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E SSENTIAL D IFFERENCE
Toward a Metaphysics of Emergence

J AMES B LACHOWICZ

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blachowicz, James, 1943–
Essential difference : toward a metaphysics of emergence / James Blachowicz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.     ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4331-7 (hardcover :  alk.  paper)
1. Metaphysics. 2. Philosophy—History.   I.  Title.
BD111.B53 2012
110—dc23
2011037906
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for Jake and Jess
who are just as I had hoped
I NTRODUCTION

The End of Metaphysics?
Philosophers, like other scholars and scientists, mark the history of their discipline by a number of turning points, each leading to some substantially new direction of inquiry. One such critical point is found in the interplay between the ideas of Hume and Kant. Kant had been swayed by Hume's argument that the necessity we often ascribe to the causal workings of nature was not demonstrable. Kant responded to this problem with his critical system – a revolutionary moment in philosophical history. Many philosophers, especially those in the early Anglo-American tradition, have looked back at this turn of events as the “end of metaphysics.”
Philosophy is a recognized discipline. Yet there is a familiar argument that it is archaic or obsolete, given the fact that various other sciences have effectively taken over its task. For many scientists, philosophy is perhaps of historical interest as an integral part of our culture, but unlike the arts and sciences, it does not today possess any distinctive subject matter of its own.
It is not my purpose here to evaluate this judgment. Philosophers today who would want to defend the distinctiveness of their discipline would probably concentrate on the role and nature of epistemology or ethics, areas of inquiry which the arts and sciences do not seem to circumscribe adequately by themselves. Few philosophers would choose metaphysics as the front line in defending their discipline; some have even granted that metaphysics was a kind of primitive proto-science, largely confined to ancient times, and that philosophy has no business nowadays talking about such things.
It is always difficult to reach an understanding of something when there is confusion over the identity of the object in question. In this respect, defining something like “the scientific method,” while itself an enormous task still subject to controversy, is still easier than defining “metaphysics,” for there is at least some conventional understanding that science exists and that it employs some distinctive method to achieve its aims. In the case of “metaphysics,” on the other hand, the word itself has different meanings for different philosophers at different times. I will explore some of these differences in the first chapter.

Old and New Metaphysics
The metaphysics that was declared dead in the aftermath of Hume's and Kant's criticism was that associated, among others, with Plato and Aristotle, with medieval philosophy, and with Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. This criticism was taken up by logical empiricism, positivism, and linguistic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century and used as a basis for rejecting later post-Kantian speculative philosophers, including Hegel. Even then, however, at least some speculative meta-physical inquiry continued in marginal areas – in modern Thomism, for example, or in the process philosophy of Bergson, Alexander, Peirce, and Whitehead. Further, theories of “emergent evolution” in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries ran in parallel with these “process” perspectives, but with representatives often trained less in philosophy than in the biological and social sciences. 1
In recent decades, there has been new growth in metaphysical inquiry within the analytic tradition – a surprising development for those who have associated that tradition with its older anti-metaphysical precursors. These new efforts have not, however, either completely assimilated or been assimilated by older, more speculative strains. Almost no recent books (anthologies, monographs) in analytic metaphysics, for example, provide in-depth discussions of Aristotle, Hegel, or Heidegger. Further, the topics treated in analytic approaches and older non-analytic treatments do not completely overlap.
What counts as another contemporary development in metaphysics is the growth of theories of emergence, mostly within philosophy of science and concentrated, understandably, in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind. Given that this area of inquiry has focused on explaining the nature of physical entities and what might be the distinctive causal conceptions that complex structure involves, it is surprising that it too is seldom examined in analytic metaphysics. (Of course, mereological analyses seem to be largely ignored by emergence theorists as well). I believe, however, that emergence theory has provided a new context for articulating the anti-reductionist metaphysics found in Aristotle, Hegel, and some process philosophy. My study is situated squarely in this area.
In terms of topics, the reader will not find in this book any substantial discussion of the following issues: conceptual realism (except briefly in the context of philosophy of mind) and nominalism; the ontological status of properties (e.g., property dualism and “superve-nience”); free will; possible worlds; mereological analyses (with one exception); space and time; the existence, nature, or action of a divine being. Still, there other substantial issues in the approach I adopt that should be of interest to analytic metaphysicians, including the nature of existence, “being as being”; the nature of material/physical entities; the principle of individuation; part/whole ontology in the context of emergence theory; “downward causation” (and “formal cause” as used in this context); non-reductive physicalism; the problem of bottom-level physical entities; and the ontology of artifacts and aggregates. I also offer in-depth analyses of major historical figures: Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel.
I have found no recent books in metaphysics that discuss in any detail the reductionist issue that is the focus of my treatment here. Yet I would argue that an appreciation of this issue is essential, not only for a comprehension of the fundamental problem that lay at the bottom of the metaphysical explorations of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, but also for an understanding of the nature of metaphysics itself.

Plan of the Book
Any metaphysics focuses on transcendental determinations, that is, determinations of “being as being,” as Aristotle would say. This captures Kant's critical perspective as well, for in seeking the formal conditions for our knowledge of objects, he restricted himself to determinations of objects as objects – determinations that he (like medieval philosophers) referred to as “transcendental.” Thus, while it is true that Kant's version of this problem was formulated within an epistemological rather than a metaphysical context, both Aristotle and Kant, despite their many differences, shared this transcendental perspective.
Most metaphysical systems of the past (as well as Kant's critical philosophy) were committed to the idea that transcendental determinations had to be formal in nature. Put simply, this meant that determinations of objects as objects had to be determinations of all objects. Indeed, few philosophers were able to see how this wasn't a necessary truth. For any such formalist metaphysics, material differences of any kind among objects could not be essential to their nature as objects. Such a metaphysics is consequently reductionist in nature with regard to such differences. What is left is only some unitary principle (“Being” for Parmenides and Plato; “matter” for materialists; “God” or “mind” for other monists; and the a priori forms of sense and the understanding for Kant) that underlies such differences.
To avoid this consequence, we would have to take at least some differences among objects as essential to their nature as objects, that is, as transcendental determinations – a possibility I will defend in the course of what follows. In doing so, we abandon the idea that “being” is knowable in some fundamentally generic way. Rather, as we come to try to understand the nature of physical entities, we must accept that “physical entity” changes its meaning as we come to consider these differences among such entities. This produces a metaphysics in which the concept of ontological emergence is central – a metaphysics that will depend necessarily on the material content of the natural sciences for an understanding of these differences. For this reason, any metaphysics of emergence will be necessarily incomplete, for these sciences (and physical reality itself for that matter) are and presumably will continue to be works in progress.
In my treatment of this problem, I will construct a logical parallel between its ancient and modern forms. While the “crisis” of the possibility of metaphysics is often taken as originating with Hume's criticism, I will argue that much the same crisis occurred in ancient Greece, and in a remarkably similar form.
Parmenides and Hume each formu