The Unfinished World

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In several posts to this forum including An Alternative View of History and Historical Disruption, I discussed Tamim Ansary’s book, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, and I would like to make a few remarks on his description of Islamic jurisprudence in relation to wider culture. Ansary is careful to explain that he was not writing a scholarly treatment of Islamic civilization, but there is a virtue in considering the clear and plainspoken formulations of cultural practices as they appear in popular histories, in contradistinction to the labyrinthine rationalizations of more erudite studies.

In a brief discussion of Islamic jurisprudence, Ansary gives a litany of the layers of Koranic interpretation involved in rendering a decision: “If a scholar had exhausted Qur’an, hadith, qiyas, ijmas, then and only then could he move on to the final stage of ethical and legislative thinking, ijtihad, which means ‘free independent thinking based on reason.’ Scholars and judges could apply this type of thinking only in areas not derived directly from revelation or covered by established precedents.” (p. 97) In this litany, Qur’an, of course, constitutes the revelations to the prophet Muhammad by the angel Gabriel, hadith is the tradition of recorded words of Muhammad other than his explicitly Koranic utterances, qiyas is analogical reasoning based on the previous sources, and ijma is community consensus, i.e., the community of recognized scholars.

Hadith Classifications

Ansary then goes on to add, “…over the centuries, even those cracks [in established precedent] grew narrower, because once an eminently qualified scholar weighed in on some subject his pronouncements also joined the canon. ” Just before this, in explaining the analogical reasoning of qiyas, Ansary wrote, “…for each unprecedented contemporary situation, scholars had to find an analogous one in classical sources and derive a judgment parallel to the one already made.” (pp. 96-97) This I find troublesome and problematic — and I am not targeting Ansary, for I agree with his interpretation, but I am taking issue with the tradition so interpreted and the institutions that have been created by this tradition — and I will try to explain why this is the case.

Ansary also describes the deeply conservative process whereby institutionalized Islam produced further recognized scholars. I won’t recapitulate his account of this, but it is process that is not unique to Islam or to the institution of the law, though it is especially prevalent in law. Some time ago in Exaptation of the Law I made the claim that law has an intrinsic bias in favor of the past.

In that post I wrote:

If we think of the common law tradition, in which there is no constitutional basis but only a history of case law, it is obvious that precedent plays a central role. A ruling in the past establishes a convention that is followed in later rulings preserves the past into the present. And we may think of the establishment of a constitution or formal statutes as a “re-setting” of precedent. Laws and constitutions are not written in a vacuum, and the legal history that precedes such an effort must loom large in the minds of those so occupied.

Since it is law that gives shape to the nation-state based upon the presumption of the territorial principle in law, this bias in favor of the past that is built into the law makes itself felt today, in the Age of Nation-States, even more vividly than before, in the ages of kingdoms and empires when these institutions of law initially emerged.

In all cultures, the methods of training scholars inculcates the most retrograde and non-progressive ideas into eager minds.

It almost certainly the case — again, not only in Islam, but in most civilizations — that the conservative process of producing an intellectual elite (what Marxists would call the mouthpieces of the ideological superstructure) and the equally conservative institution of the law, which provides the detailed framework in which the transactions of the civilization are carried out, have skewed our conception of the world, so that we see it as a lot less novel and a lot less interesting place than it is in fact. These conservative institutions of all societies have so deeply penetrated into our minds that it has produced a metaphysical outlook that is not necessarily representative of the actual world. As Ecclesiastes prophesied: “there is no new thing under the sun.”

Ecclesiates: The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

As against Ecclesiastes, and with Heraclitus, who said that one cannot step twice in the same river for fresh waters are ever flowing, we hold that all things under the sun are new. The world is a complex and changing place. It is constituted more through accident than anything else, and the continual churning of individual lives, as well as of whole species and genera, and all the natural systems of the world upon which the more complex organisms base their lives, makes our environment and the various creatures that populate it at all times new. The world is frayed and torn round the edges, but at the center where new life wells up it is young and tender and evergreen. The world is perpetually unfinished and remaking itself.

Heraclitus: You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in.

It could be argued that the changing, churning world always and continuously renews itself, so that everything that happens is unprecedented. As the world ages and grows changes, less and less of the old survives, and it is replaced by the new. It is only a perversion of our perception that leads to the belief that the parallel growth of a body of legal and political precedent, all of which addresses the past and situations from the past, can provide a complete guide to life. This is not a process of filling in ever-narrower gaps, crowding out the possibility of novel thinking. Or, rather, it is only this in our imagination, shaped and indeed misshaped by the institutions that are perpetuated by limiting our imagination to what has gone before.

The unfinished world, such as it is, demands that we re-think our lives every step of the way, that we re-interpret the world with every changed condition, and that we recognize that each new day that dawns constitutes a changed condition.

We have attempted above, however awkwardly, to draw a distinction between a common conception of the world becoming more rigid, inflexible, and closed as mature institutions dominate progressively greater areas of life, and the world becoming more unpredictable, changeable, and open as novel developments open new possibilities to us. I am not denying that the mature institutions of contemporary civilization do indeed conspire to confine us within ossified categories, but exclusively interpreting the world in this way does an injustice to the world.

This is an issue of paramount importance, and deserves a more careful treatment. Whether one conceives of the world as finite, closed, bounded, finished, and completed on the one hand, or as infinite, open, unbounded, unfinished, and incomplete on the other hand, is one of those frighteningly clear points where one’s Weltanschauung — and not merely any aspect of one’s world-picture, but one’s intellectual world-picture, one’s ontological orientation, one’s personal metaphysic — comes into direct if not poignant contact with life. How one acts, and how one understands that action — with hope or fear, optimism or fatalism — will depend crucially on one’s conception of the world: what it is, how it is, and whether there is any “why” behind it.

This image is from Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Universe_bounded_unbounded_finite_infinite_1.jpg#filehistory)

Traditional institutions that are as old as civilization itself — law, economic organization, political hierarchy, privilege and subordination, hold before our eyes the image of a world that, if not eternal, is as close to eternal as anything sublunary can be. Even the sciences constructed to study these institutions — the social sciences — while often critical nevertheless end up recapitulating and regurgitating the society that they study, whatever shortcomings are found in it. It is this sort of attitude that must have inspired Marx to write in the last of his Theses of Feuerbach (which also appears on his tombstone), “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

What shows us a very different world, a transient world in which all things solid melt into air, and what ought to excite us, are those institutions that have emerged since the advent of modernity: modern science, modern industry, modernism in the arts, the city as megalopolis, and all the things that are condemned by moralists and self-appointed defenders of the old order.

Hermann Weyl

As Hermann Weyl formulated it in his Yale lectures of 1932 subsequently published as The Open World:

Modern science, in so far as I am familiar with it through my own scientific work, mathematics and physics make the world appear more and more as an open one, as a world not closed but pointing beyond itself.

Weyl was not the only one inspired by contemporary science to imagine a world no longer subject to the dead weight of tradition. Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest logicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, turned his later career to expressing his skepticism about traditional society that he had earlier expressed regarding traditional logic. Russell was an iconic iconoclast and was often unsparing in his attacks on traditional institutions.

Bertrand Russell lecturing at University of California Los Angeles in 1939; Russell was one of the great iconoclasts of recent philosophy, and he often expressed his iconoclasm in compelling prose.

Not precisely describing an open world, but definitely a modern and non-classical world view (perhaps we could call it a quantum world view), Russell, in one of my favorite passages from his writings painted this picture of the world for us:

Academic philosophers, ever since the time of Parmenides, have believed that the world is a unity. This view has been taken over from them by clergymen and journalists, and its acceptance has been considered the touchstone of wisdom. The most fundamental of my intellectual beliefs is that this is rubbish. I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love. Indeed, there is little but prejudice and habit to be said for the view that there is a world at all.

Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook, Part One, Chapter IV. Scientific Metaphysics

While I am ready to countenance “the view that there is a world at all” (though with the caveat, as I wrote in my Variations on the Theme of Life, that the world is a metaphor for a concept that cannot be made literal), of which Russell here appears skeptical, on the whole I enthusiastically approve and applaud the world-picture that Russell draws in this passage.

In this semi-popular work by Russell he criticizes the idea of the unity of the world in clever and immediately comprehensible terms, but unlike much that Russell wrote for a popular audience this radical criticism of the unity of the world was also something that he developed in his technical philosophical writings. There is one particular passage in his lecture “On Scientific Method in Philosophy” that always strikes me as incredible each time I read it, though it is not widely quoted:

The philosophy which I wish to advocate may be called logical atomism or absolute pluralism, because, while maintaining that there are many things, it denies that there is a whole composed of those things.

The whole composed of logical atoms would presumably be the world, hence Russell’s skepticism about the world mentioned above. Russell’s “logical atomism” went on to enjoy a stellar career within philosophy, spawning one of the great movements of twentieth century thought. Unfortunately, the idea of absolute pluralism got lost in the logical shuffle that led to what we may call orthodox analytical philosophy. If Russell’s technical work in the philosophy of logic and mathematics had come to be called absolute pluralism instead of his other moniker, logical atomism, the history of twentieth century though might have been different.

One of the classics of intellectual history of the twentieth century is Alexander Koyre’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, which characterizes the emergence of modernity in history as precisely the opening up of the closed conception of the world that dominated ancient and medieval thought into the infinite universe of modern science.

Alexander Koyre

Instead of imagining the world as described in the passage I quoted yesterday from Tamim Ansary — “…over the centuries, even those cracks [in established precedent] grew narrower, because once an eminently qualified scholar weighed in on some subject his pronouncements also joined the canon. ” — in which novelty is being squeezed out and the scope of human action narrowed to insignificance, we ought to make an effort to imagine the world as opening up ever greater vistas, so that history shows us a widening human future that only gets larger the closer we approach it.

Ernst Friedrich Ferdinand Zermelo

Even if one conceives of the world as an open world — and according to Koyre, most Westerners since the renaissance so conceive of it — that does not settle all questions and leave us all in agreement. The world, open by consensus, remains a complex and mysterious place, and it will still be variously conceived by different persons. Weyl, for example, as a constructivist, conceives of the infinitude of the world differently than someone like Ernst Zermelo, who was an unabashed advocate of the actual infinite. Zermelo wrote:

Purely “finitistic” mathematics in which, as a matter of fact, nothing has been left to be proved because everything could be verified already by a finite model, would no longer be mathematics in the true sense. Rather, a true mathematics is genuinely infinitistic and based on the assumption of infinite domains; it can directly be called the “logic of the infinite.”

The open and infinite world of Zermelo is distinct from the open and infinite world of Weyl. Thus even if we can agree with Weyl’s elevated statement near the end of his lectures that, “…mind is freedom within the limitations of existence; it is open toward the infinite” (and I do agree), the infinite recognized by Weyl is not necessarily the infinite we recognize, and therefore the quality of freedom is distinct as well. Again, this is important, though it sounds like mere scholasticism to point out the importance of something that will be dismissed by most as overly-subtle and without human interest or personal relevance.

Zermelo built upon the work of Georg Cantor, who was one of the great intellectual revolutionaries of all time.

I find Zermelo’s uncompromising defense of infinitistic domains and infinitistic reasoning to be refreshing. Cantor, of course, preceded Zermelo and made Zermelo possible, but it is interesting to notice the analogy between the response of the scientific establishment to Darwin and Cantor, both of whom put forward a radical and simple idea and changed history. In both cases, after the initial shock wore off, the research program initiated by each took off and rapidly bore fruit, but not long after Darwin many distanced themselves from the mechanism of natural selection, while after Cantor many distanced themselves from Cantor’s realism and his more imaginative use of infinitistic methods.

Darwin, like Cantor, was an intellectual revolutionary because he formulated an idea that changed all subsequent thought and opened up new domains of inquiry.

Radical innovations like those of Cantor and Darwin made the mind of the mind immeasurably larger than they were before. The world of man is expanding, and it is expanding at a faster rate than ever before in history.

We know now that the universe is not only expanding, but that its expansion is accelerating: the world is getting bigger faster.

It was not until the twentieth century that Hubble (whose name has now become synonymous with the orbiting telescope named after him) proved the existence of galaxies outside the Milky Way. Up until that time, the world was quite small. Now we know better. Subsequent discoveries in astronomy have forced us to repeatedly expand our conception of the world. And only at the end of the twentieth century did we learn that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. From the first formulation of the big bang theory, that assumption had been that the expansion of the universe was slowing down. Now we know that is not the case. There is not yet any satisfactory explanation for this. We have more than ever to learn, and more than ever before to explain.

Edwin Hubble at the 48 inch Schmidt Telescope, Palomar Observatory, 1949.

The world is more unfinished than ever.

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