A.N. Whitehead observed that “there is no nature at an instant.”1 This is to say that nature cannot really be perceived synchronically any more than a colour can be perceived in utter darkness. Nature, in other words, can only be grasped through a diachronic perspective. A sculpture, as a finished product, is not this way because time is not inherent to what a sculpture is. Space, on the other hand, is indeed inherent to what the sculpture is. Put another way, if you removed space, the sculpture would go along with it, like a colour with light. Music, by contrast, is diachronic, as is the formation of the sculpture. In other words, time is inherent to these phenomena. If a researcher were only capable of conceiving synchronic cross-sections of phenomena, his ontology would look very different from that of one who was able to follow the evolution of phenomena through time, thereby grasping their diachronic structure. The first will only be adequate to apprehend the products of nature’s activity and not their processes and energies of production; natura naturata and not natura naturans. The scope of diachronic “depth perception” will also condition his perception of phenomena and, by extension, his conception of nature and of existence as such. For instance, a researcher able to conceive of events lasting one minute will be adequate to perceive the destruction of a statue by iconoclasts, or activists, but not its sculpting.
In The Idea of Nature (1945), R.J. Collingwood suggests that the lack of a metamorphic idea of nature and the correlative deficiency in diachronic depth-perception is directly responsible for the pervasive forecasts of “universal heat-death” by physicists and their characterizations of the ineluctable march of entropy. Collingwood argues that if scientists took seriously many of the fundamental theories in their fields, like particle physics and Darwinian evolution, they would arrive at a metamorphic idea of nature that would corroborate Whitehead’s statement. Of course, it does no good to pour new wine into old wineskins and hence, a transformation of how we see nature will only follow from a transformation of how we look at nature. As Goethe observed, “If we wish to behold nature in a living way, we must follow her example and become as mobile and plastic as nature herself.”
It is virtually certain that such a transformation of vision—from theorizing to theoria—will not be limited in its disclosure power to nature as we currently conceive of it. Put another way, “nature” as we currently conceive of it may give way to a new idea of nature that compasses much of what we now regard as beyond nature. Owen Barfield hints at this connection in the penultimate chapter of Saving the Appearances:
I believe that the blind-spot which posterity will find most startling in the last hundred years or so of Western civilization is, that it had, on the one hand, a religion which differed from all others in its acceptance of time, and of a particular point in time, as a cardinal element in its faith: that it had, on the other hand, a picture in its mind of the history of the earth and man as an evolutionary process; and that it neither saw nor supposed any connection whatever between the two.2
Whitehead, Nature and Life (1934), 48.
Barfield, Saving the Appearances (1965), 167.