Tot despre modelul grec în cultura română: parabole ... - Caiete Critice

Mihai A.
STROE
Romanticism
and Chaos
Theory
Abstract
Chaos theory and the sciences of complexity
are a relatively new field in modern science. In
the present paper, starting from a definition of
chaos theory, such as can be derived mainly
from Ilya Prigogine's works, we undertake to
explain the relevance of this new paradigm in
science for a modern understanding and
revaluation of romanticism .
Keywords: chaos, complexity, evolution,
bifurcation epoch, increase of freedom, orderdisorder,
chaotic attractor, punctual/periodic
attractor, stasis-kinesis, literature and science
Chaos theory and the sciences of complexity
are singularly relevant for the science
of archetypes, which in the near future
may constitute “integralogy”, a complete
science of man. In this respect, Ilya
Prigogine’s works have laid an important
experimental and conceptual brick at the
foundation of chaos theory – in this sense,
Prigogine’s discovery of the so-called selforganisation
of physical matter, with its
resultant science, is relevant for the modern
study of romanticism, as we propose to
demonstrate in the present paper.
Henry H. H. Remak suggested the following
definition of romanticism which is
connected to what chaos theory asserts:
“romanticism is the attempt to heal the
break in the universe, it is the painful
awareness of dualism coupled with the
urge to resolve it in organic monism, it is the
confrontation with chaos followed by the
will to reintegrate it into the order of the
cosmos, it is the desire to reconcile a pair of
opposites, to have synthesis follow antithesis”
1 .
An analysis of the romantic phenomenon
from the perspective of chaos theory seems
therefore fully justified.
According to Ilya Prigogine, one of the
main heralds of chaos theory, in dissipative
systems there are two types of behaviour,
which are relevant for chaos theory:
1) close to equilibrium, therefore close to
reaching stable order, systemic order
tends to decrease, so the system tends
towards disorder;
2) far from equilibrium, the extant order
can be maintained and new structures
can be formed which are defined by a
more elaborate order: in other words,
the dissipative complex systems can
go, when far from equilibrium,
through irreversible processes in
which the entropy or the degree of
disorder tends to decrease (contrary
to the principles of classical thermodynamics),
the result being the formation
of more complex structures.
This is the so-called “universal criterion
of evolution” which P. Glansdorff and Ilya
Prigogine announced in Physica, 20, 773, in
1954; it most likely has a high degree of
ontic validity 2 .
This universal criterion of evolution
(according to which reality forms an oscillating
system, that successively goes
towards ever more elaborate, more complex
orders; this idea drew the scientists’ attention
to the concept of complexity and science
of complexity) seems to have been
intuited (at least in its spirit), long time ago,
by George Santayana (in the latter’s The Life
of the Reason or the Phases of Human Progress,
1905-1906) as founding the cognitive life of
1 Henry H. H. Remak, “A Key to West European Romanticism?”, 1968, p. 44.
2 Amelia Dragotã Chirca, Mihai ªtefan Chirca, Premiile Nobel, Fizicã Chimie Medicinã, 1901-2002, 2002, p.
563.
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