Numbers are an act of definition, an effort to quantify is an effort to produce consistency, and, as with precise language, if ‘life’ is squeezed out, a more precise pattern is produced which approaches the universal. Or such is the claim, which relates to the claims that are inherent in all linguistic systems, claiming in someway to create systems of metaphors which tie to reality — at the very least as lived, at the utmost as a claim to ultimate reality.
Numbers are, everywhere, an attempt to take us in this direction or a claim to this attempt — the reduciblity of form. But if they can, what are the necessary constraints? What is ‘reducible,’ what is not, and how can this difference be adjudicated? Moreover, who is in the best place to evaluate this? If they are ‘beyond’ form and thus dispute the reduction of form to number, how can one evaluate their claims?
One answer is presence / being / essence encountered in experience, but can this experience, however real to the one experiencing it, ever be constitutive in a definitive way — does it not often lead us back to the world of form, a Shinto procession, rather than any truth.
Thusly we stumble on the way, to find it.
