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On The Concept of Nature (1920).
Whitehead thinks that old-timey metaphysics wrongly insists that what's fundamental in the world to be studied by science is things (substance) moving around in space and time. We don't actually experience any such thing as "substance," so on this view we end up with an uncrossable gap between the world of our experience and that of science. Whitehead wants us to start instead with what we experience, which is events, and figure out how to abstract from those to come up with time, space, objects, and motion.
By getting rid of a pre-existent space-time grid, he also thinks his way of describing nature will accord better with relativity theory, since he allows for multiple space-time frameworks. His explanation involves a lot of tortured 4-dimensional geometry and heaps of weirdly defined terms, but the regular four podcasters are mighty events (not mere people), and we will soldier on to Cleopatra's Needle and beyond!
This will all be clearer to you if you listen to Mark's introduction, then you can read more about the topic and get the book. When you're done with this, listen to the Aftershow for more discussion hosted by Stephen West.
End song: "Run Away," by Mark Lint, written in 1987 and recorded in 2005 and 2015. Read about it.
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The Whitehead picture is by Sterling Bartlett.
Well done, gang. Well done. I feel a little better about my engineer’s difficulty with ANW’s writing style after hearing graduate phil expertise express the same troubles.
As you noted, he kept adding to his cosmological work which addresses some of your discussion. I think the issue y’all had with ‘what is character w/r an object’ is better understood in his subsequent development as affective tone of occasions/events (and so also the affect of a society of occasions such as a rock or an animal).
W/r extensive abstraction and time/space, I think it was in the ‘Past, Present, and Future’ chapter of Adventures of Ideas where he better explains time/space in terms of different interconnection paths of inter-related events.
Also in the latter half of AI, values and worth in individual experience is more succinctly drawn out.
among other things my sense is that Whitehead vastly overestimated the role that Concepts/Theories actually play in the day to day work of scientists (and even in say conferences/journals/etc):
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2009/01/02/how-to-think-about-science-part-1—24-listen/
“Philosophers of science tended, until quite recently, to treat science as a mainly theoretical activity. Experiment – science’s actual, often messy encounter with the world – was viewed as something secondary, a mere hand-servant to theory. Popular understanding followed suit. Theories were what counted: one spoke of the theory of evolution, the theory of relativity, the Copernican theory and so on. It was as thinkers and seers that the great scientists were lionized and glorified. But this attitude has recently begun to change. A new generation of historians and philosophers have made the practical, inventive side of science their focus. They’ve pointed out that science doesn’t just think about the world, it makes the world and then remakes it. Science, for them, really is what the thinkers of the 17th century first called it: experimental philosophy. In this episode we hear from two of the scholars who’ve been influential in advancing this changed view: first Ian Hacking, widely regarded as Canada’s pre-eminent philosopher of science, and later in the hour Andrew Pickering, author of The Mangle of Practice. “
be interested in Dylan’s (and or anyone in the know’s) take on Smolin’s idea that the laws/forces/principles of physics (time and such) are also in flux (if not evolving), or at least not fixed/continuous in the ways that we generally assume?
http://leesmolin.com/
I’ve been wanting to look at Smolin, both for the changing laws of physics argument, but also for his distaste of string theory (which my not really be separable). Thanks for the reminder!
thanks Dylan, maybe you guys could get him and Unger on to talk about their new book, the everything-is-connectedish newage/panpsychic aspects of Whitehead clearly are what draws most folks into the fly-jar but there are some real questions there in his work that I don’t have the math/physics to wrestle with and also the related questions of computation/information and existence, for example is Max Tegmark on to anything?
http://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2014/dec/08/cosmology-robert-mangabeira-unger-universe-time
Smolin cites two modes of change for the laws of nature: Changes that occur within a universe during its lifetime and changes that occur during the transfer of information from parent to offspring universe. Whitehead called his philosophy “the philosophy of organism,” though process philosophy is the name that caught on. But “organism” suggestively anticipates Smolin. Changes to natural law within a universe are ontogenetic/developmental, and those that occur between generations of universes are phylogenetic/evolutionary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organicism
Nice. Thanks for that.
anw would say that the cosmological organism changes over time just as our far more finite individual existences do
Great podcast. If you ever do another podcast on Whitehead, I’d suggest “Adventures of Ideas.” It’s written for a more popular audience, and thus doesn’t have weird math stuff. Also, he spends a lot more time addressing traditional philosophical disputes, and in particular has some fascinating thoughts on the philosophy of science and trippy speculative metaphysics. Whitehead is awesome; it’s unfortunate that you chose a work that would lead anyone to dislike reading Whitehead.
“weird math stuff” isn’t ancillary to his work so without engaging with it one is doing something other than trying to get a grip on his project. I appreciate that the PELers are making the time and effort to wrestle with primary sources, lots of pop versions of philo out there for folks who prefer that.
Math isn’t necessary to understand Whitehead’s metaphysics. “Adventures of Ideas” is a primary source that explains his thought much better than “The Concept of Nature,” and it has no math whatsoever.
silly of him to have wasted all that time and effort than…
I tried to explain some of Whitehead’s chapter on abstractive sets to myself, and thought I’d share.
Whitehead expresses our experience of nature as a sequence of events, where ‘event’ to Whitehead means the ‘happening’ or ‘occurrence’ of nature. The Big Event is all of nature happening, but an individual can only experience part of this Big Event. These part events are still proper events. Part events, for humans, are complex happenings that include all sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, and their relations, among a multitude other things happening. For Whitehead, the part-whole relation of events forms a sequence or set of events, and from this sequence he derives all of the common ‘characteristics’ we use to describe nature (time, space, chairs, bugs, colors, sounds, centers of mass, paths…). We can visualize this sequence of events as follows. Consider events e1,e2,en,en+1…
e1 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx…
e2 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx…
en xxxxxxxxxxxxx…
en+1 xxxxxxxxx…
Each subsequent event is part of the previous event. To get at the ‘eveyday’ objects we talk about it (as opposed to the hopeless complexity of events), Whitehead introduces quantitative expressions q(e1), q(e2), q(en)…q(en+1), that are essentially functions of events, as below. The quantitative expressions can be considered a sets of all possible quantitative measurements .
q(e1) f(xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx….)={A1,B1,C1,D1,…}
q(e2) f(xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx…)={A2,B2,C2,D2,…}
q(en) f(xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx…)={An,Bn,Cn,Dn,…}
q(en+1) f(xxxxxxxxxxxx…) ={An+1, Bn+1, Cn+1, Dn+1}
Where A1..An,B1..Bn, Bn+1 are quantitative measurements of empirical science (or possibly also measurements we do automatically in our heads….Whitehead does not let us know).
Then, if A1,A2,An..An+1 are ‘homologues’, this series will converge to “an ideal simplicity of natural relations”, or to the “intrinsic character” of an event. This intrinsic character corresponds to what we typically call spatiotemporal objects, and Whitehead uses the example of a train moving over a period of a minute, than a second, then the train’s engine, and so on.
Whitehead does not define Homolgue in this work, but he appears to imply, roughly, “a definite rule giving a definite succession of diminishing events”. So long as we apply a consistent rule to each element of the set, we can call the resulting quantitative measurements homologues, and they will give rise to the common objects we talk about.
There are plenty of problems here, but this is a rough sketch. I think Whitehead would say that all of these entities are ‘real’. With regard to the question of ontological primacy, I think Whitehead would agree that the whole cannot exist without its parts, and parts not without the whole.
I like the ideas of Smolin and the challenges of string theory. To make it really interesting, bring on Brian Greene to debate both sides of the issue. That would be a primo episode.
Thanks so much, Marc for your elucidation.
Formatting didn’t work quite right. The sets should look more like this. Each subsequent event is smaller than the previous but never reaches a smallest event.
e1 —- xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx…
e2 ——–xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx…
en ——————– xxxxxxxxxxxxx…
en+1 ————————xxxxxxxxx…
I thought I’d put this note here that Whitehead shared a lot of his ideas with other contemporaries, so I’ll link to a book and interview to contemporaries with overlapping ideas (Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell [obviously]) ;
http://newbooksinphilosophy.com/2015/01/15/erik-c-banks-the-realistic-empiricism-of-mach-james-and-russell-neutral-monism-reconceived-cambridge-university-press-2014/
Cheers!
Kirk is right that AI (also maybe MT) are far less brutal. primary sources are good, but anw never stopped developing his cosmology, and so much of what needs to be said of his work on experience, objectified past/subjective present, affect, propositions, and consciousness is unaddressed. This misleads others to think anw was all about just physics. Delving into his physics is ok iff there are followup episodes.
Marc, your math was quite helpful in getting at the meanings of english terms. A little math can be useful, esp if reading/studying a math guy – but only small snippets, please!
Relatedly, how do these CN events compare w/ the ‘real actualities’ that later in his work became (atomic/individual/monadic) occasions of experience in processual time? There are past events of objective fact, but present durational moments of subjective experience.
we can’t, yet, simply derive biology and all from physics but it does serve as a kind of limit as the other sciences’ findings cannot contradict physics (even folks like Terrence Deacon agree here). Who knows where Whitehead would have ended up if had started waxing metaphysical earlier in his life but I see no evidence that he ever stopped working out the kind of strict logics of his mathematical training/research.
Brings to mind current “speculative-realists” like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Meillassoux
🙂
Hey Guys,
I joined as a citizen this month but I am not sure where I should post this link. In the episode the necessity for a nice overview of Whitehead’s work by one of his disciples was needed, you’ll find that piece here by Robert Mesle. It really is an excellent technical overview of Whitehead’s thought and concepts.
http://www.amazon.com/Process-Relational-Philosophy-Introduction-Alfred-Whitehead-ebook/dp/B0064C35HI/ref=pd_sim_kstore_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0Y18VMVZGVMRMXMMR5VE
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/55700-the-allure-of-things-process-and-object-in-contemporary-philosophy/
maybe you can help me w/ this OOO stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK-5XOwraQo
i listened twice to above as well as 2 other harman talks. i get great overviews like rorty could give, but get no idea of what news is in his stuff. objects exert forces on each other in gravity or in art…i don’t follow his point
Thank you for the link. Interesting stuff. At least for this lecture, I think the idea of ‘undermining’ and ‘overmining’ objects quickly gets at the main point of Harman’s philosophy of objects. His idea is that we should prioritize objects of direct experience in our philosophy, rather than attempt to reduce them to something else (like to all-pervasive fields, identical particles, mathematical structure..), or eliminate them by saying that objects are useful linguistic fictions (where events, effects, or processes are the real thing–like Whitehead claims). In brief, Harman’s main reason for focusing on objects is that every object is more than its particles and more than its effects in the world. Every object has a ‘surplus’ that is not explained by its particles nor that is explained by the object’s effects on the world. And humans are not special objects. Or similarly–and Harman does not say this–all objects are special.
He feels art objects display this character quite clearly. A piece of art is more than its particles and more than its effects on others.
He claims that when objects interact (relate), they do not exhaust all the ways that they may interact with each other. In this claim, he is denying the materialistic conception of interaction, which posits only four fundamental interactions. We have to have a broader conception of interaction (relation between objects) to understand how objects can relate to each other beyond materialistic forces. For instance, if you accept that love is a relation between people, and that this relation is real and not easily reduced, then why could not other objects relate to each through other real ways beyond the four fundamental forces identified by today’s physics? This is how objects might exert forces on each other through gravity and art.
https://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/the-case-for-objects/
thank you for this helpful explanation and link, Marc
it got me to look up this wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology
i think i can say i am onboard w/ ooo. it jibes w/ my civil/structural engineering mindset and disdain for all anthropocentrism (the latter, in my thinking, has made philosophy seem anything but wisdom-seeking.)
i am still reading the wiki link, but wanted to say that on its defining ‘withdrawal’ of objects, i totally get this: i have all sorts of odds and ends in drawers and scattered about that i don’t throw away because something about them suggests to me a possible future repurposing in some project or other.
don’t think OOO is likely to be yer thing see:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/55821-the-universe-of-things-on-speculative-realism/
c k chesterton famously says ‘ the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs’
theism aside, he is right. it is this common sense that has always haunted me w/r whitehead’s buddhist-like no-thing-ness. i promise you that bridges i have worked with are real, and they are there for you to safely cross whether or not their builders are around.
that all things are related and relative was made poignantly obvious with sagan’s ‘pale blue dot.’ things are related so much that whitehead’s hyperbolic pansubjectiveness seems to bear some merit. what attracted me to anw was how he insisted on including all known reality when seeking wisdom. no bracketing shit until language and logic are the only reality. no ignoring the headache and eyestrain when studying mathematics or any high-minded concepts. nature is not out there – you are it. you are the thing-in-itself. harman’s ooo urges us to take such ‘things’ seriously.
most important to me was whitehead’s naturalism and primacy of affect. i think harman and i agree with the chesterton quote. but i say to thomists, don’t try to tell me my dog can’t think or feel or be less worthy of life than a lot of human garbage walking the planet. high reasoning is all well and good, but if such a theist metaphysics posits ala aquinas that this single human capacity is what exclusively links us to god, well…i can think of a better god. too many millions of sentient creatures suffer as a result of this bad metaphysics.
As for the bridge, you can cross it not only without the builders being present, but also without even believing that it is real. I don’t have to believe that electrons exist, or are real, or are facts (let alone real, true facts) for my TV to work. Our experiences proceed as they do at least somewhat independently of our beliefs and truth claims. So, why bother insisting that the bridge is real? Or that its existence is a fact? Why bother slathering over our experiences with metaphysical assertions? We and our bridges will continue to interact with each other in certain, predictable ways, regardless of what we think about the bridges. Even if we swear up and down that the bridges are not real.
Having said that, we likely will continue to use the word “bridge” in certain contexts for certain purposes according to certain rules of usage that we agree to abide by. And that will serve us adequately.
mostly jesting w/ ya’ here, SL, but your bridge sounds like maybe richard rorty drew up its plans while achieving consensus thru communal discourse.
federal, state, and some local highway departments that have in-house bridge engineering units normally have sub groups for design, construction, special permit/load rating, and routine inspection and maintenance. sadly, the current way to determine when replacement is in order is sometimes after collapse.
so if rortyian-style consensus to fund replacement is hard to achieve amongst government officials directly responsible to do so, just be careful w/ your thinking that “you can cross it not only without the builders being present, but also without even believing that it is real,” because given the former, you may well have the latter.
I’m admittedly under the sway of Rorty but don’t feel deprived. It’s refreshing to let go of baggage — things like “reality” and “facts.” It lightens the load, for sure. AND, I’m not walking off bridges or dashing into traffic. When certain procedures are followed, such as those pursuits engaged in by civil engineers, then certain predictable results are observed, such as an ability to get to the other side of the river. The word, “bridge” can come in handy when discussing such phenomena.
We can try to dig beneath experiences and usages to some “real” “true” “facts” but it’s not clear what benefit derives from pursuing such a goal, nor is it clear what criteria we should use to determine when (if ever) we have succeeded in reaching such a goal.
it seems to me you are taking dead serious the notion that the partially examined life is the only one worth living. kant convinces an entire discipline formerly searching for the nature of what it is to be, thus stultifying philosophy until rorty declares it null and void. meanwhile science forged ahead with the positive effect of learning a lot more about ourselves and our place in the cosmos. if philosophy is content to shrug off the handling of the baggage of Knowing, it really needs to cease criticizing scientists when they are busy at work. i think anw’s contempt for the logical positivists and their analistic philosopher descendents was an exercise directed at getting philosophy and science back on track as a team focused on discovery of a proper geometry and theology.
liberty mutual called. and i am doing my happy dance!
i AM on-board w/ harman’s ooo. he has finally said things in a way that clears up my 10 yrs of fumbling w/ whitehead. “speculative reality is a philosophy that tries to save reality from relations.” the process between the things seen in two photos taken at some time apart is what anw is about; spec realism is about the objects captured in the two photos..
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/p/ooo-for-beginners.html
nothing concrete/everyday about objects for Harman…
http://www.academia.edu/1572436/REVIEW_OF_GRAHAM_HARMANS_THE_THIRD_TABLE
well thanks a lot, dmf. i thought i had found escape from anw’s rabbit hole. when bogost talks up ‘things’ i like what he says
like about object oriented programming and toasters and gadgets. guess he is not in sync w/ harman. but i must now admit ignorance as to harman’s exact notion. i heard him say something like he means ‘essence’ ala hylemorphism — i just shrugged that off figgering he was too immersed in the islamic scene.
anw’s uber organism idea really is hard to see in this ‘epoch of electromagnetism’. a cell phone is not like a dog. but now i am even more afraid to find out harman’s take on the two.
i’m thinking maybe i should revert to hylemorphism like most common sense people think. gotta figger where all those forms hang out, though…but that just puts me in the company of most philosophers throughou the ages.
no matter what, i still insist that an egg is an egg, and if you come up with some damned link casting doubt on this, dmf, i am gonna hunt you down and make you eat one ;).
just found this wonderful abc podcast by leon and stephanie. the is, to me, the main power of a seamless metaphysics – it can make us better humans. thanks, l and s for your work http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2014/06/pze_20140629.mp3
Thank you for another very good episode! W/r/t your question in this episode as to who is using, or has used, Whitehead’s philosophy, it comes up in Deleuze a bit—in particular in his book The Fold. I think Deleuze found ANW’s idea of the event to be quite useful.
When I first heard that you were going to cover Whitehead, I was really looking forward to it–then you picked Concept of Nature, began the episode with how he was going to avoid metaphysics and I felt let down. Then you began describing his concept of nature and, and it had a surprising ring to it, something very familiar, as I have spent a good deal of time with Deleuze. Whitehead’s entire Concept of Nature is pure metaphysics of the Event, a very common Continental Philosophy theme. I’m still amazed and will perhaps come up with a short article putting what was discussed in more straightforward language. So what do you get out of understanding Whitehead?–a theory of the universe, and the ability to talk about it from the inside out with metaphysical consistency: philosophy.
Metaphysics of the Event:
“When the Event moves from the experiential flow to representation rationally, it becomes abstracted, cutting off and distorting the Event, committing “The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.” (1925, 64,72)
Reality is the Event which does not separate into subject versus object, reason versus experience, image versus thought, organic versus inorganic, but is fully the flow of the Event: “We may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon” (1920, 29; cf. 1929c, Pt 2, Ch. 9, sec. 2).
Many Continental philosophers have included the concept of the Event in their philosophy (e.g., Bergson, Blanchot, Foucault, Heidegger, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Derrida, etc.) due to the attempt to push back from the abstract rationalistic focus of the Enlightenment to a richer and more encompassing account of reality. That a scientific mind like Whitehead was able to see the need for the project of the Event while transforming scientific language was a reflection of his ambidextrous genius.
Whitehead tries to deal with the post-relativistic world as well as with the world of common-sense perception, and it’s a worthy attempt, but he comes up very much with a mathematician’s view of reality and nature. Which is hardly surprising. Several of his weirdest notions make much more sense when read through the lens of George Herbert Mead’s “The Philosophy of the Present”, which tries to deal with many of the same problems from a pragmatist’s perspective (much saner as I see it). Mead manages to incorporate into his naturalist notion of the sociality of all phenomena some of the elements that would seem to lead Whitehead into some really weird pan-spiritualism. It’s not easy reading but it won’t lead you into the corners and contortions that Whitehead gets himself into: https://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Mead/pubs2/philpres/Mead_1932_toc.html
I need to listen to this more (i.e., several times more), but on first blush the Whitehead I draw from listening to this as well as reading other summaries is that his does not appear to be a dotting of “i”s and crossing of “T”s the way a lot of even canonical philosophical works can sometimes seem. As if he has in mind a very different story altogether he’s looking to relate..