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
1.
Docent and
senior lecturer in Literature at
2.
3.
Visiting
professor University of California, Berkeley 1964
4.
Declared
competent for full professorship several times from 1968 and onwards
5.
Nominated
as Senior Professor in Theory of Literature at
1. Multi-disciplinary
graduate course “Towards a holistic-dialectic paradigm” together with. prof. Joachim Israel
in
2.
Appointed "Årets förvillare 1998" (Misleader of the Year) by the association
"Vetenskap och folkbildning" (Science and Adult Education)
3.
Declared heretic 2003
4.
Awarded
the “Wise Price”
of the magazine “Sökaren” (The Searcher) 2003
5.
Some other interviews: in Ystads
Allehanda, av Antoon
Geels, för
TOK, för
Kronobergs läns landsting. Introduction
in Ordfront magasin 4 / 2003
6.
Member
of Scientific
and Medical Network , http://www.paradigmdialog.com/ och http://www.complexityforum.com/
7.
Competiton
swimmer in my youth, jogger since 1945
8.
Pilot in the Swedish Airforce
1945-46
9.
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
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
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
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
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.
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, Gaia. 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
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
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
Henri
Bortoft’s powerful book The Wholeness of Nature.
Goethes Way of Science from 1996 is pregnant with ideas:
1. Goethe hoped to be remembered more as a
scientist than as a poet (in the year 1987 there had, as a matter of fact, been
published 10.000 works about him as researcher).
2. Goethes”way of science”,
his way to see and think, is an alternative, an
intentional counterproject, to Galilei’s, Descartes’ and
3. Goethe does not force nature to answer reason’s
questions; instead he enters deeply into the sensuous impressions of its
motions and life. He is not judge but participant.
4. He does this, not by examining phenomena as they exist
”ready-made”, but instead by contemplating how they come
into existence and are further developed.
5. In this way he can approach for example the growing
plant's ”authentic whole”, which is not the sum
of its parts but, on the contrary, its”diversity in
unity”. Thanks to this diversity in unity, the plant by its own force is
able to blossom out in stem, blades, flower, and fruit. He can not observe all
this in one and the same moment but he is able to see it for his “inner eye”. In
this way he can apprehend the plant's whole project, and for that reason he
rejects any idea that there should be another world hidden behind the material
world. What he sees is another dimension of the same phenomenon,
its dimension as a whole. The whole is not an
abstraction only (nominalism/empirism), but neither an independent, separate
reality (Platonism).
6. In this way Goethe is more empiric than most people,
but at the same time he realizes that all observations contain something that
exceeds the testimonies from the senses, namely the
phenomenon's unit. This is what he reaches in his ”sensuous imagination” (internal contemplation). In the
history of science Bortoft calls this ”the organizing
idea”, and he is convinced that such ideas, often derived from cultural
history, has been more important for the development of science than concrete
experiments.
This is only
some samples from this rich book, see more in my introduction”Judge or
participant - two attitudes in science”.
”A vild, complex, dynamic being” – that’s what Stephan Harding calls Earth in his book Animate Earth. Science, Intuition and Gaia (2006).
There he collects the wisdom that as a ”Resident Ecologist” he gives out at
In our time Earth is desperate, Harding
means; it wobbles between glacial periods and shorter hot periods like a top
that is losing its speed. With his square reason man is not skilled to handle
this. Instead, we need to feel that we live our lives in symbiotic relationship
with a planetary being, so very much bigger than we – something similar to
mitochondria in the cell. Gaia certainly is more like a living organism than a
dead stone lump, but alive in the ordinary sense she is not, maybe. But Earth
is something much bigger and more
remarkable than we usually think.
The Song of
Songs of the concrete reality of the Earth is sung by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous from
1996. The foundation is laid by a demonstration that phenomenology
not, as by Husserl, has to reduce the experience of reality to something
purely subjective (solipsism). As by Merleau-Ponty, it can also look at
perception as a duet between the body and the landscape it inhabits, a dance for two, an open cycle completed first in the
concrete environment. Traditional science focuses the material world apart from
the experience of it, while New Age often maintains that material reality is an
illusion created by an immaterial consciousness. They seem to be opposed, but
both see nature as something passive, to be manipulated by man. Both views are
unstable, but by bouncing from scientific determinism to spiritual idealism and back, contemporary discourse
easily avoids the possibility that both the perceiver and the perceived are
interdependent and at once both sensible and sensitive. Merleau-Ponty is of the
opinion that language has a first sensuous, evocative dimension of tone, rhythm
and resonance and that added abstract dimensions build upon this flesh of language. Our speech inscribes us in the
chattering, whispering landscape.
But how did we end up in this inert, deterministic world that we often
seem to live in? One reason is the Jewish and Christian traditions with a God
who is not of this world; another one is the philosophical tradition from
Socrates’ and Plato’s Athens with the derogation of the sensible and changing
forms of the world in favour of pure ideas in a nonsensorial realm beyond the
apparent world. And both traditions were, from the start, profoundly informed
by writing, by the strange and potent technology we have come to call “the alphabet”. Abram tells about the history of the
alphabet, were the crucial point is the transfer of the Semitic aleph-bet into
the Greek “alphabet”. The Semitic letters kept a certain relation to physical
reality: Aleph meant ox and “A” had the shape of the head of an ox etc.
But when the Greeks took over, the letters lost all sensorial reference and
turned into an abstract human system of signs.
Abram strolls in the landscape of oral language,
more exactly in those by Indians and the Aborigines in
Abram ponders upon space and time, earth and air, especially air. To us today air is not much more than empty space
– we forget how air by the vital breathing connects the smallest cell within us
with the whole earthly world. Words like “psyche”, “pneuma”, “spiritus”,
“anima”, “atma” once also meant air, breath, wind. Air seems to have been
looked upon as the stuff that builds mind, as the subtle body of the soul.
For many oral, indigenous people, the boundaries enacted by their
language are more like permeable membranes,
binding the people to their landscape. But after the establishment of phonetic writing, language became an impenetrable
barrier, a hall of mirrors: from a purely “interior”
zone the speaking self looks out at a purely “exterior” nature. But the human
mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our
physiology. Rather it is induced by the tensions and participations between the
human body and the animate earth.
Something is terribly wrong with our global aspirations, Abram means. In
order to obtain the image of the earth whirling in the darkness of space,
humans have had to relinquish something just as valuable – “the humility and
grace that comes from being fully a part of that wirling world. […] If,
however, we simply persist in our reflective cocoon, then all of our abstract
ideals and aspirations for a unitary world will prove horribly delusory. If we
do not soon remember ourselves to our sensuous surroundings, if we do not
reclaim our solidarity with the other sensibilities that inhabit and constitute
those surroundings, then the cost of our human commonality may be our common
extinction.”
The Earthly Reality
The empiric, earthly line by
Goethe-Bortoft, Harding and Abram is found again in three books from 2007, 2008
and 2009. First Brian Goodwin’s almost sensational Nature’s Due. Healing Our Fragmented Culture from 2007. The title is a pun: It means both Nature is
due and Nature’s due (our debt to Nature). Goodwin demonstrates that nature and
culture have more in common than we think. In the same way as a reader
interprets a written text, organisms create meaning
of their genetic texts “by expressing them in a form (morphology and behaviour)
appropriate to their habitat and their history” (99). Nature and culture “are
understood to be one continous and unified creative process, not two domains
that are distinguished by unique human attributes.” (12) The concept of meaning
belongs also to nature, in a “biological hermeneutics”.
The great enigma is “who” creates, and Goodwin emphasizes that it is not a
“builder” in the form of a separate entity in a cell (105 f) but instead the
process itself on the basis of a “morphogenetic field”
in the form of “the pattern of relationships that exist in a developing
organism at different levels of organization” (127). In this way the enigma of self-organization seems to be solved: at every level
there is a “head” for the organization, from the beginning the fertilized egg,
and then different combinations of cells, that this gives rise to. At the same
time as there in the universe seems to be a creative
power that forces it all. – Goodwin is the head of a oneyear-course in
Holistic Science for MSc at
One more book on the same line is Stuart A Kauffman’s
book Reinventing
the Sacred. A New View of Science, Reason and Religion from 2008. The
title of the book is made clear already on the inside of the cover: “Consider
the woven integrated complexity of a living cell after 3.8 billion years of
evolution. Is it more awesome to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the
cell at a stroke, or to realize the truth: the living cell evolved with no
Creator, no Almighty Hand, but arose on its own, created by the evolving
biosphere? The truth is much more magnificent, much more worthy of awe and
wonder, than our ancient creation myths.” Or as it is said some pages into the
book: what is important is to “find a ‘third way’ between a meaningless
reductionism and a transcendant Creator God, which preserves awe, reverence,
and spirituality – and achieves much more” (31). This means that
Kauffman breaks with reductionism and determinism and their impoverished world
and goes in for self-organization, emergence and creativity. We live our lives forwards into mystery. Life, biosphere, man and his
everyday world and history are real and not reducible to physics. Agency,
values, meaning, ethics, are real parts of the furniture
of the universe. Poetry and poetic wisdom are right and real and show us
the truth. So art and humanities, investigating our way into the unknown, are
as important as science, this scientist writes. But we are of the world, it is
not of us.- A longer essay on this great book under the title “Att uppfinna det
heliga på nytt eller Guden som vi inte behöver tro på” (To reinvent the sacred
or the God we don’t have to believe in) is found here.
In the beginning was the
process
The book
from 2009 is A Third Window. Natural
Life Beyond Newton and Darwin by Robert
E Ulanowicz, professor In Theoretical Ecology with the
The
difficulty with the old world view is: how
can the world change? An essential explanation is chance. Chance can be handled with
statistical mechanics and insurance mathematics, but that depends upon the
units here being (functionally) identical. But as Walter Elsasser has shown,
the universe is full of unique chance events. It is not causally closed but open and so it exhibits a flexibility that is
essential, if evolution is going to continue. For the new world view the
problem is the opposite: how can the
world persist? The question now is what process might yield ordered form
out of chaotic substrate? And Ulanowicz finds the answer by Gregory Bateson:
“In principle, then, a causal circuit will
generate a non-random response to a random event.” Such circuits can endure,
for with their feedback function they can react
non-randomly upon random stimuli. In short, they govern themselves. Positive feedback and autocatalysis
then create systems that are so stable that they can resist most
disturbances. Otherwise life would not be possible.
Process-ecology accomodates a “soft” form of materialism.
Aristoteles “material causes” play a rather passive role. Furthermore, this
ecology shows that we have “read the text of nature backwards”. The material
objects of everyday life are actually the endpoints
of evolutionary processes from Big Bang and onwards. But we have taken
these end stages as starting points for scientific explanation. We have placed
the cart before the horse. In principle, Ulanowicz means, life originated in the same way, from a
series of processes . This makes its origin less enigmatic, he thinks.
What is missing in his book is a large
exposition of the form of existence, common to life and non-life, which Bateson
divined, Prigogine discovered and Erich Jantsch developed further: “dissipative structures” or self-organizing
systems. This want depends upon the author through his window focusing
only life, not the processes and systems of non-life. But he does not need to
worry. In 2007 he was awarded the Prigogine-medal, a prize set up by The Wessex
Institute of Technology and the
Ulanowicz declares himself for theist (like
A clear conception of what I did all these years.
The essays after Världen underbarare än vi tror, mentioned above,
can be read in my 16th
book Humanist bland naturvetare eller Vetenskap-världsbild-sätt att tänka (Humanists
among Scientist or Science-World View-Way of Thinking, 2008). Struggling
with chapter 15 on science and humanities, my
thoughts started to move, and suddenly I saw, not only the name of the book,
but also what I had been doing all these years and why. This
insight was printed on the back of the book:
“A humanist among scientists, that must be a cat among the ermines.
Oh yes, if it concerns science. But science is not all, nor is humanities.
They both have their presuppositions in what you mean with science, how you look upon the world and the way you think. This "triunity"
is not given but well worth pondering, because ultimately it settles what
happens in the branches of science. But at the same time it lies outside their
field of sight and so seldom has been seen, especially in
From the
British philosopher Mary Midgley (Science and Poetry 2001) I
learnt that this is a philosophic level
and that scientists don’t take precedence there. But it is a level that is
irritating for all those for whom science, world view, way of thinking are
unproblematic entities, given and self-evident.
Is
it possible to sum up the previous?
Perhaps, but the road to the end is
always more than the end alone. Some results seem however as central.
The traditional science – Descartes’
and
The objective of science ”to understand nature by breaking it down into ever smaller components is
supplanted by the objective of understanding how nature organizes itself”
(Laughlin). And a functioning whole is always more than the sum of its parts.
The entire evolution from Big Bang – if that was the beginning – over galaxies,
stars and planets to cells, plants, animal, man and consciousness shows of
course indisputably that the world has ability to develop and improve itself.
Or as Wilber says: Kosmos is run by a self-transcending force.
What
lies behind this force – if some authority now feels necessary - one can
speculate about, of course, but any solution is hardly in sight. On the other
hand, the understanding of the world as active and creative can become a new
gospel for humanity. For the best wordings of this stands the first and
greatest genius on my journey of discovery, Erich Jantsch:
“Creation is
the core of evolution, not adaptation; the joy of life and not just the
securing of survival". “[…]
evolution becomes manifest in all kinds of creative dynamics, from the
processes bringing about particles and atoms as well as galaxies and stars all
the way to human creativity in art and science, technology and social design." And furthermore, by me often quoted:
”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”. (The
Evolutionary Vision (Jantsch ed.), p. 91, 1, 111)
A longer attempt to a summary (in
Swedish) can be found here in a link.
Those who
want to widen their perspective over and above orthodox science may try the
following links: Scientific and Medical Network, ”What is Enlightment”, http://www.prototista.org/E-Zine/E-Zine.htm,
www.kheper.net and complexityforum, paradigmdialog.com, http://hem.bredband.net/b124876/INDEXdrag.htm, http://www.edris-ide.se/index.html.
The four last ones are in Swedish.
Speech at
the Inauguration of the University for Global Well-Being
Books and Lectures
The following books (in
Swedish) can be ordered by depositing the appropriate sum on my Swedish
postal giro service 640 36 90 - 8. Write name and address on the stub, and I'll
send the book(s). Postage is included, but for addresses outside
Svensk berättarkonst. ("Readings"
of Röda rummet, Karolinerna, Onda sagor och Sibyllan). (Vetenskapssocieteten i Lund, 1968, 338 pp.; 150
kronor)
Litteraturvetenskapen vid
en korsväg. Traditionell forskning, marxism, strukturalism, hermeneutik,
humanism, finalism. (Rabén & Sjögren, 1980, 281 pp;
120 kronor)
Världen och vetandet sjunger på nytt
(Korpen, 1994, 248 s; 150 kronor)
Den klarnade erfarenhetens förvärv
("readings” of Brott och straff, Processen, Stäppvargen,Varulven, Hans
nådes tid) (Korpen, l996, 166 s; 150 kronor)
Lovsång till livet och förnuftets filosofier. En läsning av
Bröderna Karamazov (Artos, 112 ss; 70 kronor)
Nya tankar, nya världar (Korpen, 1999; 150
kronor)
Sökandet är vårt största äventyr (170 kronor) can
also be bought for 200 kronor + postage from the publisher Mareld’s bookstore,
Sigtunagatan 3, 113 22 Stockholm, tel. 08- 33 99 87; info@mareld.se.
Bortom Darwin and DNA. En icke-mekanistisk biologi
(Mareld 2004, 120
Världen
underbarare än vi tror. Emergens, självorganisation, synkronisering,
icke-reducerbarhet (Veje
International, 2006, 160 p. 100 kr.).
For my 16th book Humanist bland naturvetare, look above: “A clear conception of what I did all these years”
During the years I have given a lot of lectures all over Sweden and in
Germany, Austria, USA, Norway, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. Most often it
has been on "The Reenchantment of Science and the World", but also on
"Landscape and Nature by Selma Lagerlöf", "Selma Lagerlöf and
Bohuslän", "What happens in Gösta Berlings Saga?", "In
Praise of Nils Holgersson", "Aniara - an Epic of its Time" etc.
I am happy to do it again, especially on the great and engaging subject "The
Reenchantment of Science and the World" (1-3 hours), but also with thoughts on Wilber and/or
Tarnas. I speak in
Swedish, of course, but also in English und auf deutsch (aber nicht
meisterhaft).
For links to separate studies (in Swedish),
see the end of the Swedish version.
Key Words
Selma
Lagerlöf, Strindberg, Heidenstam, Lagerkvist, Harry Martinson, Dostojevskij,
Sven Lindqvist, Kafka, Sandemose, Eyvind Johnson, novel, literary criticism,
close reading, relation, wholeness, process, system, creation, hermeneutics,
paradigm, dialectics, feed back, finalistic approach, reenchantment,
self-organizing system, dissipative structure, self-transformation, ecology,
recycling, metabolism, emergence, synchronization, non-reducability.
Jean-Paul
Sartre, Ilya Prigogine, Erich Jantsch, Joachim Israel, Fritiof Capra, Gregory
Bateson, E F Schumacher, Henryk Skolimowski, Ken Wilber, Richard Tarnas,
Elisabet Sahtouris, Lynn Margulis, Rupert Sheldrake, Brian Goodwin, Susan
Oyama, Stephen Wolfram, Mario Bunge, Robert Laughlin, Harold Morowitz, Steven
Johnson, Steven Strogatz, Stephen Wolfram, Goethe, Henri Bortoft, Stephan
Harding, David Abram.
Humanities →
natural science; Man↔Nature; science↔world view↔way of
thinking↔science; ontology – epistemology.