Process Studies

Volume 45, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2016

Society, Ideology, and Cosmic Organicity
Human Discursivity and the Post-Mechanistic Tum in Biology

Ongoing developments in evolutionary and systems biology highlight the deficiencies of reductionistic and mechanistic explanations of the "organic" world (and widen the meaning and application of this term). Whitehead's ontology provides the basis for a unified theory of social organization that connects the emergence of primitive life to the development and diversification of human societies along a continuum of creative ontogeneration. The metaphysical characteristic of "creativity" is precisely the manifestation of the ontogenerative relationship between possibility and actuality. Actualization is change. While all actualization necessarily exhibits some degree of continuity with the past, it is driven by the inertiac availability of specific relevant forms of possibility (etemal objects), through which it has access to an array of "novel" forms for actualization. This relation to novelty explains everything from the emergence ofprokaryotes on earth 3.6 billion years ago to the possibility of ideological resistance in human societies today.