Table Of ContentTHE PASSAGE OF NATURE
Also by Dorothy Emmet and published by Palgrave Macmillan
THE EFFECTIVENESS OF CAUSES
FUNCTION, PURPOSE AND POWERS
THE MORAL PRISM
THE NATURE OF METAPHYSICAL THINKING
RULES, ROLES AND RELATIONS
SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY AND PHILOSOPHICAL
ANALYSIS (editor with Alasdair Maclntyre)
WHITEHEAD'S PHILOSOPHY OF ORGANISM
The Passage of
Nature
Dorothy Emmet
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Manchester
Emeritus Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge
Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
M
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© Dorothy Emmet 1992
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First published 1992
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Emmet, Dorothy
The passage of nature.
I. Title
116
ISBN 978-1-349-12646-0 ISBN 978-1-349-12644-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-12644-6
To my great-nephews and great-nieces
in the coming generation
Contents
Preface ix
1 The Idea of a Process 1
2 Events and Facts 11
3 Events and Facts in Causation 25
4 Causal Processes 35
5 Things in Processes and Things-in-Process 48
6 Organic Processes 61
7 Social Processes 73
8 Creative Processes 91
9 Providential Processes? 103
Appendix Aristotle's Conception of Kinesis 114
Notes 119
Bibliography 129
Index 134
vii
Preface
Many years ago - over sixty in fact - I was turned seriously to
philosophy by reading Whitehead's Science and the Modern World. I
obtained a Commonwealth Fellowship for study in the USA, and
attended his courses at Harvard (or, rather, at Radcliffe College).
On my return in 1930 I was asked to give some lectures in Oxford
on his philosophy, and afterwards I published a book, Whitehead's
Philosophy of Organism. This was marked by youthful enthusiasm
and exegetical inadequacy. I do not now want to direct anyone to
it, nor to supplement it by yet more exegesis. As time went by I
found myself moving away from Whitehead; nevertheless certain
Whiteheadian themes have remained with me.
What follows, therefore, is not a set of Whiteheadian essays,
though it might be said to be an alternative development of some
Whiteheadian themes in which Process has a philosophical, in
deed a metaphysical role.
Process, it might be said, is a notion we constantly use, and we
know well enough how to use it. Why treat it as a formal concept
for philosophers? I wanted to do so because it can affect how one
sees certain problems of philosophy, and my suspicion was that
though it is often used it has seldom been discussed. A look,
admittedly not an exhaustive one, through the literature bore out
this impression. Some of our forebears have used it on a grand
scale, giving a metaphysical picture of the world as a process.
Hegel has a process of dialectical advance, both in reason and in
world history. Marxists have turned this into a process of dialecti
cal materialism. But these views are presented rather than argued.
Whitehead set out to describe a world in which things are seen as
'processes of becoming', and called his magnum opus 'Process and
Reality'. But that work contains little direct treatment of the notion
of Process, though there are remarks on this, sometimes illuminat
ing, throughout his books and I shall be referring to some of them.
There is a contemporary movement calling itself 'Process Philos
ophy' which runs a journal Process Studies; this is concerned largely
with exegesis and development of Whitehead's philosophy, and I
am not aware that it carries discussion of Process as such.
So I look at the general characteristics of anything that can be
ix
x Preface
called a process, distinguishing it from events and facts. I consider
some philosophical uses to which the concept may be put, notably
in connection with causation. I then turn to distinctive characteris
tics of organic and social processes. I have not written specifically
about mental processes. These have been abundantly discussed
and anything I want to say about them comes indirectly in the last
three chapters, especially that on 'creative processes'. I end by
looking at a possible significance of the notion of Process for
morals and religion. I set all this within a metaphysics of what,
adopting a phrase of Whitehead's, I call 'the passage of nature'.
'Passage' indicates that something is going on. 'Nature' is a
slippery word; I use it to refer to the world in the widest sense,
along with its contents, properties and ways of working. Nature
need not have a uniform system of laws (though it probably has),
and it need not be subject to universal causation, since it may
contain indeterminacies. 'The natural' is perhaps best thought of
by contrast with 'the conventional', where distinctions depend on
human fiat, and on 'the supernatural', which is held to depend on
a special kind of cause. (Human voluntary action might be said to
involve a special kind of causation; I see this, however, as stem
ming from creativity within nature and not from the operation of a
special non-natural factor.)
Since this is a metaphysical work, I shall indicate my approach to
metaphysics. This is realist in intention. It is not a priori, but an
attempt to elucidate some of the concepts in which we interpret the
furniture of the world, to use a term of Berkeley's. I am not
concerned (here, at any rate) with the furniture of possible worlds.
At times I suggest applications for the notion of Process in the
sciences. I am aware that I speak here out of considerable ignor
ance and that I am giving hostages to fortune. Metaphysics need
not be tied to current scientific views, which may well be tempor
ary; nevertheless, I welcome possible illustrations, and so venture
to make them. I also take a realist view with regard to scientific
knowledge, taking this as discovering real entities, however differ
ent these may be from the objects of common sense. An alternative
view treats at any rate fundamental entities as concepts with an
instrumental role in the construction of theories, a view epitomised
when a friend of mine went as a child to a Christmas party given
by Sir Lawrence Bragg in his laboratory, and afterwards said to
R.B. Braithwaite, 'Uncle Richard, Professor Bragg has been show
ing us electrons'. 'Nonsense, child. An electron is a theoretical
Preface xi
concept'. There is a powerful philosophy of science behind this
remark, but one which I reject.
So I am trying to elucidate the idea of Process as a key concept in
describing what goes on in the world. I do not feel bound by usages
of ordinary language. Such usages have to be taken seriously, but
there is no need to make them normative for metaphysics. My
sympathies are therefore with what Straws on has called 'revision
ary' as against' descriptive' metaphysics. Descriptive metaphysics
brings out a conceptual structure in how we talk about the world,
grounding this in ordinary language. Revisionary metaphysics
brings out a possible conceptual structure which may enlarge our
vision. However, such metaphysics as I am putting forward is a
good deal less revisionary than Whitehead's. I shall say why I
cannot follow him in some features especially of his later work. If,
however, a philosopher encourages others to go on with their own
work, this is surely what he would want rather than to make
disciples.
I have discussed parts of this book with Hugh Mellor, Peter
Clark, Robin Le Poidevin, and Christopher Williams. I discussed
the chapter on Organic Processes with Brian Goodwin and Eric
Ashby (who was my contemporary as a Commonwealth Fellow in
the USA), and the chapter on Social Processes with Martin Hollis. I
am grateful to all of these (including the radical dissenters); and I
also want to thank Jamie Whyte who has put the work onto a word
processor, as well as making some good suggestions, and Bill
Williams who helped draw the diagrams.
Parts of Chapters 3 and 4 are based on an article 'How near can a
Cause get to its Effect?' which appeared in The Philosophical Quar
terly for October 1988; I draw on this with the permission of the
Editors.
