Chaos
I · Chaos as emptiness
For the ancient Greeks, kháos meant abyss: that which, opening wide, is hollow, coarse and dark. Apparently, the word has its origin in the Proto-Indo-European root ghieh-, from which other words will be derived, such as gap in English (gap) or yawn in Greek (khasmourito).
The first Latin translators of the Gospels must have been familiar with this meaning. Thus, in Luke 16:26, Abraham, from Heaven, says to a man condemned to Hades: “Between you and me there is a great chasm […]”. The expression “great chasm”, mega khasma in the original Greek, was translated into Latin as magnum chaos.
For the ancient Greek poets and mystics, Chaos was also one of the primal deities. For Hesiod, it was the first of all: “In truth, at first Chaos appeared, then Gaia (Earth) with broad breasts […], and Eros (Love), the most beautiful among the immortal gods […].”
Regarding the interpretation of Hesiod’s cosmogony, I have taken note of three comments from contemporary scholars that I found interesting:
Jaeger comments that in Hesiod’s time the universe was conceived as eternal and uncreated and that, therefore, for the pre-Socratic mind, Chaos would resemble a kind of First Cause engendering and uncreated.
For Bussanich, “Chaos [of Hesiod] symbolizes the initial state of pre-cosmic reality, an abysmal yawn,” a kind of dimensionless space, an empty and expansive substrate that, because it is prior to the world, “cannot be conceived according to the laws of perspective or dimensions.”
For Hyland, Hesiod’s Chaos would symbolize the idea of space and separation, the concept of difference, which precedes the differentiated, that is, which precedes identity and the binary.
It is curious that these three commentators agree in describing Hesiod’s Chaos as a begetting and ineffable god-power, that is, beyond geometry and, at the same time, that which is necessary for the manifestation of geometry.
Making a psychological reading, perhaps Hesiod’s Chaos could be identified with the intuition of the geometer or the artist, that is, a generating force that, being formless, engenders all forms.
On the other hand, it occurs to me that the daily action of going to sleep could be interpreted as a chaotic ritual, since it is frequently in the bosom of the Night when we yawn and close our eyes, that is, we tear apart two gaps, we unfold two dark canvases, two expansive abysses from which new dreams always emanate.
II Chaos as disorder
It is possible that the contemporary meaning of chaos as disorder has its origin in the history of another word that would end up being very closely related to it: kosmos.
For the ancient Greeks kosmos meant order, arrangement or ornament. The verb kosmein, for example, meant both to order and to decorate. Likewise, our word cosmetic, which shares a root, has its origin in the noun kosmetike —which was the art of dressing and adorning oneself.
It is very possible that the Greeks initially referred to the firmament as kosmos, since, in addition to being able to observe patterns of great regularity, ordered patterns, the stars resemble the shiny ornaments of a dress (or should we say that our ornaments and diamonds resemble the stars?).
Later, the noun would end up being applied to the entire physical world, perhaps thanks to the study of geometry, which allowed us to imagine the rest of nature as an increasingly intelligible, beautiful and ordered set of elements.
In Plato’s Timaeus we can read cosmogonic reflections where the future of the world is synonymous with kosmos as order:
[The Demiurge] was good, and the good never harbors envy about anything. Lacking envy, He wanted everything to become as similar as possible to Himself. [This is the supreme principle] of becoming and the cosmos (geneseōs kai kosmou). As the Demiurge wanted, as far as possible, all things to be good […], he took everything that is visible, which moved without rest in a disorderly manner, and brought it from disorder to order.
Several centuries later, in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, we already find the explicit opposition of kosmos, as a synonym for world and order, with kháos, as a fundamentally disordered initial state of things:
Before the land or the sea existed […], nature appeared the same throughout the world, what we call chaos: a raw, confusing mass, inert matter, discordant atoms […]. Nothing kept its shape, one thing obstructed the other, because […] the cold fought against the heat, the wet against the dry, the soft against the hard, and the weight against weightless things.
In the cosmogony presented in the biblical Genesis, the initial state of the world is also described as “formless and desolate”, words that are reminiscent of Ovid’s Chaos. However, neither in the Septuagint nor in the first Latin translations of the Bible will the word chaos be used as a synonym for disorder, and it will not be until the Modern Age when classics scholars will incorporate in their translations and commentaries the meaning of the Roman poet to the European vocabulary, in general, and to the imagery of Christian Genesis, in particular.
III Chaos as hidden order
The word chaos currently retains Ovid’s classical meaning—chaos as disorder. In the same way, the reading of the universe as cosmos, that is, as an ordered set of elements whose study allows us to describe useful regularities, is still very much in vogue in the scientific field.
We must not forget that the enormous progress in science has also allowed us to identify new unknowns and irregularities in Nature. A recent scientific revolution—Chaos Theory—has shed light on some of them.
In the early 1960s, Lorenz was working on the problem of climate prediction. Due to an oversight, he entered starting data into his computer with a very small variation compared to the previous time. Although the data only varied from the fourth decimal point, and the computer was configured identically, his machine returned results that evolved, over time, in a completely different way.
Lorenz, motivated by his own discovery, began to investigate the dynamics of the apparently random evolution of his data and discovered that there were hidden regularities, which he expressed geometrically—what Mandelbrot would later call fractal geometry.
Even more surprising is that the same geometric regularities were found by many other scientists who, inspired by Lorenz, studied the dynamics of systems in their own different academic niches.
The growth of populations, of plants, of veins…, the irregular beat of a heart, the frequency of pandemics, the wobbling of a die on the table, the dripping of a faucet, the flow of water, smoke and wind, the frenetic dance of a flame… multiple and daily natural phenomena, governed by very different laws and understood, some of them, as synonyms of chance, hide the same regularities in their future.
Making a philosophical reading, it is possible that chaos theorists have achieved a kind of dissolution of opposites: chaos and cosmos. Well, if cosmologists of all times talk to us about order that is born from chaos, chaos theorists, in addition, talk to us about chaos that is born from order.
On the other hand, due to these recent discoveries in the study of dynamical systems, from philosophers to computer scientists today they wonder if there is such a thing as chaos, as true chance, or if chance is just a veil of unpredictability drawn by our ignorance about a genuinely and absolutely cosmic universe.