Faust's Two Natures

Goethe’s Faust em­bod­ies the di­alec­tic be­tween earth­ly ex­is­tence and the divine—a strug­gle that is, at its heart, math­e­mat­i­cal and on­to­log­i­cal. In the tra­di­tion of on­to­log­i­cal math­e­mat­ics (as ad­vanced by Leib­niz and mod­ern­ized by Mike Hock­ney), all is con­cept: the in­tel­lect, or monadic mind, is pri­ma­ry, ca­pa­ble of gen­er­at­ing and know­ing itself with­out the need for any per­cept. Per­cept—what we call direct ex­pe­ri­ence or sen­sa­tion—is a second-degree con­cept: a local, in­stan­ti­at­ed, or pro­ject­ed con­cept within the uni­ver­sal field of pure thought.

At the foun­da­tion of re­al­i­ty is the prin­ci­ple that all is noth­ing: every math­e­mat­i­cal truth ex­press­es a bal­ance, a per­fect equa­tion to zero. All valid on­to­log­i­cal states are com­bi­na­tions whose sum is zero; ex­is­tence is nec­es­sary and suf­fi­cient, as simple as pos­si­ble but not one bit sim­pler.

Im­por­tant­ly, this process is not a simple one-way ascent from matter to mind. All is waves: ex­is­tence is a con­tin­u­al move­ment of peaks and troughs, de­scent and ascent, in­car­na­tion and tran­scen­dence. The mind de­scends into the world—be­com­ing lo­cal­ized, em­bod­ied, and ex­pe­ri­enc­ing space­time—yet, if it learns and re­flects, it can build its own Bifröst and ascend again, lead­ing both itself and other lo­cal­ized minds from Earth (the domain of per­cepts) to the heav­ens (the non-local domain of pure energy and thought). In this way, we im­ma­nen­tize the es­cha­ton: the divine is brought into the world, and the world is el­e­vat­ed to the divine.