wisdom and mathematics?

“[Plato] was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.” Bertrand Russell

I prefer to define mathematics as a profound understanding of the relationships between things, rather than mere quantification. It would then be more acceptible to say a truer wisdom can be had by this practice. To be fair perhaps we should say the same of the other fine disciplines or humanities? Or perhaps that by study of any one of the disciplines the others become more vividly internalized.

Yet, how can we say that mathematics has anything to do with poetry for example? It can hardly be denied that fine literature is in part comprised of verse, which to a varrying degree is a pattern of ideas if not also lingual attributes. Perhaps by recognizing that mathematics provides templates for understanding these textual relationships we can then agree we are in part looking for patterns, likenesses and comparisons when we critique poetry, and thus perhaps formulate a wiser interpretation of the meaning of the words.

This not to say that these few are the sole criteria for establishing a hierarchy of good and bad poetry, though because it is not by mathematics that we will discover virtue necessarily nor a unanimous sense of beauty. These resonances perhaps we are not able ever to discover, nor should we attempt to give synchronicity to literature or any other human endeavor. Perhaps this Spartan aspiration will ever haunt us though, the search for a sublime order of things and human sensibilities. This is the trappings of socialism, that the unity of a people can reach beyond community for transcendence yet only find bondage in totalitarianism.