John Cage and Chaos

Cage and Chaos

“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.” So says the composer John Cage.* It is difficult to find a statement more opposed to my worldview. I came across this conflict in an unlikely place: a GRE study book.

My irresistible urge to write notes in the margins of everything, including random reading comprehension passages, has proved a substantial distraction from my recently-begun GRE study. Oh, well. Some of us yell at the TV and some of us write angr– ahem, frustrated –  notes in the margins of texts.

Thus it is that I am writing a blog post about a GRE study passage concerning John Cage. I was doing okay up until the last sentence: “His stated goal was to remove personal agency and purpose from music and let music act as a reflection of the natural chaos of the world, rather than as an effort to organize and improve nature.”

To me, it’s clear that this is not a brilliant innovation in music. This is just missing the point of music. But since John Cage’s music was centered around his philosophy, we cannot judge the one separate from the other. So let’s talk about this philosophy.

Natural Chaos, or the Natural Order?

What does the writer mean by “natural chaos”? Do we mean that nature is naturally bereft of order and beauty, that everything is random, and the only order around is that which we imagine to make ourselves feel better? Is all order and regularity a lie? That’s what Nietzsche argued for in his “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Do our minds impose an artificial order on a world of chaos because we can’t cope? There’s an argument to be made.

On the other hand, I keep hearing about the “natural order” that was running everything perfectly until humans came along and messed it up. I keep hearing about how we need to return to nature if we want to fix humanity’s problems, that nature is balanced and we are the only species lost in chaos. We are the ones who have messed up a naturally beautiful order; it is our disruption that creates chaos.

It can’t be both. Either nature is completely chaotic, and the only order around is that illusory order which we create, or nature is a perfect example of order and beauty, and the only thing wrong with it is that we’re here. Both of those views may be wrong, but they can’t both be right; they are directly opposed. Nor can we switch from one to the other whenever it’s convenient; that would be doublethink.

So, is it a natural order or natural chaos? Do we impose order or destroy it? Maybe we should look at the facts and come up with a little more complicated picture.

What’s the Story?

The facts say that nature is not, in fact, chaotic. Look at a bacterial flagellar motor. Or if you want to go big, look at the mathematically-expressible equations that govern the laws of the universe. Look at the impossibly fine-tuned constants needed in order for our planet to sustain life. Look at the delicate balance of ecosystems. We aren’t making these things up. There is a natural order.

There is, on the other hand, also a good deal of chaos in the world. Killing, death, suffering, natural disasters – and of course, evil, once we bring in the human factor. But chaos doesn’t work like a natural part of nature. It isn’t an imperfection that’s built into the system; it’s instead a disruption in that system. The question is, how did the system get disrupted?

This is no longer a question of science or philosophy, then; we are entering the realm of history. I can’t go into that here. I will only say that we must look past one-size-fits-all answers such as “nature is perfectly balanced except for man” or “nature is really nothing but chaos.” We need a more complicated truth; we need not a system, but a story, to explain the world.

But perhaps there is a simpler way to judge John Cage’s philosophy. Because the more philosophically conscious Cage’s work gets, the less appealing it is. An attraction to such music is generally an artificial attraction; people listen to it because it’s something new, or because they agree with its philosophy, not because they’re naturally drawn to it. Maybe that means more than it might seem at first glance.

* in his work Silence: lectures and writings