|
The Philosophy of the Present
Chapter II Emergence and Identity
CHAPTER II
EMERGENCE AND IDENTITY
I have spoken of the present as the seat of reality
because its character of a present sheds light upon the nature of
reality. The past and the future that appear in the present may be
regarded as merely the thresholds of a minute bit of an unbounded
extension whose metaphysical reality reduces the present to a negligible
element that approaches the world at an instant. This view of reality
as an infinite scroll unrolling in snatches before our intermittent
vision receives another variant in the picture of reality as a four-dimensional
continuum of space-time, of events and intervals, forever determined
by its own geometry, and into which we venture with our own subjective
frames of reference, receiving momentary impressions whose present
character is a function of our minds and not of any section of the
ordered events in the universe. I have suggested that such an approach
to reality does not answer to the scientific technique and method
by which we seek for disclosures of the universe. Scientific procedure
fastens upon that necessary conditioning of what takes place by what
has taken place which follows from passage itself. In space-time relations,
that is, in motion, this conditioning may reach the certainty of deduction,
though even here we stand before the possibility that our conclusions
may often rest upon statistical results which negate the final determination
which we seek. There is evidence that the very effort to refine the
technique to absolute precision defeats itself. Then there is the
other branch of this determination of passage which we refer to under
the caption of probability. Whatever our doctrine of probability,
(33) we assume that the happening of earlier events
carries with it a probability as to the nature of later events, even
if this probability can be reckoned only on a theory of chances. The
basis of this determination of the future by the past is found in
the fact that something is taking place which has a temporal spread-that
reality cannot be reduced to instants-- and that earlier stages must
be conditions of later phases. It is the undertaking of science to
find out what it is that is going on.
Furthermore the study of passage involves the discovery of events.
These cannot be simply parts of passage. These events have always
characters of uniqueness. Time can only arise through the ordering
of passage by these unique events. The scientist finds such events
in his observations and experiments. The relation of any event to
the conditions under which it occurs is what we term causation. The
relation of the event to its preceding conditions at once sets up
a history, and the uniqueness of the event makes that history relative
to that event. The conditioning passage and the appearance of the
unique event then give rise to past and future as they appear in a
present. All of the past is in the present as the conditioning nature
of passage, and all the future arises out of the present as the unique
events that transpire. To unravel this existent past in the present
and on the basis of it to previse the future is the task of science.
The method is that of ideation.
I have indicated that we find in the living form an individual thing
that maintains itself through the mutual determination of the form
and its environment. The surrounding world is so related to the animal
or plant by their sensitivity and response that the life process continues.
Over against the animal the world is one of food, shelter, protection
or their opposites. Over against the inanimate thing the surroundings
do not exhibit characters that answer to the (34)
action of the thing in being what it is. A boulder is a definite thing
with its own mass and form, but its relations to things about it do
not give rise to qualities in them which through the contacts, weight,
or momentum of the boulder conserve the boulder. The boulder has no
environment in the sense in which the animal has an environment. The
background of the inanimate object is that of conservation-in our
present day formulation, of the conservation of energy. No transformation
affects the reality of the physical system. We have reduced matter
and mass, in terms of which this presupposition was earlier formulated,
to energy, but the essential feature of the doctrine has been that
reality does not lie in the form-for there may be endless transformation
-- but in the matter, mass or energy. While, then, there has been
a history of a stellar body, which may be traced in a causal series,
science grasps the reality of the star only as it conceives of it
as energy, which is unaffected whether the form of the body becomes
a binary or a planetary system. The particular form of an inanimate
body is irrelevant to "what it is." For such bodies the
environment is as unessential as the object.
Plants and animals, however, present to science objects whose essential
characters are found not in that which undergoes transformation but
in the process itself and in the forms which the object assumes within
that process. Since the process involves the interaction of animal
or plant with surrounding objects, it is evident that the process
of life as really confers characters upon the environment as it does
upon the plant or the animal. However, plants and animals are physical
objects as well as living objects. As physical objects their reality
can be reduced to the whatever it is that is undergoing transformation,
and their forms become unessential. As such they must be brought within
the sweep of the physicist's and the chemist's doctrine. The life
process (35) is bound to disappear in the reduction
of these processes to expressions of energy. The introduction of a
vital force would help matters not at all; if it could be found it
would inevitably be subject to the same reduction.
The difference between the physicist and the biologist evidently
lies in the goals which their sciences contemplate, in the realities
they are seeking. And their procedure answers to their goals. That
of the physical scientist is reduction and that of the biologist is
production. The biologist cannot investigate until he has got a life
process going. He must, however, have physical means for this process
and must therefore be a physicist as well as a biologist. If he reduces
the reality of the life process to the means he is using he becomes
a mechanist. If the life process appears to him a reality that has
emerged out of the physical world, and his study is of the conditions
under which it maintains itself, he is a teleologist. These two attitudes
come into conflict with each other only if on the one hand he denies
reality to the process because he can reduce to energy the objects
that enter into it, and therefore refuses to recognize that the process
that he is investigating is a reality that has arisen; or if, on the
other hand, he states the physical and chemical things that enter
into the process solely in terms of the process, and thus makes them
Aristotelian qualities or adjectives. If he thus takes the position
that all constituents of things are really potentialities of the thing
which imply its pre-existence, then the biologist becomes an Aristotelian
or, in a modern atmosphere, a "type" idealist; and, if he
is consistent, surrenders the field of scientific research, and denies
the possibility of emergence as well.
What I have wished to emphasize in this reference to the emergence
of life is that it confers upon the world characters quite as genuine
as those it confers upon living beings. This fact is recognized in
the term environment. We are apt (36) to use the
term in a phenomenalistic fashion, to lodge the reality of the environment
in its physical reduction to mass or energy, and to allow a real significance
to the relation of the animal to his surroundings only in so far as
these can be stated in physical and chemical terms. The reality of
food, for example, is then found in the atoms or electrons and protons
of which it is composed, and its nutritive character is a mere concession
to our interest in an isolated group of happenings going on about
us. As I have indicated, we cannot preserve this attitude without
denying a fundamental reality to life. If life is a reality, its operation
within form and environment must confer its characters within its
whole field of operation. If an animal digests, there must exist a
food which the animal digests. Another fashion in which to present
the situation is in terms of the contrast between the conditions of
that which takes place, and the conditioned occurrence. It has back
of it also the distinction between things and events. The passing
event solidifies into the thing as it becomes in the present the fixed
conditions of later occurrences. Good digestion, health, and life
itself are conditions for the varied activities which the future holds,
and as such they are things that constitute some of our most precious
possessions. They are, in especial, those contents to which varying
characters or accidents are attached. In other words, they tend to
become substances, being concreted by the fact that, having transpired,
their conditioning nature, whatever it may be, is fixed. Thus the
future is continually qualifying the past in the present.
The distinction which I indicated above between reduction and production
falls in with that between our attitudes toward past and future respectively.
The past we reduce to dependable conditions, and all the rich context
of the future as it takes place, if it is to be comprehensible and
serviceable, must be woven into this dependable web. Thus new things
(37) continually arise, the novelty of whose occurrence
is worn down into the reliability of that which becomes familiar.
But the thing is preeminently the physical thing of contact experience.
We find here the fundamental relation between the future and the past
in the present. The distance experience is the promise of contact
experience. The something we can get hold of is the substance to which
the qualities of sound, color, taste and odor belong. In the immediate
perceptual world what we can handle is the reality to which what is
seen and heard must be brought to the test, if we are to escape illusion
and hallucination. The development of the distance receptors with
their inner apparatus, the encephalon, has endowed the higher animals
with a future which could become effective only in proportion as it
was stretched out behind into the past in which the contact experiences
that were promised or threatened by sight or sound were made specific
by the finer adjustments of the hand in manipulation.
It was the peculiar advantage of Newtonian mechanics that its fundamental
concept of mass was so closely correlated with the weight and volume
of contact experience. It has always been easy for us to imagine the
subdivision of perceptual objects into mass particles, and to translate
inertia, force and momentum into the effort which contact experiences
call out. In this mechanical doctrine the reliable conditions to which
science has reduced the past have been made inherent in the mass particle,
and the mass particle could be regarded as a refinement of the physical
thing of the perceptual world. It is this peculiar agreement of the
physical thing in science with the thing of perception that has given
the so-called materialism of the doctrine its vogue. It is in no small
degree to this correlation that we must attribute our instinctive
tendency to ascribe the reality of life to the physical and chemical
changes of inanimate things. The (38) Aristotelian
found no difficulty in recognizing life as a nature that could belong
to things, for he had no scientifically schooled imagination that
could exhibit to him subperceptual physical things accomplishing living
processes. Democritus offered this latter hypothesis, though without
its experimental verification. I wish, however, to insist that the
essential fallacy in this materialism, lies not in its assumption
of a massive character for ultimate physical things-for mass has already
disappeared in energy-but in the assumption that it is possible to
give an exhaustive account of any event that takes place in terms
of the conditions of its occurrence. I will not say that we cannot
conceive of a passage within which nothing happens, but I do make
bold to say that every event by which it becomes possible to differentiate
passage must have a unique character which cannot be resolved into
the conditions under which the event happens. The attempt so to resolve
it leads not so much to materialism as to identical equations and
a changeless Parmenidean block of reality. If this is true there is,
of course, nothing peculiar in the emergence of life or of consciousness
so-called. They may have had more import than other unique occurrences
but other events have been as genuinely unique as they and have been
as genuinely involved in the process of reality.
The striking feature in the appearance of life is that the process
that constitutes the reality of a living being is one that extends
beyond the form itself and involves for its expression the world within
which this form lives. The reality of the process thus belongs to
the world in its relation to the living being. This is referred to
in the terms, form and environment. It is an expression of relativity
in terms of life. The world is evidently a different affair for the
plant and for the animal, and differs for different species of plants
and animals. They have different environments. That we may reduce
all of these to the physical world of (39) the conditions
under which life can go on, which is the field within which so-called
purely physical processes take place, does not wipe out these various
environments as aspects of reality.
The doctrine of relativity at present connotes a similar relation
between any moving object or group of objects moving with the same
velocity and in the same sense, and the rest of the world within which
this consentient set[1] is moving. The spatial, temporal
and energic characters of objects vary with the velocity of their
motion in relation to the world that is at rest in respect to this
moving consentient set. But, unlike the living form and its environment,
the consentient set which is moving may be regarded as at rest, while
its environment will then be regarded as moving with like velocity
and in an opposite sense. The effect of relativity is then to carry
what I have termed the reduction of physical science still farther;
for if the same reality may appear indifferently as the motion of
one set with reference to another at rest or as the motion of the
second set with reference to the first, which is now at rest, it is
evident that the temporal character of the objects at rest, their
endurance or passage, must in some way be equated with the temporal
character of the same objects in motion. The point-track of the first
situation becomes equal to the translation in the second situation.
We pass inevitably into a continuum in which time becomes a dimension.
What was motion has become the interval between events in space-time,
which, regarded from different standpoints, may be either rest or
motion. A simpler if cruder way of saying this is that the reality
of motion does not lie in the change but in the relative positions
of things, regarded as events, with reference to each other.
(40) In the Newtonian world a boxlike space, conceivably
filled with a stagnant ether, whose structure was irrelevant to time,
was the absolute environment of all change, i.e., for the physical
sciences, of all motion. The new absolute space-time is not the environment
of anything for there is nothing going on there. There are only the
events at intervals from each other. There is an ordered geometry
of this continuum, and matter may be translated into this geometry
in terms of curvature.
Something more has happened here than the disappearance of absolute
space and time. These had already disappeared with the advent of a
relational theory of space and time. It is no more possible to get
evidence of an absolute motion from the standpoint of a relational
theory than it is from the standpoint of relativity. What the Michelson-Morley
experiment undertook to show was not the absolute motion of the earth
through space, but its motion through the stagnant ether that was
the accepted medium of light. But a new problem arose when Einstein
proved that, by any system of measurement which could be instituted,
the measurement of distances and times in a moving system from the
standpoint of a system at rest would give a different result from
that reached if the measurement took place within the moving system.
The yardstick in the moving system would be shorter and the time measured
would be longer. And this fell in with the transformations that Lorentz
found necessary if Maxwell's electro-magnetic equations were to be
rendered invariant. There was the same variation in the values of
space, time and energy; and there appeared the constant value of light,
which Einstein assumed for his measurement by signals. And this concurrent
speculation by physicist and mathematician exactly accounted for the
negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment. On this new hypothesis,
(41) not only was it shown that evidence of an absolute
motion was meaningless, but the process of measurement itself was
shown, when it involved moving objects, to be highly complex, and
to call for more complex mathematics and the genius of Einstein, who
showed that the accepted results of Newtonian mathematics were but
first approximations to more exact formulations. Thus the reduction
of the conditions under which the measurements of exact science are
made has been carried back of the structure of the space and time
that had hitherto been presupposed. And the same is true of matter.
The two attitudes with reference to matter which lie back of our perception
and our thought are indicated in the two definitions which Newton
gave of mass-as quantity of matter, and as the measure of inertia.
The first is not capable of scientific use, since it presupposes determination
of density; but it indicates a prevalent attitude of mind, the assumption
of something that has a nature within itself, that can be grasped
in independence of the relations into which it enters with other objects.
Inertia can be grasped only through the relations of a body to other
bodies. The attempt to define mass in terms of inertia leads to a
circle-mass is defined in terms of force and force defined in terms
of mass. It is necessary to presuppose a system in order to define
the objects that make up the system. But the conception of a physical
thing simply as that which occupies a certain volume, even if it did
not provide a determinable quantity of matter, at least appeared to
offer to the mind the objects out of which the system was to be built
up. We meet the same conception in the hypothetical body Alpha which
was suggested as located beyond the gravitational field, and as providing
a fixed physical entity from the standpoint of which the physical
universe could be oriented. If now we state the "what it is"
of a body in terms of energy, we are implying a system (42)
as there in advance of the objects that make up the system. We have
pushed our statement of the conditions which determine the nature
of objects back of the perceptual object, and back of the subperceptual
object of the Newtonian doctrine which merged so easily with perceptual
experience. And we have lost the conception of an environment, such
as that of the Newtonian space and Newtonian mass particles, within
which the affairs of the physical universe can go on. For a space-time
continuum does not provide such an environment. It is a metaphysical
world of things in themselves, to which there may be a reference in
the mathematical apparatus which we are obliged to use, but which
does not provide us with an environment. It lacks the characters that
are conferred upon an environment by an organism through its relationship
to it, and has a nature out of which both organism and environment
have arisen, and which may therefore be regarded as independent of
them. The world of the physical and chemical sciences provides the
conditions for life and the surroundings within which life may be
lived. Evidently a world that lies beyond possible experience cannot
be the environment of experience.
Nor can we regard two consentient sets moving with reference to each
other as standing in the relation of form and environment, though
the movement of one set confers upon the other a certain structure
due to that movement. The fact that either set may be regarded as
in motion, at least in so far as this change in structure is concerned,
would make the conception of form and environment inappropriate. What
we seek in the environment is a statement of the world out of which
the emergent has arisen, and consequently the conditions under which
the emergent must exist, even though this emergence has made a different
world through its appearance. Newtonian matter in Newtonian space
provided an original environment within which all(43)
changes took place, and Alexander presented space and time as such
an environment out of which emerged matter, qualities, life, mind
and deity. His philosophy was that of an emergent evolution, as the
biologist Morgan presented it.[2] It had the historical
sense which belonged to the period of evolution. Relativity does not
belong to that period. its more profound reductions of the exact conditions
of existence open no doors toward the past. The early attempt to give
it a metaphysical formulation eliminates change. It reduces time to
a dimension on a parity with those of space, and substitutes geometry
for history. Whitehead has indeed undertaken to preserve motion and
change within a relativistic universe. He would keep the different
time systems as perspectives in nature, but that he has avoided the
rigidity of the geometry of the space-time continuum I cannot see,
nor can I see how the ingression of eternal objects into events so
determined can open the door to the contingent.
But it is not in these early metaphysical precipitates that I am
interested. What does stand out from relativistic physical theory
is that the reduction of the conditions of change, or in this case
motion, has been carried so far back that change or motion itself
disappears. Nor do we reach a situation out of which the change arises
-- except in so far as we set up a metaphysical realm which cannot
be an environment within which the change takes place. On the contrary,
space-time becomes a reality of which change is a subjective reflection.
The same is true if we undertake to push back a theory of energy as
the "what it is" of the physical object to the situations
within which arise the objects which, as such, constitute the systems
within which energy may be measured. Ostwald suggested such a doctrine
(44) as this-that is he set up energy as a metaphysical
entity which does not as such come within the range of physical stuff,--
an entity that can constitute an object in advance of the systems
into which it can enter. Mass as quantity of matter offered such a
conception, though it was not subject to exact definition. Still,
it could be held in thought as the occupied volume, which exhibited
itself in the resistance of inertia, and hence could be held in thought
as a presupposition of the system of things. But an energy that can
take various forms and still remain the same loses this empirical
value. It can be presented in an object only in so far as a system
of that type is already there. There must be an electro-magnetic system
on hand to present an electron. To present a body whose content is
so much energy in advance of the system is to posit a metaphysical
realm which does not come within the range within which the scientist's
hypotheses operate. This offers no difficulty as long as the hypotheses
are occupied with the situations in which systems are already there.
The "what it is" of the object can be defined in terms of
the system. But the conception of energy as the nature of the physical
thing does not provide us with an environment within which we can
build up the system. Both the conceptions of relativity and of energy
as the nature of the physical thing indicate that we have pushed our
technique of exact measurement and our analysis beyond the point of
historicity, i.e., we cannot go back to such a logical beginning as
Alexander presented in his sweeping philosophy of emergence or evolution,
or if we do we must reach it in some metaphysical realm which transcends
scientific thought.
The striking fact is that these two phases of what I have called
the reduction of the conditioning of passage-the conditions of measurement
of that which is moving from the standpoint of that which is at rest-and
the implications (45) of accepting energy as the
"what it is" of the physical object -- I refer to the Larmor
and Lorentz transformations as the conditions of the invariance of
the Maxwell equations -- should have come to the same conclusion at
almost the same moment. The effect was to remove from the background
of scientific thought an independent space and time within which a
physical universe could be built up, and a matter which could be thought
of in logical independence of the systems of things which were built
up out of it. This background of historicity disappeared with relativity
and the electro-magnetic theory of matter. For Newton space was the
garment of God, and mass atoms were the preexistent building stones
out of which the world was constructed. The influence of such conceptions
as an absolute space and mass particles led to the search for reality
in causal series running back to ultimate entities that were the exactly
measurable conditions of present reality. It was not at all necessary
that such an implied absolute beginning should have been presupposed
in determinate thought, but the concepts carried with them a set of
mind that found reality in the conditions which, spread out, constitute
the absolute past. The disappearance of an absolute space and the
relegation of mass to a more general conception of energy emphasize
present scientific findings as the test and seat of reality.
Does the hypothesis of the preceding causal conditions fit into the
data of observation and the laboratory? As long as it accomplishes
this function its consonance with an ordered picture of a mechanical
process is of no importance. Any hypothesis such as a wave theory
of matter is welcome. Its test lies in its functioning. The set of
the scientific mind toward its reality is away from the past and toward
a present which carries within it the test of actual findings.
Yet we cannot desist from setting up histories; indeed (46)
they become more fascinating. Compare for instance the excitement
of Eddington's or Jeans' histories of stellar bodies with the monotony
of a Newtonian mechanical structure or the Kantian or Laplacean hypotheses.
But they carry with them no finality. We expect them to change with
new problems and with new findings, and we should be greatly disappointed
if they did not change. Nor do we expect them to become internally
more consistent as in the case of the deciphering of an obscure manuscript.
In scientific procedure there is no longer anything that conflicts
with new pasts arising with emergent events.
Endnotes
- This term with much of the exposition that follows is borrowsed
from Whitehead, "Principles of Natural Knowledge," 2nd
ed., chapter 3.
- Cf. Alexander, "Space, Time, and Deity," Book III and
Lloyd Morgan, "Emergent Evolution," chapter 1.
The content of this page is still protected
by copyright in the United States of America and can not be reproduced
for any purpose other than scholarship.
This hypertext page is copyrighted and represents
an official communication of The Mead Project. Copyright © 1996, 1997,
1998, 1999. The Mead Project. All rights reserved. While scholars are
permitted to reproduce these materials for the own private needs, no
part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording
or any information storage or retrieval system, for the purpose of profit
or personal benefit, without written permission from the Department
of Sociology at Brock University. Permission is granted for inclusion
of the electronic text of these pages, and their related images in any
index that provides free access to its listed documents.
Lloyd
Gordon Ward and Robert
Throop
The Mead Project, Department of Sociology, Brock University, St. Catharines,
Ontario, Canada L2S 3A1
(905) 688-5550 x 3455
|