by Jon Fennell
Like much of my thinking and
nearly all of my writing in recent years, my ruminations on emergence grow out
of repeated encounters with Personal
Knowledge by Michael Polanyi. For readers of a certain sort, the final
chapter and closing sections of this book, which offer a dramatic chronicle of
emergence (of life as well as of the universe generally), are extremely moving.
For those who have been repeatedly disappointed by various reputed sources of
meaning, Polanyi’s emergent account, founded on his unique epistemology and supported
by his confessedly circular account of justification, is a much appreciated
oasis in a vast and often baneful wasteland.
In 2012 I wrote
a Polanyi-informed review (published in 2013) of Thomas Nagel’s strikingly
honest Mind and Cosmos. During this
enterprise it became clear that emergence was at the heart of Nagel’s atheistic
account of a meaningful universe. But, while emergence is centrally important
to both Polanyi and Nagel, Polanyi’s account is richer and more complex (though
not for that reason necessarily more accurate). A comparative analysis of their
underlying conceptions of emergence would have been quite fruitful in
identifying their differing presuppositions. Alas, the review was already
substantially beyond the allowable length for the journal in which I aimed for
it to appear. So, rather than pursue the discussion, I simply noted its
importance and implied that I might return to it at a later time.
As Polanyi and
kindred authorities invite us to do, in the months that followed I remained
open to new ideas and possibilities, allowing them freely to incubate when they
arose. One such episode began when in late 2013 I read an essay by David
Bentley Hart in First Things, titled ‘Emergence
and Formation’. What most struck me in Hart’s article was his forthright rejection
of the logic of emergence. Persistently piqued by Hart’s position, a new
inquiry began to take shape. In the disarray that typically accompanies such
preliminary reflection, one thing was beyond question: Polanyi was to be the
vehicle by which I would move ahead.
For Hart,
emergence is the ‘idea that in nature there are composite realities whose
peculiar properties and capacities emerge from the interaction of their
elements, even though those properties and capacities do not reside as such in
those elements themselves’. He states that one such instance of (alleged)
emergence is water: both hydrogen and oxygen are combustible, but water, formed
by the conjunction of the two elements, is well known for its use in extinguishing
fire. Hart argues that it is manifestly false to say that water is not
reducible to its constituent elements. To say so is to ‘confus[e]
irreducibility with identity…water’s resistance to combustion is not identical with any property resident in
either hydrogen or oxygen molecules, but it is most definitely reducible to those special molecular
properties that, in a particular combination, cause hydrogen and oxygen to
negate one another’s combustible propensities’. He concludes, ‘At the purely
material level, whatever is emergent is also reducible to that from which it
emerges; otherwise, “emergence” is merely the name of some kind of magical
transition between intrinsic disparate realities’.
I should
quickly add that Hart is by no means a materialist, and his full position
includes a critical role, as a formal cause, for the soul. Equally interesting
is that Polanyi was a world-class chemist. But he is a chemist who
enthusiastically embraces emergence, even, in the non-sentient domain. Take,
for example, a clock. Insofar as it keeps time, the clock (which manifestly is
composed of atoms, molecules, minerals, etc.) is, in light of what it does, fundamentally
and ontologically different from the elements of which it is constructed. The
clock, says Polanyi, is an instance of a lower level (here, a level well
described by physics and chemistry) being seized by a higher level (the
‘operational principle’ measuring and telling time) and turned to its purpose. Polanyi
invites us to recognize similar relations, in a hierarchical scale, between chemistry
and biology, biology and physiology, physiology and (a healthy) body, the body
and the intellect, and the intellect and moral and spiritual excellence. Polanyi’s
emergentist account may be a corrective to the accounts offered by Nagel and
Hart. It is, in any event, a comprehensive picture, given that Polanyi,
consistent with evolutionary theory, but in vehement opposition to the claims of
natural selection, explains in terms of emergence not only the appearance of
life but also the wholly implausible but altogether remarkable existence of
truth, beauty, and the good. In Polanyi’s grand drama, we find ourselves in a
universe that is unfolding according to intrinsic ordering principles that,
under suitable circumstances, are capable of actualizing a potential that was
there from the beginning.
In coming to
terms with and then writing on Polanyi’s emergentist philosophy, I soon
realized that there already exists a literature on this subject. There is,
moreover, a vast literature on emergence that preceded and extends beyond
Polanyi. There is a reason for this. The human mind, in pursuit of the truth,
is rationally led to consider emergentism. One suspects there is no other way
to explain the world in which we live.
Jon M. Fennell is professor emeritus and
formerly Dean of Social Sciences at Hillsdale College. Author of numerous
studies on Michael Polanyi, he has also published widely on the philosophical
dimensions of politics and education through essays on figures ranging from
Rousseau, Dewey, and Rorty to Leo Strauss, Harry Jaffa, and C. S. Lewis.
No comments:
Post a Comment