“If Whitehead’s universe is really god-infused, the materialists say, then his speculative adventure in cosmology is for that reason also made irretrievably irrelevant for any modern, scientific, rational investigations of nature…The problem with this assessment of Whitehead’s scheme, as I understand it, is that the story of modern scientific rationality and its technological mastery over matter has itself already been made irretrievably irrelevant by the planetary scale of the ecological crisis it helped to bring about. Nature is not at all like what the moderns thought she was. Her mechanical “laws” turn out to be more like organic tendencies–tendencies whose stability we, as living earthlings, are beginning to have the power (conscious or otherwise) to alter at genetic and geological scales. The supposedly secularized concept of Nature invented by Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, and Galileo proved to be utterly unprepared for the thermodynamic, electromagnetic, quantum, relativistic, and complexity revolutions of 19th and 20th century science. Nature can no longer be depoliticized, denuded of all subjective quality, moral and aesthetic value, and creative potency. Nature is more like a goddess than a machine.”

The above passage comes from Matthew David Segall’s blog post series (part 1, part 2) from May 2014 in which he compares and contrasts Nietzsche’s and Whitehead’s post-nihilist pluralistic process philosophies. This is the second time I’ve read the series and I will probably be reading them again in the future because they’re jam packed with insightful and profound observations like the one above.

…

Painting above by Atkinson Grimshaw

Tags:goddessnatureNietzscheprocess philosophywhitehead