Recent Log24 entries have parodied the use of the phrase "deep beauty" as the title of the Oct. 3-4 physics symposium of that name,
which was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and
sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at
Princeton University.

Such parody was in part suggested by the symposium's sources of
financial and academic support. This support had, in the
view of some, the effect of linking the symposium's topic, the
mathematics of quantum theory, with both religion (the Templeton Foundation) and philosophy (a field sometimes associated in popular thought-- though not at Princeton-- with quantum mysticism.)

As a corrective to the previous parodies here, the following material
on the mathematician Harish-Chandra may help to establish that there
is, in fact, such a thing as "deep beauty"-- if not in physics,
religion, or philosophy, at least in pure mathematics.

MacTutor History of Mathematics:

"Harish-Chandra worked at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton from 1963. He was appointed IBM-von Neumann Professor in 1968."

R. P. Langlands (pdf, undated, apparently from a 1983 memorial talk):

"Almost immediately upon his arrival in Princeton he began working at a ferocious pace,
setting standards that the rest of us may emulate but never achieve. For us there is a welter
of semi-simple groups: orthogonal groups, symplectic groups, unitary groups, exceptional
groups; and in our frailty we are often forced to treat them separately. For him, or so it
appeared because his methods were always completely general, there was a single group. This
was one of the sources of beauty of the subject in his hands, and I once asked him how he
achieved it. He replied, honestly I believe, that he could think no other way. It is certainly true
that he was driven back upon the simplifying properties of special examples only in desperate
need and always temporarily."

"It is difficult to communicate the grandeur of Harish-Chandra's
achievements and I have
not tried to do so. The theory he created still stands-- if I may be
excused a clumsy simile-- like a Gothic cathedral, heavily buttressed
below but, in spite of its great weight, light and
soaring in its upper reaches, coming as close to heaven as mathematics
can. Harish, who was
of a spiritual, even religious, cast and who liked to express himself
in metaphors, vivid and
compelling, did see, I believe, mathematics as mediating between man
and what one can only
call God. Occasionally, on a stroll after a seminar, usually towards
evening, he would express
his feelings, his fine hands slightly upraised, his eyes intent on the
distant sky; but he saw as
his task not to bring men closer to God but God closer to men. For
those who can understand his work and who accept that God has a
mathematical side, he accomplished it."

For deeper views of his work, see

1. Rebecca A. Herb, "Harish-Chandra and His Work" (pdf), Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, July 1991, and
2. R. P. Langlands, "Harish-Chandra, 1923-1983" (pdf, 28 pp., Royal Society memoir, 1985)

Yesterday's meditation ("Simon's Shema") on the interpenetration of opposites continues:

"The fundamental conception of Tantric Buddhist metaphysics, namely, yuganaddha, signifies the coincidence of opposites.  It is symbolized by the conjugal embrace (maithuna or kama-kala) of a god and goddess or a Buddha and his consort (signifying karuna and sunyata or upaya and prajna, respectively), also commonly depicted in Tantric Buddhist iconography as the union of vajra (diamond sceptre) and padme (lotus flower).  Thus, yuganaddha essentially means the interpenetration of opposites or dipolar fusion, and is a fundamental restatement of Hua-yen theoretic structures."

-- p. 148 in "Part II: A Whiteheadian Process Critique of Hua-yen Buddhism," in Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism: A Critical Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration (SUNY Series in Systematic Philosophy), by Steve Odin, State University of New York Press, 1982

And on p. 163 of Odin, op. cit., in "Part III: Theology of the Deep Unconscious: A Reconstruction of Process Theology," in the section titled "Whitehead's Dipolar God as the Collective Unconscious"--

"An effort is made to transpose Whitehead's theory of the dipolar God
into the terms of the collective unconscious, so that now the dipolar
God is to be comprehended not as a transcendent deity, but the deepest dimension and highest potentiality of one's own psyche."

Odin
obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Philosophy at the
State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook in 1980. (See curriculum vitae (pdf).)

For an academic review of Odin's book, see David Applebaum, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 34 (1984), pp. 107-108.

It is perhaps worth noting, in light of the final footnote of Mark D. Brimblecombe's Ph.D. thesis "Dipolarity and God" quoted yesterday, that "tantra" is said to mean "loom." For some less-academic background on the Tantric iconography Odin describes, see the webpage "Love and Passion in Tantric Buddhist Art." For a fiction combining love and passion with the word "loom" in a religious context, see Clive Barker's Weaveworld. 
This fiction-- which is, if not "supreme" in the Wallace Stevens sense,
at least entertaining-- may correspond to some aspects of the deep
Jungian psychological reality discussed by Odin.

Simon's theology here, though radically reductive, is
at least consistent with traditional Jewish thought. It may help
counteract the thoughtless drift to the left of academic writing in
recent decades. Another weapon against leftist nonsense appears,
surprisingly, on the op-ed page of today's New York Times:

"There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few
people in Europe have not joked in their time about 'concrete steps,'
'contradictions,' 'the interpenetration of opposites,' and the rest."

-- Doris Lessing, winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature

The Times offers Lessing's essay to counter Harold Bloom's remark
that this year's award of a Nobel Prize to Lessing is "pure political
correctness." The following may serve as a further antidote to Bloom.

The Communist use of "interpenetration," a term long used to describe
the Holy Trinity, suggests-- along with Simon's hymn to the Unity, and
the rhetorical advice of Norman Mailer quoted here yesterday--  a
search for the full phrase "interpenetration of opposites" in the
context* of theology.  Such a search yields a rhetorical gem from New
Zealand:

* See the final footnote on the final page (249) of Brimblecombe's thesis:

³ The Latin word contexo means to interweave, join, or braid together.

A check of the Online Eymology Dictionary supports this assertion:

context 1432, from L. contextus "a joining together," orig. pp. of contexere "to weave together," from com- "together" + textere "to weave" (see texture).

See also Wittgenstein on "theology as grammar" and "context-sensitive"
grammars as (unlike Simon's reductive process) "noncontracting"-- Log24,
April 16, 2007: Happy Birthday, Benedict XVI.

Background from 1947: