The journal Erkenntnis, one of the principal organs of the Vienna Circle, was republished in the Netherlands by D. Reidel (P.O. Box 17, Dordrecht). The same publisher also released a Vienna Circle Collection under the direction of Robert S. Cohen (Boston), Brian McGuinness (Oxford), and Henk L. Mulder (Amsterdam), in which the works of Otto Neurath (Empiricism and Sociology, 1973), Hans Reichenbach (People, Politics, and Probability, 1973), Ludwig Boltzmann (Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems, 1973), Rudolf Carnap (Selected Essays, 1974), Moritz Schlick (Philosophical Papers, 1975), Victor Kraft (Foundations of a Scientific Value Theory, 1976), Ernst Mach (Knowledge and Error, 1976), have appeared. A similar collection, the Library of Exact Philosophy, is in the course of publication by Springer-Verlag (Vienna-New York), under the direction of Professor Mario Bunge of Montréal. Herein we find studies by Lothar Krauth (Die Philosophie Carnaps, 1970), Victor Kraft (Mathematik, Logik und Erfahrung, 1970), Nicholas Rescher and Alasdair Urquhart (Temporal Logic, 1971), Richard von Mises (Wahrscheinlichkeit, Statistik und Wahrheit, 1972), Rudolf Carnap (Bedeutung und Notwendigkeit, 1972), Herbert Stachowiak, Joseph Horovitz, and so on.323
The Three Matters
‘Energy, by virtue of its nature and its constitution, includes properties for the potentialisation and actualisation of its antagonistic dynamisms, each of them actualising themselves while potentialising the others’.
For any reader familiar with the work of Stéphane Lupasco, a physicist of Romanian origin and former researcher at CNRS, this sentence sounds like the synopsis of a theory.
Due to the apparent complexity, the layperson may admittedly become confused and feel like giving up. But this would be a mistake.
Since the beginning of the century, we have witnessed a sort of ‘divorce between experience and human understanding’. The cause: microphysical experience obliges us to consider as real ‘events’ which, from the point of view of traditional logic, are ‘impossible’.
This traditional logic is that of Aristotle. We know that it is based on the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middles. This means that a thing cannot be something other than what it is, that it cannot be in two different locations at the same time, and so on.
Now, following Einstein, physicists have shown that matter, in the final analysis, is identical with energy. The neutron, the electron, the atom, the molecule are ‘energetic events’. The cosmos is made up of encompassing and overlapping sequences of systems within systems and structures within structures that destroy each other and mutually engender each other by constant transformations. In short, the universe is essentially dynamic. It is therefore ‘incomprehensible’ from the perspective of traditional logic, which is a static logic. In articulating his ‘quantum’ theory in 1900, Max Planck (1858–1947) demonstrated that radiant energy exists only in the form of tiny grains, the quanta, whose ‘nature’ is particularly disconcerting. The quantum can be regarded equally as a wave or a corpuscle, that is to say as an undulatory frequency, necessarily continuous, and at the same time, as a finite, necessarily discontinuous arithmetic quantity. For classical logic, this is a contradiction.
Now in microphysics, this kind of contradiction is not only possible, it is the rule; every quantum contains the potentiality of its transformation into a pair of electrons (drawn to orbit the nucleus of an atom by virtue of Coulomb’s laws of electrostatic attraction).
Appearance of Diversity
After Planck, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) made a number of observations which Lupasco has condensed into three principal laws:
1. The law of antagonism. The principle indispensable to the formation of any system is a principle of antagonism: no atoms exist without simultaneous attraction and repulsion. The universe is a vast, tragic conflict: ‘Everything within energy is a system by virtue of its constituting antagonism’ (Lupasco).
2. The law of a contradiction that is constitutive of the homogenisation and heterogenisation of energy. Electrons gravitate around the nucleus of the atom. Crucially, however, they do not all gravitate in the same orbit. Why? Because they are in accordance with Pauli’s principle of quantum exclusion. ‘The electrons’, writes Lupasco, ‘possess the property, which is quite disconcerting if one holds to the rules of classical logic, of excluding one another from the quantum state that they occupy’. This principle of exclusion is essential because it engenders an individualising diversification of energy, that is to say a heterogenisation: it explains the appearance of diversity.
‘From the molecule’, Lupasco adds, ‘all systems therefore contain, by their very formation, the antagonistic competition of the two principles of homogenisation and heterogenisation’. This means that the more energy a system contains, the more heterogeneous and differentiated it is.
3. The law of the potentialisation and actualisation of each antagonistic dynamism. By this it must be understood that for every dynamism, the actualisation of a term (element) brings about by correlation the potentialisation of another term (anti-element).
The Law of Increasing Inequality
From these laws, Stéphane Lupasco draws many conclusions. The most important one takes into consideration the fact that, depending on whether the homogeneous or the heterogeneous will predominate within a system, we will see the development of structures (or more precisely the ‘chains of structuring systematisation’) of a different nature.
Three ‘matters’ can thus be identified:
1. Physical matter. (The only one that man has known and ‘imagined’ until recently). This is the matter of the macrophysical systems, i.e. of the world which surrounds us every day. Here homogenisation predominates, becoming actualised at the expense of heterogenisation (which is potentiated to the same degree as homogenization is actualised).
Physical systems obey the second principle of thermodynamics, articulated by Clausius, the principle of increasing positive entropy, that is to say, of the progressive degradation of energy. More and more accentuated, their homogenisation ends up destroying them.
2. Living matter. This is the matter of biological systems. It differs from the physical matter starting from the molecule. In this type of system, it is heterogenisation which dominates. As long as it is alive, an organism resists the ‘entropic fatality’. More precisely, it ‘inverts the classical entropic current by a negative entropy which has been aptly named negentropy’. Heterogenisation persists in it and acts as the theatre of perpetual becoming that keeps it alive.
‘Accordingly’, says Lupasco, ‘biological death can be equated to a return to the physical system’. The living being is thus confounded, even in its most intimate structure, with the differentiated, the individualized, and consequently, the unequal. Every organism is characterised by its personality, which distinguishes it from all others, and (by virtue of the law of antagonism) by its aggressiveness, which allows it to place itself in opposition’. ‘Histocompatibility antigens mark each of us with a personal seal’, remarked Professor Jean Hamburger in 1973. It is only when they can no longer evolve, when they are no longer the locus of any becoming, that individuals or species, by ‘materialising’, become homogeneous and ‘equal’: the final stage before death.
‘Life’, says Stéphane Lupasco, ‘is nothing but inequality — a growing or increasing inequality’.
3. Microphysical matter. This kind of matter defines energetic systems in which the two contradictory principles (homogenisation and heterogenisation) are closely associated in a balancing antagonism (an ‘equilibrating-antagonism’).
In the atomic world, this type of system corresponds to the nucleus. The energies combine with such an antagonistic intensity that they can only be disintegrated in the laboratory by powerful bombardments. ‘Curiously’, notes Lupasco, ‘this type of matter is found in the development of the neuro-psychological system, particularly in man’.
Indeed one of the characteristics of man consists in the considerable development of his central nervous syste
m, whose nervous substance attains such complexity that it allows reflexive consciousness (consciousness ‘understands’ itself). Now it certainly seems that, in this central system, as in the nucleus of the atom, the tendencies toward homogenisation and heterogenisation are also associated within an energetic systematisation differing from both the physical and biological systems. The mind of man is a universe unto itself.
It is this thesis which Lupasco develops in his essay on L’énergie et matière psychique.324
In the ordinary man, the two tendencies would be simultaneously potentiated and actualised in a perpetual tension forming the driving force of the mental life.
Taking the opposite view to most fashionable theories, Lupasco declares that ‘it is not psychological contradiction and conflict that engenders mental illness, but, conversely, that the mentally ill suffer from a conflictual deficit, a lack of contradictions’. Psychoses and neuroses, for example, would be characterised ‘by a paralysing hypertrophy of the non-contradiction which isolates the subject from the object and influences the dialectical mechanisms of the related systems of representation and of locomotion’.
A ‘Dialectic of Death’
Also corresponding to the three matters are three cybernetics, the universe containing not one but three dialectics which are distinguished by the predominance within a given system of one or another kind of matter.
Every ‘event’ thus becomes tripolar at the same time as it induces a general tri-dialectic logic. The dialectics of life, which place the accent on energetic differentiation and therefore on increasing inequality, are opposed by the dialectics of physical systems, which place the accent on homogeneity.
‘In essence’, says Stephane Lupasco, ‘the Marxist dialectic is a dialectic of death. Its approach is one of “materialisation” of society, which involves the gradual dissipation of its energy, its weakening, and ultimately its disappearance’.
It is therefore understandable why classical logic proves fruitful for analysing and describing physical systems: it operates in a domain where homogeneity and non-contradiction rule. ‘The same is not true of biological phenomena. Here, it is an inverse logic, the antagonistic logic of the heterogeneous, that constitutes their energetic driving force’. This is what has probably been misunderstood by certain theorists of modern biology: as long as they remain within the bounds of classical logic, which is inadequate to their discipline, their science will not be able to escape its own limitations — and they will remain locked in the old alternative of ‘mechanism’ and ‘teleology’.
The Secret Crisis of Our Old Understanding
Since 1935, the publication date of a thesis entitled Du devenir logique et de l’affectivité (republished by Vrin in 1973),325 Lupasco has developed an entire tripartite ‘cosmology’ whose principal steps were: L’expérience microphysique et la pensée humaine (PUF, 1941),326 Le Principe d’antagonisme et la logique de l’énergie (Hermann, 1951),327 Les trois matières (Julliard, 1960),328 La tragédie de l’univers (Casterman, 1969),329 and so on.
Figures as diverse as author Vintila Horia, scholar René Huyghe, painter Georges Matthieu, sociologist Edgar Morin, Professor Ernest Kahane, former president of the Rationalist Union, Eugène Ionesco, and others, have shown a great interest in these theses.
In Great Britain, George Melhuish published a study on The Paradoxical Nature of Reality which owes much to them.
An International Center for Research on the Logic of Antagonism330 was formed in November 1973. It is chaired by Marc Beigbeder, head of the ‘Lupascian’ school and author of Contradiction et nouvel entendement (Bordas, 1972).331
‘It is the resistance to the triple aspect of reality’, asserts Lupasco, ‘which via the secret crisis of our old understanding, provokes this general confusion and the intellectual malaise characteristic of our time’.
*
L’énergie et la matière psychique, et L’énergie et la matière vivante, studies by Stéphane Lupasco, Julliard, 327 and 356 pages.332
The Paradoxical Nature of Reality, a study by George Melhuish. St. Vincent’s Press (St. Vincent’s Priory, Sion Hill, Bristol), 196 pages.
*
On the work of Stéphane Lupasco, cf. the special number of the journal La Tour de feu (Nr. 85, March 1965): Être et ne pas être avec Lupasco;333 and the text by Alain de Benoist, published by the review of the Club français de la médaille (Nr. 53, 2ème semestre 1976), on the occasion of the issuing of a coin (thanks to James Guitet) by the Currency Administration with the effigy of Lupasco. This text is accompanied by an article by Stéphane Lupasco on the Trois orthodéductions qui se disputant le monde.334
Centre international de recherches sur les logiques de l’antagonisme (CIRLA): 95 avenue Denfert-Rochereau, 75014 Paris.
Cybernetics and its Theoreticians
In Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001, A Space Odyssey, a robot that does not support the idea of being ‘disconnected’ becomes a murderer, thus violating the first of the ‘laws of robotics’ set out in 1941 by the novelist Asimov. In the film by Joseph Sargent, Colossus, the Forbin Project,335 a supercomputer methodically attempts to conquer the world.
From the point of view of cybernetics, this kind of situation is the very model of a false problem.
Norbert Wiener defines cybernetics as the ‘science of information’; Ashby, as the ‘rational science of machines’; Couffignal, as the ‘art of the efficiency of action’.
A relatively recent discipline, cybernetics is therefore a threshold-science. Pertaining to both machines and living beings, it does not seek to realise a ‘synthesis’, but rather a comparative study: to see how far we can make machines and life coincide. In practice, it mainly deals with automatic mechanisms and neurophysiology.
Its ‘inventor’, Norbert Wiener (1894–1963), was a kind of Mozart of science. He learned to read at eighteen months, completed his bachelor’s degree at fourteen, defended his doctoral thesis at eighteen. A former student of Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert, he was a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1948, he published a book entitled Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Four years later a new study appeared, this time aimed at the general public: The Human Use of Human Beings.336 (There would be a second, revised edition in 1962, and a third edition including different variations in 1971, through Collection 10/18).
In these two books Wiener proposes an introduction to the ‘human use of living beings’. More precisely, he attempts to determine what living organisms can teach us about the nature and possibilities of future machines.
‘It is my thesis’, he writes, ‘that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback’.337
The word ‘cybernetics’ (which is found in Ampère in 1834) designates in Greek the art of conducting men in society, of ‘piloting’ them. It was chosen intentionally. Indeed for Wiener, the function of a ship’s pilot is quite similar to the action of the regulatory organs of a mechanism.
‘Between the captain, who says where the ship must go’, he explains, ‘and the steersman who maneuvers the helm, there is always an intermediary: the pilot, who chooses the route according to the orders received, and determines the best course to follow.
Similarly, in a steam engine, the centrifugal governor controls the steam flow so that the velocity remains constant.
In the human body, it is the cerebellum which receives information from the brain and the nerves. It then determines the orders to be sent to the muscles, so that the movements they perform may be accomplished without affecting the equilibrium of the body. Thanks to the cerebellum, a true, built-in ‘autopilot’, we can hold an egg without breaking it, pick up something from the ground without falling, and so on.
The ship’s pilot, the centrifugal governor, the cerebellum, and so on, are cybernetic org
ans which act by feedback. We do not tell them what to do, but what we want to happen. It is then up to them to ‘perform’.
The Notion of Feedback
Whenever the ‘autopilot’ in the organism corrects the harmful effects of the variations of the external environment, whenever, in a mechanical system, the ‘pilot’ ‘opposes’ the tendency of the machine to deviate from the plan which should be its own, it is said that there is retroaction. Or, to use the language of the cyberneticians, there is feedback: the effect (the energy of the ‘exit’) acts ‘retrospectively’ on the cause (the energy of the ‘entry’).
Thanks to the notion of feedback, cybernetics accounts for innumerable phenomena interacting in time. Thus, Vito Volterra, the creator of functional analysis, has studied the ‘oscillating balances’ characteristic of predation phenomena: in the Canadian North, foxes feed almost exclusively on rabbits. The rabbits, for their part, are scarcely pursued except by foxes. Under these conditions, if the foxes eat too many rabbits, their food reserves decline excessively. Therefore the fox species declines. At the same time, the rabbit population, enjoying a renewed security, proliferates. In so doing, it automatically remedies the scarcity of foxes. And they multiply again, which puts the rabbits at risk. An ‘oscillating equilibrium’ is thus established by virtue of the feedback between the population of hunters and the population of the hunted.
In cosmology, the study of the processes of star formation reveals that, beyond a certain threshold, the mass and the density of the stellar sun ends up ‘stabilizing’. ‘This stability’, explains Professor Louis Rougier, ‘results from the cybernetic equilibrium between the thermonuclear energy (energy input) and the flux of energy lost to radiation (energy output)’ (Thermodynamique, cybernétique et évolution du cosmos, in Revue générale des sciences, n° 5–6/1965).338
In economics, the same notion of feedback explains the interaction of supply and demand, prices and wages, liabilities and receivables, as well as cessations in expansion, reversals of trends, or the way in which a capital feeds upon its interest.
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