Organization, Teleology, and Value

ORGANIZATION, TELEOLOGY, AND VALUE

The Ontological Foundations

of the

Theory of Value

Paper published in Journal of Religion, January 1997

Anthony Mansueto
Institute for Philosophy and Social Progress
2511 West Schaumburg Rd. #221
Schaumburg, IL 60194

www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/1593
[email protected], [email protected]

Throughout most of human history, our ideas about value --about the Beautiful, the True, the Good and the One-- have been intimately bound up with our ideas about the nature of the universe itself. Humanity understood itself as an integral part of an organized, purposeful totality in which each element, including both individual human beings and human society taken as a whole, had a definite purpose. In the Scholastic tradition, for example, value was understood as the organizing principle which brought things into being by making them whole and by drawing them towards their telos . Beauty was understood as the integrity and harmony which makes things whole and the clarity which reveals their form, Truth as the intelligibility of things, which makes it possible for rational beings to take on their form, and the Good as the very wholeness or perfection which makes things desirable. Each of these in turn was regarded as a mode of the underlying unity of the cosmos, a unity which is ultimately convertible with God.

The advent of the market system and the resulting crisis of the Scholastic tradition, as well as of cognate philosophical-theological systems in other civilizational traditions, undermined the integrity of humanity's historic grasp of the cosmic principles of value. Increasingly people experienced themselves as isolated atoms, related only in a purely external fashion through the laws of supply and demand. Not surprisingly, they soon began to rethink their understanding of the universe as a whole on much the same model. Newtonian mechanics replaced the teleological cosmology of Aristotle with an atomistic worldview in which the universe appears as a system of only-externally related particles --or, what ultimately amounts to the same thing, as a pure system of quantities. The science of thermodynamics gave voice to somber prophecies of the "heat death of the universe." Darwinian evolutionary theory located the origins of life and intelligence in random variation and natural selection.

This had important consequences for ethical theory. In so far as systems of atoms bouncing randomly off of each other have no visible purpose or order of their own, form or organization must come to matter if at all from the outside, as if by divine decree, or else emerge spontaneously through blind variation and natural selection. Since matter itself, and thus the material universe which is the object of rational, scientific investigation, no longer seemed to have any purpose or meaningful organization, all questions of "ultimate concern," as Protestant theologian Paul Tillich called them, had to be referred for resolution to some nonrational criterion --faith, tradition, personal preference, etc. Ethics rapidly degenerated into a discipline concerned with adjudicating the competing claims of isolated individuals, while remaining largely agnostic regarding the ultimate principles of value, and the nature of the Beautiful, the True, the Good, and the One.

One real exception to this trend was the dialectical system developed by G.W.F. Hegel. For Hegel, the whole cosmos was simply the necessary self-objectification of the Idea, which gradually became conscious of itself through the long, slow, and often contradictory progress of human history. From this standpoint, the human civilizational project was nothing other than "God's march through history," the process by which God became conscious of himself. But the natural science of the day simply didn't support Hegel's vision. The result was the disintegration of the dialectical tradition into idealist and materialist factions. Objective idealists sought a ground for order and value outside of matter --generally speaking in the divine. At best this led to a reassertion of something like the conclusions of the Scholastic synthesis, without the organic relationship to the empirical sciences which had given that synthesis its credibility. At worst it led towards irrationalism. Dialectical materialists, on the other hand, while occasionally making an effort to demonstrate the self-organizing dynamism of matter in general, tended in practice to make meaningful organization, and thus value, first and foremost a product of human labor. The resulting theory of value lacked an adequate ontological ground. Moral norms or other principles of value derived from the logic of human social life are difficult to distinguish from mere expressions of the will of one or another social group --alibis for individual or collective self-interest rather than authentic transcendentals. Because of this inadequacy, dialectical materialism has tended to disintegrate into various types of postmodernism.

There has been considerable discussion in recent years regarding the "emptiness" of the liberal ethics which emerged out of the crisis of the Scholastic tradition but only a few scholars have begun to reassert the need for a solid ontological ground for the theory of value, and even fewer have really looked for the foundations of ontology in the sciences. Recently, however, the trend in the sciences has been away from atomism and towards a view which has, variously, been called relational, holistic, self-organizing, and even dialectical and teleological. This paper will argue that, properly understood, the scientific study of physical, biological, and social organization provides the basis for the revitalization of a dialectical ontology which, in turn, provides secure foundations and ample direction for value theory. We will begin with a brief consideration of some scientific results which challenge the hegemonic atomism. We will then explore the ontological implications of this science and show how the resulting ontology can ground and inform value theory.

I. The Scientific Foundations of a Dialectical Ontology

Important scientific developments over the course of the past few decades, such as general relativity, unified field theories, complex systems theory, postdarwinian developmental and evolutionary biology, and anthropic cosmology, have begun to restore the scientific basis for comprehending the cosmos as an organized, meaningful totality which is developing towards a telos characterized by complex organization, while at the same time ratifying the "modern" insight that humanity plays an active, critical, even leading role in the organization of the cosmos.
It is possible here only to outline briefly the ways in which these new disciplines have altered our understanding of the universe. The new science has transformed our understanding of every level of cosmic organization. Newtonian physics regarded space as a formless void in which particles moved over the course of time without thereby affecting or being affected by the space-time continuum through which they moved. The theory of relativity, on the other hand, has demonstrated that space-time itself has a structure, a "curvature," so that far from being "void and without form," it is a kind of matrix, out of which more complex forms of organization emerge. Indeed, it is precisely the curvature of the space-time continuum which requires gravity, and therefore mass -- and ultimately the whole complex of structures which make up the material world.

Closely related to the relativistic theory of space-time and gravitation (if not yet fully unified with it) is the shift from particle theory to field theory. Newtonian mechanics regarded the universe as constituted by irreducible particles which interact with each other through the medium of various forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism. As physicists have carried on the search for increasingly more fundamental particles, as they have discovered new physical forces (the strong and weak nuclear forces) and as they have tried to develop a unified theory which explains the relationship among the various forces, they have been forced to abandon the atomism which characterized their original paradigm. Contemporary physics regards matter (including observed and theoretically postulated "particles") as actually constituted by gravitational, electromagnetic, and strong and weak nuclear fields. These four fundamental forces, furthermore, seem originally (during the earliest stages in the development of the universe) to have been identical with each other. It is only as the universe develops that they become distinct. Indeed, certain results, such as the EPR (Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen) nonlocality, suggest that we ought not even to speak about separate particles at all, but rather about a structured network of relationships.

The second dimension of the current scientific revolution is the growing recognition of the tendency of matter to develop towards increasingly complex levels of organization. Nowhere is this process more apparent than in the non-linear dynamic systems which have become the focus of the new science of complex systems theory. Complex systems theory has made three important discoveries. First, it is becoming increasingly clear that even the most complex systems, which are characterized by behavior which is "chaotic" and unpredictable, are in fact governed by relatively simple, mathematical algorithms. In this sense, it appears even chaos has underlying, organizing principles. Second, while the behavior of complex systems is extraordinarily difficult to predict, because even small variations in initial conditions can produce very large differences in final results, these systems are, nonetheless, characterized by the emergence of complex, intricate, and relatively stable patterns. As systems approach chaos, they tend to go through a phase of "period doubling" in which they oscillate between two values with constantly increasing frequency. Graphs plotting the behavior of complex systems are characterized by "self-similarity." Patterns which develop at a larger scale repeat themselves, with minute variations, at successively smaller scales, creating objects of extraordinary beauty. Finally, complex systems theory has suggested that not only do natural systems behave in a way which is deterministic even when it is chaotic, and spontaneously form coherent structures, they also have the capacity to adapt to environmental conditions in such a way as to better maintain and reproduce their structures. This adaptive process in not confined to living systems.

It might be objected, of course, that the emergence of complex systems is simply a counterpoint to a larger process of cosmic disintegration, a local dynamic governing an area more extensive, perhaps, than human society, but ultimately no match for large scale cosmological processes which will lead ultimately either to the endless expansion of the universe, so that communication and thus complex interactions become all but impossible, or else to the recollapse of the universe to a final singularity in which molecular matter, and thus all complex organization as we know it, will have disappeared. There is an emerging body of evidence, however, which suggests that this is not the case. It appears that a whole series of fundamental physical constants -- the masses of the elementary particles, and the strengths of the fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces) are fixed at just the values necessary for the emergence of intelligent life. This suggests that complex systems, including not only life but also intelligence, are in fact a constitutive dimension of the cosmos, and fully necessary for its existence. This result is often called the "anthropic cosmological principle," though in fact it argues for the necessity not specifically of humanity, but of complex organization in general.

All of these results are, of course, open to a variety of different interpretations. Here we can only correct a few of the more serious misinterpretations --errors which have important philosophical implications but which can and must be corrected at the level of the special sciences.

The most important general result of the findings we have discussed is to bring to the fore the concept of organization --a concept which is gradually overtaking the concept of particle or atom as the fundamental concept of the sciences. Clearly an understanding of the nature of organization is of central importance for a philosophical interpretation of the new sciences. It should come as no surprise, however, that many interpreters of this evidence should try to pour new wine into old skins as it were, and define organization, and analyze its emergence, in a way which is more compatible with the old paradigm than with the new. Some interpreters, for example, following Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, continue to attribute the origin of complex organization to some extramaterial dynamic --something like Teilhard's "radial energy."

This approach is unsatisfactory because it fails to recognize the self-organizing character of matter, something which makes recourse to extramaterial principles unnecessary.

Rather more highly problematic is the information-theoretical interpretation. According to this view the organization of a system is its negative entropy, or the quantity of information encoded within it. Closely associated with the information-theoretical approach to the nature of organization is the notion that organization emerges spontaneously through the interaction of discrete particles, and, above a certain level of complexity, through competition over scarce resources --a view which is used not only to "save" Darwinism, but also to legitimate the market system.

But negentropic and information theoretical approaches to organization have serious difficulties. IBM scientist Charles Bennett has recently pointed out that the negative entropy theory has limitations even at the physical level. The human body, for example, is intermediate in negentropy between a crystal and a gas, while being more highly organized than either. Similarly, organized objects, "because they are partially constrained and determined by the need to encode coherent function or meaning, contain less information than random sequences of the same length, and this information reflects not their organization but their residual randomness." He proposes instead to define organization as logical depth, "the work required to derive a" message "from a hypothetical cause involving no unnecessary ad hoc assumptions," or "the time required to compute this message from" its "minimal description." This definition bears an interesting resemblance to the dialectical materialist labor theory of value, according to which the value of a commodity is equal to the average socially necessary labor time necessary to produce it.
The problems become more serious still when we attempt to theorize the emergence of organization from an information theoretical standpoint. Random variation, competition, and natural selection -- the mainstays of the atomistic paradigm -- do not seem adequate to the task of explaining the emergence and development of living -- and especially social -- systems. Complex systems theorist Ilya Prigogine has shown that

spontaneous

Evolutionary biologists point out that the theory of natural selection provides no mechanism to explain the origin of progressive, adaptive change. Molecular biologist Barry Hall for example, has found that the bacterium E. coli produces needed mutations at a rate roughly 100 million times greater than would be expected if they came about by chance. Nor can it account for the fact that such changes seem to occur rather suddenly, rather than in gradual increments, as the theory of natural selection would suggest. A retina or a cornea, after all, without the rest of the organ, would have no survival value by itself, and would be unlikely to be preserved in future generations. Because of these difficulties, evolutionary biologists have begun increasingly to stress the central role of self-organization and symbiosis in the evolutionary process.

The information-content approach to organization encounters particular difficulties in theorizing social systems. Consider the marketplace, which information-theoretically oriented scientists such as John Barrow and Frank Tipler regard as the information processing system par excellence, and a powerful catalyst for social progress. Yet the marketplace has no access to information regarding the impact of various activities on the qualitative complexity of the ecosystem and the development of human social capacities. On the contrary, all the market "knows" is a quantitative expression of the existing capacities (supply) and current interests (demand) of individuals, as these are expressed in the form of price curves. It has no way to analyze latent capacities or optimum paths of development for either individuals or the system as a whole. It is market forces, after all, which draw people away from preparing themselves to be elementary school teachers, and towards selling crack cocaine. Working from very different tendencies within the dialectical materialist tradition, Ernest Mandel and the dependency and world systems theorists have demonstrated that insertion into market relations in fact undermines a country's economic development, measured in value terms -- i.e. in terms of the total quantity of socially necessary labor embodied in its products. On the one hand, as a system becomes more technologically developed and thus more capital intensive, the rate of profit declines, and capital is redeployed to low wage, low technology activities on the periphery of the world system, blocking capital formation and holding back technological development. At the same time, differences in productivity and/or the value of labor power lead to unequal exchange between developed and underdeveloped countries, draining the latter of a significant portion of the value they produce, and holding back their development. This, in turn, blocks the formation of demand for high technology goods and high skill services, constituting a further obstacle to social progress. Finally, in order to rectify the resulting tendency towards underconsumption, states attempt to "pump up" their economies through deficit spending on both income-transfer, demand supporting, and military technological programs. The resulting expansion of the public debt further strengthens rentier elements, raises interest rates, and leads to overconsumption of luxuries and a crisis in capital formation.

The evidence, in other words, weighs very heavily against the information-theoretical approach to the problem of organization, and suggests, on the contrary, that we need a rigorously dialectical interpretation --i.e. an interpretation which breaks sharply with the old atomistic paradigm, and which comprehends the radical relationality and interdependence of all things --an interdependence which extends beyond the phenomenal or behavioral level to the very core of being itself.

Clearly more work is necessary at the level of the special sciences before we can advance an entirely adequate definition of the concept of organization. For now, however, we will simply regard organization as the capacity to integrate and thus bring into being, a system of relations structured for some purpose. We will regard the "logical depth" and "labor content" theories as only partially adequate attempts at quantifying this notion.

II. Ontological Implications

What, if anything, does the new science tell us about the nature of being as such? We are no longer accustomed to seeking the foundations of metaphysics in science, but this was in fact the first meaning of the term metaphysics. Aristotle's treatise on first philosophy did not merely come after physics in the compilation of his works; it presupposed his extensive research in physics, biology, and psychology --even if those sciences ultimately presupposed the principles which he formulated rigorously only in the Metaphysics .

In order to make the transition from the special sciences to ontology, we must begin by specifying the precise character of philosophical knowledge, and then show its relationship to the knowledge achieved by the special sciences. There are a number of ways to do this. Hegel's argument in the Phenomenology is probably the most rigorous, but for reasons of accessibility we will use a version of the argument set forth by Plato in the Republic (509d-541b).
Human knowledge is constrained from the beginning by the finitude of our perspective. This finitude means that our knowledge is only partial, and, when we take our partial perceptions, inferences, and judgements for an accurate account of the whole, we soon find ourselves in error. These errors are, to a certain extent, compensated by the fact that we communicate and are able to check our claims against those of others. Thus the emergence of the complex of more or less stable opinion about the world which characterizes the "sound common sense" of any given community.

But common sense, however adequate to the tasks of daily life, has some very real limitations. Say, for example, that I am a cultivator called upon to improve the yield of my lands, or a craftsman called upon to design and build a new and better plow. Even these apparently simple tasks require me to look behind my common sense understanding of how plants grow or of what a plow is, and seek a more profound, more nearly conceptual understanding. I need to grasp the idea or concept of a plant or a plow. We humans achieve this kind of understanding by drawing out the implications and contradictions of our pre-existing, common sense conceptions, and then driving towards a higher synthesis --by advancing concepts which resolve these contradictions, though they may, of course, contain new ones. We may do this through direct interaction with physical, chemical, biological, or social matter (this is the origin of the experimental method), through debate and discussion with others (the original meaning of dialectic), or by simulating either of these processes within our own minds. The result is an ever more profound, though never perfect grasp of the organizing principle of the particular system with which we are concerned --the kind of knowledge produced by the special sciences, and the kind of knowledge which has proven itself so rich in technological applications. By examining results across the sciences, it is even possible to achieve a kind of preliminary synthesis, of the kind obtained by general systems theory and other projects for the unification of science.

But this is not the end of the journey. For the special sciences tell us how things are, and thus how we can act more effectively in the world, but they do not tell us why things are, either in the sense of providing an ontological ground or in the sense of pointing towards principles of value. For this we require specifically philosophical reflection.

Viewing the results of the special sciences synoptically it becomes possible to identify certain common patterns. It gradually becomes clear that there is an order to the cosmos generally and to human history in particular. One begins to get a sense of how organization emerges across the system as a whole and of the different ways in which the underlying organizing dynamic is expressed at different levels on the dialectical scale (physical, chemical, biological, social) and during different epochs of human history. The result is a philosophical synthesis of the results of the special sciences. This is the procedure which was first outlined by Plato in the Republic (509d-541b) where the gradual training of the mind in the disciplines of mathematics (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) prepares it for an intuitive grasp of the whole, with the one difference that today we have sciences not only of the formal objects of the mathematics, but also in the more complex, concrete, and more highly organized objects of physics, chemistry, biology, and particularly sociology. A long immersion in the special sciences gradually awakens one's ability to intuit the organizing principle which lies behind particular forms of organization, making it possible to comprehend the universe as an organized totality and eventually to grasp the "community and interrelationship of all things (Plato, Republic 531d)," the principle of value which is the highest expression of the dialectic.

There are, of course, a number of objections which have been raised against the possibility of this kind of "metaphysical" or ontological investigation. While we cannot address these objections in depth in this context, a few comments are in order. The first objection which is generally raised is that the "organization" which we perceive is not "in the universe" at all, but rather only in our minds. This objection can be made in a strong, Humean form, which leads to radical skepticism, or in a more modest Kantian form, which still allows for some connection between our perceptions and objective reality. It may also be modified by the insight that mental categories and forms of intuition are not shared universally among all human beings, but rather vary from one society to another, being shaped in complex ways by social organization.

It is my conviction that this objection has already been dealt with adequately by Hegel. Our ideas, including our philosophical ideas, are indeed products of the human mind and reflect the mind's own internal structure. But the mind is itself a product of cosmos (which includes human history, with all its diverse evolutionary pathways) and our ideas are cosmos' own self-consciousness, which is no less "objective" for being mediated through the forms of the human psyche.

A second objection which is often raised against metaphysical investigation argues against the possibility of any theory which is complete, in the sense of being able to derive all logically possible knowledge with no unproven assumptions, logically consistent, and unique --i.e. able to show itself to be the only such system or to be identical or isomorphic with any other possible system. This objection is often stated with great wit and irony. Andre Kojeve, for example once wrote that while Hegel would have had to become God in order to write his system, Baruch Spinoza (making no provision for cosmic evolution) would have had to have been God from all eternity. And the objection itself is well founded. No finite system can have perfect knowledge of any system larger or more complex than itself. We humans, so long as we remain human, will fall short of perfect wisdom. But this argues only against the more extravagant claims of certain metaphysicians, not against metaphysics itself. No finite system can have fully adequate --i.e. infinite-- knowledge, but this does not mean that its knowledge does not represent a relatively adequate grasp of the system as a whole, a grasp which, furthermore, improves as the system matures and grows in organization and complexity. Plato, Aristotle, or Aquinas would never have claimed more.

How, then, do we move from the special sciences to ontology? Our starting point is always and only a rational intuition of the organizing principle of the cosmos as a whole --i.e. of the order which lies behind the entire complex manifold of forms which we find arrayed before us in our synoptic view of the results of the special sciences. By a rational intuition we mean a direct perception of a common pattern of which all of the particular patterns discovered by the special sciences seem to be a manifestation. Clearly no such intuition can be uniquely adequate. Differences in language alone will generate differences in the way in which the principle is formulated, and will thus lead to more or less permanent differences between philosophical systems.

But this does not mean we cannot test the validity, and evaluate the relative merits of our various formulations of the organizing principle. There are, broadly speaking, three different ways in which we might proceed to do this. The first, what is generally called the transcendental method, attempts to show that something like what we have identified as the organizing principle is in fact the rationally necessary presupposition of the whole manifold of concepts used by the special sciences. A second approach attempts to show that the proposed organizing principle constitutes the most general law governing the motion of matter, or, to use a less explicitly materialist formulation, a "descriptive generalization" of the laws discovered by the special sciences. A third approach, which we will call dialectical, attempts to show that both of these approaches are in fact the same. It is only possible to show that the laws discovered by the special sciences presuppose our proposed organizing principle by actually deriving those laws from it, and thus showing that it constitutes the general form of the cosmic law. At the same time, discovering the most general laws of motion of matter means discovering those laws from which all others can be generated or derived and which, therefore, they presuppose. The proof of metaphysics, in other words, lies in (philosophical) cosmology. It is this last approach which we find most adequate.

It is not possible in this context to do more than merely outline what a dialectical ontology, grounded in a scientific understanding of cosmic organization, might look like. But this will be more than sufficient to show how such an ontology grounds and gives direction to the theory of value.

The most fundamental philosophical implication of the scientific results we have examined is the radically relational character of the universe. Relativity, quantum mechanics, complex system theory, organismic, developmental, and evolutionary biology, and dialectical sociology all suggest that the entire cosmos is interconnected at the most fundamental levels of its being. As we noted in the previous section, this means not only that the cosmos is a system in the sense that the behavior of its constitutive elements is radically dependent on the behavior of all the other elements in the system, but also that the essential nature, indeed the very existence, of these elements is determined by their interrelationships with each other, so that they are best conceived not as elements at all, but rather as relations.

It is, therefore, no longer possible to understand the universe as a composite of immaterial forms and a passive material substrate, or as a set of interacting atoms which sometimes come together to constitute systems. Being is not substance but relation. Indeed, it is first and foremost a system of relationships , from which it is possible to abstract certain nodes which therefore appear particular, but which exist, and can thus be comprehended, only as part of the general system.

A few points of clarification and elaboration are in order. Relationship implies both unity and difference. Being realized as relationship consists neither in simple, undifferentiated unity nor in pure difference. Without difference there is nothing in particular, but only a One which is at the same time Nothing. Without a prior, underlying unity, difference is mere disintegration: the absence of any capacity to connect, to relate, and therefore potentially to act, have properties, etc. Being consists precisely in the capacity to unite things which differ -- in the self-differentiating unity which we call "system." The word "system" comes from the Hellenic roots sys- and histanai meaning "to put together." At the very simplest level, therefore, system refers to the radical interconnectedness of all things, an interconnectedness so profound that the existence of the tiniest subsystem abstracted from the whole implies the system in its entirety. The most minute alteration at any point in the system affects the system as a whole. The fact that I am sitting here at my computer, thinking and writing, requires and implies, with iron clad logical necessity, everything else in the universe -- not only the existence, but the precise disposition of every particular system along every possible world trajectory in the cosmos, from the most intimate thoughts of a young woman on a corner in Bangkok waiting for her lover to the precise disposition of the atoms and molecules in some remote nebula in a galaxy far too distant for its light to ever reach me during my lifetime.

This approach has the merit of clarifying the relationship between appearance and essence. The universe generally, and its various subsystems, appear to us as things possessing various properties. The underlying essence or nature of a system or subsystem, however, (what it is), is determined by its internal and external relationships, of which its appearance is merely the expression. Essence , in other words, is nothing other than structure , both a system's internal structure and its place in the larger structure of the cosmos as a whole, which defines both its own trajectory of development, and its contribution to the development of the cosmos generally. Now the structures of various subsystems of the cosmos do not merely differ from each other. They are arranged in a kind of hierarchy or dialectical scale. We already know from the results of the special sciences the characteristics of at least several different levels on this scale. Mechanical systems are merely ordered but do not have the capacity to combine and form larger wholes which are more than the sum of their parts. Chemical systems, on the other hand, manifest precisely this kind of holism. Carbon and oxygen, for example, combine to form a new whole, carbon dioxide, which has properties which make it quite different from either of the two elements which compose it. With biological systems we see the beginning of purposefulness or teleology. Each particular organ within an organism has a specific function with reference to the whole, the integrity (and reproduction) of which constitutes its telos or goal. Finally, with the social form of matter, we find the capacity to develop systems which have new structures, and thus serve new functions, which were not encoded in the genome of the organisms which created them.

The principle which governs this hierarchy is nothing other than the principle of organization itself. By organization we mean the integrating power which brings systems into being. Chemical valence reflects a higher degree of this integrating power than mere mechanism, biological organism a higher degree than mere chemism, and social organization a higher degree than mere biological organism. The extent to which a particular subsystem of the cosmos is organized makes it physical, chemical, biological, or social, while its specific pattern of organization makes it, for example, carbon rather than oxygen, a sheep rather than a goat, an engineer rather than a philosopher, etc.

While each one of these types of system expresses to a greater or lesser degree the organizing dynamic which is embedded in being itself, none of them express this dynamic perfectly, and, indeed, none of them possess the characteristics or capacities necessary to account for the fact that there is something rather than nothing, cosmos rather than chaos. For this it is necessary to have recourse to the idea of a system whose very essence it is to organize, and thus to bring into being. This system, "organization itself," corresponds to the scholastic idea of the ens realissimum -- that being whose essence it is to be. Such a structure would contain within itself all other structures, which are, ultimately, just partial, imperfect expressions of its own nature, vanishing moments in its drive to express itself. Such a form includes the qualities and capacities of all lesser forms (relationality, holism, self-organization, teleology, consciousness, the capacity for love, work, power, creativity, knowledge) as well as others which, located as we are at a more humble place on the dialectical scale, we are unable to even conceive. It is, in short, God.

This way of theorizing being is superior to even the most advanced forms of objective idealism or dialectical materialism. Objective idealism shows why organization is necessary, but treats it as something external to matter, a view which conflicts with the new science and which has authoritarian implications. Dialectical materialist theories of reflection, we have seen, have the merit of highlighting the role of concrete interactions in the process of development, but do not really explain why there is organization (and thus being) rather than chaos (and thus nothingness) or why systems evolve towards higher, more complex forms of organization. Our own approach captures the strengths, and avoids the weaknesses, of both doctrines. On the one hand, unlike objective idealism and like dialectical materialism, we make organization internal rather than external to matter. If being is organization, then unformed matter simply doesn't exist, while an "organizing principle" is nothing other than organization in potentia -- what the philosophical tradition has historically understood as the prima materia . On the other hand, like objective idealism and unlike dialectical materialism, we show why organization is necessary, and thus supply an adequate ontological ground to the whole process of cosmohistorical evolution. If being is organization, then everything existing participates, to a greater or lesser degree, in the drive towards organization.

If being is organization, then logic, far from being purely a purely formal science, is, in fact, nothing other than the science of the organizing principles of being itself, the rationally necessary determinations of the very concept of being: system, structure, organization. Our approach, in other words supports the dialectical understanding of logic as essentially one with ontology.

Our approach also has important implications for the interpretation of such traditional metaphysical categories as "matter" and "spirit." Matter, from our perspective, is simply the potential for organization. We use "potential" here in its authentic sense, to mean a latent, as yet undeveloped, organizing capacity and not merely the ability to receive organization from the outside. Spirit, on the other hand, is actual organization, the developed ability to organize. The "degree of spirituality" of a system is the degree of actualization of its organizing capacity. How does matter become spirit, or what is the same thing, how does "organization as such" act to bring the cosmos into being? Synergism rejects both taxis and katallaxis -- the idea that organization is imposed on matter from the outside, or emerges spontaneously through the interaction of discrete particulars. Rather, we argue, cosmopoesis (the emergence of organization) is a complex process which can be understood in three ways. First, there is a unitary, underlying, organizing principle which contains the entire organization of the cosmos in potentia , and of which the cosmohistorical process is simply the gradual, logically necessary unfolding. At the same time, this logical unfolding involves real, material interactions. These are not interactions between discrete particulars (which our theory does not allow), but rather interactions which bring simpler systems into relationship with larger, more complex systems, thus negating their relative particularity and transforming them into something new, more complex, and more highly organized. Finally, all systems are drawn towards the beautiful, the true, and the good, towards the complex synergistic integrity which they already are , at least implicitly, and in which alone they can find true joy.

On the basis of this ontology, it is possible to systematize the results of the special sciences and to show that the Universe is in fact a unified, self-organizing, teleological system. This task will, however, have to await another context, for we need now to turn our attention to the problem of value.

III. The Principle of Value

What does this tell us about value? Historically, the transcendentals --the Beautiful, the True, the Good, and the One-- were regarded as terms "convertible" with Being, meaning that they referred to the same thing as Being, though they added some relation (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae , I, 5.1, 9.1, 16.3). It is this strategy precisely that we propose to use here. If being is organization, then organization is the principle of value. The value of a system is nothing other than its level of organization, or its capacity to unite, under a common structure, a complex diversity of elements. The greater the number and diversity of elements united, and the greater the level of unity, the more organized, and thus the more valuable, the system.

It is not possible to develop in detail in this context the full implications of this understanding of value. A few points are, however, in order. Consider, for example, the nature of beauty. By the beauty of a system, we mean simply its level of organization, understood as the object of (sensory or intellectual) perception. The greater the diversity of the elements organized, and the more perfect the harmony in which they are united, the more beautiful the system. This is true throughout the natural world, from simple harmonies of the night sky, through the more complex forms of the crystalline structures and living organisms to the rich, lush diversity of complex ecosystems and human societies. And it is true as well of great works of art, which are nothing if not a complex manifold of relations harmoniously arranged. Beauty itself, as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas taught long ago, is the capacity to bring things into being, and is thus convertible with Being itself, or God.

The truth value of a statement, a concept, or theory, similarly, is its capacity to organize large quantities of qualitatively diverse, and therefore highly complex experience. It is necessary in this connection to focus equal attention on the complexity of the experience organized and on the level of organization of the experience in question. Our experience is most highly organized when we identify highly compact "organizing principles," knowledge of which permits us to derive logically all the rich particularity of the experience on which the principle was based. It is this organizing capacity of theories which leads us to speak analogously of their "power." The most powerful theories are those which comprehend the full range of experience in unique compact statements which are themselves pregnant with rich experiential content.

The good, finally, is organization realized as something desirable, and thus as final cause. As final it is the object of our desire or appetite, whether sensual or intellectual, and as cause, it is the actual capacity to organize. Broadly speaking there are three levels of ethical judgement.

Right action is action in accord with cosmic law --i.e. in accord with the tendency of matter to develop towards ever higher levels of organization. Virtue is the capacity for right action. Justice is the capacity of a society to produce virtuous human beings and thus realize humanity's destiny in the cosmos.

All of these various determinations of the concept of value -- beauty, truth, and goodness-- are ultimately just aspects or modes of being as such, or of organization. This is the significance of the fourth and last transcendental: the One. For what is organization if not the capacity to make all one, not in the sense of negating difference, but in the sense of integrating infinite difference into a single, harmonious whole, so that each particular system draws its strength from the cosmos as a whole, while contributing with all its power to the organizing activity which brings the cosmos into being. In this sense, the One is the complex synergistic integrity of the universe.

But here we begin to come up on the limits of philosophical discourse. As reason exhausts itself, complex determinations once again give way to the simple. When we speak of the One we are in the presence of an organized complexity the depth and beauty of which we cannot even begin to comprehend. Here human science and philosophy reach their outer limit and give way to a properly mystical theology.

These limitations, however, are in no sense so severe as to stand in the way of a philosophical ethics with a well grounded and richly articulated theory of value. On the contrary, our knowledge, partial and incomplete as it is, provides more than adequate guidance for the organization of human society, and the ordering of human society to the higher good of the cosmos as a whole.

And even when we do run up against the limits of our natural capacities, there is no cause for despair. From the vantage point of the dialectic the whole journey of life and indeed the whole journey of human history --the joys and struggles of childhood and adolescence, the process of forming intimate bonds and lasting friendships, the experience of productive labor, of building and exercising power, of creating and contemplating beauty, of grasping the cosmos in all its wonderful complexity and subtle organization, and all of humanity's long struggle for justice-- appear as a kind of preparation for something still more wonderful, still more glorious, which we cannot name. We are like the traveller who struggles to the top of the highest mountain, hoping to reach the heavens, only to find above and beyond an endless expanse of space across which our limited powers cannot carry us. And yet still we strive. To many of course, their minds untrained by the dialectic, their hearts uninformed by a vision of the beautiful, the true, the good, and the one, what we see at the top of this mountain might well look like a barren wasteland: cold, thin, dry air, and then above, the distant starry sky. This place is not fit for human habitation. But those who have followed along on the difficult journey, whose minds and hearts have matured, find here an incomparable splendor.

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