Modes of Nature

What makes something an individual thing instead of just a collection of spatially and/or temporally contiguous traits? The chapter explores a structuralist and a functionalist answer; it develops the functionalist account that centers on the disposition of individual things to maintain their integrity as organized systems: their conatus. The chapter elaborates on the conatus in a way different from Spinoza’s. It’s not just maintaining an individual thing’s existence but rather the disposition to realize what makes it what it is (its self-realization). Moreover, to be the individuals they are, things must be not only assertive but receptive, enlisting the causal powers of others needed for their own process of realization (what the book calls receptivity). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how self-realization and receptivity change how we should see Nature. Nature is not a collection of individual inert things waiting to be struck by one another like billiard balls, but more like waves of the ocean that are inherently active and dynamic—not nouns but verbs.