Instability As Condition

Since its beginnings, Western philosophy has undertaken a continuous effort to safeguard the world from instability. What we today call "chaos" was almost always conceived not as an intrinsic and operative ontological condition, but rather as a mere transition, a failure, a threat to be contained, or a functional resource to be domesticated. This persistent ontological deafness to instability constitutes the guiding thread of a genealogy that extends from archaic cosmogonies to the most recent attempts at thought.

The founding narrative of Western philosophy, rooted in Ancient Greece, reveals a profound aversion to instability as a principle. In Hesiod, in his Theogony, Khaos emerges as the primordial name of origin. However, this entity does not denote an operative presence, an active potency; rather, it configures an interval, a hiatus, an indefinite void between Earth (Gaia) and Sky (Uranus). Far from being a generative force, Khaos is conceived as a lack, an absence that urgently needs to be filled. The genealogy of the world begins, but the unformed is quickly relegated to oblivion, supplanted by the emergence of order.

Plato, in Timaeus, deepens this gesture of exclusion through a radical distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible world. The genesis of the sensible is mediated by a third term: the chôra – a receptacle of becoming, a matrix of generation. However, even the chôra lacks its own consistency; it is a passive space, destined to be molded, never an autonomous potency. The Platonic cosmos does not emerge from an intrinsic self-organization of instability, but rather from the imposition of proportion by an external and rational demiurge. Chaos, in this context, is not a regime; it is an inert raw material, awaiting its domestication by form.

Aristotle, in turn, consolidates this exclusion. In his Physics, he establishes that all change is oriented towards an end, towards the realization of the form immanent to each entity. Physis is conceived as the intrinsic movement towards the telos. Instability, therefore, can only be a temporary deviation, an imperfect state on the path to full realization. Even chance (to automaton) is interpreted as that which occurs outside natural finality, but which, even so, does not escape the general framework of rational movement. The Aristotelian universe is explained by four causes, and none of them contemplate a regime that emerges without finality, without subject, without essence. Instability is thus subsumed by teleology.

In a few centuries, Greek thought erected the pillars of a logic that would endure for millennia, dictating that:
The origin cannot be unstable.
The real cannot be born from the unformed.
That which lacks a center must be overcome.

Even Heraclitus, often evoked as the thinker of change and flux, subordinates conflict to a universal logos. “Pólemos is the father of all things,” he affirms. However, pólemos does not constitute an unstable and disoriented regime; it is, rather, a generative principle whose tension is justified by a superior harmony. The universal flux is subjected to a cosmic reason, a reason that does not tolerate excess without containment. Instability, in its essence, was never truly thought; it was neutralized, absorbed, justified or, simply, rejected. It was not granted the right to exist by itself, but only as a transitory interval before the establishment of the cosmos. Greek philosophy, in short, did not listen to chaos; it diverted it, transforming it into a rationalized form of order.

In the transition to modernity, instability metamorphoses from a metaphysical void into a functionally necessary deviation, although always under strict surveillance. Already in Lucretius, in De Rerum Natura, the clinamen – that minimal and unpredictable deviation of atoms that allows their collision and the consequent formation of the world – is introduced not as a manifestation of autonomous instability, but as an explanatory resource. Its function is clearly finalistic: to free nature from absolute determinism and enable the emergence of the world and freedom. The deviation is tolerated because it prepares the form, because it enables organization. It is never recognized as an independent ontological regime.

Mechanistic modernity, led by Descartes, reinforces this gesture of containment. The physical world is entirely reducible to extension and movement, and, therefore, to mathematical predictability. Chaos, in this paradigm, is unthinkable; everything follows clear, rational, and geometric laws. Isaac Newton consolidates this architecture: the universe is a machine perfectly regulated by universal forces, where any apparent instability is merely an effect of our local ignorance. The real is predictable; the deviation is a calculation error, not an intrinsic potency of the real. Instability is, in this model, expelled from the cosmos as a principle.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz conceives the world as the best of all possible worlds: an infinitely rational structure where even chance finds its place, but always governed by a pre-established harmony. Nothing emerges from the unpredictable. The possible is a variant of order, and order is the sine qua non condition of all reality.

Immanuel Kant's critical turn, although apparently opening space for the incalculable – especially in the experience of the sublime, of the unlimited – does not affirm instability. On the contrary, he domesticates it through practical reason. Chaos, whether as a natural threat or as a limit of understanding, serves to confirm the necessity of the subject's a priori structure. Instability, in Kant, authorizes the transcendental, but fails to think the "outside," that which transcends reason itself.

With Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, this rationalization reaches its peak. Negativity is finally integrated, but only as a dialectical moment of the spirit's self-overcoming. Becoming, contradiction, collapse: everything is allowed, but everything is, ultimately, reconciled. Instability is necessary, but only so that reason realizes itself as absolute. The negative is never a persistent condition; it is a stage of overcoming. Chaos, if admitted, is only the "other" of order, and never its intimate regime.

Thus, between Lucretius and Hegel, Western philosophy orchestrates a sophisticated strategy: it does not outright reject instability, but incorporates it as a functional resource, subordinate to freedom, order, reason, or totality. That which is unstable is only acceptable if it is in transit towards some form – whether physical, moral, or dialectical.

In the philosophies of the 20th century that rebelled against the totalizing systems of modernity – notably in French post-structuralism – instability ceases to be rejected and begins to be celebrated. However, this celebration, in many cases, converts into a new form of capture. It is no longer about integrating it into a rational structure, as in Hegel, but transforming it into an aesthetic, symbolic, or desiring principle, devoid of material reinscription.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are, perhaps, the most influential formulators of this turn. In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, they propose a rhizomatic ontology of the real: there is no center, no origin, no plan. What exists are lines of flight, deterritorializations, nomadic movements, regimes of flux that cross, interrupt, and bifurcate. The world is not cosmos; it is chaosmos. However, this chaosmos, far from designating an operative regime of matter, is often presented as an intensive field of desire, a space of continuous variation, a plane of multiple consistency. Instability becomes libidinal flux, vibratile surface, non-hierarchical multiplicity – but hardly a physical regime of material emergence.

In Jean Baudrillard, instability assumes a distinct face: that of spiraling simulation. The acceleration of signs, the collapse of reference, the implosion of reality are forms of radical instability, but no longer material. Chaos, here, is hyperreal, an effect of symbolic excess, of informational saturation. Disorder is no longer physical; it is media-based. Consequently, rather than thinking about emergence, this instability annihilates the very regime of inscription. It is the end of form, not its mutation.

Jean-François Lyotard discourses on the collapse of grand narratives and the multiplicity of language games. Instability, in this context, is epistemological and political: there is no longer narrative unity, nor totality. However, this fragmentation, despite being critical, is rarely reinscribed as a positive ontological regime of matter. Thought dissolves into multiplicity without anchoring, without questioning from which body these voices emerge.

Even in the sciences of complexity, instability begins to be recognized as productive, but without this generating a true philosophical reinscription. Ilya Prigogine, for example, demonstrates that systems far from equilibrium can generate spontaneous order – the so-called dissipative structures. Instability, in this framework, does not destroy the system; it reorganizes it. However, philosophical discourse remains, to a large extent, oblivious to this reformulation. Science points the way, but philosophy did not listen to it. The leap between physical instability and symbolic inscription does not materialize.

Thus, if in the classical tradition instability was denied, in the contemporary tradition it is celebrated, but without body, without regime, without real consequence. Chaos transforms into flux, collapse, performance. But there is no material reorganization. There is no listening to instability as an operative condition. There is slippage, there is speed, there is implosion – but there is no ontological gesture that recognizes it as a foundation.

Throughout this entire journey, from archaic cosmogony to the avant-gardes of the 20th century, instability was systematically detained before it could become a principle. Whether named as khaos, clinamen, chance, negativity, flux, or collapse, it was never recognized as an autonomous ontological regime. It was a support for organization, a transition to form, an interval of harmony, or an aesthetic of dissolution – but never a regime for the sustenance of the real.

It is not just a question of name or image; it is a question of ontological listening. Western philosophy, even in its most critical aspects, did not recognize instability as an operative body. The unstable was converted into a sign (in postmodernity) or subordinated to teleology (in the classical tradition). In no case was it recognized as a permanent condition of emergence, as a foundation without basis, as a fertile field without a plan.

This “deafness to the unstable” is not neutral. By refusing instability as structure, inherited thought reinforced the illusion of order as essence – and, with it, the idea that everything that exists must obey a finality, a logic, a foreseen form. The origin, thus, was always a mistake: it was either projected as a point, or as substance, or as a regulating idea. But it was never recognized as an event without an author, without a center, without a guarantee.

This text stops here. It does not yet propose a new foundation, nor does it anticipate what an affirmative thought of instability might be. It limits itself to fulfilling the necessary gesture: clearing the field. Showing that thought did not fail by accident, but by structure – because it was incapable of thinking what does not submit, what does not resolve, what does not order. Instability, if it is to be thought, will have to be listened to in another way. That gesture will be the next step.

"But what was always there — was never absence.
It was what thought refused to listen to."

—— David Cota — Founder of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity ——