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We tend to think of numbers as pure, abstract ideas, untouched by the messiness of material things. Numbers underlie science, one of our culture's big enterprises, but they tend to give science its authority, its ability to approach some "truth."
I remember when I first read Oswald Spengler's description of the Classical Greek understanding of numbers. The ancient Greeks thought of numbers as being concrete, definite magnitudes. But later in history, European civilization defined numbers more abstractly, as a relation, a variable, or as a function. Spengler showed how a culture's understanding of number was affected by what was going on in the culture itself. "There is not, and cannot be, number as such" (Spengler, 1922/1987, p. 59).
If numbers themselves are cultural artifacts, then we may think of them as metaphorical, since they translate experiences from one domain to another. In fact, Buckminster Fuller defines numbers as experiences (1975, p. 237). In my search for the ever-present metaphor, I started wondering about the ways that numbers are organized into systems....