Yngling a philblog

PHILBLOG
Shaping up the –ed/-ing Quadrants (blogging itself is –ing-ing the –e)

Note on –“ing”. The sound connects also (see previous THING blog) to “Yngling”, name of oldest Swedish dynasty, and ‘ng” sound of a letter in the rune alphabet shaped like a small four-sided diamond. http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/House+of+Yngling

A dialectic of two grammars for ‘knowledge’: didactic and Cartesion ‘knowledge’

Cartesianism, as a system of philosophy named after the famous French philosopher Rene Descartes (l. Renatus Cartesius) “Cartes” goes over from the French to English as “chartes”; “de” is the prefix “of”, so “Descartes” as a name associates etymologically with “of the charts”. It (this philosophical system) was sweeping Protestant north Europe from the 1650’s on, especially Sweden, where he came to live and enjoy the court of Queen Christina, who took special interest in it. He had been proceeded as her intellectual favorite by Olin Rudbeck, hyperborean professor from Uppsala who discovered the lymph system of the body (confirming Descartes’ thesis that the heart pumped blood circulating through channels), and unearthed Sweden’s glorious (he thought Atlantis) history. It was over the metaphysical interpretation of the body that the faculties of Uppsala University split. It was the theologians vs the medical men. Rudeck took a crypto-deterministic approach to the body, based on dissections he performed and even constructed an elaborate theatre for. David King (“Finding Atlantis”, p. 43f) says of the split:

“Watching this radical vision of a machine-universe, best understood by using a method of doubt and apparently leading only to cryptic creeds, the Uppsala theology department had good reason to be alarmed. At stake, too, was itsl long-established authority at the university, where it had enjoyed a frankly privileged position. The department had long exerted a great influence over everything form selecting staff to examining materials for publication to teaching the theology classes that were mandatory for all degree candidates…. In many ways the Cartesian philosopher was a real threat to this established order – and the battle over this heretical metaphysi8cs was waged as if it were a life-and-death struggle.”

Three major propositions characterized the Cartesian world. A. Scientific, as opposed to probable knowledge, is grounded on the mentioned method of systematic doubt, removing all possibly false assumptions, to attain certainty. B. From a purely formal standpoint, the universe we perceive has no center, is theoretically unlimited, and C. Has no God, except ‘as a bare possibility’ (Bertrand Russell put the same line of thought) -- a creator existing apart from “his” creation, which is a causally closed on itself, calculable totality in space and time. This was rationalism. It was topped off, by Descartes himself in the 6th meditation by a proof for the existence of God, previously removed by doubt, by turning it into a token of the completeness of reason, itself, which few took seriously. Suppose Descartes’ God existed, as Thomas Jefferson allowed (he called himself a “deist”, aka Cartesian rationalist when it came to explanations of phenomena in the perceived material universe) what would you have? Nothing to help in this life. (But it isn’t supposed to anyway, so cleverly is this “God” belief packaged.)

Decartes chief enduring, incontrovertible contribution to knowledge was the “coordinate system”, where, by assigning a set of 4 digits to each point on any line drawn through any of the quadrants on a four-space plane. Any line can be plotted by arithmetic ratios, thus bridging the gap between mathematics and geometry. This was begun by Pythagoras and Archimedes taking 3-2-4 as the standard units defining the right triangle (and, minus the “4th”, the letter L. cf. The FUTHARK alphabet on Old Uppsala runes, where the double-four (with the right-hand one turned upside-down and attached) makes the letter-sound “D”, 4th in the English alphabet).