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
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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 3
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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)