In the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the catastrophes which befall the heroes are announced beforehand. In the Agamemnon, Cassandra foretells her slaughter and Agamemnon’s by Clytemnestra, and the subsequent revenge by Orestes. In the Oedipus Rex, both Tiresias and the Delphic Oracle presage the horrible self-discoveries which remain to be made by Oedipus.
This foreknowledge raises questions of responsibility and freedom. If things have to be this way, am I truly free to avoid them? And, if it is not my actions which made it so, then in what sense am I accountable for what happens? For the tragedians, the answer was: the difference one can make is precisely one’s being. Character is fate. There is no escaping pain or the change it makes in us, but we do not only suffer blindly—we make this fate our own.
As Bernard Williams writes in Shame and Necessity, the later Athenians imagined that it was possible “to control the political and practical world by empirical, rational, planning… There is a game against circumstances, but it is one that we might be able to win, because it is stupidly played by the other side.” This, he argues, hopes to trade one kind of constraint (the arbitrary irony of destiny) for another (political power and coercion over other agents). Plato and Aristotle are “on the same side, [both] believing in one way or another that the universe or history or the structure of human reason can, when properly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and human aspirations.”
This latter viewpoint is that of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, in which the scientist Hari Seldon is able, by a statistical method called Psychohistory: “that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli,” with the “necessary assumption… that the human conglomerate be itself unaware of psychohistoric analysis in order that its reactions be truly random.”
In this first volume of the Foundation series, psychohistory predicts the downfall of the Galactic Empire due to its own inertia and excessive size, and the Seldon Plan is a guiding mechanism to ensure that the collapse will be minimally disruptive and that a second Empire (rather than barbaric chaos) will arise in its place. That is, unlike Greek tragedy, Asimov skips quickly over the negative prediction (the downfall) and concentrates on the ameliorative process of the recovery.
Foundation is not really a novel, but rather a collection of short stories, held together by the premise of inevitable and foreknown “Seldon Crises,” in each of which “freedom of action will become… circumscribed so that [one] will be forced along one, and only one, path.” In each crisis, one is “faced by hard necessity, and… action is forced on you. The nature of that action—that is, the solution to your dilemma—is, of course, obvious!” The consoling teleology: “Whatever devious course your future history may take… , the path has been marked out, and that… end is new and greater Empire!”
On occasion, Seldon himself appears in pre-recorded messages to inform the actors of their progress according to his plan, but the purpose of these is inscrutable and probably merely to reinforce the narrative conceit. The Seldon Plan begins with an initial deception to hide the purpose of the Foundation from its operators, but each time he reappears, he remains bound to conceal his foreknowledge and guidance from the blind bearers of his statistical predictions. This means that the Seldon Crises are pre-resolved, they are turning points, but their outcome is not in question.
Here we can see the difference between the tragic foreknowledge of the Greeks. The tragic hero knows, but can do nothing with this knowledge (except suffer regret and an obscure responsibility). Oedipus tries to evade his prophesied outrages, but it is precisely this evasion which ensnares him. In Foundation, we have the much less interesting prospect of acting, without foreknowledge (Seldon cannot tell the Foundation any specifics, since this would throw off the statistical model) but also without consequences (since whatever happens is already guaranteed to work out, ultimately, for the pre-ordained good).
This outlook can be criticized in ethical, ideological, or religious terms (Dostoevsky’s parable of “The Grand Inquisitor” has anticipated and devastated Asimov’s position in advance), but it simply is unsatisfying narratively. The interesting thing is to act without guarantee; time and again Asimov shows us “risky” and dynamic solutions to the political crises that arise. Why then drag out Seldon to assure us that this was not, after all, exciting and courageous, but merely necessary and obvious?
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