A family tree with roots in East and West - complex thought

From Lao-tzu to Hegel, thinkers from different cultural horizons point the way to complex thought

Complex thought has a long history, which can be traced in both Western and Chinese philosophies.

From Heraclitus to Lao-tzu

Some philosophers of Western Antiquity argued that reality is complex but thought is simple, and that if people did not realize this, the essence of reality would escape them altogether. For instance, the properties of being, which are contradictory and incompatible according to the categorizations of human thought, may be in harmony and simultaneous in real life. This was the key idea of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (535-480 B.c.), who taught people "to listen to nature" in order to find its "invisible harmony". "Union consists of bringing together and tending apart, agreement and disagreement; the One comes out of all things and all things out of the one."

According to Heraclitus, the underlying connection of opposites - the transformation of a thing into its opposite - is the principle of the logos, the universal formula in accordance with which all natural events occur. But this concept is difficult to grasp owing to the fixed, one-sided nature of human intelligence.

Similar ideas appeared at a very early stage in Chinese philosophy. In the I Ching ("Classic of Changes") dating from the eleventh-twelfth centuries B.C., yin and yang constitute the two opposite poles of a single reality, its fundamental duality. In its original sense, yang meant the brightness of the sun or a sun-bathed slope, while yin meant lack of brightness, or a shady slope. Later, all phenomena came to be classified in terms of yang and yin and to be regarded as comprising two opposing aspects. As efficient causes, yin and yang co-operate to produce the universe and all its constituent parts and to regulate their movement. As the I Ching puts it, "Yang is the principle that makes things commence, while yin is that which completes them".

The ancient Chinese believed that the cosmos is governed by a bipolar principle and cannot be reduced to a single ultimate principle. Thought is governed by the proposition that opposites are exclusive and incompatible, but real life is governed by the complementarity of opposites. In the Tao-te Ching (the "Classic of the Way of Power"), Lao-tzu (fourth century B.C.) explains that "the movement of tao," which is at the origin of the universe and causes order to reign within it, is "to act in the opposite direction".

The tao encourages what is underdeveloped and represses what is overdeveloped. This leads to the implacable law whereby everything that has developed to its extreme turns into its opposite. "People who have grown robust, age", for example. This law maintains the harmony of the world as an organic whole, but it often goes against the will and the spontaneous intelligence of human beings. By claiming that the successful completion of an enterprise means starting out from its opposite, Lao-tzu brings to light a multitude of paradoxical phenomena and criticizes the linear nature of human understanding.

Protagoras and Chuang-tzu

Philosophical relativism, which in the West was introduced by the Greek sophist Protagoras (485-441 B.C.), takes account of the multiplicity of approaches which are the basis of knowledge. While "matter" is the common source of human sensations, the images human beings have of matter are determined by their senses, which change with age and the constitution of their bodies, so that each of us sees matter in a different way. However, no one representation of the true physiognomy of matter is superior to any other. There are as many yardsticks for measuring things as there are people to measure them.

Plutarch tells the story of an athlete who died of a wound inflicted by a javelin during a sporting contest. After the accident, the Athenian statesman Pericles and Protagoras spent a whole day discussing who or what was responsible for it, the javelin, the javelin thrower or the organizers of the event. The philosopher maintained that it was necessary to distinguish several different viewpoints: for a doctor, the javelin was the direct cause of death; for a judge, the javelin-thrower was responsible; from the viewpoint of a magistrate, the organizers of the contest should be charged.

In proposing a many-sided version of the truth, Protagoras is advocating that diversity and contradiction should be tolerated and even legitimized in the process of knowledge. He points to the unsimplifiable, irreducible dimension of thought.

These ideas also have an equivalent in Chinese thought. In the view of Chuang-tzu (c. 369-268 B.C.), people apprehend different aspects of the same object, depending on their standpoint. This observation prompted him to relativize the truth. "The male monkey seeks the female," he wrote. "The stag seeks the hind. Moaqiang and Liji are beautiful creatures whom all men adore, but when they approach, fish dive deep into the water and birds fly quickly away. Who knows true beauty?" Human knowledge is conditioned and is therefore uncertain.

Kant and Hegel

In modern times, philosophers began to realize that the human mind is capable of both simple thought, which abides by the rules of formal logic, and complex thought, which goes beyond those rules and criticizes, corrects and improves simple thought. The mind has the power to criticize itself and improve itself. It is capable of knowing the complexity of reality, and also of knowing itself.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) held the view that understanding is concerned with knowing the relative (or the finite) and reason with knowing the absolute (or the infinite). However, the distinction he makes between these two cognitive faculties prevents him from arriving at a true paradigm of complexity. G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) combined the two by making a distinction between three levels in the human mind: understanding, which is responsible for analytical knowledge and separates concepts; negative or dialectic reason, which is concerned with synthetic knowledge and unites all concepts by removing the difference that divides them; and positive reason, which unites analytical and synthetic knowledge and grasps that all concepts are distinctive yet linked, and certain by virtue of their mobility. These three cognitive levels are also essential and are organically welded into a single process. We thus have a perfect process, capable of self-perfection.

In Hegel's view, the movement of the mind follows an ascending loop. It emerges from its usual form of operation (understanding) in order to reveal the limits of that form and remedy its failing, and then returns with all the results of its criticism and correction (dialectic) to its usual form of operation, but at a higher level.

The active nature of the mind brings it closer to the self-organizing being which, by virtue of its dynamism, resists natural tendencies towards chaos and degradation. The paradigm of complexity thus unveils the essential way in which our mind functions, while providing us with the means of understanding the workings of reality, of the self-organizing and self-producing being.

Fang Yizhi

A century and a half before Hegel, the Chinese philosopher Fang Yizhi (1611-1671) had formulated very similar ideas. Deeply influenced by the dialectic arising from Chinese philosophical tradition and Indian Buddhism, Fang Yizhi argued that two fundamental methods of knowledge existed simultaneously: the "investigation of qualities" (identifying the specific determinants of different things) and the "embracing of the essence" (finding the common cause that determines different things).

According to Fang Yizhi, only through the fusion of these two methods (analytic and synthetic) is it possible to know dynamic reality. The essence of the real is to be found in self-determination and self-creation. He takes the example of the tree. The root, which is at the origin of the tree, comes from the tree has flowered, the seed is no longer its substance (ti) but its mode of operation (yong). The functioning of a thing has a causality that is not linear but recursive.

Fang Yizhi's methodology is based on the theory of the threefold truth which he took from Buddhism. He believed in the paramount need to affirm the existence of two opposing extremes (Heaven and Earth, for example) and of all the distinctive things of the world of phenomena. The next step is to deny the existence of all this in order to grasp the unitary value of the noumenal world as nothingness. The synthesis of these two forms of knowledge leads to complete and perfect knowledge. In other words, Fang Yizhi first of all observes the principle of non-contradiction and then subjects it to the principle of the unity of opposites, before going on to comply with both principles at the same time, each to its relevant degree. Here once again are Hegel's three cognitive levels: understanding, dialectical reasoning and positive reasoning.

YI-ZHUANG CHEN, of the People's Republic of China, is engaged on research into comparative Sino-Occidental Philosophy at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Montreal (Canada).

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