Economics and ecophysics

 ‘Know that the entire world is a mirror,
in each atom there is a hundred burning suns.
If you break the heart of one drop of water,
a hundred pristine oceans will rise from it.
If you examine each speck of dust
you can find a thousand Adams…
In a grain of millet is hidden a universe;

everything is gathered in the present…
From each point of this circle
thousands of forms are taken out.
Each point, in its circular rotation,
Is now a circle, now a rotating circumference.

Mahmud Shabestari, Golshan-e Raz

 

Economics, the Theology of the last centuries.
Like many other words and ideas currently in use, the word Economics comes from the ancient Greek.
Originally, this word comes as a crasis of the words oikos (home) and nomos (law, order): Oikonomia, ‘the order of the house’.

Does this mean that, originally, economics was just mere domestic administration (as the current economic practice, with his low horizons, might make us think)?
Not at all, but to understand its true, original meaning, we have to step backwards and analyze each one of the two terms that form the word ‘Economics’.
 

OIKOS

First of all, oikos, the home.

As Coomaraswamy wrote in his ‘Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art’, the construction of houses, especially in the ancient ages, has always been the object of a careful evaluation, which transcends the banality of the architectural and aesthetic rules in vogue at the present moment.

As, for men, their ‘world’ coincides every time with the space of which they have direct experience, their house – as a space in which they spend a great deal of their time – becomes one of the most important ‘temporary’ human worlds.

Consequently, in the thought of many civilizations, the house itself had to be configured as a cosmos, or, to say it better, as a minuscule representation of the original cosmos, of which the house had to maintain the essential structures.

For example, this is the reason why, according to Coomaraswamy, many civilizations in different parts of the world dedicated themselves to the construction of houses with a circular plan, in which, at the top of the roof – often a dome – there was a circular opening (such as, amongst others, the dwellings of the natives from the border between USA and Mexico, such is the structure of the central part of the Mycenaean Megaron, such is the ‘cosmos-house’ par excellence, the Pantheon in Rome, and so on…)

The circular plan and the dome correspond to the shape of the universe^{1 [1]}, while the circular opening on the top of the dome was meant, rather than as a mere chimney, as a necessary link between the original cosmos and its micro representation, the house^{2 [2]}.

Titus Burkhardt, in Alchemy, gives an explanation of such correspondence writing about the nature of the human, ‘who is both part of the cosmos which is the object of his knowledge and who also […] appears as a small cosmos within the lager one, of which he is the counterpart, like a reflected image.’

To those who know the hermetic philosophy, this idea will sound particularly familiar, as it is clearly inspired by the first paragraph of the Emeraldine Table by Hermes Trismegistus – one of the first, fundamental books on alchemy – where it is written, in the English translation by Sir Isaac Newton ‘This is true without lying, certainly most true. That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below, to do ye miracles of only one thing. And as all things have been arose from one by ye meditation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.’^{3 [3]}

 

NOMOS

It is this mirroring between superior and inferior world that leads us to the second term which forms the word Economics: nomos, that is order, law.

For a long time, the word nomos has been central in the Greek philosophical debate. If on one hand, indeed, there were legions of sophists who found in the nomos nothing more than a convention – fundamentally opposed, in their vision, to the physis, that is the ‘nature’ of things – on the other hand there were philosophers as Plato and Aristotle who managed to resolve this apparent opposition. According to Plato, although the nomos is a convention amongst humans (because everything, amongst humans, is language, that is a convention), it is still true that we have the possibility of developing a nomos the closest possible to the superior reality of ‘ideas’ from which everything was originated. Thus, in Plato’s vision, it was possible to create a nomos that was very similar to symbols and mythologies, that is something which works as a reflection – undoubtedly incomplete, but nonetheless indomitably aimed – of the reality which exists beyond our superficial impressions of the world.

This is how we should understand the nomos which forms part of the word ‘Economics’: a ‘nomos tes physeos’, that is a ‘law of nature’ that constantly tries to bring into the conventional human structures that law, or to say it better, that harmony, which belongs to the natural order of things and, more generally, of the cosmos. This is also how we can understand the deepest meaning of the supreme and harmonic beauty of Greek art.

Nomos is, then, the point where aesthetics, law, politics and economics converge, in their fundamental aspiration of representing the ‘natural’ order of things.^{4 [4]}

 

OIKONOMIA

Now, we can reunite the two terms, oikos and nomos, and recreate the word ‘Economics’.

Economics becomes, therefore, the art of organizing one’s own universe of reference according to the rules that are at the basis of universal harmony. 

How different this definition is from those currently in use!

There is an infinite distance between this thought and that of ‘economists’ such as Lionel Robbins, who, in his influential text of 1932, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, defined economics as ‘the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’.

Economics, in our vision (that, we believe, is also more respectful of the original meaning of the word), is closer to the alchemical procedure of ‘transmutation’

 

ALCHEMY, OIKONOMIA, ART AND MEDICINE

Since the ancient age that precedes the magnificence of ‘classical’ Greece, alchemists dedicated themselves to the hard work of transmutation of the imperfect or ‘thick’ substances (like lead) into perfect or ‘thin’ substances (like gold).

Using the metaphor of metallurgy – according to which, in the words of Muhy ‘d-Din ibn ‘Arabi, gold corresponds to the original condition of human soul, able to reflect without distortions the supersensible Reality^{5 [5]}, while on the other side lead corresponds to the sick and distorted condition of a soul which is no longer able of such reflection – alchemists have actually been working for centuries to the restoration of the inner equilibrium of their own spiritual world.^{6 [6]}

In the alchemical process of transmutation, thus, the use of material substances, like metals, is configured as a magical-symbolic act through which the alchemist manages to comprehend, communicate and perform equivalent and deeper transformations in his own human soul. 

We can now notice how both the alchemical and the work of oikonomia used to happen on two different –and yet interrelated – layers: the layer of visible and material activity (metallurgy for alchemy, management of the resources of the ‘house-world’ for oikonomia), and the deeper and mirroring layer of the work on one’s own human soul.

Through the restoration of the equilibrium within the material and object world, which constitutes the first of those two layers, both the alchemist and the original economist (similarly to what used to be done also by the Greek artist whit his harmonically proportioned sculptures) are actually seeking the restoration of such equilibrium in themselves. 

Therefore, we can say that the alchemist, the original economist and the artist used to work in a very similar way to the ancient medicos of the Greek Epidaurus, where, quoting Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, ‘the healer himself was healed, first and most important step in the development of the art, which is not medical but religious’.

 

ECONOMICS AND ECOPHYSICS

What a distance, between this idea of economics and the current one of late capitalism!

Such and so much, that we doubt of the opportunity of using for both the same word, ‘Economics’.

Once again, we have to step backwards in time, to the sophistic debates on the difference between nomos (considered as ‘mere convention’) and physis (considered as ‘real nature’), to maybe find the keystone that can help us resolving this lexical problem.

This time, rather than following Plato, we will accept the sophistic definition of nomos as convention, as consequence of the doxa (‘mere opinion’): that ‘nomos basileus panton’ (convention, king of all things) that in the famous fragment of the Greek poet Pindar is able to justify every iniquity.

If we accept this second interpretation of the word nomos, we could happily leave to the current ‘administration of the contingent’ the word ‘economics’. After all, what is more conventional and less real than financial economics, which is currently dominating global economy as its main engine and nemesis?

On the other hand, as far as our idea of economics is concerned – intended as a magical-symbolic art of management and transformation of resources, aimed at the transmutation of its operators, in accordance with the equilibrium that rules and harmonises the cosmos, through the restoration of such order in material/object reality – we could choose the word which used to be opposed to nomos by the sophists: physis, the nature of things^{7 [7]}.

An Ecophysics, then, that will effectively work within reality (just as alchemy effectively worked with metallurgy, to the point of creating the basis of modern chemistry, and as Greek medicine developed most of the essential practices of modern medicine), but that will never forget that the reality itself in which we live is nothing more than a mirror which need s to be cleaned, just as our own soul is only a fragment of mirror, on which dust has been gathering for too long. 

First duty of the ecophysicist, then, is cleaning that fragment of mirror which he keeps within himself.

How can the economists, today, pretend to manage the material resources of the world, if they are not even able to see them reflected in their own essence? How can economists, today, decide about the best allocation of resources, if they don’t even have enough clarity to see what resources they have in themselves? How can managers, today, manage other humans, if they don’t even comprehend the humanity that they keep in themselves? How can, again, economical operators produce resources, if within themselves the demon of disorder is still struggling and there is no space at all where they can find peace? 

Just as there cannot be leaders who have not obtained, first of all, the full mastery on themselves, so it is not possible to imagine an ecophysic (or an original economist) who has not had a clear vision of his own essence, of the beings’ essence and of the equilibrium that rules them all. 

The current economics, barricaded behind the pretended scientific seriousness of a dogmatic materialism (which, just like the illuminist rationalism described by Adorno and Horkheimer, desires to dominate nature rather than to comprehend it) reveals itself, today, as the most ambitious science and the one which is most far away from the truth, imprisoned in the illusions which it is feeding itself, at all unsuitable to play what should be its role. 

It should make us think – even just as a metaphorical coincidence – that the current economy, unable to manage the reality of the world (as cyclically and increasingly proves itself to be), has decided in last decades to rapidly migrate to the universe of virtuality, might it be the online space where the new economy operates, or the mental and oneiric space of the consumers, colonised by the latest marketing strategies, or the virtuality of financial trading, where money dissolves itself in sequences of numbers.

It does well, economy, to escape from reality, which it has already strongly contributed to pollute. 

Today more than ever, on the eve of the umpteenth global economic crisis, on the edge of the umpteenth global conflict, in the middle of a permanent state of world emergency, on the limit of sustainability of the use of natural resources, today more than ever is urgent the thought of a new economics. 

A new art of managing resources (first of all, the first resource that belongs to everyone, our own whole of soul, intellect and body), having at least enough respect to observe and comprehend the object of its work, rather than exclusively aiming at gaining the dominion over it. 

Our reality does not need such blind ‘administrators’, just as a field does not need to be cultivated by people who do not know the difference between seeds and bran.

  

 

Federico Campagna

28-12-08, London