Teoreticity and Historicity in Agazzi’s Thought

As a matter of fact, Evandro Agazzi has always maintained a great balance in eval­uating the various theoretical conceptions. This was due to the fact that he always based his findings on a rigorous and careful historical reconstruction that allowed him to enunciate theoretically relevant judgments, fitting the specific nature of the subject he was gradually taking up.

Given the impossibility to talk about all the works he wrote about the rela­tionship between science, historicity and complexity, I will limit my discussion to some thoughts expressed in one of his most theoretically mature and clearer texts in terms of argumentation and training: Le rivoluzioni scientifiche e la civ- ilta dell’occidente (2008), that specifically includes the issue of Complexity. I will focus specifically on the problem, which he discussed in detail, “of the widening of the scientific landscape in the 20th century”.

After recalling quickly some of the most significant developments that charac­terized science and technology in the twentieth century—namely quantum phys­ics, space travels, the moon landing, the discovery of DNA, the techno-sciences, etc.—Agazzi makes an interesting reference to the methodological and theoretical aspect that more deeply marked the difference between classical science and that of the twentieth century, highlighting that the reference to the twentieth-century science is not enough

to give us the measure of the new intellectual model that characterizes in its entirety contemporary science, which is distinguished from modern science especially by the abandonment of a strictly deterministic and analytic perspective in the name of a fair appreciation of the complexity and globality (Agazzi 2008: 152).

From this observation he draws the motivation for a historical-theoretical recon­struction of the disciplines, which were decisive to impose the methodologi­cal turning point that he mentioned, a turning point that refers “to the theme of complexity, systems theory, cybernetics” (ibid.) From these new sciences, Agazzi draws inspiration to support and transform the realism that has always character­ized his thought.

In this concrete horizon it is possible to get the meaning of the self-develop­ment that characterizes all the living forms, or more clearly that “shows a spon­taneous tendency toward the growth of complexity itself, even starting from situations that did not seem to prepare it (a phenomenon called self-organization), just as it happened many times in the course of natural evolution” (ibid.). Agazzi knows that these considerations—starting from the second half of the twentieth century—have been increasingly corroborated at all levels, and he notes that this is “why someone has started to think (and in some cases it has been shown) that at the heart of many—if not all-of these extraordinary structures there are natural dynamics of this kind” (ibid.). He avoids carefully the temptation to prefigure or endorse some new form of biological determinism, and to this purpose he speci­fies first and foremost that “with that we would not have a surreptitious return to reductionism” (ibid.).

However, he seems to attribute the impossibility, in these cases, to make exact forecasts, to our inability to follow the complex evolution of an organism, and not to its intrinsic impossibility. In his opinion, that is,

this ‘creative’ aspect of complexity never suppresses the irreducible limit to our ability to calculate. Therefore, even if we could determine the dynamic that governs the genesis of a certain structure, as the structure generates itself, our ability to forecast will decrease, and therefore we couldn’t know in any way what will be the global properties of the structure itself, except by letting it evolve and then seeing the result (ibid.).

We couldn’t know it also because the developments are not determined by an abstract law, but by the concrete historical and evolutionary Reality.

In other words, it will never be possible, in general, to predict the behavior of a structure that is the result of a nonlinear dynamic starting from the law that governs this dynamic; to get a prediction we will identify some new law, which must be obtained from the analy­sis of the direct reality and not deduced from the previous law (ibid.).

In other words, contrary to what was supposed by classical science, the top level is not explained by the lower level, and therefore not reducible to it, and “this applies to all levels of reality: atoms with respect to molecules, molecules with respect to cells, cells with respect to the body, and so on” (ibid.).

For this reason there is no direct affiliation between the different disciplines, since for each of them the main reference is always concreteness, in the sense that “every time you go one level up it is necessary, so to speak, ‘to return to reality’, looking for it in its own objects, according to specific methodologies, with the very important result of ensuring again the autonomy of the different sciences, which are therefore, each in its own order, all equally ‘fundamental’ as physics” (ibid.). In this way, the classical hierarchy is replaced by the network interactive relationship where what counts are equal relations, and not hierarchical depend­encies. This is what emerged from today’s complexity theory and the historically complex processing systems.

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