Pondering the Cosmic Icon

Continuing our series of posts on Dr Wolfgang Smith's 2019 monumental monograph: Physics & Vertical Causation, the End of Quantum Reality. (Angelico Press, 2019, also available on Amazon Kindle). 
For further reading on this and related material, see the Philos-Sophia Initiative website.

Dr Smith's final chapter is entitled ''Pondering the Cosmic Icon''. He added it after the publication of the first edition of his monograph and it is rich in insights drawn from numerous sources, Eastern and Western.

He begins for example with a line attributed to the Sufi mystic and poet, Mahmoud Shabistari (1288-1340): From the point comes a line, then a circle. Before developing this point, however, he reminds us that Plato (427-347 BC) taught that all ''science'', inclusive of metaphysics, was ultimately a matter of ''seeing''. Now, a man may see with his eyes but he may also see with the ''eye of the intellect''. Seeing with the corporeal eyes has a role to play in the metaphysical realm. Smith introduces an important notion:

...just as visual forms can facilitate the perception of corporeal entities, so too can they catalyze an intellective perception pertaining to the metaphysical realm.

An object of visual perception can enable the intellective perception of a metaphysical truth. The object becomes, therefore, a ''metaphysical icon''. 

Plato understood this and his Academy attributed a major role to the study of geometry, cautioning that no-one ignorant of geometry should enter it. Geometry was one of the seven subjects in the Trivium and Quadrivium which Plato describes in The Republic and which later formed the basis of the Master of Arts degree in medieval Christendom. Incidentally, this is why graduates from Oxford and Cambridge can apply for their MA in the seventh year after matriculation.

Having laid this groundwork, Smith proceeds to consider a simple geometric figure which he prefers to call a ''Euclidian'' figure, meaning that it is constructed using the Euclidean instruments: a straight-edge and a compass. The simplest is a circle.

The first step is to determine the ''first point'' or ''origin'', ie in this example, the centre ''O'' of the circle. It must be noted that neither of the two Euclidian instruments can do this. The geometer himself does this as if by fiat.

Before drawing the circumference with the compass, the geometer must first use the straight-edge to measure out the radius from ''O'' to a point ''P''. This produces the image illustrated. Smith  goes on to explain that what renders the figure iconic is not the final, static, two-dimensional image but the construction itself. When the compass sweeps or traces out the circumference, it brings into play the two cosmic bounds of space and time: space, by terminating the radius OP and time by the single but continuous act of sweeping out the circumference. Intriguingly, Plato referred to ''time'' as ''the moving image of eternity.'' In our construction, one compass point stands at the centre O, the nunc stans, whilst the other, its moving image, sweeps out the circumference. The centre O stands above (or apart from) time.

Developing his iconology a little further, Smith proposes the following correspondences:

• the centre O represents the spiritual realm, transcending both time and space
• the interior of the circle, enclosed by the circumference, represents the intermediary domain, subject to time alone
• the circumference represents the corporeal domain subject to both temporal and spatial bounds.

From these considerations, Smith asserts that the icon entails metaphysical equations upon which may be based metaphysical theorems.

1. The fixed point O represents aeviternity. It is impacted by time, represented by the moving point P. There is however a distinction between authentic eternity and aeviternity (impacted by time).
2. The corporeal domain (circumference) emanates from the intermediary (interior) through the imposition of the spatial bound. The intermediary has therefore primacy with respect to the corporeal.
3. The moving point of the circumference represents the corporeal domain at that very instant; the moment of time imposes itself upon all of space.
4. The moving point, swept out by the compass, returns to its starting point. Time is cyclical.

In the next section, Smith  invites us to reflect upon the significance of these metaphysical claims, with some most surprising conclusions for Einsteinian physics.

To be continued.