Cause for Thought: An Essay in Metaphysics 9780773591943

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
1 Introduction to Metaphysics
2 The Ontology of Cause
3 The Cosmology of Complex Cause
4 The Psychology of Conscious and Rational Agents
5 The Theology of Comprehensive Agency
6 Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

C au s e f o r T h o u g h t

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Cause for Thought An Essay in Metaphysics John W. Burbidge

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-4353-9 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4354-6 (paper) 978-0-7735-9194-3 (ep d f ) 978-0-7735-9195-0 (ep u b )

Legal deposit second quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Burbidge, John, 1936–, author A cause for thought: an essay in metaphysics / John W. Burbidge. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. I S B N 978-0-7735-4353-9 (bound). – I S B N 978-0-7735-4354-6 (pbk.). – I S B N 978-0-7735-9194-3 (ep d f ). – I S B N 978-0-7735-9195-0 (ep u b ) 1. Causation.  2. Metaphysics.  I. Title. B D 541.B 87 2014     122      C 2014-900733-7 C 2014-900734-5

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10/13 New Baskerville.

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In memoriam Ernest Everett Just (1883–1941)

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Contents

1  Introduction to Metaphysics  3 2  The Ontology of Cause  18 3  The Cosmology of Complex Cause  34 4  The Psychology of Conscious and Rational Agents  50 5  The Theology of Comprehensive Agency  72 6 Conclusion  94 Acknowledgments 109 Notes 113 Works Cited  123 Index 127

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C au s e f o r T h o u g h t

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1 Introduction to Metaphysics

Metaphysics has a bad name. David Hume started the attack with the final paragraph of his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: “When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence ? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”1 Immanuel Kant provided a more systematic critique. Metaphysics uses rational arguments to establish conclusions about the world that underlies our everyday existence. But all our experience is governed by the particular spatio-temporal context in which we receive the input of their senses. Since we are unable to escape from our subjective limitations, any judgments we make about the objective state of affairs can apply only to the world as it appears, not as it is in itself. When reflective thought tries to go beyond those limits, it introduces logical f­allacies, ­produces conflicting and contradictory arguments, or assumes that real existence is no different from the concepts that spring from its own spontaneous activity. We cannot reach beyond our immediate surroundings to get at things as they r­ eally are, whether the psyche, the cosmos, or god.2 Some of those who followed Kant, now convinced that understanding and reason were impotent when faced with the

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ultimate questions, appealed to some kind of non-rational access to the realm of being as such. Friedrich Schleiermacher called on the feeling of absolute dependence as the point of direct access to the divine.3 In his System of Transcendental Idealism Friedrich Schelling turned to art as providing an intellectual intuition into the transcendent. 4 For Friedrich Jacobi faith in what is directly presented by both sensible and rational perception escapes the divisions and limitations of the understanding.5 In the twentieth century the turn to the non-rational as a way of escaping the abstractions of the understanding was transformed. Whereas the nineteenth-century romantics appealed to some kind of feeling or intuition into what would positively enhance our existence, the existentialists identified darker moments in our lived experience as the point of access to metaphysical truth. Martin Heidegger provided the most compelling account of this dynamic. In his introductory lecture as Professor at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau in 1929 he presented his answer to the question What is Metaphysics? 6 The totality of what has being is bounded by nothing, and that nothing impinges on our moods and consciousness in a combination of dread and anxiety; the German word is Angst. Metaphysical reflection into the ultimate ground of being starts from such moments, and all life that ignores such incursions of negativity is inauthentic and banal. To establish that conclusion Heidegger transforms the word “nothing” from simply designating a lack to capturing the profound essence of a presence. He gives it a definite article (“the nothing”), makes it into a verb (“the nothing nothings”), and uses it to generate an elaborate and influential philosophy. Even as Heidegger was initiating his project, however, the Vienna Circle7 was mounting a counterattack on all such attempts to escape Kant’s critique, and they did so by revising Hume’s dichotomy. On the one hand we have analytic statements that simply spell out what is involved in the meaning of certain abstract concepts; on the other there are statements grounded in empirical evidence. Moritz Schlick and his colleagues8 made

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Introduction to Metaphysics 5

the latter requirement more radical by claiming that only statements that could be verified by sense experience were meaningful. Any claim that is in principle unverifiable – and that includes all metaphysical statements – are nonsense and to be discarded. So when Aristotle, for example, talks about “being qua being,” or Heidegger about “the nothing nothings,” they are s­ imply using words without any meaning.9 Critics soon reminded the logical positivists that their verification principle was itself unverifiable in principle, and so was “metaphysical nonsense.” For it sets its standard so high that very few significant claims can meet it. Many of the advances even in the most rigorous sciences result in provisional theories that are amenable to revision. While falsifiable they cannot be completely verified. Nonetheless, the conviction of the Vienna Circle that talk about the world needs to take account of the way that world actually is and cannot simply use words in ways that have no practical relevance has had an impact on philosophical reflection. Even when experience does not definitively disprove such claims, it can show their limitations and partiality. And creative theories that are resistant to empirical disconfirmation are more likely to be misleading and illusory than genuinely productive. As a result, any subsequent venture into metaphysics has had to move cautiously. An example of that caution can be found in Peter Strawson’s Individuals.10 He contrasts revisionary metaphysics, which seeks to construct a better way of thinking about reality, with the more modest task of a descriptive metaphysics, “which is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world.”11 He starts by considering what information speakers would have to provide to enable anyone else who hears their words to identify some intended particular. And he concludes by saying: “There seems no doubt that these things of which I have tried to give a rational account are, in a sense, beliefs, and stubbornly held ones, of many people at a primitive level of reflection … It is difficult to see how such beliefs could be argued for  except by showing their consonance with the conceptual

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scheme which we operate, by showing how they reflect the structure of that scheme.” Metaphysics, then, becomes “the finding of ­reasons, good, bad or indifferent, for what we believe on instinct.”12 What is generally believed by many people at a primitive level, however, may often turn out to be quite false. This not only applies to a culture that assumes the world is flat, or came into being in the year 4004 b c e . It can also apply to the metaphysical structure that Strawson develops. Central to the process of identifying particulars, he says, is the ability to locate them “in a unitary spatio-temporal framework of four dimensions.”13 This assumes that one can specify both the location and the velocity of moving objects, and that the spatio-temporal framework provides a fixed structure with specific locations. Yet even as he was writing, the world of the physical sciences had reached conclusions that put this into question: with certain elementary particles (which certainly would satisfy the requirement of being particulars), it is impossible to specify both location and velocity; the theory of special relativity had claimed that it is impossible to establish that two events widely removed in space and moving at different velocities happen simultaneously; and the theory of general relativity had shown that space curves when affected by gravitation, so that the spatial framework can be as much a function of the particulars as the particulars a function of spatial location. In other words, Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics, while ­capturing what a particular culture assumes to be true when it comes to identifying particulars, articulates nothing more than the worldview of that culture rather than telling us what really lies behind and finds expression in the world we experience. It is a metaphysics in only a derivative and metaphorical sense. For on this account what serves as metaphysics varies depending on where one happens to live: in a Hopi village, in an Oxford common room, or in a physics laboratory. Both Strawson and Heidegger, then, have developed approaches to metaphysics that are susceptible to charges of relativism. Strawson’s is relative to the beliefs a particular culture

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Introduction to Metaphysics 7

holds, whereas Heidegger’s is relative to the personal psychology of the metaphysician: if he is subject to melancholy his experience may be pervaded by anxiety and dread; if, however, he is of a different temperament, he may find ultimate satisfaction in meditation, in Schleiermacher’s religious feeling of absolute ­dependence, or in the ecstasy of an aesthetic intuition. Neither seems to offer an approach to metaphysics that can do justice to the human quest to know the way things really are, quite independent of our personal or social location. Rather than articulating the basic structure of the cosmos, both of them offer what the Germans call a Weltanschauung, a worldview. The attacks of Hume, Kant, and the Vienna Circle seem to be justified. • • • There is, however, one consideration to give us pause. For all that Kant provided a devastating critique of the traditional forms of philosophical psychology, cosmology, and theology in his Transcendental Dialectic, he nonetheless undertook to write works on metaphysics. Drawing on the results of his Critique of Pure Reason he produced books entitled The Metaphysics of Morals and The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. This suggests that there may be other ways of practising metaphysics despite Kant’s criticisms and those of Hume and the Vienna Circle. Because we start from the limited perspective of our own experiences Kant limits our knowledge to the way things appear. When we understand the multitude of sights, sounds, and feels that experience presents to our senses, he argues, we introduce concepts that organize their rich diversity into meaningful patterns. But these concepts are pure forms, empty of content; they become significant only when they are fleshed out by the givens of sensible intuition. Neither derived from our immediate ­experiences, nor resulting from reflective deliberation, they are  the presuppositions that govern all interactions with our environment.14 As a result the categories, on their own, tell us nothing. They cannot be applied arbitrarily to the givens of experience since we frequently make hasty assumptions that lead us astray. If we

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are to reach reliable and objective conclusions, rather than adopt subjective prejudices that mislead, Kant says, we must appeal to schematic principles that ensure the categories fit the fundamental spatio-temporal structure of our experience. And we need to provide sufficient reasons for their application.15 While Kant does not tell us what those reasons might look like, they can only come from what is presented empirically if they are to flesh out the formal framework of the categories. When Kant develops his various “metaphysical” studies, then, he does not simply spell out implications that follow from the basic set of pure categories. He introduces in addition what he calls “empirical concepts,” which identify particular kinds of things without specifying any further empirical information. By applying the pure categories of quantity, quality, relation, and mode to the empirical concept of matter he derives the metaphysical foundations of natural science. And by turning to the empirical concept of a thinking being he develops a metaphysics of morals. When applied to mechanics, for example, his metaphysics was able to derive from the concept of matter the concepts of movement, attractive and repulsive forces, and the laws of conservation, inertia, and reaction. When applied to thinking beings, Kant’s metaphysics grounds the autonomy of the will and the categorical imperative.16 For Kant’s critical philosophy, then, metaphysics explores the implications of general concepts that have emerged from our empirical understanding of the world of nature and human affairs. This understanding of metaphysics sets the stage for what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel sets out to do with his Science of Logic. He starts with the most fundamental concepts that we use to comprehend our world and analyses their significance. Each concept has implications that first transform it from simple into more sophisticated versions, and then lead on to other more complex concepts. But Hegel abandons not only Kant’s sharp separation between appearances and things as they are in themselves, but also Kant’s abstract appeal to the principle of sufficient reason and the schemata that link the forms of space and time with the

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Introduction to Metaphysics 9

categories of the understanding. When he claims that his logic takes the place of what previously was called metaphysics, he is adopting a different strategy for establishing the objectivity and reliability of his analysis. This, he says, is articulated in a preparatory volume called Phenomenology of Spirit.17 The task of the Phenomenology is to determine how we fix our beliefs or, as Hegel puts it, to achieve an absolute knowing. Rather than assuming that he knows what a proper way of knowing is, Hegel allows different knowledge claims to articulate conceptually what kinds of effects would result from putting those claims into practice. Then he describes the way those confident expectations are confounded by what experience reveals. In practice the opposite of what was expected happens. Once each failure has been absorbed into consciousness, new knowledge claims emerge, which are subjected, in their turn, to the rigorous testing of experience.18 Hegel traces a long history of such sequences that ranges through much of Western history, suggesting that the final achievement of absolute knowing will incorporate all that has been learned from those failures as well as the features that have survived through the whole transforming process. When we come to that final chapter on “Absolute Knowing” we find that what it describes is little more than the general structure of that dynamic. Consciousness has learned, from the beautiful soul, that when one acts on the distilled essence of what one knows, one discovers that the results are seldom exactly what one expects and one then needs to incorporate that discovery into one’s accumulated knowledge. From revealed ­religion it has heard that this sequence is the ultimate rhythm of the universe, where the divine essence acts to create a world, discovers the result is not what it expects, and then initiates a pattern in which original design is integrated with the way the world actually is. The final form knowing takes involves drawing on the accumulated results of experience to establish a claim, putting it into practice, and then taking note not only of the successes, but also of the failures that result.19 The concept of pure science presupposed by the Science of Logic, then, is nothing other than this process of learning from

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experience. It is because the concepts and categories analyzed by logic have emerged from this process that Hegel can assume its concepts to be not simply a priori categories of transcendental thought, but metaphysical principles inherent in the universe. The Logic as metaphysics takes our accumulated experience as its presupposition, distills it into its core conceptual content – the basic intellectual operations that have over time become second nature because they have survived the corroding impact of experiential failure – and explores the links and implications they contain. Metaphysics, however, is not to be confused with the empirical sciences. It looks at the basic conceptual structures we use to understand and comprehend the world – the general framework within which we organize our experiences to make sense of them. It does not use them to extend the reach of our actual knowledge. To be sure, our basic concepts have been refined over the ages as humans have learned from their failures, but in practice they have acquired the character of a priori judgments, used without critical reflection about how appropriate they are. While the empirical sciences presuppose such categories in their investigations, it is metaphysics that sits back, reflects on what those concepts involve, and considers whether the way they are being used does full justice to our experience. Hegel’s Logic precedes, and sets the context for, not only his philosophy of nature but also the theoretical constructs of ­empirical science. Nonetheless there is a kind of triumphalism in his analysis. As I have suggested, there is strong evidence that, by absolute knowing, Hegel is referring to the critical process by which we learn from experience: putting our most well-founded convictions into practice, discovering that they encounter unexpected surprises, and incorporating the significance of those surprises into the wisdom already accumulated through the ages.20 So he is open to new discoveries and the constant need to re-evaluate what we understand even our metaphysical knowledge to be. But that evidence is embedded within a comprehensive systematic structure that appears to smother such

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Introduction to Metaphysics 11

contingencies. For all that Hegel was quite ready to rework the order of the categories in his Logic, there is a residual authority in his analysis that seems to imply its inevitability. Charles Sanders Peirce, while recognizing the role experience plays in modifying and elaborating our well-founded beliefs, avoids assuming that there is only one way to objective knowledge. For three years Peirce immersed himself in detailed study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Like Hegel, he realized that once you set the human knower in the context of an environment where there is action and response, you escape the subjectivity of our immediate sensory perceptions. There is no need to schematically correlate space and time to concepts. So concepts are essentially fallible. We propose them; we put them into practice; we discover that the world confounds our expectations; we take account of those discoveries in developing a more adequate set of beliefs. So he sees no need to develop a single idealized history of human experience, as Hegel does. The objectivity of our concepts is partial and temporary, always open to revision and reconsideration.21 This background in Kant, Hegel, and Peirce sets the stage for our present venture into metaphysics. After Kant’s Critique it is no longer possible to assume that pure thought, through careful reflection, can reach reliable conclusions about the self, the ­cosmos, and God. Such reasoning proceeds by appealing to reductios: assume the opposite of what we want to establish; show that it leads to a contradiction; since it must then be false, the desired conclusion must be true. But opposed alternatives seldom exhaust all options. By enlarging the frame of reference one frequently discovers that both could be true, since they refer to different kinds of things; or that both are false, because they have been misapplied. In addition, we can look closely at the implications that led to the contradiction and show that the consequences are not inevitable and necessary. Pure thought on its own seldom if ever reaches satisfactory conclusions about the ultimate structure of reality. Nonetheless in our interaction with the world, as we discover more and more about its regularities and the way they fit

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together, we do not simply absorb and appropriate the givens presented through experience. We interpret them, and this means, as Kant realized, that we introduce conceptual categories to make sense of them. The given data are taken as signs to be organized by our thoughts into coherent theories. We bring a range of assumptions acquired from our cultural background – frequently unnoticed and taken to be so fundamental that they are never questioned. Seldom can they be confounded by experience in the manner of Peirce’s proposal, since they govern the way experience itself is understood. They determine what counts as significant among the givens of sense and what is to be disregarded. In other words, they establish the metaphysical framework within which our scientific investigation of the world takes place. If there is a role for metaphysics in our modern world then it will be realized as we examine these fundamental assumptions, which govern our interactions with the world in which we live. An example will illustrate what is involved. In the twentieth century we saw a major revolution in our understanding of space and time: unquestioned assumptions that space is essentially Euclidean and that it is theoretically possible to have simultaneous events anywhere in the universe have been overthrown. When Albert Einstein put forward the theories of special and general relativity he had to free himself from the conceptual framework of his predecessors, and develop a radically different understanding of the cosmos. Towards the end of his life, he looked back at the role that disciplined reflection on our fundamental concepts had played in this achievement. One of his intellectual mentors was Ernst Mach, who had inspired the members of the Vienna Circle.22 Mach believed “that facts by themselves can and should yield scientific knowledge without free conceptual construction.” But Einstein saw this as a misconception, for it ignores the role of concepts, originally freely chosen, which “through verification and long usage, appear to be immediately connected with the empirical material.”23 In characterizing his own approach, Einstein set “the totality of concepts and propositions” over against the “totality of

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Introduction to Metaphysics 13

sense-experiences.” While logic explores the relations between concepts and propositions and works out their implications, they acquire meaning and content “only through their connection with sense-experiences” which is intuited, not logically derived. While the conceptual systems are, from the standpoint of those who develop them, entirely arbitrary, they are constrained by the fact that they need to be coordinated as reliably and completely as possible with the totality of sense-experiences. “A proposition is correct,” he concludes, “if, within a logical system, it is deduced according to the accepted logical rules. A system has truth-­content according to the certainty and completeness of its co-ordination-possibility to the totality of experience. A correct proposition borrows its ‘truth’ from the truth-content of the system to which it belongs.”24 By recognizing that thought, as “arbitrary,” need not be constrained by assumptions drawn from past experience, Einstein was able to modify fundamental concepts that determine how we understand the world. But these revisions were not simply the arbitrary constructs of logical thought. Any alteration to a concept acquires content only when it is found to fit, better than whatever it replaces, our intuited experience of the world. And we are frequently driven to reflect on and question received ­wisdom by the fact that our received conceptual framework in some way fails to do justice to this totality of experience. Einstein’s reflections set the stage for the approach to metaphysics developed in the following chapters. As a reflective discipline, metaphysics examines the logic of those fundamental concepts that organize our understanding of the world. It considers the rational links that contribute to, and flow out from, that interpretive framework. But it cannot remain enclosed ­within the confines of pure thought. It needs, at the same time, to keep an eye on what we have discovered about the world in which we live – the evidence of accumulated experience and the disciplined results of scientific exploration. Since the metaphysical categories organize and structure that knowledge, they cannot simply be derived from experience through some form of induction. But a careful observation of what experience reveals

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can show these categories to be inadequate, misleading, or incomplete. They can then be refined as logical thought looks for unexplained leaps and implicit contradictions in the way they fit experience. This involves a double process. In the first place, the prevailing concepts are examined critically to determine whether their assumptions really fit what disciplined observation has in fact revealed. In the second place, thought constructs, carefully, and with an eye to the evidence, a logically plausible structure of implications that integrates what we know in a coherent and comprehensible way. There is no sure way forward. Despite Einstein’s sharp distinction between the totality of the conceptual structure and the totality of experience, they are not isolated realms. Hegel has already suggested that received concepts are the product of accumulated experience over the generations. They have taken account of misjudgments and refined their applicability and so they are not entirely arbitrary. But it is equally naive to assume that we have an unimpeded and direct intuition into the data of experience. Even the fact that this data is presented over a period of time and extended through stretches of space means that it has been mediated and interpreted by conceptual thought.25 All observation involves interpretation, using conceptual categories. What we identify as significant is determined by what we expect. So there is always a tension. On the one hand we have the familiar metaphysical thoughts that have proven over time to be productive in extending our ability to control nature and human affairs. On the other, we introduce a critique that throws some or all of them into question – a critique that can emerge from noticing either anomalies in our concepts or unexpected discrepancies in our evidence. Recognizing the fallibility of our fundamental assumptions has a double significance. In the first place, it means that we have to be much more cautious in claiming absolute authority for the beliefs we hold concerning the structure of the universe and of human society. Our ingrained convictions may well be simply the  unreflective response to the specific conditions of

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Introduction to Metaphysics 15

our place in the world. But, in the second place, the very fact that we recognize the possibilities of partiality means that we are no longer confined to a single and unavoidable worldview. We can look for factors that put them in question, and we can explore options that may structure our understanding of the world in more adequate ways. Whenever we discover ways in which our conventions are not universal, we transcend them and open up a pathway to more comprehensive perspectives. It is not easy to actualize this capacity for recognizing the blinkers that limit our vision and finding ways of going beyond them. For we are talking not about categories and conventions that are simply proposed as intellectually satisfying explanations, nor about beliefs not universally shared. Metaphysical concepts are those that pervade the reflective discourse and practical interventions that make up the totality of social life. They provide the framework within which we are able to communicate and disagree, to reflect on our failures and capitalize on our successes, to investigate and discover patterns and structures in the natural and social world. Even as we start to think about their role in our intellectual lives, we use them, and rely on their ability to make sense of things. So any metaphysical investigation of the fundamental categories that organize our understanding of the world must move cautiously. It needs to recognize the value of those conventions that have survived: they should not be jettisoned precipitously. But such an investigation also needs to think carefully about the way the fundamental categories fit with the world of experience, noticing places where our assumptions read in more than the evidence justifies, and places where there is significant evidence that would benefit from a different analysis. The tension between extending past successes to new experimental data, even though the fit is not precise, and taking discrepancies as evidence of flaws in our basic categories, despite their effectiveness, means that any metaphysical reflection is inevitably tentative and fallible. Neither revolutionary manifestos for a new world order, nor infallible insights into the ground of all being, the results of

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such reflection simply provide proposals for adjusting our organizing principles to fit more appropriately the world it seeks to understand. This way of doing metaphysics cannot pretend to be comprehensive and exhaustive. It will take a particular concept that is used regularly in our discussions of the way the world is, analyze it carefully to identify what is generally meant when it is used and what that implies for the way the world functions, then consider what kind of evidence is actually available and whether that justifies its pretensions. By rendering the concept more precise, and by excluding those aspects of its conventional meaning that are not completely justified, we may open up new ways of considering other features of our world and the way they can be comprehended. It is tempting to start with a concept that identifies what something is. We want to list the various kinds of beings that inhabit the universe. But the things in the world are not static and permanent. They are continually subject to emergence, change, and decay. As significant as the entities that populate our current environment are the processes by which they come into being and pass away. So it is not surprising that much of our language is centred around verbs that name actions and happenings. Verbs start from some initiating agent and lead on to some result, indicating a dynamic alteration. Frequently they are accompanied by clauses that specify both what the initial conditions need to be and what consequences follow. Rather than being fundamental, then, things emerge from and dissolve into processes expressed by verbs. So, instead of focusing on metaphysical ­concepts that govern our understanding of things, such as “being” or “particular,” I shall, in this study, consider one that structures the way we think about development and change. The most determinate concept we use for such changes – one that organizes fundamentally the way we approach the world – is “cause.” For “cause” talks not about becoming in general, but a process that emerges from specific conditions and has a significant impact on what happens afterwards.

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Introduction to Metaphysics 17

So I begin this essay by reflecting on what we mean when we use the word “cause” (Chapter 2). By refining what are the precise components of its sense, and which of these are justified by experience, I set the stage for applying it in more complex situations – ones in which causal influences mutually reinforce and modify each other. Organic causation turns out to have a quite different conceptual structure from mechanical causation (Chapter 3). By extending this analysis to the functioning of self-conscious agents like ourselves I suggest, next, that the philosophy of mind may benefit from a more sophisticated understanding of the way causes work (Chapter 4). Finally, the quest for ever more comprehensive causal explanations of why the world functions as it does points towards the possibility of a single explanatory principle. Since the discovery of such a principle would be legitimated by its success in predicting the way the world actually functions, it would seem to involve a description of the ultimate ground of the universe itself – what has traditionally been called god (Chapter 5). Were we to place these discussions within the framework of traditional metaphysics, we could say that the first discussion – on cause – fits within philosophical ontology, since it is looking at the fundamental characteristics of the way things come into being and pass away. The second exploration – of complex cause – takes up questions of philosophical cosmology, the way causes interact in an interconnected world. The third, on self-conscious agents, becomes a kind of philosophical psychology. And the fourth discussion of the ultimate explanatory principle ventures into the realm of philosophical theology. In this essay, then, I shall be touching on many of the themes that have intrigued metaphysical thought throughout the ages. It is not that the traditional questions were misguided; it is rather that the method of reaching answers needs to abandon pure reason, and incorporate a strong sense of how even our most abstract concepts function in the world.

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2 The Ontology of Cause

One of the basic concepts that we use to understand the world around us is “cause.” Whenever something happens, we want to know what conditions and influences brought it about. And we use the answers to those questions when we frame our actions, so that we can either enable or prevent similar events occurring in the future. “Cause” is applied to all sorts of situations, from what spices we put in our cooking to what precautions we take to  prevent cancer. And the specific causes we identify range over a rich diversity of alternatives, from the naivety of primitive religion and magic, through the folk wisdom of the ages, to the disciplined conclusions of scientific research. For all of its familiarity, however, and the ease with which we use the term in daily speech, the concept turns out, on examination, to have a number of different senses. At one extreme it may mean an event that, whenever it occurs, will produce a specific result; there is a necessity here that implies inevitability. At the other extreme, cause may refer to a contingent event that contributes in some way to an effect, even though that consequence would probably have happened in one way or another without it. While we are reluctant to admit even the possibility of an event that is not caused, we are at the same time convinced that, when deliberating about a choice, we are free to take most options, even though the prior conditions remain the same.

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The Ontology of Cause 19

Some take the inevitability of there being causes as evidence of a necessity that makes every event inescapable. Causal determinism affirms not only that a single event is necessitated by the concatenation of conditions that came together to make it happen, but that the intersection of influences at that particular time and place was itself inescapable. What appear to be contingencies reflect nothing more than our limited awareness of what is really going on. There are inexorable laws that determine how nature follows a specific and invariable pattern. Yet, in some areas of research we have a sense that novelties emerge that have never occurred before. Those who have explored the evolution of life on our planet suggest that certain contingent sets of conditions have generated new kinds of entities that function in new kinds of ways. Those who have turned their attention to human history have noticed the way that, over time, novel patterns of social organization and government have emerged that are rooted in what went before, but do not seem to have been inevitable. For all that such research does not abandon a disciplined exploration of causes, it does not feel the need to assert inevitability and necessity. For these reflective approaches, universal causality need not imply causal determinism. • • • This imprecision about what we mean when we use the language of cause suggests that, as a first venture into the examination of metaphysical concepts, we are well advised to focus on this concept: what is central to cause that makes it a fundamental ontological category in our metaphysics? And what other features need to be associated with it? We begin by reviewing a few highlights from our Western intellectual history to establish some context for our reflections. Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the observation that “all men by nature desire to know.”1 What distinguishes humans from other animals is that their memories of similar events lead to judgments that neither recount individual things that

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happen nor recognize general patterns, but identify why the ­patterns are the way they are. They want to find general explanations that situate individual occurrences within a more ­comprehensive context. So knowledge is acquired when we ascertain the causes and principles of things and events in the world. There are, he says, four kinds of answers to the question “why?” The first answer points to the material out of which something is made, the raw material that contains the possibility of something more determinate. The second looks for its specific nature, what that thing is to be; it considers the way the parts fit together into a characteristic structure. The third answer identifies the source of any change or rest, what initiates an event or produces a result. And the fourth looks for some goal or purpose that the change is to accomplish.2 Aristotle does not answer these questions in any fixed or formulaic way. In biology, the nature or “form” of a plant or animal also serves as a kind of end or goal that determines its development. Manufactured things are determined as much by the purpose they are to fulfil as by the artisan who produces them, though the material may vary depending on what is available. His point is rather that it is always useful to ask these four questions when explaining why things are the way they are. Aristotle’s analysis, rediscovered in the west in the twelfth and thirteenth century, became an important feature of the late mediaeval understanding of the world. In the meantime, a second strand of causal analysis had been initiated by the Stoics. Impressed by the regularity of nature, the Stoics traced it back to the gods who are the ultimate ground of all that is. Rather than being capricious and arbitrary, they ensure that things always happen in the same way. In this they are like good rulers who not only legislate laws to govern their citizens, but ensure that the laws are implemented without fail. Laws are written in distinctive kinds of sentences: they use conditionals and disjunctions. If one action is done, a penalty follows; if another then there is a reward. Citizens have the option of doing one or the other – of being penalized

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The Ontology of Cause 21

or rewarded. This vocabulary suggests necessary connections between the antecedent “if” clause and the consequent “then” clause and an exhaustive listing of the disjunctive alternatives. The language of if / then and either / or certainly had a previous history. Not only had it been central to promises and threats – whether enshrined in law or elsewhere – designed to influence human behaviour,3 but it had also been used for implications of meaning, where one idea seems to lead with some kind of  inevitability to another as in traditional dilemmas. What the  Stoics introduced was the conviction that such language could also be applied to natural phenomena. By grounding the regularity of nature in the decisions of gods who were ultimately trustworthy they attributed to it a law-like necessity that links antecedent to consequent and alternative to alternative. Whereas human law is fallible, prey to partial and corruptible judges, and whereas reasoned implications could be adjusted in light of further reflection, the if / thens of nature, once set in place, were inviolable. On this basis the Stoics applied the logic of conditionals and disjunctions to natural events, augmenting the Aristotelian discussion of the syllogisms, which had worked primarily with the nature or essence (the “formal cause”) of things. The law-like regularity of nature is most evident in the realm of astronomy, where the heavenly bodies move with a consistency that could justify reliable predictions. In the seventeenth century investigators like Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton discovered that all matter in motion, whether celestial or terrestrial, conformed to mathematical models and equations. Other things being equal, a ball rolling down an inclined plane accelerates at a regular rate that remains consistent whenever the trial is made; and the force of gravity can be measured as the product of the mass of the two bodies divided by the distance between them. By reducing the number of possible variables to the minimum and by showing that the resulting regularities could be expressed in mathematical terms, scientists established that bodies move with the kind of necessity identified by the Stoics.

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Since mechanics, as the discipline that investigates matter in motion, proved to be singularly effective in making predictions and capturing characteristics of the world, mechanical causation came to be applied by analogy in other spheres as well, and Aristotle’s fourfold analysis was discarded. Over the centuries researchers have measured the precise force of gravity, identified the chemical elements and the quantities that are critical for combustion, isolated the conditions that generate cholera, and discovered how vitamins are essential for certain organic functions. The success of these endeavours has led us to call the specific mechanical condition that has been isolated in scientific experiments the cause of the resulting phenomenon. And we have then assumed that these causes produce their effects necessarily and in a mechanistic way. So it is not surprising that Immanuel Kant, when looking for the conceptual clue to our belief in causes, traces it back to the way our thinking regularly appeals to conditional judgments. As the Stoics had seen, the if / then statement affirms that there is a necessary connection between the antecedent and the consequent – whenever the first appears, the second inevitably follows. It captures the fact that causes make something else happen: they initiate processes that lead to effects. And that efficacy is understood to be so strong that it cannot be controverted. In his discussion of cause, however, John Stuart Mill recognizes that the situation is more complex than that simple statement suggests. For, he writes, “it is seldom, if ever, between a consequent and a single antecedent that this invariable sequence subsists. It is usually between a consequent and a sum of several antecedents; the concurrence of all of them being requisite to produce, that is, to be certain of being followed by, the consequent.”4 In other words, a number of conditions must be present to produce an effect; it is the whole set, not any one factor on its own, that makes the result necessary. This does not lead Mill to question the inevitability of causes, for he distinguishes one active cause from the rest of the conditions, which he claims represent only continuing states. And he goes on to develop his theory of causal determinism as if that

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The Ontology of Cause 23

single distinctive condition triggers, necessarily, whatever consequent follows. Later in his discussion, when Mill briefly considers what happens when two “active” causes intersect, he assumes that the two sequences are independent of each other and can be isolated by careful analysis. One does not interfere with the other in a way that would impair the inevitability of its required consequence.5 After a moment’s reflection one becomes uncomfortable with Mill’s calm confidence in the inevitability of causes. While we are loathe to give up our sense that there are forces that conspire to produce the things and events that surround us in the world, two of his admissions – that any particular event is usually the result of a concatenation of conditions, and that at times several of these may be active agents, and not simply passive states – puts in question the assumption that one can find a single “cause” that always and inevitably produces its effect. Only seldom may the attendant circumstances be propitious. Some novel agent may be introduced that controverts the process. Indeed, much scientific research into causes is designed to discover ways by which we can frustrate causal sequences in just that way. If we extend the range of what is included within the initiating cause to the whole set of conditions, it is often impossible to find other instances of the same combination of circumstances that would serve to validate the belief in unavoidable necessity. Yet causal determinism emerges from the conviction, espoused by both Kant and Mill, that there is a necessary and inevitable connection between cause and effect. For everything that happens there is a cause that made it necessary; and that cause itself is likewise necessitated; and so on back through an indefinite regress. Things could not have been otherwise than they are, given the initial condition of the universe, whatever that turns out to be. • • • Once we recognize the way multiple conditions conspire to produce most effects, however, a simple version of causal determinism will not make sense. We seldom, if ever, find single causes

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that always produce the same effects. We regularly have to take into account the way a number of features come together to generate an intended result. But the kind of causal influences that direct a wide variety of forces so that they intersect at a ­particular time and space is quite different from what happens when a single cause exerts its influence in a controlled environment. In other words, necessity and inevitability are not as evident once we move from simple cause / effect relations to analyzing sets of conditions. To be sure, we are well aware of productive forces that introduce changes into both the social and the physical universe. They exert a kind of power that presses forward and overwhelms most impediments put in their way. That suggests some kind of relative necessity. But are we justified in extending that necessity to the universe as a whole in all its interactions, making everything that happens within the whole panorama of space and time inevitable and absolute? To answer that question requires further reflection on what we mean when we use the language of cause: what does it mean when we say that a virus causes a specific kind of flu, for example? Does it assert the strong claim that whenever the virus is present the host will suffer flu symptoms, or the weaker claim that it is only statistically probable? Does it simply mean that the flu symptoms cannot develop whenever the virus is absent? Why do we implicitly assume that, if we change the conditions under which the virus becomes involved with our bodies, we can successfully prevent the disease from happening? In other words, what is the nature of what we might call “causal necessity”? Before proceeding further, it is worth noting that, once we allow for a range of conditions that need to be present for a cause to be active, a version of Aristotle’s division of four causes becomes relevant. The ability of an active or agent cause to produce its effect on some object depends on what other passive conditions, which function as a material basis for the action, are present; and it also depends on the distinctive way these passive conditions intersect and interact with the agent cause, which forms or structures the process. Certain biological processes, for

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The Ontology of Cause 25

example, happen only when the material conditions emerge in a definite order. Agency, then, presupposes both matter and form. Looking for purposes or ends retains a definite role when we are evaluating the reasons for human action and, on occasion, when explaining the actions of animals and the functioning of organisms.6 So Aristotle’s four causes, adjusted to focus on the dynamic of action rather than the conditions of things, provide us with a useful framework as we proceed. Nonetheless, usually when we talk about causes we are thinking of an agency that initiates some sort of activity, and we distinguish that agency from the continuing states that provide the context – the physical components and the way they intersect. With this in mind, in this study we shall use “agent cause” to distinguish an initiating cause from other causal conditions. • • • It was John Stuart Mill who outlined the methods we can use to identify an agent cause in this sense. In essence, this involves two  contrary moves. In the first place, when looking for the cause of an event, we consider a wide variety of situations in which it occurs, where the attendant factors – the materials and the structural forms – are as diverse as possible, and identify as  cause the feature or features that are always present. This “method of agreement” has, however, significant problems. Since we may not have isolated all the conditions in each of the  various situations, there may be a number of unnoticed ­conditions that continue to be present in all, any one of which could be the significant agent. Ambiguity is inevitable. As well, as Mill himself allows, there are certain types of events that can be caused by quite different sets of conditions so that there may never be a single feature present in all the relevant cases. Complicating the picture is the distinction between correlation and cause. Simply because two types of events or things are always found together does not mean that one is the cause of the other. Either of them could be the cause; or there could be a third factor, not yet noticed, that is the cause of both of them; or the correlation may simply be a matter of coincidence. Even if

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one of the pair always precedes the other, it is dangerous to infer immediately to a causal pattern. Temporal sequence need not imply causal efficacy, as the standard fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc reminds us. Mill’s second move provides a means for escaping this dilemma. For it starts from a set of fixed conditions, and then looks for the feature that needs to be introduced to generate the effect we are interested in explaining. More generally, it starts with situations that are in general similar and then distinguishes cases where the event to be explained is present, from those where it is absent. Any conditions that are present whenever the event occurs yet absent when it is not found are correlated with that event; one can distinguish cause from correlation by seeing if it is possible to introduce one of the items in question on its own prior to the appearance of the other. This is the strategy of the controlled experiment. One sets up two (or more) identical scenarios, then introduces a new feature into one (or some) of them in order to see if the expected result emerges. In this way we begin to distinguish an agent cause from those attendant conditions and states that provide the setting in which it is able to act. It is tempting, then, to follow Mill in saying that necessity is involved: whenever the agent is present, the effect will inevitably occur. But this move is premature. For much research into causes involves looking not only for a specific agent, but also for those attendant conditions that are required to make its efficacy possible. Its purpose is to find ways of changing those formal and material conditions in such a way that the agent cause will be frustrated; we seek to prevent it from bringing about the normal result. By making people sick with cowpox, for example, Edward Jenner made it more difficult for the smallpox virus to follow its normal destructive path. This means that a particular result is not inevitable whenever the agent cause is present. Causal efficacy is dependent on having an appropriate setting. There is a kind of necessity, nevertheless. For not infrequently we do find that a particular result can only occur when a particular agent is present. This inevitability can be expressed with a

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The Ontology of Cause 27

conditional statement: whenever (or if) smallpox occurs, then a particular virus is its agent cause. In this case, the prior event (the virus) is the consequent of the if / then statement, whereas the later event (the smallpox) is its antecedent. The conditional statement reverses the temporal order. In this situation we say that A (the virus) is a necessary condition of B (the smallpox) – that is, B would not have happened had A not been around. There are, however, three significant implications of this analysis. In the first place, while causal efficacy is understood as moving forward from condition to result, the necessity of necessary conditions is retrospective and moves backward, from effect to cause. There is a kind of forward-moving necessity: given appropriate circumstances, a necessary condition will produce its result. Yet this necessity is not absolute or strict, but rather dependent on the contingent presence of those other conditions. It cannot be used to ground causal determinism. In the second place, the agent cause is seldom the only necessary condition; for it is also necessary that the attendant circumstances be appropriate for the result to emerge. Indeed, there could well be a number of necessary conditions – certain kinds of material, specific organic patterns, coincident secondary agents, an order of occurrence – all of which are required if the desired effect is to happen. The language of necessary conditions cannot enable us to isolate one specific cause that triggers significant changes; many of the attendant conditions may also be included under this rubric. This is why it is useful to use Aristotle’s language of agency to distinguish initiating causes from other relevant factors. In the third place, there are certain kinds of events that can be produced by a variety of different agent causes. In such cases no one agent cause is necessary in the strict sense that it has to be there every time, but each is the agent without which this particular occurrence would not have happened. Various weather patterns could produce a slippery pavement, no one of which is strictly necessary. Our ability to identify necessary conditions and agent causes, while critical in advancing our ability to live in the world, does not, then, imply causal determinism.

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For neither of them entail a forward-moving necessity that advances inexorably from cause to effect. For that we need to have a conditional statement in which the cause is in the antecedent of the sentence and the effect is in the consequent: “if there is more than 100 centimetres of rain in twelve hours, then the river inevitably overflows its banks.” In this case the stated conditions are sufficient to ensure the result. Seldom, if ever, is a single condition sufficient on its own, independent of all attendant circumstances, to generate an effect. Forward-moving conditionals are regularly qualified by talk of probabilities, or with a phrase like “other things being equal.” Even when we try to identify all the significant conditions that together ensure a result, we frequently discover that some factor, previously ignored or unnoticed, has a critical role to play. While we have over time discovered an impressive array of regularities in the way the world functions, it is always possible for irregularities to intervene and frustrate a causal sequence. In other words, we can only be confident that conditions are sufficient to produce an event once that event actually occurs. By that time, however, they are no longer conditions, since the event has taken their place. Prior to the event, it is going beyond the evidence to assume that all relevant factors whatsoever have been covered. Nonetheless, we are interested in making predictions that are accurate: we take note of what conditions are in fact present and active, figure out how they will interact, and develop some description of events that will later occur. Thus we work with conditions from the present and past to draw reliable conclusions about the future. And the complexity of our modern world provides ample evidence that a great many ventures of this sort have been successful. This implies that there is some kind of forwardmoving necessity, even though it is not absolute but only highly probable. At this point, to see how this works out in practice, it is worth taking a detour through some arcane mathematics. In the late nineteenth century, one of the puzzles that intrigued mathematicians was figuring out what would happen if more than two

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The Ontology of Cause 29

bodies interacted. Henri Poincaré developed formulae that enabled him to calculate the kind of complexity that results. No regular patterns emerge in this calculation, but rather events that would otherwise be surprising follow one after another. So the branch of mathematics that explores the implications of this discovery has been called chaos theory. The kinds of regularity that Mill requires to identify necessary conditions are quite absent. For all the dynamic variability, however, the calculus shows that once one knows the structure and location of the various bodies involved and the trajectories they are following, one can develop deterministic predictions that tell where each body will be at any time and how it will move relative to its peers. The mathematics of chaos provides a theoretical framework within which one can explore the movement of sufficient conditions within the world of nature even when events betray no regularity at all. In practice it may be difficult to identify all of the significant agents involved or to be precise about the course of their movements, but in principle it should be possible to do so.7 Meteorology provides the best example of putting this theoretical possibility into practice. The need for accurate weather predictions – particularly in military contexts – has justified directing extensive funds to improving our ability to establish current conditions and calculate their consequences. In the first place, an elaborate network of measuring stations, not only on the surface of the planet but also at various levels of the atmosphere has ­increased the range and number of initial determining factors that can be put into the reckoning. In the second place, as computers have increased in power and complexity, they have been able to make an astronomical number of calculations relatively quickly. As a result predictions have become much more accurate than was possible when meteorologists relied on mere human reckoning.8 Even so, the accuracy diminishes as one moves away from the present, and ceases to be very useful after about two weeks. In part, this is because the initial data are neither precise nor exhaustive. There may be measurements for only one point within a cubic kilometre of the atmosphere. Many of them, particularly

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from the surface and depths of the ocean and within the atmosphere, are not directly measured but extrapolated from known parameters. With such imprecise premises, mathematical inferences cannot be expected to produce absolute certainty. This lack of predictable accuracy may have another cause, however. It is theoretically possible for minor contingent variations, not thoroughly determined by their conditions, to intervene in the various processes, moving them in directions not predicted by the mathematical model. In the short term, this would not be too significant; but as time passes, and more such contingencies occur, results could be quite unexpected. There is some evidence that this is not a mere theoretical ­possibility. At the very least, quantum theory has made us aware that electrons swerve in unpredictable ways. Since any such swerve becomes a condition that could modify subsequent events, there is room for significant variations to emerge over time. Velocity and direction can be altered, changing the way various forces intersect.9 Once such contingencies are allowed, we find them in other places as well. Organisms, both plants and animals, seem to act and behave in arbitrary ways. The infamous butterfly, by lifting off at one moment rather than the next, may fail to trigger the typhoon off the coast of Japan. And humans, acting impulsively or deliberately, are said to be transforming the conditions within which weather patterns develop. Indeed, human actions offer many interstices where contingencies can intervene. For with human action we introduce Aristotle’s fourth classification of final cause. Humans are able to take note of the causal regularities that they discover in the world and orient their action to take advantage of them. So it would seem to be a contingent matter whether they simply respond to the pressures of the moment or reflect before deciding. And once they do reflect there is a vast range of causal sequences that may come into play, with contingencies determining which ones they focus on. Such contingencies are not radical novelties, totally independent of all preceding conditions. The successes of modern science demonstrate that the world is governed by regularities that

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The Ontology of Cause 31

make effective predictions possible. But the causal regularities of nature emerge within a vast array of attendant conditions, within which small contingent variations make fully accurate predictions impossible. The failure to develop absolutely accurate weather forecasts may stem from just such indeterminacy. Of course the determinist can provide an answer. The inability to predict weather precisely, as well as the fact that no experiment produces results that exactly fit the predictions but fall within a margin of error, can be attributed solely to our inability to measure precisely all the significant factors that are involved, particularly with such complex systems as the earth’s weather patterns. But that “solely” begs the question. It assumes causal determinism and fits its explanation of the way the world functions to that prior belief. Yet most of the evidence does not support such an exclusive claim. Too many of our causal inferences are based on statistical probabilities, not deductive certainties. And when minute contingencies are expected within quantum physics it is presumptuous to assume that no such variations are possible elsewhere in the cosmos. To be sure, Albert Einstein is said to have insisted that “God does not play dice,” and spent the last years of his life searching for a universal theory that would integrate both gravitation and quantum physics into a deterministic framework. But he failed to achieve his goal, and the majority of physicists have seen no need to follow in his footsteps. In other words, the most plausible scenario is that, as events combine into sufficient conditions, there is no strict necessity, but one subject to contingent variations that could over time modify the general pattern of regularities. To use the simple ­conditional judgment, “if A then B,” as the Procrustean model for our understanding of forward-moving causal action is misguided. • • • It is time to draw together the strands of our investigation. From our experience in the world, we have become convinced that we can always find conditions that in some way or other have produced an event we find puzzling, and we have crystallized

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this conviction in the concept of cause. At the very least this assumes that there are forces that move from one set of circumstances to the next, and that pressure frequently has a kind of implacability that can only be averted by finding the right strategies. This experience has led us to associate inevitability and necessity to the causal connection – an association that is strengthened by the way carefully controlled scientific investigations, working within these assumptions, have discovered not only correlations but also causal links between entities and events. By ensuring that attendant circumstances do not interfere, we can frequently identify which, of a set of possible conditions, is the effective agent. But when we turn from the laboratory to the world of actual events we do not find such inevitability. Indeed, the very fact that experiments have to be rigorously controlled indicates that there is always the risk that interfering conditions can prevent the “­inevitable” from happening. So the concept “cause” is not as ­simple and straightforward as we regularly assume. Several components of its meaning are basic. First is the sense of an agent cause that exerts some kind of forward pressure that results in certain effects. We do not have a completely contingent collection of events but, given the appropriate circumstances, the cause will lead to a specific result. There is a kind of relative necessity. Second, we have found in practice that, for some events, we can identify a set of causal conditions that appear to be sufficient to explain why they happen the way they do. We may never be absolutely certain that we have exhausted all possibilities, but we expect that it is, in principle, possible to do so. Third, for many kinds of events we can discover conditions that are necessary – the result would not have happened if that precedent had not occurred. Such necessary conditions are more closely associated with the forward push of causal influence than are attendant passive conditions that simply allow it to be effective. Once we move beyond this conceptual structure and take into account the larger picture of life in the world, however, matters become less clear. It is tempting to believe that we can discover

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The Ontology of Cause 33

sufficient reasons for any set of conditions whatever. But that move goes beyond the evidence of our experience. For few if any carefully controlled expectations are ever satisfied exactly – and even the most thorough mathematical model fails to provide fully accurate predictions. Contingencies, many of which are minor, though some could be significant, would seem to enter into the assembling of any set of conditions. Quantum indeterminacy, variations in frequency, temporal order, or spatial direction all could become critical ­factors. When we add to this the indeterminacy involved in the action of organisms – that a particular stimulus may trigger a range of possible responses, each of which would generate a distinct result – we open up a wider sphere for contingent events. So we have at least two possible models for the wider theory of cause. The first says that, even though there is a regularity that governs events with a kind of causal necessity, that necessity is relative to the presence of contingencies that could have been otherwise. While we can identify the conditions that made those contingencies possible, we cannot confidently assume that they are inevitable. There is room for genuine novelties to emerge. The second model says that there is a forward-moving causal necessity such that, once it is set in motion, it will move forward with an inescapable necessity. The world could not have been other than it is. This second model goes beyond the evidence, and makes an absolute claim about the way the universe as a whole functions. For our present purposes we shall not be so dogmatic. As we extend our exploration of the metaphysics of cause, we shall leave open the possibility that new kinds of causal processes can emerge, processes that are not the inevitable result of prior conditions.

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3 The Cosmology of Complex Cause

For Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason the concept of cause determines the way we understand the world. Within the temporal flow of our experience, we distinguish a cause from a simple before and after by appealing to a rule that spells out a sufficient condition for the sequence. In other words, we appeal to the necessity of a forward-moving conditional judgment that excludes all contingency: whenever such conditions combine, a specific result inevitably follows. We usually call this mechanical causality. Later, however, in the Critique of Judgment Kant admitted that we find in nature a kind of causality that runs counter to this mechanistic determinism. “In such a product of nature, every part not only exists by means of the other parts, but is thought as existing for the sake of the others and the whole.”1 In natural organisms there is a reciprocal dynamic, where every part both influences and is affected by every other part and the organism as a whole both influences the action of those parts, and is itself moulded by their activity.2 This seems to involve some kind of final cause, for when a thing is “both cause and effect of itself” it exists as a natural purpose.3 In his definition of a natural purpose, Kant has recognized that organisms seem to function in a way that does not match the conceptual framework of rigorous mechanical causality, where cause leads on to effect and effect can be traced back to

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cause in a linear sequence. If we consider a living animal, for example, we find that heart and lung, stomach and intestine, liver and kidney, brain and nerve, eye and ear all interact so that each one can only function because it is affected by and influences the others; moreover, the actions of the creature as a unified organism both result from the activity of the parts and determine the particular ways those parts function. Biology has identified less integrated forms of such reciprocal activity in what biologists call symbiosis. Lichen, for example, is composed of two distinct organisms, one a fungus, the other frequently an alga, which mutually reinforce one another in the process of procreation and development. And there are fig trees that can only be fertilized by a particular species of wasp that breeds exclusively within their fruit.4 Surprisingly, Kant takes the analysis of these phenomena no further. One would have thought that he might appeal to the category of reciprocity (which, in his table of categories, is a third kind of relation after substance and cause) to make sense of the interaction between parts. But because not everything we experience has this structure and the basic categories are to mould our experience as a whole, he limits reciprocity to what one might say about the totality of our experience. Everything is interconnected with everything else.5 Thus linear cause constitutes the structure of our experience, while organic cause is only a convenient way of interpreting certain phenomena. Since all experience is to be understood under the category of mechanical cause, he has to assume that in due course all examples of “natural purpose” will be explainable in terms of necessary, forward-moving cause. We have no justification for assuming that in the objective world of our experience there are objects determined by reciprocal causality. For “to speak strictly, the organization of nature [according to natural purposes] has in it nothing analogous to any causality we know.”6 Since reciprocity involves a dynamic of mutual interaction, it seems strange that Kant displays no curiosity about the logical structure of the process, but instead simply uses the necessity of mechanical cause as an excuse for abandoning such an

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investigation. That anomaly, however, becomes easier to understand when we realize that, for Kant, the concept of cause requires a forward-moving necessity. Essentially isomorphic with the conditional judgment “if A then B,” cause carries the same unavoidable necessity. And he is convinced that our understanding is constrained by this conception: “I must always reflect upon [events in material nature] according to the principle of the mere mechanism of nature, and consequently investigate this as far as I can, because unless this lies at the basis of investigation, there can be no proper knowledge of nature at all.”7 In our analysis of cause in the previous chapter, however, we discovered that the belief in such a strict and universal forwardmoving necessity goes beyond the evidence since contingencies may well have a role to play. This puts in question Kant’s assumption that mechanical causation is the a priori necessary condition of all our understanding of nature. And it opens the prospect of a more pragmatic consideration of our fundamental conceptions of cause. • • • Our task, then, is to develop a conceptual model – one that is based on the relative necessity of causal influences yet takes account of what happens when we introduce reciprocal activity. In place of a universal forward-moving necessity, there emerges a more complicated pattern of interaction that generates new kinds of effects. I shall distinguish this more intricate causal ­pattern by adopting the term “complex cause.” This covers a variety of forms, for the development of a satisfactory conceptual framework faces significant challenges. In the first place, many of the phenomena we want to explain involve the interaction of a multiplicity of interacting agents, and the more terms we bring into the picture the more complicated the analysis needs to be. We have already noticed that, once mathematics attempted to calculate the results of mechanical causation when there are more than two bodies, simplicity and regularity disappeared and the projected sequences became intricately complex to the point of being labelled

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“chaos.” When we allow, in addition, for contingencies to have a part to play in what we might call organic causation, we ­magnify the complexity of our analysis, making it impossible to ­develop one within a reasonable compass. With that in mind, I shall deliberately limit the discussion to models where only two agents are in play. That is enough to suggest the distinctive character of this kind of causality. But any application of such a simplified concept to phenomena in the world of nature would need to allow for many agents to interact reciprocally in a comprehensive dynamic. In the second place, since a reciprocal dynamic can develop a life of its own, there is the possibility of its being integrated into a unified agent that functions at a higher level – of being able to interact with other agents in a more intricate pattern of development. There is, then, a possible hierarchy of complex causes as each level builds on integrations achieved at an earlier stage. No single model will suffice. Indeed, the term “organic” may only apply to some of those stages, because others have such a distinctive character that they merit their own defining adjective. The process for developing an analysis of what I am calling “complex cause” is made easier by the fact that, in the generation following Kant’s Critiques, reflective thinkers took up the challenge of making sense of organic, as opposed to mechanical, cause.8 Among them Hegel was the most disciplined, and it is worth our while to begin our discussion by considering some of the points he makes within his Science of Logic. Rather than attempting a detailed commentary on his analysis, I present a more informal discussion. In his analysis of causality, Hegel takes up the fact that an agent cause has, as its necessary counterpart, a passive condition or set of conditions, upon which it can effect its action.9 Both the active and the passive moment are requisite for the cause to become operative. That means, however, that until the passive condition makes its appearance, the agent cause is itself passive and unable to produce its effect. It becomes active only through the agency of what initially we called the

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passive cause. So even for mechanical causation to be effective there is a kind of double activity; each moment is in one respect passive and in another active. To start moving towards what we have called organic cause, however, a further move needs to be made.10 Instead of having only one agent cause, we introduce a second, so that the activities intersect. Since both are active simultaneously one cannot predict what will happen when they intersect. They may simply pass each other by and continue functioning as before, with a minimum of alteration. One may overwhelm and destroy the other. Or they may reciprocally influence and modify each other. Because causal sequences are open and not closed, this mutual interaction can become quite complex. The action of one evokes a reaction from the other that responds to, and in its turn alters, the functioning of the first. This can happen in several ways: the first agent adjusts so that it is better able to resist the incursion from outside; or it discovers that its own operations work better when stimulated by the alien activity; or it finds that, by cooperating with the action of the other, it can produce effects not otherwise possible. The resulting changes in its activity stimulate, in turn, changes in the way the second agent functions. As this dynamic on one side is balanced by a similar dynamic on the other, the two develop a modus vivendi. They develop a systematic pattern of behaviour in which their operations adapt to each other and become more effective both because of the separation of powers and because of the increased possibilities produced by cooperation. Each thrives in a more sustained way because its initiatives are reinforced and encouraged by the other as well as distinguished from it. They develop a shared existence in which the action of one continually reinforces what the other is doing, and vice versa, and in which the activity of each is regularly modified so that it does not directly conflict with the action of the other. We have a full-fledged and systematic reciprocity. Reciprocal causality, then, works in a more complicated way than does mechanical causation, for any action is continually adjusted to take account of what happens

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to it and thus alters the effects it produces. A kind of circle replaces the traditional line. What results is a new kind of reality. Hegel points out that a dynamic and ongoing reciprocity can develop a character of its own and become integrated into a unity.11 Unified in this way, it incorporates all the elements of the two original forces and embodies a kind of universality. It has a unique identity of its own so it functions as a singular. And it has features that emerge from the specific nature of the interaction and distinguish it from other possibilities, becoming one particular among many. We have a new kind of entity that, as universal, particular, and singular, integrates the full activity of its constituent parts, and that can, in its turn, become an agent or passive condition in causal processes at more complex levels of existence. This emergent complex entity develops a life of its own that manifests properties and functions quite different from those found in the original constituent agents.12 The model we have developed in which two agents interact to produce a new, more complex unit has implications for our understanding of causality. For when the second-order unit starts to interact with its environment a number of things have to happen. First, each of the original agents and its characteristic functioning plays its part in determining what the integrated unit is able to effect. Second, the systematic pattern of interaction that has developed in their reciprocal dynamic, being more than the simple sum of their initial contributions, has its own role to play in making things happen. Third, the unit as a whole, constituted by both the original components and that dynamic pattern, acts as a new kind of singular agent with respect to other agents and conditions that make up its environment. There are, then, at least three different sorts of causal influence in play: the agency of the original components; the systematic pattern of their interaction; and the integrated activity of the primary agent. Once again we find that the language of Aristotle’s causal analysis is appropriate, though it is now applied to causes as active processes and not to conditions that

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explain events. The intrinsic action of the constituent components serves as the material cause of the act initiated by our unit. The systematic structure or form of their interaction that has developed over time can be called its formal cause; and the action of the unit itself, whether it impinges on something else, or reacts to what others do to it, can be identified as a distinctive agency that both presupposes and influences its material and formal causes in the process of generating its effects. It has been conventional wisdom that the development of ­mechanics in the sixteenth century put paid to the traditional causal analysis of Aristotle. Yet our discussion of complex cause suggests that its complexity provides a useful corrective to the simplicity of mechanical cause. Not only does Aristotle’s analysis remind us that any causal process involves a number of conditions and cannot be reduced to a single cause producing a single effect; it also distinguishes among the causal activity of basic components, the dynamic patterns that emerge when components interact among themselves, and the action of an agent as an integrated entity. Far from presenting an outmoded causal schema, Aristotle is more relevant than we had thought. Successful integrations of this sort develop a consistency in their activity that is able to withstand much of what the world throws against them. Because the components mutually reinforce and modify each other, the action of the whole acquires a stability that makes it more effective and reliable than the action either part displays on its own. For it is in the interest (if we may use that term) of each component to reinforce those activities of its fellow that maintain and enhance the productive dynamic and to counteract any action that would disrupt their cooperation. In this scenario there may well be radical contingencies at the most primitive levels of causal activity in quantum mechanics; nonetheless, when such variable processes intersect and develop a systematic reciprocity they cancel and restrict any chance influences that interfere and disrupt, and reinforce those processes that maintain and improve stability. As we advance up the levels of complexity, contingencies come to be nothing more than minor variations within a developing regularity. On this

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reading, much of the regularity we find in the world is not ­primordial but the result of such reciprocal networks, strengthened even more because not two but rather a number of components interact to mutually reinforce and sustain each other.13 It is worth pausing to consider whether the conceptual analysis presented so far has any bearing on the world of nature as we know it. On first glance it seems to have some measure of plausibility. When physicists describe the internal structure of the atom they identify electrons (which are essentially charges of negative electricity), protons (which are positively charged entities), and neutrons (which are neutral). The negative and the positive bits of energy do not simply cancel each other out and collapse into neutrons, but rather maintain the integrity of the atomic unit through their reciprocal interaction. Whereas free electrons and free protons are erratic agents, once they become integrated into most atoms they develop a stability that establishes many of the basic substances in our world that can interact in mechanical ways. An atom of silica has properties that can have significant impact on its surroundings in a way that the component electrons and protons could not. To be sure, a few elements are volatile and can disintegrate over time – we call them radioactive – but they are understood as variations within the basic regularity of the others. From this perspective, mechanical causation emerges from the complexities of atomic structure, for the causal energy of the subatomic particles in itself does not have the capabilities that characterize bodies in motion. Mechanistic functions are emergent properties. Chemistry offers a second example. A molecule of water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one atom of oxygen. Yet the way water interacts with its environment is quite different from the way the two gases operate when they are on their own. It takes much less energy to disperse the components of water than it does to break up an atom, but nonetheless it does not happen easily. And it is clear that the internal components of all three atoms interplay to make the molecule resistant to most efforts to disentangle it. As a result, while oxygen feeds a burning fire, water extinguishes it. The task of chemistry is to find the

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conditions under which new complex compounds with systematic integrity can be constructed out of well-known elements, and familiar but persistent compounds can be disintegrated into their radicals. The examples from physics and chemistry serve to show that new qualities emerge when agents reciprocally interact in a ­consistent and self-maintaining way. The kind of complex cause we have described is able to generate emergent properties – new kinds of entities that cannot be explained simply by aggregating the constituent activity of the material components. • • • We have, however, said nothing about Aristotle’s fourth, or final, cause, even though it was because organisms showed a kind of natural purpose that led Kant to take note of them in his Critique of Judgment. We need to take a further step before we move from physics and chemistry into the realm of biological or organic cause. The second-order unit, if we may call it that, interacts with other agent causes and conditions as a single entity. It can actively interfere with their passivity and work its effects on its ­surroundings; passively it can receive the brunt of their energy. If we take the passive moment, there are two possible courses it could follow: on the one hand our unit may fall prey to the action of the other and have its intricate dynamic destroyed; or it may resist interference and maintain itself by developing, within its reciprocal dynamic, new strategies that will be more effective in its interaction with the world around it. That interaction may be mechanical: exerting or resisting pressure, transmitting force, succumbing to attack in a linear progression from cause to effect. But it may also be reciprocal: one agent interferes with others in its neighbourhood in such a way that each complex entity stimulates, restricts, and reinforces the action of its counterpart. And each may incorporate elements of that interfering environment into its own functioning, adding new components to the set of material and formal conditions that constitute its internal dynamic. The interacting agents

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do not succumb to dissolution when their normal modes of operation are harmed or frustrated. Instead, they draw on resources present in their various functioning parts (their material conditions) and on whatever flexibility is available in their internal structure (their formal conditions) to reconstitute themselves as integrated agents. At the same time they may acquire new capabilities that emerge from the stimulus of unforeseen challenges. In this way they are able to survive threats to their continued functioning, and indeed to improve and extend the range of their activity. Building on the reciprocal interaction that constitutes the internal integrity of each individual, they initiate a more complex reciprocity in which each benefits from and contributes to the actions of the others. Once we introduce reciprocity into the way an integrated entity engages with its environment there are a number of adjustments we have to make to our model. In the first place, any such second-order agent in the interaction has ceased to be the simple assembly of a number of interacting components into a uniform and relatively homogeneous entity that simply responds mechanically to whatever impinges upon it. It needs to have enough complexity that it can on the one hand intrude into the complexity of its counterpart and on the other receive the intrusions of the other without having its integrity shattered. This means, in the second place, that each of the interacting agents needs to have a distinctive centre that can not only initiate action but also respond to the initiative of the other. While that focused unity is in one sense the result of the functioning of its constituent parts as well as the demands imposed by the environment, it can at the same time respond to unexpected challenges by initiating distinctive strategies. It can alter the way its components interact, and it can incorporate new material from the environment that modifies the functioning of its internal dynamic. So, in the third place, we introduce a more complex type of reciprocal action into the internal structure of the individual agents. In addition to the way the components influence and are influenced by each other, we have an interaction between

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the way those parts function among themselves and the demands of the integrating centre. The internal “formal” dynamic as well as the material conditions that maintain it are continually being modified in light of what happens externally. Similarly, the centre takes account of the restraints imposed and the opportunities offered by its material conditions as it acts on its environment. To complement the horizontal dynamic among components of an agent cause developed earlier, there develops what could be called a vertical dynamic in which parts and whole mutually influence each other. This means, in the fourth place, that the agent as a whole becomes less stable and more open to change. By being able to interact with its environment in a coordinated and integrated way, it can adjust its responses in appropriate ways. Any such adjustment leads not only to a restructuring of the “formal” dynamic that plays among its components, but also to the way those parts – or the “material” conditions – themselves function. While it thus acquires the ability to improve its functioning, it also opens the possibility of failure. In the fifth place, this continual readjustment is governed by the need to re-establish its integrity. New material, either appropriated from the other or imposed by the other, could disrupt the functioning of the original components. The centre has to reconstitute in some way an integrated and mutually beneficial dynamic. It does not simply re-establish the equilibrium that prevailed before but incorporates novelties that have been introduced on the way. Where those novelties are destructive, the centre finds a way of healing the wound; where they are beneficial, it absorbs them into its dynamic, using them to enhance the functioning of the original components and even incorporating them as additional components of its complexity. The agent is thus not simply self-sustaining but also self-reproducing and selfenhancing. It seeks not only to reconstitute itself in light of the novelties that have intervened, but also to modify and improve its functioning. After all, the self that emerges from the process need not be strictly identical with the one that entered into it. Both the internal dynamic as well as the material conditions that

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make it up could alter significantly.14 In sum, that drive toward self-reproduction and self-enhancement adds a purposive focus to the way it functions as an agent. By seeking to achieve an end it introduces a form of Aristotle’s final cause. So, in the sixth place, the agent becomes what we would call an organism. Its component parts differentiate their roles from each other and, in more developed forms, become what we call organs, each with its distinctive mode of functioning, benefiting from the activity of the others and of the centred whole and contributing to their effectiveness. Root, leaf, flower, and fruit have particular roles to play in maintaining the integrity of a plant. Because the centre integrates the dynamic as a whole, it is not one component among equals, but rather the focus of the activity of all the others, present in some way throughout. The activity of an organism, then, is not random and undirected, but manifests an innate tendency to reproduce itself and re-establish equilibrium whenever it is put in jeopardy. This can involve developing stronger defences, commandeering troops to develop techniques for resistance, or appropriating new material and new forms so that the unit as a whole grows and becomes more complex. It is this nisus, or endeavour, welcoming the challenge of confrontation while incorporating its benefits into its centred unity, that gives the organism its purposive character. In the seventh place, the other agent, with which our organism is in reciprocal interaction, is no longer primarily a mechanical object, but is itself either an organism in its own right, or at least something that has the potential of becoming such. If it is to be actively involved in this reciprocity, it must also be amenable to change so that it, too, can benefit. All such external interaction involves two contrary processes: one negative and one positive. On the one hand there is the moment of resistance, in which the centred organism differentiates itself from its other so that it functions in its own distinctive way. The creation of defences has already been mentioned, but more subtle forms of creating difference are also possible. If two organisms come into conflict over some particular type of nutrition, for

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example, they may fight it out for victory, or they may adapt their preferences and divide up the spoils so that one develops a taste for one sort of food, whereas the other enjoys the flavour of what remains. This articulation of differences extends further to different modes of functioning, so that the organisms come to complement each other in the quest for food, or in the enjoyment of leisure. Their benefits are increased because they work cooperatively yet disjunctively. While this is going on at the second-order level, a similar process can occur within the organism itself as various organs differentiate their functions from each other more explicitly, producing a much more articulate and complex structure or form. There is no guarantee that resistance will be successful. The interaction may lead to disintegration and decline, where the functioning of the centred agency is harmed or frustrated, because either elements of its material basis are destroyed or the interacting dynamic of its form is perverted. On the other hand, the organism may benefit directly from the new material and kinds of activity that it receives from the encounter. Through its purposive activity in recreating equilibrium and reproducing itself, it incorporates novel features of both matter and form into its own functioning. At times this takes the form of reintegrating itself after it has been injured; some plants, like euonymus or fuchsia, are able to reconstitute full organisms from segments of their stems. More generally, basic reproduction and enhancement is what we call growth, as the organism appropriates new material to augment the functioning of its component parts.15 By interacting with elements of its environment, an organism can develop more complex forms of positive enhancement. Two differentiated organisms can integrate their actions so that each provides services to the other, while benefiting from what it could not produce itself. Like the fungi and algae of common lichens, they develop a symbiotic relation, in which each depends on the other to produce a distinctive form of causal agency. In some cases one organism could interact with another that is closely related by each contributing part of its own formal

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structure, the two parts combining into a new organism that integrates characteristics of both parents. For this kind of reproduction and enhancement to happen, however, there needs to be a large measure of compatibility between the two interacting agents, so that their distinctive components complement each other. For the materials that each contributes to the new entity need to interact formally in ways that replicate the functioning of the originating organisms. This compatibility, which presupposes uniformity of formal functioning but allows for diversity of detail, defines the generic character that all three organisms share. In this model of how organisms function we find that causal agency is transformed by its ability to reproduce and enhance its functioning. When an integrated agent is able to respond creatively to the opportunities and influences of the environment, in ways that promote and enrich its actions, it manifests a centred purposive character that is quite different from the causal dynamic of less complex, mechanical entities. Once again, we have a kind of causal agency that possesses emergent properties. Its distinctive features cannot be explained or reduced to the simple functioning of its prior components or their mere aggregation into a collective. Biogenesis is as novel as the emergence of mechanistic regularity.16 The examples used in developing this conceptual model of organic cause have been taken primarily from the world of botany. While plants do not have fully developed organisms, they nonetheless distinguish the functioning of various parts, and so provide a basic empirical application of our theoretical construct. There is a reason for limiting its application in this way, for we started from mechanical cause, which traditionally assumed direct contact between agent and its effect. Plants respond directly to what immediately impinges on their integrated functioning, growing into and drawing nutrients from the earth, water, and air that surround them. As we shall see, reciprocal action among agents and entities separated spatially from one another introduces new and different modes of functioning that require a further adjustment in our conceptual arsenal.

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By introducing into the concept of complex cause the feature of full reciprocal interaction with the environment, then, we have added to the complexity of complex cause. We have incorporated the thoughts of centred agency, adaptability, organic complexity, purposive activity, differentiation of functions, reproduction, and enhancement. For all that we find these features in abundance in the world of nature, they also follow logically from our original decision to extend the concept of reciprocity from the way internal components function within a  single agent to the way a variety of agents interact within a wider environment. They are part of what I am calling the ­metaphysical underpinning of the way we understand the cosmos. And since organic agents direct their action in ways that reproduce and enhance their own functioning, they introduce the moment of purposiveness or final cause to our conceptual model of complex cause. There is, then, no need to follow Kant and presuppose a sudden leap over a nasty broad ditch when we move from the inorganic to the organic. Certainly we find full-fledged examples of the two forms of complex cause, basic and organic: silicon and water, on the one hand, and mushrooms and cherry trees on the other. But when we begin to apply the concepts to our understanding of the world of nature we may well discover all kinds of intermediate stages, where one or another feature is more or less developed. At one extreme we may find sub-atomic particles that do not directly produce the stability of a carbon atom but nevertheless develop a reciprocal play. In the middle we may find chemical compounds that have a measure of centred adaptability, yet are not full organisms. And in the sequel we may find self-reproducing organisms that are capable of kinds of activity not yet discussed. The concepts analyzed provide a framework within which we can understand how the world is constituted, and how it embodies processes and entities through a rich hierarchy of diversity. Empirical observation will fill in this framework. Indeed, it may well make us aware of significant details that do not fit our concepts and require that they be revised to incorporate new features into our conceptual model.

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Nonetheless, as the complexity has expanded, it has become clear that we are overly simplistic when we assume that the only kind of causal activity involves mechanistic determinism. Nor can we assume, with Kant, that all phenomena can be explained in such terms. For reciprocal interaction generates complex units that manifest properties, functions, and characteristics that cannot be simply reduced to their material base but need to be defined as well by the form the interaction takes, the way the units act and react with their environment, and, in some, by the need of an organism to continually re-establish equilibrium and enhance its functioning. We are led back to a version of Aristotle’s division of four types of causes as a way of discriminating among the many conditions that set the stage for, and explain, events that happen in our world.

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4 The Psychology of Conscious and Rational Agents

If our analysis of organic cause provides a more adequate way of understanding living beings than the simple appeal to mechanical causation, it carries with it important implications for Descartes’ distinction between mind and matter – between thinking substance and extended substance. For Descartes all animals, including our human bodies, are simply complex machines, incapable of thought and consciousness. Our minds with their capacity for thought, however, represent a kind of being radically different from the rest of the natural order. So human beings are split in two: a nasty broad ditch separates the brain, with its networks of neurons working mechanically in response to external forces, from consciousness, with its qualitative sense of self-determination.1 By adopting the conceptual model of complex cause, however, we have called into question that radical dualism. For we have identified a process whereby what starts out as a mechanical cause becomes involved in a network of interacting forces. That network in turn develops a life of its own, determined by the functioning of the basic elements, by the way they interact, and by the way they become integrated into a purposive, self-­ reproducing unity. We have already discovered several stages in that development: from complex units examined by physics and chemistry to organic structures found in plants. This suggests that, by complicating the picture further, we may find

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further levels leading to the emergence of consciousness and human reasoning. In following that path, we are returning to Aristotle’s De Anima, or On the Soul. His word “soul” (or psyche) incorporates much more than what is usually meant in the Christian context. In its simplest form, it refers to any centred being that is able to grow and decay through its dynamic interaction with its environment; it is then extended to refer to centred beings that are able to move around within that environment, and through the senses and appetites respond to aspects of the environment that are not in direct contact with them. In addition to what can be called the nutritive and the sensitive stages, there is a third dimension, found in humans, which involves the power of reasoning and thought. These three levels build in a kind of progression, for the merely nutritive soul is found in plants; animals, while being able to move, sense, and desire, also presuppose the nutritive powers; whereas humans, in addition to the animal functions, are able to think and reason.2 This Aristotelian hierarchy is more consistent with the models of complex cause developed in the previous chapter than is the dualism put forward by Descartes. We have already suggested that, even at the level of physics and chemistry, we have more than a merely mechanical network of causes. Once we introduce some kind of centred self-reproducing agency with its ability to act purposively we have moved to the organic realm, corresponding to Aristotle’s nutritive soul. With this as background we can now investigate what kind of conceptual model we need to adopt when we consider the functioning of animals, organic causal agents who are able to move, sense, and desire; and of humans, who are also able to reason. We thus move more explicitly into the realm traditionally called psychology, for it would stretch our contemporary sense of terms like “soul” or “psyche” to apply them to vegetables and plants in the way Aristotle did. Descartes’ sharp divide between thinking substance and extended substance produces a strange anomaly when it comes to animals. For he ascribes imagination, memory, and sensation to the soul that thinks, which only humans have, and attributes all

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animal functioning to the mechanical operation of bodies being moved by other bodies. Aristotle’s more empirical approach recognizes that many animals as well are able to sense, remember, and imagine. They employ many functions that we regularly associate with consciousness, even though they are not able to reflect, understand, or make rational decisions. So they provide an intermediate stage between an agency that is merely organic and an agency that is fully rational. In developing a conceptual model for understanding the psychology of conscious as well as of rational agents, then, it makes sense to do so in two stages, corresponding to Aristotle’s sensitive and rational souls. While on occasion I shall use the language of psyches and souls to describe these entities, my primary focus will be on their causal role as agents. Aristotle identifies three functions that distinguish animals from plants. Animals are able to move, whereas plants are rooted in a single space; animals have senses with which they perceive the world around them; and animals are driven by appetite and desire, which initiate both movement and interaction with the perceived environment. While not all animals manifest all functions to the same extent, this characterization provides a template within which we can situate the wide variety of actual cases; and it enables us to identify what modifications need to be made to our earlier model of organic cause. What is required for an agency that involves movement, sensation, and desire? The analysis in the last chapter, when talking about the dynamic interaction of an organism with its environment, assumes implicitly that the centred agent is in direct contact with its surroundings. It can absorb nutrients that it encounters; its internal structure can be damaged by the thrust of alien forces, either evoking the drive to a restored equilibrium, or destroying the functioning of the organism entirely; and it can adjust its ­functioning so that it cooperates directly with a complementary partner. There is, then, a rudimentary sense of touch, and even possibly of taste, that determines how the agent functions. One can also see a limited possibility for motion, as roots reach out through the soil towards sources of water and nutrients, and

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stems and leaves are drawn upwards by the heat of the sun.3 All such moves, however, can be explained simply in terms of direct contact and reciprocal interaction. Things change when we consider an agent cause that can move, use the senses of sight, hearing, and smell, and which, rather than simply following the path of least resistance, is stimulated by appetites and desires to adopt one course of action rather than another. Sensation, motion, and appetite develop because an organic agent does not simply respond to things with which it is in direct contact but is influenced by, and acts on, agents and entities that are spatially removed from its immediate surroundings. By adding this feature of reciprocal action at a distance to our conceptual model of organic cause, we can begin to do some justice to what an Aristotelian calls the animal soul. When an organic agent, in its continuing effort to reproduce and enhance itself, interacts with an environment that is separated from it spatially it requires what we may call the indirect senses, such as sight, hearing, and smell. These do not involve any immediate contact with the source of those sensations. What impinge on the organism are lights, sounds, and odours – which on their own neither provide immediate benefit nor threaten imminent danger. Since the origin of these phenomena is spatially removed from the organism, colours and sounds as immediately presented reveal nothing about what these distant entities can do. The centred animal is able to move from place to place. So it has an interest not only in what it encounters directly through touch and taste but in what is present further afield. It can only benefit from the ability to take particular colours, sounds, and smells not simply as delightful pleasures or grating discords, but as signs of distant objects with which it can interact in its desire to enhance its life and avoid attack and disruption. This ability requires some function that does more than simply respond to immediate stimulation and pressure. It takes a sensed given not simply in terms of its immediate phenomenal characteristics, but as a sign of something else. To achieve some appreciation of

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what is being offered it develops mediating links that connect what is given to its purposive goals. To read what we might call the distant warning signals of the indirect senses, then, the animal organism needs to interpret them, and it can do so only by appealing to what has happened in its past. A particular sound reminds it of a partner in the process of reproduction and enhancement; a particular pattern of colours in motion augurs the presence of a predatory enemy; a particular odour offers the promise of nutrition. And it needs to recognize within the phenomenon features that differentiate friend from foe. For its drive towards self-reproduction and enhancement requires an appropriate response to what it discovers about the world around it. When implementing its appetites, then, the sensitive agent relates the immediately given to a wider context by drawing on recollections of what has happened before. It has to hand not only the immediate impressions of colour, sound, and smell, but also some awareness of images and patterns of behaviour recalled from a storehouse of memories as well as the ability to compare and contrast past with present. At the centre of such an organism, then, is some arena within which it can entertain both present impressions and images from the past, some independence that enables it to compare and discriminate, and some latitude for determining what actions it is to initiate. The particular causal agency that satisfies these requirements is consciousness: it holds in abeyance the direct effects of present conditions, sets them in the context of past experience, and activates a response that takes the larger picture into account. If the indirect senses are to provide useful information to the organism then the centred agent must consciously integrate those sensations with its past experience and its appetites and desires. On this analysis consciousness becomes not primarily a quality or state of being but rather a form of causal agency. The emergence of consciousness introduces the peculiarly psychological focus of our analysis, for we here have an agency that is able to control and direct in some measure what the organism does by discriminating among possibilities; instinctive

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and immediate responses are not the only option. A number of  characteristics are involved in the conceptual structure of conscious agency. When we turn from theory to practice and apply this model to the zoological world around us, we may find these to be present in various degrees and forms. Nonetheless most of them are essential for any organism able to move around the world and process what the indirect senses tell it about ­distant objects. Central to the functioning of consciousness is the ability of the conscious centred agent to distinguish itself in some measure from the environment in which it immediately finds itself and from the information provided by its own constituent organs. Since the phenomena presented by the distant senses are inevitably ambiguous, the agent has some independent capacity for determining how to respond. Its action is not the mere aggregate of the various external forces acting upon it but enjoys some space within which the agent can settle on a particular strategy for using those forces in its ongoing quest to reproduce and enhance its life. Thus its operation is no mere instinctive response to the positive impact of the senses but is, rather, the negative ability to determine how to respond. It is what Hegel calls a “negative unity”: while the centred organism has a singular, integrated focus it is not simply the sum total of its components and the information they provide. It can also separate itself from them and mediate the way they interact both with the environment and amongst themselves.4 As such a negative unity, the conscious organism represents a distinctive kind of centred agency, quite different from the direct reactions and innate initiatives of what Aristotle calls the nutritive soul. It is worth pausing to reflect on what is involved in this negative unity. No less than the simple organism discussed in the last chapter, it involves a centred agency with the purposive goal of continually reproducing and enhancing its life as it interacts with its environment. But it does not do this through immediate and automatic reactions, triggered by what has ­happened. It is not condemned to having the impressions of the environment directly stimulate the organs that implement

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motion. The centre has to distinguish itself from the network of organs that it integrates so that it can interpret and evaluate the sensed data and then initiate and determine what the organism does. As a result the unifying agent is more than the set  of reciprocal interactions among its constituent parts. Rather, as conscious, it is independent and negatively related to them. This independence opens up room for alternative possible actions to emerge, and it provides the setting for an agency that is detached from and able to influence the inherent activity of all the component organs, even as it activates one option rather than another. The ability to evaluate what is presented, necessary for the indirect senses, can easily be transferred to the tactile senses of taste and touch. Rather than simply absorbing whatever liquids it comes in contact with, the agent discriminates and decides which it will absorb and which refuse. In pushing out against the solids and gases that surround it, it need not simply follow the path of least resistance, but instead can move towards some more distant object that promises delightful tastes and tactile pleasures and away from another that would be bitter or hurtful – even if that requires extra effort. The immediate givens of these senses as well become signs to be interpreted, because that enables the organism to direct its motion in ways that promote its final cause: reproducing itself and maintaining equilibrium, while obtaining as much advantage as possible from the environment in which it acts. This dynamic has its implications for the way the organism itself develops. To get the most benefit from the feels, sights, sounds, and smells that impinge upon it, the parts that are sensitive to those givens are encouraged to become more specialized, becoming fully fledged organs able to discriminate more effectively colours and movements, pitch and tone, heat and cold, acid and bitter. At the same time, other components need to develop skills that make locomotion more effective. This will not only involve particular limbs and joints, but also an infrastructure that provides the resources needed to nurture and maintain sustained action. The organism becomes articulated into a

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complex and intricate interaction of subordinate agents. As parts become more specialized into differentiated organs, it becomes harder for the organism as a whole to replace and reproduce them when damaged; they develop lives of their own that have quite distinctive modes of operation. At the same time, it is within the range of possibility for healthy organs, working under the direction of the centred agency, to develop subsidiary functions that substitute for those that have been lost elsewhere. One would expect that, in this division of labours, there would develop a particular organ that serves as the seat of the centring agency and provides not only its material and formal conditions, but also the means through which it interacts with the rest of the body. As the organism as a whole becomes more intricately articulated, so will this organ become, on its own, a mini-organism with a number of constituent parts, each performing its peculiar function. And it will extend this activity through subsidiary networks, by which it maintains contact with the other organs and components. The agent cause in such a being is not simply located in the brain, but throughout the whole nervous system. If the challenge of interacting with a distant environment ­requires, on the one hand, the ability to read as signs the information provided by the senses, it also demands, on the other, explicit motives that stimulate and direct activity. The operations of all the various organs need to be focused and integrated in a way that the simple demand to reproduce and re-establish equilibrium does not. For instead of simply responding to the attractions and intrusions of what is in immediate mechanical contact, the activity of the centred, conscious agent has to select from the many impressions and influences that converge from all sides and through various portals of sense. It is faced with a variety of options, many of which will lead to variations in how the equilibrium functions, the kind of self that is reproduced, and what enhancements it could benefit from. And that selection is motivated by interests and desires that not only focus on one out of the many possible options but also initiate movement towards or away from the perceived object.

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For all of its ability to consider past and present within a single arena, the conscious agent does not have the resources for a thorough discrimination of all possibilities at hand. Over time it learns that some stimuli are desirable and others are threatening, and this acquired experience finds expression in appetites and emotions. It comes to anticipate an immediate future. This ability to envisage what is not immediately present is developed, not through reflective deliberation, but embedded in the subconscious over time through evolutionary processes, as memories are correlated and interconnected beyond the purview of the camera of consciousness. They provide the impetus that drives the activity of the organism as a whole. When possibilities of nutrition or reproduction, or threats of competition or destruction emerge, the reaction needs to be as instantaneous as possible. Desires and fears not only articulate consciously the interests of an animal organism but also motivate appropriate action. Even though they become second nature, they may ­nevertheless come into conflict in particular situations. So there remains an independent space that enables the organism to opt for one alternative rather than another. Appetites and desires add to the complex dynamic of this stage of psychological development. By introducing the concept of acting at a distance to the ­concept of organic cause developed in the last chapter, we have shown how a number of additional features need to be included in the total picture. The organism needs to be endowed with motion and the ability to sense things at some degree of remove. It needs to have the ability to take all it encounters, not as a direct stimulus for action, but as material that can be considered from a separate, yet comprehensive perspective; it needs to determine consciously how to act. Its parts need to develop specialized capabilities that discriminate more effectively the details of what is presented through the senses, and that act and move more efficiently in responding to the promises and threats they suggest. It not only entertains images and impressions of past experiences, but is also moved to respond as appetites and e­ motions, nurtured over time and fed by what has

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been learned from those impressions, stimulate immediate reactions. We have the concept of a centred agency that is able, in some ­measure, to take control of its reciprocal interaction with the environment. The causal agency of the negative unity we have called consciousness, then, is qualitatively distinct from the purposive quest for self-reproduction and enhancement that we identified in more basic forms of organic life because it involves the capacity for separating itself from the totality that it integrates. There is introduced an element of arbitrary indeterminacy that reintroduces contingency into the way causes operate. While that activity presupposes the integrated functioning of the centred living organism, its distinctive features cannot be derived directly from mere processes of self-maintenance but instead incorporate demands and capacities that emerge only as the organism acquires the capacity to interact reciprocally with distant objects. With the negative unity of conscious agency, we have once again the emergence of causal properties that are not reducible to the combined contribution of the constituent parts. Conscious agency, then, provides an integrated conceptual model for what Aristotle called the sensitive or animal soul. It involves an organism that is capable of motion, employs both direct and indirect senses, is moved by appetites and emotions, and is able to distinguish its own operation from the influence of the forces directly impinging on it. We have suggested how all these various features fit together into the structure of an integrated and conscious causal agent that incorporates many of the features earlier described under complex and organic cause, yet is independent and negatively determined. • • • Our next task is to follow Aristotle’s psychology to its third stage: what he calls the rational or ratiocinative soul. We developed the model provided for the sensitive soul by exploring what happens when an organism interacts through the senses with events and things removed in space. For all that this extends the range beyond the direct contact of the tactile, it

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nonetheless limits the range of activity to a past and present that is actually perceived by the sense organs, and to future prospects anticipated by instinctive appetites and desires. If we now add to this picture the ability to interact with events and agents that lie beyond those limits we introduce qualitatively distinct demands. Events that happen before the centred agent came into existence or any time after the immediate future lie beyond the purview of the typical sensitive psyche. In addition, events happen within its lifetime that are not part of its immediate sensed environment. Many of these have had an impact on the setting within which it acts, and influence the results of any process it initiates; its ability to cause changes in its environment is affected by what such remote conditions allow. What is directly presented by the senses provides no evidence of such activities or possibilities. Nonetheless a centred agent may gradually realize that events beyond its immediate purview have affected the success of its ventures. Past experience may suggest that what is beneficial in the short term may be seriously detrimental when one looks further into the future. In such a context it becomes a useful strategy to develop some means for interacting with circumstances and influences well beyond the scope of its immediate sensations and desires. By drawing on possibilities inherent in its character as a negative unity, the rational agent can begin to move away from the immediate and focus on more distant influences. This requires that it not be confused or beguiled by the plethora of impressions and appetites that constantly present themselves. Since it is not simply identical with the sum total of those influences, the agent is able to pay attention to some features, while excluding others from its purview. This capacity of focusing its attention by ignoring attendant circumstances presupposes its basic character as a negative unity, and makes possible its discovery of influences that lie beyond its adjacent neighbourhood. To obtain information from this beyond, however, an agent must have ways of acquiring information that do not depend on what it, on its own, can sense. Here and now it has to rely on

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other agents who were present then and there and can transmit what they discovered in ways that can be readily appropriated. This requires some form of communication: public signs that can be seen or heard, and that have become conventionalized over time. Through some sound or motion that can be interpreted and understood – even a warning cry or a particular dance – a conscious organism informs others of its species about the threat of remote danger or the promise of remote nutrition.5 To exploit these signs the organism must be able to identify them with specific regularities in its experience. When a conscious agent or animal psyche reads sounds, sights, and smells as signs of attractive or threatening prospects it is not simply interested in identifying distant particulars. What is important is what those entities regularly do – their actions and the effects they produce – and how those actions can enhance or frustrate its own functioning. Although limited to what the senses provide, the agent learns to anticipate developments on the basis of regularities that have emerged within its experience. In other words, it needs to have some sense of causal patterns, which enables it to formulate appropriate responses and anticipate the effects of its own actions. This sense of causal regularities need not be applied just to singular sequences that have actually been experienced. Since such patterns are general and not specific, they can easily be extended beyond the immediate into the past, the future, and the indefinite reaches of the present. And they can be adapted to fit a variety of conditioning circumstances. Further, the rational agent does not generate a sign as an ­immediate response to some stimulus but instead exploits the capacity of consciousness to separate itself from the immediate. It focuses on a regularity that over time has become important in its conscious deliberations about what to do. Then, as a negative unity, it freely takes up a sound or figure and links its phenomenal form arbitrarily to that particular representation. That form becomes the sign, which then signifies some regularity noticed by consciousness – what can be called its significance. By exploiting detailed differences in sound, touch, or motion in its mode of communication the rational agent can articulate the

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differences that distinguish the many features of its accumulated experience. Since the agent is concerned with causal influences the most important signs will signify actions and events. Of almost equal importance are signs that identify things – agents that initiate actions and entities that are affected by them. Verbs and nouns in isolation, however, do not convey information in the most useful way. Also critical are the conventions of syntax, which structure the way words are put together into a sequence and signify how they are to be connected in thought. Thus a cluster of nouns may surround a verb, spelling out the way the action moves from agent to consequence. And circumstances and conditions can be represented by conventions that link a variety of clauses into unified sentences. The more detailed such conventions, and the richer the vocabulary, the more effective is the communication of what has happened in remote times and places. Where the action being described is in the proximate neighbourhood, it may be useful to our agent to know which particular individual is the agent, and what familiar objects have been affected. But as one moves further afield such specific references cease to be important, and one adopts general words that signify certain kinds of actions, agents, and things. This enables language to capture the regularities that are so useful when an agent is interested in interacting with its environment. For the generalities in form allow for particular circumstances to be introduced that modify and influence how they in fact are functioning. We have already discussed the importance of regularities in developing our understanding of cause. It is this fact – that certain causal patterns recur over a diverse range of circumstances – that makes the development of language with its abstractions and universals so useful for helping a rational individual act appropriately within a world that reaches far beyond its immediate sensed environment. But simply noticing similarities is not enough. Language also needs tools for discriminating significant differences. Actions that initially appear to be much the same may have quite varied effects. To respond adequately to

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what is communicated through language, one needs to take account of such distinctions. Since language is the product of agents who are negative unities – separate from the information that is being communicated – the signs they adopt are arbitrarily linked to what is signified. So the conventions of language can become more detailed as agents develop strategies for using similarities and differences to ensure that the words used, and the syntactical particles that link them together, reflect the actual situations being described. General terms are exploited to identify and discriminate natural kinds and types of action. Gradually, over time, the significance of words comes to be refined as experience teaches when terms have been used inappropriately, and when they have been useful in predicting results. Rational agency, then, presupposes the ability to communicate: using a variety of verbs to discriminate among actions and a number of nouns to distinguish agents and entities, as well as conventions for linking them together and strategies for ensuring that they adequately capture the events and processes being described. While able to refer to specific individuals, these descriptions are most useful when their generalizations capture the causal regularities found in the world and their differentiations can discriminate among distinct processes. By appropriating a shared language through which events and actions from an indefinite range of contexts can be shared, our rational agent has the resources for discovering how causal regularities produce the world in which it lives. It can draw distinctions among a variety of formal and material conditions and determine which are necessary, and which contingent. It can discover causal connections that have a regular pattern, even though their phenomenal appearances take on quite different forms. And it can explore ways by which its own action could alter or divert the course of events. Able to investigate general causal features of the larger environment through the use of verbs and nouns, it acquires a better understanding of how and why it has become what it is; and it discovers new possibilities for the future.

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The ability to formulate signs is not idiosyncratic to individual psyches, but develops through a form of causal reciprocity – for individuals start by aping their elders, assuming that they are consciously referring to the same sorts of things. By trial and error they learn that others do not use signs in quite the same way, and so, working together, they develop a common vocabulary that becomes more precise as more distinctions are introduced and more individuals participate in the dynamic. While each may well retain certain prejudices that reflect their specific interests, the shared meanings develop a life that continues to function independently of what any singular participant does, yet is accessible to all. Communication, then, can only occur where a number of agents share experiences and have common goals. The personal quest for self-reproduction and enhancement of each individual becomes part of a wider context in which a number of agents both contribute to and benefit from each other’s actions. While this is created in part through the language spoken and heard, it also develops through actions that respond to and affect others. If the development of language extends the ability to understand what happens to us, the reciprocal interaction of communication widens the focus for rational action. Just as effective communication requires that the organism go beyond reliance solely on the senses, so the demands of communal life come into conflict with the immediate appetites and desires that motivate action. The individual sensitive agent starts out situated in the world, with particular threats and particular interests. This agent responds to the immediate demands of the sensed environment and reflects, if it reflects at all, only in order to determine how it can better satisfy its desires and evade destruction. Once it establishes a bond with its immediate community, however, it looks beyond its own interests. By following immediate drives it may come into conflict with other agents even though they have become essential to its own well-being. Were the agent to follow a thoughtless quest for immediate satisfaction, it would be in danger of destroying the environment it needs for self-reproduction and enhancement.

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A rational agent is able to meet this challenge by exploiting once again the fact that it is a negative unity, able to integrate a number of features, while keeping itself separate from them. Earlier we distinguished the individual impressions produced by the indirect senses from the agent that considers them in the context of its recalled memories and formulates a language to describe what happens. Here, that negative distancing escapes from the immediacy of appetites and desires and considers in addition the interests of the social network in which it lives, whether that be family, neighbourhood, nation, or global community. As a negative unity, the rational agent subordinates its immediate appetites and biases to goals with longer terms that reach far beyond its instant satisfaction – goals that include other agents whom it may never have met and a future it may not live to see. It develops the ability to be disinterested. Dispassionate reflection on goals benefits the quest to understand causes. Instead of simply pushing ahead to satisfy a perceived need, it separates the agent from those needs and focuses on what is objectively happening in the world – what it learns from others who are knowledgeable and what it discovers from its own interactions with the environment. Setting aside its prejudices the rational psyche performs experiments and takes note of undesirable as well as desirable effects of its actions. It is thus more likely to initiate an action that will be of genuine benefit, not only to itself, but also to the community of which it is a part. But equally the understanding of causes achieved through ­effective communication also contributes to the widening range of goals and objectives. For as the arena being considered stretches beyond the immediate present into the near and remote past the agent becomes aware of the way the actions of other agents intersect and influence each other in many and various ways. There is no longer a single sequential line from cause to effect, but a network of influences that alter and affect each other. What appears to be an irrelevance turns out to produce reactions that frustrate or destroy one’s initial intentions; and an action by someone else that seems at first sight to be detrimental to one’s future, in fact transforms for the better the

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environment in which one lives. It is no longer possible to isolate one small set of actions and events that are significant for achieving the agent’s goals. By taking account of more and more regularities that characterize and affect the world, rational agents extend their understanding of how their actions not only have a direct impact on the world, but also trigger reactions on the part of other agents, both conscious and not, that can have repercussions on their own future. Rational action needs to take into account a wider perspective than that anticipated by an individual’s particular interests. So the disinterested rational agent improves his prospects of achieving some understanding of the way the world really works. No longer primarily focused on satisfying appetites and desires, it can take more care in determining what the causal processes that have produced the present state of affairs actually are, and be more accurate in its predictions about what will in fact happen in the future. It moves beyond a subjective focus for its actions to one that is more objective and appropriate to the actual network of interconnections that function in the environment and with which it interacts. This quest for objectivity benefits, in turn, the quest for disinterested action because the agent acquires more resources for assessing what benefits will actually accrue to the community whose well-being it seeks to advance. For a rational agent both disinterested action and objective information enable it to interact with a world that extends well beyond the limits of what is directly and indirectly sensed. Rational psyches, then, are centred, negatively integrated agents able to use a common language to formulate a causal understanding of the world that justifies successful predictions about impending events, and able to reach beyond their immediate interests as they initiate credible programs for enhancing the well-being of a shared future. They can do so because they draw on objective information acquired from remote times and spaces, and because they have become disinterested when determining their goals and actions. Through conversation and discourse in which they listen as well as speak they learn of not only what has happened in the past, but also the material and formal conditions

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that made it possible and the motivations that underlie specific actions. By distancing themselves from their immediate situation they develop informed expectations about the future, and consider what differences would be introduced in their world if one action were taken rather than another. Careful deliberation leads to decisions that are aware of remote as well as proximate effects, take account of known regularities as well as the possibility of contingencies and unknown conditions, and balance a number of desirable ends that are in the interests, not only of the agents, but of the many communities of which they are a part. Rational agents develop the ability to reciprocally interact with others from remote lands or the distant past, and with others who will inhabit the proximate and remote future. When we consider how this conceptual model functions in practice, however, we discover that there are significant limits to this rationality. For the capacity to reflect objectively on causal processes that function beyond one’s immediate environment and to value dispassionately the interests of a wider community and a long-term future are possibilities only latent in rational agents. To activate those possibilities they need to step back from the immediate presentations of the senses and the pressure of appetites and desires and place them in a larger context. And that move is not a function of any regular pattern of causal regularity but responds to contingent and variable factors. Even when agents do stop and reflect, a wide range of possibilities opens up. How broadly do they spread their net when looking for causal influences, and how extensive is the community whose well-being is to be enhanced? Immediate pressures are generally stronger than more distant considerations. So rational action always has to be integrated into the more pressing concerns of the conscious and sensitive psyche and can easily be subordinated to them. Rationality introduces a difference of degree, not a difference in kind. Even where agents are prone to reflect and consider matters more broadly, they never achieve complete rationality. In the first place, there are no clear lines of demarcation between ­personal interests and the well-being of people generally; nor

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between individual biases and the unacknowledged beliefs of society as a whole. This means that what is subjective and what is objective do not stand as polar opposites, but represent stages on a continuum, such that every time a more objective stance is achieved, one has discovered hidden assumptions that restricted the universal applicability of its predecessor. There is no clear way of isolating what is absolutely objective and disinterested. In the second place, in the disinterested move beyond appetites and desires, there is no single community that demands exclusive consideration. Any action can affect family, associates, neighbourhood, region, nation, human society generally, or the global environment in quite different and opposing ways. So there is seldom a single solution that will benefit everyone and harm none. An agent has to evaluate conflicting and wide-ranging interests when deliberating what to do. In the third place, actions are never actions in general. They occur at particular moments and in particular concrete situations. That immediate setting contains a network of very specific material and formal conditions that have an effect on what develops from the action, since they could trigger a variety of unexpected causal patterns. So any decision involves taking what one knows about the regularities inherent in the world and figuring out how they apply in a very specific context, given the likelihood of contingencies. Because each situation is unique, particularly in the way causal regularities intersect, one has to appeal not only to universal reasons but also to particular sets of conditions, and estimate how they affect each other; no comprehensive experience covers all possibilities. At this point agents can only draw on personal values and beliefs in making their decisions. In the fourth place, just as contingencies can play a role in the way conditions combine to produce effects, contingencies can emerge from actions, no matter how much foresight has been invested in the decisions and how much care has been taken to ensure the results intended. Even the most responsible action can trigger complications, and the range of possibilities expands when one includes the impact of the actions of other conscious agents on the course of events. Whereas within the laboratory an

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experimenter can limit the sphere within which contingencies may emerge, rational agents acting within the social arena can never be confident that expected regularities will ensue. In the fifth place, the range of time is unlimited. Yet the experience of the past upon which we draw is partial, limited by the languages we speak and the traditions we know, as well as by the fact that written language, which provides contact with past ages, is a relatively recent phenomenon. In addition, the future into which we project the results of our action extends well beyond the next day, year, century, or even millennium, and predictions become less accurate the further they are extended into that future. Once again the range of our objective assessments varies depending on what periods we take into account and how far they extend. And under the pressure of circumstances to make a decision quickly, the immediate interests of appetites and desires may push aside any inclination to reflect or deliberate. So in practice Aristotle’s rational soul is not a fully-formed and independent kind of agency. What we have is an agent that has supplemented the functions of the sensitive and animal organism with the capacity to approach things more objectively – to become aware of universal regularities in the world, notice the way particular conditions can influence and transform what happens, and implement goals that are more disinterested – by taking into account the well-being of the communities within which one lives. Aristotle admits that not all humans are rational, suggesting that there are diverse classes characterized by diverse mental capacities. What he fails to notice, however, is the stronger fact that no human can ever be completely rational, but that interests and biased perspectives affect even the most disciplined. No decision can be completely objective and completely disinterested. Nonetheless, rationality does introduce an important dimension into our psychology, since it opens up the possibility of always moving beyond our limitations and developing broader, more comprehensive perspectives. Rationality makes us aware of its own inherent limitations, and in so doing introduces its most distinctive and most essential function. Not only does it

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exploit the universals of language and, through its negative unity, adopt ever more objective approaches in its interaction with the world. Not only does it take account of the interests and well-being of communities and individuals in ever widening circles. But it is also aware that any “objective” insights are always fallible, and may well turn out to be relative and partial, and that any disinterested action retains subjective and impulsive motivations. While rational agents need to act decisively, they can never assume that what they believe and what they achieve is in fact the most accurate truth and the most comprehensive good. They allow that whatever they do will produce results, some of which are undesirable. This diffidence in practice is the one thing that clearly differentiates a fully rational soul from one that is still fundamentally determined by the certainties of immediate interests and biases. Up to this point we have outlined a series of stages in which forms of causal functioning emerge that cannot be reduced to being simply the aggregate of simpler forms. The quantum ­mechanics of sub-atomic particles becomes transformed once the particles become integrated into atoms that are able to interact mechanically. The ability of living organisms to reproduce themselves while appropriating and responding to what the immediate environment presents introduces a purposive and centred agency that can initiate actions and reactions in ways that are qualitatively distinct from the simple mechanical patterns of Newton’s laws. The ability of conscious agents to distinguish themselves from what they experience of their environment and determine how they will respond to the ambiguities presented is grounded in their character as negative unities that are able to direct in some way how their organisms respond. This involves a function that presupposes purposive self-­reproduction but involves characteristics that cannot be directly reduced to that base. When we come to rational agents, however, we do not encounter such a difference of kind. The capacity for generating linguistic signs is an extension in degree of the ability of conscious agents to read the signs of the indirect senses. The ability

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to reflect using generalities is implicit in the almost instinctive thrust of appetites and desires. When conscious agents pay attention to how the world actually functions, rather than how it will satisfy their interests, and considers the impact of their actions on other agents, rational, conscious, organic, and mechanical, rather than on their personal quest for self-reproduction and enhancement, they are redirecting their negative ability to separate themselves from what is presented towards their own operations. This self-reflexive move may be novel, but it does not introduce a distinctive form of causal activity. And when a rational agent seeks to initiate actions it never does so in an entirely rational way, but inevitably incorporates particular interests that stem from organic and conscious components of its agency. So at this point there is no need to introduce the language of emergence. Rational agency is different in degree from conscious agency, but not different in kind. Nonetheless, as we shall see in the next chapter, the realm of meanings can develop a quite distinctive character of its own in which the conditions that determine the way it develops are no longer the natural functions of a centred agency but rather the results of rational reflection. In this analysis of the models we use to understand the psyches of animals and humans we have moved far beyond Descartes. Once his thoroughgoing mechanism is seen to be restrictive and misleading when applied to the world of organisms, his radical dualism loses its appeal. There is a conceptual and causal continuum that starts with variations of mechanical cause but, once reciprocal interaction is introduced, develops complexity. Causes range from physical and chemical interactions, through simple botanical organisms, to developed agents that can interact with things at a distance in space and in their more developed forms can learn from the remote past and project action into the remote future. As Aristotle suggests, our human psyches stand as one stage in a developing range of causal complexity that makes up the natural world in which we exist.

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5 The Theology of Comprehensive Agency

Traditional metaphysics concluded its investigations with a discussion of philosophical theology: the existence and nature of god. In our discussion so far, however, we have been focusing on causes that function in the world we experience. Even when we introduced final causes, we limited our attention to centred agents that respond to their environment by readjusting their centred equilibrium – by seeking to reproduce themselves in response to the disruptions and opportunities that events introduce. And when we expanded our horizons in our discussion of rational agents, we talked about the well-being of communities. While conscious and rational agents adopt more sophisticated ways of effecting their goals, there has been no need to introduce, as Aquinas does in his fifth way, any appeal to an external intentional purpose to explain the natural order. Nonetheless, we cannot avoid theological considerations entirely. For we have situated rational agents within a larger context and shown how that context affects and influences what they do. For all that they are fallible they continue to probe beyond the limitations and distortions of what has already been achieved. It is not surprising, then, that they push that process to its limit and ask about the total picture within which all individual events occur. Reciprocal interaction can comprehend not only the distant past and the remote future, but also the cosmos as a whole. What significance could such a comprehensive perspective have on our understanding of the details?

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It was Kant who linked theology with this demand for a comprehensive explanation. In his introduction to the section of the Critique of Pure Reason on “The Idea of Pure Reason” he suggests that, in our effort to understand the world, we need to understand why things are the way they are. Each entity is determined and determinable in a particular way. Out of the sum total of all real possibilities,1 only a select few actually occur. And those few are themselves determined by their role within that totality. Ultimately this means fitting things into a kind of disjunctive syllogism: in the major premise we have the conception of all real possibilities as a massive set of alternatives; in the minor premise we show why most of these are irrelevant and do not apply in this situation; in the conclusion we infer that individual entities and events can only be what they in fact are. In other words we have a framework of explanation; we are setting out the connections and interrelationships – the network of causes – that determine why things develop the way they do. Kant goes on to say that, in our rational quest for completeness, this sum total of all real possibilities, together with the implications that can be drawn from them, needs to be integrated into something singular and all encompassing, a unity that integrates everything into one comprehensive and comprehensible reality. This, he says, is the concept of god.2 In other words, god is not simply equated with nature in the manner of Spinoza; he is the integrating reason why, given the sum total of all possibilities, things are the way they are and events happen the way they do. By examining the definition Anselm puts forward in his famous argument we can throw further light on this conception of god. “We believe,” he writes, “that thou art something than which none greater can be thought,”3 in Latin: aliquid qua nihil maius cogitari possit. The critical term is the verb, “be thought,” or cogitari. What is involved in “cogitation”? Gaunilon, in attempting a refutation, appeals to a perfect island; Kant to a hundred thalers. In both cases, retained images of past experiences are refined and adjusted to produce an ideal than which one cannot imagine a greater. Thoughts, they suggest, rework pale copies of experiences that have impressed themselves on our

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mind, in the manner described by John Locke and David Hume – copies that can be manipulated to produce subjective ideals. But these examples, used in refutation, only highlight a fundamental ambiguity in the term “cogitari.” For other translations have rendered it with “conceive,” a stronger term than “thought” that somehow seems to escape such imaginative constructions. “Thinking” can well be used for both. But are conceiving and imagining identical? And can results drawn from one type of cogitation justify conclusions that apply to all sorts? What, indeed, does it mean to think? At this point we can draw on our earlier discussion of rational agency. Rational thought works with universals and, in the process of discovering what happens beyond the limited purview of conscious experience, it seeks to develop a standard and objective vocabulary that is shared by other rational agents and captures essential features and regularities of the real world. This involves a triple dynamic: we analyze our terms and conventions to identify their basic significance; we link them together, not haphazardly nor arbitrarily, but in ways that are justified with good reasons; and we take account of experience, particularly the success or failure of our predictions, to adjust our concepts so that they capture essential features of the universe. These three functions interact. Only if we analyze our terms carefully, with a clear understanding of the way they are connected in significant complex conceptions, are we able to make predictions specific enough to be testable. We cannot know whether our predictions are faulty if we are not really sure what we are expecting. If our initial concepts do not represent regularities within the world, but are simply constructs of the mind, they can be of little use in providing strategies for practical action. If the reasons we use to combine concepts into complex explanations and descriptions do not reflect regularities and necessary conditions that have emerged from our interaction with the global environment, our thoughts will produce idle dreams rather than effective comprehension. Analysis, synthesis, and comprehensive application to present and future experience interact to generate ever more reliable and objective thoughts. They stand

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in sharp contrast with the arbitrary and imaginative constructs of our subjective cogitations.4 Since the theological goal is to find an explanation for the way the world is as a whole – beyond the immediate environment that we experience directly, it must appeal to thoughts that are refined by that developed interplay among analysis, synthesis, and disciplined application. The refining of such thoughts we call “conceiving” – the process of grasping details, interconnections, and implications – and the results of such operations we call “concepts.” Only if we limit Anselm’s term for “thinking” (cogitare) to concepts, does it make sense to talk about god as “something than which none greater can be thought.” For such thoughts capture and incorporate what we have discovered about the actual workings of the world. Once we do focus on concepts and conceiving, however, we discover a basis for implementing the comparative that Anselm includes in his definition. If we define god as something “than which nothing greater can be conceived,” we are saying that, in order to discover what god is, we need to develop a conceptual explanation that is more precise in its details, more explicit in the reasons for the interconnections among its components, and more effective in making accurate predictions about what will happen than other thoughts and explanations that may be advanced. Such a demand would be difficult, if not impossible, to satisfy with any finality. But the quest is not totally impractical; for it tells us that, whenever we find an explanation to be incomplete or inadequate in one respect or another, we can be confident that we are not talking about anything that could be called god. We have a razor for removing flawed contenders for the title, even if we can never, with full confidence, claim victory for any one achieved comprehension. And Anselm’s definition sets a goal that serves as a standard: in our rational interaction with the world the more comprehensive understanding of casual processes is the more desirable.5 Anselm uses the definition as the basis for making his critical move: from simply defining to asserting the actual existence of such a being. Before exploring that path, however, it is worth

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pausing to reflect on what goes on as the conceptual process develops – for it has characteristics that separate it significantly from the world of mechanical and complex cause discussed earlier. • • • Consider what generates adjustment or change in a conceptual explanation. We become most aware of its inadequacy when a prediction, well-grounded in its detail, turns out to be controverted by events. For this to happen, we must have our initial expectations clearly defined, with a precise indication of what each of its terms mean, and a strong sense of the way those components are linked together into a complex and detailed network. And, if we are to notice the radical discrepancy between expectation and fulfilment, we must disinterestedly free ourselves from our prejudices and take note of what actually happens. In all of this, we are exploiting the fact that, as rational beings, we can distance ourselves from the immediate pressures of the environment – our interests, our habits, and our basic needs – and consider the terms we are using and their significance within the community of discourse. Our language is not the mere product of our desire to express ourselves. It has been gradually refined through reciprocal interaction with the whole community of reflective discussion and with our accumulated experience to the point where genuine communication can occur. When some of us discover we are using terms in ways that differ, we have the tools by which we can clarify our differences and establish a common and shared vocabulary. That vocabulary, then, is the result of an ongoing process of discussion and debate in which terms are distinguished to introduced subtle variations of meaning, in which links are exposed through which tendrils of significance intersect and combine, and in which appeal is made to carefully observed events in the world around us. Since our language is designed not only to communicate meanings among rational psyches, but also to prepare ourselves for an ongoing interaction with our environment – one that takes account of events beyond our immediate purview, whether in

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other parts of the contemporary world or in the remote past or future – it contains expectations of future experiences that are likely to follow from putting our thoughts into practice. All of this happens within the arena of conscious, and indeed rational, agents. Because such agents are what we have called “negative unities” they need not simply react to stimuli that intersect with their material conditions – the functioning of the component elements on their own – or interfere with the formal ways organs within their bodies interact; they are free to separate themselves from such distractions and determine whether they are significant or not by situating them within the realm of conceptual meaning. So the agent cause of the changes and alterations that occur in their conceptual landscape is not the simple product of material and formal conditioning, but rather conceptual processes initiated by the mind. While contingent circumstances may throw up new thoughts, they only become integrated into the network of commonly shared discourse because of (1) distinctions in meaning not noticed before; (2) explicit links that are justified with sufficient reasons; and (3) evidence that they are effective in predicting what happens in light of our initiatives. The formation and development of the network of shared meanings comes about, then, because conceptual thought on its own, without having to take into account the material and formal functioning of our minds, has rigorously examined its own presuppositions. That process may happen within one particular rational psyche; or it may result from experiment, discussion, and debate, over a long period of time, among a large number of reflective investigators. But the justification for any adjustment or revision in our explanations can only be that it is not precise enough in its distinctions, not justified in its syntheses, or not effective in its application in practical action. Its necessary conditions are to be found in the reasoning that leads to the results, not in whatever may have happened organically or psychologically within the minds and bodies of the participants. To be sure, developments in our understanding of the world can only happen within the minds of embodied individuals; but no particular set of reflections – no

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particular material or formal functioning – is on its own a necessary condition that justifies and explains the changes that occur. It could have happened just as easily somewhere else. What we have, then, is a realm that is quite distinct from the physical and organic realm of natural causes. What happens within it requires no direct contact with its specific location in time and space, but can range over generations and across widely separated spaces. It continues to expand, develop, and at times regress, while the individual organisms that participate in its development come to be and pass away. It is an immaterial realm, where the significant conditions that determine how it functions are thoughts of differences, of similarities and relations, and of empirical implications – not physical events, organic interactions, or sensed phenomena. Even when thought appeals to experience to confirm or disconfirm a prediction, it does not take the sensations as immediately given, but interprets them in light of the developed complex of comprehensive meanings. So when Anselm adopts the language of conceiving for the essential feature of his definition of god, he is not appealing to some material reality that can be imagined or pictured in the mind, but to the immaterial world – of thoughts and meanings – that can have a life of its own and that can, when well developed, explain why things are the way they are. In a similar way, when Kant describes god as the sum total of all possibilities, he is suggesting that this being incorporates a structure of meaning that can explain, through a detailed use of disjunctive syllogisms, why any particular thing is determined in the way it is. Since we use “physical” to characterize the world of mechanical, organic, and psychological cause, we may be justified in using “spiritual” as a name for this realm of the rational, which is determined simply by the concepts of our understanding and the way they are defined, related, and successfully applied. When Anselm says that god is something than which no greater can be conceived, then, he is saying that god is a single reality whose nature becomes apparent not through the usual material vehicles of c­ onscious experience, but through the spiritual

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operation of conceptual thought. Such a being would thus not be some kind of physical entity, but something spiritual. This “spiritual” realm of conceptual thinking has had some notable achievements. By refining its definitions and its formulation of the way concepts are interconnected, the realm of conceptual meaning has been extraordinarily successful in explaining why things happen the way they do. By regularly taking account of the way the real world does not confirm its expectations, this mode of thought has responded to the way the cosmos actually functions; and by developing strategies and technologies to modify and improve the way nature and society develop, it has had an impact on what happens in the future. This reciprocal interaction between the realm of significance and meaning on the one hand and aspects of the cosmos on the other suggests that their inherent structures are in principle very much alike. Within the wide range of activities that occur within the universe there lies implicit a network of relationships that responds to and affects the development of successful conceptual explanations. In other words, the cosmos around us is governed by links and interconnections that correspond to the patterns of interconnection developed by conceptual thought. This success, limited though it may be, encourages us to think that it can be extended. It is not simply parts of the universe – the physical, the biological, the psychological, the social – that manifest an integrated pattern. These are all components of a more comprehensive dynamic that makes up the cosmos as a whole, and one would assume that they do not function as isolated and disparate spheres, but are linked together in ways that enable them to react and respond to each other in complex and integrating ways. The definitions of god put forward by Kant and Anselm point towards this integrated “spiritual” dynamic, which functions like an agent generating and maintaining the cosmic order. Even though that network of interconnections has not yet been articulated effectively in thought, it would be presumptuous to assume that it does not exist. While one cannot reach a definitive conclusion that there is a god, there are nonetheless reasons for entertaining the possibility of its existence.

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Indeed, this is a move that Einstein was prepared to make. To the end of his life he refused to accept the validity of Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy. And this refusal was based on theological grounds: “What does not satisfy me in that theory, from the standpoint of principle,” he wrote, “is its attitude towards that which appears to me to be the programmatic aim of all physics: the complete description of any (individual) real situation (as it supposedly exists irrespective of any observation or substantiation).”6 “God does not play dice,” he is reputed to have said; the integrated structure of the sum total of all real possibilities (to use Kant’s phrase) is such that indeterminacy is impossible.7 As a result Einstein devoted his later years to finding a theory that would unify quantum mechanics and relativity into such a single comprehensive explanation. In other words, his opposition to quantum mechanics operated within a belief that the successes achieved by theoretical physics in explaining space and time point toward an ­all-­encompassing conceptual description able to capture the dynamic that ultimately integrates the real world. The debate is focused not on the existence but on the nature of that dynamic. Long before Einstein, Plato made a similar move. In Republic VI he introduces the analogy of a divided line with four stages to explain the relation between the visible and the intelligible (in the language of this discussion, the sensible and the rational or spiritual). In the first half, one moves from images of the visible to the real sources of those images. That resembles the move of conscious agents from the immediate givens of the senses to successful interaction with the agents that are the origin of those sensations. In the second half there is the stage of hypotheses – of the sciences that develop ways of thinking about the world conceptually – and then the stage that moves beyond their incomplete reliance on assumptions to dialectic, by recognizing that the hypotheses are simply fallible hypotheses, and thereby rising to “the unhypothetical first principle of everything.”8 This last transition would represent, in our terms, the shift from the explanations of the particular sciences to the explanation of the way they fit together into a single totality.

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Earlier, in the analogy of the sun, Plato compares the power of the sun to make things visible with the power of the good to make things intelligible: “what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good. And though it is the cause of knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge.”9 The good that “gives truth to things known” is what grounds their reality, and is comprehended through the interrelationship between truth and knowledge. Like Einstein, Plato holds that the quest for comprehensive knowledge can in principle reach some kind of completion, and reaches a reality that both grounds that final knowledge and can itself be known.10 • • • However, Plato’s use of the term “good” raises an important consideration. For the quest for knowledge is not an isolated endeavour, but rather closely linked with the need to act – to function causally in the world. And action, whether organic, conscious, or rational, is purposive – oriented towards some final end. What starts out as the goal of self-reproduction and enhancement in the organic realm expands in the actions of rational agents to become the well-being of a community. When one goes further and considers the universe as a whole – the sum total of all possibilities – the most appropriate term is Plato’s: we call the final cause which will maintain and produce the well-being of the cosmos “the good.” So the reciprocal dynamic that functions between the conceptual realm and the ­cosmos as a whole involves not only exploiting particular technologies but also achieving the purposive end that is implicit in all things. So we need to add a further dimension to our theological discussion. God is not simply the truth that explains why everything does what it does, but also the good that is the comprehensive goal of all the actions and interactions of the component parts of the world. For the rational agent, god not only provides an ultimate explanation “than which none greater can be conceived,” but also sets the ultimate standard in the disinterested

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quest for well-being. Just as the quest for the true extends beyond the actual achievements of rational beings by pointing ­towards a reality that explains why everything is what it is, so the quest for the good extends the range of what is to be considered in disinterested decisions about what to do to encompass the ultimate purpose of the entire cosmos. The two quests are not independent. For what will produce the greatest well-being of the universe as a whole will be a function of the network of interrelations that the comprehensive explanation ultimately discovers. And actions that promote the good should be able to modify and transform in some way the regularities that govern the world. Both, however, are quests that stretch into an indefinite future. • • • As we have seen, rational agents are embedded within the immediate demands of the senses and appetites and are forced to act long before calm reflection can reach definitive conclusions. It is thus impossible to assert with any finality that there is a being that explains everything that is. Nonetheless a major presupposition in all our investigations in science and in all our reflections on human action affirms that we can always find better explanations than those we already have and we can always be more successful in enhancing the well-being of our world. We assume some kind of asymptotic goal towards which we are striving, that there is a completely comprehensive truth and a completely all-encompassing good even if it is impossible for us ever to discover them. Both our research and our principled action seem to presuppose the existence of such an ultimate point of reference even though we have no way of determining its nature. We have some reason for believing that there is a god but no idea what that god would be like. If it were simply a matter of reaching some theoretical conclusions concerning the nature of the world, we could leave the matter aside and allow disciplined investigation to take its course. But we are agents, acting in the world, aware of the fact that our actions can have far-reaching consequences into the

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distant future. And it makes a difference which framework we adopt for organizing our thoughts and expectations. The network of causal explanation within which we act and the goals we reasonably expect to achieve have an impact on the strategies we follow when investigating the cosmos and human affairs; they prejudice the initiatives we take to improve and change our technology, our political structures, and our personal development. When we act in a way that is appropriate, given the nature of the world, we are more likely to achieve our goals, whether they involve a more comprehensive understanding of, or a more wholesome and sustainable existence in, the cosmos, the natural environment, and human society. Identifying the nature of Plato’s good, however, is not easy. For it is to embody and integrate the actions of all the various elements and features of the cosmos. Each action is a singular event, specifically located in space and time and conditioned by  its unique circumstances. Many of these actions provoke ­reactions from others that respond to, and in fact modify, the functioning of the original agent. There develops a pattern of interaction that is not simply an aggregate of the individual events but develops a systematic pattern that can be self-­ perpetuating. These patterns, in their turn, develop lives of their own that interact reciprocally with other complex structures. At each level effects are produced that have an impact on the functioning of the environment and generate inescapable conditions that will affect future events. Since the good is to integrate all such activity into a comprehensive dynamic that continually reproduces and enhances the functioning of the cosmos it is as complex and intrinsically diverse (if not more so) as the comprehensive explanation that is envisaged by Kant’s and Anselm’s definition of god. The Platonic quest is of importance, however, because it is seeking a standard for human action. Every act is singular; nonetheless its impact is general. In its ongoing interaction with the environment, an agent is affected by influences that converge from far afield, and it introduces changes that can extend far into the future. What it does, matters. And a rational agent seeks

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to understand not only the nature of the causes that have produced its immediate situation but also the implications that ­follow from its activity. Once it has a sense of what contributes to the ultimate well-being of the cosmos, it will be able to act appropriately. To be sure its action will in the last analysis be only one of the many material conditions that contribute to the envisioned end. And its effects will interact with the actions of others to generate systematic integrations that are qualitatively distinct from any of the acts on their own. Corporate bodies of which the individual is a member will develop a life of their own, making decisions and triggering consequences whose reach extends over a wide range and interacts, in turn, with other organizations and institutions. And all of this is set within the ongoing dynamic of the natural order, which is continually affected by the technological innovations of humans and at the same time reacts to produce unexpected disasters and develop new forms of organic and inorganic entities. For all of its singularity, an individual act plays a role in that development and can influence its result. So when one is considering what one should do, one wants to have some sense of what the ultimate well-being of the cosmos is like. The complexity of causal interaction makes it difficult if not impossible to anticipate with any confidence the consequences of one’s action. Yet a rational agent wants to do that which is best – to contribute to the good. So it matters how one understands the ultimate structure of the world. While it may not define precisely what specific thing one should do, it can indicate what types of action are most productive and what kinds of ­effects one can in general anticipate. In other words, an answer to the theological question can provide a framework for responsible action. This makes it a matter of some interest what the nature of god is. Even some broad outline of both a fully adequate explanation of the universe and the ultimate purpose of existence would aid and abet the actions and decisions we are constantly making. Indeed, as humans involved in maintaining a healthy family life, a viable community, a functioning economic system,

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and a sustainable natural environment, we regularly commit ourselves to a framework of belief about what is ultimately important and the ways we can make it happen. We are faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, our investigations of the natural and social worlds are incomplete and fallible; we discover that there is always more to be taken into account, that the world is more complex than it first seems. While we may assume there is a god – a final explanation towards which we are moving – we know that we will never achieve certain and final answers to our questions concerning its nature. On the other hand we cannot avoid acting, and every action that seeks to do what is best presupposes that embedded in the universe are values to be realized; we implicitly attribute a determinate nature to whatever god there is. That nature is sufficiently significant that it constrains our behaviour and the decisions we make. David Hume explores one conceptual strategy for facing up to this dilemma. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,11 those participating in the debate agree that the critical question is not whether there is a god or not, but what god is like – not the existence, but the nature of god. The existence of a god seems to be assumed whenever we struggle to find a more adequate explanation of things or a better way of organizing our lives. The critical question – one that generates much debate – is just what that ultimate explanation and final cause will look like. The primary argument, around which the bulk of the discussion develops, is an argument from analogy. When one observes the world of nature, says Cleanthes, one discovers “a curious adapting of means to ends [that] resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance.” When effects resemble each other, the causes must also be similar, so the cause (or explanatory principle) of nature is similar “to human mind and intelligence.”12 The world is like a machine, he says. On the basis of this analogy, he draws the conclusion that characteristic features of machines, such as being produced by a purposive intelligence, will also apply to the universe as a whole.

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It does not take the sceptic, Philo, long to show the weakness in this argument. For other analogies are possible: god could be like a soul or psyche whose body is the universe;13 or the universe could be produced, not through some purposive intention, but simply through natural generation, analogous to the way plants and animals develop.14 Indeed, a hundred years later Charles Darwin established the plausibility of the latter hypothesis with his theory of evolution through natural selection. Since any appeal to analogy does not reach definitive conclusions, Cleanthes’ (and Descartes’) talk of machines was not the only realistic alternative. When we move from a part of our experience to the total picture there are not only similarities but a myriad of differences, and it is not immediately evident which are significant and which are not. The universe, as a whole, involves much more than the intelligent adaptation of means to ends, for example, or selective breeding. And some of those alternative features may well offer more significant clues to the kind of explanation that is most appropriate. Yet arguments from analogy seem to offer the only strategy that we realistically have available. They involve three distinct features. In the first place, we select an analogue – some phenomena in the world of our experience that stand out as exemplifying essential and distinctive features of that world. In the second place, we identify the similarities that link this analogue with the ultimate structure of things. And in the third place we conclude that these similarities tell us something about the nature of god. Cleanthes took the products of human invention and focused on the relation of means to ends; Darwin took the  process of selective breeding and the way animals and plants with desirable characteristics benefit from supportive environments while those with unproductive characteristics are destroyed. When deliberating about the best thing to do in complex situations, we appeal to such analogues. Those inspired by Cleanthes’ argument treat animals, human bodies, and societies as machines that can be exploited and manipulated according to some governing purpose or intention, while those inspired by Darwin claim that the world is essentially a

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struggle for survival in which the unproductive and weak are weeded out. In sum, despite the fact that we cannot reach a definitive conclusion through our disciplined investigation of the universe, we identify some feature of the world that does function effectively, and draw an analogy from that to the universe as a whole, concluding that this tells us something about the nature of god and of the good. We then act upon that understanding in our quest to promote rather than frustrate the ultimate course of the cosmos. Our earlier discussions of ontology, cosmology, and psychology provide us with some broad categories within which determinate analogues may be situated. They suggest some of the most characteristic moves made by those who want to justify their actions in the world. We start by setting aside one false trail. Physics is driven by the quest for a single unified theory that will explain why the physical world develops in the way it does. A similar concern motivates biology as it looks for the basic principles that structure organic functioning. In the social sphere, there have emerged a number of candidates that would serve as a comprehensive explanatory and normative theory. None of these satisfies our criterion for a theological analogy. For each can be developed and expounded in its own sphere without claiming to be a comprehensive explanation of everything. The physicist need not assume that a “unified field theory” would tell us much about the evolution of species, nor a biologist believe that, once we can explain the functioning of living cells, we will have the answer to the appropriate framework for social action and theory. There could be many comprehensive theories, each applied to a specific type of function or entity. At one time, this diversity of explanatory frameworks might have led to a kind of polytheism, where each variety has its own tutelary deity; but the definition we have advanced in this chapter rules out applying the term “god” to any such partial ideal. God is to be ”that than which none greater can be conceived,” and any theory or explanation limited to only one part of the world in which we live can easily be trumped by some thought that is greater.

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Nonetheless there are many candidates for our analogical ­argument. We shall focus on three general possibilities: one working with the basic concept of mechanical cause, one drawing on the reciprocity of organic cause, and one appealing to the structure of rational explanatory practice. Within each many variations are possible as one or another feature is taken as paramount. But it suffices to identify three general types within which others can be situated. First, mechanical cause: in our discussion of the ontology of cause, we noted that a branch of mathematics called chaos ­theory is able to calculate a complex sequence of events once initial conditions are known. While those events display no regular patterns, they nonetheless follow necessarily once one knows the initial location and velocity of the basic elements. In a similar way, physicists are able to derive mathematically what must have happened in the initial moments of the universe. By using this kind of successful prediction as the analogue for our theological inference, we reach a conclusion that ultimately the correct description of the universe will be some kind of complex mathematical equation on the basis of which one could predict correctly everything that happens. The reality captured in this description thus satisfies our original definition of god. According to this argument for causal determinism, everything happens with necessity. Contingencies are irrelevant. All biological and rational functioning can in principle be explained through a mathematical calculation of the basic causal activity of elementary particles. So it might appear that there is little point in exploring how one should act to produce the most comprehensive good.15 But the equation could include a recursive formula in which the functioning of a process is modified in a systematic way whenever it is blocked by other processes. That could allow for the possibility of some entities “learning” to operate more effectively. It is an open question, however, whether this allows for any significant ability to modify action in light of rational reflection. Recursive processes, however, are more characteristic of our second kind of proposed analogue: organic cause. At that stage

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the important process is symbiosis – a dynamic process in which two or more organisms reciprocally interact. As they respond to each other they modify the ways they operate, so that the combined functioning achieves more than any one of the participants could achieve on its own. The quest is to learn, through interaction, not only how to reproduce and enhance their own operations but also how to improve and benefit the larger context in which they function. When this model is adopted as the analogue for god, the ­cosmos as a whole acquires the characteristics of an integrated ecological environment in which the internal components interact and struggle with each other, sometimes generating a cooperative impact that is greater than any achieves on its own, sometimes requiring a new kind of synthetic integration that had not emerged previously, sometimes triggering a mass extinction. It constantly finds ways of reproducing and maintaining its functioning, learning how to respond to catastrophes and exploit new contingencies. In this context the good for rational agents is to act in ways that will ultimately rejuvenate the total environment in which they live, avoiding anything that would be disruptive and taking remedial action when things go wrong. As they learn more about the way the universe functions, whether chemical, biological, or social, they can identify not only the causal patterns involved but also places where intervention can have an effect on what will emerge. Third, rationality: once we move to the negative unities that characterize conscious rational beings, we have a different kind of cause. For we have a centred activity that is aware of what is around it and integrates that awareness into a single perspective without becoming simply the positive sum of that totality; it is able to determine what to focus on and what to accomplish within that given environment. At the same time it separates itself from the immediate pressures of particular interests and adopts as its goal the well-being of a larger community. So we have an intelligent agency that can use its knowledge to initiate action for the general good.

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This analogue leads to what is usually meant by a “personal god.” Some kind of negative unity – conscious and intelligent – wills the regularities and interrelationships that characterize the world of nature. And it promotes a comprehensive community in which rational agents cooperate in using their powers of comprehension and decision to enhance natural functioning and generate a thriving social milieu. The task set for humans is thus to find out what strategies will best promote the final cause willed by god.16 The concepts of mechanical cause, organic cause, and rational agency offer three large-scale analogues that theological reflection can draw on when setting human actions within the context of the universe as a whole. Within each of them, varieties have emerged over time, as some features are selected as essential while others are set aside as irrelevant differences. In addition, critical reflection has regularly exposed significant difficulties that call into question the reliability of one or other of the analogical inferences. So the philosophical question of the nature of god – of what ultimately is significant about the way the universe functions – is best presented (as Hume saw) through a dialogue in which the details, the links, and the effectiveness of the various alternatives are presented clearly and their evident weaknesses acknowledged. Any theological inference from some analogue to the nature of god goes far beyond the limits of our limited and fallible rational capacities. For all that such a move may be implicit and indeed inescapable whenever we debate about what actions we ought to do, it is always a venture into the unknown. As they continue to probe beyond the limits of our experience to the ultimate explanation and goal of the universe, rational agents cannot escape their finitude. • • • Nonetheless given the multitude of possible analogues that could be used to suggest the nature of god, the question emerges whether there is a standard of measurement that philosophical reflection can use to assess their adequacy. When there are

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so many options available, it is tempting to assume that one is as good or as bad as the next. But it is useful to recall that, in our initial discussion of how we can practice metaphysics, we said that concepts are significant only if we can articulate conceptually what kinds of effects would result from putting those concepts into practice. While it is impossible to devise experiments that would resolve our quest for an ultimate explanation, there are nonetheless other ways of evaluating their credibility. The nature of god defines not only why the world functions the way it does, but also what is ultimately of value for the universe as a whole. So when someone adopts an analogue as a point of reference for the theological quest they are also adopting an ultimate norm that is to govern their actions. Since those actions produce practical effects, the behaviour of committed believers provides what evidence we have for the value and validity of their theological hypotheses. In our discussion of disinterested action in the previous chapter we saw that, as the subject of action expands from single agents to the communities in which they live and on to the broader natural environment, the focus of purposive action transcends the limits of individual self-reproduction and takes into account the enhancement and well-being of a wide range of agents and entities. When we extend this pattern to the theological sphere, the ultimate goal of rational action becomes the enhancement and well-being of the cosmos as a whole, and in particular the societies and natural settings that are directly affected by individual and corporate action. Theological positions, then, can be assessed against this standard. While it may not be possible, from our finite perspectives, to know definitively what that ultimate good is like, we at least have a way of showing that some commitments and some beliefs can be rejected. For they disrupt community and spread gratuitous destruction. Just as Anselm’s definition of god spells out that any explanation that is not fully comprehensive cannot be god, so the moral standard that emerges from our metaphysical considerations asserts that any theological concept that results in action that diminishes the quality of life and exacerbates the

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effective functioning of the social and natural environment cannot seriously be adopted as a concept of god. There is, then, a way of evaluating the credibility of the analogues proposed in answer to the theological question. When such concepts are put into practice one can compare their effectiveness in enabling the human community and the natural world to thrive. In sum, philosophical theology takes two features of rational agency and pushes them to the limit. In the first place, rational agents seek to extend their understanding of the network of causes that determine the way their world functions. In the second place, as they come to appreciate the way the actions and well-being of others have an impact on their own lives, they broaden the focus of their goal-oriented activity. Both of these characteristics develop by always looking beyond what has already been achieved to find more wide-ranging influences and implications. Each stage reached, whether in finding successful explanations or determining comprehensive goals, turns out to be itself limited and susceptible to expansion. Whenever thought encounters limits it looks beyond to some stage where such limits are transcended. It entertains the concept of some end point where everything is understood and the good of all is recognized. To the extent that this ideal plays a role in effective agency, the metaphysical question of god emerges. Unlike the earlier discussions of causal agency, however, there can be no direct appeal to experience as a way of testing and evaluating the reliability of a conceptual model that describes the nature of god’s agency. For we render our concepts objective only by implementing them and experiencing their consequences – by entering into dialogue with our predecessors, our contemporaries, and our heirs. We are embedded in the cumulative tradition that continually extends and adjusts its comprehension of the way things are. So any perspective able to grasp the integrated focus of the whole is beyond our reach. Even were we to articulate conceptually what kinds of effects would result from putting one or other proposal for the nature of god into practice, the resulting evidence would be insufficient to confirm any one of the alternatives. For all such effects would be

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limited and specific, and could not claim to capture the way the universe as a whole functions. One may well compare what kind of social and natural world emerges when those committed to various conceptual models put them into practice, and one may well decide that some are more successful than others in meeting the criterion of enhanced well-being. Yet all agents are incompletely rational; and one could never be certain whether the achievements and failures follow from their conceptual models, or stem from more idiosyncratic interests. The need to act intelligently in the world requires some ­commitment to ultimate values – what Plato called the good. And from experience one can learn that certain commitments ­generate well-being more effectively than others. Reflection can take such considerations and use them to refine its sense of what is ultimately important. But it cannot hope to reach a ­definitive conclusion. So we are left philosophically with the practical need to assume that there is a god – some ultimate explanation that makes sense of everything and sets the standard for what we should do; but its specific nature will always lie beyond our reach.

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6 Conclusion

The approach to metaphysics undertaken in this study involves two main innovations. In the first place, drawing on the metaphysical works of Immanuel Kant, it focuses on fundamental concepts that are used to organize our understanding of the world. While these concepts incorporate much of what we have learned from experience over time, they are seldom examined critically to ensure that all the elements of their meaning are in fact justified. Since they are used to structure our observations and reflections, they frequently determine what we notice and what we set aside as insignificant. So there is a built-in tendency to discount any evidence that suggests the need for revision. Metaphysics can serve a purpose by turning our attention to the way those concepts function, by considering carefully whether experience does in fact fit with their specific expectations, and by exploring whether other conceptual models may be more effective and productive. In the second place, this study has opened up the range of metaphysical concepts to include those expressed by verbs: actions and processes by which things change, come into being, and decay. By adopting “cause” as the object of our reflection, it considers processes that have a direction – that are initiated by some entity or agent and that alter the state of affairs. There are significant advantages to making this shift from the metaphysics of beings and entities. Things are not permanent, but emerge

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from prior conditions and wear out as they are affected by exterior events. What they are is determined more by the network of actions and processes of which they are a part than by any inherent nature that is independent of what happens to them. Further, a nuanced focus on causes can explain how and why things that manifest regular characteristics emerge as the result of processes, even as they are also able to initiate and respond to them. A fully developed analysis would explore in more detail how that interaction between entity and causal agency is structured. But as an initial venture in exploring a metaphysics of verbal action rather than of nominal entities, the preceding discussion has been able to introduce a number of significant observations. These will be the focus of this concluding chapter, which identifies the various ways the arguments of the preceding chapters intersect with traditional philosophical concerns. 1. Both Hume and Kant focus considerable attention on our conviction that every event has a cause. For both of them, this belief involves a forward-moving necessity. Having just shown that our idea of necessary connection results from nothing more than the experiencing of a number of similar instances of temporal sequence, Hume was nonetheless prepared to assert that “it is universally allowed, that matter, in all its operations, is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause, that no other effect, in such particular circumstances, could possibly have resulted from it.”1 In a similar way, Kant took the necessity of a conditional judgment as the conceptual structure implicit in the concept of cause. When we look more closely at the claim of universal causality, however, we find that it need not entail such a strong connection as forward-moving necessity. All it says is that, for any event, there will be found conditions that initiated and formed its dynamic. Some of those may have been necessary, in the sense that the event could not have happened had those conditions been absent. But on their own they need not be sufficient, since their effectiveness may have been dependent on chance circumstances and other more permanent conditions. Thus any necessity

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that moves forward from cause to effect has to be traced back to the full set of conditions that preceded the event in question. But it is difficult to be certain that one has in fact assembled all the significant features that are required to complete the picture. One can only be sure in practice that conditions are sufficient when the result actually happens. But that is little more than a simple tautology: once whatever happens actually happens, then it had to happen. It does not justify a firm and inevitable forward-moving causal necessity. For included in that supposedly sufficient set of conditions may be contingencies that could not, in fact, have been anticipated. In other words, the inference from the fact that every event has a cause to a theory of rigorous causal determinism in the form enunciated by Hume is not strictly justified. Indeed, it would seem to represent one form of what we have called a theological inference – of pushing beyond the limits of our human understanding to some kind of unconditioned explanation of the functioning of the universe. 2. One version of causal determinism extends its explanation even further. We have seen how the mathematical theory of chaos describes what happens when a number of bodies interact. Although the results follow with necessity, they present no regular pattern. By adapting this perspective to our understanding of the cosmos as a whole, this version claims that the only ultimate causal agency is to be found in the most basic particles, which trace the inevitable path of their innate mechanical functioning as articulated in clearly defined mathematical equations. Any more complicated structure can be explained as the result of what happens when the action of such elements intersect and nothing more. Since there would then be no significant contingencies it should be possible in principle to calculate, once one knows the basic motion and velocity of the particles, the way more complex bodies come to exist and the way they function. In sum, the explanation of whatever happens in the cosmos can ultimately be reduced to the laws of basic physics. By offering an alternative picture of the way complex entities develop, the model presented here suggests that this

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reductionism is not the only available option, and that a much more plausible story can be developed by exploring the concept of reciprocal interaction, where a set of diverse agents are each affected by, and alter their functioning in light of, the actions of others. As this interplay proceeds, there emerges a modus vivendi that could not have been deductively derived from the original functioning of the agents, even when taken together in aggregate, but which has instead emerged from the particular responses and reactions that surface under specific environmental conditions, and by the distinctive course those interactions take. The result is a new kind of entity that is not simply the sum total of the actions of its components assembled together, but also incorporates the particular pattern of systematic interaction by which they have come to rely on and influence each other. It has become an integrated agent that functions in quite a different way from the elements that make it up. Since the action of the complex whole operates in ways quite different from the actions of its more basic components, any explanation cannot simply consider the latter in isolation if it is to be adequate, but must also take into account both the way the elements mesh together into a reciprocal dynamic and the features and modes of operation of the unit as a whole. Those features and functions have emerged from the complex interaction, and cannot be extrapolated by simply adding together the features and functions of the parts in isolation. On this account such characteristics and modes of operation cannot be recreated when we dissect the entity into its components and then reassemble those components into a simple ­aggregate. On the contrary, they emerge from the mutual interaction of the components as they respond to and influence each other. So in place of the dogma of reductionism, the model presented here offers a way of explaining the emergence of a new form of agency. And emergence happens at a number of different levels, from the structure of the atom and chemical molecule, through the self-determining dynamics of simple organisms, to the negative unity of conscious and rational agents.

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3. Once we allow that contingencies may have a role to play, there opens up a new way of understanding what happens when two agents interact in a way that mutually reinforces their functioning. It would seem on first glance that introducing a place for contingencies would reduce the reliability of those regularities that we find in the world and which underlie our belief in universal causality. We could not be sure whether a particular sequence will happen again, even though it had occurred since time immemorial. Certainly, this has been presented as one of the problems with Hume’s reliance on the repetition of similar instances to justify necessary connection. But when reciprocal interaction turns out to be successful it has an innate tendency to reinforce those actions of the constituent agents that are mutually beneficial, to discard and ignore those factors that are irrelevant, and to make disruptive features impotent and ineffective. So regularity and consistency emerges from what we have called complex causes, and becomes more ingrained as the structures become more intricate, incorporate a greater variety of interacting agents, and build more complex structures. This characteristic of the approach taken above heightens its contrast with metaphysical reductionism. There, in order to explain what happens in the world the most basic functions are taken to be the least likely to deviate from fixed laws, and all higher-level regularities are derived from them. Here, it is possible to allow contingencies to surface quite widely at the basic level, since these will become less and less significant as complex structures emerge and reciprocal interaction promotes consistency in functioning. There, it is assumed that regularities are the most plausible feature of primitive entities and contingencies are anomalies. Here regularity is, on the surface, a puzzling phenomenon that needs to be explained. A model that includes the emergence of regularity is more effective in explaining the great variety of causal agency that we find in the world than any reductive approach. While constituent elements are important in the functioning at any level and emergent characteristics would be impossible if those material

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conditions were not present, they are not sufficient on their own to either explain or bring about the regularity that develops in higher-level actions and operations. In addition to the material dynamic of the basic components, one needs to take into account the form that their continued interaction generates, the new characteristics that emerge when that interaction solidifies into an integrated entity at a more complex level, and the way that higher-level agent develops its own distinctive ways of interacting with the environment, responding to its demands and appropriating its benefits. By replacing a conception of cause as a linear sequence of agents in which every dynamic process operates within the same parameters, this model recognizes that different kinds of objects function in different ways, and that the habitual action of some entities results from, and takes advantage of, the quite different activity of others that make up its basic fabric. 4. Ever since Descartes opposed unextended thinking to extended matter, the philosophy of mind has struggled with the question of dualism. Is the mental world evident in consciousness of a completely different order from the physical world of bodies in motion? If they are the same, does that mean that the mind is simply the visible froth on the surface of a brain that functions in essentially mechanical ways? If they are different, how can mental events cause physical changes and vice versa? The debate has raged throughout the succeeding centuries. In Chapter 4 a quite different approach has been adopted. Consciousness emerges in the argument as a function required by a particular kind of organic agent rather than as a state of being. In order to interact effectively with entities at a distance the animal psyche needs to determine whether the sensed phenomena represent a threat or a benefit. It cannot do so simply on the basis of what is presented but must instead draw on previous experience that has somehow been retained and offers clues to the significance of the given. What is directly apparent has to be interpreted. This means that the agent, in initiating its activity, does not simply react to those parts of the environment with which it is in direct contact but separates itself from them and

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whatever stimuli they transmit so that it can identify the benefits and dangers that they represent, and act accordingly. At the same time it incorporates them and the information they provide into its own integrated unity. It is a single centred being whose action is not simply a stimulated response but takes its distance from the sensory data and converts them into motives for action. This characteristic, which we have called its negative unity, is the distinctive core of consciousness. Consciousness, then, is not a peculiar kind of entity, nor is it simply a state or quality of a physical entity that acts essentially in mechanical ways. It is a distinctive kind of causal function, a way some agents can initiate changes in their own organisms and in the world around them. It presupposes both the material conditions of the organism’s various components and the formal conditions of the way they interact to produce an integrated and complex entity. Because it enables the agent to respond to and initiate action on things with which it is not in direct contact, it transforms the agency present in simple organic beings. Rather than simply responding to immediate stimuli, it takes the initiative and instigates strategies that will make it more effective in achieving its goals of self-reproduction and enhancement. By differentiating itself from the phenomena it encounters, the conscious agent entertains a variety of ways of implementing its goals and settles on one as the action to be undertaken. By viewing consciousness as a distinctive form of organic agency rather than as some kind of alternate substance we are able to resolve a couple of traditional puzzles. In the first place, it presents a distinctive response to metaphysical dualism. When it is assumed that the human person is nothing more than a complex of mechanical processes, it becomes difficult to explain the role of consciousness. It appears to be an essentially useless decoration. In this study, by contrast, while the conscious agent is a single, unified organism, it is not defined simply in terms of physical causes. While it incorporates a variety of components, some of which may function in primarily physical ways, their activity is significantly affected by their reciprocal interaction and governed by the needs of the organism as a whole. The

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operation of any living organism is oriented towards the purposive goal of self-reproduction and enhancement. Conscious agency, as a particular form of that integrated activity, exploits the capacities of its components and the possibilities that emerge from their interaction to accomplish its purposes. The unified body is thus a complex organism of interacting functions, and the distinction between mind and body becomes a distinction within the organism itself; as a centred agent, it integrates all its parts into a unity, yet separates its own initiating agency from those parts and whatever information they provide. In the second place, by characterizing consciousness as a negative unity we have introduced a function that has the capacity to determine within an ambiguous situation how to act. The phenomena presented by the indirect senses do not point toward one inevitable course of action; rather, they open up a variety of possible readings, most of which would be legitimate responses to what has actually occurred. When it starts to act the conscious agent has to focus on one of them to the exclusion of others. Since none of the options follows with strict necessity from the prior conditions, there is an element of contingency in what is actually chosen. Yet one always finds among those prior conditions factors that point toward what actually occurs, so the action is not entirely arbitrary. This whole process, in which ambiguous givens result in a single course of action, represents the most basic form of what has traditionally been called free will. Once we add the capacity for rational reflection to conscious agency the options available to free agency expand, since the prior conditions include reasons derived from a broad experience of the world beyond one’s immediate environment and the agent entertains values whose influence will reach into an indefinite future. At that point deliberation may well introduce a pause in the freely initiated transition from stimulus to response. But deliberation ends only when the agent contingently decides on the course of action. 5. While this study has replaced the traditional dualism between mind and body with a more complex monistic framework,

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there has emerged a quite different contrast between the natural and what could be called the spiritual. Once we add to our model of conscious agency the function of rationality, we have a different kind of causal efficacy. Rationality requires the use of  language – general terms that name kinds of entities and kinds of events. And it requires a set of conventions that specify how such entities and events are interconnected. But it requires as well a strategy for ensuring that those terms organize and classify the world in ways that are significant. For one wants to know the actual characteristics of what happened in the past, and expect with reasonable assurance what will occur in the future. These requirements cannot be met by relying simply on what immediately surfaces through the senses or on what has had a direct impact on the agent in the course of its experience. Rational discourse needs to be objective, capturing as accurately as possible the way the world is. And it needs to be dispassionate, not shaped to satisfy the immediate interests of the agent in its quest for self-reproduction and enhancement. So the development of tools for rational reflection is not achieved by simply appealing to what happens to occur within experience. There are at least three fundamental skills that need to be exercised to achieve that dispassionate objectivity. In the first place, each term used for communication needs to have a very specific significance, set within a general context and delimited from closely related alternatives. In the second place, the connections between the components of a definition and among the terms associated in a sentence need to be justified by good reasons. In the third place, the terms need to be specific enough to have practical implications when used as the basis for action in the world, so that one can discover when they are inappropriate and when they in fact expedite the agent’s intentions. By exercising these skills within the community of discourse, rational agents develop a network of concepts and thoughts that articulate what they have discovered about the functioning of the world and what they can legitimately expect when they put their plans into practice. There emerges a realm of significance that has its roots deep in the past of human history,

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interconnects epochs and cultures, and constantly adapts to newly refined definitions, newly discovered links, and newly encountered failures when familiar theories have been applied. When we consider these three types of causes that form and modify this realm they all turn out to be functions of rational reflection: noticing distinctions previously ignored, discovering necessary conditions where chance seems to be dominant, and developing very specific expectations that emerge from one’s rational reflection and can be tested against experience. To be sure, the brute facts of what happens have a role to play. But they become effective only when they are set into a framework of expectations that have been articulated in precise detail by reflective thought. The realm of significance has emerged and will continue to expand within the community of rational agents. As its material conditions it presupposes the existence of organic entities that are both conscious and able to develop strategies of communication. It presupposes as well the ability of such organisms to interact effectively among themselves and with their environment. But while such conditions are necessary in general terms, any changes that occur and persist can be explained only in terms of new distinctions, newly identified conceptual relations, and more precisely defined observation. They have to be justified by thought, not by the physical and biological conditions that set the context. To be sure, at times a singular individual, such as Einstein, sees intellectual possibilities that would have escaped almost everyone else. But there have been many times when thinkers, working in isolation, develop remarkably similar theories. One thinks, for example, of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Isaac Newton, and calculus, or of Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and evolution. It is because the conceptual realm has come upon anomalies and puzzles at a particular time that rational agents quite independently reach similar solutions. The empirical facts that generate those puzzles had been present all along. The active agent in the development of the realm of significance, then, is the working of rational thought itself – the acts of

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distinguishing, of reasoning through a pattern of interconnections, and of testing hypotheses and expectations. No appeal to the contingent conditions within which a particular thought has emerged can justify, on its own, retaining it within the reliable discourse of the community. This kind of causal efficacy is radically different from the kinds of causes explored within the main argument of this study. It does not follow necessarily from a set of prior conditions, nor is it defined by the way agent causes interact within the world of physics, chemistry, botany, and zoology. Even rational agents, as we have seen, can seldom escape the limitations of their particular experiences and their particular interests. When one enters the realm of what Kant calls pure reason, however, one moves beyond the natural and enters a realm that is defined and develops its complexity simply in terms of its own internal dynamic. So there turns out to be, in the world, a kind of dualism. The second-order reality we have called the spiritual is not independent of the natural, but rather presupposes it as its material substratum and constantly checks its conclusions against the facts of experience. Indeed there develops a significant reciprocal interaction, for the realm of significance responds to and incorporates what actually happens in the world, and nature has been moulded and transformed by the technology that conceptual thought has produced. Nature and spirit intersect in the lives of living rational agents. 6. Fundamental to the approach taken in this study is the concept of complex cause. Traditionally causes were situated within a linear sequence that passes from cause to effect or from effect to cause within an infinite progression. Complex cause introduces the concept of causes that function reciprocally in such a way that an action stimulates a reaction and the reaction modifies and transforms the original action. The operation resembles a circle much more than a line. At times the network of relations developed within the circle becomes so intricate and systematic that it coalesces into a single functioning entity that operates at a higher level of complexity.

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Reciprocal causality permeates the conceptual models that we have been investigating. It is not only basic to the internal operations of organisms, but their development as organisms is also stimulated by interactions with their environment. Consciousness as a more deliberate form of self-determined activity emerges once reciprocity extends to entities that are spatially removed from the agent. And the particular characteristics of rationality explain how agents can interact with times and places not directly experienced. Even the theological quest for ultimate explanations and goals is set within the framework of a reciprocity that links the inherent rationality of the cosmos and the realm of significance developed by rational agents. The discipline of metaphysics is set within the context of that theological reciprocity. Thought reflects on the concepts used in our understanding of the world, while also taking account of how those concepts fit within what actually happens in that world. Its goal is to identify inherent principles that underlie both the phenomena of our experience and the achievements of our initiatives. Like all theology, however, it is constrained by the inherent limitations of rational agents. It cannot take into account all that is currently known in the many human disciplines, and it cannot presume that there is nothing more to discover. Agents have to act in their immediate situations, and cannot wait for reflective thought to explore all possibilities. Immediate interests and desires are so pressing that they curtail, if not completely overwhelm, any attempt to deliberate about what is the best thing to do. Nevertheless the quest for a comprehensive perspective lies implicit within the progressive achievements of theoretical explanation and practical action, as they arrive at more integrated theories and more all-embracing strategies. The fact that the realm of conceptual significance is in practice unable to ensure a definitive answer encourages the impatient to look for other ways of finding an answer to the ultimate questions. Abandoning conceptual thought both metaphysics and religion appeal to other sources of insight. We have already encountered two forms that this appeal takes.

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In the first place, one turns from the critical discipline of thought to the immediate givens of personal experience. As we have seen, Heidegger points to the dreadful anxiety of angst as the point at which the cosmic reality of nothingness that sets the limits to, and defines the totality of, being emerges into the human psyche.2 We referred as well to the way Schleiermacher and Jacobi adopt a similar strategy (while appealing to a different subjective moment) in their defence of religion against its cultured despisers. Similar claims are made by adherents of a variety of religious traditions, as they refer back to profound experiences and articulate techniques for enlightenment. Because subjective experiences are inevitably conditioned by the unique formal characteristics of the subjective agents and the particular context in which they exist, such moments cannot avoid being partial, and influenced by contingencies. They reveal much more about the person making the claim than they do about the cosmic reality that explains why everything happens the way it does. Even within a single life, there are moments of profound exaltation and moments of profound despair, and the individual has to decide which is revelatory and which is delusion. The only way of resolving such dilemmas is to reflect on their implications, and thus return in one way or another to participating in the ongoing dynamic of conceptual thought. In the second place, one escapes the limitations of a fully rational quest by appealing to tradition. The conventional wisdom of the community in which one lives, which includes the inheritance of past ages, becomes the source of beliefs about the cosmos. In this approach the realm of significance is not totally ignored but appropriated in a casual, rather than disciplined, way. Strawson’s rational account of stubbornly held beliefs espoused by many people at a primitive level of reflection epitomizes such an approach.3 Since he calls his work an essay in metaphysics rather than cultural anthropology he implies that such primitive beliefs escape the limitations of one particular culture and point toward cosmic reality. But he is not alone in adopting such an approach. Many of those who adopt a reductive causal determinism appeal to the prevailing assumptions

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(or stubbornly held beliefs) of natural scientists – or at least those whose positions are congenial – about the ultimate makeup of the universe. And one finds the same strategy frequently repeated within the religions of the world, particularly where certain writings and their interpretation acquire an authoritative status. The appeal to tradition, while recognizing that the conceptual is significant, adopts some achieved consensus and expands it to incorporate the totality of things, even those that are not actually covered by the received wisdom. It recognizes that the reciprocal interaction between the cosmos and the realm of significance produces an accumulation of experience that becomes enshrined in prevailing beliefs. But the fact that they are frequently stubbornly held suggests that they can easily ignore disconfirming evidence and never appreciate the fallibility of all rational life, for the demand for decisive action makes claims of unquestioned “truth” attractive. So the reciprocal interaction between the cosmos and the realm of conceptual significance involves a dynamic that will never come to a halt. There will always be new events, some contingent, some never previously noticed, that turn out to be significant; more careful reflection on assumptions already held will reveal facets of meaning not yet differentiated and causal links previously unnoticed. The metaphysical quest will never end as long as there are rational agents to undertake it. The crux of the argument developed in this study occurred in our initial discussion of cause. There we suggested that for all the success in making accurate predictions, even in the most demanding natural sciences there is no compelling evidence for strict causal determinism. The fact that results seldom if ever confirm expectations precisely can be attributed to the inaccuracy of the initial settings, but it can equally be the result of small contingencies. By adopting the hypothesis that contingencies are possible, we have explored the structure of reciprocal causation as well as some implications that follow. So this essay in metaphysics is itself provisional and subject to revision, reflection, and refutation. It is put forward as an alternative to the

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determinist position, and it claims to do greater justice to the phenomena of organic, conscious, and rational agency than reductive materialism. But its destiny lies in what happens once it enters the community of discourse that constitutes the realm of conceptual significance.

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Acknowledgments

In the fall of 2009 Jacob Quinlan and I spent an evening with William Seager to discuss his work on emergence and consciousness.1 The careful detail with which he developed his ­arguments impressed us, and we learned much from the conversation about his interaction with the world of physics. Subsequently, however, I began to wonder if it might be possible to develop another explanatory model that would situate emergence within a biological context where not only consciousness but also life itself represents a kind of functioning causality that is not easily explained simply in terms of the physical functioning of an entity’s constituent components. Within a year the basic structure of the present study took shape. It was Jacob Quinlan who had originally made me aware of the significance of the concept of emergence in the philosophy of mind. In our subsequent discussions over coffee at Natas Coffee Shop he has not only provided opportunities for clarifying my ideas, but has frequently pointed out nuances that I had missed and flaws in my drafts. Other strands have influenced my thinking: Willena Foster, associate professor of physics at the University of Western Ontario, giving me a copy of Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist for Christmas, 1956; Arthur Pap introducing a class at Yale in the fifties to the excitement of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the work of the Vienna Circle; Charles Hendel that same year

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110 Acknowledgments

mounting a course on Experience and Metaphysics; William Dray, when investigating what historians mean by the word “cause,” confessing in the Senior Common Room that he could establish no single sense running through their usage and that it seldom meant either necessary or sufficient condition; Marion Fry, after giving a set of introductory lectures on the philosophy of mind, observing that, if one understands the mental as a feature of a single, integrated person, then the resulting organism no longer functions in the purely mechanical or physical way ascribed to the body in traditional dualism, but acquires more complex forms of behaviour that incorporate features of consciousness; Cinzia Ferrini discovering the added remark in the second edition of Hegel’s Science of Logic where he stresses the significance of double transitions for the scientific method.2 In exploring the possibilities of publication the reciprocal interaction with Mark Abley of McGill-Queen’s University Press has been both enjoyable and productive, and Kathryn Simpson’s copy-editing has gently smoothed out many awkward phrases. I have benefited greatly from the interest and perspectives of my family. James regularly draws my attention to works explaining recent discoveries in biology, mathematics, and computer science. Elizabeth’s enthusiasm constantly reminds me that I need to write for the intelligent layperson, and not for the specialist. Bruce made me aware of Poincaré’s solution to the threebody problem and the resulting chaos theory and is always ready to counter my Hegelianism with a sophisticated Thomism. Barbara, throughout the years, has not only provided support and encouragement, but also perceptive, if gentle, advice. As this work was being considered by the press for publication I came across Stephen Jay Gould’s article, “Just in the Middle.”3 He tells the tale of Ernest Everett Just (1883–1941) who sought to develop a middle way between the reductive simplicity of ­traditional mechanism and the “mystical” pronouncements of vitalism. “In his very first paper, for example, [Just] showed that, for some species of marine invertebrates at least, the sperm’s point of entry determines the plane of first cleavage (the initial division of the fertilized egg into two cells). He also proved that

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the egg’s surface is ‘equipotential’ – that is, the sperm has an equal probability of entering at any point.” In that paper Just’s “concern with properties of entire organisms … and with interactions of organism and environment” was already evident. Despite his significant achievements, however, Just’s work was not respected in his native country because he was black. In recognition of his pioneering contribution to the discussion of emergent “principles that are additional to, yet consistent with, the physics and chemistry of atoms and molecules,” I have dedicated this essay to his memory.

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Notes

Chapter one   1 David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. E. Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 114.   2 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Dialectic,” A293/B349–A704/B732; E T trans. N. Kemp Smith (London Macmillan, 1953), 297–570.   3 See Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), and On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman with an introduction by Rudolf Otto (New York: Harper, 1958).   4 F.W.J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. P. Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978).   5 See F.H. Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. G. di Giovanni (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 537–90.   6 M. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1929); E T in M. Heidegger, Existence and Being, with an introduction by Werner Brock (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1949).   7 A group of thinkers who met regularly between the wars, whose aim was to make philosophy scientific.   8 Who included Gustav Bergmann, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Friedrich Waismann, among others.

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Notes to pages 5–9

  9 The critique of metaphysics advanced by the Vienna Circle was introduced to the English-speaking world by A.J. Ayer, in his Language, Truth and Logic (London: V. Gollancz, 1936). 10 P.F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959). 11 Ibid., 9. 12 Ibid., 247. 13 Ibid., 39. See also p. 25: “The system of spatio-temporal relations has a peculiar comprehensiveness and pervasiveness, which qualify it uniquely to serve as the framework within which we can organize our individuating thought about particulars.” 14 See Critique of Pure Reason, “The clue to the discovery of all pure concepts of the understanding,” B91–B116; E T , 104–19. 15 See Critique of Pure Reason, “Second Analogy,” B232–B256; ET, 218–33. 16 See the Preface to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), especially 6. Compare also the Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals: “We shall often have to take the special nature of man, which can only be known by experience, as our object, in order to exhibit in it the consequences of the universal moral principles; but this will not detract from the ­purity of the latter nor cast any doubt on their a priori origin – that is to say, a Metaphysics of Morals cannot be founded on anthropology, but may be applied to it.” Translated by T.K. Abbott in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on The Theory of Ethics (London: Longman’s Green, 1909), 272. 17 See G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. G. di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 29: “The concept of pure science and its deduction is therefore presupposed in the present work in so far as the Phenomenology of Spirit is nothing other than that deduction.” 18 I have deliberately used expressions from C.S. Peirce’s two essays, “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–35, 1958) [c p ], volume 5, paragraphs 384 and 402 [5.384 & 5.402]. For Hegel (as later for C.S. Peirce) acquiring knowledge involves not only reflection on the structures of our thought and how it applies to the world of

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Notes to pages 9–13

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experience, but develops out of our practical interaction with the world, learning particularly from our failures. 19 I expand on this reading in “Hegel’s Absolutes,” The Owl of Minerva 29, no. 1 (Fall 1997), 23–37, and “Absolute Acting,” The Owl of Minerva 30, no. 1 (Fall 1998), 103–18, reproduced as Chapter 5 in J.W. Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 20 See my Hegel’s Systematic Contingency and “Contingent Categories: A Response to Professor Lau,” Owl of Minerva 40, no. 1 (2008–09), 115–31. 21 See note 18 above. There is no evidence that Peirce ever read the Phenomenology. The Widener Library at Harvard, however, has a copy of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences of 1827 with Peirce’s book plate. 22 Indeed their name for it was Verein Ernst Mach [Ernst Mach Society]. 23 Albert Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes” in Albert Einstein: PhilosopherScientist, ed. P.A. Schlipp (New York: Tudor, 1951), 49, translation by P.A. Schlipp. 24 Ibid., 11–13, my italics. Compare page 7: “What, precisely, is ‘thinking’? When, at the reception of sense-impressions, memory pictures emerge, this is not yet ‘thinking.’ And when such pictures form series, each member of which calls forth another, this too is not yet ‘thinking.’ When, however, a certain picture turns up in many series, then – precisely through such return – it becomes an ordering element for such series, in that it connects series which in themselves are unconnected. Such an element becomes an instrument, a concept. I think that the transition from free association or ‘dreaming’ to thinking is characterized by the more or less dominating rôle which the ‘concept’ plays in it. It is by no means necessary that a concept must be connected with a sensibly cognizable and reproducible sign (word); but when this is the case thinking becomes by means of that fact communicable.” In Ideas, Concepts, and Reality (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2013) I have advanced, I think, a more satisfactory explanation of the move from sense-impressions to concepts than Einstein sketches here. He appears to be still too enamored with Hume’s philosophy.

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Notes to pages 14–30

25 This, it seems to me, is the point Hegel is making in the first chapter of the Phenomenology on sense certainty.

Chapter Two  1 Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1, 980a20 in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1552.  2 Aristotle, Physics, 2.3, 194b16ff and Metaphysics 1.3, 983a24ff in Complete Works, 332–3, 1555.   3 There is evidence that people are much more successful in solving a problem testing the validity of if/then statements when they articulate threats and promises than when they describe situations. See L. Cosmides, “The Logic of Social Exchange: Has Natural Selection Shaped How Humans Reason? Studies with the Wason Selection Test.” in Cognition 31 (1989), 187–276.   4 J.S. Mill, A System of Logic (London: Longmans, 1961), III, v, §3, 214.  5 Mill, Logic, III, x, §3, 288f.   6 Indeed, curiously enough, it can surface in even stranger ways. When people go looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, they are implicitly assuming that there is a natural tendency for nature to develop towards intelligence when circumstances are appropriate, which sounds remarkably like a form of final cause.   7 In this discussion I have drawn on Edward N. Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993).   8 Paul N. Edwards, in A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge: mit Press, 2010) documents this development in detail.   9 When trying to determine the possible repercussions of a hydrogen bomb, mathematicians and scientists abandoned the attempt to develop a strictly deterministic formula because the actions of the particles were known statistically as probabilities, rather than as strict necessities. Stanley Ulam designed a method, called Monte Carlo, that could use computers to obtain a credible result. “The idea was to try out thousands of such possibilities and at each stage, to select by chance, by means of a ‘random number’ with suitable probability, the fate of kind of event, to follow it in a line, so to speak,” Ulam explained. “After examining the possible histories of only a few thousand, one

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would have a good sample and an approximate answer to the problem.” George Dyson, Turing’ Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (New York: Random House, 2012), 191.

Chapter Three   1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), §65, 220, Kant’s emphasis.   2 Cf. ibid., §66, 222: Of the Principle of Judging of Internal Purposiveness in Organized Beings: “This principle, which is at the same time a definition, is as follows: An organized product of nature is one in which every part is reciprocally purpose and end.”   3 Ibid., §64, 217.   4 From a review of Margaret Redfern, Plant Galls (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 2011) by Mark Cocker in the Times Literary Supplement, #5691, April 27, 2012, 24. See also Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).   5 While Kant’s discussion of substance is clearly related to the subject / predicate judgment, and cause is defined by the conditional, he fails to show how the disjunctive judgment correlates with reciprocity, and the way that might clarify what goes on when two parts mutually interact.  6 Critique of Judgment, §65, 221.   7 Ibid., §70, 234 (Kant’s emphasis). The final “because” clause is significant. Kant makes clear that the tension between mechanism and the purposiveness of nature lies in the contingency requisite for making sense of the latter. See §78, 262: “For in the place of what is thought (at least by us) as possible only by design we cannot set mechanism, and in the place of what is cognized as mechanically necessary we cannot set contingency, which would need a purpose as its determining ground.”   8 One thinks of F.W.J. Schelling and those who were inspired by his philosophy of nature.   9 G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. G. di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 501ff. Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 11 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1978), 405–7. 10 We are here moving beyond Hegel’s text.

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Notes to pages 39–41

11 Science of Logic, 504–5; Werke, 11.409. His move from reciprocity at the end of the second book to the activity of conceiving in the third book is facilitated by the fact that the integrated unity that emerges from mutual interaction is universal, in that it incorporates all the features of the component agents, is particular in that it is characterized by the specific nature of the interaction, and is singular, as a new kind of individual agent. 12 It is worth noting that this move from reciprocal dynamic to new integrated unity is central to Hegel’s logical enterprise. By the time he came to his revisions of both the Encyclopaedia Logic and Science of Logic he realized the significance of what he calls “double transition.” G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), §241, 306; Werke, Vol. 20 (1992), 230. Science of Logic, 279; Werke, Vol. 21 (1985), 320. The sentence about double transition has been introduced into the second edition of the larger Logic at the point where the analysis of Quantity has resulted in affirming the significance of Quality, well after Quality had led to the concept of Quantity. This pattern of mutual conditioning provides the basis for introducing the concept of Measure, which endeavours to unite a quantity with a quality, and vice versa. In other words, a concept passes over into its contrary; but the contrary passes back into the original concept in a pattern of reciprocity. This then becomes the basis upon which the move he calls “sublation” (Aufhebung in German; see Hegel’s Remark at Science of Logic, 81–2; Werke, 21.94–5) comes into play; for sublation collapses the moments of the doubled dynamic into a simple unity which cancels, preserves and yet goes beyond the components of the two contraries. It generates a new singular concept. 13 Biology provides some empirical evidence for the way contingencies can become reduced through reciprocal interaction. Viruses, as basic biological particles, “mutate with astonishing speed, something like a thousand times faster than bacteria, which in turn mutate approximately a thousand times faster than we do.” Yet it was discovered that the viruses that enable parasitic wasps to exploit caterpillars in their reproductive cycle have been conserved by natural selection for approximately seventy-four million years since the original symbiosis. Frank Ryan, Virolution [London: Harper-Collins, 2009] 18, 94–5.

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Notes to pages 45–50

119

Ryan also points out that the most primitive domains of life, Archea and bacteria, routinely swap genetic material in confusing and chaotic ways (352–3). The third domain, cellular existence, which retains a consistent genomic character through reproduction, may well have developed from the symbiosis of a bacterium with an Archea (230). 14 One could even have the material completely replaced over time, while the formal dynamic of interaction adjusts to the changes as it maintains its distinctive character. The “self” that is reproduced is characterized by the way the centred agency exploits and responds to that form. 15 Recently the study of embryology or epigenetics has shown that environmental factors can alter those elements of the nucleated cell that determine how, when, and whether the genetic components of the d n a function. There is some evidence that these alterations can become so integrated with the cellular structure that they can be transmitted to subsequent generations. (Ryan, Virolution, 310–15.) 16 In Genesis: The Evolution of Biology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), Jan Sapp has shown how the traditional view that biology need only appeal to neo-Darwinian forms of mechanical cause to provide a comprehensive explanatory model has been challenged by recent discoveries made in embryology, symbiosis and microbial biology, which indicate that more complex causal patterns are involved in the diversification of life. See also Ryan, Virolution.

Chapter Four   1 See René Descartes, Description of the Human Body and all its Functions, Part 1, Preface: “our soul, in so far as it is a substance which is distinct from the body, is known to us merely through the fact that it thinks, that is to say, understands, wills, imagines, remembers, and has sensory perceptions; for all these functions are kinds of thoughts.” As for the body, “I want the reader to have a general notion of the entire machine which it is my task to describe. So I will say here that the heat in the heart is like the great spring or principle responsible for all the movements occurring in the machine.” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), I, 314–16.

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Notes to pages 51–75

 2 Aristotle, De Anima, 2.3, 414a29–415a13, in The Complete Works of Aristotle. ed. J. Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), I, 659–60.   3 Aristotle assumes that plants have neither motion nor the sense of taste or touch: “The primary form of sense is touch, which belongs to all animals. Just as the power of self-nutrition can be separated from touch and sensation generally, so touch can be separated from all other forms of sense” De Anima 2.2, 413b4–6 (Complete Works, 658).   4 Hegel introduces this term in his discussion of “something” in the Science of Logic. See page 89 in di Giovanni’s translation: “As something, the negative of the negative is only the beginning of the subject … At the base of all these determinations there lies the negative unity with itself” (Werke, 21.103). See also the discussion of consciousness in his Philosophy of Spirit §413: “I, as this absolute negativity, is implicitly the identity in the otherness: the I is itself that other and stretches over the other as if that object were implicitly cancelled.” Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 153 (altered); Werke, vol. 20 (1992), 422.   5 This ability to read signs is simply an extension of the process by which a conscious agent interprets the givens of the indirect senses.

Chapter Five   1 Kant’s term is der Inbegriff aller Möglichkeiten.  2 Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Dialectic, Book II, Chapter 3, Section 2: “The Transcendental Ideal,” A571–583/B599–611. I use the lower case initial to indicate a generic term, rather than a name.   3 I am using Eugene Fairweather’s translation in A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, Volume X of The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), 73. However, I have substituted “something” for Fairweather’s “a being,” since it captures the Latin aliquid.   4 This paragraph summarizes the discussion in Chapters 6–9 of my Ideas, Concepts, and Reality.   5 One could develop another version of this definition by drawing on Aquinas’ third way. Contingent beings require a cause or sufficient conditions to bring them into existence. And the necessity of that

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causal connection would seem to be simply a contingent characteristic of the universe unless we assume some ground, or ultimate explanation, that not only establishes its necessity but is self-justifying. This would certainly be something than which no greater can be conceived. See St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Book I, Question 2, Article 3, as found in Introduction to Saint Thomas, ed. A.C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1948), 26.   6 Albert Einstein, “Reply to Criticisms,” in Albert Einstein: PhilosopherScientist, ed. P.A. Schlipp (New York: Tudor, 1951), 667, translation by P.A. Schlipp.   7 Einstein was also quite explicit in saying, however, that he did not believe in a personal god.  8 Plato, Republic, Book VI, 511b, trans. G.M.A. Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve, in Plato, Complete Works, eds. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchison (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1, 132.  9 Republic, VI, 508d-e, Complete Works, 1,129. 10 It is not surprising that such passages led Christians to adopt Plato as a spiritual ancestor. 11 D. Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. N. Kemp Smith (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1947). 12 Ibid., Part II, 143. 13 Ibid., Part VI, 170–2. 14 Ibid., Part VII, 176–7. 15 This conclusion appears to have been drawn by some Stoics: “Wise men are contented in the face of events, since all of them occur according to divine allotment.” Excerpted from a passage of PseudoPlutarch “On Fate,” cited in Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, trans. B. Inwood and L.P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 128. 16 In Being and Will: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (New York: Paulist, 1977). I identify some organic and rational analogues that distinguish five major religious traditions, and then work out in more detail how Christian doctrine fits within that framework.

Chapter Six   1 D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 54.

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Notes to pages 106–11

  2 See M. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik?, 15.   3 See P.F. Strawson, Individuals, 247.

Acknowledgments   1 Subsequently published as Natural Foundations: Science, Emergence and Consciousness (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 2012).  2 Hegel, Science of Logic, 279; Werke, 21.320.   3 In S.J. Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1985), 177–391. Citations come from pages 382 and 380.

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Works Cited

Anselm. Proslogion. In A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, edited by E. Fairweather, Volume X of The Library of Christian Classics. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956. Aquinas, St Thomas. Summa Theologica. In Introduction to Saint Thomas, edited by A.C. Pegis. New York: Random House, 1948. Aristotle. Physics, translated by R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye; On the Soul, translated by J.A. Smith; and Metaphysics, translated by W.D. Ross. InThe Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by J. Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Ayer, A.J. Language, Truth and Logic. London: V. Gollancz, 1936. Burbidge, J.W. “Absolute Acting.” The Owl of Minerva 30, no.1 (Fall 1998): 103–18. – “Contingent Categories: A Response to Professor Lau.” Owl of Minerva 40, no. 1 (2008–09): 115–131. – “Hegel’s Absolutes.” The Owl of Minerva 29, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 23–37. – Being and Will: An Essay in Philosophical Theology. New York: Paulist, 1977. – Hegel’s Systematic Contingency. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. – Ideas, Concepts, and Reality. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013. Cocker, Mark. “Review of Margaret Redfern, Plant Galls.” Times Literary Supplement 5691, (April 27, 2012): 24.

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Cosmides, L. “The Logic of Social Exchange: Has Natural Selection Shaped How Humans Reason? Studies with The Wason Selection Test.” Cognition 31 (1989): 187–276. Descartes, René. Description of the Human Body and All its Functions. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Dyson, George. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. New York: Random House, 2012. Edwards, Paul N. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. Cambridge: mit Press, 2010. Einstein, Albert. “Autobiographical Notes” and “Reply to Criticisms.” In Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, edited by P.A. Schlipp, 1–95, 663–88. New York: Tudor, 1951. Gould, Stephen Jay. “Just in the Middle.” The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History. New York: Norton, 1985: 177–391. Hegel, G.W.F. Gesammelte Werke, Vols 11, 20, 21. Hamburg: Meiner, 1978, 1992, 1985. – Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Translated by W. Wallace and A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. – The Encyclopaedia Logic. Translated by T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991. – The Science of Logic. Translated by G. di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Heidegger, Martin. Existence and Being. Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1949. – Was ist Metaphysik? Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1929. Hume, David. An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by E. Steinberg. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. – Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Edited by N.K. Smith. Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1947. Inwood, Brad, and Lloyd P. Gerson, eds. Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings. Translated by B. Inwood and L.P. Gerson. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988. Jacobi, F.H. The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill. Translated by G. di Giovanni. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994.

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Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J.H. Bernard. New York: Hafner, 1951. – Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by N.K. Smith. London Macmillan, 1953. – Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985. – Metaphysics of Morals. In Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, translated by T.K. Abbott. London: Longman’s Green, 1909. Lorenz, Edward N. The Essence of Chaos. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993. Mill, J.S. A System of Logic. London: Longmans, 1961. Peirce, C.S. “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” In Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce Vol. 5, edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–35, 1958. Plato. Republic. In Plato, Complete Works, edited by J.M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchison. Translated by G.M.A. Grube and C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. Ryan, Frank. Virolution. London: Harper-Collins, 2009. Sapp, Jan. Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. – Genesis: The Evolution of Biology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Schelling, F.W.J. System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Translated by P. Heath. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. Translated by J. Oman with an Introduction by R. Otto. New York: Harper, 1958. – The Christian Faith. Edited by H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976. Seager, William. Natural Foundations: Science, Emergence and Consciousness. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 2012. Strawson, P.F. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Methuen, 1959.

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Index

action at a distance: in space, 53–9; in time, 60–71 agency. See cause agent cause, 20, 22, 24–6, 37, 39–40, 57, 77 alternative options for action, 56–7, 101 analogy, arguments from, 85–90 animals, 51–9 Anselm (1033–1109), 73–6, 78 appetites. See desire Aquinas, Thomas (1224–1274), 72 Aristotle (384–322 bce), 19–20, 24, 39–40, 49, 71; De Anima, 51–2, 69 astronomy, 21 attention, 60 being, 16 beliefs: fixing beliefs, 9; metaphysical, 5–7 botany. See plants categories. See concepts cause, 16–17, 18–33, 94–5; Aristotle’s four causes, 20, 22,

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24, 39–40, 49; causal determinism, 19, 22, 27–8, 88, 95–6, 107–8; centred agency, 57, 59; complex cause, 36–49, 50–1, 98, 104–5; concepts and reasons as causes, 76–81, 102– 4; conscious agency, 54–9; and correlation, 25–6; mechanical causation, 17, 50, 88; organic causation, 17, 42–9, 88–9; rational agency, 60–71, 81–4, 89–90; reciprocal causality, 38–9, 105 centred organism, 43–4, 54–5, 59, 66, 100 change, 16, 94 chaos theory, 29, 88, 96 chemistry, 41–2 communal life, 64, 68, 102–3 communication, 61–4, 66, 76 concepts, 7–10, 12–14, 75; conceptual realm, 76–81, 102–4; and images, 73–4; relation to experience, 8–10, 12–15 conditional statements, 20–2, 26–7, 36

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128 Index conditions, 22–8, 37–8; necessary conditions, 27, 32; sufficient condition, 28–9 consciousness, 50–2, 54–9, 89–90, 99–101; as negative unity, 55 contingency 19, 30–1, 40, 59, 67–8, 77, 88, 98, 101, 107–8 cosmology, 17, 34–49 decisions, 30, 67, 69, 101, 107 deliberation, 67, 69 Descartes, René (1596–1650), 50–2, 71, 99 desire, appetites, motives, 51–3, 57–8, 59–60, 64–5, 100 determinism, causal, 19, 22, 88, 95–6, 107–8 diffidence, 70 dilemma, 21 disinterested, dispassionate, 65–9, 76, 81–2, 91, 102 disjunctions, 20–1 dualism, 50, 99–101, 104 Einstein, Albert (1879–1955), 12–13, 31, 80 emergence, 19, 39, 41–2, 47, 59, 70–1, 95, 96–9 experience, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 72, 106; learning from, 9–11, 13–14, 31, 58, 88, 91–3; relation to concepts, 7–10, 12–15 explanation, 73, 75

formal cause, formal conditions, 20–1, 24, 39–40, 43–4, 63, 77, 99–100 freedom. See alternative possibilities for action general words, 62, 70–1, 74, 102 god, 73–6, 78–82, 84, 92; nature of god, 85–91 good, the, 80–4, 91 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831), 8–10, 14; Phenomenology of Spirit, 9; Science of Logic, 9–10, 37–9 Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), 4, 7, 106 Hume, David (1711–1776), 3, 85, 95 immaterial realm, 78, 101–4 inevitability, 23, 26–7 integration, 39, 97. See also centred organism; negative unity intuition, 4, 13 Jacobi, Friedrich (1743–1819), 4, 106 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 3, 7–8, 11, 22, 73, 78, 94–5; Critique of Judgment, 34–6, 48, 95 language, 62–4, 66, 102

fallible beliefs, 11, 14–15, 69–70, 72, 85, 90, 107 final cause, 20, 25, 30, 34, 42–8, 56, 72, 81, 90. See also purposiveness

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Mach, Ernst (1838–1916), 12 material cause, material conditions, 20, 24, 39–40, 43–4, 63, 77, 98–100, 103

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Index 129 meaning, 21, 71, 76–81, 101–4. See also sign mechanical causation, 17, 21–2, 34–6, 40–1, 88, 90 metaphysics, 3–17, 94–5, 105–7 Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873), 22–3; Mill’s methods, 25–6 motives. See desire movement, 51–3, 57–8

purposiveness, 34–5, 44–48, 55, 81, 91; goals and objectives, 65–6, 100

objectivity, 66–9, 102 ontology, 17, 18–33 organic causation, 17, 34–7, 42–9, 53, 88–90, 100–1 organisms, 34, 45–7 organs, 45–6, 56–7

reason, rationality, 50–1, 59–71, 76–81, 89–90, 92, 101; limits to rationality, 67–9, 92–3, 105. See also meaning reciprocal interaction, 34–6, 38–9, 49, 89, 96–7, 100–1; among rational agents, 66–7; at a distance in space, 52–9, 99–100; at a distance in time, 59–71; between the material and the spiritual, 88–9, 104–7; in language use, 63–4, 66, 76; with the cosmos, 79–83; with the environment, 42–8 recollection, 54, 58, 65 reductionism, 96–8 regularity, 28–9, 40–1, 61–2, 65–6, 95, 98–9; in tension with particular sets of conditions, 68–9 relativism, partiality, 6–7, 14–15, 106

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839– 1914), 11 philosophy of mind. See psychology philosophy of religion. See theology physics, 41 plants, 47, 51–2 Plato (late fifth century– mid-fourth century bce), 80–1, 83 predictability, 28–30, 33, 66, 88 processes, 16, 94–5 psychology, 17, 51–71, 99–101

Schelling, Friedrich (1775– 1854), 4 Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1768–1834), 4, 106 Schlick, Moritz (1882–1936), 4–5 sensation, 51–3, 59–60; indirect senses, 53–4, 58 sign, significance, 12, 53, 57, 61–3, 99–100, 102–3. See also meaning social interests, 64–5 soul, 51, 66. See also psychology space and time, 12

natural law, 19–21 necessary condition, 26–8, 95–6 necessary connection, 22–3, 77, 88, 95–6; relative necessity, 24, 28, 31–2, 36 negative unity, 55–6, 60, 64–6, 77, 89–90, 99–101 nothing, 4

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130 Index spiritual, 78–9, 102–4 standards for responsible action, 83–4, 91–2 Stoics, 20–1 Strawson, Peter (1919–2006), 5–7, 106 sufficient reason, 7–8, 28, 95–6 symbiosis, 35, 46, 89

tradition, 106–7 truth, 81–2

theology, 17, 72–93, 96; and metaphysics, 105–7

zoology. See animals

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universals. See general words Vienna Circle, 4–5, 12 world view, 6, 7, 15

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