Process Philosophy

Process Philosophy

A Synthesis

Bart Nooteboom

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Bart Nooteboom 2021

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021935297

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-746-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-746-4 (Hbk)

Cover credit: Shutterstock\images

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Preface

Foreword by Patricia de Sá Freire

Introduction: Definition of Terms, Purpose and Summary

1.Evolution

2.Learning and Truth

3.Language

4.Individual and Society

5.Morality and Ethics

References

Index

PREFACE

In my career as a scholar of innovation and organisation, I was professionally interested in processes of change, and was struck by the ubiquity of change in different fields of science and philosophy, and became intrigued by the question what they might have in common. I have been reading philosophy since I was 13, and was interested in particular in philosophies of change, finding that the theme was more in evidence in Eastern than in Western philosophy. After many years of study, I came to this book, discussing forms of change and seeking connections.

FOREWORD

I thank Dr Bart Nooteboom for the honourable invitation to write these few pages as a foreword to his book. In this newest book, based on an interdisciplinary vision brought about by the dialogue between philosophy and organisational studies, the author delves into human sociocultural relations, among other matters, helping to recover the focus on the individual with microfoundations in a technological era, and offers foundations for consistent research and projects on the organisational level.

Upon reading Professor Bart Nooteboom’s book, my reaction was the pleasant satisfaction of identifying that the themes indispensable to the establishment of organisational resilience and the configuration of contemporary governance models (multilevel governance and governance of learning and knowledge) will have, starting from the launch of this book, a fundamental support. Various elements covered in this book are multilevel governance mechanisms, such as intra- and inter-organisational learning networks, organisational and individual, management of change processes and the creation of human knowledge, and the elements of trust and collaboration for the entire system to cohere.

In the world of disruptive digital transformations, the focus has been on technological changes and integrations, but the adaptive advantages inherent to successful organisations are the result of collaboration between autonomous individuals capable of learning and adapting to multilevel learning networks.

It is clear that despite the individuality of the subjects, they are all integrated into the general program of Homo sapiens and also into more limited programming frameworks, such as the cultures to which they belong. But this limitation is illusory, since the subjects are connected to the organisational network, translating information and reinterpreting it, returning it to the environment from their personal connections, and strengthening the cultural network from their view and interpretation of the world. In other words, this phenomenon of interactive construction between the environment and the individual is linked to other phenomena, within a network of space-time connections.

When one tries to understand the process that leads individuals to make the decision to collaborate or not with peers, it is realised that one can no longer look at those individuals as autonomous. A system emerges with complex structures, and with interwoven elements, and that, after we perceive the extent of its complexity, makes us capable of dealing with the real and of dialoguing and negotiating with it.

Looking with a systemic view at the complexity inherent to an individual’s cognitive process is to perceive the infinite play of inter-feedback between cognition and environment. To really understand and put in order the complex phenomena intrinsic to the social process, it is necessary to perceive the challenges of human experiences from the perspective of the individual, selecting the elements of order and certainty, which will help to clarify, distinguish and hierarchise the formal phenomena. One must recognise the restlessness, the disorder, the ambiguity, the paradoxical, and the uncertain that make up the elements that are part of this complex open system called the human being, and its process of knowing the world in order to decide about it.

It is understood that human knowledge is built from the relationships experienced within the complex system of relationships between them, the environment and the other participants in the network of connections: their perceptions, interpretations, emotions and reactions. And, to understand the individual, the high-performance teams and the organisational machine in its complexity, they should no longer be perceived as a simple summation of their behavioural expressions, but rather as a being in self-organisation, woven by events, actions, emotions, interactions, determinations and chance.

This book warns that what individuals know affects and is affected by what they are able to perceive in the environment. The way they conceptualise and classify what they perceive ends up influencing their way of reasoning about the relationships they experience, leading them to make decisions consistent not with the result intended by a dominant paradigm, but with what they have discovered.

After reading this book, leaders will be made aware that decision-making is an individual cognitive process, but that it also depends on the environment around the subjects because individuals are possessed by the environment in some way, since it is the environment that dictates the rules for their self-organisation, limiting or providing opportunities for their cognitive development. And, reciprocally, the individuals affect the characteristics of the environment in which they are inserted, actively participating in its construction and reinforcing its beliefs, because, if they do not accept them as rules, they will enter into a state of defence, moving themselves away or provoking their own withdrawal. An understanding will be reached that the decision to collaborate or not with the development of the collective good is first made internally to the individuals and only then they come together in a collaborative group in order to carry out as a common movement the transfer of knowledge into the organisation’s practice.

Besides other important points, the book leads us to foresee that the way to make a conscious (that takes into account all the determining variables) and committed (to the intended results) decision goes through the individual cognitive system but, for it to be applied in the organisational practice, one will need to collaborate and negotiate with other individuals and with cultural characteristics that may enhance or block the achievement process. So, to make a decision, individuals must become aware of their own complex relationship with the environment and other people.

In this way, becoming aware of reality is seen as one of the important stages of cognitive development, to enable the perception of disagreements, relationships of trust and the motivations that lie behind relationships. From the point of view of philosophy, the individuals’ action in the world is a dynamic of construction of their own being, it is their presence and their possibilities of coming to be something else in the next moment, and it is dependent on their relations with the phenomena perceived in the environment. It is a dynamics of continuous structuring, in which states, passages and places are exchanged.

This subject, which is existence, is a project of being able to be something else in the future, that is, it is a project of what is to come. All the concretisations in the existence of a being exert an action expressed together, never occurring as being or a way of being isolated, because every being is always being-with; even in solitude and isolation, presence is always co-presence, the world is always shared, living is always coexistence.

But how can this process be understood? In their actions when coming into contact with a new phenomenon in the environment (and the author brings us several cases in his works as examples), the individuals seek, in their memory, recorded representations that help them to give meaning – to interpret – to their current experience. When identifying something ‘similar’ in their memory, they classify the new phenomenon based on similarities. Then, a new relationship is established, and if the phenomenon behaves as expected, that is, like the one already registered in their memory, nothing will change, and the mental model will be confirmed, rooting their beliefs and values more deeply. However, if the new events do not proceed as expected, the individuals are forced to leave their comfort zone and change their mental models by adopting new elements from their environment.

But these new elements are not so easily incorporated; on the contrary, the individuals react to changes they do not recognise, which can generate a state of organisational crisis through the paralysis of the productive flow, focusing on the defence of their comfort zone – which means to accomplish what is already known and accepted by the group. The group instinctively concentrates its energies on its self-defence, in the search for the previously existing balance, starting a long path of instability, until the end of the dynamics of adaptation to the adopted changes.

Dr Bart Nooteboom presents us with a beautiful book about the essential elements to be considered for the governance and management of these human and sociocultural relations so as to innovate but not reach the state of crisis.

I congratulate Dr Bart Nooteboom and wish everyone a good reading.

Patricia de Sá Freire

Knowledge Integration and Governance Engineering Center,

ENGIN/UFSC/CNPQ

INTRODUCTION: DEFINITION OF TERMS, PURPOSE AND SUMMARY

Philosophical Orientation

Practical philosophy asks what to do with life, while taking responsibility for one’s role in society (Hubert Dethier 1993, 525). From philosophical pragmatism (Peirce, James and Dewey, see Malachowski 2013) I adopt the view that ideas are to be evaluated by the implications they have for practical life. Peirce, an early pragmatist, ‘called Jesus a pragmatist and proposed that the saying By their fruits ye shall know them was an early version of the pragmatic maxim’ (Nicholson 2013, 251).

Philosophers call this orientation towards a goal intentionality. Even microbes have it, in moving towards a source of food. People, in contrast with most animals, have ‘second-order intentions’ (Okrent 2013, 150), in seeing their intentions as their own, in self-awareness and possibly changing them. This allows people to consider not only what is actual but also what is possible, and to consider one’s death. In a practice, things are connected, and this leads to a view of the world as a connected whole. Practices change, in adaptation to a changing world, and this leads to a process view. We come to the world with a potential for development of ideas in interaction with things in the world, especially people.

With pragmatism, focusing on the usefulness of individual things, one may neglect the wider system, in not seeing the wood for the trees. Something that is useful for a single thing may be harmful to the system it is in. Damage to the natural environment is an obvious example. This is akin to the notion, in economics, of ‘externality’: The environment is taken for granted, and one is unable to take into account the cost of pollution. One neglects the totality of the environment.

A wider task of philosophy is to discuss issues that are otherwise not questioned, are taken for granted, in daily life and science, of which there are many that we are hardly aware of. An example is in the understanding of puzzles that arise in modern physics, discussed below.

The puzzles yield the urge to come up with new ideas, in new thought, as pursued, for example, by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. In other words: Philosophy tinkers with fundamentals. The problem with this, this looking for what underlies fundamentals, is that it is not clear what the fundamentals of it are. When asked what philosophy is, my granddaughter said that it is about questions to which there are no answers. It is riding a horse which is not there. It is a precarious affair that demands modesty. With a paucity of empirical grounding, philosophy is a matter of debate, with arguments from experience and science to make it plausible. In my view, which I share with Hubert Dethier (1993, 529), life, and the philosophy of it, is an endless attempt to transcend what is given, in knowledge and rules. It is imperfection on the move. Such change constitutes human purpose itself, gives meaning to life, is the human condition. That requires spirit, courage, resilience and, paradoxically, both perseverance and flexibility. However, while Deleuze, for example, wants to escape from common sense, I want to connect to it while going beyond it.

A challenge for philosophy is to contribute to an understanding of modern physics: relativity theories, quantum mechanics and attempts to bring the two together, in theories of ‘Quantum Gravity’ (Rovelli 2016). The levels of nature studied in modern physics, of elementary particles and fields, and in this book the level of people in society, are widely different. What is the connection? Is there similarity? Does there need to be? The question is not only whether philosophy can contribute to an understanding of modern physics, but also whether it can itself employ the logic, the way of thinking, the mathematics that emerges from that physics, concerning the relation between particles and fields, in physics, and here between people and social fields. In a later chapter on language I ask whether the realisation of one of many possible meanings of a word that arises when it is connected with other words in a sentence can be compared to the ‘collapse’ of a cloud of probabilities of the position of an elementary particle to a specific position upon the collision with another particle, in the complementarity view of the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ in physics.

I do find it interesting that, like the present book, modern physics yields a process theory, with universal and ongoing movement, in quantum theory, and a relational view, where elementary particles, such as electrons, exist only in interaction with others. The interaction consists of the exchange of another particle. Two electrons repulse each other in the exchange of a photon. In this book, people are constituted in interaction with each other: in isolation, people cannot flourish. People exchange meanings, in communication. How useful is this comparison? Is it a metaphor? Can it serve as a model? How far does the comparison go? There are fundamental differences. All particles of a certain kind are identical. People are not. Some kinds of particles cannot interact with all other kinds. People can, more or less.

Fritjof Capra (1975) claimed that the apparent mysteries in modern physics are similar to those of ancient Eastern mysticism, in particular Taoism, which held that opposites cohere, are one, such as in the physical notion of complementarity where elementary particles are both particles and waves of probabilities of their locations. Things can literally be neither here nor there. Like modern physics, Buddhism and Taoism are process views: everything flows. Also, they both claim that everything is connected to everything else. The Eastern mystics claim direct apprehension of ‘the One’ that encompasses all, in absolute knowledge, without concepts and language, let alone theory. Science, by contrast, is always based on basic assumptions, as a point of departure for the deduction, in a theory, of possible phenomena, which are subjected to experiment, and form the basis for critical debate among colleagues. In Chapter 3 of this book, in which I discuss knowledge and learning, I say that looking in any direction one cannot at the same time look in all other directions. Scientific knowledge