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Out of Chaos
From the dust"In this, the crowning achievement of his career, Professor Halle presents a survey of all basic knowledge. As it unfolds under the reader's eyes, there emerges from it the vision of one universsal order that rises above the underlying chaos in which our lives are still so largely immersed. By bringing together in one perspective the physical universe, the evolution of life within it, the emergence of mind, and the fruits of mind's creativity, Halle reveals, step by step, what presents itself at last as a seamless whole. We see how order arises out of the fundamental chaos represented by the Uncertainty Principle in physics, or by the "Extended Uncertainty Principle" that applies to all aspects of being."
657 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1977
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 29, 2007
Probably the most encompassing book I've ever read. I picked this up at the library years ago, barely made it through before it had to be returned, and then searched down a copy from out of print book dealers online a few years later. The diversity of subject matter covered is amazing, in one book you can pick up tidbits of so much seemingly unrelated knowledge, from the beginnings of civilization to molecular biology and how our bodies are contstructed and function on the molecular level, and on and on. Certainly a tome I am glad to have on my bookshelf.
May 25, 2013
It's a tour de force, like they say of awesome mind-expanding books that are easily digested.
If you're curious about your own self and the world that self is within, then welcome to "Out of Chaos." You'll be left feeling quite mystical, as Halle poetically and simply states all we've learned about all that is.
If you're curious about your own self and the world that self is within, then welcome to "Out of Chaos." You'll be left feeling quite mystical, as Halle poetically and simply states all we've learned about all that is.
October 24, 2024
THE THINKER PROVIDES A "HOLISTIC" VIEW---FROM SCIENCE, TO HISTORY, TO ART…
Louis Joseph Halle "has lived several lives in one---as an official of the State Department, as author of books in the fields of politics, philosophy, and natural history, and as Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. His home is in Switzerland."
He wrote in the Preface of this 1977 book, "This book is based on the premise that the realm of being is meaningful to the extent that we are able to view it comprehensively ... I have done my best to command at least a distant view of all basic knowledge... The close-up and the distant views are complementary rather than contradictory. Let us have both. In one of its aspects, this book is an exercise in perspective. As such, it will have much to say of the very small and the very large, of analysis and synthesis." (Pg. v)
He continues, "The reader will also see that the book begins with a straightforward description of the universe and of life on earth. As it progresses, however... certain philosophical principles begin to emerge, seemingly of their own accord, with greater force---until, by the end, a whole philosophy has asserted itself. I cannot help feeling that this philosophy is not of my invention but implicit in the material.... I have felt like one who, putting the meaningless bits of a picture-puzzle together, sees meaning gradually emerge of itself..." (Pg. viii)
He suggests, "[we have] little choice but to abandon the naïve assumption that reality as we know it in our own order of magnitude could be the same in other orders. The problem is that our minds, our concepts, and our consequent vocabulary have developed to fit only our own order of magnitude. The corresponding challenge, then, is to develop them from now on so that they will be suitable to those wider horizons, of which we have just become aware, that embrace other orders of magnitude. We are facing this challenge for the first time in our own day. Perhaps it will take us thousands of years to meet it, by which time we may be facing other challenges beyond it." (Pg. 47)
He states, "The evolution of being is based on a process of natural selection that prefers order to chaos. Although organic molecules have been combining for three or four thousand million years now, only those combinations that have made sense, in terms of order as opposed to chaos, have survived. The others, which are the overwhelming majority, have vanished. Moreover, those that have made more sense have displaced those that have made less sense, and the latter have vanished in consequence. By this process a progressive and expanding order has been emerging from an original chaos. The process is incomplete as yet, but it has already ... led to mind and the consciousness of knowing in our species. The process continues---to what end, no one knows." (Pg. 215-216)
He argues, "The line between heroes and gods... is not sharp. Our need is for mythic personages, whether we call them gods or heroes... So it is that Confucius ... or Marx... play the same role as Christ and Christianity or Mohammed and Mohammedanism in providing the authority we need for the organization of our necessarily artificial societies, and for our own personal conduct within them. It seems a prediction worth risking that, at the point where we now stand in history... where worldwide civilization is replacing the multiple civilizations of the past, having become outdated, will be replaced by secular religions... specifically by a Marxism that is not one body of belief but that undergoes constant transformation and differentiation, as all the great religions have in the past." (Pg. 320)
He speculates, "What cannot be in doubt is the continued striving toward order. Until the advent of mind, the evolution of life represented and unconscious drive toward an ever greater and more complete order. With the advent of mind that drive became conscious. It is the basic fact of evolution, perhaps the basic fact of being, and we must expect it to continue. One is tempted to believe that it progresses toward some final realization---but, if that is so, we cannot say whether the final realization lies a few thousand years ahead, a few million, or untold thousands of millions." (Pg. 496)
He summarizes, "Let the reader note the confirmation of the holistic thesis in the aspects of being we have reviewed so far. When... we examined the very small... we saw how it represented the chaos of the Uncertainty Principle; but how the ever greater combination of the items that in themselves represented chaos represented an ever greater order was attained. This perfect order was what we saw when we examined physical being in the large, as provisionally represented by the Theory of Relativity. Again, when we traced the evolution of life ... we saw the same progressive construction of an increasingly wide and elaborate order out of an elemental chaos.... there has been evidence of an increasing order in the history of civilization ...If the holistic thesis is valid, however, it is absolutely valid only in terms of the whole of being in time and space. The smaller the proportion of the whole that the observer comprehends in his view, the more partial and uncertain are its manifestations." (Pg. 500-501)
He concludes, "Mind seeks to bring order out of the chaos of raw experience, whether by the discovery of an order existing independently or by its own invention. Implicit in this use of the mind is a liberation from the here-and-now except in terms of an order that extends beyond it. Therefore we must equate the liberation from the here-and-now with that evocation of order, real or imaginary, which is the faculty of mind." (Pg. 613)
He continues, "All of us live in two worlds at once, the chaotic world by which we are buffeted in our daily lives and an orderly world of the imagination that transcends it. Because our minds function only in terms of order---indeed, exist only as expressions of it---our failure to achieve such transcendence would produce mental breakdown. It follows that our dependence on a visionary order of some sort is complete...
"Works of art, including works of science, teach us to see. They are the wings that life us above the chaos of the here-and-now to a higher standpoint. Whatever is worthwhile in life depends on what they enable us to see, which we would not see otherwise. So all art invests our experience of actuality with meaning that it would not otherwise have. It creates the meaning... the works of art we produce are not just finished creations in themselves but sources of creative radiance by which life, through the agency of our species, is remaking the world." (Pg. 618-619)
I personally love attempts of a single author (e.g., H.G. Wells, Will Durant) to encompass all of knowledge; however, such enterprises are necessarily unsuccessful in their "details": Halle wrote before the discovery of quarks, before superstring theory, before the "multiverse" concept became popular in cosmology. He also wrote prior to the collapse of Marxism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. And he would have abhorred the virtual replacement of fine art in our day by the mass media's hawking of popular culture and pop icons. Still, I found this book a fascinating and broadening journey. If you like "broad" thoughts and visions, you may well enjoy it too.
Louis Joseph Halle "has lived several lives in one---as an official of the State Department, as author of books in the fields of politics, philosophy, and natural history, and as Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. His home is in Switzerland."
He wrote in the Preface of this 1977 book, "This book is based on the premise that the realm of being is meaningful to the extent that we are able to view it comprehensively ... I have done my best to command at least a distant view of all basic knowledge... The close-up and the distant views are complementary rather than contradictory. Let us have both. In one of its aspects, this book is an exercise in perspective. As such, it will have much to say of the very small and the very large, of analysis and synthesis." (Pg. v)
He continues, "The reader will also see that the book begins with a straightforward description of the universe and of life on earth. As it progresses, however... certain philosophical principles begin to emerge, seemingly of their own accord, with greater force---until, by the end, a whole philosophy has asserted itself. I cannot help feeling that this philosophy is not of my invention but implicit in the material.... I have felt like one who, putting the meaningless bits of a picture-puzzle together, sees meaning gradually emerge of itself..." (Pg. viii)
He suggests, "[we have] little choice but to abandon the naïve assumption that reality as we know it in our own order of magnitude could be the same in other orders. The problem is that our minds, our concepts, and our consequent vocabulary have developed to fit only our own order of magnitude. The corresponding challenge, then, is to develop them from now on so that they will be suitable to those wider horizons, of which we have just become aware, that embrace other orders of magnitude. We are facing this challenge for the first time in our own day. Perhaps it will take us thousands of years to meet it, by which time we may be facing other challenges beyond it." (Pg. 47)
He states, "The evolution of being is based on a process of natural selection that prefers order to chaos. Although organic molecules have been combining for three or four thousand million years now, only those combinations that have made sense, in terms of order as opposed to chaos, have survived. The others, which are the overwhelming majority, have vanished. Moreover, those that have made more sense have displaced those that have made less sense, and the latter have vanished in consequence. By this process a progressive and expanding order has been emerging from an original chaos. The process is incomplete as yet, but it has already ... led to mind and the consciousness of knowing in our species. The process continues---to what end, no one knows." (Pg. 215-216)
He argues, "The line between heroes and gods... is not sharp. Our need is for mythic personages, whether we call them gods or heroes... So it is that Confucius ... or Marx... play the same role as Christ and Christianity or Mohammed and Mohammedanism in providing the authority we need for the organization of our necessarily artificial societies, and for our own personal conduct within them. It seems a prediction worth risking that, at the point where we now stand in history... where worldwide civilization is replacing the multiple civilizations of the past, having become outdated, will be replaced by secular religions... specifically by a Marxism that is not one body of belief but that undergoes constant transformation and differentiation, as all the great religions have in the past." (Pg. 320)
He speculates, "What cannot be in doubt is the continued striving toward order. Until the advent of mind, the evolution of life represented and unconscious drive toward an ever greater and more complete order. With the advent of mind that drive became conscious. It is the basic fact of evolution, perhaps the basic fact of being, and we must expect it to continue. One is tempted to believe that it progresses toward some final realization---but, if that is so, we cannot say whether the final realization lies a few thousand years ahead, a few million, or untold thousands of millions." (Pg. 496)
He summarizes, "Let the reader note the confirmation of the holistic thesis in the aspects of being we have reviewed so far. When... we examined the very small... we saw how it represented the chaos of the Uncertainty Principle; but how the ever greater combination of the items that in themselves represented chaos represented an ever greater order was attained. This perfect order was what we saw when we examined physical being in the large, as provisionally represented by the Theory of Relativity. Again, when we traced the evolution of life ... we saw the same progressive construction of an increasingly wide and elaborate order out of an elemental chaos.... there has been evidence of an increasing order in the history of civilization ...If the holistic thesis is valid, however, it is absolutely valid only in terms of the whole of being in time and space. The smaller the proportion of the whole that the observer comprehends in his view, the more partial and uncertain are its manifestations." (Pg. 500-501)
He concludes, "Mind seeks to bring order out of the chaos of raw experience, whether by the discovery of an order existing independently or by its own invention. Implicit in this use of the mind is a liberation from the here-and-now except in terms of an order that extends beyond it. Therefore we must equate the liberation from the here-and-now with that evocation of order, real or imaginary, which is the faculty of mind." (Pg. 613)
He continues, "All of us live in two worlds at once, the chaotic world by which we are buffeted in our daily lives and an orderly world of the imagination that transcends it. Because our minds function only in terms of order---indeed, exist only as expressions of it---our failure to achieve such transcendence would produce mental breakdown. It follows that our dependence on a visionary order of some sort is complete...
"Works of art, including works of science, teach us to see. They are the wings that life us above the chaos of the here-and-now to a higher standpoint. Whatever is worthwhile in life depends on what they enable us to see, which we would not see otherwise. So all art invests our experience of actuality with meaning that it would not otherwise have. It creates the meaning... the works of art we produce are not just finished creations in themselves but sources of creative radiance by which life, through the agency of our species, is remaking the world." (Pg. 618-619)
I personally love attempts of a single author (e.g., H.G. Wells, Will Durant) to encompass all of knowledge; however, such enterprises are necessarily unsuccessful in their "details": Halle wrote before the discovery of quarks, before superstring theory, before the "multiverse" concept became popular in cosmology. He also wrote prior to the collapse of Marxism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. And he would have abhorred the virtual replacement of fine art in our day by the mass media's hawking of popular culture and pop icons. Still, I found this book a fascinating and broadening journey. If you like "broad" thoughts and visions, you may well enjoy it too.
February 16, 2013
Outdated but great.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews