The Production of Harmony

Cooperation: Something that Happens

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• Consider the term cooperative phenomena... would you attempt articulation? The term itself sounds speculative but the fact remains, that some things cooperate while others do not. If you consider the things that cooperate, you could call what happens among them a 'dynamic of cooperation'. By way of happening, these dynamics weave things together, giving rise to bigger wholes or 'patterns' that behave like a single entity.

• Like an organism, patterns of collective behavior can grow and multiply. They can even cooperate among themselves and give rise to still bigger wholes. Cooperation is the way-of-birth of every society and every larger entity. There is a sense of rising edification – you can call it emergence– a growth towards wholesomeness. If cooperation is edifying, it's because it itself is the source of structure.

• We're not discussing cooperation as a behavioral attitude or state of mind or way of willingness, we're discussing a phenomenon or "something that happens". The process of joining forces to accomplish something is cooperation.

• Cooperation is the production of harmony under a logic of affinity. Maybe cooperation and emergence are one and the same. Cooperation is the fundamental emergent phenomenon, a manifestation of affinity between the ends and the teleology different aspects of Reality. There’s a strange erotic nature in cooperation. There’s an attraction, an appeal made by the situation, by its particular configuration.

  • ✰ ⇢ Term / Emergence, Epigenesis, Ontogenesis