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CHAPTER 1
Nature and Recursivity
Nature loves to hide.
— Heraclitus, Fragment 123
Contingency is always contingent upon something, as long as this something is considered probable or even necessary in time — for example, laws of nature. Not all laws of nature are in themselves necessary, though they are only laws insofar as they are considered to be so. Laws of nature remain necessary until they are disproved by exceptions. In this case, they become contingent, meaning things can be otherwise. It ceases to be a law and is now a fact. It is this particular relation between nature and contingency that we would like to elaborate as a point of departure for reflecting upon the realization of systemic thinking and, finally, technical systems. We are going to examine two fundamental points:
1. Contingency is fundamental to the understanding of nature, not least because nature demonstrates an irregularity deviating from rules that are derived from empirical observations. In order to develop a philosophy of nature, it is necessary to recognize such contingency as a necessity.
2. Any systemic philosophy, either ideal or real, will have to address nature external to the mind (the "I"), and in consequence is obliged to deal with the question of contingency, since contingency challenges the very foundation of such systems: If the foundation of a system is contingent then all knowledge might be suspended and deprived of its validity. Systemic philosophy will have to render contingency necessary, not only factually but also logically.
These two motivations are key for reflecting upon eighteenth-century Naturphilosophie and its successors. (As we will argue in this chapter, its twentieth-century successors are organicism and the Gaia theory.)
If philosophy wants to become a system, it will have to develop a mechanism allowing it to resolve the threat posed by contingency. If the a priori laws become contingent, then the system will collapse immediately. The system would therefore better respond to contingency by not having predefined rules, and instead allow rules to emerge during its confrontation with contingency and irregularity. We pass here from a transcendental characterized by rules to a transcendental characterized by teleology, analogous to the movement from Kant's first to his third Critique. At the center of this systemic thinking is the concept of the organic, which comes from discoveries in the natural sciences, especially biology. Being organic is not merely maintaining part-whole relations, but also designates self-organization and autopoiesis, which we want to call recursivity. And if we want to address the question of technical systems, it is necessary to examine the history of the concept of nature, which is always the other of itself in the Hegelian sense. It is only through a close examination of the concept of nature that we can see clearly the question of technology, since the two have been opposed throughout the history of philosophy. In other words, without understanding the relation between nature and system, we will not understand technical systems: as Heidegger says, "technics: history of nature" (Technik: Historie der Natur).
§9. KANT AND THE MODEL OF SYSTEM
I would like to refer to a very intriguing quote from Schelling's late philosophy here in order to open up the question of contingency, not only because Schelling will be guiding us throughout this chapter, but also because it in a certain sense reverses our conventional concept of necessity:
The first impression (and this is decisive not only in life, but also in knowledge) of this thing, on the whole and in the particulars so highly contingent, that we call the world — this cannot possibly be the impression of something that has arisen out of rational necessity, that is, through a mere logical emanation. The world resembles nothing less than it resembles a product of pure reason. It contains a preponderant mass of unreason, such that one could almost say that the rational is merely the accidents.
This seems to be a conclusion that Schelling has given to his early career of systemizing nature, an attempt made between 1794 and 1833 and continuing for a period of almost forty years. Schelling's verdict is astonishing, not only in his rejection of rational necessity as the ground but also in his consideration of the rational as merely "the accidents." This contingency is not only related to the particular, to the very instantiation, but rather concerns the whole, the system. We may conceive the system that Schelling is referring to here as a system regulated by the laws of nature. Schelling's critique is very radical, probably even more so than that of Boutroux, author of the classic On the Contingency of the Laws of Nature (1874). Boutroux argued in this work that contingency is omnipresent, and that each law of nature always contains contingencies that can be logically deduced. It is also different from what we know today as Godel's incompleteness theorem, since what Schelling is claiming is that contingency is probably the ground, the "substantial," while the rational is nothing but its accident, and remains one of its expressions. In other words, if contingency is the original ground (Urgrund), it is also a nonground (Ungrund), or an abyss (Abgrund).
One may want to ask, doesn't this conceptualization in the late Schelling contradict the usual impression of the regularity of the concept of system — a philosophical credo of eighteenth-century philosophy? The task of creating a system, or taking philosophy as a system, can be seen as an effort to revive metaphysics after the domination of science and the French Revolution. Schelling stands out as one of the most systemic thinkers — probably even more systemic than Hegel — especially in his last publication, Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, often referred as the Freiheitschrift. In this essay Schelling famously declares that the system is not able to get rid of evil; on the contrary, evil is always present in the system as the possibility of freedom. It is sufficient to see that contingency, which can be evil or a state of exception, is immanent in the system. It is of our interest here to carry out a historical-critical exposition of Schelling's Naturphilosophie, since it is an effort to eliminate oppositions (real-ideal, subjectobject, contingency-necessity) through the construction of a generic system, which we can call, following Schelling, the general organism (Allgemeiner Organismus).
It is within such a conception that the system as an organic being is postulated, and from there we would like to understand it as a precursor of cybernetics. When it is seen in this way, nature is dissolved in cybernetics: the end of nature. It is such an end in the sense that an innocent, Romanticist, productive nature ceases to be; it is succeeded by cybernetics, as what happened to philosophy in general according to Heidegger. However, what exactly is a system, and in what sense can subject and object (nature) be reconciled?
Before Schelling, other philosophers, notably Kant, had already attempted to answer this question. In his three Critiques, Kant laid down two fundamental methods of systematization. In the first Critique he proposed his famous architectonics to analyze the relation between nature and subject. Nature appears to the subject as phenomenon, the transcendental faculties regulating the apperception of it. The transcendental deduction of categories of the understanding defines the limit of the understanding as well as the limits of the appearance of phenomenon according to the four groups of categories: namely, quality, quantity, relation, and modality. The model presented in the first Critique is constitutive, in the sense that nature must be submitted to concepts legitimated by the transcendental deduction. Kant's strategy can be understood in two points: On the one hand, Kant wants to avoid the phantasm of speculative reason, the well-known Schwämerei, hence reason is confined to the unification of rules of the understanding under principles; second, Kant was obliged to develop a new mechanism or heuristics capable of addressing the Humean challenge on the "contingency of necessity." A second model is mentioned in the appendix titled "The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection" in the first Critique, in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and more precisely again in the Critique of Judgement, in which reflective judgement is elaborated. The reflectivity here is regulative instead of constitutive, since it is no longer about the submission of nature to the mind according to concepts, but rather a heuristic (as Lyotard describes it) in search of an un-predefined end and its purposiveness (Zweckmässigkeit). In Kant's own words, determinative judgment is the imposition of the universal on the particulars, whereas reflective judgment is the search for the universal in the particulars. Simondon was very sharp to point out that in the first two Critiques, criticism was not able to think cybernetics since, like Auguste Comte's positivism, Kant's criticism still tends to think in terms of structure. It is only in the Critique of Judgment that Kant was able to address the question of cybernetics.
The second book of the Critique of Judgment is dedicated to teleological judgment, in which Kant presents an organic model. Kant's writing on teleological judgment had a profound impact on the natural scientists of his time, as well as on the next generation of philosophers such as Fichte, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, and Hegel (among others). The clearest definition of the organic form can be found in §64, where Kant defines the organic being as follows: "a thing exists as a natural end if it is (though in a double sense) both cause and effect of itself." Kant then provides the example of a tree, highlighting three elements that define it as an organic being. Firstly, the tree reproduces itself according to its genus, meaning that it reproduces another tree; secondly, the tree produces itself as an individual, absorbing energy from the environment and turning them into nutrients to sustain its life; thirdly, different parts of the tree establish reciprocal relations and thus constitute the whole — as Kant writes, the "preservation of one part is reciprocally dependent on the preservation of the other parts." The concept of the organic being consists in the reciprocal relations between parts and the whole and the capacity of reproduction. It also affirms the two important categories of relation: namely, community (Gemeinschaft) and reciprocity (Wechselwirkung). In other words, they constitute a primitive form of self-organization. As Kant writes: "[N]ature, on the contrary, organizes itself, and does so in each species of its organized products — following a single pattern, certainly, as to general features, but nevertheless admitting deviations calculated to secure self-preservation under particular circumstances."
§10. THE ORGANIC CONDITION OF PHILOSOPHY
The organic constitutes a new condition of philosophizing, for the reason that the organism provides an exit for philosophy, enabling it to move out of the systemic determination by a priori laws, which surrender freedom to mechanical laws and fatalism. We would like to emphasize again that we are not talking about a philosophy of the organism but rather arguing that the organic imposes on philosophy a new condition and new method of thinking. The heuristic of the reflective judgment that Kant elaborated in the Critique of Judgment is the model based on which the final cause (Endursache) is interpreted. The natural end is something that cannot be observed objectively. We can see such and such a tree or such and such an animal, but we cannot grasp nature as a whole through mechanical rules. Reason can only understand the natural end through reflective judgment, meaning that it recursively arrives at a self-organizing being. Teleological thinking is in this sense circular: A->B->C->A.
The figure of the organism gives Kant the means to resolve several problems. First, it provides the inspiration to imagine a system that is not based on mechanical laws. Mechanical laws are not sufficient to explain contingency and the teleology of nature; this comprises one of the major arguments in the antinomy of judgment. Secondly, organism provides the framework or foundation through which natural scientists should consider their object of study, without referring to merely mechanical explanation. Third, it allows Kant to systematically refuse mechanism, hylozoism (living matter), Spinozism (pantheism), and theism. Fourth, it is at the core of Kant's political philosophy, since nature is "the great artist ... the eventual 'guarantee of perpetual peace.'" Nature is not something that can be judged from a particular point of view, just as the French Revolution cannot be judged according to its actors. Rather, nature can be comprehended only as a complex whole, and the human species, as one part of it, will ultimately progress toward a system (or republican constitution) that approximates the natural end, to that "cosmopolitan whole, i.e., a system of all states that are in danger of acting injuriously upon one another."
In §72 of the Critique of Judgement, Kant refused two approaches to explaining purposiveness of nature — namely, the idealist and the realist approaches. The idealist approach implies a lack of design (Ansicht), which Kant illustrates with the accidentalism of Epicurus and Democritus as well as the fatalism of Spinoza. Kant criticized Spinoza's metaphysics as a "fatalism of purposiveness" precisely because, in such an undesigned system, although the world is derived from the original being, it ignores its intelligence and sees it as emergence out of a mere "necessity of nature" of the original being, which leads to Kant's objection that Spinoza's system eliminates all contingency. This is because deus sive natura can be interpreted as implying that God is reduced to the substance of nature, thereby losing its transcendence: a dead god. The realism of purposiveness, on the other hand, assumes a life of matter as the result of design — namely, hylozoism — which implies that "life being either inherent in it or else bestowed upon it by an inner animating principle or world soul." We will see later how Schelling took up Spinoza's concept of nature and Plato's world soul — namely, hylozoism — by integrating it into the organic.
We may want to consider that this development in the study of the organism, which later took the name biology, has provided a new condition for philosophizing, of which Naturphilosophie is part. Philosophy of nature is not one that is independent from other disciplines such as moral and political philosophy; in the third Critique this relation is clear, though sometimes seems to be only symbolic. For example, Kant wrote in the famous §49, "Beauty as symbol of the moral," that one can always contest that the beautiful is not merely symbolic, but rather analogic in terms of operation since the organic, here taking the form of reflective judgment, shares the same mode of operation as practical reason. Therefore, Kant wrote, "in the latter (reflective judgment) connexion ... must on the contrary be confined to the service of just the same practical faculty of reason in analogy with we considered the cause of the purpose in question." The new causality, meaning that the organism is at the same time cause and effect of itself, is distinguished from the efficient cause (means to the end). With self-causation in mind, Kant opens the question, which resonates with what is called complexity theory today. In §71, "Introduction to the solution of the antinomy of judgment," Kant states that "we cannot see into the first and inner ground of the infinite multiplicity of the particular rules of nature, which, being only known empirically, are for us contingent, and so we are absolutely incapable of reaching the intrinsic and all-sufficient principle of the possibility of a nature — a principle which lies in the supersensible." It is sufficient, if not impossible, to list all the mechanical causes, however, the world cause (Weltursache) forces us to situate the phenomenon within a broader perspective: the uncanny whole.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Recursivity and Contingency"
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Copyright © 2019 Yuk Hui.
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