The Subversively Ironic Joke of the Diotima Principle in Art and Science

In Shakespeare's the Merchant of Venice, Portia, like Mozart's Pamina in the Magic Flute performs a service that is emblematic of dissolving the obscurantism of superstition of symbolic magic of that particular time and era. This recurring principle reverts to all so called mystery religions from time immemorial worship of a infantile belief in the Sibyl in mythology. In every instance great artists have exposed the oligarchic use of "mind control," or perhaps better "below the belt" control.

For Shakespeare the target is the then current Cabalistic (with a capital C) Rosicrucians of the Tudor court. For Mozart it is the ritual of masonic Magick (with the obligatory ending "k.") So too did Cervantes utilize Dulcinea del Toboso as the joke against the Spanish soap opera quality in romantic fantasizing.

As I have attempted to advance from time to time in these pages a rebirth of method of anti symbolic truth seeking reverts always to the classical radical anti oligarchy philosophy embedded in Plato's method of questioning the underlying hypotheses of society's ruling assumptions. So too, properly situated, did Bernhard Riemann's Hypothesen, lead to the undermining later of Bertrand Russell's symbolic (or magical) logic by Riemann's acolyte Gödel.

Just as in Dante Alighieri's Beatrice and Beethoven's Fidelio, so too in Plato's Diotima an overturning of the oligarchy's hold over a superstitious and manipulated audience evolves. Here, as with LaRouche, from the adumbration of what Leibniz held as sufficient reason, does the categorical separation of art from science become inconsequentially meaningless.