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Filosofía
Slavoj Zizek, On Melancholy
domingo, 5 de mayo de 2013
Slavoj iek. On Melancholy. 2012
En realidad no gira en torno a la melancolía esta colección de divagaciones de Zizek, sino que giran más bien en torno a la ideología, la muerte de Dios y la anomia, y de allí a la interpretación simbólica o desmitificadora del cristianismo, una teodicea negativa. Dios es como un regulador trascendente, hacemos como si existiera (Zizek atina bastante al caracterizar el tipo de fe frecuente en el cristianismo, puesto que muchos cristianos no es tanto que crean en Dios, sino que más bien quieren creer que creen en Dios). Los musulmanes radicales también están atacados por la misma crisis de fe, y sus actos violentos, sus suicidios explosivos, son una especie de apuesta pascaliana resultado de la duda, no de la certidumbre, nos dice. Duda inconsciente, será. Pasa Zizek a una meditación sobre la radical libertad que da al ser humano la falta de sentido del mundo, o (dicho de otro modo) la brutalidad inmoral e inhumana de Dios, evidenciada en el libro de Job... y al final del todo, sí, pasamos a la melancolía y a Freud, "Trauer und Melancholie", a cuenta de la melancolía de la sexualización, la identificación con la identidad sexual prohibida, y la pérdida de Dios. Los homosexuales serían en la lectura de Judith Butler los que persisten en la identificación con el objeto de deseo sin aceptar su pérdida. El melancólico, para Freud, es el que hace rituales de luto por el objeto perdido antes de perderlo. (Es de suponer que porque sabe lo va a perder: aún estamos juntos, pero sabemos que nos tenemos que perder, por eso nos dedicamos, todavía en presencia, a los rituales de la melancolía). La melancolía está de luto no por la perdida del objeto de deseo, sino por la pérdida del deseo hacia el objeto. Al final de todo, nos volvemos hacia Melancholia, de Lars von Trier. Que sí iba sobre el mantenimiento del cristianismo como una ilusión de sentido, una ficción deliberada mantenida como cortesía hacia los demás. Aunque para Zizek no es una ilusión lo que ofrece Justine al final de ese film, sino una invitación a que no nos importe la muerte. Yo matizaría que eso es lo que comunica al espectador, posiblemente, pero no es lo que comunica al niño. El niño necesita la ilusión del consuelo, aunque se le esté educando en cierto modo en la ficcionalidad del mismo—mientras que el espectador y Justine están ya en otra posición. Estamos, más bien.
La mitad de la historia de todo
domingo, 31 de marzo de 2013
La mitad de la historia de todo
Esta es la parte de mi conferencia que me dio tiempo a dar ayer en el congreso de París de la ENN:
The Story behind any Story:
Evolution, Historicity, and Narrative Mapping
José Angel García Landa
Universidad de Zaragoza
"The narratives of the world are numberless"; yet, all stories may be seen as chapters of a single story. Evolutionary approaches to literary and cultural phenomena (E. O. Wilson, Joseph Carroll) have led to a growing awareness that these literary and cultural phenomena are best accounted for within a consilient disciplinary framework. From this consilient standpoint, human modes of communication must be contextualized as situated historical phenomena, and history as such is to be placed within the wider context of the evolution of human societies and of life generally (what is often called "big history"). Using the notions of "narrative mapping" and "narrative anchoring", the present lecture aims to draw from the aforementioned theoretical outlook a series of conclusions relevant to narratology, in particular to the narratological conceptualization of time. Diverse cultural conceptions of big history underpin the production, the reception and the critical analysis of any specific narrative, as well as any narrativizing strategy, in the sense that these conceptions provide both a general ideational background to the experiences depicted in the narratives, and a mental framework in which to situate (e.g. historicize) the narrative genres used in the depiction. Herbert Spencer's philosophical work will be seen through the lens of its narratological significance, as a significant contribution in the development of our own big history, in the narrativization of science, and in the development of a scientific narratology.
—oOo—
Narratology was born with a scientific aspiration to universality. In Aristotle's poetics, philosophy as a knowledge of universals is contrasted to history as a knowledge of individual facts. Any opposition seems to call for a synthesis or mediation, and Aristotle suggested one in his theory of poetry: poetry is more philosophical than history, because it imposes a conceptual order or pattern on the events of human experience and action. The Poetics offers a foundational model for narratology—it is the first formal narratological treatise, besides much else. But in addition to its structural analyses of plot, of discovery, of closure, or of structure, it also contains some pointers relating to the origin of drama, and of mimetic art generally, grounding it on the imitative insticts in human nature. And it can also lay claim, therefore, to taking precedence as the first treatise in cognitive poetics.
Paul Ricoeur pointed out the cognitive importance of emplotment, as first conceived by Aristotle. Emplotment, organizing events into a story, paving the road to a closure, is a prime cognitive move, equal at least in importance to the joining of subject and predicate in a proposition, or to metaphor, which—as Giambattista Vico pointed out—stands at the root of creative thought. There is of course a chapter on metaphor in the Poetics, but the main emphasis falls on the analysis of plot.
Emplotment and narrativity allow us to see, or to establish, the connection in a series of events. Most post-structuralist criticism has been suspicious of such connections, and has deconstructed narrative causality and the unities built by master plotters. As an instance of such criticism I'd like to mention Gary Saul Morson's Narrative and Freedom, a masterful critique of several ills attending the retrospective stance of narrative, and a major contribution to the analysis of hindsight bias, although this term is not used in the book, he calls itbackshadowing. Hindsight bias is the narrative fallacy par excellence, although one might go one step further and argue that narrative is the narrative fallacy par excellence—so entwined with distortions and with illusions are the truths we articulate and the stories we tell, with facts, fictions, omissions and additions being present in almost equal proportions, though not in the same way, in fictional stories and in historical or biographical records.
Unity and unity-finders have been much disparaged since the 1960s, although they no doubt tell part of the truth in the story. Nietzsche's aphorisms and his hermeneutics of suspicion have been much been preferred to the grand philosophical systematics of Hegel, which are largely left unread, at least outside the philosophical field. But the work of unification, unfashionable like romantic fiction, goes on nonetheless, with much work being done behind the back of the deconstructors, changing the very landscape in which we live and think. The unforeseen revolution of Internet communications, unforeseen by the imagination of science-fiction even, is a particularly relevant example. The demise of the Great Narratives was one of the catchphrases of Academia precisely at the time in which the Great Narratives of globalization, electronic communications and relativistic cosmology were asserting their influence in an incontestable way.
As my title suggests, I want to emphasize one such aspect of narrative, its inherent power to provide unification, to connect—in the last analysis, to connect all narratives in a cognitive step which makes sense of the whole of the world we live in. The term "third culture" has become widespread in recent years, associated to E. O. Wilson's notion of consilience—building bridges between the sciences and the humanities, on the basis of cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology. The accounts of "Big History" we can find in the books by David Christian or Fred Spier provide histories of cosmic evolution. Inspired by Jan Smuts's concept of emergence,[1] they set in a wider context the rise of life and of civilization, and provide a scientific context which throws a much-needed light on the present problems of human societies and cultures—especially in the light of the energy crisis, overpopulation, sustainability, and the depletion of the environment. These are the inescapable contexts of both present and future cultural investigations and representations. And these Big Histories make it clear that there is a human story, and a history of the universe, which is the inescapable backdrop to all the stories of mankind, and the soil on which they grow.
There are many directions one can take to go from the many stories to the principle of all stories. One such was the road taken by structuralist critics, the founding fathers of narratology, trying to find the common structural principles of stories, a grammar of stories or a semiotic system accounting for all narratives. Both the central and east European formalists in the early decades of the 20th century and the structuralists from the 60s were retaking Aristotle's project—all narratives answering to common structural principles. Myth criticism as best exemplified in the work of Northrop Frye undertook a similar project—and the insights provided from these perspectives can be usefully rethought from a consilient stance. Joseph Carroll's Darwinian poetics or Brian Boyd's book On the Origin of Stories are only the first steps in this reassessment, which sometimes takes a contentious turn, given that the sociobiological critics stress the limited flexibility of human nature, as against the claims of constructivist critics which tend to see human nature as a blank slate for culture to write on.[2] The sociobiological critics claim that human nature, for all its flexibility, is limited and circumscribed, and tied to our age-long heritage and evolutionary history. The Big Story is especially prominent from this stance, it weighs heavily on the shoulders of the naked and the clothed ape.
Another way to synthesis, from the many to the one, and to science, was provided in the nineteenth century by the philosophy of history (Hegel) and also by evolutionary theory, which set down the conceptual frame for a scientific grounding of all natural phenomena as part of a single big history. Cultural theory, biology, and geology all became historical sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; chemistry, astronomy and physics followed suit in the twentieth century—resulting in narrativization of the Universe, no less.
One of the earliest and most complex theories of evolution was formulated by Herbert Spencer one hundred and fifty years ago. The first edition of his groundbreaking First Principles is from 1862, last revised by the author in 1900. It is somewhat ironic that Spencer is usually regarded today as something of an epigone of Darwin, given that his theory of evolution not only predated the publication of the Origin of Species, in Social Statics (1850): it is also much more complex and wide-encompassing than Darwinism. It is a theory of the global evolution of the universe and its phenomena, not merely a theory of the evolution of living forms, although it certainly takes into account the evolution of living beings, for the details of which Spencer often refers readers to Darwin. He goes much farther in trying to account for the generation of many phenomena, at the physical-mathematical level, at the cosmological level, and also at the level of geology, of biology, psychology, sociology, economics and culture. Clearly Spencer's conception of evolution is much more abstract and general than Darwin's, as it aims to explain a multitude of phenomena which were outside the scope of Darwinian biology. Actually, Darwin does not address the origin of life, not venturing to write on the subject, being as he was too prudent both in scientific terms and in terms of the possible damage to his social life and reputation. Darwin suggests that all living beings descend from one primeval living form, but he does not speculate on the origin of that being, only telling us in pseudo-Biblical language that "life was breathed into it". Darwinism addresses evolution understood as the formation of species and diverse varieties of living beings; evolution means for Darwin (who does not much use the term himself) "descent with modification"; and his celebrated principle of natural selection and the self-organizing emergence of complexity applies only to living beings. But many complex biological phenomena, such as consciousness, are not dealt with by Darwin either, while the evolution of consciousness is central for Spencer.
Spencer's very definition of evolution is more encompassing and ambitious than Darwin's, too ambitious some have said:
1. "Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." (§145; p. 358, italics in the original)
Evolution is the process whereby greater complexity is generated, through the spontaneous integration of natural forces and phenomena. Some examples of this relative integration, at various levels, may be mentioned (2):
- The formation of a planet out of dispersed matter
- The formation of pluricellular beings out of unicellular beings
- The formation of complex societies, unifying dispersed populations.
- The integration of productive and economic systems in a global economy.
I pause to say that these can only be accounted for through narrative, through the kind of storytelling which integrates diverse phenomena into a coherent story of processes and development.
And some instances of the growing heterogeneity which goes along with these unifications:
- The formation of planets with different characteristics, a plurality of worlds, in different positions of the Solar System.
- The diverse forms of pluricellular beings and of anatomical structures, as compared with the relative uniformity of single-celled organisms, or of the first hypothetical primeval organism.
- Different modes of social life, different ecological economies, exploiting a variety of natural resources and landscapes.
- The differentiation of social classes and professions in a nation.
- The global division of work, and the extreme specialization of production allowed by the development of communications.
Although Spencer was not familiar with the Internet or with GATS, the global village, thebusiness niches of the Long Tail, etc., are only a corollary of this law of evolution, once we acknowledge the growing generation of complexity. And he did not know the European Union, either, but he announces it quite explicitly, a century in advance, in the mid-Victorian age, based on the analysis of data and of historical processes, and well before the idea had reached the thoughts of any politician.
Spencer could not deal in any detail with the origin of life and consciousness, but he does situate them within the framework of this general theory of the evolution of complexity out of more basic components. It should be said that although in a more general sense any change, including processes of disintegration and disaggregation, are part of evolution, Spencer considers the latter a contrary process: the growth of integrating and complexifying evolution in certain sections of the Universe may be followed by dissolution, or this may be taking place elsewhere at the same time; this is the result of a tendency to what others have called entropy,[3] a reduction in heterogeneity. Consciousness is, within the scope of Spencer's theory, a phenomenon which is possible only in the context of highly complex living processes, resulting from high heterogeneity. (The materialist and evolutionary theory of consciousness developed some decades later by George Herbert Mead in The Philosophy of the Present is highly consonant with Spenser's thought, and it is tempting to see each of these two theories of complexity in terms of one another).
This global integration of evolutionary processes (resulting from what Mead would call the sociality of physical phenomena), and this notion of consciousness, cannot but culminate in a philosophy of evolution which redefines itself, and accounts for itself, in such terms. Philosophy must needs be a process of integration, and being the highest activity of consciousness, philosophy must conceive of itself in these terms; it must develop an awareness of what it is, that is, what is the status of philosophy considered in the light of overall evolutionary processes. (And Spencer, like Hegel, must be forgiven if these reflections lead to a somewhat circular reflexivity, consciousness being essentially reflexive, or more immodestly to an aggrandizing of their own system within the scale of Being. I for one will not question the accuracy of their self-assessments).
William Whewell's term "consilience", revived of late by E. O. Wilson in his 1998 bookConsilience: The Unity of Knowledge, is not used by Spencer, but he is as clear-sighted and ambitious as Wilson when it comes to the formulation of this as an aim for thought.[4] Without any need to reorient the task of philosophy, Spencer finds consilience presupposed in the very notion of philosophy, which operates under "the tacit implication that Philosophy is completely unified knowledge" (First Principles 484). After a preliminary definition of the task,First Principles sets down the axiomatic bases of knowledge, "Fundamental propositions, or propositions not deducible from deeper ones" and deriving from the very nature of rationality, taking as our data "those components of our intelligence without which there cannot go on the mental processes implied by philosophizing" (484)—and from there we pass to certain basic truths, which for Spencer are "the Indestructibility of Matter" (remember that we are working here within a largely Newtonian paradigm predating Einstein and Bohr) and "The Continuity of Motion", both derived from the more basic principle of "The Persistence of Force"—a notion whose ultimate nature would have to be revised in our universe of quantum fluctuations. Be as it may, Spencer derives other basic principles of physics from these primary axioms: "The Persistence of the Relations among Forces" or the "Uniformity of Law", a necessary consequence of the fact that a Force cannot arise out of nothing nor lapse into nothing. (Present-day cosmology is still grappling with the limits set to these principles, and to our universe, by the Big Bang theory, black holes and baby universes, but of course those lay beyond the Newtonian paradigm of nineteenth-century physics).
The next step in reasoning is that forces which seem to contradict that principle and seem be lost, "are transformed into their equivalents in other forces; or, conversely, that forces which become manifest, do so by the disappearance of pre-existing equivalent forces" (484-5), a principle exemplified in astronomical physics, in common geological phenomena, and in biological processes—for instance, Spencer reminds us of the huge amount of biological or geological forces on earth which result from the transformations of incoming solar radiation.
Other laws derive from the principle of the Persistence of Force, and illustrate in their turn a multitude of physical, biological or neuropsychological phenomena. Thus, the celebrated Law of Minimal Effort, "The law that everything moves along the line of least resistance, or the line of greater traction, or their resultant" (485).[5] It is to be noted that long before Ramón y Cajal or neuroscience, Spencer lays down at this point a bridge between the psychology of the association of ideas and the modern science of neural connections.
3. "A stimulus implies a force added to, or evolved in, that part of the organism which is its seat; while a mechanical movement implies an expenditure or loss of force in that part of the organism which is its seat: implying some tension of molecular state between the two localities. Hence if, in the life of a minute animal, there are circumstances involving that a stimulation in one particular place is habitually followed by a contraction in another particular place—if there is thus a repeated motion through some line of least resistance between these places; what must be the result as respects the line? If this line—this channel—is affected by the discharge—if the obstructive action of the tissues traversed, involves any reaction upon them, deducting from their obstructive power; then a subsequent motion between these two points will meet with less resistance along this channel than the previous motion met with, and will consequently take this channel still more decidedly. Every repetition will further diminish the resistance offered; and thus will gradually be formed a permanent line of communication, differing greatly from the surrounding tissue in respect of the ease with which force traverses it. Hence in small creatures may result rudimentary nervous connexions." (§79, p. 211-12)
The same principle is applied by Spencer to the acquisition of habits, to learning, to the personal association of impressions and memories (before Proustian madeleines).
Another of the principles derived is that of the Rhythm of Movement, the creation of alternance and rhythm out of the composition of forces, repetitions, ondulations, or partial balancing of forces. As a matter of fact, if life exists at all as a form of complex order, it is because physical forces and chemical processes have come to be arranged in a complex and rhythmical way, and because there have come to exist large, complex and long-standing equilibria of forces giving rise to the appropriate ecosystems.
Knowledge of natural phenomena thus rests on a physics grounded in its turn on the principles necessary for the rational understanding of phenomena. The task of philosophy is to elucidate the way in which diverse physical and cosmical phenomena obey a common logic, a "law of cooperation" (which Mead will refer to as the basic sociality of physical phenomena, present at any level from the interaction of forces to the phenomenology of consciousness and cultural dynamics). (Hd 4): "And hence in comprehending the Cosmos as conforming to this law of co-operation, must consist that highest unification which Philosophy seeks" (486)
The law Spencer was looking for, a law accounting for "the continuous redistribution of matter and movement" might be seen realized at least in part in Einstein's theory of relativity, specified in the formula relating energy and matter, e=mc2. Although physicists are still looking for a comprehensive "theory of everything" which accounts for all of the basic forces of the universe under a single explanation.
But, beyond the problem of physical reductionism, a consilient science should account for emergent phenomena; it should be able to explain all phenomena at their own level "in their passage from the imperceptible to the perceptible, and back to the imperceptible." This passage takes place in each of the phenomena of the universe, and also in the universe considered as a whole. The passage from nothing to everything and back to nothing is at once the ultimate expression of the short short story and the most comprehensive evolutionary backdrop to any narrative. It is the history of everything, the gradual and emergent development of all phenomena which is evolution as conceived by Spencer.
I find a fascinating historiographic and narratological dimension in this philosophical project, and one much akin to the contemporary concerns with the natural and ecological contextualization of the whole of human endeavours, for instance in Edward O. Wilson's books Consilience and The Social Conquest of Earth. A philosophy of evolution is necessarily a global theory of the history of the universe, considered in its physical, astronomical, geological and biological aspects. It includes a history of human evolution, although Spencer avoids dealing with the subject in First Principles. This evolutionary conception also provides a framework—a cognitive map, or all-encompassing script—for the narratives of human history: the development of cultures and societies, and of psychological and ideological phenomena. Recently we have had a spate of excellent documentaries popularizing this issue, notably those by Jacques Malaterre, which witness to a growing interest and consciousness on the educated audience about the need to connect cultural history and the history of civilization with an increased awareness of the origins and the ecological significance of the human phenomenon. Anthropology and cultural history find their appropriate perspective within this scope, as does the more specific disciplinary study of psychological, political, economic and ideological phenomena in the various branches of the social sciences and the humanities. Any given phenomenon is understandable, on the one hand, as a manifestation of more basic principles of which it is an emergent expression; on the other, it becomes part of a wider interactional context. Thus, the history of specific phenomena, "in their appearance and until their disappearance", is rooted on a wider history, the comprehensive framework of all effective histories. As to possible worlds or imagined histories, they are best approached initially as culturally situated fictions in the highly specific context of human communications.
All this has a narrative dimension, and many implications for the theory of narrative. In analyzing a story's narrative anchoring, we show how individual narratives are not a narratologically simple phenomenon; rather, they are made up of many narrative layers and structures: processes, anecdotes, previous histories, archetypes, interpretive frames and scripts, virtual plots and sideshadows. All of these find an anchoring in the narrative in question which articulates, uses or invokes them, but they can only do so through the link provided by the general narrativity of reality—that relational character of all evolutionary phenomena, the all-encompassing frame of temporal development, which can be conceptually grasped by evolutionary and consilient "Big Histories" such as the one articulated by Spencer. The many ways such big histories or contextualizing narrative frames are invoked or negotiated in any specific encounter or discourse event should provide much matter for narratological analysis; here I can only focus on my Spencer example as an instance of emergent narrativity in the context of evolutionary philosophy.
Every time a narrative presupposes a given world view, a given theory of reality, or a practical assumption of the way things are or are not, it is anchoring itself in such a narrative understanding of reality—or if it does not do so explicitly, we must bring that anchoring to light in order to make sense of it. This is also the case every time a "grand narrative" is taken to be the background of lived or narrated experience—grand narratives such as the spread of civilization, progress, globalization, consumption, rural exodus and the development of cities, dreams of utopia—or conversely, grand narratives of crisis, impending catastrophes, ecological doom, overpopulation and global warming. Perhaps we need an updated Theory of Myths, a contemporary and historicised Anatomy of Criticism, to help us contextualize and historicize these narratives of Spring, Summer, Crisis, and Winter which are at work structuring our discourse every time we do not hold our peace.[6] Michel Butor said about narrative: "it is a phenomenon which goes significantly beyond the domain of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our apprehension of reality."[7] And indeed our understanding of reality is a narrative one; reality is narrative in nature because it is evolutionary; the human symbolic world is made of words and of the stories we build with them, but there is a perceptual grounding both in words and in stories which ensures that our virtual world of symbols is not arbitrarily imposed on the real world.[8] One may say that reality is a narrative, literally so, from the moment we have a brain to understand it.
There is an intuitive cognitive projection of complex narrative frames in everyday experience, as well as in the production of narrative discourses and in their interpreters and critics. Elaborate intellectual articulations of this complexity, such as the one we find in Spencer's philosophy, build on this general narrativity of our experience and communication. We perceive the world as an ongoing process of transformation and change, integrated in its complexity and diversity, made up of analogies between temporal processes and obeying to observable regularities. The analogy between the cycles of the day and of the year, the course of human life, and stories of creation and apocalypse is only one prominent example.
The Universe, universal evolution, can be conceived, as suggested by Spencer's philosophy, as an all-encompassing narrative (or narrable) process, as a complex multitude of narrative processes rather, framed within one another, embedded or sequenced in ways familiar to narratologists; processes which are classifiable or understandable through their relation to the whole. History as usually taught, that is, the history of civilizations, is only a small chapter in this big history of mankind, the history of humanization, of the origin of language, the history of the dozen extinct species of humans and proto-humans which preceded us or were driven to extinction, as happens even today to the primitive populations, cultural isolates, still surviving in their ancestral mode of life. The Big History of mankind was for Darwin a "grand sequence of events" which should be explained by evolutionary biology. And sociobiologists like E. O. Wilson have done their best to show how our story is not just our story—it is our nature, stamped in our being. The evolutionary perspective shows just to what extent our very bodies and minds are living narratives, structured by embodied history, if only we can read them.
Darwin's perspective was grand, but Spencer's is grander, and much more closely argued than Nietzsche's vision of the Eternal Return. The history of life and consciousness is only a chapter, our chapter, in the history of physical and chemical processes. And Spencer conceives the role of his evolutionary philosophy (his System of Synthetic Philosophy as he called it) as a consilient perspective on reason and knowledge, on the natural and human sciences, a narrative explanation of all possible phenomena in nature (and culture), from their emergence (at the beginning of the story) to their disappearance, as nothing is eternal:
5. "If [Philosophy] begins its explanations with existences that already have concrete forms, then, manifestly, they had preceding histories, or will have succeding histories, or both, of which no account is given. Whence we saw it to follow that the formula sought, equally applicable to existences taken singly and in their totality, must be applicable to the whole history of each and to the whole history of all. This must be the ideal form of a Philosophy, however far short of it the reality may fall." (First Principles§186; p. 486)
The Universe is a complex process, in which Spencer distinguishes a primary process of evolution, an "integration of matter and dissipation of movement" as he puts it, and secondary processes accompanying it, a composite evolution—"The primary re-distribution of Matter and Motion is accompanied by secondary re-distributions" (§186, p. 487), re-distributions resulting in the generation of complexity, not in the integration of everything into a simple universal unity. Separate wholes divided into parts are created, and there are indirect processes of integration making these parts mutually dependent, even as they become differentiated—and so reality unfolds into complex emergent levels,[9] even as it maintains an essential unity:
6. "From this primary re-distribution we were led on to consider the secondary re-distributions, by inquiring how there came to be a formation of parts during the formation of a whole. It turned out that there is habitually a passage from homogeneity to heterogeneity, along with the passage from diffusion to concentration. While the matter composing the Solar System has been assuming a denser form, it has changed from unity to variety of distribution. Solidification of the Earth has been accompanied by a progress from comparative uniformity to extreme multiformity. In the course of its advance from a germ to a mass of relatively great bulk, every plant and animal also advances from simplicity to complexity. The increase of a society in numbers and consolidation has for its concomitant an increased heterogeneity both of its political and its industrial organization. And the like holds of all super-organic products—Language, Science, Art, and Literature." (§187; p. 488)
In any kind of phenomena, as Spencer puts it in a necessarily general formulation, we pass from a relatively diffuse, uniform and indeterminate structure to the creation of multiple, concentrated, complex and mutually integrated forms. Unless, that is, these complex forms enter a process of decay and dissolution. It is not by chance, Spencer asserts, that all disciplines of knowledge and all phenomena can be subsumed unter this all-encompassing law of evolution. It is, rather, the other way round: the disciplines we use to know and classify reality are "mere conventional groupings, made to facilitate the arrangement and acquisition of knowledge" but their ultimate object is the same, cosmic evolution—so "there are not several kinds of Evolution having certain traits in common, but one Evolution going on everywhere after the same manner" (p. 490). As a matter of fact, the labour of science is to show the common grounding of the evolution of all phenomena, once we have come to know the general principle of reality as manifested in the elementary laws of physics governing matter and energy—that is, in the primary effects of the Force which has generated the universe:
7. "Analysis reduces these several kinds of effect to one kind of effect; and these several kinds of uniformity to one kind of uniformity. And the highest achievement of Science is the interpretation of all orders of phenomena, as differently conditioned manifestations of this one kind of effect, under differently-conditioned modes of this one kind of uniformity" (§194, p. 498).
Spencer's theory of complexification and dissolution has an interesting aspect related to observability and to information processing which might be further explored, though not at this point. Still, we may note in passing that the difference established here between Evolution and Dissolution is relative to the observing subject. As life and consciousness are in themselves complex phenomena, and the necessary basis on which theories of evolution must rest, the very phenomenological constitution of the subject matter leads per se to conceive of the subject matter directionally. Complexification is positively evaluated, it is a "rising" phase of evolution, while disintegration is negatively evaluated—although, if we imaginatively suppress the material basis of our cognitive viewpoint, it's all the same process of evolution, and as a matter of fact both evolution and dissolution fall in Spencer's theory under the same explanation, as effects resulting from the same causes, as a continuum in fact. We may argue that the mere fact that Spencer uses two different terms, evolution as against dissolution, is invidiously "teleological", "directionalist," "anthropic" and other nasty words fron the standpoint of late 20th-century evolutionism. Nonetheless, his theory is quite self-consciously deliberate on this point: we live in a world of objects—as a matter of fact subjects have to be objects before they are subjects—and therefore we are keenly interested in the formation of objects, and in their dissolution—in their biography we might say, because we [subjects indeed!] are subject to the same law of evolution and dissolution which governs other objects.[10] Our knowledge is narrative knowledge because it is not neutral with respect to the structure and history of the universe—the structure of our knowledge is of a piece with the evolutionary nature of the universe itself. This is perhaps the key sentence of my talk, so I will repeat it for emphasis: Our knowledge is narrative knowledge because it is not neutral with respect to the structure and history of the universe—the structure of our knowledge is of a piece with the evolutionary nature of the universe itself. Understanding of narrative is therefore an essential cognitive tool in order to understand the universe and evolution. But understanding the universe and evolution, our evolution, is an essential cognitive tool in order to understand narrative.
[1] Jan Smuts proposed the holistic conception of cosmic evolution as an organized series of emergent systems.
[2] See some of the arguments against evolutionary criticism and neuroaesthetics in Tallis (2012).
[3] Rudolf Clausius, Ludwig Boltzmann,etc.
[4] For some narratological remarks on Whewell, Wilson and consilience, see my paper "Consiliencia y retrospección."
[5] Alfred J. Lotka and other scientists used a version of this principle in order to extend Darwin's concept of natural selection to physics and cosmic evolution. Lotka's maximum power principle was proposed by Howard Odum as an additional law of thermodynamics governing the ecology of ecosystems (see Odum 1994; Odum and Pinkerton 1955).
[6] Big history should provide us with tools for rethinking both the modes of repetition and of static time (habit, laws, customs, etc.) and the modes of crisis and event (transformation, conflict, epiphany), etc.—historicizing them in a new light. More generally speaking, Frye's poetics of myth is in for an appreciative revaluation from the present standpoint of present-day evolutionary and cognitive poetics.
[7] Michel Butor, "Le roman comme recherche" in Essais sur le roman, 7.
[8] See Benjamin K. Bergen, Louder than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning (Basic Books, 2012).
[9] The concept of emergence or holism are not explicitly stated by Spencer, although it can easily be seen they are ready to emerge. It is nonetheless curious that in Holism and Evolution (1926) Jan Smuts refers to Spencer only marginally.
[10] I would modify, however, the way in which Spencer formulates the relationship between evolution and dissolution, to show that the mutual involvement of processes of integration and of decay is much closer than his formulation would seem to suggest. I add the italicised words: "All things are growing and / or decaying, accumulating matter and / or wearing away, integrating and / or disintegrating" (§95, p. 251).
Martin Heidegger
lunes, 18 de marzo de 2013
Martin Heidegger
By Bernard Radloff. From Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. Irena Makaryk. (U of Toronto Press, 1993).
HEIDEGGER, Martin. (b. Germany, 1889-d. 1976). Philosopher. A student of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger emerged from and transformed the phenomenological movement and the hermeneutic tradition of continental philosophy. He taught at Marburg (1923-8) and Freiburg im Breisgau (1928-44) and was briefly rector of Freiburg University (1933-4). Heidegger's work has influenced much contemporary thought: existentialists (Jean-Paul Sartre), Marxists and poststructuralists (Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard) have taken up his critique of modern society, technology and the 'logocentrism' of metaphysics. Ontological hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricœur) owes much to Heidegger's understanding of language and history. See also phenomenological criticism, Marxist criticism, post-structuralism).
Heidegger's first studies were theological and through many transformations the question of the relation of the logos to the divine remained central to all his work. By his own account, the central question of Heidegger's thought is the question of being: what does it mean to say that a human being, a thing, a work is, each in its own way in being? Heidegger's investigation of this question—which is both 'systematic' and 'historical'—calls for the radical dismantling and recovery on a more primordial ground of the entire metaphysical tradition, from its Greek beginnings to its consummation in and dissolution into the technological practices and metadiscourses of our time. The question of art, in turn, is implicated in the being-question and Heidegger thus calls for the abandonment of the metaphysical premises of aesthetics.
One may distinguish at least six major phases in his thought directly or indirectly pertinent to an exploration of the arts: (1) Sein und Zeit [Being and Time 1927] and the lectures on mood —Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (1929-30)—the first remains the starting point for any reflection on a 'Heideggerian' literary theory: (2) 'The Origin of the Literary Work of Art' (1936) and the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis 1936-38), its systematic context; (3) the Hölderlin lectures (volumes 39, 52 and 53 in the complete edition); (4) Heidegger's recovery of Friedrich Nietzsche's aesthetics (The Will to Power as Art 1936-7); (5) the late essays on language and poetry collected in On the Way to Language (1959); (6) essays on technology and the fate of art and thought in the in technological era (Discourse on Thinking 1959; 'The Question Concerning Technology' 1953). The question of art as it is posed within the horizon of technology is the essential source of Heidegger's reflection on art. The arts, in Heidegger's estimate, have the potential of bringing to light and 'in-corporating' the dynamic event of the arrival and departure of beings into being in the face of a technological modelling of all that is as static, 'finished' products on line and on call.
Sein und Zeit (1927), Heidegger's first major work, has as its goal the analysis of the structure of human being taken as a clue to the investigation of the meaning—the different possible senses—of being. Human being, or Da-sein, is understood as openness-to-being: Dasein is the site where beings manifest themselves. The analysis of language, truth and 'emotion' carried out in this work, while far removed from the specific concerns of literary theory, nonetheless offers the bassi for a radical reappraisal of literature (Corngold; Marshall). The language of poetry has traditionally been regarded as being without 'truth value'. In the formulation of I.A. Richards, it is composed of 'pseudo-statements' which are parasitical (J.L. Austin) upon 'normal' language use: given that poetic devices have a merely decorative function without cognitive insight, the chief 'value' of poetry finally resolves itself into its ability to communicate sincerely the emotion of the speaker. This account rests on the assumptions that the pre-eminent form of language use is the propositional schema of the statement and that truth is a property of the proposition.
In deconstructing this metaphysical doctrine, Heidegger allows that the origin of truth is not the proposition but the disclosure of the things themselves (See *deconstruction). For in order for a statement to say truely or falsely about something, thus corresponding or failing to correspond to it, the thins must already be manifest. Truth as the openness of manifestation, as the 'unhidenness' of beings (the Greek aletheia), is the condition of the 'truth' of the statement. The statement, moreover, is just one, derivative way in which things can be disclosed and thus become meaningful. What Heidegger calls *discourse (die Rede)—understood as the articulation or 'jointedness' of the meaningfulness of Dasein's being in the word—articulates itself more primordially in other forms of disclosure—for example, in action, in silence and in art works. The power of literature to disclose, therefore, cannot be judged by the criterion of the proposition. The truth of the artwork ultimately rests on its power to found a structure of meaning or 'world'. Propositional language-use makes statements about aspects of the alreayd founded and is in this sense less primordial than the linguistic work.
Inasmuch as Heidegger deconstructs the metaphysics of subjectivity he also distances himself from the long-standing aesthetic problems associated with the concept of 'aesthetic emotions' and attempts to ground the nature of 'emotion' in the fundamental structure of Dasein. Human being is always open—and at the same time closed—to beings; we are always already prereflectively disposed to our being in the world as a whole. Disposition (die Befindlichkeit), which opens the whole of what is to us to disclose and conceal our world, expresses itself through different ways of being attuned (die Stimmung) to and at one with things. Emotions arise out of our being attuned, out of the rhythm of our involvement with things. Heidegger argues that the 'subject' in its self-consciousness and the 'objective' world of 'facts' are equally derivative abstractions from the unitary structure of a given rhythm. In Heidegger's estimation, literary works (as well as other art forms) play an essential role in communicationg attunements or moods. The work discloses the meaningful whole of a set of relations. In effect, it manifests the possibilities for being of a fictional world by giving expression to the governing moods which modulate the work to attune the different modes of being presented in it—the being of humans, of nature, of the diviniti3es—to each other. The modes of attunement of the 'chain of being', as presented in a literary work, would correspond in some respect to the traditional plot forms whivch developed in the course of literary history. By the same measure, tropes articulate the interconnectedness and mutual sympathy of different modes of being on the microlevel of the work: hence, Dylan Thomas's 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, / Drives my green age' gathers the human, organic and inorganic into one articulated whole.
In later works (in his Hölderlin lectures), Heidegger argues that artworks have the potential to inaugurate, as well as to structure and communicate, fundamental attunements; their disclosive power is therefore more primordial than that of rational discourse, for reason always operates within a horizon of disclosure opened up by an attunement. Every attunement is historical, not merely in that a certain 'Zeitgeist' agitates an era, but that the basic, prereflective understanding inherent in an attunement establishes the rhythm of the interrelatedness of beings, the how of their manifestation, and that this rhythm of manifestation inaugurates what we call a 'period' of history. 'Renaissance melancholy', 'Romantic agony', and the stylistic period of art history, for example, may thus be read as conceptualizations of an attunement to beings as a whole. The same goes for current attempts to define *postmodernism by describing its characteristic mood (is it boredom? or panic?).
Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art' (1936), his ifrst major essay dedicated entirely to the question of art, is central to his development of the question of being, die Seinsfrage. While the 'Origin' does not deal with the issue of the meaning of technology, it is within the horizon of this question that the essay has to be understood to be made fruitful for us. Two key questions are posed. (1) Why art? What necessity for this kind of event and this kind of being in the technological epoch? (2) Why the artwork? What 'originates' the work and in what sense is the work itself an origin?
In his analysis of 'world' in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger begins with a consideration of equipment and its use. The being of equipment, of a tool such as a hammer, for example, is circumscribed by its serviceability and fulfils this being when it unobstrusively 'disappears' into the work-context where it is serviceable. The particular world, moreover, which gives the use of the tool in its immediate work-context its 'rationale', also withdraws from view as long as tools function without breakdown. As Heidegger's late discussions of technology will propose, the smooth frictionless functioning of equipment totalities is the telos of the technological ordering of the modern 'world'. By 'world,' however, Heidegger ultimately understands the event, the open horizon of meaningfulness which constitutes the wherefore and why of technological mastery. 'World' in this dynamic sense is dissimulated by the functioning of the system of production because it aims at presenting all that is as available (or unavailable) stock. Whereas equipment disappears into its functioning, and becomes the function of an equipmental context, art has the power to 'save' the phenomena by allowing each thing to come into its own and shine forth as that which it is. The artwork acts as a kind of midwife to manifestation, which is to say, to the emergence of truth; its truth-potential is greater than that of equipment in the rank order of beings because it allows the things to be—to come into their own—more fully. In the late essays collected in On the Way to Language Heidegger allows that it is ultimately the essence of language as 'saying' (die Sage) which calls upon things to show, to 'own' themselves as that which they are. The structure of the artwork, moreover, manifests the world-as-event, bringing it out of the concealment into which it is cast by the opacity of technological functioning. In this way, by bringing a world to light, and by saving the phenomena from becoming transparent functions and weightless simulacra of themselves, art becomes necessary to the manifestation of the being of beings.
The artwork comprehends the structure of an event which includes the artist (who comes into being through the work) and the 'audience' (die Bewharenden—the 'preservers')—which 'preserves' the work by letting the work happen, put itself to work, in their lives. Only in a derivative sense, therefore, is the work an object of aesthetic contemplatin defined by its formal qualities. In Heidegger's estimation, the object-being of art, which is inscribed by cultural critique, institutionalization and the economics of the art industry, is a relatively static representation and derivation of its work-being. But neither is the literary work, for example, a '*text' understood as a subsystem of signifiers fading away at the edges, as it were, into the context of 'writing in general'. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) The work has its own, unique self-subsistence and shines forth without the limits set by its form. The self-subsistence of the work, which withdraws it from the grasp of conceptuality, is what Heidegger calls 'earth.' The work unites in a fruitful strife the intelligibility of a world and the self-seclusion and withdrawal of earth. The ways in which a historical earth and world are attuned to each other gives the work its unique structure. It is precisely as this unique 'thing' that the work works and it works by enacting and incorporating the event of the emergence of beings. But emergence into manifestation is itself the primordial sense of 'truth.' Hence the origin of the work is the happening of truth, inasmuch as it incrporates itself in a being. With this incorporation, the work itself becomes an origin: for just as a sculpture, one of Henry Moore's 'Reclining Figures' for example, creates its own space, so the work opens up a new site, and new possibilities for being emerge from the rhythm it establishes in the midst of beings. The work 'legislates' by setting the measure for beings by overthrowing conventional ways of seeing to found a new law.
Broadly speaking, Heidegger's explication and 'mystical' reflections on Hölderlin may be considered as a more concrete working out of the conditions of authentic community and historicity first broached in Being in Time. The lectures devoted to this poet mark a crucial turning in Heidegger's thought: for example, the potential of art will be unrealized and the work remain a truncated fragment as long as the earth does not become a homeland (Heimat) to its peoples. The homeland has nothing to do with the modern nation-state, for this collective entity is conditioned by the metaphysical tradition beyond which Heidegger seeks to go. The homeland rather is as the healing whole of the mutual attunement of a people and their earth. This attunement realizes itself in the festival when the wholeness of the homeland sends itself to humanity in the guise of the messengers (the gods) of the holy. The poet receives these messengers and incorporates their message in the work ('Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry').
The seemingly hermetic character of Heidegger's encounter with Hölderlin apparently offers no way, no methodology, which might guide us toward the 'same' goal or insight. Hence the frustration of many commentators (de Man, Fynsk). Yet Heidegger would argue that his approach to Hölderlin is as rigorously phenomenological (although in a transformed sense) as his description of Dasein in Sein und Zeit. In fact, it can be argued that Heidegger's way to the things themselves, inlcuding the poem, cannot be a methodology. In section 77 of theBeiträge, entitled 'Sätze über "die Wissenschaft"' ('Statements Concerning Science'), Heidegger takes issue with the premises of the modern sciences (die Wissenschaft includes the human as well as the natural sciences). Heidegger does not consider science—and thus also literary theory and criticism to the extent that they aspire to formulate a methodology and become systematic—as a form of knowledge, but rather as the derivative institutionalization of a knowledge of of the truth (the manifestation) of beings. Hence every attempt to formulate a methodological approach to poetry would exclude itself from the truth of poetry (which does not mean that a methodology could not ascertain much that is correct). Literary theory predetermines the totality of its object area or field as already known in advance. Its investigations amount to determinations of the correctness or incorrectness of statements within the field of the given. It is precisely this presupposition, that poetry belongs to the already-given, which Heidegger questions (poetry is rather the radical overthrown of the given if it 'is'—in being [as origin]—at all). Confirmed in its object-being, on the other hand, poetry ceases to be poetry and becomes 'literature'; but with the progressive triumph and pre-eminence of methodology ('theory') over its subject area, even the object-being of the work implodes—it becomes 'text.' Defined as a cultural object or an ideological structure, as an expression of the artist or as a formal system, the work is not in being as a work but merely makes itself available in some derivative objectification or function of itself and the general economy which circumscribes it. A 'reform' of method, moreover, cannot change this state of affairs, because what counts methodologically is the production of results, not the essential truth of its subject. A turn in our relation to poetry, Heidegger maintains, is only possible within the horizon of a fundamentally new attunement to the whole of what is: only when we cease to think primarily in categories of production and consumption can poetry come into its own again. While we cannot will such a turn to come about, a turn in our attunement to beings can 'overcome' us insofar as we are open to the mystery of the withdrawal of beings—which postmodernism experiences as the implosion of phenomena—from the vice-grip of technological calculation.
Primary sources
HEIDEGGER, Martin. (b. Germany, 1889-d. 1976). Philosopher. A student of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger emerged from and transformed the phenomenological movement and the hermeneutic tradition of continental philosophy. He taught at Marburg (1923-8) and Freiburg im Breisgau (1928-44) and was briefly rector of Freiburg University (1933-4). Heidegger's work has influenced much contemporary thought: existentialists (Jean-Paul Sartre), Marxists and poststructuralists (Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard) have taken up his critique of modern society, technology and the 'logocentrism' of metaphysics. Ontological hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricœur) owes much to Heidegger's understanding of language and history. See also phenomenological criticism, Marxist criticism, post-structuralism).
Heidegger's first studies were theological and through many transformations the question of the relation of the logos to the divine remained central to all his work. By his own account, the central question of Heidegger's thought is the question of being: what does it mean to say that a human being, a thing, a work is, each in its own way in being? Heidegger's investigation of this question—which is both 'systematic' and 'historical'—calls for the radical dismantling and recovery on a more primordial ground of the entire metaphysical tradition, from its Greek beginnings to its consummation in and dissolution into the technological practices and metadiscourses of our time. The question of art, in turn, is implicated in the being-question and Heidegger thus calls for the abandonment of the metaphysical premises of aesthetics.
One may distinguish at least six major phases in his thought directly or indirectly pertinent to an exploration of the arts: (1) Sein und Zeit [Being and Time 1927] and the lectures on mood —Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (1929-30)—the first remains the starting point for any reflection on a 'Heideggerian' literary theory: (2) 'The Origin of the Literary Work of Art' (1936) and the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis 1936-38), its systematic context; (3) the Hölderlin lectures (volumes 39, 52 and 53 in the complete edition); (4) Heidegger's recovery of Friedrich Nietzsche's aesthetics (The Will to Power as Art 1936-7); (5) the late essays on language and poetry collected in On the Way to Language (1959); (6) essays on technology and the fate of art and thought in the in technological era (Discourse on Thinking 1959; 'The Question Concerning Technology' 1953). The question of art as it is posed within the horizon of technology is the essential source of Heidegger's reflection on art. The arts, in Heidegger's estimate, have the potential of bringing to light and 'in-corporating' the dynamic event of the arrival and departure of beings into being in the face of a technological modelling of all that is as static, 'finished' products on line and on call.
Sein und Zeit (1927), Heidegger's first major work, has as its goal the analysis of the structure of human being taken as a clue to the investigation of the meaning—the different possible senses—of being. Human being, or Da-sein, is understood as openness-to-being: Dasein is the site where beings manifest themselves. The analysis of language, truth and 'emotion' carried out in this work, while far removed from the specific concerns of literary theory, nonetheless offers the bassi for a radical reappraisal of literature (Corngold; Marshall). The language of poetry has traditionally been regarded as being without 'truth value'. In the formulation of I.A. Richards, it is composed of 'pseudo-statements' which are parasitical (J.L. Austin) upon 'normal' language use: given that poetic devices have a merely decorative function without cognitive insight, the chief 'value' of poetry finally resolves itself into its ability to communicate sincerely the emotion of the speaker. This account rests on the assumptions that the pre-eminent form of language use is the propositional schema of the statement and that truth is a property of the proposition.
In deconstructing this metaphysical doctrine, Heidegger allows that the origin of truth is not the proposition but the disclosure of the things themselves (See *deconstruction). For in order for a statement to say truely or falsely about something, thus corresponding or failing to correspond to it, the thins must already be manifest. Truth as the openness of manifestation, as the 'unhidenness' of beings (the Greek aletheia), is the condition of the 'truth' of the statement. The statement, moreover, is just one, derivative way in which things can be disclosed and thus become meaningful. What Heidegger calls *discourse (die Rede)—understood as the articulation or 'jointedness' of the meaningfulness of Dasein's being in the word—articulates itself more primordially in other forms of disclosure—for example, in action, in silence and in art works. The power of literature to disclose, therefore, cannot be judged by the criterion of the proposition. The truth of the artwork ultimately rests on its power to found a structure of meaning or 'world'. Propositional language-use makes statements about aspects of the alreayd founded and is in this sense less primordial than the linguistic work.
Inasmuch as Heidegger deconstructs the metaphysics of subjectivity he also distances himself from the long-standing aesthetic problems associated with the concept of 'aesthetic emotions' and attempts to ground the nature of 'emotion' in the fundamental structure of Dasein. Human being is always open—and at the same time closed—to beings; we are always already prereflectively disposed to our being in the world as a whole. Disposition (die Befindlichkeit), which opens the whole of what is to us to disclose and conceal our world, expresses itself through different ways of being attuned (die Stimmung) to and at one with things. Emotions arise out of our being attuned, out of the rhythm of our involvement with things. Heidegger argues that the 'subject' in its self-consciousness and the 'objective' world of 'facts' are equally derivative abstractions from the unitary structure of a given rhythm. In Heidegger's estimation, literary works (as well as other art forms) play an essential role in communicationg attunements or moods. The work discloses the meaningful whole of a set of relations. In effect, it manifests the possibilities for being of a fictional world by giving expression to the governing moods which modulate the work to attune the different modes of being presented in it—the being of humans, of nature, of the diviniti3es—to each other. The modes of attunement of the 'chain of being', as presented in a literary work, would correspond in some respect to the traditional plot forms whivch developed in the course of literary history. By the same measure, tropes articulate the interconnectedness and mutual sympathy of different modes of being on the microlevel of the work: hence, Dylan Thomas's 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, / Drives my green age' gathers the human, organic and inorganic into one articulated whole.
In later works (in his Hölderlin lectures), Heidegger argues that artworks have the potential to inaugurate, as well as to structure and communicate, fundamental attunements; their disclosive power is therefore more primordial than that of rational discourse, for reason always operates within a horizon of disclosure opened up by an attunement. Every attunement is historical, not merely in that a certain 'Zeitgeist' agitates an era, but that the basic, prereflective understanding inherent in an attunement establishes the rhythm of the interrelatedness of beings, the how of their manifestation, and that this rhythm of manifestation inaugurates what we call a 'period' of history. 'Renaissance melancholy', 'Romantic agony', and the stylistic period of art history, for example, may thus be read as conceptualizations of an attunement to beings as a whole. The same goes for current attempts to define *postmodernism by describing its characteristic mood (is it boredom? or panic?).
Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art' (1936), his ifrst major essay dedicated entirely to the question of art, is central to his development of the question of being, die Seinsfrage. While the 'Origin' does not deal with the issue of the meaning of technology, it is within the horizon of this question that the essay has to be understood to be made fruitful for us. Two key questions are posed. (1) Why art? What necessity for this kind of event and this kind of being in the technological epoch? (2) Why the artwork? What 'originates' the work and in what sense is the work itself an origin?
In his analysis of 'world' in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger begins with a consideration of equipment and its use. The being of equipment, of a tool such as a hammer, for example, is circumscribed by its serviceability and fulfils this being when it unobstrusively 'disappears' into the work-context where it is serviceable. The particular world, moreover, which gives the use of the tool in its immediate work-context its 'rationale', also withdraws from view as long as tools function without breakdown. As Heidegger's late discussions of technology will propose, the smooth frictionless functioning of equipment totalities is the telos of the technological ordering of the modern 'world'. By 'world,' however, Heidegger ultimately understands the event, the open horizon of meaningfulness which constitutes the wherefore and why of technological mastery. 'World' in this dynamic sense is dissimulated by the functioning of the system of production because it aims at presenting all that is as available (or unavailable) stock. Whereas equipment disappears into its functioning, and becomes the function of an equipmental context, art has the power to 'save' the phenomena by allowing each thing to come into its own and shine forth as that which it is. The artwork acts as a kind of midwife to manifestation, which is to say, to the emergence of truth; its truth-potential is greater than that of equipment in the rank order of beings because it allows the things to be—to come into their own—more fully. In the late essays collected in On the Way to Language Heidegger allows that it is ultimately the essence of language as 'saying' (die Sage) which calls upon things to show, to 'own' themselves as that which they are. The structure of the artwork, moreover, manifests the world-as-event, bringing it out of the concealment into which it is cast by the opacity of technological functioning. In this way, by bringing a world to light, and by saving the phenomena from becoming transparent functions and weightless simulacra of themselves, art becomes necessary to the manifestation of the being of beings.
The artwork comprehends the structure of an event which includes the artist (who comes into being through the work) and the 'audience' (die Bewharenden—the 'preservers')—which 'preserves' the work by letting the work happen, put itself to work, in their lives. Only in a derivative sense, therefore, is the work an object of aesthetic contemplatin defined by its formal qualities. In Heidegger's estimation, the object-being of art, which is inscribed by cultural critique, institutionalization and the economics of the art industry, is a relatively static representation and derivation of its work-being. But neither is the literary work, for example, a '*text' understood as a subsystem of signifiers fading away at the edges, as it were, into the context of 'writing in general'. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) The work has its own, unique self-subsistence and shines forth without the limits set by its form. The self-subsistence of the work, which withdraws it from the grasp of conceptuality, is what Heidegger calls 'earth.' The work unites in a fruitful strife the intelligibility of a world and the self-seclusion and withdrawal of earth. The ways in which a historical earth and world are attuned to each other gives the work its unique structure. It is precisely as this unique 'thing' that the work works and it works by enacting and incorporating the event of the emergence of beings. But emergence into manifestation is itself the primordial sense of 'truth.' Hence the origin of the work is the happening of truth, inasmuch as it incrporates itself in a being. With this incorporation, the work itself becomes an origin: for just as a sculpture, one of Henry Moore's 'Reclining Figures' for example, creates its own space, so the work opens up a new site, and new possibilities for being emerge from the rhythm it establishes in the midst of beings. The work 'legislates' by setting the measure for beings by overthrowing conventional ways of seeing to found a new law.
Broadly speaking, Heidegger's explication and 'mystical' reflections on Hölderlin may be considered as a more concrete working out of the conditions of authentic community and historicity first broached in Being in Time. The lectures devoted to this poet mark a crucial turning in Heidegger's thought: for example, the potential of art will be unrealized and the work remain a truncated fragment as long as the earth does not become a homeland (Heimat) to its peoples. The homeland has nothing to do with the modern nation-state, for this collective entity is conditioned by the metaphysical tradition beyond which Heidegger seeks to go. The homeland rather is as the healing whole of the mutual attunement of a people and their earth. This attunement realizes itself in the festival when the wholeness of the homeland sends itself to humanity in the guise of the messengers (the gods) of the holy. The poet receives these messengers and incorporates their message in the work ('Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry').
The seemingly hermetic character of Heidegger's encounter with Hölderlin apparently offers no way, no methodology, which might guide us toward the 'same' goal or insight. Hence the frustration of many commentators (de Man, Fynsk). Yet Heidegger would argue that his approach to Hölderlin is as rigorously phenomenological (although in a transformed sense) as his description of Dasein in Sein und Zeit. In fact, it can be argued that Heidegger's way to the things themselves, inlcuding the poem, cannot be a methodology. In section 77 of theBeiträge, entitled 'Sätze über "die Wissenschaft"' ('Statements Concerning Science'), Heidegger takes issue with the premises of the modern sciences (die Wissenschaft includes the human as well as the natural sciences). Heidegger does not consider science—and thus also literary theory and criticism to the extent that they aspire to formulate a methodology and become systematic—as a form of knowledge, but rather as the derivative institutionalization of a knowledge of of the truth (the manifestation) of beings. Hence every attempt to formulate a methodological approach to poetry would exclude itself from the truth of poetry (which does not mean that a methodology could not ascertain much that is correct). Literary theory predetermines the totality of its object area or field as already known in advance. Its investigations amount to determinations of the correctness or incorrectness of statements within the field of the given. It is precisely this presupposition, that poetry belongs to the already-given, which Heidegger questions (poetry is rather the radical overthrown of the given if it 'is'—in being [as origin]—at all). Confirmed in its object-being, on the other hand, poetry ceases to be poetry and becomes 'literature'; but with the progressive triumph and pre-eminence of methodology ('theory') over its subject area, even the object-being of the work implodes—it becomes 'text.' Defined as a cultural object or an ideological structure, as an expression of the artist or as a formal system, the work is not in being as a work but merely makes itself available in some derivative objectification or function of itself and the general economy which circumscribes it. A 'reform' of method, moreover, cannot change this state of affairs, because what counts methodologically is the production of results, not the essential truth of its subject. A turn in our relation to poetry, Heidegger maintains, is only possible within the horizon of a fundamentally new attunement to the whole of what is: only when we cease to think primarily in categories of production and consumption can poetry come into its own again. While we cannot will such a turn to come about, a turn in our attunement to beings can 'overcome' us insofar as we are open to the mystery of the withdrawal of beings—which postmodernism experiences as the implosion of phenomena—from the vice-grip of technological calculation.
BERNHARD RADLOFF
Primary sources
Heidegger, Martin. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65). Frankfurt a/M: Klostermann, 1989.
_____. "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens." In Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens.Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969.
_____. "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking." In Heidegger, Basic Writings. Ed. David farrell Knell. New York: Harper, 1977. 169-92.
_____. "Die Frage nach der Technik." In Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Neske, 1954.
_____. "The Question Concerning Technology." In Heidegger, Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Knell. New York: Harper, 1977. 2873-317.*
_____. Gelassenheit. Pfullingen: Neske, 1959.
_____. Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. H. Freund. New York: Harper, 1966. 43-57. (Trans. of Gelassenheit).
_____. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt - Endlichkeit - Einsamkeit. (Gesamtausgabe, vols. 29-30). 1983.
_____. "Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denkens." In Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen. Frankfurt a/M: Klosterkann, 1983.
_____. Hölderlins Hymne 'Andenken'. (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 52). 1982.
_____. Hölderlins Hymnen 'Germanien' und 'Der Rhein'. (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 39). 1980.
_____. Hölderlins Hymne "Der Ister." (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 53). 1984.
_____. "Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung." In Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. (Gesamtausgabe vol. 4, 33-49).
_____. "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry." Trans. Douglas Scott. In Existence and Being. Ed. Werner Brock. Chicago: Regnery, 1949. 291-315.
_____. Nietzsche I: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst. Pfullingen: Neske, 1961.
_____. Nietzsche I: The Will to Power as Art. Trans. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper, 1979.
_____. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927.
_____. Being in Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM, 1962.
_____. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Tübingen: Neske, 1959.
_____. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper, 1971.
_____. "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes." In Heidegger, Holzwege. Frankfurrt a/M: Klostermann, 1959.
_____. "The Origin of the Work of Art." Trans. Albert Hofstadter. In Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper, 1971. 17-87.
_____. "Wozu Dichter." In Heidegger, Holzwege 265-316.
_____. "What Are Poets For?" Trans. Albert Hofstadger. In Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. 89-142.
Secondary Works
Bruns, Gerald L. Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth and Poetry in the Later Writings. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.
Corngold, Stanley. "Sein und Zeit: Implications for Poetics." boundary 2 4 (Winter 1976): 439-55.
Fynsk, Christopher. Heidegger: Thought and History. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976.
Haar, Michel. "Le Primat de la Stimmung sur la coporéité du Dasein." Heidegger Studies 2 (1986): 67-79.
Halliburton, David. Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
von Herrmann, F. W. Heideggers Philosophie der Kunst. Frankfurt a/M: Klostermann, 1980.
Kockelmans, Joseph J. Heidegger and Science. Washington: UP of America, 1985.
_____. Heidegger on Art and Art Works. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985.
Levin, David Michael. "Logos and Psyche: A Hermeneutics of Breathing." Research in Phenomenology 14 (1984): 121-47.
de Man, Paul. "Heidegger's Exegesis of Hölderlin." Trans. Wlad Godzich. In de Man, Blindness and Insight.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. 246-66.
Marshall, Donald. "The Ontology of the Literary Sign: Notes Toward a Heideggerian Revision of Semiology." InMartin Heidegger and the Question of Literature. Ed. William V. Spanos. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.
McCormick, Peter. Heidegger and the Language of the World. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1976.
Metha, J. L. The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. New York: Harper, 1971.
Palmier, Jean-Michel. Les Écrits politiques de Heidegger. Paris: Editions de l'Herne, 1968.
Vycinas, Vincent. Earth and Gods: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969.
Evolution, Culture, and Truth
"Well, it seemed a good idea at the time" - Dennett (not Socrates) on the Ideal and Perfect Knowledge— i.e. on language and on memes as a mode of fitness enhancement and bootstrapping by refining our knowledge. And on the dange of toxic ideas and their spread in the contemporary informational ecosystem.
And "Breaking the Spell"—another Dennett lecture on religion as a mental virus:
Subscribe to Daniel Dennett (YouTube channel)
http://www.youtube.com/channel/HC1VcCvcWr-nM
Sobre el orden autogenerado
lunes, 25 de febrero de 2013
Sobre el orden autogenerado
Se atribuye con frecuencia a Charles Darwin la noción del orden autogenerado por selección natural, el principio que hoy rige las ciencias naturales para explicar cómo un orden de fenómenos complejos puede surgir espontáneamente a partir de una multitud de fenómenos simples, por selección natural, sin necesidad de apelar a un diseño inteligente. El orden es espontáneo, no producto de un diseño inteligente. Esta noción, si bien Darwin la aplicó con genialidad y tesón para explicar el origen de las especies, está explícita o implícita en diversos grados en muchos pensadores evolucionistas anteriores—porque Darwin tampoco inventó la evolución, claro: no la inventó ni Charles ni Erasmus.
Ya hablé sobre algunos clásicos de la emergencia del orden complejo en Micromotivos, Retroalimentación y Fenómenos Emergentes. Hoy añado un par de notas a cuenta de otros pensadores evolucionistas.
Primero, Lucrecio. Siempre hay que volver a Lucrecio. Aparte del atomismo, el evolucionismo tiene uno de sus clásicos en Lucrecio. El mundo no es obra de un dios, sino el resultado azaroso e imperfecto de la acción de fuerzas naturales. El edificio del mundo no es durable; todo ha tenido un principio y tendrá un final. Si bien Lucrecio concibe a la Tierra suspendida en el vacío, su cosmología es confusa y romana; tampoco da cuenta muy satisfactoria del origen de las especies, ateniéndose a la teoría clásica de la génesis continua de seres a partir de la tierra o del agua. Pero hay intuiciones importantes en su tratado. Por ejemplo, concibe un estado primitivo de la tierra poblado por seres imperfectos (ver más abajo las nociones de Saunderson). Y formula un primer principio de selección natural o supervivencia de los más aptos, que da lugar gradualmente al mundo tal como lo conocemos hoy:
Necesario es que entonces se extinguieran muchas especies de animales y no pudieran, reproduciéndose, forjar nueva prole. Pues todas las que ves nutrirse de las auras vitales, poseen o astucia o fuerza o, en fin, agilidad, que han protegido y preservado su especie desde el principio de su existencia. Muchas hay que por su utilidad nos son encomendadas a nosotros, confiadas a nuestra tutela.
En primer lugar, la valentía ha defendido la violenta raza de los leones, especie cruel; la astucia, a las zorras; la rapidez, a los ciervos. Per los canes, de sueño leve y fiel corazón, toda la especie engendrada por el semen de las bestias de carga, los rebaños de lanosas ovejas y los bueyes cornudos, han sido todas, Memmio, confiadas a la tutela del hombre; pues ansiaban huir de las fieras, en busca de la paz y de ricos pastos adquiridos sin pena, que es lo que nosotros les damos en premio a sus servicios. Pero aquellos a quienes la Naturaleza no concedió ninguno de estos dones, de modo que ni podían vivir por sí mismos ni sernos de utilidad alguna, a cambio de la cual concediéramos a su especie pastos y protección bajo nuestra vigilancia, sin duda todos quedaban como presa y botín de los otros, impedidos por sus trabas fatales, hasta que la Naturaleza hubo cumplido la extinción de su raza. (V. 855-77).
En primer lugar, la valentía ha defendido la violenta raza de los leones, especie cruel; la astucia, a las zorras; la rapidez, a los ciervos. Per los canes, de sueño leve y fiel corazón, toda la especie engendrada por el semen de las bestias de carga, los rebaños de lanosas ovejas y los bueyes cornudos, han sido todas, Memmio, confiadas a la tutela del hombre; pues ansiaban huir de las fieras, en busca de la paz y de ricos pastos adquiridos sin pena, que es lo que nosotros les damos en premio a sus servicios. Pero aquellos a quienes la Naturaleza no concedió ninguno de estos dones, de modo que ni podían vivir por sí mismos ni sernos de utilidad alguna, a cambio de la cual concediéramos a su especie pastos y protección bajo nuestra vigilancia, sin duda todos quedaban como presa y botín de los otros, impedidos por sus trabas fatales, hasta que la Naturaleza hubo cumplido la extinción de su raza. (V. 855-77).
Pero Lucrecio no cree en la evolución de las especies: "Cada cosa procede a su manera y todas conservan sus caracteres distintos según una ley inmutable", con lo cual no tiene una teoría del origen de las especies al margen de decir que surgen de la naturaleza; ha de pasar por alto los inconcebibles detalles. Y habla de hombres primitivos, viviendo como bestias (V.925ss.), con lo cual sí concibe una evolución cultural, pero no ve el origen del hombre en especies animales. Hay evolución de la vida social a partir de la familia, así como a partir del dominio del fuego, y una invención colectiva y gradual del lenguaje y de las instituciones (como luego la habrá en Vico)—pero los cuerpos humanos al parecer se originan completamente formados en algún extraño fenómeno natural.
Más adecuada es su concepción de las raíces de la evolución cósmica en el movimiento de los átomos. Se preocupa Lucrecio de añadir a estas partículas elementales un elemento de irregularidad o impredicibilidad, la declinación en su caída, sin la cual nada todo sería vale decir perfectamente uniforme y nada se hubiera generado. Veamos el pasaje en el que explica la generación espontánea de la complejidad y de fenómenos físicos complejos y equilibrados como los que describirá Spencer muchos siglos despues:
... [Si el espacio fuera finito, no podría contener una cantidad infinita de materia; y si ésta fuera limitada y el espacio infinito] ni el mar, ni la tierra, ni las luminosas bóvedas del cielo, ni la raza de los mortales, ni los sagrados cuerpos de los dioses podrían subsistir un instante; pues la masa de la materia, disgregándose, sería llevada, suelta, por el espacio inmenso; o mejor, jamás se hubiera agregado para crear ningún cuerpo, porque sus elementos dispersos no hubieran podido juntarse.
(Aquí se ve una remota intuición de cómo la fuerza de la gravitación, desconocida claro está para Lucrecio en los términos newtonianos, es necesaria a la hora de explicar la formación de fenómenos complejos en el universo, al llevar a una interacción compleja de los átomos que no podría darse en un estado de por así decirlo máxima entropía. Sigue Lucercio explicando cómo el orden así generado no procede de un diseño inteligente, y sin embargo da lugar de modo espontáneo a la complejidad).
Pues, ciertamente, los átomos no se colocaron de propósito y con sagaz inteligencia en el orden en que está cada uno, ni [pactaron entre sí cómo debían moverse]: pero como son innumerables y han sufrido mil cambios através del todo, maltratados por choques desde la eternidad, van ensayando toda suerte de combinaciones y movimientos, hasta que llegan por fin a disposiciones adecuadas para la creación y subsistencia de nuestro universo; y una vez éste ha dado con los movimientos convenientes, se mantiene durante largos ciclos de años, y hace que los ríos abastezcan el mar insaciable con su amplio fluir, y la tierra renueve sus frutos bajo la cálida caricia del sol, y florezca la nueva generación de vivientes, y vivan los errantes fuegos del éter; todo lo cual no sería en modo alguno posible, si del infinito no fluyera sin cesar materia para reparar a su tiempo las pérdidas. Pues así como la naturaleza de los seres animados, privada de alimento, se derrite y pierde cuerpo, así todas las cosas deben disolverse en cuanto deja de nutrirlas la materia, desviada por algún obstáculo de su recto camino. (I. 1014-1041).
Todo está en movimiento y cambio, para Lucrecio, y el orden y ritmo repetitivo que percibimos en los fenómenos naturales es provisional, un momento de estabilidad aparente en un universo que fluye desde un caos inicial a su destrucción final. Dedica unos pasajes a refutar la teoría elemental de Heráclito, pero en lo sustancial está de acuerdo con él en cuanto a la naturaleza evolutiva del universo.
Segundo, Maupertuis (Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis), astrónomo, físico y polígrafo del siglo XVIII. El principio de Spencer relativo a la conservación de la fuerza, y a la ley del mínimo esfuerzo, fue anticipado por Maupertuis, que como Spencer lo convierte en un punto clave de sus reflexiones, en varias obras pero especialmente en su Ensayo de Cosmología (1750). Según la Wikipedia,
Maupertuis est célèbre pour avoir énoncé, un des premiers le principe de moindre action. On lui doit, après Lucrèce et Fermat (pour la lumière), d’avoir eu l’intuition de ce principe. Plus d’un siècle et demi avant la révolution quantique, il ouvre la voie conceptuelle de l’intégrale des chemins de Feynman et de l’électrodynamique quantique. Mais la primauté de cette invention lui fut contestée dès son vivant par Samuel König, au nom de Leibniz.
Este principio, anticipado también por Lucrecio en sus conscuencias, es esencial para explicar la autogeneración de la complejidad, sin necesidad de esperar a la teoría de la selección natural de Darwin. La idea genial y revolucionaria ha estado allí desde hace mucho tiempo, para los pocos que han sido capaces de verla trascendiendo los mitos religiosos.
Tercero, Saunderson y Diderot. No puedo localizar la fuente de las afirmaciones de Diderot sobre Saunderson; según el Dictionary of National Biography Saunderson no parece haber publicado obras sobre sus reflexiones evolucionistas. Saunderson era ciego y matemático genial, extraña combinación; es además uno de los precursores en la invención de la calculadora, con un ingenioso artefacto que describe Diderot en su Lettre sur les aveugles (1749) También nos cuenta Diderot, sin citar la fuente, unas conversaciones de Saunderson inspiradas por su ceguera, donde expresa su escepticismo (y el de Diderot) sobre la existencia de un Dios creador y de un diseño inteligente en el universo. Aquí cuenta Diderot una de las últimas reflexiones de Saunderson, o quizá de "su" Saunderson filósofo escéptico que contempla un inmenso universo en evolución y un orden humano precario:
Lorsqu'il fut sur le point de mourir, on appela auprès de lui un ministre fort habile, M. Gervaise Holmes; ils eurent ensemble un entretien sur l'existence de Dieu, dont il nous reste quelques fragments que je traduirai de mon mieux; car ils en valent bien la peine. Le ministre commença para lui objecter les merveilles de la nature: "Eh, monsieur! lui disait le philosophe aveugle, laissez là tout ce beau spectacle qui n'a jamais été fait pour moi! J'ai été condamné à passer ma vie dans les ténèbres; et vous me citez des prodiges que je n'entends point, et qui ne prouvent que pour vous et que pour ceux qui voient comme vous. Si vous voulez que je croie en Dieu, il faut que vous me le fassiez toucher.
—Monsieur, reprit habilement le ministre, portez les mains sur vous-même, et vouse rencontrerez la divinité dans le mécanisme admirable de vos organes.
—Monsieur Holmes, reprit Saunderson, je vous le répète, tout cela n'est pas aussi beau pour moi que pour vous. Mais le mécanisme animal fût-il aussi parfait que vous le prétendez, et que je veux bien le croire, car vous êtes un honnête homme très incapable de m'en imposer, qu'a-t-il de commun avec un être souverainement intelligent? S'il vous étonne, c'est peut-être parce que vous êtes dans l'habitude de traiter de prodige tout ce qui vous paraît au-dessus de vos forces. J'ai été si souvent un objet d'admiration pour vous, que j'ai bien mauvaise opinion de ce qui vous surprend. J'ai attiré du fond de l'Angleterre des gens qui ne pouvaient concevoir comment je faisais de la géométrie: il faut que vous conveniez que ces gens-là n'avaient pas de notions bien exactes de la possibilité des choses. Un phénomène estíl, à notre avis, au-dessus de l'homme? nous disons aussitôt: c'est l'ouvrage d'un Dieu; notre vanité ne se contente pas à moins. Ne pourrions-nous pas mettre dans nos discours un peu moins d'orgueil, et un peu plus de philosophie? Si la nature nous offre un nœud difficile à délier, laissons-le pour ce qu'il est; et n'employons pas à le couper la main d'un être qui devient ensuite pour nous un nouveau nœud plus indissoluble que le premier. Demandez à un Indien pourquoi le monde reste suspendu dans les airs, il vous répondra qu'il est porté sur le dos d'un éléphant; et l'éléphant sur quoi l'appuiera-t-il? sur une tortue; et la tortue, qui la soutiendra?... Cet Indien vous fait pitié; et l'on pourrait vous dire comme à lui: Monsieur Holmes, mon ami, confessez d'abord votre ignorance, et faites-moi grâce de l'éléphant et de la tortue."
Saunderson s'arrêta un moment: il attendait apparemment que le ministre lui répondît; mais par où attaquer un aveugle? M. Holmes se prévalait de la bonne opinion que Saunderson avait conçue de sa probité, et des lumières de Newton, de Leibniz, de Clarke et de quelques-uns de ses compatriotes, les premiers génies du monde, qui tous avaient été frappés des merveilles de la nature, et reconnaissaient un être intelligent pour son auteur. C'était, sans contredit, ce que le ministre pouvait objecter de plus fort à Saunderson. Aussi le bon aveugle convint-il qu'il y aurait de la témérité à nier ce qu'un homme, tel que Newton, n'avait pas dédaigné d'admettre: il représenta toutefois au ministre que le témoignage de Newton n'était pas aussi fort pour lui que celui de la nature entière pour Newton; et que Newton croyait sur la parole de Dieu, au lieu que lui il en était réduit à croire sur la parole de Newton.
"Considérez, monsieur Holmes, ajouta-t-il, combien il faut que j'aie de confiance en votra parole et dans celle de Newton. Je ne vois rien, cependant j'admets en tout un ordre admirable; mais je compte que vous n'en exigerez pas davantage. Je vous le cède sur l'état actuel de l'univers, pour obtenir de vous en revanche la liberté de penser ce qui me plaira de son ancien et premier état, sur lequel vous n'êtes pas moins aveugle que moi. Vous n'avez point ici de témoins à m'opposer; et vos yeux ne vous sont d'aucune ressource. Imaginez donc, si vous voulez, que l'ordre qui vous frappe a toujours subsisté; mais laissez-moi croire qui'il n'en est rien; et que si nous remontions à la naissance des choses et des temps, et que nous sentissions la matière se mouvoir et le chaos se débrouiller, nous rencontrerions une multitude d'êtres informes pour quelques êtres bien organisés. Si je n'ai rien à vous objecter sur la condition présente des choses, je puis du moins vous interroger sur leur condition passée. Je puis vous demander, par exemple, qui vous a dit à vous, à Leibniz, à Clarke et à Newton, que dans les premiers instants de la formation des animaux, les uns n'étaient pas sans tête et les autres sans pieds? Je puis vous soutenir que ceux-ci n'avaient point d'estomac, et ceux-là point d'intestins; que tels à qui un estomac, un palais et des dents semblaient promettre de la durée, ont cessé par quelque vice du cœur ou des poumons; que les monstres se sont anéantis successivement; que toutes les combinaisons vicieuses de la matière ont disparu, et qu'il n'est resté que celles où le mécanisme n'impliquait aucune contradiction importante et qui pouvaient subsister par elles-mêmes et se perpétuer." (Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles p. 102-5)
—Monsieur, reprit habilement le ministre, portez les mains sur vous-même, et vouse rencontrerez la divinité dans le mécanisme admirable de vos organes.
—Monsieur Holmes, reprit Saunderson, je vous le répète, tout cela n'est pas aussi beau pour moi que pour vous. Mais le mécanisme animal fût-il aussi parfait que vous le prétendez, et que je veux bien le croire, car vous êtes un honnête homme très incapable de m'en imposer, qu'a-t-il de commun avec un être souverainement intelligent? S'il vous étonne, c'est peut-être parce que vous êtes dans l'habitude de traiter de prodige tout ce qui vous paraît au-dessus de vos forces. J'ai été si souvent un objet d'admiration pour vous, que j'ai bien mauvaise opinion de ce qui vous surprend. J'ai attiré du fond de l'Angleterre des gens qui ne pouvaient concevoir comment je faisais de la géométrie: il faut que vous conveniez que ces gens-là n'avaient pas de notions bien exactes de la possibilité des choses. Un phénomène estíl, à notre avis, au-dessus de l'homme? nous disons aussitôt: c'est l'ouvrage d'un Dieu; notre vanité ne se contente pas à moins. Ne pourrions-nous pas mettre dans nos discours un peu moins d'orgueil, et un peu plus de philosophie? Si la nature nous offre un nœud difficile à délier, laissons-le pour ce qu'il est; et n'employons pas à le couper la main d'un être qui devient ensuite pour nous un nouveau nœud plus indissoluble que le premier. Demandez à un Indien pourquoi le monde reste suspendu dans les airs, il vous répondra qu'il est porté sur le dos d'un éléphant; et l'éléphant sur quoi l'appuiera-t-il? sur une tortue; et la tortue, qui la soutiendra?... Cet Indien vous fait pitié; et l'on pourrait vous dire comme à lui: Monsieur Holmes, mon ami, confessez d'abord votre ignorance, et faites-moi grâce de l'éléphant et de la tortue."
Saunderson s'arrêta un moment: il attendait apparemment que le ministre lui répondît; mais par où attaquer un aveugle? M. Holmes se prévalait de la bonne opinion que Saunderson avait conçue de sa probité, et des lumières de Newton, de Leibniz, de Clarke et de quelques-uns de ses compatriotes, les premiers génies du monde, qui tous avaient été frappés des merveilles de la nature, et reconnaissaient un être intelligent pour son auteur. C'était, sans contredit, ce que le ministre pouvait objecter de plus fort à Saunderson. Aussi le bon aveugle convint-il qu'il y aurait de la témérité à nier ce qu'un homme, tel que Newton, n'avait pas dédaigné d'admettre: il représenta toutefois au ministre que le témoignage de Newton n'était pas aussi fort pour lui que celui de la nature entière pour Newton; et que Newton croyait sur la parole de Dieu, au lieu que lui il en était réduit à croire sur la parole de Newton.
"Considérez, monsieur Holmes, ajouta-t-il, combien il faut que j'aie de confiance en votra parole et dans celle de Newton. Je ne vois rien, cependant j'admets en tout un ordre admirable; mais je compte que vous n'en exigerez pas davantage. Je vous le cède sur l'état actuel de l'univers, pour obtenir de vous en revanche la liberté de penser ce qui me plaira de son ancien et premier état, sur lequel vous n'êtes pas moins aveugle que moi. Vous n'avez point ici de témoins à m'opposer; et vos yeux ne vous sont d'aucune ressource. Imaginez donc, si vous voulez, que l'ordre qui vous frappe a toujours subsisté; mais laissez-moi croire qui'il n'en est rien; et que si nous remontions à la naissance des choses et des temps, et que nous sentissions la matière se mouvoir et le chaos se débrouiller, nous rencontrerions une multitude d'êtres informes pour quelques êtres bien organisés. Si je n'ai rien à vous objecter sur la condition présente des choses, je puis du moins vous interroger sur leur condition passée. Je puis vous demander, par exemple, qui vous a dit à vous, à Leibniz, à Clarke et à Newton, que dans les premiers instants de la formation des animaux, les uns n'étaient pas sans tête et les autres sans pieds? Je puis vous soutenir que ceux-ci n'avaient point d'estomac, et ceux-là point d'intestins; que tels à qui un estomac, un palais et des dents semblaient promettre de la durée, ont cessé par quelque vice du cœur ou des poumons; que les monstres se sont anéantis successivement; que toutes les combinaisons vicieuses de la matière ont disparu, et qu'il n'est resté que celles où le mécanisme n'impliquait aucune contradiction importante et qui pouvaient subsister par elles-mêmes et se perpétuer." (Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles p. 102-5)
(Apunta en este importante pasaje una cierta noción de la selección natural, pero también a la vez un esbozo del principio antrópico: sólo en los universos viables llega a haber criaturas como nosotros, pero eso no quiere decir que el universo se haya hecho con nosotros en mente, pues hay que tener en cuenta la multitud inconcebible de universos no viables. No sé si lo he dicho en algún otro sitio, pero quienes interpretan el principio antrópico de modo teleológico son víctimas de una de las manifestaciones más enraizadas y más radicales de hindsight bias, de la distorsión retrospectiva a la hora de interpretar los hechos. Continúa inmediatamente Saunderson:)
"Cela supposé, si le premier homme eût eu le larynx fermé, eût manqué d'aliments convenables, eût péché par les parties de la génération, n'eût point rencontré sa compagne, on [—ou?—JAGL] se füt répandu dans une autre espèce, M. Holmes, que devenait le genre humain? Il eût été enveloppé dans la dépuration générale de l'univers; et cet être orgueilleux qui s'appelle homme, dissous et dispersé entre les molécules de la matière, serait resté, peut-être pour toujours, au nombre des possibles."
(La alusión a las moléculas de la materia, y a los seres deformes y monstruosos del origen de los tiempos, hace pensar que Saunderson estaba familiarizado con los razonamientos de Demócrito o de Lucrecio. Estos debían ser bastante más apreciados en los círculos escépticos y librepensadores de lo que pensamos por las noticias que nos llegan; así pues no es descartable que otras muchas personas opinasen como Saunderson, sin por ello publicar estos pensamientos, como no parece haber hecho él por otra parte. Diderot lo hace un tanto indirectamente; sus Pensées Philosophiques fueron condenadas por el Parlamento de París).
"S'il n'y avait jamais eu d'êtres informes, vous ne manqueriez pas de prétendre qu'il n'y en aura jamais, et que je me jette dans des hypothèses chimériques; mais l'ordre n'est pas si parfait, continua Saunderson, qu'il ne paraisse encore de temps en temps des productions monstrueuses." Puis, se tournant en face du ministre, il ajouta: "Voyez-moi bien, monsieur Holmes, je n'ai point d'yeux. Qu'avions-nous fait à Dieu, vous et moi, l'un pour avoir cet organe, l'autre pour en être privé?"
Saunderson avait l'air si vrai et si pénétré en prononçant ces mots, que le ministre et le reste de l'assemblée ne purent s'empêcher de partager sa douleur, et se mirent à pleurer amèrement sur lui. L'aveugle s'en aperçut. "Monsieur Holmes, dit-il au ministre, la bonté de votre cœur m'était bien connue, et je suis très snsible à la preuve que vous m'en donnez dans ces derniers moments: mais si je vous suis cher, ne m'enviez pas en mourant la consolation de n'avoir jamais affligé personne."
Puis reprenant un ton un peu plus ferme, il ajouta: "Je conjecture donc que, dans le commencement où la matière en fermentation faisait éclore l'univers, mes semblables étaient fort communs. Mais pourquoi n'assurerai-je pas des mondes, ce que je crois des animaux? Combien de mondes estropiés, manqués, se sont dissipés, se reforment et se dissipent peut-être à chaque instant dans des espaces éloignés, où je ne touche point, et où vous ne voyez pas, mais où le mouvement continue et continuera de combiner des amas de matière, jusqu`à ce qu'ils aient obtenu quelque arrangement dans lequel ils puissent persévérer? O philosophes! transportez-vous donc avec moi sur les confins de cet univers, au-delà du point où je touche, et où vous voyez des êtres organisés; promenez-vous sur ce nouvel océan, et cherchez à travers ses agitations irrégulières quelques vestiges de cet être intelligent dont vous admirez ici la sagesse!"
Saunderson avait l'air si vrai et si pénétré en prononçant ces mots, que le ministre et le reste de l'assemblée ne purent s'empêcher de partager sa douleur, et se mirent à pleurer amèrement sur lui. L'aveugle s'en aperçut. "Monsieur Holmes, dit-il au ministre, la bonté de votre cœur m'était bien connue, et je suis très snsible à la preuve que vous m'en donnez dans ces derniers moments: mais si je vous suis cher, ne m'enviez pas en mourant la consolation de n'avoir jamais affligé personne."
Puis reprenant un ton un peu plus ferme, il ajouta: "Je conjecture donc que, dans le commencement où la matière en fermentation faisait éclore l'univers, mes semblables étaient fort communs. Mais pourquoi n'assurerai-je pas des mondes, ce que je crois des animaux? Combien de mondes estropiés, manqués, se sont dissipés, se reforment et se dissipent peut-être à chaque instant dans des espaces éloignés, où je ne touche point, et où vous ne voyez pas, mais où le mouvement continue et continuera de combiner des amas de matière, jusqu`à ce qu'ils aient obtenu quelque arrangement dans lequel ils puissent persévérer? O philosophes! transportez-vous donc avec moi sur les confins de cet univers, au-delà du point où je touche, et où vous voyez des êtres organisés; promenez-vous sur ce nouvel océan, et cherchez à travers ses agitations irrégulières quelques vestiges de cet être intelligent dont vous admirez ici la sagesse!"
(Esta noción de los múltiples universos ensayados o fallidos recuerda inevitablemente a ciertos pasajes del Star Maker de Stapledon, pero claramente Saunderson y Diderot son menos teístas que Stapledon. Pero ante todo este pasaje también es crucialmente inteligente en tanto que se refiere a la inmensidad de nuestro propio universo, y a los otros mundos contenidos en él, en la medida en que explica el orden antrópico de la Tierra como una ilusión perspectivística; carecemos de criterios fiables o de sentidos capaces de medir la desproporción inmensa, impensable, entre la magnitud del universo y la pequeñez del orden que nos constituye; y esa misma incapacidad, y nuestro mundo habitual de los sentidos, nos llevan a crear equivocadamente un universo antropocéntrico. Nuestro elemento es el mundo humano, y toda reflexión que cree trascenderlo nos hace caer víctimas de este tipo de falacias).
"Mais à quoi bon vous tirer de votre élément? Qu'est-ce que ce monde, monsieur Holmes? Un composé sujet à des révolutions, qui toutes indiquent une tendance continuelle à la destruction; une succession rapide d'êtres qui s'entre-uivent, se poussent et disparaissent; une symétrie passagère; un ordre momentané. Je vous reprochais tout à l'heure d'estimer la perfection des choses par votre capacité, et je pourrais vous accuser ici d'en mesurer la durée sur celle de vos jours. Vous jugez de l'existence successive du monde, comme la mouche éphémère de la vôtre. Le monde est éternel pour vous, comme vous êtes eternel pour l'être qui ne vit qu'un instant. Encore l'insecte est-il plus raisonnable que vous. Quelle suite prodigieuse de générations d'éphémères atteste votre éternité! quelle tradition immense! Cependant nous passerons tous, sans qu'on puisse assigner ni l'étendue réelle que nous occupions, ni le temps précis que nous aurons duré. Le temps, la matière et l'espace ne sont peut-être qu'un point."
Saunderson s'agita dans cet entretien un peu plus que son état ne le permettait; il luis survint un accès de délire qui dura quelques heures, et dont il ne sortit que pour s'écrier: "O Dieu de Clarke et de Newton, prends pitié de moi!" et mourir.
Saunderson s'agita dans cet entretien un peu plus que son état ne le permettait; il luis survint un accès de délire qui dura quelques heures, et dont il ne sortit que pour s'écrier: "O Dieu de Clarke et de Newton, prends pitié de moi!" et mourir.
Era, quizá, la propia ceguera de Saunderson la que le abría los ojos a estas especulaciones sobre la naturaleza de la realidad que escapaban a los que podían ver, cegados en su comprensión por lo que veían y tomaban por la evidencia. Un punto de vista marginal y diferente, por ejemplo el de un ciego, permite así ver la realidad desde un punto de vista desfamiliarizador y penetrante. Así lo dice Diderot—otros tienen ojos que le faltaban a Saunderson, pero en cambio "viven como ciegos, y Saunderson muere como si hubiese visto."