Of human and inhumane circles

[ by Charles Cameron — infernal and celestial geometries ]

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It is well known that the Platonic “ideal” circle is not to be found in the “real” world of people and things, since it would be composed of an infinte number of non-dimensional points. Human and inhumane circles, however, are another matter.

The upper circle shows spectators who gathered around the mangled body of an alleged homosexual, thrown from the roof of a seven-storey building by members of the Islamic State, and stoned the still breathing victim to death.

The lower circle is intended as a counter-weight to the atrocity shown above it. It is the Zen master Hakuin’s enso or zen brush-and-ink circle, perfect in its imperfection, its human spontaneity, and certainly not in the Platonic “ideal” sense.

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The Topological Musings blog quotes Plato from The Republic, deftly avoiding any mention of circles…

And do you not also know that they (mathematicians) further make use of the visible forms and talk about them, though they are not thinking of them but of those things of which they are a likeness, pursuing their inquiry for the sake of the square as such and the diagonal as such, and not for the sake of the image of it which they draw?… The very things which they mold and draw, … they treat in their turn as only images, but what they really seek is to get sight of those realities which can be seen only by the mind.

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Three circles: the utterly inhumane, the perfectly imperfect, and the impossible.

For a “transgressive” study of the issue of homosexuality and the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno, see John Boswell‘s Dante and the Sodomites, in Dante Studies, No. 112 (1994), pp. 63-76. What exactly “transgressive” means, I have yet to understand. I do however, personally, abhor people throwing other people off high buildings and / or stoning them to death.