Books
Antonio Escohotado, Chaos and Order
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MPH, MSc
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Antonio Escohotado (1941-2021) explains how order often arises spontaneously from disorder, seeking its own economy and systematicity. Escohotado's work is heavily influenced by Ilya Prigogine, who won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work on dissipative structures. In the first part, Escohotado explores the mechanistic view of the world in the face of chaos, from Newton to authors such as Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, Schrödinger, Pauli, Dirac, De Broglie, Heisenberg, not forgetting Mandelbrot, Lorenz, and Brownian movements. Chaos is no longer the noise of the observer's perceptual experience of the observed, as claimed by the mechanical determinism that filled the physics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries with optimism. What is understandable is what repeats itself, but not everything seems to fall within the realm of the mechanically predictable, aggravated by the difficulty encountered in understanding the world of elementary particles. This is where chaos comes in.
Escohotado questions whether knowledge, or scientific truth itself, can be reduced to predictive control. While the Greek philosopher looked at the cosmos with fascination because he wanted to understand, the scientist seeks to anticipate. Knowledge is transformed into predictive capacity, leaving complexity outside the realm of the controllable and discarding it as inessential or chaotic. The "real" becomes the experimental nature of techniques using devices that measure certain aspects, and the measurement of a phenomenon is transformed into the force causing the phenomenon. But subjugating the earth with techniques that produce effects is not the same as understanding the world in which we live. What was initially conceived as a theory sought to illuminate knowledge, but gradually became the subjugation of the theory itself to what fits into the framework of technical subjugation. Knowledge is displaced to the instrumentally useful, but in this process we do not find the truth of what a phenomenon is, but rather we find utility in something it does and assume it for all that it is. This has undoubtedly resulted in useful techniques and technologies, but what Escohotado is trying to explain to us is that this has narrowed our understanding of knowledge. The funnel of the reducible becomes the whole, but we must differentiate between empirical prediction of change in a variable that is measured and decided to be applied in an intervention and the total truth about something.
Societies
From physics, Escohotado moves on to the order of societies. In many cultures, organizational milestones were initially attributed to external, magical phenomena. The order of the first great civilizations, based on military empires, showed "immense sovereigns, tiny subjects," which later tended toward a less hierarchical order, more spontaneous than social life itself, of which Escohotado gives Greece as an example.
Mao and Stalin saw order as the strengthening of the state, and fascism and National Socialism had an equally top-down concept of order. Marx's predictive difficulty is evident not only in his failed historicism or in a reductionist class funnel, but also in the fact that Lenin triumphed where there was less proletariat, where industrialists abused them less, and where he settled least, precisely in the countries where the bourgeoisie was developing most. The state of predictive control destroys the associative spontaneity of peoples, leaving a mass of people uprooted from themselves. This is perfectly visible in our current society. If in totalitarian governments it is the government that interferes in industry, in our societies we could say that industry interferes in government, and government interferes in industry.
Keynesianism leads to a shift towards highly speculative financial capitalism, both because of the financial risks dissipated by the spread of derivatives and all kinds of products with a hidden portion of toxic assets, socializing risk and costs in an opaque manner, and because states use debt as private finance for their own political purposes. The order from within societies, Escohotado tells us, is transformed into an order imposed from outside. Once again, we find the illusion of control, and the illusion that control is equivalent to understanding things. All this under the belief that aspects such as human relations, spontaneous conversations between people, human happiness, good neighborliness, the intellectual cultivation of people, that is, social life, were things that could be solved by giving politicians more money or more control over our lives. Delirium.
The essay finally leads us to very specific aspects of 20th-century Spanish politics that were taking place at the time the work was published. The direction of politics today is moving in a more totalizing globalizing direction than Escohotado intuited in those days, which places the work in a context that clearly limits the potential scope of the topic Escota develops here. We could add that today we can glimpse on the horizon the destruction of nation-states and the emergence of immense, total sovereigns in the form of global public-private biotechnocratic oligarchies. It is as if the dynamic between chaos and order in the history of civilizations ran parallel to Hegel's dialectic of master and slave. The promise of control seeks to reduce the uncertainty of societies to zero. Whether it comes from politicians or scientists, it is sacralized and turned into a cult myth of modern society.
Final words
Some physics professors described Escohotado as "postmodern" because of this book. The fact that the recurring response of representatives of "science" to someone intellectually uncomfortable is to play the motecitos shows that "science" is indeed not going through its best moment, and that there are difficulties in convincing people. The debate in the world of physics about information and matter has only come to the forefront since Escohotado wrote this work.
Escohotado's essay seeks precisely to show the "unnecessary divorce between scientists and humanists," in which each must be "the critical sense of the other." Physics has proven to be more complex than the reasoning that was glimpsed at the time of the great discoveries of physics in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We could add that many disciplines have sought to reduce themselves in an attempt to resemble physics, in a bid to gain glamour, renouncing much knowledge in order to undergo a process of refinement. Psychology itself aspired to this by reducing the epistemic and the clinical to a mere nosological classification in the hope of being led to a technical-specific system. The house of cards was met with replication crises, problems of nosological validity, genetic studies showing taxonomic artificiality, low specific effects... Psychoanalysis and metaphysics were accused above all of preventing their falsification, but this does not happen only there; orthodox "science" also gets away with ad hoc modifications to prevent its falsification. Lakatos explained this aspect very well. But we also find the attempt at reductionism in the name of public health. The spectacular act of reducing a pandemic to a future biomedical product, turned into "scientific truth," the whole truth and nothing but the truth, when it was nothing more than a possibility, not the only one, and with the ever-present cost of displacing and suppressing other research and interventions. Escohotado tells us that "the basics can be examined without resorting to technicalities reserved for experts." The trumpet-blowing discourse is incompatible with the absolute mortality statistics following the intramuscular administration of scientific truth. Hannah Arendt said that modern masses do not believe in facts, they only believe in their imaginations and what the system tells them. They do not defend facts, but the discourse of the system.
Every statement is rather momentary, useful for explaining some things, but it will be replaced. So what is truth, what is objectivity, what is "science," and what are the ad hoc additions to the original theory to try to circumvent the unpredictable and continue to be the dominant "truth"? Sir John Lighthill expressed it in these terms at the opening of an international physics conference:
"We would like to collectively apologize for having misled the public by spreading ideas about the determinism of systems based on Newton's laws of motion, which since 1960 have been proven wrong."
Bertrand Russell himself, who defended mathematics as something "inexpugnable," in 1959 showed more doubts about his youthful mechanistic impetus.
"The splendid certainty I had always hoped to find in mathematics has been lost in a bewildering labyrinth."
Escohotado tells us that schools always require us to solve concrete problems in idealized situations. This is very accurate. Reductionist thinking is learned in the educational system, where reasoning in complex contexts of irreducible problems is suppressed or taught mechanically without context. Students are trained to put the part before the whole, not to reason about distal and transversal relationships, etc. In addition to suppressing everything that is inconvenient. The education system has certainly been successful in its objectives (see Illich or Foucault). In short, the book is like an everyday conversation with Escohotado: it begins with Newton, Prigogine, scientism, and predictive control, moves on to Greece, arrives at Marx, discusses law and justice, the sewers of the state... pure Escota. Not for everyone.
"That spirit rots at the root when a hybrid of corporatism and simplification reigns over reality." Antonio Escohotado.
Cite as: Bordallo, A. Review of Chaos and Order, by Antonio Escohotado. ICNS. Available at https://www.icns.es/en/news/antonio_escohotado_chaos_and_order
Copyright © ICNS Institute
Escohotado questions whether knowledge, or scientific truth itself, can be reduced to predictive control. While the Greek philosopher looked at the cosmos with fascination because he wanted to understand, the scientist seeks to anticipate. Knowledge is transformed into predictive capacity, leaving complexity outside the realm of the controllable and discarding it as inessential or chaotic. The "real" becomes the experimental nature of techniques using devices that measure certain aspects, and the measurement of a phenomenon is transformed into the force causing the phenomenon. But subjugating the earth with techniques that produce effects is not the same as understanding the world in which we live. What was initially conceived as a theory sought to illuminate knowledge, but gradually became the subjugation of the theory itself to what fits into the framework of technical subjugation. Knowledge is displaced to the instrumentally useful, but in this process we do not find the truth of what a phenomenon is, but rather we find utility in something it does and assume it for all that it is. This has undoubtedly resulted in useful techniques and technologies, but what Escohotado is trying to explain to us is that this has narrowed our understanding of knowledge. The funnel of the reducible becomes the whole, but we must differentiate between empirical prediction of change in a variable that is measured and decided to be applied in an intervention and the total truth about something.
Societies
From physics, Escohotado moves on to the order of societies. In many cultures, organizational milestones were initially attributed to external, magical phenomena. The order of the first great civilizations, based on military empires, showed "immense sovereigns, tiny subjects," which later tended toward a less hierarchical order, more spontaneous than social life itself, of which Escohotado gives Greece as an example.
Mao and Stalin saw order as the strengthening of the state, and fascism and National Socialism had an equally top-down concept of order. Marx's predictive difficulty is evident not only in his failed historicism or in a reductionist class funnel, but also in the fact that Lenin triumphed where there was less proletariat, where industrialists abused them less, and where he settled least, precisely in the countries where the bourgeoisie was developing most. The state of predictive control destroys the associative spontaneity of peoples, leaving a mass of people uprooted from themselves. This is perfectly visible in our current society. If in totalitarian governments it is the government that interferes in industry, in our societies we could say that industry interferes in government, and government interferes in industry.
Keynesianism leads to a shift towards highly speculative financial capitalism, both because of the financial risks dissipated by the spread of derivatives and all kinds of products with a hidden portion of toxic assets, socializing risk and costs in an opaque manner, and because states use debt as private finance for their own political purposes. The order from within societies, Escohotado tells us, is transformed into an order imposed from outside. Once again, we find the illusion of control, and the illusion that control is equivalent to understanding things. All this under the belief that aspects such as human relations, spontaneous conversations between people, human happiness, good neighborliness, the intellectual cultivation of people, that is, social life, were things that could be solved by giving politicians more money or more control over our lives. Delirium.
The essay finally leads us to very specific aspects of 20th-century Spanish politics that were taking place at the time the work was published. The direction of politics today is moving in a more totalizing globalizing direction than Escohotado intuited in those days, which places the work in a context that clearly limits the potential scope of the topic Escota develops here. We could add that today we can glimpse on the horizon the destruction of nation-states and the emergence of immense, total sovereigns in the form of global public-private biotechnocratic oligarchies. It is as if the dynamic between chaos and order in the history of civilizations ran parallel to Hegel's dialectic of master and slave. The promise of control seeks to reduce the uncertainty of societies to zero. Whether it comes from politicians or scientists, it is sacralized and turned into a cult myth of modern society.
Final words
Some physics professors described Escohotado as "postmodern" because of this book. The fact that the recurring response of representatives of "science" to someone intellectually uncomfortable is to play the motecitos shows that "science" is indeed not going through its best moment, and that there are difficulties in convincing people. The debate in the world of physics about information and matter has only come to the forefront since Escohotado wrote this work.
Escohotado's essay seeks precisely to show the "unnecessary divorce between scientists and humanists," in which each must be "the critical sense of the other." Physics has proven to be more complex than the reasoning that was glimpsed at the time of the great discoveries of physics in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We could add that many disciplines have sought to reduce themselves in an attempt to resemble physics, in a bid to gain glamour, renouncing much knowledge in order to undergo a process of refinement. Psychology itself aspired to this by reducing the epistemic and the clinical to a mere nosological classification in the hope of being led to a technical-specific system. The house of cards was met with replication crises, problems of nosological validity, genetic studies showing taxonomic artificiality, low specific effects... Psychoanalysis and metaphysics were accused above all of preventing their falsification, but this does not happen only there; orthodox "science" also gets away with ad hoc modifications to prevent its falsification. Lakatos explained this aspect very well. But we also find the attempt at reductionism in the name of public health. The spectacular act of reducing a pandemic to a future biomedical product, turned into "scientific truth," the whole truth and nothing but the truth, when it was nothing more than a possibility, not the only one, and with the ever-present cost of displacing and suppressing other research and interventions. Escohotado tells us that "the basics can be examined without resorting to technicalities reserved for experts." The trumpet-blowing discourse is incompatible with the absolute mortality statistics following the intramuscular administration of scientific truth. Hannah Arendt said that modern masses do not believe in facts, they only believe in their imaginations and what the system tells them. They do not defend facts, but the discourse of the system.
Every statement is rather momentary, useful for explaining some things, but it will be replaced. So what is truth, what is objectivity, what is "science," and what are the ad hoc additions to the original theory to try to circumvent the unpredictable and continue to be the dominant "truth"? Sir John Lighthill expressed it in these terms at the opening of an international physics conference:
"We would like to collectively apologize for having misled the public by spreading ideas about the determinism of systems based on Newton's laws of motion, which since 1960 have been proven wrong."
Bertrand Russell himself, who defended mathematics as something "inexpugnable," in 1959 showed more doubts about his youthful mechanistic impetus.
"The splendid certainty I had always hoped to find in mathematics has been lost in a bewildering labyrinth."
Escohotado tells us that schools always require us to solve concrete problems in idealized situations. This is very accurate. Reductionist thinking is learned in the educational system, where reasoning in complex contexts of irreducible problems is suppressed or taught mechanically without context. Students are trained to put the part before the whole, not to reason about distal and transversal relationships, etc. In addition to suppressing everything that is inconvenient. The education system has certainly been successful in its objectives (see Illich or Foucault). In short, the book is like an everyday conversation with Escohotado: it begins with Newton, Prigogine, scientism, and predictive control, moves on to Greece, arrives at Marx, discusses law and justice, the sewers of the state... pure Escota. Not for everyone.
"That spirit rots at the root when a hybrid of corporatism and simplification reigns over reality." Antonio Escohotado.
Cite as: Bordallo, A. Review of Chaos and Order, by Antonio Escohotado. ICNS. Available at https://www.icns.es/en/news/antonio_escohotado_chaos_and_order
Copyright © ICNS Institute
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