MUSIC AND THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING (A SKETCH)
The classically derived "Theory of the Great Chain of Being" was often
characterized as a "ladder" descending from the heavens (where the powers of
creation were thought to be), but it turns out that its actual location is within, and
was discovered by a scientific adventure described by Abraham Pais, a modern
historian of physics, in his book 'Inward Bound' (1986).
The soulful foundations of music according to idealism, are dealt with
helpfully by Plotinus, Boehme, Malebranche, and Hegel, as well as by Augustine
(‘On Music’). Plotinus, it should be noted, was the great mind behind Aurelius
Augustine.
Hegel’s pregnant, but not completely original, remark that the soul or self
“is of temporal origin” looks to have found a modern “physical” basis with the
relatively recent discovery (1973) of moving invisible fields, among them
electromagnetic, which can be theorized to represent a kind of immaterial
symphony at the microphysical foundation of living matter, applied in ascending
stages finally as a kind of bias against the thermal chaos of living cells. This
essentially answers the age-old question, What Is Life?
There is a clear chain of physical influence, representing heretofore
missing links in the fabulous Great Chain of Being, that begins in the complex
moving fields of the “color vacuum” at the fundament, ascends through the
medium of atomic nuclei, reaches to the electron fields, and terminates in
animals in a unique cellular micromachine, perhaps most aptly characterized as a
“psychic transducer,” known to biologists as the centriole.
It should be noted that a mechanism in the color vacuum establishing the
independence of the finite self can be hypothesized, though too complex to
discuss here.
Also, it turns out that each embodied living symphony is
perceptible to incoming inorganic atoms as they are incorporated into cells. This
is furthermore important because living things incorporate other living things
and the organisms must maintain distinction. “Self-recognition” must begin at
the atomic level, although it must also involve the molecular.
Some biologists, observing the remarkable activity of the centriole, declare
it to be “the brain of the cell,” for it controls all sensory processes, all neuronal
activity, the entire complexity of DNA replication, all ciliary motion, as well as all
intercellular biochemical communication. Fundamental research on the centriole
began only in the 21st century and so far the thesis holds.
Centrioles, it turns out, in animals are handed down only paternally, in
contrast to the maternal transmission of mitochondria. (The analog in plants, as
most botanists know, is the chloroplast.) Hegel’s biological discussions hold that
animal subjectivity is transmitted only paternally, and this is now apparently
confirmed by cellular biology.
The so-called “fall of parity,” a microphysical discovery of the mid-20th
century appears to show that the finite or sensuous universe is only one side (the
“left-hand”) of an important bilateral, though still directional, relation evident
within the psyche, a situation concretely anticipated in Plotinus, Boehme, and
Malebranche. This would ultimately pertain the CONTENT, not the form, of the
symphony we have mentioned--let us imagine as embodying the contrast, say, of
Brahms versus Ravel.
It is pertinent to note that plants lack a psyche per se, so that living motion
in things botanical must be of fundamentally different origin, though also
transmitted microphysically. This supposition is dealt with concretely in Boehme
(‘Election of Grace’) and to the lesser extent in Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature.’
The proof is so complex it cannot even be indicated here.
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R. Schleyer, M.A.
St. Paul, Minnesota USA
schleyer@earthlink.net
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