LITERARY EMERGENTISM

DIMITAR KALEV

Abstract. This essay introduces the philosophy of emergentism to literary theory. The emergent perspective examines the emergence as genesis of a new system that, before its appearance, cannot be predicted or explained by its previous conditions. In our opinion, the most relevant application of the emergent approach is in epistemology and interpretive theories in the philosophy of language. Virtually, in all contemporary literary-theoretical discourses, an epistemological "gap" between the sensory-imagery phenomena of reading, and their proto-phenomena from the text, is inevitably present. Applied to emergentism, this "gap" always appears as intelligibility of literary creation, perceived first as immanent and then also as transcendent. Literary emergentism contemplates the genesis of the text, i.e., it describes the logic of its becoming, giving it strict hierarchical quality and methodological indivisibility. In conclusion, nine principles of literary emergentism are formulated.

Key words: emergentism, emergent approach, literary theory, philosophy of language, epistemology, intelligibility.

1. The intentions of these literary and theoretical speculations are conditioned by the disappointing and boring prejudices of modern interpretive theories. Reader and text continue to meet on the "neutral" territories of language, structure, hermeneutical and semiotic confabulations, etc. Even literary personalism seems no more than witty chatter between author and critic at an art café. The sense of deficiency of epistemes, hierarchy and methodology is palpable and can be defined as a feeling of sorrowful longing for the lost literary mystery.  

2. Emergentism is a concept of interpreting the reality of natural and social human life in all its procedural complexity and forms pertaining to physics, biology, metaphysics, philosophy, neurophysiology, and social sciences¹. The Cambridge social ontology, in the person of Tony Lawson, promotes emergentism as denial of any kind of dualism, implying total independence between the realms of matter and mind, of physical and social, but at the same time insisting on avoiding any reductionist causal explanation of the connections between them².

3. Generally, emergentism deals with the emergence of certain phenomena, characteristics and properties as a result of the interconnection of other existing units (elements), which, however, they cannot be completely reduced to³. The emergent perspective examines emergence as genesis of a new system that, before its appearing, cannot be predicted or explained by means of its previous conditions. According to Geoffrey Hodgson, emergence is a hierarchical category providing means for focusing on higher-level elements and relations and for avoiding the potentially unsolvable problem of analytical reductionism to lower-level elements⁴.

4. Some thinkers propose the thesis of "transformative emergence" and develop an ontological framework in which basic and structured systems or individuals undergo fundamental change, acquiring new forces that are not "latent", i.e., there is no preceding, ontologically justified predisposition for their subsequent emergence⁵. Naturally, with the emergence of new forces, new laws describing their evolution are already in place.

5. It would be naive to impute to emergentism any psychologism exploring the intentions and qualia of experiences so as to challenge physicalism, opposing to it an epiphenomenalist version of emergence. According to Timothy O’Connor from the Stanford School, the most indisputable emerging force is free will, that is, the conscious control upon one’s own actions through exercising the power of choice⁶. It is exactly this thinking will that most convincingly opposes the physicalist concept, according to which the behaviour of any system is determined by the structure and activity of its own parts.

6. In short, emergentism arises as a natural-philosophical and anthropological doctrine that views the human being as a culturally emerging being, and claims that all entirely new traits that appear in the course of human evolution and cultures (symbolic languages, transmission of ideas through languages, autobiographical self, etc.) are typically emerging bottom-up and then strongly influenced by environmental contexts^7-9. However, in the works of Terrence Deacon from the University of California, USA, author of the theory of incomplete nature, the emergent perspective is somewhat more metaphysical: human consciousness is not merely an emergent phenomenon but it emerges as an incessant creation of something from nothing – a process continually transcending itself. To be human, Deacon claims, is to know what it feels like to be evolution happening⁸.

7. Recognizing the religious potential of the emergent worldview, some researchers classify it as religious naturalism describing personal interpretations, spiritual and moral responses to emerging human views on nature, where those spheres are not experienced as separate categories but as an overall orientation. According to Ursula Goodenough from the University of St. Louis, USA, this orientation encompasses three spheres of human experience: (1) interpretive (theological, philosophical, existential), describing the answers to Big Questions; (2) spiritual, describing internal personal responses to existence, such as gratitude, awe, humility, reverence, etc., and (3) moral, describing external social reactions, such as care, compassion, justice, and trust⁹. Used in this way, the emergent approach is readily conductive to atheistic findings in which the perspective of emergence structuralizes models for creation that do not require any creator.

8. Other researchers use the word magical for emergentism, insisting that it opens up countless opportunities to meet and celebrate the magical while remaining aware of the completely natural basis of each encounter. Thus, emergentism inevitably reaches transcendence and reverence. In the works of Michael Kalton from the University of Washington, USA, transcendence is used to both denote the vertical ("top-down") interruption in the actions of the transcendent deity, and to describe phenomena of emergence where the interruption (something else) occurs, remaining attached to its predecessors (nothing else)¹⁰. Formulating it as "horizontal transcendence", Kalton believes that in this way he deconstructs arrogance in the human sensory nature, replacing it with awe, gratitude, and the ability to feel, and also, that our context is much larger and more important than ourselves. Thus, emergentism is freed from evolutionism and moral relativism, i.e., from those arguments according to which, without supreme authority, without any arbitrator of plan and purpose, there is no ontological basis for the human moral behaviour, and therefore, everything is allowed. In short, the emergent perspective allows us to understand the human being not as an interrupted moral unit, but as an emerging one.

9. In our opinion, the most relevant application of the emergent approach is in epistemology and in literary theory where each object or text is considered as a function that links sensory perceptions and mental imagery with their conceptual (of the ideas, intelligible) correspondences, i.e., as a way of thinking and as a logical system. Traced in different perspectives – formalist, hermeneutic, structuralist and other, the object of the literary-critical toolkit is solely and only the being of the literary work. However, in this way, literary history involuntarily ignores its own ontology and accepts it as a gnoseological constant, whereas the particular literary discourse continues to function within the particular literary-historical plot, with the naivety for representativeness outside the history of logic, i.e., outside the emergence of consciousness. However, being, Hegel would say, ought to metamorphose into nothing, whereas nothing should metamorphose into becoming. “Whenever I think, I shake off my subjective features, immersing myself into the object, allowing the thought to develop from itself, and I think badly if I add something from myself”¹¹. Here Hegel cannot be identified with any other thinker because only with him the object of thinking is allowed to swim in this inimitable style in the proto-phenomenology of thinking ideas. And, were it not be limited to triads only, Hegel’s science of logic would be the science of initiation into emergentism.

10. Literary theory can apply the emergent approach as a scientific methodology describing the emergence of the text only if interpretive thinking clearly differentiates within itself the transition from conventional reflective logic (which science uses today) towards contemplative logic. Transformation (metanoia) would be quite natural because, in their own thinking, humans are actually busy connecting their own individual sensory perceptions and mental imagery with the ideal counterparts of those perceptions and imagery that spring from the Transcendental Intelligence (Rudolf Steiner)¹². Thus, knowledge inevitably comes to the necessity of reviving, in the very thinking, the act of contemplation of those intelligible essence entities (according to Plato), which, as archetypal proto-phenomena, are experienced reflectively in the phenomena of concepts, whereas the morphology of their movement is actually the science of logic.

11. To contemplative logic, knowledge is an act of synthesis between the perception and the concept (idea) of the thing, and only this act constitutes the whole thing. The transition from reflective to contemplative logic evokes the process of world development (ontology) in human sensory reality itself, making it available to thinking consciousness. Constantly starting out of and returning to the dialectical triad, contemplative logic is internally strictly organized in such a way that the synthesis again undergoes Hegelian "sublation", appearing to us in its archetypal form (form at the level of ideas) and transforming the time process into a two-dimensional space, inherent in the figurative and geometric world. Here, the contemplation of synthesis is the key fourth degree of logic in which the thinking subject volitionally generates such love towards the object of knowledge that this subject manages to get free from one’s own self and become one united entity with the object itself. Thus, the pure individual will is united with the intelligible essence entities, which apparently are of volitional nature, too. And, in this uniting, the researcher experiences the emergent nature of logic, experiencing emergence as conceptual perception (i.e., at the level of ideas), and/or intuitive insight. Some authors from the anthroposophical school describe three more degrees (seven in total) of contemplative logic – moral intuition, moral fantasy, and moral technique¹³.

12. Transposed to literary theory, everything inherent in emergentism in contemplative logic can be applied as an interpretive toolkit, i.e., any text can be "contemplated" as a meta-text in which epistemes (more precisely, moral epistemes), directly flowing into the consciousness of the literary critic and/or reader, arise from the connections between semantics and intelligibility. Virtually, in all contemporary literary-theoretical discourses, an epistemological "gap" is inevitably present between the sensory-imagery phenomena of reading and their proto-phenomena from the text. Applied to emergentism, this "gap" always appears as intelligibility of literary creation, perceived first as immanent and then also as transcendent¹⁴. Therefore, in any real attempt at literary reconstructions, certain "destruction" is inevitably reached, which, from an epistemological point of view, is the designation of this transcendence as some "interruption" of the divine "top-down". It is also the Hegelian antithesis of nothing. Just when we ask ourselves the question of what is going on, anyway, inside this "interruption" before it becomes a phenomenon of individual literary writing, then the hour of emergentism strikes.

13. In fact, literary emergentism contemplates the genesis of the text, i.e., it describes the logic of its becoming, giving it strict hierarchical quality and methodological indivisibility. It would be misleading to identify emergentism with a variety of literary hermeneutics, at least because the two approaches work with different gnoseological (logical) instruments. Hermeneutics favours prejudices in interpretations and their variable uniqueness, a property of reflective logic. Emergentism does not interpret the literary event but participates in its becoming, identifying itself with the contemplative logic of the writer, because it possesses a being of ideal objectivity and universal accessibility. George Mead from the University of Chicago, USA, defines hermeneutics as an absence of a special privileged perspective in which traditionary thoughts present themselves as correct ones, which is why the activities in which the consciousness participates are both irrevocable and revocable¹⁵. Both approaches work with the phenomenology of the present but exploit it at completely different levels. Paraphrasing Scott Taylor, hermeneutic prejudices are transmitted by tradition, whereas literary emergentism is objective present arising from both the past and the future of the text itself¹⁶. With the emergent approach, literary history ceases to experience texts as old but constantly renewing messages, and recognizes that semantics is always explored in the present that arises from nothing and therefore without any prejudice. In short, emergentism restores the experience of literature as a mystery practice.

14. It is appropriate to illustrate the mission of the emergent approach in literary reconstructions, where (as in any construction) only the question of what can be asked, but there is no answer to the question of how – how the text arises in and from the "interruption" of its transcendent substance. In those cases, the specific goal of this method is to save sensory semantics from abstract attrition, and also to transpose it into the transcendent.

15. In a literary-historical plot of his own, Mihail Nedelchev defines Botev's ballad "Hadzhi Dimitar" as a text-substrate and meta-text capable of reincarnating into immanent motifs from the lyrics of Bulgarian symbolists, through Yavorov, through the "September Four", and all the way to Ivan Peychev, Ekaterina Yosifova and Petar Karaangov.¹⁴. And, above all of them, as a kind of para-meta-text, according to Nedelchev's profound find, the national mythopoetic text is present. Our hypothesis is that, by contemplating this mythopoetic text, the quoted Bulgarian poets pierce it by means of their thinking will (initially similar to artistic fantasy), behind which intelligible entities (beings), proto-phenomena of things, inevitably begin to show through. As we have seen, in the literary-emergent aspect, the lyricist operates with a completely different thinking, that is, contemplative thinking, quite naturally and psycho-physiologically leading his logic beyond the concepts of things, connecting them to their transcendent myth-like essence. There, the objects (again quite naturally) undress their static geometric images, and one can see and hear (in the literal sense of these words) how, behind their illusory reflections, the life of real disembodied beings – dwarves, fairies, dragons, small and large gods – dances. This volitional act of lyrical thinking which connects the shadows (imitations) in the senses with the reality of the imaginations that give them life, is actually the knowledge of the mythopoetic – and, in this sense, it is the contemplative emergence sought by Mihail Nedelchev’s reconstruction.

16. In our illustration so far, the emergent approach turns literary history into knowledge of knowledge, i.e., into a plot about how the logic of individual lyrical thinking contemplates, achieves and metamorphoses the national mythopoetic text. In the sense of Mihail Nedelchev's interpretation, the emergence literally splits Botev's ballad by means of the last verse in the fourth quatrain: "But shut up, heart!". The lyrical thinking suddenly collapses into the epistemological gap, which is like an abyss between the day-sensory (premortal) and the night-astral (immortal) existence of Hadzhi Dimitar. And, from this "interruption", Botev's genius contemplation explodes: in the premortal panorama of consciousness (here the lyricist and the dying hero easily become identical), nature strips itself from its materiality and, with all the nakedness of its figurative and tonal reality, pulls down the mythopoetic proto-phenomena, turning them into a stream of consciousness. "Hadzhi Dimitar" is not a ballad but a frantic attempt made by the contemplative logic in order to achieve the truth of death as sacrifice and freedom. Finally, like any perfect logical cycle, it returns to the daily sensory nature as an idea before and after things: "But it is already dawn!"

17. Yavorov's emergence is completely different. The quatrain "Morning comes, the sky is burning…" (Yavorov, "In the Fields") is undoubtedly a reminiscence of "Evening comes, the Moon rises..." (Botev, "Hadzhi Dimitar"), but only by its rhythmic and syntactic structure¹⁷. As a lyricist of genius, Yavorov clearly feels obliged to legitimize, once and for all, the contemplative emergence in Bulgarian poetry. In this case, he does it by a completely different, non-heroic scenario – not on the mountain, as in Botev’s poetry, but in the lowlands, in the fields, and not through the senses of a hero, but though those of a pragmatic peasant. In the utilitarian spirit of the 20th century, this view is of course more credible. Therefore, contemplation here refuses to continue towards the transcendent but withdraws instead, remaining in the daily materiality and nature-likeness, whereas the mythopoetic stays hidden. "But we are afraid to drink, we the suffering ones..." (Yavorov, “Nirvana”). In general, fear of the occult nature of the mythopoetic text often arises (and will continue to arise) in the lyric poetry as a kind of guardian of the threshold. And it is in those cases, namely, that literary reconstruction should not fail to notice this "interruption" caused by mystical fear. It is appropriate to define it as an emergent wandering of lyrical thinking. In general, "wandering" is the literary surrogate of the mythopoetic, so typical of modern lyrics.

18. In conclusion, nine principles of literary emergentism can be formulated: First, literature can be considered as a gnoseological phenomenon, i.e., as a kind of knowledge. Second, as a kind of knowledge, each text is busy connecting sensory perceptions/imagery with their counterparts at the level of ideas/ intelligible counterparts, i.e., each text can be considered as a way of thinking and as a logical system. Third, literary epistemes arise from the connections between textual plots/semantics and intelligibility. Fourth, in the description of the connections between plot/semantics, on the one hand, and intelligibility, on the other hand, epistemological interruptions inevitably occur “top-down”; that is, every text is occult. Fifth, the description of phenomena where epistemological interruptions arise from, while remaining attached to their predecessors, is the essence of the emergent approach in literary theory, i.e., the text and the author’s thinking are viewed as a non-dismembered system of "awareness – what we are aware of". Sixth, in the interpretation of each text, the objective of the emergent method is to formulate and answer the question of how, not what, i.e., the method describes how the text arises, not what it is in content, structure, style, etc. Seventh, through the emergent method, each "text – author’s thinking" system can be described as a logical system of seven hierarchical degrees. Eighth, the logismos inherent in the emergent method allows for each text and/or author's thinking to be classified according to the scope (number of degrees) in the seven-degree logical spectrum. Ninth, the emergent method in literary theory unites the conditionality and the autonomy of the text, discovering in it an occult content that is neither an artifact nor is subject to physicalistic interpretations.

19. The applicability of literary emergentism as a theory and an interpretive methodology is yet to be tested and verified in literary studies.

20. As with any manifesto, any accusations of pretentiousness and haughtiness would be well-grounded for this text as well.

 

References

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27 December 2023, Varna
dimitar@kalevi.eu