Yvette Collett Arts's Page

Well I never - "evolving purpose" - I like the sound of that.
Fits with my wider "memetic" view of the evolution of ideas, consciousness and rationality itself, with "purpose" as an "emergent" pattern. Not noticed that term in my MPF readings so far - but it fits.

Hi Yvette Collett Arts (what a GREAT name!) and Ian Glendinning (also wonderful!).  

 

Sorry to respond so late to your dialogue.  Over the years I've made my own indexes for Follett's writing & speaking.  "Let the purpose evolve" is one phrase I use in relation to Follett often.  But, I don't see that this morning as I find pages 57 & 58 of The New State to cover "purpose."

 

Now, as if I haven't already said to myself a thousand times, I say again, "Mary, you are so FAR OUT!"   In The New State (written in the mid-1910s and published in 1918) she says . . .

 

"As right appears with that interrelating, germinating activity which we call the social process, so purpose also is generated by the same process.  The goal of evolution most obviously must evolve itself.  How self-contradictory is the idea that evolution is the world-process and yet that some other power has made the goal for it to reach.  The truth is that the same process which creates all else creates the very purpose."

Phew!!  Just the other day I was reading in the Scientific American of this "new & radical" theory of the laws of nature having to evolve themselves!

 

Well, Mary knew this concept needed more study.  She goes on to say . . .

 

"That purpose is involved in the process, not prior to process, has far wider reaching consequences than can be taken up here.  The whole philosophy of cause and effect must be rewritten.  If the infinite task is the evolution of the whole, if our finite tasks are wholes of varying degrees of scope and perfection, the notion of causality must have an entirely different place in our system of thought.

 

She goes on to ponder what will be the purpose of the unity of European nations after the war . . . explaining that it will evolve from the union . . . again, a few decades ahead of her time.

I wish you two would hop on a plane and come to the Boston Conversation this October 20-21st!

See you there!   Albie