12. Heraclitus: “live of death, die of life”
In this union of notions logically complex, there is a relationship between life and death.
I often quoted the illuminating phrase of Heraclitus, from the VIth century b.C.: “live of death, die of life”. It became recently intelligible, from the moment when we learned that our organism degrades its energy, not only to reconstitute its molecules, but that our cells themselves are degraded and that we produce new cells. We live from the death of our cells.
And this process of permanent regeneration, almost of permanent rejuvenation, is the process of life. What makes it possible to add to the very right formula of Bichat, saying: “life is the ensemble of the functions that fight against death”, this strange complement that presents us a logical complexity: “Integrating death to fight better against death”. What one again knows about this process is extremely interesting: it has been learned rather recently that cells that die are not only old cells; in fact apparently healthy cells receiving different messages from neighboring cells, “decide”, at a given moment, to commit suicide. They commit suicide and phagocytes devour their remains. Like this, the organism determines which cells must die before they have reached senescence. That is to say that the death of cells and their postmortem liquidation are included in the living organization.
There is a kind of phenomenon of self-destruction, of apoptosis, since this term has been taken from the vegetal world, indicating the split of the stems operated by trees in autumn so that dead leafs fall.
On the one hand, when there is an insufficiency of cellular deaths following different accidents and perturbations, there are a certain number of diseases that are deadly in the long run, like osteoporosis, various types of sclerosis, and certain cancers, where cells refuse to die, becoming immortal, forming tumors and go for a stroll in the form of metastases (It can seem that it is a revolt of cells against their individual death that lead to these forms of death of the organism). On the other hand, the excess of cellular deaths determine AIDS, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s disease.
You see at which point this relationship between life and death is complex: it is necessary for cells to die, but not too much! One lives between two catastrophes, the excess or insufficiency of mortality. One finds again the fundamentally epistemological problem of generalized complexity.
13. On non-trivial machines
Living beings are certainly machines, but unlike artificial machines that are trivial deterministic machines (where one knows the outputs when one knows the inputs), these are non-trivial machines (von Foerster) where one can predict innovative behaviors.
We are machines, this truth was already in L'homme-machine of La Mettrie. We are physical machines, thermal machines, we function at the temperature of 37'. But we are complex machines.
Von Neumann established the difference between living machines and artificial machines produced by technology: the components of the technical machines, having the good quality of being extremely reliable, go towards their degradation, towards their wear, from the very start of their operation.
Whereas the living machine, made up mainly by components far from reliable, degrading proteins-and one understands very well that this lack of reliability of proteins makes it possible to reconstitute them non stop-is able to be regenerated and repaired; it also goes towards death, but after a process of development. The key of this difference lies in the capacity of self-repair and self-regeneration. The word regeneration is capital here.
One can say that the characteristic of innovations that emerge in the evolution of life (which are determined by environmental changes, or by the irruption of multiple hazards), such as the appearance of the skeleton in vertebrates, wings in insects, birds, or bats, all these creations, are characteristic non-trivial machines. That is to say, it gives a new solution to insurmountable challenges without this solution.
All the important figures of human history, on the intellectual, religious, messianic, or politic levels, were non-trivial machines. One can advance that all the History of Humankind, which begins ten thousand years ago-is a non-trivial history, i.e. a history made of unforeseen, of unexpected events, of destructions and creations. The history of life that precedes it is a nontrivial history, and the history of the universe, where the birth of life and then of humankind are included, is a non-trivial history.
We are obliged to detrivialize knowledge and our worldview.
14. To complexify the notion of chaos
We have seen how the notion of system brings us to complexities of organization which themselves lead us to logical complexities. Let us look now at the notion of chaos, as it appears within chaos theory, and which comprises disorder and unpredictability. The beat of the wings of a butterfly in Melbourne can cause by a succession of chain processes a hurricane in Jamaica, for example.
Actually, I believe that the word chaos must be considered in its deep sense, its Greek sense. We know that in the Greek worldview, Chaos is at the origin of Cosmos. Chaos is not pure disorder, it carries within itself the indistinctness between the potentialities of order, of disorder, and of organization from which a cosmos will be born, which is an ordered universe.
The Greeks saw a bit too much order in the cosmos, which is effectively ordered because the immediate spectacle, the impeccable order of the sky that we see each night with the stars, is always in the same place. And if the planets are mobile they also come to the same place with an impeccable order. However, we know today with the widened conceptions of cosmic time that all this order is at the same time temporary and partial in a universe of movement, collision, transformation.
Chaos and Cosmos are associated - I have employed the word Chaosmos - there is also a circular relation between both terms. It is necessary to take the word chaos in a much deeper and more intense sense than that of physical chaos theory.
15. The need of contextualization
Let us take again the “complexus” term in the sense of “what is woven together”.
It is a very important word, which indicates that the breaking up of knowledge prevents from linking. and contextualizing.
The knowledge mode characteristic of disciplinary science isolates objects, one from another, and isolates them compared to their environment. One can even say that the principle of scientific experimentation allows to take a physical body in Nature, to isolate it in an artificial and controlled laboratory environment, and then study this object in function of perturbations and variations that one makes it undergo. This indeed makes it possible to know a certain number of its qualities and properties. But one can also say that this principle of decontextualization was ill-fated, as soon as it was ported to the living. The observation since 1960 by Jane Goodall of a tribe of chimpanzees in their natural environment could show the supremacy of observation (in a natural environment) over experimentation
(in a laboratory) for knowledge. A lot of patience was necessary so that Jane Goodall could perceive that chimpanzees had different personalities, with rather complex relations of friendship, of rivalry; a whole psychology, a sociology of chimpanzees, invisible to the studies in a laboratory or in a cage, appeared in their complexity.
The idea of knowing the living in their environment became capital in animal ethology. Let us repeat it, the autonomy of the living needs to be known in its environment.
From now on, becoming aware of the degradations that our technoeconomic development makes to the biosphere, we realize the vital link with this same biosphere that we believe to have reduced to the rank of manipulable object. If we degrade it, we degrade ourselves, and if we destroy it, we destroy ourselves.
The need for contextualization is extremely important. I would even say that it is a principle of knowledge: Anybody who has made a translation in a foreign language will seek an unknown word in the dictionary; but with words being polysemous, it is not immediately known which is the good translation; the sense of the word will be sought in the sense of the
sentence in the light of the global sense of the text. Thought this play from text to word, and from text to context, and from context to word, a sense will crystallize. In other words, the insertion in the text and in the context is an evident cognitive necessity. Take for example the economy, the most advanced social science from a mathematical point of view, but which is isolated from human, social, historic, and sociologic contexts: its prediction power is extremely weak because the economy does not function in isolation: its forecasts need to be unceasingly revised, which indicates us the disability of a science that is very advanced but too closed.
More generally, mutual contextualization is lacking in the whole of social sciences.
I have often quoted the case of the Aswan dam because it is revealing and significant: it was built in Nasser’s Egypt because it would make it possible to regulate the course of a capricious river, the Nile, and to produce electric power for a country which had a great need for it. However, after some time, what happened? This dam retained a part of the silts that fertilized the Nile valley, which obliged the farming population to desert the fields and overpopulate large metropolises like Cairo; it retained a part of the fish that the residents ate; moreover today, the accumulation of silts weakens the dam and causes new technical problems. That does not mean that the Aswan dam should not have been built, but that all the decisions taken in a techno-economic context are likely to be disastrous by their consequences.
It is like the deviation of rivers in Siberia that the Soviet government made and where the perverse consequences are more important than the positive ones.
It is thus necessary to recognize the inseparability of the separable, at the historical and social levels, as it has been recognized at the microphysical level. According to quantum physics, confirmed by Aspect’s experiments, two microphysical entities are immediately connected one to the other although they are separated by space and time. Even more, one arrives to the idea that everything that is separated is at the same time inseparable.
16. The hologrammatic and dialogical principles
The hologrammic or hologrammatic principle should also be advanced, according to which not only a part is inside a whole, but also the whole is inside the part; just as the totality of the genetic inheritance is found in each cell of our organism, the society with its culture is inside the spirit of an individual.
We return again to the logical core of complexity which we will see, is dialogical: separability-inseparability, whole-parts, effect-cause, product-producer, life-death, homo sapiens-homo demens, etc.
It is here that the principle of the excluded middle reveals its limit. The excluded middle states “A cannot be A and not A”, whereas it can be one and the other. For example, Spinoza is Jewish and non-Jewish, he is neither Jewish, nor non-Jewish. It is here that the dialogic is not the response to these paradoxes, but the means of facing them, by considering the complementarity of antagonisms and the productive play, sometimes vital, of complementary antagonisms.
17. For the sciences, a certain number of consequences
Regarding sciences, we can see a certain number of consequences.
First of all, classical science is somehow complex, even when it produces simplifying knowledge. Why?
Because science is a quadruped which walks on the following four legs: the leg of empiricism made of data, experimentation or observation; the leg of rationality, made of logically constituted theories; the leg of verification, always necessary; and the leg of imagination, because great theories are products of a powerful creative imagination. Thus science is complex, produced by a quadruped movement, which prevents it from solidifying.
The objective knowledge which is its idea, resulted in the need of eliminating
subjectivity, i.e. the emotional part inherent to each observer, to each scientist, but it also comprised the elimination of the subject, i.e. the being which conceives and knows. However, any knowledge, including objective, is at the same time a cerebral translation starting from data of the external world and a mental reconstruction, starting from certain organizing potentialities of the spirit. It is certain that the idea of a pure objectivity is utopian. Scientific objectivity is produced by beings who are subjects, within given historical conditions, starting from the rules of the scientific game. The great contribution of Kant was to show that the object of knowledge is co-constructed by our spirit. He indicated us that it is necessary to know knowledge to know its possibilities and limits. The knowledge of knowledge is a requirement of the complex thinking.
As Husserl indicated in the 30's, in particular in his conference on the crisis of European science, sciences developed extremely sophisticated means to know external objects, but no means to know themselves. There is no science of science, and even the science of science would be insufficient if it does not include epistemological problems. Science is a tumultuous building site, science is a process that could not be programmed in advance, because one can never program what one will find, since the characteristic of a discovery is its unexpectedness. This uncontrolled process has lead today to the development of potentialities of destruction and of manipulation, which must bring the introduction into science of a double conscience: a conscience of itself, and an ethical conscience.
Also, I believe that it will be necessary to arrive more and more to a scientific knowledge integrating the knowledge of the human spirit to the knowledge of the object which this spirit seizes and recognizing the inseparability between object and subject.
18. Two scientific revolutions introduced complexity de facto
I already indicated how the concept of complexity emerged in a marginal fashion in a sphere of mathematicians/engineers. It should be indicated now that the XXth century knew two scientific revolutions which de facto introduced complexity without, however, recognizing this notion that remains implicit.
The first revolution, after the thermodynamics of the XIXth century, is that of the microphysics and cosmophysics that introduced indeterminism, risk-where determinism reigned-and elaborated suitable methods to deal with the uncertainties met.
The second revolution is that which gathers disciplines and restores between them a common fabric. It begins in the second half of the XXth century. Thus in the 60's, Earth sciences designed Earth as a complex physical system, which makes it possible today to articulate geology, seismology, vulcanology, meteorology, ecology, etc. At the same time, ecology develops as a scientific knowledge bringing together data and information coming from different physical and biological disciplines in the conception of ecosystems. It makes it possible to conceive how an ecosystem either degrades, develops, or maintains its homeostasis. From the 70's, the ecological conception extends to the whole biosphere, necessarily introducing knowledge from the social sciences.
Although ecology, at the biosphere level, cannot make rigorous predictions, it can give us vital hypothesis, concerning, for example, global warming, which manifests itself by the melting of glaciers in the Antarctic or the Arctic. Thus ecology, cosmology, and Earth sciences have become poly-disciplinary sciences, even transdisciplinary. Sooner or later, this will arrive in biology, from the moment when the idea of self-organization will be established; this will arrive in the social sciences, although they are extremely resistant.
Finally, the observer, chased by the objectivity postulate, was introduced into certain sciences, such as microphysics where the observer perturbs what it observes. In the case of cosmology, even if one does not adhere to what Brandon Carter called the anthropic principle, which holds account of the place of humans in the universe, one is obliged to conceive that this universe, among its perhaps negligible possibilities, had the possibility of human life, perhaps only on this planet Earth, but perhaps also elsewhere.
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| The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured this billowing cloud of cold interstellar gas and dust rising from a tempestuous stellar nursery located in the Carina Nebula, 7500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. This pillar of dust and gas serves as an incubator for new stars and is teeming with new star-forming activity. |
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| Li Liwei |
19. The insertion of science in History
In addition, there is the problem of the insertion of the Sciences in human History.
You know that there are two conceptions of history of sciences, the internalist conception and the externalist conception. The internalist mode sees the development of sciences in isolation, only in function of their internal logic and their own discoveries. The externalist mode sees them in function of historical and social developments which determine the scientific developments.
I think that it is necessary to link both, and this is appropriate for other developments than those of sciences. Thus, some wanted to understand the perversion of the Soviet Union starting from internal factors, such as insufficiencies of the Marxist doctrine, limitations of that of Lenin. Others wanted to impute it to external elements such as the surrounding and hostility of the capitalist powers with regard to the Soviet Union or former elements such as the backwardness of tsarist Russia. Whereas the true cognitive game is to link these two aspects in a dialogical fashion.
If one continues to place oneself from the viewpoint of modern Western history of science, one sees how from its marginal and quasi-deviating birth in the XVIIth century, it is developed in the XVIIIth, introduced in universities in the XIXth, then in states and companies in the XXth, and how it becomes central and driving within human history in the form of techno-science, and produces not only all the major elements for a renewed knowledge of the world and beneficial effects for humanity, but also formidable and uncontrolled powers which threaten it.
I don’t know if I am right or wrong in retaking an expression of Vico, but it is necessary for us to arrive to the “Scienza Nuova”. Very precisely, Vico inscribed the historical perspective at the heart of the scienza nuova. It is necessary to amplify the idea of scienza nuova by introducing the interaction between the simple and the complex, by conceiving a science that does not suppress disciplines but connects them, and consequently makes them fertile, a science which can at the same time distinguish and connect and where the transdisciplinarity is inseparable from complexity.
I repeat it, as much as the compartmentalization of disciplines disintegrates the natural fabric of complexity, as much a transdisciplinary vision is capable of restoring it.
20. The link between science and philosophy
The link between science and philosophy has been broken. Still in the XVIIth century, the great scientists were at the same time great philosophers. Certainly, they did not identify Science and Philosophy. When Pascal made his experiments in Puy de Dome, he did not think about the bet problem. But in the times of Pascal, Gassendi, Leibniz, there was not this cut. This became a frightening ditch. The ditch of ignorance separates the scientific culture from the culture of the humanities.
But the current has started to be reversed: the most advanced sciences arrive to fundamental philosophical problems: Why is there a universe out of nothing? How was this universe born from a vacuum which was not at the same time the vacuum? What is reality? Is the essence of the universe veiled or totally cognizable?
The problem of life is posed from now on in a complexity that exceeds biology: the singular conditions of its origin, the conditions of emergences of its creative powers. Bergson was mistaken by thinking that there was an élan vital, but was right while speaking about creative evolution. He could even have spoken about evolutionary creativity.
Today we can foresee the possibility of creating life. From the moment when it is believed that life is a process developed starting only from physicochemical matter under certain conditions, in underwater thermal vents or elsewhere, one can very well consider creating the physical, chemical, thermodynamic conditions which give birth to organisms gifted with qualities that one calls life. We can also foresee the possibility to modify the human being in its biological nature. Therefore, we have to meditate about life, as we never did it. And at the same time we must meditate about our relationship with the biosphere.
Thus all the most advanced sciences arrive to fundamental philosophical problems that they thought to have eliminated. They do not only find them, they renew them.
If one defines philosophy by the will and capacity of reflection, it is necessary that the reflectivity is also introduced into the sciences, which does not eliminate the relative autonomy of philosophy nor the relative autonomy of scientific procedures compared to philosophical procedures.
Finally and especially, any knowledge, including the scientific one, must comprise in itself an epistemological reflection on its foundations, principles, and limits.
Still today there is the illusion that complexity is a philosophical problem and not a scientific one. In a certain way, it is true, in a certain way, it is false. It is true when you place yourselves from the point of view of an isolated and separated object: the fact that you isolate and separate the object made the complexity to disappear: thus it is not a scientific problem from the point of view of a closed discipline and a decontextualized object. But, as soon as you start to connect these isolated objects, you are in front of the problem of complexity.
21. Second epistemological rupture with restricted complexity
It is here that a second epistemological rupture with restricted complexity appears.
Restricted complexity is interested essentially in dynamical systems called complex. That is to say, it constitutes its own field, within the field of sciences.
But generalized complexity not only concerns all fields, but also relates to our knowledge as human beings, individuals, persons, and citizens. Since we have been domesticated by our education which taught us much more to separate than to connect, our aptitude for connecting is underdeveloped and our aptitude for separating is overdeveloped; I repeat that knowing, is at the same time separating and connecting, it is to make analysis and synthesis. Both are inseparable, and our atrophy of the capacity to connect is increasingly serious in a globalized, complexified mode, where it is a matter of generalized interdependence of everything and everyone.
The International Ethical, Political and Scientific Collegium has formulated a declaration of interdependence which it would wish to see promulgated by the United Nations. We must think the interdependence in all fields, including the complex relation between the parts and the whole. We need to be able to face uncertainties of life whereas nothing prepares us for it. We need to face complexity, including for action, whereas one opposes the cautionary principle to the risk principle, while Pericles had truly expressed the union of the two antagonistic principles when he said during a speech to the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war: “we Athenians, we are capable of combining prudence and audacity, whereas the others are either timorous or bold”. It is the combination which we need. Also, precaution needs today sometimes much invention.
We need to deeply reform all our way of knowing and thinking.
22. The principle of ecology of action
The principle of ecology of action is, in my opinion, central: from the moment an action enters a given environment, it escapes from the will and intention of that which created it, it enters a set of interactions and multiple feedbacks and then it will find itself derived from its finalities, and sometimes to even go in the opposite sense. The ecology of action has a universal value, including for the development of sciences, whose destructive nuclear consequences were absolutely unexpected.
Think that when Fermi elucidated the structure of the atom in the 30's, it was a purely speculative discovery and he had by no means thought that this could allow the fabrication of an atomic bomb. However, a few years later, the same Fermi went to the United States to contribute to the fabrication of the atomic bomb that would be used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When Watson and Crick determined the structure of the genetic inheritance in DNA, they thought that it was a great conquest of knowledge without any practical consequences. And hardly ten years after their discovery, the problem of genetic manipulations was posed in the biology community.
The ecology of action has a universal value. One can think of examples in our recent French history: a dissolution of the Parliament by President Chirac to have a governmental majority led to a socialist majority; a referendum made to win general support led to its rejection. Gorbachev tried a reform to save the Soviet Union but this one contributed to its disintegration. When one sees that a revolution was made in 1917 to suppress the exploitation of man by his fellow man, to create a new society, founded on the principles of community and liberty, and that this revolution, not only caused immense losses of blood, destruction, and repression by a police system, but, after seventy years, it led to its contrary, i.e. to a capitalism even more fierce and savage than that of the tsarist times, and with a return of religion! Everything that this revolution wanted to destroy resurrected.
How not to think about the ecology of action!
23. Creating “Institutes of fundamental culture”
The reform of the spirit seems to me absolutely necessary.
Once that I had understood that the reform of thought, deep work that I carried out in La Méthode, is a necessity, I accepted the offer of a Minister of Education when he called me for the reform of the content of secondary education. I tried to introduce my ideas of reform of thought into an educational project. I saw its total failure-finally it did not failed, it was not applied!-That pushed me to reflect even more. I wrote a book called La Tete bien faite (The head well made), then on the initiative of UNESCO I made a book called Les Sept savoirs nécessaires a l’éducation du futur (The seven knowledges necessary in the education of the future).
Following a University which will be created on these principles in Mexico, I had the more restricted but maybe more necessary idea of creating “Institutes of fundamental culture”, which would be sheltered in a University or independent, addressing everybody, i.e. before University or during University or after University, students, citizens, members of trade unions, entrepreneurs, everybody.
Why the word “fundamental culture”? Because it is that what is missing. In fact, it is the most vital matter to be taught, the most important to face life, and which is ignored by education.
In addition, there is the problem of the insertion of the Sciences in human History.
You know that there are two conceptions of history of sciences, the internalist conception and the externalist conception. The internalist mode sees the development of sciences in isolation, only in function of their internal logic and their own discoveries. The externalist mode sees them in function of historical and social developments which determine the scientific developments.
I think that it is necessary to link both, and this is appropriate for other developments than those of sciences. Thus, some wanted to understand the perversion of the Soviet Union starting from internal factors, such as insufficiencies of the Marxist doctrine, limitations of that of Lenin. Others wanted to impute it to external elements such as the surrounding and hostility of the capitalist powers with regard to the Soviet Union or former elements such as the backwardness of tsarist Russia. Whereas the true cognitive game is to link these two aspects in a dialogical fashion.
If one continues to place oneself from the viewpoint of modern Western history of science, one sees how from its marginal and quasi-deviating birth in the XVIIth century, it is developed in the XVIIIth, introduced in universities in the XIXth, then in states and companies in the XXth, and how it becomes central and driving within human history in the form of techno-science, and produces not only all the major elements for a renewed knowledge of the world and beneficial effects for humanity, but also formidable and uncontrolled powers which threaten it.
I don’t know if I am right or wrong in retaking an expression of Vico, but it is necessary for us to arrive to the “Scienza Nuova”. Very precisely, Vico inscribed the historical perspective at the heart of the scienza nuova. It is necessary to amplify the idea of scienza nuova by introducing the interaction between the simple and the complex, by conceiving a science that does not suppress disciplines but connects them, and consequently makes them fertile, a science which can at the same time distinguish and connect and where the transdisciplinarity is inseparable from complexity.
I repeat it, as much as the compartmentalization of disciplines disintegrates the natural fabric of complexity, as much a transdisciplinary vision is capable of restoring it.
20. The link between science and philosophy
The link between science and philosophy has been broken. Still in the XVIIth century, the great scientists were at the same time great philosophers. Certainly, they did not identify Science and Philosophy. When Pascal made his experiments in Puy de Dome, he did not think about the bet problem. But in the times of Pascal, Gassendi, Leibniz, there was not this cut. This became a frightening ditch. The ditch of ignorance separates the scientific culture from the culture of the humanities.
But the current has started to be reversed: the most advanced sciences arrive to fundamental philosophical problems: Why is there a universe out of nothing? How was this universe born from a vacuum which was not at the same time the vacuum? What is reality? Is the essence of the universe veiled or totally cognizable?
The problem of life is posed from now on in a complexity that exceeds biology: the singular conditions of its origin, the conditions of emergences of its creative powers. Bergson was mistaken by thinking that there was an élan vital, but was right while speaking about creative evolution. He could even have spoken about evolutionary creativity.
Today we can foresee the possibility of creating life. From the moment when it is believed that life is a process developed starting only from physicochemical matter under certain conditions, in underwater thermal vents or elsewhere, one can very well consider creating the physical, chemical, thermodynamic conditions which give birth to organisms gifted with qualities that one calls life. We can also foresee the possibility to modify the human being in its biological nature. Therefore, we have to meditate about life, as we never did it. And at the same time we must meditate about our relationship with the biosphere.
Thus all the most advanced sciences arrive to fundamental philosophical problems that they thought to have eliminated. They do not only find them, they renew them.
If one defines philosophy by the will and capacity of reflection, it is necessary that the reflectivity is also introduced into the sciences, which does not eliminate the relative autonomy of philosophy nor the relative autonomy of scientific procedures compared to philosophical procedures.
Finally and especially, any knowledge, including the scientific one, must comprise in itself an epistemological reflection on its foundations, principles, and limits.
Still today there is the illusion that complexity is a philosophical problem and not a scientific one. In a certain way, it is true, in a certain way, it is false. It is true when you place yourselves from the point of view of an isolated and separated object: the fact that you isolate and separate the object made the complexity to disappear: thus it is not a scientific problem from the point of view of a closed discipline and a decontextualized object. But, as soon as you start to connect these isolated objects, you are in front of the problem of complexity.
21. Second epistemological rupture with restricted complexity
It is here that a second epistemological rupture with restricted complexity appears.
Restricted complexity is interested essentially in dynamical systems called complex. That is to say, it constitutes its own field, within the field of sciences.
But generalized complexity not only concerns all fields, but also relates to our knowledge as human beings, individuals, persons, and citizens. Since we have been domesticated by our education which taught us much more to separate than to connect, our aptitude for connecting is underdeveloped and our aptitude for separating is overdeveloped; I repeat that knowing, is at the same time separating and connecting, it is to make analysis and synthesis. Both are inseparable, and our atrophy of the capacity to connect is increasingly serious in a globalized, complexified mode, where it is a matter of generalized interdependence of everything and everyone.
The International Ethical, Political and Scientific Collegium has formulated a declaration of interdependence which it would wish to see promulgated by the United Nations. We must think the interdependence in all fields, including the complex relation between the parts and the whole. We need to be able to face uncertainties of life whereas nothing prepares us for it. We need to face complexity, including for action, whereas one opposes the cautionary principle to the risk principle, while Pericles had truly expressed the union of the two antagonistic principles when he said during a speech to the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war: “we Athenians, we are capable of combining prudence and audacity, whereas the others are either timorous or bold”. It is the combination which we need. Also, precaution needs today sometimes much invention.
We need to deeply reform all our way of knowing and thinking.
22. The principle of ecology of action
The principle of ecology of action is, in my opinion, central: from the moment an action enters a given environment, it escapes from the will and intention of that which created it, it enters a set of interactions and multiple feedbacks and then it will find itself derived from its finalities, and sometimes to even go in the opposite sense. The ecology of action has a universal value, including for the development of sciences, whose destructive nuclear consequences were absolutely unexpected.
Think that when Fermi elucidated the structure of the atom in the 30's, it was a purely speculative discovery and he had by no means thought that this could allow the fabrication of an atomic bomb. However, a few years later, the same Fermi went to the United States to contribute to the fabrication of the atomic bomb that would be used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When Watson and Crick determined the structure of the genetic inheritance in DNA, they thought that it was a great conquest of knowledge without any practical consequences. And hardly ten years after their discovery, the problem of genetic manipulations was posed in the biology community.
The ecology of action has a universal value. One can think of examples in our recent French history: a dissolution of the Parliament by President Chirac to have a governmental majority led to a socialist majority; a referendum made to win general support led to its rejection. Gorbachev tried a reform to save the Soviet Union but this one contributed to its disintegration. When one sees that a revolution was made in 1917 to suppress the exploitation of man by his fellow man, to create a new society, founded on the principles of community and liberty, and that this revolution, not only caused immense losses of blood, destruction, and repression by a police system, but, after seventy years, it led to its contrary, i.e. to a capitalism even more fierce and savage than that of the tsarist times, and with a return of religion! Everything that this revolution wanted to destroy resurrected.
How not to think about the ecology of action!
23. Creating “Institutes of fundamental culture”
The reform of the spirit seems to me absolutely necessary.
Once that I had understood that the reform of thought, deep work that I carried out in La Méthode, is a necessity, I accepted the offer of a Minister of Education when he called me for the reform of the content of secondary education. I tried to introduce my ideas of reform of thought into an educational project. I saw its total failure-finally it did not failed, it was not applied!-That pushed me to reflect even more. I wrote a book called La Tete bien faite (The head well made), then on the initiative of UNESCO I made a book called Les Sept savoirs nécessaires a l’éducation du futur (The seven knowledges necessary in the education of the future).
Following a University which will be created on these principles in Mexico, I had the more restricted but maybe more necessary idea of creating “Institutes of fundamental culture”, which would be sheltered in a University or independent, addressing everybody, i.e. before University or during University or after University, students, citizens, members of trade unions, entrepreneurs, everybody.
Why the word “fundamental culture”? Because it is that what is missing. In fact, it is the most vital matter to be taught, the most important to face life, and which is ignored by education.
- Knowledge as a source of error or illusion; nowhere the traps of knowledge are taught, which come owing to the fact that all knowledge is translation and reconstruction.
- Rationality, as if it were an obvious thing, whereas we know that rationality knows its perversion, its infantile or senile diseases.
- Scientificity. What is science, its frontiers, its limits, its possibilities, its rules. Moreover, there is an abundant literature, but which has never been consulted by the scientists who are recruited at CNRS for example. Most of the time, they do not know anything about the polemic between Niels Bohr and Einstein, the works of Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn, etc.
- What is complexity.
And also:
- A teaching on “what is the human identity and condition”, which is not found anywhere.
- A teaching on the global age, not only today’s globalization, but all its antecedents starting from the conquest of America, the colonization of the world, its current phase, and its future prospects.
- A teaching on human understanding.
- A teaching concerning the confrontation of uncertainties in all the fields: sciences, everyday life, history (we have lost the certainty of progress, and the future is completely uncertain and obscure).
- A teaching on the problems of our civilization.
24. I conclude: generalized complexity integrates restricted complexity
Unfortunately, restricted complexity rejects generalized complexity, which seems to the former as pure chattering, pure philosophy. It rejects it because restricted complexity did not make the epistemological and paradigmatic revolution which complexity obliges. That will be done without a doubt. But in the meantime, we see that the problematic of complexity have invaded all our horizons, and I repeat “problematic”, because it is an error to think that one will find in complexity a method that can be applied automatically to the world and anything.
Complexity is a certain number of principles which help the autonomous spirit to know. Whereas a program destroys the autonomy of the one who seeks, the problematic of complexity stimulates an autonomous strategy, obliges in the field of action-once that one knows that the ecology of action can pervert the best intentions-to reconsider our decisions like bets and incites us to develop an adequate strategy to more or less control the action.
In other words, in all the fields, I would say “help yourself and the complexity will help you”, which has nothing to do with the mechanical application of a program or a rule. It is a deep reform of our mental functioning, of our being.
These ideas now marginal, deviating, begin to constitute a tendency still in minority, or rather tendencies since there are several paths to go towards complexity. These ideas, these deviations, can be developed and become cultural, political, and social forces.
The probabilities of a global future are extremely alarming: our spaceship is pulled by four engines without any control: science, technology, economy, and the search for profit - all this under conditions of chaos since the techno-civilizational unification of the planet, under the Western push, causes singular cultural resistances and cultural and religious re-closings.
The planet is in crisis with all the possibilities, ones regressive and destructive, others stimulant and fertile, such as invention, creation, new solutions.
25. We should even apprehend the possibilities of metamorphosis
We should even apprehend the possibilities of metamorphosis because we have completely astonishing examples of it from the past. The change in certain places where there have been demographic concentrations in the Middle East, in the Indus basin, in China, in Mexico, in Peru, from prehistoric societies of hundreds of men, without cities, without state, without agriculture, without army, without social class, to enormous historical societies with cities, agriculture, army, civilization, religion, philosophy, works of art ... that constituted a sociological metamorphosis.
Perhaps we are going towards a meta-historical metamorphosis suitable for the birth of a society-world at a global scale.
I would say that complexity does not put us only in the distress of the uncertain, it allows us to see besides the probable, the possibilities of the improbable, because of those which have been in the past and those that can be found again in the future.
We are in an epoch of doubtful and uncertain combat.
That makes one think of the Pacific war, after the Japanese had broken into the Pacific Islands and had begun to threaten California, there was a gigantic naval fight over 200 kilometers along the Midways between the Japanese and American fleets: battleships, aircraft carriers, submarines, planes. The global vision was impossible for both of them: there were sunken Japanese ships, sunken American ships, planes that did not find the enemy fleet; in short, total confusion, the battle divided in several fragments. At a given moment, the Japanese Admiral realizing his losses in battleships and planes, thought that they were defeated, thus called for retreat. But the Americans, who had lost as much, were not the first to think that they were defeated; after the Japanese retreat, they were victorious.
Well, the outcome of what will happen, we cannot conceive it yet! We can always hope and act in the direction of this hope.
The intelligence of complexity, isn’t it to explore the field of possibilities, without restricting it with what is formally probable? Doesn’t it invite us to reform, even to revolutionize?
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