Philosophy

Detailed review of the 2018 film. This article is concerned to define contemporary art such that the machinations of the current art market - as portrayed in the film - make sense. The central idea is that the best of contemporary art is narrative rather than merely aesthetic; and a failure to understand this leads to the confusion that currently characterizes judgements about modern artworks.

HBO's 'The Price of Everything' (2018): a documentary by Nathaniel Kahn Jakob Zaaiman London 2018 Oliver Barker in action As so often with documentaries that try to come to terms with contemporary art, the real subject seems to evade capture. The title suggests we are in search of something like an 'understanding of value', meaning that behind the astronomical prices currently being realised for works of art, there is a perception that buyers are not so much interested in the works themselves, only in their asset-worthiness. In other words, no one really cares anything about the art, only about the money. Not an easy idea to explore visually, but Khan's plan is to let the facts speak for themselves. So he documents key aspects of the moneyed artworld by showing successful artists and their artworks interspersed with interviews with a variety of relevant experts and dealers, all the while leading up to an anticipated Sotheby's extravaganza (c1:20:00). This is fine as far as it goes, but the problem is that none of the experts involved are themselves exactly sure what the 'art' of contemporary art is all about, and so are unable to offer anything particularly insightful. And asking artists to talk about art can also be something of a let-down, as they often have no idea what they are playing at and tend to resort to banalities. This doesn't mean the unfolding of events, overlaid with authoritative but slightly shallow commentary, isn't entertaining to watch: it is. And we still get to witness the problems besetting contemporary art directly, even if by default, and in the absence of editorial guidance. As a starter, there is the populist sentiment – surprisingly decades old now – that contemporary art objects are ludicrously overvalued, and that a reckoning of sorts ought to be on the cards. Gavin Brown, himself a dealer, thinks that he can 'smell smoke' (1:10:52), but it's not 2 clear exactly what he means by this. Is this smouldering the result of buyers starting to lose an interest in art, or is it their dawning realisation that they're not quite sure what they are paying for ? This is really where the essence of the 'problem' with contemporary art lies: nobody knows what the 'art' of contemporary art amounts to, so people are parting with money on the basis of what gets to be described in the film as a 'fashionable consensus' (c49:00). As far as asset management goes, this is neither here nor there – let the enablers like Sotheby's Amy Cappellazzo monitor the market for you (c1:02:03) – but if anyone is genuinely interest in the art itself, and wants to know if what they are buying has real worth, an entirely different set of ideas need to be brought into play. For a work of art to have genuine value, not as a tradable commodity but as 'itself', it has to form part of a revelatory narrative with substantial and cogent content. It has to have more to it than surface features, or its value as a mere 'recognisable' image. And it has to be more than a mere relic. The Mona Lisa, for example, is a crafted relic of a bygone age, and its 'meaning', such as it can be said to have one, is entirely limited to its historical context and the techniques employed to realise it. There is nothing to the Mona Lisa beyond that, and although the image may have its own fascination as an instance of highly crafted portraiture, it is spectacularly dull as an artwork, as it does not possess any narrative content, or anything particularly interesting to say about itself other than the decidedly obvious. And this in turn is true of almost all the classical museum pieces: they are all about the realisation of narrow classical conceptions and sensibilities, which explains why wandering around art museums and national galleries can be something of an ordeal: worthy, perhaps, but also faintly boring, as the 'wow' factor can only deliver so much before it begins to tail off (see Alexander Nemerov, art historian, at the Frick Collection c28:14). Is this all there is to art ? Not if you know what to look for, and it seems that most people – even the art professionals – don't know where to start. The transition from 'classical' to 'contemporary' has not brought with it a crucial change in perspective, and so still languishes in the idea of 'art' as a mixture of cultural artefact and crafterly technique, with 'value' as a function of desirability. And desirability in turn is a mixture of recognisability and fashionable consensus, the consensus being generated and sustained – or diminished – by changeable ideas as to what is 'current' or 'interesting' or 'artistically substantial'. This whole train of thought is somewhat circular and insubstantial, and cannot come to rest on anything like solid ground, which is exactly why dealers are constantly alert to a possible day of reckoning when someone will call time on much of the duplicitous waffle which counts as sales talk. Then what to look for ? You look for content. Content, as opposed to surface imagery is everything in contemporary art. What is content ? Content is the totality of the artistic narrative represented by a particular artwork. What is the artistic narrative ? It is the theatrical declaration – and all its directly related avenues – presented to the viewer by the artist through their artwork or works. Put more simply, it is the information contained in, and represented by, the theatrical meaning of an artwork, not as a merely sensual and aesthetic experience, but as a portal to a more imaginative type of experience. In the same way that an item of clothing, closely associated with a particular person, can generate an imaginative encounter not only with that person but with their world, so carefully conceived artworks can do exactly the same thing; only this time it is not necessarily the mundane world being represented, but a narrative and imaginary one. For example, a Joseph Beuys sculpture is not an ersatz Rodin, it is a portal to the Beuys world, and in its own way an infinitely more interesting invitation than that presented by a classical sculptural pose; the same is true of the technically shoddy but arresting works of Andy Warhol, or the technically sophisticated works of Jeff Koons; in both cases these works are items which conjure 3 up distinctive theatrical environments which extend way beyond the immediate aesthetic features on display. Narrative artistic content is not about the relative superficiality of sensual beauty; it is about inviting you to partake in a mentality, or to view another modality of experiencing. The more powerfully an artwork can pitch you into its own realm of theatrical narrative, the better the art. The problem is that the popular conception of art conceives each and every artwork as a standalone object, to be assessed according to classical principles of skilled technique and traditional subject matter. In this view, you compare a Warhol to a Caravaggio, and a Koons to a Donatello, and decide in both cases that the modern works are seriously 'insubstantial'. But this is an astonishingly blunt and blinkered view of the possibilities of art, and doesn't even begin to acknowledge the opportunities which extend beyond judging objects in terms of mere sensual beauty. And it is this basic inability to recognise – and inhabit – a realm beyond classical conceptions of 'art as crafted beauty' which explains why there is an ongoing sense that all of contemporary art could turn out to be nonsense, and that a collective awakening might be about to bring the whole market crashing down. Does this mean that, as essentially narrative objects as opposed to aesthetic ones, all of contemporary art is somehow validated ? Of course not: much of it is as superficial as it appears to be. Much contemporary art is simply not able to act as a portal to a distinctive theatrical realm, and so remains, despite the best efforts of its creators, at a level no higher than that of 'creative crafting'. This is not the fault of the artist; this is the fault of the artistic muse, which has failed to bless that artist and their creations with access to the interesting, or the unsettling, or the revelatory. A Richter abstract As an aside, it needs to be said that one of the most vacuous genres of modern and contemporary painting is that of 'abstraction', where colourful splotches and swirls on a canvas are imbued with a significance beyond mere ornamentation. The idea that splotches can be 'meaningfully interpreted' is an idea well worth investigating, and testing objectively, but anyone who does so will soon realise that it is a complete waste of time and goes nowhere. It is possible for abstract painters to develop a markedly distinctive style, but the style invariably ends with itself, and cannot generate narrative content which can develop into something approaching an involving theatricality. A 'Pollock' is just a large-scale decorative work with a highly characteristic method and style, but there's nothing more profound to them than that (see Jerry Saltz on Pollock c57:41). Abstract paintings may have historical value as recognisable instances – or relics – of a 4 particular line of visual experimentation, but it doesn't make sense to pretend that they are worthy of extended intellectual exegesis (see the sections on Gerhard Richter 30:24 & 49:00). Where does all this take us ? We're establishing the principles whereby one is able to judge the worth – in terms of authentic content – of contemporary art. And these principles have little or nothing to do with classical academic technique, or aesthetic (meaning 'sensual') representations of beauty. Contemporary art is about conjuring up, using artworks, frames of mind which cannot be accessed any other way: it is about using presentational objects (sculptures, paintings, installations and so on) to present to the viewer unusual and revelatory narratives, which can then be experienced vicariously as recreational events. As was said before, the more an art object offers you an entry point to a fascinating vicarious world, the better the art. Why isn't this simple perspective on contemporary art more widely understood ? Partly because many people are so locked into the idea of artworks being standalone aesthetic objects that they can't think of them in any other way; so if an artwork is not obviously beautiful by classical standards, it may well not be a 'proper' work of art at all (see Alexander Nemerov on Koons c50:47). Viewing contemporary artworks as subtle forms of theatre requires a certain ability to enjoy sharing other people's frames of mind. Alexander Nemerov examining a Koons Our conception of artworks as items in a kind of narrative theatre, and as an invitation to explore very distinctive takes on life, is certainly complicated by the fact that many artists might themselves dispute this characterisation. They might want to see themselves as members of a classical tradition producing standalone objects that ought to be judged by classical standards – give or take a few concessions to modernity – but this lack of insight into their own endeavours only succeeds in adding a peculiar and fascinating dimension to the whole experience. Genuine 'lack of self-awareness' can invest creative work with a depth and mystery that far exceeds anything cynical market-manipulation can achieve, which is why Warhol and Beuys and Koons and Gilbert and George have a cogency to their achievements – perhaps despite themselves – that others like Hirst and Emin and Creed can only marvel at. 5 But having established principles by which we can assess contemporary art objectively – and in so doing bypassing the sense of uncertainty that fuels the idea that the contemporary art market is an absurdist charade – we still have to acknowledge another somewhat perplexing possibility which the film reveals in passing. And this is the idea that because contemporary art is so widely misunderstood by all concerned – as well as being inherently bohemian and weird it is always going to have a sense of playful decadence about it, with people competing for apparently meaningless objects just for the entertaining hell of it. So what if the thing in my lounge is a bizarre pile of junk, we outbid guys in Japan and Russia, and the catalogue assures me it's 'profound'. Who cares if the monstrous splotch and swirl painting over the fireplace in my chateau would be better placed in a kids' nursery; it's worth tens of millions, and it makes all my educated friends jealous. And so on. It may well be that people really don't care that much about the real 'art of art'; they just want to spend their moola extravagantly in public; and if a successful bid creates a frisson of shock and bewilderment among the chattering hordes, so much the better. Of course you might also need to be able to recognise what's fashionable and desirable, but there's always someone at Sotheby's to help you with that. Where does this leave us ? Well, 'The Price of Everything' certainly gives us a mildly diverting look at the goings-on at the very top end of the food chain, even if it fails to present us with any decisive insights. So we never come close to learning the real value of art. The auctioneer Simon de Pury reminds us (c53:15) that much of the fashionable desirability of artworks is down to a matter of ever-changing taste, and that the only way cultural artefacts will survive is for them to have commercial worth (c1:45). Both ideas may be true in their way, though this doesn't tell us anything about the art, only about the people who buy it. But looking ahead – and things being what they are with the way the rich spend their money – we can be reasonably confident in the belief that, no matter how many bubbles and crashes there are to come, and no matter how shallow the appreciation of art itself remains, the art market – as an arena for conspicuous acquisition – is always going to be there. After all, the rich are always going to need to decorate their properties with spectacular trophies. More on this conception of art: https://ulondon.academia.edu/JakobZaaiman Other reviews of the same film: https://www.mrqe.com/movie_reviews/the-price-of-everything-m


Review â Correct English: Reality or Myth?

Philosophy

CORRECT ENGLISH Full Title: Correct English: Reality or Myth? Author / Editor: Geoffrey Robert Marnell Publisher: Burdock Books, 2015 BUY ON AMAZON Review © Metapsychology Vol. 21, No. 10 Reviewer: Karl Pfeifer, PhD, I came to Correct English: Reality or Myth? thinking of myself as a modest prescriptivist. Thanks to Geoffrey Marnell I have come to understand that I need to distinguish my concern over the mechanics of the language as a tool for communication from the idea of grammatical rules per se, many of the traditional ones of which I myself have regarded as ill-informed and illadvised. Marnell rightly regards the important issues as being not whether traditional rules are complied with, but whether language is used in accordance with principles of clarity and economy; and the common usage of our GENRES Art and Photography Fiction General Memoirs Philosophical Self Help SUBJECTS Addiction and Alcoholism Anxiety Childhood Disorders Children Depression Ethics Grief Medications Search ... Se a r c h METAPSYCHOLOGY ONLINE REVIEWS intended audience should be a guide as to what works in respect of achieving that goal. Marnell recapitulates many of the familiar examples of traditional rules based on prejudice and unfounded opinion and it is hard to disagree. Of course it is not wrong to split in]nitives and often that is even the better option, inasmuch as it may contribute to clarity. But at the same time, it is also hard to see how a shift from rules to principles is not still a species of prescriptivism, differing only in what is being prescribed. Clarity and economy rather than traditional rules have become the main virtues to be pursued. "We do not need the putative varieties of prescriptivism to write well (my italics)," he claims, "and good (my italics) writing can be taught" (p. 12). Yet it seems an odd notion of descriptivism that subsumes such notions as goodness, which is a prescriptive notion. Marnell is focused on the terms "correct" and "incorrect", although he does allow "wrong" as a virtual equivalent of the latter (pp. 51-52), and ignores the status of the other terms that he employs and that would ordinarily also be regarded as terms for prescribing: "well", "good", "should", "ought", "better", etc. It is one thing to say that good principles of writing or principles of good writing (or good practices) should be informed by descriptions of common usage; it is quite another to deny that this is just a new and better nuanced prescriptivism. When I attribute goodness I do not merely describe. What is unusual about Marnell's explanation and defence of descriptivism is that it is basically a piece of applied philosophy, employing vocabulary, drawing distinctions, and referencing authors that would be familiar to many who have had a few introductory Mental Health Personality Psychoanalysis Psychology Psychotherapy Relationships Religion Sexuality Wellness MEDIA TYPES Audio Books Movies courses in philosophy: a priori vs. a posteriori, deductive vs. inductive reasoning, "justi]ed true belief", categorical imperative, category mistake; Ryle, Wittgenstein, Hare, Beardsley, Ayer, Rawls, Hume. Moreover, he lays out arguments explicitly with numbered premises. As an academic philosopher, I love this. But one might wonder, will the wider audience for whom the book is intended be equally loving or become impatient with the ]ne dialectical manoeuvres? Let's hope it will educate and win some converts to the philosophical cause. Through a series of tortuous arguments involving dictionary de]nitions, Marnell hopes to convince us that the use of "correct" and "incorrect" to describe language is a category mistake; he quotes Gilbert Ryle: "[A category mistake represents facts] as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories), when they actually belong to another" (Marnell, p. 88). Marnell believes that correctness belongs to the category of things we can know, and he claims grammar cannot be placed in that category. It turns out that his underlying reason for this is that sentences that purport to express grammatical knowledge, viz. grammatical prescriptions, cannot be true or correct because they are categorical imperatives (unconditional commands) and commands cannot be true or false. Well, I agree he is correct (!) that commands cannot be true or false. However, they can still be appropriate or inappropriate: For two-way roads, "Drive on the right" is an appropriate command in Canada, but inappropriate in Australia. "Pass the salt" is infelicitous if there is no salt. However, the problem for Marnell is that rules or prescriptions don't have to be expressed as commands: "You ought not to do X", "You should not do X", "It is wrong to do X" are all declarative (or indicative) sentences. Moreover, the reductive thesis that value-judgements are disguised commands is controversial and not widely accepted. Many people believe there is such a thing as moral truth, after all. Indeed, it is odd to see a descriptivist arguing that it is a mistake (as in "incorrect"?) to call a rule in the declarative form "correct" (or even that it is a mistake to regard any particular piece of language as correct or incorrect) given that it is such a common and well established usage. Marnell approvingly quotes Hume's claim that an "ought"-statement cannot be derived from an "is"statement. He calls Hume's "ought"-statements "imperative statements" but that is a bit of sleight of hand; imperatives don't make statements. Hume himself regarded "ought"-statements (his term is "propositions") as capable of expressing truths or falsehoods - he just didn't believe you could derive them without an "ought"statement among the premises. Marnell devotes a large chapter to what he calls "the myth of correctness". After reading Marnell, I want to add a myth of my own: the myth of prescriptivists vs. descriptivists. As far as I can tell, it's all prescriptivism, with the differences just being a matter of degree. Marnell divides prescriptivists into two camps, strong and weak. At the very far end of the spectrum you would have his strong prescriptivists, viz. those who believe in "inviolable laws of language use that should never be broken" (p. 56), and next door you would have his weak prescriptivists, viz. those who believe that language can at best be governed by rules (conventions), not laws, where the rules are regarded as a product of human intervention, but still worth treating as inviolable. One might be suspicious of the strong/weak distinction, but perhaps a case can be made for laws of grammar being analogous to Aristotle's Laws of Thought, thereby rationalizing a belief that grammar is not governed by mere convention. (I have encountered grammar Nazis but never one who actually believed anything like that, and I suspect that upon closer examination an ostensible strong prescriptivist would turn out to be just a vehement weak prescriptivist, but at least the stronger position is conceivable if nothing else.) Nevertheless, even by Marnell's own lights there are no descriptivists who do not offer prescriptions for language use; their prescriptions are just more modest and limited in scope. Marnell's descriptivists are not mere practitioners or a]cionados of descriptive linguistics. They make recommendations based on common usage and the goal of communication, and what they recommend is deemed to be better. (What exactly is "common usage" anyway? The concept itself is vague and at best based on extrapolations from limited data subjected, for better or worse, to various selection criteria.) Marnell, as a descriptivist, maintains that "communication is paramount and ... in general the best way to achieve it is by adopting the conventions of one's audience (whoever they might be)" (p. 175). Many of us have had the experience of reading instructions for a product written by someone whose native language is obviously not English and whose prose is so incomprehensible that even educated guesswork is of no help. Is the error of the instructions' writer simply that he hasn't taken the common usage of his particular audience into account? That's unlikely. In such cases it's virtually certain that an audience for which that would be common usage does not exist. The instructions' writer knows what he means to say (one hopes) but cannot say it in idiomatic English. Is it really plausible to regard his English as neither correct nor incorrect? As a university professor I have had students, whose ]rst and only language is English, write sentences that are gobbledygook; yet they cannot understand what is wrong with the sentences or coherently explain what they mean. Such students are the victims of a school system that replaced literature, grammar, and composition with so-called "language arts", which seems to have consisted mostly of rap sessions and movies. They were not taught grammar because it was contended that as native speakers they already knew how to properly speak the language. Not even having learned about parts of speech and the roles of those parts, they ended up producing sentences that couldn't be parsed (oh, for the days of sentence diagrams). The common usage of a group may not be adequate to the demands of communication in a technologically advanced society, and educators need to step in, prescriptions in hand, to educate the intended audience. The resources of pidgin aren't always up to the task. I confess that part of my motivation for prescriptivism has always been the hope that it would slow down linguistic change. It saddens me that much of the English canon is becoming less and less accessible because of change (but not only because of change: many young people have not been taught how to understand sentences with embeddings and subordination). I don't deny that change is inevitable, but I don't want to embrace it as Marnell seems to and I wish he had more sympathy for such concerns. Be that as it may, Correct English: Reality or Myth? is an important book. As far as I know, it is the ]rst of its genre that can justi]ably be regarded as being signi]cantly a work in applied philosophy. The issues it addresses, as well as those it hints at in passing (e.g. national policies for language), deserve further study and should become part of a more broadly envisaged philosophy of language. © 2017 Karl Pfeifer Karl	Pfeifer,	PhD,	Adjunct	Senior	Research	Fellow	in Philosophy,	Monash	University,	and	Professor	Emeritus, University	of	Saskatchewan PREVIOUS REVIEW NEXT REVIEW Home About Metapsychology Terms and Privacy


Beyond Global Studies. The Introductory Lecture to Big History Course

Philosophy

Globalistics and Globalization Studies 2014 321–328 Beyond Global Studies. An Introductory Lecture into a Big History Course* Leonid E. Grinin, Andrey V. Korotayev, and David Baker Global studies can be made not only with respect to the humans who inhabit the Earth, they can well be done with respect to biological and abiotic systems of our planet. Such an approach opens wide horizons for the modern university education as it helps to form a global view of various processes. However, we can also ask ourselves whether the limits of our studies can be moved further. Would not it be useful for the students to understand the evolution of our planet within the context of the evolution of our Universe? The need to see this process of development holistically, in its origins and growing complexity, is fundamental to what drives not only science but the human imagination. This shared vision of the grand narrative is one of the most effective ways to conceptualize and integrate our growing knowledge of the Universe, society, and human thought. Note that the respective discipline already exists and it has been developing quite successfully for more than three decades; it is denotes as Big History. Keywords: Big History, Universe, evolution, complexity, grand narrative. What is Big History? Big History has been developing very fast indeed. We are currently observing a 'Cambrian explosion' in terms of its popularity and diffusion. Big History courses are taught in the schools and universities of several dozen countries, including Australia, Great Britain, China, Germany India, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, the USA, Russia and many more. The International Big History Association (IBHA) is gaining momentum in its projects and membership. Conferences are beginning to be held regularly. Hundreds of researchers are involved in studying and teaching Big History. What is Big History? And why is it becoming so popular? According to the working definition of the International Big History Association, 'Big History seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life and Humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods' (Grinin et al. 2014a: 5). So, Big History brings together constantly updated information from the scientific disciplines and merges it with the contemplative realms of philosophy and the humanities. It also provides a connection between the past, present, and future. Big History is a colossal and extremely heterogeneous field of research encompassing all the forms of existence and all timescales. * The text of this lecture has been prepared on the basis of our introduction to the edited volume Teaching & Researching Big History: Exploring a New Scholarly Field (Grinin et al. 2014b). For more information on Big History see, e.g., Grinin et al. 2011, 2014b; Grinin, Korotayev, Rodrigue 2011; Grinin, Korotayev 2013; Grinin, Ilyin, and Korotayev 2012. Globalistics and Globalization Studies 322 Scientific specialization and the immense amounts of information contained in the various 'compartments' of academia can hinder our capacity for inclusiveness, but, paradoxically, it also amplifies the need for it. Many scientists would like a more integrated vision that sees beyond their meticulous and complicated fields of specialization. One can see the growth of such interest in the framework of individual disciplines, as well as in interdisciplinary research. Moreover, without using 'mega-paradigms' like Big History, scientists working in different fields may run the risk of losing sight of how each other's tireless work connects and contributes to their own. Yet while interdisciplinarity is not a new idea, many disciplines can run the disappointing tendency of only paying lip-service to it. This is not possible in Big History. In a discipline that starts by weaving together all the disciplines into a single narrative, interdisciplinary work is not only possible, it is essential. A unification of the disciplines, a deep symbiosis of academic cells, will open up research areas that are vital to the development of the twenty-first century thought and culture. As has been mentioned on a number of occasions, the rapidly globalizing world needs global knowledge that explains a unified global system (see Grinin, Carneiro, Korotayev, and Spier 2011; Grinin and Korotayev 2009). Indeed, globalization itself becomes a vehicle for Big History. The very existence of the International Big History Association is proof of that. Origins of Big History Big History ideas did not appear out of nowhere. They have deep roots in human spirituality, philosophy, and science. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was an explosive growth of scientific knowledge accompanied by a deep differentiation of disciplines. This made borders between scholars and scientists much more rigid, while research specialization grew by an order of magnitude. As Erwin Schrödinger justly noted: '[I]t has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it'. However, he continued, there is 'no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim be lost forever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories' (Schrödinger 1944: 1). As disintegration peaked in the twentieth century, such undertakings were not mentioned as often as they ought to have been. When an interdisciplinary synthesis was mentioned at all, it was seen as a lofty goal, the barest whisper of a dream, rather than an approachable reality. A very different picture appears if we look further back in the history of human thought. From the very moment of their emergence, grand unified theories of existence tended to become global. Even the Abrahamic theological tradition, that was dominant in the western half of the Afroeurasian world-system in the Late Ancient and Medieval periods, contains a sort of proto-Big History. It presents a unified vision of the Universe's origin, development, and future. In that grand narrative, the Universe has a single point of creation and it develops according to a divine plan. Similarly, classical Indian religious philosophy loosely resembles the principle of the unity of the world through the idea of reincarnation, in a Hindu approximation of the First Law of Thermodynamics. Even the delusions of astrologers and alchemists contained the idea of universal interconnectedness (stars and planets affect human fates; everything can be transformed into everything else). This is only a fragment of the pre-modern ideas that contained an element of Big History thinking. Many interesting insights on the properties of the Universe can be found in prescientific worldviews generated by various human civilizations. Grinin, Korotayev, and Baker • Beyond Global Studies 323 Ancient philosophy even aspired to find the single principle cause for everything that exists1. This was done in a very insightful way in the works of the ancient Greeks, who were especially interested in the origins and nature of the Universe. Note that, even while Greek (and, more generally, classical) philosophy concentrated on ethical or aesthetic issues, it was still dominated by the idea of the single law of Logos that governed the whole Universe, with many different interpretations of it provided by various thinkers. This was reinforced by the concept of a 'cosmic circulation' that also influenced human society. Medieval philosophy inherited the Greek tradition 'to comprehend the universe on the basis of archetypical principles ... as well as the inclination to detect clarifying universals in the chaos of the life' (Tarnas 1991). The Beginning of Modern History of Big History The transition from the geocentric (Ptolemaic) to the heliocentric (Copernican) perspective took many decades notwithstanding all the brilliant conjectures of Giordano Bruno (1548– 1600). Discoveries by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Galileo Galelei (1564–1642), and Isaac Newton (1643–1727) produced a majestic vision of the Universe. For the first time in history, a more advanced form of Big History thinking was produced – not by the speculations of philosophers or theologians but on the basis of corroborated facts and mathematically formulated laws of Nature. 'Mechanicism' became the dominant paradigm in western scientific thought (including the social sciences). Thus the formation of a unified scientific worldview was consolidated. 'Natural philosophy', the precursor term for science, investigated everything from the highly cosmological to the deeply sociological and continued to preserve its dominant position in the eighteenth century: the age of the Enlightenment (see Barg 1987; Grinin 2012 for more details). However, new ideas stressing historical variability soon emerged. Those ideas and discoveries led to a crisis of the dominant scientific paradigm. In geology, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, systematized all the known empirical data and analyzed a number of important theoretical issues of the development of the Earth and its surface. He also produced a few insights that turned out to be important for the development of the theory of biological evolution. The hypothesis of the emergence of the Solar System from a gas nebula was first spelled out by philosopher Immanuel Kant and later by mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace in one of the notes to his multivolume Mécanique Céleste (1799–1825). Some of the philosophical roots of evolutionary ideas are very old indeed, and scientifically based evolutionary ideas first emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the idea of universal evolution only became really influential in the nineteenth century. The first major evolutionary theory in biology was produced by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744– 1829), who advocated change via acquired traits. Another no less evolutionary theory was formulated in geology by Charles Lyell (1797–1875) who, in his Principles of Geology (1830–1833), refuted the theory of catastrophism. It is no coincidence that the first narratives beginning to resemble modern big histories first emerged around this time. The first real concerted and conscious attempt to unify the story of the physical processes of the universe to the dynamics of human society was made 1 In particular, in the classical Indian Philosophy one finds the belief in the 'eternal moral order' of the Universe as well as ideas of the collossality of the world space and time, infinity of the Universe comprising millions of such worlds as our Earth (see, e.g., Chatterjee, Datta 1954). Globalistics and Globalization Studies 324 by Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), a Prussian natural philosopher, who set out to write Kosmos (1845–1859), but died before he could complete it. Also, Robert Chambers anonymously published the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844. His book began with the inception of the Universe in a fiery mist and ended with a history of humanity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the concept of evolution by natural selection as pioneered by Charles Darwin (1859) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1858) merged with the idea of social progress espoused by Herbert Spencer (1857, 1862, 1896) and became a major influence on western thought. The idea of evolution/progress as a transition from less to more complex systems dramatically transformed the human worldview (note: although Spencer paid more attention to biological and social evolution, he treated evolution as a universal process taking place at all possible levels – from microorganisms to galaxies). It became known that stars and planets, including the Sun and the Earth, are objects that have their origin, history, and end. There was a great deal of indication that revolutionary changes in astronomy were forthcoming. Two discoveries produced the most important contribution to the emergence of Big History. First, the interpretation of the redshift by Edwin Hubble in the 1920s demonstrated that the Universe is not static and eternal, but is in a general state of expansion, as if it began with a primordial 'explosion'. By the 1940s, interacting teams of physicists and astronomers from around the world speculated on the existence of left-over radiation from this event – cosmic microwave background radiation. This radiation was detected in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson and provides the most convincing observational evidence for the explosive beginning of our Universe, which in the late 1940s George Gamow and Fred Hoyle called the 'Big Bang'. The simple epithet became useful for the theory's supporters. Moreover, the emergence of historical evidence for a point of origin of the Universe established a sense of chronology and transformed astrophysics into a historical science. The door firmly swung open for scholars of all shades to produce a universal history, called, to use our own simple epithet, 'Big History'. Cambrian-Style Explosion of Big History By the last decades of the twentieth century, it became clear that the natural sciences contained a clear narrative from the Big Bang to modern day and this unity began to find expression in an increasing number of written works. For the first time it was actually possible for the mainstream to grasp the entire chronology.2 This began the process of thinking about both natural and human history as part of the unified whole. In 1980, astrophysicist Eric Jantsch wrote The Self-Organizing Universe (Jantsch 1980), now sadly out of print, which tied together all universal entities into a collection of processes. It constitutes the first modern unifying Big History. Jantsch did a credible job of examining human history as an extension of cosmic evolution and as just one of many structures operating beyond thermodynamic equilibrium. Jantsch's work constitutes the first attempt to find a common strand or dynamic that streamlines, unites, and underwrites the entire grand narrative. It is thus possible to explore history from the Big Bang to modern day without being weighed down by the scale of the chronology. Around the same time American-based astrophysicists, geologists, and biologists such as Preston Cloud, Siegfried Kutter, George Field, and Eric Chaisson began writing and 2 A phenomenon best discussed in David Christian (2009). Grinin, Korotayev, and Baker • Beyond Global Studies 325 teaching courses about the cosmic story. Then at the end of the 1980s history and psychology professors like David Christian in Sydney, John Mears in Dallas, and Akop Nazaretyan in Moscow3 began to craft grand narratives that incorporated the human story more seamlessly into a larger universal narrative. Fred Spier did the same at Amsterdam and Eindhoven. From here, a Cambrian-style explosion of courses and works has occurred.4 Eric Chaisson's Cosmic Evolution (2001) defines the unifying theme of Big History as the rise of complexity, which, he argues, occurs when energy flows through matter become increasingly dense. Chaisson even proposed a way of objectively measuring this trend. Free energy rate density is the energy per second that flows through an amount of mass. In this way Chaisson empirically established that complexity has been rising in the Universe for 13.8 billion years. The theme of rising complexity was incorporated into David Christian's Maps of Time (2005) which further employed it in the human tale. Fred Spier, most recently in his book, Big History and the Future of Humanity (2010), has emphasized the Goldilocks principle, and how the rise of complexity occurs when conditions like temperature, pressure, and radiation are 'just right' for the rise of complexity to occur. Spier asserts that the rise of complexity combined with energy flows and the Goldilocks principle form the beginnings of an overarching theory of Big History. The unique approach of Big History, the interdisciplinary genre of history that deals with the grand narrative of 13.8 billion years, has opened up a vast amount of research agendas. Or, to engage an evolutionary metaphor, it has triggered a scholarly speciation event where hundreds of new niches have opened up waiting to be filled. The ecological terrain is vast and the numbers that currently populate it are few. The research comes in a variety of forms. We big historians must collaborate very closely to pursue this vibrant new field. Big History and Evolutionary Megaparadigm Big History has much in common with the interdisciplinary evolutionary research, and this is not a coincidence that the Russian version of Big History is called Universal History or Universal Evolutionism. We need epistemological key terms in order to understand change in nature and society in its entirety. There are not that many scientific notions that could play the role of such key terms. We think that evolution is one of them. One of the clearest manifestations of the universal evolutionary approach is just Big History that considers the process of evolution as a continuous and integral process – from the Big Bang all the way down to the current state of human affairs and beyond. Big History provides unique opportunities to consider the development of the Universe as a single process. However, one should note that the Big History studies tend to pay little attention to such an important aspect as the unity of principles, laws, and mechanisms of evolution at all its levels. We believe that combining the Big History potential with evolutionary approaches can open wider horizons in this respect (see Grinin et al. 2011). Indeed, common traits in development, functioning, and interaction can be found in 3 For more detail on the Russian Big History tradition see Nazaretyan 2011. 4 For recent survey of size and of the field see Rodrigue, Stasko 2009; and the canon of seminal works includes but is not confined to Fred Spier's The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang until Today (1996), David Christian's Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (2004), Eric Chaisson's Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos (2006), Cynthia Stokes Brown's Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (2007), and Evolution, a Big History Perspective (Grinin, Korotayev, Rodrigue 2011). Globalistics and Globalization Studies 326 apparently quite different processes and phenomena of Big History. In this respect the universality of evolution is expressed in those real similarities that are detected in many manifestations at all its levels. The comparison between different types of macroevolution appears to be essential for the search for such similarities. We also believe that there are several important aspects to such an approach. First of all, there are established fundamental notions such as 'matter', 'energy', 'entropy', 'complexity', 'information', 'space', and 'time', that provide a general framework for comparisons. In the second place, matter has some very general properties, which were perhaps already predetermined during the initial super dense phase of the universe. During the subsequent phases of universal evolution, matter acquires very specific forms, while new properties emerged at every new stage of the universal evolution. In the third place, a few general system-dependent structural properties of matter5 appear to determine similarities between different types of macroevolution. Ashby (1958) noticed that while the range of systems is enormously wide, most systems consist of physical parts: atoms, stars, switches, springs, bones, neurons, muscles, gases, etc. (see also Hall and Fagen 1956). In many cases we are dealing with very complex systems that are found in many places (Haken 2005: 16). The emergence of forms of greater complexity results from the transition from one evolutionary level to another. The general principles related to the functioning and development of such objects can be described by general system theory. The concepts of self-organization and transition from equilibrium to a non-equilibrium state are also relevant in this respect. In addition, both biotic and abiotic systems show complex interactions with their environment that can be described in terms of general principles. In the fourth place, mega-evolutionary trajectories can be considered as components of a single process, and their different phases can be regarded as different types of macroevolution that could be similar in terms of their main trends and directions as well as particular mechanisms. This will be discussed in more detail below. In the fifth place, we can speak about common vectors of megaevolution as well as common causes and conditions during the transition from one level of organization to another. There is a number of very important categories that are relevant for the analysis of all phases of megaevolution, most notably self-organization, stable and chaotic states, phase transition, bifurcation, etc. It appears to be also possible to speak about some other points confirming the unity of many principles of the organization and functioning of our world at all the levels and in rather various aspects. Hence, the integration of such paradigms as Big History and megaevolutionary comparative studies allow researchers and students to view a colossal panorama of our Universe at various levels and in very different aspects. References Ashby, W. R. 1958. General Systems Theory as a New Discipline. General Systems 3: 1–6. Barg, M. A. 1987. Epochs and Ideas. The Formation of Historism. Moscow: Mysl. In Russian. Brown, C. S. 2007. Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present. New York – London: The New Press. 5 If we take into account the concept of dark matter, it might be more appropriate to speak about ordinary matter as 'matter that is capable of evolution' (see Grinin 2013). Grinin, Korotayev, and Baker • Beyond Global Studies 327 Chaisson, E. 2001. Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chaisson, E. 2006. Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos. New York: Columbia University Press. Chatterjee, S., and Datta, D. 1954. 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