Reconsidering the Notion of the Organic

Abstract

The advent of the Enlightenment entailed a radical shift in worldviews from one wherein life dominates all events to the perspective that all phenomena ultimately are elicited by encounters between lifeless, unchanging particles. A necessary casualty of this shift has been the notion of organic behavior. The possibility exists, however, that both the pre- and post-Enlightenment attitudes are extremes, and that a general, more complete description of nature might lie between these poles. One useful tool for such interpolation appears to be Karl Popper’s definition of propensity as an agency that is intermediate to deterministic force at one end and pure chance at the other. Another is Robert Rosen’s description of organic behavior as self-entailing. One way of interpreting self-entailment is to identify it with the influence of the aggregate configuration of processes upon the structure and composition of the organic system. To paraphrase Alfred North Whitehead, the creature is derivative of the creative process. One particular embodiment of the top-down influence of processes upon components might be akin to the action of autocatalysis among propensities, the effects of which can be measured using network and information theories. Once one expands the scope of consideration to include boundary conditions as well as dynamics, it then can be argued that the organic narrative is actually more compact than the conventional neo-Darwinian construct. Furthermore, the revised organic narrative provides a more appropriate metaphor for other self-organizing systems than did classical organicism, and it has the advantage of serving as a more congenial setting within which to portray the origin of life.