The Renaissance of the Universe
Introduction
In this article, we sketch the radical new picture of the universe that emerged from the all-but-forgotten 20th Century scientific revolution that we surveyed last time.
—The Editors
The Renaissance of the Universe
A 20th Century Radical Departure from Today’s Currently Prevailing 16th-Century View
Last time, in “Catching Up with the Past,” we presented a synoptic account of an extraordinary, large-scale, wide-ranging scientific revolution, with roots going back as far as the 17th Century, which reached its apogee in the middle decades of the 20th Century.
As we indicated there, this was a scientific and philosophical revolution in ideas on a scale—and with a comprehensive sweep across all the sciences—that had not been seen in four centuries, or according to the “scientist’s scientist” Gregory Bateson whom we quoted, not in 2000 years.
We saw how these remarkable scientific investigators, each destined to be eminent in their own field, came together from countless scientific disciplines to form the most unlikely interdisciplinary teams, often working closely with colleagues in other disciplines on the far side of the Atlantic.
One major upshot of their groundbreaking scientific discoveries, when taken together, was that they yielded, almost in passing, a comprehensive new cosmological picture of the universe.
This was a radically revised conception of all of Nature and its workings—the first to emerge in centuries not only to rival but indeed turn on its head the whole superannuated 16th and 17th Century Galilean-Cartesian account of Nature regrettably still dominant, indeed still almost universal even as we near the end of the first quarter of the 21st Century.
Bear in mind, the once daring Galilean-Cartesian account of a mathematical, mechanistic universe was a picture of Nature conceived a priori, at a time even before powdered wigs had yet come into fashion, when comparatively little was known scientifically compared to what we know today. Nor was it based on any major scientific breakthroughs, or indeed on any empirical data at all.
It was a purely speculative conception of Nature, dreamt up by men of genius, however benighted, sitting by the fire. The Galilean-Cartesian picture was first directly challenged by the Newtonian experimentalists, whose robust empiricism all but eclipsed the Galilean-Cartesian view for a century or so, as the Newtonians’ drubbing of the Cartesians gathered significant momentum particularly after the publication of Newton’s Opticks in 1704.
The rival camp to the Cartesian mechanists had been led a century before by Galileo’s even more remarkable contemporary Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who in 1620 published the birth certificate of modern science and technology, his Novum Organum. But it was Newton and the Newtonians, along with a stellar lineup of 18th Century philosopher-physiologists throughout the Germanies, who would lead the charge against the Cartesian epistemology and cosmology.
And yet, and yet. Somehow the Galilean-Cartesian cosmology managed to stick and ultimately prevail, for reasons as much social and political as anything else. The utopian dream of a mathematically ordered universe along with a correspondingly well-ordered system of government modelled upon it, held widespread popular appeal after the chaos and mindless wholesale slaughter of the wars of religion fought across Europe.1
Nor did the Galilean-Cartesian mechanistic view have much real influence on the burgeoning development of both science and technology throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries, as most scholars now agree.
Rather, the impetus came more from the practical engineering breakthroughs of the industrial revolution and the increasing availability of capital, along with, if anything, the continuing appeal and success of Baconian-Newtonian experimentalism shorn of pre-conceived mechanistic ideas or any other unnecessary a priori assumptions.
The Galilean-Cartesian picture of Nature is so familiar that it is by now part of the wallpaper—it is how lay persons, if they think about it at all, as well as the overwhelming majority of scientists, consciously or unconsciously assume the world just is, and how it works.
The old view can best be appreciated by considering it in contrast to the alternative picture of Nature emerging from the all-but-forgotten 20th century revolution in ideas that has been the foundation for all our work on change, and which we surveyed last time. But what exactly was this alternative picture of the universe? How did our scientific revolutionaries come to see Nature as operating?
Here I will do my best to characterize the overall picture of Nature—a fundamental shift in “how Nature is said,” to borrow Aristotle’s phrase—that emerged from the new epistemology and the groundswell of fundamental scientific discoveries that made up this new scientific revolution, discoveries which at one and the same time gradually gave rise to the new epistemology and yet would have been impossible without it as the work proceeded.
.
The Actuality and History of Nature
The actual universe, as opposed to the “official” view of things we have all acquired in school, turned out, surprisingly perhaps, to appear to be a genuinely spontaneous universe, without causes and with little order.
The universe, Nature, was characterized first and foremost by its actuality—a notion I struggle to define succinctly, so in this brief synoptic overview let me just say that on this reconceived picture of the world, Nature is actual, real, independent of our conceptions of it, and fully present in the form of current, existing conditions.
Certainly, the present configuration of Nature was now seen as entirely contingent, and as having a history—it might have been utterly different, and in an infinite variety of ways—had events, purely contingent events, taken a different turn, a different and again arbitrarily contingent and undetermined historical course.
But there is no other Nature, no other universe, than this Nature, this universe. It is fully available to us here, now. The whole of the world as we find it, the whole of Nature, is an historical artefact. It’s how things just turned out.
All the same, the past is irrelevant to the actual present functioning of Nature, and the present state of things is irrelevant to the course it will follow, the forms it will assume in the future as it unfolds.
Everything in Nature exists in a continuous, timeless present, although the boundaries of the present are simultaneously different and endlessly diverse for its different aspects and ‘parts’ from their utterly different and unrelated points of view.
Everything that we see, everything we do or can experience here, now—including all that is manmade—all, together, make up Nature.
Whatever qualities can be distinguished, discerned in Nature are equally real—there is no bifurcation (in Whitehead’s terminology) between Nature and its qualities as they exist in purely physical dimensions on the one hand, and Nature and its qualities as impressed upon our minds.
There are no primary qualities distinct from secondary or tertiary ones. And the human realm, including our mental life, is very much part of Nature.
Nature in this sense is just as we actually find it. It is characterized not only by this actuality but by transparency—“Nothing is hidden.” There is nothing occult in Nature, no vital force and no mechanistic causes. What you see is what you get. There is nothing more, nothing beyond.
Nature is historical, and so self-explanatory, in the way we explored in our Collingwood series over the past few months. “Nature” as we find it now is what has happened through a series of contingent and utterly independent and unrelated events which can be rendered intelligible by showing how things have, historically, come to be this way, in terms of what the various dramatis personae are and were up to, what they were after, what they were, literally or metaphorically, trying to do.
.
Patterning in an Anarchic Universe
The universe is characterized too by ceaseless, random flux, and by infinite and irreducible diversity, non-uniformity, and radical heterogeneity. Nature is different everywhere and at every point in time. The regularities we can observe, the pattern that appears to pervade Nature is exceptional.
There is pattern to be sure, but only against a background of overwhelming difference and unrepeatability, singularity. Only in an infinitesimally small proportion of aspects of Nature is there any regularity or pattern, any invariance to be observed.
Our minds and the conditions of our life are specially attuned to such invariance or pattern, for it is only pattern that is ultimately intelligible, but Nature, unbeknownst to us, is for the most part unintelligible, though in its unintelligibility (which is always contingent—we could come to understand this or that piece of the story, but the story is infinite and can never be fully known, or anywhere near) it is outside the reach of our understanding. To the extent that Nature is patterned it is patterned from within and from a point of view.
Such order as can be found amidst the prevailing disorder arises not from causes or according to laws, but by design—specifically, out of the design constraints of the multifarious players.
To all this ceaselessly fluctuating, radically heterogeneous diversity (radical because it is not a mere heterogeneity of kinds but of singularities), there is nevertheless an irreducibility-and-integrity which enables everything in Nature, as in history, to be self-explanatory when rightly interpreted.
.
Context, Meaning, Form and Purpose in Nature
Within the organic realm at least, everything is characterized by purposefulness, complete autonomy, and by irrepressible spontaneity. The spontaneity, freedom, and voluntariness of all living things at all levels down to the tiniest organelle means that events in Nature can be conceived of as instances of improvisation, not the following of a script or score that existed prior to the event.
In this actual universe, wherever there are living things, there is always, everywhere, infinite plasticity, fecundity and creativity. And every such act is carried out in relation to a context which is unique, unrepeatable, and private to the actor.
Everything in the universe, all that transpires, is a function of local context. Not universality but locality must become the basis of our understanding of Nature as it is in itself. For the universe operates always within localities—devolution operates at all ‘levels’ and in all spheres—and all pattern that is intelligible is characterized not by timelessness but by timeliness and by seasonality (which is itself a form of context).
The universe is forward-looking, both in a passive way insofar as all things are full of expectancy, and in an active way—proceeding by a kind of deliberate cultivation. There is a progressive and unpredictable unfolding of Nature, but—and this is the key—the universe unfolds not from the back but from the front, not out of what has been but expectantly towards what might be.
The past is irrelevant to the future—it is relevant only to the present, and only by way of exhibiting the present to be the future of some previous present, the future created by the actions of some earlier present in the light of the future as the various players desired it to be.
The universe is pulled from the future, not pushed from the past. The future may or may not be relevant to understanding the present, depending on the questions being asked.
The universe has a history (“our past effects us not because it is past but because it is ours”)—a history as context-and-contingency—but Nature acts only forwards, towards and not from, and nothing that happens before the moment of action has any determining effect on that action.
Nature is coded, everywhere laden with meaning—both intended and inferred, and both kinds are equally instrumental in guiding how events unfold. There is purpose everywhere in the organic realm and at every level of description. Wherever there is purpose there is choice, selection according to criteria, and perfect freedom.
Description is inherent in all things, in all that transpires, as real and objective and efficacious as mechanical causes were once believed (within the Galilean-Cartesian view) to be. And so change—a descriptive difference (from a point of view) over time—is an inherent part of Nature. Change is always qualitative, never merely quantitative.
Form, not matter, is what matters. It is not what anything is made of, but its selected design which makes the difference to what transpires.
If we distinguish2 between Nature in the sense of the “nature of” something—the principle or source within itself, ultimately belonging to, inhering within it, which makes something behave as it does, versus Nature as the sum total or aggregate of natural things or “all that is,” we must say that every single thing in Nature has its own nature, which is entirely unique.
As Collingwood reminds us,3 in the Renaissance conception of Nature, Nature was regarded “as something divine and self-creative; the active and passive sides of this one self-creative being they distinguished by distinguishing natura naturata, or the complex of natural changes and processes, from natura naturans or the immanent force which animates and directs them.”
Although Nature is free and undetermined, nonetheless the present configuration—Nature as this historical artefact at this present moment—is the only configuration currently possible given the constraints in place, comprised of the multitude of purposes—the “agendas”—of everything in Nature at the present time. But in the next moment, anything might happen.
Flux is the default condition—it is what is to be expected, all things being equal. The persistence of any invariance—pattern—over time requires explanation. Patterning in Nature, arising from agents’ inner patterning and design-from-a-point-of-view, is, as we observe it, an artefact of interaction between such purposeful entities, such entelechies.
Nature is infinitely re-describable and infinitely diverse, a diversity that can never be catalogued because it is non-denumerably infinite—an infinity of interpenetrating, infinitely diverse realities.
Nature is palpable. It is not a bunch of abstractions, let alone equations. As Maeterlinck put it, “The universe was put into equations the way the history of France was put into madrigals.”
.
Up Next
Next time we shall have a little more to say about this reconception of the universe which in its details gets more radical still. We’ll especially highlight the pivotal role played by information and value, communication and relationship that were found to be operative, indeed seminal, in the actual mechanics of the universe.
And we’ll reveal how this view that emerged in the scientific world full-blown like Athena from the head of Zeus between the end of the First World War through the mid-1980s, proved to be an even more radical departure from the 16th and 17th century Galilean-Cartesian picture than the already radical reconception of reality stemming from quantum physics in the early decades of the 20th Century.
We shall have a little to say too about how our own team’s concerted research at Oxford and elsewhere over the course of succeeding decades took this truly revolutionary scientific work further still:
For this new conception of Nature at last made room for a science of the singular, that is, the possibility of applying rigorous scientific understanding and investigation to idiosyncratic situations in any domain, not least in the world of affairs, a technological capability that opened up tremendous implications for creating major change swiftly and with precision. To these implications too we shall turn next time.
© Copyright 1996, 1999, 2001, 2007, 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
On this see Stephen Toulmin’s classic account in his Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, New York: The Free Press, 1990
cf. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, pp. 43-44
ibid., p. 94