Rupert Sheldrake’s notion of morphic resonance was never really about physics. It was about memory — but a kind of memory that could not be located in any brain, gene, or archive. What he was trying to name was the world’s own capacity to remember itself.
That claim, in the idiom of twentieth-century science, sounded outrageous. Yet the intuition was profound: that form is not merely produced; it is re-produced. Every new leaf, crystal, or behaviour recurs not because its cause is repeated, but because its pattern has already been construed.
Where Sheldrake faltered was not in the intuition itself, but in the metaphors he inherited. He spoke the language of fields and energies, because that was the only idiom available to a scientist seeking credibility. But the field he sought to describe is not an energetic medium; it is a relational potential — a system of constraints on what can come to be.
The problem of mechanism
Sheldrake’s “morphic field” tries to solve a real impasse in modern biology: how does the form of an organism arise from the play of matter? Genes code, cells signal, tissues differentiate — yet none of this explains form as form. Morphogenesis, the becoming of form, implies a coordination that exceeds any single causal chain.
His answer was to imagine fields that remember past forms, and through “morphic resonance,” guide present forms to cohere with them. But this move trapped him between metaphysics and mechanism: either the field was causal (and therefore measurable) or it was mystical (and therefore unscientific). Neither satisfied.
A different reading: intuition as ontology
Relational ontology lets us rescue what was worth keeping. Instead of treating morphogenetic fields as things that exist and exert influence, we treat them as systems of potential — theories of possible instances.
In this frame:
-
A “field” is a structured possibility space, not a hidden force.
-
“Resonance” is not transmission, but reflexive alignment between construals.
-
Memory is not stored content, but persistence of relational structure.
The world, on this view, does not remember by retaining data; it remembers by maintaining patterns of alignment through which new instances can be actualised.
Form as remembered construal
Seen this way, Sheldrake’s “field that remembers” becomes a statement about the continuity of construal: the way potential aligns with its own past without transmitting anything through time. Form is a reflexive recurrence — an echo not of matter, but of meaning.
Beyond the scandal of sympathy
When we cease to imagine the world as a collection of separate objects, “morphic resonance” ceases to be scandalous. It becomes the natural condition of a relational cosmos: that patterns cohere because they are phases of the same underlying potential.
Sheldrake’s field does not need to send signals; it only needs to remain coherent. The task is not to find its particles, but to articulate its grammar.
Next: From Field to Potential
The next post translates this intuition fully into relational terms. We will re-define morphogenetic fields as systems-as-theories-of-instance and morphic resonance as reflexive alignment — showing how Sheldrake’s “memory of nature” can be re-actualised without invoking occult causation.
No comments:
Post a Comment