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Thesis Final Draft 28Aug14 Liberating Emergence Human Dependence and Autonomy in Emergentism, Hermeneutics, and Pragmatism by Matthew E. Johnson Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Program in Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies Director: Dr. Ronald Kuipers (Institute for Christian Studies) Internal Committee Member: Lambert Zuidervaart (Institute for Christian Studies) External Committee Member: Tom Reynolds (Toronto School of Theology) August 2014 Institute for Christian Studies Toronto, ON CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………...….….iv Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………...….v Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………………………..vi Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..……1 Chapter I. Emergence and Personhood……………………………………………………….…...6 The Evolution of Emergentism……..…………………………………………………......9 Emergence: A Third Way…..…………………………………………………..………..15 Synchronic vs. Diachronic Emergence……………..…………………………………....21 Artificial Intelligence: Behaviour and Self-Organizing Systems……..….……..…...…..23 Emergent Mind…………………………..……………………..………………………..24 In Defense of Downward Causation……………..………………………………......…..28 Chapter II. An Ontology of Indebtedness: Reflecting on Finitude…………………………..…..32 2.1 Martin Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology……………...……………...………….33 Heideggerian Groundwork…………………………………………………...…..33 Anticipatory Resoluteness as Innovative Engagement…………………………..36 Anticipation…………………..…..…………………………………..…..38 Resoluteness…..………………..…………………………………….…..40 Authenticity as Creative Reconfiguration of Possibilities……………………….42 Fate and Destiny as the Boundaries of Creativity…………………………….….44 Dasein’s Creative Essence…………………………………………………….…47 2.2 Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Ontology…..……………………………...…50 Setting the Stage…………………………………………………………………51 Play and the Conditions for Emergence……………………………………….…54 The Hermeneutic Circle and the Dynamics of Emergence………………………56 Linguisticality as Emergent Freedom……………………………………………59 Emergent Causation…………………………………………………………...…62 Gadamer’s Hermeneutics of Interdependence………………………………...…64 2.3 Charles Taylor’s Moral Ontology……...………………………………...………….65 Defined by Inescapable Frameworks…………………………………………….66 ii Constituted by Webs of Interlocution……………………………………………68 Hermeneutics and Emergent Creativity…………………………..……………...70 Chapter III. Innovative Individuality: Re-imagining Liberty……………………………............72 3.1 John Dewey and the Live Creature……………………………………...…………..72 Dewey on the Mind-Body Problem……………………………………………...73 In Defense of Emergence and Non-Linearity……………………………………76 The Live Creature and the Environment: Embeddedness in a World…………...79 Temporality………………………………………………………………………82 Experience as Emergent………………………………………………………….84 Art and Emergent Mind………………………………………………………….85 Liberty, Creativity, and Imagination……………………………………………..86 Imagining a Better World………………………..………………………………88 3.2 Richard Rorty and the Ironist………………………………..……………………...90 Contingency and Historicism: The Contours of Embeddedness………………...90 Antiessentialism: Non-Reductive Physicalism and the Number 17…………......92 Contingency and Final Vocabularies…………………………………………….95 Irony, Redescription, and Self-Creation…………………………………………97 Utopian Visions and Liberal Individuality………………………………………99 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...101 Reference List…………………………………………………………………………………..105 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Although I may have been the one who sat down to organize these thoughts into a thesis, I cannot claim sole credit for how it turned out. I am deeply indebted to my friends, colleagues, professors, and fellow students at the Institute for Christian Studies for helping me grapple with difficult concepts, sparking my imagination, and opening up new ideas I never would have thought of alone. I have great respect and appreciation for my supervisor Dr. Ron Kuipers, who worked with me through several revisions to show me my blind spots and from whom I learned a great deal both in seminars and in conversation. I would also like to thank Dr. Doug Blomberg for putting in the long hours to make ICS a thriving academic environment where we could focus on our studies. My time at ICS would not have been possible without the financial support extended to me from the donor community, for which I am deeply appreciative. Studying at ICS has been a rich experience both intellectually and interpersonally, and I am grateful to have been a part of the community. On a more personal note, I would like to thank my parents for continuing to believe in me through all my uncertainty. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Joshua St. Pierre, who challenges me and encourages me in my study of philosophy and who has been a faithful and helpful friend through this process. Most of all, this project would never have been possible for me without my wife Jill, who has read every word of this thesis and has been there for me through all the ups and downs as my best friend and my most dedicated editor, for whom I am grateful beyond words. iv ABSTRACT This thesis traces a thread that runs through emergentism in analytical philosophy and the thought of five philosophers: Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Charles Taylor, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty. I suggest that the insight that connects all of these thinkers is precisely the insight that undergirds a theory of “strong emergence,” which acknowledges that in certain systems, properties emerge that exert causal influence on the system out of which they emerged. Strong emergence offers a helpful “third way” to describe human personhood that is neither reductionistic nor dualistic and maintains that the human person is both dependent upon and (within certain limits) autonomous from the system out of which it emerges. I will suggest that the hermeneutic philosophy of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Taylor clarifies the historical cultural conditions out of which the human person emerges as a critical and creative agent in a way that similarly maintains a balance between the dependence and autonomy of the human person. Dewey and Rorty, on the other hand, provide accounts of human situatedness but emphasize the creative freedom that emerges out of this situatedness, characterizing humans as artists or poets who can engage with their situatedness in novel ways. For both Dewey and Rorty, our ability to shape the future and to shape ourselves is built into our experience in the world. I will conclude that each of these five thinkers develop accounts of human personhood that resonate with strong emergence, describing how human persons are able to emerge out of their embeddedness in the world, upon which they remain ever dependent, as creative innovators. v ABBREVIATIONS AE Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: New York, The Berkley Publishing Group. CIS Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. EHO Rorty, Richard. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. EN Dewey, John. 1958. Experience and Nature. 2nd ed. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. OENF Dewey, John. 1960. On Experience, Nature, and Freedom: Representative Selections. Edited by Richard J. Bernstein. Indianapolis: The Bobbs- Merrill Company, Inc. ORT Rorty, Richard. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PC Dewey, John. 1963 [1931]. Philosophy and Civilization. Capricorn Books Edition. New York: Capricorn Books. PMN Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. PSH Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books. SS Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press SZ Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Foreword by Dennis Schmidt. Revised. Albany: State University of New York Press. TM Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method 2nd rev. ed. Trans. rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. vi INTRODUCTION From the time René Descartes introduced the distinction between res extensa and res cogitans, philosophers in the West have been faced with the difficult problem of articulating how the mind is related to the body.1 In the 20th century, many philosophers focused their efforts on dissolving the mind-body problem altogether by doing away with the idea that res cogitans exists independently of the body and can therefore disengage from the material world. In the words of Charles Taylor, “much of the most insightful philosophy of the twentieth century has gone [on] to refute this picture of the disengaged subject” (Sources of the Self, 514). However, Descartes’ distinction still represents an intuition about the nature of human experience that cannot be ignored or dismissed, and indeed, one that is taken up even by those who critique the Cartesian picture. This intuition involves the common sense idea that humans seem to have a special self- awareness that allows them to adopt fresh perspectives on themselves and the world. In other words, regardless of the precise details of what makes up the human person, we (along with many philosophers) cannot seem to shake the idea that we are more than the sum of our parts. Our special status of being “more” characterizes us as what some philosophers call emergent. The easiest way out of the mind-body problem is simply to eliminate the problematic term. The reductionist project in science and
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