Incursions into the Future - The foreshadowing of the possible

31 August 2011

"The evolution rather looks like a sculptor tramp who walks the world and picks up a thread here, a can there, a piece of wood, and unites them in the manner permitted by their circumstances and structures, with no other reason than that it is he who can not join them.
And, so, in their wanderings, they produce forms that combine harmoniously interconnected parts, which are not the product of a project but a natural drift."  Leibniz.

The randomness, that is the unexpected opportunity, invention, improvisation and adventure, governs the becoming, the change in life of each individual as in the collective history and in humans, in the way a sculptor, rather than draw from a block of marble a figure that pre-exists already in his mind, assembles items found while wandering, the famous objets trouvés with which were created many works of avant-garde.
But this process of finding and assembling is not arbitrary, but responds to some internal laws of things, to their structures and circumstances of their discovery, and it can take place because is the becoming to join them.

Chance and necessity come together in the evolution of nature as in the work of human mind.
From this meeting comes a new creation, a “jump” in the continuity of the flow of time.
The statue that reproduces a model would be a copy of something that already exists, a déjà vu, a mirror image. The world would be immobility then. The act of collecting fragments that Chance and Necessity put together on the road of those that penetrate the exploration of things, produces dynamic forms whose complexity is given by their own formation process as composition of parts connected by harmonic relationships.

Who joins them discover or recognize their “affinity”, a mutual approach of one to the other, not by imitating a preconceived idea (a project), but rather through a natural drift, for a movement, as if it were under an internal force, from a direction already marked, by a route that would enclose them in the repetition.
In other words, by the invisible laws that manage the invention, in nature as in human skills.
George Kateb writes: “We must think of utopia as a world in which individuals and groups have the freedom, the will, strength and talent to build and rebuild their lives overcoming the shortcomings”.

George Kateb was Professor of Politics at Princeton University until 2002. He was director of the program of Political Philosophy, director of University Center for Human Values, Columbia University. He wrote some important works of political science including: Utopia and its Enemies; Political Theory: its nature and uses; Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil; The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture; Emerson and selfeliance. His field of research is the modern political theory, with particular attention to the different kind of individualism.