Order v. Xaos

Quentin Meillassoux, reason, and hyperchaos

We shall see below that a certain necessity does enter Meillassoux’s thinking (the necessity of contingency, and the necessity of the law of non-contradiction), but it is made necessary, precisely, by the need for there to be no necessary being or necessary law.

The radical nature of his position becomes apparent if we consider the import of this “only”. There are no eo ipso necessary laws, either of nature or of logic, and certainly no necessary being or beings. Why does Meillassoux insist on this starting point? Because allowing any necessity into philosophy would, in fact, be opening wide the door to religion. A belief in perennial laws is religious because it makes some transcendent action necessary in order to maintain the laws over time. Without such a metaphysical intervention there is nothing to guarantee that (natural or logical) laws may not change. Concomitantly, Meillassoux warns that ‘We have removed the gods, but we have kept the belief in the divine solidity of laws’ (L’Inexistence divine[1] 4), reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”[2]

For his own part, Meillassoux insists that these constants can be abolished, for the simple reason that nothing sustains them from the outside (ID 4).  He deals at length with the obvious objections that could be raised to this adherence to the contingency of natural and logical laws, not least among which is the observation that natural laws have remained constant over a long period. We might resist Meillassoux’s notion that natural laws could change at any instant with the simple observation that they do not, in fact, change: Eppur non si muove! Meillassoux’s argument, in brief, hinges on the difference between chance (understood in terms of a finite and known number of possibilities, like a dice throw) and contingency (for which there is no known number of possible outcomes). Whereas chance presupposes a prior structure within which it operates (for example the structure of the faces of a die), contingency obeys no law and works within no such structure (ID 13). It follows, Meillassoux argues, that we cannot use probabilistic reasoning about the set of all possible worlds, because there is no set of all possible worlds (ID 36-38). Contingency is the appearance of a new universe of cases, not the appearance of any given universe (ID 16). We are therefore mistaken to refute Meillassoux’s thesis on the basis that the chance of a given law not having changed over a very long period of time (the argument that “if it can change, it would have changed by now”), because chance itself is only thinkable under a regime of the stability of physical laws, and so the objection assumes the stability it intends to prove.

Meillassoux builds his position as follows. First, there can be no real necessity, no necessary being, on pain of theology. Secondly it follows that the facticity of a thing is not itself a fact (Après la finitude 107/After Finitude 79)[3], because if facticity were itself a fact (that is to say, contingent and not necessary) there could be a necessary being, and the door would once more be open to religious fideism.

Quentin Meillassoux, reason, and hyperchaos

Sounds like what I'm into.

Sounds like what I'm into.

You mean Hyper Chaos as Meillasoux describes it or the qualifications the article mentions - that there is a thread of rationality within the Xaos.

I assume you mean the latter?

You mean Hyper Chaos as Meillasoux describes it or the qualifications the article mentions - that there is a thread of rationality within the Xaos.

I assume you mean the latter?

I meant the idea of “hyper chaos” and that there is no reason the next instant might not see the demise and recreation of the entire universe. If there was “necessity” as he puts it, then we exist in an absolute prison of unbreakabld rules. My view is that the thing that holds reality on the course of rationality is a collective “faith”. And so faith (or intention or will) can also interrupt the regularity and appeal to the chaos to introduce some novelty.

More thoughts later... gotta go!

I meant the idea of “hyper chaos” and that there is no reason the next instant might not see the demise and recreation of the entire universe. If there was “necessity” as he puts it, then we exist in an absolute prison of unbreakabld rules. My view is that the thing that holds reality on the course of rationality is a collective “faith”. And so faith (or intention or will) can also interrupt the regularity and appeal to the chaos to introduce some novelty.

More thoughts later... gotta go!

I guess it depends on how we define Necessity, though this does recall the existential feelings of the Greeks regarding the goddess/Titan/Primordial Ananke...

I would agree under the usual, modern definitions of (Efficient) causation there doesn't seem to be any real reason the Universe doesn't fly apart in the next moment. But under the four-fold causation model of Aristotle one can see a certain stability via Final Causation (the others being Efficient, Formal, and Material). This gets us into the place of God as intervening in every moment (Occasionalism), providing the direction of the natural world in a mechanistic order that proceeds from Creation's inception (Deism), and God as Primer Mover who provides the potential of Purpose to sentients while ordering the natural world (Aquanius' Theism), and finally God as both Prime Mover but also Inherently Involved with the evolution of Occasions that permeate creation (Whitehead.)

My money is on the latter...but it's based on the hope of getting something out of Whitehead's writings.

I guess it depends on how we define Necessity, though this does recall the existential feelings of the Greeks regarding the goddess/Titan/Primordial Ananke...

I would agree under the usual, modern definitions of (Efficient) causation there doesn't seem to be any real reason the Universe doesn't fly apart in the next moment. But under the four-fold causation model of Aristotle one can see a certain stability via Final Causation (the others being Efficient, Formal, and Material). This gets us into the place of God as intervening in every moment (Occasionalism), providing the direction of the natural world in a mechanistic order that proceeds from Creation's inception (Deism), and God as Primer Mover who provides the potential of Purpose to sentients while ordering the natural world (Aquanius' Theism), and finally God as both Prime Mover but also Inherently Involved with the evolution of Occasions that permeate creation (Whitehead.)

My money is on the latter...but it's based on the hope of getting something out of Whitehead's writings.

I think I followed you there but I'm just an armchair philosopher / theologian.

To my mind there are three answers to the question "why?" (1) Everything is a mechanism; a chain of reactions going back to infinity; there is no free will behind anything; (2) Everything is of the Will and what appears to be Mechanism is merely the consistent application of Will (Occasionalism) or (3) a duality of polar opposites exists where mechanism and free-will are mutually exclusive and opposed. The Mechanism is embedded in the Will (e.g. God) and the Will is embedded in the Mechanism (e.g. the will within each of us).

The Mechanism is perfect in its form and operation, but being surrounded by ambiguity, the Will can change the Mechanism to any degree and it remain perfect in form and operation.... in other words, any change to the Mechanism by the Will can always be explained mechanistically up to the point where ambiguity necessitates circularity or infinite regress. There are no apparent "glitches in the matrix" because a chain of causality will always exist leading back into the ambiguity of the quantum soup or of language and perception.