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Friday, October 14, 2011
Vitalism and Mechanism: Bennett and Bryant
Levi Bryant recently expressed reservations about Jane Bennett’s measured vitalism in Vibrant Matter: “The Lucretian materialist in me is extremely uncomfortable evoking agencies and principles that are not susceptible to materialist explanation.” I expressed some reservations, saying, in effect, that it wasn’t clear to me that his position was so very different from Bennett’s. He, in turn, expressed some exasperation with my admittedly rather sketchy comments: “It’s also rather difficult to have a discussion with you on this matter as you’re taking up no position of your own so I’m unable to know what alternative you’re proposing.”
The purpose of this post is to explain why I’m taking no position of my own.
In short: because I don’t know what matter is and so I couldn’t possibly know the proper forms of material explanation.
How could you not know what matters is? you ask. Surely that’s just some sort of rhetorical ploy.
I suppose there is a bit of a rhetorical ploy. But my puzzlement about matter is real, though perhaps of an odd type. It’s an extension of one of my standard examples, the difference between salt and sodium chloride.
But they’re the same, aren’t they?
Materially, almost, but not quite the same. Conceptually, not at all.
What do you mean by conceptually?
The notion of sodium chloride, NaCl, is embedded in an atomic theory of matter that emerged in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. That’s when people, a very small group of people, first conceptualized ordinary salt as a compound consisting of molecules containing a single sodium atom and a single chlorine atom. Prior to the creation of this theory no one conceptualized salt in that way.
OK, I think I follow. But what do you mean that salt and sodium chloride are not quite the same material when that theory defines them to be so?
Well, sodium chloride is, by definition, a pure substance. But actually existing salt is almost never – and perhaps never, I don’t really know – never pure. In any given volume of salt there’s always going to be traces of other substances. Not all the molecules will be sodium chloride molecules.
Aren’t you being a little picky?
No, I don’t think so. Impurities matter. They matter to chemists and they matter to cooks.
But what does that have to do with your professed ignorance about matter?
Well, it’s easy enough for me to talk of sodium chloride as being embedded in a certain conceptual framework. But I haven’t really internalized that framework. I had some of it back in high school chemistry, but I’ve forgotten most of that. So I can’t really think in terms of those concepts. I just know that they exist and that they’re different from my common sense concepts of the world.
Well, it’s the same thing with matter.
How so?
Well, I certainly have lots of experience with material stuff, with solids (“earth”), liquids (“water”), and gases (“air”). And when I think of matter as being made up of atoms I’m really thinking in terms of grains of sand, or pollen, or salt, or sugar, except really really small and ‘pure.’
But I don’t think that’s how physicists think of these things. Back in high school chemistry, and then physics, I learned that atoms consisted of a nucleus of protons and neutrons and that electrons orbited around this nucleus. So atoms are mostly empty space. Which means that this very solid chair I’m sitting in is mostly empty space. It’s a swiss cheese tissue of mostly nothing with bits of something here and there.
So you’re saying that your view of matter is mostly the commonsense view, like ‘salt’, while the specialized concepts of physicists are much different, more like ‘NaCl’.
Yes. MUCH different. And I don’t have any useful intuitions about them. Yes, I know that matter and energy are interconvertable according to Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc^2. But those are mostly just symbols to me. I can’t work with them in any deep way.
And everything is both a wave and a particle.
Yes, but again, just words to me. I don’t really know what’s going on. The quantum world is just weird. I mean those Feynman diagrams have subatomic particles taking little backward jaunts in time, we have entanglement, non-locality. It’s all strange, and all I know is what I’ve read in the pop science literature, and that doesn’t count for much. I can’t do any interesting intellectual work with those concepts.
What the heck can I make of wave/particle matter/energy non-local backward jaunting swiss cheesy stuff? ‘Cause that’s what matter seems to be.
But doesn’t Bryant more or less admit that when, after the billiard ball example he says “isn’t this a wildly simplistic notion of matter and what is possible for matter?”
Yes, it does. Though he doesn’t quite spell it out, but he does have those nice video clips of chemical clocks. And what he says about those clocks
is that we don’t need any “vital principle” to explain these sorts of processes. These are entirely ordinary material processes requiring no mysterious agency to take place. In this regard, rather than suggesting that there’s some sort of vital life that resides in matter, wouldn’t it be better to say . . . that matter is able to produce life? Aren’t the phenomena of life just more complex versions of these sorts of self-organizing processes and chemical clocks?
He’s right, of course, invoking a vital principle doesn’t explain anything. But you see, I’m wondering if ‘vitality’ isn’t simply a descriptive property that Bennett’s introducing to differentiate a more or less commonsense notion of matter as itty bitty chunks of stuff from the wave/particle matter/energy non-local swiss cheesy stuff that science presents to us.
I think I see what you’re getting at. At the end of the vitalism/mechanism chapter Bennett notes (p. 80): “Driesch and Bergson both believed that nature, irreducible to matter as extension in space, also included a dynamic intensity or animating impetus.” So you’re saying that matters-as-extension-in-space is more or less the commonsense notion of matter as itty bitty stuff
Yes.
and that she’s using vitality as a way to talk about how a more contemporary conception is quite different.
I think, yes, that’s a reasonable interpretation. But it’s not at all clear to me that she thinks of this vitality as some outside agency, as Bryant implies. It seems to me she thinks of it as immanent in matter. Bryant, on the other hand, prefers to talk about complexity and self-organization. But aren’t they too just labels? Do they actually explain anything? That’s not at all clear to me.
That is, it seems to me that we’re dealing with both mere definition and with substantive ideas and I don’t know how to parse the difference. Bennett and Bryant use different language, but I’m not sure the underlying concepts are so very different. I just can’t tell.
And it would be possible to go through the same routine with the concept of mechanism. In the commonsense world we have ordinary mechanical mechanisms, pulleys and levers, old-fashioned lawn mowers, grand father clocks and so forth. They give us certain intuitions about mechanism. But when we talk about computers as machines, of virtual machines, that’s something else, a different conceptual world. And the ‘mechanisms’ of life? What conceptual world is that?
No, I find all this very strange, but interesting too.