Context:

We started our journey towards Karen Barad’s “Meeting the Universe Halfway” by reading Bergson’s “Time and Free Will” (see report here). We then saw Bergson’s initial challenge to psychophysics morphing into the Einstein-Bergson debate about the primacy of physics over philosophy (see report here). From a contemporary, modern Western, point of view it was Einstein’s point of view that prevailed, so entrenching the classical-corpuscular view of mechanistic physics as the ideal science (and therefore philosophy) should strive for. Such a view was however not only contested by Bergson but in his own way by A. N. Whitehead who thereby inspired contemporary thinkers such as Donna Haraway. We were fortunate enough to get introduced to Whitehead by Ronny Desmet (author of the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on him). Although Whitehead is almost erased from the history of analytic philosophy, his approach was of a thoroughly mathematical and physicist nature and at the same time embraced elements of Eastern philosophy. As shown in the picture of a letter by Whitehead, he directly interacted with Einstein and, whilst in Harvard, was mentor of many leading analytic philosophers like Quine. Therefore he may well be pivotal in controversies between the current philosophical traditions. In the following we provide a short reflection on this session. After this we’ll have one session on the interpretation of quantum physics by Whitehead and Bohr. This makes us well prepared for our final goal of an informed discussion of Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway.

The Whitehead wave:

If Whitehead is known today it is mainly for his contribution to mathematical logic together with B. Russell. It is lesser known that he was a friend of and an influence on Conrad Waddington, the developmental biologist who laid the framework for systems biology and who framed the term epigenetic landscape. Whitehead’s process philosophy has, however, survived as an undercurrent to reemerge in full force again in current ecological and posthumanist thought. The peculiarity of his synthesis of mathematics, physics and subjective, aesthetic, experience is evident in his biography. Schooled as ‘mixed mathematician’ (using mathematics to solve questions in physics) and deeply interested in poetry and history, he was subsequently employed as professor in mathematics, physics and philosophy. Throughout this career he pursued his programme of elaborating Maxwell’s field theory into a comprehensive view encompassing the whole of (natural) philosophy. As such he introduced organismic process notions – like entanglement and diffraction – into his philosophical physics that were profoundly opposed to an Einsteinian mechanistic physics. For Whitehead, relationality was always the primary notion to the extent of developing a theory of gravito-dynamics as alternative to Einstein’s general relativity. A theory that only in 2008 was proven to be empirically less predictive (and this after decades of work on Einstein’s theory and an almost complete forgetfulness of the alternative provided by Whitehead). 

The basic challenge of Whitehead was that Einstein in his theory denies what is practically necessary for its experimental verification/falsification: an intuitive understanding of what it is to ‘measure’ something. Concepts like ‘simultaneous’ ultimately rested on our subjective and direct, experience of time as, for example, irreversible and as always in the process of becoming. In this he acknowledged the influence of Bergson’s intuitions discussed in some of our previous sessions but gave them a less mystical physico-mathematical grounding in which physical and psychological time could effectively be merged. Whitehead criticized all abstractions if they were pursued to the extent of denying the internal relatedness of all the physical and experiential phenomena (see, his criticisms of the ‘fallacies of simple location and misplaced concreteness’ mentioned in the previous session read-out). This criticism is in the end a criticism of the bifurcation of nature into a physical and a psychological world.

With respect to wave-particle duality of quantum physics this meant that where an Einstein saw substances as basic (and ultimately grounding relations), Whitehead saw relations as basic (and ultimately grounding our view of substances). Ultimately, this led Whitehead to his process philosophy (or philosophy of organism) where the basic unit is not a particle but an experiential event (or ‘actual occasion’). Such an actual occasion is a ‘drop of experience’ in which the history of the occasion is ‘felt’ so giving rise to a new original or creative becoming in the world. The terminology Whitehead uses is very idiosyncratic, and sometimes very difficult to digest, but the gist is clear: everything is felt as connected – and in this feeling of connectedness each experience gives rise to a new original fact that then reverberates throughout the feelings of future experiences. It is no coincidence that this is somehow reminiscent of William James’ specious present (but not limited to an experience of human consciousness!) as Whitehead specifically acknowledged this influence, as well as the influence of Bergson’s notion of ‘durée’ and its consequence for the free will debate (see our first session). Still, Whitehead’s integration of physics and experience is unique.

Bohr aligned with or opposed to Whitehead?

Whitehead seems close to Bohr. Both are critical of Einstein’s search for a determination in mechanical terms of the universe. On the other hand, Bohr and Whitehead did not share a same experience of the emergence of what is now known as the standard or Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. It also seems true that Bohr always resisted speculative interpretations of (quantum) physics and wanted to limit ‘the lesson of quantum physics’ to an especially poignant example of an age-old epistemological problem common to all the sciences. Maybe Bohr would have resisted, on his interpretation of complementarity, both an Einsteinian extension of the classical mechanical picture ànd a Whiteheadian extension of intrinsically entangled force fields? 

We will delve into this in detail in our next session. It will be a crucial element of discussing Karen Barad’s view that starts with Bohr’s indeterminacy interpretation of quantum physics to end with a view of holistic entanglement that is clearly reminiscent of Whiteheads views on process philosophy. From our first session it seems that magnetism and atomism are in debate throughout physics and psychology, and that the wave-particle duality of quantum physics is a particularly acute expression of this debate. Will we find this debate lays bare the ultimate truth about the universe or just tells us something on the way we can come to know it? Or, as is more likely, will we remain divided on that question but content that it is a question worth posing?

By Jo Bervoets