Guest Post:A Hipbone Approach to Analysis III.

Here’s Hesse on the analogical / isomorphic nature of the moves that connect ideas — “only connect!” said EM Forster — in his great Game:

Throughout its history the Game was closely allied with music, and usually proceeded according to musical or mathematical rules. One theme, two themes, or three themes were stated, elaborated, varied, and underwent a development quite similar to that of the theme in a Bach fugue or a concerto movement. A Game, for example, might start from a given astronomical configuration, or from the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads, and from this theme, depending on the intentions and talents of the player, it could either further explore and elaborate the initial motif or else enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts. Beginners learned how to establish parallels, by means of the Game’s symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature. Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited combinations. For a long time one school of players favored the technique of stating side by side, developing in counterpoint, and finally harmoniously combining two hostile themes or ideas, such as law and freedom, individual and community. In such a Game the goal was to develop both themes or theses with complete equality and impartiality, to evolve out of thesis and antithesis the purest possible synthesis.

It is Bach, it is Hegel, it is the very essence of creativity, it is the associative, metaphoric nature of mind and brain (and I won’t get more than toe-deep in the “deep problem” of consciousness here).

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And it does involve combining the understanding of both puzzle and mystery, to return to that distinction from Heidegger:

I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

Hesse is proposing his intuition that the world of ideas is a mandala-form array of symmetries with a “vanishing point” in the center.

Well, I have leapt far from my original topic, Jeff Jonas’ comments on piecing together a puzzle, but I hope the bungee-cord I’ve been depending on has held your attention, and now as always, at the far end of the extension there’s a bouncing-back.

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The human mind “connects the dots” and “pieces together the puzzle” by recognizing likenesses — pattern recognition, if you like.

But just how human analogical thinking functions is not exactly an easy question…

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