Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society
Issue Number 7
Introduction
Curtis Naser: The Dialectics of Self-Organization and Nonlinear Systems
Anthony and Maggie Mansueto: In These Dark Times
Introduction
In this issue we bring our readers an important theoretical article by Curtis Naser,
Associate Director of the Institute for Medicine in Contemporary Society at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook. Drawing on recent work in complex systems
theory and evolutionary biology, Professor Naser makes a powerful case for the
superiority of dialectical to formal logic in theorizing complex organization and
evolution. He argues further that complex systems theory has important implications
for the dialectical philosophical tradition. Specifically, Professor Naser's analysis of
the implications of current research in evolutionary biology suggests that higher levels
of organization emerge out of the complex material interactions of the natural world,
rather than out of the necessary self-unfolding of some prior organizing principle.
Whether one agrees with his conclusions on this point or not, Professor Naser's article
clearly represents an important contribution to the ongoing debate regarding the
philosophical implications of the new science, and the kind of cutting edge scientific
and philosophical analysis which Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society hopes to bring to its
readers.
This issue also contains an extended reflection by the editor on the nature of the current
crisis and our tasks in the present period. "In these Dark Times ..." argues that
resolution of the current crisis of human civilization requires a revitalization of the
archaic disciplines of prophetic-philosophical, priestly-pastoral, and political leadership
which have historically enabled humanity to overcome structural obstacles to progress
and once again unleash the development of human social capacities.
Because of the length of these two articles, we have been forced to exclude from this
issue of Dialectic, Cosmos and Society the shorter articles analyzing the significance
of key thinkers for the development of synergistic theory, or analyzing some aspect of
the current situation, which we have carried in past issues. We hope to resume
publication of these articles in our issue number 8, Summer 1995.
With this issue, we welcome to our editorial board the philosopher Errol Harris,
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Northwestern University, and probably the most
important living interpreter of the Hegelian tradition. Professor Harris' Formal,
Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking bears directly on the topic of this issue's
principal theoretical article, and his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Science, Cosmos
and Anthropos and Cosmos and Theos are among the most important recent works
regarding the philosophical implications of the natural sciences.
We call your attention to the Call For Papers for the Foundation's first research
conference, which will be held in Orlando in August 1995, to be held in conjunction
with the Second World Congress of the International Society for Universalism, and to
the Announcement of the Foundation's first national training, which will be held at the
same time. We welcome your active participation in both events.
The Dialectics of Self-Organization
and
Nonlinear Systems
Curtis R. Naser
With the publication of Stuart A. Kauffman's The Origins of Order: Self Organization
and Selection in Evolution, a quiet revolution in the biological sciences has reached
a critical mass and promises to transform the very concept of science that has been with
us at least since Newton. The problems --both methodological and epistemological--
posed by complex self-organizing systems, of which living organisms are the archetype,
are beginning to be recognized as serious challenges to the traditional paradigms of
mathematical modeling that fall within the scope of Hempel's deductive-nomological
theory and its variants. The crux of this revolution lies in the epistemology of
nonlinear systems. Such systems have become the objects of intensive study with the
rise of chaos theory in mathematics and its application in physics, chemistry and the
life sciences. Such systems are in principle unpredictable in the strict sense that they
cannot be modeled as a finitely axiomatized formal calculus. Without prediction,
however, either we must transform our concept of science which has since Newton
relied upon the predictability of physical systems for verification of hypotheses, or we
must exclude from our consideration a vast set of nonlinear physical phenomena.
In this essay, I would like to explore the epistemology of such nonlinear systems by
first presenting a brief outline of formal modeling relations of linear systems, and then
analyzing how nonlinear systems differ. The epistemological difficulties that such
nonlinear systems present will then be analyzed in terms of a dialectical logic which is
drawn from both Kant's Critique of Judgment and Hegel's dialectic of life in the
Phenomenology of Spirit. I will argue that a dialectical logic of parts and wholes is
adequate to understanding the peculiarities of nonlinear systems, but further that self-
organizing systems themselves present a metaphysical challenge to Hegelian dialectics
which, if it is to be useful as an epistemological foundation of natural science, must
itself be transformed.
The Epistemology of Formal Modeling
Much of the work of theoretical science consists in the generation of formal
mathematical models of physical systems. Observational data is encoded into the
appropriate language of the mathematical machinery. This data is then transformed by
the mathematical operators and the result is then mapped back onto the physical system
as a prediction of its future state after some finite amount of time has elapsed. It has
long been recognized that the particular mathematical machinery employed as the model
is not unique in its capacity to return a unique output given some initial input. It is
generally the case that several different mathematical models can be produced that will
be equally predictive, that is, return the same results, given the same initial inputs.
Thus, the scientist's task is not to find just any old set of equations that will stand the
test of prediction and verification. Rather, in modeling a physical process, the scientist
is also interested in generating a formal mathematical image of the causality of the
physical system. That is, it is hoped that the inferential structure of the mathematical
model maps onto, or is in correspondence with, the modes of causality in the
phenomena being modeled.
Herein lies the familiar problem of the ontological status of theoretical entities. My
own bias should be clear on this question: the project of mathematical modeling has
as its goal the generation of theoretical concepts or entities, usually expressed in
mathematical form, which map directly onto the parts of the system being modeled.
Thus the concept of force in Newtonian dynamics is supposed to represent something
real in the world, as opposed to simply being a theoretical construct. Were it simply
the latter, then we would have no sufficient reason to prefer one set of equations or one
model over any other which is equally capable of generating the same predictive outputs
from the same observational inputs.
The general structure of mathematical modeling outlined above has been a very
powerful and successful paradigm in science, or rather it has been the structure of
science itself and continues to define the practice of science in most quarters. It has
also led to a vast technological revolution that continues unabated. Indeed, it is the
very requirement of predictability that has allowed us through engineering to apply
mathematical models to the project of creating physical systems which behave precisely
according to our wishes. The concept of the machine is part and parcel of the
epistemology that treats the world as a mechanistic system of efficient causality.
Insofar as we have for the most part only admitted as legitimate scientific knowledge
those models which are able to predict the course of physical events, we have
necessarily limited ourselves to analyzing only those physical systems which behave
mechanically, or alternatively stated, whose causality is linear.
Of course, we have no justification for assuming that all physical phenomena are
mechanical in this precise sense. It certainly cannot be proved in principle by science
itself, for the scientific method is not itself a proper object of science, that is, there can
be no formal model of scientific method which could justify the assumption that all
physical processes are mechanical in the sense that they can be modeled by a formal
mathematical calculus which is predictively accurate. In this sense, science is blind to
itself and its own practice. This is not to say that scientists are therefore blind to their
own practice, but only that there is at least one phenomenon in this world which is not
a proper object of scientific inquiry, and that is the methodology and epistemology of
science itself. Kuhn and those who have followed in the path he opened up for the
philosophy of science have admirably demonstrated that the practice and progress of
science is anything but scientific, but no one to my knowledge has used these
observations to call into question the completeness of the fundamental methodological
paradigm of science itself. If there is even one domain within the universe that the
methodology of science is in principle barred from analyzing and comprehending, then
the promise that the natural scientific method can achieve a complete understanding of
the world and therefore is the only valid method for the generation of knowledge is
immediately suspect.
I do not wish to hang my argument upon what I would call this intrinsic myopia of
science to itself and its own method. I only cite this problem because it raises the issue
of self-reference that is crucial to my argument. The above description should at least
echo the famous problem of self-reference which G”del made famous in his
Incompleteness Theorem. It will be recalled that G”del demonstrated that any attempt
to formalize number theory in terms of number theory itself was necessarily
incomplete. Number theory can no more justify itself from within itself than can the
scientific method justify itself by a rigorous application of that method to its own
practice. But the problem of self-reference goes much deeper than the philosophical
problem of justifying scientific method. It lies at the very heart of the project of formal
modeling itself. Let us explore how.
Early in this century, powerful tools for transforming mathematical expressions into
formal axiomatic logical systems had already been developed by Russell and Whitehead
and it was soon discovered that any mathematical model generated according to the
principles of the scientific method could easily be formalized into a finitely axiomatized
logical system. Observational data translated into well formed sentences of the logical
calculus (semantics) could then be transformed via the production rules and axioms to
deduce theorems (syntactics) which in turn could be decoded back into the observational
language (semantics) as predictions to be verified. Though the method of logical
formalization was not necessarily useful to practicing scientists until the widespread use
of computers, it stood as a significant testament to the power and truth of the formal
logical method.
Though G”del published his famous incompleteness theorem in 1931, and the limits of
formalization were then firmly staked out, this fundamental incompleteness was never
viewed as a problem in the formalization of mathematical models of physical reality.
This was no accident. The constraints imposed by the condition of predictability had
foreclosed from the very start models which contained sufficient entailment to generate
the self-referential feedback loops that make for nonlinearity and hence unpredictability.
The constraint of predictability makes very strong demands upon the kinds of causality
that can be modeled. Only linear causal sequences in which context dependence is
vastly restricted are amenable to such modeling. Hence, the experimental method itself
is designed from the very start to limit variables to a manageable number such that a
linear mathematical model can be generated. The experimental method is designed to
abstract a very small dimension of a physical system, isolate it from the multitude of
variables that can impinge upon it, in order to observe and model specific sequences
of causal interactions. For many years in all the sciences, nonlinear systems were
systematically excluded from consideration because there was, by definition, no
predictability to such systems. The logical problems of self-reference that G”del's
work highlighted were thus never seen as an impediment to the progress of science or
the logical and philosophical tasks of understanding it.
The Limits of Linear Modeling
Although there has been a long but marginal tradition in biology which has resisted the
mechanistic reductionism of the natural scientific method, it was not until recently that
this method in its application to certain biological problems began to come up against
intractable problems of complexity. And only within the past twenty to thirty years
have the mathematics of nonlinear equations begun to be explored. These two trends
together are contributing to a quiet revolution in the sciences that requires a rethinking
of the epistemology and methodology of science itself. So, what is the relationship
between biological complexity and nonlinear mathematics?
It is now recognized that many biological systems are built upon complex systems of
feedback and self-reference. Some may be as simple as a DNA molecule that codes
for an enzyme whose function it is to replicate DNA. Others are quite complex,
involving complicated signaling systems between cells in a developing embryo, or
between immune system cells. For instance, it is known that the immune system will
manufacture antibodies that target other antibodies in the immune system, as well as
self antigens. Such antibodies are not necessarily destroyed; many are simply
repressed by yet other molecules in a complex network:
When a B-cell produces antibodies, the immune response does not
stop there. These antibodies are themselves antigens which induce
the production of further antibodies, which induce the production of
yet others, and so on.
The primary task of the immune system is the discrimination of self from non-self and
it is only through such complex networks of chemical and cellular interactions and feed
back that this system is able both to attack foreign material as well as to keep from
attacking itself. The neuro system is, naturally, another area in which very complex
feed back loops and self-referential structures are encountered.
Let us note in passing that simply because a system contains some self-referential
structure is not itself a guarantee that the system is unpredictable and so no claim is
made here that all self-referential systems are nonlinear. However, many such systems
are, and it is the characteristic of these that we must understand.
Let us take as an example of a nonlinear system a very simple computer model of
flocking behavior that is presented by Christopher Langton in his Introduction to
Artificial Life. Langton discusses the simulation of flocking behavior on a computer
and suggests there are two ways to accomplish this. One way is to write a global
program which would specify the movements of the individual "boids" as they fly
across a given space and around arbitrary obstacles. This strategy is notoriously
difficult and is generally unsatisfactory in giving a result that looks "lifelike" to the
observer. The other method is to specify the algorithms that govern the individual
"boids" and to "tinker" with these algorithms until lifelike behavior emerges. The
difficulty in this strategy is that the "space" of possible algorithms is quite large and
one has no guarantee of finding just those algorithms (if any exist) that will allow the
desired flocking behavior to emerge. As a side light to this effort, it is significant that
this second strategy has had recourse to employing computer models of natural selection
to scan the vast space of possible algorithms in order to make the process feasible and
more efficient. We will return to the significance of this fact below.
Through a process of tinkering and selection, Langton was able to generate a lifelike
flocking behavior among his virtual "boids" on the computer screen. What makes this
process so difficult is the rather extreme context dependence that was necessary to
program into the rules that govern the behavior of the individual boids. Each boid is
programmed to respond in specific ways to the environment around it, which includes
first and foremost the other boids surrounding it. They likewise respond to all the
boids in their vicinity. As a result each boid is effected in its behavior by the behavior
of those around it and ultimately by the effect it itself has upon itself through the
mediation of those neighboring boids. Boid A effects the behavior of the surrounding
boids. They adjust their behavior accordingly. However, in their adjustment of their
behavior, they in turn effect the behavior of boid A, which now adjusts its behavior in
response to the effect it has had upon those surrounding it. Through the mediation of
the surrounding boids, each boid is thus effecting its own behavior.
If the context sensitivity of the boids is sufficiently high, their behavior becomes
nonlinear, i.e., essentially unpredictable. The reason this is the case has to do with the
nature of the self-referential relations thus generated. The epistemological problem lies
in trying to model this flocking behavior by a formal axiomatic system. What would
be necessary to do so is to encode into the formal system the self-referential relations
among the boids. But here is where G”del comes back to haunt the project of scientific
modeling. Any self-referential formal system is necessarily incomplete, that is, there
will be true theorems which cannot be deduced by a finite set of axioms. Not only
that, there is in principle no way to discriminate formally between those self-referential
systems that behave chaotically and those that do not. Hence, the system is
unpredictable, and falls completely outside the scope of formal axiomatic systems.
Since the possibility of such formalization has been a defining condition of scientific
method and epistemology, we must either abandon this constraint upon scientific inquiry
or deny that complex nonlinear systems are a legitimate object of science. The
conclusion seems to be obvious.
What is not obvious, however, is an epistemology that can handle self-reference and
the consequent nonlinearity characteristic of complex systems, biological or otherwise.
It is here that I would like to introduce a dialectical logic drawn from Kant's Critique
of Judgment and the dialectic of life section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
The Dialectics of Life: Kant
Let us begin with Kant's teleological judgment of the organism. In section 65 of the
third Critique Kant articulates the structure of the organism first in terms of its
teleological structure, that is, that an organism "must relate to itself in such a way that
it is both cause and effect of itself." However, his analysis of this goal directed
structure results in a logical description in terms of the reciprocal relations of parts and
whole. Kant lists two requirements for a thing to be a "natural purpose" or living
organism:
First, the possibility of its parts (as concerns both their existence and
their form) must depend on their relation to the whole.
This first condition, however, is too broad for it includes those things which are
products of a conscious intention, namely, works of art. The doors and drawers of a
cabinet, its handles, legs, side panels, top and etc. are all parts which are determined
in advance by the idea of the whole thing, its purpose and function, in the mind of the
artisan which stands outside, or is extrinsic to the thing itself. The various parts of the
cabinet do not spontaneously organize themselves into this form, yet alone even produce
themselves in the form they have as parts. But it is just such a spontaneous production
which is characteristic of living organisms:
A second requirement must be met if a thing that is a product of
nature is yet to have, within itself and its inner possibility, reference
to purposes, i.e., if it is to be possible only as a natural purpose,
without the causality of concepts, which rational beings outside it
have. This second requirement is that the parts of the thing combine
into the unity of a whole because they are reciprocally cause and
effect of their form.
Thus the parts stand in reciprocal relations to one another as cause and effect of each
other's form, and together they combine into the form of the whole. Finally, it is the
whole that determines the function of each part and their relations to the other parts.
Thus a living organism is a system of reciprocally related parts and whole such that the
parts produce (and effect) one another, and in so doing produce and effect the whole,
while the whole is reciprocally the cause of each of the parts and their relations to one
another.
Now, although Langton's boids are the product of conscious intention, their behavior
in flocking fits precisely Kant's description. First the boids are programmed to respond
to the other boids surrounding them. Each affects the behavior of the other and
through this affection, affects itself. Thus the particular position and velocity of the
boids is determined by the relations among the other boids within the flock. If we take
the flock to be the whole, each of the boids is a part which is reciprocally related to the
other parts (boids). The ensemble of these relations constitute the whole. The manner
in which the whole (the flock) determines the relations of the parts is determined by the
process of selection by which the rules of behavior of the parts is determined in the first
place. This process of selection itself turns out to have a dialectical structure, a topic
we will explore below.
Another example can be easily seen in the case of the ontogeny of multicellular
organisms. Developmental biology distinguishes two types of ontogenetic growth:
mosaic and regulative. This distinction is one that arises in observing the results of
transplanting cells to different parts of a developing embryo. Embryos whose cells can
be transplanted and result in normal growth are said to be regulative because it is the
embryonic system as a whole which regulates the differentiation of the cells into
specific organs and tissues. Embryos whose cells do not so adjust themselves, but
whose fate is determined once and for all are said to be mosaic. There are no purely
regulative embryos. Embryonic cells of all species of higher animals which tend to be
the most regulative, will eventually reach a point of differentiation from which they
cannot return.
Embryologists have been able to map out the developmental pathways of specific
regions of the embryo, tracing out in some cases which regions of the egg will
eventually develop into which parts and tissues in the adult organism. As a result of
transplantation experiments, it has been possible to determine at which time cells in
specific regions of the embryos become locked into specific developmental pathways.
Prior to this point the cells are totipotent in that any cell can equally develop into any
type of tissue.
An important conclusion follows from this fact which Davenport succinctly states as:
The phenomenon of regulation indicates that the potential properties
of parts of embryos are not intrinsically determined but depend on
their relationship within the whole system.
It is well known that the genetic information contained in each cell remains the same
throughout the process of ontogeny, thus the differentiation of cells in an embryo
cannot simply be reduced to genetic differences. There are a number of determinants
of cell differentiation, ranging from specific chemical signals propagated across
diffusion gradients, specific chemical signals on cell surfaces (cell adhesion molecules,
CAM's), to gross spatial and geometric properties of the developing embryo (surface
tension, geometrical relations between cells, etc.). All of these determinants affect the
individual cells through the mediation of the genes, but the genes alone cannot account
for these differentiations. Rather, the information necessary for cell differentiation
is an epigenetic result of the development of the entire system. The individual cells
thus affect one another through the mediation of each other and of the whole.
Logically, the process is not significantly different from that of the boids, and like the
boids, it is a process of selection that has determined what the parts are and how they
interact to produce one another.
Dialectics of Life: Hegel
Before we pass any further into the specific biology of complexity and self-
organization, let us now turn to the Hegelian interpretation of the organism. The
demonstration of the extent to which Hegel's dialectic of life section in the
Phenomenology is informed by an engagement with Kant's theory of teleological
judgment is far too big of a topic for us to entertain here. It requires a detailed
interpretation of the inverted world section of chapter 3 of the Phenomenology and a
general engagement of the entire Kantian epistemological project. To a certain extent
then, my discussion here will be incomplete. Nevertheless, we can get a hold of this
conceptual beast by first analyzing the dialectical logic implicit in the Kantian
formulation and then bringing in Hegel's logical categories to develop this structure.
Above we observed that for Kant the organism is a system of reciprocally related parts
and whole, in which the parts reciprocally produce one another, and in so doing
produce the whole, while reciprocally, the whole produces the parts and their
interrelations. Each part then is in reciprocal relation to all the other parts and to the
whole. Each part is determined by the whole to fulfill a certain function or behave in
a specific way and this function or behavior is a part of the whole and is implicit in the
functions and behaviors of all the other parts. Each part, insofar as it has a specific
role to play in an overall economy or division of labor, presupposes the complementary
functions of all the other parts of the organism for its survival.
Let us take the organ systems of the higher mammals as an example. The kidneys
fulfill several physiological functions for the organism. They are responsible for
excreting metabolic waste as well as maintaining the balance of certain key ions in the
blood stream. All living cells must have a process for excreting unneeded metabolic
byproducts which if they are allowed to accumulate either within the cell or in its
immediate environment can become toxic and lead to death. The cells of the other
organs in the body thus depend for their survival upon the function of those specific
cells of the kidneys to remove these waste products. The liver cells and brain cells
and indeed all other cells have given up this specific function in order to specialize in
other functions needed for the survival of the organism. Their specialization thus
presupposes the specialization of the kidney cells and the function they fulfill.
In this respect, each part of a living organism contains within itself its relations to
all the other parts of the organism and their organization into a whole. The nature
of this 'containing' relation is very peculiar. It would be easy to posit (or hypostatize)
this information in the genome of the cell, and indeed the genome certainly contains all
the information necessary to produce the proteins necessary for most metabolic and
structural functions. However, as we noted above, the process of ontogenesis is
epigenetic, that is, it constitutes its own conditions of development from out of itself.
The developing system produces from out of the interactions of its parts information
not present within any of those parts and this information is necessary for the proper
development of the parts of the organism and their corresponding functions. Thus the
genome alone is not a sufficient condition of development and cannot be said to contain
in any positive way all the information necessary for the development and functioning
of the organism.
But the parts themselves, in the specific form in which they have constituted themselves
through their interaction with the other parts of the system, bear the mark of the system
as a whole in their integrated functional relations. To borrow a Derridian metaphor,
each part contains within itself the trace of the whole and the relations of the parts
therein. In this sense, each part therefore contains within itself the determination of its
own function and behavior as an integrated part of the whole. Or, each part contains
within itself its relations to the other parts and to the whole, and consequently contains
within itself its own specific determination.
Such a relational logic has been shown to lie outside the bounds of traditional formal
logic by Errol Harris, and I have argued above that self-referential relations lie
outside the scope of such systems as well. However, in the dialectic of life section of
chapter 4 of the Phenomenology Hegel articulates the logical structure of this relational
logic in terms of the categories of being-for-self and being-for-another that underpin
the development of the Phenomenology. As I mentioned above, the demonstration of
this argument is long and complex and I will necessarily have to indulge the reader's
faith in my presentation of Hegel's argument. This section of the Phenomenology is
perhaps the most difficult and the least understood and some textual commentary will
be in order.
The dialectic of life begins with the concept of Infinity, which Hegel has deduced at the
end of the Chapter "Force and the Understanding" in the Phenomenology. This
concept of Infinity is characterized logically as the unity of being-for-self and being-
for-another:
b-f-s <-> b-f-a
These determinations form the logical core of the Phenomenology and have their
genesis in Hegel's analysis of the various relations of a knowing consciousness to its
object. The meaning of these terms depends upon the particular context in which
they are deployed. Qua object they can mean either that object considered just by itself
as it is for itself --being-for-self; or as that object may exist in relation to other objects
or a knowing consciousness --being-for-another. The demonstration of the unity of
these determinations suggests that what an object (or a subject, i.e., a knowing
consciousness or self-consciousness) is for itself, it is only through another, or it has
its being only through its relation to another. Apart from giving a general sense to
these logical determinations, we have here to examine their specific development in the
concept of life.
The unity of being-for-self and being-for-another has the following implication: each
moment can be produced from out of the other, or alternately stated, each moment
contains the other within itself:
(Diagram 1:)
Thus being-for-self contains within itself being-for-another and vice-versa. Of course,
since each contains the other within itself each must also, therefore, contain itself within
itself:
(Diagram 2:)
Or, I prefer the following formulation, namely, that each moment contains within itself
both itself and its other:
(Diagram 3:)
This is what is implied by the structure of Infinity as deduced by Hegel in the
Phenomenology. But further, one must always understand these determinations and
their relations, not as static, but rather as dynamic, in constant flux such that they are
continuously and ceaselessly passing over into each other and back again:
(Diagram 4:)
It should be obvious that one could trace out any number of moments and pathways.
It is from this dynamic that Hegel will deduce the logical structure of life. Let us now
attend to that development.
Without getting ourselves too deeply enmeshed in the text of the Phenomenology itself,
we must note that Hegel distinguishes two moments within this movement:
Essence is Infinity as the supersession (aufgehobensein) of all
distinctions.
All that is meant here is that the multitude (if not infinity) of moments which are
implicit in each moment of Infinity are equally superseded by Infinity itself as the
simple b-f-s <-> b-f-a dyad with which we started. Just as much as these moments
may differentiate themselves into a plurality of identical moments, so this plurality
returns itself back into that from which it has emerged. The second moment of the flux
is...
Independence itself, in which the differences of the movement are
resolved.
Independence here designates the individual moments of the plurality into which Infinity
has differentiated itself. Both moments coexist in this dialectic even while the one is
the negation of the other. That is, the Essence as the supersession of the independent
moments is the negation of this very independence, just as the Independence of the
moments of the plurality is the negation of the superseding Essence.
It is the manner, however, in which the Independence of the moments is preserved that
is crucial to understand. Independence designates the moments which have separated
themselves off from the superseding Essence (the being-for-self®being-for-another
dyad that is Infinity). In a pattern that is familiar in the Phenomenology, this object
develops first according to an abstract supersession wherein the independent moments
have no enduring being, but are forthrightly negated in their reflection back into the
Essence. According, however, to the logic of Infinity, these moments are no less
reproduced in their reflection (and negation) back into the Essence that is Infinity. The
moments gain their enduring being and Independence from this very flux itself in
which they are repeatedly produced and negated. It is this whole motion that
constitutes the independence of the plurality of moments and the Essence of life as
Infinity is the negative unity which nevertheless contains within itself this multiplicity.
The key to successfully unraveling this argument is to recognize that the supersession
of the Independent moments back into the original b-f-s <-> b-f-a dyad that is
Infinity need not be a return back into the original Infinity from which we started, but
only a return into another of the same, that is another Infinity. Since any moment of
Infinity can generate both its other and consequently itself from out of itself, there is
no reason why a given moment cannot reproduce from out of itself the same logical
Infinity, even if not the original Infinity from which we started.
Though we have not followed the exact detail of Hegel's development of the logic of
life, we have drawn out the logical conclusions that we need. I present below the fuller
schematic representation of the exact path according to which Hegel develops this same
conclusion:
(Diagram 5:)
Each cycle by which the Essence differentiates itself and returns back into itself
constitutes an Independent moment in this schema. Each of the "sub-essences" in this
diagram represent Infinity reproduced from out of the differentiation and return of its
own moments. For Hegel, consciousness was an integral part of this schema and it is
represented here by the thin, single headed arrows. However, for our purposes, we
need not complicate the matter further in this regard. We need only recognize that the
logic of Infinity is such that these self-reproducing moments can differentiate themselves
within the flux of determinations, and through a process of repeated appearance and
negation, they gain Independence, like small vortecies spun off of a larger whirlpool.
In this manner, Infinity is self-reproducing and any moment or part of Infinity can
reproduce within itself the whole from which it is derived. It therefore follows that any
moment or part of infinity contains within itself both the whole of which it is a part as
well as its relations to all the other parts that may be derived from that whole, since
they are implicit within the whole which is now a part of the part.
We have thus arrived at the same dialectical structure of the organism into which we
pushed Kant's teleological formulation. Indeed, I was led to this latter analysis by the
structure of Hegel's logic here in the Phenomenology. Hegel has advanced the Kantian
formulation by giving it a logical formulation in terms of the categories of being-for-
self and being-for-another and thereby demonstrating that the relations of parts to
parts, parts to whole and whole to parts is contained virtualiter within each part itself.
Each part contains within itself its own determination and specification of itself within
the overarching system of which it is a part. Each part is thus constituted through its
own self-reference. Indeed, each part is just this self-reference of itself to itself within
the overarching economy of the whole.
David Lachterman has analyzed extensively the attempts to formalize Hegelian logic in
finitely axiomatized formal systems and shown that these attempts invariably founder
upon the self-referential dimension of Hegelian speculation: the Logic is a treatise of
thought thinking about thinking. The necessary fixation of concepts as formal
representations in any attempt to formalize Hegelian logic impedes the fluid movement
that is characteristic of Hegel's speculative logic. We see here why this is the case:
The moments or parts we have distinguished above are themselves the stable flux of
their own self-negation and self-positing within and from out of the whole of which they
are both a part of, and which at the same time they contain within themselves.
Doing Nonlinear Science
If formal axiomatic systems and their linear mathematical equivalents are in principle
barred from comprehending nonlinear systems, the question arises what kind of
science is appropriate to these phenomena, and further, what role can dialectics play
in this enterprise? I would like to close by presenting two analyses that should begin
to suggest an answer to these questions. My aim here is not so much to answer these
questions as it is to suggest that reasonable answers may be found in the dialectical
analysis of self-organizing and nonlinear systems.
Without going into the fascinating details and structure of the theory, natural selection
reduces the apparent goal directedness and functional organization of the organism
through the idea of chance variation of the genetic material and the mathematics of
reproduction kinetics and the relative differences in fitness values of alternate alleles.
That is, those variations which confer even a marginal advantage upon their
beneficiaries, will either increase the survival of those individuals making reproduction
more likely, or directly enhance their reproductive efficiency.
According to the theory of natural selection, only those systems capable of natural
selection are considered living. Natural selection itself implies differential rates of
reproduction, and so therefore, those systems capable of differential rates of
reproduction through hereditary variation are alive. Those systems which may
reproduce themselves (arguably crystals) but cannot vary their forms through a
hereditary mechanism are not dead, but rather non-living or inorganic. Death is, only
in virtue of life. This definition of life can only apply to replicators or genes and not
to the organisms formed as a result of the actions of these genes. This is because
individual phenotypes do not replicate themselves. Rather as Dawkins has pointed out,
they are the "transient engines of long term replication." Or again:
They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When
we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are
denizens of geological time: genes are forever...What I am doing is
emphasizing the potential near-immortality of a gene, in the form of
copies, as its defining property.
What survives, and hence what lives, are genes, and they survive by replicating
themselves. Those genes that fail to replicate themselves die.
Here, then is where dialectics may make a first stand in the logic of natural selection,
and it results from a sort of gestalt shift in its logic: failure to reproduce equals death.
Death is thus the negation of the continued being of a particular form of organization,
namely a sequence of nucleotide base pairs. Life then, as the negation of death, is the
negation of negation. Genes maintain themselves in their being, through a negative
relationship to their own negation or death. It may seem that we have put the cart
before the horse, or inverted the order of reasoning here, since death is defined in
opposition to life, as suggested above. But let us look more closely at what death
means in this context.
Neither DNA nor RNA polymers are particularly stable on their own. Unprotected and
unreproduced, such molecules will, as a result of thermal buffeting, quickly lose their
sequential integrity: the polymer chains will split and fragment, perhaps recombining
in different orders, substituting one base for another --the usual sort of chemical
mischief. There are three ways that such a molecule can maintain itself, that is,
continue to be. Either it must be protected from thermal effects via a drop in
temperature, or it must either repair itself constantly, and/or constantly reproduce itself.
In the former case, if that is all it did, the molecule of DNA would be no different than
a rock or crystal. Some species have adapted themselves to preserve their genetic
material in cold climates and over long periods of time, but never so permanently. The
seed lies dormant until favorable conditions arrive and it can begin the life cycle anew.
Thus discounting the former possibility as that in which life consists, we are left with
the other two: repair and replication. Actually, both are pervasive throughout the
living spectrum. It is conceivable that only reproduction could maintain life, as it
presumably did in the beginning until repair mechanisms evolved, but only under the
condition that the total genome remain restrictively small. This has been shown to be
the case in some viruses. They survive only via the sheer weight of numbers. Even
the simplest bacteria have such large genetic sequences that they require extensive
repair machinery to guarantee copying fidelity from one generation to the next. On the
other hand, repair alone would not be sufficient because ironically the inevitable errors
of replication are what lead to opportunistic adaptations when conditions change. A
system that relied on repair alone to maintain itself would surely suffer a change in
conditions to which it in principle could not adapt and if such existed, it would have
died long ago. Besides, the mechanisms by which repair is effected would themselves
have been the product of reproductive variation in the first place.
That repair alone is not sufficient, but that replication is, suggests that what has being,
what is alive, is not the individual molecule of RNA or DNA as the case may be, but
rather, its organization, and most immediately its sequential ordering. A part of this
organization is its realization in a material substance of a particular kind, but this should
not lead us to confuse the organization with any one particular material realization of
it.
Repair and replication take on a new meaning in this light, for their object or goal is
the preservation of a given form or organization. Each error, that is, alteration in the
nucleotide sequence, does not just alter the organization, it kills it, replacing it with
another. This is why Manfred Eigen refers to the distribution of mutants around a
wildtype as a quasi-species. It turns out that most of a given population does not sit
at the peak of fitness, but rather is distributed around it in a sort of cloud of nominally
varying mutants. At this very primitive level, every mutant is like another species.
Only by averaging and thus mathematically homogenizing them does one attain the
appearance of a unified species in the wildtype. And as soon as one of these mutants
gains a higher selection value, the previous wildtype or quasi-species evaporates or
dies, to be replaced by a new one.
Every act of repair and successful replication is a step away from death, from the
destruction of the given organization. Repair and replication are the negation of death,
or the negation of negation, which we may now recognize as Concept, for it is
precisely in the negation of their own supersession in the Essence that the Independent
moments gain their being. The first supersession of the Independent moment is the first
negation of their independence, but the moments are no less reproduced from out of
that essence, and this is the second negation (of the first negation). In this way the
Independent moments establish their being and as we see, it is by virtue of this double
negation. We should be careful to understand the term Concept in the sense of a
concrete universal and not in the sense of an abstraction or representation of the mind.
This was perhaps Hegel's greatest accomplishment: to show that the Concept is not an
abstraction. For Hegel in the Phenomenology, Infinity is precisely such a concrete
universal, that is, a self-realizing concept. It is the unity of thought and being.
However, the ontological status of this living concept as we have developed it from out
of the neo-Darwinian evolutionary logic differs from that of the Hegelian formulation.
This difference ultimately depends on how the two systems understand the relative
necessity of death in the constitution of the concept.
In the evolutionary case, this concept should be understood as self-organizing and
emergent from the underlying physical and chemical mechanisms:
The theory describes the origin of the information that is laid down
in the sequences of the nucleic acids, and whose quantity is expressed
by the lengths of these sequences. The information is needed for the
optimization of self-replication under given environmental conditions.
This information is coupled to its own origin in a feedback loop
that is based upon the inherently autocatalytic nature of
reproduction kinetics. This feedback loop is the ultimate cause of
the self-organization that led to genetic information.
When a given organization reproduces itself and maintains itself against inevitable decay
from copying errors by the sheer weight of numbers, it is death itself in the form of
less efficient reproduction of mutants that maintains the form of the wildtype as
dominant. In this manner death serves as the mechanism of error correction. The
organization itself --the wildtype-- does not actively maintain itself other than to
replicate itself. With the evolution of error correcting mechanisms the organized
system is able to pull this negative power of death directly inside itself. After all,
every corrected mutational error is the death of that same new form of organization,
and the survival of the old. It is difficult at this point to maintain a rigorous separation
between life and death: life is built from the inside out upon death. This principle is
generalizable and pervasive in the biosphere, where life constantly feeds upon death,
and death upon life.
Although death is an essential part of life thus understood, it turns out in current
evolutionary theory that there is no necessity to death as such, even if it is ubiquitous
and de facto universal. The stability of a nucleotide polymer is limited by thermal
motion that is essentially stochastic. The mutations, cleavages, fragmentations and
recombinations it undergoes if left unprotected and even within a living cell are
essentially random in nature. It is possible that a gene might remain intact forever,
though so exceedingly unlikely, that death is a de facto necessity, or put otherwise,
death is universal but contingent.
Here lies the distinctive difference between Hegel's system and the dialectics of
emergence I want to develop. For Hegel, death is a necessity because of the
inadequacy of the individual to the universal or genus. In other words, the universal
or Concept is the negation of the particular instantiation or actualization of it. The
individual actualization -- the organism-- contains the seed of its own death by virtue
of its necessarily incomplete realization of the Concept itself. As singular, it is
inadequate to the universality that is its essence. To this extent the essence of the
individual lies outside and beyond itself. The case is similar in the context of the
dialectic of life that we just analyzed. There is ultimately a primacy accorded in the
Phenomenology to the moment of Essence understood as the Infinity from which we
started, taken as the totality or whole. Though reproduced within the Independent
moments of its plurality, these moments contain this whole only virtualiter whereas
Infinity is the concrete totality. In this context, negation of the Independent moments
back into the Essence has a necessity, which even if pulled inside those Independent
moments as their own necessity, is nevertheless the necessity of the concept of Infinity.
On the other hand, the emergent Concept we have developed from out of our
reflection upon repair and replication is itself the negative reflection out of inevitable
but nevertheless contingent death. The necessity of death in the Hegelian system
derives from the prior universality of the Concept, whereas, here the necessity of this
emergent Concept derives from the prior ubiquity of death. The Concept thus emerges
from the fact of death rather than death deriving from the necessity of the Concept.
This difference opens up a whole Pandora's Box of philosophical problems which we
cannot entertain here. Let us just say that this biological situation calls into question
the very structure of the Hegelian system, even if it confirms the validity of a general
dialectics.
Before concluding, let us also note that even at the very primitive stages of life
speculated upon here in light of current evolutionary theory, the logic of parts and
wholes discussed above is applicable to the structure and organization of life at this
point. Genetic reductionists argue that it is simply the chance mutations of the genetic
material that is the efficient cause of the development of the complexity of living
organisms through the aeons of geological time. However, there is more than one
principle of selection at work. For any organism, however simple, any change,
addition or alteration of its structure requires that change be integrated within the
overall organization of the organism. Those genetic changes that result in
unintegrated phenotypic effects will necessarily disadvantage the individual, resulting
in a drastic loss of fitness value, if the organism is even capable of surviving. Thus
it is the organization of the whole which first selects which parts are admissible to the
system and consequently which genes are admissible to the genome. New functions or
parts will of course transform the character of the whole, but the whole will always be
determinative of the functional integration of the parts. Thus we see that the logic of
parts and wholes developed above fits neatly in with the dialectics of negation that we
find just behind contemporary evolutionary theory of natural selection.
Finally, let me conclude by returning to the question of what kind of science we can
have of such nonlinear, self-organizing complexity. Although we necessarily cannot
make exact predictions, the project of modeling remains a viable enterprise, though it
will be a very different kind of modeling than is traditional in science. We have seen
that one aspect of modeling is the attempt to map conceptual or mathematical relations
onto the structures of causality in the phenomena. That is, in a model, we hope that
the inferential entailment structures reflect the causal entailments in the system
modeled. If science remains committed to this aspect of theoretical modeling then it
will require a different kind of logic to accomplish this, a logic capable of self-
referential entailment. I suggest that a dialectical logic of parts and wholes as described
here is such a candidate.
Stuart Kauffman in his The Origins of Order, while not embracing dialectics, has taken
a large step forward into post-reductionistic modeling. Using mathematical models of
complex relational systems, Kauffman has analyzed the dynamics of chaos and stability
in relation to self-organization. The result is a recognition of the primacy of the
emergence of self-organization in complex nonlinear systems. Biological form and
function are products of a nonlinear epigenetic process which could not in principle be
predicted a priori, even if one had sufficiently detailed knowledge of initial conditions.
The production of form and function does not violate the underlying mechanistic
causality of the physical world, it just exceeds it and the types of models we have
developed to understand this linear causality. As a result, scientific modeling itself
becomes experimental. The models employed are largely computer generated nonlinear
systems whose behavior is compared to the physical systems. The modeling relation
thus becomes a very special kind of metaphor in which one experiments with different
kinds of programming in an effort to discover the kinds of relations between parts of
complex systems that will generate behavior similar to that found in nature.
Kauffman has discovered that by manipulating the relations between the parts of
complex systems, one can generate behavior that ranges from linear to chaotic. At the
border between these two poles lies a region of spontaneous self-organization: a sort
of fluid stability which can naturally adapt to changes in context and environment.
Although Kauffman's work is based largely upon Boolean networks of simple
mathematical operators, as soon as context dependence and hence self-referential
feedback is built into the system, what began as a simple formal axiomatic system
quickly breaks free to manifest a spectrum of nonlinear and unpredictable behaviors,
but which can also spontaneously present order and self-organization that is emergent
and supervenient upon the underlying mechanisms.
There is yet much to be analyzed from the dialectical point of view in this new science,
and although I am skeptical that dialectics can actually be useful to the practice of much
of this science, I think that it is absolutely essential for the interpretation of its results.
At the very least the definition of life itself is at stake. And beyond that, our culture
has long borne the weight of a fundamental discontinuity between the practice of
Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (the spiritual,
human, or social sciences). The natural sciences have long dreamed of an entirely
mechanistic explanation, not only of the cosmos, but of human behavior, psychology,
social relations and culture. This new science of complexity casts doubt upon that
project but also opens up a vast frontier that is only now beginning to be explored.
Such a science may indeed bridge the gap between our understanding of nature and our
own self-interpretation of ourselves and of culture. Hegelian dialectics and its progeny
have long explored the relations between these domains and can make genuine
contributions to this project. But as I noted before in the discussion of how biological
death is understood by Hegel in contrast to evolutionary theory, if an Hegelian
dialectics is to become a viable contributor to this new science, the metaphysical
underpinnings of Hegel's system will have to be reexamined and transformed in a
manner consistent with a logic of emergence and self-organization.
In These Dark Times ...
Anthony Mansueto
with Maggie Mansueto
The present period is at once pregnant with potential and fraught with the very gravest
of dangers. Nothing less than the future of the human civilizational project is at stake.
On the one hand, the emerging synergistic mode of social organization offers to
humanity the possibility of participating at an unprecedented level in the self-organizing
activity of the cosmos --of building not only a new and brilliant future for ourselves and
our children, but of helping kosmos to realize her own latent potential. At the same
time, the penetration of market relations into every sphere of social life not only holds
back realization of this potential, but threatens the very fabric of society itself. How do
we define our tasks in a period which is, at once, one of tremendous progress and of
the most terrible social disintegration?
Strategic assessments too often take as their point of departure simply a detailed
analysis of the conditions of the "present period" or of the "current situation" without
situating this analysis properly in the context of a larger understanding of the human
civilizational project. While such detailed analysis is clearly one prerequisite for a fully
elaborated strategic plan, there is a danger that strategies which depend exclusively on
such analysis will tend to become imprisoned in the failed models of the recent past --or
at best propose modest modifications-- rather than making the bold new departures
which are required by epochal transitions. This danger is especially acute in times like
our own when the existing strategies for social development --capitalism and socialism--
are both clearly spent, and the "next steps" in the human civilizational project are only
now becoming visible to us. Thus, we speak of developing a "synergistic mode of
social organization which transcends the limitations of both market and plan," of
building a "leadership organization which is neither party nor mass organization," or
at best give formal, abstract definition to the new forms which are required. But this
is no longer enough. We must flesh out our vision.
This is possible only if we consider the crisis of this present age in the larger context
of human civilization as a whole. This means being clear not only about the cosmic
vocation of the human civilizational project, but also about the ways in which human
civilization historically has attempted to realize this vocation, and has moved to
overcome structural obstacles to progress. Democracy and socialism were not, after
all, the first revolutions, if we understand by revolution the reorganization of human
society in order to unleash newly developed organizing capacity, nor will they be the
last. Indeed, when set in the larger context of human history, these revolutions turn
out to be very peculiar in their narrowly political character --in their failure to invoke
the cosmic order which is at once the original source and ultimate purpose, the arche
and telos of human organizing capacity. This is one way of formulating the reason for
their failure, or rather their serious limitations as strategies for human development.
Situating the current crisis in its civilization-historic context will help us both to better
understand these limitations and to define our tasks in a way which is adequate to the
synergistic future we are called to construct. If the result seems as much conservative
as revolutionary, then this is because human civilization, its failings and detours
notwithstanding, has given us much to conserve --and because revolutionaries have, for
the past two centuries, been too quick to forget (and too lax in continuing to develop)
those ancient disciplines which permit them to invoke the cosmic order which is the
ultimate source of their power and the ultimate ground of their authority.
And so, in what follows I have attempted to identify the starting point for our journey,
and also to determine in what direction we must travel. I caution the reader, however,
that these are only a few preliminary reflections, and that political strategy is far from
an exact science, so that what is written here ought not to be taken as a definitive
statement on what is to be done, so much as an invitation to further investigation and
debate.
* * *
I begin with some preliminary reflections, for the benefit of those who are not familiar
with the main outlines of synergistic theory. Being is relationship, structure,
organization. The universe is a self-organizing, teleological system which develops
towards ever higher degrees of organization and complexity. The human civilizational
project plays a critical leading role in this process, as a center for the creation of
dynamic, organized complexity: technology and institutions, art, science, philosophy,
and spirituality. We make this contribution by studying the laws of nature (which are
also the laws of human, social nature), grasping the latent potential of the diverse and
complex forms of matter we find at hand (physical, chemical, biological and social) and
then using this knowledge to help us work matter, ever more powerfully, in a way
which realizes its potential, and thus contributes to the self-organizing activity of the
cosmos itself.
Humanity's progress has been far from uniform. Often it has seemed easier to expand
our wealth by war and conquest, by seizing slaves and booty or by imposing tribute,
than by the difficult work of bearing and raising children, tilling the soil and building
machines, centralizing and allocating resources for development, and engaging in
artistic creativity, scientific research, and philosophical reflection. It was humanity's
turn to warfare as a strategy for growth which led to the world historical defeat of
women and of mother-right, and to the rise of the great patriarchal warlord states.
And it was this turn to warfare which created the basis in experience for the patriarchal
ideology which says that matter is dangerous, dirty, and disorganized, and that order
is always and only imposed from outside or on high (Engels 1884/1989; Amin 1980,
1989; Daly 1984).
Always, however, humanity's own fundamentally social nature has reasserted itself,
calling us back to the "perfect pattern of creation," to Tao or Dharma, Dike or Torah,
healing the torn fabric of society, making shattered humanity whole, and building up
the power necessary to break the cruel oppressor's rod and throw off the yoke of those
who would drain humanity of its lifeblood for no other reason than that they might live
in luxury.
Historically, this work of calling humanity back to its vocation --the authentic work of
the revolutionary-- has been shared by three distinct but related disciplines, each of
which produces its own type of leader. I am referring to the disciplines of prophecy
and philosophy, of the priestly and pastoral leadership, and of political leadership in the
fullest sense of the word.
By philosophy I mean not the "professional" philosophy of our corrupt university
departments, but humanity's original attempt to look deep into the fonts of being itself,
discerning the underlying structure of the universe, and thus of human society, grasping
the principles of value --the beautiful, the true, the good, and the one, and charting the
next steps in the human civilizational project. I call this discipline philosophy because
in its fully developed form it always involves the attempt to demonstrate and persuade,
as well as to intuit the truth. But authentic philosophy at once presupposes and passes
over into the discipline of prophecy. The prophet differs from the philosopher only in
that s/he intuits truths which have not or cannot (yet) be demonstrated, and which are
thus best conveyed in poetic rather than scientific form. Thus Isaiah and Jeremiah,
Dante and Shakespeare, Dostoevski, Cardenal, and Lessing share the
prophetic/philosophic office with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, Hegel,
and Marx.
There are three dimensions to the work of the philosopher. The first of these is the
work of seeking wisdom itself. Here philosophy enjoys the assistance of the special
sciences --mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology-- which gradually
build up knowledge of the structure of the various forms of matter. It is a synoptic
view of the results of these sciences which is the ordinary, though not the only, path
to the philosopher's vision of the cosmic whole. But the philosopher does not merely
synthesize the results of these sciences. Rather s/he looks behind their special theories
to the first principles of cosmic organization, and beyond them to the principles of
value --the beautiful, the true, the good and the one-- which guide the evolution of the
cosmos and which draw all things to themselves.
The second task of the philosopher is that of teaching: of forming the people generally,
and especially their leaders, in a way which catalyzes a burning desire to know and
serve the truth, and which gives them the tools necessary to grow in wisdom, and to
use their knowledge to advance the human civilizational project and the cosmohistorical
evolutionary process in general. The educational system as a whole, not only but
especially the universities, must be in the hands of authentic philosophers, and it must
prepare students, through the disciplines of the liberal arts and the special sciences, to
engage in authentic philosophical reflection. This is necessary not only for those who
are themselves called to be philosophers (always only a small minority) but for priests
and pastors, political leaders, and ordinary workers as well, so that they are at once
able and disposed to hear and respond to the leadership of the philosopher, and also
able to make independent and informed judgements regarding what philosophical
counsel to accept, and what to reject.
This brings us to the third and final task of the philosopher: critical and visionary
intervention into the political life of the community, in order to insure that human
society continues to progress, and continues to grow in service to kosmos. The
discipline of philosophy and prophecy confers on its authentic practitioners a
tremendous authority. It is the philosopher and prophet who best comprehend the
cosmic order which is arche and telos of human civilization, and who is thus in the best
position to chart the next steps in the human civilizational project. Or, to use the
poetically powerful (but dangerously imprecise) language of prophecy, the philosopher
or prophet speaks the word of God, dbr yhwh, the very word of being itself. Because
of this s/he stands over priests and kings like a great giant, founding and demolishing
religious movements which priests only perpetuate, seating and unseating kings as if
they were mere castellans and war dukes of the Great Queen, the High King whose
name may not be spoken.
This day I give you authority over nations and kingdoms,
to uproot and pull down,
to destroy and to demolish,
to build and to plant. (Jeremiah 1:10)
There are of course false prophets and false philosophers, and even the greatest have
but a very limited grasp of the truth. Indeed, Jeremiah himself, who grasped so deeply
the truth of Israel's religion, at the same time raised his voice against the cult of the
great mother, and Plato and Aristotle, authentic servants of wisdom though they were,
were nothing if not misogynists and racists. This is why the prophet/philosopher does
not have the authority or the power to compel, but only to know the truth and to teach
and persuade, so that no partial truth ever gains final hegemony over humanity. The
philosopher who is also priest or "king" (and such exist) holds his or her priesthood or
kingship in virtue of having mastered those separate disciplines --in virtue of an ability
to embody the sacred and make the community whole or the ability to build and
exercise power-- and not in virtue of having mastered philosophy alone. As a result
of course, much authentic prophecy and much profound philosophic truth goes
unheeded. Every prophet or philosopher worth his or her salt aspires to the calling of
a Jeremiah, but must also be willing to accept that of Isaiah.
I heard yhwh saying "Whom shall I send?" ... I said "Here I am!
Send me." He replied: "Go tell this to the people:
You will listen but you will not understand,
You will look but you will not see,
This people's wits are dulled; they have stopped
their ears and shut their eyes ... (Isaiah 6: 8-10).
The calling of this sort of prophet or philosopher is both more common, and less
happy, than that of a Jeremiah. As Karl Morrison put it,
His words are not prophecy for him or for his people, but for the
future which will understand them ... he carries the expectation, the
hope, only, of fulfillment. As far as he can see, God has deceived
him, made him suffer ... The true content of the promise will be
shown only through time, as a flowering almond, or an olive,
awakes, blossoms, and bears fruit. (Morrison 1975: 158).
The second revolutionary discipline is that of the priest and pastor. The priest is first
and foremost s/he who makes the holy or the sacred --which is nothing other than
kosmos herself, realized as an organized, meaningful totality-- present to the people in
and through the various forms of matter. Matter, after all is merely the potential for
organization; the priest makes the realized form of this potential shine through the
limited forms of the present level of organization. This is the true significance of myth
and ritual, of the system of religious representations and of the cult, of "doctrine" and
"sacrament." This task of mediation is especially important for those who have not
been trained to grasp the whole through the discipline of philosophy; for them it is their
only means of access to some vision of the whole. But it is necessary for all of us who,
after all, live and move in the realm of the potential and material and not in the realm
of pure spirit --i.e. of fully realized capacity for organization.
The discipline of the priest does not, however, stop with the performance of ritual
functions. On the contrary, the more powerful expressions of the priesthood concern
action in relation to the social form of matter: the work of teaching and of promoting
the full development of individuals and communities.
The work of teaching is something which the priest and pastor shares with the prophet
and philosopher. Where the prophet or philosopher is concerned first and foremost
with catalyzing a naked confrontation with the truth in all its austere beauty, the priest
or pastor is concerned more with conserving and passing on the traditions of her
community, the archaic knowledge which binds the present generation to those which
have long since passed away.
Above and beyond the work of teaching, however, is that of spiritual discipline. It is
the priest, first and foremost, who bears the task of helping individuals to realize their
latent potential, to become virtuous human beings capable of participating fully in the
self-organizing activity of the cosmos --of making the particular an ever more adequate
expression of the whole of which it is a part. This means not only healing the broken
but also helping the strong to grow in ways that their limited minds could never have
imagined.
The human person, of course, develops only in community. And thus the highest
expression of the priestly office is that of pastor --the one who builds and preserves
community and thus creates and sustains the context in which alone human virtue can
thrive. And here too the priest makes the sacred or the holy present under the form
of the material and particular, for what is the community but the microcosm which
creates the basis in experience for comprehending the universe as an organized,
meaningful totality.
There is an underlying tension between the office of priest and that of prophet or
philosopher. The bold confrontation with the naked power of the truth, which is the
foundation of the prophetic or philosophic discipline is often disruptive of priestly and
pastoral routine. The prophet or philosopher is often called upon to demystify myths
and rituals which no longer adequately express the truth, or to unseat priests and
pastors who no longer make the sacred really present among the people. In this sense
the prophet or philosopher exercises authority over the priest, whose vision is always
more limited and bound by tradition. And yet the prophet is also human, and may have
his or her own need for priestly mediation.
The third and final revolutionary discipline is that which the ancients called kingship.
It is the discipline of political leadership --the discipline of building and exercising
power. This discipline has three distinct dimensions. The first dimension --and the one
which constitutes the ordinary form of the exercise of political authority-- is that of
organizing. It is the organizer who centralizes and allocates the resources necessary
for the community to reproduce and more especially to develop, and who organizes,
develops, and deploys the people necessary to carry out the tasks of research,
development, production, etc. Partly this discipline depends on knowledge of the
research and production processes, but more especially it depends on the ability to
grasp and tap into the diverse interests of the people, to help them see that they will
benefit in the long run from the surplus labor, the savings or taxation, and the
investment which the organizer demands of them, and the ability to combine people of
diverse interests and abilities into work groups which accomplish more together than
all could working separately. It also involves the ability to think strategically: to
identify those activities which will most contribute to the development of the community
or organization, and the larger systems of which it is a part.
This does not mean, to be sure, that political leadership by nature entails direct
command and control of the economic activities of a community. On the contrary the
principle of subsidiarity applies here above all. Decentralization of economic decision
making contributes both to diversity and innovation, on the one hand, and to the
development of the workers and lower level leaders who gain experience in leadership
in the process. But production ultimately serves a purpose higher than individual
consumption or even the collective consumption of the community as a whole. It
serves the process of civilization building, and ultimately the self-organizing activity of
the cosmos. All work, in this sense, is liturgy. There must, therefore be some person
or group of persons, who have a vision of larger interests served by the community or
organization, and who organize and direct its activities in accord with those interests,
insuring that sufficient resources are centralized for investment in expensive research
and development efforts, and that sufficient resources are retained by workers to
guarantee the integrity of their families, while working to limit wasteful luxury
consumption, etc.
The second dimension of political leadership is perhaps best called diplomatic.
Diplomacy is above all the ability to negotiate with other organizations and other
communities which have interests which at once overlap with and differ from one's own
--to build alliances both strategic and tactical and thus to make possible endeavors
which are beyond the capacity of one community or one people, one organization or
one corporation. Effective diplomacy requires, in addition to the skills of the organizer
which we have already analyzed, the ability to apply pressure without alienating
potential allies, and to yield without sacrificing essential interests. There are, to be
sure, great diplomats who are but poor organizers, better able to work out alliances
between ancient foes than they are to secure support for their own vision among their
own people.
The final dimension of political leadership is that of military command --a necessity
imposed upon us by the fact that, as one of the great revolutionary generals of our time
put it
... someone invented slavery,
took up his weapon
and left someone else hungry and cold,
and our brothers and sisters,
our parents and children,
began to die. (Morales-Aviles in Aldaraca et al 1980).
Often the obstacles to social progress --to the continuing drive of the cosmos towards
ever greater beauty-- can be removed by diplomacy. Sometimes they cannot. Thus the
necessity of armed struggle, of legitimate insurrection, a right which has been exercised
by the working communities of this planet ever since Israel took up arms against the
warlords of Canaan (Gottwald 1979) --and perhaps before.
When conditions exist which require armed struggle, the political-military leader or
"king" as s/he was once called, is endowed, as no other leader ever is (not prophet or
philosopher or priest or pastor or organizer or diplomat) with the authority to
command: to order those people and resources necessary to carry the day for the cause
of justice, limited only by the principles of natural law which govern the just initiation
and conduct of war. This authority, however, is limited to times of war, and to
matters bearing directly on the conduct of war, and does not extend to the tasks of
social reconstruction faced by a people after a successful revolutionary or defensive
struggle.
It is confusion regarding this question which has contributed so much to the corruption
of great revolutionary movements not only in our own time, but in ancient times as
well. It was, after all, too great a regard for the military prowess or self-sacrificing
heroism of liberating warriors which led salvation religions such as Christianity and
Islam to absorb much of the cult of the warlord god, ba'al, which their parent religion,
Judaism, originally arose to contest. In Christianity, of course, it is the priestly cognate
of the warlord cult --the cult of the dying and rising god-- which prevailed, while
in Islam warfare itself, in the form of jihad has become the principal means of realizing
the will of God. And it may be that it was this same excessive regard for the political-
military dimensions of the revolutionary task which led Israel to conceive the divine
exclusively under the form of a patriarchal warrior God, liberator though he might be:
el yahwi sabaoth yisrael --god who brings forth the armies of Israel-- and to ban once
and for all the cult of the Magna Mater, font of so much wisdom.
In our own time, this problem has grown ever more serious. As market relations
penetrate every sphere of human activity, undermining the social fabric which is the
basis in experience for our knowledge, people have lost sight of the cosmic order which
is the ultimate ground of all legitimate revolutionary authority. Revolutionary
movements have emerged which, like socialism, attempt to ground meaningful
organization, and thus their own authority, exclusively in human labor and human
organizing capacity. Such movements understand revolutionary leadership in narrowly
political terms, denying both the cosmic order which is the ultimate source of their
authority, and the prophetic-philosophical and priestly disciplines which mediate that
authority.
Not surprisingly, this seriously undermined the transformative power of socialism,
which had, after all, correctly grasped the limitations of the market system and was at
least searching for a superior alternative. Without any means of comprehending, or
ordering itself to, the larger cosmic system, the socialist movement, with its mass base
among the trade unions, became mired in economic struggles to realize the purely
individual, consumer interests of the workers. Organizers who saw the only ground
of organization in human labor power were powerless to break this stalemate.
Lenin (1902/1929) saw clearly that the working class, mired as it was in a day to day
struggle for survival, and caught in the web of market relations, would never develop
beyond trade union consciousness to authentic communism. His solution, however, was
to transform socialism from a political-economic into a political-military movement,
attempting to ground the socialist project on the essentially military authority of the
democratic centralist revolutionary party. Only members of the party needed to
comprehend the "line of march, conditions, and ultimate general result" of the
struggle. The rest could be won over by an appeal to more immediate trade union or
democratic demands.
But this only compounded the problem. On the one hand, it further exacerbated the
tendency to regard socialism as something imposed on the universe from the outside,
rather than something which expresses, as it actually does, the inner nature of the
cosmic order itself. Now, however, it was not merely human labor, something creative
and deeply rooted in the self-organizing activity of the cosmos, but the political-military
struggle, which is destructive even where it is legitimate and necessary, which became
the ground of the socialist state power. Second, it left the work of socialist
reconstruction to the task of men (and women, but mostly men) who were essentially
generals, and unfit to carry out this sort of task.
The lesson should be clear. In so far as the authority to reorganize society is an
expression of imperatives rooted in the very order of the cosmos itself, the political
leadership must be subject to the prophetic-philosophical and priestly-pastoral offices
which mediate that authority: the prophet-philosopher by grasping the self-organizing
dynamic of the cosmos and setting forth its imperatives for the present period, the
priest-pastor by making the cosmic order visible to the untrained eyes of the people,
and by making the people themselves, individually and collectively, an embodiment of
that order.
Indeed, revolutionary political leadership, understood as political leadership directed
at reorganizing society in order to unleash new organizing capacity and thus augment
humanity's level of participation in the self-organizing activity of the cosmos, cannot
be exercised except with the aid of the prophet and priest. It is only the prophet who
bears the vision of the future and only the priest who can make that vision real and
present to the people and cultivate in them an interest, however limited and incipient,
in serving that vision. And unless the people are willing, moved by a vision of the
incredible beauty of the cosmos they serve, the revolutionary political leader will
always and everywhere be hated as a tyrant.
***
This understanding of the nature of revolutionary leadership sheds more than a little
light on the nature of the current crisis. It is not just that humanity is at a turning
point, that new modes of organization are emerging which cannot be accommodated in
the old structures, which therefore most be swept away to make room for new growth.
It is, rather, that the very disciplines which humanity has developed down through the
ages to help it envision its future, make that future real and present in the form of
powerful, virtuous individuals and a powerful, just community, have themselves been
undermined by the very same market forces which tear away at the fabric of society
generally and which block the centralization of the resources necessary for investment
in the development of human social capacities.
Let us examine this question in greater detail. Take first the case of philosophy.
Market societies appear to the people within them to be merely an aggregate of discrete
individuals --a system of only externally related atoms. In such societies people will
gradually begin to see the universe itself in much the same way, so that they lose sight
of more profound, teleological levels of cosmic organization. And from a system of
only externally related atoms there is no way to derive principles of value --of the
beautiful, the true, the good or the one-- and thus no way either to criticize the existing
structure of human society or envision a new and better one. Thus the rise of
positivism, long the dominant ideology in our universities.
Postmodern nihilism, the other ideology with significant influence in our universities,
has a similar social basis. On the one hand, as a result of the industrial, democratic,
and scientific revolutions (but especially the democratic revolution) people have become
increasingly aware of their role as the authors of social organization and the creators
of meaning, truth, and value. At the same time, the market system has obscured the
cosmic ground of this human organizing activity, so that human society appears
increasingly to be an island of meaning in an ultimately meaningless universe. Thus
the rise of moral relativism, which draws from the correct insight that values are
immediately a social product, shaped by the experiences and imperatives of particular
cultures, the incorrect conclusion that they are only this --that they lack an underlying
ontological ground. While postmodern "deconstructions" are often useful in
unmasking the social interests at stake in ideological struggles, postmodernism offers
even less basis than positivism for criticizing the limits of market society or envisioning
a new, more just social order.
Closely related to this ideological degeneration, of course, is the organizational and
economic crisis of the universities, the institutional context in which the discipline of
philosophy has been practiced since the medieval period. While nominally operated
"not-for-profit" universities are under constant pressure to increase their incomes.
Partly this pressure comes from "private sector" trustees attempting to artificially
impose market norms, but mostly it comes simply from an authentic need to find the
resources to support important research. Inevitably, however, this need translates into
constant pressure on faculty to bring in grant and contract revenue, preferably grants
accompanied by steep "overhead" charges, and into a "strategic emphasis" on those
fields in which such grants and contracts are available. But this means subordinating
the university's research agenda to market criteria, and thus undercutting the
institution's prophetic vocation. It is this same market pressure which forces the great
universities to place a strategic emphasis on research rather than teaching, and all of
the others to tailor their teaching programs to meet market demand. This has meant
a sharp decline in the number of students receiving an authentic liberal education --i.e.
gaining the skills necessary to penetrate the depths of being, to grasp the underlying
structure of the universe, and to develop a vision and strategy adequate to the next steps
in the human civilizational project-- even as the bachelor's degree, once the mark of
the beginning initiate in the discipline of philosophy, has become the ordinary credential
of a skilled worker in the "information society." It is little wonder that the discipline
of philosophy has declined so far, and that its authentic practitioners find such little
welcome in the halls of the academy.
The marketplace has had a similar impact on the discipline of the priest and the pastor.
Let us consider first of all the impact of the marketplace on religious ideology. People
in a market society are driven to make every activity simply a means of realizing their
individual consumption interests and are engaged in constant competition for what they
experience as scarce resources. It is little wonder that people have come to regard
themselves as fundamentally egoistic, or even radically depraved. And while the
market seems to catalyze constant change and (sometimes) rapid growth and
development, there seems to be little or no rational pattern to its priorities, or to its
impact on the lives of individuals, families, and communities, who are as likely to be
ruined for working hard as they are to be rewarded for crime or parasitism. Should
we be surprised if people feel that the meaning of the universe is forever opaque to
human reason --or that it has no meaning at all, and that they feel at the mercy of
powerful forces beyond their control.
The result is the emergence of the two dominant religious ideologies of the market
society. Some, who continue to believe they discern through the "eyes of faith" an
ultimate meaning to the universe which is inaccessible to science and philosophy
become religious fundamentalists. Others, who see no such meaning, become nihilistic
relativists. From this standpoint, of course, it is easy to see that for all their railing
against secular humanists, religious fundamentalists are in fact at once the products and
promoters of secularism, if by secularism we mean a loss of the sense of the
immanence of the sacred in nature and human society. For neither the fundamentalist
nor the secular nihilist believes it possible to make the whole really present under the
partial forms of the material world, or to make individuals and communities really
whole, and thus truly sacred.
At the organizational level, the marketplace everywhere undermines pastoral authority
and thus the effectiveness of pastoral leadership and the pastor's ability to heal. For
even if we acknowledge the fundamental goodness of human nature, we must also
acknowledge that human beings grow through tension and confrontation --through
confrontation with interests which are different from and in tension with their own, the
legitimacy of which, however, they must acknowledge, and through confrontation with
their own limitations and their need to participate in something larger than themselves
in order to grow and become whole. The pastor must, therefore, confront as well as
console. But in a market society the pastor is forced to compete for her flock --and
their funds. If she raises issues which her people wish not to confront, if she
intervenes unwelcomed into a family or neighborhood dispute, or demands that the rich
share of their plenty, then likely as not a good portion of her flock will simply pick up
and head for another congregation where grace comes cheaper and the pastor is less
committed to her calling --and take their donations with them.
The same disease which affects the prophetic-philosophical and priestly-pastoral
disciplines is undermining the effective exercise of political leadership in our society.
At the ideological level this disease takes the form of liberalism: the conviction that the
state exists only to protect and or advance the interests or "rights" of the individual. In
our time we have all different sorts of liberals: radical libertarian "neoliberals" who
believe that the state should confine itself to the task of creating the minimum
conditions for the operation of the marketplace; moderate "neoliberals" who believe the
state should centralize and invest resources in infrastructure, education, research, and
development, in order to improve the competitive position of the "national" community
which makes up its constituency; and even a few left over "social liberals" who believe
that individuals have rights and interests which the market cannot protect or realize and
which the state must therefore undertake to guarantee. All of these different
perspectives, however, which taken together comprise the whole political spectrum in
the U.S. share a common view of the nature and purpose of the political community -
-and all are a reflex of the market relations which make every activity, every
organization, every institution into simply a means of realizing individual consumer
interests.
Liberalism, of course, is nothing new. What is new is the rapid erosion of state
sovereignty by the formation of a global market. There was a time, not too long ago,
when, under the pressure of the organized working class, a state could intervene in the
centralization and allocation of resources, whether this intervention was justified under
liberal grounds or not, and expect to achieve something like the intended results.
Increasingly, however, the once sovereign state --even a great superpower like the
United States-- finds itself in much the same situation as our poor pastor who dares to
intervene in a family dispute, or our university professor who "doth profess too much."
Raise taxes too high, regulate a bit to much, and capital will redeploy itself in an instant
to a more favorable venue --perhaps faster, in fact, than parishioners can pull up stakes
and register in a new parish, or university students can wait through the lines to drop
one course and register for another.
This attack on the institution of the state has been accompanied by a parallel attack on
the person of the political leader. Isn't it more than a little peculiar, this way we have
of raising up political leaders out of nowhere, and then casting them down, so that an
obscure governor from an obscure state suddenly becomes the front runner for the
Presidency, besting established leaders from more important jurisdictions --and then
suddenly finds his popularity evaporating in a series of minor scandals and public
relations faux pas? Isn't it a bit odd that we feel more comfortable asking the President
of the United States what kind of underwear he prefers than we do asking him to share
his vision for our country and for humanity? And it is not only leaders from what
passes for the "left" side of the aisle that are subject to this kind of treatment. Before
he was sworn in as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, while he was first
and foremost a weapon to be wielded against President Clinton and the Democratic
Congress, Newt Gingrich received only coverage which would help to build up his
power. But no sooner did the new Congress convene than the new Speaker himself --
simply because he seems able and willing to exercise power, and irrespective of his
largely promarket ideology-- suddenly becomes a threat to the univocal power of the
marketplace, and the media begins moving, subtly but quickly, to tarnish his public
image.
The result is an all sided collapse of humanity's historic capacity to right itself --to
recover its vision of the arche and telos, the organizing principle and ultimate purpose
of the cosmohistorical evolutionary process, to heal its wounds and rebuild community,
and to organize the power necessary to remove the structural obstacles to progress and
unleash the development of human social capacities.
* * *
Situating the current crisis in its proper civilization-historic and cosmo-historic context
tells us something very important about our tasks in the present period. Indeed the way
in which we have formulated the problem has put us in a position to give considerably
greater specificity to some of our earlier formulations of both our general aims and our
principal task in the present period.
Consider, for example, our definition of synergism as a "nonmarket, nonbureaucratic
form of social organization in which resources are allocated in such a manner as to best
promote the development of human social capacities and the self-organizing activity of
the cosmos as a whole (Mansueto 1994a)." Thinking within the confines of nineteenth
and twentieth century social theory it is very difficult to envision institutions other than
the market and the state which might organize and direct, or participate in organizing
and directing, the human civilizational project. As a result, those who are dissatisfied
with both capitalism and socialism end up opting for some form of "mixed economy,"
which fails to fully resolve the problems of either system. Ultimately this was true
even for Christian Democratic and religious socialist advocates of a "third way."
Our own perspective suggests a very different way of approaching the problem. First
of all, the prophetic-philosophical and priestly-pastoral disciplines, together with the
institutions which organize them, must come to play a leading role in organizing and
directing human society, a role equal to and in certain respects even higher than that
of the state. The people must look first and foremost to their philosophers and pastors
for direction and for the building up of their communities, and to their political leaders
only for the implementation of the vision generated by these other, higher forms of
organization.
It is easier to say what we do not mean by this, than it is to outline specific forms of
institutionalization. We do not mean that the state ought to be under the exclusive
control of philosophers or priests, and especially not under the control of philosophers
belonging to some one school or priests representing some one religious tradition. The
truth is complex, infinitely deep, and ever evolving and no school must ever gain final
hegemony. And even if the holy is ultimately One, we know that there are many roads
by which a people can be made whole. Furthermore, we certainly do not mean that it
is our present cadre of positivistic and postmodernist professional "philosophers" or our
present cadre of fundamentalist or liberal priests and ministers who we want to see in
leadership. Positivism and postmodernism, religious fundamentalism and liberal
flirtation with nihilism, must give way to a renewed practice of authentic philosophy
and authentic priesthood rooted in humanity's great civilizational traditions and open
to the brilliant synergistic future which we are called to build. But more on this later
...
Perhaps the most natural way for philosophers to lead is through teaching. If an
authentic liberal arts education were made the ordinary pre-requisite for positions of
leadership in any field, and if the gates were kept by mature philosophers who admit
only those clearly called to lead, barring those who only seek to improve their
consumption position, then both pastors and political leaders would naturally look to
philosophers for advice and counsel.
Just how one finds a parallel way to institutionalize a gate-keeping role for priests and
pastors while guaranteeing a very broad religious freedom, including the freedom to
live a fully secular life for those who do not perceive the sacred, and struggling against
distorted fundamentalist religion, presents a more difficult problem. Perhaps it is a
matter of revitalizing the priestly disciplines, and of building strong local religious
communities, so that the people, while increasingly open to diverse expressions of the
sacred, at the same time becoming increasingly resistant to purely secular leadership,
which is unable to speak to and tap into their love for the beauty of the cosmos as a
whole.
Furthermore, when the people as a whole come together to chart their direction for the
future, this assembly should include not only their political leaders, but also and
especially their prophets and philosophers, their priests and their pastors. This need
not mean giving philosophers and priests an official role in the state structure. Indeed,
our highest assembly should be located not within but above the state, and should
include representatives of corporations and trade unions, local communities
(neighborhoods and cities), and the (reformed) universities and religious institutions.
It is hard for us to think this way, so accustomed we are to regarding the state as the
highest level of organization of human society, but it is precisely this change of thinking
which is necessary if our vision is to succeed. Perhaps the old idea of the Soviet,
stripped of its antireligious bias and the legacy of one party rule, or the institutionally
based community organization, opened to the leadership of philosophers and leaders of
non-Christian religious, communities offer some points of departure.
But even if these models should prove grossly inadequate, as they might, or a false
starting point, the aim must be clear. In so far as human civilization is ordered to an
end which transcends itself, namely the self-organizing activity of the cosmos as a
whole, it requires the leadership not only of the political leader, but also of the
philosopher and the priest.
A further step towards fleshing out our vision of a nonbureaucratic, nonmarket mode
of organization can be taken if we analyze further what we have said about the relations
between the various dimensions of political leadership: the political-economic, the
political-diplomatic, and the political-military. In the past, public, political intervention
into the economy has been carried out by state institutions which, however
"democratized" are ultimately the heirs of the political military function and endowed
with bureaucracies organized in quasimilitary fashion. It is little wonder that such
institutions were very poor at the complex relational tasks of economic organization.
At the same time, the corporation, which has become the organic institution of
production in industrial and "postindustrial" society, replacing the family and the village
community, has for too long remained a private legal entity, exploited by individual
shareholders for their own profit, without any regard to either the public welfare or the
good of the workers.
Corporations need to be socialized without being statified. Two key steps are in order.
First, corporate charters must be rewritten so that they more closely resemble those of
our current nonprofit organizations. Specifically, all surplus must either be reinvested
in developing new technological or human capacity, donated to universities, religious
institutions, or other charitable institutions, or paid to a central investment fund in taxes
--though part of the funds reinvested might be granted to individual workers for self-
development, etc. Second, while it will continue to be important for corporate boards
to represent diverse "outside" interests, including other corporations with which they
have strategic relationships as suppliers, consumers, collaborators, etc., both the
ordinary workers of the enterprise and the society as a whole need to be represented
as well.
These two reforms provide a distinctly nonsocialist, nonstate method of abolishing
private property in capital, and thus the capital markets. Corporations would thus be
freed from the tyranny of private investors and of the stock market. At the same time,
enterprises would not be entirely or even primarily dependent on state bureaucrats for
investment funds. Rather, they would negotiate with each other, pooling resources for
larger projects, forming strategic and tactical alliances, etc. --a pattern which is already
common in Japan, where the great corporations effectively own each other, and only
some 20% of capital is controlled by private investors. The amount of capital paid to
a central investment fund could be as large or as small as circumstances required,
depending on the relative priority of large infrastructure projects or other public
ventures (e.g. space exploration) in a particular period as opposed to smaller ventures
which can be undertaken by corporations individually or in concert. The level of
taxation, furthermore, would be fixed by the highest assembly in the land which
represented not only the state but also the corporations and trade unions, universities
and religious institutions, and which, therefore, had no intrinsic interest in maintaining
either a high or a low level of taxation.
What these reforms do not do, of course, and what we must still work towards, is the
abolition of the market in labor power and the market in consumer goods as well as the
market in capital.
The kind of social reorganization which we envision clearly involves the renewal and
revitalization of the three disciplines of revolutionary leadership: philosophy,
priesthood, and political leadership. And here again we are in a position to give
greater specificity to one of our earlier specifications: that our principal task in the
present period is the construction of a synergistic leadership core. As we prepare for
the transition, our first and most important task is to build an organization, a
community even, of prophets and philosophers, priests and pastors, organizers,
diplomats --and yes, even of warriors.
The first step in this process is philosophical. Specifically, we must restore the
tradition of philosophical inquiry which has been undermined by the corruption of the
universities. There are, to be sure, prophetic insights which take place outside of the
discipline of philosophical investigation and demonstration --insights which grasp some
dimension of the nature and destiny of the cosmos which transcends our capacity for
rational demonstration and which therefore find expression in poetic form. But it is by
and large through the journey of the dialectic that we are able to look into the depths
of being, grasp the essential nature and underlying structure of the universe, and
develop a vision and a strategy for the future.
This new philosophy will rest firmly on the foundation of the special sciences. It is
above all from the sciences, and especially from unified field theories, complex systems
theory, postdarwinian evolutionary biology, and dialectical sociology, that we are
learning to appreciate the underlying interconnectedness and the complex self-organizing
dynamism of the universe. Through the study of the special sciences our minds are,
on the one hand, formed in such a way as to learn to see order and pattern, and at the
same time we gradually gain a synoptic view of the universe as a whole. It is this
grasp of the universe as an organized totality which must form the starting point for
philosophical investigation proper, for it is the task of philosophy to ground and
elaborate this insight, drawing out its implications for our understanding of being itself,
of the universe, of value, etc. --and for the next steps in the human civilizational
project.
This new departure in philosophy must be accompanied by an attempt to rebuild the
community of philosophers. Authentic philosophical reflection is not simply a
profession which is learned through specialized study: it is a calling. We must scour
the planet for the best minds --many young, some old and grown wise through hard
experience-- which have this calling. Their training must be comprehensive. Before
one can be a philosopher, it is necessary to master at least one of the special sciences,
natural or social, and to be familiar with several more. It is necessary as well to have
some experience in the practical disciplines --perhaps as a pastor or organizer, perhaps
as an ordinary worker-- and above all to understand how human communities work and
how to share the philosophical vision with those who are not and never will be called
to be philosophers. But above all we must rebuild the university as an institution which
is dedicated first and foremost to the pursuit of the truth, and which recognizes
philosophical inquiry as the most powerful instrument we have as we undertake that
pursuit. This means endowing universities with sufficient resources to make them
radically independent of the marketplace.
We face a similar task with respect to our religious institutions. On the ideological
front we face a sharp battle against the religious alienation generated by the
marketplace, and against the deeper, older wounds of patriarchy. We must restore
humanity's conviction that the universe is a purposeful, organized totality, that human
beings are vitally important, active participants in the self-creation of that totality, and
therefore essentially good, however long the road and however crooked the path
towards Omega. And we must find a way to do this which is accessible not only to
those who are able to grasp the truth rationally, at a philosophical level, but also to
those who will remain, for the time being, at least, in the world of myth and legend,
symbol and ritual.
It is on the basis of this theological transformation that we must attempt to restore
pastoral authority to its proper place. So long as pastors teach the sinfulness of
humanity and our dependence on another for salvation they damage our cause. But
when they begin to teach that everyone can know God's will and fulfill it, and that our
confrontations with each other, and with our own limitations will lead us not to the
edge of some terrible abyss into which we leap in fear and trembling, but to a new
wholeness, then whatever language they speak, whatever symbols they use, they will
begin to rebuild shattered lives and shattered communities, and even when they must
be hard the people will follow, because they will know that it is a hardness informed
by the truth and nourished by love.
In order to thus restore pastoral authority we must scour the planet for women and men
(but in this time I think it will be especially women, as the ancient cult of the Magna
Mater reasserts itself under new forms) who have an authentic calling to the priesthood,
and training them in the arts of ritual, and in the disciplines of counseling and
community building, so that they can make the sacred once again present to humanity,
and help humanity to feel its own sacred wholeness.
Finally, we must restore the position of political leadership to its proper place. This
means breaking the ideological hegemony of liberalism in all its forms, and cultivating
an awareness that human civilization is ordered to ends higher than itself: that we serve
kosmos, in all her incredible beauty, and that policy therefore most be oriented towards
developing human civilization as a center for the creation of that dynamic, organized
complexity on which cosmos depends for her growth and development.
It also means that we must train organizers, diplomats, and warriors who at once feel
authentic pride in their own callings, but who respect the different but in some ways
higher callings of the philosopher and pastor. And we must bring these leaders into the
larger circle of leadership so that, in dialogue with each other, prophet and priest,
philosopher and pastor, organizer, diplomat and military commander can work out a
vision and strategy adequate to the task of unleashing humanity's untapped creative
potential.
It bears saying that even this preliminary task of restoring and revitalizing the archaic
disciplines of revolutionary leadership is a very difficult one. Day by day the market
erodes more and more of the social fabric, and makes it ever more difficult to
centralize the resources necessary to carry out our work. It is entirely possible that
human civilization itself will enter into general crisis, and even into a period of
collapse, long before we are in a position to carry out the kind of reforms we envision.
But this does not mean that all is lost. It is just another prejudice of nineteenth and
twentieth century social thought that transitions to a higher form of social life always
take the form of either evolutionary reform or revolutionary reorganization. The fact
is that most of the great epochal transitions of the past came on the heals of a long
period of decadence and apparent collapse. The great classical age of Greece, for
example was the product not of a revolution but of centuries of "dark ages" during
which a few wise women and men preserved the arts of civilization, and reformed them
in the light of past failures. The same is true of the great flowering of medieval
Europe. Perhaps this is the road which we too must travel.
This, then, is what we are trying to do at the Foundation for Social Progress: to
conserve the achievements of human civilization, to revitalize and renew the archaic
disciplines of revolutionary leadership, the disciplines of prophet and philosopher, priest
and pastor, organizer, diplomat, and military leader. It is a hard road we travel, and
we are in dark times. But for those of use who are schooled in the arts of the dialectic
and who have learned to see human history as a whole --and as a part of a larger
cosmic evolutionary process, for those of us to whom the sacred is really present in the
matters which we work, in ourselves, and in our community, for those of us who know
that the power we wield is not our own but that of kosmos herself, then this present
darkness, no matter how long, is but a few fleeting hours before the coming dawn.
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