This
pedagogical appears in the November
22, 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
POWER VS.
ENERGY
The Difference
Between Dynamis and Energeiaby Jonathan
Tennenbaum
Since
at least the time of Plato (427?-347 B.C.) and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.),
and most likely even long before Pythagoras (fl. 530 B.C.), the struggle
between oligarchical and republican conceptions of physics has turned on
the relationship between what the Greeks called dynamis and
energeia. To a rough first approximation, the Greek dynamis
might be rendered, in its broad usage, variously as "ability,"
"potential," "potency," "power"; whereas energeia corresponds
(roughly) to "activity" and (in Aristotle, especially) to "actuality," in
the sense of "actively existing."
Plato's
dialogues demonstrate, however, that Plato and his circles possessed a
precise and highly developed scientific conception of dynamis,
having no direct equivalent in today's degenerated modern language
usage.
Perhaps
the best illustration of that degeneration, and its causes, is the
freak-out by virtually every modern translator, at the implications of a
celebrated passage in Plato's Theatetus, to which Lyndon LaRouche
has often referred. It is there that the young Theatetus recounts to
Socrates a preliminary discovery concerning the nature of the "powers"
connected with the doubling, tripling, etc. of a square, and which lie
beyond the domain of simple linear magnitudes. Rejecting the implications
of Plato's actual term, dynamis, modern translators typically try
to bring the passage into conformity with the "academic correctness" of
textbook mathematics, using "root" or "surd" in place of "power," and
apologizing in footnotes for the supposed "inappropriateness" of Plato's
choice of language.
Actually, as the Theatetus, the Meno, and other
dialogues demonstrate, Plato's conception of dynamis belongs
uniquely to the domain of physics, not mathematics per se. In
particular, the subject of Theatetus's account is not solving an equation,
but rather discovering the unseen principles of generation of the
Universe—physical principles—focussing for this purpose on the paradoxical
characteristics of the visual domain.
It is
Plato's conception of dynamis, as revived and developed by Nicolaus
of Cusa and Kepler, that leads to Leibniz's founding of physical economy
and what Leibniz called "the science of dynamics," as opposed to Newton's
mechanics; the pathway leads thence into the work of Gauss and Riemann,
and finally to Lyndon LaRouche's discoveries in physical economy. It is
not by accident that LaRouche, in his book In Defense of Common
Sense, cites exactly the indicated passage of Plato's
Theatetus, in the context of presenting his own conception of "rate
of increase of relative potential population density" through the process
of individual human discovery and the successive integration into social
practice, of new physical "powers." That latter conception constitutes, in
my view, the highest development reached so far, in unfolding what was
implicit in Plato's dynamis.
To shed
further light on these matters, I propose now to take a brief look at the
oligarchical side of the coin, which goes back to Aristotle. What sticks
out in examining Aristotle's Metaphysics, is his insistence on the
primacy of energeia over dynamis. That insistence went
hand-in-hand with Aristotle's attack on metaphor and the Platonic ideas.
Aristotle writes (Metaphysics, Book IX):
"Since
all abilities (powers) are either inborn, as are our senses; or are
acquired by practice, as the ability to play a flute; or are acquired by
learning, as the powers of the sciences; in all cases one can gain such
powers, as are acquired by practice or learning, only through the
aid of something that was already realized
(actualized)....
"For
from the potentially existing, the actually existing is always produced by
an actually existing thing, e.g., man from man, musician by musician;
there is always a first mover, and the mover already exists actually. We
have said in our account of substance that everything that is produced is
something produced from something and by something, and that the same in
species as it....
"Obviously, then, actuality (energeia) is prior both to
potency (dynamis) and to every principle of change."
Rather
than get entangled in the ins and outs of Aristotle's theory of existence
and becoming, focus on the systematic, axiomatic flaw in Aristotle's whole
manner of argumentation: He rejects—or at least disregards, as if it were
nonexistent—the power of human creative discovery, of human reason, and of
a creative principle underlying the Universe as a whole. In other words,
Aristotle denies the possibility of a self-developing, or
self-actualizing potential, that which Nicolaus of Cusa later called
the posse-est (posse corresponding to Plato's
dynamis). Lurking behind Aristotle's notion, that existence can
only flow from what he calls "actually existing things," is a mindset
which can attribute "actual existence" only to such objects and motions as
have the quality of objects of sense perception.
These
points require elaboration. For the present purposes, however, as a
short-cut, and to throw the issue of "dynamis vs. energeia"
into strategic perspective, I propose turning to one of the more effective
British operations of the 19th Century, one which—as so much British
wickedness—drew originally from Aristotle.
The Cult of
Energy
From
the early decades to the middle of the 19th Century, parallel with
operations leading to the unleashing of the Confederacy and the U.S. Civil
War, a scientific cult was launched by Lord Kelvin and the Thomas
Huxley-Herbert Spencer "X-Club" circles, Hermann Helmholtz, Rudolf
Clausius et al., directed against the influence of Leibniz and his
successors, including Gauss in particular. Although that cult involved
several interrelated "theme parks"—such as the so-called Darwinian theory
of evolution and Herbert Spencer's fraudulent concept of an "iron law of
progress"—we might fittingly refer to it as "the Cult of
Energy."
Crucial
to the operation was the relative success, achieved by the conspirators,
in foisting two fraudulent formulations on the scientific community: the
"First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics," and their monstrous corollary,
the supposedly inevitable "heat-death of the Universe."
The
utopian political thrust of the operation was more or less obvious from
the beginning, but became luridly explicit in the "Energeticist Movement"
associated with Wilhelm Ostwald around the turn of the 20th Century.
Ostwald advocated a World Government based on the use of "energy" as the
universal, unifying concept not only for all of physical science, but for
economics, psychology, sociology and the arts.
Although the energeticists and the myriad, competing materialist
(including "Diamat"—"dialectical materialism"), reductionist, and
positivist movements and countermovements of the late 19th Century and
early 20th Century, are now mostly forgotten, the axiomatic germ of the
Cult of Energy remains deeply embedded in European culture, like the
modified genome left over in the tissues of a patient after an acute
lentivirus infection has subsided. In particular, for over a century
nearly everyone has been miseducated to believe that "energy" is an
objective scientific reality, and that the First and Second Law constitute
proven scientific truths.
Not
accidentally, the Kelvin-Helmholtz doctrine of "energy," became a key
feature of Anglo-American geopolitics, from the British launching of
Middle East "oil politics" at the beginning of the 20th Century, to the
orchestration of the so-called "energy crisis" of 1973-74, and, not least,
the present march toward a new Middle East war. This is not to say that
"energy" per se (or "oil supplies") has anything really significant to do
with the present war drive. Rather, the reasons that people permit
themselves to be manipulated into tolerating actions leading to perpetual
war and a new "dark age," are inseparably connected to those axiomatic
flaws in thinking, that underlie popular belief in the cult doctrine of
"energy."
The
common origins of the "energy" doctrine and utopian geopolitics go much
further back than the launching of the modern energy cult itself, by
Helmholtz, Kelvin et al. From the standpoint of economics, the energy
doctrine represented nothing but a rewarming, under "scientific" guise, of
old feudalist—and specifically, physiocratic—doctrines of supposedly fixed
"natural resources," ignoring the function of the human mind in
discovering and realizing new physical principles. On the other hand,
anyone who has thought through what LaRouche and others have written on
Gauss's early work concerning the "Fundamental Theorem of Algebra," should
immediately recognize, in the so-called "First and Second Laws of
Thermodynamics," exactly the same essential fallacy that Gauss refuted in
his 1799 attack on the "utopian" mathematics of Euler and Lagrange. Not
accidentally, the Euler-Lagrange doctrine of "analytical mechanics"
created the mathematical foundation for the Helmholtz-Kelvin energy
doctrine. Conversely, the manner in which Gauss generates the algebraic
"powers," in the cited 1799 work, by principles lying entirely outside the
mathematics of Euler and Lagrange, is characteristic of the way Man acts
as an instrument of the anti-entropic development of the
Universe.
On one
level, the fallacy of the "First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics" is
simply this: These laws have never been demonstrated to be properties of
the real Universe, but only properties of certain closed
mathematical-deductive systems, which ignorant or malicious physicists
claim to represent the real Universe, but which manifestly do not.
On this level, the fraud is identical to that of so-called economists who
claim to be able to deduce theorems about the real economy, from supposed
self-evident properties of "money." In fact, the elementary error revealed
in the very title of Newton's famous Principia mathematica philosophiae
naturalis (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) finds
itself reproduced, countless times, in textbooks dealing with non-existent
"Financial Principles of Economics."
Contrary
to popular academic belief, there are no actual experiments establishing
the validity of the "First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics" as
universal physical principles. To the extent those "laws" have a
certain empirical correlate at all, they are both circumscribed by a
purely negative principle, already identified by Leibniz long
before the Kelvin-Helmholtz gang came along: the impossibility of a
so-called "perpetuum mobile" or "perpetual motion machine"—a hypothetical
subsystem of the Universe, able to generate a net surplus of power in the
course of a closed cycle, in which the system is supposed to return to
exactly its original state, without any other net change in the
surrounding Universe.Just as in the
case of so-called "impossible" or "imaginary" numbers, the
source of the supposed "impossibility" involved is not a limitation of
the real physical universe. The limitation is located rather in the notion
of a "machine," as a system describable by the "utopian" Euler-Lagrange
form of analytical mechanics. To put it another way: To the extent a
physical system is either chosen or forced to mimic the characteristics of
a "machine" in the indicated sense, it will appear to obey the First and
Second Laws of Thermodynamics. But the Universe as a whole is not a
machine; the Universe not only never returns to an earlier state,
but its successive states are strictly incomparable with each other
from a formal-mathematical standpoint. Thus, the extrapolation of the
so-called "First and Second Laws" to the Universe as a whole constitutes
the crudest, most elementary sort of scientific error.
If
"Universe" refers to the most generalized form of Man's action upon
Nature—no other Universe could be known to us!—then the "state of the
Universe" changes fundamentally with each discovery, by some human mind,
of a new universal physical principle (power). A formal-mathematical
system which (to a first, "engineering" approximation) may have more or
less adequately described Man's physical-economic activity up to that
point, now breaks down, as technologies based upon the new principle
transform the physical economy to the effect of increasing the relative
potential population-density of the human species beyond any a priori
"limits."
The
very fact of the successful increase in human population potential by some
three orders of magnitude over documented history and prehistory, attests
to the existence of a self-developing "power," lying entirely outside the
domain of visible or visible-like objects, but commanding the visible
Universe to an increasing extent.
This
brings us back to the fundamental flaw of Aristotle's
energeia.
Utopianism and
the Enlightenment
Before
the modern cult of energy could be created, Aristotle had first to be
reincarnated in the so-called "Enlightenment" of Paolo Sarpi et al., as a
crucial component of the Venetian operation to destroy the influence of
the Renaissance and the nation-state principle, and to plunge Europe into
decades of religious war.
Sarpi's
"Enlightenment" based itself essentially on Aristotle, but with some
differences that are relevant to the mindset of the Utopians to this day.
The quarrel between the Enlightenment ideologues and Aristotle was not a
matter of substance. From their standpoint, Aristotle was excessively
cautious and old-fashioned, wrapping his conclusions in endless
distinctions and qualifications. Furthermore, Aristotle felt obliged to at
least quote the existence of opposing views; while Locke, Descartes et al.
went for a "clean break," blatantly ignoring the entire preceding history
of philosophy and science, and promoting the crudest "post-modernist" sort
of reductionism.
In this
way, the creation of the modern cult of energy out of Aristotle's
energeia, represents just one more case of "putting lipstick on a
pig." |
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