8 - The Compass of Beauty: A Search for the Middle

Summary

A very specific problem occurs at the heart of ontology: how can things exist externally, with others, while being made up of parts, and thus existing internally? Or, to phrase it a bit more pointedly, in Kantian terms: how can things have synthetic relations between the whole and the world while being constituted analytically, through relations between the whole and its parts? How can these two realms be part of one continuum of existence? No variety of materialism has been able to solve this problem. In its traditional form, determinism, either God or consciousness is needed to direct the connecting vector of necessity; and its later form, emergence, leaves a gap between the interacting parts and the emerged whole happily interacting with other wholes. Even in the nineteenth century, Darwin struggled with the idea that variation acted as the sole positive force in nature, ‘endlessly’ adding ‘forms most beautiful’, with natural selection doomed merely to act as a negative force, selecting out some of those variants as ugly misfits. Indeed, fitness in itself contributes nothing to the concept of variation, since it is not the environment that tells parts how to come together. Apparently, parts only interact with parts and wholes with wholes, and while materialist ontologies succeed very well in explaining the intensive parts stage and the environmental wholes stage, they completely fail to connect the two. The two physical sides of the equation are separated by a yawning metaphysical gap, impossible for them to bridge, at least physically. A brief reflection on the vertical nature of the term ‘emergence’, however, should make us realise that the flat, blind world of material interactions cannot exist without transcendence. Scientists and philosophers of science speak of emergence as if it is the reverse of classic top-down imposition, and it is, but merely in directionality, certainly not conceptually: it inhabits the same vertical axis, covers the same vertical distance and thrives on the same dualisms. Without question, admitting to the metaphysical nature of emergence would deeply affect all notions of physicality, which is why all materialists shy away from it. Therefore, we should find a way to accept transcendence and, instead of making it part of external agency, make it part of things themselves.