Wolfgang Schirmacher (New York)

Chaos and Philosophy - A Love-Hate-Relationship.

First draft of a paper presented at the CHAOS SYMPOSIUM, Chicago Academy of Sciences, October 7, 1989

It is CHAOS all around, has ever been, will always be. CHAOS is a name for our ongoing experience of a life process which is always there before any human interpretation . We have no way to address directly this process of life, and all our explanations, the poetic as well as the scientific, are merely interpretations which can never cover the whole truth. CHAOS therefore is oursecret word for the truth of the whole we can never ever expressin thoughts but live throught as long as we exist. This whole isfor us never undivided, a strange flow in which everything ispossible. CHAOS and order are experienced an this level ofperception as dialectially intermixed: there is order in chaos aswell as chaos in any order. Open up your perception for "RunningWater" (directed by Eric Roth) and feel the flow of chaos andorder.

What has philosophy to do with chaos? Plenty.

In the understanding of the old Greek, chaos was thebirthplace of cosmos. The world without order brought forward the known order of the world. With the very thinking of this given cosmos, philosophy started 2500 years ago. Philosophy always considered chaos its birth trauma and, therefore, as a"Grenzbegriff", that means a borderline concept indicating a last frontier behind which human rationality has no way of acting.

But on the other hand, it should be noted that the horror with which the idea of chaos was met by many philosophers and ordinary people was contradicted by a strange fascination chaos caused inmost of the leading philosophers of the West. To embrace chaos inorder to break the laws and limitation of common thinking was a possible remedy no philosopher ever gave up totally.

Nonetheles, metaphysics, that is the order of a world we cannot see, as well as physics, that is the order of a world we are supposed to see, were founded and maintained especially againstchaos, which was the ultimate threat.

With the decline of metaphysics in the philosophy after Kant and the fundamental critique of science as a human enterprise inthe 20th century, chaos returned as a critical concept. Chaos was on the core of Hegel's dialectics, Kierkegaard's existentalism, Schopenhauer's and Freud's philosophy of the needs and the subconsciousness, and especially Nietzsche's active nihilism. The artist, irresponsible in his urge to create, became the role model. Nietzsche said: Only who has chaos in him/herself can give birth to a dancing star.

In Postmodernism and its philosophy of differences from Foucault to Derrida, chaos has many faces and is officially approved: it appears as rupture, delay, resistance and break. To conclude this little history of the love-hate-relationship between chaos and philosophy, let me tell you the good and thebad news.

Good news are that chaos theory seems to be in accordance with major schools of thoughts in continental philosophy. But this is also the bad news. The discovery of the non-linearity and the order in chaos/chaos in order scheme is news only for natural sciences which narrow mindeness is notorious. Heidegger's comment "Science doesn't think" addresses the structural problem of any scientific order which can not challenge its own giveness.

But should art not know better? That artists are fascinated by some moments of chaos theory in no way indicates that the concept of chaos is new to them. The fascination has to do with the new language science provides for chaos, a language which can be cannibalized by contemporary artists. Take the great example of music videos: chaos is very entertaining in blurring the borders.

But seriously, there is more bad news. Chaos theory is in my understanding on the level of Hegel's dialectics, in fact provides a great opportunity for everyday thinking and scientific discourse to leave now the out dated Kantian horizon we take for self-evident. In dialectics, to make it short, contradictions like chaos and order are the best thing which can happen, opens you up to a new horizons. You never try to eliminate contradictions dealing with them in their own terms but push onto find a level on which these once powerful contradictions became merely moments of a new phenomenon. Exactly this is theway of chaos theory because there is no preference for chaos, but also no preference for order. The mood is a cool prediction of chaos and its acceptance as an unpredictable order. Unpredictability is surely the indication of the New, the unprecedent horizon of Hegel's synthesis. Even Hegel's concept ofthe "absolute idea" which expresses the self-understanding of a world is mirrored in the mathematics of chaos theory.

But why is the nearness of Hegel's dialectics and chaos theory bad news? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we learn to think dialectically, face contradictions, learn to live with creativity and forget security as the main rule? In my mind there is no doubt that dialectical thinking and acting would be a significant improvement for our society. But as a philosopher of technology I have reasons to believe that dialectics is not sufficient to cope with the ecological crisis and the political turmoil which will shape the 21st century. Dialectics as well as chaos theory are restricted to a world not longer here but still governing our minds. The anthropocentric world of progress, of becoming, of challenging, of instrumental truth is determined to be the world of the dying human species. We cannot survive a life world shaped by Kant's "court of reason", but the same is true for a lifeworld shaped by Hegel's "world spirit". Chaos theory is an expression of this "world spirit" and is routed in an scientific enterprise to reveal the secrets of nature for the good of mankind (or at least curiosity).

Chaos as a concept vanishes with metaphysics and its urge to explain and discover but remains as experience of basic perceptions before interpretations. We philosophers have great sympathy for the shaking-up that chaos theory is doing for science and common sense, and we are looking forward to how artists translate these impulses in their work. But what we really have to do is to understand and live the "Geviert" (Hilderlin's "fourfold" of mortals and divine, of heaven and earth) in an artificial life of creative responsibility. Science is a play played by children who are unwilling to grow up and in this respect there is always a spot for science and its new toy chaos.