On the Place of Life in the Cosmos
Whitehead and Contemporary Theoretical Biology
Last November, I hosted a seminar series for the Cobb Institute Science Advisory Committee that included authors from a recently published volume Process-Philosophical Perspectives on Biology: Intuiting Life (2023) edited by Spyridon Koutroufinis and Arthur Araujo. The video above presents a summary of my chapter.
Below is a transcript of my remarks:
My chapter in this book was titled "On the Place of Life in the Cosmos: Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism and Contemporary Theoretical Biology."
In this chapter, I do a number of things. I try to argue that understanding the possibility of life emerging in this universe requires altering our normal conception of the physical world in line with Whitehead's process-relational ontology and his panexperientialism. I also engage with some other research programs and paradigms in theoretical biology, in particular, autopoiesis developed by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana and carried forward more recently by Evan Thompson.
I begin my chapter by emphasizing the importance of developing a participatory cosmology. You could think of this as an attempt to approach these topics with an endo-methodology. When we study the living world, the physical world, or even when we do theology, we have to remember that we are part of what we are trying to understand. We are physical beings trying to understand the physical world; we are biological organisms trying to understand the nature of life. Scientists are part of the universe they are attempting to know. This seems kind of obvious, but I think this often gets forgotten because of some Cartesian residue—a kind of Cartesian hangover—where dualism is denied theoretically even while remaining implicitly presupposed in practice as an unacknowledged metaphysical habit.
In terms of the explicit theories that naturalistic scientists develop, they will deny that they are dualistic. The problem here is that very often, scientific explanations of natural processes, whether in physics or in biology, take on this mechanistic character. They end up being incompatible with the fact that organisms like us—conscious agents—exist. Not only do conscious organisms with agency exist, but these organisms, human beings, are capable of generating natural scientific knowledge. Scientific explanations of natural processes must be compatible with the existence of organisms capable of that type of explanation. I think the mechanistic account of physics and biology undermines its own conditions of possibility. There are cosmological conditions for the possibility of scientific knowledge.
That the cosmos is intelligible and capable of being understood at all is one of the metaphysical presuppositions of natural science. Whitehead understood this quite well. Immanuel Kant also understood this quite well. But there are important differences between Whitehead's panexperientialism and Kant’s transcendentalism. Whitehead says in the very first few pages of Process and Reality that there's an essence to the universe which forbids relationship beyond itself. In the Cartesian and Kantian approaches, rational knowledge and mind as such is considered something outside of the natural world, providing us with a kind of view from above, a view from nowhere. This kind of Cartesian approach to knowledge is part and parcel of the pursuit of external control and mastery over a material world that is imagined to be entirely separate from us.
When Whitehead says that there's an essence to the universe which forbids relationship beyond itself as a violation of its rationality, I take him to be suggesting that rational knowledge is in fact a function of relationship. When we come to know things, we're really building and maintaining relationships with other organisms. We're building and maintaining alliances with other organisms. A stable fact, a stable understanding of a particular system in the natural world, is more a function of how we have come to relate to that system rather than determining it as though it were some kind of mechanism with fixed laws that it obeys. We have to recognize that the way we approach that which we are trying to know, the way we relate to it, is going to affect how that system, that other organism or community of organisms, is going to respond to us. There's a relational aspect to all of our knowing, and this is part of the very essence of the universe as Whitehead understands it.
In my chapter, I draw on the work of Hans Jonas, who, in addition to writing some influential books on Gnosticism, also wrote The Phenomenon of Life, a text on philosophical biology. He picks up on some important contributions that Aristotle makes to the study of life, but also Immanuel Kant, particularly in his Critique of Judgment, where Kant develops one of the earliest theories of self-organization to describe the living world. I'll get back to Kant in a moment. Jonas tells a bit of history in this book, pointing out that primal peoples and the primal worldview prior to the modern age was animistic. In this context, because life was accepted as the primary state of things, death loomed as the disturbing mystery. Jonas thinks that for this reason, the problem of death is probably the first major problem in the history of conscious human thought.
In Jonas's time, ethologists hadn't observed quite so many examples of other animal species mourning the dead. Particularly the higher mammals—elephants, primates, some corvids—exhibit behaviors that suggest they also encounter this mystery of death. It's clear that this awareness of death is something that higher organisms—not exclusively human beings—can experience. We can say with some degree of assurance now that higher organisms become aware of this fact of death and respond to it. Human beings develop whole cultures, religions, and worldviews in response to this.
As the evolution of consciousness unfolded and the modern European worldview was developed out of the Scientific Revolution, things became inverted. Rather than life being accepted as the primary state of the universe with death as the anomaly, after the Scientific Revolution, with its new mechanistic worldview coming to dominate at least in the Western world and now increasingly around the whole planet, it was death that was considered to be the norm. Death became the primary state of things—the universe is 99.9999% dead stuff, and living organisms form this thin film on at least our planet that’s doing something different. Within this thin film of biological material, human beings arose and became conscious of their sorry state of affairs. For the modern world view, life and consciousness became the great anomalies in an otherwise well-behaved mechanistic universe.
Instead of the question that primal peoples asked and oriented themselves around—"What is death?"—modern people tend to ask, "What is life?" Life itself becomes the mystery. In our time, it's no coincidence that just as we find ourselves entering the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth's history, one that may claim our own species, philosophers are beginning to take the ontological prospects of panpsychism seriously. It's as though the prospect of mass death has brought the significance of life more fully into view. As we face mass extinction, climate change, and ecological catastrophe, our study of life must take on a new urgency. We must approach biology as if life depended on it, because the mechanistic worldview is not just an inadequate theory: it is destructive in practice. It undermines the life systems of the planet. We've imagined nature as though it were just a machine and related to it in that way, resulting in the destruction and undermining of the capacity of the community of life on Earth to maintain itself.
Part of a participatory approach to these questions is recognizing the interplay between theory and practice. There is a link between the way that we know and how we behave towards the world. To develop a more organic biology, we also need to develop a more organic physics. Whitehead's philosophy of organism is up to the challenge. In his book Science and the Modern World, he began to develop his picture of a philosophy of organism. He says in this book that "the appeal to mechanism on behalf of biology was originally an appeal to the well-attested self-consistent physical concepts as expressing the basis of all natural phenomena." But, writing in 1925, he continues, "At present, there is no such system of concepts." In the early 20th century, physics underwent a series of revolutions, almost a second Scientific Revolution, as relativity theory and quantum theory emerged to upset the old clockwork picture of the universe. Whitehead realized quite early on that these new understandings of the physical world, of the nature of matter and energy, space and time, required a new metaphysics. The old mechanistic ontology that had undergirded science since its inception in the 17th century was no longer adequate to the new data and theories emerging in the early 20th century.
Whitehead felt that the concept of organism, with some minor amendments from how the ancients understood it, was more appropriate for understanding non-locality and entanglement and the relativity of space and time than the old mechanistic view of particles in the void obeying externally imposed fixed laws. He thought that an understanding of organisms engaged in a nexus of relations with one another, internally related to one another, was a more appropriate metaphysical backdrop for this new science. He developed an organic cosmology. In this chapter, I also show the resonances between Whitehead's approach and that of Friedrich Schelling before him and Robert Rosen after him.
Schelling was a German idealist philosopher and philosopher of nature who began developing his approach in the late 1790s and into the early 1800s, building on Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment and his understanding of the self-organizing nature of living organisms. Kant recognized that the Newtonian way of approaching nature as an elaborate mechanism was totally inadequate for biology, as it could not explain the organization of even a single blade of grass. Because of the circular causality at play in even the simplest living organisms, Kant famously said there would never be a Newton of the grass blade. Schelling picks up on this, as does Robert Rosen in the 20th century. Rosen argues that the universe described by mechanical laws is an extremely non-generic one in which life cannot exist. "Far from being a special case of these laws and reducible to them, biology provides the most spectacular examples of their inadequacy."
Rosen argues that the mechanistic laws of physics, which are purely efficient in terms of Aristotle's four causes—just an exchange of forces between inert particles—are too special to account for the more generic form of causation in the natural world, prominently displayed in the biological world. The idea is that self-organization is a principle that goes all the way down and all the way up. It becomes more obvious in the biological world that nature is a series of nested self-organizing processes. To understand how what we see displayed in the biological world is possible, Rosen thought we need to rethink physics to understand it in terms of self-organization.
Schelling, before Rosen, said in his 1798 book On the World-Soul that "the particular successions of causes and effects that delude us with the appearance of mechanism disappear as infinitely small straight lines in the universal curvature of the organism in which the world itself persists." Schelling suggests that rather than thinking of organism or living organization as merely apparent and ultimately reducible to mechanisms, it's the reverse: mechanism is the appearance, and organism is the reality. When we see mechanism, a particular succession of causes and effects, we're not taking in the whole picture. We need to step back and recognize that there is a universal curvature of the organism in which the world itself persists. Like Whitehead, Schelling sees the universe itself as a kind of organism, with a macrocosm-microcosm relationship to biological organisms. While there may be mechanical causes operating at various local scales, they are always ensconced within a larger, more encompassing organic process.
More recently, in 2018, a couple of philosophers of biology, John Dupré and Daniel Nicholson, edited the text Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. It's a wonderful collection of chapters trying to advance this processual approach to biology. They do mention Whitehead and acknowledge his importance for the development of process thought, but in their introduction to this collection of essays, they claim that his work is a liability best avoided by serious philosophers of biology. They state, "The panpsychist foundations of Whitehead's system, not to mention its theological character, are hard to reconcile with the naturalistic perspective."
Naturalism as they define it is what I refer to as a kind of closed naturalism. One could, and many have, including David Ray Griffin, argued that Whitehead's philosophy of organism is still naturalistic, but it's a kind of open naturalism. Open to the possibility that some modicum of experience and purposiveness or urge, as Spyridon was describing it, is basic to self-organizing processes at every scale. Whitehead develops a process theology that recognizes the natural world as imbued with a kind of cosmic Eros, which is just a natural part of how creation occurs moment by moment in individual actual occasions. Rather than God being outside the world, imposing laws on it externally, like the deistic picture of Newton and the other early scientists, Whitehead imagines God as part of the world and the world as part of God (i.e., panentheism; or better, “pan-gen-theism,” since God and the world are also caught up in co-evolution and co-creation). So it's a strange kind of naturalism, perhaps, but I think Whitehead is still offering us a naturalistic picture.
The problem with the kind of closed naturalism that Dupré and Nicholson are defending is pointed out by Jonas, who thought that, “after the loss of the transcendental counter-pole provided by dualistic metaphysics, in whose shelter alone unadulterated materialism in physics was rationally possible,” Whitehead's philosophy of organism offered one of the only reasonable alternatives for a scientific approach. What Jonas is suggesting here is that the kind of closed naturalism that says there's no experience in nature, no purpose, no eros or urge in nature, actually presupposes at least implicitly a kind of Cartesian dualism. It's as if the mind of the knowing scientist was not properly part of nature but just a neutral outside observer. To understand life in this closed naturalistic way, as empty of intrinsic purposiveness and devoid of experience until some magical level of complexity is reached, is still residually Cartesian. It depends on this transcendental counter-pole provided by dualistic metaphysics, implicitly imagining the mind of the scientist is perched above nature looking down at something fundamentally non-mental.
A participatory approach to these questions, as I introduced earlier, requires inverting this transcendental picture so that mind becomes ensconced within things themselves. Rather than there being any room for an outside observer to peer into the universe from beyond, we have to put ourselves and our scientific inquiries back into the universe. I think Whitehead's panexperientialism allows us to do that. In that sense, it's more naturalistic than this closed, residually dualistic pseudo-naturalism that even Dupré and Nicholson, despite the wonderful work they are doing, continue to presuppose.
To move on now to the autopoietic approach to biology, I was quite lucky to be exposed to Maturana and Varela's work, and Evan Thompson's work, early on as an undergraduate when I was studying cognitive science. Their approach to understanding the nature of life is quite powerful and provides much resistance to mechanistic reductionism in the life sciences. I mentioned a few sessions ago Francisco Varela's last paper with Andreas Weber titled "Life After Kant," where they draw on Whitehead a little bit and try to establish the reality of purpose in the living world, as Spyridon was suggesting, not as a mere "as if" or as a “teleonomic” description that human beings are projecting onto the living world, but really, organisms are purposeful creatures in and of themselves. Varela and Weber write,
"On a material concrete level, we can observe in the organism the flip side of mechanical causality: a final causality as the basic process of life itself, the establishment of an identity. But this happens not by revising physical laws for particle interactions and special application to organisms, nor by imposing an extra mechanical intelligence. It is rather the subject pole, that is, the organism in its autonomy, which changes linear causality by structuring matter in the process of self-realization to maintain itself as this very process."
An autopoietic system is not only a self-organizing but a self-producing system that produces a membrane that defines itself over and against an environment. In his more recent work, Evan Thompson, once a student of Varela’s, has recognized that a gap still remains. Even if the gap between mind and life is overcome, such that even single living cells are understood as cognitive systems, there's still this gap between neutral physics and chemistry and the purposiveness of life. Thompson has been coming closer to a kind of panexperientialism. As he says in his book Waking, Dreaming, Being, "Physical being and experiential being imply each other and derive from something that is neutral between them." He has a new book coming out early next year, co-authored with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, titled The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience. I'm very excited about this text. Over the years, I've seen Thompson come closer, as a result of studying Whitehead, to the sort of position I'm going to put forward here, which I see as not in conflict with autopoietic biology at all but as an ontological or metaphysical supplement to it.
This is the picture of autopoietic biology that comes out of Varela and Maturana's work. This quote from the "Life After Kant" paper states,
"Organisms can be said to transcend the neutrality of pure physics to create their concern for life. Only this organic perspective actually has the status of world; only this is real because the living can only act in the form of such an intentional world. Life is thus always subjective in the strong sense of the word."
These circles represent organisms, and within the organism, as a result of the self-producing network of processes, a kind of “subjective concern” arises. The organism's purpose is to maintain itself, to survive. These internal dynamics are described as operationally closed, meaning the most you can say about its relationship to the environment is that it is “perturbed” by the environment, but how it responds to that environment is totally dependent on the ongoing dynamics internal to that organism. Organisms are related to their environments, and the term “structural coupling” is used to understand how organisms co-evolve with their environments and other organisms. It's a bit like Leibniz's monads in the sense that this relationship of structural coupling to the outside world of merely neutral physics is not exerting a causal influence, at least not in the sense of some kind of information transfer from the environment to the subjective perspective of the organism. That subjective perspective, brought forth by the autopoietic dynamics of the organism, is closed to any informational influence from the outside. It's ultimately a kind of solipsistic picture, I would suggest.
How does this differ from the process-relational ontology that Whitehead gives us? For Whitehead, it's organisms all the way down. There is no realm of merely neutral physics that is not also composed of experiential creatures at sub-biological scales. Rather than a realm of just neutral physics that precedes life and having to explain this new gap, Whitehead's view is that organisms are internally related through their physical prehensions of one another. Even while they're internally related to the actual occasions in their past, they're still self-creating. Whitehead points out that contemporary actual occasions of experience occur in causal independence of one another, providing elbow room for self-creation. This allows the mental pole of actual occasions to ingress novelty not determined by any route of physical inheritance in their past. I can’t go into more detail in this short presentation, but I try to unpack all this more in my chapter.
This is the major contribution I hope to make: affirming the core insights of the autopoietic approach while overcoming any residual dualism between life and neutral physics. Whitehead's philosophy of organism provides the missing ontology for autopoietic biology, without which it remains basically a transcendental point of view on life. Such a transcendental approach is crucial for undermining the absurdity of mechanistic materialism, but itself remains metaphysically underdetermined.