Did evolution evolve?  If evolution came into being, it was not. If evolution was not, then on its own theory, its being is contingent. That is, it may not have come into being. If evolution is timeless, it fails to explain itself, it fails to explain how it came into being. 

True communication can only be attained at the expense of the receiver of a message.  First, communication presupposes two or more differences.   There must at least be a sender and a receiver, and they must not contain the same information or have the same structure. Second, communication only occurs as a product of the force of an impulse, or a shock.  True communication means undergoing a change from which one cannot return.  

That is, take two systems or complexes (two human individuals, if you like) that may wish to communicate, A&B.  One can admit that communication has occured only if a change in the state of system A corresponds to a change in the state of system B.  Prior to communication, A had a larger range of freedom or possibility, its sending a message constrained it.  B's receiving a message means constraining its possibilities (though this makes the future possible).  Thus, communication means limitation.  Communication means making a selection, reducing the complexity in one's environment, interpreting the message.  However, such limitation is necessary.  It is a condition of communication.  It is constitutive of it.

Because it is always based on a message that may or may not be received, whose meaning may be variously interpreted, all communication is contingent.  It is so even for the minimal two differences required of communication, however, meaning that communication is always doubly contingent.  This condition of communication is nicely expressed in the idea that I don't know what I've said until I hear it repeated back to me. 

Some provisos to these early remarks: 1) placing emphasis here on the sender-receiver model involves all sorts of ontological commitments that may be cleared away, in large part, by focusing on the selection of the message, its self-referential processing, rather than on those systems between which it is said to be transmitted.   

Selection of information has been a huge concept in communication since the cybernetical theories of Weaver and Shannon.  However, we would do well to remind ourselves of Bertalanffy's criticism of the cybernetic model of communication as mechanistic inasmuch as it first assumes structural order for systems that communicate.  Thus, the cybernetic model tends to focus concentration on secondary processes of communication.  Rather than viewing those systems which communicate as themselves events of communication, cybernetics assumes systems ready made and asks how it is that they may maintain themselves homeostatically.  Here, the identity of a system is presupposed. 

The Darwinian revolution in science meant especially that things be treated as accumulations of free-floating differences rather than as presupposed identities.  Systems are thus open to the future, not determined by their past. 

While there is much to admire in the concept of Gaia, and here I reserve my remarks to James Lovelock's seminal conception, this admiration ought to be critical.  Lovelock defined Gaia in cybernetic terms:

"a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil;  the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet."

Yes, by general rule the processes undergone by the objects of these various sciences (organisms, weather patterns, ocean currents) are so ordered as to maintain the systems of which they are a part, but  the type of system maintenance (its operations and constraints) explained in the theory of cybernetics (with its particular method of searching for optimality) leaves many conceptual shortcomings and difficulties.  For example, how are we to discriminate between processes of order and organization in the cybernetic model?  Cybernetic theory was developed with the conceptual tools and aims of mechanistic sciences.  Is it's model complex enough to deal with open systems at far from equlilibrium conditions (such as organisms), those dynamical systems constantly open to flows of matter and energy?  

Cybernetics' concept of seeking optimal conditions of the systems it treats is feedback.  Feedback shows how systems are self-regulating, a  cybernetic system directs its own behavior in response to perturbations in its environment, yet the cybernetic model of causality is too simply circular, not yet dynamic.  

 The mechanistic origin of cybernetical theory is our clue to the conceptual difficulties of circular causation.  Cybernetic systems presuppose structural arrangements (mechanistic) in the sense that their regulative behavior is determined by static structural conditions.  While cybernetic systems are open to information (inputs and outputs), they are not open to material or structural change. Thus, cybernetic models refer mainly to secondary regulations of the system, while the primary regulations of systems remain in a sense internal and unaffected by these regulations.  Yet what happens when we come to consider the structural arrangements of systems as themselves results of dynamical processes rather than as preestablished?

Returning to Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, premised on cybernetics, the question becomes one of whether Lovelock treats all the wonderful phenomena he speaks of in reductive fashion.  Cybernetic systems have been shown to be rather special types of more general systems, open and dynamical in structure and function. Cybernetics may not be an adequate model for thinking living systems, and they ways in which living systems interact with their environments, even if one wanted to examine the problem in informational terms alone.  How can the cybernetic model deal with the complexities of systems whose components are dissolved in catabolic processes or replaced in anabolic ones?  With system differentiations in organization, such as those progressive differentiations seen in growth rates and development? 

I've been regretably inactive on Gaia community this past month, partly because I've been away from home.  While away, though, I read Marcus Aurelius' Mediations. Aurelius was very inspirational for me, causing me to want to read Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, even Thomas a Kempis.  My interest in Aurelius stemmed from a long desire I've had to develop an ethics (Deleuze-Spinoza ethology vs. prescriptive, regulative rules).  Aurelius helped me to consider whether such an ethics would be centered around certain Stocial philosophical principles: materialism, monism, mutation.  The only way to find out?  Experiment. 

Here are some quotations from the Meditations that inspired me:

--Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

--Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

--Each day provides its own gifts.

Why did I find these quotations inspirational?  They all lay claim to the power of passivity. 
Passivity's power lies in its capacity to receive.  Reception is a power indeed.  If a body can receive, it can endure, it enables future communication.  Receiving means openness (structural coupling), to flows of matter and energy.   

Hegel and Religion

Objective religion can be studied in a book or lecture, subjective religion refers to religious feelings or acts. Hegel raises the distinction and then declares: subjective religion is all that matters. "Subjective religion is pretty much the same in all people, while objective religion can have almost any color whatever."

Hegel distinguished between the understanding, dialectical reason and speculative thought.

The understanding fixes propositions and things in immediate identities, dialectical reason reflects on the essences, ground or conditions of things, examines the differential basis at the heart of immediate identities, and speculative thought seeks to produce the Notion of the thing, reconstructing it conceptually. On Hegel's understanding, the understanding is a necessary train of thought, an essential ingredient in speculative thought--yet it represents the most impoverished form of knowledge and remains at the level of mere representation. For Hegel, the understanding was the organ of experience in objective religion:

"The understanding serves only objective religion. By purifying principles and by representing them in their purity, the understanding has produced splendid fruit, such as Lessing's Nathan, and it deserves the eulogies heaped on it. But the understanding can never transform principles into practice. The understanding is a courtier who obey's his master's moods and knows how to provide justifications for any passion and any enterprise."

The understanding fixes things, and does not transform them. Here Hegel criticizes Kantian religious philosophy in unsavory terms because it was dominated by the logic of the understanding. This logic, for Hegel, knows not how to transform moods into ethical actions, but only represents or fixes moods in static moral principles of the individual, without connection to the actual, moral content of a community.

Thus, not only does the logic of the understanding fix religious content into static or dogmatic principles, but it serves the passions of the individual. It promotes a culture of selfish individualism. Over against this selfish individualism, Hegel spoke of the unselfishness of love, which, though grounded in the passions, is nonetheless a product of ethical reason. Love does not fix things in immediate identities, but binds individuals in a community. While Kant believed love to be a question only of passions and so without respect for the moral law, Hegel believed love to already contain morality, and the act of loving to be at once ethical life. Love is the actualization of subjective religion, for Hegel. Christianity, too much a product of the modern individualism for Hegel, proved to be objective religion despite its emphasis on love.

For the Christian form of love, for the younger Hegel, was as impoverished as the state of ethical life of the community who propounded it. This younger Hegel thought the ancient Greek conception of love favorable to the Christian conception since it reflected the ethical life of the community rather than that of the individual. Not only did Chrisitian love promote a life of individualism in its modern instantiation, but it had an element of transcendence in its raising of one individual above the community, Jesus, whose teaching were then also separated from life, community, and action. For Hegel, Socrates was much more a man of the people:

"Of course, one did not hear [Socrates] deliver sermons on a platform or a mount: How could it have even occured to Socrates, in Greece, to deliver sermons? He aimed to enlighten men... the number of his closer friends was indeterminate: the thirteenth, fourteenth, and the rest were as welcome as the preceding ones...Socrates did not live in them and was not the head from which they, as members, received the juice of life. He had no mold into which he wished to pour his characters and no rule according to which he might have desired to even out their differences: for that only small spirits would have been at his disposal;.... Each one of his students was himself a master...not heroes in martyrdom and suffering, but in action and life...He did not offend anyone by swaggering self-importance or by using high-flown or mysterious phrases of the sort that impresses only the ignorant and credulous. ... the teachings and principles of Jesus were really only suitable for the education of single human beings, and intended only for this."

Hegel looked down not only on the transcedence of the individual figure of Christ, though, but also on the institutions of the modern Christian church, condemning the Catholic Church and Protestant Reformers for the impracticality of their moral legislation, "practice of confession, church ban, penance, and the whole series of debasing monuments of human degradation." The issue here for Hegel is that Christianity in modern times is wedded to a culture of individualism (whose roots are economic and social more than anything else) and not one that fosters the living spirit of a people, which must be defined by its freedom and creativity.

Hegel disparaged the use of Church authority for control, power, and money rather than for the cultivation of free consciences and spirits. This authority never moved beyond "the concept of the church as a kind of state within the state," where even Luther "took from the clergy the power to rule by force, over men's purses, too, but he himself still wanted to rule over their opinions."

In sum, Hegel believed that modern Christianity was rather a "corruption of human nature" rather than "a real knowledge of the human heart." Thus, as with Kant, Christianity does not pass moral mustard for Hegel as it became a form of objective religion rather than a celebration of community fostering and creative love (which actually and concretely exists with ethical life and civil liberty) and its expression so that "whoever acts with a pure heart is always misunderstood by the moral and religious yardstick."

Younger Hegel believed that a folk religion would properly fit with subjective religion in his modernity. He was no doubt influenced by the ancient Greeks in this conception, one which "does not force its teachings upon anyone, nor does any violence to any human conscience." A folk religion whose doctrines "must not contain anything that universal human reason does not recognize--no certain or dogmatic claims [which would necessarily be then the outcome of the understanding in objective reason] which transcend the limits of reason, even if their sanction had its origin in heaven itself." For Hegel, such a morality of subjective religion was no way in keeping with Christian tradition, and modernity's hold on it.

Who is really polemicizing against the Christian tradition here in the young Hegel is the romantic Hegel, cut from the revolutionary mold, champion of civil freedom, a Hegel who found in Enlightenment's promise of educating the masses toward autonomy only an emptiness replaying the authoritarianism of the Medieval age, a relapse into barbarism, here a predatory clergy, there a police-state, everywhere a submission to heteronomy.

Hegel would later abandoned faith in the idea of a subjective religion, so too the revolutionary zeal of the German Romantics. Why? Some excesses (of passion and dogma in religion and in the homegrown masses) appeared to lead to untamed nationalism, or else disenfranchisements and disilluionments of anarchy.

I post this blog as the beginning of a mediation on the requirements of communication within a community, such as we find here at Gaia. The main questions I will be thinking through throughout are 1) what is communication and 2) what are the requirements of communication?

I begin with an analysis of Hegelian themes in communication because Hegel threw down a gauntlet for all those thinkers of communication who came after him.  By first analyzing and understanding communication in its Hegelian parameters we open up a valid possibility of moving beyond Hegel.  The reasons for moving beyond Hegel should only be discovered in the course of examining his philosophy.

Hegel: Since the man of common sense makes his appeal to feeling, to an oracle within his breast, he is finished and done with anyone who does not agree; he only has to explain that he has nothing more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same in himself.  In other words, he tramples underfoot the roots of humanity.  For it is the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with others; human nature only really exists in an instituted community of consciousness.  The anti-human consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, being able to communicate only at that level. PoS, 69

1. The roots of humanity are located in a community of communicating consciousness striving toward agreement, for Hegel, it is here and in this activity only where human nature exists.

Why?  Feeling is inadequate inasmuch as it cannot be expressed or shared in a community of consciousnesses.  The emphasis here is on expression.  Feeling cannot be expressed as such, as singular existence because expression demands entry into language, a universal medium.  One cannot say the singular as such since language is a realm of universality and not singularity.  As soon as one attempts to communicate or express their feelings (singularity), they do so through language, but they necessarily betray feeling.  The worry is that one loses one's unique individuality.

2. This is why, for Hegel, private consciousnesses are deposited in language, in a universal medium, in Spirit, a universal "I".  For Hegel, dialectic is the activity of communicating consciousnesses that expresses and develops a universal self-consciousness.  Those consciousnesses that deny the realm of universality, preferring the certainty of feeling, are for Hegel beautiful souls. 
3. The beautiful soul in wanting to be preserved from the universality of language, the empty abstracting force of the community, is for Hegel dissolved in its own immediacy. 
Jean Hyppolite analyzes this dialectic, the intertwined nature of the singularity of immediate being or feeling and universality or mediated being at another, related level of consciousness: "The issue is a sort of conscious, and if we can call it deliberate, decision to turn back.  He takes the episode of Faust and Gretchen as his example of such an experience.  It is the issue of a consciousness, weary of the universality of knowledge and of the burden of mediation, that claims to turn back completely toward ineffable pleasure.  This consciousness knows that "all theory is gray and green the golden tree of life," it despises "the understanding and science, the supreme gifts of man."
4. This is the portrait of a consciousness who prefers to live life rather than undertake the path of knowledge or of despair it necessitates.   It is a decision, in an alternate register to the one we have examined in the dialectic between feeling and expression, to turn toward singularity of self, to reject the community of consciousnesses striving toward agreement.

More to come...

My posts thus far on Gaia have been characterized by a certain more formal language, one in touch with the study of systems.  HOWEVER, I have not put enough effort into describing how a systems theoretical perspective translates into living, lived experience and action. 

Living systemically means refusing the idea that our individuality has being outside of relations we enter into with others.  Other people, cultures, forms of life, religions, philosophies, and the other that is the environment as a whole. 

Yes, the claim is that our individuality is NOT unless it is with others, alongside them or sometimes against them.  The other makes the I possible. 

So the questions are, how do I recognize the other, how do I best interact with the other? 
Recognizing the other means, from a systems perspective concerned with living systemically, learning what distinctions the other makes.  How does the other distinguish between wrong and right, good and bad, just and unjust, that which has value and that which does not? 

Our identity stems from differences from others, we make different distinctions, have different boundaries and different ways of maintaining these differences.  Difference might then be viewed as constitutive of identity.  We are what the other is not.  This holds for the other as well.  Thus, in order for us to be individually, we must have an other to distinguish ourselves from.  This means, that whether we agree with the other or not, whether we like the other or not, we must recognize that the other makes us who we are.  Whether we define ourselves for or against the other. 

In order to best interact with the other, we must respect the differences of the other, those differences which preserve the other in a RELATIONSHIP with us.  The other must be able to make his own distinctions, have his own freedoms and choices and find them validated. 

Pluralism fits with cosmopolitanism. 

I of course realize that there is much anxiety in our relations with the other, and much at stake.  The other is a source of potential threats.  Yet the other has an other in kind, the other's other is I.  The other experiences the same anxiety and knows the same dangers as I.  This fact must be admitted. 

I shall write more on these topics in the future.

I can't even begin to review this film after seeing only once.  But I can register awe.  Watching this film was one of the most rewarding artistic and cinematic experiences I've ever had.  The film was haunting in its tone and conculsion, captivating in its cinematography and character development, and through and through arresting in its mise-en-scene.  So many individual shots were these striking minimalist tableaux.  I love the way Tarr demonstrated a scale of power relations, cat-young girl-young male-Irimias.  I have to stop writing on it until I see it again.  If you can get a hold of it, you have to see it.

Recovering, hopeful, determined

Examples.  Dialectics means thinking the category of thing as, first, process/relation.  For example, Marxian method. Marx viewed the thing called capital as a result of a process.  Namely, a result of a movement describing the development of primitive accumulation (in itself), accumulation (for itself), mass concentration of capital.  Capital is now viewed as the outcome of a diachronic process, just as primitive accumulation is a result of the end result development of capital as such.  The things these terms might represent outside of this abstracting activity is now concretized within an ideal structure of terms. 

Hegel viewed philosophy itself as a structure of idealized relations.  A thing, taken in itself, had no meaning outside of its ideal relations with other terms.