“third places” of this reconstruction are emerging everywhere. The levers of their effectiveness are known. It is up to us to activate them.
I.1. Tricky words relating to the transformation of the living world
Deconstruction, alteration, transformation and conservation are words often used to try to express what is transformed in the living world. The terms “alteration” and “conservation” are delicate. Alteration indicates a change in nature without there necessarily being “destruction”, which corresponds to another category, as mentioned in the work of Aristotle, for example.
Conservation poses another problem: the principles of conservation in physics assume that something precise is preserved, but for theoretical reasons, the living world never remains itself identical, and does not maintain anything without change. Conservation biology is interesting here. Historically, it was at first to conserve species, whereas today, it is rather to conserve biodiversity and the processes that produce it “globally”.
For example, biologists are worried in situations where the evolutionary process is disrupted, even if the populations concerned are not collapsing (for the moment). Would it perhaps be more apt to speak of the forces of destruction and the forces that oppose it (life as being that which opposes death)?
The philosopher Bertrand Vergely tackles somewhat similar subjects in La destruction du réel (Vergely 2018). He inspired me. He speaks of destruction and thereby introduces a form of irreversibility. I prefer to speak of deconstruction because deconstruction is part of the evolutionary dynamic of living things, and is not systematically bad news. However, this word is also unsatisfactory; deconstruction implies something methodical, a deconstruction that is piece by piece and associated with the idea of a reconstruction, possibly the same after repair, for example. More exact words would be demolition/construction. The living world is a huge DIY exercise of an endless series of partial or total demolitions and ongoing constructions, also partial or total. In fact, the two forces present in the living world, because they alone give it its intelligibility, are those of impermanence and permanence; we could also say the force of transformation compared to forces that oppose it, or even the force of alteration in relation to forces that oppose it; all altering the permanence of forms. With all the reservations expressed above, for the sake of simplification, we will keep the term conservation to designate the forces that oppose transformation or demolition.
The second reason these words are tricky is that they embed cultural value judgments. Innovation is considered rather positive in the contemporary world. Demolition is today rather negative although often it gives way to the new, the innovative. Deconstruction is more neutral; alteration is perceived more negatively. With these remarks in mind, we will use in the rest of the text the following dualities: deconstruction versus construction, transformation versus conservation, alteration versus conservation or innovation versus conservation. We will, however, remember that, each time, there is an overarching philosophical concept: impermanence versus permanence, consubstantial with the intelligibility of all living reality.
I.2. Wear, aging, disappearance: the inescapable fate of matter?
A field of forces for alteration from the depths of matter, then from the living world as a complex system, extends across the biosphere on every scale, from the nanometric level to the macroscopic: it is entropy. This is a system, in the sense of physical and biological systems. The term system has a broader meaning in philosophy, compatible with a real consideration of historicity (this thought has been eliminated from Santa Fe, but still exists at the Institute of Complex Systems). The term entropy, on the other hand, was introduced in 1865 by Rudolf Clausius. It characterizes the degree of disorganization or unpredictability of the information content of a system. It acts in depth, towards an increasing disorder of matter. The increase in entropy is due to the fact that a system always goes from a less probable situation to a more probable situation, and therefore towards the loss of the specifics of the earlier configuration. We can say that this often corresponds, intuitively, to a disorganization (which is not a physical concept) or to the loss of macroscopic patterns. However, this is not always the case. For those who want to look further into this complex and paradoxical concept of entropy, see the Appendix.
This field of alteration forces is therefore seen, for the living world, to oppose a counter-field of conservation forces which is anti-chaotic, adaptive and beneficial. This field of conservation forces is thus opposed everywhere and on every scale to the forces of alteration. The combination of the two produces a fruitful and wonderful co-fertilization, that of the appearance of ever more complex living things. Not all living things become more complex. Bacteria are doing well and are still relatively simple living things.
The overall complexity is always greater, always more beautiful and orderly in its interactions, always more resilient and diverse; it is called Life. According to Bailly–Longo–Montévil (Longo and Montévil 2012), this axis of increasing global complexity, very present in Teilhard de Chardin’s (1956) work, is due to an asymmetry in the random space of changes in complexity owing to the existence of a wall of minimum complexity allowing survival. The asymmetry induced by this wall results in a constant growth of the average level of complexity due to the fact that more and more complex living things always appear, whereas the minimum is limited. In other words, the axis of increasing complexification is infinite, while that of increasing simplification has a minimum. Taken as a whole, the level of average or global complexity is constantly increasing.
However, this prodigious survival of the living world as a global system does not imply the conservation of each of its localities. Place can designate a geographical, ecological place, as well as a place in the organized space of living species, or even a particular organism. Each locality (species, organism, ecosystem) must adapt or disappear. It must never exceed the intrinsic limit of any dynamic and dissipative energy system, that of adapting slower than its environment is transformed. It is a transformation due to the combined effect of the given locality and all those that interact with it. So, the question becomes: can the human locality be preserved, and be preserved by a conservation mechanism? This is a very daunting question. It can be formulated differently by taking up the idea of Bernard Stiegler (2018), who designates the entropic effect induced by human activity anthropia (anthropos). The question then is: will we be able to stimulate sufficient anti-anthropia to divert just in time from this fatal path? The most effective anti-anthropia, some currents of thought in radical ecology claim, would be the disappearance of humans from the biosphere, and that may be what is happening. This thesis makes little sense, from both an ecological point of view and a philosophical one. On the ecological level, there would then no longer be maintenance of anthropic and anti-anthropic processes, which in the short term would be catastrophic since all human intervention limiting the toxicity of technological devices would disappear (I am thinking of nuclear power plants, chemicals, oil wells, etc.). Philosophically, what would be the point of saving a biosphere in which there would be no one left to be aware of it?
Conversely, I believe that the metamorphosis which could be “anthropo-salutary” comes from a transition which I will describe as an endo-contributive revolution (ENC). The global paradigm shift that underpins it seems unattainable, a battle lost in advance, some say. This generates, particularly in the West, a crisis of hope and meaning in a context dominated by ecological issues. This desperation continues to grow.
Either there will be a dynamic of adaptive learning on a global scale, sufficiently powerful and rapid, or else a catharsis of hatred, a return of repressed violence, will overwhelm us. It will be fueled by the cumulative failures of States and institutions in the face of collapses of all sizes which are sure to occur in the fields of economy, ecology, health and society. It will then plunge us into revolutionary barbarity and war. This barbarity, favored by social networks guaranteeing the anonymity of exchanges and provoking a crisis in the language and ethics of argument, already shows signs of muted emergence, before, perhaps, we are able to migrate to a new alliance with nature, accompanied by a renewal of humanist and spiritual change.
