Tag: religion

Chance & Necessity: Another Look

In everyday experience, we think of chance as what governs gambling, barring schemes to harness probability in their favor. Necessity, on the other hand, brings to mind the air we breathe, food and/or water. Previously, we discussed Jacques Monod as an early explorer of the collision of probability and chance in biology. In Laws of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance (German: Das Spiel: Naturgesetze steuern den Zufall), Manfred Eigen & Ruthild Winkler critique Jacques Monod, stating that his innovation was that the substrate of all biology is chance and accident. You may note that the subtitle of Laws of the Game states the opposite.

This gets even more subtle if you consider Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. He emphasizes the role of playful behavior as the university that educates us in the connection between chance and necessity.

Foreword

The lay reader interested in the natural sciences is exposed to a constantly rising flood of information. He may often feel himself cast in the role of a judge before whom different authors appear like competing litigants, each of whom hopes to be found in the right. If these authors are sufficiently clever in presenting their cases, the reader may be swayed by each in turn. But then a reviewer appears on the scene and objects that each cannot be as right as the other, particularly when one author’s claims are the exact opposite of another’s. The reader has no choice but to find the reviewer right, too.

This familiar anecdote, which we have slightly adapted to suit our purposes, contains a moral: Everyone could in fact be right if each one did not insist on being the only one to be right.

Everything that happens in our world resembles a vast game in which nothing is determined in advance but the rules, and only the rules are open to objective understanding. The game itself is not identical with either its rules or with the sequence of chance happenings that determine the course of play. It is neither the one nor the other because it is both at once. It has as many aspects as we project onto it in the form of questions.

We see this game as a natural phenomenon that, in its dichotomy of chance and necessity, underlies all events. Our interpretation of games and play thus goes far beyond Huizinga’s, which considers play only in its relation to human behavior. In applying the concept of play to art, we come much closer to Adorno’s views, which clearly disagree with Huizinga‘s identification of play and art.

The considerations that gave rise to this book go back to the molecular theory of evolution worked out a few years ago. It also draws on the models developed in connection with that theory, models for simulating phenomena like equilibrium, selection, and growth, all of which are based on natural laws. Although this book makes frequent use of examples drawn from the field of biology, its scope is much broader and includes general scientific, philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic perspectives. Our main purpose is to show play in its symbolic nature and in all its metamorphoses. We also make use of its different aspects to illuminate both our scientific understanding of the world and various philosophical positions. We are aware that this brings us into conflict with those who attribute validity to one and only one aspect.

The actual writing of the book was preceded by innumerable talks and discussions with friends and colleagues during our Engadin winter seminars, on hikes and ski tours in the mountains, and, occasionally, over a bottle of wine. We first thought a dialogue would be the appropriate form for our exchange of ideas, but we soon abandoned this concept. The classical dialogues are without exception artificially constructed. Simplicio and Salviati, for example, are both mouthpieces for Galileo. We finally decided that we would both take turns going over all the material point by point. We have, of course, ventured into areas in which we are only dilettantes. We hope the reader will forgive us this in the light of our efforts to uncover parallels and so to emphasize the unity of nature and mind.

We do not want to go any further into the substance of the book here than is necessary to make clear why we chose the title we did. Similarly, the introductions to the individual chapters are meant to lead the reader into the material treated, not to summarize it.

Chance and law (or principles) are the basic elements of games. The subtitle of the book suggests the interaction between them. And here we should add that it is the consequences of chance that are subject to regulation. Only if there is a large number of individual events does the element of chance come under the control of statistical law. This law is at work, for instance, when chance fluctuations undergo self-regulation in equilibrium or when they are amplified in the evolutionary process. The origin of the genetic code, the development of languages by which we transmit our thoughts, the intellectual play of artistic imagination are all based on the same fundamental principles of evolution, even though the results of individual games are determined by the caprice and variability of chance.

The manifestations of the game that matter plays in time and space and the effects this game has on human beings are the themes of the central chapters in the book. Much as we may agree with Jacques Monod in his view of molecular biology, we differ from him greatly in the conclusions he draws from it for mankind and society. We see Monod’s demand for an “existential attitude toward life and society” as an animistic inflation of the role of “chance.” Such a demand neglects the complementary role played by natural law. Criticism of the dialectical overemphasis on “necessity”—a criticism we find fully justified—should not move us to deny completely its obvious infiuence.

We are in complete agreement with Monod’s statement that ethics and knowledge cannot be divorced from each other. For us, however, this view does not condemn the great religions but rather sets them a new task. As we have occasion to point out in the present work, the natural sciences yield no proof of God’s existence, but neither do they claim that men “can do without faith in God.”

The unity of nature is expressed more in the laws governing the relationships between structures than in the structures themselves. Taking this “motto” as a point of departure for Part IV, we examine a number of problems that have recently come more and more under the purview of the natural sciences and that are still far from being solved. In these considerations, we are mainly concerned with the mechanisms of cognizance. In terms of the elementary processes involved, these mechanisms always amount to a falsification in Karl Popper’s sense. Still, we cannot fully accept the views of this great epistemological logician, particularly when he claims: “There is no induction.” Good enough! But there are different mechanisms of falsification that vary in their degree of inductive adaptation.

One of our main concerns in this book lies at the heart of Part III. There we raise the still unsolved question of the hubris of human knowledge. Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s categorical imperative “What concerns all can only be worked out by all” is as relevant for the physicist whose knowledge can unleash the forces of nature as it is for the biologist who is now in a position to manipulate genetic material and influence psychic behavior with drugs. And our appeal here is also directed at the economist and the politician, who have the task of creating, maintaining, and protecting the conditions necessary for a worthwhile human existence.

Pessimistic predictions based on simple extrapolation are widespread today. We will not be able to solve the problem of limited resources by frugality alone. A raw material that will be used up in about fifty years at present rates of consumption might last a hundred years if we cut down on its use. (Such a reduction might, of course, threaten the stability of our economy.) In other words, the catastrophe could be delayed for another fifty years. Would it not be more sensible to concentrate on ensuring unlimited resources, perhaps by reusing our raw materials in a recycling economy and by developing sufficiently productive sources of energy? However we solve this problem, the practicability of our solution will depend on stopping population growth, perhaps even on reducing the world’s population.

We must be clear about one thing: The human being is not a fluke of nature, nor does nature automatically guarantee his survival. The human being is one player in a huge game, the outcome of which is, for him, uncertain. He has to make full use of his capabilities to hold his own as a player and not become a plaything of chance.

Manfred Eigen / Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch
Göttingen, September 1975

ONE

The Taming of Chance

Research in physics has shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that in the overwhelming majority of phenomena whose regularity and invariability have led to the formulation of the postulate of causality, the common element underlying the consistency observed is chance.

Erwin Schrödinger, “What Is a Natural Law?” (Inaugural Address delivered at the University of Zurich, December 1922)

1

The Origin of Play

Play is a natural phenomenon that has guided the course of the world from its beginnings. It is evident in the shaping of matter, in the organization of matter into living structures, and in the social behavior of human beings.

The history of play goes back to the beginnings of time. The energy released in the “big bang” set everything in motion, set matter whirling in a maelstrom of activity that would never cease. The forces of order sought to bring this process under control, to tame chance. The result was not the rigid order of a crystal but the order of life. From the outset, chance has been the essential counterpart of the ordering forces.

Chance and rules are the elements that underlie games and play. Play began among the elementary particles, atoms, and molecules, and now our brain cells carry it on. Human beings did not invent play, but it is “play and only play that makes man complete.”1

All our capabilities arise from play. First, there is the play of limbs and muscles. The aimless grasping and kicking of an infant develop into carefully coordinated movements. Then there is the play of our senses. Playful curiosity sends us in search of profound knowledge. From play with colors, shapes, and sounds emerge immortal works of art. The first expressions of love take the form of play: the secret exchange of glances, dancing, the interplay of thoughts and emotions, the yielding of partners to each other. In Sanskrit, the union of lovers is called kridaratnam, “the jewel of games.”2

Every game has its rules that set it apart from the surrounding world of reality and establish its own standards of value. Anyone who wants to “play” has to follow those rules. In parlor games, rules established before the game begins determine the course the game will take and define the scale of values by which it is played. But the effects of a chance occurrence can change the constellation of the game and set it running in a totally new direction. This is how life initiated its first games, and this is how our thoughts and ideas continue to play those games.

From the terrifying realm of elemental forces and the holy realm of laws arises the aesthetic impulse, which creates a third, carefree realm. This is the realm of play and appearance. In it, man is freed from the bonds of all circumstance and liberated from compulsion, moral as well as physical.1

It is our intention in this book to trace the interplay of chance and law that has come down to us from the farthest reaches of time and found its most perfect expression in the inexhaustible creativity of our ideas. We hope to translate Hermann Hesse’s symbol of the glass bead game back into reality. Hesse described this game as one that incorporated all the values of our culture.

All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property—on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.3

There is something mysterious about glass beads. The reflection and refraction of light make them glow, and as we explore the idea of play in this book, Hesse’s glass beads will take on a new life. Part of their symbolic significance derives from the fact that they can exemplify the constant transformations and metamorphoses we observe all around us: atoms evolve into crystals, molecules into genes, living cells into cognitive beings, letters into words, notes into harmonies. The course the bead game takes is determined by the roll of the dice, yet at the same time it is also influenced by the rules of the game, just as chance in nature is subject to the laws of physics. The dice and the rules of the game these are our symbols for chance and natural law.

List of References

  1. Schiller, Friedrich von, “Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind),” in a series of letters from the years 1793-94, printed in his Philosophical and Critical Writings (many eds.).
  2. Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
  3. Hesse, Hermann, The Glass Bead Game: Magister Ludi. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969.
Manfred Eigen & Ruthild Winkler. Laws of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance. Translated by Rita & Robert Kimber, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. xi-5.

Theodor Adorno, a Marxist theoretician, believed the filter before any interpretation of the world was ever-present advertising and, by extension, capitalism. While Adorno thinks of capitalism as destiny, Yeats came to realize that “accident is destiny” (as we previously discussed). Amid these infinitely debatable opinions, the world is often a perplexity machine that may not be described by a single view.

Can We Learn from Theologians in a Secular Age?

Let’s list some of the transitions from the pre-modern world:

Karl Barth attempts to establish a foundational explanation of the human body and soul without starting with a divine principle. He writes:

It is beyond our capacity to decide between flesh and Spirit. We can neither reject the one nor select the other. Nor are some small or large companies of men—in the Spirit, whilst others are—in the flesh. Should one claim he is competent to distinguish between those in the flesh and those in the Spirit, he thereby proclaims himself to be undoubtedly in the flesh. In time, it has already been decided that we are all in the flesh: in eternity, it has already been decided that we are all in the Spirit. We are rejected in the flesh, but elected in the Spirit. In the world of time and of men and of things we are condemned, but in the Kingdom of God we are justified. Here we are in death, there we are in life. Both decisions—rejection and election, condemnation and justification, death and life—form the foci of an ellipse, which approximate more and more closely to one another until they unite as the centre of one circle. The unity of both decisions—which is incapable of mathematical representation—is not the unity of an equilibrium, but of the infinite preeminence which the one has over the other, whereby time is swallowed up in eternity, and the flesh in the infinite victory of the Spirit.

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Edwyn C. Hoskyns. Oxford University Press, 1968. pp. 284-285.

Barth seeks to visualize everything not as the fixed center of a circle with flesh and spirit orbiting, but rather as an ellipse with these things trying to become central. He stresses that an ellipse has two foci, rather than a circle’s singular center.

Barth wrote, “The body is totality of my existence in the flesh, in the world of time and things and men, the totality of my existence as ‘I’, as the man of this world encircled by all manner of concrete and conceivable possibilities.” (Ibid. pp. 289)

Some thinkers use “existentialization” to describe the type of concept in Barth’s statement. Barth also gives us another dimension of our situation when he wrote, “Caught up in the struggle for existence eating, drinking, sleeping, yes, above all, sleeping! marrying and giving in marriage—men stand midway between life and death. Immersed in the flux of time and history…” (Ibid. p. 89)

In his thinking, the previous framework is contained in the larger one: “Our life is confronted with a steep precipice, towering above us, hemming us in on every side, and on it are hewn the words: All things come to an end.” (Ibid. p. 170)

Think of the word matter as the root of materialism. In daily life, we ask ourselves, “Does it matter?” Contrast the realms of science and meaning. Barth attempted to connect these with divinity, which can still provide valuable insight in our secular world.

Is There a Scheme of Things Underlying Everything?

In The Thibaults (the novel sequence for which Roger Martin du Gard won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Literature), a fundamental motif is the question of whether the universe is coherent. Roughly speaking, there are three competing schools of coherence—science, religion and art. Antoine Thibault discusses with the Abbé (French title for abbot):

Antoine did not seem to hear him. “Just think,” he exclaimed, “what it means to a youngster, when he’s turned loose, by gradual stages, on mathematics, physics, chemistry! Suddenly he discovers that he has all space, the universe, for his playground. And after that, religion strikes him as not only cramped, but false, illogical. Untrustworthy.”

Roger Martin du Gard, The Thibaults, translated by Philip Thody & Ellen Kennedy, Bantam Modern Classic Edition, Viking Press, 1968. page 762.

The climax of this debate appears when Antoine says:

“…I talked just now about Universal Order and a Scheme of Things; but that was merely to talk like everyone else. Actually it seems to me that we’ve as many reasons to question the existence of a Scheme of Things as to take it for granted. From his actual viewpoint the human animal I am observes an immense tangle of conflicting forces. But do these forces obey a universal law outside themselves, distinct from them? Or do they, rather, obey—so to speak—internal laws, each atom being a law unto itself, that compels it to work out a kind of ‘personal’ destiny? I see these forces obeying laws which do not control them from outside, but join up with them, which do nothing more than in some way stimulate them.…And anyhow, what a jumble it is, the course of natural phenomena! I’d just as soon believe that causes spring from each other ad infinitum, each cause being the effect of another cause, and each effect the cause of other effects. Why should one want to assume at all costs a Scheme of Things?…”

Roger Martin du Gard, The Thibaults, translated by Philip Thody & Ellen Kennedy, Bantam Modern Classic Edition, Viking Press, 1968. page 768.

The topic of an underlying scheme of things is close to the central question of Western civilization. In Plato’s Republic, we have the allegory of the dark cave occupied by humanity. It looks at shadows dancing on the wall, projected by a fire. Liberating humanity requires leaving the cave and climbing to the surface of the earth, glimpsing the sun for the first time. From here, with the help of philosophy, humanity flies off and encounters the Logos and the Eidos. Mathematical truth crowns this journey.

Aristotle, Plato’s star pupil and later rival, takes this quest and focuses on the biological. The Athenian tradition invents theory, a pillar of Western tradition, culminating in modern science. Jerusalem’s competing tradition, the Judeo-Christian worldview, derives its scheme of things from divinity before biology and mathematics. Thus, the novel’s debate is ultimately the struggle between Athens and Jerusalem.

What Do We Mean by “Spheres of Existence”?

The classic Hollywood film, How Green Was My Valley, is set in a Welsh coal-mining community over a hundred years ago. The spiritual head of the community, played by Walter Pidgeon, is walking along a hillside with a young boy who was traumatized after being injured in an accident. After some small talk, Pidgeon’s character tells the boy that prayer will help him heal. He explains that this isn’t mumbling in a church; what he means by prayer is the deepest possible communication with oneself, thus existentializing it.

This whole dimension derives from the existence-watchers Pascal and Kierkegaard. For example, Kierkegaard writes, “My principal thought was that in our age, because of the great increase of knowledge, we had forgotten what it means to exist, and what inwardness signifies.” (Quoted from “Truth Is Subjectivity”, a section in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments.) Note that when you watch a very gifted scientific analyst, like Robert Lawrence Kuhn, whose PBS series Closer to Truth, represents the opposite of Kierkegaard’s inwardness.

In “Realms and Domains: Levels and Confusion”, we presented realms and domains as ways of shaping knowledge. Kierkegaard utilizes the word “sphere” to communicate a similar concept. Think of the term in geometry or as a “sphere of influence” in geopolitics.

Kierkegaard tells us, “There are thus three spheres of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious.” Let’s explain these three spheres. By “aesthetic,” he means the pursuit of wine, women and song as a life. The European academic song, “Gaudeamus igitur” embodies this philosophy. In the Eugene O’Neill play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, one of the characters exclaims, “In vino veritas!” (Latin: in wine, there is truth.)

By ethical, Kierkegaard is not describing a great concern for morality. He means, rather, the sense of camaraderie felt by someone for their fellows. A strong example of this occurs in the film, The Third Man. Trevor Howard plays a conscientious Royal Military Police officer, whose mission is to catch the elusive criminal played by Orson Welles. Howard’s officer’s entire existence is characterized by his desire to protect the public and his men. One could says this protectiveness is his bottom line.

To understand what Kierkegaard means by the religious, we quote, “Existence constitutes the highest interest of the existing individual, and his interest in his existence constitutes his reality. What reality is, cannot be expressed in the language of abstraction.” In The Third Man, the criminal’s girlfriend embodies the religious sphere. Her every task in daily life can be described by the previous quote.

Kierkegaard also has a very penetrating analysis of humor and irony, given his spheres of existence. Think of a comedian like Woody Allen, who has the intelligence to glimpse the profundity of existence but this wavelength makes him intensely anxious, provoking humor. These jokes are escapist, attempting to flee the tension of existence.

Finally, there are existence-watchers like the great American author Walker Percy. In his masterpiece, The Moviegoer, he depicts a current world so fragmented, adrift and soul-crushing that the protagonist tries to find his salvation in going to movies. He sees the experience of viewing the movie as being part of a congregation. Kierkegaard writes, “In our age it is believed that knowledge settles everything, and that if a man only acquires a knowledge of the truth, the more briefly and the more quickly the better, he is helped. But to exist and to know are two very different things.”

Extracting “Big History” from Hollywood “Sword-and-Sandal” Movies: Cleopatra (1963)

Seen in “deep time,” the movie is not about colorful personalities only but on a larger scale, the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. This covers approximately one thousand years with some five centuries for each form of government, republic and empire.

The movie has as its background internecine power struggles in both Rome and Egypt.

The upshot of these struggles is the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. This transition is “punctuated” by two momentous battles:

  1. Land Battle of Pharsalus, 48 BC (Cleopatra begins with this battle).
  2. Naval Battle of Actium, 31 BC.

Rome went from monarchy (Kings) to republic (Senators) for five hundred years to Emperors for another five hundred.

(Notice that Napoleon was crowned Emperor of the French in 1804. The King was executed during the French Revolution and the word “king” was to be avoided.)

Other movies like Ben-Hur with Charleton Heston playing the lead role, show you the unhappiness of colonial peoples (like the Hebrews) under the Roman Empire. Christianity became the official religion in 330 AD under Constantine and the capital was moved from pagan Rome to Christian Constantinople. The very name “Roman Catholic Church” shows you the fusion after centuries of conflict.

After the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC, Julius Caesar went to Egypt, under the pretext of being named the executor of the will of the father of the young Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII and his sister Cleopatra.

Ptolemy and Cleopatra are in the midst of a civil war of their own and she has been driven out of the city of Alexandria.

Ptolemy rules alone under the care of his three “guardians,” the chief eunuch Pothinus, his tutor Theodotus and General Achillas.

Cleopatra convinces Caesar to restore her throne from her younger brother. Caesar, in effective control of the kingdom, sentences Pothinus to death for arranging an assassination attempt on Cleopatra, and banishes Ptolemy to the eastern desert, where he and his outnumbered army would face certain death against Mithridates.

Cleopatra is crowned queen of Egypt and begins to develop megalomaniacal dreams of ruling the world with Caesar, who in turn desires to become king of Rome.

They marry, and when their son Caesarion is born, Caesar accepts him publicly, which becomes the talk of Rome and the Senate.

After he is made dictator for life, Caesar sends for Cleopatra. She arrives in Rome in a lavish procession and wins the adulation of the Roman people. The Senate grows increasingly discontented amid rumors that Caesar wishes to be made king, which is anathema to the Romans. On the Ides of March in 44 BC, a group of conspirators assassinated Caesar and fled the city, starting a rebellion. An alliance among Octavian (Caesar’s adopted son), Mark Antony (Caesar’s right-hand man and general) and Marcus Aemelius Lepidus puts down the rebellion and splits the republic. Cleopatra is angered after Caesar’s will recognizes Octavian, rather than Caesarion, as his official heir, and she returns to Egypt.

While planning a campaign against Parthia in the east, Antony realizes that he needs money and supplies that only Egypt can sufficiently provide. After refusing several times to leave Egypt, Cleopatra acquiesces and meets him on her royal barge in Tarsus. The two begin a love affair, and Cleopatra assures Antony that he is much more than a pale reflection of Caesar. Octavian’s removal of Lepidus forces Antony to return to Rome, where he marries Octavian’s sister Octavia to prevent political conflict. This upsets and enrages Cleopatra. Antony and Cleopatra reconcile and marry, with Antony divorcing Octavia. Octavian, incensed, reads Antony’s will to the Roman Senate, revealing that Antony wishes to be buried in Egypt. Rome turns against Antony, and Octavian’s call for war against Egypt receives a rapturous response.

The war is decided at the naval Battle of Actium on September 2, 31 BC, where Octavian’s fleet, under the command of Agrippa, defeats the lead ships of the Antony–Egyptian fleet. Cleopatra assumes that Antony is dead and orders the Egyptian forces home. Antony follows her, leaving the rest of his fleet leaderless and soon defeated.

Several months later, Cleopatra sends Caesarion under disguise out of Alexandria. She manages to convince Antony to resume command of his troops and fight Octavian’s advancing army. However, Antony’s soldiers abandon him during the night. Rufio, the last man loyal to Antony, kills himself. Antony tries to goad Octavian into single combat but is finally forced to flee into the city. When Antony returns to the palace, Apollodorus, in love with Cleopatra himself, tells him she is in her tomb as she had instructed, and lets Antony believe she is dead. Antony falls on his own sword. Apollodorus then confesses that he misled Antony and assists him to the tomb where Cleopatra and two servants have taken refuge. Antony dies in Cleopatra’s arms.

Octavian and his army march into Alexandria with Caesarion’s dead body in a wagon. He discovers the dead body of Apollodorus, who had poisoned himself. Octavian receives word that Antony is dead and that Cleopatra is holed up in a tomb. There he offers to allow her to rule Egypt as a Roman province if she will accompany him to Rome. Cleopatra, knowing that her son is dead, agrees to Octavian’s terms, including an empty pledge on the life of her son not to harm herself. After Octavian departs, she orders her servants in coded language to assist with her suicide. Octavian discovers that she is going to kill herself and he and his guards burst into Cleopatra’s chamber to find her dead, dressed in gold, along with her servants and the asp that killed her.

The Battle of Actium was a naval battle fought between a maritime fleet of Octavian led by Marcus Agrippa and the combined fleets of both Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator.

The battle took place on 2 September 31 BC in the Ionian Sea, near the former Roman colony of Actium, Greece, and was the climax of over a decade of rivalry between Octavian and Antony.

In early 31 BC, the year of the battle, Antony and Cleopatra were temporarily stationed in Greece. Mark Antony possessed 500 ships and 70,000 infantry, and made his camp at Actium, and Octavian, with 400 ships and 80,000 infantry, arrived from the north and occupied Patrae and Corinth, where he managed to cut Antony’s southward communications with Egypt (via the Peloponnese) with help from Marcus Agrippa. Octavian previously gained a preliminary victory in Greece, where his navy successfully ferried troops across the Adriatic Sea under the command of Marcus Agrippa. Octavian landed on mainland Greece, opposite the island of Korkyra (modern Corfu) and proceeded south on land.

Trapped on both land and sea, portions of Antony’s army deserted and fled to Octavian’s side (daily), and Octavian’s forces became comfortable enough to make preparations for battle. Antony’s fleet sailed through the bay of Actium on the western coast of Greece, in a desperate attempt to break free of the naval blockade. It was there that Antony’s fleet faced the much larger fleet of smaller, more maneuverable ships under commanders Gaius Sosius and Agrippa. Antony and his remaining forces were spared only due to a last-ditch effort by Cleopatra’s fleet that had been waiting nearby. Octavian pursued them and defeated their forces in Alexandria on 1 August 30 BC—after which Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide.

Octavian’s victory enabled him to consolidate his power over Rome and its dominions. He adopted the title of Princeps (“first citizen”), and in 27 BC was awarded the title of Augustus (“revered”) by the Roman Senate. This became the name by which he was known in later times.

As Augustus, he retained the trappings of a restored Republican leader, but historians generally view his consolidation of power and the adoption of these honorifics as the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire.

Note: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is of course relevant here.

Education and Circular Causation: Everything Causes Everything Else

The student will have seen in these educational essays the notion of “Husserl’s rhomboid”:

The great philosopher, Edmund Husserl, who died in 1938, would bring a matchbox to class and show his students they see parts and some surface area of the matchbox (a kind of rhomboid, hence the name “Husserl’s rhomboid”) but never all of it at the same time. Students can walk around the matchbox and see facets. They can twirl the matchbox but whatever they do, the students cannot “espy” or glimpse all of it except in their imaginations, once they have been exposed to all of it, side by side, facet by facet.

Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1974, has something a bit analogous when he speaks of “circular cumulative causation”:

Circular cumulative causation is a theory developed by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal in 1956. It is a multi-causal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated. The idea behind it is that a change in one form of an institution will lead to successive changes in other institutions. These changes are circular in that they continue in a cycle, many times in a negative way, in which there is no end, and cumulative in that they persist in each round. The change does not occur all at once, which would lead to chaos, rather the changes occur gradually.

Gunnar Myrdal developed the concept from Knut Wicksell and developed it with Nicholas Kaldor when they worked together at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.

In the characteristics relevant to an economy’s development process, Myrdal mentioned the availability of natural resources, the historical traditions of production activity, national cohesion, religions and ideologies, and economic, social and political leadership.

He writes:

“The notion of stable equilibrium is normally a false analogy to choose when constructing a theory to explain the changes in a social system.

What is wrong with the stable equilibrium assumption as applied to social reality is the very idea that a social process follows a direction—though it might move towards it in a circuitous way—towards a position which in some sense or other can be described as a state of equilibrium between forces. Behind this idea is another and still more basic assumption, namely that a change will regularly call forth a reaction in the system in the form of changes which on the whole go in the opposite direction to the first change. The idea I want to expound in this book is that, on the contrary, in the normal case there is no such a tendency towards automatic self-stabilisation in the social system. The system is by itself not moving towards any sort of balance between forces, but is constantly on the move away from such a situation. In the normal case a change does not call forth countervailing changes but, instead, supporting changes, which move the system in the same direction as the first change but much further. Because of such circular causation as a social process tends to become cumulative and often gather speed at an accelerating rate…”

(Gunnar Myrdal, Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions, Gerald Duckworth, 1957, pp. 12–13)

Myrdal developed further the circular cumulative causation concept and stated that it makes different assumptions from that of stable equilibrium on what can be considered the most important forces guiding the evolution of social processes. These forces characterize the dynamics of these processes in two diverse ways.

These essays that you are reading here are examples encouraging students to put causes in a kind of circle: history exists because economics exists because psychology exists because society exists because history exists. Everything is causing everything else. There isn’t a simple “linear parade.”

By way of contrast, in a person’s private life, he/she went to the dentist before buying the batteries and after having lunch. There’s a timeline of events.

In history, there are such linear timelines also: John Kennedy was assassinated before Donald Trump became president. You had breakfast before dinner. You slept before you got up in the morning.

However, processes (industrialism, migration, urbanization, inflation, etc.) are not analyzable as events like meals and one-time occurrences but are more like getting old or learning a language.

Multi-causal interpretations and circular causes get the student out of simple, “this happened and that happened” in favor of “this and that caused each other, going both ways and interacting with other pressures too.” Everything is causing and altering everything else in all directions.

Interesting Intuition from Marx

There’s an intriguing and puzzling quote from Marx which is very informative in a completely unexpected way, when Marx says:

“Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”
(The German Ideology, International Publishers, 1970, page 47)

This seems to fit Marx’s obsession with practical circumstances as the “driver” and ideas and subjective states of mind as secondary or even derivative. For Marx, culture and consciousness are “epiphenomena” like the foam on a wave.

In a different way, modern philosophers have their own versions of this:

  1. For Wittgenstein, “forms of life” come first before all else.
  2. For Husserl, “the life-world” comes before theory.
  3. For Heidegger, “being-in-the-world” comes before theory.

Marx’s reduction of everything to material circumstances as primary causes of everything would seem to these other philosophers as a kind of extremist monomania on Marx’s part, as when he says:

We do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. Their material life-process dominates.

The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence.

Karl Marx with Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, page 47

This idea from Marx is both suggestive and obsessive and maniacal at the same time, what the French call an “idée fixe” or fixation.

It is more accurate to say perhaps that life and consciousness are a “double helix.”

Education and the Question of a “Scheme of Things”

The French classic The Thibaults (Les Thibault) from 1922 has a dialog about the presence or absence of “a scheme of things” behind everything. This Roger Martin du Gard (died 1958, Nobel 1937) classic gives us an insight into the relationship between education and this “scheme of things.”

First:

The Thibaults is a multi-volume roman-fleuve (saga novel) by Roger Martin du Gard, which follows the fortunes of two brothers, Antoine and Jacques Thibault, from their upbringing in a prosperous Catholic bourgeois family to the end of the First World War.

Antione, one of the Thibault brothers, has a conversation with a priest at the very end of the novel:

“I talked just now about a Universal Order and a Scheme of Things…actually we’ve as many reasons to question the existence of a Scheme of Things as to take it for granted. From his actual viewpoint, the human animal I am observes an immense tangle of conflicting forces. But do these forces obey a universal law outside themselves, distinct from them? Or do they, rather, obey—so to speak—internal laws, each atom being a law unto itself, that compels it to work out a ‘personal destiny’? I see these forces obeying laws which do not control them from outside but join up with them, but do nothing more than in some way stimulate them…And anyhow, what a jumble it is, the course of natural phenomena! I’d just as soon believe that causes spring from each other ad infinitum, each cause being the effect of another cause, and each effect the cause of other effects.

“Why should one want to assume at all costs a Scheme of Things?

“It’s only another bait form our logic-ridden minds. Why try to find a common ‘purpose’ in the movements of atoms endlessly clashing and glancing off each other? Personally, I’ve often told myself that everything happens just as if nothing led to anything, as if nothing had a meaning.”

Antione shook his head. “that blind appeal—to what? To that problematic Scheme of Things! To a deaf and dumb abstraction, that takes no heed of us.”

(Roger Martin du Gard, The Thibaults, Bantam Modern Classic, 1968, pages 768-770)

All bodies of knowledge like religion, philosophy, science posit a scheme of things which is perhaps subtle or occluded (“The Occluded Imam” or “mystery of the Holy Trinity”) or “the mind of God” (Steven Hawking’s way of getting at this) or “the Method of Absolute Doubt” leading to final certainty (Descartes).

String theory talks this way too.

In our own educational remediation effort, we are agnostic about any Scheme of Things and do not try to link books, lectures, courses to some pre-existing schema or “final layer underlying everything” at all.

Students create an evolving overview by “circum-spective” “walking around” or meta-intelligence and there is no ultimate “Eureka moment” where “everything is illuminated” (to use the title of the contemporary novel by that name.) We also do not deny the possibility of the existence of a Scheme of Things. Education thought of this way is an exploration and quest that does not end and there does not have to be a final “knowledge map“ or “truth atlas” other than home-made student “composite sketches” which are tentative and not final or “apodictic.”