o arquétipo da ordem

duas citações muito instrutivas de uma entrevista com matthew watkins, autor da trilogia secrets of creation (prime evolution, collapse i, urbanomic 2006).

[160] We’re taught to construct the number line starting with one and then using the Peano axioms, you know, there’s an axiom that basically says, whatever number you arrive at you can always add another one to it. And I thought, hold on, where does this come from, this idea that you can always add another one, and I started to question that as something that might not be as obvious as it first seems. There’s some hidden assumption ther about order, time or something, I felt.

And I thought, well, there’s an alternate approach we could adopt here, we could start with an infinite alphabet of meaningless symbols, an infinite alphabet of meaningless yet distinct symbols, and then create the dictionary of all possible words of finite lenght out of that alphabet. [161] This alphabet of symbols would correspond to the prime numbers. By combinig the symbols in all finite possible combinations, you generate the set of words in your infinitely-long dictionary – this corresponds to the fact that if you combine the primes in all finite multiplicative combinations, you get the set of positive integers. Except now there’s no sense of order: Because we’re not starting with the positive integers, we don’t need to think one prime number as being ‘greater than’ another. The primes are not embedded in the positive integers yet, they’re just these free-floating abstract symbols.

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[183] This last idea, that number is a bridge between psyche and matter, comes quite close to something Jung was exploring in his later career. He left a lot of incomplete work when he died, and I believe he left von Franz to look at number archetypes. He’d looked at individual integers, the first few integers and their various associations. But later, more importantly, he’d come up with the idea that, not individual numbers with their associations, but the set of positive integers as a single entity is in itself an archetype, the archetype of order.