ABSTRACT
In her work with Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers argues that recent changes in scientic practice will allow us to enter into “new dialogue with nature” (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). The basic argument is that these changes have revealed that matter is neither an inert receptacle for forms from the outside (as implied by Aristotelian science) nor a mere mass that obediently follows the immutable laws of nature (as implied by Newtonian science). On the contrary, matter, when it enters into the right alliance with energy, is an active producer of form. It needs neither eternal essences nor eternal laws to possess morphogenetic powers of its own. This new conception of matter has led Stengers to speak of a re-enchantment of nature, returning to it the magic lost by the assumptions of both essentialism and clockwork determinism, and demanding that we, humans, re-think the ways in which we interact with it. While Prigogine and Stengers ascribe the source of this change to a new conception of time as irreversible and full of contingencies, several other conceptual changes are also involved: the conceptual distinction between linear and non-linear causality, and that between equilibrium and equilibrium dynamics.
