Back in May, I shared an essay developing an approach to metaphysics that grows out of several years of dialogue with the evolutionary biologist and biophilosopher Timothy Jackson. The challenge is to think not only nature but thinking itself as ontogenesis—that is, as an evolutionary process. I received several penetrating comments in response that I continue to contemplate.
On Genesis
The central issue is not simply whether Hegel is right, or whether we can derive a more empirically grounded metaphysics than absolute idealism from Darwin’s humble hypothesis of descent with variation. I agree with Charles Taylor that Hegel’s treatment of historical evolution is “disastrous.” By my lights what we are in urgent need of today is the healthy progeny of a happy marriage between the best of absolute idealism and radical empiricism. The crux is whether reality is finally intelligible as a self-enclosed rational substance, or whether every approximation to closure is an aesthetic achievement constructed within a wider, plural, unruly process of genesis that no system can finally contain.
I have since been invited to present at the next meeting of the Agential Biology Institute. This article serves in part as my preparation for that talk. Perhaps it will also be of interest to some of you!
What follows is an attempt to once again gather my thoughts on the topic of evolution. I want to argue that the agential turn in biology, of which Stuart Kauffman has been among the most prophetic instigators, cannot be quarantined within biology alone. It demands a speculative renovation of our basic categories in two directions at once: downward, into physics, so that we come to see that the supposedly universal, context-independent laws and constants of mechanics are special abstractions from a wider historical flux of cosmogenesis; and upward, into theology, so that “God”—or the origin of intelligibility that anyone who cares about truth, goodness, or beauty must presuppose in some sense or another—ceases to be conceived as an impassive eternal engineer who stamps the gears on a finished clock-work world, and becomes instead something more like an eternally evolving embryo.
In my maybe mad mind, these two movements are inseparable. “The way up and the way down are the same way,” as Heraclitus put it. To historicize physics is to deny that there exists any pre-determined state space from which the future of the universe could be deduced. And to deny a final blueprint is also to transform what we might mean by the word “God.” To deny a pre-determined state space and so a deducible future is not only to deny our knowledge of the future, but also God’s.
The Reality of the Possible and the Closure of Constraints
Kauffman affirms that reality is made of more than what is actual. Or you might say less than what is actual, if the possible is precisely what is not. As Plato put it in the Sophist: “Not-being is a sort of being.” But the cannot and the not yet refer to different universes of possibility: to the eternally impossible or inconsistent and the futurity of the probable, respectively. Possibility is both already formed and forever fluxing. It throws being into becoming just as it gathers becoming into beings. Whitehead quotes Plato’s seemingly contradictory line several time in his corpus:
“…the notions of negation and of inference can be derived from that of inconsistency. Thus the whole movement of logic is provided for. We may notice that this basis for logic suggests that the notion of frustration is more akin to finite mentality; while the notion of harmonious conjunction is derived from the concept of a monistic universe. It is for philosophy to coördinate the two aspects which the world presents.
…this basis for logic enlightens our understanding of process, which is a fundamental fact in our experience. We are in the present; the present is always shifting; it is derived from the past; it is shaping the future; it is passing into the future. This is process, and in the universe it is an inexorable fact.
But if all things can be together, why should there be process? One answer to this question embodies a denial of process. According to this answer process is mere appearance, devoid of significance for ultimate reality. This solution seems to me to be very inadequate. How can the unchanging unity of fact generate the delusion of change? Surely, the satisfactory answer must embody an understanding of the interweaving of change and permanence, each required by the other. This interweaving is a primary fact of experience. It is at the base of our concepts of personal identity, of social identity, and of all sociological functionings.
Meanwhile, another aspect of the relationship between inconsistency and process must now occupy us. Inconsistency is the fact that the two states of things which constitute the respective meanings of a pair of propositions cannot exist together. It denies a possible conjunction between these meanings. But these meanings have been brought together in the very judgment of inconsistency. This is the sort of perplexity that Plato alluded to, when he makes one of his characters say, ‘Not-being is a sort of being.’” (Modes of Thought, 52-53).
Language fails at the limits of its own negation. Possibilities, too, are real, and without being actual. Mechanistic physicalism is uninitiated into the coherent contradictions of possibility. It remains inadequate to the creative fact of evolution, wrongly imagining that possibilities exist only as a pre-specified state space, as if all of natural history was merely a complicated trajectory through a list of optional moves already laid out in advance. This assumption is explicit in Newtonian mechanics and persists in epistemological form in statistical-mechanical accounts of probability. Classical physicalism knows only deducible futures or calculable frequencies. Kauffman has argued cogently that, in its old mechanistic mode, natural science cannot account for the open-ended evolution of the biosphere.1
His point about Darwinian exaptations remains decisive as a refutation of mechanistic biology. Evolving organisms are not browsing a prix fixe menu of morphologies. Kauffman argues life creates its own adjacent possibilities and then wanders into some subset of them, which enable the next in turn. The possible functions of an organ or protein cannot be determined in advance of organismic becoming, whether agential, accidental, or both. To borrow an image from Whitehead, Kauffman’s affirmation of “Kantian wholes” throws a match into the powder keg, blowing up the whole mechanistic neo-Darwinian workshop. An organism is a Kantian whole, a being whose parts produce one another for the sake of the whole. As Kauffman frequently reminds us, our beating hearts have countless causal consequences, but only a subset of them contributes to keeping us alive. A function is not an isolable property of a part (like a “selfish gene”), since it can only be defined in relation to the organism for whom it matters, and in relation to the environments it inhabits.
The philosophical idea of a Kantian whole has been given a rigorous natural scientific articulation by Montévil, Mossio, and others (see especially 2015, 2016). Their distinction between “generic” and “specific” objects captures something important. The theoretical objects of physics are said to be generic in the sense that they obey the same equations under the relevant idealizations. Every electron or hydrogen atom is treated as identical, with their historical individuation bracketed.2 Organisms, by contrast, are specific objects, meaning they are historically individuated beings whose phase spaces are unprestatable, who each to varying degrees qualitatively differ from others and even from themselves across development. Organisms constantly undergo functional transformations of constraints that alter the terms by which their prior organization might have been defined. Biological organization, on M&M’s account, becomes legible to scientific theorization as a special exception that within carefully defined limits can still be lawfully modeled in terms of a “closure of constraints.”
M&M distinguish open energetic process from the relative stability of forms of constraint that channel those processes at relevant time scales. In physics, constraints (eg, an inclined plane) are often externally given and independent of the processes they constrain.3 In organisms, constraints are always inseparable from the processes they constrain. Closure is their term for the mutual dependence or community of causality whereby constraints maintain processes that maintain constraints. Organizational closure is never complete, else organisms would be immortal and incapable of evolution. Thermodynamic openness and organizational closure are intended to be complementary concepts. The organism persists not by remaining the same object shaped by the same symmetries but by metamorphosizing from one regime of closure to another. An organism is an improvised melody that survives by resonating with (modifying and being modified by) its environment, not a rock that persists by resisting alteration.
Historicizing Physics
In their earlier work, Montévil and Mossio offer an epistemology of biology. They mark the living being as a distinctive kind of scientific object, protecting biology from reduction to physics by showing that biological symmetries are local and historically contingent. But they do not take the further speculative step into evolutionary cosmology by asking whether the supposedly ahistorical generic objects of physics are themselves abstractions from a deeper history, emergent products of our specific cosmic epoch rather than eternal givens. They historicize biology to distinguish it from physics. The Whiteheadian move I am proposing is that we learn from biology how to historicize physics.4
This does not mean physics should abandon mathematical idealization. Physics has earned its tremendous theoretical and technological power by modeling many phenomena as if they were ahistorical. Recognizing that physics, too, is historical—in both senses, ie, as natural history itself and as the history of physics as a science—just means never forgetting that we are working with idealizations. The success of the method has seduced many physicalists into mistaking a successful method for a finished ontology. Nature is not a bloodless dance of numbers. From the standpoint of a speculative biology enlarged into an organic cosmology, the law-like regularities that physics discovers are better understood as widespread habits, stable routes of inheritance, enduring societies, or patterns of process that have achieved such depth of repetition that they appear ageless to us. Each electron seems interchangeable with every other electron not because it stands outside history but because what Whitehead calls “the electromagnetic society” is among the most generic social habits shaping our cosmic epoch, enormously stable relative to our biological lifespans, but still an achievement of evolutionary becoming and not an eternal design imposed from beyond it.
Eternal Objects, Novel Possibilities, and a Propositional Proposal
When Kauffman insists on the indefiniteness of possibility prior to ingression, he does not just mean that possibilities are undefined prior to measurement. He means that they do not yet exist. Adjacent possibility is not a region of extended space we have failed to chart. It is, if you want, a result of spaciation, ie, possibility being created by the very creature that prehends it.
If this is right, then the dream of modern science (whether in its Baconian empirical or Cartesian rational self-conceptions) to achieve total domination of nature is not merely difficult but impossible in principle. If nature is evolutionary through and through, it cannot be exhaustively predicted and controlled. The appropriate, truly scientific posture is therefore not instrumental or representational mastery but participation, that is, relational collaboration with a democracy of fellow creatures we can commune with but cannot command. Agential biology is, in this sense, an example of what it looks like when natural science takes its own creaturely participation seriously as a condition of its knowing and its being.
In Process and Reality, Whitehead distinguishes eternal objects, “pure potentials,” or “forms of definiteness” from propositions, which he calls “impure potentials,” or “matters of fact in potential determination” (PR 22). His organic concept of propositions is far more expansive than the usual idea of a logical proposition. For instance, in Whitehead’s universe, even oysters entertain propositions (as Isabelle Stengers once told Richard Rorty). Whitehead proposes that in the becoming of the world, while novel propositions are created continually, “there are no novel eternal objects.” That is, there are no new pure potentials, but there are genuinely new propositions. So in Whitehead’s terms, I would refer to Kauffman’s unprestatable possibilities not as new eternal objects, but as new propositions.
A proposition is a hybrid of actuality and possibility. Organisms prehend propositions, feeling not only what is (conformal propositions) but also relevant alternatives, including what cannot be as well as what might be but is not yet. Propositions function as proposals, as “lures for feeling.” As Whitehead famously says, a proposition may be more important for being interesting than for being true (PR 259). Novelty flows into the cosmos through nonconforming propositions. On this Whiteheadian reading, an exaptation does not require a new eternal object. It is a new proposition: a novel actual situation has emerged in which definite forms take on novel relevance and thus function as fresh lures. Whitehead’s own phrase is as precise a translation of biological exaptation as we could ask for:
“When a non-conformal proposition is admitted into feeling…a novelty has emerged into creation. The novelty may promote or destroy order; it may be good or bad. But it is new, a new type of individual, and not merely a new intensity of individual feeling. … [It introduces] a new form into the actual world; or, at least, an old form in a new function.” (PR 187)
This lets us affirm the undeducibility of the adjacent possible without having to conjure the new out of nothing. The relevant function is new even if the possibility as such is not. While Whitehead forbids novel eternal objects, in his Harvard lectures, Whitehead is recorded as saying that the ingression of eternal objects casts the shadow of truth back upon eternity, so that the actualization of a possibility does not merely realize a fixed form but enriches the realm of forms by determining a relevance it did not antecedently possess (HL1 75). Eternity is then not diminished by history but enhanced through it. The trans-spatial gains its concrete relevance only in and through the actual occasions that prehend it. So the adjacent possible is genuinely created at the extensive level, while at the intensive level it comes with graduated eligibility; and that intensive grading is itself enriched, occasion by occasion, by the very actualizations it solicits. Permanence and flux, once again, each requiring the other.
Ruyerian Resonances
I want to hint at a resonance with Raymond Ruyer, the great thinker of the genesis of form whose work was deeply marked by his engagement with Whitehead. Ruyer argued that genuine forms are not assembled from parts in space, partes extra partes, but are unified through a non-localizable “absolute survey” (survol absolu). An embryo is his paradigm case: it is not an assemblage of parts but a division from wholeness. It is not built by external molecular machinery alone but by axiological lures that allow it to hold itself together as a self-enjoying process of unification. Ruyer is often cast as a Platonist who lodges form in an eternal trans-spatial realm that simply preforms the development that organisms perform. But I think this is a caricature of a far more nuanced position. Yes, like Whitehead, he affirms form has a sort of permanence that is irreducible to physical flux. But Ruyer’s trans-spatial domain does not preform organisms like a blueprint preforms a house.
While I am only just beginning to study his work in any depth, I believe Ruyer’s concept of “themes” rhymes with Whitehead’s propositions. For Ruyer, organisms and indeed all true forms are governed not by efficient pushes alone but by themes, which are axiological lures, values felt trans-spatially or vertically that orient an organism’s becoming without mechanically determining it via a horizontal exchange of force. A theme solicits development rather than dictating it. Like a proposition, it functions as a lure rather than a law.
Ruyer also insists that even physical processes of individuation like atoms and molecules must be understood as self-surveying organisms rather than as heaps of externally related parts. Like Whitehead, then, he sought to organicize physics from below, recognizing that apparent mechanism is the limit case of a living agency that in diminishing degrees goes all the way down. He is thus a fellow traveler in both directions: downward, dissolving the mechanistic picture of physics into a graded panpsychism of self-forming organisms; and upward, since for Ruyer the trans-spatial linkage of all themes finally requires a divine embryogenesis in which they might cohere.
I must admit that on further reflection, Ruyer’s themes may sit closer to Whitehead’s eternal objects than to his propositions. Both are trans-actual forms of value that solicit rather than compel. Both find their unity not in extended space but in a divine survey, which Whitehead specifies as the primordial nature’s conceptual prehension and valuation of the whole multiplicity of pure potentials. The decisive difference is dipolarity. Ruyer effectively fuses God with Creativity, so that the divine is at once agent and ideal: a single trans-spatial surveyor in whom the themes are held and from whom they radiate vertically into the forms that participate them. Whitehead refuses the fusion. Creativity is his Ultimate, and God its primordial creature. And he adds a consequent nature, so that the conceptual valuation of eternal objects is only one pole of the divine life, deficiently actual on its own and inert until completed by God’s reception of the achieved world. This means that the lure of a theme or proposal cannot descend as a pure verticality from the ideal; it becomes effective only through ingression into actual occasions and entrance into historical actualization, where it is physically prehended by the consequent nature. Ruyer’s God can solicit form from above; Whitehead’s God can lure only by passing through the suffering of the world it lures, so that every ideal is mediated, and made relevant anew, by the cumulative history it helps to compose.
Theogenesis
If there is no pre-stated state space, no final blueprint, no Theory of Everything, then we must rethink not only physics and biology but theology. Reductive physicalism turns local idealizations of closed systems into an absolute causal reduction base. Intelligent design patches local mechanistic limitations (eg, fine-tuning, origin of life, specified information, etc.) by appeal to a transcendent demiurge. Both mistake the mechanistic abstraction for concrete reality. My imaginative proposal is to speculatively expand what Montévil and Mossio mean by organizational closure. It is important to emphasize immediately that “closure” is always relative, never complete; it is not the conservation of a fixed set of components or constraints but the continual achievement of a community of causality through the alteration, breakdown, and acquisition of new constraints.
What happens if we take this biological insight and cosmologize it? Cosmogenesis is organization writ large, closure cosmologized, but emphatically not as closure finally achieved. Whitehead’s evolutionary panentheism intimately relates while keeping functionally distinct 1) Creativity, 2) God, and 3) the creaturely world.
Creativity is the principle of unrest that assures no form is final, and that prevents even God from knowing the future in its full concreteness.
God is both the Erotic intensity seeking novel varieties of experiential unification amidst creative unrest (the primordial nature), and the Agapic tenderness holding space for the perpetual failure of creaturely closure (the consequent nature). Death is not a flaw but a feature of creative flux. Without death there could be no life, no value, no meaning, and ultimately no love. Not to mention no evolution. At best, the dipolar divine function contributes to the evolutionary realization of tragic beauty rather than meaningless waste. Whitehead:
“Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience. … The worship of God is not a rule of safety it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.” (Science and the Modern World, 192).
Whitehead is explicit that the primordial nature of God is not a finite state space or set of eternal objects stored in a Platonic freezer. It is blind appetition adding an incline to the multiplicity of infinite possibilities, thereby grading relevant potentials for finite creaturely becomings, providing axiological definiteness without spatiotemporal determination. The consequent nature of God is the recollection of the world’s proliferation, the preservation and integration of finite satisfactions into an ever-diversifying, ever-lastingly immediate harmony of harmonies, a raucous jazz ensemble and not a museum archive. We can only hear God’s whispers in the silence between our words, in the pause after a period. That silence sways the songs of poets and sends scientists in search of deeper truths. It turns lovers into parents and children into men and women. There’s a crack in everything, even the stars; and so the stars are the fountain-veins of the divine (h/t Leonard Cohen and Jakob Böhme). God transforms the absence of the possible into the intelligible fullness of creaturely life.
This panentheist—or better, pangentheist—relation between God and world is not the external relation of a potter to clay or an engineer to an artifact (at least as we abstractly imagine these crafts: the best potters and engineers are the first to admit they are as much made by their materials as the reverse). It is not the relation of a King to His subjects, but of kin with one another. “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’?” (John 10:34). The God-world relation is the internal, mutually constitutive relation of gestation. There is no creatio ex nihilo—no unilateral fabrication or paternal parthenogenesis of the matter and form of the world by a deistic dictator. There is mutual immanence: a soul and its world growing together, an embryogenesis with no pre-given adult form from which it proceeded or toward which it is obliged to develop.
It is worth dwelling on how thoroughly this image confounds classical theology. Our traditions almost always cast God as parent, as Father or (less often under patriarchy) as Mother, and we creatures as dependent children. But process theology offers an embryogenic God, re-imagining the divine life as an ongoing gestation rather than as a judging father standing over its helpless offspring. The classical image must be turned inside out, which it turns out isn’t that far from the central mystery of Christianity: God is a gestating child. And we, along with the whole proliferating democracy of fellow creatures, are the contributing cells out of which the divine embryo takes form. We do not merely receive our being from a finished God but contribute to God’s becoming. The consequent nature grows by what we give, and shrivels by what we withhold.
Classical theists will accuse me of impiety for this inversion. Forgive me for the immodesty, but in addition to being more mature5, I think this is a more faithful reading of the incarnation, of a God who can no longer be imagined as impassive but who suffers with the world, and who redeems it not by rapturing the chosen few to heaven but by dressing everyone’s wounds so we might keep growing together here and now. To paraphrase Meister Eckhart, what good is it to us that Mary gave birth to God two thousand years ago, if we do not also give birth to God in our time and in our culture?
Whitehead:
“The good of the Universe cannot lie in indefinite postponement. The Day of Judgment is an important notion: but that Day is always with us. … [Our task] is to render the Day of Judgment a success, now.” (Adventures of Ideas, 269)
Like all artists, a gestating God genuinely risks something in co-creating. Our valuations and our refusals, our love and our lies, are the nutrients and the toxins in the womb of divine embryogenesis. We contribute to God’s growth or decay. The stakes of creaturely action are raised to an almost unbearable height by this thought. No longer are human beings simply tasked with the salvation of their own souls. Every actual occasion of experience is another cell in the divine fetus, knit together concrescence by concrescence, mitosis by mitosis, out of the cumulative achievements and failures of cosmic and biological and human history. The ecological catastrophe is then not merely a wound to the biosphere but harm being done to the tissue of the divine child. To pangentheize Paul (Romans 8:18-23):
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the divine child to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the false will of human egos too proud to perform their part, so that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of growing together into the divine child. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption into the divine embryo, the redemption of our bodies.
To call God a gestating child is, of course, to speak a “likely story,” not a final theory. It is a mythic image offered in the same spirit as Plato’s Timaeus, where Nous negotiates with Anankē and learns to dance with Khōra. I do not propose it as a doctrine that blocks further inquiry but as a lure to pry it open, to remind us of the value of truth and the beauty of goodness. The divine, like every organism, has a history. God is not recollecting childhood from the standpoint of old age, though. God is perpetually born in and through us, continually improvising, cell by cell, occasion by occasion, up and down the spiral genesis of evolution.
This is my pangentheist proposal: the God-world relation as an open-ended process of embryogenesis. God is not a finished totality but the goad and growing memory of an incompletion in process of production. There is no final concrescence, and no one completed set of actual occasions, because “we can never survey the actual world except from the standpoint of an immediate concrescence that is already falsifying the presupposed completion” (PR 211). The same applies to God. The divine is not a frozen bud on an eternal rosebush, not the closure of the cosmic circle, but a lure amidst creative unrest that keeps the blossoms blooming.
Kauffman and Plato on Eros and Logos
Kauffman new book Origins: Cosmos, Life, Mind (he discussed the ideas in it with Curt Jaimungal earlier this year) seems to me to carry us to the threshold of such a process theological vision. In recent statements of his argument in a Noema interview, Kauffman names what he calls the “Third Transition” in science. Beyond the classical and quantum paradigms, both of which still presuppose a prestated phase space, lies what he calls a domain of no entailing law, the unprestatable becoming of the evolving biosphere. He has begun to draw the theological consequences himself. The first words of Genesis, he observes, can be read in two tenses: God created, past tense, conjures the transcendent deist God of the Enlightenment, the engineer who finishes the world and withdraws; or God creates in a continuous present as an immanent God we can become with. The sacred, he suggests, is not a completed order but the act of becoming itself, an invitation to co-creative participation that resonates, as he himself notes, with process theologies.
Three cheers for all this! Kauffman dismantles the idolatrous machine god and affirms the God who grows and groans alongside us. There is one place where I would seek to nuance his tale, though. Kauffman offers a genealogy of the ancient Greek terms Eros and Logos: Eros is linked to unpredictable creativity, to the domain of no entailing law, while Logos is reduced to deductive logic. He blames Plato, that terrible totalizer, for allegedly absorbing Eros into Logos, pegging him as the ancestor of mechanistic physics. Kauffman wants to rescue Eros from Logos. I want something subtler: to recover Logos alongside an Eros it cannot finally do without. I’ve already addressed what I take to be flattened readings of Timaeus in this post:
Plato's Self-Moving Image of Eternity
Plato’s texts are as pluripotent as it gets. The Timaeus seeds both the later theories of preformation and epigenesis without itself settling into either as a positive theory. Preformation is there, obviously: the demiurge looking to an eternal model to craft the cosmos as an image of intelligible order. But epigenesis is there too, right at the khôra of the text, if you will: wandering winnower, receptacle, wet-nurse of becoming, generative matrix, the unruly condition without which order would have no place in which to be born.
Logos is not a cold engineer mind designing from a distance. From Heraclitus and Philo through Plotinus and Maximus the Confessor, Logos is described as fluid, living, relational, ever-new, and indeed, as carnal. There is good reason Chinese Bibles render Logos as Tao. The Logos I want to resuscitate is not the frozen blueprint but the erotic axiology of possibility itself. Logos so understood is not the enemy of the adjacent possible but its condition of possibility: the grading of relevance by which the indefinite becomes, not a set of pre-determined variables, but a relevant field of viable next steps. Eros without Logos is selfish yearning; Logos without Eros is dead deduction; birthing the Living Word has always required their marriage.
It is true that Plato’s dialogue contains an image of demiurgic design, of a craftsman-god who looks to the eternal Forms as a model and fashions the cosmos as a copy. Kauffman is right to see in that image the seed of the engineering paradigm. But the demiurge is not the dialogue’s main character, nor is that Plato’s final theory of cosmic construction. As John Sallis shows in his book Chorology (1999), the account given in the first discourse—the artisan-god producing the visible kosmos as a representation of the intelligible order—is interrupted and must begin again. Plato’s character, the astronomer Timaeus, encounters an aporia and is forced to set the first beginning aside as inadequate. What forces the re-beginning is an encounter with the khōra, the Receptacle, the “third kind” that mediates between being and becoming, that always appears but never as itself, fleeing as Nous approaches it. Khōra is at once the nurturing mother of all becoming and a fugitive from formalization that no calculation can capture.
These false starts are not a matter of Plato’s compositional clumsiness. The structure of the dialogue deliberately performs the impossibility of preformation. The cosmos cannot be deduced from the Forms as by uninterrupted derivation, because the eidetic order, ironically, is only given a place by that which also displaces it: the form of formlessness, the wet-nurse of becoming that provides the blue ink and paper for every design. The demiurgic image is a constant temptation to hubris. The khōric interruption is the humbling cure. As Sallis sees it, in Timaeus the basic distinction between the intelligible and the sensible is at once proposed and disrupted. Plato, in other words, did not deliver us settled doctrines but inscribed into his cosmology the recognition that no account of genesis can close upon itself. We are capable only of eikotes mythoi, telling tales that must remain provisional not only because their subject is a becoming and not a finished being, but because in telling them we participate in their creation. Read this way, the Timaeus cannot be the founding charter of an engineering paradigm that it already pre-empts. Plato becomes less the totalizer Kauffman seeks to transcend than an ancestor of the participatory cosmology we are both trying to recover.
Here’s the dialogue at the Agential Biology Institute after I presented these ideas:
Form and Flux: Agential Topics Presentation Discussion
This is a transcript of the discussion portion of my presentation for the Agential Biology Institute last night. A fuller treatment of the ideas I shared is available in this article ⤵️
[Update]: as usual, Ben Snyder has chimed in with exactly the right questions about the comparison between Whitehead and Kauffman that I’m trying to make. Here’s the exchange:
Some may object that our inability to predict which exaptation will occur is a fact about the limits of human knowledge, not about the absence of entailment in evolution. For example, a double pendulum is unpredictable too, yet its behavior remains wholly deterministic in principle. In Process and Reality Whitehead distinguishes statistical from non-statistical grounds of probability. A statistical judgment presupposes a settled ground or defined population of comparable instances over which frequencies can be taken. That ground is itself an achievement of a stable societal order, a cosmic epoch whose habits supply the reference class. But there are situations in which no such ground exists, because the space of alternatives is not yet constituted. Here judgment must proceed non-statistically, by the felt relevance of unrealized possibility to the case at hand, not by counting instances in a pre-given sample. I’d argue that biological becoming is non-statistical in this technical Whiteheadian sense: the unprestatable is not the not-yet-counted but the not-yet-constituted-as-countable. The double pendulum’s phase space is fixed, its outcomes drawn from a pre-given set of potentials; its unpredictability is epistemic. An exaptation’s unpredictability is non-statistical and generative: there is no antecedent measure because the relevant outcome space comes into being with the innovation. This is not a conflation of the epistemic with the ontic but the recognition that where there is no settled ground there can be no statistical fact of the matter to which our ignorance might be relative. The absence of a probability measure is not a gap in our deductivist knowledge but the positive signature of a process that is generating its own next possibilities.
Whitehead holds that “any item of the universe, however preposterous as an abstract thought, or however remote as an actual entity, has its own gradation of relevance, as prehended, in the constitution of any one actual entity” (PR 148). Where extensive measurement fails, where we cannot count instances in a settled sample space, there remains intensive ordering: a graded relevance of possibilities, weighted by their appetitive pull on the becoming occasion, even when they cannot be enumerated or assigned a frequency. Thus the absence of a statistical measure is not the absence of all order. The indefinite is not formless chaos but comes intensively ordered by its relevance for each novel occasion before it is extensively structured into probabilities. This is why Whitehead insists that “apart from God there could be no relevant novelty”: the primordial nature is this graded ordering of unrealized possibility, the “intensive relevance” that makes some next steps erotically eligible and others negligible. Scientific quantification of the extensive stabilizes the intensive and remains valid within a settled epoch. But it is silent at the creative edges where new possibilities are constituted. There is a deeper, intensive intelligibility that statistical methods presuppose but cannot calculate.
In this sense, Wheeler’s idea that there is really only one electron in the universe is not a discovery about nature but an extrapolation from the formal requirements of effective theorization.
Convection cells (whether in boiling pots, hurricanes, or stars) exhibit proto-organizational, circular causality and self-maintenance, such that constraints are partly enmeshed with their processes. This suggests that the physics/biology boundary is not a clean cut but a gradient of degrees of organization. This is the Whiteheadian-Ruyerian point I go on to press: self-organizing physical systems are the dim lower reaches of agency that goes all the way down. The dissipative structure is the first stammering rehearsal of closure.
We live in a time-developmental universe. The cosmos has a history. The “constants” and “laws” we observe are features of a particular cosmic epoch, not timeless dictates standing outside it. Even mainstream cosmology speaks of symmetry-breaking events in which present regularities crystallized out of earlier regimes. To historicize physics is therefore not to fight the evidence but to take its developmental character seriously, refusing to exempt law-like habits from the history that produced everything else. Insisting that the laws and constants are eternal, fixed, and so necessarily “fine-tuned” is a gift to intelligent design theorists. A set of eternal, exquisitely calibrated parameters cries out for an external tuner. The design argument feeds on the assumption of just such a finished legal order. The more adequate explanation of apparent fine-tuning is not the anti-empirical extravagance of multiverse theory, which is an obviously desperate attempt to save mechanicism. A better account involves the recognition that the regularities are themselves evolved habits of a self-organizing cosmos, inherited achievements rather than eternal impositions.
A mature theology must become theopoetic rather than systematic. The hubris of systematic theology was to treat God as a problem to be solved, a system to be figured out, a hypothesis to be confirmed or refuted by its explanatory payoff. But God is not a system we stand outside and assess. God is a life we participate in, and the appropriate means of participation is not to deduce a proof but to perform a poem. The atheist and the classical theist are quarreling over the same image: the omnipotent, external, engineer-Father. Both must grow out of that image, the affirmation and the denial of which appears as humanity’s childhood and rebellious adolescence, respectively.
Wow, such fertile thinking. Takes the evolution of God idea to a new level.
If only those minds straight-jacketed by a (mono)theistic mindset with a view toward the allure of "heaven" and the fear of "hell" could allow themselves to read these soul-healing words...