Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible
112
Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822372424 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/21/2017 |
| Series: | Thought in the Act |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 980 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
The Cosmology of the Moderns
My primary aim is to take up, while also trying to update, Whitehead's protest against what he calls "the bifurcation of nature." Although this phrase might, at first sight, appear a little puzzling, it designates the collection of experiential, epistemological, and political operations that were present at the origin of the modern conception of nature, a concept whose effects can still be felt today. Before moving on to a full analysis, I will start by providing some context.
The phrase "bifurcation of nature" appears in Whitehead's first truly philosophical book, The Concept of Nature, published in 1920. By this time, Whitehead had already produced an important body of work. He was well known for his work in mathematics, especially for cowriting Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell. However, The Concept of Nature marked a turning point. This is the first text in which Whitehead sets out the task that will characterize all his later philosophical developments: "The object of the present volume and of its predecessor is to lay the basis of a natural philosophy which is the necessary presupposition of a reorganised speculative physics." It is certainly possible to find ideas in Whitehead's earlier texts that lead up to The Concept of Nature, notably in An Inquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, which appeared in 1919. But it is only in this text from 1920 that Whitehead starts a systematic inquiry into the abstractions of science, one that will later develop and extend to cover all aspects of experience, most notably in his magnum opus, Process and Reality. For the moment, the important point to note is that in this text from 1920 Whitehead presents himself as a scientist, declaring a fundamental crisis in his discipline, namely the natural sciences. Getting beyond this crisis will involve a complete reorientation. This is one of the constant obsessions of his work, and Whitehead clarifies his point in a later text, Science and the Modern World: "The progress of science has now reached a turning point. The stable foundations of physics have broken up: also for the first time physiology is asserting itself as an effective body of knowledge, as distinct from a scrap-heap. The old foundations of scientific thought are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern, function, all require reinterpretation."
This situating of bifurcation within the context of modern science does not, however, restrict its importance to one particular field. The whole of modern philosophy is touched by the error of bifurcation. Whitehead says no more about this, and it is up to us to grasp the implications for ourselves, including the shift from modern science to the whole of modern natural philosophy. Nevertheless, two elements can be identified in this brief passage that will help clarify the status of bifurcation. First, importance appears to be relativized. It is not a constant that runs through the history of the experience of nature, setting itself up as some transcendental form, of which different conceptions of nature are merely figures or expressions. Instead, importance is historically situated. It would certainly be wrong to state that there is one moment that represents the absolute genesis of bifurcation, for the historical influences are numerous, and its conceptual conditions are rooted in the distant past. However, in no way does this vitiate the idea that this bifurcation is, in its efficacy, genuinely historically located. Implicitly, it is a matter of an epochal, or historical, theory of nature. Second, Whitehead grants bifurcation a field of application that seems, a priori, to be unlimited, as he states that the modern period is "entirely coloured" by it.
The concept of bifurcation originated in the development of modern science. There is no doubt about this. It was during an analysis of the invention of the modern science, and its particular place in the history of science, that Whitehead coined the term, to identify its constitutive operation. Nevertheless, even if its origin can be located in experimental practices, the question of bifurcation is not restricted to one specific domain of modern experience: it is the origin of a global transformation at all levels of experience. In other texts, Whitehead talks of a "predominant interest" that operates as both the source and the expression of any cosmology, affecting all dimensions, from the epistemological to aesthetic and moral experiences of nature. It is at this point that he attributes a first function to philosophy, one that will subsequently configure its other functions: "Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme."
Thus, these two aspects coincide: locating bifurcation within a particular epoch might seem to reduce its importance by making it "historical," but it enables Whitehead to grant it an unrivalled scope, one which operates at all levels of experience.
The Gesture of Bifurcation
Having clarified the context in which the concept of bifurcation originated, it is now possible to give more detail regarding its constitution and to ask directly: What exactly is the bifurcation of nature? In the very first pages of The Concept of Nature, Whitehead provides a definition, in the form of a protest: "What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons that are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality that is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind."
This passage has been the subject of a series of misreadings and misunderstandings with regard to how bifurcation should be understood. It is necessary to take this passage at face value, in order to develop a better grasp of what is at stake in the challenge that it makes and to inherit from it in an adequate way. The first impression is that, in one way or another, bifurcation returns us to "dualism." The terminology and the oppositions used certainly seem similar. Does the difference between a "reality which is there for knowledge" and a reality established by "the byplay of the mind" or, equally, between "causal nature" and "apparent nature," not return us to the distinction between extension and thought, between matter and spirit? If this were the case, would bifurcation not simply be a new way of thinking about dualism and, furthermore, a new approach to developing a critique of dualist philosophy, principally that of Descartes, and its influence on the modern epoch? If Whitehead's philosophy is read in this way, it might certainly gain something from its proximity to other critiques of dualism, but it would lose its originality. Yet, it is this reading of bifurcation, as offering a new critique of dualism, that has predominated. It can be found in the lectures that Merleau-Ponty gave on Whitehead's philosophy, and in the work of Jean Wahl, but it is Félix Cesselin who makes the point most starkly: "I think that it is only possible to fully grasp Whitehead's thought by starting with a reading of what he understands by the rejection of the "bifurcation" of nature. The bifurcation of nature is dualism. In particular, it is Cartesian dualism." This interpretation is far from being an isolated case. It expresses most clearly and succinctly what the majority of readers of Whitehead believe they have found in bifurcation.
I would like to suggest a different way of inheriting this concept by affirming a radical difference between bifurcation and dualism. This is not to claim that previous readings of bifurcation are wrong, but they have reduced its importance. If the concept of bifurcation is to be given its true force, another approach needs to be taken. In order to substantiate this hypothesis, three elements will be introduced. First, although Whitehead often refers to dualism in his writings, notably Cartesian dualism, he also talks of bifurcation, its constituent elements and its influence in the experience of modernity, without invoking any relationship to dualism. If bifurcation really were just another name for dualism, and Whitehead was trying to outline the constitutive role of the latter in the development of modern science, then why did he not take the time to link them in some way? The most plausible interpretation is that the two problems seemed so different to Whitehead that he did not think it necessary to comment on the distinction. It seems that, for Whitehead, the obvious difference between the two required no explanation. Second, according to Whitehead, the only possible relation is one of an inversion. One of the rare occasions on which Whitehead does link bifurcation and dualism can be found in Science and the Modern World, when he writes, "The revival of philosophy in the hands of Descartes and his successors was entirely coloured in its development by the acceptance of the scientific cosmology [the bifurcation of nature] at its face value." This is a particularly important remark that merits a careful reading. Far from identifying bifurcation with dualism, Whitehead is clear that both Cartesian dualism, and dualism more generally, are dependent upon the question of bifurcation. It is Cartesian philosophy that accepts "at its face value" the cosmology of the bifurcation of nature. This rare allusion to the relation between bifurcation and Cartesian philosophy makes Whitehead's position absolutely clear, although he does not draw out its implications. Third, the reading of this passage offered here entails that the notion of bifurcation outlines a concept that is broader and more fundamental than that of dualism, which, ultimately, is only one of its manifestations. Taken in the most direct, literal, sense, these two notions designate fundamentally different realities. The notion of bifurcation manifests the idea of process, of a movement of differentiation. It is the trajectory through which nature is divided into two distinct branches. The phrase says nothing about how this division occurred, and even less about that which produced it, but it already points to a primary and important difference with respect to dualism. If dualism is understood in terms of a duality of substances, regardless of how these are characterized, bifurcation indicates something very different, namely, how a single reality, nature, came to be divided into two distinct realms.
I will use the terms "gesture" and "operation" to account for this division of nature, as they seem to capture most accurately the particular character of bifurcation. The fundamental question is not that of knowing whether nature is genuinely, in itself, composed of two realms, each with distinct attributes. Rather, it is a question of the means by which the differentiation of these attributes was established. It is the modus operandi of the division, the gesture of the constitution of this division, that needs to be addressed, not its consequences, as expressed in a dualist vision of nature.
As such, the origin of bifurcation should be sought not in the relations between thought and extension, mind and body, the real and the apparent, but in the characteristics of bodies themselves. Bifurcation gains its sense at the intersection of a range of questions: What is a natural body? What are its qualities and how do we experience it? Can we identify characteristics that are common to the multiplicity of physical and biological bodies, and what would these be? These are the same questions as those posed by the distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of bodies that lies at the origin of the modern conception of nature, of which we are still the heirs.
One of the classic texts that most clearly states the difference between the qualities of bodies, and provides the basis for Whitehead's development of his critique of bifurcation, is Locke's AnEssay concerning Human Understanding. Of course, Locke's Essay cannot claim to have invented the problem. For example, Boyle's book The Origin of Forms and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philosophy, published in 1666, undoubtedly influenced Locke's thought, and this text contains the essentials of the difference between the qualities of bodies. However, what is important at this stage is not an outline of the history of bifurcation, as such. Rather, the task at hand is to trace its dispersed invention and how it became consolidated within both experimental practice and those texts that provided its conceptual expression. Locke's Essay, particularly the chapter "Some Further Considerations concerning Our Simple Ideas" is, in this sense, paradigmatic. Locke constructs the distinction as follows:
First such as are Primary qualities utterly inseparable from the body. [...] These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz. solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves but power to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e. by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colours, sounds, tastes, etc. These I call secondary qualities.
In this passage, Locke assigns the qualities of bodies to two different realms. First, there are primary qualities, which are "inseparable from the body." The term "primary" should be taken in its strong sense, as it indicates that these qualities are fundamental to the body and characterize its deepest reality. Primary qualities express the purified state of the body, unadorned by any variations to which it could be subjected. The qualities that Locke lists in this passage all refer to a physicomathematical order: solidity, extension, figure [number], motion, and rest. As such, it is now possible to give a first response to the question "What is a natural body?" It is a particular articulation between physicomathematical qualities. Locke gives an example that has become well known: "Take a grain of wheat, divide it into two parts; each part has still solidity, extension,figure, and mobility: divide it again, and it retains still the same qualities and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible; they must retain still each of them all those qualities." The phenomenal variations, such as the color of the grain, its particular texture, the sensations that we have of it, in no way undermine the status of the primary qualities with which they are associated. Even when division renders a body imperceptible, so that it falls short of producing an empirical experience, because these qualities are of a specific kind and refer to what might be called a nonsubjective aspect of nature, they must still be constitutive of all experiences of bodies. This is why it is necessary to insist that without these primary qualities, nature would be "soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly." It would be wrong to think that this is an outdated conceptual approach; its legacy can still be found in contemporary science. As Whitehead puts it, in Science and the Modern World:
There persists, however, throughout the whole period the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call "scientific materialism." Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived.
The critique of bifurcation is, therefore, linked to a radical critique of materialism. Raymond Ruyer, one of the most original readers of Whitehead, gives what he calls a "quaint," almost "humorous," image of the materialism that Whitehead is criticizing. Recalling Carlyle, he imagines a law court, as viewed through the eyes of a materialist who is an heir to the bifurcation of nature: "It undergoes a curious metamorphosis, a sort of denuding [...]. The halo of meaning, essence, values, all that which for an ordinary spectator transfigures the materiality of the scene, and yet is almost overlooked, all this dissipates like a mist." What remains, for the materialist, is the functioning "of a kind of complicated mechanism, fully given in the present and in space, where morsels of matter push one another. A man speaks: the state of his brain controls the physical formulation of his speech: the vibrations of air modify other elements of the nervous system and control movements or the preparations for movement. No intention, no purpose, guides the phases of the scene, since intention is no more than the present state of the brain."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction 11. The Cosmology of the Moderns 3
2. A Universal Mannerism 39
3. The Intensification of Experience 77
Notes 87
Bibliography 99
Index 103
What People are Saying About This
"Nature as Event is a remarkable rendering of Whitehead's most difficult points of philosophy. With his slow, light, and extremely clever touch, Didier Debaise has a unique ability to make speculative philosophy understandable to everybody, artists as well as social scientists and humanists. One will never find another book that makes the notion of the 'eternal object' commonsensical. A great read."
“This remarkable book may serve as an introduction to Whitehead's thought due to its brevity, beautiful clarity, and quality of its argumentation. But it is much more than that: it is a very original and thought-provoking contribution to philosophy and humanities that is motivated by the concerns of our time. Didier Debaise renders the thorniest questions intelligible and characterizes concepts in such a way that readers feel each concept intensifying an aspect of their experience. A deeply rewarding book.”