Definition of Bifurcation of Nature

What is Bifurcation of Nature?

Alfred North Whitehead's term for the problematic creative achievement of the western metaphysics of Science (as an Apparatus/Dispositif). The extended practices of the modern scientific Dispositif bifurcates reality into two distinct domains: an objective, physical realm of basic “stuff” – the so-called building blocks of the universe – and the universe of subjective, meaning-laden, human experience (from sense experience, to values, aesthetics, and ethics). And in this logic, only the basic building blocks of reality are really real – the rest is a type of useful fiction given our universal objective human nature. An example: The grass is objectively just molecules, but what we experience – the greenness of the grass, the smells, the coolness to touch, the emotions and values – this is a psychic addition we create that is not “out there” – not really real. This leads to a type of meaning crisis where value is exiled from reality itself.

In this logic reality is a given which we can know objectively, while how people and cultures might experience and value this objective reality is ultimately subjective – a question of belief: “you believe that the grass is green… and you might also believe it has a soul – but that is just your beliefs, the green you see is just in your head, no where else – and these beliefs and experiences have nothing to do with the hard facts about reality…” 

This highly abstract creative production of a view from nowhere is a very sophisticated achievement that requires enormous systems and efforts to move out of direct experience to create such a worlding (see: Apparatus/Dispositif). But direct experience is both primordial – gives rise to abstractions – and cannot be taken out of the looping process of abstraction (see: Worldmaking). Meaning and value are inherent in the practices of living. These abstractions and processes key to a scientific metaphysics are of a worlding and not a view from nowhere – they are the achievements of a specific mode of being alive (worlding) that cannot claim a precedence over others.

This bifurcation metaphysics is the root of a form of the modern global West's worldblindness and world-denying logics. And they are a key part of the reason that creativity, meaning, and experience get systematically expelled from the world and reduced to human, ultimately individual subjectivities.

See also: Worldmaking, Worldblindness, Explaining Away, World-Denying, Apparatus/Dispositif, Common Interests