Chaos as a Force of Creation

How the Concept of Chaos Shapes Cosmology and Metaphysics

“Chaos” by George Frederic Watts

You might come across phrases like “descending into chaos” in the news or hear your boss refer to “organized chaos” at work. In such expressions, the word “chaos” is used in a very modern and scientific way. Today, there are multiple fields that study chaos. Robert Bishop, in an entry for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, explains:

The phenomenon of chaos is studied in disciplines as diverse as mathematics, astronomy, meteorology, population biology, economics, and social psychology. While it’s unlikely such diverse disciplines have any causal mechanisms in common, the phenomenological behavior of chaos — e.g., sensitivity to the tiniest changes in initial conditions or seemingly random and unpredictable behavior that nevertheless follows precise rules — appears in many models in these disciplines. Observing similar chaotic behavior in models across such diverse fields presents a challenge to understanding chaos as a phenomenon and what might count as unification of such phenomena. (“Chaos,” 2024)

What Bishop fails to mention is that the long history of the concept of “chaos” goes back to the ancient Greeks. The word “chaos” (χάος) was used by the Greeks, for example, in their myths and thought long before it was integrated by modern and contemporary science.

Here, I propose to briefly examine how some philosophers have conceptualized “chaos” over its long history to help you get a better idea of what it is, hopefully paying tribute to a long tradition that is often overlooked in contemporary scholarship.

I will begin by explaining how we usually present chaos as part of Plato’s “cosmology,” since it is supposed to be where such a discussion begins, at least for a metaphysician. I will continue with one of the most interesting discussions of the term in the 20th century, in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Plato and the Concept of “Chaos”