Nature and Recursivity

Nature loves to hide.

— Heraclitus, Fragment 123

Contingency is always contingent upon something, as long as this something is considered probable or even necessary in time — for example, laws of nature. Not all laws of nature are in themselves necessary, though they are only laws insofar as they are considered to be so. Laws of nature remain necessary until they are disproved by exceptions. In this case, they become contingent, meaning things can be otherwise. It ceases to be a law and is now a fact. It is this particular relation between nature and contingency that we would like to elaborate as a point of departure for reflecting upon the realization of systemic thinking and, finally, technical systems. We are going to examine two fundamental points:

1. Contingency is fundamental to the understanding of nature, not least because nature demonstrates an irregularity deviating from rules that are derived from empirical observations. In order to develop a philosophy of nature, it is necessary to recognize such contingency as a necessity.

2. Any systemic philosophy, either ideal or real, will have to address nature external to the mind (the "I"), and in consequence is obliged to deal with the question of contingency, since contingency challenges the very foundation of such systems: If the foundation of a system is contingent then all knowledge might be suspended and deprived of its validity. Systemic philosophy will have to render contingency necessary, not only factually but also logically.

These two motivations are key for reflecting upon eighteenth-century Naturphilosophie and its successors. (As we will argue in this chapter, its twentieth-century successors are organicism and the Gaia theory.)

If philosophy wants to become a system, it will have to develop a mechanism allowing it to resolve the threat posed by contingency. If the a priori laws become contingent, then the system will collapse immediately. The system would therefore better respond to contingency by not having predefined rules, and instead allow rules to emerge during its confrontation with contingency and irregularity. We pass here from a transcendental characterized by rules to a transcendental characterized by teleology, analogous to the movement from Kant's first to his third Critique. At the center of this systemic thinking is the concept of the organic, which comes from discoveries in the natural sciences, especially biology. Being organic is not merely maintaining part-whole relations, but also designates self-organization and autopoiesis, which we want to call recursivity. And if we want to address the question of technical systems, it is necessary to examine the history of the concept of nature, which is always the other of itself in the Hegelian sense. It is only through a close examination of the concept of nature that we can see clearly the question of technology, since the two have been opposed throughout the history of philosophy. In other words, without understanding the relation between nature and system, we will not understand technical systems: as Heidegger says, "technics: history of nature" (Technik: Historie der Natur).

§9. KANT AND THE MODEL OF SYSTEM

I would like to refer to a very intriguing quote from Schelling's late philosophy here in order to open up the question of contingency, not only because Schelling will be guiding us throughout this chapter, but also because it in a certain sense reverses our conventional concept of necessity:

The first impression (and this is decisive not only in life, but also in knowledge) of this thing, on the whole and in the particulars so highly contingent, that we call the world — this cannot possibly be the impression of something that has arisen out of rational necessity, that is, through a mere logical emanation. The world resembles nothing less than it resembles a product of pure reason. It contains a preponderant mass of unreason, such that one could almost say that the rational is merely the accidents.

This seems to be a conclusion that Schelling has given to his early career of systemizing nature, an attempt made between 1794 and 1833 and continuing for a period of almost forty years. Schelling's verdict is astonishing, not only in his rejection of rational necessity as the ground but also in his consideration of the rational as merely "the accidents." This contingency is not only related to the particular, to the very instantiation, but rather concerns the whole, the system. We may conceive the system that Schelling is referring to here as a system regulated by the laws of nature. Schelling's critique is very radical, probably even more so than that of Boutroux, author of the classic On the Contingency of the Laws of Nature (1874). Boutroux argued in this work that contingency is omnipresent, and that each law of nature always contains contingencies that can be logically deduced. It is also different from what we know today as Godel's incompleteness theorem, since what Schelling is claiming is that contingency is probably the ground, the "substantial," while the rational is nothing but its accident, and remains one of its expressions. In other words, if contingency is the original ground (Urgrund), it is also a nonground (Ungrund), or an abyss (Abgrund).

One may want to ask, doesn't this conceptualization in the late Schelling contradict the usual impression of the regularity of the concept of system — a philosophical credo of eighteenth-century philosophy? The task of creating a system, or taking philosophy as a system, can be seen as an effort to revive metaphysics after the domination of science and the French Revolution. Schelling stands out as one of the most systemic thinkers — probably even more systemic than Hegel — especially in his last publication, Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, often referred as the Freiheitschrift. In this essay Schelling famously declares that the system is not able to get rid of evil; on the contrary, evil is always present in the system as the possibility of freedom. It is sufficient to see that contingency, which can be evil or a state of exception, is immanent in the system. It is of our interest here to carry out a historical-critical exposition of Schelling's Naturphilosophie, since it is an effort to eliminate oppositions (real-ideal, subjectobject, contingency-necessity) through the construction of a generic system, which we can call, following Schelling, the general organism (Allgemeiner Organismus).

It is within such a conception that the system as an organic being is postulated, and from there we would like to understand it as a precursor of cybernetics. When it is seen in this way, nature is dissolved in cybernetics: the end of nature. It is such an end in the sense that an innocent, Romanticist, productive nature ceases to be; it...