Krasilov, 1997. Metaecology-19. Mephistopheles (conclusion). Faust

Games. Mephistopheles. V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Palaeontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 pp. Part 19. Mephistopheles (conclusion). Faust. Chapter 6. PRODUCTIVITY. Jesters. Job. The latter, however, is possible only in developed systems, whereas absolute freedom is the negation of necessity — that is, of the system as such. The logic of absolute freedom equates man to the sole radially symmetrical (like Hestia, Nous, or the many-armed Shiva) inhabitant of primordial chaos. Already the first act of creation transforms radial symmetry into bilateral symmetry. The Creator rebels against the emerging bilateral relationships (for the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair, and took them to wife), unleashes floods, enters into a covenant with man that imposes mutual obligations, and ultimately accepts the fundamental rules of the game, including death. So too does man, having rejected systemic constraints, discover the unacceptable absurdity of unlimited freedom — the same absurdity that compelled God to create the world, to give it laws, and to subject Himself to them. We have already discussed how natural ecosystems, in the course of their development, pass through a series of stages, from pioneer community to climax, with the system remaining relatively open in the early stages, when ecological niches are not yet fully partitioned and the introduction of new species is still possible. The underdevelopment of the system — the removal of the climax phase — facilitates such introductions. The most promising among them prove to be those that open new ecological niches (just as the appearance of flowering plants opened new niches for anthophilous insects and fruit-eating vertebrates), thereby promoting the complexification of the system and the growth of biological diversity. Social and metaecological systems pass through analogous stages and, in their completed — climax — state, become closed to innovation. For people striving toward the new and finding no place in the established system, there are two paths suggested by the system itself. The first consists in the destruction of the climax phase, in creating a crisis situation — an underdeveloped community into which it is easier to insert oneself; the second, more constructive path lies in the complexification of the system's structure, in opening new social and metaecological niches. Thus, the emergent youth subculture (which met with such active rejection in the 1950s, but is now perceived as a familiar phenomenon) opens vast possibilities for creative self-realization to those for whom there is no place within the framework of a mature cultural tradition. Discovery, in whatever sphere of activity it occurs, always hinders the ossification of the system by creating, as already mentioned, new technological and sociocultural niches. Thus, photographic film opened a vast domain of artistic, and electronics a domain of technological, creativity, impeding the realization of the Marxist schema of hyperdominance and the corresponding simplification of the structure of social relations. Living systems arose on the basis of non-living ones — inert, as V.I. Vernadsky called them — and contain non-living components. The law of development of an inert system consists in the growth of entropy; that of a living system, in the reduction of the rate of entropy growth. This discordance is the general cause of crises. As mortmass accumulates, the structure of the system becomes increasingly rigid. This applies equally to biological, social, and metaecological systems. The ossification of a system can be overcome only through its destruction. However, as the system becomes ever more living, the necessity for destruction disappears. Renewal becomes the norm and no longer demands endless sacrifice. Sustainable development is most likely to be achieved in the domain of spirit — a system freed from the inert component — gradually drawing in the social body and the biosphere. The metaecological system, in its early stages, afforded man so much freedom that he could enter into single combat with the gods. Even the biblical Abraham dared to dispute with God and even prevailed, as in the memorable argument concerning Sodom and Gomorrah. Over time, however, the system, obeying its own laws, increasingly suppressed man, convincing him of his own insignificance and causing him to recall the past as a golden age. Fate is inexorable — this is a property of the system. Yet Prometheus freed men from the gift of foresight, himself becoming its victim. Thereby men were granted, if not freedom of choice, then at least the freedom of search — the tracing of fate by trial and error. The ancient era passed under the sign of this kind of freedom. The subjection of the Olympian gods to blind fate was a subject of mockery by Christians, who (as witnessed, for example, by Corneille in Polyeucte) contrasted it with the omnipotence of the biblical God. However, a system cannot suppress the freedom of its components without limit — that would be self-destruction. The merciful Son of God sacrificed himself in order to free man from karmic guilt and to open before him the prospect of forgiveness — the reversibility of fate in time. The birth of a forgiving God was, therefore, the beginning of a new era. Faust The radical outcries against thermodynamic predetermination gave rise to a succession of ethical, aesthetic, and sexual revolutions, always carried out in the name of freedom (of the proto-ego in the last case; sexual counter-revolutions asserted the freedom of the meta-ego) and provided a natural periodization of the history of European culture, which absorbed heterogeneous elements capable of unfolding anew into a spectrum of currents of philosophical thought. We have already mentioned the most ancient pan-Aryan elements in the cultures of West and East. The Mahabharata is the Eastern analogue of the Iliad, and the Ramayana of the Odyssey. Zarathustra preached in Bactria, and was heard on the shores of the Dead Sea. The division of philosophy into "Western" and "Eastern" belongs to a later period and consists in the affirmation of opposite models of existence — struggle in the West, equilibrium in the East. If the Eastern moral ideal lay in following the "middle path," then in the West those who "hold to the middle" were regarded as contemptible: Dante found no place for them in either heaven or hell. The Western worldview was grounded in the constancy of essences standing behind the illusory mutability of phenomena, and in faith in the absolute; the Eastern — in the continuous change of all that exists, the illusoriness of constancy, and the relativity of faith (in Mahayana this stance is called sunyata). Western ethics opposed good to evil; Eastern ethics affirmed their unity. The Western conception of freedom was identified with the fulfillment of desires; the Eastern, with liberation from desires. The interpenetration of ideas occurred at all times and goes far toward explaining, as we have already noted, the diversity of viewpoints within Greek philosophy, its dynamism. However, Christianity achieved an even higher degree of syncretism, within the framework of which it became possible to ground diametrically opposed conceptions of the way of life. Christian philosophy of life assimilated elements of Platonism, and the spindle (wheel) of Fortune remained a favorite image in medieval literature. Passivism — the "Eastern" element of Christian teaching — in the Middle Ages was combined with the recklessness of the Crusaders and the unbridled experimentalism of the alchemists. Jesus did not approve of vain activity (in the Sermon on the Mount and in the episode with Mary and Martha), which destroys the soul. But he also taught that, having lit a candle, one does not place it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, so that it gives light to all in the house. Whoever fears to lose his soul will lose it, and whoever does not fear — will save it. The significance of this principle was recognized only in modern times, and Goethe provided a brilliant illustration of it in his interpretation of the medieval Faust. The Renaissance became the triumph of Platonism as a secular philosophy of life (the parallel theological revival — the classical scholasticism of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas — drew on Aristotle). Its logical culmination was Spinoza's formulation of freedom as conscious necessity. Necessity itself, however, derives from the developmental laws of the system that determines the fate of individual elements. Yet already within the late Renaissance — early Baroque a split occurred, marked by the return of strangely transformed medieval figures — Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet. It was precisely these who became the heroes of the modern age, pushing into the background Heracles, Achilles, Orlando, and the Christian saints. The model of struggle generates the hero. Classical culture is the cult of the hero, about whom songs are sung, legends told, novels written. The hero of antiquity is a strong man who carries out the will of the gods or the dictates of fate — that is, one who works for the system. These are Perseus, Heracles, Theseus, destroying monsters who were once totems. However, over time a new trait appears in the hero — fits of madness that compel him to challenge the system (fate, the will of the gods, necessity, and of course the last enemy — death). Mad, irresponsible acts, once the province of weak women — Eve, Pandora, Sophia, Helen — begin to be performed by men. Heracles, Achilles, Ajax, Orlando all run mad. Historical heroes display a tendency toward epilepsy, to which Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon were subject. Let us recall that the ancients considered opposition to fate to be madness. Macbeth, following the prescriptions of fate (voiced by the three witches), appears as a villain. By challenging fate (the advancing Birnam Wood), he is transformed into a hero. This is a hero of a new type, fighting not on the side of the system, but against it. The folkloric archer-supermen Robin Hood, Gamelyn, Adam Bell, immortalized by Chaucer, Jonson, and Shakespeare, served as prototypes for an entire galaxy of noble outlaws — from Calderon's Eusebio to Karl Moor, Lara, and Dubrovsky — who challenged the system from the depths of the forest, from Caledonian crags, from pirate ships. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, their markedly degenerated descendants attacked old milkwomen and moneylenders, compensating for a lack of courage with bombastic philosophizing borrowed from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The philosophers of the modern era, synthesizing the spiritual experience of romantic rebellion, took the field against Plato's system from very nearly the same positions as his contemporaneous opponents, the Cynics. This philosophy of life proceeds from the uniqueness of lived experience, which is not susceptible to systematization, from the fictitious nature of essences, and from the affirmation of freedom as breaking out of the system. The alternation of Platonic and Cynic periods defines the uneven rhythm of European history. Within the framework of Platonism there developed the idea of the similarity of all systems — the cosmos, the social body, the human soul — governed by common systemic laws: Ananke, Fortuna, or whatever name they might be given. Freedom was conceived as the transformation of necessity into inner need. The logic of Platonism led humanity by a straight path to the ideal state, governed by sages who perpetually save the people from enemies of their own invention, lie to their grateful compatriots for their own good, consign to the flames the harmful writings of Homer, Hesiod, and other useless authors, breed a new race of guardian-robots of both sexes, thoughtfully cross-breeding them with one another and using them to suppress the slightest signs of civic volition. The medieval and Renaissance utopias, from Augustine to More and Bacon, follow the same schema (only philosophers are increasingly replaced by technocrats), and only Rabelais inscribed on the walls of the Abbey of Theleme: "Do what thou wilt." The opposing philosophy of free will (ancient magic — Protagoras — the Cynics — the Romantics — the Existentialists) exposed the simplifying effect of the system upon the human individual, linking the overcoming of necessity with the development of the human personality — which thereby rises above animal existence. Carried to its logical conclusion, the philosophy of the will leads to the destruction of the system, on the ruins of which the personality finds itself needed by no one, and existence absurd. For destructive actions bring satisfaction only in the presence of a system that punishes them. Freedom is self-contradictory. If the matter concerns the satisfaction of desires, then the most primitive creatures are the most free: they have few desires. Higher beings have more desires, including unattainable ones, and consequently less freedom. It is easy to say: do what you will. But what is it that we will? Someone must suggest this to us. If the desired end is liberation from desires, then the very striving for freedom is itself a desire, from which one must first free oneself in order to attain freedom. A slave performing his allotted mechanical labor may be preparing a revolt, composing verse, or working out a philosophical system. At liberty, burdened with care for his daily bread or with the acquisition of slaves of his own, he is compelled to abandon these pursuits. We make careers for the sake of the freedom that high social position affords, but in climbing the ladder of advancement we continuously expand the circle of our obligations, increase the weight of the responsibility that rests upon us — responsibility that is more often than not disproportionate to the reward. We complain of overwork, of insufficient leisure, of the consuming attitude of family and society toward us — yet, like an old sled-dog, we would yield our place in harness to no one. Growth into the system results in the absence of freedom; breaking out of the system results in the same, for absolute freedom paradoxically coincides with absolute unfreedom. Free choice is equally unrealizable in the situation of Adam choosing a wife and in the situation of Buridan's ass choosing between two equal bundles of hay. The system places man in Adam's position; the absence of a system — in the ass's position. The problem of the Grand Inquisitor is that God proved to be a negligent jailer, leaving man the possibility of choice. Hamlet's problem is that for him being and non-being are equivalent alternatives. In the development of European culture, the transition from Platonism to existentialism occupied several centuries. In the creative biography of Shakespeare, it was compressed into a single decade — between the age of thirty (Romeo and Juliet) and forty (King Lear). Romeo, setting out for the ball where he is to have his fateful encounter with the hitherto unknown Juliet, pronounces the following remarkable line: "He that hath the steerage of my course, direct my sail." The young heroes of this tragedy — fortune's fools — do nothing of their own volition (the two involuntary killings are no exception) and in the end are sacrificed for systemic ends — the termination of the longstanding feud between the clans. Hamlet represents an intermediate stage at which the hero for the first time experiences doubt as to whether being a blind instrument of fate is a destiny worthy of a human being. Many generations have mistakenly interpreted the story of Hamlet as the tragedy of a man inclined to reflection, caught in circumstances requiring decisive action. In general, this hero seemed strange — and was indeed strange — to people educated in the traditions of Platonism. Were he a character of Sartre's or Camus's, no one would find anything strange about him, and he might take his rightful place beside the Stranger and the Self-Taught Man. However, before the appearance of these last there remained no less than three hundred and fifty years; and in the meantime the "indecisive" Hamlet was a solitary madman who, following the ancient conception of madness as opposition to fate, destroyed conformist rats like Polonius and Laertes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. These impulsive actions, however, were not the final answer to the question of whether to exist within the system or to oppose it. The crisis came after the encounter with the Norwegian army on the march. To the question about the purpose of the campaign, the Norwegian captain replied that it was a piece of Polish land not worth five ducats, which he, the captain, would not want even as a gift. But would the Poles defend this land? Oh yes, they had already dispatched their garrison. And watching ten thousand men marching to their death — men who would scarcely find enough room on the conquered land to bury their dead — Hamlet reflected that by comparison with this large-scale absurdity his own mission was not so very absurd. From that moment, no personal motive can be discerned in his actions: he whose hand holds the helm directs his sail toward a sacrificial death in the name of terminating the longstanding feud between the Danish dynasty of the Hamlets and the Norwegian Fortinbrases. Thus the path had been traveled only halfway. It remained for others — fortune's fools — to complete it. Now repeated verbatim, this designation is applied to the mad Lear and the tender Cordelia, whose simultaneous deaths are as terrible as they are meaningless — absurd in the very fact that they overtake not lovers, but father and daughter. If the epilogue of Hamlet resounds with a triumphal march, Lear concludes with a funeral procession. This is, as the tragedy itself declares, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is the resolution of Hamlet's question in favor of non-being — a renunciation of all that had hitherto constituted the meaning of life. To be in the system or not to be in it — such a dilemma does not in fact exist. Man is the fruit of the development of biological, social, and metaecological systems layered upon one another in the course of evolution (aesthetic, ethical, and religious existence, in Kierkegaard's terms). Liberation from any one of these means the destruction of personality, not its construction. The sole available freedom lies in the fact that man belongs to different systems and is fully a member of none. Thus our distant ancestors, the Devonian lobe-finned fishes, having colonized the boundary habitats between water and land, were able to avoid a dead-end specialization, to preserve evolutionary plasticity, and to give rise to several lineages of tetrapods. Not-so-distant ancestors were adapted both to arboreal and terrestrial modes of life. Their evolution proceeded in the direction of expanding the resource niche, of colonizing new habitats. In developing social structures, they drew spiritual strength from the cult of nature. The intuition of our ancestors did not deceive them: for sustainable existence, three supports are necessary — nature, the social body, and the spiritual world. Each of these systems, taken individually, can absorb a man as the whale absorbed Jonah. Thus the Indians of Amazonia merged with nature and halted in their social and spiritual development. The ancient Egyptians immersed themselves too deeply in metaphysics. Ancient Rome made the greatness of the state its fetish. More successfully developed were those civilizations that managed to maintain equilibrium on the boundary of systems. The metaphysical idea of the equality of all human beings before God prevented the realization of Plato's utopia of the totalitarian state. The Cynics and the Romantics, opposing the suppression of the individual by the social body, sought support in nature. Upon the foundations of Romanticism arose the nature-conservation movement, opposing the threat of ecological catastrophe. The art of history, it would seem, consists in maintaining a mobile equilibrium between polar conceptions of freedom. Having adopted Platonism as a philosophy of life, a man imposes upon himself manifold self-limitations. The philosopher declares the limits of pure reason. The poet forces love into the Procrustean bed of the sonnet. The grandee transforms life into a meaningless ritual. At some point, their children must throw off all this lumber, or else life becomes so predictable that it is not worth living. The path indicated by Plato led to a natural conclusion — the closure of Plato's Academy after a thousand years of existence. We weep when we enter upon this stage, full of jesters. We are swaddled — a fierce and, in essence, causeless deprivation of freedom, which will leave its mark upon all subsequent life. We are disciplined in children's institutions. We are married off, deprived of the freedom of sexual choice. We fall into a career rut from which there is no exit. We become encumbered with debts and barely manage (or have not yet managed) to settle them when we are buried. Is this not, truly, a tragicomic tale told by an idiot? Blest is he, thought Pushkin, who was a dandy or a rake at twenty, was advantageously married at thirty, and settled his debts by fifty. Before thirty, do not hurry, counseled Hesiod, but past thirty, do not long delay. Around thirty — that is the best time to marry. This stereotype persisted for more than two and a half millennia (in Sparta such a periodization of life was enshrined in law). The first part of life was allotted to the assimilation of the fundamental prohibitions. Then followed a brief experimental period of relative freedom. All the events of the classical novel are contained within it and conclude with the hero's death or his marriage. Maturity — the conservative part of life — was devoted to the repayment of the social debt. The novelistic role of the paterfamilias was reduced to control-and-restriction and repressive functions (prohibitions on hasty marriages of children, disinheritance, and the like). Creative work as a process requiring freedom was naturally confined to the experimental period and concluded with the onset of maturity (only isolated geniuses managed, like Socrates and Goethe, to extend the experimental period into advanced age. More recently, interest in the more mature hero marks an expansion of the age boundaries of the experimental period — a kind of revolution in the art of living). In the individual development of man, historical periodicity is compressed and recapitulated. S. Freud distinguished several peaks of activation in the sexual sphere, the first of which falls in infancy, when man rapidly traverses the natural stage of his evolutionary path. Infantile sexuality extends to various physiological functions. Even later, in the second — adolescent — phase, sexuality is still weakly channeled and can easily be perverted. Personal sexual revolutions are experienced in one form or another, most frequently occurring before and after the optimal reproductive age (around 27-37 years) — that is, at 20-25 and 40-45 years. Social activity is maximal at 12-17 years, when hierarchies close to the biosocial are established in adolescent groups, and at 45-50 years, when a person approaches the culmination of his social career. Metaecological periodicity, as a rule, stands at the antipode of the social, with more or less distinct peaks around the age of 20 and after the age of 50. In the search for equilibrium, dualism and the tripartite unity of the human soul acquire functional significance. Natural man acts in the sphere of reproductive relations, successively taking on the roles of lover, husband, father, and grandfather (and their female analogues). Social man masters the role structure of the social system. Metaphysical man constructs the pyramid of culture and finds within it a niche for spiritual life. The art of life, it would seem, consists in maximally realizing the potentialities inherent in its natural rhythm. The repeatability of periods allows man to be, by turns, a Platonist and a Cynic, a Spinozist and a Romantic — to experience the Faustian sensation of a life lived again. The Platonic model of life must be balanced by the Cynic model, in which the striving for freedom — growing with the development of the human personality — determines the wholeness of existence, uniting all of its components: suffering, love, and opposition to death. Games. Mephistopheles. V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Palaeontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 pp. Part 19. Mephistopheles (conclusion). Faust. Chapter 6. PRODUCTIVITY. Jesters. Job.