Last week I quoted the philosopher John Dewey on the difference between life and non-living matter.
"The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered. While the living thing may easily be crushed by a superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence."
A friend asked why I considered that profound. I'll reproduce here my response, with some very slight re-working.
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One obvious example of
what Dewey has in mind is the immune system in humans and in just about all
other creatures with blood coursing through veins.
There is a wide range of infections which cause various nasty
diseases in humans, whence most of those struck can and do recover, and which
can only strike any of us once. Why? Because the
immune system adapts to that particular germ in the course of fighting off the
infection, and adapts so well there won't be a "next time." Smallpox of course
is the classic example. Survive it once and you're forever free from such
danger.
In such a case, the living system, the human body, has
successfully 'turned the energies which acted upon it into the means of its own
further existence,' to adapt Dewey's language.
Another simple example,
still at the physiological level: muscle tone. When life is too easy, when you
get into no fights and never have to carry heavy things around, your muscles are
in danger of atrophy. The flip side of that is that muscles develop and remain strong under conditions of
challenge. Since we don't live in caves, civilized folk have to develop exercise
regimens to simulate the conditions of regular challenge for which muscles
evolved. Still, the principle is the same as it is for immunology. The human
body is turning its challenges to its own advantage.
This Deweyite observation struck me as profound in part because it anticipated by decades a theme in the recent writings of Nassim Taleb, a Lebanese financial trader turned philosopher whose
latest book is aptly titled Anti-Fragile.
Taleb's point is that our usual focus on the distinction
between the fragile and the robust
is too narrow. A robust stone (to go back to Dewey's example) would be a very
dense one that would survive the collision with some likely other object. But
non-living matter of that sort can't aspire to the superior condition of
anti-fragility. That ought to be the goal for living creatures and the social
systems they create.
The phrase "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger" is so
often used as a vain boast that we may ignore what is important there. The fact
that vain people make that particular boast is an indication of a real and
valuable ideal. It is possible in many respects to "gain from disorder," as
Taleb puts it.
The stewards of an economic system in which some banks are considered "too
big to fail" have by that admission conceded its fragility, and they plainly seek
at best to make it more robust by shoring up those banks.
The ideal, surely, would be an economic system where the
failure of particular institutions would prove a good thing for the broader
system, one that would gain from disorder.
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