A brief history of Chaos: from ancient Greece to Postmodern. Part 1

The chaos factor in the Special Military Operation

The most attentive participants in the Ukrainian front note the peculiar nature of this war: the chaos factor has increased enormously. This applies to all sides of the SMO, both to the enemy's actions and strategies and to our command, to the dramatically increased role of technology (drones and aircraft of all kinds) and to the intense online information support, where it is almost impossible to distinguish the fictitious from the real. This is a war of chaos. It is time to revisit this fundamental concept.

Chaos according to the Greeks

If the word χάος is Greek, its meaning must be originally Greek, linked to semantics and myth, and thus to philosophy.

The very root of the word 'chaos' is 'gaping', 'yawning', i.e. an empty place located between two poles, most often between Heaven and Earth. Sometimes (in Hesiod) between Earth and Tartarus, i.e. the area below Hell (Hades).

Between Heaven and Earth is air, so in some later systems of natural philosophy chaos is identified with air.

In this sense, chaos represents the unstructured territory of the relationship between ontological and further cosmogonic polarities. It is in the place of chaos that order appears (the original meaning of the word κόσμος is beauty, harmony, order). Order is a structured relationship between polarities.

The erotic-psychic cosmos

In myth, Eros and/or Psyche appear (become, arise) in the territory previously occupied by chaos. Eros is the child of plenitude (Porus, sky) and poverty (Phenia, earth) in Plato's Pyron. Eros unites opposites and separates them. Similarly, Psyche, the soul, stands between the mind, the spirit, on the one hand, and the body, matter, on the other. They arrive at the place where chaos previously reigned, which disappears, recedes, vanishes, pierced by the rays of the new structure. It is the structure of an erotic - psychic! - order.

Chaos is thus the antithesis of love and the soul. Where there is no love, chaos reigns, but at the same time, it is precisely in the place of chaos - in the very zone of being - that the cosmos is born. There is thus a semantic contradiction and a topological affinity between chaos and its antipodes: order, eros, the soul. They occupy the same place, the middle place. Daria has called this area the 'metaphysical frontier' and has thematised it in different horizons in her recent writings and speeches. Between the one and the other there is a 'grey zone' in which to search for the roots of any structure. This is what Nietzsche meant, namely that 'only he who brings chaos into his soul is able to give birth to a dancing star'. The star in Plato, and subsequently in many others, is the most contrasting symbol of the human soul.

Chaos in Ovid

The second meaning, which can already be guessed from the Greeks, but which is not described by them too rigorously, is found in Ovid. In the Metaphors he defines chaos in the following terms: a rough and undivided mass (rudis indigestaque moles) composed of seeds of things badly combined and at war with each other (non bene iunctarum discordia semina rerum), which has no other property than inert gravity (nec quicquam nisi pondus iners). This definition is much closer to Plato's χόρα, 'receptacle of becoming', than to original chaos, and resonates with the notion of matter. It is the mixing of elements that is emphasised in this chaotic matter. This too - the antithesis of order and harmony, hence Ovid's discord - is enmity, which harks back to Empedocles and his cycles of love (φιλότης)/war, enmity (νεῖκος). Chaos as enmity is again opposed to love, φιλία; but here the emphasis is not on emptiness, but on ultimate but meaningless and unorganised fullness, hence Ovid's 'inert gravity'.

The Greek and Greco-Roman meanings contrast chaos with order in equal measure, but do so differently.  Initially (for the early Greeks) it is rather a void as light as air, whose sinister character is revealed in the gaping mouth of an attacking lion or in the contemplation of a bottomless abyss. In Roman Hellenism, the property of heaviness and mixture comes to the fore. Instead of air, it is water or even boiling black and red volcanic lava.

Chaos at the origins of cosmogony

The cosmogony and sometimes theogony of Greco-Roman religion begin with this instance, with chaos. God creates order out of chaos. Chaos is primordial, but God is more primordial, constructing the universe out of self and non-self. After all, if God is an eternal affirmation, one can also have an eternal negation. The relationship between the two can be of two types: chaos or order. The sequence can be one or the other: if there is chaos now, there will be order in the future. If there is order now, it will probably deteriorate in the future and the world will descend into chaos, and then God will restore order and so on in a period; hence the theory of cosmic cycles, clearly stated in Plato's 'Politics', but more fully developed in Hinduism and Buddhism; hence Empedocles' continuous alternation of epochs of war/love.

In Hesiod, cosmogony begins with chaos. In Terakides with order (Zas, Zeus). Time can be counted from morning, like the Iranians, or from evening, like the Semites. Chaos does not oppose god, it opposes God's world.

As long as there is no order, the Earth does not know it is the Earth. Because no distance has been established. And so it merges with chaos. Earth becomes Earth when Heaven asks her to marry him and gives her a wedding veil. It is the cosmos, the decoration behind which chaos hides. So it is for Ferekid - in his fascinating patriarchal philosophical myth.

Chaos disappears in Christianity - but tohu va bohu

In Christianity, chaos disappears. Christianity knows only one God and his creation, that is order, peace. Once "the earth was sightless and empty, and darkness over the abyss"[1] (תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל-פְּנֵ֣י תְהֹ֑ום ). The Hebrew word tohu means precisely emptiness, absence, and fits well with the Greek concept of chaos. Already in this sentence, with which the first section of the Old Testament begins, tohu is mentioned twice, something that is completely lost in the translation - the first time it is rendered "without sight", and the second time in the plural (עַל-פְּנֵ֣י תְהֹ֑ום) in the combination "above the abyss", literally "above the face of tohu"). The word bohu (בֹ֔הוּ) in the combination tohu va bohu (תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ) is no longer used in the Bible (except Isaiah 34:11), which simply quotes the expression from the beginning of Genesis. Thus, literally, "the earth was chaos and ? and darkness (hsd) on the face of chaos (or on the face of chaos)". In the Greek sense, one could say that 'the earth was hidden by chaos', which prevented it from seeing (Heaven, created in the first line of Genesis) that the earth was the earth.

Here God clearly creates not from chaos, but from nothingness. And he simultaneously creates a clear spirit (Heaven) and a dark flesh (the Earth). Chaos is what stands between them, what hides their true relationship.

Man is in the place of the cosmos. Do not slip into the abyss

The rest of the creation process already transforms chaos into cosmos. The Spirit of God, hovering over the waters, builds order in place of disorder. This is how luminaries, plants, animals, people and fish appear; however, this cosmogonic act was not of great interest to the Jews (unlike the Greeks), their religion dealt with an already created world (the cosmos), which needed to build a proper relationship with God the Creator through man. Man was in the place of chaos. He could slip into the abyss of Abbadon [2] or ascend to heaven, like Elijah. In the Book of Job (28:22), Abaddon - like the earth, Chthonia, in Erekid - is mentioned in the context of the veil. The veil is the cosmos. Man is the world, but it is based on chaos. This is true, but Jewish and later Christian theology hardly ever refers to chaos. Here everything is personified and even the human enemy, the devil, is not a moulded element, but the distinct personality of a fallen angel. In the Christian era, chaos retreats to the periphery, following Judaism in many ways, especially later Judaism.

Gas: the chaos of the Dutch alchemists

There was a certain interest in chaos during the Renaissance, especially among alchemists. Thus the word 'gas' comes from the Dutch alchemist Vanee Helmont, who understood it as the 'gaseous state of matter' and, in Dutch, as 'chaos'. In this more prosaic guise, chaos-gas finds a place in modern chemistry and physics, but has little to do with the grandiose cosmogonic and even ontological conception of ancient metaphysics.

Chaos: the unrecognised essence of materialism

A new wave of fascination with chaos is already present in the 20th century. With the increasing focus on pre-Christian, especially Greco-Roman, culture, many ancient theories and concepts have been rediscovered. Among these was the complex notion of chaos, which offered a cosmogonic thought movement very different from the creationist narrative of Christianity, on whose reversal modern materialist science is based. We have seen how close the first interpretation of chaos was to matter, and it is even strange that materialists have long been reluctant to see it, despite the fact that the parallels between ideas about matter and chaos are strikingly consonant and similar. However, despite the fascination with chaos, no comprehensive conclusions have been drawn on this interpretation of materialism, and the study of chaos has been on the periphery of philosophy.

Unpredictability

In physics, chaos theory began to take shape in the second half of the 20th century among those scientists who were primarily concerned with non-equilibrium states, non-linear processes, non-integrable equations and divergent series. During this period, the physical and mathematical sciences distinguished a whole vast field that did not lend itself to classical models of calculation. This can be generically called 'unpredictability'. An example of such unpredictability is bifurcation: a state of a process (e.g. the motion of a particle) that, with the same degree of probability at a given time, can flow in either one direction or in a completely different direction. If classical science had explained such a situation by an insufficient understanding of the process or knowledge of the total parameters of the system's functioning, the concept of bifurcation would have suggested considering such a situation as a scientific fact and moving on to new formalisations and methods of calculation, which would initially allow for such situations and generally rely on them exactly. This was resolved either through reference to probabilistic calculus, modal logic, the construction of a 10-dimensional model of the sheet-world (in superstring theory), the inclusion of an irreversible time vector within a physical process (rather than as absolute Newtonian time or even including time in Einstein's four-dimensional system). The whole area is what, in modern physics, can be called 'chaos'. In this case, 'chaos' does not refer to systems that cannot be calculated in any way and in which no model exists. Chaos can be calculated, influenced, explained and modelled, like all other physical processes, but only with the help of more complex mathematical constructions, operations and special methods.

Subduing chaos without building order

We can define the entire field of research into chaotic processes (as understood by contemporary physicists) as the quest for the mastery of chaos. It is important to emphasise that it is not a matter of constructing a cosmos out of chaos. It is rather the opposite: the construction of chaos from the remains, from the ruins of space. Chaos was not to be eradicated, but grasped and partially deepened. To control and moderate, not to conquer; and since the level of chaos was far from advanced everywhere, chaos also had to be artificially induced, pushing a decaying rationalistic order towards it. Thus, the study of chaos acquired a kind of moral dimension: the transition to chaotic systems and the art of their management was perceived as a sign of progress - scientific, technical and, later, social, cultural and political.

The new democracy as social chaos

From fundamental physics and the philosophy of myth, theories of chaos were now gradually moving to the socio-political level. Whereas classical democracy assumed a hierarchical system based exclusively on majority decisions, the new democracy sought to delegate as much power as possible to individuals. This inevitably leads to a chaotic society and changes the criteria for political progress. Instead of ordering it, progressives seek new forms of control - and these new forms are increasingly moving away from classical hierarchies and taxonomies and are gradually converging with the paradigms of the new physics with its priority given to the study of the sphere of chaos.

Postmodernity: chaos attacks

In culture, representatives of postmodernism and critical realism (r.o.o.) have embraced this and enthusiastically begun to apply physical theories to society. In this case, there was a shift from the quantum model, not projected onto society, to synergy and chaos theory. Society henceforth did not have to create any normative hierarchical system, switching to a network principle - to the concept of the rhizome (Deleuze/Gvattari). The model consisted of situations in which the mentally ill took power over clinic doctors and built their own systems of liberation. In this, progressives saw the ideal of an 'open society', generally free of strict rules and laws, changing its attitudes according to purely random impulses. Bifurcation would become a typical situation and the general unpredictability of the schizomic masses would be incorporated into complex non-linear theories. Such masses could be controlled, but not directly, rather indirectly, by moderating their apparently spontaneous, but in reality strictly predetermined thoughts, desires and impulses. Democracy was now synonymous with chaos. The masses were not just choosing order, they were overthrowing it, leading the cause to total disorder.

Pacifism and the internalisation of chaos

We thus come to the link between chaos and war. Progressives traditionally reject war, insisting on the historically dubious thesis that 'democracies do not fight each other'. If democracy is intrinsically linked to the undermining of normativity and order, hierarchy and the cosmic organisation of society, then sooner or later history will lead democracy to pure chaos (this is exactly what Plato and Aristotle believed, convincingly demonstrating that it is logically inevitable). Thus, the abolition of states, following the pacifist notion that war is an intrinsic part of the state, should lead to universal peace (la paix universelle), since de facto and de jure the legitimate instances of war would disappear. However, states have the function of harmonising chaos and to this end they sometimes unload their destructive energies outwards, towards the enemy. Thus, war on the outside helps maintain peace on the inside.

But this is all in classical democracy - and especially in realist theories. The new democracy rejects the practice of externalising the dark side of man in the context of national mobilisation. More responsible philosophers (such as Ulrich Beck, for example) propose instead to internalise the enemy, to put the Other inside the self. This is actually an appeal to social schizophrenia (in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari), to a splitting of consciousness. If democracy becomes chaos, the normative citizen of this democracy becomes a chaotic individual. It is not moving towards a new cosmos; on the contrary, it is expelling the remnants of the cosmos, taxonomies and order - including gender, family, rationality, species, etc. - out of itself permanently. - out of itself permanently. He becomes a bearer of chaos, but - unlike Nietzsche's formula - progressives taboo the act of giving birth to a 'dancing star' - unless it is a strip bar, Hollywood or Broadway. The schizophrenic citizen should not build a new cosmos on any pretext: that is not why the old one was so hard won. The democracy of chaos is post-order, post-cosmos. By destroying the old, one proposes not to build something new, but to sink into the pleasure of decadence, to succumb to the allure of ruins, ruins, fragments and shards. Here, at the lower levels of degeneration and degradation, new horizons of metamorphosis and transformation open up. Since there is no longer a hierarchy between baseness and heroism, pleasure and pain, intelligence and idiocy, what counts is the flow itself, the being in it, the state of connection to the network, to the rhizome. Here everything is side by side and infinitely far away at the same time.

Schizophrenia

In doing so, the war does not disappear, but is placed within the individual. The chaotic individual makes war with himself, exacerbates the split. Etymologically, schizophrenia means 'dissection', 'cutting', 'dismemberment' of consciousness. The schizophrenic, although outwardly peaceful, lives in a state of violent rupture. He allows war to enter. This is how Thomas Hobbes' hypothesis about the 'natural state' of humanity, described by this author as chaos and war of all against all, is justified in a new twist. Only it is not an initial 'natural' state, but a subsequent one, which does not precede the construction of hierarchical societies and states, but follows their collapse. We have seen that chaos is the opposite of the cosmos, just as enmity is the opposite of love in Empedocles. We have also seen that eros and chaos were alternatives to the topos of the great middle way. Thus: chaos is war, but not all war, because even the creation of order is war, violence, taming the elements and putting them in order; chaos is a special war, a total war, which penetrates deeply, it is a schizoid war, which captures the whole person in its rhizomatic web.

Total war as chaos war

This schizophrenic total war has no clearly defined territory. A knightly tournament was only possible after the space had been delimited. Classical wars had theatres of war and battlefields. Beyond these boundaries was space. Chaos was assigned strictly designated peace zones. The modern war of chaotic democracy knows no boundaries. It is waged everywhere through computer networks, drones, and the mental states of bloggers that let the underlying division shine through.

Modern warfare is a war of chaos by definition. This is where the concept of discord, 'enmity', which we find in Ovid and which is inherent in some rather ancient interpretations of chaos, comes in. Chaos is precisely based on enmity - and not the enmity of some against others, but of all against all, and the purpose of the war of chaos is not peace or a new order, but to deepen enmity down to the last layers of the human personality. Such a war seeks to deprive man of his connection to the cosmos and, in so doing, deprive him of the creative power to create a new cosmos, the birth of a new star.

This is the democratic nature of war. It is waged not so much by states as by hysterically divided individuals. Everything is distorted here: strategy, tactics, the relationship between technique and man, speed, gesture, action, order, discipline, etc. All this has already been systematised in the network-centric theory of war. Since the early 1990s, the US military leadership has aimed to implement chaos theory in the art of war. In 30 years, this process has already gone through many phases.

The war in Ukraine brought with it precisely this experience: the direct experience of confronting chaos.

[1] Genesis 1:2.
[2] The connection between the Avaddon abyss, located below Hell, the sheol (as an analogue of Tartarus in the Greeks) and the slip is perfectly demonstrated in the works of E. A. Avdeenko. Cf. Avdeyenko E. A. Psalms: a biblical worldview. Moscow: Classis, 2016.

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini