CBC Ideas - a flagship radio programme in intellectual history – is currently running a series on numbers. One of them was “The Story of Zero” and another was “The Story and Magic of Three”. I could not resist writing to CBC Ideas to offer my comments and amplifications, some of which may look familiar to those who have followed my blog over the years. What follows is the text of my reply with a few changes in light of afterthoughts.
First, let’s begin with zero. Aside from the mathematical zero, there is the historical, or political, even philosophical zero. Think of the French Revolution which had a year zero, and a day zero on a brand-new calendar meant to harmonize with the seasons. Of course, the metric system, with its infinite capacity for zeroes, was invented during the French Revolution and is in many ways representative of it. We also know from the work of painter Jacques-Louis David, in particular his Oath of the Horatii, that the French Revolutionaries were modelling themselves at least in part on the Romans, who, thanks to Livy, had their own year zero of sorts, if you look to Romulus and Remus. More recently, the Totalitarian period of the 20th century – Communism and Fascism - wanted to create a new man, hence a new zero, and with it, zero tolerance.[1]
The number three is also very interesting, and I feel CBC
Ideas has underplayed the role of the Trinity in Western culture. It was Augustine who promoted the Idea of the
Trinity. And I think of it in terms of
Northrup Frye’s “Great Code”. Without
the Trinity, we wouldn’t have the division of powers, namely the legislative,
the executive and the judiciary. This
was first expressed by Montesquieu in his classic work, appropriately titled,
“The Sprit of the Laws” (1748). The
Trinity figures in America’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”
(where the text actually derives from Locke) and in Canada’s more prosaic motto
“peace, order and good government”.
There are countless references to the number three in
Western culture, but what I find most interesting about number three is that it
has a “middle” – unlike, for example, the numbers one, two, or four. It can be argued that the number three has
served as a mediating tone in Western political culture, save for when the
number zero was invoked. Putting aside
Hegel (who seems to have his own sort of Trinity in his dialectic working
towards a synthesis), where would Canada’s “Truth and Reconciliation” process
be without this mediative role and the number three? Canada has three founding cultures: English,
French and Indigenous.
[1] Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction:
Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, tr. Kathleen Blamey
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 100, p. 107.
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