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For three centuries, science has mostly treated reality as dead matter — purposeless particles bumping around in the dark. This lecture from Academy of Ideas pushes back, using Friedrich Nietzsche’s will to power and Alfred North Whitehead’s process thought. Both thinkers concluded the basic stuff of the universe carries a primitive inner drive, dissolving the wall between what is alive and what is not. The video explains the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness,’ why materialism works for billiard balls but fails for life, and how Nietzsche built his alternative from the one thing we each know directly: desire.
Full Video Transcript
Nietzsche and the Will to Power
Metaphysics is considered one of the main branches of philosophy, and deals with questions concerning the nature of reality.
Philosophers have been interested in this field for thousands of years, and countless metaphysical systems have been put forth since the time of the ancient Greeks.
However, over the past several centuries one metaphysical system has attained a position of dominance, especially within the domain of science, that being the doctrine of materialism.
A central tenet of materialism, as the name implies, is that reality is ultimately material,
or in other words, the universe is composed entirely of matter, and it is the interaction
of basic material units which accounts for all phenomena, be it consciousness, the birth
of stars, or the emergence of life.
For the materialist these basic units of matter are devoid of life, a view which for many
may seem quite reasonable and even commonsensical, but it is also a view which leads to a seemingly
unsolvable problem. That being, if the basic units of the universe are devoid of life and
experience, then how do these units come together to produce living organisms who are able to
experience the world around them? To put it simply, how does life emerge from various
combinations of dead, or in other words, inanimate, material elements? The inability of scientific
materialism to offer a plausible answer to this question has led some to question the
presuppositions of materialism. As we will see in this lecture, Friedrich Nietzsche was
one thinker who challenged the doctrine of materialism, and we will examine his views
on materialism as well as discussing the views of another famous challenger of the materialist
doctrine, the great 20th century mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
The first philosophers of Western civilization, the Presocratics, who lived in the sixth and
fifth centuries BC, did not have trouble accounting for the emergence of life in the universe.
In fact, to them, the question never arose at all.
The Presocratics of Ancient Greece thought the universe was composed of a substance which
was alive, divine, and endowed with intelligence.
There was no question as to how life arose in the universe, for the very fabric of reality
to the Presocratics was alive itself. However, the last of the Presocratics, Democritus,
strayed from this vision of the universe, and proposed that the universe consists solely
of atoms and void. Atoms are not imbued with life and spontaneity, but instead are inanimate
particles that float in the infinite void. Such a doctrine, called atomism, saw its influence
wax and wane over the centuries. But nearly two thousand years after the death of Democritus,
atomism saw a major revival in the 17th century among thinkers of the scientific revolution
such as Galileo Galilei, Pierre Giscendi, and Isaac Newton. The influence of atomism
can be seen in the development of classical physics, the rise of modern
atomic theory, and more generally in the central role the atom has played as the basic element
of nature for the doctrine of scientific materialism.
Undeniably some fascinating and profound scientific theories have been put forth within the paradigm
of materialism, but as the years passed it became more and more obvious that such a doctrine
did not seem capable of accounting for one of the most remarkable things in the universe,
that being life.
One opponent of materialism during the early 20th century was Alfred North Whitehead, who
was famous for, among other things, collaborating with Bertrand Russell, his former student,
on the work Principia Mathematica. Whitehead thought the acceptance of the 17th century
scientific cosmology at face value, that being materialism, hampered the development of a
metaphysical system that could adequately account for the existence of life. Inheriting
and modifying what was originally Democritus’ idea, that the basic elements of the universe
are senseless, valueless, and purposeless, materialism has yet been able to explain how
these elements combine to give rise to living organisms that are purposeful and experience
the world around them.
White had thought scientific materialism, in positing the basic elements of the universe
to be senseless, valueless, and purposeless material entities, had fallen victim to what
he called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
He defined such a fallacy as the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete, which
can alternately be stated as the erroneous assumption that one’s abstract concepts describe
reality as it actually exists.
To try and make this difficult idea clear, we are going to take a slight detour to make
sure the terms used in this fallacy are clearly understood.
First of all, a concept is simply an idea of something, such as a computer, a tree,
or an atom.
One way some have suggested we form concepts is through the process of abstraction.
So for example, to form the concept of a chair means not thinking of the particular details
of a specific chair, but only of what is required for a chair to be a chair.
A certain color, size, or weight is not a requirement for something to be a chair, so
we abstract away these characteristics to get to those characteristics which are essential
for a chair to be a chair, such as it being an object which we can sit on.
In contrast to a concept formed by abstraction, a concrete is the thing that actually exists
out there in reality.
Not the idea of it we have formed in our minds, but rather the thing in all its glory.
With the terms clear we can see what Whitehead is suggesting.
As we noted earlier, scientific materialists assume that the universe is composed of material
elements which are senseless, valueless, and purposeless, or in other words, wholly inanimate.
Materialists assume that their concept of the basic elements is an accurate depiction of the
concrete basic elements, or in other words, the elements which actually exist in reality.
Whitehead, however, thought this interpretation was seriously lacking. In forming their concept
of the basic elements of the universe, Whitehead believed that scientific materialists were
abstracting away fundamental and essential characteristics of reality,
characteristics he thought were essential to explaining the emergence of
life. In other words, it is because materialists have falsely assumed that
their concept of the basic elements of the universe actually depict the
elements as they exist in reality, that they have fallen victim to the fallacy
of misplaced concreteness. Now this does not mean that by committing such a
a fallacy, the materialist doctrine and its abstractions are worthless. Rather, it points
to important limitations of such a paradigm. The assumption that the universe is composed
of senseless, valueless, and purposeless material entities works perfectly fine if one has the
goal of calculating the trajectory of billiard balls, or of how much fuel is needed to travel
to the moon. But in trying to explain and account for the emergence and existence of
life, the doctrine of materialism seems to lead to a dead end. Because of materialism’s
inability to account for the existence of life, Whitehead called for the development
of a new metaphysical vision of the universe. The field is now open for the introduction
of some new doctrine of organism, which may take the place of the materialism with which,
since the 17th century, science has saddled philosophy. Such a displacement of scientific
materialism, if it ever takes place, cannot fail to have important consequences in every
field of thought. In order to create such a metaphysical system, Whitehead thought it
was necessary to utilize a source of knowledge that is intimately accessible and familiar
to us, one which scientific materialists completely ignored, that being our own experience. Nietzsche,
who died approximately 25 years before Whitehead’s call for the development of a new metaphysical
system in fact developed an alternative, that being his doctrine of the will to power.
Similar to Whitehead, Nietzsche thought that in order to formulate an adequate metaphysical
explanation of the universe, it was necessary to start from that which is most accessible
to us, our own experience.
It was in fact by turning his gaze inwards and analyzing his own experience that Nietzsche
came to conceive the world as will to power.
As he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil,
“…supposing that nothing else is given as real but our world of desires and passions,
that we cannot sink or rise to any other reality but just that of our impulses, for thinking
is only a relation of these impulses to one another, are we not permitted to make the
attempt to ask the question whether this which is given does not suffice for understanding
even the so-called mechanical or material world?”
Nietzsche wanted to understand the ultimate constitution of reality by analyzing his own impulses, desires, and passions.
As he believed that we could learn something about reality by looking into and analyzing ourselves.
Whitehead too advocated a similar method. He claimed that
We seem to be ourselves elements of this world in the same sense as our other things that we perceive.
Since we are elements in the universe which share the same essence as the things we perceive,
We can learn something about these things by looking into and analyzing ourselves.
In utilizing their bold and somewhat similar methods, Nietzsche and Whitehead came to the idea that the basic elements of the universe have a
primitive form of experience, a view which in philosophy is now termed
pan-experientialism. It is important not to interpret this idea as saying that the elements have consciousness, or
even that they perceive the world around them. Rather,
Rather, such a view merely postulates that they have an experiential aspect, or what
Nietzsche called a primitive and rudimentary inner will.
The victorious concept force, he said, referring to the materialist view of the universe, still
needs to be completed.
An inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate will to power, i.e., as an insatiable
desire to manifest power.
Nietzsche thus put forth an alternative view of nature which, unlike materialism, did not
create a seemingly unbridgeable void between the living and non-living.
As for Nietzsche, far from being inanimate, senseless, and purposeless, reality was composed
entirely of elements which have an inner will, or in other words, which are in a sense alive.
To conclude this lecture, it is important to note that one of the central characteristics
of Nietzsche was his skepticism and anti-dogmatism.
Even with respect to his own ideas and theories, he viewed them as perspectives and interpretations,
and not as ultimate and absolute truths.
In Beyond Good and Evil, after speaking of his doctrine of the will to power, he wrote,
Granted, this is only an interpretation too.
And you will be eager enough to make this objection?
Well then, so much the better.
Source: Academy of Ideas