Introduction to Geometry & the Interior Life
This is the introduction to my book Geometry & the Interior Life: On G.W. Leibniz’s Analysis of Situation, which is now available for purchase.
I: Answering An Objection
Before we begin the book, we must answer a common objection, to even reading or writing a book like this one. The common objection is quite simply, the selfish objection -- who cares, how does it apply, why is it useful, what do I get out of it, how is this valuable to me, why is it worth my time? This is a fair objection in our era, that we must take seriously.
Each of us has a certain quality of life, mainly represented by our wealth, our relationships, our health, and our spirit. At the personal level, these aspects tell us where we are in life, both our physical location in the world, and also our emotion, mental, and spiritual state.
However, these personal aspects are greatly influenced by much larger social aspects, that remain mostly outside of our direct control, in the economy, governance, science, and religion. At the social level, the relationship between economy, governance, science, and religion tells us where our society is, as a whole.
At the personal level, many individuals have figured out how these aspects (wealth, relationships, health, and Spirit) can be harmonized with one another. And in doing so, they discover a community of other people who have also figured out how these things fit together, in their own way.
However, at the social level, there is currently no generally accepted system to understand how economy, governance, science, and religion all fit together. And there is no system for understanding how the personal level is to harmonize with the social level. Wealth, relationships, health, and spirit are all necessary aspects of the individual. And economy, governance, science, and religion are necessary aspects of society.
And if the personal aspects are not harmonized with each other, and with the social level, and the social aspects are not harmonized with each other, and with the personal level, then the individual human being and the society he lives in, will both have trouble surviving.
There must be a system in which these aspects fit together at the personal and social level. Such a system would allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to harmonize the aspects at the personal level, in an effective and timely manner, so that they can make a very good living, have very good relationships, have very good health or find very good medical treatment, and have a proper relationship with God. Such an integration of knowledge is in no way beyond the current capabilities of human beings, it is only a question of whether there is any willingness to engage in such a project.
For the moment, let us focus in on one of these aspects: science. The reason to focus on science is because it is the predominant mode of understanding. It determines how we think about what is true. And thus, it is the primary thing that informs how we think about mental and physical health. And it is the primary thing that tells us “what we are doing together.” It has predominant influence on the other social forms -- economy, governance, and religion.
Material science gives us objectively true knowledge about the world. It gives us knowledge such as the standard model of particle physics, the periodic table of elements, the theory of biological evolution. We know these things that are true, at least in part, because they have led to practical applications, such as machinery, computers, satellites, pharmaceuticals, plastics, materials. Since science has led to such vast improvements in our capability, we know that science is true. “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:16) And this applies also to our health, in large part. We think of health in terms of physiology, chemistry, biology, neuroscience. And since doctors and biomedical professionals have various ways of testing and repairing disfunction in health, the science is true because and insofar as, it works.
However, once we jump from the material sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology, up to the social sciences, such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, history, suddenly there is very little consensus agreement about objective truth across these social sciences, or in the general populace. There is very little in the way of universally practical application. There are some general agreements on methods within each field, but the fields themselves are highly specialized. The findings in one field rarely affect findings in another field, and rarely do they affect the public in a positive way. More often the findings in these fields are used to manipulate or coerce people for purposes of “nudging” them (nobel prize winner R. Thaler) towards desired behaviors. And the distortions get much worse when such social science “discoveries” are used in popular and non-academic literature, such as pop psychology and marketing.
And so while the material sciences can potentially improve our mental and physical health, or our material comfort, the social sciences can very quickly erase all the gains in social coherence won from the material sciences, and can even erase the technological gains from the material sciences themselves.
The predominant theme in social science (and thus in social media) is a post-modernism or relativism which says that the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth. This logic of absurdity erases any social coherence that was originally gained through the scientific method, and the ideals of the Enlightenment.
And so the practical result of all this is that nothing about social reality is true, in an objective sense. The marketplace is not true, our relationships are not true, our spirit is not true. But because of this rot in the social sciences, the material sciences actually are shown to have a flaw; the only things that are true, in absolute sense, are the scientific concepts that we can never experience as a normal person; things like atoms, quarks, neurons, chemicals, million year timespans of evolution, galaxies, supernovae. We cannot experience these things directly as a normal person because they require instruments such as microscope, telescope, sophisticated computer, complex mathematical model, and sophisticated credential of a scientist. And so if you deal with these things day to day, as a scientist, then you can experience them. But for the normal person, these things are not “real” in the same way. The normal person cannot test whether they exist, cannot experience them first-hand.
So despite the fact that these things are true, most people (who like medical care, for instance) must accept their existence on faith. But this blatantly contradicts the purported ethos of science itself, as it is presented by its loudest advocates like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and such. Such advocates largely oppose post-modernism, yet fail to see how material science actually perpetuates it, by denying common sense reality (Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences (1929)). That basic contradiction alone is enough for a great many people to dismiss science as mostly fake.
In the scientific worldview, nothing that we can observe with our own eyes, or with the senses, is real. Only the component parts that make up reality, or the aggregates of things as statistical data, are real. Only the very large aggregates or the very small parts can be real, but not the thing itself; the most obvious, self-evident, common-sense thing before our senses. The things that we personally experience are not real because they are social realities, which do not have any accepted scientific validity (I believe this argument is from John Senior or Dennis Quinn).
This notion that the social reality has no truth, has several important consequences. 1.) the only truth is that there is no truth, 2.) because the only truth is that there is no truth, we create our own reality, or “socially construct” reality, and create our own social justice and morals by the will to power, 3.) because we cannot actually create truth, justice, and morals (it would require creating common sense itself) through the will to power, we must fall back on “trusting the experts” who have the specialized knowledge and know the real science, because normal people are ignorant, 4.) because only specialized experts know the truth and cannot explain it in plain language to the public, the belief arises that we must be living in a computer simulation, or inside of a video game, or in the Matrix (This case is made by esteemed scientific experts and non-experts, such as Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis, Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality, Hilary Putnam’s Brain in a Vat, Renes Descartes evil demon, and strong social constructionists, among others). 5.) because we believe we are trapped in the matrix, the beliefs in conspiracy theories arise to explain the hidden, secretive scientific knowledge that keeps people trapped there, and the plot against normal, common sense people. 6.) because vague and confused conspiracy theories circulate like a game of telephone, there are vague and confused sorts of populist protests, such as Occupy Wall St., QAnon, Wokeism, Bernie bros, MAGA/Trump rallies, Wall St. Bets, Yellow Vests, Brexit, woke capital, and so on and and so on.
And is it not ironical in how the complaints of the populists reminds us of the complaints of the French revolutionaries against the Catholic Church in the 18th century? It is ironical because the situation is precisely reversed. The French revolutionaries wanted to bring about the universal enlightenment of mankind, through human reason. They were against the irrational beliefs and superstitions of the Catholic hierarchy. The revolutionaries won that battle and have taken power over the last 200+ years. Yet the reason, science, humanism, and progress that they espoused has become so specialized, and fragmented into so many fields, that no one knows what Enlightenment ideals even mean anymore. There is no way to communicate “reason” and “science” to the common man. Even though the common man has imbibed these ideals through osmosis, he has no idea what they mean or what they are for.
But whereas the French revolutionaries purported to defend and improve the lives of the common man, through reason and science, the experts of our day are comfortable in the armchair of specialization. And so the experts of our day, who are products of the Enlightenment (or at least of their progressive offspring), are ironically in the same position as the priests of old, as gatekeepers of an increasingly irrational, fragmented belief system. Two centuries ago they were throwing off the tyranny of faith and irrational beliefs, and now they defend a confused fragmented faith in specialized science, and say to the normal people, “just trust us, please.”
The principle of science in its beginnings, such as in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, was that anyone could verify for themselves the truth of things. The conception of science was as a universal science, an all-encompassing, comprehensive worldview, in no way opposed to God, religion, and common sense, but rather confirming their evidence. The original conception of science was the harmony of reason and faith, not their opposition. Was not the goal of science to discover the truth, in opposition to irrational abstractions and dogmatic assertions disconnected from real experience?
And so we may make the case that atoms and quarks are more real than Jesus and the Virgin Mary, that they offer us a greater cure for the problems of our real experience. But if we do believe so, then we are forced to say that the increasingly dire problems of humanity, are a result not of any problem with our own knowledge of science, but are a result of other people’s persistent unwillingness to learn science. In other words, we refuse to take responsibility for the problem of specialized knowledge. That is, in fact, the entire raison d'etre for specialized knowledge in science; the hardest problems (the actual problems) are always someone else’s problem.
Therefore, let us suppose that we do want to enlighten or educate the ignorant man, and to teach him the ways of science. Then we must return to the problem that we started with: who cares, how does it apply, why is it useful, what do I get out of it, how is this valuable to me, why is it worth my precious time?
On the one hand, if science gives a normative answer, then it is not objective, value-neutral, falsifiable science (traditional science), but it is rather “normative science” or corporate science, which specifically advocates a policy.
On the other hand, if science gives a pragmatic answer, that science can help us earn more money, a better standard of living or discover the truth (such as Steven Pinker), then it doesn’t give us any path to common sense, good relationships, good health, a good spirit, and the common good, in other words, a holistic science of man.
The basic problem is that there is no universal science that can harmonize the aspects of personal life with each other and the personal life as whole with the social life, and the aspects of social life into common sense and the common good. Without the true universal science [scientia univeralis], there are only specialized sciences, and fragmentation.
The most pervasive social reflex to this dilemma of specialization and fragmentation, so far, has been woke capital, which is essentially the reification and decentralized dictatorship of confusion. Wokeness is based in post-modernism, affirming the contradiction that the only truth is that there is no truth, and we create truth and morals through the will to power. The fallacy is as old as Thrasymachus. The better way to respond and meet the challenge is through universal science, discovered almost 350 years ago, which is based in the foundations of geometry.
Many scholars do not think that Gottfried Leibniz ever achieved his goal of truly discovering and completing the system of universal science, despite the fact that he openly says in his writings that he did discover the universal science. I have found strong evidence that he did complete the task. My evidence is contained in this book, and there is much contemporary scholarship that supports the finding.
And now we are in a position to answer the question: the reason to study this book and others like it, is to discover the science that harmonizes all of the other sciences. This science is the true foundations of mathematics and natural science, discovered almost 350 years ago, and not fully understood until our own time. This science is what gives meaning and context to the other various sciences, it is what allows for harmony of economy, governance, science, and religion, and for the harmony of personal wealth, relationships, health, and spirit, as each individual maintains his fullest uniqueness. In other words, it allows the harmony of reason and Revelation, the two essential aspects of man. This science cannot be properly regarded as social science, but as sacred science, after Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas who inspired Gottfried Leibniz in its pursuit.