The following is the abstraction of a topic featured in V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman :
“Nothing
can be created out of nothing.” Lucretius
“Everything comes
from everything.” Anaxagoras.
“The absolute
maximum is one and it is all; all things are in it because it is the maximum.
Moreover, it is in all things for this reason that the minimum at once
coincides with it, since there is nothing that can be placed in opposition to
it. By definition the minimum is that which cannot be less than it is; and
since that is also true of the maximum, it is evident that the minimum is
identified with the maximum.” (On Learned
Ignorance).
Very well argued.
In fact, it is impossible not to
admire this comprehensive, truthful, and indeed accomplished observation by
Nicholas of Cusa. There can be no doubt that the point at which no further
information can be added is the maximum and that the concept most completely
divested of meaning or content would have to be the minimum. Applied to the
ultimate synthesis - nothing can be placed in opposition - both coincide. At any rate, de Cusa’s legacy has less to do
with the extent to which his line of reasoning is truthful or accomplished than
with the way in which it points directly to other far-reaching syntheses.
This is not an essay in theology, but
the most irritating form of the tenet that absolute knowledge is essential to
metaphysical perfection is that which asserts that total ignorance must be a
form of imperfection. One thing is certainly beyond conjecture, if imperfection
is nothing less than a measure of the total ignorance contained in a system -
and dark matter, according to some estimates, makes up 73% of the universe[1] - then
knowledge, like entropy, must always increase. Once created, it has a momentum
of its own. It’s self-perpetuating.
A more conventional rendering of this
process is known as the second law of
thermodynamics. As an important feature
of the total energy distribution of a closed system, this law is a measure of
the disorganization of the universe which, due to
That said, none of this is likely to
happen any time soon - and, needless to add, death plays a part. No mere
abstract term, but a synonym for the meaning of irreversibility, the word death
might as well have arisen in the context of what is here referred to as the
Second Law of Thermodynamics, for it dictates that irreversible changes are
indeed irretrievable. The simple truth
is, that death determines and moulds all human apprehension. It is something
that man perceives and knows by limitation; and in relation to Space, Time is
the other limit. Hence, time and death are the two irreversible limits of the organic cosmos, embodied in a
living experience. And the effect of death, though few of us may appreciate the
real significance of the fact, is very simply to return the Self to the great
Unconscious, to a state of perfect thermal equilibrium, one might say – the
only state between chaos and order that is at an absolute
optimum.
To be perfectly frank though, that’s
neither here nor there. Clearly, ‘passing
beyond the necessities of matter’ is
susceptible to various interpretations in the fields of ontology, epistemology,
logic, ethics and moral philosophy. But death, to me, reflects the struggle of pneuma and psyche, Spirit
and Soul, or of light and darkness if you will, for the possession of man’s self-knowing.
Because irreversible processes have a direction in time, a causal system of
perceptible laws and purposes is
redundant with the surcease of linear time, and hence, so is self-knowing. Death, quite
unmistakably, is not the end of Being - whose essence is never touched - but
the highest symbol for the total triumph of Being over Time, presupposing the
idea of a world-order that has acquired perfect mental equilibrium – the
closest a living system could get to perfection.
Of course, it is worth noticing in
this connection that conjectures about the future of man generally reduce his
mental evolution to “some sort of digital computing process,”[2] whereas in
reality it develops, not in conformity with the static and the Euclidean, but
in terms of an intellectual continuity that must necessarily expand until it
has absorbed and abolished its own necessity. Nothing less will give us release.
Total intellectual absorption thus equates the state of the universe with a
relapse into pre-consciousness - with a final something unattainable by
thought. The crucial requirement for which would seem to be not so much death per
se, as a return from anthropic complexity to a state of perfect symmetry.
To an end of all division, all residue of doubt, sometimes referred to as absolute
knowledge, and of which perfection
is seen as the epitome:
Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I did not die.[3]
[1]
It is estimated that dark energy accounts for
about 73.8 per cent of the universe and dark matter 22.2. percent.
[2]
P. Davies, The
Last Three Minutes. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London (1994), p. 111
[3]
Mary Elizabeth Frye, 1932
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