The Event in Science, History, Philosophy and Art

The Event in Science, History, Philosophy and Art

Preface and Introduction

“For the Son of Man in his day will be like the lightning which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other.”

(Luke 17: 24)

One thing is quite certain: the future of the human as we knew it is truly coming to an end. The only question is will the end of our purely natural evolution become a technological nightmare ruled forever by AI zombies or will it also become the beginning of our most creative, humanly most satisfying and exhilarating, cosmic adventure ever?

Table of Contents

The Event in Science, History, Philosophy and Art

Preface
Introduction

Chapter One: The Event in Science
Part One: A New Synthesis
Creative Emergence and Becoming
Humanity is evolution becoming self-conscious
The human as the growing edge of cosmic evolution
Individuation and future cosmic integration
The Two Cultures Revisited
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Ilya Prigogine
Katzir-Katchalsky: Pioneer of a bridge between natural science and the humanities

Part Two: The Whole is the Open and It is Outside
Philosophical Embarrassments: Is the ‘I’ Within or Without?
Embodied Cognition: The San Diego School
Out of Our Heads
“It’s not what’s in the Brain that counts, but what the Brain is in.”
Part Three: The Involution of the Theory of Evolution
Evo-Devo and the Next Step
Growing Young

Chapter Two: The Event in History
Part One: Individuation and Reversal
In Search of the Ur-Phenomenon of Modern History
Modern Individuation
Failure, Regression, or Reversal?
Freedom, Privatization, Reversal
The Basic Cognitive Structure of Reversal
Part Two: Historical Reversals in the 20th century
The First Beast
The 21st Century and the Second Beast

Healing the Wound of Mortality
Reversal of reversal: Singularization

Chapter Three: The Event in Philosophy
Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari (D&G)
De-actualization and Singularization
Virtual actualization and Re-actualization Re-actualization
Body Without Organs
Deleuze-Foucault (D&F)
Jacques Derrida: The General Strategy of Deconstruction Alain Badiou: The Subject of Truth
Emmanuel Levinas: The Entry of the Other

Chapter Four: The Event in Art
Threshold identity
Initiation language
Sensation body
Vortex (metamorphosis)
Andrew Wyeth’s World: the Becoming of Free Will Consciousness crystal
Memory and destiny (Guardian of the Threshold)
History (Resurrection)

Preface

In my early twenties I experienced for the first time the fact that we are becoming co-creators in an astounding and creative cosmic evolution. I realized also to what extent this experience changes our understanding of our becoming and its role in the universe. In my books, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, The New Experience of the Supersensible, and America’s Global Responsibility, I described this experience from the point of view of the 20th century. In recent years I have begun to speak and write about the coming and already strongly experienced event of the 21st century. In the present book I simply call it “the event.”

However, the creative and uplifting energy of the event can be captured and utilized also to serve other goals. Everything positive, beautiful and valuable in our life can be also misused and reversed into its very opposite. Science and technology, that express some of our age’s most creative and valuable human capacities and achievements, can be harnessed to serve one sided, narrow, and cold conceptions of nature, human nature, and the cosmos when its plans for the future of human transformation and redemption are based on purely technological, mechanistic grounds.

I have no doubt that the materialistic scientific-technological utopia will be realized, one way or another. After all, it has been well underway for centuries and it was, is and will continue to be supported by the brightest and richest. We must understand that it will demonstrate in a practical way, a complete technological mastery and transformation, indeed, transubstantiation, of everything we still consider today to be “human,” including all the biological-genetic forces that determine our physical evolution, as well as all our intellectual capacities. All that we have come to be, insofar as we are physically-organically embodied beings, will

sooner or later be mastered by super-human technology, intelligence and creativity. Humans will produce AI machines that will make them physically immortal and infinitely clever, that is, humans are becoming superhuman, or subhuman, depending on our point of view.

One thing is therefore quite certain: the future of the human as we knew it is truly coming to an end. The only question is: what sort of an end is it going to be? Will the end of our purely natural evolution become a technological nightmare ruled forever by AI zombies or will it also become the beginning of our most creative, humanly most satisfying and exhilarating, cosmic adventure ever?

Introduction

Perhaps one of the greatest riddles of human nature is this: today we are discovering that we are really beings of becoming inhabiting a universe of becoming. So why are we always looking for eternal un-becoming? Could it be that, paradoxically, deep inside we know who we truly are, but are afraid of ourselves? Can it be that precisely because we are beings made of the stuff of becoming and change, we search frantically for solace and comfort in inertia, rest and even sleep, to save us from growth and change? Is this the reason for the most ancient of human drives, the desperate search for fundamental, unchangeable eternity?

This primordial, solid, eternally unchangeable foundation (be it substance, ground, first cause, or God) was reformulated in the 17th century. It was named ‘matter’ and a host of laws of conservation were soon invoked to secure and uphold this support and to hallow it with the unchangeable eternity for which we sought. But at the same time, is not most of modern science and mathematics since the 1920s and ‘30s also a radical revolt against this new dogmatic materialist, positivist and scientific Theology?

But what if matter, ground and existence is nothing solid, fixed, dead forever, but a living and creative event? If this is so, it would mean that “the real stuff” out of which it is all made is the stuff of becoming, evolution, and creative emergence. Entering the event means therefore that we enter the vortex of real and creative life; we are invited to become co-creators in the drama of evolution, and not only detached external spectators. Perhaps this is what Novalis meant when he said that God is the Ur-paradox for all beings, that when the Angels contemplate God they don’t get final answers from Him to their questions, but are kindly invited to penetrate ever deeper to the mystery of creative becoming, unlike humans that still look up to God to find final, eternal, immovable answers. Can it be, thus, that what is called “God” isn’t the eternally fixed place of conservation of matter, identity, or essence, but the source of ever evolving transformation?

If black holes are real, and if unperceived dark matter and unknown dark energy make up most of our universe, then conservation of all sorts, be it of matter or energy, space or time, memory or idea or God, is replaced by creativity, wonder and change. We discover through the creative event of our time, a new source of emerging life, and our sciences, thinking and arts express it in radically new ways.

On March 14-19, 1979, the most distinguished physicists in the world gathered together at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to celebrate Einstein's centennial (1879- 1979). Roy Lisker published an account of the event In Memoriam Einstein: The Einstein Centennial Symposium. This meeting brought together, as never before, names such as John Archibald Wheeler, Paul Dirac, Claudio Teitelboim, Adolf Grunbaum, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, Martin Rees, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Eugene Wigner, Isidor Rabi, Tullio Regge, Steven Weinberg, Abraham Pais, Thomas Kuhn, Yu'val Ne'Man, Res Jost, Peter Gabriel Bergmann, Dennis William Siahou Sciama and many others.

From the rich proceedings one anecdotal detail may be mentioned, because it demonstrates this turning point with fine precision. It is taken from Yu’val Ne'man's debate with Hawking after his discussion of black holes, revolving around the very problem of conservation. The reason for the debate was Hawking's indication that one may have to:

Abandon a fundamental principle of particle physics, the Conservation of Baryon Number: the quantitative difference between matter and anti-matter is an invariant in all interactions and processes of decay. Yu'val Ne'man asked if there might be some way of interpreting the equations to save baryon number conservation.

To which Hawking so aptly replied:

I find it interesting that people have such an emotional attachment to baryon conservation. This may be because most people do not believe in eternal life. They would like to hope that the particles which make up their bodies would live forever.

Ne’man answers:

We owe a lot to baryon number. We owe our existence to the conservation of baryon number. Otherwise we would be floating in the universe as E=mc2!

Liskar continues to report:

Hawking’s jest crystallizes the very style of contemporary physics. Scientists have been condemned throughout modern history for mocking the existence of a soul. Now it appears that they have as little use for matter! The viability of the law of baryon conservation seems to depend upon whom one is talking with at a particular moment.

(Lisker, pp. 65-67; 1980; see http://www.fermentmagazine.org/)

Perhaps we may not immediately start to float in the universe as E=mc2, but if we do give up our psychological (and often unconsciously theological) attachment to the concept of conservation, our thinking may expand and accelerate in approaching the event horizon of our age, confronting reality as it is, and not as we wish it to be.

As we shall presently see in the first chapter of the book, this is exactly what contemporary science teaches us. When it comes to overcoming matter and gravity, time and space, in order to float in the universe as E=mc2, let us take our counsel from creatures whose very being and existence is made of and for the elements of warmth, air and light: flying insects. Naturally, it was long assumed that flying insects speed up their movement similar to the manner in which, say, horses do it, when they change from walk to trot to canter. That is, in sense-perceptible, physical and linear, continuously advancing adjustments of essentially identical gestures of movement. Recent investigation has revealed the very opposite of this natural assumption. Insects, in fact, use all known methods of flight available in order to execute each unit of speeding up. They do not advance in a linear fashion at all; but, surprisingly, they use all possible maneuvers. If a human could move like that, instead of just walking and then walking faster and then running in a straight forward manner, she would hop, skip, jump, cartwheel and back flip, and in no fixed order at that. We don’t move this way in the physical world, but could it be the case that this is actually how we are able to create our new ideas, inventions and works of art?

The remarkable fact is that insects don’t execute each movement separately, and then move in a linear fashion from one movement to the next. Between one wing stroke and another, when flight speed changes, insects execute the whole possible range of movements with almost infinite speed. In other words, they transcend time and speed altogether, and control their flight as a whole from a virtual plane, beyond time and space (I follow Bergson and Deleuze’s use of the term ‘virtual’ to mean the infinite potential of a thing).

We can actually see and photograph with high speed cameras, how infinite wholeness is taking hold of time and space and is realized therein as event; an infinitely fast survey which is not really a physical acceleration connecting, one after the other, all flight possibilities, but an untimely and unspatial grasp of the infinite wholeness of flying. What appears in time and space - the infinite speed of the actualization of all possible flight possibilities - is not directed “from below,” that is, from space and time, but “from above,” from the infinite virtual plane that contains (in one survey) all these possibilities, and much more. The insect’s flight then displays almost tangibly in time and space the actualization of an infinite virtual plane. It is demonstrating what we call “virtual actualization,” the wholeness of a being or an event actualizing itself, incarnating in time and space, yet not exhausting itself.

What we glimpse here, what lights through the executed acceleration, or better the self-actualizing virtual wholeness of the insect’s flight possibilities, is the true virtual home of butterflies, and, if we study ourselves more closely, we find that it is also the home of the creative activity of humans. May it not be discovered, the closer we draw to the "event horizon" of our time, that also humans - as beings of

perpetual becoming - share with their thinking and consciousness the same world in which infinity is an active, virtual force?

And how otherwise could true creativity be explained, how could it ever become possible? What makes the new, the creative, possible, if not our share in infinite wholeness, and our ability to bring it down to earth, actualize it and individualize it in space and time, matter and life, in human relations and in works of art? Modern science, philosophy and art teach us this new art of creativity. They are creatively thinking and actualizing the event. This book describes some of their creative accomplishments.

Charles Tomlinson described the event this way:

The breath of circumstance
is warm, a greeting...
and under each death, a birth.

(“One World,” in the second number of “The Resuscitator,” 1964)

Read the whole book:

The Event in Science, History, Philosophy and Art