Availing the Physics of Least Action

Abstract

Amidst the talk about totality of language?its logic, its rhetoric, its aesthetics, its politics?there persists an unapparent action that we every day. Like Wittgenstein's language games that we use as commonplace, this kind of action seems not to have a locutionary figure of speech, perhaps because we it unskeptically. Yet this principle of action seems to have been tacitly or explicidy granted in history: we act upon the belief that our least acts are physically reciprocal. Each of our acts entails a compensating reaction. C. S. Peirce thought that all dualism springs from the feeling of resistance to Brute Force.1 If I feel the wind blow against me, I have to push back to gain equilibrium. Though an act be singular, its occasion is always at least dual. In physics, least action means, among other things, that natural events use the smallest measure of energy necessary for acting along a path adjusted by the pressures of reciprocating circumstances. Heraclitean stream of contradictory events is measured by recurrent intervals of troughs and peaks. This action rule has occasioned the oldest principle in the nature of things?Retribution, the lex talionis, the equation of an eye for an eye. Golden Rule second guesses this feeling of equivalent recurrence. Do unto others as you would have others unto you, has been called the leading principle of ethics. Confucius, however, used it anesthetically, do not to another what you would not like to happen to you, in order to stress his social laws of government as patrilineal family.2 In his essay Compensation Emerson said, The world likes like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.3 Jesus said, with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again (Matt. 7:1). Measure for measure, this is an aesthetic interpretation which turns upon a reversed dialogue of recip rocal action, in which one looks at recurrent acts from the perspectives of the empathetic first person and of the apathetic third person. It seems that we act socially yet diversely upon our belief in the measures of least reaction. Even if I believe only in the stock market, I act reciprocally so as to be in front of the oscillations of troughs and peaks. I act according to my belief in the inverse equation, Buy cheap and sell dear. Least action seems to be our basic code, but it is applied to diverse ends in