IV Physis. The Cosmic World

Can nature be founded?

The mythologies of nature and the mythological figures of the tamers of nature seem situated firmly behind us and in some way also: before us.

How did nature manifest itself before the Greeks? If it was named, what name did it bear and how did it bear beings and things? For it is on the basis of the Greeks that it is physis, unveiling - and veiling - in and through the logos, logos as unveiling of physis. As foundation and horizon, physis however remains unelucidated, and the relationships between chaos and cosmos, being and non-being, everything and nothing, remain enigmatic. In the Hebraic- Christian representation, nature is the creation against which we must strug­gle, opposing it and coming to terms with it, until the final end, apocalyptic (signifying the definitive catastrophe of the created sinner, when the seventh angel will empty its cup and a voice will cry: ‘It is done’) and redemptive (signifying the transfiguration of all, the appearance of the new heavens and the new earth).

The historical adventure of humans accomplishes itself on the foundation of nature, makes its being and problematises nature, negates it and negates itself.

By nature implying a kind of technics that would rule it, the technics imitating nature by transforming it, we are at the junction of the two models melting into one: naturalism-technicism.

From the outset, among the Greeks, physis seems to imply in a certain manner the power of techne; this is why techne can then imitate it. God appears among the Judaeo-Christians as the absolute technician, the creator, the plan of providence, which guides the subjugating actions of humans, their struggle against (original) sin and nature in general. Must we still wait for the domestication of energetic matter and atomic energy, the artificial creation of life, the complete cybernetisation of thought and the total plan­ning of society, to begin - on a planet as planified as it is rearranged, senseless and insignificant - to experience and think the games of planetary technics?

The absolute beginning, in space and time - extension and duration - does not offer itself to apprehension.

The cosmic totality, nature, does not exist independently of the human; it has no visible and readable sense otherwise, if it indeed has one. It is in no way, for all that, instituted by the human and constituted for the human. It passes into the human and passes the human. No decision can - still? - be made concerning nature - mobile or not - or the signification of a history of nature and cosmic and natural rhythms. If living and thinking humanity were to disappear on earth - with or without its explicit will, which could be neither a fortune nor a misfortune, since no one knows or tests why human­ity wants or does not want to survive in the movement of visible figures and spirals of being-nothingness - if making-be led to a making-disappear and the inaugural eclosion to the final catastrophe - obsession and apocalyptic aim of almost all prophetic thought - would there still be something, and what and for whom? Questions that come back to the central question that founds and surpasses metaphysics: what is the World (and not what is the universe or nature)?

World and cosmic world are not identical.

It is in the cosmic horizon that the fundamental metaphysical, ethical and poetic problem poses itself now, with and without clarity: ‘What is the being?’ (Aristotle); ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ (Leibniz); ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’ (Hamlet).

All the warnings, proud or whiny, of a planetary catastrophe, all the pity about the fate of the human species, go hand in hand with this naive and almost hysterical absolute faith in the human which exhibits metaphysi­cal or plainly anti-metaphysical anthropomorphism, one-eyed and wobbly humanism, fatigued progressivism, orthodox, heterodox or vulgar Marxism, psychosociological existentialism.

Theoretically we know quite well that the earth of humans can continue to turn without them.

The schema, ancient, biblical and Judaeo-Christian, evolutionist and bourgeois, positivist and Marxist, thus marks - schematically and circularly - the stages of being in becoming of the totality of the world and the cosmic world: logos or God or dialectic of the movement; matter, plants, animals; humans endowed with thought, realising and materialising their thought, becoming conscious of the global process and marching towards universal history and eschatological, sacred or profane salvation. We are all still fol­lowing this path. One seems to wait for the next link that must be technical (or technological?). How long will the world suffocate under this scheme?

Until the final disintegration? Doesn’t everything begin through an initial catastrophe and doesn’t it find its end in a fatal catastrophe? What does beginning and end nonetheless signify in the horizon of cosmic totality and nothingness?

‘Naturally’ one can also ‘think’: ‘that the universe is only a defect in the purity of non-being’.

All the little portable cosmologies of our epoch, with their convenient epistemological schemas that know nothing of what they are schemas of - Christian and Teilhardian, positivist and naively ontological, Marxist and materialist-dialectical, fantastical and sophisticated - presuppose and leave unthought the cosmogonic and cosmological schema that rules them, namely the biblical and Judaeo-Christian (also having ancestors) schema and its evolutionist, positivist, bourgeois and Marxist continuation (still generating offspring).

Do we begin to suspect that any cosmology can only be negative and interrogative? Nevertheless we await global answers.

Thinking cosmologically, better: cosmically, and vaster still.

Metaphysics is from the outset in physics.

Nature becoming ‘object’ of physics, and ‘subjected’ to metaphysics, mutates into ‘natural reality’ and ‘spiritual ideality’. Yet neither physics nor metaphysics can grasp that of which they are supposed to be science and knowledge.

The distinction between the natural and the supernatural expresses the loss of the (‘sacred’) sense of nature.

Nature is what vivifies and remains, resists and persists - the most.

Trying to cut out, in the unlimited circle or rather in the spiral of the open and never accomplished and given totality, two great circles, nature and history, namely that which is and is done without the human, and that which exists and produces itself through and for the human, is to distin­guish artificially the modes of being world of the World (polymorphic and unique?). This does not signify that the natural and cosmic horizon or the human and historical horizon should be the supreme horizon - for nature is and is not identical to the horizon of the world, and history the same - nor that a synthesis of the two could constitute the horizon of horizons.

Is it because it can be said, thought and experienced that nature comprises a logic? Or is it the inverse?

Mediatised nature - whether according to the ternary and unitary rhythm: ontological logos- cosmic nature-historical spirit, or comprehended as a gigantic auto-production, or in its conception as dialectical movement - remains permanently a squared circle for the human spirit.

All thought dodges the fundamental problem - whose very foundation ceaselessly hides itself, probably demanding that one not continue to seek it like that and fix it - by drowning it in being or thought, matter or spirit, reality or ideas, subjectivity or objectivity, or by wanting to catch it in the threads of a dialectical spider web. This problem would let itself be formu­lated roughly as follows: what is the ‘secret’ of the accord - even discordant - of the human and the world, that is to say, in what resides the encounter, the correspondence, the adequacy between human experience and spirit and the mode of being and things manifesting themselves? For if one presupposes a thought, an idea, a reason, a knowledge that are unveiled to be deciphered in the experience - theoretical and practical - from which they seem to emerge, one remains locked in a magical and vicious (Cartesian, Kantian, Hegelian) circle, where beginning and end meet ontologically and gnoseo- logically, metaphysically and physically, because one knows it in advance, although one only finds this knowledge again at the end. And if one pre­supposes a reality in motion or an energetic matter that ends in thought, because they would dialectically imply it from the start (materialism called dialectical), one remains equally prisoner of the infernal circle, without having posed the problem of circularity - atrociously closed and shockingly open and limitless and not infinite - and without facing up to the circle of circles or spirals that englobe us.

The problem of chaos hides itself behind and in the problem of the cosmos.

The difference between organic nature and inorganic nature should be elucidated.

In the physical totality that embraces, as you know, human and his­torical becoming, letting itself in turn be embraced by it, ‘evolution’ and ‘involution’ march hand in hand: conjointly with the process of progressive differentiation, the passage of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, the inverse process and passage unfold. These two processes lead to both inte­gration and disintegration.

Mathematical formalisation, namely theoretical and techno-scientific, and transformative techno-scientific practice constitute modern nature.

Does not that which physical experiment discovers pre-exist in nature? Is it not for all that artificially produced?

The cosmological sciences - the sciences of nature and the natural sciences - necessarily fractional and fractioning, all take root in a field cleared beforehand by philosophy, in which they move without being able to sufficiently explore the vector and the content of their concepts; doing what they can and must do, they stumble clumsily over the problem of the bond of the laws of physics with the laws of nature. And the philosophy of the sciences does not think what the sciences do not think because it remains subordinate to them. Also we do not see very clearly into the junction of mathematics and physics. Whether the physico-mathematical and biochem­ical sciences want to accept it or not, there is not a single decipherment of the ‘big book of the world’, although a certain active, rationalist, scientific, technical and practical reading seems to dominate and transform the visible stage, while maintaining a certain - loose or tight? - tension with medita­tion and poeticity, with what freezes and shakes us.

Certainly we do not stop living and also experiencing nature, so to speak, outside of theoretical and experimental scientific techniques, even if these mediatise it.

For a long time, it was in physis that the major power of being in becoming seemed to reside. Physis was then eclipsed as a source of energy. God and nature, as a relatively immobile horizon, succeeded it. For some time now, it is the science of nature, physics, that is to say, the theoretical and practical techno-scientific activity to which the human subject devotes itself, itself caught in the network of objects which it faces and of which it forms a part, that becomes the functional measure and the motive form of modern technics. It is what technically liberates the natural power of matter in motion, in the form of atomic energy, in the interior of these uncertain relations - passably mathematised and calculable - which seems to dominate that which it wants to dominate and itself. Deterministic laws combine with probabilistic laws in the certainty-uncertainty ensemble. In scientific study a play of abstract equations (of what?) now rules, whose link with natural and physical or artificially produced facts escapes us. This does not prevent mas­sive realisations and spectacular exploits, a calculation of probabilities that manages to decisively govern a great number of operations and to organise the possible. Does every unifying and unified system, capable of embracing the unitary field, become impossible?

The universe and natural phenomena support many scientific theories, which, related to the ‘same’ phenomena, seen each time differently, elabo­rate, consolidate, fluidify, combine with others, fall apart, let themselves be replaced.

lang=EN-US style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 112%'>It is by giving more play, as much to certainty as to uncertainty, in the field of nuclear physics, that the theoretician of uncertainty relations, Heisenberg, can write: ‘The conception of the objective reality of elemen­tary particles has thus strangely dissolved itself, not in the fog of a new conception of the obscure or poorly comprehended reality, but in the trans­parent clarity of a mathematics that no longer represents the behaviour of the elementary particle, but the knowledge that we possess of it.’ Does this beyond of representation, this calculation of probabilities, help us to access little by little and by jumps, while science pursues its work, a metascientific thought?

In order to be, all that is requires both a natural foundation, and, in order to appear to us, to be approached - in a more or less mediated way - instrumentally and technically, the distinction between what is natural and what is artificial remains highly problematic.

To command nature, one must accept to obey it.

Technics attacks nature. Why and how has nature led itself to what unleashes the most extraordinary violence against it? Unfathomable are the lines of force drawn within it and where violence destroys violence.

Because it is a fact that appears as incontestable: all that is the remit of physis, the cosmic world, resorts principally and exclusively to the jurisdiction of the corresponding sciences and techniques. Philosophical or metaphilosophical thought does not seem to have much to say about it. Is this a passing situation? Will thought succeed in installing a productive dialogue with the sciences or even in fertilising metascientific captures?

We hardly know what the cosmological bases of modern technology and what the technological foundations of our cosmology are. Yet the play of the world demands a comprehension of the play that englobes the play of science and all scientific and technical theory and practice of games.

Right from the start of the play, all comprehension of nature carries moral, legal, anthropological, anthropocentric, anthropomorphic and polit­ical schemas and models projected onto nature, in the same way that all comprehension of history implicates prototypes of natural and cosmic order. It is natural and historical. What remains for us to understand is the unitary root of this double and unique play.

The biocosmic and technological powers are allies and enemies. Technological networks prolong and combat the biocosmic elements. Where will their duel lead?

The links of the cosmic order and the ethical order now appear as a torn spider web.

Between what is natural and what is historically determined, how to establish a dividing line?

Nature is certainly also a historical and social category, but it is that which made possible the emergence of this category.

The non-distinction between the social and the cosmic differentiates itself ‘progressively’.

The perspective already exists: human history can reintegrate natural his­tory, from which it issued, and henceforth unfolds itself without any history.

The identity of human-nature finds itself neither behind nor before us. Is there anything natural for us other humans?

What we habitually call natural generally arises out of a second nature.

The putting into question and into practice of nature is the human, which puts itself into question and transforms its human nature.

Sometimes the human seems redundant in the universe.

The human seems to have a horror of the natural given and keeps a - hateful - nostalgia for animality.

O Mother Nature! Are we emancipated from the realm of mothers? And does the thundering father not thunder at his children anymore?

In breaking free from cosmic entanglement, the human on the march towards their dissolution as an autonomous subject, rejoins it.

From the human encrusted in the universe, spontaneously integrated into cosmic physis, we pass into the human who knows differentiation and who seeks unity.

Naturally, that is to say, historically, one can integrate culture into nature - on an ontological, epistemological and eschatological level; but, in the meantime, one can equally do the inverse.

The evolutionary schema: physics, chemistry, physiology and biology, psy­chology, history and sociology can also be traversed in the inverse direction; thus one would like to reduce history and sociology to psychology, itself reduced to physiology and biology, which in turn arise from chemistry issued from mathematisable physics. Hoping thus to cover, in the unity of the two contrary directions, the whole of duration-extension.

The world of the artifice covers more and more the world of nature. Technics becomes a second nature.

The city annihilates nature, and nature annihilates the city; nevertheless, the city develops itself on the ground of nature and it is through the city that the presence and absence of nature is unveiled and dissimulated.

One asks of mathematics - mathesis universalis - to provide the solid and unassailable foundation supporting the whole scientific and techni­cal edifice, as if mathematics - play of calculation - could be exempt of conventions and anarchy, contradictions and inconsistencies.

Ciphers are called ciphers because the Arabic word sifr designates zero. Why are numbers not content to be unlimited and transfinite and want to be infinite?

Numbers and the countable constantly devour themselves in going forwards.

The cosmic world, dominated by necessity, still remains open to the aleatory.

Heredity and milieu combine their efforts, oppose each other, and com­bine to give a result where the different lineages are not completely visible.

In the cosmic universe, with more brilliance than in the partial universes, all that is ‘knows’ birth, growth and decline, manifestation, blossoming and falling.

It is not necessary that all parts of the universe be rigorously symmetrical.

In the interior of space-time-matter-energy, supposed to constitute the universe, leaps and mutations still remain stumbling blocks for diverse sci­entific theories.

We are obliged to know that mass-energy is not infinite. Cosmically? Epistemologically?

The strange network of matter, energy, life and thought is not easily dis­assembled. We hustle the problem, when we represent to ourselves a matter-energy becoming - transforming into - thought, which, in turn and anew, might materialise itself by retransforming itself.

Is it from the exploration, the exploitation, the explosion and the artifi­cial disintegration of natural energetic matter that a kind of new discordant accord with all that is and is done, a new integration, will come - beyond the dualism that rivets one onto the other, making them interdependent, namely materialism and idealism, beyond the reign of representation? Is dualism surpassable? Between the thought and what ‘is’ not what it is, the obstacle resistant to overcoming or emergence, between the natural facts, so called or technically produced, between what is, was done, is done, or that which we consider as such - but where does the unity or the encounter or the rupture reside between what is and what we envisage as such? - and our explanations and interpretations, formulations and formalisations that fall apart, through what does the dividing line or the displaceable and surpassable border pass?

The extreme point of the will to power that shakes the human would like to direct itself towards the materialisation of thought - corollary of energetic and almost thinking matter. This would ensure humans abso­lute power, omnipotence - they ‘think’. Materialisation, dematerialisation, rematerialisation - in a time that would allow us to circulate in its past and its future - is it there the supreme present that humans await? Magic and science, dream and technique, fantastic and effective, strangeness and famil­iarity, would they be part of this - no less partial - play of imagination or would they prepare a mutation?

Since Aristotle, energy is the secret of the deployment of being in its (phys­ical and historical) ensemble. Making of power, of dynamics, an act, a force, a work. Dynamics and energetics manifest the movement - the becoming - of being and beings, their actions and works. But equally since Aristotle, the links that bind power and possibility - dynamis - to act and actualisation - energy - remain unthought. What drives possibility - potentiality - towards its manifestation as energy? The dynamics of physis alone? Or the movement itself and the Act-and-Intelligence that rules it, namely God? On the basis of the unelucidated problem, natural and atomic energy then became a force technically liberated by the act, the energy, of human and historical science. The atomic and, let’s say, material energy that inhabits the tiny particles of the cosmic All is unchained by these atoms, individuals of the totality, that are humans, even and especially when they are in the process of socialisation. The epoch that completes modernity and perhaps inaugurates another era is characterised as the atomic era, the nuclear era. It examines all the signs per­ceptible through diverse devices, macro- and micro-physically, macro- and micro-historically, to make possible the global epoch of the disintegration of the atomic energy that must thus put in motion the new era. The human, already phased-out and over-passed, aspiring to the domination and exploita­tion of this energy, trembles with fear at the forces it liberates. Humans want to play with the star that is the earth, and tomorrow with other stars, as with a ball, without knowing whether they dare or do not dare to burst this ball. They play with energy, but they too leave it unthought.

Is there a force that subjugates the universe and directs its course? Is posing the question like this not still a proof of anthropomorphism?

The lightning plays. It also plays with those struck down by it.

Matter: is it only or principally what offers resistance? What snares does ‘anti-matter’ set us?

Does not everything return to ‘matter’?

Return to nature! What else does all that is and is done do?

Molecules and planets roll around each other.

The immobile turning of the rose of the sand and the rose of the wind.

Cosmic space is spherical: finite, but without bounds, because unlim­ited; cosmic time is its major variable, and it is itself constituted in time. The cosmic world now appears to us as a four-dimensional space-time continuum.

We begin to traverse the age of cosmic space. Does the age of time await its hour?

Of the eternal time, namely omnitemporal, of the cosmic order, of the great panic physis, Heraclitus said that it is a child playing with ‘dice’. The order of the world, the becoming of being, was thus once grasped as play. Then followed the occultation of the play. The order of the world, its being and its becoming, then rested in and on God, constructor and guarantee of the providential plan, of calculation. Cum Deus calculat fit mundus, wrote the mathematician and theologian Leibniz. This God had already become for Pascal an object of a wagered game, based on the calculation of probabilities and the possibilities of gain. In the era of the commenced and unconsummated death of God - ‘I’ll never believe that God plays dice,’ repeated Einstein, the author of the equation E = mc², who did not manage to reconcile it with atomic physics - the order of the world, the ordering of natural laws and their inextricable combination with the laws of physics are problematic for us humans, who do not know either how to pose or how to solve this question. Scientific researchers, scholars, accomplish discontinuous breakthroughs, make attempts, which remain precarious, to organise chaos, or construct arbitrary synthetic edi­fices. Theories and practices of plays, deadly serious, try to comprehend what remains unplayable.

The speed of the transmission of light, is it and will it remain the measure of time?

Perhaps the cosmic totality has neither beginning nor end, without being for that eternal; perhaps it is not destined to undergo a simple eternal return, nor an infinite progress, perhaps still too much ambiguity and confusion lin­gering around keywords like: being and becoming, totality and world, nature and universe.

Since the universe was formed in time, will it not also find its end (in time)?

All that has a genesis will disappear. This physical and human knowl­edge fails to penetrate all our sensibility and all our cosmic and historical knowledge.

What is aimed at - human domination over space and time, the explora­tion of the two ‘infinities’ (from the infinitely small to the infinitely large), the simultaneous grasping and experience of the (let’s say biological) organ­ism and the (let’s say technological) automatism, of the continuous and the discontinuous, of the reversible and the irreversible, of rest and movement - binds the destiny of the human, is called upon to determine if the human will inhabit the earth, in places and dwellings, or if it will be a meteoric, stellar, sidereal being...

Between everything and nothing, and after having wishfully proceeded in filling the cosmic emptiness, not without having marked it with some beauti­ful conquests, will we accede to a new panic tune, an old and yet unheard-of discordant accord with that which was named physis and cosmos, nature and universe?

The skies hardly uncover other worlds. The sky is the sky of the world as the stars are stars of the sky.

The stars that impose themselves in the firmament are not ‘eternally’ the same.

Behold, departing from the sun, the great planets visible to the naked eye and to the mythological gaze: Mercury, star of commerce, Venus, star of love, Earth, star of mortals, Mars, star of war, Jupiter, star of the lightning, Saturn, star of the underworld, Uranus, star of the sky, Neptune, star of the waters. Around each of these planets spin satellites, while comets crisscross the four-dimensional space-time continuum in all directions. Is the moon the satellite of the earth? And is the sun the focus of light?

The light of the stars slowly nullifies and survives them.

The universe is full of those extinct stars whose brilliance we still see though they have ceased to exist. Certainly, new stars will shine. However, we do not always know what is the dominant constellation of our technolog­ical and planetary and not interstellar era.

The old moons last quite a long time. The new moon appears and disap­pears quite quickly. Can one simultaneously see the two faces of the moon?

Is the destiny of the human inscribed in the firmament, as imagined by old astrology and the new astronautics?

Interstellar, if not galactic, engines seem to be the privileged playthings of planetary humanity. Up to what ceiling?

On the chessboard of stars, troubled and regulated matches are won and lost - in a word, played.

Will human disquietude and dissatisfaction let the human jump from one square of the chessboard of the stars to another?

The wheel of the galaxy on which humans are turned suggests to them, after the enterprise of the conquest of space, the conquest of time. So worlds and humans will pass and stay almost in the middle of the web uniting the stars. It will no longer be the human individual alone that will be unique and interchangeable, if the cosmic worlds have to become so.

The interplanetary human will perhaps escape gravity, to be caught in the trap of another and subtler gear of the mechanics of the sky.

Natural and artificial satellites gravitate around errant stars, which gravi­tate around fixed stars, while shooting stars tear the sky. The harmony of the spheres - grasped in the art of the fugue - does not cease being traversed by polyphonic and atonal voices - and by the voices of silence.

Based on the treatment of information, the transmission of messages, the play of codes and decodings, cybernetics wants to measure the error to permit its correction, by establishing laws of regulation common to living beings and machines, considered as self-regulating systems - are not living organisms rather autonomous, while mechanisms and technical devices remain heteronomous? - that adapt themselves to the objectives that were - naturally and technically - assigned to them. Cybernetics, scien­tific pilot organiser, which wants government of the universal enciphered language, presents itself as something more and other than a simple - or complex - scientific theory and is called on to undergo a great devel­opment. What will be the limit against which its dominant power will stumble?

Certain mechanics are running idle.

What ties the organism to its milieu, dynamically, favouring the action of the milieu, that of the organism and their interaction, what passes through a series of intermediaries to constitute the organism and its development - thus balancing genesis and structure - seems to be more and more, for the moment, the result of a network of coordinations, the result of a self-regulation.

A crab can be occupied with eating another crab with such a ferocious appetite that it does not realise that a third crab has already started nibbling on it.

Plunging its roots into the cosmic world, corporeality overflows it in the direction of the human and historical world; presenting itself as a unique fabric with diverse interwoven threads, its texture and its tears remain to be explored, as it contains profound information. Thus we are still far from having tracked down the secrets of the little universe which is the human organism, and we have yet to discover our body and corporeality. Not only in a biological manner.

Through grafting and grafting again, let’s hope that we manage to refresh the tired human material.

From the maternal womb to the woman’s breast, from prehistoric grot­tos to Platonic caves, from Christian catacombs to atomic shelters, the places that circumscribe the two circles - concentric? - of the microcosm and the macrocosm seek at once the protection of the englobing as well as the hole of the opening.

It is as signs and signals that humans are sent into space.

The cosmic game does something more and other than being the regula­tor of a series of scenery for the pleasures of humans.

New Roman">We distinguish both too much and not enough. What are the links that attach a universe (‘ours’) to the universe? In what sense could our universe be only a fragment?

We will not be ready to pose the question concerning the existence of other beings on other planets, as long as we make up such narrow concep­tions of the life-information circuit and remain so inexperienced in the matter of presence and occultation.

And if we were alone - an extremely diluted solution - in the immensity of the universe?

To what does the evolution of nature seem to lead? To the human, naturally.