New Wave Organicism

Description

Robert Hanna and Otto Paans:

"New wave organicism — whether in philosophy, the applied and fine arts, the formal and natural sciences, the human sciences, the social sciences and society, politics, or in radically enlightened, Kant-inspired, ecological civilization—says that everything flows, grows, reposes, and repurposes. According to this comprehensive view of humanity, nature, and the cosmos, then, the world is endlessly in a dynamic process of beginning, unfolding, resting, and then beginning again."

(https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/865/1597)

Discussion

Robert Hanna and Otto Paans:

"For if we are correct, then in a direct and spontaneous reaction to the economic, ecological, political, sociocultural, and spiritual depredations and devastations of The New Apocalypse, we are now also in the earliest stages of the second wave of organicist philosophy, aka, new wave organicism, which will finally bring to completion what the most brilliant and radical philosophy and formal-and-natural science of the early 20th century—first wave organicism (see sub-section 2.2 above)—initiated, before fascism, World War II, the Cold War, and The New Apocalypse all so violently intervened.

New wave organicism can be briefly defined in six words:

Everything flows, grows, reposes, and repurposes.

It is essential to recognize that this definition is not merely an updated version of Heraclitus’s famous dictum panta rhei, “everything flows.” Heraclitus is saying that the world is nothing but an undifferentiated “becoming” that never really “is”: a river you cannot really step into even once, much less twice. On the contrary, according to new wave organicism, “flows” means that everything belongs to a complex system of causally efficacious dynamic, natural processes; “grows” means that everything has a mode of activation, actualization, and kinetic energy; “reposes” means that everything has another mode of relative rest, power-in-reserve, and potential energy; and “repurposes” means that everything also has a further mode of “messy” creativity when it is temporarily dismantling some existing causal mechanism or mechanisms, in order to reconfigure it or them for new causal functions and operations.85So in its appeal not only to the metaphysics of process, but also to the metaphysics of causally efficacious actuality (aligned with activating immanent form or structure), potentiality (aligned with activated-or-able-to-be-activated matter or stuffing), and what Kant called natural purposes, especially including living organisms,86 new wave organicism is also in fact importantly neo-Aristotelian and contemporary Kantian. New wave organicism, then, is essentially a neo-Aristotelian and contemporary Kantian continuation of the first wave organicism that briefly appeared between 1900 and 1940 as an alternative to the natural mechanist aberrations of high modernism and scientism.87New wave organicism is a direct rejection of the scientistic mindset, that by a diametric contrast consists in a liberally naturalistic and pro-scientific, but also anti-mechanistic and anti-scientistic conception of the world, including ourselves. New wave organicism in the formal and natural sciences can be found, e.g., in new applications of intuitionist mathematics to modeling “time’s arrow,” i.e., its asymmetrically forward flow from the past to the future;89 in new work towards the unification of biology and physics; and by contemporary “processual” approaches to biology.91Above all, however, new wave organicism is committed to the metaphysical doctrine of liberal naturalism. Liberal naturalism says that the irreducible but also non-dualistic mental properties of rational minded animals are as basic in nature as biological properties, and metaphysically continuous with them. More precisely, according to liberal naturalism, rational human free agency is an immanent structure of essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring human animal mind; essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring human animal mind is an immanent structure of organismic life; and organismic life is an immanent structure of spatiotemporally asymmetric, non-equilibrium matter and/or energy flows. Each more complex structure is metaphysically continuous with, and embeds, all of the less complex structures.92Again, according to new wave organicism and its liberal naturalism, human freedom is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring human animal mind. And essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring human animal mind is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from life. Therefore, human freedom is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from life. Moreover, life is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from spatiotemporally asymmetric, non-equilibrium matter and/or energy flows. Therefore, human freedom, human mind, and life are all dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerge from spatiotemporally asymmetric, non-equilibrium matter and/or energy flows.

...

By now, it should be self-evidently clear that new wave organicism’s liberal naturalism is directly opposed to the doctrine of natural mechanism. The doctrine of natural mechanism, as we have seen, says that all the causal powers of everything whatsoever in the natural world are ultimately fixed by what can be digitally computed on a universal deterministic or indeterministic real-world Turing machine, provided that the following three plausible “causal orderliness” and “decompositionality” assumptions are all satisfied: (i) its causal powers are necessarily determined by the general deterministic or indeterministic causal natural laws, especially including the Conservation Laws, together with all the settled quantity-of-matter-and/or-energy facts about the past, especially including The Big Bang, (ii) the causal powers of the real-world Turing machine are held fixed under our general causal laws of nature, and (iii) the “digits” over which the real-world Turing machine computes constitute a complete denumerable set of spatiotemporally discrete physical objects. In direct opposition to natural mechanism, however, organicist philosophy’s liberal naturalism says that the causal powers of biological life (and in particular, the causal powers of living organisms, including all minded animals, especially including rational human animals) are neither fixed by, identical with, nor otherwise reducible to the Conservation-Law-determined, Big-Bang-caused, real-world-Tu r i n g-computable causal powers of thermodynamic systems, whether these causal powers are governed by general deterministic laws or general probabilistic/Statistical laws. So if new wave organicism’s liberal naturalism is true, then anti-mechanism is true and natural mechanism is false. It is essential to recognize that new wave organcism’s liberal naturalism does not postulate any supernatural, extra-spatiotemporal or sub-spatiotemporal, and essentially mysterious, aether-like and/or external divine causal force that somehow creates, designs, and guides the natural universe. On the contrary, new wave organicism’s liberal naturalism is radically agnostic,96 and also committed to the doctrine of what the early 20th century British process philosopher Samuel Alexander—following the Romantic poet Wordsworth—called natural piety.

Correspondingly, as we have mentioned, new wave organicism and its liberal naturalism fully conform to contemporary attempts to unify physics and biology, and to processual approaches to biology,100 as well as to processual approaches to chemistry and cognitive neuroscience, insofar as these are all construed in terms of the non-deterministic interpretation of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. In other words, organicist philosophy and its liberal naturalism take natural science seriously precisely because they reject natural mechanism. It is the outdated model of natural mechanism that can no longer serve as a workable paradigm for scientific activity. To be a new wave organicist philosopher and a liberal naturalist, is to integrate physics and processual approaches to biology—especially including organismic biology and eco-systemic biology—and chemistry, and finally, cognitive neuroscience, in an essentially anti-mechanistic manner. So, we are hereby directly challenging the natural mechanist approach to science: why must all the basic sciences be interpreted in accordance with natural mechanism?

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Along with Steward, we believe that we are at the beginning of a neo-organicist revolution in philosophy, the applied and fine arts, the formal and natural sciences, the human sciences, the social sciences and society, politics, and civilization itself, that is fully comparable to Kant’s 18th century “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy. Kant’s Copernican Revolution says that in order to explain rational human cognition and authentic a priori knowledge, we must hold that necessarily, the manifestly real world structurally conforms to our minds, rather than the converse. The neo-organicist revolution, in turn, says that the real possibility of human consciousness, cognition, caring, rationality, and free agency, and therefore also the “Copernican” necessary structural conformity of world-to-mind, provided that we actually do exist, is built essentially into the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of organismic life, and necessarily underdetermined by any and all naturally-mechanical processes and facts. Hence the neo-organicist revolution in philosophy, the fine and applied arts, the formal and natural sciences, the human sciences, the social sciences and society, politics, and civilization itself, not only includes Kant’s Copernican Revolution, but also goes one full revolutionary cycle beyond it. "

(https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/865/1597)

More information

• R. Hanna, ‘The Organicist Conception of the World: A Manifesto’ (February 2020 version), available online at URL =<https://www.academia.edu/41944911/The_Organicist_Conception_of_the_World_A_Manifesto_February_2020_version_>.

• Periodicity of Philosophical Revolutions