Desmet_10-17-13.pdf

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On the difference between physics and philosophical cosmology

Ronny Desmet, Oct. 2013

The point of departure of this lecture is the diagnosis that the development and theoverwhelming success of modern physics has been a major factor in alienating us

from nature, and its aim is to highlight that it is not the primary task of contemporary physics to heal us from this alienation from nature, even though contemporary physics

is one of the important sources of inspiration for philosophical cosmology to establisha new alliance with nature.

Physicist focus on “lifeless nature” and hence, from a methodological point of view

they exclude from their description of nature all characteristics of “nature alive” such

as feeling, creativity, purpose, value. In Nature and Life, Whitehead writes: “As a

method this procedure is entirely justifiable, provided that we recognize the

limitations involved.” (NL 70) However, the overwhelming success of physics has led

to disregarding its limitations, and to turn the methodological exclusion of live into anontological exclusion, denying the existence in nature of feeling, creativity, purpose,

value. In other words, the success of the science of lifeless nature has led to the belief

that there is only lifeless nature, and that nature alive is only apparent, and will be

shown by science as reducible to lifeless nature.

But our deepest intuitions, expressed in common sense beliefs, in art, ethics, andreligion, and in the human sciences, and dominating all human practices, from “the

playgrounds” to “the law courts,” involve feeling, creativity, purpose, value. So,Whitehead writes, “the science of nature stands opposed to the presuppositions of

humanism” (NL 15), and in the light of this alienation of humans from nature, only

two options seem left. Either we declare our deepest intuitions of feeling, creativity, purpose, value, to be illusions, or we declare the human soul to be part of a non-

natural world: the supernatural world as opposed to the natural world, a religious

escape; or the world of mind as opposed to the world of matter, a Cartesian escape; or

the practical world of values as opposed to the theoretical world of facts, a Kantian

escape. With the rise and acceptance of the theory of evolution and the associated

awareness that humans are fully part of nature, supernaturalism and Cartesianism are

no longer viable options, and hence we seem to be faced with either a physics inspired

reductionism or a Kant inspired dualism. However, the belief that we are ultimately

nothing but lifeless nature has not healed us from alienation, nor has the belief that, by

arbitrary change of epistemological perspective, we can jump from either side of the

fact/value dichotomy to the other. Each of these beliefs deepens our sense of alienation.

There is, however, a third option: the refusal to accept, one, the strict separation of

lifeless nature from nature alive, and two, the opposition between specialist

knowledge acquired by the method of physics and common opinion based on

intuition.

This double refusal might lead to an anti-scientific approach, that is, to a wholesale

rejection of the method of physics, and the promotion of a healing worldview thatignores physics and solely relies on other modes of thought – romantic, visionary,

spiritual, mystical. An example from the 1970s is provided by Theodore Roszak’s

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book, Where the wasteland ends. This, however, is not the Whiteheadian way I want

to promote.

Alternatively, the double refusal might also lead to what I conceive as a more typical

New Age attitude with respect to physics. Most New Age authors interested in

physics – early examples are Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav – share Roszak’s critiqueof the so-called old physics, but they hold that it does not apply to the so-called new

physics. On the contrary, they hold that the findings of 20th century theories of

physics – special and general relativity, quantum physics, non-equilibrium

thermodynamics, chaos theory, etc. – will give rise to a new worldview that re-

enchants nature instead of disenchanting it, to use Max Weber’s expression

characterizing modernity, a worldview that re-allies us with nature instead of

alienating us. This alternative, which emphatically rejects the so-called sickening

theories of Galilei, Newton and their followers, enthusiastically embraces the so-

called healing theories of more recent speculative physicists, and can, because of the

latter, be seen as an alternative form of scientism. Again, this is not a Whiteheadian

alternative.

Because the two are easily confused, it is important to stress that the New Age

attitude toward physics does not coincide with the Whiteheadian attitude, because the

two are easily confused. Indeed, when developing his philosophical cosmology,Whitehead was inspired by the new physics of his days, meaning, primarily

Maxwell’s electromagnetism. Also, Whitehead’s followers – contemporary processthinkers such as John Cobb and David Griffin – have been inspired by the same

speculative physicists adopted, willingly or not, by the New Age movement. DavidBohm, Geoffrey Chew, David Finkelstein, Ilya Prigogine, Rupert Sheldrake, Henry

Stapp – all of them have influenced New Age thinking, and all of them have also been

part of conferences or projects organized or affiliated with the Center of Process

Studies that also organizes this conference. And yet, the New Age alternative does not

coincide with the Whiteheadian alternative. For example, David Griffin is no New

Age thinker, despite the fact that he edited several volumes including contributions of

the above mentioned authors, one of which is called, The reenchantment of science,

immediately bringing to mind a host of titles in the New Age library, ranging from

Morris Berman’s 1981 The reenchantment of the world to Ervin Laszlo’s 2005 The

reenchanted cosmos.

So what does differentiate Whitehead’s approach from anti-scientism and from any

type of scientism, including the New Age type? What is characteristic of his attemptto overcome the many-headed dragon of the bifurcation of nature in lifeless natureand nature alive, in the objective world of matter and the subjective world of mind, in

the world of facts and the world of values, in the world of theoretical reason and theworld of practical reason, in the world of specialist knowledge acquired by the

method of physics and the world of common opinion based on intuition? According tome, the answer is that Whitehead’s worldview is a philosophical cosmology that does

not turn away from science, but does not solely rely on science either. The Dalai

Lama once wrote: “We need a worldview grounded in science that does not deny the

richness of human nature and the validity of modes of knowing other than the

scientific.” Well, with his philosophical cosmology, Whitehead attempted to

philosophically construct precisely such a worldview.

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The adjective, ‘philosophical,’ is key here. In order to understand the particular

character of Whitehead’s approach, we have to be aware that it involves philosophical

construction, and hence that it needs to be differentiated from the efforts of physics or of any other of the natural or human sciences, as well as from what Whitehead calls

“a patchwork procedure” (LN 16), which tries to mend together the abstractions from

the different sciences. According to Whitehead, philosophy is about “the conciliationof presuppositions” whereas “no special science is ever grounded upon theconciliation of presuppositions belonging to all the various sciences,” and he adds:

“Each science confines itself to a fragment of the evidence and weaves its theories in

terms of notions suggested by that fragment” (NL 16).

So in order to follow a Whiteheadian approach to overcome the bifurcation of nature

in its various forms, we need to engage in philosophy as Whitehead, in Science and

the Modern World , differentiated it from the special sciences, with their particular

modes of thought and their particular sets of abstractions:

Philosophy is the critic of abstractions. Its function is the double one, first of harmonizing them by assigning them their right relative status as abstractions,

and secondly of completing them by direct comparison with more concrete

intuitions of the universe, and thereby promoting the formation of more

complete schemes of thought. … Philosophy is not one among the scienceswith its own little scheme of abstractions which it works away at perfecting

and improving. It is the survey of the sciences, with the special objects of their harmony, and of their completion. It brings to this task, not only the evidence

of the separate sciences, but also its own appeal to concrete experience. Itconfronts the sciences with concrete fact. (SMW 87)

In other words, Whitehead holds that if we want to overcome the alienation of man

from nature, we should leave all particular grooves and stray across country “because

no groove of abstractions is adequate for the comprehension of human life” (SMW

196). Instead of confining ourselves to a method and categories of thought derived

from any one of the special sciences, and explaining away everything that does not fit

it in, we should make, as Whitehead writes in Process and Reality and in The

Function of Reason, “a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization” (PR 5)

“beyond any special science,” in an attempt to provide an “interpretive system which

expresses their interconnection” (FR 86); and when straying across country, when

making a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization, philosophy should not

only be guided by its aim of appropriately reinterpreting and fitting in the evidence provided by all the natural and human sciences, but it should also rely on the compassof our deepest intuitions that also “guide the humanism of literature, of art, of

religion” (LN 90), the compass that will tell philosophers when they have to resistthoughts “that do violence to what we cannot help but believe,” as Isabelle Stengers

wrote in her 2011 book, Thinking with Whitehead (36).

As it turns out, the most difficult bifurcation or dichotomy or opposition to overcome

is the one between scientific knowledge and common knowledge based on intuition.

The reason is that, despite of a century of scientific revolutions that can indeed further

a philosophical cosmology in Whitehead’s sense, most scientific authors have not yet

departed from the rhetoric strategy of disenchantment to promote new scientificfindings – a strategy that Isabelle Stengers clearly identified and articulated in her

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2002 essay, “Beyond Conversation: The Risks of Peace”:

The seduction of the idea of a truth that should hurt and disenchant, whichshould go beyond illusions and destroy them, is exemplified each time a

scientist or somebody speaking in the name of science promotes a version of

the bifurcation of nature. And this seduction may well explain the verystability of the bifurcation theme. Be it when Galileo rejoiced in making theexperimental fact (dealing only with the way heavy bodies fall in a frictionless

world), the possibility and power of which he had just discovered, the ground

for expelling philosophers and theologians from the new territory of science.

Be it when Jacques Monod deduced from molecular biology and Darwinian

selection the existential loneliness of humanity in a meaningless universe. Or

be it each time thinking and feeling are reduced, in the name of science, to the

blind interplay of neurons: What triumphs is emphatically not scientific

objectivity but a strong affective association of truth with conflict and war.

(245)

According to Stengers, Whitehead’s philosophy can be defined as an antidote “against

our fascination with the power of truth,” as an “open set of propositions,” constituting

“a peace-producing philosophy,” directed “against the value our Western tradition

attributes to conflict as the very mark of truth” (244-245) Hence, Whitehead’sstrategy is radically different from the war strategy of disenchantment, reductionism,

and bifurcation. His strategy is a peace-producing strategy, transforming the disjointmultiplicity of diverse modes and abstractions of thought in opposition, including the

scientific modes and abstractions of thought and the intuitive modes and abstractionsof thought, into a conjoined unity of diverse modes and abstractions of thought in

contrast (cf. PR 348).

I have to add that Whitehead himself was too optimistic when thinking that the new

developments of physics, and science in general, might by itself lead to the

disappearance of the modern strategy of materialistic and mechanistic disenchantment

and reductionism, and in particular, to the disappearance of the bifurcation of nature

opposing the world of celebrated scientific truths to the world of belittled intuitive

opinions. As Stengers remarks:

When Whitehead was writing Science and the Modern World , he was enjoying

the hope that the epoch when the sciences sided with the bifurcation of nature

was about to be closed. We know that he was overly optimistic in this matter:not only is the reductionist stance still dominant, but we have very goodreasons not to believe, as he did, that scientific innovation as such might

endanger it. The idea that science is at war with opinion, that its very advancemeans “progress” framed as, “everyone thought such and such before, but we

(scientists) know that, …” has proved stronger than all the revisions of whatscientists may indeed claim to know. … As long as the “science against

opinion” image is patiently accepted, infecting scientists and nonscientists

alike, the bifurcation of nature will be produced again and again as both the

condition for science and for its confirming result. (249)

The typical modern seduction to disenchant (recognized and highlighted by a range of authors, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Roger Scruton and Marilynne Robinson) and the

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associated rhetoric of disenchanting reductionism have survived all revolutions in

science so far. They can only evaporate when an overall change from a modern to a

postmodern mentality takes place and that has not happened yet, as is clear from tworecent examples.

In his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel relied on the compass of humanintuition to conclude that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature isalmost certainly false.” This book has been greeted by a storm of extremely negative

reviews, and in H. Allen Orr’s review, “Awaiting a new Darwin,” we can read one of

the major reasons why the reception of Nagel’s book was so negative. Orr writes:

There’s not much of an argument here. Instead Nagel’s conclusion rests

largely on the strength of his intuition. His intuition recoils from the claimed

plausibility of neo-Darwinism and that, it seems, is that. … But plenty of

scientific truths are counterintuitive … and a scientific education is, to a

considerable extent, an exercise in taming the authority of one’s intuition.

On the other hand, Ray Monk in his review of Time Reborn, the 2013 book by Lee

Smolin, deals with the surprise “that the philosophical view for which Smolin is

arguing,” that is, the view “that time is real,” is described as a “revolutionary view,”

since, “for most people,” it “is just common sense.” Clearly Monk addresses readerswho expect each revolution of science to imply a de-valuation instead of a re-

valuation of our deepest intuitions as expressed in common sense beliefs.

To conclude, my hope for the 2015 International Whitehead Conference is that the participants in the track that I will chair, dealing with physics in view of Whitehead’s

philosophical cosmology, will make a significant contribution in turning the

opposition between science and intuition into a fruitful contrast.

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