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Invisible Hands
Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century
By Jonathan Sheehan, Dror Wahrman The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-75205-1
CHAPTER 1
Providence and the Orders of the World
INTRODUCTION: 0 + 1 = EVERYTHING
In 1718, some eighteen months after the death of Germany's great polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the mathematician Johann Wiedeburg published a dissertation praising the virtues of binary arithmetic. On its title page was an imprint of a medal celebrating the strings of zeros and ones that would, he hoped, replace the ten ordinary digits (fig. 1). As Leibniz had already discovered fifty years earlier, simple rules could coordinate these strings, producing an entire system of mathematics consisting only of 0s and 1s. The architecture of modern computing had its origins here, but for Leibniz and Wiedeburg, the excitement of binary lay as much in metaphysics as in mathematics. "Unus ex nihilo omnia," "imago creationis," and "unum autem necessarium" were the truths concealed inside binary: the truths that "the one is necessary," that "the one from nothing [makes] all things," and that this very emergence of something from nothing is "the image of the creation." Leibniz himself had drawn these metaphysical conclusions circa 1696 in conversation with his patron, Duke Rudolf August of Wolfenbüttel-Brunswick, who was apparently dumbstruck by such an elegant version of divine creation. In a 1701 letter to the mathematician Johann Bernoulli, Leibniz commented that Rudolf August had "had 0 and 1 engraved on a medal, which he uses to seal the letters he sends to me." Leibniz sketched at least six versions of his own medal, some more complicated than others, but all featuring some rough equivalent of the epigraph "unus ex nihilo omnia fecit," "the one made all from nothing." "In all of mathematics, it is hard to find anything more beautiful" than this marvelous system of arithmetic, he commented in an unpublished fragment, since it shows "the divine footsteps of the creator in the creation by means of the miraculous order and harmony of things."
Two notes resounded in these exclamations. First, a delight that the "one"—God, more or less—should be the only element needed to turn zero into everything. Second, a hope that the binary might answer a challenge that had puzzled thinkers since antiquity. Posed by pre-Socratics like Parmenides, the challenge was essentially this: why is there something rather than nothing? Since "what is, cannot come to be (because it is already), and from what is not, nothing could have come to be (because something must be underlying)," then how did the stuff of things come to be? The one question carried a host of others in its wake. What is a thing? How does it change? What is change? The greatest of Greek metaphysicians, Aristotle, certainly felt the force of these. "Nothing can be said without qualification to come from what is not," he agreed, but insisted that "a thing may come to be from what is not in a qualified sense, i.e. accidentally." Although nothing can come from nothing, new properties can attach to extant substances. So when two balls collide in space and bound off in new directions, he argued, their substances stay intact, but their accidents—direction, speed, and so on—change. Although it did not precisely answer Parmenides's question, this powerful description of the order of things served as a foundation of ancient natural science and metaphysics.
From a Christian point of view, however, Aristotle's account of things was perplexing. The Greek denied, after all, that anything new was really possible. His creation was no more than the ringing of changes on an eternal substratum, an a priori matter "receptive of coming-to-be and passing-away," as he put it in On Generation. This was a hard pill to swallow for anyone who looked to Genesis for the authoritative account of God's formation of the world. Swallowing the pill—and conforming Aristotle to Christian theology—was one of the major projects of medieval science and philosophy.
This project lost traction in the early modern period, as Aristotle became the bête noire of Europe's new humanistic, philosophical, and scientific movements. No longer did Aristotelian metaphysics answer in a satisfying way the Parmenidean challenge. But the questions that Aristotle felt compelled to address were not withdrawn just because his answers became increasingly unpersuasive in the face of the new science. How, after all, did something come from nothing? God did this in the book of Genesis, but the mechanism was, to put it mildly, obscure. Leibniz's discovery of the binary seemed an almost magical solution, a formula for the emergence of the world's things from an absolutely minimal substrate. Nothing can come from just nothing, Leibniz admitted. Yet given only the "one," all is possible. The immense variety of things, the world's great diversity of plants, animals, and people, the stars, the mountains: all from nothing and one, coordinated by simple rules but arranged in strings of labyrinthine complexity.
This marvelous binary was just one element of a bigger intellectual pattern that shaped the later seventeenth century. At this moment, and for the next hundred years, the worlds of science, theology, and moral theory converged on the problem of order, its origins, and its dynamics. People from across a huge spectrum of intellectual inquiry enthusiastically generated new answers to old questions: How is the world organized? Where does this organization come from? Is it just the unfolding of divine design? And if so, are human actions free? How do they fit into this design? Their answers were, no surprise, heterogeneous. Like Leibniz's binary, however, they were saturated with a deep appreciation of the world's complexity and an intense curiosity about its origins and its dynamics.
At their heart, this chapter argues, was a renewed and energized vision of providence. In the late seventeenth century, providence was the most dynamic account of how and why order exists in the natural and human worlds. It played an absolutely central role in the development of the new natural and moral sciences. A building block of new materialisms, providential thought activated the things of the world and animated a mechanical universe, giving it purpose, variety, and motion. Yet this was hardly an age of orthodoxy. On the contrary, the older tradition of Christian providence would not emerge from this period intact. The late-seventeenth-century fascination with order and complexity generated a simultaneous expansion and reorientation of the power of providence—indeed, the power of God himself.
In this, the binary was exemplary. Leibniz was surely pleased to find in it new support for God's providential design and activity in the world. Nevertheless, this was balanced by a remarkable revision of what God and providence might be. If God is the "one" in the dyadic system, after all, he need be no more than a vertical scratch on a page. Nor is it the "one" that gives this system its dynamic flexibility, but rather the arithmetical rules that govern the combinations of binary strings. And these rules that generate the complex variety of things—perhaps the equivalent of providence?—apply no less to the "one" than to the zero, apparent organizers of God himself. This was not your grandfather's providence.
This chapter explores both the late-seventeenth-century curiosity about order—its origins, its dynamics, and its complexity—and the workings of a new providentialism. It tours a wide landscape of European intellectual, scientific, and religious production. Across this landscape, it maps a set of common concerns and projects. It describes the widespread dissatisfaction with the so-called mechanical philosophy of Descartes and others, with its stress on regularity, simplicity, and predictability. Mechanism not only left human beings subject to fate and caprice, many felt, but also failed in front of the reality of the world's complexity and variety. The chapter also describes the innovative responses to this. Older Christian verities, it shows, could not simply be reasserted. As the precise symmetry between heaven and earth guaranteed in traditional Christian metaphysics became itself a threat to human freedom and dignity, natural and moral orders began to part ways. The felt alignment between the quotidian chaos that besets us and the regularities that scientists and theologians assure us are the reality of the world's operations weakened. Here at the dawn of the eighteenth century, the experience of things came unhinged from the order that subtends them. New concepts of providence were not so much the means of their ultimate reconciliation as efforts to allow us to live with this dissonance. In short, the chapter maps the new intellectual matrix of the late seventeenth century. It was out of this creative matrix—with its embrace of immanence, its attention to complexity and variety, its impatience with strict rules of causal explanation—that the language of self-organization developed.
NATURE, FREEDOM, AND THE POWER OF GOD
Interest in complexity took shape against the background of great simplifications. Most notoriously, the simplifications were those of René Descartes, who by the 1640s was a dominant figure in both natural science and philosophy. His approach to the order of things—mechanism, as it has come to be called—was severe and parsimonious. Matter, he insisted, "consists simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth, and depth." It is divisible and extended; it moves according to the laws of inertia; and it can always be reduced to uniformity once motion is subtracted:
The matter existing in the universe is ... one and the same, and it is always recognized as matter simply in virtue of its being extended. All the properties which we clearly perceive in it are reducible to its divisibility and consequent mobility. ... Any variation in matter or diversity in its many forms depends on motion.
Instead of being filled with Aristotelian properties, let alone divine ones, matter is uniform and its motion predictable. These radical simplifications were correlates of Descartes's stark epistemology. Doubt was his method, as is well known, and given this doubt, that "there exists something extended in length, breadth, and depth" is the most that can be said about the world and its things. A spare model of human capacities demanded a spare model of the world's processes, one whose virtue lay above all in its availability to mathematical formalization.
These models were just that, however: models, useful ways to think about things. For a guarantee that they are right, a guarantee that they are correct descriptions of how things actually are, Descartes had to look beyond the models. Since neither the world nor the human experience of it could confirm the truth of the models, in other words, Descartes reached beyond the world altogether, to the nature and qualities of a transcendent God. Although he always insisted that it was "quite against the grain" for him to "mingle religion with philosophy," the Christian divinity surrounded his thought with powerful arms. God's power sustained the very existence of the universe. His goodness guaranteed our ability to understand it. And his wisdom ensured that this universe would behave in regular and orderly ways. God alone, Descartes wrote, "is the author of the motions in the world in so far as they exist and in so far as they are rectilinear." Since he "always acts in the same way," he creates only simple motions, ruled by his laws of nature. Complexity grows from simplicity, then, in a deductive way. Given "a chaos as confused and muddled as any the poets could describe," Descartes maintained, "the laws of nature are sufficient to cause the parts of this chaos to disentangle themselves and arrange themselves ... [into] a quite perfect world."
In a sense, it is because God is God that we humans can have a science at all. This science is, however, limited. What Amos Funkenstein has called Descartes's "radical voluntarism" left the ultimate truths of the world, its telos and ontology, in the hands of the deity. The world is the way it is because God wanted it so. As a result, we humans work within serious restrictions. We can describe natural phenomena through the mathematics of matter and motion; we can be secure that we are accurate because God is no deceiver. But the why of the matter—why there is something rather than nothing, why processes unfold the way they do—is hidden in God's bosom. The search for final causes was "totally useless in physics," Descartes declared. Even the how of the matter was obscure to the mortal mind. "In the material world, at least, God is the only genuine causal agent," one recent Descartes scholar has written, "but it is not at all clear how he does it." How one action causes another—what causality is, in other words—is a mystery. Our job as knowers is to work inside our limits, to make the models as best we can.
This limitation does not matter if you are trying to model, say, billiard balls. But sometimes the how and why matter. Sometimes the motivations of the pool players are exactly the point at issue. Are we agents, for example, of our own thoughts? Can we exercise our judgment and behave accordingly? Descartes thought so, but he was far from sure how this might be possible. At stake was nothing less than human freedom, the ability of the human will to orient itself meaningfully to the world.
The very piety (such as it was) of Descartes's project exacerbated rather than relieved the force of this dilemma. Divine omnipotence solved one set of natural and epistemological quandaries, but it re-created others. Making God the only causal agent, most awkwardly, makes him responsible not just for our suffering but also for the malice that motivates so many human actions. When someone piously insists, as Descartes's later acolyte Nicolas Malebranche did in 1674, that "only God ... is the true cause," then humans and matter alike both get caught in the net of divine necessity. All connections between our will and action in the world—any affirmation of our ability to do anything, to orient ourselves meaningfully in the world—are imaginary. "You cannot yourself move your arm ... or effect the least change in the universe," this Oratorian priest went on. "Here you are in the world without a single power, immobile as a rock, as stupid, as it were, as a stump." You take a step and imagine that you lifted your leg. But without God, you are rooted to the spot. For it is God who moves your leg, and at just the right moment to produce the illusion that you did it yourself. The order of things became a "continuous creation, a single volition subsisting and operating simultaneously." All motion, all action, all causation, all from God.
As Malebranche admitted, this piety carried heavy consequences for human liberty, but he also had no principled objection to it. The more Malebranche exalted God's power, the more he shrank the space of moral autonomy. What resulted was a curious convergence of total piety and utter impiety, a commitment to God's omnipotence so complete that the moral frame demanded by the Christian story of sin and salvation—where Christ's judgment and justice usually depended on an element of free moral action—seemed to vanish.
The priest Malebranche could never have abandoned this moral frame entirely, nor abandoned the moral order to the mechanical one. But others in the mechanist camp were less cautious. The natural philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, for example, had no use for any moral domain distinct from that of the mechanical. For Hobbes, as he put it in 1664, "there is nothing, that can give a beginning of motion to itself. ... All ... determinations must proceed from some other move[me]nt." There is "but one universal cause, which is motion." To imagine a framework of moral action independent of natural necessity would thus be an exercise in futility. "Moral motion is a meer Word," he argued in a great debate with the Anglican bishop John Bramhall, a circumlocution that we use to avoid the real consequences of a world where "God [is] the cause of all motion and of all actions." Hobbes's thought thus teetered between pious and (for a Christian) wicked understandings of the world. God stands at the beginning of all things: "The hand of God [is] the first of all causes," he would write. But the consequences of this were dire for the human ability to orient ethically and morally, to choose responsibly between good and evil. "Liberty, and Necessity are consistent," Hobbes famously argued in his Leviathan. Human actions may be free to the extent that they express a human will. But because "every act of mans will, and every desire, ... proceedeth from some cause, and that from another cause, in a continuall chaine ... they proceed from necessity." You "choose" to sin or not just as much as a dropped stone "chooses" to fall or not.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Invisible Hands by Jonathan Sheehan, Dror Wahrman. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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