Space for a Post-Critical Platonism: A Response to my Interlocutors

Martin E. Turkis II

For Michael Polanyi, intellectual pursuits were inseparable from spirited discussions carried out as a convivial social practice. I am pleased to be able to engage in just such a conversation with four esteemed and able respondents to my book The Metaphysics of Michael Polanyi: Toward a Post-Critical Platonism (2024). In light of Polanyi’s emphasis on conviviality, I am particularly excited to see the circle of thinkers engaging with Polanyi widening. Two of these scholars—the physicist and Neo-Aristotelian philosopher of physics William M. R. Simpson and Graham Harman, the renowned founder of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)—have not previously been involved in published discussions of Polanyi’s work. I bid them a warm welcome and hope the conversation will continue. The other two interlocutors—Vincent Colapietro and Dale Cannon—have made previous contributions to Polanyi Studies and are no strangers to the readership of Tradition and Discovery, but they make fresh interventions in this symposium.

My plan for this piece is to engage selectively with what I take to be the most salient points and critiques from each of these philosophers’ papers in the order listed above. All of the contributions have certainly forced me to think more deeply about the subject matter that I took up in the book, and for that I am grateful.

I
Prime Matter, Substance, Porphyrean Trees, Biology, and Platonic Space

I am deeply honored to have interlocutors like William M. R. Simpson, who brings the deep background knowledge of a trained theoretical physicist in addition to his considerable philosophical acumen. He rightly points out that some varieties of contemporary hylomorphism are more congenial to the post-critical Platonist position I advocate than are others. I’m pleased, furthermore, to say that to a significant extent, Simpson’s own evolving development of Neo-Aristotelian thought (along with that of his frequent collaborator Robert Koons) is of this more congenial type insofar as it does not, at least intentionally, “lead to the ‘ontological demotion’ of form” (Simpson 2025, 3). Nonetheless Simpson worries that Platonist approaches, including the Polanyian, post-critical variety I put forward, are unable to adequately handle the nested structures found in nature and mapped by Porphyrean Trees. He also points to the need for something like Aristotle’s prime matter in order to explain the individuation of substances of a like kind.

Let’s take the second of these issues, the notion of prime matter, first. In recent work Koons, in a formulation I think would be acceptable to Simpson, explains that “prime matter is best thought of as a kind of infinitely divisible and atomless bare particularity, grounding the distinctness of distinct members of the same species” (2024, 93). It has “no intrinsic nature of its own, beyond the bare potentiality to receive any nature or form (of a material substance)” (ibid.).

This definition is close to that advocated by Aquinas, whose understanding of prime matter as “a pure potentiality that is apt for the imposition of form but which lacks any determinate nature” (Simpson 2025, 2) serves as a point of departure for Simpson’s own work, though the prime matter which figures in the context of his application of hylomorphism to quantum mechanics (2021) differs from “Aquinas’s conception of prime matter, inasmuch as it has discrete metaphysical parts” (2024b, 65). It thus takes up residence halfway between Aquinas and Scotus on the topic, though in its application to quantum physics it passes clearly into the territory of novel development as opposed to recapitulation. In Simpson’s evolving theory of Cosmic Hylomorphism,

the primitive particles of Bohmian Mechanics are integral parts of the Cosmic Substance, called ‘Power-Atoms’, and their powers are collectively grounded in the substantial form of the Cosmic Substance, which is referred to as the ‘Cosmic Form’. (Simpson 2024a, 5)

Simpson sums up the way that prime matter allows for the persistence through and across time and space of these Power Atoms thus,

By stipulation, the prime material entities which individuate the particles lack any intrinsic properties which persist through time. They derive their identities, however, from being parts of a temporally extended process that is prior to its temporal parts, which manifests a power to choreograph the trajectories of the particles. This process is prior to its temporal parts because it is intrinsically ordered by the telos to which this power is directed…. This power is grounded in a form. So, once again, the prime material entities do not persist per se but only per alio, deriving their identities from the form. (Simpson 2025, 16)¹

A post-critical Platonist gloss on this rich model might hold that the Power Atoms are the comprehensive entities that comprehend the prime material entities as subsidiary particulars harnessed towards their telos, all of which is comprehended within the larger comprehensive entity that is the Cosmic Substance, which harnesses the Power Atoms as its subsidiary particulars and directs their action toward its own Eleatically richer telos.

But perhaps this is to put the cart before the horse. It would be better to say, at this point, that rather than functioning as part of an escape pod from “naïve Platonism” (Koons 2024, 93), Aristotle’s notion of prime matter may be quite compatible with post-critical Platonism. After all, as Lloyd Gerson points out, many past Platonists have taken Aristotle to be a fellow traveler, “freely and enthusiastically us[ing] the concepts of form/matter, act/potency, and the fourfold schema of causes as part of the exposition and defense of Platonism” (Gerson 2005, 19).

Plotinus, for instance, spends a quite a lot of time on the subject in the Enneads. Thus Plotinus:

What, then, is this Kind, this Matter, described as one stuff, continuous and without quality? Clearly since it is without quality it is incorporeal; bodiliness would be quality. It must be the basic stuff of all the entities of the sense-world and not merely base to some while being to others achieved form. (II.4.8)

Matter, in sum, is necessary to quality and to quantity, and, therefore, to body. It is, thus, no name void of content; we know there is such a base, invisible and without bulk though it be. (II.4.12)

The distinctive character of Matter, then, is simply its manner of being—not something definite inserted in it but, rather a relation towards other things, the relation of being distinct from them. (II.4.13)

Plotinus goes on to equate matter with privation, and this takes on an explicit moral valence whereby Plotinus equates matter with evil. This move, likely distasteful to Aristotelians, just as it is to me, is not, however, universal among Platonists. Proclus, for instance, rejects this Plotinian conclusion, arguing “that matter is in fact produced by the good, and is not evil, let alone a or the principle of evil. Indeed, it is even good” (in Opsomer 2001, 161). In making this move Proclus overtly incorporates the Aristotelian approach to matter in his Neoplatonic thought (see Proclus’s De malorum subsistentia, especially chapters 30-37).

Thus in contrast to Plotinus, who holds that matter is privation and thus evil,

Proclus…upholds the distinction between privation and matter and in so doing sides with Aristotle against Plotinus. However, Proclus does not concede to Aristotle that privation is evil. If the primal good were identical with being, then indeed privation would have been the primary evil. But the good transcends being. Privation of a form could never be the primary evil, as it merely is privation of being, not of the good. Privation of a form is mere absence, and complete privation leads any being to nonexistence, thus entailing the end of its suffering. Proclus distinguishes between privation of form (i.e. “Aristotelian” privation), which is a mere absence and in no way evil, from the so-called privation of the good, i.e. that which actively opposes the good and is therefore evil. The latter kind of “privation” derives its power from the good, and should therefore be called not a contrary, but a subcontrary of the good, as he will argue later (chs 52-3)….

Proclus’ conception of matter could not be more different [from that of Plotinus]. According to him matter is produced by the good and its mode of production is not fundamentally different from that of other beings. His account of the generation of matter is mainly based on the Philebus, yet he has a very Aristotelian conception of what matter is and what its function is. (Opsomer 2001, 163-164, 173)

I have spent some time incorporating material on Neoplatonist debates on the nature of matter in order to give readers who may not have much direct association with these ancient thinkers a window into the ways in which Aristotelian doctrines which are sometimes interpreted as hostile to Platonism were not always interpreted thus in times past. I would argue that they need not be now, either.

I have no doubt that contemporary thinkers such as Koons and Simpson will develop their own understandings of prime matter in ways that go beyond Aristotle’s own and which differ in significant fashion from Neoplatonist and medieval accounts alike. I nevertheless take them to be working on the same rough, conceptual continuum as I am and am quite open to the need for a more worked-out theory of prime matter within a more finely tuned post-critical Platonism. And I see conversation with Neo-Aristotelians as an important source of insight on just this front since although I argue in my book that Polanyi is in need of Plato, I also agree that “Neoplatonists were…not wrong to suppose that Platonism needs Aristotle, too” (Gerson 2005, 290).

We turn now to Simpson’s other concern, namely, that post-critical Platonism is unlikely to be able to adequately handle the nested natural structures helpfully tracked by Porphyrean Trees. Here again, recourse to Koons’s work will prove helpful. In his telling,

…Aristotle noticed a universal pattern in the classification of substances: the Porphyrean tree of genera, differentiae, and species. Each substance belongs to a unique, maximally narrow species (an infima species). Each such species belongs to a unique, maximally narrow genus, with each species in that genus sharing one differentia among a class of differentiae that are unique to that genus. This pattern repeats itself, with low-level genera belonging to a unique super-genus…and so on up the tree. This pattern is obvious in biological taxonomy, but it can also be found in chemistry and particle physics.

…Plato’s theory of the Forms is unable to explain this structure. It can give us a class of natural kinds, but it cannot explain why those kinds should be organised in this sort of nested structure, instead of merely intersecting each other more randomly. As a consequence, Plato’s natures are not uniquely definable in terms of genera and differentiae, with serious consequences for the possibility of scientific explanation. (Koons 2024, 95)

This may be too hasty and may, I fear, be based on the unstable foundation of an overly simplistic postulation of a “naïve Platonism” in which the theory of Forms (or ideai)

…performed just one job: grounding the objective similarity or sameness of the many members of a natural kind. Aristotle’s forms (eidē) must also ground the unity of a whole composed of many parts and the persistence through time of something undergoing continuous and intrinsic changes. A single Platonic Form for each natural kind lacks the flexibility and responsiveness needed to perform such varied tasks for each member of the kind. Aristotle insists (on what [Koons] take[s] to be the right interpretation) that each substance have its own individual form. (Koons 2024, 93)

The argument seems to be that Plato’s Forms (naively construed) cannot serve by themselves as the metaphysical grounds for the more varied substantial forms that in-form the matter of unique, concrete individuals (i.e. Aristotelian substances). Perhaps there have been Platonists who have advanced versions of the theory of Forms that could be justly accused of such deficiencies. After all, Plato himself shows the deficiencies in certain versions of the theory of Forms in dialogues like the Parmenides. I do not think this charge holds against Plato’s own teaching, nor that of many of the ancient Neoplatonists, however, and I don’t think it can be properly levelled against post-critical Platonism either.

In the first instance, we might consider that on the Platonic view, particulars—whether the particular in question be a genus, a species, or an individual specimen of a species—do not simply participate in one Form that completely defines them. They also participate in a range of other Forms which add to their particular cast and hue. Thus Socrates participates not only in the Form of the Human, but also to varying degrees in the Forms of Largeness, Animal, the Rational, etc.

Consider a simple example of a Porphyrean Tree:

It seems rather straightforward to read the nested structure of the Porphyrean Tree as a way of tracking the participation in various Forms in a sort of complex Venn diagram-like structure. The category of the animate participates in the Forms of the Animate and Body; the genus animal in the aforementioned as well as the Form of Animal; and so on. As a particular concrete individual of the species human, I participate in at least all of the foregoing Forms along with that of Human and Dullness. In contrast, Socrates participates in the Form of Brilliance, and this in part distinguishes him from me as two distinct individuals within a species.

To put a more specifically Polanyian gloss on this matter, it seems to me that individual Aristotelian substantial forms can exist quite happily alongside Platonic Forms in a post-critical Platonist ontology if we think of them as the joint meanings of concrete comprehensive entities which instantiate particular cases of the relevant Platonic Form(s). Thus each individual form or ousia (as a comprehensive entity) would comprehend its own specific constellation of formal characteristics (i.e. its participation in various other Forms) and would also be logically prior (in the modality of potentiality) to the actualized individual substance. Much more might be said on this point, and I would welcome input from Simpson, Koons, or other Aristotelians. For the present, however, I see no reason to think the existence of ousia or Aristotelian forms is not perfectly compatible with Platonic Forms. And I think all this could happily coincide with natural kinds which are mappable by Porphyrean Trees.

It is, no doubt, necessary to expand on discussions of the Forms as they appear in Plato’s corpus in order to explain fully such a nested structure, and Aristotle’s hylomorphism is just such a necessary expansion. Yet the constellation of traits which define the individual substantial forms of hylomorphic compounds must still be grounded in something—and a very good candidate for that metaphysical grounding point is the Good as Form of Forms. This is, roughly speaking, why Aristotle was a key figure in much Neoplatonic teaching on these questions.

Furthermore, it seems only fair to note, as I respond to the charge that Platonism is incompatible with Porphyrean Trees, that Porphyry was himself a Platonist. While this historical fact in itself does not constitute a strong counterargument to claims that Platonic Forms offer no scope for such nesting, it ought to at least raise the question of whether Porphyry saw any important contradictions between the teachings in Aristotle’s Categories (which lead him to the formal postulation of Porphyrean Trees) and his own Platonist commitments.

The answer to this question, of course, is that Porphyry did not see any such necessary contradiction (though his predecessor, Plotinus, did). Porphyry’s reading and defense of the Categories was taken as more or less decisive in the tradition, and Aristotle’s work became a basic text in the Neoplatonic curriculum. In the introduction to his translation of Porphyry’s commentary on the Categories, Steven K. Strange nicely sums up Porphyry’s approach, in the process giving a beautiful explanation of the Neoplatonic harmonization of Platonic Forms and abstracted Aristotelian universals to which I subscribe in my book:

Aristotle calls particulars substances, according to Porphyry, because he is there discussing the classification of significant expressions, and these apply primarily to sensible individuals, and only secondarily to the abstracted universals that are predicated of them. For the primary purpose of language is to communicate about ordinary things and their individual properties. Abstracted universals for Porphyry, unlike the real universals, the Platonic Forms, have a merely conceptual existence, and are indeed posterior to sensible things.

Hence the Categories on Porphyry’s interpretation does turn out to have certain ontological commitments, but from the Platonist standpoint they…[are] incorporated within a wider, richer ontology. In particular, this ontology can be an orthodox Platonistic one, as long as allowance is made in it for the entities that ground the semantics of ordinary language…. Thus the Aristotelian abstractable universals that are the referents of general terms can be included in our ontology alongside the Platonic Forms: they are immanent universals, the Forms are transcendent universals and causes both of sensibles and of immanent universals. (Strange 2014, 10)

Gerson (2005, 77) agrees, noting that “such a study could be assumed to be carried out under general Platonic metaphysical principles, in particular the hierarchical subordination of becoming to being.”

Now, in recent work Simpson muses that

If stars are thermal substances, for example…then the photons we receive from stars that no longer exist—if they count as entities but not as substances—would involve accidental forms that survive the corruption of the original substance. (2025, 16)

This passage exhibits the Aristotelian interest in labeling those natural kinds which we are able to track and place in nested structures like Porphyrean Trees as substances. Yet this distinction between entities and substances, on a post-critical Platonist account, may be problematic. This is because the post-critical Platonist would take both the photons and the stars from which they came to have the equally substantive ontological status of comprehensive entities, though it may well be the case that the stars are richer metaphysically due to their greater Eleatic potency.

I take this to be a more flexible metaphysical approach, which is highly relevant given that one of Simpson’s claims is that “the Neo-Aristotelian who acknowledges that every substance has its own particular form…and that the species and genera to which they belong are disclosed at different levels of abstraction, keeps a halfway house between Platonism and nominalism that seems better placed to accommodate these common sense facts about nature” (2025, Conclusion). (Note that here Simpson’s language of disclosure at different levels of abstraction is perfectly acceptable on a Porphyrian Platonist reading of Aristotle’s Categories—the levels of abstraction are directly relevant to an entity’s disclosure to us but not necessarily directly to the relation of the thing to Forms). The deeper concern here is, I suspect, related to the question of whether a Platonic approach can be appropriately reconciled with contemporary scientific practice. Yet there may be empirical and scientific reasons to embrace Platonism, for all that.

Take, for instance, biologist Michael Levin, who does cutting-edge work in morphology and information processing in biological systems at his Tufts University laboratory. One of his striking experiments is the creation (from embryonic frog skin cells) of a new organism, called a xenobot. As we read the following explanation, let us keep in mind questions of the substantiality of photons versus stars and of where the joints of reality are to be carved:

Questions about selves, autonomy, plasticity and the origin of biological novelty led us to ask what would happen if skin cells were removed from a frog embryo, dissociated and given a chance to reboot their multicellularity in vitro (Blackiston et al., 2021). Many outcomes are possible a priori: they could have spread out or died or formed a monolayer, etc. Instead (Fig. 7), what they did was to reassemble and form a novel proto-organism known as a Xenobot (Kriegman et al., 2020). These spherical constructs move through water by the coherent action of cilia, exhibiting a variety of self-actuated types of motility. They have a developmental sequence of novel forms that are unlike the typical Xenopus stages; they repair after damage, interact with their environment and show spontaneous changes in behaviour. These novel morphologies and behaviours do not require transgenes or genomic editing; Xenobots repurpose their native hardware (e.g. cilia, which are normally used to redistribute mucus) to new functionality. Amazingly, deprived of their normal way of reproducing, the emergent processes of Xenobots discover kinematic self-replication (a novel mode of reproduction not used by any other organism on Earth, to our knowledge), which they implement by herding loose collections of cells in their environment together to form the next generation of Xenobots (Kriegman et al., 2021). Nothing has been added to their completely wild-type frog genome; instead, developmental constraints have been removed. Without the normal instructions from the rest of the body telling these skin cells to form a passive, two-dimensional boundary layer to keep out the bacteria (a system of low agency), the true capacities of this cellular collective are revealed; it forms a three-dimensional individual with a more exciting life of self-initiated motile behaviour. The collective intelligence of these cells is revealed as, despite a novel environment and novel internal configuration that never existed in the frog evolutionary lineage, they discover novel ways to be a coherent organism.

…If the answer to ‘Where do a frog’s shape and behaviour come from?’ is ‘Long periods of selection and interaction with the environment that sculpt the genome to be a great frog’, then where do the anatomical and behavioural goals of Xenobots originate? Their anatomical and behavioural goals are emergent (Veloz, 2021), rather than directly selected for over aeons of sculpting by selection. A number of researchers have emphasized information arising from generic laws of form (Beloussov & Grabovsky, 2007; Beloussov, 2008; Newman, 2014, 201ti; Zhang et al., 2021), from mathematics (Brigandt, 2013; Lange, 2013; Green & Batterman, 2017; Reutlinger, 2017) and from environmentally initiated novelties (West-Eberhard, 1ti8, 2005a, b; Shapiro, 2022). These Xenobots are only the beginning of a large class of beings that challenge us to develop a better understanding of how goal states arise in novel contexts and how evolution exploits the laws of physics and computation in the context of teleonomic processes. (Clawson and Levin 2023, §4, emphasis added)

Once removed from the frog embryo, do the skin cells shift from mereological parts of a substance to mere “entities,” as Simpson thinks might be the case for the photons which outlast the death of their originary star? And what of the cells’ transformation into xenobots? Do they thus reenter the domain of substance? When, precisely, and why? Are xenobots a natural kind? A true hylomorphic substance in a strict Aristotelian sense? Or are they an artifact made of wetware which does not lie along those joints? Where do they fall in terms of our Porphyrean Tree? Is the tree still growing?

Whatever answers we may give to such provocative questions, we are in deep metaphysical as well as empirical waters here. Striking an appropriate mythopoetic note by referencing the biblical task given to Adam, Levin and his colleagues are led by this experiment to note that

We now have the opportunity to extend this story and ‘name the animals’ in a much deeper way, by understanding the design principles of biology that transcend extant evolutionary examples. The implications of embracing the space of possible beings will extend to terminology, conceptual frameworks, research programmes in several fields, and ethics. (Ibid., §2 emphasis mine)

In other venues, Levin builds on this “space of possible beings,” calling it a “latent space” around biological objects, and—most interestingly for our purposes—explicitly invoking Platonic Forms that are waiting to be instantiated.² For example, in response to an interview question from Curt Jaimungl about whether Levin subscribes to a more Platonist view of transcendent Universals or an Aristotelian view of immanent Universals, Levin had this to say:

…this is my opinion, and this is where our research is going now. I actually think that the Platonic view is more correct. And I know this is not how most biologists think about things. I think that in the exact same way that mathematicians are sympathetic to the Platonic worldview—this idea that…there is a separate world in which various rules of number theory and various facts of mathematics and various properties of computation and things like…live. The idea is that…we discover those things. We don’t invent them or create them…when you make certain devices, you suddenly harness the rules of computation, […or] mathematics that are basically free lunches[.… They] suddenly have properties that you didn’t have to bake in…. I think some of the components of that Platonic space are…minds, and…when you build a particular kind of body, whether it’s one that’s familiar to us…, or really some very unfamiliar architectures…what you’re doing is…harnessing a pre-existing intelligence that is there in the same way that you harness various laws of mathematics and computation when you build specific devices. (Jaimungl 2025)

My point in bringing Levin’s work and the metaphysical speculation that has arisen from his scientific practice into this discussion is to show how contemporary scientific experimentation can and does exist in a fruitful relationship with a vibrant and evolving Platonist metaphysics and thus that we should not necessarily be driven toward anti-Platonist positions for reasons of hoping to preserve a robust scientific practice. In passing, let me also mention that in Levin’s work on xenobots we see how a case of emergence in the immanent sphere cries out for an explanatory metaphysical mechanism in the transcendent sphere, leading him toward Platonism. This is, as I will argue later, just the sort of attention to both the immanent and the transcendent that we see in Polanyi’s work.

Returning to the concerns raised by Simpson, I concede, as noted earlier, the need for more development within post-critical Platonism of a theory of prime matter (or something similar), as was the case for the Neoplatonists of old, and I am pleased to remain in conversation with Aristotelian thinkers like Simpson, to whom I am very grateful for having taken the time to engage with my proposals.

II
The Aesthetic and the Literal; the Sensual and the Real

I am likewise deeply honored to have Graham Harman, a thinker at the forefront of the movement known as speculative realism and the founder of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), engage with my work here, and I was thrilled to find that he is more than conversant with Polanyi’s thought. I will focus in my comments on a further development of my critique of the distinction between the aesthetic and the literal and, to some extent, on the line between revolutionary and normal science.

I appreciate Harman’s clarification of his use within the ambit of OOO of the term “aesthetic” in a relatively restricted sense, and I grant that in relative terms we often operate literally, treating “objects de facto as bundles of qualities” (Harman 2025, 14). I still want to maintain, with Polanyi, however, that this is only true in a relative sense, for the mere throwing of ourselves out into contact with the rest of the world (for we are a part of the world) in the merest act of perception does indeed involve eros. I would thus prefer a literal-aesthetic continuum akin to that of verification-validation proposed by Polanyi in Personal Knowledge:

The acceptance of different kinds of articulate systems as mental dwelling places is arrived at by a process of gradual appreciation, and all these acceptances depend to some extent on the content of relevant experiences; but the bearing of natural science on facts of experience is much more specific than that of mathematics, religion or the various arts. It is justifiable, therefore, to speak of the verification of science by experience in a sense which would not apply to other articulate systems. The process by which other systems than science are tested and finally accepted may be called, by contrast, a process of validation. Our personal participation is in general greater in a validation than in a verification. The emotional coefficient of assertion is intensified as we pass from the sciences to the neighbouring domains of thought. But both verification and validation are everywhere an acknowledgment of a commitment: they claim the presence of something real and external to the speaker. As distinct from both of these, subjective experiences can only be said to be authentic, and authenticity does not involve a commitment in the sense in which both verification and validation do. (PK, 202)

The first point I would like to make is that such commitment is necessary for both the direct, literal, normal science, quotidian side of the OOO ledger and the metaphorical, artistic, and revolutionary side, though this latter category undoubtedly requires more commitment than the former.

Next, I would point out that such commitment is bound up with the erotic drive towards the other which is inherent in all epistemological acts. Consider the act of setting out to learn a new language as an adult:

If I am learning…Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal. (Murdoch 1985, 89)

Now, it seems to me that learning Russian or any other second language ought to be classed principally as a literal enterprise. It begins with the memorization of one-to-one word correspondences and grammatical rules, etc. And even at later stages in the advance to fluency, when one may not need to refer back at all to one’s first language, the task of improvement (even with figurative, emotive language) is often very literal in its structure. For instance, when faced with the common use of hostia by Spaniards as a vulgar exclamation, one might reason thus: “Ah, so this has traditionally been a Catholic culture, and hostia literally refers to the host in Holy Communion, which is supposed to be sacred, so wrenching the word out of its traditional religious context and employing it as an expletive is, I suppose, arresting.”

So, in spite of the literal structure of adult second language learning, in Murdoch’s deeply compelling account, it is still bound up with eros.

One might note, of course, that not all students of a language feel the love for the new tongue that Murdoch describes. This is a truth that I know all too well, having taught introductory Spanish to ninth and tenth graders in my day—but this only serves to further press Murdoch’s point: all else remaining equal, the loveless students tend to struggle more with the most literal of bundling tasks (la mesa = the table) and never advance to more complex bundling at all ([la] hostia ≠ Communion Host when shouted at a football match).

Shifting gears a bit, I’d like to spend a moment or two on what Harman has to say on the distinction between the real and the sensual, which he points out is “the animating duality of all object-oriented thought, and always its central concern” (2025, 15). This is indeed a topic of central importance and one which continues to raise questions for me. Elsewhere Harman has said that “…all of the objects we experience are merely fictions: simplified models of the far more complex objects that continue to exist when I turn my head away from them, not to mention when I sleep or die” (2018, location 287). Though he closes his contribution here by musing that “The real qualities of things are vague and unknowable, yet tacitly present in all experience. Perhaps this is the right Polanyian note on which to end” (2025, 16).

Some thoughts occur to me as I mull these questions over:

Is the truly existent and complete entity the full quadruple object which unifies all the “objects” (real and sensual) with their attendant qualities? If so, could the sensual and real objects be appropriately thought of as subsidiary particulars within a larger (fourfold) Comprehensive Entity? This would be a Polanyian twist, indeed.

What of Polanyi’s dictum that (revolutionary) science must proceed on the foundation of the metaphysical assumption that the object of study be real/existent, whether this is openly recognized or not? Would this be a sort of noble lie (or delusion) whereby the scientist, whether she is aware or not, must take the sensual for the real in order to pursue the difficult path that is revolutionary scientific practice? Is, then, revolutionary science doomed to metaphysical error or duplicity?

When I fall on a cement floor and shatter my elbow, I am presumably experiencing the shattering of the sensual object, and not the real, since the sensual object is what is there to be sensed. But what need then of the real? After all, we might follow Berkeley here, for instance, and wonder what more the “real” object can do for us. The sensual object would thus be all we need, since it can still hold its own reserve of untapped further qualities which might be sensed under the right circumstances (more and different pain, improvement and healing, etc.). Again, then, is the insistence on the real/sensual distinction here really a division of parts within a whole which is never fully graspable for finite epistemological creatures? Does it ultimately function as a sort of metaphysical check on our pride, an insistence on epistemological humility?

Whatever shape Harman’s responses to such concrete queries might take, I certainly look forward to further engagement in his overall project with Polanyi’s ideas as well, I hope, as with Plato’s.

III
Emergence and Ordering Principles; the Transcendent and the Immanent

Vincent Colapietro notes that a gulf lies between his approach and mine, asserting that “our hermeneutic, philosophical, and…metaphysical differences are deep and multiple” (2025, 10). I agree that they are perhaps deep enough to render profitable and elucidating dialogue hard to come by, though I am grateful for his apparently longsuffering engagement with my text.

Yet there are two questions that Colapietro raises that do seem salient to me. The first is whether I am offering a friendly amendment to Polanyi’s work, or whether I am really introducing a different program which is foreign and perhaps even anathema to the issues animating Polanyi himself. The second is the status of Polanyi’s emergentism. The two are intertwined, as will be seen.

Unsurprisingly, I do think I am offering a friendly amendment. Polanyi is a thinker engaged in the ongoing development of a set of ideas—both epistemological and metaphysical—which are wide-ranging and which have many implications which are not easily foreseen at the outset. This inevitably leads to the existence within his evolving work of what may be taken by some to be various unresolved contradictions and inconsistencies. When confronting and attempting to resolve such contradictions, different interpreters of Polanyi’s work might reasonably tend in different directions.

Within the metaphysical side of Polanyi’s work, we may have just such a tension set up between Polanyi’s language of transcendent ordering principles which work through fields to shape processes such as morphology and evolution (from the transcendent “outside,” as it were) and the language of emergence as a description of how higher order principles “arise from” and then exert top-down causal force upon the lower levels. Specifically, Polanyi uses the language of emergence to, among other things, describe the rise of personal centers of hazardous striving and potential achievement from within the lower-boundary conditions set by the physics and chemistry of a putatively inanimate material substrate. It bears repeating, however, that he uses this language alongside his theorization of fields and ordering principles.

Take, to return to an example I examine in the book, the following passage:

…a simple gas flame contains all that is relevant. It represents a phenomenon of constant shape, fed by a steady inflow of combustible material and releasing a continuous flow of waste products and of the energy produced by combustion. Once a flame has been started, its shape and chemical composition can be varied without extinguishing it. To this extent, its identity is not defined by its physical or chemical topography, but by the operational principles which sustain it. A particular collocation of atoms may accidentally fulfil the conditions for starting a flame, but this accident itself can be defined as such only by its bearing on the system of ordering principles which establishes the possibility of stable flames. (PK, 384)

Any actualized, immanent flame which is burning such and such combustible material at time t can be properly considered to be a weakly emergent phenomenon, the identity of which is not strictly reducible to its “physical or chemical topography.” This is the immanent language of emergence which is inseparable in Polanyi’s work with the language of ordering principles which are transcendent with respect to any particular emergent and immanent instantiation. That is to say, the accidental instantiation of any particular flame can be so defined only by its bearing on the prior “system of ordering principles which establishes the possibility of stable flames.”

Polanyi freely uses both terminologies—that of immanent emergence and that of transcendent ordering principles—throughout his mature work. As I state in my book, some interpreters are more attracted to one or the other of these poles and also see the side which they take to be more attractive as, to one extent or another, irreconcilable or incompatible with the other. Walt Gulick, for instance, is a Polanyian thinker for whom emergence is a centrally important conceptual tool. In grappling with Polanyi’s field theory, Gulick finds it to be less persuasive (2021). So on balance, Gulick sees the possible tension I am highlighting here and resolves it by moving away from the opposite tendency within Polanyi’s work to some extent. He is, as always, admirable in the clarity with which he does this.

I see more value in the further development of Polanyi’s Platonist talk of ordering principles and fields and more or less eschew the language of emergence. Yet while I may seem to occupy a similar position to that of Gulick, though with loyalties a mirror image of his, I would actually position myself in a third position or family of positions. For though we might set up a dilemma by taking transcendent ordering principles to be incompatible with an immanent emergence, leaving us to grasp one or the other horn of the dilemma, it is also possible, I believe, to take quite seriously Polanyi’s use of both terminologies and argue that what we have is only an apparent contradiction lying atop a deeper consonance.³ Jon Fennell and Charles Lowney would be two interpreters of Polanyi who would, I believe, position themselves thus, and I would include myself in this camp as well, with one important caveat. Neither Fennel nor Lowney would be comfortable, I suspect, with jettisoning either the language of emergence or the language of transcendent ordering principles. In contrast, I am in favor of strategically decreasing the use of emergence language for rhetorical reasons that I hope will become clear.

Before moving ahead, however, I wish to emphasize that I take all of these responses as possible attempts at friendly amendments offered in the context of good-faith participation in the textual and logical activity of a community of interpretation centered on Polanyi’s corpus.

Now, in contrast to Polanyi, who always keeps both the immanent and the transcendent in sight, according to the transcendent a fundamental ontological status, Colapietro holds that there are various “tenable forms of emergentism, holding out the promise of showing how self-assembling systems or networks are explicable without appealing to transcendent forms” (2025, 4, emphasis added). In my book of course I argue that when Polanyi theorizes fields of prior ordering principles he is approaching a type of Platonistic theory of Forms. So perhaps Colapietro is making the limited claim that emergence theory simply holds out the hope of avoiding a more or less fully fledged Platonism, but I don’t think this is plausibly the case, since emergence theorists do not tend to define their program in that way (i.e., as a metaphysical alternative to a full-blooded Platonism). I think the more plausible reading is that Colapietro holds out the hope that emergence theory could provide a suitable explanatory metaphysics with no place for causal transcendence whatever. With respect to the relation of immanence to transcendence, a sort of Mad Max metaphysics seems to form the backdrop here: Two men enter, one man leaves. And it must be Immanence that leaves the cage triumphant for Colapietro.

Such use of the language of emergence—when it is taken as tantamount to a rejection of any sort of transcendent paradigmatic, formal, or final causes—is in effect a totalizing metaphysical theory. I am not entirely sure whether Colapietro would take emergence to be such a totalizing theory, but his intervention here seems to tend in that direction. Since emergence is transparently not a totalizing metaphysical theory in the case of Polanyi’s work (as already glossed), then we are faced with the question of whether Colapietro’s own assimilation of Polanyi’s emergentism is itself a case of friendly amendment or rather a sort of hostile misunderstanding and appropriation of Polanyi which yokes him to a standard-issue, critical, modernist metaphysics, simply taking as a given that the possibility of any sort of transcendent causal entity has been safely banished to outer philosophical darkness along with the likes of Plato.

For Polanyi, however, emergence is not a way of avoiding transcendence but is rather a way of tracking how transcendent ordering principles manifest themselves in the realm of becoming. This is in part why Polanyi himself states at the outset of PK that his work is likely to be taken as a bit of “out-dated Platonism…unworthy of an enlightened age” (6). I am myself quite comfortable with this pairing of the transcendent and the immanent, since I think these need to be thought through together.

The rhetorical problem I alluded to above, however, arises once we realize that for many emergence theorists this totalizing understanding of emergence as an explanation that allows one to avoid transcendence as a prior or simultaneous causal category is indeed accurate. In other words, this or something like this is, for many, precisely the attraction of emergence theory. It supposedly allows one to hold all the same priors as a reductionistic materialist would, but with none of the eliminativist downsides and entailments.

The problem is that no compelling examples of strong emergence that do not simply beg metaphysical questions have been produced, and this is in turn why more and more thinkers who consider themselves to be working within the tradition of physicalism have rejected emergence as a totalizing, live metaphysical explanation and have turned instead to panpsychism or to related calls for new fundamentals (such as fundamental psychophysical laws) to be added to our existing scientific methodology as a way of dealing with the unimpeachable direct experience of consciousness—our starting point for all further reasoning—which has come to the fore as the most hotly debated “emergent” phenomena.

In this larger philosophical context, I do not take it as incumbent upon me to present decisive counterarguments to strong versions of emergence theory which purport to provide adequate explanatory metaphysical structures without reference to transcendence or to radical revisions of what we take matter to be, which arguably entail the reentry of transcendent causality at the level of new definitions of bare matter. This is not because I think no such counterarguments exist but rather because I take it that those have already been presented by others, and I commend such work to the interested reader (also, for reasons I will lay out presently, I do not think these arguments affect Polanyi’s own position because his emergentism is not a totalizing metaphysical theory). I am confident that these arguments will not persuade all comers, but there it is. I include here a few relevant passages.

In the work of David Chalmers, for instance, we see a willingness to countenance one case of strong emergence, but, crucially, for him this case is not to be taken as metaphysically self-explanatory but rather a datum which demands new explanatory theorizing:

I think there is exactly one clear case of a strongly emergent phenomenon [Chalmers, 1996; 2002], and that is the phenomenon of consciousness…. And there is reason to believe that the facts about consciousness are not deducible from any number of physical facts.

[…] I think that…consciousness…supervenes on the physical domain. But importantly, this supervenience holds only with the strength of laws of nature…. In our world, it seems to be a matter of law that duplicating physical states will duplicate consciousness; but in other worlds with different laws, a system physically identical to me might have no consciousness at all. This suggests that the lawful connection between physical processes and consciousness is not itself derivable from the laws of physics but is instead a further basic law or laws of its own. The laws that express the connection between physical processes and consciousness are what we might call fundamental psychophysical laws.

I think this account provides a good general model for strong emergence. We can think of strongly emergent phenomena as being systematically determined by low-level facts without being deducible from those facts. In philosophical language, they are naturally but not logically supervenient on low-level facts. In any case like this, fundamental physical laws need to be supplemented with further fundamental laws to ground the connection between low-level properties and high-level properties….

Are there other cases of strong emergence, besides consciousness? I think that there are no other clear cases, and that there are fairly good reasons to think that there are no other cases. (Chalmers 2006, 246-247, emphasis added)

For Chalmers, then, conceding that consciousness is a case of strong emergence requires that physics be supplemented by the theorization of new fundamental laws. “Emergence” for Chalmers is thus not explanatory but rather signals that we are in need of additional explanation. This is in line with Michael Levin’s postulation, referenced earlier, of a Platonic space of possible morphologies upon encountering emergent phenomena such as the formation of xenobots. Nonetheless, the potential rhetorical confusion associated with emergence theory is clearly exemplified here given that in making this move, Chalmers is arguably affirming Thomas Nagel’s principle of non emergence:

There are no truly emergent properties of complex systems. All properties of a complex system that are not relations between it and something else derive from the properties of its constituents and their effects on each other when so combined. Emergence is an epistemological condition: it means that an observed feature of the system cannot be derived from the properties currently attributed to its constituents. But this is a reason to conclude that either the system has further constituents of which we are not yet aware, or the constituents of which we are aware have further properties that we have not yet discovered. (Nagel 2013, 182; originally published 1979)

In Mind and Cosmos (2012), Nagel (in contrast to Chalmers) follows the standard, common use of “emergence” in assuming that it is typically proffered as a metaphysical explanation rather than an epistemological question mark. He explains that

To qualify as a genuine explanation of the mental, an emergent account must be in some way systematic. It cannot just say that each mental event or state supervenes on the complex physical state of the organism in which it occurs. That would be the kind of brute fact that does not constitute an explanation but rather calls for explanation. (Nagel 2012, 53, emphasis added)

However, he objects that

…If emergence is the whole truth, it implies that mental states are present in the organism as a whole, or in its central nervous system, without any grounding in the elements that constitute the organism, except for the physical character of those elements that permits them to be arranged in the complex form that, according to the higher-level theory, connects the physical with the mental. That such purely physical elements, when combined in a certain way, should necessarily produce a state of the whole that is not constituted out of the properties and relations of the physical parts still seems like magic even if the higher-order psychophysical dependencies are quite systematic. (Ibid., 55)

He rejects weak emergence as a proper analogue to strong emergence, noting that

Such harmless [weak] emergence is standardly illustrated by the example of liquidity, which depends on the interactions of the molecules that compose the liquid. But the emergence of the mental at certain levels of biological complexity is not like this. According to the emergent position now being considered, consciousness is something completely new.

Because such emergence, even if systematic, remains fundamentally inexplicable, the ideal of intelligibility demands that we take seriously the alternative of a reductive answer to the constitutive question—an answer that accounts for the relation between mind and brain in terms of something more basic about the natural order…by means of a general monism according to which the constituents of the universe have properties that explain not only its physical but its mental character. (Ibid., 55-56)

Galen Strawson takes a harder line than does Nagel, asking

Does […strong] emergence make sense? I think that it is very, very hard to understand what it is supposed to involve. I think that it is incoherent, in fact, and that this general way of talking of emergence has acquired an air of plausibility (or at least possibility) for some simply because it has been appealed to many times in the face of a seeming mystery. (Strawson 2006, 12)

He goes on to say

The claim, at least, is plain, and I’ll repeat it. If it really is true that Y is emergent from X then it must be the case the Y is in some sense wholly dependent on X and X alone, so that all features of Y intelligibly trace back to X (where ‘intelligible’ is a metaphysical rather than an epistemic notion). Emergence can’t be brute.

…One problem is that brute emergence is by definition a miracle every time it occurs, for it is true by hypothesis that in brute emergence there is absolutely nothing about X, the emerged from, in virtue of which Y, the emerger, emerges from it. This means that it is also a contradiction in terms, given the standard assumption that the emergence of Y from X entails the ‘supervenience’ of Y on X because it then turns out to be a strictly lawlike miracle. But a miracle is by definition a violation of a law of nature! If someone says he chooses to use the word ‘emergence’ in such a way that the notion of brute emergence is not incoherent, I will know that he is a member of the Humpty Dumpty army and be very careful with him. (Ibid., 18)

To the wizened emergentist with rime on his beard, such arguments may well fall on deaf ears. So be it. My intention here has merely been to briefly present some of the arguments against emergence as a fundamental metaphysical explanation of phenomena such as consciousness which have been offered by significant thinkers in their own words.

Given what I have already said, I trust that it should be clear that I do not think Polanyi is committed to a form of emergence theory which either attempts to

1. avoid or explain away the operation of transcendent causes or
2. is designed to justify a sort of traditional physicalist reductionism without falling into eliminativism.

Insofar as I am correct in this, Nagel’s and Strawson’s arguments against emergentism do not touch Polanyi’s own theories. Indeed, this is why Fennell (2017) correctly argues that Polanyi’s emergentism, when taken with his theorization of ordering principles, is reductive (not reductionistic!) in Nagel’s sense. Dale Cannon, to whose other questions we will turn in due course, asks in his paper for more depth in exploring the distinction between reductive (in Nagel’s sense) and reductionistic (Cannon 2025). I am, in essence, attempting to do so here in my own way; however, I must also commend to interested parties Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos (2012) and Jon Fennell’s excellent 2017 paper on the subject, referenced above.

Allow me to say, however, that Polanyi’s emergentism is reductive in Nagel’s sense because, in its pairing with ordering principles that define the possibility of any particular emergent instantiation of a given higher-order phenomena, it does not simply assert that Y is supervenient on X and that this somehow constitutes a metaphysical explanation of X (as Strawson warns against). Nor does it commit the fallacy of assuming that one can leap the logical gap lying between X and Y (when X is a case of strong emergence) by invoking examples of weak emergence such as liquidity since these cases are not analogous. Rather, Polanyi’s model holds that the irreducible higher phenomena can emerge from the lower material strata due to the real comprehensive entity (operating at the level of potentiality which is part of the real), which is the relevant ordering principle of X which transcendently holds open the possibility for the actual instantiation of any particular, immanent X. In this sense, the ordering principle (Form) of X acts as a paradigmatic or constitutive cause. Polanyi’s account is thus one in which “the constituents of the universe have properties that explain not only its physical…character” (Nagel 2012, 56) but also its other qualities, including its mental character.

The conclusion that is here emerging is that I think that Polanyi’s pairing of his non-totalizing emergence theory with his fields and ordering principles is a profitable and defensible position and is in the same philosophical family as Plato’s investigations (carried on in various ways by Aristotle, the Peripatetics, and the Neoplatonists) into the intertwined character of transcendence and immanence in the realm of becoming. We ought to note, however, that Polanyi’s terminologies are not the only way of approaching these questions; I thus choose to reframe his ordering principles and fields as Platonic Forms.

I take the sort of arguments offered by Nagel and Strawson above to be decisive, however, in warranting the rejection of totalizing forms of emergence theory which attempt either # 1 or # 2 above (or both, of course). So, to the extent that Colapietro throws in his lot with those who seek to accomplish # 1 (which, again, I am not entirely certain of), I must reject his approach as a philosophical dead end which is contrary to both the general tenor of Polanyi’s project and to its theoretical details.

In my book I only briefly touch on emergence, as Colapietro correctly notes. I argue there that all helpful emergentist language can be recast in terms of the emergence from potentiality to actuality. This is because if the potential is accorded full ontological standing (as I argue is implied in Polanyi’s work), then so-called strong emergence is not a novel coming-into-being but rather a shift in the modality of being from potentiality to actuality which involves a transcendent paradigmatic cause.

This is, to my mind, a fair development of the use made of emergence language by Polanyi himself insofar as it does not attempt to pit the immanent against the transcendent in any totalizing fashion, though I understand that it will not be to the liking of all who interpret Polanyi’s work and invite further conversation on the topic. I would also add that weak emergence is uncontroversial and might offer additional scope for the clarifying use of emergence language in relevant cases. When weak and strong varieties of emergence are confused or conflated, however, or when strong emergence is insisted upon as a possible explanatory mechanism (rather than, as Chalmers indicates, a marker of the need for further metaphysical explanation), then as I see it we have entered the realm of mystification and ad hoc justification.

In the face, say, of the hard problem of consciousness and other relevant debates, would Polanyi have held to his own version of emergentism? Likely so. But I do not think this would be in conflict with my own post-critical Platonist proposals. I do not pretend to know what Polanyi might think of those.

My own rhetorical preference is to abandon, to the extent possible, the language of emergence, since it can give rise to so much confusion, indicating, as it often does, mutually incompatible and even diametrically opposed positions. When it is unavoidable, scrupulous attention to clarity of expression is the order of the day.

I have attempted to clarify my position on Polanyi’s pairing of emergence theory with his transcendent fields and ordering principles as well as on other more totalizing theories of emergence as metaphysical explanation at some length here since it is, in my view, the sole actionable point raised in Colapietro’s paper. Alas, I suspect that what I say will not seem compelling to him, since he takes my whole project to be “an indefensible perpetuation of a tragically flawed approach” (Colapietro 2025, endnote), but there it is. C’est la vie.

IV
Copernican Realism, Causation, and Assorted Other Matters

Dale Cannon has been a continual source of inspiration and support through the foundational work he has done in interpreting and drawing out the significance of Polanyi’s post-critical shift as well as through his critique and guidance through the process of writing my dissertation-turned-book. In this final section I will try to respond as best I can to the series of questions with which he closes his response.⁴

First, my understanding of what Polanyi was ultimately moving toward with his Copernican Realism (outlined in 1967’s “Science and Reality”) is as follows, though my answer here goes beyond what Polanyi explicitly laid out. Reality as a totality operates as a system of rational principles, though as finite beings our access to such rational principles is partial. This is true of empirical studies of material reality because we operate in such pursuits by employing abduction, deduction, and induction in various combinations as we interact with the objects of our study, which are partially graspable, cognizable, etc. Such material objects of study are comprehensible, at least in part, because they are comprehensive entities. This is to say that the very metaphysical structure that shapes their being is rational to its core. This is why, in my development of Polanyi’s positions, I argue that to be is to mean. To mean in this sense is to be in a constant state (whether potential or actual) of comprehension and comprehensibility.

Now, even in this brief discursus on the empirical, we cannot avoid dipping in and out of philosophical first principles—the operations of reason, possible answers to the question of how we can engage with other aspects of reality, the metaphysical status of those other aspects, etc. Furthermore, it seems that for empirical investigation to be possible at all, other, non-empirical, abstract, or immaterial entities must exist as well (abduction, deduction, induction, for instance). To add to this, we have yet other non-empirical elements of reality, such as mathematics, that we encounter, that can be engaged in as a more or less purely abstract pursuit but also can be seen appearing in the becoming of empirical, material entities. The overall picture is that of a reality (of which we form a part) of rational principles that manifest themselves in a range of modalities, some of which fall more cleanly on one side of the spectrum, some on the other, yet most often manifesting themselves in a mixed mode. Nonetheless, we must always make use of elements of philosophy of first principles, if only as a tacitly assumed metaphysical backdrop. It is inescapable.

I have been using “empirical” here following Polanyi’s own use in his descriptions of the debates surrounding Copernicus and his discoveries as distinguishable from a purely philosophical approach or at least an approach that privileges the discourse of philosophical inquiry. We might, however, choose to adopt a more radical definition of the empirical and take it to mean all that we experience, whether in abstract, concrete, or mixed modes. That might be a more accurate terminology, really, and I think it would lead us to the same metaphysical outcome of a unified, rational reality of which we are finite, participating parts, though it might be less rhetorically effective since it would cut against more common usage.

Turning to some of the other questions raised by Cannon, I regret that I am not at present well-enough acquainted with Critical Realism to meaningfully engage with its rather substantial literature. I do make passing reference to Roy Bhaskar in the book (most notably in footnote 6 on page 160) but cannot venture too deeply into these waters for the time being. I agree with Cannon that there seems to be significant common ground shared by CR with Polanyi and also that further research in this direction might be very profitable.

On the topic of the fact/value distinction, I would sum things up by saying that if, as I take to be the case in my development of Polanyi’s metaphysics, all existents are comprehensive entities and that the unifying principle of a comprehensive entity is its (interchangeable) joint meaning, then to be, to exist, is not just to have meaning but to be a meaning. And meaning is inextricably bound up with values. Thus if all this is the case, then there simply are no facts which are not intimately entwined with meanings and hence values. The fact/value distinction does not hold, and there is no such thing as “meaningless matter.”

We may not object to the destruction of a small lump of granite. We may refer to its existence as “meaningless,” but this is not strictly speaking correct. For the granite is a comprehensible, comprehensive entity, a meaningful and orderly existent which harnesses its subsidiaries. And so if it is destroyed, a small bit—perhaps a relatively insignificant bit but a bit nonetheless—of meaning has been destroyed. And this can naturally lead us in turn to questions of the extractionist character of capitalism referenced by Cannon, though the magnitude of addressing that topic precludes its inclusion here.

I have found Cannon’s engagement with Jacob Sherman (2024)—a dialogue in which Latour’s account is powerfully linked to Polanyi’s—to be very promising. I am also, as I’ve already indicated, fascinated to learn that Graham Harman, a thinker influenced in significant ways by Latour, broached the subject of Polanyi’s work with Latour himself. I take Cannon’s point about the depth of the roots of the problematic thinking that Polanyi attempted to overcome, but I am pleased to see the signs of some positive change in this regard.

For one thing, to move on to another of Cannon’s questions, it is clear that formal and final causes have been making a comeback since the latter days of the twentieth century. This can be seen in a variety of contexts, not least in the work of thinkers like Graham Harman or the Neo-Aristotelians with whom I engage at length but also in the context of emergence theory (even if, in the context of totalizing emergence theories, such causation is left hanging in midair, so to speak). We see it as well (though perhaps sometimes implicitly) in conversations surrounding movements like systems biology and more explicitly with respect to biological research such as Michael Levin’s. That is not to say, of course, that there are not plenty of detractors, but it can no longer be taken as settled that only material and efficient causation are fair game.

Polanyi’s work sits squarely at the forefront of thinking that questioned the reigning twentieth century assumption that Aristotle’s thinking on this could be safely ignored and thus forms a crucial part of the resuscitation of formal and final causation with allies in the groups I reference above. That said, I am wary of claiming that Polanyi’s work as it stands makes formal and final causation undeniable to their sceptics, though I do think that those forms of causation are undeniably central to Polanyi’s own metaphysics, even when he does not explicitly invoke them.

This is in part why I flesh out the ways I take formal and final causation to be active in the structure of comprehensive entities. As I put it in chapter 5,

…a comprehensive entity…consists of a set of meaningful relations among its subsidiary particulars which are harnessed by the entity’s being as formal cause and oriented forward and beyond by its being as final cause, issuing in the IFMs it sends out as ripples in the surrounding reality. (Turkis, 173)

So the joint meaning of a comprehensive entity which yokes its subsidiary details into their roles in the comprehensive entity’s structure is where we see formal causation. The entity acting as a final cause makes its impact on the larger surrounding reality by means of IFM creation. There are, of course, all kinds of ways in which material and efficient causation are harnessed by both of these higher-order processes. But what of the causal link between the actualized, particular comprehensive entity, let us say a particular black-tipped reef shark, and the Form which holds open the potential for the actualization of black-tipped reef sharks? What sort of causation is operative here? In retrospect I do not think what I say in my book is quite clear enough on this, though I do invoke Ana Marmodoro’s (2021, 75) use of the term “constitutional cause” (Turkis 2024, 196). An older term for what Marmodoro is getting at there, with a deeper Platonic pedigree, would be to refer to this as a paradigmatic cause. In the teachings of late Neoplatonists such as Proclus, Aristotle’s four categories of causation⁵ were included along with the transcendent paradigmatic causation characteristic of the Forms (Steel 2003). As I continue to think through the development of post-critical Platonism, I would formally adopt this causal schema which explicitly combines Aristotle’s four causes with the paradigmatic causation of the Forms.⁶

It is interesting to walk through some of this in the context of the aforementioned xenobot experiments by Michael Levin and his colleagues at Tufts. The xenobots (again, novel organisms which arise from the separation of embryonic frog skin cells and then go on to navigate their environment, reproduce, etc.) are immanently emergent—that is to say that the scientists did not know for sure in advance what such cells when loosed in this way would do. This marks, as Chalmers noted about consciousness, the need for additional explanation. This leads Levin, as we saw earlier, to speculate about a Platonic space in which possible morphologies exist in a state of rational relations such that one “can get something for free” by tapping into and actualizing such a possibility. A post-critical Platonist gloss on this might run thus:

Actual xenobots, comprehensive entities which come into the actual mode of being in Levin Labs rather than through the process of evolution, are only novel in the immanent sphere of actuality. They already existed as a possible stable, open system, to use Polanyi’s formulation, which is to say as a transcendent Platonic Form, ready to exercise its paradigmatic causality wherever and whenever the proper contingent conditions were met. There are possible worlds in which those conditions never do obtain and thus in which there are no actual xenobots, but in our actual world the scientists involved in the experiment set in motion the requisite scenario and actualized xenobots. Thus the scientific arrangement allowed for the transcendent paradigmatic cause to touch down in the immanent sphere, providing a paradigmatic explanation of xenobots as actual comprehensive entities. The xenobots themselves exercise formal causality in harnessing their repurposed cilia, taking in nutrients, moving about in order to continue their hazardous striving (to again invoke Polanyi), etc. They are final causes in their very existence, which makes an immediate impact on the surrounding reality in a variety of ways, from the disturbance in their liquid environment due to their motility to the surprise, fear, delight, or what have you which they induce in the range of humans who become aware of their existence.

Finally, the simple definition of mereology is the study of the relation of parts to wholes. In the context of the tripartite metaphysical schema I argue for, the mereological hierarchy of the comprehensive entity and its subsidiary details is distinguished from the metaphysical hierarchy which is defined by an entity’s causal potency—its greater or lesser production of indefinite future manifestations, which is to say its Eleatic impact. The most important point here is to note that it is possible for a metaphysically richer entity to play a subsidiary role in a comprehensive entity of lesser metaphysical status (or vice versa). This does not reduce the more potent entity’s status, however, since post-critical Platonism holds that an entity’s participation as a subsidiary detail does not necessarily involve its metaphysical demotion—it can maintain its own substantiality, as it were, even as it participates as a component in the substantiality of another comprehensive entity. Organs in a functioning organism are comprehensive entities just as is the organism itself, for example.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, allow me to once more extend the heartiest of thanks to all four of my interlocutors. Their interventions have allowed me to revisit the ideas presented in my own work, often challenging me and prompting their further development and extension. I certainly hope that such fruitful conversation with a range of thinkers continues in the future, in Tradition and Discovery and elsewhere.

References

Cannon, Dale. 2024. “Polanyi and Participatory Knowing: A Response to Jacob Sherman’s ‘Polanyi and the Participatory Turn: Reimagining Religious Studies.'” Tradition and Discovery 50: 116-121.

———. 2025. “A Review Essay of The Metaphysics of Michael Polanyi: Toward a Post-Critical Platonism.” Tradition and Discovery 51.

Chalmers, David J. 2006. “Strong and Weak Emergence.” The Re-Emergence of Emergence, edited by Philip Clayton and Paul Davies. New York: Oxford University Press. 244-256.

Clawson, Wesley P., and Michael Levin. 2023. “Endless Forms Most Beautiful 2.0: Teleonomy and the Bioengineering of Chimaeric and Synthetic Organisms.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 139, no. 4: 457-486.

Colapietro, Vincent. 2025. “The Eclipse of the Personal? Affirmations, Proposals, and Questions.” Tradition and Discovery 51.

Fennel, Jon. 2017. “Is Polanyi’s Emergence Reductive?” Appraisal 11, no. 2: 23-36.

Gerson, Lloyd P. 2005. Aristotle and Other Platonists. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Gulick, Walter. 2021. “Michael Polanyi’s Understanding of Field Theory.” Tradition and Discovery 47, no. 2: 34-45.

Harman, Graham. 2018. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: Pelican Books.

———. 2025. “Michael Polanyi and Object-Oriented Ontology: In Response to Turkis.” Tradition and Discovery 51.

Jaimungl, Curt. 2025. “Breakthrough Research in ‘Platonic Space’: Dr. Michael Levin.” Interview for Theories of Everything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP7S3mrBgYE&t=632s.

Koons, Robert C. 2024. “Prime Matter and the Quantum Wave Function.” Ancient Philosophy Today 6, no. 1: 92-119.

Murdoch, Iris. 1985. The Sovereignty of the Good. London: Ark Paperbacks.

Marmodoro, Anna. 2021. Form and Structure in Plato’s Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nagel, Thomas. 2012. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2013. Mortal Questions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Opsomer, Jan. 2001. “Proclus vs Plotinus on Matter (“De mal. subs.” 30-7).” Phronesis 46, no. 2: 154-188.

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Endnotes

Tradition & Discovery: The Polanyi Society Journal 51

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