The Coincidence Factor In History, Literature and Philosophy
()
About this ebook
Read more from Julian Scutts
An Examination of Coincidences In History and Literature Introducing an Anthology of Essays and Works In Various Genres With a Final Apologia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Word In Poetry and Its Contexts Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Emergence of the Poetic "Wanderer" In the Age of Goethe Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study of Wandering As a Phenomenon In English and German Literature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTheological Questions Prompted By Celebrated Works of Literature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMaking Ends Meet for All Souls Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Holistically and Logocentrically Based Study of the Phenomenon of the Wanderer In German and English Literature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Coincidence Factor In History, Literature and Philosophy
Related ebooks
Eugenics and Other Evils (Annotated) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMagisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReality by Other Means Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in Times of Terror Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dictionary of Last Words Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThrough Nature to God (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPlatonic Noise Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEight Popes and the Crisis of Modernity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Tyranny of Human Rights: From Jacobinism to the United Nations Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Erring: A Postmodern A/theology Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Jordan Peterson and the Second Religiousness: Explaining the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Man Who Was Thursday (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): A Nightmare Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTHE WORLD SET FREE Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGenres of Privacy in Postwar America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThrough Nature to God Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHeretics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHeretics (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPast and Present: The Challenges of Modernity, from the Pre-Victorians to the Postmodernists Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDelusions in Science and Spirituality: The Fall of the Standard Model and the Rise of Knowledge from Unseen Worlds Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Man against Mass Society Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Master Chronology of JFK Assassination: Read Me Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heretics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHitler's and Stalin's Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction was Turned into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Responsibility of Intellectuals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hear No Evil: Politics, Science, and the Forensic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Teaching Methods & Materials For You
Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters--And How to Get It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Three Bears Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Speed Reading: How to Read a Book a Day - Simple Tricks to Explode Your Reading Speed and Comprehension Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Master the GED Test, 28th Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Easy Spanish Stories For Beginners: 5 Spanish Short Stories For Beginners (With Audio) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5How You Learn Is How You Live: Using Nine Ways of Learning to Transform Your Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How To Be Hilarious and Quick-Witted in Everyday Conversation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The 5 Love Languages of Children: The Secret to Loving Children Effectively Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Principles: Life and Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Speed Reading: Learn to Read a 200+ Page Book in 1 Hour: Mind Hack, #1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Take Smart Notes. One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Success Principles(TM) - 10th Anniversary Edition: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Financial Feminist: Overcome the Patriarchy's Bullsh*t to Master Your Money and Build a Life You Love Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5From 150 to 179 on the LSAT Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jack Reacher Reading Order: The Complete Lee Child’s Reading List Of Jack Reacher Series Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Personal Finance for Beginners - A Simple Guide to Take Control of Your Financial Situation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Conversational Spanish Dialogues: Over 100 Spanish Conversations and Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Verbal Judo, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Four-Hour School Day: How You and Your Kids Can Thrive in the Homeschool Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Coincidence Factor In History, Literature and Philosophy
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Coincidence Factor In History, Literature and Philosophy - Julian Scutts
THE COINCIDENCE FACTOR IN HISTORY, LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY
By Julian Scutts
Copyright 4th October 2015
ISBN 978 1 326 43551- 6
The first chapter of this book outlines remarkable coincidences that have attracted the attention of leading writers, philosophers, psychologists and historians throughout the years. However, the debate as to whether coincidences are meaningful or not is a relatively recent preoccupation, as before the Age of Reason
the common assumption that divine providence guides all events ruled out explanations based on the concept of pure chance. Conversely, rationalism shunned any proposal that divine providence had a part to play. The Romantics and early post-Romantics challenged the arid rationalism of their day by taking an insidious interest in the uncanny, the supernatural and meaningful coincidences to boot, as the following citation from a short story by Balzac will serve to illustrate.
I have been fascinated by this subject for decades now and have my own personal and even idiosyncratic views on the phenomenon, leading me to include my own writings in the form of poems, dialogues and short stories within the scope of discussions that follow on from the introductory chapter.
CHAPTER I: ON COUNTING RHINOCEROSES
A: SYNCHRONICITY, A PHENOMENON IDENTIFIED BY PROFESSOR C. G. JUNG
‘Ce que nous appelons hasard, c’est peut-être la logique de Dieu.’(‘What we call Chance is perhaps the logic of God.’) Georges Bernanos
La mort de la comtesse fut causé par un sentiment plus grave, et sans doute par quelque vision terrible. A l'heure precise où madame de Dey mourait à Carentan, son fils était fusilé dans le Morbihan. Nous pouvons joindre ce fait tragique à toutes les observations sur les sympathies qui méconnaissent les lois de l'espace ; documents que rassemblent avec une savante curiosité quelques hommes de solitude, et qui serviront un jour à asseoir les bases d'une science nouvelle à laquelle il a manqué jusqu'à ce jour un homme de génie.
The last paragraph in the short story by Honoré de Balzac entitled Le Réquisitionnaire (The Conscript
)
The death of the countess was caused by something yet more grave; it resulted, without a doubt, from a terrifying vision. At the exact hour when Madame de Dey died at Carentan, her son was shot in the Morbihan. That tragic fact we may add to many recorded observations on sympathies that disregard the laws of space: records which men in their reclusion are compiling with sagacious curiosity, and which will some day serve as the basis of a new science for which, up to the present day, a man of genius has been lacking
.
Carl Jung gave a name to the phenomenon exemplified above: synchronicity.
The word refers to what Jung posited as the phenomenon of acausal yet meaningful coincidences that seem to cohere as though they were words or symbols in a message. To the religious mind the author of the perceived message must be a great power working behind the scenes, God for short, or at least a universal coordinating influence that defies any rational explanation at present available, perhaps the collective unconscious in terms of Carl Jung’s central theory.
One might interpret Jung’s theory as a revival of an ancient mode of thought so evident in the religious or mystical beliefs of ancient civilizations. Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondences" captures a sense of this universal unity suffusing all sensations aroused by natural objects, sounds and scents, notably in the words of the first stanza.
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symbols
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.:
Nature is a temple where from time to time living pillars utter confused words. Man traverses forests of symbols which eye him with the looks of those with whom he is familiar.
B: A SURVEY OF COINCIDENCES IN HISTORY DEPARTING FROM AN ARTICLE ON THE DEATHS OF JOHN ADAMS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON ON JULY 4TH 1826
Scholars in general are wary of discussing unexplained phenomena, leaving such matters as UFOs, crop circles or the identity of the Antichrist to the exponents of theories aired on the Internet. However, occasionally a noted scholar picks up the gauntlet thrown down by coincidences that crop up in the annals of history, a notable example of which we now consider. I refer to an article appearing in the journal Historically Speaking: the Bulletin of the Historical Society (July/August 2005, Volume 6, Number 6) by Margaret P. Battin. It bears the title: July 4, 1826: Explaining the Same-day Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Margaret Battin’s article departs from a recognition of the following fact: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, July 4, 1826, that fateful day being the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Furthermore President Monroe also died on the 4th of July, but in 1831.
In the quest for an explanation Margaret Battin runs through the gamut of six possibilities which she enumerates in the following sequence of categories.
pure chance
divine intervention
hanging on
to ensure a memorable death
suicide pact
foul play
an as yet barely understood psychological force
Margaret Battin finds within none of the above categories a completely satisfying conclusion of her quest for an explanation. Let us consider each possibility in turn.
She observes that the statistical likelihood of two presidents dying on the same prestigious day, the fiftieth jubilee of the signing of American Declaration of Independence, is a very long shot indeed, as are the chances that three of the first American presidents should die on the same date. I might add that only one president was born on the fourth of July, namely Calvin Coolidge. Even in this case the odds stacked against his birth on July the fourth were roughly one in nine (the total number of presidents divided into the number of days in the year) and yet these odds were immeasurably greater than the chance that two presidents would die on the same day.
As to the possibility that the phenomenon under discussion was the result of divine intervention, Margaret Battin feels indisposed to entering into a discussion of the imponderable theological mysteries and in this matter she reflects the diffidence of scholars in an age when the queen of the sciences no longer occupies her throne. In academic circles it is becoming increasingly respectable to profess allegiance to theism, but there are few scholars bold enough confess a firm belief in a miracle that has occurred over the last two thousand years.
The possibilities delineated within the remaining four categories amount to various speculations based on conjectures for which there is little verifiable evidence and most scholars are averse to mulling over anything that smacks of a conspiracy theory. The intriguing idea of some psychosomatically controlled time switch affecting one’s life span might deserve further investigation. In a history seminar I once attended at the University of Cologne the presiding professor gingerly commented how strange it was that Oliver Cromwell died on the 3rd of September (Old Style), the same date of two decisive battles at Worcester and Dunbar which he had won during his military career.
The issue of coincidences is far wider than the ambit of Margaret Battin’s particular discussion but the framework she uses to explore possible explanations is widely applicable to a study of the entire question of coincidences in history. One should not imagine that the example of this phenomenon is an isolated one-off
case. If it were, one might be tempted to conclude that the case of the coincidences she considers could be dismissed as a statistical quirk on the assumption that it would only be a matter of time before enough moneys typed the entire text of Hamlet. We have other cases to consider, some of them well-known, such as that of the Lincoln-Kennedy parallels or the recurrence of the ninth of November in German history.
As various pages on the internet and other sources point out, there are what some take to be eerie similarities between the facts that pertain to the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. In both cases a president named Johnson was the respective victim’s successor. Both were elected in a year that ended with 60.
Both were mortally wounded on a Friday, in Lincoln’s case on Good Friday. Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre and Kennedy was being driven in a Ford Lincoln, and so it goes on. If we apply the statistical probability test to access the chances that such a row of coincidences could take place, we should at least assess the chances of two presidents sharing the same surname, of being assassinated and dying on the same day of the week. There have been several cases of presidents sharing the same surname, namely Adams, Harrison, Johnson, Roosevelt and Bush, giving us a value of roughly one in seven (35 up to Kennedy’s administration / 5). Four presidents have been assassinated during the course of the history of the United States: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy, giving us a factor of roughly one in nine. Add on to this one in seven for Friday and we arrive at a chance of 7 x 9 x 7, which equals one in 441, a conservative estimate in view of the fact that we have taken no account of Ford’s Theatre, the Ford Lincoln and a few other matters.
What about the explanation of divine intervention? When the speaker in a well-known song of the Rolling Stones raised the question of who killed the Kennedys, he did not have God in mind. As Margaret Battin warned, the thought of divine intervention in such cases lands us in the prickly thicket of difficult theological questions. How much leeway can God give to Satan in view of the story of Job? The many who claim to have identified the identity of the Antichrist so variously in President Obama, the Pope, the Freemasons, Islam, the Jews,
or Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge (and such a genial and amiable gentleman too) seem to suggest that Satan virtually rules the roost down here, allowing God the honorary role of clearing up at the End of Days. And then what about more down-to-earth, rational explanations? The various conspiracy theories which revolve around the assassination of JFK do not to my knowledge incorporate Lincoln’s assassination. To do so would be to construe a monstrous cult whose operations spanned centuries, a cult in possession of immense powers of control and insight; in other words we are slipping back to the devil again.
Let us take another case, the recurrence of the ninth of November in history, particularly the history of Germany. Major events that took place on this date are, in reverse order:
The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989),
The burning of synagogues and associated crimes against Jews on the so-called Reichs-Kristallnacht (1938),
The abortive Hitler-Ludendorff Beerhall-Putsch in Munich (1923),
The abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1918).
Some would add on Napoleon the First’s coup d’etat on the 18 Brumaire, VIII according to the French Revolutionary calendar, which was the ninth of November 1799 in fact. A historian might also mention the less well known execution of Robert Blum by the Austrian authorities (1848). Blum played a leading role in the movement to establish a liberal and democratic pan-German parliament in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main in 1848, the year in which the historic phase known as Vormärz culminated and tragically ended.
One can offer a rational explanation for at least one repetition in the list cited above. Hitler may well have chosen the 9th of November as the day on which to stage his attempted Putsch to indicate an intended reversal of the process that led to the establishment of the Weimar Republic after the Kaiser’s abdication. On the other hand it is difficult to see how any presumed operatives could have engineered the date of the fall of the Berlin wall as the timing of this event seems to have resulted from an unforeseen bungle on the part of an East German functionary. Conspiracy theorists, here’s your cue.
Here is another case to consider. The recurrence of the years ending in 7 that mark the capture of Jerusalem. In any case the Holy City has an established place in the area of numbers to which a mystical or allegorical meaning has been imputed. In the Jewish religious tradition the ninth of the month of Av (Tish b’Av), marking the destruction of the Temple of Solomon and Second or Herodian Temple, is a fast day in the Jewish year, and according to certain opinions coincided with tragic junctures in Jewish history, such as the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the beginning of the First World War. Tradition has also linked the city with the symbolic number seven, an association that goes back to the seven branches of the Menorah, the candelabrum that was a sacred object in the Temple. One also speaks of the seven gates of Jerusalem. In reverse order again, I list the years which witnessed the capture of Jerusalem.
1967 In the Six-Day War,
1917 The capture of Jerusalem under the command of General Allenby,
1517 The occupation of Jerusalem by the Ottomans
1187 The city’s capture by Saladin .
One might even mention the year 70 when the Romans invaded the city after the first Jewish Revolt. Admittedly not all the dates of Jerusalem capture ended with seven (viz. 1099). However since 1187 the chances of dates ending with seven four times are statically slim, being 10 to the power of four, which is one to 10,000. Or, more conservatively, one to 1,000 if one considers only the repetition of any digit from 1187. While we are on the subject of recurring sevens, let us look at a case for which there is no obvious allegorical interpretation.
King Edward the First of England died when he was about to invade Scotland on the seventh day in the seventh month of the seventh year in the fourteenth century (July 7th, 1307). The two kings that followed him, Edward II, and Edward III died in 1327 and 1377 respectively. Richard II was dethroned in 1399 to die in the following year, recalling the year 1199 when his namesake Richard I (Coeur de Lion) died in battle. If one is to interpret these coincidences as the result of divine intervention, it may be just as important to recognize the simple fact that certain coincidences defy the reasoning mind’s power to find explanations as it is to decipher the supposed cryptic message itself. This recognition alone might serve to make scientists, academics and opinionated minds in general less bumptious and more humble, doubtlessly to the benefit of all.
Skeptics challenge the very idea that coincidences are inexplicable and mysterious in the face of all claims that they can be meaningful. They argue that pattern recognition based on similar but unrelated events and images is attributable to apophenia, that propensity of the mind to arbitrarily project patterns generated by the mind itself onto perceptions of objects and random items of data derived from external reality. Hence the Man in the Moon or oddities displayed on You Tube showing grotesque faces in atomic mushroom clouds or mermaids and other strange creatures on the surface of Mars. Such perceptions result from the mind’s tendency to select items that it is predisposed to discern and to suppress those that do not fit a programmed image. Here one can turn the tables. Are not these skeptics themselves liable to fall into the very trap they warn against if as a matter of principle they dogmatically rule out the possibility that coincidences are more than the result of chance and at the same time ignore the weight of uncomfortable statistics?
There are things we know to be true. After winter there is spring and after spring comes the summer. The world is a sphere. Or is it?
flat-earthers will object. Flat-earthers remind us that even knowledge of matters we take for granted results from the aggregate effect of constantly perceiving coincidences from which, according to the philosopher Hume, we only infer a sense of causality. Between what we know for