“We must know — we will know!”
The framework of the western value system, in my opinion, rested on two authorities - Aristotle and the Church. While the Church considers the human soul and ethics as the highest significance relating to God, Aristotle’s definition of man is “the rational animal,” and the foundation of the rationality is the abstractive seeing. Symbols are vehicles for carrying the conception of abstract objects.149 Whitehead (1927) said, “The human mind is functioning symbolically when some components of its experience elicit consciousness, beliefs, emotions, and usages, respecting other components of its experience.”
The complex unknowns can be symbolized by various objects, mathematical, logical, cryptological, or mythical ones. The symbol \(x\) - the unsolved quantity commonly associating with equations - first entered human thought of finding for a symbolism to represent unknown numbers in a partially determined system. Such systems were once primarily for modeling the practical problems in arithmetic and geometry.150 In China, this unknown quantity was called the heavenly element, and in the equation, it was denoted by the symbol “元” (element) that also became the monetary unit for the Chinese currency. The powers of the unknown have the corresponding symbols. From \(x^{9}\) to \(x^{-9}\), they are: immortal (仙), light (明), sky (霄), milky way (汉), build (垒), increase (层), high (高), up (上), heaven (天), people (人), earth (地), down (下), low (低), decrease (减), fall (落), pass (逝), underground (泉), dark (暗), ghost (鬼). For a long time, this kind of problem was modeled by a single non-linear polynomial equation with a single unknown. Since the French Revolution, there has arisen the notion of an organized, systematic, ideology-driven transformation of the state (or the world) as a whole. Whatever the fate of the movements led by this idea, a part of it became central to the secular lives: The unknown objects were not seriously treated if one couldn’t seek to reflect such components in a whole system.
In mathematics, objects like \(x\) were detaching themselves from the traditional mathematics of number and position, and taking on lives at a higher level of abstraction in the 19th century. Once the detachment of symbols from the concepts of traditional arithmetic and geometry happened, novel mathematical objects came to light.151 In contrary, despite that seeing the world as an interconnected and interdependent “network” or “body” was a traditional eastern view, and despite that linear simultaneous equations had appeared in the 12th century (Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art) in China, further attempts in the eastern philosophy of abstracting the world in a symbolic form went (or was guided) to the narrow, unstructured and mystic directions. Apart from numbers, \(x\) now can appear in the representations of arrays of numbers, sets, rotations, permutations, transformations, propositions, eigenforms, etc. Modeling a set of simultaneous equations becomes straightforward when we represent several unknowns in the form of vectors and vectorize the system in terms of matrices. The attempts of expressing the absolute truths that were invisible otherwise, a symbolism motivation, now can be applied much more widely and more abstractly through the mathematical objects leading us to the discovery of the hidden aspects of the world.
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