Question: I actually asked you a question from UCLA a couple days ago, but I accidentally hung up, so I couldn't ask a follow-up question. So, I'll try to sneak an extra one in right now.

My question was, involving the Arab Renaissance, which came up with a lot of good conclusions, and discovered some truths, but it was based largely on a translation of Euclid. So, my first question, I guess, was how does starting from a point where you say it's basically asinine, how do you start from that point and arrive at some beautiful conclusions?

LaRouche: Well, first of all, well, it wasn't quite so simple as Euclid. By the Arab Renaissance, we usually mean, at the beginning, we mean the Abassid dynasty, the Abassid Caliphate, which was located in the area which is now called Iraq. This was in a period in which the collapse of Rome, and the progressive degeneration of the Roman Empire of the East, Byzantium, had created a situation in which -- and also with developments in India in the same period, positive developments, radiating from there, culturally -- had produced this Arab Renaissance, and the Arab Renaissance was based on getting every bit of available knowledge from every part of the world that could be gathered, into a great library center, in Baghdad. Right? The Baghdad caliphate.

Then you had the continuation of that, as the Turks moved in. The Turks were taken in first, as enforcers for landlords, which is how the culture was destroyed. But in the process, you had al-Farabi, who was a leading thinker -- very important. And who actually worked on some of the ideas of music which came from the Pythagorean tradition, which is the famous Plato tradition. You had also the great Iranian figure, a physician and philosopher, ibn Sina, otherwise known in Spain as Avicenna, who was a great thinker, and was largely in the Platonic tradition, particularly on the ideas of the soul, things of that sort, very much that.

So, at that point, you had in this part of the world, you had this fusion of the Mosaic tradition, which was then being traced largely from Philo of Alexandria, who was a great influence on the Hebrew tradition, and of course, the Hebrew tradition and the Platonic tradition were actually fused in Christianity in the form of John, the Apostles John and Paul, in particular.

So, all of these forces were playing there, and this continued to radiate around the world, as it did through St. Augustine and his circles in Italy, which then moved into Isidor of Seville, which then moved into the Irish monks. The Irish monks Christianized the Saxons, which was a very difficult thing to do, and then established Charlemagne's system, which was a great reform. And then the Normans killed the Saxons, and there hasn't been a Christian seen in England since.

But in any case... So, this is a long process, in which humanity is humanity, and actually, this is an example of the reason why you have to be optimistic, to be right. Because, humanity is a wonderful thing. Humanity is good, intrinsically good -- if it ever grows up. Or if it ever gets a chance to grow up. The human being is naturally good; not bad, naturally good. But they have growing pains, and if they get through the growing pains successfully, and don't get bad parents, and bad education, they do pretty well. And so this optimistic goodness, of the human spirit, will tend to break free, and express itself in society, wherever the opportunities arise. It's like flowers arising out of the lava, from the volcanic eruption beforehand. Humanity keeps effervescing.

And humanity always goes back, as much as possible, and seeks from the past, the best from the past, and uses it to build the future. That's the character of man.

Now, Euclid is a mixed bag. Euclid was a systematization, an attempt to systematize, and actually castrate -- it's called the eunuch principle. You have a very good geometry by the Pythagoreans, and Thales, and Plato, and so forth, and his collaborators, an excellent geometry, which is a physical geometry, a constructive geometry, with none of this Euclidean nonsense. Along came the castrators, and they removed the testicles from geometry, and they called it Euclid.

Now, in Euclid, in the Heath presentation of the 13 books of Euclid, it's a volume which evolved over a period of time, from some guy, originally Euclid, but it was to systematize, to codify, what had been accomplished in geometry. Now, if you go into the Euclid, and you look at the 10th through 13th books of the Euclid Elements, you find that many people who are strict Aristoteleans, could not understand these last three books, of the elements. And even denounced them, and thought they were false. Whereas the smart ones, the smart people, as I do, will always tell you, start from the 10th through 13th book, on the question of spherical functions, and work backwards, and that is exactly how the original geometry was developed. It was developed from astronomy, and astronomy is what? Astronomy is essentially -- it's not exactly spherical, but as Gauss's principles of curvature, you can compare the tendency of an actual curvature of a system, with a spherical curvature, and that is a typical measure of curvature.

So, the actual ancient people -- remember, for example, Pythagoras referred to Sphaerics, which was actually a name for spherical geometry, which was a name for astronomy. So, actually, the original ideas of geometry came from astronomy, from astronomical calendars, and study of astronomical calendars. This was the idea of universal principle. It came, if you could look up at the sky, and study the behavior of the stellar system, you would derive principles you called universal. You assumed that man somehow was affected by these universal principles which could be seen in the sky. And this developed the original kind of geometry.

So, that in, even the transmission of what's called Euclid's geometry, as treated by people like al-Farabi, in the case of the Abassid heritage, that even there, the elements of the original intention, the original discoveries, are reflected. As we saw in the case of the 15th-Century Renaissance, where a few teachers, young teachers from a center there, educating, started a Renaissance, in terms of ideas. By taking the material from the ancients, the ancient texts, as from, then, they got them mostly from Greece: With the Greek texts, reworking these, were able by constructive approaches to understanding them, to reconstruct much of the knowledge which had been buried over centuries, in these lost works.

And that has happened again and again.

Look, what I'm doing, what you guys are doing, with Gauss, is exactly that. We had a great scientific revolution, called the Renaissance: This was typified by Brunelleschi; typified by Nicholas of Cusa, who was the great theoretician of this experimental measurement in modern science; and by explicit followers of Cusa's, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Leibniz in particular, and Gauss.

So, despite the destruction of modern science, by the introduction of empiricism, or what is called generically, "reductionism," despite that, that by studying Gauss today--which is why I laid the program out the way I did--by studying Gauss today, you can, now, re-create knowledge, which was essentially the lost knowledge for most people who thought they were scientists, over the recent several centuries, since the introduction of empiricism.

So, that's the way it works. One should be optimistic about this. My view is, that if you gain a sense of personal identity, in the sense that you are mastering something, which opens to you, the minds of some of the greatest thinkers before your time; and find yourself, in a sense, in harmony with them, and find yourself as a person who is continuing that knowledge, to the future, that you're not going to leave people in the abyss of empiricism--their minds in the abyss of empiricism--but, you're going to free their minds to be able to know the truth, and be able to construct the proof, to prove it for themselves, and build a generation of people who are really well-educated: that's, I think, the lesson to be learned from the Arab Renaissance.

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