Reflections on Life and Mind, Part Two

Reduction, Emergence, Form

§10 We are today unlikely properly to appreciate quite how enormous an intellectual revolution the invention of the mechanical philosophy was. It was, for both good and ill, a truly epochal triumph of human theoretical imagination over the manifest and universal testimony of common sense. Accustomed as we are to thinking of the physical cosmos as a machine, essentially devoid of any of the special properties of mental agency—such as intentionality and intrinsic unity—we are likely to see the older understanding of causality not as a diverse but coherent set of rational relations, but only as a fairly cumbersome speculative system irrationally imposed upon the constant succession of mindless forces acting on brute mass that obviously—obviously—composes our world. But, in fact, it is we who have been taught to believe in a world contrary to the one we experience. It was entirely natural, and even perhaps inevitable, for Aristotelian tradition to presume that the same order of rationales typical of thought and agency also sustains the coherence of nature. Certainly this must be so of nature as it exists in consciousness—and in what other way do we imagine nature could exist?—and there is no good reason to suspect that the rich phenomenal palette of our experience of the world dissembles another, more primordial world, prior to ordered form and devoid of phenomenal qualities. The principal “aetiological” question for, say, Aristotelian tradition was not merely how one physical force becomes the occasion for another, but also what the rational relations are within which those forces operate as part of a single order of forms, meanings, powers, and dispositions. Within that vision of things, in which mind was the model for nature, the mechanistic philosophy was unthinkable. Consciousness is unified and mechanism, by definition, is not; and so the mechanistic world is one in which actual intrinsic unities—as opposed to extrinsic integrations—do not exist. In fact, even a unified principle or ground for such integration is impossible in such an order; all that is visible to the mechanistic gaze are accidental events of composition, confluent lines of force, persisting amalgams, but not substances governed by inherent rationales. Nowhere is there even, in any meaningful sense, a place for organism as an intrinsic reality—a place for form.