Whitehead: The Man Who Escaped Mathematics Prison

Men can be as provincial in time as in space.

We may wonder if the scientific mindset of the modern world is not an example of such a provincial limitation

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(Alfred North Whitehead)

Everything is full of life.

That was Whitehead's premise.

An ancient idea that evokes that other (the only one preserved) of Thales of Miletus, the first of the philosophers: "Everything is full of gods."

Now that signs of life are discovered on Venus, the fiery planet of dawn, the matter is becoming topical.

The West has traveled a tiring path of centuries to distance itself almost completely from nature.

Christianity (first insurgent, then imperial), led by Gnostic currents, stripped nature of the sacred value it had in Antiquity.

In the modern age, Cartesian thought reduced it to an inanimate thing, a mere dissectable extension.

The industrial revolution called for its indiscriminate conquest and exploitation.

Today, the planet (which is what we call nature today) offers an alarming portrait, a dying scene beset by continuous climatic, viral and migratory crises.

This situation has a lot to do with human greed and ambitions and with the scientific revolution, that glorious period of science that Newton led and on which the world of today is built.

And it has a lot to do with the successes of mathematical physics, which is the science that has dominated the rest of the disciplines since then.

One of the thinkers who has best understood this process has been Alfred North Whitehead (UK-USA, 1861-1947).

Whitehead was one of the most important mathematicians of the last century.

He collaborated for ten years with Bertrand Russell in the so-called "logicist program", aimed at deriving the fundamental concepts of mathematics from symbolic logic.

But Whitehead always maintained contact with philosophy, through the Aristotelian Society, where he debated amicably with experts on Leibniz or Spinoza.

That hobby gave him a unique destiny.

When it was time for his retirement as a mathematician, Harvard University offered him a professorship in philosophy.

Sometimes to be someone else you have to change the landscape and the English mathematician became an American philosopher.

An intellectual metamorphosis had led him from mathematical logic to the philosophy of science, and from this to metaphysics, a field hitherto trampled only privately.

In Boston he erected a system that has had an important impact on the philosophy of science and that, in general terms, has not been fully assimilated.

One of Whitehead's most decisive discoveries was that life is not mathematical.

Life can be bloody mockery or scathing irony, drama, contradiction and chaos, all of which do not fit into an ideal and perfect world of mathematics.

Life can be sloppy and misshapen and still be life.

Spontaneity, surprise and amazement of living are very far from mathematical harmony and perfection.

Mathematics is wonderful (anyone who has studied it knows it), but it is an abstract, quantitative and, above all, colorless science.

While life is color, a mixture of light and dark.

Newton was able to reduce color to a number (the angle of refraction) and, in doing so, transmuted, like the alchemist he always wanted to be, the qualitative into the quantitative.

In that operation is the key to the modern world, the philosopher's stone that has given us wealth and prosperity, at the inevitable price of a growing climate and ecological crisis.

MORE INFORMATION

• 1. HENRI BERGSON: Time was something else

• 2. SIMONE WEIL: Gravity and grace

• 3. PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA.

  Praise of sympathy

• 4. JORGE LUIS BORGES.

  The being and the time

• 5. KIERKEGAARD.

  The problem of being eternal

• 6. GEORGE BERKELEY.

  The doors of the perception

• 7. LEIBNIZ: the mind creates a body

Molecular biology, imitating what mathematical physics did with matter, has believed to find the bricks that build living things.

The secret of life.

As if life proceeded architecturally from its foundations, as if the plant were a seed and did not feel the magnetism of the fruit.

What Galileo said about the universe (which speaks the language of mathematics), biologists repeat about life, which speaks the language of genes, proteins or DNA molecules.

But if there is something we have learned in physics, as Whitehead would say, it is that "the scale of observation creates the phenomenon."

There are many levels and each of them is a world unto itself.

Quantum mechanics has nothing to say to fluid mechanics.

General relativity cannot intrude on thermodynamics.

Simply because they work with different theoretical frameworks, because they see things from a different theoretical prism and they are, in a sense, incommensurable.

Despite this, some continue to sell the theory of everything.

This is a very American matter, the total solution, the absolute equation.

One of the great teachings of physics is precisely hermeneutical pluralism.

The world is a confederation of republics and each level expresses itself in its own way.

In a sense, this interpretation is akin to anthropology.

Each culture is a world unto itself, a universe of meanings.

In an interview at the end of his life, Whitehead, laying his hand on the wood of an old bookstore, stated: "Inside this bookcase there could be civilizations."

He was referring, of course, to the discoveries of the subatomic world, where we entered looking for bricks and found an orchard.

A world ruled by subtle forces and immaterial particles.

The different sub-disciplines of physics learned to work from their horizontal level and not to make vertical extrapolations.

But molecular biology, like neurosciences, or like all sciences in general that are unaware of the work of others, fall into the temptation of making this type of extrapolation.

Whitehead warned, among many other things, that the secret of life, or of the mind, is not on a single level.

It is at all levels and at none.

In physics there are not only foundations, there are also windows and a roof.

Life has its roots both in the molecular earth and in the sky of perception and imagination.

Human life, as Simone Weil said, is a tree that hangs from the sky, it is gravity and grace, it experiences concentric forces and upward forces.

Reducing it to a single level is not only not understanding it, it is mutilating it.

An idea that our leaders should take into account in this new era of biopolitics.

Spatial relationships between inanimate bodies are well explained mechanically.

Logic, as Bergson pointed out, expresses the general relationships between solid bodies, external to each other (like billiard balls), since logic needs precise and well-defined identities (A = A).

But life rejects that exteriority.

The concrete fact of life is process, metamorphosis, continuous refutation of identity, either at the cellular or psychic level.

We are not equal to ourselves.

Food, perception and respiration, not to mention mental life, with its memories and hopes, reveal the "fallacy of simple location", one of Whitehead's most beautiful ideas.

The habit of believing that things are simply where they are.

The life of the mind is a continuous reference to other regions of space and other rhythms of time.

Conscious experience incorporates the absent, the invisible, what was heard or dreamed of and still resonates.

What we call living beings are masses of perceptions, they can be here and there at the same time, they are

where they look and they are

what they look at.

Whitehead left us with other important insights that help us understand the scope and nature of our current situation.

One of them is the fallacy of reification, also called "

."

The work of the laboratories consists of isolating the phenomenon to study it.

But there is always the danger of taking this isolated phenomenon (devoid of its internal relations), as the real phenomenon.

The abstraction of the object, be it virus or planet, cannot be treated as the real object, that would be to confuse the map with the territory.

Another of Whitehead's great genealogies was to show that, since Newton, science has been concerned with reducing the qualitative to the quantitative.

And it has given "reality" to the second, reducing the first to the category of illusion.

Colors and sounds are an illusion created by tiny particles that we don't see with the naked eye, but that we can see with the right instruments.

What the instrument sees takes precedence over what our own eyes see, has “more reality”, as if the detail were ontologically superior to the impression, as if Courbet's painting were above Monet's.

The empire of quantity may satisfy some temperaments, while for others the focus on a colorless and abstract science is depressing.

Be that as it may, the science of quantitative is now widely accepted.

In fact, it is the only admissible science.

In that culture we have been exercising for more than three hundred years.

But rather than claiming that the universe speaks the language of mathematics, it would be more accurate to say that the universe is "mathematizable", that it lends itself to "mathematization."

It is important to understand mathematics not as a truth that hides behind phenomenal appearances, but as a particular way of reading them, a complementary reading of others.

This scientific culture makes people believe that science "discovers" an underlying reality, that it exists as an "object" or "relationship" before the investigation begins.

But what happens is simply that nature is capable of answering the analytical and quantitative inquisition.

This is not to say that nature

mathematical, but that mathematics is an efficient way (in some cases and for some purposes) of reading it.

In fact, the "truth" of mathematical physics is something that can be realized in history (the conquest of space or nuclear energy prove it), but it is not something that is behind, as a true essence, the phenomena.

That would be doing metaphysics.

The success of these companies does not mean that we understand the phenomenon, it only means that we are able to control and manipulate it according to our purposes and, as Wittgenstein would say, the accuracy depends on our interests.

Finished.

Whitehead insisted that quantitative reduction can affect both the natural environment and life itself.

And he proposed to make a bridge between the blackboard of abstractions and the lava of emotions.

That bridge is a difficult but fundamental book:

, which will soon see a new translation into our language.

The laws of life rule from within, from within habit and habit itself.

Strictly speaking, they are not laws but customs.

These habits are already oriented before birth and develop in a landscape.

Life is nothing without the environment.

There is always a you and a us.

That is why the forest, the desert or the village are breeding grounds for values, areas where other times and places throb.

Memory, that indefatigable builder of the self, constantly reminds us of it.

Living nature cannot be detached from values, from aesthetic emotions, from the very wonder of existence.

Life, each life in particular, is a garden of values, a small crop where generosity or nobility, anger or resentment grow.

Whitehead, the mathematician turned philosopher, thus collected two forgotten heritages: the praise of attention (of wonder, as the ancients would say) and the romantic idea of ​​nature as experience.