Bringing order to chaos. A lesson from Maurizio Ferraris

Professor Maurizio Ferraris is one of the most important contemporary Italian philosophers. His fields of research are vast, but in recent years he has focused heavily on the relationship between humanity and the digital world. There is no degree of separation between humankind and technology; indeed, one cannot be imagined without the other. Humankind is structurally ‘technical’. Today in Modena (in Piazza Grande at 6 pm), as part of the Philosophy Festival, he will give a lecture entitled ‘Ordine nel caos’. It is therefore interesting to understand the starting point of this lecture. The perspective here, in fact, does not appear to be of a political nature but is far more radical.

Ferraris tells us that the chaos is no surprise, that it is far easier and far more spontaneous than order. Traffic naturally tends to be chaotic, and existence tends to come to an end, with entropy (disorder) prevailing over the order that made the life cycle possible. It is hardly surprising that we wish to bring order to chaos. The problem, however, is that philosophers, in the last century, interpreted their role as that of ‘deconstructors’ or critics, which is all well and good when it comes to dismantling ethnocentrism or patriarchy, says Ferraris. The problem is that they did not concern themselves with the other side – with reordering, with revealing the metaphysical structure of the world. In doing so – or rather, by failing to do so – they left it to retrotopists or ‘parachutists’ to formulate proposals for reordering.

However, it is precisely around the word ‘metaphysics’ that the most significant point of Ferraris’s theoretical proposal lies. Indeed, he is not afraid to return to the subject of metaphysics, a concept that has, it would seem, long been gathering the dust of history. Metaphysics, however, Ferraris tells us, is neither ‘out there’, who knows where, nor behind us, in a past that is now closed off. It is amongst us, like an infrastructure that gives order and continuity to the world. Its fundamental resource is hysteresis: preserving the past whilst keeping it active in the present, preventing what has happened from dissipating without a trace. It is this persistence that allows transformations to accumulate and every beginning to become the condition for other beginnings. It has been this way since the Big Bang, but never has this power been as evident as it is today. The enormous capital of the digital world, adds Ferraris, stems from recording: from the ability to retain words, images, actions and relationships, making them available for new uses. The preserved past becomes a force that organises the present and shapes the future. In digital memories, networks and archives, hysteresis reveals its effectiveness and becomes a source of wealth and power. Let us not allow this power, and the knowledge we have gained from it, to remain solely in the hands of digital entrepreneurs and their ideologues. Understanding what constitutes us is the first step towards deciding what we can do with it.

It is clear that, for Ferraris, this is the crucial point: the moment when the history of thought finds a direct correspondence with the technology available to bring it to fruition. We therefore ask him to explain how all this will influence our experience and what political implications it might have in relation to the theme at the heart of his lecture, namely finding order in chaos.

For Ferraris, this order seems to be simply synonymous with ‘knowledge’ and know-how. Knowledge as a means of accessing truth in its entirety is the only remedy against the anti-democratic tendencies of recent years. The postmodernists were wrong to argue that solidarity is more valuable than objectivity: One can only show solidarity on the basis of an objective foundation, for example by acknowledging that it is a fact that Russia has invaded Ukraine, and that therefore it is with the Ukrainians that we must stand in solidarity, just as we must stand in solidarity with the lamb and not with the wolf. Ferraris has held this position for a couple of decades, that is, since the era of the controversies surrounding ‘new realism’. History appears to have proved him right, even if he does not seem pleased about it. The premise of chaos, he adds, is that ignorance is a good thing, and that, as someone once said, one should vote with one’s gut rather than with one’s head. Knowing how data is produced and utilised is the basis of ‘Webfare’, the digital welfare system he has been working on for several years now. Yet this represents only part of his broader project for a new alliance between metaphysics, physics, technology and humanism, which, he tells us, he is developing in Turin through the ‘New Science’ project. This is precisely a metaphysical project whose premise is that the slumber of totality-based thought, and the postmodern triumph of the ‘one is worth one’ mantra, give rise to totalitarianism.