The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 — John Shaqi
The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919Whitehead, Alfred North
Philosophy
The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
Whitehead, Alfred North
Knowledge, Theory of; Nature; Science -- Philosophy
Causal nature is the influence on the mind which is the cause of the
effluence of apparent nature from the mind. This conception of causal
nature is not to be confused with the distinct conception of one part of
nature as being the cause of another part. For example, the burning of
the fire and the passage of heat from it through intervening space is
the cause of the body, its nerves and its brain, functioning in certain
ways. But this is not an action of nature on the mind. It is an
interaction within nature. The causation involved in this interaction is
causation in a different sense from the influence of this system of
bodily interactions within nature on the alien mind which thereupon
perceives redness and warmth.
The bifurcation theory is an attempt to exhibit natural science as an
investigation of the cause of the fact of knowledge. Namely, it is an
attempt to exhibit apparent nature as an effluent from the mind because
of causal nature. The whole notion is partly based on the implicit
assumption that the mind can only know that which it has itself produced
and retains in some sense within itself, though it requires an exterior
reason both as originating and as determining the character of its
activity. But in considering knowledge we should wipe out all these
spatial metaphors, such as 'within the mind' and 'without the mind.'
Knowledge is ultimate. There can be no explanation of the 'why' of
knowledge; we can only describe the 'what' of knowledge. Namely we can
analyse the content and its internal relations, but we cannot explain
why there is knowledge. Thus causal nature is a metaphysical chimera;
though there is need of a metaphysics whose scope transcends the
limitation to nature. The object of such a metaphysical science is not
to explain knowledge, but exhibit in its utmost completeness our concept
of reality.
However, we must admit that the causality theory of nature has its
strong suit. The reason why the bifurcation of nature is always creeping
back into scientific philosophy is the extreme difficulty of exhibiting
the perceived redness and warmth of the fire in one system of relations
with the agitated molecules of carbon and oxygen, with the radiant
energy from them, and with the various functionings of the material
body. Unless we produce the all-embracing relations, we are faced with a
bifurcated nature; namely, warmth and redness on one side, and
molecules, electrons and ether on the other side. Then the two factors
are explained as being respectively the cause and the mind's reaction to
the cause.
Time and space would appear to provide these all-embracing relations
which the advocates of the philosophy of the unity of nature require.
The perceived redness of the fire and the warmth are definitely related
in time and in space to the molecules of the fire and the molecules of
the body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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