on systems unthinkable (aragon)

There exists in the world an unthinkable disorder, and the extraordinary thing is that, as a rule, men have sought a mysterious order beneath the appearance of disorder, an order entirely natural to them which merely expresses an innate desire of theirs and which, once they have introduced it into things, they behold with wonder, ascribing it to an idea, explaining it in light of that idea. So it comes about that for them everything is providential, and they account for a phenomenon which merely bears witness to their reality, which is the relationship they establish between themselves and, say, the germination of a poplar, by an hypothesis which sets their minds at rest; then they wonder at a divine principle which gave the lightness of a cotton to a seed requiring air enough to ride in its countless appointed rounds of self-propagation.

Man’s mind cannot tolerate disorder because it cannot think it; I mean that it cannot think it first, in isolation. That every idea arises hand in hand with its opposite is a truth suffering from the lack of examination. Disorder is conceived only in relation to order, and, subsequently, order only in relation to disorder. But only subsequently. The form of the word itself determines that. Your intention, in giving a divine character to disorder, is to make it impossible for disorder to evolve from an abstract conception into a concrete value. The concept of order is scarcely counterbalanced by the ineradicable concept of disorder. Whence the divine explanation.

- 154, "The Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon