Владислав Педдер – Processual Pessimism. On the Nature of Cosmic Suffering and Human Nothingness (страница 8)
Therefore the idea of freedom, if it is possible at all, can only be understood as the recognition of one’s inclusion in an endless process of determination. Freedom is not the capacity to act independently of causes; it is rather an understanding of the causes that operate through us.
Fractal determinism unites self-motion, chance, necessity, and recursion into a single ontological schema in which everything – matter, consciousness, event – turns out to be different levels of the same self-generating process. There is no external observer, no position outside or above being from which one could judge it. Everything that exists is internal to being; the external is merely a shift of scale, a transition to another level of organization that likewise remains internal. Hence every difference is an internal differentiation of being with itself – a differentiation of the unified process into many local processes, each of which reflects the whole.
All that occurs is the infinite self-diffusion of being within its internal dimensions, the unfolding of potential differences into actual forms. If one regards such determinism as fatalism, it is a fatalism not of predestination by an external will or divine design but of the internal inevitability of a self-generating process. It is the fatalism of infinite self-similarity, in which every act repeats the structure of the whole, reproduces it at its own scale, yet never coincides with it completely, always adding a new difference, a new fold in the fabric of being.
This view has profound implications for the understanding of human existence. If our actions are determined not by a linear chain of causes but by a fractal chain of interactions, then the question of responsibility must be reformulated. We bear responsibility not because we could have chosen otherwise in some metaphysical sense, but because we are part of a causal network through which further trajectories of the system are realized – a system that already possesses, in its own terms, a predetermined end12. Our actions have consequences that propagate through networks of connection and affect future states. In this sense we are responsible as active participants in the process of self-organization, not as free agents standing outside causality.
Sapolsky emphasized that understanding the biological determinism of behaviour requires a revision of systems of punishment and reward. Fractal determinism extends this conclusion. If action and behaviour are properties of a multiplicity of interacting factors operating across different spatio-temporal scales, then the point of intervention must shift from the individual to the environment. We are not dealing with a “bad person” but with a person in a bad system (a bad society). This idea is taken to its ethical limit by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who argued that society bears guilt for crime not merely because it failed to prevent it, but because its indifference produced it.
Fractal determinism, therefore, is not merely an update of classical determinism in the light of contemporary science, but a rethinking of the very nature of causality. It shows that determinism is compatible with unpredictability, necessity with contingency, lawfulness with novelty. It integrates the findings of quantum mechanics, chaos theory, self-organization theory, and complex-systems theory into a single philosophical picture in which being is understood as a self-generating, self-organizing process possessing an internal necessity that manifests across all scales through self-similarity.
Cosmic Pessimism
The Birth of the Universe from Nothing
In
The material Universe rarely becomes the explicit subject of contemporary pessimism. And when it does, such works usually leave no real trace of the Universe or cosmology. Of course, the Universe is studied by science, but science is not concerned with the character of the Universe as a place or with its relation to life – that is not its task. And yet it is science that inadvertently pushes philosophy toward transformation and toward a new self-definition.
Today, the philosophy of pessimism, it seems to me, faces an urgent problem: to comprehend the nihilistic character of the Universe itself. Moreover, all the conclusions of modern physics point either to scepticism or to direct pessimism regarding the Universe as such. The Universe, like the world as a whole, is not indifferent to our existence – it is actively hostile to it.
The early pessimists of the late nineteenth century, while not speaking directly of the Cosmos, simply lacked sufficient knowledge about it. What was there to say when the expansion of the Universe was only announced in 1929? With the rise of philosophical nihilism in the twentieth century and the rapid development of the sciences, the idea of “indifference” – of the nihilistic nature of the Cosmos and the meaninglessness of life and of all living things – prevailed. At least, virtually all contemporary pessimistic works and authors repeat this mantra.
Philipp Mainländer perhaps came closest to cosmic pessimism: he distinguished in the world a tendency toward destruction and self-negation. Yet, alas, his metaphysics and the spirit of his age prevented him from thinking about the Cosmos impartially – just as Schopenhauer’s notion of the “Will” hindered Schopenhauer himself.
In the twentieth century Peter Wessel Zapffe, reflecting on the re-equipment of our reason, argued that this very re-equipment makes us especially vulnerable to an indifferent, “silent” nature. We are forced to invent defensive mechanisms for reason itself. Subsequent pessimists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – from Cioran to Ligotti, from Benatar13 to others – continue this line: the Cosmos is taciturn and indifferent.
However, there are strands of pessimism that reject the nihilistic reading of the Cosmos. Thus, in the Russian-speaking community EFILism it is asserted14:
“The Universe was not created by an intelligent Being. Rather, its arising is conditioned by the fundamental necessity of reality itself. Perhaps the state of “nothing” (the absolute absence of everything) is logically impossible. Something must always exist.
The primordial state was not a true “nothing” but a quasi-stasis. Think of it as a potentially unstable equilibrium in which events were temporarily absent, while the intrinsic properties of reality (nomological laws) already contained the potential to disturb that calm. Put simply, the Universe is not a “creation” but a breach or disruption of an original, albeit fragile, equilibrium that occurred thanks to internal, necessary laws. It is like the “division of zero by zero” – not something someone did, but something that happened because of the fundamental properties of being itself. Just as gravity simply is, so too the existence of the Universe may be equally fundamental and require no external cause. But note an important point: most of these conclusions rest on the postulate of the Universe’s indifference – on the phenomenology of human experience of that “background,” rather than on detailed cosmology or an analysis of the world’s telos.
After that “beginning” the Universe does not move toward any goal or plan. It exists and unfolds as a purposeless but strictly deterministic chaos. It is an endless process of decay, recombination, and motion of matter and forces. There is no “plan,” “purpose,” or “meaning” in this dynamics. Events simply “happen” in accordance with unchanging physical laws and inertia. Imagine billions of falling dominoes where each fall is perfectly determined by the previous one, yet the entire chain has no final aim other than simply being. Life, including consciousness, is not some special, necessary, or “desirable” part of the Universe. It is merely a temporary, local “mutant of chaos” – an immensely complex but ephemeral configuration of matter and forces.”
Here the line of thought is strictly pessimistic, and the phrase “fundamental necessity” points toward a deterministic orientation. Yet contradictions soon appear, returning us once again to natural nihilism and the supposedly indifferent orientation of the cosmos. Let us return, however, to the question: why are works devoted specifically to “cosmic pessimism” either nonexistent or given that title only in a speculative sense?15 The idea of an indifferent Universe has become so familiar, even clichéd, that no one bothers to challenge it. Attention is focused on the “indifferent” role of the cosmos, while the direction of thought itself remains oriented toward the human being and the human place in the Universe. Such works are, of course, closer and more engaging to the reader, but this does not justify their titles. There are many reasons for this: a lack of philosophical interest in the cosmos, the Wittgensteinian principle that one should remain silent about what cannot be spoken of, and so on. But one of the key “problems” behind the absence of works on cosmic pessimism – apart from the difficulty of the topic itself – is, in my view, the unexamined and erroneous assumption of the cosmos’s indifference to life, from which further premises follow.