The Quality of Numbers 1-31

By Wolfgang Held

One sun, two parents, three meals a day, four seasons, five fingers … every child soon discovers that lots of things in life have an inherent number attached to them. Just as five individual fingers become something much more important and powerful when combined together in a hand, these numbers are often much more than a simple addition of their parts: they are intrinsically connected to the object, expressing a particular quality. In this readable little book, Wolfgang Held explores the fascinating qualities of numbers one to thirty-one. The Pythagorean School in ancient Greece had a saying, 'all is number'. Held reveals the hidden numerical order of our world and our remarkable harmonic relationship with our surroundings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Floris Books
• Release date: Oct 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9780863159701

Book preview

1. The Number of the Whole

The happy man is the man who does not suffer from either of these failures of unity, whose personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the world.

Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 17

We begin with the most difficult number, the number one. The medieval mystic Agrippa von Nettesheim wrote that ‘Unity penetrates every number and itself always remains the same’; and the mathematician Köbel wrote in 1537 that one was not a number at all, but rather the endower, the beginning, the foundation of all other numbers. We come to such an idea if instead of seeing the numbers additively, we view them as divisions of the one unity. Then one is the whole from which the other numbers grow by division into two and beyond. Although one is the smallest whole number in mathematical terms, it embodies the greatest dimension of what we might call ‘unique’. As people we are not just one personality with one history, but we see the world as a unity. This idea of the unity of the whole world sounds elementary and yet is one of the great ongoing processes of human insight. It takes its departure from the idea that there is only one God, one Creator, rather than a host of divinities such as we find in all pagan religions.

This is connected with a profound change in human consciousness, for only when we believe in one God is it possible also to speak of an enclosed world and a distinct personal identity. The pharaoh Akhenaton was the first to replace the countless figures of gods and spirits with the sole sun god Aton, thus elevating one to its throne. Judaism, and subsequently Christianity and Islam, likewise spoke of one Creator, enabling the indivisible, all-encompassing element to inform the human spirit.

Philosophically, this question as to whether the world is one or a larger number, has preoccupied almost all thinkers. In

AD

250, Plotinus wrote, ‘Every multiplicity is a multiplicity of unities, and therefore is predicated on unity.’ Eight hundred years before this, the Greek philosopher Parmenides had already sought to grasp the nature of one in a didactic poem, by comparing the unity of the world with the form of a sphere.

The image of a sphere as one, is one which cosmology draws on when speaking of the curvature of space, which is finite but boundless. The cosmos must be finite for if it were infinite there would be an infinite number of stars with infinite light, and at night the sky would be glittering bright. Nevertheless, due to the curvature of space there is no limit to the cosmos – in the same way as the surface of a sphere does not end. Just as the square is used as an image of the number four, so the circle or sphere is the image for the greatest number, one, which according to Pythagoras is the only number that is simultaneously masculine and feminine.

At the age of one, we can stand ‘on our own’; there is one sun, which sustains life, and one earth. There is a first breath at birth, and a first day at school. No number has such an aura as this, standing at the beginning of everything and therefore less easy to grasp and understand than all other numbers until – usually after a long quest – we become able to grasp our own identity, the quality that distinguishes our own ‘I’. I suspect that this is the key to the number which is at the same time the biggest and smallest of all.

2. The Number Between Doubt

and Suspense

Question: Look at a stick –

One end is yin, the other yang.

Which is more