Causality, Time, and Creativity The Essential Role of Novelty

Donald A. Crosby

The Pluralist, Volume 4, Number 3, Fall 2009, pp. 46-59 (Article)

Published by University of Illinois Press

DOI: 10.1353/plu.0.0031

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 symposium on creativity and novelty

Causality, Time, and Creativity:

The Essential Role of Novelty
donald a. crosby
Colorado State University

Rationalistic philosophy has always aspired to a rounded-in view of

the whole of things, a closed system of kinds, from which the no-
tion of essential novelty being possible is ruled out in advance. For
empiricism, on the other hand, reality cannot be thus confined by
a conceptual ring-fence.
—William James, Some Problems of Philosophy 99

in this article i emphasize and discuss the critical importance of what

William James terms “the notion of essential novelty,” the intriguing topic
to which I devoted a book called Novelty. As the present article’s title indi-
cates, I explore the relations of novelty to the concepts of causality and time
and especially to the concept of creativity as I conceive it. In what follows,
I devote a section to the relation of novelty to causality and a second one to
the relation of novelty to time. In the third section, I investigate the essential
connection of novelty with creativity and explain how this connection bears
on the concept of creativity. In the final section of the article, I respond to a
provocative challenge raised by Peter Gunter in his review of Novelty in The
Pluralist 3.1, namely, the challenge of explaining why, in terms of my par-
ticular view of nature, and of the character and role of novelty within nature,
there should be the astounding amount of creativity we find exhibited in the
history of our universe.

I. Novelty and Causality

It is commonly acknowledged that if there is such a thing as novelty it will
take place within the context of causal constraint and causal continuity. With-
out regular cause and effect relations, it is reasoned, there would be no stable
background against which novel events could take place and have their own
effects, and with which they could be contrasted. Moreover, sheer uncon-
strained chance would be indistinguishable from chaos, and pure chaos is un-
intelligible and unimaginable because it would lack any discernible structure

the plur alist   Volume 4, Number 3  Fall 2009 : pp. 46–59 46

©2009 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
crosby : The Essential Role of Novelty 47

or pattern, or even the potentiality of such. It is not as commonly understood,

however, that without novelty cause and effect relations themselves would be
impossible. I readily agree that causality is a necessary condition for novelty,
but I contend that novelty is equally essential to causality.
In my view, the two are correlative, mutually entwined concepts or prin-
ciples. Neither is prior to the other, and neither is reducible to the other.
Furthermore, neither is derived from anything else more fundamental. The
question “Where does the novelty come from?” is thus no more meaningful
than the question “Where does the causality come from?” The two principles
and their necessary interrelatedness constitute a primordial feature of the uni-
verse, its ever-present modus operandi. This idea has a surprising and ironic
implication: the conception of a closed causal universe devoid of novelty
that is regularly championed by proponents of causal determinism is in fact
self-contradictory. It is self-contradictory because, by adamantly denying any
role to metaphysical chance, contingency, or novelty, causal determinism is
also by implication required to deny the possibility of causality itself. Let me
explain why I hold this to be so.
According to causal determinism, whatever occurs in the present is already
contained in toto in the past. There is nothing really new in any present mo-
ment or at any point of human history, any point in the history of the earth,
or any point in the history of the universe. For something to be genuinely
new it would have to involve a break in the causal chain or something other
than what can be exclusively accounted for by that chain. But that there can
be no break in the causal chain is the thesis of causal determinism. All that
transpires over the whole course of the history of the universe is already con-
tained in germ at every earlier stage of the universe, meaning that it would be
possible in principle to see that whole history, even in its tiniest details, in any
segment of it. Another way of putting this idea is to say that every effect is al-
ready contained in its cause, and the sum total of effects at any given time can
be traced back without remainder to the sum total of causes preceding those
effects. Still another striking way of putting the thesis of causal determinism
is that there is no reason why we could not conceive of the roles of causes and
effects being reversed—meaning the latter could just as easily be regarded as
leading to or implying the former—since the whole universe is ex hypothesi
already contained in any of its phases, past, present, or future.
A fatal flaw in this deterministic picture is that there would now seem to
be no way to distinguish effects from their causes, meaning that the whole
notion of cause-effect relations collapses. Relations are impossible if there are
no distinct things to be related. And if cause and effect are one and the same,
the second being exhaustively contained in the former, then there can be no
48 the pluralist  4 : 3  2009

such thing as relations between them. “Ah, but effects flow from causes; they
are the necessary outcomes of causes,” it might be objected. But it is just these
notions of flowing or resulting from that are the points at issue. If everything
that occurs is already completely contained in a set of preceding causes, what
need, explanation, or even intelligibility would there be for the idea of the
entirely complete and self-contained causes producing effects, for reaching
beyond themselves, as it were, to bring about something different or new?
This question has special urgency when we recall that, according to causal
determinism, there is not really anything different or new under the sun.
William James perceptively explained years ago in his article “The Di-
lemma of Determinism” that unless possibility outreaches or is in excess
of actuality, we are stuck with a block universe, one in which there can be
only seamless connections and no types of disconnection, including the
apparent relative disconnections or distinctions of the present from the
past. If possibility and actuality are one and the same, which, according to
causal determinism, must be the case because there is always only one pos-
sibility of any future occurrence—the one that follows inexorably from its
causal antecedents—then the seeming openness of the future to alternative
possibilities is an illusion (James 150–51). The so-called future is rendered
every bit as fixed or already settled as the past, in which case the distinc-
tion between future and past is erased and all we have left is a universe in
which the picture of present effects flowing or resulting from past causes is
an illusion. Whereas the ancient philosopher Heraclitus proclaimed that
“all things flow” and exhibit processes of ubiquitous, ceaseless change, the
causal determinist must concede that “nothing flows” (Kirk, Raven, and
Schofield 195). Time stands still, which means that there can be no such
thing as time and that the whole storied history of the universe jerks to a
halt. This conclusion is perfectly acceptable to confident rationalists like
Parmenides, Benedict Spinoza, and F. H. Bradley. It is assuredly and even
enthusiastically proclaimed by some of today’s physicists.1 But it is hardly
an acceptable conclusion for philosophical empiricists, as James notes in
the epigram to the present article.
I count myself among those philosophical empiricists. I am convinced
by my observations and experiences that cause-effect relations are real. I
contend that they can only be real if some element of novelty is characteristic
of every effect, a characteristic that serves to distinguish it and set it apart
from its cause or set of causes. Effects can flow from their causes precisely
because they are not exhaustibly contained within or made wholly explicable
by those causes. They are certainly based upon, contextualized, and con-
strained by those causes, but they also contain in themselves something of
crosby : The Essential Role of Novelty 49

their own, something unique and distinctive to themselves. For one thing,
the new effect occurs now rather than then. For another, it has a different
causal past from which it is the outcome than did its causal antecedent—
different because all that was contemporary for the antecedent is now also
in the causal past of the new effect. In other respects as well, when an effect
takes place, something new has taken place, however slight or insignificant
that element of newness may be or seem to be in specific cases. In short, there
is a new synthesis of a new causal past. The amount of novelty expressed in
the particular effects of particular causes varies and may vary widely, but it
can never be entirely absent.
The point is not that some effects may seem to be novel on account of
our lack of knowledge of all the causal variables or intricate details of past
history that may have contributed to their occurrence; it is that they are novel
in principle, in the metaphysical, not merely the epistemological, sense. And
they are such because without such a thing as metaphysical novelty, there
could be no such thing metaphysically as the relations of causes and effects
and therefore as causality itself. The absence of cause-effect relations would
make of the universe a monolithic mass stripped of all semblance of change.
It would brand the very notion of causality—upon which our day-to-day
confidences and expectations rest and most if not all of the explanatory pow-
ers of science would seem critically to rely—a pitiful sham and delusion. To
tear novelty from causality is to shred the very fabric of the universe. It is like
trying to imagine a piece of cloth that is all warp and no woof.
Finally, it is the fact of the presence and possibility of novelty in cause-
effect relations that allows for human freedom and the extent of free action
available to other organic beings. This pervasive novelty or, as James terms
it, a “certain amount of loose play” of the parts of the universe upon one an-
other, “so that the laying down of one of them does not necessarily determine
what the others shall be”(“Dilemma of Determinism” 150), is a precondi-
tion for freedom, although it is not the same thing as freedom. Freedom, as
I understand it, is the power of bringing novelty under conscious direction
and control, of being able to select deliberately among a range of possibilities
made available by the causal past and to decide which of those possibilities
is to be brought into actuality.2 How is this done? It is part of the mystery
of consciousness, about which we know so little despite all of our studious
research into the workings of the brain. These intricate workings and their
complex relations to other aspects of the body and to the world external to
the body3 make consciousness possible, and with it the conscious exercise of
judgment, choice, and free action. How this is so remains mysterious. That
it is so is a fact of everyday life.4
50 the pluralist  4 : 3  2009

II. Novelty and Time

In my book Novelty I explained the flow of time in this way: “The flow of
time is constituted by a difference in content between the present and the
past which is achieved by the selections and modifications of the present
in relation to the past” (17). Here we see the same stress on the difference
between the present and the past that I made in the previous section with
regard to cause-effect relations. And the “selections and modifications” spo-
ken of in this passage are none other than the innovative or novel characters
of the effects in relations to their causes. Causality is not mere replication
but involves some element of innovation, even if only enough innovation to
constitute the effect as a new occurrence, an occurrence of the present con-
trasting with occurrences of the past. It is just this combination of the fixed
character of the past and the emerging character of the present that accounts
for time as flux, flow, or ongoing change. More specifically, we can say that
time is nothing other than cause-effect relations as they occur—the patterns
of those relations as they stretch back into and constitute the past and the
new processes of actualization they manifest in the present and the future.
This blend of continuity and novelty is the essence of time.
Time and the cause-effect relation as I have described it are therefore
intimately related, the former being an expression of the latter. Because there
is such a thing as cause and effect, there is such a thing as time. Time is not
a container or receptacle within which cause-effect relations or the changes
they produce take place. Instead it is itself produced by those cause-effect
relations as they unfold, lay down their paths, and bring their particular
contributions of novelty into existence. The old dies away in order that the
new may be brought forth and leave its mark on an ever-changing world. In
the meantime, there is enough continuity and replication remaining in the
world to provide a stable background of laws, principles, constituents, traits,
and characters that remain constant in the midst of change.
The new thus finds expression in the context of the old, and one moment
of time flows continuously into another rather than each new moment being
an entirely detached or discrete jolt, throb, drop, or pulse. Time is indeed
granular in its nature, because each moment of time has an integrity and
uniqueness that distinguishes it from what went before, but its elements are
necessarily connected with one another and flow smoothly into one another
despite their distinctions from one another. This combination of difference
and sameness, change and stability, innovation and replication is what ac-
counts for the forward march of time but also for its nature as something that
grows steadily out of and retains its intimate connections with the past.
crosby : The Essential Role of Novelty 51

The past continues to exist by virtue of its influences on the present, and
the present continues to exist by virtue of its influences on the future. The mode
of existence of the past is of that which has already been realized. The mode
of existence of the present is of that which is in process of realization. And the
mode of the future is of that which has yet to be realized. But these modes are
inseparable from one another as old causes produce new effects and as those
new effects, in their turn, become old causes to make their contributions to
even newer effects. The old and the new, continuity and novelty, work together
as causes and effects and as the dynamic and unceasing passage of time.
This passage is unidirectional and nonreversible because while the causes
are necessary for the effects to occur, they are not sufficient to account for why
they occur as they do. There is something, however slight, in the effects that
is not already contained in their causes. The novelty of the effects is emergent
from the fixity of the past, dependent upon it but also contributing something
new to it. What is coming into being cannot be a basis of what has already
been because it is still in the process of becoming and has not yet attained the
status of something that already is. The determinate and fixed can be a basis
for the indeterminate and as yet unfixed, but the reverse cannot be the case,
so time can go in only one direction. It could go in both directions only if
everything is already fixed, but then time itself, as the combination of continu-
ity and novelty, would cease to be. As we have already seen, a reversal of time
would also amount to a negation of the relations of causes and their effects,
making the latter indistinguishable from the former. The factor of novelty is
thus as crucial to the nature of time as it is to the nature of causality.
Because the flow of time reflects the dynamics of cause-effect relations, and
the rate of these dynamics varies from one inertial frame to another, as Albert
Einstein observed and numerous experiments confirm, time is not absolute
but relative. At high velocities it slows down relative to an observer moving at
a slower velocity, and at slower velocities it runs faster relative to an observer
moving at a higher velocity. At the speed of light, which is for Einstein an ab-
solute, unsurpassable velocity, time will have slowed down to nothing, meaning
that a photon is in effect timeless and ageless because by definition it moves at
the speed of light. So persons traveling in a spaceship moving at an extremely
high rate of speed far out into space will age more slowly and thus be younger
upon their return than persons born in their same year who remained on earth.
The space travelers will become aware of the discrepancy only when they return
to earth and compare their apparent age with that of those around them on
earth. In fact, their former contemporaries may well be long since dead. There
is thus no privileged perspective from which it can be said that any given time
is the unequivocal or absolute time of the universe as a whole.
52 the pluralist  4 : 3  2009

However, within a given inertial frame such as our own, the passing of
what qualifies as a uniform and commensurable public time can be measured
by such publicly observable motions or changes as the regular cycles of the
heavenly bodies, the drippings of a water clock, the pulsations of a quartz
crystal, the vibrations of a cesium atom, or the rate of decay of the radioactive
isotope carbon-14. And because the laws of nature are deemed in our cur-
rent science to be the same across the universe, we can calibrate the relative
times of different inertial frames with a high degree of accuracy, given suf-
ficient knowledge of the relative velocities of the frames and their respective
relations to the absolute velocity of light. Just because there is no absolute
“now,” time is not rendered illusory or unreal. And in all cases it exhibits the
necessary combination of continuity and novelty, and the reliance upon the
continuity and novelty of cause-effect relations, for which I am arguing here.
Recognition of the concept of novelty’s essential role in the twin concepts of
causality and time brings us now to consideration of its connection with the
topic of creativity.

III. Novelty and Creativity

The first thing I want to note about the topic of creativity is that creativity,
at least as commonly viewed, is not merely a descriptive notion. It is also a
eulogistic notion, one with significant evaluative overtones. To say that Jones
is highly creative in his saxophone playing or that Martha exhibits consider-
able creativity in the writing of her short stories is to praise Jones and Martha,
not merely to describe their respective activities. A notably creative architect is
one whose buildings can be commended as things of strikingly original and
elegant design, well-suited to the functions for which they have been designed.
However, when Alfred North Whitehead speaks of “the creative advance of
the world” (Process and Reality xiv) and of his category of Creativity as “the
principle of novelty” (21), I do not think that he intends a necessarily eulogistic
or commendatory meaning of the terms creative and creativity.
What he means instead is “the advance from disjunction to conjunction,
creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction”(Whitehead,
Process and Reality 21). This kind of process is not necessarily progress or im-
provement; it can also result in retrogression, in making things worse over time
rather than better. “Advance,” then, means for Whitehead simply the many
becoming one, and the one becoming many, not necessarily an advance into
greater and greater goodness or an ever more desirable state of affairs. And
this process of the many past actual entities becoming synthesized into the
unity of a present entity, and then of that entity being a part of the set of past
crosby : The Essential Role of Novelty 53

entities entering into the concrescences of future entities, is what he techni-

cally terms “Creativity” and calls “the Category of the Ultimate”(Whitehead,
Process and Reality 19). The upshot of these considerations is that creativity
often does connote but need not connote something good, desirable, produc-
tive, or praiseworthy. The term is ambiguous in this regard.
I propose that we resolve this ambiguity by reserving the term for what
is positive in the way of process or advance into novelty and use the term de-
structiveness for what is negative and detrimental. We can then take notice of
the important fact that creativity in this positive sense is often accompanied
by formidable negative consequences or side effects. In fact, there is always at
least some negative side to creativity as so understood. For creativity does not
take place de novo. It is always transformation of something that pre-exists it
and provides a basis, resource, or point of departure for it. And with this trans-
formation of the old into something new, something of the old is inevitably
left behind. In addition, creation as the achievement of positive value often
requires that another positive value or set of values must be excluded in order
for this particular value to occur. In general, then, creation and destruction go
together, just as continuity and novelty do in the cases of causality and time.
A familiar example is that the waysides of biological history are strewn
with extinct species and yet the extinction of these species helped to make
room for the evolution of other types of organism, including our own species.
This process can be said to have been creative in the proposed sense, but it also
involved a massive amount of destruction. Another commonplace example is
that, in order for one organism to eat, another organism must be eaten and
therefore destroyed. As Whitehead wryly notes, “life is robbery” (Whitehead,
Process and Reality 105). Moreover, the gift of life is itself a sentence of even-
tual death. Other examples lie ready at hand. For every path taken by our free
decisions, no matter how creative those decisions, there are other paths not
taken, other possibilities for creativity left behind. Moreover, the gift of hu-
man freedom itself—an undeniable good—is also the capacity for destructive
misuses of that freedom, as human history so sadly bears witness.
Consider also the fact that a wondrous technological invention like the
airplane, chosen at random as just one manifestation of the stupendous cre-
ativity of human ingenuity, reason, imagination, and freedom, has been put
to rampant destructive uses involving civilian as well as military targets in
the horrendous recent wars of humankind. The invention of the stirrup, dy-
namite, and atomic energy are other closely related cases in point. They also
are mixed achievements, capable of being put to use for widespread good or
calamitous ill. Destructiveness on large scales is not always the other side of
the coin of particular cases of creativity, but my point is that it often is. And
54 the pluralist  4 : 3  2009

I do contend that there is always some amount of destructiveness or loss,

however negligible it may seem in particular instances, which is the inevi-
table concomitant of the transformative processes of creativity. The perpetual
productiveness of the processes of nature—processes of cause and effect, the
passage of time, and the emergence of novelty—is accompanied, as White-
head observes, by “perpetual perishing” (Process and Reality 81–82; emphasis
added). Creativity is not only ambiguous as a term, with its often murky
commingling of prescriptive and descriptive connotations. An ineliminable
ambiguity of character and consequence is also built into it as a properly
understood philosophical concept. In my proposed reformed usage of this
philosophical concept, we are encouraged to speak and think of creativity as
something productive, desirable, and good, but only so long as we do not
lose sight of its actual and possible tradeoffs and costs—tradeoffs and costs
that may in some cases be deplorable and dire.
It is the combination of creativity and destructiveness, therefore, which
can best qualify as what Whitehead calls the category of the ultimate, and not
creativity as understood in the strictly evaluative and commendatory sense I
am proposing. What shall we call this combination, in place of Whitehead’s
now inappropriate and misleading term creativity? I think that the best term
for it, and one that seems to me to do full justice to Whitehead’s intent, is
nature naturing, the English translation of the phrase natura naturans, used by
Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and others in earlier times and brought to special
prominence today in the writings of Robert S. Corrington.5
Nature naturing is a term that describes the restless, processive, volatile
character of nature, a character that underlies, suffuses, and relentlessly in-
trudes upon its other character as nature natured (natura naturata), i.e., the
present relatively stable, predictable, lawlike face of nature. Nature natur-
ing is, as Whitehead says of creativity, “the principle of novelty.” It is the
most general and inclusive way of calling attention to the ever-emerging
novelty that lies at the heart of the world, a novelty that operates within
a context of stability and continuity but is continually transforming and
thereby frequently destroying elements of that stability and continuity in
order that new things may be brought forth, new events take place, and
new structures emerge.
My answer to the question, “What is the relation of novelty to creativity?”
is then that creativity would be impossible and unintelligible without novelty,
but also that the novelty required in the concept of creativity involves some
measure of destructiveness, meaning that creativity and destructiveness are
correlative conceptions. Not all novelty is good and not all process or change
crosby : The Essential Role of Novelty 55

works to produce something desirable or good. Therefore, it is a mistake to

identify creativity, properly understood, with novelty. It is better to see it as
one expression of novelty or one kind of novelty.
It is also important to recognize that what is seen as creative from one
perspective may well be seen as destructive and undesirable from another.
The industrial revolution has brought many benefits to the earth’s peoples
and is an unquestionably creative development in human history, but it has
also brought widespread pollution of the earth’s atmosphere, soils, oceans,
and rivers, as well as accelerating extinctions of large numbers of its nonhu-
man life forms. The novel good for the predator hawk, i.e., an instance of
successfully swooping down and capturing a prey animal to feed itself or
nurture its young, means snuffing out the life of the animal preyed upon
and thereby its possible care for its young. A raging fire in a long-standing
forest of Lodge Pole pines allows the cones of those pines to germinate and
produce in time new and more robust trees, but only at the price of wiping
out most if not all of the old trees and leaving behind in the meantime a
scarred and blackened mountainside. Gentrification, to make use of an-
other example, may radically improve neighborhoods in one sense, but it
may also displace people who formerly lived in those neighborhoods and
make it difficult in the extreme for them to find new affordable and suit-
able housing. We see once again—in these cases and many others which
could readily be cited—that creativity is a mixed bag and that not all forms
of novelty are unqualifiedly beneficial.
Nature naturing and the novelties it brings into being are initially neutral
with respect to distinctions between good and bad, helpful and hurtful, in
a way that creativity as a concept is not. The idea of creativity, as I am urg-
ing us now to interpret and understand it, connotes production of forms
of novelty that can be viewed—rightly at least from some perspective or
other—as admirable and commendable, as exhibiting positive value. Nature
naturing, on the other hand, makes reference to processes of nature, includ-
ing actions of human beings as creatures of nature, which have generated
things of positive and often inestimable worth and will continue to do so.
But these same processes and actions sometimes also bring rueful destruc-
tions and calamities in their train. The positive side of these processes and
actions can be termed creativity. The negative side is destructiveness, and it
needs for clarity’s sake to be called that. Nature naturing, as a replacement
for Whitehead’s term creativity as the category of the ultimate, encompasses
both creativity and destructiveness as coordinated, interlinked, closely con-
nected processes.
56 the pluralist  4 : 3  2009

IV. Creativity and Cosmic, Terrestrial,

and Biological Evolution
Peter Gunter challenges me to explain why there has been so much creativity
displayed in the history of the universe, the earth, and the evolution of biologi-
cal species on the earth. Does not “the constant emergence of dynamic form”
suggest, he asks, “that creativity, at least in the long run, is able to prevail over
destruction”? And if “creativity essentially prevails over destruction,” does this
not imply that “in some sense there may be teleology widespread in the universe”
on the basis of which “the emergence of galaxies and solar systems, planets and
life itself” can be accounted for? (Gunter 132). Whitehead was driven by this
kind of reasoning to build a teleological aspect into his actual entities and to call
upon God to supply the initial impetus for that teleology. And in his book The
Function of Reason, Whitehead speaks of a trend “upwards” of the universe, as
indicated by “the fact that organic species have been produced from inorganic
distributions of matter, and the fact that in the lapse of time organic species of
higher and higher types have evolved”(7). He contends that this upward trend
requires explanation by means of a teleological principle operative throughout
the cosmos and at every stage of its development.
Let me now explain my response to this kind of reasoning. So far as the
evolution of our present cosmos is concerned, the cooling after the big bang
would allow for the emergence of lighter elements, the formation of clumps
of matter through gravitational attraction, the development of heavier ele-
ments within the stars that result from this clumping, and the scattering
of these elements in the explosions of supernovae. The eventual result was
galaxies, solar systems, planets and their satellites, including our own solar
system with its earth and moon. No teleology was necessary for this process,
no direction or guidance by anything like cosmic purpose.
The same thing can be said of the evolution of the earth and the evolu-
tion of its diverse living creatures. The development toward greater complex-
ity within the cosmos and in the domain of earth’s biological species can be
accounted for without introducing overall purpose, guidance, or specified
direction. The same thing can be said for the evolution of life from nonlife,
as I tried to exhibit in some detail in the fifth chapter of Novelty. The inter-
relations of chance (i.e., novelty) and selection—working with relatively few
raw materials—can result, as Ian Hacking notes, in “unendingly complex
patterns, including life on earth as we know it” if such interrelations, oper-
ating in accordance with quantum mechanical laws, are allowed to run their
course (Hacking 5). However, there is also the patent fact that an immanent
teleology has emerged with the course of biological evolution. Even the ear-
crosby : The Essential Role of Novelty 57

liest life forms on earth exhibit a capacity and impetus for self-preservation
and self-replication that can be regarded as a primitive kind of teleology or
unconscious, instinctive goal-motivated and goal-directed behavior. This
kind of teleology characterizes all of life. But the evolution of mentality, and
with it, the comparative adaptive advantage conferred on species evolving
toward higher and higher degrees of mentality, is more explicitly, fully, and
recognizably teleological. The more mentality is developed in evolution, the
more potential adaptive advantage is attained, as organisms consciously and
purposefully explore strategies and niches—and possible purposive trans-
formations of their existing environments—in order to survive and thrive
(Crosby 73–75). And as I indicated earlier, the greater the degree of purpo-
sive freedom, the more we can observe that novelty is being brought under
conscious control by these creatures. My point is not that all innovative and
successful evolutionary adaptation has been made possible by mentality or
conscious purpose, but that increasingly significant amounts of adaptation
in nature over time have been facilitated in this way. The fact remains that
the vast majority of successful adjustments of organic species to their envi-
ronments have been achieved without conscious purpose or intent. In these
cases, novelty is still exhibited but not in the form of consciously directed
exploration and implementation of novel possibilities.
Consciousness and purposive freedom are made possible by increasing
orders of complexity in biological organisms. Complexity of organization
eventually gives rise to a capacity for purposive action, and purposive action
confers selective advantage on those organisms possessing it. Organisms ca-
pable of acting with conscious purpose and intent have a greater resilience,
efficiency, and effectiveness of behavior in many situations than those without
this kind of ability. Teleology, not only of the more primitive sort described
earlier but also of the more fully developed, intentional kind, is a central
overall factor in life and biological evolution. It is not a cosmic teleology
working at the outset of the origin of our present universe, but an emergent
teleology coming into being as part of the very nature of life and becoming
increasingly sophisticated because of the selective advantages its more fully
developed forms confer. The immanent interplay of causality and novelty is
sufficient to account for the origin of intelligence in its earliest forms, and
once it begins to be a feature of specific organisms, it confers an adaptive
advantage on those organisms. The increasing degrees of sophistication and
development of intelligence can be explained by this same adaptive advantage,
in that particular members of a species possessed of genes highly favorable to
intelligence are more likely to survive and leave progeny than those permit-
ting only lower amounts of intelligent outlook and behavior.
58 the pluralist  4 : 3  2009

An intriguing possible example of the adaptive advantage of intelligence

and the consciously directed purposive freedom it makes possible is dis-
cussed in a recent article in The Economist entitled “Alex the African Grey.”
Alex is a parrot who was taught by a researcher named Irene Pepperberg an
amazing range of tasks to which he responded over time with seeming great
intelligence. Pepperberg claims that Alex, by the time of his death, was able
to display an intelligence matching that of a five-year old child. Parrots gen-
erally live in groups, as do those primates who have also shown impressive
amounts of apparent intelligence and ability to learn. Pepperberg’s choice of
a parrot for her research was influenced in part by the thinking of a British
researcher named Nicholas Humphrey, who contends that intelligence evolves
in response to social environments. Group living promotes intelligence and
that, in turn, enables larger groups to function, thereby providing an impe-
tus and need for more intelligence. The development of intelligence, group
living, and success in surviving are thus claimed to work hand-in-hand, each
contributing to the other.
The beginnings of cultural evolution can also be accounted for in this
manner. Biological and cultural evolution display emerging degrees of con-
scious direction and control of novelty. With such conscious direction and
control, purposive, end-directed behavior comes into being. To summarize,
then, there is purpose within the universe—a capacity for conscious purpo-
sive thought and behavior that emerges over eons. But there is no purpose of
the universe as a whole and no need to posit such cosmic purpose. There is
no primordial, consciously envisioned and directed purpose, goal, or set of
goals. The universe blindly runs at the outset but eventually produces crea-
tures with intentions, aims, and ends in view. This is at least what I claim
and how I respond to Peter Gunter’s challenge.
Does creativity outweigh or prevail over destructiveness, as indicated by
this evolutionary progression toward higher levels of complexity and complex
modes of thought and behavior? Gunter thinks so, but I would hesitate to make
this judgment, given the colossal amount of destruction that has accompanied
the evolutionary process and that has been made both possible and actual by
the evolutionary development of mentality and purposive behavior in human
beings. It is important to remind ourselves again that creativity and destruc-
tiveness go together, although their relative weights can vary, and that process
is not synonymous with progress. So I find myself not readily agreeing with
one of the premises of Gunter’s reasoning. With regard to the truth or falsity
of that premise, I am going to have to suspend judgment. Whitehead himself
acknowledged that it is “a fallacious conception of the universe” to imagine,
in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s words, that there is “. . . one far-off divine event/To
crosby : The Essential Role of Novelty 59

which the whole creation moves” (Process and Reality 111).6 The relative roles of
creativity and destructiveness, goodness and evil, involved in the whole course
of the universe await an uncertain future, and their overall relative roles in the
universe’s past are difficult, if not impossible, to calculate.

notes
1. See for example Julian Barbour’s aptly titled The End of Time: The Next Revolution
in Physics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), and Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space,
Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
2. David Conner, in personal correspondence, has responded to this statement by
arguing that “many of our ontologically free actions may not be rational or even entirely
conscious.” I agree that not all of our free choices are rational—one may choose a stupid
course of action, for example—and that such choices may not be “entirely conscious,”
in the senses of not being enacted with completely focused attention or of not being
carefully deliberated or thought out. But I do not think that an act wholly devoid of
conscious purpose or intent can rightly be called free.
3. W. Ted Rockwell argues convincingly for the thesis that the mind is not located
merely in the brain but in the nexus of brain, body, and world. On this basis, he rejects
both mind-body dualism and the mind-brain identity theory. See his book Neither Brain
nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory (Cambridge, MA:
MIT P, Bradford Book, 2007).
4. For a discussion of the nature of consciousness and its integral connection with
freedom, see Crosby, Novelty, ch. 6, esp. 75–79.
5. See Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Religion, Forward by Robert C. Neville (Lanham,
MD: Rowman, 1997).
6. The quote is from the last two lines of Tennyson’s In Memoriam.

references
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“Obituary.” Economist 22 Sept. 2007: 103.
Gunter, A. Y. Rev. of Novelty, by Donald Crosby. The Pluralist 3.1 (Spring), 2008: 132.
Hacking, Ian. “Root and Branch.” Nation October 8, 2007.
James, William. “The Dilemma of Determinism.” The Will to Believe and Other Essays
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———. Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. Lincoln
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Kirk, G. S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, eds. The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd ed.
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