Whitehead’s Universe · Chapter 3: Misconceptions of Philosophy and Science
Can anything exist by itself?
Descartes thought so. He defined a substance as a thing that needs nothing but itself in order to exist. Andrew Davis playfully calls it the “nothing but” syndrome, and in this third conversation we look at why Whitehead saw it as the misconception that has haunted philosophy for centuries. “There is no such mode of existence,” he wrote. Every entity is only understood by the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
Something only looks independent when we don’t look long enough. A photo of a bee is still, silent and alone, but no bee is. Whitehead called this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: mistaking a frozen snapshot for the living thing. We are not things that happen to have relationships. We are, in a real sense, made of them.
Then we turn to science. Whitehead was a mathematical physicist, and he criticized science on its own behalf. The picture of dead matter and blind mechanism was never a discovery of science, but a philosophy scientists carried in without noticing. And science itself has been dissolving it, from Maxwell’s fields to today’s quantum fields, where even “nothing” turns out to be full of possibility.
New here? Start with Episode 1: Introduction & Chapter 1, then Episode 2: Ancient Intuitions of Flux and Permanence.
Listen here on Substack, on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. If you’d rather watch, this conversation is on YouTube. A new chapter arrives every Tuesday.
If something here stays with you, send it to one person who still asks the big questions.
The world is not a collection of separate things. It is a living web we belong to.
With love, André & Mary-Anne
