“Abstraction is everybody’s zero but
nobody’s nought.”
~ Robert Smithson
~ Robert Smithson
Zero is believed to have
been invented as a number like other numbers by the Indians, somewhere between
the fifth and ninth centuries. The idea of ‘null space’ or the ‘void’ was known
and used by earlier cultures, but the Indians were the first to produce a
symbol that could be utilized in mathematical calculations to represent the
void. When we consider numbers today, it is appropriate for us to begin with
zero as the unique numerical symbol for nothingness – indeed, when we derive
mathematical operations from set theory this is exactly how we do start, with
zero as the symbol for the empty set.
If the first number is zero,
denoting nothingness, then the second number – one – denotes identity. In
set-theoretic terms, it is the set which can have only one possible element
(the set of the empty set, in fact). This set-theoretic interrelation between
nothingness and oneness is mirrored in the symbolism of the taijitu, and the
doctrine of creatio ex nihilo –
something out of nothing.
The existence of zero and of
one as numbers generates the concept of category;
a unitary entity having more than one component subentities. The simplest
structure of category is duality –
the category that has exactly two elements, as ‘one and zero.’ The numerical
symbol for duality is two.
Three elaborates this
concept of category further into the more general plurality. Where twoness denotes a paradigm of either/or, a binary
system within which ‘one’ may acceptably and completely be defined as ‘not-zero,’
threeness opens a doorway – a Gateless Gate, indeed – onto countable infinities
of paradigm in which each element is uniquely itself and cannot be defined in
terms of any other element (although it can
be defined in terms of all other
elements, with reference to the established concepts of nothingness, identity,
and duality).
Four, being both the sum and
the product and the power of two twos, embodies divisibility. This is a further elaboration upon plurality – with the addition of
fourness, we now find that there exist some plural entities which are both
entities in themselves and unions of lesser entities. We can, of course, derive
numbers along the real number line by defining mathematical operators that
utilize this principle more generally – indeed, we could do that when we had
only zeros and ones to play with – but fourness
is the philosophical symbol that uniquely develops this concept.
These, then, are the numbers which symbolize the essential concepts of being: nothingness, identity, duality, plurality, and divisibility. You probably already realized this, but we have just derived another expression for the Law of Fives.
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