What’s the Chinese obsession with numbers all about?

From Euclid’s Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (FTA), or unique prime factorization theorem, we know that any natural number greater than one that is not itself prime can be uniquely identified as a product of primes. The decomposition of a number into (one or more) primes is its canonical representation or standard form.

Through the FTA, arithmetic attains the cultural absolute. Number is comprehended beyond all traditional contingency, as it exists for any competent intelligence whatsoever, human, alien, technological, or yet unimagined. We encounter the basic semantics of the Outside (comprehending all possible codes).

Insofar as numerical notation is constructed in a way that is extraneous to the FTA, we remain Greek. Our number signs fall lamentably short of our arithmetical insight, stammering deep patterns in a rough, ill-formed tongue. Stubbornly and inflexibly, we translate Number into terms that we know deform it, as if its true language was of no interest to us.

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If there’s one thing everybody seems to agree about the history of zero, it’s that it was driven primarily by notational considerations. More specifically, zero was required to enable positional notation. The historical record reinforces this assumption, to such an extent that it becomes apparently obvious, and thus unproblematic.

For instance (grabbing what’s immediately to hand), John D Barrow’s The Book of Nothing organizes its discussion of ‘the Origin of Zero’ by relating how

… the zero sign and a positional significance when reading the value of a symbol, are features that lie at the heart of the development of efficient human counting systems.

Robert Kaplan, when discussing the retardation of Greek arithmetical notation, explains:

… the continuing lack of positional notation meant that [the Greeks] still had no symbol for zero.

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Reaction – even Neoreaction – tends to be hard on Modernity. God knows (so to speak) there are innumerable reasons for that.

If the criterion of judgment is set by the Occident, whether determined through its once dominant faith or its once dominant people, the case against Modernity is perhaps unanswerable. The Western civilization in which Modernity ignited was ultimately combusted by it. From an Occidental Traditionalist perspective, Modernity is a complex and prolonged suicide.

An Ultra-Modernist, who affirms the creative destruction of anything in modernization’s path, assumes an alternative criterion, inherent to Modernity itself. It asks: What had to happen to the West for it to become modern? What was the essential event? The answer (and our basic postulate): Zero arrived.

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