Alfred North Whitehead and the Bifurcation of Nature

There’s an object, and there’s a subject. That’s how we’re taught in our very first grammar class. Subject, object; one observes, one is observed. One is the “real” thing and the other is just what interprets it. This concept is so well cemented in our minds that we even use the term objective as a synonym to true. Yet the dichotomy between subject and object doesn’t stop there. In our scientific inquiries, we also make it well known that matter is the real thing, and we are simply the observer who interprets these lifeless pieces of mass. We even go as far as to take these “real” observations and decide that we, just like matter, are completely determined by the laws of physics. We’re simply a collection of matter predetermined to move as physics dictates. All of nature falls under this objective reality, where everything must remain logically and rationally faithful.

Is this the full story though? Alfred North Whitehead, a world-renown mathematician from Kent, had spent his entire life trying to sort out the most objective truths of reality through his respective field of mathematics. He was working at such a fundamental level, that his book on the foundations of mathematics, Principia Mathematica, cowritten with his former pupil Bertrand Russell, famously took over 300 pages just to demonstrate that 1 + 1 = 2. This book is a colossal tome. Spanning over 3 volumes and well over 1500 pages, it took nearly a decade of both the authors’ lives. However, although they made great advances in the fields of logic and mathematics, they ultimately decided to stop because they could not secure the foundations of mathematics as they set out to. They found new projects, and new methods of tackling their problems.

Another decade passed, when a now 63-year-old Whitehead was offered the post of professor of philosophy at Harvard University. While most professors his age were approaching retirement, Whitehead decided to jump into a new adventure. So new in fact, that he is quoted saying that the first philosophy class he taught was the first he had ever attended! To be clear, he was an avid reader of philosophy in his free time, reading Descartes, Locke, Plato, along with his contemporaries of William James and Henri Bergson among others, but this was nevertheless a new endeavor to do philosophy. In this milieu, he was in a unique position to pose a challenge to the subject-object dichotomy that we’ve taken for granted. That is, he called into question what he named the bifurcation of nature.

Bifurcation of Nature

What exactly about nature has been bifurcated (split in two) according to Whitehead? In this regard, he is responding to John Locke’s idea that nature is divided into “primary” and “secondary” qualities. Primary qualities are, simply put, the qualities that cause secondary qualities. For example, if you see a ball, what the ball is made of are the “real” primary qualities (matter, atoms, and molecules) while the secondary qualities are how we perceive it (the size of the ball, its color, shape, and feel). With such a viewpoint, the primary qualities are the real things while the secondary qualities don’t really exist in nature but are “purely offspring of the mind.”1placeholder This is a purely material-based view of nature: one that sees the world through the lens of needing to connect every piece of matter back to one particular isolated place in space and time. All of nature’s primary qualities must be traceable to what Whitehead calls a simple location, meaning that “in expressing its spatio-temporal relations, it is adequate to state that it is where it is, in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time.”2placeholder From this standpoint, all bits of matter are isolated from each other. Though they might act on each other with their respective forces (gravity for example) they remain separate and distinct. Nature is simply a collection of separate bits of material, a “dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.”3placeholder

As these dull primary qualities are the actual basis for nature, what is to be said of the secondary qualities? Quite simply, they are explained away as simple additives of the mind, nothing other than something we produce as a collection of matter. It is as if “the poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind.”4placeholder Where nature is simply the hurling of matter, all of our own experiences have no place in it other than as a subject to interpret it. Our own experiences aren’t seen as real and are simply explained away as the byproduct of a material existence.

In our scientific investigations we take this distinction as a given. We study matter as these separate entities, and we must isolate these real bits and pieces as much as possible from the biases of any subjective experience. Whitehead describes this worldview as scientific materialism, 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.”5placeholder All of our thoughts, feelings, ideas, senses, and observations can always be traced back to a plain material existence of cause and effect in this scientific ontology. Simple, neat, ordered, and bland.

Nevertheless, Whitehead assures that nature itself does not make this distinction; rather, we impose it on our perception of nature, which he terms the bifurcation of nature. In fact, he argues, both primary and secondary qualities are “in the same boat, sink or swim together.”6placeholder We have fallen victim to what Whitehead calls the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, which is when one confuses the abstract concepts we use to think for concrete reality. As such, Locke’s concept that there are primary and secondary qualities is an abstraction that we have taken as completely representative of reality.

Now, it does need to be emphasized that this doesn’t mean that we need to do away with abstractions all together. It would be impossible to think or go about our day if we couldn’t ever use abstract concepts. Even the idea of primary and secondary qualities doesn’t need to be dismissed completely. Clearly, they have brought forth many advances in scientific development by creating this distinction and focusing on matter. The danger though is that abstractions can be predatory as Whiteheadian philosopher Didier Debaise puts it.7placeholder Many times an abstraction that can be useful in one way, can dominate different ways of thinking that might have just as valid of an existence. Thus, it is “of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction.”8placeholder

Living in a Non-Bifurcated World

Taking the need to reevaluate abstractions seriously, what is the importance of recognizing the possibly harmful nature of the bifurcation of nature? One concern is that it can hide lines of possible scientific inquiry, veiled under such a dominating abstraction. Whitehead was a great admirer of the psychologist and philosopher William James, who saw his own field limited by the bifurcation of nature. In contextualizing the importance of mental research, he states that

“A genuine glimpse into what [the mind] is would be the scientific achievement before which all past achievements would pale. But at present psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo and the laws of motion, of chemistry before Lavoisier and the notion that mass is preserved with all reactions.”9placeholder

With the current inquiries of a bifurcated science, we are only able to conduct and make conclusions on research regarding the mind by connecting it to the primary qualities that we use routinely in modern science. Again, this isn’t to say these practices are bad or that tremendous research hasn’t been done from a materialist viewpoint, but simply that they can limit our research if the other qualities are ignored.

What James is after is a science that takes seriously all that experience offers, one that is willing to “take anything, to follow either logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences.”10placeholder This is what he preaches in his pragmatic theory: that we must look at the ends and not assume the means, that we must take all of experience seriously even if it doesn’t fit into our neat theories of nature, and that all experience – even those of secondary qualities of the mind – are still valid and part of nature. From this perspective, if we are to continue to research the mind we must go beyond the bounds of science’s investigations of only primary qualities and find creative new ways for our sciences to explore the mind.

Similarly, within the realm of quantum physics, it has become difficult to take the stark separation between subject/object as a given. In the now famous (or infamous) two slit experiment, photons shot at a wall with two small slits form a wave pattern on a second wall behind it when they are not observed in action. Yet, when a detector is added to record where the photon travels in the experiment, instead of creating a wave pattern, it instead acts as if it went straight through one or the other hole, leaving two distinct lines. The different interpretations of this phenomenon are far from settled, but what it does bring into question is the previously assumed separation of the observer from the observed. That is, the causal primary qualities of nature could very well be affected by the secondary qualities in a turn of events.

There are even stranger anomalies within quantum physics, such as the ability to be in multiple states at the same time (superposition) or for two interacting atoms to affect each other from an impossibly large distance away (quantum entanglement). If we remember the definition of simple location, that matter is always isolated from each other in a specific location and at a specific time, this doesn’t agree with the evidence of empirical experiments. Even Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle doesn’t assume a simple location, since it states that to know a particle’s position means we cannot definitely know its speed, and if we know its speed, we cannot definitely know its position. For quantum mechanics to become one of the most successful scientific theories ever created, it had to do away with many of the assumptions classic physics inherited from the bifurcation of nature.

Outside of just scientific research though, recognizing the limits of the bifurcation of nature and the other means of thinking is also important in that it affects our everyday practices. We all inherit and live different ontologies, different ways of understanding and living in reality. When we take a bifurcated nature as the ontology, the way that nature is, we blind ourselves to the plurality of other modes of being. It is a matter of acknowledging how it permeates our lives. We form sentences with a subject and an object, reinforcing that nature acts in the same way; we separate and categorize species as separate, even when organisms such as lichens, which are fungi and algae in an interdependent relationship, exist; we dominate the decisions of tackling climate change through our sciences and ways of living in the world, bulldozing the different indigenous, ecological, and non-human ways of living with such issues in non-bifurcated worlds.

The ontologies we live by are not just bystanders, but actively participate in our ways of living. What’s important to take away is not to simply accept that Whitehead’s critique of the bifurcation of nature is a thoughtful and interesting critique and move on. We need to recognize that action is also required, that “the old foundations of scientific thought are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern, function, all require reinterpretation.”11placeholder Yes, we need to keep much of the very successful research that’s been performed from the perspective of a bifurcated nature, but if we are to have even greater and more fruitful scientific endeavors, to learn how to live differently, to think differently in the future, we need to also create new practices, both scientific and otherwise, with a non-bifurcated view of nature. Thus, Whitehead’s critique allows us to open ourselves to new possibilities and to create new and exciting problems and questions for us to reckon with and explore.