemporary "environmentalist" organizations are exemplary of such paganist cultism. This applies not only to the characteristic features of the environmentalist organizations, and to the Dionysiac "rock culture" which has been crucial to developing Dionysian cults (environmentalists, terrorists, and so on). The environmentalist and terrorist cults of today have been created through British intelligence and the Zionist subordinate arm of British intelligence. The center is the British faction of the Order of Malta, including that inner circle of Isis cultists known as the "Order of the Golden Dawn," the order which created Adolf Hitler.

Hitler and Mussolini's fascist movements are both strictly cults, created by exactly these forces and based on the basic sociology and psychological principles used in creating Dionysiac cults over the centuries. The hand behind both Hitler and Mussolini was the old British-monarchy-centered "black" aristocracy of Europe and the Middle East. The British Order of Malta, the British Isis-cultist form of international Freemasonry, the Anglican faction among Jesuits (for example, Major-General Professor Karl Haushofer), and the Zionist subcult of British Freemasonry, created Adolf Hitler and brought him to power. True, having created the Nazi "Frankenstein's monster,” the British, who had intended that Hitler's forces would plunge only eastward, to conquer the "Eurasian heartland," found the monster they had created largely out of their control. Nonetheless, it was they who created the monster and set it afoot.

The political content of pseudo-Christian and other cultism has been that of an instrument deployed by the oligarchical faction to the continuing purpose of bringing the world under a hideous sort of feudalist utopia, of an end to scientific and technological progress, and a perpetuation of world rule by a feudalist oligarchical elite, the goals stated by Otto yon Hapsburg and his allies today.

The Judaism of Philo of Alexandria, and the Islam of the Prophet Muhammad, have the same categorical significance as Christianity, in their opposition to the various pseudo-Judaic and pseudo-Islamic cults. This

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is implicitly indicated in our outline of summary features of the case for Christianity. This similarity is a featured element of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's development of his proposal of an ecumencial policy for relations among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Cusa's analysis is also the basis for the extended ecumenical policies represented in the Vatican's "Ostpolitik."

Historiographical Lessons

The vulgarized version of Karl Marx's doctrine of history as a succession of "class struggles" is premised on the variously stated or implicitly required assumption that members of social classes secrete specific qualities of ideas as an epiphenomenon of the objective conditions and social relations characteristic of that class. In the twentieth-century U.S. socialist movement, this vulgar doctrine was expressed by Daniel DeLeon's argument that a socialist outlook springs from "the horny hand of labor."

We would not wish to imply that Soviet thought is to be equated generally with such vulgarity. Rather, by focusing on the extreme, vulgar version of the "class-struggle theory of history" we use this worst-case version as a point of reference for marking out the range of views of historiography which lie between the vulgar view cited and the view which we are obliged to entertain in light of the Plato case.

The first level of general correction of the "vulgar-Marxist" version of historiography was developed by Karl Marx in early sources including The Communist Manifesto. It is not the condition of labor, individually, which determines "socialist potentialities" of outlook. It is only as the atomized working class is developed as an independent political force, and develops a consciousness of its fundamental interests as a whole, independent political force, that it becomes what Marx defines as a "political class-for-itself."

So far, Marx's argument stands up against the empirical realities of subsequent history and repeated concrete experience with the labor movement generally. The remaining question to be resolved is that posed by Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach: Who will educate the educator? Granted, the creation of an organization based, in sociological emphasis, on working people does correlate with the potentialities of outlook associated with the "political class-for-itself." How are these mere potentialities to be realized as actualities?

The fact is that working people in particular may, or may not, assimilate and reflect ideas, outlooks, which correspond to the actual self-interest of working people as a whole.

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Their actual interests are high rates of capital formation, both in respect of expanding the scale of the most advanced productive technologies and in the rate of advancement of technology. Their interest is also for improvement in education, in material conditions of life, and other matters of "consumption," but meeting those interests depends upon the realization of high rates of capital formation.

In practice, trade unions and other bodies frequently appropriate and are governed by policies directly opposite to the most fundamental interests of working people as a social class taken in its entirety. Although those unifying tendencies which correlate with the potential emergence of independent political "class-for-itself" social formations do tend to correlate with receptivity toward ideas and outlooks in agreement with the interests of working people as a social class, there is in no way any automatic, "spontaneous" connection between valid conceptions and policies and the condition of being a worker or a member of an organization of working people.

How is the educator to be educated? V.I. Lenin accurately grasped the essentials of the point in his What Is To Be Done? It is a question of the existence of a political elite, of appropriate qualifications, dedication, and so forth, to catalyze appropriate trends in class political activities, organization, and ideas. The role of the modern industrial working class as a potential political class-for-itself is a potentiality, which cannot be realized without an "outside" agency, an elite, dedicated to and qualified for realizing such potentialities.

The same point is demonstrated by the history of the industrial capitalists as a class. In fact, no class in history has generated a self-interested policy as a "spontaneous" epiphenomenon of its mere existence. Rather, the actual "objective" self-interests of such a class represent merely a potential consciousness of self-interests. Under proper circumstances, practice will tend to corroborate widely circulated ideas which do converge on the actually underlying self-interests of that class.

In summary, then, beginning with our negation of the vulgar "class-struggle history" doctrine, and proceeding in the same way through both the cited and other available illustrative cases, we note that the notion of the significance of social classes in history is not entirely wrong; it is wrong only in the sense that it is an inadequate conception, which is wrong only when it is made the axiomatic basis for historiography.

Going directly to the point we introduced at the outset: Plato's writings show us that there has been virtually no progress--and much retrogression--in

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respect to the most fundamental features of Platonic science; but there has been much development from the archaic level of particularized aspects of Attic Greek knowledge and practice. To restate the point: with some distinguishable exceptions, there has been no significant advancement in general knowledge of the higher hypothesis; there have been successive, qualitative advancements in knowledge on the lower orders of hypothesis.

This is the general, empirical fact of the past twenty-three centuries of human history. Any history which does not begin with that empirical fact, which does not adequately comprehend that crucial fact and its implications, is axiomatically an incompetent historiography.

First, we must settle accounts with the lack of insignificant progress in respect to the notion of the higher hypothesis. Is the lack of advancement on this matter a reflection of some necessary principle? Is that principle connected to the presumption that Plato and the Neoplatonists might have approximated a perfected

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notion of the higher hypothesis, such that very little further progress were available? Or is the lack of development of the higher hypothesis's notion over the ages a result of some defect in the progress of mankind during that period?

It might appear that the Platonic-Neoplatonic notion of the higher hypothesis is approximately perfected in one respect: in both its definition, and the implications of the existence and function of such an empirical actuality. Yet, if we examine the cognitive content of thought associated with the higher hypothesis, with self-consciousness of the higher hypothesis, the answer is entirely different.

The writer's own fundamental breakthrough in theoretical economics proves the second observation. That breakthrough enables us to explore, with increasing refinement, the connection between the ordering principles of higher hypothesis and differing rates of potential development of the negentropy of society's willful power over the lawful ordering of nature. From that vantage point, the possible and

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required unlimited advancement in knowledge pertaining to the content of the higher hypothesis is analogous to the case for what we ordinarily regard as scientific thought.

We understand this more richly if we compare the case of the writer's breakthrough in theoretical economics with the correlated notions of Riemann and Cantor. The writer's breakthrough in economics is of the same order of conceptual nature as the Riemann and Cantor discoveries, and therefore all three were feasible discoveries under the conditions of general social development which produced Riemann's breakthrough. It was not inadequate technological development which prevented earlier discovery of what this writer discovered for economics, or which has prevented several generations of scientists to date from reaching an adequate comprehension of Riemannian physics.

Extending this backward in the history of scientific knowledge, through Leibniz, Descartes, Kepler, Gilbert, Cusa, Roger Bacon, ibn-Sina, Archimedes, to Plato, we are able to account adequately for the fact that the development of knowledge of the higher hypothesis which could have occurred at varying degrees of technological progress was blocked by social process considerations external to the connection among advancements in the higher and lower orders of hypothesis and their respective and mutual connections to existing conditions of technological progress.

Examining this same issue more closely, we ought to be able to distinguish the kinds of advancement in the content of the higher hypothesis, as knowledge, which should have occurred under suitable conditions at each point of further advancement in the technology of social practice. This latter inquiry shows us that the implicit (potential) knowledge of the higher hypothesis has been unconsciously advanced through the advancement of ordinary scientific knowledge, through advancement in the quality of technology.

However, it is not a matter of indifference to progress whether the advancement is present as an unconscious potentiality or is made conscious. The making conscious of the higher hypothesis with respect to an existing body of ordinary scientific knowledge has the effect of accelerating the power of guessing, and thus of accelerating the power of mankind at any level of technological progress, variously to create and to assimilate new advancements.

Most readers are familiar, to one degree or another, with the fatalistic notion of progress associated with G.W.F. Hegel. In this misguided historiography it was necessary, to save the appearances of the doctrine, to argue that the succession of the principal

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phases of history in the main line of civilization represented successive advancements over their predecessors. In this way, Hegel and others have asserted "slave society" to be a necessary phase in the development of civilization. Similarly, a positive value has been attributed to Rome.

It is such perversions which must be extirpated from every attempt to order history according to a causal principle of progress. The fatalistic notion of the single, self-elaborating idea in Hegel and the kindred "materialist," "class-struggle" version are more or less equally defective on principle in this connection. The case of Rome illuminates the nature of the proof.

Except for its militia system, and possibly also the baked-brick construction business and its derivatives, there is not a single advancement in knowledge for practice which can be attributed to ancient Roman republican or imperial origins. The argument that the Romans developed the principles of law is the most hideous of frauds, with no competent evidentiary basis--except for those disoriented persons who admire so immoral a body of law as the Roman.

The fact is that the history of civilization has been one of alternating advancements and retrogressions. The cause for this pattern is the shift in power of two, contending elites, that of the city-builders and that of the oligarchists. The overall character of society tends to be determined by which of those elites is relatively hegemonic, but progress has persisted often despite the hegemony of the oligarchists.

The oligarchist apologists, especially those in the Manichean tradition, refer to this evidence to argue that the world is governed by unending contention between the forces of good and evil. The Manichean view is best understood by comparing it to the contention between the alternating preference for order (Apollonian phase) and bestialized chaos (Dionysian phase) in the internal development of the oligarchical order itself.

There is not a "force of evil" inherent in the world. There is rather man's failure to rise out of infantile bestialization. Mankind creates its own evil by clinging to its mother's skirts, by refusing to grow beyond the infantile state of bestial preoccupation with infantile-egoistical sensuality.

It is an interesting and fruitful philological-historical fact that the Christian "Satan" is no one but the Middle Eastern form of the Phrygian "Dionysus." The "Satan" of Christianity is alternately the Orphic, Dionysiac cults of Greek-Hellenic culture and the Osiris-Horus cults of Ptolemaic Egypt. The Christian "Satan," or"Whore of Babylon,"is the high priestess of Isis who is currently the ranking official of the

32L

British Ashmolean Freemasonry and British Most Venerable Military and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, who is also the person of veneration for the Isis-Urania Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The personality who has the misfortune to enjoy such titles is the British monarch.

The Christian "Satan" is a man-created agent of the cause of the bestiality represented by adult persons who refuse to loose their childish grip on their mother's skirts,

The Roman Empire was the embodiment of such evil, and was so correctly understood by the apostolic and patristic Christian leaders. The City of God of St. Augustine is a useful introduction to such lines of inquiry.

The oligarchical rule has had several interconnected problems over the ages. Although the oligarchical ideal is zero growth, a halt to all scientific and technological progress, the oligarchs have been forced to make concession to technological progress, most emphatically in the domain of military technology, and in the need to develop the logistical strength, the general infrastructure, to support that military rule.

Because mankind is human, humanity asserts itself through the pores of opportunity. The greed of the oligarchs promotes trade and production. The need of arms against dangerous foes creates opportunities for technological innovations. The social forces developed by such activities--with recurring emphasis on colonies and "marcher lords"--have turned against their oligarchical masters. Usually, this insurgency against established oligarchs has been categorically unconscious of the principles of the higher hypothesis, except--in European history since Rome--as Neoplatonic Christianity and Neoplatonic Islam have maintained and disseminated such knowledge.

Thus, a certain degree of successive development asserts itself despite even the hegemony of oligarchical rule and policies.

In this process, technological development is associated with an advancement in the quality of human knowledge and existence, and with social forces which identify themselves with the benefits of a policy of continued technological progress.

Thus, that process which can be comprehended only from the standpoint of the higher hypothesis asserts itself through the unconscious action of the creative-mental species-potentialities of human beings. Just as infantilism (evil) finds its institutional forms, so the process of progress finds its institutional forms.

32R

The problem of mankind is not that evil is an inevitably permanent institution and force in the world. The problem is that society is not yet ordered according to the conscious principle of the higher hypothesis. This principle must have a conscious agency, the Platonic-Neoplatonic elites. It is to the extent that such elites exist as an efficient agency, and that such elites contribute a higher rate of progress to the forces otherwise engaged in fostering progress, that we may, at last, eradicate the power of "Satan" from the ordering of the affairs of nations.

It is the defeat of the institutionalized forces of the city-builders by the institutionalized forces of the oligarchical faction which have produced the reverses in the course of civilization. It is the inadequate influence and development of the humanist (Neoplatonic) elites over the forces for progress which account for the principal weaknesses of the forces of humanity against the infantilism, the bestiality, of the oligarchical adversary and his degraded rabbles.

The enemies of humanity win battles chiefly by winning a psychological warfare battle for the minds of the backward sectors of the population and in gaining control--through pornography, "disco" cultism, drug cultism, and so forth--over the minds of adolescent youth of the cities. The ordinary person, otherwise committed to progress, has not yet, himself or herself, broken from the controlling impulse which Dante Alighieri associates with "Purgatory" and the utopian goals of "Earthly Paradise." Since he or she has not resolved the corruption within himself or herself, his or her own attachment to the vestiges of infantile bestiality, he or she tolerates the enemy's manipulation of the infantilism of his or her own children.

The Neoplatonic elites alone recognize and consistently combat the kinds of corruption represented by "disco," drug-cultures, environmentalism, "existentialism," and so forth today. Hence, without the Neoplatonic elite's increased influence, humanity may well lose in a manner analogous to the rise of Ptolemaic Egypt and the evil that was Rome. This time, the price would be far more hideous.

The progress of scientific knowledge today demands that we solve the ostensibly insoluble problems of physics and so forth by mastering the implications of Riemann's notion of fundamental physical hypothesis. Yet, if we fail to do that, we lose more than the scientific progress this makes feasible. Unless we bring our political and moral life under the rule of the same principles, the same conscious mastery of the notion of the higher hypothesis, our species might not survive this century.

Overwhelming Goodness

"First of all, Papa Smurf didn't create Smurfette. Gargamel did. 

She was sent in as Gargamel's evil spy with the intention of DESTROYING The Smurf Village, but The Overwhelming GOODNESS of The Smurf Way of life transformed her. 

And as for the whole gang-bang scenario, it just couldn't happen. 

Smurfs are asexual. 

They don't even have reproductive organs under those little white pants. 

That's what's so illogical, you know, about being a Smurf : 

What's the point of Living --- if you don't have a dick?"

-- Donnie Darko

Eastman

Why do you have a cell 

in your cabin? 

Eastman :

Built this place with my wife a while 

before our daughter was born. 

It didn't have a cell back then. 

That was just the other 

side of the living room. 

In my job I interviewed 

over 800 men and 25 women 

convicted of awful things. 

Stuff from the darkest part 

of the human soul. 

I was evaluating 

a man by the name of 

Crighton Dallas Wilton. 

(chuckles)

Name like that, sounded like 

he should own an oil company 

and wear a big hat-- 

Crighton Dallas Wilton. 

Despite doing some 

truly unspeakable acts, 

he was up for parole. 

And he was one of the most damn 

likable people I had ever met. 

He said all the right things, 

he went to therapy —

He wrote letters to the prison board

 to start a program to grow flowers 

for the waiting rooms 

in state hospitals, rest homes. 

And I saw right through him. 

Saw that he was a 

true psychopath, that 

he knew how to play people, 

exactly how to play people. 

I was interviewing him 

next to the cafeteria. 

The place smelled of industrial pizza. 

They were polishing the floor. 

I had to shout my questions half the time. 

And there was this moment. 

Can't even remember the exchange --

But right then I knew 

that Crighton knew that 

I knew exactly 

What He Was —

Everything he had said, 

done to hide away 

what he was from everyone, 

from himself, just slipped away, 

and... and that model prisoner 

of 10 years stood up, smiled, and 

just cracked me across the face. 

His fist felt like a rock. 

Then he was on top of me 

and the floor polisher next door 

was thudding out every sound. 

And I-- and 

I saw his face, his-- 

his eyes, his evil. 

Mask had slipped. 

And he was gonna 

kill me right then and there 

because he knew 

I would make sure 

he would never 

get out again. 

Arm bar counter for being choked 

from a pinned position. 

Aikido. I wasn't taking it for self-defence, 

but it saved my life. 

And I got to make sure 

he never got out again. 

Well, got to try. 

He got out. 

Talked to the right people 

who got him the right things 

and he broke out, 

but it wasn't to escape. 

Crighton Dallas Wilton 

went to my home 

and killed my wife, 

my daughter, and my son. 

He walked down the street to 

the police station around the corner 

covered in their blood. 

He surrendered. 

Said the only reason 

he broke out was 

to destroy my life. 

A year passed... 

and he was still working those plots. 

They just let him work those 

plots by the roads out by 85, 

grow chrysanthemums, 

forget-me-nots. 

I built that cell with the full intention 

of bringing Crighton Dallas Wilton here, 

putting him behind those bars 

and watching him 

starve to death. 

Morgan :

And did you? 

Eastman :

.....I have come to believe 

that all life is precious. 

Morgan :

Even for a man like that? 

Who did that to you? 

To your family? 

Eastman :

.....I have come to believe 

that all Life is precious. 

That's why we're having 

oatmeal burgers. 

Morgan :

You're good at it. 

Redirecting. 

We need more gear. 

Tarp, crowbar. 

I'm thinking we could try for 

the islands off the coast. 

I think people could have gone there. 

Hell, at the very least, 

we could see the beach.

Wilde

Wilde Full Movie | Stephen Fry and Jude Law Drama Movies

The story of Oscar Wilde, genius, poet, 

playwright and the First Modern Man.

In his heyday, Oscar Wilde’s wit, flamboyance 

and creative genius were widely renowned 

and he was celebrated as a literary genius. 

But his private life flew increasingly in the face 

of the decidedly anti-homosexual conventions of late Victorian society. 

WILDE focuses on Oscar’s fall from grace, 

charting his obsessive love for Lord Alfred Douglas, 

nicknamed “Bosie”, which consumed 

and ultimately destroyed him. 

Starring Stephen Fry, Jude Law, 

Vanessa Redgrave, Jennifer Ehle, 

Tom Wilkinson, Orlando Bloom 

and Michael Sheen. 

You Demanded without Grace and Received without Thanks.

 

Oscar Wilde's De Profundis read by Neil Bartlett

Writer and performer Neil Bartlett reads Wilde’s De Profundis – a 50,000-word letter to his lover and betrayer ‘Bosie’ – in its entirety, live from the old chapel in Reading Prison, 4 September 2016. 

Find out more https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/i...

Performed by Neil Bartlett:  

http://www.neil-bartlett.com

Filmed and broadcast live by Kinura : http://www.kinura.com/

Thumbnail image: Jean-Michel Pancin's 

In Memoriam (2016). 

Materials: Concrete plinth, steel frame, 

Original wooden door to Oscar Wilde’s cell. 

Courtesy the artist, Galerie Analix Forever and Galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham. 

Installed in the old chapel as part of 

Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison. Photograph: Will Eckersley 2 September 2016.

"I blame myself again for having allowed you to bring me to utter and discreditable financial ruin. 

I remember one morning in the early October of ’92 sitting in the yellowing woods at Bracknell with Your Mother. At that time I knew very little of your real nature. 

I had stayed from a Saturday to Monday with you at Oxford. You had stayed with me at Cromer for ten days and played golf. The conversation turned on You, and Your Mother began to Speak to Me about Your Character. 

She told me of your two chief faults, Your Vanity, and your being, as she termed it, “all wrong about money.” 

I have a distinct recollection of how I laughed. 

I had no idea that the first would bring me to prison, and the second to bankruptcy. 

I thought Vanity a sort of graceful flower for a Young Man to wear; as for extravagance — for I thought she meant no more than extravagance — the virtues of prudence and thrift were not in my own nature or my own race. But before our friendship was one month older I began to see what your mother really meant. Your insistence on a life of reckless profusion : your incessant demands for money : your claim that all your pleasure should be paid for by me whether I was with you or not : brought me after some time into serious monetary difficulties, and what made the extravagances to me at any rate so monotonously uninteresting, as your persistent grasp on my life grew stronger and stronger, was that the money was really spent on little more than the pleasures of eating, drinking, and the like. 

Now and then it is a joy to have one’s table red with wine and roses, but you outstripped all taste and temperance. You demanded without Grace and received without Thanks. 

You grew to think that you had a sort of Right to Live at My Expense and in a profuse luxury to which you had never been accustomed, and which for that reason made Your Appetites all the more keen, and at the end if you lost money gambling in some Algiers Casino you simply telegraphed next morning to me in London to lodge the amount of your losses to your account at your bank, and gave the matter no further thought of any kind."

Basking in Reflected Glory

“Oh!” exclaimed The Little Prince.

And he was suddenly 

overcome with sadness. 

His Flower had told Him 

that She was The ONLY 

one of her kind in 

The Universe. 

And here were 5000 of them, all alike, in one single garden!

“She would be rather resentful,” 

He thought to himself, 

"if she could see THIS… 

She would cough and cough 

and pretend She was dying 

so as to avoid being 

thought ridiculous. 

And I would have to 

pretend to nurse her, 

for otherwise 

she would really 

LET herself die... 

in order to humiliate me.”

I Don't Think He Did It.

Dave Chappelle Slams Michael Jackson Accusers

My Life, as Long as You Were by My Side, was Entirely Sterile and Uncreative

You admired My Work 

when it was finished...

H. M. PRISON, READING

Dear Bosie, 

After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain.

Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness and contempt should for ever take that place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me : and you yourself will, I think, feel in your heart that to write to me as I lie in the loneliness of prison-life is better than to publish my letters without my permission or to dedicate poems to me unasked, though the world will know nothing of whatever words of grief or passion, of remorse or indifference you may choose to send as your answer or your appeal.

I have no doubt that in this letter in which I have to write of your life and of mine, of the past and of the future, of sweet things changed to bitterness and of bitter things that may be turned into joy, there will be much that will wound your vanity to the quick. If it prove so, read the letter over and over again till it kills your vanity. If you find in it something of which you feel that you are unjustly accused, remember that one should be thankful that there is any fault of which one can be unjustly accused. If there be in it one single passage that brings tears to your eyes, weep as we weep in prison where the day no less than the night is set apart for tears. It is the only thing that can save you. If you go complaining to your mother, as you did with reference to the scorn of you I displayed in my letter to Robbie, so that she may flatter and soothe you back into self complacency or conceit, you will be completely lost. If you find one false excuse for yourself, you will soon find a hundred, and be just what you were before. 

Do you still say, as you said to Robbie in your answer, that I “attribute unworthy motives” to you? Ah! you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely. A motive is an intellectual aim. 

That you were “very young” when our friendship began? Your defect was not that you knew so little about life, but that you knew so much. The morning dawn of boyhood with its delicate bloom, its clear pure light, its joy of innocence and expectation you had left far behind. 

With very swift and running feet you had passed from Romance to Realism. The gutter and the things that live in it had begun to fascinate you. That was the origin of the trouble in which you sought my aid, and I, so unwisely according to the wisdom of this world, out of pity and kindness gave it to you.

You must read this letter right through, though each word may become to you as the fire or knife of the surgeon that makes the delicate flesh burn or bleed. Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant of the modes of Art in its revolution or the moods of thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the vowelled Greek, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song may yet be full of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You have been such a one too long. Be so no more. Do not be afraid. The supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right. Remember also that whatever is misery to you to read, is still greater misery to me to set down. To you the Unseen Powers have been very good. They have permitted you to see the strange and tragic shapes of Life as one sees shadows in a crystal. The head of Medusa that turns living men to stone, you have been allowed to look at in a mirror merely. You yourself have walked free among the flowers. From me the beautiful world of colour and motion has been taken away.

I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. As I sit here in this dark cell in convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame myself. In the perturbed and fitful nights of anguish, in the long monotonous days of pain, it is myself I blame. I blame myself for allowing an unintellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things, to entirely dominate my life. From the very first there was too wide a gap between us. You had been idle at your school, worse than idle at your university. You did not realise that an artist, and especially such an artist, as I am, one, that is to say, the quality of whose work depends on the intensification of personality, requires for the development of his art the companionship of ideas, and intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace, and solitude. You admired my work when it was finished : you enjoyed the brilliant successes of my first nights, and the brilliant banquets that followed them: you were proud, and quite naturally so, of being the intimate friend of an artist so distinguished: but you could not understand the conditions requisite for the production of artistic work. I am not speaking in phrases of rhetorical exaggeration but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact when I remind you that during the whole time we were together I never wrote one single line. Whether at Torquay, Goring, London, Florence or elsewhere, my life, as long as you were by my side, was entirely sterile and uncreative. And with but few intervals you were, I regret to say, by my side always.

I remember, for instance, in September ’93, to select merely one instance out of many, taking a set of chambers, purely in order to work undisturbed, as I had broken my contract with John Hare for whom I had promised to write a play, and who was pressing me on the subject. During the first week you kept away. We had, not unnaturally indeed, differed on the question of the artistic value of your translation of Salome, so you contented yourself with sending me foolish letters on the subject. In that week I wrote and completed in every detail, as it was ultimately performed, the first act of An Ideal Husband. The second week you returned and my work practically had to be given up. I arrived at James’s Place every morning at 11.30, in order to have the opportunity of thinking and writing without the interruptions inseparable from my own household, quiet and peaceful as that household was. But the attempt was vain. At twelve o’clock you drove up, and stayed smoking cigarettes and chattering till 1.30, when I had to take you out to luncheon at the Café Royal or the Berkeley. Luncheon with its liqueurs lasted usually till 3.30. For an hour you retired to White’s. At tea-time you appeared again, and stayed till it was time to dress for dinner. You dined with me either at the Savoy or at Tite Street. We did not separate as a rule till after midnight, as supper at Willis’s had to wind up the entrancing day. That was my life for those three months, every single day, except during the four days when you went abroad. I then, of course, had to go over to Calais to fetch you back. For one of my nature and temperament it was a position at once grotesque and tragic.

You surely must realise that now? You must see now that your incapacity of being alone : your nature so exigent in its persistent claim on the attention and time of others : your lack of any power of sustained intellectual concentration: the unfortunate accident—for I like to think it was no more—that you had not yet been able to acquire the “Oxford temper” in intellectual matters, never, I mean, been one who could play gracefully with ideas but had arrived at violence of opinion merely— that all these things, combined with the fact that your desires and interests were in Life not in Art, were as destructive to your own progress in culture as they were to my work as an artist? When I compare my friendship with you to my friendship with such still younger men as John Gray and Pierre Louys I feel ashamed. My real life, my higher life was with them and such as they.

Of the appalling results of my friendship with you I don’t speak at present. I am thinking merely of its quality while it lasted. It was intellectually degrading to me. You had the rudiments of an artistic temperament in its germ. But I met you either too late or too soon, I don’t know which. When you were away I was all right. The moment, in the early December of the year to which I have been alluding, I had succeeded in inducing your mother to send you out of England, I collected again the torn and ravelled web of my imagination, got my life back into my own hands, and not merely finished the three remaining acts of An Ideal Husband, but conceived and had almost completed two other plays of a completely different type, the Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane, when suddenly, unbidden, unwelcome, and under circumstances fatal to my happiness you returned. The two works left then imperfect I was unable to take up again. The mood that created them I could never recover. You now, having yourself published a volume of verse, will be able to recognize the truth of everything I have said here. Whether you can or not it remains as a hideous truth in the very heart of our friendship. While you were with me you were the absolute ruin of my Art, and in allowing you to stand persistently between Art and myself I give to myself shame and blame in the fullest degree. You couldn’t know, you couldn’t understand, you couldn’t appreciate. I had no right to expect it of you at all. Your interests were merely in your meals and moods. Your desires were simply for amusements, for ordinary or less ordinary pleasures. They were what your temperament needed, or thought it needed for the moment. I should have forbidden you my house and my chambers except when I specially invited you. I blame myself without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.”

Excerpt From

De Profundis

Oscar Wilde