“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, March 12, 2011

Uniqueness, Irreduction, Individualism

Irreducible Fractions on a Complex Plane

An object is unique. This means that it's far more contingent than an individual. Individuals can't be divided further. Unique objects could be exploded into a million bits at a moment's notice. Or an ant could crawl hungrily over a tiny portion of the object's sandstone exterior, smelling for a crumb, ignoring its bulk.

Individualism is a social atomism, reducing society to a swirling powder of particles. No wonder emergentism has been adopted by the right: it's a libertarian dream to imagine that groups self-organize.

This form of emergentism this relies on atomism. Only in the eyes of an atomist does a swirling cloud appear miraculous.

But objects can be broken just as they can combine. What appears to be emergence from one (object's) point of view is just existence or movement from another's.

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