Survey 7: The New Naturalism—A Critique of Order Out of Chaos

Abstract

"Physics and metaphysics are indeed coming together in a conception of the world in which process, becoming, is taken as a primary constituent of physical existence..." (page 303). "The world is far from being homogeneous " (page 16). "In the world we are familiar with equilibrium is a rare and precarious state" (page 128). "...most of reality, instead of being orderly, stable, and equilibrial, is seething and bubbling with change, disorder, process " (page xv). These are the words of Prigogine and Stengers, the authors of Order out of Chaos, and of Toffler, who has provided an enthusiastic foreword to their much publicized book. Taken on their own, these and other similar statements are very appealing to those of us who regard historically and geographically concrete phenomena in terms of interpenetrating structuring processes, in terms of simultaneous diversity and successive variation, in terms of the dialectics of human agency (or practice) and structure, in terms of the dialectics of individual and society. Such statements also

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