Preface
…miracles are ceas'd;
And therefore we must needs
admit the means,
How things are perfected.
Shakespeare (King Henry V)
I assure you, dear reader, that it wasn’t my own will that got me started working on this book that took me almost three years to write. In that time I could have published several books on topics more familiar to me: foreign policy and international relations. The responsibility for my long silence rests with a woman (the French got it right: “cherchez la femme,”) and this woman is my wife. For something like 15 years she has been insisting that I finally write a book about Force that will explain everything.
You see, it was way earlier, some 25 years ago, that I considered the Communist Party formula well known in the times of the Soviet Union: the balance of powers in the world is shifting in favor of the forces of peace, progress and socialism - and I asked a naïve question of my boss in the science field: what exactly is it - force? He replied that every schoolboy knows that. Then I asked him to explain the difference between force and might and the ways to measure them. I cannot reproduce his answer here in acceptable language; essentially he told me where to go, and to stop wasting time on foolishness. “You’re not a German, after all, to dig into concepts and categories,” he added unexpectedly.
Having received no answers to my seemingly simple questions, I decided to devote some of my spare time (in those years I was researching Japan and China) to “foolishness” - that is, researching literature about force. To my surprise, I discovered a perfect chaos on this subject in the minds of the political scientists and scholars of international relations whose works I managed to read (about 100 monographs in all). It became clear to me that this topic is not as simple as it seemed initially. Moreover, several theoreticians advised their readers to steer clear of the tangled topic of force, since one cannot hope to extricate oneself from it. I decided to leave the topic alone and continued researching the problems of international relations in the Far East. However, no matter what I was working on, the problem of force kept cropping up and demanding a scientific explanation.
Some people may ask: what on Earth for? After all, many authors write about politics and international relations using the word “force” all the time (e.g. center of force, politics of force, etc.) without bothering with the question of what it means. It is supposed to be obvious to everyone anyway. - True enough, they do write in this fashion; but the trouble is, their writings have nothing in common with science; they are nothing but political fiction. Into this class fall even some official documents, for example the so-called Conceptions of Foreign Policy or National Security - say, those of modern Russia. I labored more than once to prove the illiteracy of these documents and their authors. When fiction is made the basis of actual foreign policy, the resulting course of action inevitably results in failure, as attested by the foreign policy of the later-years USSR and today’s Russia.
Be that as it may, the moment came when I started myself to define the category of force in foreign policy and international relations, which simplifed for me right away the task of forecasting the activities of this or that state in the world arena. But these were all definitions of force as a reflection of something more fundamental that I was unable to discern on the ontological level. Therefore, these definitions were incomplete, or, rather, they did not grasp the essence of force in its entirety. In spite of this, I kept avoiding delving too deeply into cognition of force, mindful of the warnings from those scholars who had already been “burned” when tackling this category. Still, just to remind you: under pressure from my wife, I decided to tackle this problem after all.
Since I knew already that neither the political science theorists nor the international relations theorists would be of any help to me in this endeavor, I decided to browse for starters the philosophical literature, beginning with the ancient Greeks. I had to find out how this category was understood in the philosophers’ parlance. After that I was supposed to determine in what form and through which phenomena force manifests itself in the inorganic (the sphere of cosmogony and physics) and in the organic world. Quite unexpectedly, I found myself in the thick of nature-philosophy issues at the heart of scientific battles whose existence I never suspected.
When I started work on the chapter about “consciousness and thought”, in Ernst Haeckel’s book I came across the name of the German physiologist Emil Dubois-Reymond who said the following in his famous speech “On the Limits of Cognition of Nature” (1880): “Regarding the puzzles of what matter and force are, and in what fashion they can think, he (the scientist. - A.B.) must make once and for all a much more difficult confession, expressed in the verdict "ignorabimus" (we won’t learn)." In this speech, he spelled out seven major puzzles of the world: 1) the essence of matter and force; 2) the origin of motion; 3) the origin of life; 4) the purposefulness of nature; 5) the emergence of senses and consciousness; 6) the emergence of thought, and of speech that is closely tied to it; 7) the problem of freedom of will. In Dubois-Reymond’s opinion, three of these puzzles are perfectly transcendent and irresolvable - 1), 2) and 5); three others, though difficult, are solvable - 3), 4) and 6); the last one is likewise non-solvable. Haeckel, though, precisely as he was addressing these above-listed puzzles, declared in response to this: “We do not know yet.”
Despite Haeckel’s optimism, I was gripped by a light panic, since in this present work I had become entangled in one way or another in the thickets of all these puzzles (the last one I was planning to address in my next book). If only I had come across this book of world puzzles before I started my research, I would most likely have refrained from beginning my own book. Then I remembered the English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, who wrote (if I remember correctly) in his The Principles of Political Economy (1848) that if a capitalist had studied his book, he would likely never have started his business. Apparently, many achievements come to be only because their authors do not know in advance of the difficulties ahead. I guess that Napoleon was right after all when he declared that the important thing is to get engaged in battle, and then let the chips drop where they may.
When in my ignorance I became involved in this battle for the recognition of force in philosophy – force in the inorganic and organic worlds, and in the realm of psychology as well - I discovered the savagest arguments between different schools and currents about these very puzzle-problems, and I was obliged to develop my own position on these matters, and occasionally offer my own solutions.
I will talk of this in more detail I my Introduction. Right now, I want to draw your attention to the following:
Ordinarily I do not discuss my works with anyone until they are published. I am repulsed by the practice of talking over ideas among specialists working on the same topics. I have horrible memories of how it was done in the USSR (I suppose that the practice is still alive in that land to this day), when your idea was first discussed in your “sector,” then in your department of the Institute, so as to receive approval for publication “with due note taken of criticisms.” Since all books without exception underwent this procedure, upon publication they appeared practically no different from each other, no matter who was the author. Can you imagine Aristotle “taking due note” of criticisms by Plato, Leibniz - of those by Newton, Hegel - of those by Schelling, Marx - of those by the above-mentioned Mill? If it had been done this way, none of them would have become what they were; theirs would have been faceless works, in compliance with the views dominant at that time, i.e., without a hint of new ideas.
However, in writing this book I was forced to drop my rule, since I strayed outside my “turf”. Even though I had of necessity read many books on physics, biology and psychology, I still was not feeling sufficiently confident in these areas. That is why I was obliged to subject the sections about physics and biology to the scrutiny of specialist professionals: the cosmonaut Yu. M. Baturin, one of whose areas of expertise is physics of the cosmos, and G.Yu. Lyubarsky - a biologist, leading expert at the Zoological Museum of the Moscow University. Their comments proved to be extremely valuable to me: not only did they help me to correct some of my terminological mistakes, but they also helped me to formulate somewhat differently my conceptual thoughts on different problems. Mr. Baturin, among other things, compelled me to read a lot of additional literature, including works about information entropy. I hereby express my sincerest gratitude to all of them. Should professionals find any incongruities in the physical or biological parts of my work, it will be only because I inserted them there after my esteemed reviewers were finished with the text.
Let me add that many of Mr. Lyubarsky’s criticisms proved useful to me, and I complied with them gratefully. At the same time, I left as is many things that had my well-disposed reviewer perplexed. Specifically, I’m talking here of Chapter III (The Origin of the Organic World…) Georgy Yurievich brought up many times the names of several Soviet (or Russian) biologists whom I failed to mention, while offering a detailed analysis of the works of several Western biologists whose views Mr. Lyubarsky considers “trivial” or “non-scientific”. And why did I have to “promote” K. Popper, while there are other interesting philosophers? I expect that similar questions or “bewilderments” may occur to many Russian readers “hurt” by the insufficient attention to Russian scientists. Even though I perceive such reactions as just, they may lose ground when one considers certain circumstances that are unusual to the Russian readers’ perceptions. (Their explanation may be of interest to the Western reader as well.)
The matter is, even though the original text was written in Russian (my native tongue), I am not a Russian scholar, but rather a representative of the Western scientific community; therefore my book is geared first and foremost toward the Western reader. To the Western readers, even those in the sphere of science, Russian names say little, with some very few exceptions. That, by the way, is a criticism I level against Western science; it is present in this book. Wherever useful (or sometimes just for the sake of remembering), I try to insert or remind this or that Russian name.
Another thing: even though some Western scientists express views that are, in Lyubarsky’s opinion, “unscientific,” these views are nonetheless widely discussed in scientific literature; in other words, they constitute a kind of background for certain problems. Of course there are other philosophers besides Popper, but it is precisely Popper who is for many a great authority on the subject of determining the boundaries of science, as attested by frequent references to his works rather than, say, the works of Deborin, Mitin or Kedrov (Soviet-era philosophers).
This applies to biology, too. Of the ten Russian biologists mentioned by Lyubarsky - major figures, perhaps - not one is to be found in the bibliographies of modern Western works that I used in my monograph. They are absent even in the bibliography of Stephen Gould’s Structure of the Evolution Theory - a major tome 1433 pages thick. This absolutely does not mean that Russian scientists are at a lower level than their Western counterparts are. It is just that Russian science is limited by national boundaries, while Western science encompasses the entire world and sets the tone for the progress of science and technology.
Moreover, my choice of this or that scientist was determined not by his contribution to science (I then would have had to write an entirely different book), but rather by the degree of connection between his views and the problems analyzed in this book. Among contemporary Russian scientists, the problems tackled in this book are practically not discussed at all.
One more thing to consider: I live in the West, so I have limited access to Russian sources; besides, even those Russian scientific magazines that are represented online only offer titles of their articles, but not the texts.
At this point, I wish to draw the reader’s attention to this fact: several select parts of my work had been presented on my website. I needed to gauge the degree of my text’s accessibility for the regular reader. This got me a number of E-letters that contained complaints about excessive quotation and “abuse” of certain scientific terms. I was advised in the first case to put others’ ideas in my own words, and in the second to replace terms with “normal words”.
In this connection I want to warn the reader right away that this book is not a popular essay that can be browsed in the subway or when taking tea. This is a scientific analysis of an extremely difficult problem that has been discussed by scientists for over 2,000 years. Moreover, regardless of the results I arrived at in solving the problem of force, important here is the process itself that was used to arrive at them - the process of achieving the stated goal, what Hegel called “the result together with its realization.” The perception of this realization requires a mental effort, including the course of mastering my predecessors’ original texts, rather than their simplified interpretations. I quote different authors rather than re-tell their ideas precisely because oftentimes the idea itself is not as important as the road to it, i.e. the logic of thought and the manner of presentation. It is only then that the reader himself starts to think - and understand. When reading, say, a textbook on philosophy, a person receives certain information that is quickly forgotten. But the reader who studies the original - say, Aristotle’s Metaphysics or Hegel’s Science of Logic - learns to think. It is no accident that many Russian thinkers of the 19th - 20th centuries “underwent” Hegel; suffice it to name Belinsky, Hertzen, Chernyshevsky, Pisemsky, Bakunin, Plekhanov, Lenin. Curiously, those who missed the chance to train their brains on the works of “the objective idealist” Hegel, remained either second-rate politicians or theologians of no note who had no influence on their countries’ development. This is precisely why I oftentimes intentionally overdo it with quotes from, say, Leibniz, Kant or Hegel: I want the reader to exercise his brains.
As for special terms, their use is unavoidable in principle, since each science has its own specific lexicon. So just in case, I did put together a small glossary of terms. Perhaps I failed to include some terms there, but please bear in mind that this book is not intended for the uneducated reader who consumes bestsellers by Danielle Steele or by some similar Russian hack. My reader is a thinking man who reflects on questions like: what is life, what is the meaning of it, and why does the Universe exist.
In this book, I offer my answers to these questions. As always, they are not identical to the answers provided by most of the scientists mentioned in this book, and certainly to those by many others who remained outside my research. Thus the opportunity is offered to criticize my views and concepts, but preferably in writing only (in the mass media or on my website), rather than in backroom talks.
To sum up: in this book I offer the definition of force as an ontological category, then examine its manifestation in the inorganic world within the framework of the Big Bang conception, and then I use my understanding of force in the organic world to define the life/non-life boundary. I also use it to offer a solution to the body-mind problem (i.e. what is consciousness and thought), which led me to a new formulation of the concept of progress.
This done, I consider the nature-philosophy part of my discernment of force to be complete. The next part will be dedicated to the analysis of force in social relations (draft title: Society: Force and Progress). The last part will deal with defining the concept of force in international relations.
Finally, a few more words about my wife, without whose persuasion this book would never have been written. Actually, this is true of my previous books too, as well as, I suspect, the books to come. The thing is, Valentina has the unique ability to deprive me of rest. Before I even finish a work, she starts demanding that I write another one. At that, she does create unique conditions for my creative work: on the one hand, she does not require from me any involvement in household work and breadwinning; on the other hand, she provides the necessary technical functions, such as editing, proofreading, formatting, information searches and computer upgrades. For all that, Valentina is herself a creative person - an artist and a poet who paints in the Chinese style and writes poems to go with the paintings, in Russian and in English. The works of Wang Liushi (her artist name) have received recognition not just in Russia but also in China herself.
It is to Valentina that I dedicate this book on force; it may not explain everything the way she told me to, but at least it explains the force of my love for her. And that in itself is a lot.
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)