Chaos and Form

Abstract

Chaos and Form Ernst Fischer (bio) Translated by Brigitte Schludermann Keywords Literature, form In the version by Karl Kraus of Aristophanes's The Birds, he makes the play end with the words: "Man has departed. The air is pure." I fear that this is not so, and that before man makes away with himself he will leave behind him air no longer fit for breathing. Humanism—has it not reached its end? Man, a verbal spectre, a prejudice—has he not been done away with? And what will arise and has already begun to make its appearance, has it not to do with the dictatorship of things, the absolutism of material and factual relationships, of systems and orders which rid themselves of man as a disturbing element? "Such a pity about man's lot!" Strindberg ventured to exclaim. A pity—Why? is the rejoinder of a petrified philosophy. "Before the end of the 18th century man did not exist," announces the widely acclaimed philosopher Michel Foucault in his book Les mots et les choses. And he continues: "Man was an invention of very recent date, a phenomenon less than two centuries old, in simple terms, an intellectual routine, un [End Page 1] simple pli de notre savoir." Man as mere phenomenon, and not as a living figure and shape, goes back farther in literature and the fine arts than he does in philosophy. And this phenomenon, Foucault thinks, would vanish as soon as a new form of expression has been discovered. Has this new form not been found, in this age of thinking atom heads and bursting human brains? Have men not been reduced to statistical cyphers, to parts of a mechanism which manipulates them? Has each variant of a future atomic war not been tested, with the result that such a war, being conceivable and calculable, might in given circumstances also be a product of rationalistic thought processes? By means of a very advanced technology the loss of a billion people might be made up within a foreseeable period of time. A science which has stripped itself of values makes each event an equation; and when this equation is correct the world may come to ruins. It is perhaps old-fashioned in this age of ours to defend the incalculable against the formula, to defend what is living against objectification (Verdinglichung), the improbable against probability, i.e. to come to the defence of man, this recent and yet already defunct invention, and thus to consider that a future is still possible for him. ________ Chaos is the most likely possibility. The rule and order of the inorganic is not entirely improbable. Man, the living form, the thinking creature who anticipates the future is as a probability most unlikely. Life is a violation of the law of entropy, of the tendency of matter to be transformed into chaotic molecular motion. This tendency is opposed by a mysterious striving after the improbable, after the accumulation of energy. Erwin Schrödinger speaks of the capability of organisms to accumulate "negative entropy" through processes of progressive evolution and of qualitative change. The intensification in the organized condition of living creatures signifies a breach in the order of things, and life a revolt against probability. This revolt culminates in man who, in feeding upon primary nature, brings forth another, a super-nature, which allows of deliberate acts of decision between alternatives, and thus of freedom conditioned though it may be. This second nature, however, seems to revenge itself for the fact that man has been transgressing the law of primary nature, that he who had been creature has made himself creator. For it is precisely his works which threaten his freedom, which draw him back into an order of things he undertook to burst asunder. In the works of men their relationships freeze into material and factual contexts, into ordered systems and structures to which laws we are being subjected. These material and factual contexts confront us as an alien power, as an external fatality, apparently condemning us to impotence. [End Page 2] Hegel and Marx spoke of man as an autonomous creation; the philosophy of total objectification knows only of his autonomous invention...