Friday, April 08, 2005
Dialectic of Life
or theImpossibility of Knowing it All
Hegel was, to all accounts, impossibly brilliant, impossibly incomprehensible and just a little bit of a pain in the you know where. But he had a very good idea with his dialectic. If only he had fully understood its implications.
The dialectic supposes a logical movement from a thesis to its antithesis to a synthesis of the two. Consider the following chain: A says the government should control everything. B says the government should control nothing. C, sitting in the middle, suggests that maybe the government should do some things. That's phase one. Then the sequence starts again. A says the government should run the economy. B says it shouldn't. C says it should intervene sometimes. A says it should intervene to help the unemployed. B says it shouldn't. C decides it should only help the unemployed who really can't get jobs. This continues until finally an unemployment policy emerges.
That was a bit tedious, and wasn't an exact picture of how the dialectic works. But it should give you an idea if you haven't run across this.
Hegel believed that through the continuous refinement of this dialectic, we'd eventually get down to the real answers. The example I chose of how this works has a flaw: Governments have been designing unemployment compensation systems for quite some time. They show no signs of stopping. And now you have to ask yourself the question, do you think the left and right will ever agree that they've got it right, declare there's nothing more for the politicians to do and go home?
Hegel believed his dialectic would eventually lead to the truth. In practice, it leads to ever finer refinements of evermore tedious minutiae. In the 1990s, many complained about the tediousness of American politics. Somehow, the less important the issue, the more fractious the debate about it. In fact, what we were witnessing was the winding down of the Reagan era. The dialectic was being refined at what might be called a "micropolitical" level, that is, a level of insufficient consequence for the making of political hay.
Had Hegel been right, the Bush presidency would have been a snooze. The volume levels would have been high, but just to compensate for the lack of things being said. However, 9/11 came along and threw all the old assumptions about security out the window. As a consequence, we've started working on a whole new series of dialectics - security vs. liberty, safety vs. cost, foreign vs. domestic policy as the key priority of government.
Here's the funny thing. If you've followed so far, you've noticed that the Hegelian thing was coming along nicely, and you might be wondering if we couldn't eventually have reached a full consensus on how government was supposed to work if 9/11 hadn't come along. The answer is that something like 9/11 had to come along. Maybe it would have been something different that happened. Maybe a number of small things would have upset the applecart. But regardless of how it comes about, something always prevents the dialectic from reaching its conclusion.
When Hegel was in his prime, he was convinced that all the answers would soon be found. Physics was getting smarter and smarter, explaining more and more. Philosophers were putting together more and more about how we think through the world. Medicine was decoding the body as mechanism. That all went to hell, too, with the arrival of quantum physics.
The wit may joke at the ultra-religious who are always convinced that the world is now at last so bad that the Messiah is sure to return in their lifetime. The same joke may be made about the scientist who, knowing so much more than the greatest scientists of the century before, believes himself at the pinnacle of science. In both cases, there's a theoretical possibility they're right, but a greater likelihood that they're hysterical. Here's why: The earth is an organism.
The environmentalists, of course, have been telling us for years that the earth is an organism. Maybe the pagan references to Mother Earth represent the first intuition of this. But they haven't understood the full implication of this. If the earth is an organism, it is subject to death. But in the meantime, it is subject to entropy, to instability, to flux.
If you attempt to take a degree in chemistry, you may one day stumble into a course in biochemistry. Should you do so, you will discover something strange: in all the equations, the arrows go both ways. Inorganic and organic chemistry are both rife with equations that end with a final product to be extracted and used elsewhere. But in biochemistry, the goal is not to create a product, but to keep the equations going. The only real goal is the generation of heat, this indicating that energy is being consumed. In this chemical process, the final products are the waste and the still unstable solutions are the end. Once all the equations balance in biochemistry, you're dead.
If the earth is an organism, the same thing applies. Environmentalists sometimes posit an earthly paradise where we all exist in harmony with the earth and where, finally, nature is allowed to blossom to its fullest. The picture is pretty, but it is an eschaton. And like the Marxian "end of history," it isn't going to happen.
For the world we know to exist, inasmuch as it functions as an organism, it must remain unstable. Species must die. New ones must arise or evolve. As part of the mix, humans must continue to be human. This is not a political imperative for which governmental initiative is required. It's simply the way things are. If you're a Christian, you see man as fallen. If not, you probably don't think he was ever that high to begin with. And so people, individually and collectively, will continue to wreak havoc. So will the stronger species vis-à-vis the weak, the rivers vis-à-vis the rocks and so on.
The necessary instability of the earth raises an interesting philosophical problem: If everything still in play is unstable, how can we ever know everything? This is the aim of the Hegelian project after all. But it's an impossible aim.
I've already talked about the problem of getting politicians to agree that a problem is solved. What about scientists? I said that if 9/11 hadn't shaken the American project, something else would have knocked it out of its slumbers enough to start new debates. Is it also necessary that scientists will get a surprise every time they think they've got almost all the answers? Of course.
Every time that science has a really good run, one of two things happen. Either the new discoveries are so astonishing that we spend a couple centuries stagnating for our unwillingness to challenge the no longer new and fresh. Or punk scientiests make new discoveries that throw the old ones into doubt. Aristotle explained the whole world for centuries. Newton and Descartes messed the whole thing up by showing that a) Aristotle was wrong and b) his basis for knowledge was unsound. Then Newton and Descartes explained the whole thing for a few centuries till Einstein and the quantum physicists showed that a) Newton was wrong and b) Descartes basis for knowledge was unsound. The quantum physicists pulled a really neat trick, showing that even Hume was relatively uninquisitive about the dubiousness of reality existing as we thjnk we perceive it. Since then, we've suddenly stumbled upon the string theorists who think they've got a workable Grand Unified Theory. Don't count on it.
Every time we know something, there is a curious but predictable result: We act on that knowledge. The problem is that when this is so, the dynamic that created that knowledge is altered. Today's twenty year-old in therapy knows enough about Freudian psychology that Freud himself would be at odds in getting around the already self-diagnosed and otherly-repressed feelings that underlay the patient's neuroses.
The expert stock picker from twenty years ago will get clobbered by traders who have learned his techniques and how to sucker those using them. And so on. No one is giving their bank account numbers to "Nigerian refugees" anymore.
Even if we start to figure out everything else in the world, there are two fundamental sources of instability in the world (one if you're an atheist). This first of these is a Creator whose fullest plans and intentions are not fully known and whose ability to turn things completely upside down is presumably unlimited. One hates to take Kant and Wittgenstein's dodge, but for the purposes of this discussion, we may pass over God in silence as there's nothing we can do about him. But there's a second monkey wring in the gears, and that is us. For us to predict how we're going to act and react requires that we simultaneously know our psychology so well as to even see where we will act both against our own purposes and the greater good and yet know it so little that we soldier on anyway. Human beings with self-knowledge self-correct. Not well, not wisely and not always consistently. But there is enough adjustment based on knowledge that knowing would create adjustment that led to not knowing. This, then, creates a final bit of instability in any logical system, including science. We can't know everything, because we would act in ways that kept us from knowing everything if we did.
The place I posit is, of course, the place where thesis, antithesis, synthesis really leads. The endless refinements that help us know more and more always ultimately bring us to a place where our epistemology is blown to hell by the self-contradictory nature of the oracle's injunction, "Know thyself." If we could, we wouldn't be who we are; if we did, we wouldn't be who we are. Whether this instability owes to quantum interactions in the brain, souls floating about in unmapped dimensions or something else entirely we'll never know. But this much can be known: For the whole of the world to be fully understood, we must be understood. And the only way for us to be fully understood is for the life-force that animates us to have been stilled.
Whether the world ends with a bang, a collapse or the blowing of the final trump is unclear. But until our species' instinction, the dialectic of life requires, as we have shown, that no all-encompassing philosophical system, including science, shall ever succeed in the aim of explaining it all.
posted by gbarto at 10:04 PM