The All is an Egg

An egg has a hen’s way to produce another egg. This essay has no intention of reducing all the facets of human knowledge to a metaphor of one very common item. Instead the egg is used as a focus because of its apparent simplicity, to elaborate from thereon towards the more complicated issue of offering a new synthesis for the fragmentized human knowledge and skills.The logarithmic growth of our knowledge has stimulated people to specialize in one particular field, thus causing a further growth of knowledge and compartmentalization. The current system encourages people to know everything about one thing and almost nothing about the rest. The so called ivory tower mentality among scientists is one manifestation of this attitude or, on a more mundane level, the refusal of a cameraman on a film set to replace the empty batteries of his camera because that job has to be done by an electrician. Both examples indicate the power of a socially induced conditioning against knowing or doing something that lies beyond one’s very narrowly defined field of competence.This essay, far from being of an encyclopedic nature, goes back to the foundations of the three main facets of human abstract thinking: science, art and religion. Evolutions and new insights have emerged in all three of them. This essay wants to bring forward the core aspects that link them together and emphasize that those are stronger than the bifurcation points where they seem to clash. Let’s not forget that Einstein has spent half of his life to contest the quantum theory because it apparently clashed with some theorems of his Relativity Theory. It took scientists almost a century to come up with a Grand Unifying Theory that reconciled both. It is my personal hope that this essay could lay out the basics for a new synthesis from where a new paradigm could take hold; a contemporary Philosopher’s Egg.In alchemy the egg stands for the chaos apprehended by the artifex, the prima materia containing the captive world-soul. Out of the egg - symbolized by the round cooking vessel - will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Physis.