ABSTRACT
With its culmination in Faraday’s physical field theory, the history of the triumph of the dynamical theory of matter shows itself to be the recovery of natural agency in the world of physical objects. Wisdom’s rejection of the thesis that efficient causation is passive can now be understood to have been, actually, unnecessary for the natural science of physics. The reason is eminently available: his proposal of an active conception of causation had already been presumed by the meaning of the dynamical theory, and its triumph finalized the establishment of that very meaning, and much more, in physics (Wisdom 1971: 123-27, 135-36). The central theme of field theory then is that material particulars are active because of their efficacy: while potentially efficacious in virtue of their powers, they are actually efficacious by virtue of the forces they become when their powers are released or unblocked in interaction with other powerful particulars. This theme can be enriched with a metaphysical principle that, I suggest, is implied by Newton’s three laws. But it can be seen with particular clarity, however, in the second law (F = ma), and that is exactly because the law defines force as the product of the mass of an object multiplied by its acceleration. If we peal away the mathematical concepts of weight (m) and speed (a), what is revealed is the relevance of the metaphysical relationship unifying the concepts of power, motion, force according to this principle: the power to be a force is the power to be moving. I now propose that we have in this principle the first part of Giddens’s Call
answered: natural agency is the concept of “agent causality.” That nature is constituted by powerful moving particulars promotes the
thesis that the recovery of the agency of physical objects is the necessary but
not the sufficient basis for the recovery of the agency of cultural subjects. This thesis is underwritten by Kant’s suggestion that human freedom is a “kind of free motion.” The above metaphysical principle can be developed to express exactly this thesis, with Kant’s contribution: if the power to be a thing is the power to be a moving thing, (an object), the power to be a human thing is the power to be a signifying moving thing (a subject). Thus moving physical objects and thence moving cultural subjects are, equally, to be seen as constituted by powers of agency, though, as Kant magnificently intimated, they are of quite different natural kinds. Hence the question to be raised, which is Kantian through and through, is that, although natural agents are to be conceived of as being dynamically embodied efficient causes, how can human dynamically embodied agency be conceivable as a special case? This is the cardinal question at issue in the recovery of human agency, but only because, in our time, it is finally and fully recognized to be ontological. The intimation here is that, metaphysically speaking, it is another and very
different matter to realize the recovery of human agency, and that is because it requires that we come to terms with the difficult treatment of time in Kant’s theory of transcendental or noumenal freedom. In The Cambridge Edition Of The Works Of Emmanuel Kant Wood clearly reveals that the question of time is the heart of the matter in Kant’s noumenal theory (also, see Harré 2000: 8-9).
