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Chapter 4

Judging Organization: A Plea
for Transcendental Logic in Philosophy
of Biology

Gertrudis Van de Vijver and Levi Haeck

**Abstract** Even if the concept of organization is increasingly recognized as cru-
cially important to (philosophy of) biology, the fear of thereby collapsing into vital-
ism, understood as the metaphysical thesis that “life” involves special principles
irreducible to (and that perhaps even run counter to) the principles governing the
physical order, has persisted. In trying to overcome this tension, Georges Canguilhem
endorsed an *attitudinal* form of vitalism. This “attitudinal stance” (a term coined by
Charles Wolfe) shifts the issue of organization away from ontological commitments
regarding the nature of things as they are in themselves, in favor of epistemological
issues concerning the stance of the knowing subject. However, it is based on some
epistemological tenets that deserve further examination. Firstly, in spite of its anti-
Cartesian spirit, the attitudinal stance implicitly relies on a Cartesian perspective on
the relation between subject and object. Secondly, it rests on the idea that some
objects can meaningfully be identified as persisting individuals—living organ-
isms—in a way in which others cannot, even if it denies that the capacity to be
meaningfully identified as such reflects an actual property of them. This chapter
outlines a possible alternative viewpoint that takes these challenges to heart by
developing a co-constitutive picture of the relation between subject and object—a
picture based on Georges Canguilhem’s own theory of judgment, but supplemented
by Immanuel Kant’s transcendental logic. Most fundamentally, it is argued that the
(self-)organization of living beings draws attention to and is structurally intertwined
with the (self-)organization of the thinking subject’s rational (i.e., logical, concep-
tual, judging) capacities.

<footnote>G. Van de Vijver (✉)
Ghent University, BE, Ghent, Belgium
e-mail: gertrudis.vandevijver@ugent.be</footnote>

<footnote>L. Haeck (✉)
The Research Foundation Flanders (FWO Flanders), Ghent University, BE, Ghent, Belgium
e-mail: levi.haeck@ugent.be</footnote>
## 4.1 Introduction

What might it mean for the organization of living beings to be intrinsically linked to the organization of our rational capacities as thinking subjects? In “The concept of the organism”, Joseph Henry Woodger brings this traditionally philosophical question into the heart of biology. He writes that we must distinguish between ‘investigation’ and ‘interpretation’, two processes that appear to be “different in their nature, their outcome, and in the ‘canons’ which regulate them” (1930, p. 2). The *investigatory process* “reduces at bottom either to observing organisms or parts of organisms in their natural relations, or to altering their natural relations in a systematic way, and recording the results [...],” with heuristic success as the touchstone “by which the investigator will measure all things.” The *interpretative process*, on the other hand, requires “knowledge about the properties of knowledge itself, and will not be natural scientific knowledge” (1930, p. 2). Woodger assumes that people who pursue natural scientific knowledge do not pay much attention to the dimension of “knowledge about knowledge” and vice versa, that people who make knowledge into an object of investigation “do not always know much about the subject matter of natural scientific knowledge” (1930, p. 2). He regrets this mutual disregard and compares it to the relation between the cook and the baking powder: “the people who pursue natural knowledge may be said, as a rule, and from one point of view at least, not to know what they are doing in somewhat the same sense in which a cook may be said not to know what she is doing when she uses baking powder” (1930, p. 1). In relation to the investigatory process, Woodger deplores that little appreciation is left for “understanding the properties of the intellectual tools involved—concepts, propositions, principles of inference, ‘working hypotheses,’ postulates, etc.” (1930, p. 3). He coins the latter as “the logical realm” and considers it to be an intrinsic part of the pursuit of scientific knowledge: “Natural scientific knowledge springs from a fertilizing union of two ‘realms’: the realm of sense experience or perception, on the one hand, and the ‘logical realm’ or the realm of abstract logical entities and relations, on the other” (1930, p. 4).

In line with Woodger’s focus on “knowledge about knowledge” and with the help of Immanuel Kant and Georges Canguilhem, we develop the idea that the workings of the “logical realm,” as Woodger calls it, become manifest first and foremost where something *resists* the investigatory procedures pertaining to natural science. The history of the modern sciences shows that this is most prominently the case in the study of organisms or living systems. This becomes clear from the many forms of vitalism that have been put forward (cf. Normandin & Wolfe, 2013), from the recurrent attention to the organism seen as more than the sum of its parts and as a complex and self-organizing entity vis-à-vis evolutionary theory (e.g., Kauffman, 1992; Salthe, 2010), as well as from the attention to developmental and emergentist dynamics and the accompanying criticisms of (genetic) reductionism (Webster & Goodwin, 1996; Kauffman, 1992; Salthe, 2010; Oyama et. al., 2000; Van de Vijver, 2009; Robert, 2004). As illustrated by the contributions to this volume, a recent outcome of these developments is the rising recognition of the value of the concept of biological
organization in studying organisms (e.g., Mossio et al., 2009, 2016) and their distin-
guishing features (e.g., Saborido et al., 2011; Nunes-Neto et al., 2014; Montévil &
Mossio, 2015; Pontarotti, 2015; Mossio & Bich, 2017). As we see it, this trend
involves recurrent “moments of crisis” of the logical realm prevailing in the modern
sciences.<fnref n="1" /> In relation to the living organism, the conceptual space itself comes under
pressure and cannot but change gear, moving from “knowledge about the object’ to
‘knowledge about knowledge.” The attention to the organism appears to be the point
where the conceptual space is compelled to investigate its own structural procedures
and dynamics—i.e., where it is compelled to fold back onto itself.

The hypotheses taken as a guiding thread here are threefold: (i) we interpret the
crisis of the logical realm to concern at heart the relation between “subjects” and
“predicates” and in particular the resistance of certain things (such as organisms) to
being reduced to predicative descriptions; (ii) we take it that Kant was after some-
thing that diverges from the subject/predicate structure encountered in most of our
Western languages and considered our logical and conceptual capacities to consti-
tute objects, rather than merely being instruments to develop (predicative) knowl-
edge about objects existing independently from us;<fnref n="2" /> thus, Kant contributed to a
fundamental rearrangement of our viewpoint on what counts as an object and on the
place the knowing subject can have in the process of knowing; and (iii) Canguilhem
was on a similar track to Kant in relation to judgment and knowledge, even if some
of his writings on living phenomena are at times at odds with it.

Our discussion of Canguilhem and Kant, which calls for a focus on logic in mat-
ters relating to organization in biology, suggests that the crisis of “knowledge about”
requires a more critical viewpoint on what can be qualified as a knowing subject.
Insofar as one wishes to take on board the Kantian premise that the knowable is
always *for us*, never *in itself*, the most straightforward move to make is to *include*,
in the heart of conceptuality, the knowing subject’s participation in living dynamics.
More precisely, *both* the living organism *and* the knowing subject seeking to
describe the living organism appear to be characterized by an internal logic of reci-
procity. Pace Brilman (2018, p. 26), then, whose analysis suggests that life must
either be external to rationality (which she takes to be Kant’s view) *or* internal to
rationality (which she takes to be Canguilhem’s view), we suggest that the episte-
mological difficulty of objectifying living organisms is in a profound sense due to
their commonality with the organization of our rational capacities. This commonal-
ity, we conjecture, impacts *both* what can be called an object and what can be called
a knowing subject. From this point of view, the *attitudinal* type of vitalism, as
articulated and to a certain extent also upheld by Canguilhem (cf. Wolfe, 2011),<fnref n="3" />
uncritically leaves the knowing subject intact and distinct from the things it seeks to

<footnote n="1">¹This trend has, in relation to vitalism, been called a “counter-history” of biology, a term that has
recently been used in the context of the FWO-research project: “Vitalism: A counter-history of
biology” (2019–2021).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²For a technical (and compelling) analysis of the nonpredicative aspects of Kant's logic, see
Codato (2008).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³Cf. Normandin & Wolfe (2013); Etxeberria & Wolfe (2018)</footnote>
investigate, even if it acknowledges, as Canguilhem does, that a knowing subject is
fundamentally a living subject.<fnref n="4" />

In what follows, we begin by briefly explaining Canguilhem's attitudinal vital-
ism (in Sect. 4.2.1). This brings us to an analysis of what we take to be his own
theory of judgment and account of "knowledge about knowledge" (in Sects. 4.2.2
and 4.2.3), on the basis of which we offer a first critical assessment of attitudinal
vitalism (in Sect. 4.2.4). Both the flaws and the assets of Canguilhem's thought lead
the way to an in-depth analysis of Kant's philosophy (in Sect. 4.3). First, we discuss
Kant's take on logic (in Sect. 4.3.1) and his transcendental theory of judgment (in
Sects. 4.3.2 and 4.3.3), which is then brought in relation to Canguilhem's thought
(in Sect. 4.3.3) as well as to Kant's own account of biological organization (in Sect.
4.3.4). This allows us to dissect in a renewed and more precise manner the uncritical
tenets of Canguilhem's attitudinal vitalism while simultaneously shedding a more
distinctive light on how the organization of our rational capacities is intertwined
with the organization of living beings (in Sects. 4.4 and 4.5).

## 4.2 Canguilhem's Theory of Judgment vis-à-vis Life

### 4.2.1 Canguilhem's Attitudinal Vitalism

We focus on the work of Canguilhem, because his questions in relation to living
phenomena are very often questions of knowledge and vice versa. In Thought and
the Living, for instance, he writes that we “accept far too easily that there exists a
fundamental conflict between knowledge and life, such that their reciprocal aver-
sion can lead only to the destruction of life by knowledge or to the derision of
knowledge by life.” This presupposition leaves us “with no choice except that
between a crystalline (i.e., transparent and inert) intellectualism and a foggy (at
once active and muddled) mysticism” (Canguilhem, 2008c, p. xvii).<fnref n="5" />

<footnote n="4">⁴In his contribution to this volume (“Varieties of Organicism — A Critical Analysis”), Charles Wolfe (2023) also touches on the connection between the knowing subject and the known object in the context of organization. He addresses, differently from but still remarkably in line with our own analysis, that with regard to “the problem of [...] objectification (of properties of organisms), there is kind of symmetrical problem, the other horn of the dilemma, which is subjectification.” He adds that “the Kantian / epistemological view can also be transfigured into something ‘ontologi- cal’, not as a claim about the world [...] but as a claim about the unique nature of the subject [...],” which is indeed not surprising “if we consider Kant’s famous proclamation that ‘there will never be a Newton of a blade of grass’: a point which is both about our cognitive capacities and [...] about the uniqueness of organic entities in comparison with the entities studied by physics [...]” We agree with the idea that for Kant, claims about the world (especially in respect to organization) go hand in hand with claims about the subject, but in our view this does not for Kant necessarily involve a “slippage from the epistemological to the ontological,” for, as we will try to show in this chapter, Kant’s transcendental system has the merit of warning against such a slippage (see esp. Sects. 4.4 and 4.5).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵We refer to the English translation of Canguilhem's works, except when the English translation is unavailable, in which case we translate it ourselves. As for Kant, we refer to the *Akademieausgabe*</footnote>
Canguilhem contends, in line with Woodger, that the encounter with living beings confronts us with issues concerning “knowledge about knowledge” and concerning the place of the knowing subject in relation to what is known. More specifically, he stresses that the perspectival dimension in relation to life is ineliminable and should serve as the core of epistemology at large (see 2008a, c, 1966, 1971). In this respect, he describes vitalism, an umbrella term for scientific theories that treat living organisms as *fundamentally* distinct from other natural objects, as a “permanent exigency”<fnref n="6" /> of life in the living” (2008a, p. 62). Vitalism, according to Canguilhem, is not a mere theory among others but a central “orientation of biological thought” (2008a, p. 60). He speaks in this regard of a “vitality of vitalism” (2008a, p. 61). So, even if it

may be that vitalism appears to today's biologists, as to yesterday's, to be an illusion of thought [...] the illusion in question is not of the same order as geocentrism or phlogiston theory—that is, it has a vitality of its own—in which case, one must philosophically account for the vitality of this illusion. (2008a, p. 61)

This constitutes the core premise of what is, according to Wolfe (2011), Canguilhem's *attitudinal* vitalism. However, even if this line of thought draws attention to “knowledge about knowledge,” it remains rather meagre, because it leaves both terms, the knowing subject on the one hand and the exigency or demand of life on the other, relatively unquestioned. We therefore propose to focus on Canguilhem's view of judgment, which is, we think, much more promising for dealing with the relation between knowledge and life and which remains until now largely unexplored in the secondary literature on Canguilhem.

## 4.2.2 Canguilhem's Theory of the “Broken Judgment”

It is in “De la science et de la contre-science” (1971) that Canguilhem puts forward the core of his theory of judgment. If we observe a wooden stick in a glass, he says, we see it as broken.<fnref n="7" /> Such will be our viewpoint, our perspective, no matter how many times we repeat the observation. Nonetheless, we will *know* that we see the stick as

<footnote>(Gesammelte Schriften) from 1900 by indicating title abbreviation, volume, and page numbers (with the exception of the first *Critique*, for which we use the customary A and B indication), but we cite from the English translation if available (cf. our list of references down below).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶This term and its translation (“exigence”) would deserve more attention. We see it here as a “requirement,” a “demand,” even a “need” of life.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷As aptly noted by a reviewer, one could object that the stick in question is actually “bent” rather than “broken.” Yet Canguilhem clearly chooses to speak of the brokenness (*brisure*) both of the stick (*le bâton brisé*) and of judgment, as will be clear below (“[...] *c’est le jugement qui s’est brisé [...]*”), even after citing La Fontaine, who says that “the water” indeed “bends” the stick (“quand l’eau courbe un baton [...]”) (1971, p. 173). Thus, we follow Canguilhem in his usage of the term *brisé*’ in both contexts as it highlights a *shift* from the brokenness of the stick *to* the brokenness of judgment. We assume that this word is best translated as “broken,” although the same reviewer notes that *le jugement brisé* could also be translated as “the fractured judgment,” but then again it seems a bit loaded to speak of a fractured stick.</footnote>
broken only in so far as the possibility of another type of knowledge has opened, a
knowledge that describes things in an objective way, that describes how things are in
*reality*. We will then also *know* that the perceived stick is not broken at all. From that
moment on, it is impossible to maintain both viewpoints simultaneously: "one cannot
be both naïve and warned, credulous and critical, ignorant and learned" (Canguilhem,
1971, pp. 173-175; our translation). The initial "seeing" of the stick is from then on
broken in two: *my* judgment and the *reality* judgment. What is broken is therefore not
so much the stick itself as our *judgment*: "Quoique paraissant brisé, le bâton n'est plus
brisé, mais c'est le jugement qui s'est brisé" (1971, p. 173).

Canguilhem stresses, moreover, that both options are “inverse” as well as “cor-
related” (1971, p. 173). From the moment judgment is broken, there is an exclusive
disjunction between *my* perspective and the perspective *of reality*. Their very pos-
sibility rests on a mutual exclusion: on the one hand, objective knowledge cannot
but exclude the moment of *naïveté* whereby the stick is seen as broken. On the other
hand, the “naïve seeing” of the stick as broken, revealed from thereon as an appear-
ance, an ignorance, an uncritical evidence, is incompatible with the “objective see-
ing” of the stick (1971, pp. 173–175). As such, in their being inverse and mutually
exclusive, both judgments are correlated. More in particular, Canguilhem states that
*if* there is (a judgment about) a reality, it is the result of a transfer that establishes a
correlation with a judgment that, by virtue of this transfer, can be called mine, a
judgment that is related to something being identified as “my” perspective. To
Canguilhem, appearance emerges together with reality: both are posited in relation
to each other, albeit the one next to the other, the one excluding the other.

In addition, both perspectives are legitimate—the one is not “truer” than the
other. Yet the issue of their legitimacy only appears when something like an observer
perspective, and thus also something like an observed reality, enters the scene. As a
result, appearance judgments cannot be said to be about reality just as much as real-
ity judgments cannot be said to reveal the falsity of appearance judgments. As soon
as judgment is broken, the false can no longer be seen as proportionally related to
the true. The false is not a moment of the true; it is what is excluded from the true
as soon as a decision has been made about the truth of the proposition. Instead of
considering error as a matter of consistency—whereby the two judgments are con-
ceived to be on par with each other, with “my judgment” becoming a false moment
of “true judgment”—Canguilhem advocates for a categorical brokenness of judg-
ment, a fundamental heterogeneity between the two judgmental sides which does
not allow for reconciliation, for “taking over” one type of judgment from within the
other (1971, pp. 173–175).

We could of course (scientifically) explain the falsity of my judgment that the
stick is broken by considering it as a mere optical illusion. However, this misses
Canguilhem's point, which is to indicate a *structural* condition: if a human being
makes judgments, it does so *both* from within its own, singular, lived perspective
(potentially and at times actually shared by others) *and* from within a general per-
spective (shared by others as a *norm*). The general perspective, which adheres to
universal laws of nature, often presents in an unjustified way the singular perspec-
tive as an initial, but false and therefore temporary moment of scientific
investigation.<fnref n="8" /> To Canguilhem, both standpoints are correlated while being inverse to each other: they exclude each other qua content (so that no comparison can be justified at that level), but they are related qua possibility. We will see below that this *reciprocal dynamic* is the key to understanding in what sense our capacity to judge participates in the living dynamics.

### 4.2.3 Knowledge About Knowledge: Reflexivity and Reciprocity

Two things need to be underlined in relation to Canguilhem's account of judgment, two things that are important in addressing the issue of the concept of the organism. The first has to do with *how our viewpoint on the capacity to judge*, as it took shape from within the objectifying project of the modern sciences, *is impacted by life and its knowability*. Canguilhem's work (as well as Kant's, as we will show in a moment) weighs the knowability of living beings in the field of the modern sciences in terms of broken judgment: life brings us to the point of having to express something about the structure of judgment. Indeed, in line with the previous section, judgment emerges as broken, not between a reality out there and a knowing subject but between a reality as objectively apprehended *by us*, representing normative universal laws of nature, and an observational perspective that is *mine*. An *I* does not perceive reality as a *we* knows it. This means that if there is something like (scientific) objectivity, it is *not* because of the fact that an agreement has been found between two pre-existing terms, a knowing subject and an observed object. If there is objectivity, it is because we have succeeded, from within our sensible (i.e., sensory) and conceptual activities, to obtain distinct judgments that can be qualified as a *reality* perspective, inverse to and correlated with *my perspective*.

In this regard, Herman de Vleeschauwer's work on Kant (1937, p. 434) suggests that to succeed in making such kinds of distinctions between judgments, we need a *reflexive return (un retour réflexif)* to our sensible and conceptual activities. Without such a reflexive return, there is no distinction to be made between conceptuality and sensibility—or between “the reality perspective” and “my perspective”. These capacities or activities themselves (conceptuality and sensibility) are representational products *of* the reflexive return upon them, which highlights that they cannot but remain structurally caught up in a complicit and solidary totality.<fnref n="9" />

<footnote n="8">⁸Even a phenomenological or embodied cognition-inspired approach, which might highlight the singularity of the sensorimotor procedure whereby getting the stick out of the water informs us that, in fact, it is not broken at all, is irrelevant in this sense. Such phenomenological approaches, however much they stress the initial, singular, and lived conditions of experience, seemingly consider the false to be a moment *of* the true, thus neglecting the structural condition human beings are in as knowers.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹This dynamic is what Kant seized under the heading of an “original acquisition” (e.g., in *On a Discovery*, ÜE, 8:221) and of the “epigenesis of pure reason” (e.g., in the first *Critique*, KrV, B166–168, and in his Inaugural Dissertation, MSI, 2:395).</footnote>
This brings us to our second point. If we come to ask ourselves the question of the knowability of life, as has been recurrently the case since the very onset of the modern sciences, it cannot but indicate that something in our “standard” representational procedures is shaken and has obliged us to undertake such a reflexive return. This is precisely what Woodger underlines in his analysis of the concept of the organism and in relation to which he comes to highlight the importance of logic. Precisely the standard ways of turning things into objects, i.e., the standard ways of grasping phenomenal diversity on the basis of concepts, becomes contentious in the context of scientific research about living organisms, where phenomenal diversity resists being subsumed under a concept as its predicate.<fnref n="10" /> At stake here is the impossibility of identifying objects in terms of appropriate predicates (or properties), i.e., the impossibility of finding adequate concepts—a “reality perspective”—that can be stably, but inversely, correlated with the phenomenal diversity at hand, that is, “my perspective.” Instead of arriving at knowledge about the object, there is, in the case of the living organization, a prevailing indecision or indeterminacy between my perspective and the reality perspective.<fnref n="11" /> This prevailing indecision implies that to address the question of the organism solely in terms of predicates or properties adequately characterizing it as a living organization, cannot but miss the point. Fundamentally at stake is indeed not the adequacy of properties but the structure of judgment underlying our procedures of knowing.

In sum, the identification of properties as if they are more or less adequate to capture objects that exist independently from our doings misses the core of the logic that both Woodger and Canguilhem, so it appears, intrinsically relate to an epistemological project that purports to be in line with what is implied by the living. There is no sense in assuming in this process an “originary standpoint,” as there is no sense, in Canguilhem’s broken judgment, in assuming the *reality* judgment to be more originary than *my* judgment. Here lies, in our opinion, the core of what can be called “reflexivity,” understood in terms of reciprocity: instead of referring to a knowing subject that develops knowledge *about* something, it indicates, *from within* an organic dynamic (as will be shown below), a return, a folding back onto certain activities (sensible and conceptual ones), leading to a “representational product” about that activity. As such, the prevailing indecision between my perspective and the reality perspective guides us to the insight that in the constitution of objectivity through the identification of properties, the knowing subject is an ineliminable factor.

<footnote n="10">¹⁰We shall see in Sect. 4.3 how this implies that the distinction between what counts as subject and what as predicate becomes critical.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹This can remind us of Von Neumann’s and Burks’ idea that in relation to autonomous machines, there is an inescapable confusion between the autonomy of the model and the modeling of autonomy (Von Neumann & Burks, 1966; Dupuy, 1985). See also Pask and Von Foerster on a relational definition of self-organization (1960)</footnote>
### 4.2.4 Life and Logic

In “Aspects of vitalism,” where the core of Canguilhem’s attitudinal vitalism is articulated, it is argued that the crucial fault of classical vitalism lies in its “insertion of the living organism into a physical milieu to whose laws it constitutes an exception.” He takes this to be mistaken, because “[t]here cannot be an empire within an empire without there being no longer any empire, neither as container nor as contents. [...]” (2008a, p. 70). A justification of this enigmatic statement follows right after in the text:

> One cannot defend the originality of the biological phenomenon, and consequently the originality of biology, by demarcating within the physico-chemical territory—that is, within the milieu of inertia, of externally determined movements—enclaves of indetermin nation, zones of dissidence, or foyers of heresy. *If one is to assert the originality of the biological, this must be in terms of the originality of one realm over the whole of experience, and not over islets of experiences.* In the end, classical vitalism sins, paradoxically, only in its excessive modesty, in its reluctance to universalize its conception of experience. (Canguilhem, 2008a, p. 70; our italics)<fnref n="12" />

Canguilhem appears to claim that life serves to be the sole perspective for all science, whereby the originality of the biological phenomenon reigns over “the whole of experience” as the one and only empire. There is no islet of life within a world of inertia, nor is there a “vitalist” empire contained within a “mechanistic” empire. But it is still enigmatic that Canguilhem formulates his criticism of (this excessive modesty of) classical vitalism in terms of the relation between a “contained” or “content” and a “container” (contenu et contenant). This distinction is traceable at least to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ *New Essays*, where he writes the following in relation to Aristotle’s logic:

> [...] rather than saying ‘A is B’ he [Aristotle] usually says ‘B is in A’ [...]. This manner of statement deserves respect; for indeed the predicate is in the subject, or rather the idea of the predicate is included in the idea of the subject. [...] when I say *Every man is an animal* I mean that all the men are included amongst all the animals; but at the same time I mean that the idea of animal is included in the idea of man. ‘Animal’ comprises more individuals than ‘man’ does, but ‘man’ comprises more ideas or more attributes: one has more instances, the other more degrees of reality; one has the greater extension, the other the greater intension. So it can truthfully be said that the whole theory of syllogism could be demonstrated from the theory *de continente et contento*, of container and contained. (1996, p. 486)<fnref n="13" />

<footnote n="12">¹²He goes on: “Once one recognizes the originality of life, one must *comprehend* matter within life, and the science of matter—which is science itself—within the activity of the living. Physics and chemistry, in seeking to reduce the specificity of the living, did no more than remain faithful to their underlying intention, which is to determine the laws between objects, valid without any reference to an absolute, central point of reference. Today, this determination has led them to recognize the immanence of measuring to the measured, and to see the content of observation protocols as relative to the very act of observation. The milieu in which one looks for the emergence of life only acquires its meaning as milieu in virtue of the operation of the human living being who takes measurements of it, measurements that bear an essential relation to the technical apparatuses and procedures by which they are made” (Canguilhem, 2008a, p. 70).</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³See Book IV, Chapter XVII, §8.</footnote>
Canguilhem's suggestion is that our "standard" scientific approach to nature must to some extent adhere to this logic of predication, according to which we are to mold our observations into a structure of predicates, subjects, and their internal (logical) relation, which allows for syllogistic reasoning.<fnref n="14" /> He also seems to suggest that we simply cannot apply (this kind of) logic to nature in order to know what *life* is. This is because in an important respect *life* is the attempt to know what life is. In *The Living and Its Milieu*, for instance, he argues that:

> [...] if science is the work of a humanity rooted in life before being enlightened by knowledge, if science is a fact in the world at the same time as it is a vision of the world, then it maintains a permanent and obligatory relation with perception. And thus *the milieu proper to men is not situated within the universal milieu as contents in a container*. (2008b, p. 120; our italics)

Thus, Canguilhem appears to defend the idea that living beings somehow escape our logical procedures—i.e., cannot be seen as a contained in a (predicative) container—because these logical procedures are *themselves* to some extent “rooted in life,” i.e., that “the living” reigns not only over the whole of experience but over “rationality” as well. The logical or intellectual tools (that we use to rationally study nature) discussed by Woodger are themselves living tools (used *by* living beings).<fnref n="15" />

However, these and other passages might also lend themselves to a diverging interpretation. Schmidgen, for instance, observes that Canguilhem's account of rationality involves a conception of life as "predominantly [manifesting] itself in organic individuals that act and react within specific environments which, in turn, are defined by the *needs and desires* of these individuals" (2014, p. 235; our italics). This is confirmed by passages such as the conclusion of *The Living and Its Milieu*:

> From this stems the insufficiency of any biology that, in complete submission to the spirit of the physico-chemical sciences, would seek to eliminate all consideration of sense from its domain. From the biological and psychological point of view, a sense is an appreciation of values in relation to a need. And for the one who experiences and lives it, a need is an irreducible, and thereby absolute, system of reference. (2008b, p. 120)

It would take us too far to analyze Canguilhem's standpoint concerning *needs* and their satisfaction in relation to his renewed epistemology, but we are certainly doubtful about the "irreducible, and thereby absolute" status of them as a "system of reference." What is clear, however, is that a viewpoint that falls back on absolute and irreducible needs misses his insight that the living is not predicatively or logically graspable (i.e., that it is not a "content" included in a "container"). Hence, the chances are thin from thereon to arrive at a consequential viewpoint in which our *logical* capacities (as representational products) are seen as genuinely undetachable from the living dynamics.

<footnote n="14">¹⁴This structure is indeed what allows for truth, according to Leibniz: "[...] always, in every true affirmative proposition, necessary or contingent, universal or particular, the concept of the predicate is in a sense included in that of the subject; the predicate is present in the subject; or else I do not know what truth is" (1967, p. 63 [G, 56]).</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵We developed this idea in more detail in Haeck & Van de Vijver (2023).</footnote>
The way in which this point is at stake in the current discussions on vitalism would certainly also merit further discussion. Let us just say here that the mere distinction made between substantialist, heuristic, and attitudinal vitalism (Wolfe, 2011) potentially testifies to a similar predicament. Attitudinal vitalism refers to the viewpoint—attributable to Canguilhem, but also Kurt Goldstein (1995)—that the knowing subject adopts a certain stance in relation to life (call it epistemological, ethical, or political) and thereby refuses to ontologize and to substantivize the idea of a “vital supplement” (*force*, *élan*), so as not to fall into a scientifically unacceptable ontological vitalism. It does problematize the view that life is in any standard sense objectifiable, suitable for standard scientific investigation, yet it seems to do so by (uncritically) substantivizing that which is not objectifiable in terms of a (subjective) “stance” or “attitude.” In this respect, attitudinal vitalism appears to operate on par with classical or substantialist vitalism, however different the former claims to be from the latter.<fnref n="16" /> In this respect, it potentially misses the very notion of reciprocity that Canguilhem (be it in his theory of judgment), Kant (as will be shown below), and Woodger, in his way, are at pains to articulate.

In order to make clear how essential a *logical* viewpoint is in this discussion, we now turn to Kant’s theory of judgment. It will allow us to show how difficult it can be to escape from the “Cartesian trap” of ontologizing subject and object in terms of a knowing instance that cognizes a world which is more or less (or not at all) graspable through predicative means.

## 4.3 Kant's Theory of Judgment vis-à-vis Life

Kant’s reflections on the possibility of objectivity led him to carry out a transcendental investigation into the thinking subject’s logical capacities.<fnref n="17" /> Whereas its foundations reside in the *Critique of Pure Reason* (1781/7), Kant brings his investigation to a head in the *Critique of the Power of Judgment* (1790) by engaging precisely with issues, such as the issue of living organization, that seem to *resist* objectification. In this section, we argue that the special place Kant gives to living organisms in his “transcendental logic” (broadly construed) and theory of judgment must be addressed in terms of his overall concern with the science of logic and not so much in terms of their belonging to a supposedly unique ontological class. First, we briefly present Kant’s view that logic concerns a return upon unconsciously

<footnote n="16">¹⁶A similar tendency can be found in Evan Thompson’s seminal *Mind in Life* and its treatment of the organism, which (arguably) plays the card of the attitudinal stance toward organisms *while* adhering to aboutness vis-à-vis “the mind.” Thompson’s theory of *autopoiesis* ultimately *intends* to make self-producing organization into an object of investigation, considering that we now *have* scientific accounts of circular causation and nonlinear emergence, which means that self-organization would no longer be a matter of merely regulative but also of constitutive principles (e.g., Thompson, 2007, pp. 138–9).</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷At this point in history, the science of logic more or less amounted to a study of “thought.”</footnote>
operative formal rules (in Sect. 4.3.1). This allows us to move on to his so-called
transcendental logic, which involves a subtle critique of the reigning logic of his
time (i.e., a logic of subjects and predicates) and which brings him to develop a new
theory of judgment. We discuss how this theory emerges and is developed in both
the first and third *Critiques* (resp. in Sects. 4.3.2 and 4.3.3). By picking up
Canguilhem along the way, we show that the Kantian point of view on judgment is
closely connected to the one upheld in “De la science et de la contre-science” (Sect.
4.3.3). On this basis, we explain why the difficulty of acquiring objective knowl-
edge about organized beings in nature is tied to the organization of our own capacity
to judge—again in line with Canguilhem (Sect. 4.3.4).

4.3.1 Logic as a Return Upon Unconsciously Operative Rules

Although Kant never got to the point of formalizing his philosophical system, it
cannot go unnoticed to what a tremendous degree his entire philosophical enterprise
is anchored in and fed by the issue of logical formality. Striking in this respect is his
attention to *rules*. He used to inaugurate his lectures on logic, for instance, with the
statement that “[e]verything in nature, both in the lifeless [*leblosen*] and in the liv-
ing [*belebten*] world, takes place *according to rules*, although we are not always
acquainted with these rules” (Log, 9:11). One could read this as some kind of insis-
tent—some might even say dogmatic—conviction that the world shall be seen as a
rule-governed thing, even when evidence thereof is lacking. But Kant seems to be
after something else: to him, rules seem first and foremost *unconsciously operative*,
such that they can only be revealed in retrospect. In Kant’s works, regularity is
above all a *presupposition* that allows us to understand certain results or effects
(thus requiring a return upon the presupposition of regularity itself). Clearly, formal
rules are not merely being put to use as methodological tools for “making sense” of
the world. Instead, our scientific-methodological attention to rules is an essential
feature of our condition, reflecting our own powers and capacities:

The exercise of our powers also takes place according to certain rules that we follow,
unconscious [*unbewußt*] of them at first, until we gradually arrive at cognition of them
through experiments and lengthy use of our powers, indeed, until we finally become so
familiar with them that it costs us much effort to think them *in abstracto*. Thus universal
grammar is the form of a language in general, for example. One speaks even without being
acquainted with grammar, however; and he who speaks without being acquainted with it
does actually have a grammar and speaks according to rules, but ones of which he is not
himself conscious. (Log, 9:11)

So, when we approach “the world” in terms of a search for “its” underlying rules,
we cannot exclude the “we” from the equation: *we are indeed rule-oriented by vir-
tue of being rule-governed*. In his lectures on logic, Kant thinks through this assump-
tion by suggesting that if we are, in a sense, condemned to rules, then this is so
because our power to think these rules must itself, in its activities, be bound by
rules. Investigating into these rules is the task of logic:
[...] as sensibility is the faculty of intuitions, so the understanding is the faculty for thinking, i.e., for bringing the representations of the senses under rules. Hence it is desirous [begierig] of seeking for rules and is satisfied [befriedigt] when it has found them. Since the understanding is the source of rules, the question is thus, according to what rules does it itself proceed? [...] Now what are these rules? (Log, 9:11–12)

These opening passages of his lectures on logic indicate that in construing scientific theories about the natural world—both in respect to what we call lifeless matter in physics and to what we call living organization in biology—it is crucial to reflect on our rational capacities, which are indeed of a *logical* nature. And, as will become clear below, this need to reflect on or “fold back onto” our rational capacities is indeed *especially* felt in relation to organisms. But first, we must consider the *Critique of Pure Reason* (the first *Critique*), in which Kant lifted to a higher level the idea that logic is not so much instrumental as it is constitutive vis-à-vis what we can call an object.

### 4.3.2 Transcendental Logic: The Emulsifying Function of Judgment

One of Kant’s central ideas in the first *Critique* is that analysis always presupposes synthesis: if we are to *analyze* the material world, we have to presuppose that it is always already *synthesized* following certain rules (KrV, B 130).<fnref n="18" /> It is for this reason that, by investigating the capacity to have knowledge about the material world, one immediately lays bare the conditions of possibility of the material world itself. In other words, if knowledge of an object can generally be dissected into a conceptual constituent on the one hand and a sensory constituent on the other, this means that an object is as such *made possible* by a synthesis of sensibility and conceptuality (KrV, B 137). This is the heart of Kant’s transcendental logic. It presupposes the joint cooperation of two basic human faculties: the understanding and sensibility, each accompanied by representations of their own that are fundamentally heterogeneous to one another (*concepts* and *sensible intuitions*, respectively).

Besides heterogeneity, then, there is also reciprocity at play between the two faculties. Sensible representations are entirely heterogeneous to the understanding’s concepts, but they are nonetheless distinguished as such from within the understanding. Sensibility is identified as distinct from conceptuality, while being anticipated by it. If we want to maintain that sensibility and conceptuality are “inverse” terms, then we must also maintain that they are “correlated” ones. In other words: we must presuppose our conceptuality to have significance precisely in view of the fact that we have sensibility. Turning the manifoldness of our sensory

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ In Kant’s eloquent words: “[W]e can represent nothing as combined in the object without having previously combined it ourselves [...] for where the understanding has not previously combined anything, neither can it dissolve anything, for only through it can something have been given to the power of representation as combined” (KrV, B 130).</footnote>
representations into an object is only possible by making an appeal to the opposite thereof, namely, the unity of concepts. Thus, the concept is constitutive of the object on account of the fact that it unifies the manifold of intuition delivered in sensibility (KrV, B 135). Objectification requires *overcoming* heterogeneity while being *indicative* of it. It is only through objectification that heterogeneity itself is retrospectively revealed. That is why Kant defines the object as “that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united” (KrV, B 137). The condition of possibility of the object lies in the homogenization of our heterogeneous condition. Kant stresses quite elaborately in this respect that the act of homogenizing is a matter of judgment: judgment is the activity that *relates* concepts to sensible intuitions (KrV, B 169/A130—B 178/A 139). In that sense, judgment is not only the linchpin of Kant’s logic but also of his epistemology. The apparent “tension” behind object constitution, consisting in the homogenization of what can be called heterogeneous elements, is like mayonnaise: the watery parts could never mix with the fatty ones if it were not for an *emulsifier*—judgment.

The activity of judging, then, *cannot* represent an object “out there” by attributing predicate terms to subject terms and by drawing inferences on that basis. Such a logic of predication is potentially too compliant with epistemological realism, because it presupposes that judging merely consists in reflecting *about* the world by applying formal instruments. Instead, judgment is to Kant the condition of possibility of the object *to begin with*—its formal features are *constitutive* of objectivity.<fnref n="19" /> We can indeed see his “transcendental logic” as a radical meditation on the constitutive *impact* of our human condition as divided between sensibility and discursivity. But all this is still more obvious in Kant’s writings on judgment in relation to the knowability of living organisms, as will be shown in the following sections.

### 4.3.3 The Life of the Reflecting Power of Judgment

In the *Critique of the Power of Judgment* (the third *Critique* for short), Kant sheds an even more distinctive light on our divided human condition. He now shows how the conditions of possibility of objectivity as described in his first *Critique*, otherwise valid for mechanical systems, see their activities fail. This failure of objectification befalls our judgment upon confrontation with the beautiful, the sublime, and living organisms. In light of this failure, Kant seizes the opportunity to develop a more distilled account of what it means to judge, considering that upon

<footnote n="19">¹⁹It is true that, in taking up this philosophical struggle, Kant can sometimes give the impression that our logical capacities are *mere tools* employed to discover something about the world (e.g., when discussing judgment in terms of a procedure of reflection, comparison, and abstraction in his lectures on logic (Log, 9:94–5)).</footnote>
confrontation with the beautiful, the sublime, and living organisms, judgment is forced, as it were, to fold back onto itself.

In what is conventionally referred to as the *First Introduction* to this work, Kant writes that the capacity to judge “is not merely a faculty for subsuming the particular under the general (whose concept is given), but that it is also, conversely, one for finding the general for the particular” (EEKU, 20: 209–210; our italics). In the first *Critique*, it was indeed argued that, by way of a *determinative* (or determining) kind of judgment, sensible particulars are subsumed under general concepts of the understanding, thus constituting objects in conformity with mechanical laws of nature. But what if there is no general concept available to us? If this is the case, we read in the third *Critique*, the capacity to judge becomes a faculty for finding the general for the particular, that is, for finding an adequate concept for what is presented to us by the senses. In this situation, we are dealing with a *reflective* (or reflecting) kind of judgment, which, as it *tends toward* the generality of the concept without necessarily attaining it in a final manner, stresses above all the reciprocity of our heterogeneous condition. In that sense, we must presume that the reflective kind of judgment grounds the determinative kind, because “the latter is, as it were, a dressed-up version of the former” (Haeck, 2020). It seems indeed that subsuming particulars under general concepts is nothing but an instantiation of the structural tendency to find the general for the particular.

It is at this point that the dynamics of living organization enter the scheme. Why would a human being want to know, want to generalize? The answer to this question must be found in the structure of judgment itself. The third *Critique* teaches us that there is no life for the cognizing subject when we assume that we always already have rational capacities on the one hand and, separately, a world to investigate on the other, whereby the former is simply to be “put to use” in order to teach us something about the latter. It seems rather that these two poles are *produced* from within the seemingly *purposive* structure of the power of judgment itself. The living human being is set to generalize and to know by virtue of the fact that it is condemned, on the grounds of its heterogeneous condition, to judge. Meanwhile, it acknowledges its heterogeneous condition *by* judging. That the human subject is judging is therefore indicative of the fact that it is inscribed in the dynamics of the general and the particular and that it attempts to orient itself on this basis.

The drive to find the general for the particular is related to the fact that the legislative power of the understanding (which is set to subsume the particular under the general, thus constituting it as an object of nature) is not always *satisfying* to the power of judgment. There is a need to reflect on the particularity of nature in its very contingency and infinite manifoldness and to seek the general *from within* the particular (KU, 5:186–7). It is important to note, in this regard, that “subsuming” (determining) and “finding” (reflecting), if they are in a sense “inverse” to each other, are certainly also “correlated” acts of judgment: determinative judgment constitutes natural phenomena adhering to natural laws, yet in doing so, it also leads the
way to reflect on (those) phenomena insofar as they showcase infinite specificity, diversity, and contingent particularity.<fnref n="20" /> This “excessive multiplicity” of nature makes the power of judgment run at full speed (KU, 5:193), pressing again and again to search for laws that explain the very contingency of those phenomena. In other words: even if particular phenomena are determined by a priori general laws of nature, they are still “determinable in so many ways” (KU, 5:183).

Consequently, Kant writes that the power of judgment “must thus assume it as an *a priori* principle for its own use that what is contingent for human insight in the particular (empirical) laws of nature *nevertheless contains a lawful unity*” (KU, 5:183; our italics). Objects and laws that are contingent from the point of view of the understanding (i.e., from the point of view of determinative judgment), must, in other words, appear as *purposive for* the reflective power of judgment. This principle of purposiveness “attributes nothing at all to the object (of nature), but only represents the unique way in which we must proceed in reflection on the objects of nature with the aim of a thoroughly interconnected experience.” It is a “purposiveness through which nature agrees with our aim, but only as directed to cognition” (KU, 5:186). Kant adds quite tellingly in this regard that due to the fact that this principle of purposiveness is a *subjective* principle of judgment, we are “delighted (strictly speaking, *relieved of a need*) when we encounter such a systematic unity among merely empirical laws [...]” (KU, 5:184; our italics). Our human scientific rules of thumb or “stock formulae,” as Kant calls them, like “nature takes the shortest route,” “she does nothing in vain,” “she is rich in species but sparing with genera,” and so on, are “nothing other than this very same transcendental expression of the power of judgment in establishing a principle for experience as a system and hence for its own *needs*” (EEKU, 20:210; our italics). These needs instigate an endless search for satisfaction: even if it would never be truly satisfied, the power of judgment seizes every opportunity to reiterate its endeavors (KU, 5:187–8; see also Van de Vijver, 2019).<fnref n="21" />

Although the particular must be subsumed under the general, the act of reflection requires judgment to return its focus once again to that particular. Here, Canguilhem’s theory of broken judgment is echoed, for Kant’s theory of judgment involves a similar type of brokenness. Not only between subjective perception (the broken stick) and objective experience (the knowledge that the stick is in reality not broken), between sensibility and discursivity, between the ever-contingent sensible presentation and the law-like objective one, but also between judgments of reflection and

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Put differently: “in spite of all the uniformity of things in nature in accordance with the universal laws, without which the form of an experiential cognition in general would not obtain at all, the specific diversity of the empirical laws of nature together with their effects could nevertheless be so great that it would be impossible for our understanding to discover in them an order that we can grasp [...]” (KU, 5:185).</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ In a footnote to the official introduction to the third *Critique*, in which he discusses the notion of desire, Kant seems to claim that we will try to satisfy our wishes *even if*—or rather *especially when*—we know it is impossible to do so. And indeed he explains this “tendency in our nature to consciously vain desires” precisely by stating that “we learn to know our powers only by first trying them out” (KU, 5:177).</footnote>
judgments of determination. Insofar as judgment is determinative of the particular, it *opens up* an opportunity for reflection on the particular's particularity. Then again, we must at the same time assume reflecting judgment to *ground* determinative judgment. These two kinds of judgment, although inverse, must always be considered correlated to one another. The perception of the broken stick *can* go together with the knowledge that it is not broken. Even more, the reflective power of judgment *cannot* ignore the fact that we see the stick as broken, although we know from the determinative one that it is not. Kant's theory of judgment thus joins Canguilhem's conception of science as rooted in life, which also "maintains a permanent and obligatory relation with perception" (2008b, p. 120). Hence, his discovery of the reflective power of judgment in the third *Critique* serves primarily as a first hint of the idea that a "living organization" can be found not only in nature, but at least also in the power of judgment itself. We will explain below that the drive to judge *is* a drive to live, even if life becomes manifest to the extent that it escapes a perfect and neat covering of the particular by the general.<fnref n="22" />

### 4.3.4 The Organization of Judgment and/as Living Organization

It is against this backdrop that we must consider what Kant says about living organization, the so-called natural purposes or self-organizing products of nature. Kant describes the organism in diverging, yet thoroughly interconnected ways. It is, first of all, a thing that "exists as a natural end" as if it were "cause and effect of itself" (KU, 5:370–71). And, as "a thing that is to be cognized as a natural product *but yet at the same time* as possible only as a natural end," it must also "be related to itself *reciprocally* as both cause and effect" (KU, 5:372; our italics). On these grounds, Kant concludes that a "natural purpose" is to be regarded as both an *organized* and a *self-organizing* being (KU, 5:374). This concept of organization could never be objectively attributed to mechanical nature, according to Kant, because "as a concept of a **natural product** it includes natural necessity and yet at the same time a contingency of the form of the object (in relation to mere laws of nature)" (KU, 5:396). But although the concept of organization "can never be a constitutive concept of understanding or reason," it can (and must) be a *regulative* concept, suited "for guiding research into objects of this kind and thinking over their highest ground in accordance with a remote analogy with our own causality in accordance with ends" (KU, 5:375).

For Kant, living beings cannot be scientifically investigated as a phenomenon subject to general laws of nature, because they are not to be found "out there" as a special kind of matter organized in space and time. When we say they are not "out

<footnote n="22">²² In this regard, it is unsurprising that Kant links the power of judgment to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure (e.g., EEKU, 20:208; KU, 5:186–7; 218).</footnote>
there,” we mean that “we do not actually **observe** ends in nature as intentional, but merely **add** this concept as a guideline for the power of judgment in reflection on the products of nature, [as] they are not given to us through the object” (KU, 5:399). Likewise, “it is quite certain that we can never adequately come to know the organized beings and their internal possibility in accordance with merely mechanical principles of nature, let alone explain them” (KU, 5:400). Kant’s view is certainly not that an organism resists objectification in itself, as being qua being. His view rather implies a restriction on the *knowability* of organisms, which is to be taken seriously by the life sciences.

Assuming, moreover, on the basis of the previous section, that the knowing subject is structurally condemned to reflection rather than merely voluntarily engaged in a scientific practice, it cannot come as a surprise that organisms occupy such a prominent place in Kant’s theory of judgment. The tension within judgment between particularity and generality, which seems to correspond to the heterogeneity between sensibility and conceptuality, is at its peak where the concept of a *self-organizing being* comes in. Here, the power of judgment must account for the lawfulness of the contingent *itself*. To regard such a lawfulness as purposive for our faculty of cognition is therefore not only an enormous *challenge* to the power of judgment. It is, on account of the structure of judgment as divided between two heterogeneous realms, also an enormous *need* of it (KU, 5:404). We have to regard “the concept of the purposiveness of nature in its products” as “a concept that is necessary for the human power of judgment in regard to nature,” although it does not “pertain to the determination of the objects themselves” (KU, 5:404).

But there is more to this slightly dramatic presence of living organisms in the world. The fact that they *are* in some way dramatically present to us gives us some retrospective insights into our own (unconscious) endeavors as knowing subjects. Kant writes that when the understanding “cannot follow” the excessive multiplicity of nature (especially, we would say, in relation to organisms), it is reason itself that becomes excessive (KU, 5:401). Therefore, in order to get a conceptual hold on living organisms, the power of judgment finds itself in need of supplementation and takes recourse to supersensible ideas proper to the faculty of reason. But in contrast to Onnasch (2014), we do not believe this recourse has to be taken intentionally.<fnref n="23" /> Instead, Kant invites us to consider the knowing subject’s concepts and ideas and their logical organization as a “source of supplementation” with regard to a realm heterogeneous to them, namely, the realm of sensibility in which they take part—and certainly when, from within this realm, something like the lawfulness of the contingent, like natural purposes, becomes manifest. This organization and its dynamics are precisely what Kant’s transcendental logic is about. From the first *Critique*, we know that transcendental logic is the rational organization of a discourse providing the conditions of possibility of objectivity. In the third *Critique*, through what escapes conceptualization in a principled manner, it appears most

<footnote n="23">²³ In that sense, we also disagree with Philonenko that the third *Critique* would be about direct communication between humans (1984, pp. 10–11).</footnote>
vividly that the knowing subject, instead of being a “central directing agency,” a Cartesian cogito, *participates* in this conceptual and “vital” dynamics—is an effect of it, rather than its director.<fnref n="24" /> The human being is subject to, rather than a subject over and above, its heterogeneous condition. This conjoins our suggestion, developed in Sect. 4.3.1., that logic is able to expose the *unconscious* dynamics of rationality. Rationality, as Kant wrote about it, is fundamentally alive: insofar as it involves heterogeneity between conceptuality and sensibility, it involves reciprocity. Whereas the first *Critique* shows, in relation to this reciprocity, that our rational capacities amount to an organized system, the third *Critique* informs us in hindsight that it has in fact always been self-organizing (see also Van de Vijver, 2006).

In this regard, it should be noted that for Kant, purposive self-organization, which we ascribe to “organisms,” is not necessarily identical to what he calls “life,” which is first and foremost to be ascribed to the faculties of our mind (*Gemüt*).<fnref n="25" /> Yet, as Kant suggests in his *Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science*, both life in the biological sense and life in the “facultative” sense “in no way belong to representations of the outer senses, and so neither [...] to the determinations of matter as matter” (MAN, 4:544). This is because life is defined by Kant as “the faculty of a substance to determine itself to act from an internal principle, of a finite substance to change, and of a material substance [to determine itself] to motion or rest, as change of its state.” However, we “know no other internal principle in a substance for changing its state except desiring, and no other internal activity at all except thinking, together with that which depends on it, the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and desire or willing” (MAN, 4:544).<fnref n="26" />

Here, it is interesting to note that Kant describes what he calls *Gemüt* as “the principle of life itself” (KU, 5:278). This *Gemüt* is not so much “the mind” in the contemporary sense, as it is “the position or place of the *Gemütskrafte* (the *Gemüt’s* powers) of sensibility, imagination, understanding and reason” (Caygill, 1997, p. 210). It is the place where different parts of “rationality” come together in a systematic whole, being in a sense *inverse* to one another (i.e., heterogeneous), but nonetheless *correlated*. Insofar as reciprocity is concerned, it seems indeed to involve an organized reciprocity that is at the same time *self-organizing*, since it is due to the very structure of judgment—i.e., internal to the organization—that the activities of determination and reflection take place. This self-organization is also clear from Kant’s *Opus Postumum*, where he cites from Friedrich Schiller’s *On the Aesthetic Education of Man* (1794), according to which the human *Geist* is like a system of reason that “becomes active [thätig] only through suffering [Leiden], that

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Cf. Lu-Adler, who writes that “[r]egulative principles, which concern nature as a whole, are not just optional heuristics for the investigation of nature” (2023, p. 141). She rightly notes that for Kant, a regulative principle of reason is not “merely a device of reason for achieving economy” (KrV, A653/B681).</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ On account of this distinction, not all organisms are necessarily “alive,” such as plants. However, when we use words like “life,” “alive,” and “living” in this text, we mostly use it in the broader sense of “self-organization.”</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ See also Kant’s *Critique of Practical Reason*, KpV 5:9n.</footnote>
reaches absoluteness only through boundaries [Schranken]; that acts and forms only in so far as it receives matter [Stoff]” (Op, 21:77; our translation). More importantly, it is said here that:

[s]uch a mind will, therefore, combine the drive for form or absoluteness [Triebe nach Form oder nach dem Absoluten] with a drive for matter or boundaries [Triebe nach Stoff oder nach Schranken], as these are the conditions without which it could neither have nor satisfy [befriedigen] the first drive. (Op, 21:76; our translation)<fnref n="27" />

This is yet another way to illustrate that our rational capacities are indeed fundamentally “alive” themselves: they structurally involve the reciprocal distinction and oscillation between matter and form, between receptivity and spontaneity, between sensibility and conceptuality. The need to continuously oppose yet relate sensibility and conceptuality, as inverse but correlated, is revealed from within a system of judgment. For this reason, it should not surprise us that this reciprocity is connected, as mentioned above, to a search for satisfaction (KU, 5:187–8; see also Van de Vijver, 2019). What is striking, however, is that we come to this conclusion by investigating why living beings—and their self-organization—resist objectification. This can show that, even if the laws of nature run counter to the order of the living, this is not to say that the order of the living runs counter to the logical organization behind the knowing subject’s attempt to investigate the world in line with these laws of nature.

## 4.4 Back to Attitudinal Vitalism

In honoring the epistemological restrictions with regard to knowledge about living organisms, one might nonetheless be committed to a kind of ontological dualism between subject and object, such that there is a capacity to judge on the one hand and a world on the other. It should be clear now that this Cartesian view is foreign to Kant’s theory of judgment, which is rooted in an overall rejection of the assumption of an independent world that can be adequately (or inadequately, for that matter) described and investigated. But is this Cartesian view also foreign to Canguilhem’s so-called attitudinal vitalism? In spite of its obviously anti-Cartesian spirit, there seems to be a Cartesian side to it.

What is it, after all, that grounds the requirement of an *attitude*? Although this remains an open question, Canguilhem seems to be convinced that it is life itself that incites a certain attitude toward it. Recall the “vitality of vitalism” (2008a, p. 60), the idea that:

[i]ntelligence can apply itself to life only if it recognizes the originality of life. The thought of the living must take from the living the idea of the living [...]. [T]o do mathematics, it would suffice that we be angels. But to do biology [...] we sometimes need to feel like beasts ourselves. (2008c, p. xx)

<footnote n="27">²⁷This statement appears on pp. 370–371 of (the original edition) of Schiller’s (1794/2019) work. It is quite telling that Kant wrote it down in his notes in what seems to be an approving vein.</footnote>
But is this not to suggest, be it implicitly, that if life resists objectification, it does so
in the capacity of a *being qua being*? This idea, in turn, seems to be contingent on
the assumption that there is a world consisting at once of mechanical nature *and* of
living entities that transgress the mechanical order, thus necessitating the very atti-
tude toward them. But we know from Sect. 4.2.4 that Canguilhem would certainly
deny that: “[t]here cannot be an empire within an empire without there being no
longer any empire [...]” (2008a, p. 70). This means that (explicit) hints of a form of
Cartesianism, upholding a conception of the world or the object as independent
from our subjective doings, are not to be sought for in Canguilhem’s writings.<fnref n="28" /> The
hints are rather to be found on the (implicit) flipside of the Cartesian point of view
on the object, namely, in its point of view on the *subject*—or rather the *absence*
thereof. As explained in Sect. 4.2.4, the position of the knowing subject endorsed by
Canguilhem remains to a certain extent unquestioned precisely because it is ulti-
mately reduced to “organic individuals that act and react within specific environ-
ments which, in turn, are defined by the needs and desires of these individuals”
(Schmidgen, 2014, p. 235). This, of course, can be seen as an anti-Cartesian move.
So where does the attitudinal stance’s Cartesianism reside? It resides precisely in its
relative silence on the topic of our rational capacities and their autonomous logical
organization in which the knowing, *living* subject cannot but take part. We saw in
Sects. 4.2.2 and 4.2.3 that Canguilhem himself had already come to the point of
raising this issue, yet in this regard it was Kant who did justice to the arguably *atti-
tudinal* idea that the impossibility of objectifying living organisms is fundamentally
tied, not to a material state of affairs, but to the living dynamics proper to our *own*
capacity to judge. When Kant employs the distinction between the nonliving (the
mechanical) and the living (the organic), as two “kinds” of natural objects, his con-
cerns are not only epistemological but also involve a circumscription of the living
dynamics of the *knowing* subject itself (see also Van de Vijver & Demarest, 2013).
The problem with Canguilhem’s attitudinal vitalism is indeed that it fails to give due
consideration to what it means for a capacity to *judge* to take part in the very living
dynamics that it seeks to investigate. In rightly suggesting that we must take an
attitudinal stance with regard to the living organization, thus denouncing any sub-
stantivism with regard to its real properties, this stance inadequately takes on board
the significance of the *relation* between the knowing subject and the observed
object, even if it would admit, as Canguilhem arguably does (cf. Wolfe, 2011), that
both the organism and our capacity to judge must be treated as if they were self-
organizing, “alive”. To presuppose that we humans are alive *in* our rational endeav-
ors, however, should not be a trivial fact—just *saying* it is not enough. As a
presupposition, it has implications for what rationality *means*. The point is the fol-
lowing: by foreclosing oneself from examining these implications, one implicitly
treats the knowing instance as a neutral epistemic agent.<fnref n="29" />

<footnote n="28">²⁸ For a recent account of Canguilhem’s own reading of Descartes, most notably in his “Descartes et la technique” essay from 1937, see Sfara (2023).</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ In our view, then, Canguilhem’s implicit Cartesianism is also recognizable in his transition (in the late 1930s) from focusing on “the mental” (judgment, the intellect, etc.) to focusing on “the practical.” For a very helpful historical account (and defense) of this transition, see Sfara (2023).</footnote>
Although the concepts of life and organization do, in fact, go hand in hand with
the almost compulsory need to assume that living organisms are to be encountered
in nature, this is not essential.<fnref n="30" /> What is essential is that insofar as we encounter life
in organisms “out there” by reflectively using our capacity to judge, we retrospec-
tively bump into (fold back onto) our capacity to judge as participating in the
dynamics of life itself. In thus going beyond a mere attitudinal vitalism, we agree
with Jennifer Mensch that “[w]hen reason saw organic activity in nature, according
to Kant, what it was really looking at was itself” (2013, p. 144). But this, we submit,
seems to hold not only for the faculty of reason, but also for the other Kantian facul-
ties of the intellect (understanding, judgment, etc.).

However, if the living organism is epistemologically challenging, this is not just
in relation to the object that escapes, but perhaps also in relation to the subject
itself: there is no clear division between the knowing subject and the observed
object. There seems indeed to be something fundamentally symmetrical to the rela-
tion between subject and object, whenever the former is considered to be a self-
organizing system and the latter is taken to be a self-organizing being. They are
symmetrical to one another in the sense that what aims to be a judgment about the
so-called living organism is revealed at once to be a judgment about judgment, for
in both cases we attempt to grasp something of which we must presume that it is,
in a way, organized and self-organizing. Quite strikingly, this means that knowl-
edge about our capacity to judge might very well be subject to the same epistemo-
logical challenge that pertains to knowledge about living organisms.<fnref n="31" /> Paying
attention to “knowledge about knowledge” should therefore not be seen as simply
summoning some kind of a meta-perspective. This would be out of place here,
because in dealing with living organisms, we are ultimately dealing with a condi-
tion to which we are subject ourselves—which we cannot investigate from “a view
from nowhere.”

In this regard, we have argued against the interpretations according to which
Kant's system of thought is seen as distant, theoretical, or instrumental, as such too
external to be able to capture the living, whereas Canguilhem's conception of our
rationality would, on the contrary, be closer to the living in its creative "theoretical
polyvalence" (Brilman, 2018). According to Brilman (2018, p. 26), for instance, it
seems that if life is the condition of possibility of rationality, then it should not be
its blind spot, such that life must *either* be external to rationality (which she takes to
be Kant's view) *or* internal to it (which she takes to be Canguilhem's view). She
concludes that life is the condition of possibility of rationality, "rather than" ratio-
nality's 'blind spot.'" But this is a misleading opposition, because life can be the
condition of possibility of rationality *while* being its blind spot. If Canguilhem

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Phenomenologically speaking, the presupposition of life is indeed both the horizon and the origin of a knowing subject.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ For an interesting account of Kant's "methodological skepticism" in regard to a related issue, see Lu-Adler (2022). For an equally fascinating account of how the biological notion of epigenesis can be made relevant for the science of logic and logical cognition, see Lu-Adler (2018).</footnote>
deplores that rationality is too often seen as a “crystalline (i.e., transparent and inert) intellectualism” (2008c, p. xvii), thus hiding rationality’s deep connection to life, then his own and Kant’s theory of judgment should come to the rescue.<fnref n="32" />

## 4.5 Conclusion

The conclusion is *not* that there exists, between organization “in nature” on the one hand and logical organization “in rationality” or “in our minds” on the other, an absolute kind of isomorphism. A precise “mapping” of the elements of the one to the elements of the other would be the answer to a question we did not pose. It would also dishonor one of our core convictions, namely, that there is no sense in attempting to develop a meta-perspective overviewing what is “knowledge about knowledge” and what is the world at large. In that sense, Woodger’s programmatic essay might be a bit misleading at first. Instead, we tried to convey that the process of acquiring knowledge about living organisms *forces* us to fold back onto our own rational capacities (“knowledge about knowledge”), a process that ultimately reveals that the latter is in fact also to be understood in terms of a living organization. This revelatory moment, which involves a return upon certain (sensible and conceptual) activities, is essentially retrospective.

Through a survey of the theories of judgment put forward by both Kant and Canguilhem in connection to the problem of knowledge about living organisms, we articulated our dissatisfaction with Canguilhem’s attitudinal form of vitalism. In so doing, we shed a light on what it means to form judgments about living organisms but also about what it *generally* means to judge. While attempting to formulate objective judgments about living organization, we must not trivialize the assumption that our capacity to judge is (self-)organized too. It involves an internal reciprocity between heterogeneous elements, which highlights a certain purposefulness in its tendencies. A structural *drive* to connect our sensible representations with conceptual ones in judgments functions as the motor behind our rational endeavors and intentions. In this regard, Canguilhem’s theory of the “broken judgment” eloquently captures to what extent judgment is *structurally* torn between a conceptual, universal realm (the reality judgment) and a sensible, singular one (*my* judgment). Confronted with nature’s infinite specificity and particularity (not excluding self-organizing beings), the attempt to unify sensible representations according to concepts or universal laws ultimately fails. This then breaks judgment in two and leaves us, as Kant would have it, with the distinction between “reflective” and “determinative” judgements.

In this regard, our take-home message is that the judging, knowing human being—according to the philosophical tradition, the conscious holder of all sorts of

<footnote n="32">³² See Sfara (2023), for a very different but thought-provoking comment on Brilman’s characterization of the Kant-Canguilhem relation.</footnote>
intentions—is subject to, rather than a subject over and above, its rational capaci-
ties. The subject is perhaps not so much an agent that simply makes use of these
capacities in view of acquiring knowledge about the world—for instance, while
judging organization in nature. Rather, it is condemned to use these capacities on
the grounds that it *is* a judging organization.

**Acknowledgments** Special thanks are due, firstly, to the “Georges Canguilhem Seminar” organized by the Centre for the History of Philosophy and Continental Philosophy (Ghent University, Belgium) in cooperation with Charles Wolfe (Université Toulouse II Jean Jaurès, France). This seminar was the birthplace of most of our basic ideas for this chapter. Secondly, to Andrea Gambarotto, for having invited us to present an early version of this chapter to the “Life and Cognition Seminar” organized by the Institut supérieur de philosophie (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium). Thirdly, we would like to express our gratitude to Xuansong Liu, Alexandre Métraux, and August Buholzer for their thought-provoking and sharp comments, as well as to the three reviewers for their useful criticism and questions. And, finally, to Matteo Mossio, for his always constructive feedback.

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# Chapter 5
## On the Organizational Roots of Bio-cognition

Cliff Hooker

### 5.1 Introduction

The theme of this book is the place of organization in the life sciences, especially biology. In that context, this essay is concerned with the place of organization within mind and the place of mind within the life sciences, especially biology. There are many possibilities for theories of mind, ranging from noumenal to neural to nihilist (behaviorist), and for most of these, the question of the role for organization therein makes no sense; further, they escape, or are opposed to, any deep tie to biology. Even when some link to biology is acknowledged, as for physicalisms, no inherent notion of organization appears in their development. But this chapter will present a thoroughly organizational conception of mind-as-cognition, anchored in a supportive conception of biology.

There are three versions of how something – here, cognition – is bio-organizational, each more stringent than its predecessor. (I) Cognition is best understood from within a bio-cognitive organizational framework. (II) There is a key high-level organizational characterization of cognition. (III) At the core of cognitive function is organization. Here explanation is ultimately dynamical explanation, and these three characterizations of cognition are to be considered as three degrees of explanatory centrality for organization, rather than, for example, as three distinct conceptual kinds (see below).

Consider, in illustration, an unheated pot of fluid on a stove, its liquid molecules moving at random. There is neither ordering nor organizing. Then the stove is used to gently heat the bottom liquid layer. The liquid forms ordered horizontal layers, warmest at the bottom, coolest at the top. Molecular motion remains random horizontally, but the vertical symmetry of random motion is broken, replaced by an ordering of layers by temperature (random molecular energy) that conducts the heat

<footnote>C. Hooker (✉)
University of Newcastle, New Lambton, NSW, Australia
e-mail: jeanandcliff@gmail.au</footnote>
slowly upwards. Finally, as heating increases, rolling boil (or Benard) cells form, vertical and horizontal symmetries are broken and random motion is replaced by a pattern of cells within each of which molecules move circularly, conveying hotter liquid up to the fluid surface and cooler liquid back down to be reheated, their intra-cellular circular motions so arranged horizontally that at each pair of adjacent cell surfaces they are moving in the same direction. The whole manifests moderate order (horizontal) and moderate organization (vertical and horizontal). Then, following the three nested requirements for organization as fundamental, we have the following: (I Benard) The phenomena are indeed best understood from within the molecular organizational framework given above. (II Benard) There is a key high-level organizational characterization of the phenomena as representing a succession of molecular arrangements providing increasing heat transfer capacities. (III Benard) At the core of this succession lies breaking symmetries, partly through ordering (vertical stratification), but with the largest capacity shift achieved through coordinated horizontal and vertical reorganization. Nor is more needed for core understanding; (within limits) it does not matter what the fluid is, nor what the heat source is, or what the pot is made of, the sequence of pot states will recur.

## 5.2 Characterizing Organization

The intracellular Krebs cycle is a useful model of organization. Its function is to transport energy into the cell and eject waste. It is made up of several molecular steps and produces several products, each combining a specific external input with the current internal chemical to dynamically lead to (produce) an output internal chemical for the next step. It is typically diagrammed as a large cycle with several nested cycles driving off it and ordered around it.<fnref n="1" /> Organisms are congeries of such kinds of processes, nested from the subcellular (Krebs cycle) to whole organism (e.g., respiration), all component processes appropriately space-time interrelated.

This is not so different from a motor vehicle engine where all of the many kinds of components are very different from one another (cf. fuel injectors, spark plugs, cam shafts) yet are interrelated in many distinctive ways so that together they perform the transformation of fuel into linear motion. We can think of this as an interrelated structure of sub-functions – fuel injections into cylinders, cylinder heads rising up, sparking the injected fuel, etc. – that together bring about the overall global function. In a clarified ontology, each sub-function is realized as a causal process (one driven by an energy gradient) that takes its start as the function initial condition and moves dynamically to generate the function end condition. In many situations, sub-functions and their realizing dynamical processes may come and go as part of the overall function/process. Immediately after sparking a cylinder head, a large energy gradient forms in it which forces it back along its cylinder shaft. But

<footnote n="1">¹See, e.g., Bechtel (2006, 2007) and Bechtel and Abrahamson (2011).</footnote>
this gradient only lasts until the fuel is “burnt.” Then another cylinder takes its turn. Similarly, there are many biochemical interactions in molecular biology that only briefly exist while some momentary, but precisely located, function is realized. In the case of the engine, the constraints that structure and stabilize these processes include the entire engine frame and are much longer lasting than individual cylinder processes. And this is common for current human-made machines. But in molecular biology, it frequently occurs that the whole realizing processes, energy gradients and constraints are ephemeral, changed by equally ephemeral processes of which they are temporarily a part (cf. a seasonally eroding river bank and its flow). This should be understood as normal. The core process organization that grounds cognition relies on just such a structure (see III below).

“Organization” has a narrow and a wide usage. In its narrow usage – n-organization – it means possessing internal, nested correlations of the general sort illustrated above in the Krebs cycle and car engine. In its wide usage, “organization” means no more than “is in some respect, to some degree, systematic,” as in having a well-organized work desk. In this wide sense, one may speak of hierarchical organization though only an ordering by parts and composition is intended, and whether or not internal nested correlations are involved. “Self-organization” as commonly used includes molten iron cooling down to a solid bar (the ion lattice is “well organized”), and ordering coins by size through random vibration against varying mesh-widths. In neither case is n-organization part of the output. And in neither case is there any more than the faintest suggestion of a “self-active” process. But both of these examples have new constraints as output. This feature generalizes: self-organization is best conceived as a process leading to the emergence of new constraints, whether or not they produce n-organization and whether or not there is an active self involved (see Hooker, 2011c). Here we are concerned only with n-organization where, as we shall see, it forms a distinctive class of biological conditions.

Ultimately, all n-organization is grounded in dynamical processes, as are all non-organized (a-organizational) states and behavior. N-organized dynamics grades into a-organized dynamics (i.e., plain old dynamics) as the internal processes show decreasing variety, decreasing uniqueness and complexity of collective functions realized and increasing dependence on specific dynamical conditions. But the universality of dynamics is the same in all cases. Two billiard balls colliding show no n-organization but are fully dynamical; the Krebs cycle is strongly n-organizational but each transformation is fully chemo-dynamical. N-organization carries only relationship or form, not quality; quality is carried by dynamics, including the dynamics that grounds relationships or form. This applies to cognitive accounts (e.g., Russell's electrical charge, Penrose's intracellular coherent quantum states – Russell, 1927; Penrose, 1989). Here only n-organizational character will be considered.<fnref n="2" />

<footnote n="2">²An instructive case of dynamics in organization in this setting is the notion of levels of organization. See, e.g., Eronen and Brooks (2018). These, like emergents (see text above), can be made up of dynamical constraints, within which the dynamics takes place (e.g., systems of double pendulums for constrained chaos), but they can also be externally unconstrained, their system-wide sta-</footnote>
*N-organization and Order* In terms of interrelations between components, n-organization lies between complete disorder and complete order. Complete disorder is where all component interrelations are random, so that there is no simplifying multi-component pattern which constrains their interrelated behaviors. With completely ordered components, there is a governing pattern, illustrated in soldiers marching in tight formation, or crystals in a uniform lattice, and also distinct from the random collection of its components. With n-organized components, there are also governing patterns, but these can be much more complicated and subtle than the simplicities of complete randomness or complete orderedness (cf. Krebs, engine).³ Wholly random and wholly ordered are poles of zero internal n-organization, all n-organized systems falling somewhere between them. Bennett proposed the notion of logical depth to capture a formal notion of n-organization located along this continuum (Bennett, 1985). Roughly, logical depth is the number of nested correlations within correlations in an entity. This is certainly an important step in the right direction because it places distinctive correlations at the heart of n-organization. But obtaining a satisfactory measure for degree of n-organization is not easily done.⁴ Further exploration lies beyond the scope of this paper.⁵

bilities an outcome of their internal interactions (e.g., gravitational solar systems with planetary moons). Conditionalization within systems can also be by dynamical switching, like fast constraint formation, or as slower dynamical transitions to new interaction basins. (Cf. SDAL below.) The assumption that all these differences must instead be conceived logically has great difficulty in understanding any of them. As with weak organization (above), there is also a weak notion of level of organization where it names only commonalities of spatial scale, e.g., in the common “hierarchy of life,” representation (cells, multicellular organisms, populations, etc.) Dynamical systems may have scales of statistical aggregation of various dynamical kinds, all consistently with also having cross-scale dynamical interactions. Such dynamical distinctions are likely to play important roles in accounts of brain function underlying cognition and other mental capacities, but not when confined to logical models of brain function where dynamics is neglected. (The otherwise useful review of the conventional literature by Eronen and Brooks, e.g., makes only occasional mention of dynamical levels and does not explore the consequences of a systematic dynamical approach. See further, e.g., Hooker, 2004, Sect. 5, 2011d, Sects. 4–5, for expositions of agency and cognition in dynamical terms, as in Moreno & Mossio, 2015; cf. Hooker, 2011b; Hooker & Hooker, 2018.)

³See, e.g., Bennett (1985), Li and Vitànyi (1990), and earlier discussion in Collier and Hooker (1999).

⁴For instance, correlations can be used to specify both ordered and n-organized states, so when is each supported? How are cycles that stay within an order (e.g., a cycle within a device) compared with those that move across functional orders (e.g., a cycle that includes both machine and regulatory administrative states)? How are these to be compared when system n-organization is vertically modular versus horizontally modular? And so on.

⁵As note 4 illustrates, there is at present little to be gained from pursuit of precise definitions, formal or otherwise, for the foregoing distinctions, or for similar notions to come concerning agency and cognition. Rather, there are good examples on which to rest creative conceptions, as a way of moving forwards constructively. This approached is buoyed by noting that even in the most developed domains, like physics, definitions, if they come at all, come after the domain has been thoroughly understood, not beforehand, while pursued too early, they can stifle deeper explorations.
## 5.3 N-organization and Bio-cognition

**Briefly, Looking Ahead** First, it is argued that a specific kind of n-organization, called autonomy, characterizes all and only living organisms. Autonomy is shown to ground all the major n-organizational aspects of agency. Second, cognitive agency, the main objective here, is in turn shown to be a sub-class of autonomous agents and so ultimately a specific class of n-organized systems. Third, cognitive agency spans a range from elementary to deep problem-solving powers, a range that can be characterized n-organizationally. In sum, autonomy > agency > cognition > deep cognition, with each step along the way, distinctively and strongly characterized n-organizationally. With this framework in mind, let us proceed.

### 5.3.1 Autonomy, Agency (and Robotics), Auto(self)-directedness, and Anticipation

**Autonomy** Our concern in this paper is with the place of n-organization in a biologically centered account of mind. Even so, it is essential to begin with at least one aspect of the wider issue of the place of n-organization within biology generally. N-organization lies at the heart of what an organism is and when we properly understand how that is, we shall have constructed the basis for an n-organizational account of organism minds.

At their most basic, all living things are thermodynamic engines, existing in a far-from-equilibrium condition only maintained by conversion of an input flow of negative entropy (food) to do work and by the export of unutilized material to the environment (wastes). Essential work is of three kinds: (i) the repair or replacement of internal infrastructure, including of any enclosing membrane, and of the capacity for suitable work, (ii) the support of action in the environment, and (iii) the export (elimination) of wastes. This is already an n-organizational arrangement, focused around two cycles, an external interaction cycle with the environment comprising resource extraction and waste elimination and an internal action cycle comprising repair and replacement.

There are various obvious constraints on successful versions of this n-organizational arrangement: (C1) the negative entropy input flows have to arrive in a timely manner, at appropriate places and in appropriate quantities, to sustain all the organism's processes; (C2) the internal work doable on these flows by the organism must produce sufficient components to fully support the internal repair work, including reproduction of the repair capacities; and (C3) at the same time, their consequent resource exploitation and waste accumulation must be extractable and exportable by the organism at sufficient rates and volumes as to avoid both direct damage to the organism internally and indirect damage via environmental damage. Despite their apparent particularity, these constraints are in fact permissive in form.
For instance, it does not matter whether the food-gathering action is largely passive (e.g., a pitcher plant trapping insects) or active (e.g., a dragon fly hunting insects), discriminating (e.g., a koala's taste for eucalypt leaves) or indiscriminate (e.g., the pitcher plant); it matters only that it satisfies at least the constraints C1–3.<fnref n="6" />

The condition for organism viability is that each cycle is supported and the two cycles so interact as to meet constraints C1–3 above. This n-organized dynamical viability condition is called *autonomy*.<fnref n="7" /> It picks out all, and plausibly only, living individuals – from cells to multicellular organisms to various multi-organism communities, including many (but by no means all) business firms, cities and nations. There is an issue of how sub-function processes might exactly fit together, each helping to canalize others (e.g., Kauffman’s work-constraint cycles, Kauffman, 2000), to achieve self-reproduction on a sufficiently small scale (contrast engine repair and the whole economy), but in principle some combination of longer-lasting and ephemeral process constraint formation should do it.<fnref n="8" />

The name is appropriate: in autonomous systems, the locus of living process regulation lies more wholly within them than in their environment. Birds use twigs to make nests, but twigs themselves have no tendency to use nests or birds to any purpose. Hence the root sense of autonomy in the traditional social sense. Moreover, there is a richness to the notion that escapes the bare appearance of inter-locked cycles. Autonomous entities have a distinctive wholeness, individuality and perspective in the world derived from the global, interconnected nature of their cycles and the regenerative condition they sustain. This gives rise to achieving (or not) an integrated condition of satisfying autonomy (or not).<fnref n="9" /> Further, when this satisfaction

<footnote n="6">⁶This example makes it obvious that there will be a raft of particularities characterizing the many different ways to satisfy these constraints. In addition, further rafts of particularities will characterize nearer satisfactions that strictly do not fully satisfy all the constraints but do so nearly enough, long enough for organisms to replicate before dying, and so on. Again, there is at present little fruitfulness in attempting to explore these n-organizational byways.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷On autonomy, see further Hooker (2011a, Sect. 4.1.1), Christensen and Hooker (2000a, 2002), Christensen (2004), Bechtel (2007), Moreno (2007), Ruiz-Mirazo et al. (2008), Moreno et al. (2011), Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno (2012), Arnellos et al. (2014), Moreno and Mossio (2015) and references.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸See Moreno and Mossio (2015, Chap. 1) and its Foreword by Hooker (pp. x, xi). This remark covers a complex issue: how is autonomy to be understood? The origins of the notion of autonomy lie with the biological ideas concerning the nature of cellular life by Maturana and Varela (Varela et al., 1974; Varela, 1979; Maturana & Varela, 1980, among others) and attempts to construct formal principles that distinguish living forms (Rosen, 1991; cf. Smithers, 1995). Here the notion of a closed set of states, e.g., one that regenerates metabolism, plays a central role. Such closures were then seen as the mark of the living and sought everywhere, e.g., among information states as the mark of the cognitive. Every organism was ipso facto a cognitive entity (Maturana & Varela, 1980). Some reflected this position back on to the constructive idea that every closure loop of states would give rise to a semantic system of symbols so that autonomous entities were ipso facto internally meaningful cognisers (e.g., Stewart, 1996; Pattee, 1993, 1995, 2007).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹As an alternative to the cognisor approach, others distinguished between dynamical (energetic, material) closure and functional closures (see, e.g., Barandiaran & Moreno, 2006; Barandiaran et al., 2009). It is clear that organisms cannot be energetically closed because the laws of thermodynamics require that they replace higher entropic degraded states with lower entropy (more</footnote>
condition is available to the organism itself as some kind of associated signal (e.g., absence of enclosing membrane stress), then the autonomous system has a basic sense of normative requirement. A situation will come to be identified as injurious (reduced integrity), healthy (increased integrity), or neutral, an evaluation that amounts to a distinctive normative perspective. In this manner, autonomous system activities are also willful, anticipative, deliberate, normatively self-evaluated, and adaptive. Such entities are properly treated as genuine *agents*. Autonomous systems are inherently all of those things.

**Agency and Robotics** Meanwhile, let us pause to briefly consider technologies in relation to autonomy and the possibilities of autonomy-based robotics. The dominant difference between biology and technology is, as the petrol vehicle illustrates, that organisms are much more active, responsive and integrated entities than technological systems are, or are often capable of being. A primary difference lies in the inner loop. Vehicles are not self-repairing. Their metabolism is outsourced to repair specialists (mechanics), and from there – via manufacture of spare parts and tools for repairing, the process strengthened by human n-organizational technologies such as pacemakers – to the rest of the economy. Plants do reproduce branches and roots, and both they and animals adaptively alter their bodies in response to environmental interactions, but in animals these alterations are mostly confined to nervous systems, while plants self-maintainingly adapt their bodily forms to support photo-synthesis; and both, like vehicles, rely on a larger ecology for the resources to do so, and so on. Pursuing these analogies raises issues concerning how widely distributed, “socially” interlocking and interactively open an agent’s body may be, and conversely how deeply capacity-modifying protheses may be integrated with “natural” agents, and how much does reliance on surrounding ecology for repair differ n-organizationally from reliance on societal economies (cf. notes 9, 10). A second primary difference lies in the external loop: organisms are much more active in responsively regulating their interactions with their environment, and within themselves. This difference is deeply rooted in organism autonomy which provides them a self-orientation to the world that works on integrating many streams of information

<footnote>ordered) ones, and often will not be materially closed when doing so (e.g., nucleic acid diffusion across common boundaries among slime molds; the several vitamins that humans cannot manufacture but must import. This requires identifying some other features that characterize closure. Moreno and Mossio (2015) choose dynamical constraints as that characterizing closures and argue that while such entities do no work in a system and have none done on them, they “guide” the reconstitution of autonomous systems (Moreno & Mossio, pp. xxvi–xxx). This turns out to be a challenging set of requirements to sustain (Hooker, Foreword pp. x–xi, Hooker, 2013b). It also leaves the origins of cognition and semantics to be explained (cf. Moreno & Mossio, 2015, Chap. 7). Others attempt to have constructive interaction in the context of autonomous organization bearing the weight of understanding how cognition and semantics emerge within autonomous systems (e.g., Christensen & Hooker, 2000b, 2002). The roots of these approaches lie in C19 biological theorists like Simmel, 1895 (see Coleman, 2002; Hooker, 2013a; von Uexkull, 1926). The approach opens up an integration of cognition and semantics via intentionality as a Merleau-Ponty (1942/1963) close interactive “grip” (see above and e.g. Bickhard, 1993; Christensen & Hooker, 2004; Hooker, 2009), cf. Di Paolo, 2003.</footnote>
tion (perceptual, proprioceptive, affective, etc.), using them to enrich and modify their anticipative interaction models and the directed responses to which it gives rise. Finally, organisms show a wide variety of boundary forms and defenses, from an identifiable exclusionary membrane offering regulated intake of specific nutrients (e.g., gastrointestinal membrane) to socially constructed maintenance of internal community regulation (e.g., through mating roles) and to a highly inter-penetrating film through which DNA may be directly interchanged. These differences are rooted in differences of n-organization.

This autonomy-based characterization of agency meets all the criteria for being deeply n-organizational: (I) Agency is best understood from within a bio-cognitive n-organizational framework, namely, the inter-locking cycles underlying agent autonomy. (II) There is a key high-level n-organizational characterization of agency, namely, as expressing autonomy. (III) And since every capacity of agency is based on autonomy, whose core is n-organizational, the core of agency is n-organizational. The distinctive n-organizational character of life penetrates deeply into its nature, into universal roots constituting agency. And it will be on this basis that any account of mind as n-organizational will be built and find its place in biology.

Meanwhile, there remain 3 + 2 robotics issues. (A) How might the constitution of an integrated internal perspective be achieved, if at all? What role has autonomous n-organization in the construction of robotic focused and responsive bodies? What might their perspective on the world be? (B) How does the manufacture of tools by tools and commodities by commodities proceed and how, if at all, does it include all elements (And how is it shown that the manifest tool improvement that does in historical fact occur within it, can actually occur within it?) (C) What is the biology and sociology of boundaries, how can these be constructed robotically and with what consequences for internal n-organization? Each of these presents a deep and subtle problem. They are left for the reader to consider, as is their impact on the n-organizational character of these aspects of natural and artificial existence. Only after these issues have been addressed will there be a proper platform for addressing the issue. (D) What are the limits to autonomy? And then (E) can there be a truly autonomous robotics?<fnref n="10" />

<footnote n="10">¹⁰There are differences among researchers as to how relationships among autonomy, agency, and cognition are properly drawn and this impacts development of a dynamically based account. Compare, e.g., Moreno and Mossio (2015), Chaps. 1, 4, and 7, where each new concept represents an elaborated aspect of the preceding one, with one where autonomy, agency, and cognition are each aspects of the same core n-organizational development (Christensen & Hooker, e.g., 2002, 2004). This latter account needs a problem-solving, as opposed to logic rule applying, conception of rational process and a similar “n-organized focus” account of intentionality that unifies its development with that of cognition and both with agency (note 9), obtaining a unified, dynamically based, n-organizationally characterized, core framework. The specific dynamical ontology that potentiates this framework, and may support a transition from cognition to a broader mentality, is left open here (cf. notes 8, 9, 16, 17). On the matter of the constitution of an internal perspective and artificial robotics, see Christensen and Hooker (2004), cf. Moreno and Mossio (2015), Chap. 7, and Nolfi (2011). On the biology and sociology of boundaries, see, e.g., Rayner (1997), Nolfi (2011), Bickhard (2011, Sect. 3.1), Bishop (2011, Sect. 3.5), and Hooker (2011b, Sect. 3).</footnote>
Returning to the main argument, its overall structure is as follows. Self-
directedness and anticipativeness are two fundamental cognitive capacities har-
bored by autonomy. Mutually supporting one another, these capacities form the
central cognitive process of self-directed anticipative learning (SDAL). SDAL in
turn provides the foundation of the deepest, most powerful forms of problem-
solving, that is, of cognition, and of tracking, that is, of intentionality. Thus, inten-
tion and cognition are provided their common n-organizational root.

**Auto(self)-Directedness** Auto- or self-directedness [the latter, more common, version will be used] is the capacity to self-modify interaction in the light of its evaluation by the directing organism. Changing behavior to acquire newly available food (e.g., spring flower nectar) is one example, and changing behavior to manage pain is another. Such sensitive, conditionalized attention forms the intertwined root capacities of intention and cognition (cf. Christensen & Hooker, 2004). A mosquito has one known such process (whether or not to initiate search for a blood host – Klowden, 1995), and a mammal has a vast number of such conditionalizing processes, especially within its motor regulatory system. Cycles (the n-organized aspect) of signaling and initiating specific actions within the external interaction cycle, and evaluating their outcomes against autonomy support through the internal interaction cycle, provide the basic autonomy n-organization with strong outcomeled self-directedness. In appropriate context, something about the direction of value increase (i.e., autonomy support) is also provided (e.g., by testing small departures in various directions from the present setting to see which is more rewarding). In more sophisticated form, self-direction allows the interplay of multiple evaluative signals, combining, compromising and conditionalizing them when arriving at which values are appropriate for guiding action in the context, recognizing corresponding multiple streams of information as relevant to those decisions, and in that light follows their integration for regulation of decision-making. The more mutually convergent guiding values and streams of information the learner has about performance, the more effective its actions can be. Initially, guidance will be limited because of learner ignorance, while at the concluding stage, information will have been sufficiently enriched, focused and integrated into the interaction cycles as to allow the learner to converge on a solution.

***Anticipation*** There is another, closely related, feature that the mosquito and the mammal share (very unequally): anticipation. Reflex and random actions aside,

Christensen and Hooker (2004), followed by Barandiaran and Moreno (2006), provides a critical perspective on formal robotics – dynamical systems theory (DST, van Gelder variants) and autonomous agent robotics (AAR, Brooks/Braitenberg variants) – and analysis of cognitive theory that could integrate with them, while DiPaolo (2003) provides a complementary examination of AAR as anchored in the Maturana/Varela tradition. More widely, Ruiz-Mirazo, together with Moreno and others, pursued the related issues of how minimally artificial chemical cells could be constructed and how they would need to be additionally internally constituted if they are to form evolving communities (e.g., Moreno, 2007; Ruiz-Mirazo et al., 2008; Ruiz-Mirazo & Moreno, 2012; Arnellos et al., 2014).
every action anticipates its outcome. At its most primitive, anticipation is the form-
ing (learning) of a simple association between current features and an outcome of
an action. The bee dance anticipates re-locating ephemeral nectar supplies as out-
come; it would not be attended to unless that outcome and its attendant resource
availability were frequently enough the consequence of the dance.<fnref n="11" />

Anticipative learning is where the organism learns to anticipate a goal achieve-
ment by employing an action sequence, thus associating receiving goal satisfaction
with doing an action sequence. Elementary associative learning such as neural con-
ditioning provides the simplest anticipative associations. More sophisticated ver-
sions of this process can be elaborated as learning capacities widen. For instance,
though much more sophisticated than the mosquito, the cheetah swinging right-
wards chasing a dodging gazelle with a right-swing bias is still doing so anticipating
a desirable outcome (a kill). But with the cheetah, all the mammalian apparatus of
planning ahead, tracking trajectories for oneself and others and so on is put to use
managing these interactions fluidly and at high speed. The cheetah's many associa-
tions – approach downwind, remain camouflaged where possible, maintain prey
separation from herd and so on – have come to be integrated in richly associated
models (here of the hunt). Bringing all these capacities together, in n-organizationally
mutually supportive ways, provides the close attentiveness to problem-solving that
is the core of intentional cognition.

*Self-directed Anticipative Learning [SDAL]<fnref n="12" />* The combination of self-
directedness and anticipative action provides the basis of fluid self-steering. An
action is undertaken in anticipation of achieving a goal; if it does so, the anticipation
is entrenched, and if it does not, the action may be repeated, extended or modified,
at the actor's self-direction. In this way, the actor steers itself through a process of
learning its environment. The capacity this invests in its agents is adaptability. The
ultimate goal of external adaptation is internal regulation, i.e., to be able regulate the
operation of the twin autonomy cycles so as to continue to satisfy autonomy, in the
environmental circumstances obtaining. However, in a dynamic environment, where
creatures are constantly changing (e.g., their current location and posture), often
across many fronts and on many time scales, detailed adaptation is momentary and
only approximated. Instead, it is necessary to be adaptable, able to adapt once useful
adaptations as new conditions emerge (run from a predator, switch diet, migrate,
etc.) There are limited physiological adaptabilities, most subconscious and of fixed
operation (e.g., callous formation, switching to burning visceral fat to extend flight
in extremity). But the largest, most variable and most rapidly adaptable are the
behavioral adaptabilities, from singing to flying to technology construction, regu-
lated by the central nervous system and largely expressed through the motor system.

<footnote n="11">¹¹For a sensitive and powerful exposition of steering, goal-directed regulatory n-organization in mind, see Sommerhof (1974).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹²See, e.g., Christensen and Hooker (2000a, b, 2002, 2004) and Christensen (2004).</footnote>
These latter features (largest range, most variable, most rapidly adaptable) do not in themselves constitute more than small augmentations of cognitive power. Fluid adaptation ranges from the superficial to the deep, and these add finesse to the superficial capacity. That the flatworm withdraws into the shadows in a larger range of ways and circumstances, more variably, and faster, when a light is shone on it, does not modify its simplicity, or its fixity, of response. Superficial adaptation offers fixed information channels and evaluation routines that provide only first-order fixed responses to changing situations, the whole working off an n-organized algorithm without the need of higher-order regulation, something that fairly cheap route planners and guided missiles, along with rafts of insects, worms and others, can provide. Moving toward greater capacity involves increasing numbers of conditionalizations, supporting increasing spread and discrimination of judgment. Though always useful, this level of fluid but fixed regulation cannot surmount significant shocks such as failure to recognize anticipated response sequences, or interaction dynamics altering mid-action.

Beyond this impasse lies the introduction of increased layers of higher-order conditionalizations, offering increasing orders of responsiveness and increasing integration of responses. Sufficiently developed, such higher-order, integrated judgment formation underlies powerful new dimensions to problem-solving, for instance, the capacity to respond to a “mis-match” signal as indicating, not merely a new trial in response, but a change in investigative methods used. Consider discovering through a mis-match signal (e.g., unexpected viral outbreaks) that the present testing method has an unexpected high false-negative rate (say in pharyngeal swab testing for a viral infection), requiring a change in testing method to achieve greater reliability in estimates of infection rates and hence in demand for healthcare resources, and so on. As well as method change, consider also bringing about reformulations of the problem to hand (“It’s not the measuring process, but it’s the modeling of sub-population interactions we are using”), changed criteria for successful outcomes (“predictions of infection breakout locations and frequencies accurate to within 10”), changed external constraints framing the problem (“rural sub-populations are much more constrained by travel times”) and changed criteria for “cleaned” data supporting these judgments (“estimates of false positives as well as of false negatives are required”). As will appear, supporting the integration of these features will provide deep fluid adaptation, or deep adaptability, the mark of truly human intelligence. (In this respect, we are a long way yet from deeply intelligent robotics.)

To see how these features work together, consider a detective conducting a murder investigation. She uses clues from the murder scene to build an initial proposed profile of the suspect and then uses this profile to focus the direction and methods of the investigation. Lipstick on a glass suggests a crime of passion, with the suspect female, in a personal or sex worker relationship to the victim. The profile tells the detective what the murderer may be like and what characteristic types of clues to pursue. For a crime of passion, look for further personal effects – special clothes, whips or other “technologies” in producing sexual effects, etc. Look too for places nearby, possibly frequented for romantic assignations, a romantic bar, a brothel, etc.
The chosen profile in turn sets new intermediate goals, for example, narrow down the nearby places frequented, eliminate or reduce the likelihood of the suspect being a male cross-dresser, but conversely try to obtain an estimate of how many women might be involved. If the chosen profile is at least partially accurate, and with a little luck, the modified investigation will uncover further evidence that in turn further refines the search process, ultimately culminating in the capture of the murderer, and resolving the nature of the investigation.

But such searches are not fixed; a good detective will have in mind other possible profiles awaiting supporting evidence. Further search of the murder site, for example, may uncover a gambling note for a substantial sum. This turns attention to enforcing debt default as the kind of crime involved. The lipstick cue does not fit comfortably into this version; the culprit is more likely a male, with a history of criminal activity and likely enforcer violence. This profile redirects the search from sexual partners to gambling associates and perhaps money laundering and the like. From this point of view, the lipstick is mis-directing; perhaps it belonged to an attempt to persuade the victim to settle his debts, or was indeed worn by a cross-dresser, but just as a personal quirk, irrelevant to the financial issues at stake, or planted to "throw the investigation off the scent."

It is the interplay between the discovery of clues, the construction of a suspect profile and subsequent modification of the investigation that makes the process self-directing. It is powerful self-direction because it encompasses re-thinking the nature of the investigation (here from sex to gambling), contextual assumptions (here from assignations to debt collections), data (lipstick from evidence of lover's presence to irrelevance), and solution types (from identification of passionate conflict, murder process and culprit motive to identification of debt association and assassin presence and actions). As an organism interacts in an SDAL process, its improving anticipative models and model-based interaction processes allow it to (a) improve its recognition of relevant information, (b) perform more focused activity, (c) evaluate its performance more relevantly and precisely, and (d) learn about its problem domain more effectively. Indeed, in this setting, error itself can be a rich source of context-sensitive information that can be used to further refine these four features.<fnref n="13" /> The richer the system's anticipative and norm structures are, the more directed its learning can be, and the more potential there is that learning will improve the system's capacity to form successful anticipative models of interaction. To this the detective adds an additional kind of learning, higher-order learning about the entire domain of murders. It is the capacity to learn across many such investigations what sorts of profiles there are; what are their general features and rare exceptions; what their associated kinds of investigatory methods, timetables and costs; and so on and to recognize when there is more to learn and how to be alert to doing it that makes the process such a powerful problem-solving tool.

<footnote n="13">¹³Popper, who emphasized the importance of falsification (“signal mis-match”) in scientific method, missed this power to scientific cognition by confining himself to just immediate logical structure, where indeed a falsification conveys no more than “something is false somewhere.” See Popper (1980), cf. Hooker (1995, 2010), Hoffmaster and Hooker (2018).</footnote>
When that kind of “double-loop” learning occurs, the detective is both learning what works, or not, in the immediate investigation to hand and at the same time using that experience to improve general knowledge of detecting murders, and crimes more generally – knowledge that will in turn be used to improve the next investigation. In short, by learning a higher-order characterization of the problem class (murder investigations), she will have been *learning how to learn* about investigations in that domain while learning how to solve specific problems to hand. Just this is the fundamental bootstrap required for all learning to be improvable. It forms the key to understanding the n-organization, and thence the general power, of the learning process. Indeed, this process allows the rational resolution of initially ill-defined problems, problems whose formulation and structure are vague, gappy or ambiguous, or tacitly internally conflicted, or whose valid methods are unsettled, like how to detect or marry well, or validly test a scientific theory in a new domain. Such problems of necessity lie at the root of every new problem-solving domain.

It is possible to synthesize a model process for such learning-how-to-learn-
while-learning processes. Each of the five foci or nodes of learning identified above
(method, problem formulation, solution formulation, constraints, data) are repre-
sented. As each specific learning process is under gone, attention shifts from one
node to another, or to several nodes in parallel, as the potential consequences of
experimenting with alternatives are explored. (Cf. the different investigations
formed by the detective's various crime profiles.) Eventually (and with some luck),
the investigations are reduced to one, the one that resolves the core detecting prob-
lem. Although all investigations share the same n-organizational form, the non-
organizational features play their decision structuring and making roles alongside
them and varying from incidental to central. A measure of their importance is the
degree to which they must be appealed to at each choice point. For this reason, there
is no specifiable model, let alone algorithm, for the order in which nodes are visited,
nor for what changes are consequently made, nor for how these changes in turn
spread across the nodes, nor for what kinds of compromises are made in reaching
for an enriched solution, and so on.<fnref n="14" />

Yet the model does capture the fundamental n-organization of kinds of actions
that deliberative problem-solving centrally involves. In its lowest form, this
n-organization is expressed in the cyclic processes of specific trial-and-error inter-
rogations. Moving to higher-order organization, these n-organized trial-and-error
processes are nested within sharings of information about how to coordinate the
findings from several such trials covering these kinds of crimes. Every cheetah hunt,
and every detecting, is unique in its qualitative details but they are also all the same

<footnote n="14">¹⁴The detective, for example, has been developing the crime-of-passion profile, impressed by the initial lipstick clue and visits to nearby gay bars, but it has proven increasingly hard to find further useful clues. Several lines of investigation have been proposed and their consequences pursued, for example, that the lipstick belongs to a relative of the victim, leading to tracking down family members and examining any tensions in these relationships, and so on. As these lines dried up, the pressure mounted to look elsewhere, for example, to business dealings, with trial options ranging from gambling debts to defaulting debtor relatives.</footnote>
as n-organized hunting processes. In particular, they all share the higher-order prospects of reformulating the problem and/or the solution, changing and nested again inside more general formulations of investigating crimes of these general kinds. This tri-layer of nested cyclings is of the same general form as the Krebs cycle (above), but here its n-organizational depth is much greater because, for example, at each of its nodes, it stores structured content about the domain related to that node, and stores cross-nodal interrelations pertinent to the domain involved, both contents increasing their richness as problem-solving multiply, none of which the Krebs cycle has available. In this enriched form, the problem-solving model has deeply illuminated the 30 years of research into the linguistic capacities of apes, even how (pace Kuhn) rational deliberative problem-solving can proceed through scientific revolutions.<fnref n="15" />

## 5.4 In Conclusion

It remains to reiterate that this model of problem-solving is primarily n-organizational. No matter the domain concerned, this moderately n-organized, moderately ordered process successfully models the general problem-solving process. The underlying sense of agency on which the problem-solving SDAL process is built is fundamentally n-organizational, satisfying the three criteria for being essentially n-organizational: (I) best understood from within a bio-cognitive n-organizational framework, (II) has a key high-level n-organizational characterization, and (III) its core is n-organizational. The distinctive n-organizational character of life penetrates deeply into its nature, into its universal roots constituting agency. And now it is on this basis that the roots of cognition have also been revealed to be in essence n-organizational. (I) Problem-solving is best understood from within a bio-cognitive n-organizational framework, here that of autonomy-based bio-agency, with its distinctive accounts of identity and normativity. (II) There is a key high-level n-organizational characterization of problem-solving, namely, that of the general SDAL problem-solving process model. (III) The core of problem-solving is n-organizational because it lies within the improvable, enrichable tri-nested cyclicities of the general problem-solving process model. Goal-pursuit is an inherent, if moderate, n-organized process; it marshals the steering sub-processes – anticipation and self-directedness – to orient to the goal and to explore self-improving ways to move toward it. SDAL, equipped with higher-order regulation, is inherently this n-organization. Global-level n-organization is emphasized by the steering processes in SDAL, which are typically higher order. This completes the n-organizational “golden thread” running throughout biology, ultimately integrating mind into living being.

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ For the general model of problem-solving, see Hooker (2017, 2018). For investigation of research in ape language capacities, see Farrell and Hooker (2007a, b, 2009). For the relationship to design problem-solving, see Farrell and Hooker (2013, 2014, 2015).</footnote>
Such n-organizational principles evidently have but small extension beyond life to the cosmos at large. While the inanimate world has n-organization – wherever “mechanical” cyclicities operate, for instance in rolling boil formation (Introduction: Benard cell) – n-organization evidently does not lie deep throughout the cosmos as it does throughout biology. The inanimate makes more use of order than n-organization. No doubt this reflects the simplicity of orderedness and the priority in time of the inanimate world with the emergence of life within it. This makes living n-organization, autonomy, the more remarkable.<fnref n="16" />

The details of the general problem-solving process will vary across subject matters. The golden thread of n-organization abstracts from these differences to locate a fundamental n-organizational category: life. It is thinkable that it might not have been so. Understanding how that n-organizational category is possible will involve tracing it back to the fundamental qualities as we know them, the quantum and relativistic qualities: mass, spin, charge, and so on, along with those that structure irreversible thermodynamics. There is at present no neat accepted story here, and the problems are so deep and unresolved as to make it thinkable that there is none for finite mortals to have. The complications rise further if those qualities associated with mind, the perceptual and emotional qualities, are included. It is always possible to try for a purely process account of these, or for a more n-organizational one, though how complete they can be also currently remains open.<fnref n="17" />

**Acknowledgments** Special thanks to Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio for careful, detailed, and critical appraisal of draft versions and to Hal Brown for challenging comments from a wider philosophical perspective – all of which resulted in a substantially improved essay. The defects remaining surely derive in substantial part from my willful refusal to respond to all comments as their authors intended. With so tricky a topic, I have tried to keep the notion at issue – organization – always at the central focus. In addition, there undoubtedly remain defects not yet appreciated because we all – author and commentators – remain blind to them.

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<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>
Chapter 6
Does Organicism Really Need
Organization?

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>

Olivier Sartenaer

**Abstract** The main purpose of the present chapter is to argue in favor of the claim that, contrary to what is usually and tacitly assumed, organization is not necessary for organicism. To this purpose, I first set up the stage by providing a working characterization of organicism that involves two free parameters, whose variations allow for covering the rich and diverse conceptual landscape of organicism, past and present. In particular, I contend that organization is usually construed as a “mean to an end” notion, or as a tool put at the service of vindicating organicism’s twofold defining assumption, namely, that organisms are determinative entities in their own right, to the effect that (organismic) biology is epistemologically autonomous from physico-chemistry. After a short detour devoted to show that organicism generally collapses on a spectrum of variants of emergentism, I take inspiration from a recent account of emergence called “transformational emergence” to put forward a transformational version of organicism. For such a version meets organicism’s defining standards in a way that is free of any commitment to organization, arguing for its very conceptual soundness finally allows for legitimizing the claim that organicism doesn’t really need organization.

**Keywords** Organicism · Organization · Downward determination · Emergence · Diachronic emergence · Transformational emergence · Transformational organicism

**6.1 Introduction**

That biological entities are organized, and in a rather intricate way to be sure, is a somewhat bland and commonplace observation. Contrary to certain physical or chemical objects, like the solar system or methane molecules, it is uncontroversial that even the most elementary living entity – whatever it is – consists of an exactly complex web of spatially and temporally integrated interactions.

O. Sartenaer (✉)

Département Sciences, Philosophies et Sociétés, Université de Namur, Namur, Belgium

e-mail: olivier.sartenaer@unamur.be
As the editor of this volume indicated in his introduction, the history of biology is marked by a profound and recurring antagonism as to the exact significance and reach of such an observation. On the first side of this antagonism, we find those reductionist biologists or philosophers who tend to consider biological organization as a mere quantitative prolongation of the kind of structuring of matter and energy that can be found in the physicochemical world. According to them, living organisms just are particularly complex bundles of molecules, for which a proper scientific understanding should not in principle require a substantially different treatment from the one(s) already at stake in physics or chemistry – perhaps issues of computational power apart. On the opposing side of the antagonism, there is a (probably minority) community of thinkers who are rather willing to take biological organization *seriously*, as what essentially marks a dividing line between biological and physicochemical entities, as well as, incidentally, between the biological and the physicochemical sciences. These thinkers, regardless of their specific allegiances and in sharp contrast with their opponents of a reductionist temperament, share as a common rallying sign some specified measure of antireductionism, according to which “there is more in biological objects than physico-chemistry alone could ever tell.”

It goes without saying that organicism, a perspective on biology and biological objects that essentially grew as an articulated scientific-philosophical doctrine in the early days of the twentieth century, is to be counted as a particular instance of such an antireductionist attitude toward biological organization. According to organicists indeed – and in a way that will of course be further explicated in this chapter – it is the very fact that biological entities are organized that constitutes the ultimate, empirical ground as to why one should conceive of the objects and/or the science of biology as unique and idiosyncratic.

In the present chapter, and perhaps a little bit provocatively I’m afraid, I would like to question what is often taken as self-evident, that is to say – and more particularly – I intend to scrutinize the apparently inexorable association of organicism with organization, by raising the following question: does organicism *really* need organization? Of course, for answering this question positively would not be that exciting, I plan to give it a (certainly more remarkable) negative response. So to put it bluntly – and before feeling the need to add a few rhetorical provisos – I’ll claim that organicism could actually stay true to its promises by *not* taking organization seriously, by playing the game, so to speak, of their lifelong, reductionist opponents.

As with any philosophical endeavor that proclaims itself provocative, it actually isn’t as much as it would like. From the outset, I must indeed temper my enthusiasm of setting the cat among the pigeons by explicitly disclosing what I will *not* claim in this chapter. So here it is. In this chapter, I will *not* claim that:<fnref n="1" />

* Organisms are not organized*

* Organization* doesn't play a crucial role, explanatory or otherwise, in (organis-
mic) biology

* Organization* does not crucially participate in making organisms what they are

<footnote n="1">¹I use the categories of organism and organization* here for reasons that will be clear from Sect. 2 onward. The reader can then come back here in due time to benefit from a quick reminder.</footnote>
What this essentially amounts to is this: I will neither endorse nor try to argue for the idea that organicists (or any other biologist/philosopher with an antireductionist penchant) should downplay or neglect biological organization. Rather and more modestly, I'll simply claim that they *can*. The point of such a contention is that, should the reductionist side of biology's recurring antagonism finally have the upper hand, this would not necessarily mean the end of organicism and its uncompromising plea for an autonomous or irreducible biology.

Here is how I intend to structure the upcoming discussion. In Sect. 2, I first propose a general definition of organicism. In particular, after emphasizing the role that organization usually plays in organicism (Sect. 2.1), I'll articulate a characterization of the view in which organization appears as a free parameter (Sect. 2.2). I then turn to a discussion of the close relationship that organicism has with emergentism in Sect. 3. I'll first claim that organicism generally collapses on emergentism (Sect. 3.1) and then proceed by showing how a recent, nontraditional theory of emergence allows for defining a nontraditional, “transformational” version of organicism (Sect. 3.2). In Sect. 4, I'll then be in a position to provide an articulated answer to the core question of this chapter, by showing that such a transformational organicism, which eschews any serious commitment to organization, is conceptually sound (Sect. 4.1). As a bonus, I will provide some preliminary thoughts as to why one should consider transformational organicism as deserving further philosophical scrutiny (Sect. 4.2). I will finally address a possible objection to the whole endeavor of this chapter and use it as a stepping stone to point in the direction where future elaboration on transformational organicism should be made (Sect. 4.3).

## 6.2 When Is Organicism?

As a preliminary, I first set up the stage by formulating a general, working characterization of organicism that contains two free parameters. Varying both these parameters will allow for covering the very diverse conceptual landscape of organicist variants, past and present.

### 6.2.1 Organization as a Mean to an End

To this aim, I take inspiration from Nicholson and Gawne (2015)'s recent identification of three “general ideas” that are taken to “unite” the different trends of organism. These ideas – organism, autonomy, and organization – together with the conceptual connections between them can be explicated as follows:<fnref n="2" />

<footnote n="2">²Most of the quotations in this section are directly extracted from Nicholson and Gawne's paper, even if, for the sake of proper reference, I only mentioned their actual origin. The way in which the three tenets are presented and organized is my own.</footnote>
* *Organism* – It is a recurring theme among organicists that living organisms are idiosyncratic entities. As such, they are supposed to possess some unique (set of) trait(s) that allows for unambiguously distinguishing them from other, non-organismic entities like molecules, stones, or stars. Typically, organisms are considered peculiar in that they are – contrary to molecules, stones, or stars – “unified wholes” that are “more than the sum of their parts.” Although this traditional, holistic idea can be given very different interpretations, there seems to be a widespread tendency in organicism to read it in *determinative* terms. In a nutshell: organisms are idiosyncratic wholes to the extent that they are determinative *in their own right*. Put differently, organisms are those united wholes that happen to be determinatively effective *qua* wholes, that is, not only insofar as they are made of underlying entities – cells, molecules, atoms, or ultimately, non-composite physical units – that are themselves determinative. A typical way of making sense of such an overarching determinative effectiveness of organisms is to consider that organisms are the kind of entities that are able to “make a difference” as to how their own constitutive parts behave. In the words of notorious organicists: “The whole enters always into the determination of the activities of the parts” (Woodger, 1929, 247); or “the behaviour of an isolated part is [...] different from its behaviour within the context of the whole” (von Bertalanffy, 1952, 12).

* *Autonomy* – A second core tenet of any particular variant of organicism is the relentless contention that the biological sciences – broadly understood as, among other things, the scientific study of organisms – are autonomous from, or irreducible to, the physical sciences. There are many different ways in which such an autonomy or irreducibility can be precisely construed, depending on one's preferred view about the general nature, goals, and methods of science. These can range from, for instance, the inability to adequately *represent* biological phenomena through the formal machinery of physics to the inability to *deduce* biological laws – if any – from physical laws plus some other assumptions. Perhaps the most widespread way of capturing the putative autonomy of biology is the one that directly pertains to explanation, i.e., biology would be an autonomous discipline insofar as they are biological phenomena out there that cannot be properly *explained* from the exclusive vantage point of physics.<fnref n="3" /> As Haldane evocatively put it: “[t]hose who aim at physico-chemical explanations of life are simply running their heads at a stone wall, and can only expect sore heads as a consequence” (1908, 696).

It is noteworthy that both these first ideas – organism and autonomy – are not conceptually independent. If one is ready to take seriously the claim according to which “[a]ll of the organicists shared the conviction that the distinctiveness of organisms demanded a unique set of theoretical tools for their elucidation” (Nicholson & Gawne, 2015, 366), it then appears that the idea of organism is what

<footnote n="3">³Although this is a generic way in which the tenet of autonomy will be broadly construed here, it is by no means the only one possible. For different takes on the issue, see, e.g., Moreno and Mossio (2015) or Varela (1979).</footnote>
enforces, entails, or grounds the idea of autonomy. It is indeed essentially *because organisms are the way they are* – unified whole that are determinative in their own right – that the science that studies them, biology, happens to be autonomous from the science that study their constitutive parts, physics (or chemistry). As it were, it seems that “[b]iology must retain the courage of its own insights into living nature” (Weiss, 1969, 400).

* *Organization* – The third and last core ingredient that should be definable of organicism is the rather commonsensical idea that organisms are organized entities. Obviously, for such an idea not to be overly trivial, or for it to be of any philosophical significance, it has to be considerably sharpened and refined (as it is uncontroversial that molecules, stones, and stars *also* are, to some extent, organized entities, and not mere unstructured clusters of elementary physical units). Because it is not the place to speculate about how exactly one should achieve this sharpening or refinement, that is, how one should precisely conceive of the idiosyncrasy of organismic organization, let’s imagine that such a sharpening is possible, and let’s refer to its result as “organization*.” Under this hypothesis, organization* just is the kind of organization that is typical of organisms. As such, it allows for unambiguously distinguishing organisms from other organized – though not organized* – entities like molecules, stones, and stars.

As with the two first ideas of organism and autonomy, the third tenet of organization is not conceptually freestanding. Rather, organization must essentially be taken as a *mean to an end*, that is, as a tool that supports the organicists’ main contention that organisms are unique entities that require an autonomous science to be dealt with. As things stand, “organisms are what they are by virtue of their organization[*]” (Nicholson & Gawne, 2015, 364). That is to say, organisms are (supposed to be) determinative entities in their own right, precisely in virtue of the fact that they happen to be the kind of entities that are organized in a very idiosyncratic way, i.e., they are organized*. In the words of contemporary organicists: “The principle of organization states that biological systems realize a closure of constraints. The organization of constraints realizing closure achieves a form of ‘self-determination’” (Mossio et al., 2016, 7). As it appears, it is assumed here that the unique determinative dynamics of organisms – referred to as “self-determination” – turns out to be brought about by the realization of a unique mode of organization, here a “closure of constraints.”<fnref n="4" />

This being said, I am now in a position to fully articulate Nicholson and Gawne’s three unifying ideas in order to provide a general, working characterization of organicism.

<footnote n="4">⁴It should be noted that organicists – on the model of those quoted here – don’t necessarily restrict themselves to considering *organisms* as organized*. More generally, they are often open to extending the scope of organization* to the broader category of “biological systems.”</footnote>
## 6.2.2 Defining Organicism

Here is a first attempt, formulated as a claim [Oº], that any organicist, and organicists only, should take as true:<fnref n="5" />

[Oº] – Organization* makes organisms what they are – determinative entities in their own right. That organisms are such makes biology an autonomous science.

Of course, presented like this, organicism is nothing but a speculative philosophical view (hence the superscript “φ”). Should one want it to have some actual bearing on science – something that I suspect most, if not all, organicists certainly want – then the following companion claim is also to be endorsed (with the superscript “em” standing for “empirical”):

[Oem] – There is some restricted class of entities in nature, namely, organisms, that are organized*.

In order to generalize this twofold characterization of organicism, three preliminary remarks are in order.

First, it should be noted that the three defining ingredients of organicism are associated with claims that are not on equal footing. In particular, the tenet of organism is associated with a claim – “organisms are determinative entities in their own right” – that is *ontological* (*modulo* a proviso to be found below); the idea of autonomy comes with a contention – “biology is autonomous from physics” – that is essentially *epistemological*; and the claim that corresponds to the tenet of organization – “organisms are organized* – turns out to be *empirical*. By being committed to [Oº] and [Oem], the argumentative structure of organicism is then rather sound, as well as, incidentally, quite widespread in the philosophy of science literature. It consists in identifying a class of entities in nature that appear to share a very special feature, for then extracting some putative metaphysical consequences therefrom, which are believed to have some impact on our way of doing science.

Second, thesis [Oº] may appear at first glance as overly restrictive, to the effect that, from the outset, some strands of organicism would be excluded from its scope. More particularly, I wouldn’t be surprised if some organicists considered the requirement that organisms are determinatively effective in their own right as being too ontological, hence inconsistent with the supposedly *exclusively* *epistemological* version of organicism they want to promote. I think this hypothetical concern is misguided for two interrelated reasons. The first is that, in a nutshell, it is really far-fetched to consider that there could be versions of organicism that are free of *any* ontological commitment, no matter how thin. As I take it, organicism at least endorses the idea that organisms do exist as “wholes” of a somehow *unique* kind, to the effect that there is a principled way in which they can be classified in a separate category from non-organismic things. “[A]fter all, [and contrary to stones and stars,] organisms are not just heaps of molecules” (Weiss, 1969, 400). Organicism then

<footnote n="5">⁵The (certainly) ambiguous and polysemic notion of “determination” employed here will be unpacked below.</footnote>
generally comes with some appetite toward an (at least very shallow) “ontologiza-
tion” of organisms, or some minor degree of “biochauvinism” (Wolfe, this volume).<fnref n="6" />
Without it, biology’s irreducibility would lack its main rationale and appear accord-
ingly as exquisitely gratuitous. Should it indeed turn out that organisms just are “the
sum of their parts,” on the model of – as the story goes – molecules, stones, or stars,
then one could justifiably wonder why biology’s relation to physics should be *that*
different from the other special sciences, like chemistry, geology, or astrophysics.
This brings us to the second, related reason: as such, the very notion of “determina-
tion” is in itself highly noncommittal. This is of course why I opted for this term to
begin with: determination denotes a neutral relation that can come with various
intensities of ontological oomph, ranging from “thin” to “meaty” ones (Beebee,
2000). The “only epistemological organicists” can then rejoice, for, perhaps con-
trary to appearances, they have not been left ignored. Among the possible interpre-
tations of the idea of determination that appears in the proposed definition of the
view, the first of the following should actually satisfy them:

* Ontologically thin organicism:

*Logical* determination – Organisms are determinative in the sense that facts about them entail facts about their parts (to the effect that the deduction/explanana-
tion of some facts about parts requires knowledge of some facts about organisms).

• Ontologically modest organicism:

*Noncausal* determination – Organisms are determinative in the sense that they noncausally make a difference as to how their parts behave (e.g., organisms con-
strain the way in which their parts behave).

* Ontologically meaty organicism:

*Causal* determination – Organisms are determinative in the sense that they con-
tribute in bringing about their parts’ behavior (e.g., organisms possess irreducible
causal powers and exercise them for making their parts behave in certain ways).<fnref n="7" />

Third and finally, the core question to be addressed in this chapter – “does organ-
icism really need organization?” – requires us to seriously ponder the hypothesis,
pace Nicholson and Gawne, that organization* be *not* an integral part of organi-
cism’s very *definiens* (otherwise this would simply begs the question at hand). The
(organicist) reader is then kindly asked to at least leave open the possibility that the
concepts of organicism and organization* are not analytically connected (so organi-
cism is not to be defined as the claim that organisms are organized*).

With these preliminaries, I can now propose a revised version of the aforemen-
tioned characterization of organicism, on the following model:

<footnote n="6">⁶The term itself comes from Di Paolo, E. (2009). Extended Life. *Topoi*, 28, 9–21.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷For the sake of simplicity, I consider causation as a monolithic concept here, which reduces to “efficient causation” as construed under the compulsion of a productive account (e.g., Dowe’s (2000) transfer theory). Accordingly, possible alternative forms of causation – typically “formal causation” – are here considered noncausal. This choice is purely terminological and should therefore not afflict too much causal realists with an Aristotelian penchant.</footnote>
[O<sup>e</sup>] – X makes organisms what they are – determinative<sup>y</sup> entities in their own right. That organisms are such makes biology an autonomous science.

And:

[O<sup>em</sup>] – There is some restricted class of entities in nature, namely, organisms, that have X.

As it appears, this definition involves two free parameters, X and Y. While the former is meant to cover scientifically kosher empirical means – among which organization* certainly occupies a prominent place – that would be conducing to the uniqueness of organisms, the latter fixes the strength of the ontological oomph one wants to give to the view – respectively thin, modest, or meaty.

In the light of such a characterization of organicism, the main question that will keep us busy here is the following: for all possible values of Y, is it possible to vindicate the truth of [O<sup>e</sup>] without considering X as some variant of organization*? In other words, is there a viable, empirical mean different from organization* that organicists could exploit in order to ground the uniqueness of organisms and, with it, the autonomy of biology? In order to address this question and, more particularly, to answer it positively, it is necessary beforehand to make a short detour.

## 6.3 Organicism and Emergence

The main goal of this section is to show that the varieties of organicism as defined through [O<sup>e</sup>] collapse to a spectrum of emergentist positions. Put differently, I'll argue that, in order to live up to its promises, organicism necessarily has to be committed to some nontrivial form of emergence. This claim will not be defended here for mere informational purposes (though it may have some interest for that sake). Rather, it will open the door for exploiting some recent resources of the emergence debate, which will turn out to be helpful for addressing the central question of this chapter.

### 6.3.1 Emergence and Organization*

In and of itself, emergence is a very general and uninformative concept. In a nutshell, it captures any kind of relation between two *relata*, usually referred to as an “emergent” and its “emergence basis,” such that the emergent *depends on*, is *grounded in*, or *arises from* its basis, and yet, in spite of such a dependence, the former is also to be considered *autonomous from*, *novel with regard to*, or *irreducible to* the latter (see, e.g., Sartenaer (2016)). Of course, these ideas of dependence and autonomy are (i) very vague and (ii) mutually conflicting, to the effect that emergence is a notoriously ambiguous and unstable idea. Accordingly, putting it to
philosophical work previously requires (i) clarifying these ideas in a way that (ii) they are rendered compatible.

That organisms are emergent entities is not a new idea. Actually, it has been explicitly endorsed by the founding fathers of emergentism themselves.<fnref n="8" /> For instance, in the words of Lloyd Morgan:

> What emerges at any given level affords an instance of what I speak of as a new kind of relatedness of which there are no instances at lower levels (1923, 15–16); and:

> I accept with natural piety the evidence that there is more in the events that occur in the living organism than can adequately be interpreted in terms of physics and chemistry, though physico-chemical events are always involved. Changes occur in the organism when vital relatedness is present the like of which do not occur when life is absent. This relatedness is therefore effective (1923, 20–21).

There is much to unpack in these quotes, though it is not the place to do it exten-
sively here. Suffice it to emphasize that, according to the characterization put for-
ward in Sect. 2, Morgan's emergentism could be seen as an organicism of some sort,
as for him the empirical realization of some kind of organization* – "vital related-
ness" – is what renders organisms determinatively effective, to the effect that they
cannot be "adequately interpreted" in physicochemical terms only.<fnref n="9" />

Apart from any particular historical episode, three features make organicism
generally collapse on emergentism. The first – which is actually sufficient in itself –
is an obvious definitional convergence. That organisms are determinatively effective
in their own right make them somehow autonomous from their parts – logically,
noncausally or causally, according to one's preferred version of the view – parts on
which they are also supposed to depend. Second, organisms are ultimately to be
considered determinatively effective and emergent because of organization*. More
particularly, it actually is some reification of organization that provides the neces-
sary ontological oomph for both views to get off the ground. As organicists and
emergentists alike would put it, respectively:

> In essence, organization has become a *thing* (Rosen, 1991, 117; emphasis in the original); or:

<footnote n="8"><sup>8</sup>Although emergentism has some deeper historical roots, one usually considers that the first, fully-articulated defense of the doctrine appeared around the 1920s, mainly in the combined works of philosophers and biologists (see, e.g., Blitz (1992)). Apart from George Henry Lewes who coined the term “emergence” in 1875, the first systematic, philosophical use of the concept is to be found in Lloyd Morgan’s works. Other notorious early emergentists were Samuel Alexander, Roy Wood Sellars, and Charlie Broad.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹True, Morgan’s position could also be considered as a (monistic) form of vitalism (Sartenaer, 2013), for (i) it is arguable that a “vital relatedness” that needs to be accepted with “natural piety” is not a scientifically kosher mean to vindicate the uniqueness of organisms, or (ii) such a view requires to be committed to the existence of nonphysical, “configurational forces” (McLaughlin, 1992). As it will appear below, I do not intend to fight over this point, which ultimately hangs upon the boundary between meaty organicism and materialism-friendly vitalism being somewhat blurry. In emergentist terms to be explicated below, one generally considers that Morgan was endorsing a “strong” form of emergence.</footnote>
All through the argument of this book, we have proclaimed the *reality* of form (Sellars, 1922, 329; emphasis is mine).

Third, it is this very ontologization of organization that provides both views with the opportunity to occupy the conceptual space between reductive physicalism – “no ontological oomph” – and hard-nosed vitalism, “too much ontological oomph” – allowing for a reconciliation between some degree of antireductionism and the naturalistic demands of modern science. As it appears, both organicism and emergentism then conceive of organization* as the very key to their commonly targeted “third way.” Besides the intrinsic determinativeness of physical entities themselves, with organization* becomes available indeed an alternative, scientifically legitimate source of determinative effectiveness in the world – *contra* reductive physicalism – source which has nothing to do with the putative determinative potency that a separate realm of nonphysical entities would have intrinsically, *contra* (substantial) vitalism.

Table 6.1 summarizes this collapsing of organicism on emergentism along the possible variations of the parameter Y, X being fixed on organization.⁴ It should be noted that, whereas every possible variety of organicism amounts to a particular declination of emergentism, the converse is not true. This is unsurprising, given the very high generality of emergence, together with the fact that most traditional emergentists, including Morgan, were considering natural entities other than organisms as putative candidates for emergence (for instance, the products of chemical reactions or, typically, mental and conscious states).

Table 6.1 calls for some comments. First, a relatively peripheral one: given that both organicism and emergentism are usually formulated within the framework of a layered ontology of “levels,” where an organism is supposed to occupy a higher level than its underlying, lower-level parts, the determination that is at stake is generally to be considered “downward,” that is, oriented *from* the higher level of the whole *to* the lower level of the parts. This is why, though varieties of downward determination are typically coextensive with emergence – the most widespread being so-called downward causation (see, e.g., Kim (2006)) – they are also pervasive in organicists’ debates.<fnref n="10" />

Second, the reader should not be startled by the diversity of concepts of emergence referred to in the table. Weak and strong (ontological) emergences are actually commonplace in the literature (see, for instance, Wilson (2015)). They are usually distinguished in that the second entail, while the first doesn’t, the coming into being of new higher-level causal powers, something which makes the second, though not the first, inconsistent with physicalism (in the minimalist sense according to which “all worldly causal powers are physical”). “Modest emergence” is certainly more unusual and is here only meant as a label to paste on any account of emergence that would allow for

<footnote n="10">¹⁰See, e.g., Arnellos and El-Hani (2018), where the authors construe modest determination under the category of “medium downward causation” (to be contrasted with “strong downward causation,” following Emmeche et al. (2000)). This prevalence notwithstanding, it should be noted that some recent works in the organicist tradition *do* eschew any commitment to the idea of downward determination as construed here (see, e.g., Mossio et al. (2013)).</footnote>
<table><caption>**Table 6.1** Varieties of organicism along dimension Y, together with the type of emergence they are committed to</caption><thead><tr><td>Organicism</td><td>Determination (Y)</td><td>Emergence</td><td>Physicalism</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Thin</td><td>Logical</td><td>Weak</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>Modest</td><td>Non-causal</td><td>Modest</td><td>Yes?</td></tr><tr><td>Meaty</td><td>Causal</td><td>Strong</td><td>No</td></tr></tbody></table>

reconciling physicalism with a decent measure of ontological antireductionism – something that, notwithstanding claims to the contrary, has still to this day not been achieved uncontroversially (I take this as an open endeavor whose fruitfulness has, in any case, no bearing on my current objective).

Third and finally, though I’m certainly sympathetic to the idea that nothing should in principle prevent us from considering meaty organicism as a genuine variant of the view, I also don’t have any good reason to contest the widespread idea that this looks “dangerously too much like vitalism” to deserve being properly named organicism – Lloyd Morgan’s strong emergentism being a vivid illustration of such an uncomfortable borderline situation. Accordingly, and in order not to raise unnecessary matters of controversy, I would be ready to leave aside meaty organicism/strong emergentism/monistic vitalism out of the scope of “respectable” organicism.<fnref n="11" />

It is now time to close this section by putting forward a third formulation of the characterization of organicism, in the light of what has been just said. Here it goes (with [O<sup>em</sup>] remaining unchanged):

> [O<sup>em</sup>] – X makes organisms emerge<sup>Y</sup> from a physical basis. That organisms emerge<sup>Y</sup> makes biology an autonomous science.

Parameter Y now corresponds to possible variations as to the kind of emergence involved. My central question then becomes: is there an empirical mean different from organization* that would be conducing to emergence<sup>Y</sup>? As it turns out, recent works on emergence can be called to support the claim that there is.

### 6.3.2 Emergence and Transformation

Since its very inception in the 1920s, emergence has been almost exclusively construed and discussed with, in the background, two interrelated assumptions. The first is that the dependence relation that connects an emergent to its basis is to be considered *synchronic*, that is, it is assumed to obtain between the putative emergent and its basis as they are instantiated at the very same time. The second is that emergence is an intrinsically *hierarchical* relation that connects lower-level to higher-level entities. Both these assumptions are implicit in the traditional organicist/

<footnote n="11">¹¹For a finer-grained analysis of the relationship between organicism, emergentism, and vitalism, the reader can refer to Sartenaer (2018a). See also Wolfe (2011).</footnote>