SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD

No modern thoughtscape makes sense except in light of the mental atmosphere brought about by science over the last four hundred years. The English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) traced the origins and developments of such a “climate of thought” in Science and the Modern World, a great series of lectures published in 1925, whose centennial is worth celebrating. In an extraordinarily comprehensive effort, Whitehead explains the key conceptual movements of science from Galileo to Einstein. Century after century, he masterfully highlights a living history of world-shaping ideas, revealing the deep habits and unfolding trends of the scientific mentality.

Science was born in the 17th century as a reaction to medieval thought that nevertheless embraced its belief in a natural order. Its forerunners admirably blended rationality and empiricism, balancing powerful abstractions with attention to concrete facts. Mathematical refinements and mechanical insights propelled science’s success throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, led by pioneering French mathematicians like Pierre-Simon Laplace and Joseph-Louis Lagrange and Italian physiologists like Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta.

The 19th century was marked by what Whitehead calls “the invention of the method of invention,” together with the professionalisation of science. These advances were met with the “Romantic reaction,” opposing the mechanical view of life and affirming the intrinsic reality of value. Whitehead underscores key scientific ideas in this period: the notion of fields leading to the electromagnetic synthesis of James Clerk Maxwell, the concept of atomicity successfully deployed both chemistry and biology respectively via molecules and cells, and the gestation of the theory of evolution. He then turns to the 20th century revolutions in modern physics and their counter-intuitive nature, which his “organic philosophy” seeks to accommodate. His take on quantum physics and relativity is original and profound but remains obscure and untrodden.

What is so remarkable about science? For Whitehead, it’s empirical observation coupled with mathematical reasoning. More than its “method,” he argues, it’s the scientific “mentality” which has profoundly influenced our lives and morphed societies for generations. He compares the acts of “great conquerors” with the ideas of thinkers, “individually powerless, but ultimately the rulers of the world.”

Whitehead celebrates science’s great accomplishments but critiques its abstractions when they go too far, especially when they are mistaken as concrete. The most pervasive and pernicious scientific abstraction of all, he argues, is “simple location”: the idea that there is merely motion of material in a mechanical universe, namely, a world made of independent bits of matter distinctly located in space and time. The notion of mass is actually the great pearl in the crown of scientific materialism but also its Achilles Heel, as it afforded science with the basis for measurable and regular laws at the price adopting an “unbelievable” idea, writes Whitehead, one that does violence against the very facts of our immediate experience and also leads to the mechanization and, ultimately, the destruction of the natural world.

In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead also offers hints of his own radically organic view of nature, anticipating the grand philosophical scheme that would be published four years later in his magnum opus, Process and Reality. He proposes to make relations no less foundational than the things related, replacing “substances” with “events” as the real constituents of the world. His cosmology naturally accommodated (and even anticipated) in real time the radical transformations in humanity’s conceptions of space, time, matter, and measurement that occurred at the dawn of the 20th century.

Whitehead’s thought is a century old and yet it still seems to stream in from the future. His ideas are finally catching up in cutting-edge biology, which is currently enjoying an organicist renaissance: the crumbling of gene-centrism, the recognition of organismal agency, a grasping of the processual nature of development, and a more sophisticated understanding of evolution. A similar subtle revolution is also going on in the cognitive sciences, where mind and life interpenetrate, and in consciousness studies, where the mind and matter gulf is also getting bridged and dissolved. Back to theoretical physics, Whitehead offers a path forward for a field stalled and captured by “theories of everything” so disconnected from facts and concrete human experience that they seem to have abandoned the realm of science altogether. Thinking with Whitehead we can escape our ideological “groove.” Nothing seems more urgent in our polarized, post-modern, artificial intelligence-seized age.