"A remarkable burst of creativity in science is transforming traditional disciplines at an extraordinary rate, catalyzing movements whereby old boundaries are dissolving and newly integrated territories are being defined.  The new vision comes from the world of complexity, chaos, and emergent order.  This started in physics and mathematics  but is now moving rapidly into the life sciences, where it is revealing new signatures of the creative process that underlie the evolution of organisms.  A distinctive sign of life is the emergence of new order out of the complexities of its material foundations.  The concept of emergence, once regarded by many biologists as a vague and mystical concept with dangerous vitalist connotations, is now the central focus of the sciences of complexity.  Here the question is, How can systems made up of components whose properties we understand well give rise to phenomena that are quite unexpected?  Life is the most dramatic manifestation of this process, the domian of emergence par excellence.  But the new sciences united biology with physics in a manner that allows us to see the creative fabric of natural process as a single dynamic unfolding."

"What do complex systems have to be so that they can know their worlds?" By "know" I don't mean to imply consciousness; but a complex system like the E. coli bacterium clearly knows its world. It exchanges molecular variables with its world, and swims upstream in a glucose gradient. In some sense, it has an internal representation of that world."
Stuart Kaufman, "Order for Free"

The problem of intellectual “progress” throughout the eighteenth century appears in this light.  Perhaps no other century is so permeated with the idea of intellectual progress as that of the Enlightenment.  But we mistake the essense of this conception, if we understand it merely in a quantitative sense as an extension of knowledge indefinitely.  A qualitative determination always accompanies quantitative expansion; and an increasingly pronounced return to the characteristic center of knowledge corresponds to the extension of inquiry beyond the periphery of knowledge.  One seeks multiplicity in order to be sure of unity; one acepts the breadth of knowledge in the sure anticipation that this breadth does not impede the intellect, but that, on the contrary, it leads the intellect back to, and concetrates it in, itself.  For we see again and again that the divergence of the paths followed by the intellect in its attempt to encompass all of reality is merely apparent.  If these paths viewed objectively seem to diverge, their divergence is, nevertheless, no mere dispersion.  All the various energies of the mind are, rather, held together in a common center of force.  Variety and diversity of shapes are simply the full unfolding of an essentially homogeneous formative power.  When the eighteenth century wants to characterize this power in a single word, it calls it “reason.”

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of  the Enlightenment

the problem of class: the givenness of any classificatory scheme cannot be made to yield socio-political causation.  The {working class} in itself does not become the {working class} for itself.  The in-itself is taken as theatrical context and lifeworld, not as essential being.  And humans are seen not as {persons} but as complex organisms contextually parameterized.

Being itself is seen as a provisional emergent out of the flux of forces and fields, contextually parameterized.

For example, in construing the Keynesian Elite; the shopfloor; the the psychological experience of hierarchy (Art Lamb interview)

Being and the play of forces: a dialectical double helix
Being and Praxis

Being as an effect of discourse
Being as an uncertain and provisional emergent