The Gordian Knot - "Whither Brute Force or Deft Touch?"

The Gordian Knot -

"Whither Brute Force or Deft Touch?"

by R.E. Slater

Whither brute force

    warrants savage act,

or deft touch may

    thwart one's ends,

is a question for the ages

    asked time and time again.

Some, the wiser, may fall upon

    task with slashing violence,

rather than pull at stubborn stay and twine

    where another, perhaps less wise,

wrest at lashings losing time

    to wind and tide, day with night.

Whither the means,

    or whither the ends,

which directs fated hand

    or mind its errant task,

the act reveals all to all beholding

    the actor deigning to lead.

R.E. Slater

November 1, 2021

rev. Nov 2, 2021

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

* * * * * * * * *

The Gordian Knot

Aug 9, 2021

Shall I Use the Sword to Solve the Gordian Knot?

link to passage

The problem of untying the Gordian knot resisted all attempted solutions until the year 333 B.C., when Alexander the Great - not known for his lack of ambition when it came to ruling Asia - cut through it with a sword.

'Cheat! ' you might cry.

And although you might have been unwise to have pointed it out in Alexander's presence, his method did seem to go against the spirit of the problem.

Surely, the challenge was to solve the puzzle solely by manipulating the knot, not by cutting it.

Yes, life itself is the fiction. And knowing self is that - and cutting life with sword of self, knowledge - is like Alexander's way of solving puzzle.

But being able to solve by patience, perseverance and constant effort to make impossible to possible is way of imagination and fiction!

- Anon

link here

The Alexandrian Solution

https://andreaskluth.org/2010/05/24/the-alexandrian-solution/

A lot of people have a very famous story… wrong.

The story is that of the Gordian Knot and precisely how Alexander the Great loosened it. Most people imagine Alexander slashing the knot with his sword, as pictured above. But he did not.

In the nuance of how he really untied the knot lies hidden a worldview: 

the supremacy of simplicity and elegance over brute force and complexity. 

The true “Alexandrian Solution” was, for example, what Albert Einstein was looking for in his search for a Grand Unified Theory — a formula that was simple enough (!) to explain all of physics.

I’ll give you the background and the nuance of the story in a moment, but first another fist bump to Thomas for reminding us to make the association.

We are, remember, talking about complexity:

• The Gordian Knot is the archetypal metaphor for mind-numbing, reason-defying complexity;

• Alexander’s triumph over the knot is the archetypal metaphor for triumphing over complexity.

Now read on…

I) Background

a) Phrygia

The Gordian Knot was, as the name implies, a knot in a city called Gordium. It was in Phrygia, an ancient kingdom in Anatolia (today’s Turkey).

The Phrygians lived near (and may have been related to) those other Anatolians of antiquity: the Trojans and the Hittites. They were Indo-European but not quite “Greek”. Their mythical kings were named either Gorgias or Midas (and one of the later Midases is the one who had “the touch” that turned everything into gold). Later, they became part of Lydia, the kingdom of Croesus. And then part of the Persian Empire. And then Alexander showed up.

b) The knot

Legend had it that the very first king, named Gorgias, was a farmer who was minding his own business and riding his ox cart. The Phrygians had no leader at that time and consulted an oracle. The oracle told them that a man riding an ox cart would become their king. Moments later, Gorgias parked his cart in the town square. In the right place at the right time. 

So fortuitous was this event and Gorgias’ reign that his son, named Midas, dedicated the ox cart. He did so by tying the cart — presumably by the yoke sticking out from it — to a post.

And he made the knot special. How, we do not know. But Plutarch in his Life of Alexander tells us that it was tied

with cords made of the rind of the cornel-tree … the ends of which were secretly twisted round and folded up within it.

It was a very complicated knot, in other words, and seemed to have no ends by which to untie it.

Lots of people did try to untie it, because the oracle made a second prophesy. As Plutarch said,

Whosoever should untie [the knot], for him was reserved the empire of the world.

II) Alexander, 333 BCE

Alexander, aged 23 and rather ahead of me at that age, arrived in (Persian) Phrygia in 333 BCE. The knot was still there, un-untied.

Alexander had already subdued or co-opted the Greeks, and had already crossed the Hellespont. But he had not yet become divine or conquered Egypt and Persia. All that was to come in the ten remaining years of his short life. And it began with the knot, since he knew the oracle’s prophesy.

Here he his, his sword drawn, approaching the knot:

Did he slash?

No, says Plutarch (ibid,. Vol. II, p. 152, Dryden translation):

Most authors tell the story that Alexander finding himself unable to untie the knot, … cut it asunder with his sword. But … it was easy for him to undo it, by only pulling the pin out of the pole, to which the yoke was tied, and afterwards drawing off the yoke itself from below.

III) Interpretation

I leave it to the engineering wizards among you to re-create the knot as it might have been. But what we seem to have here is a complex pattern that was nonetheless held together by only one thing: the beam.

It was, Einstein might say, like quantum physics and gravity: intimidatingly complex and yet almost certainly reducible to one simple reality.

Alexander, being Great, understood this. He saw through the complexity to the simple elegance of its solution and pulled the peg.

This is how I understand “the Alexandrian Solution.” I intend to look for it in all of my pursuits.