7/18/2023 0 Comments Rachel wells hall music math![]() ![]() No longer can the ancient Greeks be contemplated, in museum-like isolation, as perfect models of everything European. And it has also transformed the idea of the ‘humanities’: never again can they be taught as just a narrow study of the ‘classical’ texts or litterae humaniores of Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance. The modern world-view and its vast astronomical time-frame have changed our conception of humanity itself, if only in recognising our evolutionary affiliations with, and biological dependence on, other species in the terrestrial ecosystem. Thus the Pythagorean vision of the living cosmos - or Plato’s ‘World Soul’ - has reappeared in new vitalist theories, including the Gaia hypothesis of James E. Ĭentral to this new understanding of the world is the concept of the ‘Biosphere’, which is the very antithesis of Newton’s mechanistic universe. The new paradigms of the Age of Ecology are already transforming the professions, sciences, arts, academic disciplines, and human enterprises generally - from the minute study of bird-song and insect music to the utopian vision of planet Earth designed and managed as a single, organic Gesamtkunstwerk. This emergent rationality is fundamentally ecological and its impact is being felt from metaphysics to everyday manners. Though hardly any of these writers would describe themselves as Pythagoreans, their ideas have important connections with the old tradition and all are symptomatic of a new era in the history of thought when mechanistic and reductionist paradigms are giving way to a holistic and organic world-view. His wife, Jill Purce, is a music therapist so both sides of the Pythagorean tradition - the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ sciences - are here reunited in the work of one family. Sheldrake’s notion of ‘morphic resonance’ - forms resonating in Nature’s memory - is a very Pythagorean-Platonic alternative to mechanistic causality. To his extensive bibliographies could be added not only impressive results of recent mainstream research into Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, e.g., Huffman, but also the publications of several ‘alternative’ thinkers, including the French-American composer, music theorist, and astrologer, Dane Rudhyar, the French ‘neo-astrologer’ Michel Gauquelin, the English numerologist John Michell, and the English geneticist Rupert Sheldrake. ![]() Neo-pythagoreanism is now a conspicuous feature of post-modern philosophy and science: the revival of musica speculativa, part of a larger resurgence of neo-classicism, is well represented in the writings of Joscelyn Godwin. McClain (both of whom are living in retirement). ![]() Since the pioneering studies of Thomas Taylor (1758-1835), Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (1767-1825) and Albert von Thimus (1806-1878), there has been a steady renewal of interest in the old science of harmonics, culminating in the work of Hans Kayser (1891-1964) and his two most influential successors, Rudolf Haase and Ernest G. During the seventeenth century, the ‘harmony of the spheres’, which had remained an article of faith until the age of Shakespeare and even Louis XIV, was suddenly overwhelmed by the mighty discoveries of Kepler and Newton but this traumatic ‘Untuning of the Sky’ did not entirely obliterate the Pythagorean tradition (to which both Kepler and Newton were sympathetic). One of the ironies of twentieth-century thought is that the final dethronement of Pythagoras as a ‘father’ of western science and philosophy and the ‘inventor’ of music and mathematics should be accompanied by a world-wide revival of Pythagorean research and speculation.
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