Part III - The Modern View of Nature

The Concept of Life 

Evolutionary Biology

 Twentieth Century Metaphysicians: 

Bergson and Whitehead

Just when modern science was reaching its most impressive heights of achievement, two bold speculative philosophers called into question the basic assumptions of the scientific mode of thought. Neither Bergson nor Whitehead wished to deny that the scientific method had given man considerable control over nature and to that extent was a brilliantly successful enterprise. What concerned them primarily was a philosophical question, namely, whether reality, the basic nature of things, was what science assumed it to be? As late as the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, the major assumption of science was that nature consists of material objects located in space. Matter, it was held, is the final irreducible stuff out of which all things are formed. The model for thinking about the contents and behavior of nature was a model of a machine. All the particular things in nature were thought to be part of a large mechanism, things were related to each other in a tight sequence of cause and effect. Human nature was also viewed in these material and mechanical terms. As parts of a highly tightly organized cosmic machine, people were no longer thought of as being “free” as possessing freedom of the will.

Each of these assumptions raise serious philosophical problems for Bergson and Whitehead. They wondered whether nature really does consist of inert material objects located in space and whether the intellect is capable of discovering “out there” such an orderly and mechanical arrangement of things as the logical and mathematical reasoning of science portrays. How, moreover, can there be any genuine novelty in nature if the basic reality is material and its various parts organized in a tight mechanism? Can a world made of material things ever become anything more than these same objects simply rearranged from time to time? How, is short, can inert matter overcome its static status and “evolve”? How can the concrete experience of life be explained in terms of a lifeless nature? And how can human freedom be explained in a thoroughly mechanistic universe? Science itself had recently been developing new concepts, as, for example, the theory of evolution, which made the mechanical model of nature less and less plausible.

Whitehead pointed out that late in the nineteenth century, “men of science were quite unaware that the ideas they were introducing, one after another, were finally to accumulate into a body of thought inconsistent with the Newtonian ideas dominating their thoughts and shaping their modes of expression.” Whitehead moved, as it were, from within science to his metaphysics, drawing out many of the implications of the emerging new physics. Similarly, Bergson had no intention of rejecting science but thought, rather, that metaphysics and science could enrich each other. His view was that “philosophy ought then to follow science, in order to superimpose on scientific truth a knowledge of another kind, which may be called metaphysical. Thus combined, all our knowledge, both scientific and metaphysical, is heightened.” What Bergson and Whitehead did challenge in science, however, was the assumption that the scientific mode of thought could be the sole comprehensive source of knowledge. Accordingly, they sought to show just what the limits of science are and what unique insights could be provided by metaphysics.