Natural Philosophy as a Disciplinary Imaginary
As we have seen, Renaissance and early modern natural philosophy located what would now be described as ‘natural science’ within a broader theological, ethical, and affective context, which offered a loose conceptual or imaginative unification of the many facets of the natural world, while encouraging attentiveness to each of its aspects. This was not seen as a contrived unnatural alliance of divergent disciplines, but simply as an appropriate imaginative correlation of multiple facets of a complex world. Some such form of interdisciplinary engagement, whether known by that term or not, can be seen throughout intellectual history.1
We begin our reflections on how we might retrieve a viable concept of natural philosophy by stepping into the third of Popper’s worlds, which is made up of human intellectual constructions and artefacts—products of the human mind such as scientific theories, moral values, languages, mathematical constructions, and socially shared ideas about certain ‘things’. Although Popper’s ‘World Three’ was initially regarded with suspicion by his critics, it is increasingly being recognized as the ‘keystone of his thought, holding its arches together, unifying and extending his ideas, allowing a comprehensive vision of our place in the universe’.2
The Greek term theōria, which underlies our modern term ‘theory’, has the deeper sense of ‘beholding’ or ‘contemplating’, a term which enfolds both gaining a deeper understanding of the world and developing appropriate practices within it. There is a direct continuity here with the use of the term to refer to contemplation in religious contexts, as the widespread use of theōria in early Greek-speaking Christianity makes clear.3 Yet as we noted earlier, Aristotle tended to consider theōria as sterile and pointless (pp. 21–2), in that it seemed to serve no useful purpose in advancing human happiness. This judgement can now be seen as having been superseded in the light of the growing recognition of the importance of a sense of coherence and perception of wholeness for human mental well-being.4
The act of discerning order within the world and being able to make connections often relieves metaphysical anxiety, reassuring us of the possibility of responsible and rational inhabitation of the world. The point of a good scientific theory is to identify patterns and establish connections within nature. In his first novel, C. P. Snow—a physical chemist who later gained fame as a novelist—spoke of the sense of coherence and beauty that resulted from reflecting on Dmitri Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of the Elements (1869). The chemical world could be seen in a new way, in which the surface experience of disorder gave way to a deeper sense of ordered elegance.
For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes – as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden. “But it’s true,” I said to myself. “It’s very beautiful. And it’s true.”5
Some philosophers have noted the relationship between discerning coherence and experiencing resilience. Iris Murdoch, for example, wrote of ‘the calming whole-making tendencies of human thought’,6 evident in our attempts to discern patterns within our world, and impose a coherent structure upon it. Although Murdoch does not use this phrase, she recognizes the importance of an ‘inner consilience’—an imagined unification or correlation of what initially appears to be discordant and disconnected. Murdoch is, of course, aware that this can easily become the act of imposing an order of our own desiring and making, and consequently stresses the importance of a truthful attentiveness to the natural world, which helps us break free from self-serving myths and habits of thought. Nature can serve as a decentring corrective to human self-referentiality. Yet the most important discussions of the impact of theory on human well-being originate from within psychology, in response to the empirical evidence that suggests that finding coherence within the world or meaning in events promotes human well-being, and enables us to cope with trauma in life.7
Nature is not seen directly, but seen through an informing theōria. We do not simply ‘see’ nature; we see it as something. William Whewell argued that we do not see nature as it is, but rather approach it through a theoretical gateway: there is ‘a mask of theory over the whole face of nature’.8 The act of observation incorporates an assumed and often unacknowledged commitment to a theōria, which—like Bacon’s ‘Idols of the Mind’—might prevent us from seeing nature as it really is.
The remarkable transition from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican worldview over the course of the seventeenth century highlighted a theme which is essential to any proper understanding of a natural philosophy. Observation is not a neutral process, but is shaped by assumptions, explicit or implicit, about what is being observed. The recognition of the theory-laden nature of observation has highlighted the point that an apparently ‘natural’ or ‘unbiased’ beholding of the natural world is actually informed and to some extent determined by an assumed theory.9 Part of the ‘paradigm shift’ described by Thomas Kuhn involves seeing the world through a new theōria and appreciating the difference this makes. As Kuhn points out, a new theory allows us to observe things in a new way, displacing an older way of interpreting and envisaging the world—with significant cognitive and affective consequences. ‘Before [Copernicanism], the sun and moon were planets, the earth was not. After it, the earth was a planet, like Mars and Jupiter; the sun was a star; and the moon was a new sort of body, a satellite.’10
Kuhn’s point is that the phenomena were unchanged; they were, however, seen in a new way. One observer might ‘see’ the sun rise and set; another might ‘see’ the earth turning on its axis, leading to the apparent motion of the sun across the heavens. The history of science offers many examples of the same object being seen in different ways as the result of using different theoretical lenses. For example, on 3 December 1714, John Flamsteed, the British Astronomer Royal observed a faint star in the constellation of Taurus, only just visible to the naked eye, which he catalogued as ‘34 Tauri’; on 13–14 March 1781, the British astronomer William Herschel observed the same object, and realized it was a planet, now known as Uranus.11
The point to appreciate is that seeing is not a mechanical act of visual capture, comparable to a photographic image; rather, it presupposes a ‘hermeneutical consciousness’ (Hans-Georg Gadamer), in that seeing is an act of interpretation, which elicits the kind of responses that Popper located in World Three—such as languages, theories, concepts, and symbolic systems of representation and meaning.12 And, as Aristotle rightly pointed out, theōria allows us to envisage a particular way of understanding ourselves and our place in the world, and thus links theōria with its appropriate ēthos and askēsis. For example, a Christian theōria leads to nature being seen as divine creation, thus pointing to the need to live according to this view of reality, and developing practices or disciplines that consolidate this way of seeing things.13 There is thus an implicit connection between theōria and praxis—a connection that was made explicit by Gadamer.
We have already noted the importance of theōria to classic Greek philosophers. For many today, the word ‘theory’ has overtones of detachment and abstraction, allowing ‘the subject to stand over against the object’.14 If this is the case, it would seem that an appeal to theōria is of little use in dealing with this bifurcation between the divergent approaches to nature now offered by science and the humanities, which contrasts with the more holistic vision of natural philosophy.
As an example of this bifurcation, we may consider the tensions in mid-nineteenth-century England between those who saw nature in essentially objective scientific terms, and those who stressed its subjective impact on the beholder, especially in terms of arousing a sense of beauty and wonder. The former assumed that ‘the world of natural objects, of bare, clear, downright facts, is unproblematically given’;15 the latter regarded this as unacceptably reductionist, failing to give due weight to the aesthetic and affective impact of nature on humanity. The human observer is affected by the act of observation. The point to appreciate is that theory does more than link observations in the mind of the beholder, enfolding and connecting them with epistemic filaments, like those of Whitman’s ‘Noiseless Patient Spider’;16 theory also connects the human observer with nature, rather than merely establishing connections between one observed aspect of nature and another.
Gadamer points out that, in its original classic Greek context, theōria was not concerned with an abstract and detached spectatorial account of the world; it rather gives rise to a transformative contemplative journey with specific moral outcomes.17 ‘Theorizing’ was not understood as an impartial and detached apprehension of an object at a distance, but was ultimately an act of self-transformation, in that it created a redefined sense of the individual self.18 This point is echoed by Martha Nussbaum, who observes that there are limits to a constant critical detachment towards texts or the world; at points, we have to allow or force ourselves to be receptive and ‘porous’ to what is being encountered.19
In retrieving these aspects of the classical notion of theōria in his essay ‘In Praise of Theory’, Gadamer argues that, while the prevailing sense of ‘theory’ is now that of detached observation,20 this is a significantly diminished account of the classic notion.
We must ask a double question: is there perhaps more to theory than what the modern institution of science represents to us? And, is practice too perhaps more than the application of science? Are theory and practice correctly distinguished at all when they are seen only in opposition to each other?21
Theory is ‘seeing what is’; yet this seeing is an act of interpretation. It is a ‘hermeneutic concept which means that it is always referred back to a context of supposition and expectation’.22
Gadamer notes Aristotle’s emphasis on the human desire for knowledge, partly in order to survive, but more importantly to flourish and achieve happiness. Yet while Aristotle held that our ‘greatest joy’ lay in such knowledge, Gadamer stresses that he also knew the importance of human practices arising from this way of ‘seeing’ (Schauen), thus holding theory and practice together.23 Gadamer stresses that the term ‘theory’ has its origins in the observation of Greek religious festivals, in which the observer was also a participant in these events. ‘The type of vision that Gadamer associates with theōria is not that of a neutral observer, whose emphasis is on the control of an object or to turn it to their own purposes by explaining it, but rather involves participation and more relational experience.’24 Theōria does not denote a singular detached act of observation ‘that establishes what is present’, but rather involves attentive participation in what is found to be present.25
Gadamer argues that the bifurcation between the ‘theoretical’ and the ‘practical’ is in fact a modern development, which does not adequately capture Aristotle’s assumption of the fundamental interconnection of theory and practice.26 ‘Both Aristotle and Gadamer equally acknowledge the inseparability of the practice of understanding and theoretic awareness. This hermeneutic circle that mutually defines theory and practice transforms our understanding of both theory and practice.’27
Gadamer’s retrieval of theōria offers both an intellectual and a pragmatic stimulus to holding together theory and practice, as well as the intellectual and affective dimensions of the human engagement with the natural world. Emphasizing that theōria simultaneously enfolds observation and participation, Gadamer expands the category of theory to go beyond scientific and utilitarian instrumentality, enabling it to engage areas of life that lie beyond the scope of objective science. ‘The possibilities of science are limited in a far more fundamental way. There will always be areas that fundamentally cannot be approached by objectification and treated as methodical objects. Many of the things in life are of this kind.’28 In his revisionist account of the notion, Gadamer presents theōria as bridging theory and practice on the one hand, and objective and subjective aspects of the human engagement with the world on the other. This can easily be mapped onto Popper’s ‘World One’ and ‘World Two’.
Gadamer’s reflections also allow an easy alignment with Pierre Hadot’s signature claim that the philosophy of the Hellenic age was fundamentally understood and enacted as ‘a way of life’ (une manière de vivre) based on a set of practices intended to foster both discourse and behaviour that accorded with a right understanding of nature and the good life.29 A disciplined contemplation of the world enabled human self-transformation, leading to forms of practices and disciplines which served to foster wisdom.
Ancient philosophy, and the “science” it made possible, was first and foremost about the advocacy for a way of life and the disciplines that enabled its practitioners to live well (however that was conceived). Theoria, the way of seeing being recommended by a philosophical school, was inextricably connected to an ethos or way of being in the world.30
This leads us to reflect further on how we are to understand natural philosophy as such a ‘way of seeing’, which is an imaginative undertaking that is clearly located within Popper’s ‘World Three’.
During the 1990s, the notion of ‘imaginaries’ began to gain traction as a way of visualizing the ways in which individuals hold together multiple aspects of a complex reality. This idea emerged in the later writings of Jacques Lacan, who used the term imaginaire to designate a human subject’s capacity to achieve integration of seemingly disconnected experiences.31 Where many philosophers offered objective theoretical accounts of this process, which can be justified on rational grounds,32 others have argued that this is really about understanding how individuals imagine their social and personal worlds.33 This turn from third person objectivities to first person subjectivities places a new emphasis on the role of the imagination in organizing perceptions of the world.34 Perhaps the most familiar of this category of approaches is the ‘social imaginaries’, which is particularly associated with the philosopher Charles Taylor.
Reacting against the pre-eminence of epistemology in modern philosophy, Taylor points to the importance of ‘social imaginaries’ in shaping how we see the world and visualize its multiple aspects. Drawing on Heidegger’s notion of Verworfenheit, Charles Taylor argues that we find ourselves ‘thrown into’ an historically given way of thinking and imagining. Taylor’s point is that we inherit or embrace a way of seeing things, and subsequently rationalize this, providing a theoretical justification for connections that are already present in this ‘social imaginary’.35 While the intellectual visions of Kepler, Boyle, and Newton appear to have been shaped by prevailing ‘social imaginaries’ that regarded such a richer outcome as culturally natural and intuitively plausible, many today would suggest that this attitude is no longer ‘given’, but now has to be reconstructed through an act of reimagination.
Yet we are not trapped by or within existing or inherited imaginaries; these are products of the human mind that can be recreated and reinvented. For Cornelius Castoriades, one of the earlier advocates of the idea of a ‘social imaginary’, such imaginaries are autonomous self-constructions, and thus are not to be seen as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. A new social imaginary can thus be constructed and inhabited, through a process of interrogating our own constructions and thus creating a new social world through imagining a preferable alternative.36 This work suggests that we might retrieve an older vision of natural philosophy through challenging prevailing disciplinary imaginaries, and constructing alternative ways of imagining the natural world. Natural philosophy can be retrieved as a ‘disciplinary imaginary’, whose intellectual coherence is created within the mind of the observer, rather than imposed by the force of prevailing academic conventions.
As we shall see, there are some important outcomes of seeing a retrieved natural philosophy in this way. In her important study of the role of ‘imaginaries’ in constituting our experience of the world, Kathleen Lennon makes the point that such ‘imaginaries’ offer us frameworks for organizing our experience of the world, and allowing us to engage both its cognitive and affective senses. An ‘imaginary is the shape or form in terms of which we experience the world and ourselves; a gestalt which carries significance, affect, and normative force’.37 It allows us to connect up aspects of our experience of the world, in that they are not merely the way we think about that world; they are also the means by which we ‘feel our way around’ that world.38
Lennon’s account of an imaginary thus allows us to see ways of connecting Popper’s ‘World One’ and ‘World Two’ through something that belongs to his ‘World Three’. The objective and subjective aspects of the natural world are thus engaged through an imaginative lens that is not observed or experienced, but is constructed—not in isolation from observation and experience, but as a means of enfolding and affirming them.
The imaginary texture involves a gestalt, a schema or organizing form, which we find in the world as experienced by us. This gestalt we have suggested, following Kant and Merleau-Ponty, is neither imposed nor simply discovered, but emerges from a creative interplay between corporeal subjects and the world within which they are placed, and to which they are sensible.39
Lennon does not consider the realm of the imaginary to be ‘a domain of illusion posited in opposition to a “real”; it is rather that by which the real is made available to us’.40 An imaginary is not something that we whimsically and arbitrarily impose upon the natural world; rather, it emerges plausibly from our interaction with that world. Lennon’s position is open to criticism;41 it does, however, open a way of holding together themes that are intuitively seen to be interconnected, with a view to exploring their relationships, and the outcome of this more expansive way of engaging the world.
This observation helps us understand how we can imagine a domain which extends across present disciplinary boundaries—boundaries that arose for specific historical reasons, yet which can be transcended imaginatively, even if they remain an important means of obtaining and structuring both our knowledge of the natural world, and the academic structures within which this is researched and taught. The increasing tendency to speak of ‘disciplinary imaginaries’ highlights concerns about potentially arbitrary boundaries between different areas of knowledge production,42 which leads to the isolation and fragmentation of discussions that properly transgress such boundaries—including many that were once enfolded in the generous conceptual space of ‘natural philosophy’. It emphasizes that there are no ‘right’ articulations of disciplinary boundaries, and invites the development of individually satisfactory reimaginations of intellectual territories. Historically, disciplines tend to fragment and diversify, often for highly pragmatic reasons. Yet there is no good reason why a wider disciplinary imaginary should not be conceived, countering this tendency towards increasing specialization, which would be capable of encouraging dialogue across multiple domains of interest and concern.
The concept of a ‘disciplinary imaginary’ can be used as an interpretative lens to understand how seventeenth-century writers—such as Kepler, Galileo, and Boyle—envisaged the intellectual domain of natural philosophy, seeing it as enfolding philosophy, theology, physics, biology, astronomy, mathematics, and—in Kepler’s case—music. These three writers offered, not so much a personal synthesis of these fields, but a personal imagined vision of their interconnectedness—a ‘disciplinary imaginary’, which they and others in this cultural location found both intuitively plausible and intellectually satisfying.
The case of Newton is particularly instructive. While some older accounts of Newton suggested that his synthesis of theology, philosophy, and science reflected a rigorous intellectual framework, more recent studies suggest that there is ‘no support for the notion that there is some simple conceptual or methodological coherence to his work’.43 Newton’s concept of natural philosophy appears to represent a personal assimilation of its multiple components, in effect representing an individual disciplinary imaginary that resonated with others during this formative period.
One of the chief virtues of retrieving this disciplinary imaginary is its receptiveness towards multiple disciplinary conversations and correlations, opening the way to potentially enriching approaches to fields such as environmental ethics, natural law, science and religion, and scientifically engaged philosophies and theologies.44 Natural law, for example, can be understood as resting on the belief that the cosmos has a moral, and not merely a physical, order,45 thus extending the scope of its investigation beyond the natural sciences. This idea is encountered in many forms, including the Confucian notion of seeking ‘harmony’ with heaven and earth.46 This would enable reconnection across such artificial disciplinary divides, and recapture something of the original spirit of natural philosophy, which links attentiveness to the natural world with the acquisition of both understanding and wisdom. It does not require abandoning present-day understandings of disciplinary identity and integrity, but rather to imagine how they might be brought into productive conversation and correlation.
In this chapter, we have sketched some aspects of Popper’s World Three—the world of human mental creations, which enable us to make sense of what we observe around us, and experience within us. Yet these theories and imaginaries do more than help us understand our world; they encourage and facilitate a deeper level of engagement with nature, which is conducive to human wisdom, flourishing, and well-being. In the next chapter, we shall turn to consider Popper’s ‘World One’, the objective world of objects that exist around us.