Relation to the world· Nature and the living
Emergentism
Axis: Wholes and parts — Can a whole be fully explained by its parts, or does it have irreducible properties?
The whole is more than the sum of its parts: organization gives rise to new properties, such as life or thought, that no analysis of isolated components can predict. Complexity demands a way of thinking attentive to relations and levels.
Movements 2
Show inferred positions (2)
Romanticisminferable
The whole precedes and overflows its parts: an organism, a poem, a people are not the sum of juxtaposed elements but a living unity from which each member draws its meaning. Against the analysis that decomposes and the mechanism that reduces, Romanticism thinks in organic totalities, where the higher is never explained by the lower.
Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature · Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
Aristotelianisminferable
The soul is defined as the , or first actuality, of the organized living body: a living thing is not reducible to its material parts, for it is its form that unifies it and makes it what it is. The whole is thus prior in nature to its parts, aligning Aristotelianism with a kind of emergentism avant la lettre.
Aristotle, On the Soul, II, 1 · Aristotle, Parts of Animals, I, 1
Philosophers 6
Chalmersexplicit
Chalmers distinguishes two emergences. Weak emergence covers phenomena one would not have guessed from the parts, but which follow from them once one knows where to look, like the patterns of a cellular automaton. Strong emergence is that of a property deducible from no knowledge of the parts, however complete, and he takes consciousness to be its only uncontestable case in nature. Hence his conclusion: psychophysical laws must be added to the inventory of the world, as physics had to add electromagnetism to mechanics.
"Strong and Weak Emergence" (2006)
Nagelexplicit
Nagel disputes that analysis into physical constituents can exhaust everything. How does matter produce conscious beings? A successful explanation of life and mind would have to make it intelligible that matter produces conscious beings; yet describing the parts and their interactions leaves precisely that unexplained. His anti- therefore calls for principles of another order, without his claiming to have found them. The hypothesis of a natural teleology he then advances, offering it as speculative, has been widely rejected, including by readers who share his refusal of reductionism.
The View from Nowhere (1986) · Mind and Cosmos (2012)
Searleexplicit
Searle holds consciousness to be a higher-level property caused by neuronal processes, as the liquidity of water is caused by the behaviour of molecules although no molecule is liquid. The emergence he accepts is that one: explicable from the parts once their organization is known. He refuses, by contrast, any property that would possess causal powers inexplicable from the elements, which would amount, he says, to magic. He therefore sits barely on the emergentist side, and not at all on the side of a mysterious whole.
The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992)
Show inferred positions (3)
Aristotleinferable
The soul is defined as the form of an organized body, its first actuality, neither a separable substance nor a mere aggregate of matter. Living beings and their functions thus do not reduce to their components: an emergentist reading of is warranted.
On the Soul (De Anima), II.1 (412a-b)
Charles Sanders Peirceinferable
, the principle of continuity, commands in Peirce a refusal of sharp breaks and holds the continuous to be primary: between matter and mind, between the levels of the real, there are transitions, not jumps. Nature evolves by forming habits that bring forth new orders, irreducible to the mechanics of their elements. Against atomist reductionism, this is a metaphysics of emergence and growth, where the whole is more than the sum of parts that are, besides, never truly separate.
The Law of Mind (1892)
Leibnizinferable
For Leibniz, perception cannot be explained by mechanics: were one to enter a thinking machine enlarged like a mill, one would find only parts pushing one another, never anything to account for a perception. The life of the soul is thus not reducible to the motions of bodies; it belongs to an order of its own (final causes) harmonized with the mechanical, which leans to the emergentist side.
Monadology, §17 (the mill argument)