Saturday, 23 June 2018
The challenge for complex theories is to demonstrate the genesis of structure. The dilemma is that if structure is taken to be purely nominal, inheriting its stubborn appearance only from extraneous interests, then it will be too easy to modify and so provide no point of leverage against those interests. Or alternatively if it is genuinely rigid, or derived from genuinely rigid substructures, from laws of being, then you have not only failed to explain its origin other than through metaphysics, but have lost the prospect of being able to modify it according to your deferred desire. A complex theory must weave its way between these alternatives, taking mathematics as its model, whereby derived structures can be functionally rigid but nonetheless subject to complex and open-ended processes of reconfiguring whereby they are superseded by by other quite different but in their turn equally rigid structures. In other words these all represent elaborate ways of attempting to reconcile freedom and necessity which must seem to simultaneously take both sides. The way things are is illegitimate, but this cry is uttered in terms of the very same laws which seem to determine the way things are. And this only seems to be a contradiction if you imagine that contradiction is not already the sublation of of a deeper and incurable disjunction at the heart of being. This is perhaps the most darkened form of the vision of unity.
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