View source for Mathesis

= hermeneutical method to obtain knowledge

=Description=

Matthew Seagall:

"In the original and perhaps more esoteric sense of μάθησις (mathesis), which need not be quantitative
in its approach but is, as the ancient Pythagorean school had it, essentially an educational
method — the art of learning — meant to dialectically lead one along a trail of proportional
and analogical resonances from the sensible to the archetypal mode of perception. The
Spinozist philosopher Gilles Deleuze defines mathesis as an initiatory and incarnational way
of knowing that overcomes dualities, whether between percept and concept, particular and
universal, finite and infinite, or corporeal and spiritual.


Robin Mackay elaborates:

- Mathesis treats of the nature of life anterior to philosophical reflection and
scientific objectivity, that is to say before the cleavage between the subject
and object of thought: it returns us to ‘things-in-themselves in their wild
state,’ the world of concepts fauves [bestial concepts].


Of course, mathesis can sometimes make use of abstract algebraic symbols in its pedagogical
pursuit of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. While Goethe did not employ algebra in
his scientific studies, as a celebrated man of letters he can hardly be said to have dispensed
with the symbolic in the composition of his scientific much less his poetic works, both of
which must count as expressions of his love for the rhymes and rhythms of Nature. For example, when we first hear from Faust just after the Prologue in Heaven, he, having learned
all that culture has to offer, asks for spiritual help “to learn what nature has to teach”. He
opens the book on his desk to reveal the symbol of the microcosm: “Was it a god that made
these symbols be / … And with mysterious potency / Make nature’s hidden powers around me,
manifest?”

While Goethe’s participatory, concretely phenomenological approach to the study of Nature must be distinguished from the model-centric mathematical analysis characteristic of modern physical science."

(https://footnotes2plato.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/goethe-and-whitehead_holistic-science-journal.pdf)

[[Category:Cosmobiological]]