The Tao of Organicity

One night a few nights ago I went to sleep a dualist. When I woke up the next morning, I was a dualist no more. Outwardly at least, it was as simple as that.

Inwardly, I have been fighting a losing battle to stave off whatever the notional opposite of dualism is — monism, I suppose — for many years. The battle is now over. Monism has won.

Dualism? Monism? What do these words mean, and why are they so important to me?

The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra

Fritjof Capra gives a clue in his well-known book The Tao of Physics. The book concerns the strong similarity between the time-honored worldview of the Eastern mystics, Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist, and modern physics, with its realization that atoms are not really made up of independent, objectively characterizable "particles" after all.

Moreover, the dualism which imagines the observer always to be separate from what is being observed, when one is doing a scientific experiment at the atomic and subatomic level, no longer holds. Rather, according to one interpreter of quantum theory whom Capra quotes (p. 139), "An elementary particle is not an independently existing unanalyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach out to other things."

Even according to a different quantum theory interpreter who generally has little in common with the first (p. 138):

One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical idea of analyzability of the world into separately and independently existing parts ... We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent "elementary parts" of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independently behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole.

So it is an illusion to believe that there are two things, the observer (along with his chosen experimental apparatus) and the object being observed (such as an electron). In quantum physics, when the attributes of a so-called "elementary" particle (which is really no more that a pattern of probabilities that certain kinds of interconnections with other particles and systems will predominate) is to be measured, it first has to be prepared for the measurement operation ... and how it is prepared for observation and measurement determines its eventual measured characteristics.

The act of preparation needed to fix the particle's position with total precision prevents learning its momentum (hence its velocity) with equal precision. This quantum indeterminacy is unavoidable. Why? In the final analysis, imply because the imagined distinction between the observer and the observed is untenable.


False, too, are other classical dualisms. One of these, for better or worse, is that of "an intelligent and personal God who stands above the world and directs it" (p. 20).

In his first chapter, Capra gives a brief history of classical Greek thought, in which there was a shift from "the monistic and organic view of the Milesians" — Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, and others — to the view that above the fundamentally dead world of matter was a separate order of pure being, or of indestructible substance. Though mere matter underwent change, Being was eternal.

In that dualist view, what was pure and unchanging came to seem, with Plato and Aristotle, more real than anything that changed from one mode of imperfection to another over the course of time. The philosophies of Plato and, later, Aristotle, came to pervade Western Christendom down through the millennia.

The Judeo-Christian God, born in the Middle East in a different culture, merged into the European worldview at the time of the decline of the Roman Empire. The nascent churches of Christendom had embraced the neo-Platonism of Plotinus in the third century A.D., and later, during the Middle Ages, the now-regnant Church of Rome rediscovered the original, fourth-century-B.C. thought of Plato and Aristotle.


Before Plato, in Greek culture, the philosophy of Leucippus and Democritus sought to avoid the dualism between the mere "things" we know in this material world and what would become Plato's Forms and the Aristotelian idea of Being as the noblest degree of abstraction. The pre-Platonists did this by assigning the unchanging permanence Plato would allocate to immaterial Forms to certain physical items: the atoms, as originally conceived of by the Greeks. But if atoms, matter's building blocks, were "passive and intrinsically dead," what produced motion and change?

The cause of the motion was not explained [by Democritus and other atomists], but was often associated with external forces ... of spiritual origin and fundamentally different from matter. In subsequent centuries, this image became an essential element of Western thought, of the dualism between mind and matter, between body and soul. (p. 21)

So the thought of the West was, even before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, on a slippery slope to dualism, leaving behind the insights of an earlier Greek philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, who

believed in a world of perpetual change, of eternal 'Becoming'. For him, all static Being was based on deception and his universal principle was fire, a symbol for the continuous flow and change of all things. (p. 20)

It is this Heraclitean idea that you don't need a separate entity, spirit, to explain why "dead" matter undergoes change, that Capra extols as the lesson of modern science in The Tao of Physics. The same idea lies at the heart of Eastern religion, whether Hindu, Buddhist, or Taoist. That "perennial philosophy" of mystical traditions, says Capra (p. 10), "provides the most consistent philosophical background to our modern scientific theories."


Capra's discussion carries a lot of weight, for me. But it's not ultimately the reason why my dualist assumptions crumbled into dust one recent night while I was asleep. I am more attuned to matters biological than matters physical ... which is why I feel I ought to read Capra's The Web of Life before too much longer (I've ordered it from Amazon).

Though I haven't read it yet, I have done a lot of thinking about the area of modern scientific inquiry which one scientist, derisively, calls "emergilent chaoplexity." (See "This Man Wants to Control the Internet," Discover, Nov. 2007, pp. 99 ff.) Chaos and complexity are both hot topics in science these days, as are the idea of "emergence" and that dubbed "consilience" by entomologist Edward O. Wilson.

In chaos studies, scientists have found that there is rampant disorder at the heart of many natural processes. This "chaos" has a mathematical basis such that, although we can never be certain what a chaotic system will wind up doing, we can be sure that it is on a path set by its initial conditions. The so-called "butterfly effect" means that a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil may inexorably cause a tornado in Texas.

The study of complexity takes chaos study a step further by locating in mathematical "space" not only a region of chaotic dynamics, but also one where life inexorably emerges from a dynamical source located at the very "edge of chaos." In our universe, the biological realm "emerges" ineluctably from the workings of "mere" physics in ways that can be expressed mathematically and modeled on computers.

Meanwhile, Wilson's "consilience" — the word which puts the "il" in "emergilent chaoplexity" — proposes a new "unity of knowledge" (see his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which I also ought to read, but haven't). I gather that Wilson's main idea in showing how the various spheres of human knowledge today hope to "leap together" — the root meaning of "consilience" — is that reason ought at long last to replace mysticism ... which would seem to put him in opposition to Capra.

However, my thought is that "mysticism" is an ambiguous word, as is "reason." If you begin with an unquestioned assumption that spirit (if spirit exists) and matter are separate and dual, and that "mysticism" is a search for spirit, then it is easy for many of us to favor the matter side of this supposed dualism and call your stance the "rational" one.

Go all the way back to Heraclitus, though, and the dualism between mysticism and reason, as that between spirit and matter, disappears.

If the assumption that matter is dead and change comes from something apart from the material world is canceled, then it becomes eminently rational (yes) for so-called mystics to pursue scientific inquiries into how the cosmos works. And, since there is ultimately no way to separate out the individual consciousness that we house in our minds from all the rest of reality, it makes sense — for those who are so inclined; not all of us are — to experiment with altered states of mind, which is what the Eastern mystics have done since time immemorial.


The derisive phrase "emergilent chaoplexity" is one that I would prefer to replace with the word "organicity." I mean it to suggest that the cosmos is intrinsically organic in the way it proceeds over the course of billions of years to develop, and eventually to produce life and then conscious life.

Things are said to have an organic unity if they fit together harmoniously as necessary parts of a whole. Organic also means "characterized by continuous or natural development." These are the senses of the word I am interested in when I say I have almost a religious faith in the organicity of the universe.

I'll refer to that faith, then, as "the tao of organicity." In Chinese Taoism, the tao is the natural, spontaneous "way" of all things when left to their own devices and allowed to unfold without a lot of rules imposed on them from without. In my view now as a former dualist, my longstanding Christian faith was essentially a system of understanding in which God was an external rule-giver. Standing apart from nature, including human nature, and finding it/us "fallen" — or, since Adam's "sin," lacking in its original perfection — the God of the monotheists sought to "save" or "redeem" the world.

No wonder it was so easy to wed monotheistic ideas about God to philosophies from supposedly pagan Greece: both idea systems were fundamentally dualist (once Heraclitus and the Milesians were set aside in Greece). In the monotheist view, the material world is wholly distinct from a God who is basically spirit. Though God "became flesh" and was "made man" in Jesus Christ, in the Christian view, there is still a dualism such that Christ is like us in all ways but sin. That idea is undergirded by the idea that Mary, Jesus's mother, was born without the stain of Original Sin which the rest of us inherit from Adam and Eve — yet another dualism.

The list of monotheist dualisms goes on and on. God vs. world. Heaven vs. hell. Good vs. evil. Soul vs. body. Mind vs. matter.

In recent months, in this blog, I have tried to defend all the dualisms by means of some two dozen or more posts under the topic of Consciousness. My idea was that if it can be established that the attribute of the human mind which is variously called consciousness or sentience or subjective experience is indeed a distinct type of being from all the other, merely physical manifestations of mind/brain, then there is hope for all the other dualisms that are inherent in the Christian worldview.

Now, suddenly, I find myself on the other side of the fence, as it were, believing in my bones that dualisms are illusory.

In posts to come, I plan to discuss what has led me to this "sudden" insight, and where I think it will lead me now. But I must hastily note that this "insight" has not really been all that sudden. I have been flirting with it for well over ten years, at least since I first began trying to show how the ascent of complexity and such constructs as the "edge of chaos" in the halls of science today could be squared with Christian belief.

It did not take me long to twig to the notion that if Darwinian natural selection is abetted by self-organizing, complex systems whose dynamics unfold at the "edge of chaos," and if chaos is rightly associated in the Christian imagination with the evil workings of Satan, then there is every reason for Christians to resent the sciences of complexity as much as many of them have long resented Darwinian evolution theory.

Looking back, I realize that I never really overcame that difficulty, and the book I was trying to write under the assumption that it might reconcile Christian belief with the theory of evolution sort of petered out into nothingness. It never got finished, and today I can see why. The whole idea of an "edge of chaos" bridging the order-chaos dualism is fundamentally unchristian, if you stop to think how crucially dependent the Christian outlook is on the existence of a long list of dualisms.

I intend to extend these remarks about the anti-dualist Tao of Organicity in subsequent posts. Stay tuned ...