Causality, Time, and Creativity: The Essential Role of Novelty

Rationalistic philosophy has always aspired to a rounded-in view of the whole of things, a closed system of kinds, from which the notion 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 indicates, 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 particular 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. Without 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 unconstrained chance would be indistinguishable from chaos, and pure chaos is unintelligible and unimaginable because it would lack any discernible structure 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 principles. 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 universe, 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 moment 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 contained 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 already contained in its cause, and the sum total of...