Erland Lagerroth’s Homepage
From Criticism of Fiction to Criticism of
Science-World View-Way of Thinking
The
Way of a (Re)Searcher
svensk version
ENGLISH VERSION
"Search is our greatest adventure" (Rolf Edberg). Join me in
this adventure and experience the same joy, enlightment, and insight that this
journey of discoveries during 50 years has given me!
The journey, way, narrative begins with criticism
of fiction and hermenutics and goes via
rethinking of literary research, humanities, and natural science to the discovery of a "humanistic" natural science, a "world philosophy", a "passion
of the Western mind", a possible solution of the crucial
question of mankind, and a biology beyond Darwin
and DNA, “a new kind of science” and a science about emergence and self-organisation, ”in which
the objective of understanding nature by breaking it down into ever smaller
components is supplanted by the objective of understanding how nature organizes
itself” (Laughlin). Special attention is given to Goethe and Gaia. But at the same time, it is a
journey towards new or different ways of
thinking (and seeing and living): in relations, wholeness, process, system,
dialectics, feed back, recycling, self-organization, self-transformation,
creation. All of it results in a transcending of the traditional (natural)
science, a new world view, a new gospel and the spell of the sensuous.
So what follows is a personal journey of discoveries through
humanities and science with the thrills and epiphanies of such an enterprise,
not an attempt at historical or systematic survey of the territory crossed.
I’ll tell about a process, not describe a situation. What is offered is the
life and flexibility of the process of research, not a frozen picture of the
landscape itself with its illusion of objectivity and finality. And a final clear conception of what I have been doing and what it all
has aimed at.
(The links are only in Swedish, unfortunately.)
Erland Lagerroth. Photo Michael Högberg, Ystads Allehanda 11
Jan 2005
- Docent and senior lecturer in Literature at
- Visiting professor University of
California, Berkeley 1964
- Declared competent for full professorship
several times from 1968 and onwards
- Nominated as Senior Professor in Theory of
Literature at
- Multi-disciplinary graduate course “Towards
a holistic-dialectic paradigm” together with. prof. Joachim
Israel in
- Appointed "Årets förvillare 1998" (Misleader of the Year) by the association
"Vetenskap och folkbildning" (Science and Adult Education)
- Declared heretic 2003
- Awarded the “Wise Price”
of the magazine “Sökaren” (The Searcher) 2003
- Some
other interviews: in Ystads
Allehanda, av
Antoon Geels, för
TOK, för
Kronobergs läns landsting. Introduction
in Ordfront magasin 4 / 2003
- Member of
Scientific and Medical Network
, http://www.paradigmdialog.com/ och http://www.complexityforum.com/
- Competiton swimmer in my youth, jogger
since 1945
- Pilot in the Swedish Airforce 1945-46
- On behalf of the Swedish Foreign Office and together with an
American accountant, I inspected
Born 1925, married to Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, professor
emerita in Comparative Literature at the University of Lund, Sweden. Son of
Fredrik Lagerroth, professor in Political Science at the
Journeys in
USA 1959-60, 1964, 1967, 1991 and to Egypt 1965, Israel 1968, Morocco 1975, India 1992
and 1993-94, Tanzania 1994, China 1995, Brazil-Argentina-Chile 1996, South
Africa 1997, Indonesia 1998, Thailand 1999, Mexico 2000, India-Nepal 2001, Gran
Canaria 2002, Kenya 2003, Cambodia 2004, Dominican Republic 2005, Tenerife
2006, Istanbul and Rhodos 2007.
Tunavägen 7,
S 22362
Telephone +46-46-2118766
E-mail: erland.lagerroth@telia.com
Many thanks to my son Andreas for getting me started
and giving support in the complicated world of computers.
Literature
Literary
Criticism, Hermeneutics
For nearly 50 years, my research developed
"vertically", reaching more and more comprehensive perspectives. In
my dissertation Landskap och natur i Gösta
Berlings saga och Nils Holgersson (1958) I discovered that parts
of a literary work always have to be looked upon in their relations to other parts of the work. In my
dissertation it is a question of the interrelations of landscape and Nature to
human beings and events – both epic relations on the causal level and lyrical
relations on the level of similarities and contrasts. The latter case can be
called "counterpoint compositions".
When squire Sinclaire in his sledge goes to bring home his daughter Marianne,
he is in a “radiant mood”, “nor [!] was there any limit to the light which
poured from the clear sky on that February day”. The effect of such a lyrical
composition between man and landscape may be greater than that of a metaphor or
symbol in a poem but has been less noticed. Selma Lagerlöf is a master in
creating such compositions. Together with some novels by Thomas Hardy, Gösta
Berling's Saga might be the tightest woven novel "of character and
environment" (Hardy's expression) in world literature. In this way she
also loaded the landscapes in these two books with an aesthetic
effect, an emotional resonance, that has
few equivalences and that produces a strong feeling of presence
in the reader. His/her reaction is not any longer restricted to abstract perception but develops into
concrete experiences for the reader’s inner eye,
an experience that works back in enriching his mind.
As a
consequence I tried to come to grips with, not parts or fragments of novels,
but the entire fictional work as a functioning,
developing whole, resulting in Svensk
berättarkonst (Swedish Fiction 1968; close readings of
Strindberg’s Röda rummet, Heidenstam’s Karolinerna, Lagerkvist’s Onda
sagor and Sibyllan). This project, however, involved a number of
complications that analytic science had not given much attention. What is in
fact a novel and how to understand it? The traditional ideas of the literary
work as imitation (mimesis), expression, structure, or symptom, were not
sufficient. But one day a new and different approach suggested itself to me: to
look at the novel as a process, an epic process, that acts
out and realizes the meaning of the novel. With such an approach, one can
contemplate, not what a novel is, but what
it does, one can study how it functions to realize its meaning. Something
happens in the novel, a development from a position to another. It searches for
something that is not there from the beginning, a balance, a clarity, an
understanding. From the first side to the last one it operates in principle as
a functional whole.
This way of thinking stimulated to close readings
of a series of novels (I don’t use the word "analysis", because in
this kind of study it is a matter of keeping together what functions together,
to survey instead of breaking up into
fragments). Thus, apart from the four readings in Swedish
berättarkonst, three minor
monographs on (Selma Lagerlöf´s)
But how best to proceed in such studies, how to understand or interpret
a novel? This is reflected upon in Romanen i din
hand (The Novel in Your Hand, 1976). (The title implies that the
book deals with the individual novel "in your hand", not with any
abstract structure of novels in general. The goal is to enable an optimal
reading, a reading that gives you the novel "in your hand".) That
this orientation towards wholeness and process in a separate novel being
original, yes alien to science, the science from the
seventeenth century searching general laws, did not dawn upon me until
the 15th of November 2006. My objective, what I wanted to
understand, was the individual, not any general
phenomenon or concept. Anybody who tries to understand an individual by
splitting it up into a pattern of viewpoints,
established in advance, has already violated the object of research.
Because in-dividual means indivisible. Instead is requested an imaginative leap on the basis of free overview
over all sides of the work, for the individuality to stand out. An imaginative
leap that permanently must be checked and corrected through a returning to the text.This is the
more important as this science from the 17th century has become the
model also for humanities. Here is one of the
reasons for the adversities I met in my career.
There was, however, an old science
for which an orientation like this was not alien and that is hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation. At this
time it had undergone a revival and offered new knowledge. The interpretation,
too, is a process, a process going from part to
whole and back to part again in a lasting cycle between appropriation,
discovery, and control, a cycle that in principle can last as long as you like,
and therefore doesn’t have the form of a circle but of a spiral (though I did not succeed to draw a spiral
here):
Continued reading,
implying testing of this idea
against the continuation of the
text
Reading of the text from the
beginning———>An
idea of the character,
wholeness, meaning
of the work arises
The idea of the character,
wholeness,
meaning is adjusted
in accordance with the new impressions
As the
discoveries – of coherence, wholeness, individuality, "meaning", in
the literary work - happen by leaps, as creative acts,
it is a heuristic process ("heureka" –
I found it). And as the process proceeds in a continuous interplay between part and whole, where the results
are fed back into what has already been read and change the understanding of it
(feed-back), and as every discovery transcends the prior understanding, it is also a dialectic process that has the complexity and mobility of such a
process. There is no true interpretation, only interpretations that are adequate in relation to the text and valid in relation to what is known. The result must
always be checked against the text that is its outermost corrective.
(Inter)relation,
interplay, wholeness, process, function, survey, heuristic and dialectic
process with feed-back, and transcending of earlier results in a sudden creative act – these were experiences and insights
that constituted a new and creative way of thinking.
New in relation to the analytic reductionism of everyday science and new to the
sloppy view of the world as a collection of passive things or an accumulation
of matter. A wholeness, a process, a system – even a relation or interplay –
can never be understood by an analysis of the parts. He who attempts something
like it simply is incompetent. The way of thinking at the same time is the way of looking at reality.
The contrast between the old way of thinking and the new one can be made
visible in approaches to the novel. According to the positivistic view, the
object of research is something given, as sense data ("data" meaning
what is "given"). And, certainly, a novel is given in this way,
namely as paper and printing ink. But that is interesting only for the printer
and to some extent for the publisher. As reception
aesthetics has realized, the novel that interests the reader and the
researcher is something quite different: it is created at every reading in
accordance with social conventions and the reader’s competence.
The ultimate
consequence is that the object of research is created in the process of
research itself, in a heuristic-dialectic act that, principally, has no end and
therefore never can reach either exhausting or definitive results, only results
that are adequate in relation to the text and valid in relation to what is known. There is no
absolute truth, only what is true for that reader of this novel in that
situation. What, however, does not mean any absolute
relativism, since the phase of control vis-à-vis
what is interpreted permanently remains and
forbids each pretension on absolute results, also the assertion about absolute
relativism.
Literary Scholarship and Science
With these experiences it was natural for me to continue and consider both literary criticism and
scholarship. In Litteraturvetenskapen vid en
korsväg (Literary Criticism at the Cross-roads) (1980) the
limitations of positivistic, Marxist, and structuralistic methods are
demonstrated and - partly under the impression from Sartre's
Critique de la raison dialectique - dialectic, humanistic, and finalistic
(purpose oriented) approaches are advocated.
How to proceed in research in general is discussed in
my book Mot en ny vetenskap (Towards a new science) (1986). This book
introduces (I:8) and uses a paradigm theory that
is more sophisticated than that of Thomas Kuhn,
a theory developed by Håkan Törnebohm,
former professor in Theory of Science, Gothenburg, Sweden. It introduces and discusses
14 books towards a new paradigm, among them Joachim
Israel’s Språkets dialektik och
dialektikens språk (The dialectics
of language and the language of dialectics) and
Om konsten att blåsa upp en ballong inifrån (On
the art of inflating a balloon from the inside). Furthermore, Karel Kosík’s Det konkretas dialektik (Dialektika konkrétního), Raymond Williams’ Marxism and
Literature, Fritiof Capra’s The Turning Point, Richard Matz’ Sams med Jorden (Reconciled with the Earth) and Erich Jantsch’s The Self-Organizing Universe (II: 6-10, 12-13).
Keywords are here dialectic,
wholeness, relation, feed-back, process, system, self-organization.
A concept that first intrigued me in Joachim Israel’s book “The dialectics of language
and the language of dialectics” was internal relation.
But here one can find the most evident divergence from traditional empirical
science. When that science investigates reality, it does so by analysis,
by disjointing the object, often enough also by reducing it to some more elementary
level. Characteristic is that “analysis” since far back has become synonymous
with “science”. So already from start, the wholenes
is annihilated. When the parts then have been explained, they can be related to
each other in external relations, though from the beginning they were
parts of one or several wholes. A holistic-dialectic research, however, from
the beginning attempts to grasp the wholes the
world is full of, and within them we look for relations, internal relations, relations conditioned by the
wholeness. And all this is in movement, in a continuing process. What does not exclude concepts like structure and order:
they are occasional characteristics of the process, a cross section, so to
speak, at a certain moment.
In this book, the situation in the scientific society
for him/her who speaks for a new paradigm is also illustrated and debated (I:
17, 19-21). That the situation for literature at school is problematic, too, is
made clear from two reports as inspector of senior high schools (I:6).This book
also pleads in favour of research as an existential
quest: to understand the world we live in and the life we live (I:17).
Ultimately it is as a question of the triunity science-world
view-way of thinking and what it means for our way
of life
Science
World View
Way of Thinking, Seeing,
Living
A humanist’s attempt to understand the world we live
in
Natural Science
Mostly
empirically, by studies of my own, I had arrived at a new way of thinking. To
my great delight as researcher and human being, at this point, I recognized the
same general way of thinking and looking upon the world in a new science that
had developed during the time I was finding my way. (In this connection it
might be mentioned that I have an old interest in science - chose physics,
chemistry and special mathematics at school. So my two interests could be
united and both the world and I myself could be whole again.) The discovery
came in 1980 through Erich Jantsch’s great book The
Self-Organizing Universe (1980). My five following books mainly deal
with this new paradigm: Världen och vetandet sjunger på nytt
(The Reenchantment of science and the world) (1994),
Nya tankar, nya världar
(New thoughts, new worlds) (1999), Sökandet är vårt
största äventyr (Search is our greatest adventure)
(2003), Bortom Darwin and DNA (Beyond
Darwin and DNA; 2004), Världen underbarare än vi tror (The
World more wonderful than we think; 2006).
This new science can be said to be "humanistic" in the way that it shows us a world
that exists in the same way as man (or better we as it).that Nature, just as Man (and in
Christianity God), is able to create. But
not in the same conscious and "rational" way (compare the following
on metabolic function!). With the help of the energy that goes through the
world, matter is able to organize itself into functioning systems, as the vortex and the candle flame,
complicated chemical structures and phenomena of weather and climate, as well
as all ecological systems up to Gaia, and life and all parts and forms of life,
man included. It is a question of systems that thanks to the feed-back function also support and regulate
themselves. They are called self-organizing systems
or dissipative structures. (from latin
“dis-sipare”, what is dissipated is the energy that is required for the function). We have them all around us and are ourselves such
systems, and so are all systems in our body down to the individual cell. Nature, like
man (and in Christianity God), can create.
But not in the same conscious and rational way (cf. below about metabolic
function).
Keywords for
these systems are far from static balance, open for
flowing through of matter and energy in a continuous process,
which through feed back organizes itself.
Furthermore fluctuations (disturbances) from
outside or from inside which via a thrust with
high gradient can force the system over an instability-threshold to transcend and recreate itself. As has been made clear by Maturana and
Varela, life, in addition, is characterized by autopoiesis; it produces also, its own components (the
foetus!)). This kind of system or structure is a universal form of existence, but
nobody seems to have understood it before Prigogine.
What
was wrong with materialism was not that it was a doctrine on matter but that it
didn’t understand matter. For what can be more obvious than the fact that Nature organizes itself
and always did – that is when you abandon the idea of God as engineer and
mechanic and understand that Man certainly does not arrange whirlpools in water
and air and other mobile matter. Matter itself is creative and not only
passive, innocent “materiel” for human activities, including science. After
Einstein’s equating of energy and matter according to the formula E = mc2,
however, one should not, perhaps, make any absolute difference between energy
and matter, and so it should be said: the world
or Nature can organize itself. –That this world, that creates
itself, once must have been created, is a circumstance that never worried me,
because I do not have instruments to understand how it happened and because I
love this world as it is. But I
am aware that others think they have such instruments and so they see me as one
who turns his back on ”mystery's gate”.
When
disturbances occur, these systems can exceed and reorganize themselves into
more and more complicated forms of existence (as
long as energy is available). In this way Nature itself created the tremendous
multiplicity that we had the privilege to be born into. And we ourselves are
the latest creation of this great evolution, an
evolution that, in contrast to Darwin's, encloses everything on this earth, not
only the biological level. Darwin was not wrong, but Darwinism is not the
entire truth.
We are used
to think of creation and organization as rational, conscious activities, but
this is only one possibility. The agency that
governs the system doesn't need to be neural (or to be God); it can just as
well belong to the metabolic system (we need
only think about our own body systems and intestines, which regulate themselves
in this way). The physiologist Lewis Thomas declared that he would rather fly a
jumbo jet than govern his own liver. As a matter of fact, systems run by their
own metabolism are the ordinary case in nature and evolution. And that has
worked very well. Rationality, on the other hand, is a more problematic agent -
as we know today, in a time of threatening ecological disaster.
Rationality is a faculty with limited scope and capacity.
A central
figure in this new paradigm is the Nobel Laureate in chemistry 1977 Ilya Prigogine, (1917-2003), who was professor in Brussels and Austin, Texas. From
an early interest in the humanities he went to a career in natural science, a
career that made him the Newton of our time. In contrast to the first Newton,
he despises a worldview that does not enclose both Nature and Man
(including the scientist himself). And since Prigogine created such a
world-view that is adequate and valid, he can be said to be greater than
Newton. My way to Prigogine went via the epochal book The Self-Organizing Universe (1980) by his
interpreter and accomplisher Erich Jantsch –
mentioned above – an all-round genius and a master of thinking in
processes, systems, feed-back, evolution. On the back of the book one can read:
This book views the evolution of the universe - ranging from cosmic and
biological to sociocultural evolution - in terms of the unifying paradigm of
self-organization. The contours of this paradigm emerge from the synthesis of a
number of important recently developed concepts, and provide a scientific
foundation to a new world-view which emphasizes process over structure,
nonequilibrium over equilibrium, evolution over permanency, and individual creativity
over collective stabilization. From an understanding of non-dualistic, creative
sharing in evolution arises a new sense of meaning. This book, therefore,
provides a comprehensive framework for a deeper understanding of human
creativity in a time of transition.
The coordinate evolution on the macro- and microlevel towards more and
more complex forms of existence Jantsch summarizes in a famous figure. In a link you find a picture of
him, seldom seen, at least in
Prigogine
himself (and the philosopher and chemist Isabelle Stengers) I met in Order out of Chaos (1984, French original La nouvelle alliance 1979) and later in many
other books. About ”modern” analytical-reductionist science from the 17th
century it is said: ”Nature's humiliation is parallell to the glorification of
whatever escapes it, God and man” (p. 53 in the Swedish translation from 1984).
The depreciation of nature unites science and religion. But life is ”the
outermost consequence of the occurrence of self-organizing processes, instead
of being something outside nature's order” (172). We are the last creation of
the nature we learnt to despise. ”The classical science”, it is said summarizing,” the
mythical science about a simple, passive world, belongs to the past, killed not
by philosophical criticism or empirical resignation but by the internal
development of science itself” (57).
With the help of Prigogine's theory, covering both matter and life, we
can overcome the biases of natural
science and humanities. For natural science deals with a world without Man, the humanities -
and still more "humanism" - with Man without world. The first
case can be felt to be poor and inane and the second one to be
narrow-minded and anthropocentric. This depends on the fact that in both cases
it is a question of abstraction and construction. For the world is one only, it is only we
who persist in dividing it into two: Man and Nature, soul and body, mind and
matter.
So it becomes urgent to contemplate the
relationships between both sides, something I did already in my
doctoral dissertation. And whoever understood to focus wholeness and process in
a big novel and in this way succeeded to grasp a fictive world's way of
functioning has also got prerequisites to understand big and small systems in
the actual world, from the swirl and the light flame to Earth as a
geological-biological organisation, ” Gaia”. The
way of thinking is the same.
That is why it is such bliss to work and (re)search in the way I do now.
And whoever understood how to focus wholeness and process in a great novel and
so succeeded to grasp its way of functioning also got prerequisitions to
understand big and small systems in the world, from the whirl and the candle
light to Earth as a geological-biological organisation. The way of thinking is
the same. And evolution runs from matter to man:
Peter Östman, illustration to my
contribution to the debate ”Tro och vetande – igen” (Belief and knowledge –
once again) in Svenska Dagbladet in the year 2002: ”Vetenskap mellan tro
och vetande” (Science between belief and knowledge) (Nov 17th).
Ecology, Philosophy, Biology; the World as
Process; Emergence
This new paradigm is necessary, if
"modern" science (dating from the 17th century) and its subsequent
technique and economy will not devastate the Earth, our splendid home in the
universe. (Books with an ecological message by Capra, Laszlo, Skolimowski, Alf Hornborg, Goldsmith
and Roszak are introduced and discussed
in Nya tankar, nya världar.)
In the spring of 2000 a new stage in my
development was reached, thanks to the learned American new-thinker Ken Wilber, especially
to his magnum opus: Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
(1995). Wilber takes the new science created by
Prigogine and others as his starting point. But according to Wilber, not only
Newton’s but also Prigogine’s science deals only with the external
aspects of reality, and thus omits the other half of reality. Wilber wants to
proceed to the levels of mind and spirit. In order to show how
our world is constituted, he draws a square and divides it into four quadrants,
two to the right representing the external aspect and two to the left
representing the inner one. In both cases two quadrants, because Wilber also
distinguishes between what is individual that is assigned to the upper
quadrants and what is collective, that is assigned to the lower ones. In every
quadrant he draws a diagonal from the centre and on it he indicates the levels he discerns in the world: in the external world
everything from the atom to the human cerebral cortex, in the internal world
from the atom’s ability to react to the human “vision-logic”,
capable of dealing with relations, wholes, interconnections:
So the world is not a “flatland”, but
vertically structured in accordance with the old idea of “The Great Chain of Being”. Following Arthur Koestler,
Wilber calls this a
“holarchy” (from the Greek holon =
a whole that at the same time is part of
another, higher whole). By Don Beck and others, the inner holarchy of Man has
been further developed into a “Spiral Dynamics” in
nine levels distinguished by different colours, to which approach Wilber has
agreed (A Theory of Everything, 2000, p.
7 f).
In this way,
Wilber wants to achieve what he calls "a world philosophy, an “integral philosophy", meaning a system of
thoughts covering “all quadrants/all levels”, and doing so in form of “orienting
generalizations” about a world which thus is not disjointed and reduced
to its lowest level. A philosophy which furthermore unites this new science with classical
philosophy and religion in west and east into a great, all-embracing worldview. An essay of mine, titled "Do
we live in a flatland? Worldview, theory of evolution, and history of ideas in
Ken Wilber's magnum opus", is published in Vetenskapssocietetens
i Lund Årsbok 1999-2000, later also in my book Sökandet är vårt största äventyr, 2003 (in Swedish). An initiated
book about Wilber by Frank Visser is introduced here. A presentation I held about
Wilbers philosophy on Filosoficirkeln in Lund 2004 can be seen and heard, if
one loads down RealVideo G2 through link bottomed on the side that follows here. Click then on lectures May 18.
In October
2006 Wilber published a new book, Integral Spirituality. Here he complements the quadrants
with perspectives, from inside and from outside.
A person, who is meditating, experiences himself from inside and can not
see himself from outside, can not see that he is active on a certain level in
the upper left quadrant, and that he knows nothing about the other three. The
old wisdom traditions from hinduism, buddhism, Christianity, islam etc. cannot
therefore withstand the criticism from modernity,
which requires objective evidences, and from postmodernity,
which shows that their ”eternal truths” partly are formed by the culture, where
they are created. The survey the quadrants offer, however, makes it possible to
recognize and to incorporate what is best of premodern, modern and postmodern
contributions. Without metaphysics, however, for Wilber now replaces
perceptions with what goes before, namely perspectives, and asserts that
phenomena only exist within the framework of the perspective an observer is
able to open up. In this way, there are also ”different levels of God”.
But
precisely for that reason, religion can become ”a
conveyor belt” from primitive levels to the most developed ones.
Provided, though, that both science and religion cease with their confinement
to the mythical level, to war-gods or the nice
uncle on the cloud etc. Because spirituality, religion, God are found on all
levels. Forgetful of his earlier fights against modernity, Wilber now sides
with this movement, but so he is threatened with total
relativism. He does not seem to realize that, just as the text is corrective in literary interpretations, so the
physical world is a corrective against total
relativism in the interpretation of the world.
An even later discovery (than Wilber) is Richard Tarnas, The
Passion of the Western Mind (1991, pocket edition 1993). In an admirable survey, characterized by
stringency and verbal intuition, Tarnas narrates the history of the Western
mind up to our days, and in this way shows how our world view originated – the
world view where Man monopolized conscious intelligence, while cosmos is turned
blind and mechanistic, and God is dead. Man has become a stranger in his own
world. This, however, has generated a longing for the communion
that was lost. The deepest passion of the Western mind, Tarnas means, is to
transcend this worldview by a reunion with Nature, from which Man once emerged.
"The telos, the inner direction and
goal of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely
and consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy
while also transcending human alienation" (p. 443 f). This, one might say,
is the same idea and feeling that is found in Selma Lagerlöf’s compositions on
Man and Nature, and in Prigogine’s demonstration that the whole world – Man
included – functions as self-organizing systems.
Similar thoughts permeate the biologist Elisabet Sahtouris' book, Earthdance. Living Systems in
Evolution (1999 and later), but here they are
developed further into a possible solution of the crucial question of mankind:
how to avoid to destroy the ecosystem we live in
and by, and to perish ourselves? Her answer is that we must learn from Nature,
Life, and Earth. As a young species we are still in our adolescence: we don't understand how to see beyond our own crisis,
and to realize that Life formerly solved such crises by turning struggle and
competition into cooperation, and by always recycling all matter of Earth, because that is all we
have got; Earth is an island in space. The problem is, however, that in
contrast to the cells in our body, all of them cooperating so perfectly, we are
not cloned, and in contrast to other living beings, we are self-conscious, and
anybody can oppose such solutions. Human aggressiveness, lust for
power, the desire to conquest are obstacles on the road.The hope is, however, that the
driving force, the “moment”, in "Gaia's" development will also pull
us into a new kind of cooperation. (The book is
introduced in Sökandet är vårt största äventyr.)
Among other researchers and (new)thinkers introduced and discussed in my
books from 1994, 1999 and 2003 are Gregory
Bateson, Susan Oyama, Anthony Wilden, Nicholas Maxwell, E F Schumacher, Stuart
Kauffman, Amit Goswami, Beverly Rubik, Rolf Edberg, Elisabet Hermodsson and Bo Ahrenfelt.
More and more I have realized that
modern science from the 17th century is an ideology,
ruled by “the profoundly scientific idea” that evolution is governed by chance
acting on chemical and physical processes. Biology is the last science to have
joined this ideology – and succeeded! But is chance and DNA really everything?
In the thought-provoking book How the Leopard
Changed Its Spots, Brian Goodwin
shows that the most important processes in nature take place “beyond
Darwin and DNA”. What is wrong with materialism is not that it is a science
of matter, but that it doesn’t understand matter. Goodwin has also written
memorable “Lessons
for Living from New Science”. Essays on these and on works by Rupert Sheldrake, Susan Oyama, Lynn Margulis and Dorion
Sagan are included in my fourteenth book Bortom
Darwin och DNA. En icke-mekanistisk biologi (Beyond Darwin and DNA. A
Non-mechanistic Biology, 2004). Since then I have discovered Steven Rose, Lifelines. Biology Beyond Determinism, introduced
in my book from 2006.
Later on I
have worked half a year with Stephen Wolfram’s gigantic book A New Kind of Science from 2002. Here there
really is a new kind of science inasmuch as Wolfram, by running different kinds
of simple programs for cellular atomata in the
computor, has found a way unprejudiced to investigate the world, not as permanent state but as process.
In this way he can run cellular automata, not ten or hundred steps but in
thousands, with the result that he can see how several of them, in spite of
very simple rules and initial conditions,
develop into total complexity and apparent
irregularity. Here according to rule 110 (700 steps, p 33, on the following
pages up to 3200 steps):
It is a
complexity that is not surpassed anywhere else, maybe, and it cannot be reduced
to any simple formula or law. Nevertheless, however, Wolfram dreams of
searching and finding an underlying simple rule, a rule that ultimately
controls the whole universe in all its complexity. So he, too, is obsessed by
the idea of a theory of everything, though it
should not be a law for permanent states but a rule for development. Nor is he satisfied with a world
that develops freely at its own discretion, not to say its own delight. In this
he shares the confinement of traditional science, not to say its guardianship.
Much more on this (though only in Swedish!) in my ”Tillstånd eller process –
två sätt att förstå världen”. How much wiser is not Erich Jantsch when he writes: “The purpose of
evolution, as well as its direction, is not prescribed; they evolve together
with the systems carrying evolution.” “The result is an overall open
evolution […].” “Evolution makes
sense post hoc only.” (Jantsch (ed.), The
Evolutionary Vision, 1981, p. 111.)
During spring 2005 I was pondering on what concept was
the most fundamental and covering one, of those the new sciences introduced,
and decided upon emergence, the
appearance of something qualitatively new without this being possible to
anticipate from the properties of the parts participating in the process of
coming into being. This led to a new book: Världen
underbarare än vi tror. Emergens,
självorganisation, synkronicering, icke-reducerbarhet (The World More Wonderful than We Think. Emergence, Self-Organization,
Synchronization, Non-reducability, 2006). Here
are introduced and discussed books by Mario Bunge, Robert Laughlin, Harold J Morowitz, Steven
Johnson, Steven Strogatz, Steven Rose, and Stephen Wolfram and
furthermore sites on the net by Alder Stone Fuller
och M Alan Kazlev. As a renewal in
thought of the same dignity that Jantsch and Prigogine gave me in the eighties,
I experienced the demonstration by Laughlin – Nobel Laureate in physics in 1998
– how ”the objective of understanding nature by breaking it down into ever
smaller parts [today] is supplanted by the objective of understanding how
nature organizes itself.”
In this book
there are also attempts to settle my own position between an orthodox,
reductionistic science and a self-sufficient spirituality. Five
contributions can be read here (in Swedish): .
Inledning, Från
reduktionism till emergens, Mellan
Skylla och Charybdis, Ett omöjligt
äktenskap? and Att
segla mellan Skylla och Charybdis. Reading the book, I was inspired to
write four more essays: De
lärda och Galileis kikare – i dag; Utbrott och
uppbrott, en formel för paradigmskifte; Den höga muren; Empiri och
metafysik.
Especially the last one attempts to solve the riddle why emergence and
self-organization are so alien to established science. The fundamental reason
seems to be that the analytic-reductionistic method
almost by itself leads to an atomistic-mechanistic-deterministic world view; the view lies, so to say, implicit in the
method. The parts – the atoms, the molecules, the genes – come to the fore, the
great connections, processes and systems are lost sight of. There is, anyhow,
no room for Nature’s own creative power, for
emergence and self-organization. It is something like the relation between
doctor and patient: the patient patient is not supposed to have any ability of
his own to act. Alike with the relation between conquerers and colonizers on
the one hand and ”natives” on the other.
Nature cannot act, it is said, because an action “requires an intention
that in turn requires an awareness that in turn requires an operator” (Mats
Bengtsson). Undeniably there are difficulties applying such concepts on nature.
But it depends upon that they are coined on man, denotes properties of his. Why
should they fit equally well for nature? Applicable there is instead what Ken
Wilber calls ”the self-transcending drive of the
Kosmos”. And that such a drive exists is as self-evident as its
continuous results of permanent transcendencies: from Big bang to galaxies,
stars, planets and life; from cells to plants, animals, man and consciousness.
And Wilber continues with well balanced words: ”Creativity,
not chance, builds a Kosmos. But it does not follow that you can then equate
creativity with your favourite and particular God. […] But the fundamentalists,
“creationists”, seize upon these vacancies in the scientific hotel to pack the
conference with their delegates. […] There is a spiritual opening in the
Kosmos. Let us be careful how we fill it. The simplest is: Spirit or Emptiness
is unqualifible, but it is not inert and unyielding, for it gives rise to
manifestation itself: new forms emerge, and that creativity is ultimate.
Emptiness, creativity, holons.” (A Brief History of
Everything, 23 f)
Phenomena like these are passed over in silence and so they don’t exist.
This is understandable, but both misleading and fatal. The method that brought
about so many blessings to mankind also generated a sterile world view, out of
touch with reality, preventing us to see that this world was able to create us.
This is one of the great tragedies of human thought. These ideas are further
developed in Naturvetenskapens blinda fläck.
A new perspective on what is discussed here was established in 2006 in a dissertation in Linköping, Sweden, by Emma Eldelin: