Philosophy Beyond Spacetime Implications From Quantum Gravity Christian Wuthrich All Chapter

Philosophy Beyond Spacetime :
Implications from Quantum Gravity

Christian Wüthrich
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Philosophy Beyond Spacetime

Philosophy Beyond
Spacetime
Implications from Quantum Gravity
Edited by
C H R I ST IA N W Ü T H R IC H ,
BA P T I ST E L E B I HA N ,
and
N IC K H U G G E T T
1
3
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844143.001.0001
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Figures ix
List of Contributors xi
1. Introduction 1
Christian Wüthrich, Baptiste Le Bihan, and Nick Huggett
2. Levels of Spacetime Emergence in Quantum Gravity 16
Daniele Oriti
3. On Dualities and Equivalences between Physical Theories 41
Jeremy Butterfield
4. From Quantum Entanglement to Spatiotemporal Distance 78
Alyssa Ney
5. Taking Up Superspace: The Spacetime Setting for Supersymmetric
Field Theory 103
Tushar Menon
6. Thinking about Spacetime 129
David Yates
7. Finding Space in a Non-Spatial World 154
David J. Chalmers
8. Explanations of and in Time 182
Alastair Wilson
9. Do You See Space? How to Recover the Visible
and Tangible Reality of Space (Without Space) 199
Jenann Ismael
10. The Measurement Problem for Emergent Spacetime
in Loop Quantum Gravity 222
Richard Healey
vi contents
11. The ‘Philosopher’s Stone’: Physics, Metaphysics, and the Value of

a Final Theory 235
Kerry McKenzie
12. Problems with the Cosmological Constant Problem 260
Adam Koberinski
Index 281
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to everyone who interacted with us in the context of our project
Space and Time After Quantum Gravity. All the speakers and participants at
the events we hosted contributed immensely to the project’s success. We owe
special thanks to the contributors of this collection. In particular, we would like
to acknowledge the winners of our essay contests: in this volume the outstanding
chapters by Adam Koberinski and Tushar Menon. The interdisciplinary nature of
the collection required significant efforts of intellectual openness in addressing
audiences and in working from perspectives that differed for many from their
usual work. We also thank our assistants for their help and the contests’ anony-
mous judges for their valuable feedback and considered recommendations. The
final preparation of this volume also owes a lot to our editorial assistant at the
University of Geneva, Gaia Valenti, whose help was invaluable. We thank the staff
at OUP, in particular Peter Momtchiloff, Céline Louasli, Kalpana Sagayanathan,
and Sally Evans-Darby for their help in the production of the collection. Finally,
we acknowledge the financial support from the John Templeton Foundation for
making the project and this collection possible.
List of Figures
3.1. Equivariance of duality for dynamics: for states and quantities 51

4.1. AdS/CFT correspondence 80
4.2. Ryu–Takayanagi cut 81
4.3. Minimal surface 81
4.4. Closed surface in the AdS bulk 83
4.5. Tangent curve extended to the CFT boundary 83
4.6. Minimal surface variation 90
4.7. Eternal AdS black hole spacetime 91
4.8. Static case 93
10.1. The observer observed 230
List of Contributors
Jeremy Butterfield, Trinity College, University of Cambridge

David J. Chalmers, Department of Philosophy, New York University
Richard Healey, Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona
Nick Huggett, Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago
Jenann Ismael, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University
Adam Koberinski, Department of Philosophy, University of Waterloo
Baptiste Le Bihan, Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva
Kerry McKenzie, Department of Philosophy, University of California at San Diego
Tushar Menon, Department of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
Alyssa Ney, Department of Philosophy, University of California at Davis
Daniele Oriti, Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics, Ludwig Maximilian
University of Munich
Alastair Wilson, Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham
Christian Wüthrich, Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva
David Yates, Centro de Filosofia, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa
1
Introduction
Christian Wüthrich, Baptiste Le Bihan, and Nick Huggett
Abstract
Quantum gravity offers a fertile ground for philosophical work, particularly

through its suggestion that spacetime may not be fundamental but merely a
derivative structure. As such, theories of quantum gravity stand in a long tradi-
tion of physical theories with deep implications for the nature of space and time,
and indeed the fundamental structure of our material world. This Introduction
summarizes the contributions to this collection by structuring them around
three themes. The first group of chapters analyses various aspects of the search
of lost spacetime in quantum gravity. The second group studies metaphysical
and epistemological aspects of the emergence in play in quantum gravity. The
third group widens the investigations to several key methodological challenges
arising in the context of quantum gravity.
Contemporary physics has much to teach us about the nature of space and time,
as has become obvious with the advent of relativity theory at the latest. What is
less obvious is that the relativistic revolution may only have been the first step
in a longer process of deconstructing our pre-theoretical categories of space and
time. In fact, attempts to unify the lessons of general relativity (GR) with the
other great revolution of the twentieth century in physics, quantum physics, into
a theory of quantum gravity (QG) suggest a rather strange idea: that space and
time as we know them do not fundamentally exist, but instead emerge from a non-
spatiotemporal structure. Thus, the physics under construction, which we hope
will one day provide a more unified and fundamental view of reality, could lead
to a novel understanding of the nature of space and time, radically opposed to
everything previously believed. This volume is the result of our conviction that
this stunning consequence, difficult as it may be to conceptualize, could genuinely
change the way in which many discussions in philosophy are conducted—say, on
the existence of space, the flow of time, or the boundaries of space and time, to
name but a few examples. Hence the title of this collection: Philosophy Beyond
Spacetime.
Christian Wüthrich, Baptiste Le Bihan, and Nick Huggett, Introduction In: Philosophy Beyond Spacetime: Implications from
Quantum Gravity. Edited by: Christian Wüthrich, Baptiste Le Bihan, and Nick Huggett, Oxford University Press.
© Christian Wüthrich, Baptiste Le Bihan, and Nick Huggett 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844143.003.0001
2 introduction
The current situation in contemporary physics results from a long historical

journey. As we have already mentioned, two revolutions took place in physics
during the twentieth century: special and then general relativity, and quantum
physics. The first gave a new understanding of gravity as a feature of the geometry
of space and time, with dramatic philosophical consequences: the relativity of
simultaneity, the dynamical relation between spacetime and matter, the possibility
of temporal anomalies, and the existence of singularities in spacetime, for example.
The second deals with the matter that inhabits spacetime, and poses equally deep
philosophical challenges: the non-local connection between entangled systems,
the appearance of a classical world, the very existence of particles. While being of
enormous empirical power and accuracy, both have raised deep and unresolved
philosophical and foundational questions—as the ever-expanding literature on the
subjects attests.
There is as yet no generally accepted unified theory of quantum matter and
gravity, capable of describing all phenomena that need to be understood. Quan-
tum matter cannot easily be described as interacting with classical relativistic
spacetime. But it seems as if matter and geometry must be closer in nature than
they are in the two separate theories. By itself, this observation gives us reason to
think that a successful theory of QG will raise similarly important challenges for
our conceptions of space, time, and matter—perhaps abolishing them altogether
as fundamental entities. Although such a theory does not yet exist, we may
nevertheless see the silhouettes of coming changes in the fragmentary theories
that do exist, and come to understand new possibilities for epistemology and
metaphysics. But just as important, there is good reason to think that some of
the problems in finding a theory of QG are themselves conceptual, in need of
philosophical analysis by philosophers and physicists—just as relativity required
Einstein’s reconceptualizing of the nature of space, time, and motion, and as
quantum mechanics was driven by the competing pictures of Schrödinger and
Heisenberg.
This volume is one of the fruits of a three-year research project, Space and Time
after Quantum Gravity (2015–18), funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The
project involved both physicists working on the physics of QG and philosophers
working on this topic or related notions in contemporary philosophy. We have
selected a few outstanding works, the fruit of intense discussions over several
years, and we have divided them into two volumes. One—Beyond Spacetime: The
Foundations of Quantum Gravity (Cambridge University Press, 2020)—deals more
with philosophical questions arising in the technical development of different
approaches to QG. The other volume—this one—is more directly concerned with
the implications of QG for questions traditionally seen as more philosophical in
nature. Of course, this distinction is gradual at best and often blurred—not the
least in foundational research in QG. Several of the chapters of either collection
christian wüthrich, baptiste le bihan, and nick huggett 3
could equally well have been included in either volume. To a first degree of
approximation, the companion volume, which requires more technical skills in
physics, addresses a wider range of physicists, while we hope to reach many
philosophers beyond the narrow confines of technically demanding philosophy
of physics with the present volume.
The key aim of this volume is to expand knowledge and understanding of
the philosophy of QG by the philosophical community. It emphasizes how
debates in metaphysics—regarding time, emergence, composition, or grounding,
for example—shed light on the conceptual questions of QG; and conversely,
how quantum theories of space and time call into question philosophical views
grounded in classical spacetime. Furthermore, the philosophy of QG raises
methodological questions, for instance concerning the relation between physics
and metaphysics. The essays in this volume have been chosen to demonstrate to a
wide range of philosophers the significance of the subject, as well as making novel
contributions to it.
The essays are organized around three main subjects: (i) the possible emergence
of spacetime in various approaches to QG, (ii) philosophical (especially metaphys-
ical and epistemological) discussions of the nature of this relation of emergence,
and (iii) a final section devoted to methodological aspects of the philosophy of QG.
The remainder of this Introduction sketches these topics and the contributions.
1.1 Searching for Spacetime
The first series of chapters explores various approaches to QG and examines how
spacetime might emerge in these specific approaches. The first chapter categorizes
the way in which spacetime can be said to emerge from a more fundamental
but less spatiotemporal structure into qualitatively different levels and exemplifies
them in the context of loop quantum gravity (LQG). The first three chapters all aim
to clarify, and perhaps to some extent downplay, claims of emergence of familiar
spacetime structures in this context. The last chapter, in contrast, proposes that
the classical notion of spacetime would have to be generalized if nature turns out
to be supersymmetric.
The first chapter by Daniele Oriti proposes a levels view of the emergence
of spacetime in QG. According to Oriti, the emergence of spacetime comes in
degrees, where ‘degree’ or ‘level’ is not to be understood ontologically as meta-
physical layers or a sequential succession. Rather, levels are intended to indicate
a broadening of the perspective on the problem, such that at each step, novel
conceptual, methodological, epistemological, or ontological issues show up as the
complexity and the richness of the physics increase. He identifies four distinct
levels of emergence of spacetime and of the gravitational field, and offers the
4 introduction
helpful analogy of the emergence of hydrodynamic properties of (super)fluids

from its atomic constitution.
The first level, Level 0, covers classical GR and direct quantizations of its
geometric degrees of freedom. Already at the classical level, there is a sense in
which space and time dissolve, as the general covariance of classical GR implies
that, generically, there exists a multitude of notions of space and time. Moreover,
in the Hamiltonian formulation of GR required for canonical quantization, there is
a ‘problem of time’ in that time and dynamics appear to vanish altogether. Even so,
the fundamental degrees of freedom are still spatiotemporal, or geometric. These
difficulties are exacerbated at the quantum level, where superpositions of exact
geometric configurations are permitted. In the hydrodynamical analogy, Level 0
would correspond to the construction of macroscopic hydrodynamic observables
as functions of different ones, with their quantization adding difficulties. Follow-
ing Carlo Rovelli, Oriti believes that these challenges can be resolved by deploying
a relational strategy.
Level 1 complicates this picture by adding new, distinct kinds of degrees of
freedom, which are neither spatiotemporal nor geometrical in any direct sense.
Typically, the fundamental degrees of freedom are combinatorial or algebraic, and
show no continuum structure. Many theories of QG, such as LQG, string theory,
causal sets, and causal dynamical triangulations, are naturally interpreted to at
least ascend to this level. While the explication of emergence at Level 0 involves
the classical limit, to see spacetime emerge at Level 1, the continuum limit—to
be carefully distinguished from the classical limit—must be taken (usually via
coarse graining or renormalization). Unlike the other levels, Level 1 includes an
ontological aspect in that the postulated new kinds of degrees of freedom form
a novel ontological category. This level is directly analogous to the move from
macroscopic hydrodynamics to the grainy world of the atoms which constitute
the fluid.
Levels 2 and 3 do not proceed to a novel, qualitatively distinct kind of degrees
of freedom. Instead, they involve different conceptual perspectives on the same
basic ontology. Level 2 starts from the realization that the continuum limit is often
not unique, but leads to distinct macroscopic phases separated by possible phase
transitions. Not all such macroscopic phases will be geometric or spatiotemporal.
What needs to be shown to resolve this level is that there exists a spatiotemporal
phase in some approximation and some limit. In the case of such non-trivial
macroscopic phase diagrams, spacetime, argues Oriti, can be said to be emergent
in a more radical sense compared to Level 1. In the hydrodynamic analogy, one
and the same system can condense into different macroscopic phases such as solid,
fluid, and gaseous, and will only obey hydrodynamic laws in one of them.
Finally, the existence of distinct macroscopic phases leads to the possibility
that the system undergoes a phase transition. Thus, a system may transition
from a non-spatiotemporal to a spatiotemporal or geometric phase, sustaining

a ‘geometrogenesis’. This is what may occur in quantum models of the big bang
where one can distinguish an ‘earlier’, non-spatiotemporal phase from a ‘later’,
approximately spatiotemporal one. While this transition ought to be regarded as
a physical process, the difficulties involved in conceptualizing these transitions as
physical yet non-temporal processes justify regarding them as Level 3 transitions.
In comparison, appreciating the physical nature of phase transitions in the hydro-
dynamic analogy seems more straightforward.
Oriti’s categorization of qualitatively different kinds of spacetime emergence
gives useful guidance to a field which has so far only started to appreciate the
systematically different kinds of issues involved at the different level of emergence.
Jeremy Butterfield’s chapter addresses the nature and significance of ‘dualities’
in physics. These symmetries attracted a great deal of interest amongst physicists
when they were discovered in string theory in the 1990s, sparking the ‘second
string revolution’. More recently they have been the subject of intense scrutiny
by philosophers, for their implications for the interpretation of string theory
(for a general overview aimed at philosophers, see Le Bihan and Read 2018).
For instance, Huggett (2017) argues that duals should be understood as fully
equivalent descriptions, so that any apparent differences are non-factual. If so,
the T-duality between theories with different radii for the universe means that
fundamentally space has no definite radius, and, developing a line of thought
proposed by Brandenberger and Vafa (1989), the observed definite radius must
be emergent.
Butterfield argues that such reasoning should be resisted. Drawing on work by
(and with) Sebastian De Haro (e.g. 2020), he first gives a formal account of ‘duality’:
broadly speaking, two theories are dual when they are different formal representa-
tions of a common ‘bare theory’. For instance, one can represent the same system
of moving bodies in frames of reference with different origins, orientations, and
states of rest. There is an isomorphism between the two representations that allows
one to see how they are describing a common set of quantities in the same way.
However, this formal mapping says nothing by itself about whether one of the
representations is right about absolute rest, or whether there is in fact no standard
of absolute rest.
Such questions are a matter of the interpretation of physical theory, in this case
the two duals. Do they automatically say the same things, or disagree substantively?
Butterfield (and De Haro) therefore invoke a formal theory of interpretation, in
which reference is handled by actual worldly extension, and sense by extension
across possible worlds. Of course, in this framework, whether the duals say the
same things depends on their intended sense: Newton’s ‘space’ has an absolute
standard of rest, which Newton hypothesized to be that of ‘the centre of the world’.
Of course, in that sense of ‘space’, one could meaningfully disagree with him, even
6 introduction
though Galilean symmetry means that no experiment can settle the issue. Similarly
for T-duals: one could in principle understand their difference as either merely
representational or as real. For Butterfield, until we have a theory that explicitly
unifies them, revealing the underlying bare theory, we must understand them as
disagreeing about the actual world. Those advocating for emergence will disagree,
arguing that one can in suitable circumstances infer that duals agree factually, even
absent an explicit underlying theory (e.g. Huggett and Wüthrich 2020).
In her chapter, Alyssa Ney asks whether there is evidence for the emer-
gence of spacetime—specifically metrical—structure from quantum entanglement
entropy: this is an idea that has received recent attention (for instance, Cao et al.
2017). A starting point for this way of thinking (though related ideas go back
further) is the Ryu-Takayanagi conjecture that ‘holographically’ relates the entan-
glement on the boundary of anti-de Sitter spacetime to an area in the bulk, using
the AdS-CFT duality. (Specifically, the entropy arising from the entanglement
between the conformal fields in two regions on the boundary is directly related to
the area of the minimal surface in the bulk that separates them.) It is quite striking
that two things as disparate as quantum entanglement—which at root measures
the ability to factorize vectors in Hilbert space—and metrical quantities can be
related in this way. It is an insight that led Cao and co-authors to describe how to
reconstruct a spatial metric from an abstract quantum system.
Such an idea strongly suggests emergence. The quantum structure, from which
the spatial structure is supposedly recovered, is seemingly non-spatial, as we
noted. However, as Ney explains (drawing on the earlier work of others), that
conclusion is hasty, for the mere correspondence does not entail emergence.
Amongst other possibilities, which, if either, of the two sides is more fundamental?
The correspondence alone does not tell us that it is the Hilbert space side. If, Ney
argues, one looks at the derivation of the Ryu-Takayanagi conjecture, the reasoning
seems, if anything, to show that it reflects the way spatial structure constrains
the quantum entanglement. (And, she claims, similarly in earlier derivations of
the Hawking-Bekenstein entropy that also relate entropy and area: e.g. Bombelli
et al. 1986.) In that way of looking at things, space seems to be at the same level
as entanglement. Thus, she concludes, these derivations of space from Hilbert
space do not support the claim of emergence. Of course, that is not to say that
they are incorrect, or that there may not be other motivations for seeking to
derive space in this way: for instance, one might hope that by starting from
such a solidly quantum foundation, one might eventually recover emergent GR,
thereby providing a route to a full theory of QG. But Ney’s claim is that such
motivations are future-oriented speculations, not at present well supported by
metric-entanglement correspondence.
According to what Tushar Menon calls ‘Earman’s principle’, dynamical and
spacetime symmetries ought to coincide in a theory. Thus, if the dynamics of
matter is Lorentz covariant, as is the case for the standard model, then the
appropriate spacetime venue for the theory is one which is Lorentz symmetric,
i.e. Minkowski spacetime. If it turned out to be the case that matter enjoys an
additional, and hitherto undetected, symmetry, the spacetime should follow suit
and be generalized accordingly.
In his contribution, Menon explores the possibility that matter is supersym-
metric, which is the case if the theory’s Lagrange density remains invariant under
transformations mapping bosons to fermions and vice versa. As it turns out,
such transformations ‘mix’ with spacetime translations in the sense that repeated
applications result in a net translation in spacetime. Menon concludes from this
that supersymmetry is inherently spatiotemporal, giving us all the more reason
to extend the spacetime arena for supersymmetric physics. Such a superspace
consists in a ‘supermanifold’—constructed from commuting and anticommuting
‘supernumbers’—endowed with a ‘super-Minkowski metric’. The reward for for-
mulating supersymmetric physics in superspace is that the resulting equations of
motion are manifestly supersymmetric, allowing the theory to wear its symmetry
on its sleeve.
As it turns out, the light postulate of special relativity is violated in such a
supertheory: the speed of light is no longer invariant in all superspace coordinate
systems. Menon concludes from this that we should be hesitant to read off the
operational information concerning the behaviour of measuring devices such as
rods and clocks made from supersymmetric fields from the structure of super-
space. Maybe so, but this might alternatively be counted as a strike against the
extension of Earman’s principle to the supersymmetric context.
1.2 The Metaphysics of Spacetime Emergence
That space and time or spacetime might emerge from a non-spatiotemporal

structure seems frankly puzzling—and difficult to articulate conceptually. Hence
the second series of selected chapters, devoted to the philosophical analysis of the
claim that spacetime is emergent. The series comprises four chapters written by
David Yates, David J. Chalmers, Alastair Wilson, and Jenann Ismael, respectively.
They discuss the prospects of analysing the dependence of spacetime on a non-
spatiotemporal structure via a relation of functional realization (an important
milestone in a debate which is gaining momentum—cf. the forthcoming special
issue of Synthese on the topic, edited by Karen Crowther, Niels Linnemann,
and Christian Wüthrich), a relation of causation, or even the possibility to fully
eliminate spacetime from the furniture of the world.
In his contribution, David Yates examines the problem of empirical incoher-
ence in QG: if spacetime is not part of the fundamental ontology of physics, how
8 introduction
is it possible for fundamental physical theories to be justified by observations of

spatiotemporally located things like rods, pointers, and clocks? As a solution to the
problem, he distinguishes between views that accept and reject the reality of a spa-
tiotemporal structure over and above the more fundamental non-spatiotemporal
structure. Drawing lessons from the philosophy of mind, he argues that we should
adopt a form of realism about the dependent spatiotemporal structure in order to
solve the problem of empirical incoherence.
This dependent spacetime, according to Yates, can either be grounded in
or caused by the more fundamental non-spatiotemporal structure. Thus, Yates
sees spacetime as a set of functional roles implemented by a more fundamental
structure, a view called ‘spacetime functionalism’, which was developed in the
context of QG by Lam and Wüthrich (2018). The spatiotemporally located things
that act as evidence for physical theories are thereby regarded as being real entities
caused by, or grounded in, more fundamental non-spatiotemporal entities. Yates
thereby makes a case for a specific sort of spacetime functionalism that takes
the existence of spatiotemporal roles, ontologically speaking, very seriously—
against another sort of spacetime functionalism, more linguistic in nature, that
regards spatiotemporal roles as mere linguistic roles some predicates occupy in
the architecture of the theory. The view is at odds with Linnemann (forthcoming)
who argues that spacetime functionalism as a general view does not help with the
problem of empirical incoherence.
David J. Chalmers focuses first on the emergence of space rather than of
spacetime with a focus on philosophy of mind and the possibility of identifying
what he calls ‘Edenic space’—namely, space as we immediately find it in the
manifest image of the world—with real physical space. His main claim is that we
should be functionalists about the manifest image, and that we should not expect
the Edenic space of the manifest image to faithfully mirror the structure of the
physical space. Rather, we should construe space as the structure triggering (our
experience of) the manifest spatial image. In other words, Chalmers argues against
what he dubs ‘spatial primitivism’, namely the view that space is just as it appears in
the manifest image. He favours instead spatial functionalism—the view that space
is what causes the Edenic space of the manifest image.
The move from spatial primitivism to spatial functionalism has major fallouts,
not only for the status of the physical space in which we live but also for other
sorts of more abstract spaces involved in virtual reality experiences. Indeed, he
argues that the rejection of spatial primitivism in favour of spatial functionalism
has a straightforward consequence: virtual spaces should be regarded as real
spaces, functionally implemented by an ontology to which we have no direct
epistemic access via our experience of the virtual reality. Then he moves on to
analysing the interpretation of spacetime in the context of GR and of the relation of
emergence existing between the relativistic spacetime and the more fundamental
non-spatiotemporal structure of QG. Likewise and in line with other works, he

discusses the strategy of finding spatiotemporal functional roles in the general
theory of relativity before turning to quantum theories of gravity to identify the
realizers of these roles. There again, he defends the view that the functionalist
strategy justifies realism about the spacetime of GR. Drawing from discussions
about the existence of an explanatory gap between a non-spatiotemporal theory of
QG and a theory of GR, Chalmers then focuses on the possible existence of another
explanatory gap, this time between GR and the manifest image; he argues that
spacetime functionalism may close this gap. In brief, according to him, we should
free our ontology from Edenic space assumptions; but we should nonetheless be
realists about a functional physical space, identified with the structure that triggers
our experience of Edenic space.
Alastair Wilson also examines spacetime functionalism as a way to analyse
the dependence of spacetime on a non-spatiotemporal structure. He begins with
the following question: should we construe the dependence of spacetime on the
non-spatiotemporal structure as causal or non-causal? As Wilson points out,
distinguishing between causal and non-causal relations—also called ‘grounding
relations’—requires a demarcation criterion. This criterion is supposed to allow
us to decide, in the face of a relation of dependency, whether this relation is causal
or not. An intuitive demarcation criterion is related to time. Causation would
refer to cross-temporal dependency relations—the two relata of the relation being
located at different times—and grounding to synchronic dependency relations—
the two relata being located at the very same time. As Wilson notes, if this temporal
demarcation principle were to be right, then it would follow that the emergence of
spacetime cannot be causal (and not grounding either), since time doesn’t exist at
the fundamental level—thereby preventing us from identifying the dependence of
spacetime on the non-spatiotemporal structure to a causal relation.
But Wilson takes another road as, drawing on previous work (Wilson 2018),
he rejects the temporal criterion and proposes an alternative mediation criterion:
causal relations are dependence relations mediated by a law of nature, while
grounding relations are mediated by constitutive principles—what it is to be a
particular thing or kind of thing. This suggests that we can use our understanding
of what it is to be a law of nature to grasp the distinction between causation
and grounding. Of course, as Wilson acknowledges, this amounts to replacing
questions about the nature of dependency relations with questions over the nature
of those mediating principles. For instance, if we construe causal relations as
relations mediated by a law of nature, then we need to understand what a law of
nature is—without appealing to causation, at risk of vicious circularity—which
might or might not be problematic, depending on which of the two notions one
takes to be more fundamental. Nonetheless, it is an important result that the
difference between grounding and causation can be illuminated this way as we
10 introduction
can then analyse, in some approaches, emergent spacetime as being caused by a

non-spatiotemporal structure.
As Wilson notes, this idea might surprise the reader as, at first sight, it seems
at odds with the common assumption found in the literature that spacetime
does not emerge via a causal process, causation being too tightly related to the
existence of space and time (a possible exception could be found in cosmological
models based on QG; see e.g. Huggett and Wüthrich 2018). Usually, this relation
of dependency is considered to be both non-temporal and non-causal, either
because it is a primitive relation of grounding (i.e. not to be specified further
via another relation) or because it is a relation of mereological composition.
But Wilson’s new criterion suggests that spacetime could literally be caused by
a non-spatiotemporal structure, in particular in LQG. Wilson then shows that
there is a way to avoid this surprising consequence by using the functionalist
machinery. Spacetime functionalism offers a new way to interpret the situation in
LQG, spacetime being functionally realized—a constitutive principle—and hence
grounded in, rather than caused by, the non-spatiotemporal structure, according
to the mediation criterion. Wilson closes with a discussion of the many-instant
landscape view defended by Gomes (2017). According to this view, the world is
a ‘timeless’ state space of spatial field configurations. Wilson argues again that
the existence of spacetime in this approach should be regarded as mediated by
a functional principle and so, because of his demarcation principle, as grounded
in the non-spatiotemporal structure.
In her chapter, Jenann Ismael argues for an expansive view of what the ‘emer-
gence of spacetime’ might amount to, which opens an unnoticed and perhaps
surprising route to recovering spacetime. It is typically assumed that conscious
experience will be recovered from fairly high-level physics, so that reduction from
any lower physics can (with a sigh of relief) ignore the mind—to be taken care
of later. Ismael cites Maudlin (2007) as an example of this position. Since the
physics which is supposed to explain the mind is spatiotemporal, the corollary
is that physical space itself will have to be recovered from any non-spatiotemporal
theory—as programmes in QG typically assume.
However, of course all that need be recovered, strictly speaking, is the conscious
experience of spatiotemporality. If one assumes that that is given immediately in
experience, then the result is the same—physical spacetime must emerge. But,
Ismael argues, spacetime is not at all immediately experienced. Empirical studies
support the view—which has antecedents in Berkeley, Poincaré, and Mach (on
whom she focuses)—and provide evidence that the concept of spacetime is a
construct from experience. More specifically, different sensory modalities present
different perspectives on the physical world, each in its own ‘sensory manifold’.
But the mind unifies these through sensory and motor interaction with the world,
finding that a representation in which they are viewed as different takes on a single
spatiotemporal world simplifies their relations greatly. (The significant plasticity

in this unification shows that it is not a fixed given.)
The upshot of course is that strictly speaking, a theory without spacetime is not
required to deliver spacetime itself, but only to explain the sensory modalities, to
recover the sensory manifolds. Then the brain itself will take care of spacetime,
which would be recognized as a mere appearance. Ismael notes that such an
account would fit a functionalist model: the functions of the modalities could be
found to be played by the non-spatiotemporal. She does not necessarily advocate
such a strategy, but argues that it should be recognized to understand the epis-
temology and goals of spacetime emergence. At first glance the strategy appears
radical, but Ismael points out that it may not be so far from what has already been
suggested. For instance, Rovelli (1991) suggests a strategy of recovering rods and
clocks instead of spacetime: it is not such a great leap to consider instead recovering
‘information gathering and utilising machines’, cashed out functionally in non-
spatiotemporal terms (see also Baron 2020).
1.3 Methodological Issues
The last series of chapters reflects the diversity of works in the growing community
of philosophy of QG. If a central issue in QG is the conceptual articulation of the
potential emergence of spacetime, many other issues in QG arise along the way.
With this last section, we want to invite philosophers to delve deeper into those
other questions related to the construction of a theory of QG—and thus to draw
their attention to a number of points that could have important repercussions for
many philosophical questions.
The first chapter by Richard Healey deals with the perhaps most famous
problem in the foundations of quantum mechanics, the measurement problem.
However, it does so in the context of one specific approach to quantum gravity,
LQG, raising the difficult question of whether or not we should solve the mea-
surement problem in order to make progress with QG. The second chapter by
Kerry McKenzie focuses on the connection between physics and philosophy, and
on the possibility of obtaining metaphysical knowledge from the current state
of physics where we lack, one must note, a final theory applying to all domains
of observation. The final chapter by Adam Koberinski examines a deep puzzle
about vacuum energy, sometimes called the ‘vacuum catastrophe’ or ‘cosmological
constant problem’. The problem arises from a clash between the value of the
vacuum energy we calculate via quantum field theory—which must be extremely
high—and the value we get from cosmological data when we observe the way
the energy is distributed in the observable universe, suggesting an extremely
low value.
12 introduction
These three issues, although quite different, may serve to show just how fertile
research in the philosophical foundations of QG is for very different questions,
traditional and new, technical and fundamental.
Richard Healey’s contribution discusses critically, but sympathetically, Carlo
Rovelli’s relational interpretation (1996) as a way to solve the quantum measure-
ment problem in the context of (covariant) LQG. Although Rovelli was of course
one of the main architects of this theory, Healey shows that there are significant
tensions between the two. Healey believes that these can be overcome in his own
pragmatist approach to quantum physics.
Rovelli’s relational interpretation of quantum mechanics departs from von
Neumann’s notion of a measurement resulting in a correlation between the initial
state of the ‘system’ and the final state of the ‘measurement device’. In Rovelli’s
interpretation, there is no place for an absolute and objective state of a system;
instead, all states are relational in that a system is in a state only relative to another
system, which may be an observer who has or gains knowledge about the first
system. Consequently, Rovelli rejects the idea that there is such a thing as the
complete description of the total state of the world.
Applying the relational interpretation to covariant LQG, Rovelli and Vidotto
(2015) propose to understand its transitions between spin network states as phys-
ical processes enclosed between interactions between systems whose boundaries
are ultimately conventional. It is these processes which are ultimately nothing but
spacetime regions. The resulting ‘relational loop quantum gravity’, Healey argues,
struggles to accommodate the concept of an observer capable of registering the
outcomes of measurement interactions as it deals exclusively in spacetime regions
(and their conventional boundaries). Since observers are not mere spacetime
regions, more work is required to show how they (and thus von Neumann
measurements) can be modelled in the context of relational LQG.
As one of the morals to be drawn, Healey concludes that the characterization of
observing or measuring systems needs to be established as emergent in LQG. In
this sense, he requires the emergence of spacetime for the quantum measurement
to be resolved. As he notes, this is in disagreement with Wüthrich (2017), who
argues instead that the emergence of spacetime in QG requires the resolution of
the measurement problem, not the other way around.
The second chapter of this series, by Kerry McKenzie, begins with the obser-
vation that many philosophers dream of a final physical theory of everything
that will answer some of the deepest and most intriguing metaphysical questions.
For instance, is time really flowing or is it just a perceptual artefact of the way
we experience a static four-dimensional world? Is there a sort of modal glue
connecting events in a systematic way and explaining why the world seems to
obey some laws of nature? We do not have such a final, absolutely fundamen-
tal theory, but this situation does not prevent metaphysicians from engaging
in metaphysical activity by using constraints from empirically well-confirmed

physics.
McKenzie argues that this kind of naturalized metaphysics is problematic. If we
step back and look at theoretical physics as a whole, we can see that the empirically
well-confirmed theories on which it is based should ideally be replaced by another
more fundamental, and perhaps definitive, theory. Until we find this Holy Grail—
assuming that it exists—we are stuck in a far from ideal epistemological situation.
Indeed, it seems difficult to reliably draw metaphysical knowledge from the current
state of physics. Why should we trust our currently most fundamental physical
theories to give us empirical access to the fundamental structure of the world?
After all, we know that those theories are not absolutely fundamental.
After characterizing her preferred sense of ‘naturalistic metaphysics’, McKenzie
shows that claims in metaphysics had to change their truth value as science, and
especially physics, progressed. With regard to the classic debate between scientific
realists and anti-realists, she argues that friends of scientific realism may appeal
to the notion of approximate truth and argue that certain structures are preserved
by the change in theory and, therefore, can be seen to justify certain claims about
the world. McKenzie goes on to argue that this notion of approximate truth is of
little use in dealing with more metaphysical issues. Indeed, metaphysical questions
(say, regarding the existence of past and future entities) are often ontological
or substantive questions that are difficult to answer in terms of approximation.
McKenzie concludes that the value of engaging in metaphysical speculation based
on our currently most fundamental physical theories is unclear.
We believe that this situation offers a powerful motivation to shift our attention
from the well-established theories of physics to QG. Indeed, McKenzie’s challenge
to naturalized metaphysics does not necessarily oblige us to wait for the develop-
ment and empirical confirmation of a final theory. Le Bihan (2020), for example,
argues in response to McKenzie that we can obtain substantial metaphysical
knowledge from speculative physics by examining the field of QG as a whole and
looking for features present in all or almost all approaches to QG.
The final chapter, by Adam Koberinski, engages with a topic at the interface
of QG and cosmology. The notorious ‘cosmological constant problem’ concerns
what some physicists have labelled the ‘worst prediction in physics of all times’:
theoretical expectations for the value of the cosmological constant Λ based on
considerations from particle physics overshoot observational limits anywhere
from 50 to 120 orders of magnitude (depending on a choice of ‘cutoff ’). The
problem arises because quantum field theory seems to suggest that empty space
has an enormous energy density, which, according to GR, ought to manifest itself
in the geometry of spacetime, coupling to the Einstein equation as a cosmological
constant term, inflating the latter to gargantuan proportions inconsistent with
observations.
14 introduction
After clarifying what exactly the problem is supposed to be, Koberinski argues
that this argument ought to be resisted at each turn. First, he shows that there is
little basis on which to accept an objective zero-point energy scale in quantum
field theory and hence to take the vacuum energy as real. Second, even if one did
accept this, the vacuum energy turns out to be badly divergent on standard renor-
malization procedures and hence does not deserve to be trusted. Third, it turns out
that there exist more rigorous ways of coupling quantum field theory to GR than
is assumed in the standard argument to the cosmological constant problem, and
that under these approaches, vacuum energy, and so the cosmological constant
problem, does not arise in the first place.
In the last part of his contribution, he shows that even assuming that all these
steps to the cosmological constant problem can be justified, the presently domi-
nant attempts to solve it all fail. These attempts include ‘naturalness’ approaches
such as supersymmetry, apparent violations of the equivalence principle (for
example, due to higher dimensions as we find them in string theory), or statistical
avenues based on anthropic reasoning or quantum statistical considerations. All
of this leads Koberinski to the sobering conclusion that the cosmological constant
problem has not been established as an actual problem, and physicists taking it as
a heuristic to develop new physics may well be barking up the wrong tree.1
References
Baron, S. (2020). The curious case of spacetime emergence. Philosophical Studies 177,
2207–2226.
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for black holes. Physical Review D 34(2), 373–383.
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Physics B 316(2), 391–410.
Cao, C., S. M. Carroll, and S. Michalakis (2017). Space from Hilbert space: Recovering
geometry from bulk entanglement. Physical Review D 95(2), 024031.
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1007/s11229-020-02722-z.
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pp. 257–283. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1 Grant number 56314 from the John Templeton Foundation, performed under a collaborative
agreement between the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Geneva. The contents of
the work produced under this grant are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily
represent the official views of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Quantum Gravity 34(23), 235004.
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Springer.
2
Levels of Spacetime Emergence
in Quantum Gravity
Daniele Oriti
Abstract
We explore the issue of spacetime emergence in quantum gravity by articulating

several levels at which this can be intended. These levels correspond to the
reconstruction moves that are needed to recover the classical and continuum
notion of space and time, which are progressively lost in a progressively deeper
sense in the more fundamental quantum gravity description. They can also
be understood as successive steps in a process of widening of the perspective,
revealing new details and new questions at each step. Each level carries indeed
new technical issues and opportunities, and raises new conceptual issues. This
deepens the scope of the debate on the nature of spacetime, both philosophi-
cally and physically.
2.1 Introduction
The problem of quantum gravity is terribly multi-faceted and can be characterized

in very different ways. It is the problem of obtaining a quantum theory of geometry
and spacetime, a complete quantum description of gravitational phenomena. This
is the common understanding: a possibly modified version of quantum mechanics
should provide the mathematical framework of the theory and the object of the
theory should be the gravitational interaction and the geometry of spacetime. The
latter have been inextricably linked by General Relativity (GR) and nobody expects
this link to be eliminated in a more fundamental quantum gravity theory. Beyond
this common understanding one finds a variety of perspectives, which is moreover
rapidly changing over time. This variety of perspectives, in turn, corresponds to
a variety of approaches (Oriti 2009). One could identify two main schemes, each
comprising several specific formalisms: one corresponding to the idea of quantum
gravity resulting from quantizing a classical theory of geometry and gravity (e.g.
GR) (Teitelboim 1982; Thiemann 2001; Kiefer 2006), the other in which spacetime,
Daniele Oriti, Levels of Spacetime Emergence in Quantum Gravity In: Philosophy Beyond Spacetime: Implications from
Quantum Gravity. Edited by: Christian Wüthrich, Baptiste Le Bihan, and Nick Huggett, Oxford University Press.
© Daniele Oriti 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844143.003.0002
daniele oriti 17
geometry, and gravity are in some sense ‘emergent’ from something else (Seiberg
2007; Oriti 2014; Padmanabhan 2015). In fact, not only is the distinction very
coarse grained, but it is ambiguous since the issue of the ‘emergence’ of features of
spacetime and geometry appears also in the first scheme. The emergent paradigm
is the most recent and it is acquiring traction in recent years. Especially from
the perspective of this second scheme, the problem of quantum gravity can be
stated as: to identify the fundamental (quantum) degrees of freedom of spacetime,
the ‘atoms’ of space (or spacetime); to define a consistent quantum dynamics for
them; to show that a continuum and classical spacetime (with a geometric and
matter fields) emerges from it, in some approximation; to show that GR is a good
effective description of the dynamics of this emergent spacetime.
Quantum gravity in general, and the emergent paradigm in particular, face
a large number of conceptual issues and raise an even larger number of philo-
sophical questions (Isham 1991; Butterfield and Isham 2001; Kiefer 2013). This is
inevitable, given the fundamental nature of the problem, shaking the very founda-
tions of our thinking about the natural world, i.e. space and time. The (necessary
and useful; see Oriti 2019) existence of a number of different approaches tackling
the problem from different conceptual perspectives makes the situation more
complex still. Plus, every solution is tentative, and every approach is incomplete,
even when solid or promising. We are truly at the chaotic frontier of knowledge.
The situation for philosophical reflections is excellent. It is also very different,
however, from most philosophy of physics, since we are not dealing with the
conceptual issues arising within established (mathematically and observationally)
physical theories. The only way to deal with this peculiar situation is to exercise
extra caution in adopting the points of view coming from specific approaches to
quantum gravity as if they were more established than they are, and to refrain from
resting too much on specific results as if they were a necessary part of any future
theory. The same situation calls for more work to map this complex landscape (see
also Mielczarek and Trześniewski 2018), especially at the conceptual level. This is
what we hope to achieve with our contribution: a tentative map of the meanings in
which space and time can be understood as ‘emergent’ in quantum gravity, and of
the conceptual issues associated to this emergence, and thus a greater conceptual
clarity about these issues.
The notion of emergence is itself subtle to define, even in ordinary physical
theories (Batterman 2006, 2011; Bedau and Humphreys 2008). We will base our
analysis on a very general characterization of it, provided by Butterfield and
collaborators (Butterfield 2011a,b; Butterfield and Bouatta 2012). Emergence is
understood to be the appearance, in a certain description of a physical system,
of properties that are novel with respect to a different (more ‘fundamental’)
description of the same system, and robust, thus stable enough to represent a
characterization of the new description and to form part of new predictions
18 levels of spacetime emergence in quantum gravity
stemming from it. Emergence, in this understanding, usually requires the use of
some limiting procedure and of a number of (possibly drastic) approximations, to
allow the novel properties to become visible in the new description.
This notion of emergence is compatible with the situation in quantum gravity,
and it has been indeed already applied in this context (Butterfield 2011a; Huggett
and Wüthrich 2013; Oriti 2014). Our analysis will be based on this and on a
growing literature about the emergence of space and time in quantum gravity,
concerning both physical and epistemological issues, among which: how to char-
acterize this emergence and which physical consequences it may (or may not)
have (Maudlin 2007; Bain 2013; Huggett and Wüthrich 2013; Crowther 2014;
Huggett and Wüthrich 2018; Lam and Wüthrich 2018; Wüthrich 2019), what are
the ontological implications of emergent spacetime scenarios (Lam and Wüthrich
2013; Wüthrich 2020), and more. Like the rest of the philosophy of quantum
gravity, reflections on these issues could impact considerably, we believe, on
philosophy of physics more generally, and on metaphysics and epistemology, since
they challenge important aspects of these domains as well.
The scope and content of this contribution, however, are much more limited.
We will illustrate four levels of emergence for space, time, and geometry (thus,
the gravitational field) in quantum gravity formalisms. We discuss four ways in
which space, time, and geometry may be said to disappear in quantum gravity and,
consequently, have to emerge to recover the description provided by GR, within a
more fundamental quantum gravity formalism. These four levels have to be under-
stood as successive steps in a process of widening of the perspective, revealing
new details and new conceptual issues and new questions at each step. They also
represent a deepening of our understanding of the issue of the emergence of space
and time in quantum gravity. They should not be misunderstood as successive,
sequential ontological, or inter-theoretical steps. They are not characterized each
by different entities and they are not described each by a different theoretical
framework. On the contrary, some of them can share the same fundamental
degrees of freedom and all can be part of the same theoretical framework or
quantum gravity formalism.
Let us clarify further the way we see our four levels of emergence,1 in order to
make the following presentation clearer.
First, the word ‘levels’ suggests an ordering among them. Such ordering should
be understood in the following sense. At each step, as said, new issues emerge
and new questions need to be tackled. In other words, what increases in going
1 We use the word (and the concept of) ‘emergence’ in the sense clarified above, which we maintain
applies to all levels we will identify in the following. This being said, different and more specific notions
of emergence, as also proposed in the literature, could also be applied to the same four levels, but will
most likely apply only to some of them or differently in each.
daniele oriti 19
from one level to the next is the complexity and the richness of the required
understanding of spacetime and, correspondingly, of the understanding of its
emergence in quantum gravity. One could maybe speak instead of ‘degrees’ of
emergence, indicating again such complexity and richness of understanding and
of corresponding physical/mathematical description. This increased complexity or
richness does not correspond directly to energy/distance scales (both are in fact
spacetime-dependent notions, thus inapplicable in this context) or to metaphysical
layers (of different fundamental vs. emergent entities, which only apply to the step
from level 0 to level 1, as we will see). Thus, the ‘levels of emergence’ we speak
about correspond instead to epistemological steps that we are required to take for a
progressively improved understanding of the issue of the nature and emergence of
spacetime, the improvement itself being defined exactly by the mentioned greater
complexity and richness.
Second, we have also characterized the move from one level to the next as a
deepening of our understanding of spacetime nature and emergence. Also, the
notion of ‘depth’ of understanding that we adopt, and thus the idea of progress
hinted at above, necessitates some clarification. Our working definition is the
following. An issue is considered as understood in a deeper manner and a problem
is considered as tackled at a deeper level if they are ‘dressed’ by a more complex
network of related sub-issues and questions (the latter becoming visible, so to
speak, at ‘higher resolution’, as a finer-grained conceptual visualization of the
same issue is adopted). This does not mean that the deeper level is necessarily
more complicated than the more superficial one, in terms of ‘relevant entities’
(metaphysical) or ‘explanatory principles’ (epistemological). On the contrary, very
often the converse applies: simpler constituents may give rise to a plethora of
complex emergent phenomena, just as simple general explanatory principles may
be declined in a rich variety of concrete manners, depending on specific contexts.
On the other hand, even when the latter situations arise, we maintain that the new
‘level of understanding’ obtained by discovering simpler constituent entities or
simpler explanatory principles is more complex, and therefore deeper, because of
the increased complexity of their consequences, i.e. because the overall picture has
become richer.2
Finally, we may also characterize each successive level of spacetime emergence
as more ‘fundamental’ than the previous, in line with the usual characterization of
emergence in physical theories. It requires, though, an important caveat, following
from what we said above. Only level 1 is more fundamental than level 0 in our
classification, as we will explain, if one refers to the ontology corresponding to
2 It may be interesting to develop this notion of depth of understanding, in the context of scientific
theories, in more detail and relate it to the notion of ‘explanatory depth’ as discussed, for example, in
Strevens (2008). We leave this to future work.
each level in terms of primary/derived relations. Level 2 and level 3 are on equal
ontological footing as level 1, since the entities they refer to are the same. What
changes is their understanding/characterization and the number and nature of
questions referring to them that are tackled at each level. If instead by ‘more
fundamental’ one refers to the improvement of our understanding of the world, i.e.
a better understanding is dubbed a more fundamental understanding of it, then
indeed, each step from one level to the next in our classification is a step towards
a more fundamental level of (understanding of) reality. We also point out that the
use of such labels implies, implicitly, a picture of progress in science as motion
in the direction of increased complexity and refinement of understanding, in the
sense specified above. This is another aspect that would deserve further work.
2.2 Level 0: Classical and Quantum (Modified)

General Relativity
The zeroth level of spacetime emergence is the one corresponding to the traditional
idea of quantum gravity as ‘quantized GR’ (or variations thereof). Quantum
geometrodynamics and (Euclidean) quantum gravity path integrals à la Misner-
Hawking, as well as canonical loop quantum gravity as initially understood
(and still pursued by many), are examples of such traditional ideas. Quantum
supergravity studied as a (non-)perturbative quantum field theory is another
example, and the asymptotic safety scenario would be another, if the metric field
is maintained as the fundamental entity.
In the classical theory, we have a covariant set of equations for the spacetime
metric (identified with the gravitational field) and matter fields living on the same
differentiable manifold, following from the gravitational action of choice. These
equations encode the dynamics of spacetime.
The latter can be identified with the metric field itself or with the spatiotemporal
quantities (temporal intervals, spatial distances, etc.) computed out of it. Since
material objects are usually required to give physical meaning to such quantities,
one can instead identify spacetime with specific combinations of matter and metric
fields. One could call spacetime also the differentiable manifold itself (after all, this
is what gives the first intuitive notion of ‘spacetime point’), but this is of dubious
physical significance, since the dependence of physical quantities on individual
points in the differentiable manifold is removed by the request for diffeomorphism
invariance (Rovelli and Gaul 2000), the gauge symmetry of GR.
Diffeomorphism invariance is indeed a key mathematical ingredient at the root
of many of the conceptual difficulties about the nature of space and time in classical
GR, and which have to do with the variety of possible identifications hinted at
above (Norton 2003; Pooley 2010).
daniele oriti 21
A more physical way of characterizing these difficulties is to say that they

arise from the fact that every ingredient of the theory entering the definition of
‘spacetime’, matter, and metric fields is dynamical and that the dynamics itself,
and its generic solutions, do not select any preferred time or space direction. On
the contrary, the theory admits an infinity of equally valid local notions of time
and space (that could be associated to specific coordinate frames, but without
attributing to the latter any special physical significance).
In this sense, one can already speak of a disappearance of space and time in
classical relativistic gravitational theory (Rovelli 2020). It is bypassed, in some
sense, by the use of special solutions of the dynamics, which possess global
spacetime symmetries and thus select special spacetime directions. In fact, much
of gravitational physics rests on the use of such solutions.
At the conceptual level, this is already a big challenge to our customary concep-
tions of space and time, and raises many subtle issues, which form the subject
of a vast literature in the philosophy of spacetime (Earman 1989; Albert 2000;
Dainton 2001).
Notice that we are not distinguishing, here, between Lagrangian or Hamiltonian
formulations of the theory, even though they are not strictly speaking equivalent
(diffeomorphism symmetry is implemented in subtly different ways in the two
settings, and a canonical Hamiltonian formulation requires global hyperbolicity,
thus it is a priori less general than the covariant, Lagrangian one). We are also not
distinguishing between space and time, even though the absence of a preferred
notion of time is especially troublesome for our usual understanding of physical
dynamics and of physics more generally. These special difficulties are the ‘problem
of time’ in classical GR. These distinctions are not crucial to the main points we
want to make in this contribution.
At the quantum level, assuming a standard formulation of quantum mechanics,
the situation is much the same, just a little worse. The kinematics has states
forming a Hilbert space which encode the geometry (intrinsic and extrinsic)
of spatial submanifolds (possibly forming the boundaries of the differentiable
manifold) and the values and momenta of matter fields on them, and the possible
histories of the same states, thus the spacetime metric and the matter fields for
the whole manifold. The dynamics is encoded in some operator equation, taking
necessarily the form of a constraint equation for the same data, or in a sum-
over-histories, path-integral formulation of the ‘transition amplitudes’ or ‘2-point
functions’ between the same quantum states (e.g. those interpreted as defining
a physical scalar product for them), depending on the chosen classical action.
Again, and for the same reasons as in the classical case, no preferred space or time
direction is present in the theory, coordinate frames are unphysical, and generic
physical configurations of the quantum spacetime will also not select any. The
situation is worse than in the classical theory because even quantum states that
solve the dynamics and possess special symmetries will usually not select exact
metric or matter configurations, but mostly because a preferred time direction
is essential to the standard formulation and interpretation of quantum theory
itself, for any physical system we know of. Thus, in the quantum gravity case
we are at a loss. However, this seems to us more an important problem in the
foundations of quantum mechanics (can we build a consistent interpretation of
quantum mechanics that does not rely, even implicitly, on a notion of time?) that
any quantum gravity theory will force us to tackle, rather than new problems with
the nature of space and time themselves, which remain essentially those of the
classical theory.
At both classical and quantum levels, a solution to the problem of time and space
can be found in the relational strategy (Rovelli 1991b; Gambini and Porto 2001).
It takes on board the main lesson of GR, and it rephrases it in a way that immedi-
ately suggests a tentative solution: there is no time and no space, but only physical
(imperfect) clocks and rods. The strategy amounts to identifying internal degrees
of freedom of the complete system composed of metric and matter fields that can
be used as approximate rods and clocks to parametrize the spatial relations and
temporal evolution of the remaining degrees of freedom. To us, this is an adequate
solution3 to the issue of defining space and time in a (quantum) relativistic context,
and a very physical one (but for a sample of the remaining issues, see Page and
Wootters 1983; Rovelli 1991a; Gambini and Porto 2001). It forces us, however,
to accept the fact that physical clocks and physical rods will never be perfect, i.e.
matching the idealized (but unphysical) notion of time and space provided by
coordinate systems. This is simply the other inevitable side of their being physical
systems: quantum and interacting with the ones they parametrize.
There is thus a sense in which space and time disappear in classical GR and, in
a more drastic sense, in the quantum GR. There is thus also a sense in which space
and time have to emerge also in this context. In the classical case, this amounts to
the dynamical selection of symmetric spacetimes or to the approximation leading
to physical rods and clocks behaving as perfect ones. In the quantum case it is
part of the standard problem of the classical approximation of a quantum theory,
since the above symmetric spacetimes or geometries, and the close-to-ideal clocks
and rods, have to emerge from ultimately quantum entities. General covariance,
once more, leads to several additional complications to this notoriously already
difficult problem, but, we maintain, does not change its nature. Most of the above
3 To be clear, we do not want to imply at all that the relational strategy is uncontroversial or that it
enjoys full consensus in the quantum gravity community. Different perspectives are taken. Beside the
formalisms or perspectives in which full diffeomorphism invariance is renounced and a global notion
of time is invoked in correspondence with preferred foliations of spacetime, one can try to extract a
notion of time evolution, for example, from any (causal) ordering relation between events or boundary
configurations in a diffeomorphism-invariant path integral.
daniele oriti 23
challenges are well explored in the quantum gravity literature. But this is only level
0 of spacetime emergence.
2.3 Level 1: New Degrees of Freedom—Geometry

and Spacetime as Emergent Entities
An altogether different sense in which space and time disappear in quantum grav-
ity, and thus have to emerge in some approximation, is central in quantum gravity
approaches that do not deal simply with quantized gravitational and matter fields.
A new level is reached when quantum gravity formalisms are based on new types
of quantum degrees of freedom which are not geometric in a straightforward
way, but of a different nature, usually combinatorial and algebraic. In particular,
this often implies a fundamental discreteness of the same quantum entities. The
spin network states of loop quantum gravity (Ashtekar and Lewandowski 2004;
Perez 2013; Bodendorfer 2016), with their dual functional dependence on group
elements or group representations associated to graphs, and their histories labelled
by the same algebraic data and associated to cellular complexes, fit this char-
acterization.⁴ The simplicial (piecewise-flat, thus singular) geometries of lattice
quantum gravity approaches like quantum Regge calculus (Hamber 2009) and
(causal) dynamical triangulations (Ambjørn, Görlich, Jurkiewicz, and Loll 2012)
can also be understood in this perspective. The quanta of group field theories
(GFTs) (Krajewski 2013; Oriti 2012), which can be described both as generalized
spin networks and as simplicial building blocks of piecewise-flat geometries, and
whose quantum dynamics merges the idea of spin foam models and that of lattice
quantum gravity, are another example. Causal sets (Dowker 2013) are another
purely discrete replacement for continuum fields. String theory offers a number
of results all pointing to the replacement of the notion of continuum geometric
fields as fundamental entities (Blau and Theisen 2009) and to a much more general
type of geometry being reconstructed from the dynamics of strings (Hohm, Lüst,
and Zwiebach 2013). Other examples could be cited. The main point should be
clear: in quantum gravity, the fundamental degrees of freedom are not continuum
fields and spacetime dissolves into pre-geometric, non-spatiotemporal entities,
from which space, time, and geometry have to emerge in some approximation.
With the appearance of new fundamental (quantum) entities replacing con-
tinuum fields, call them ‘atoms of space’, an altogether new dimension opens up
for quantum gravity research. Besides identifying the properties and dynamics
of such fundamental entities, the crucial task becomes understanding by which
⁴ This is true even though, historically, they have been ‘discovered’ within a rather conservative
strategy of quantizing the gravitational field once it has been recast in the language of gauge theories.
physical mechanisms and under which approximations they become amenable to

a description in terms of continuum spacetime and geometry (and matter fields).
This is the problem of the continuum limit in discrete quantum gravity approaches.
It must be carefully distinguished, conceptually and mathematically, from the
classical limit mentioned in the previous section. It rests on coarse graining and
renormalization schemes, the identification of appropriate collective observables,
and in particular the identification of the usual continuum fields (metric, matter
fields) as examples of collective quantities built out of the more fundamental atoms
of space.
It is along this new dimension that we expect space and time to emerge in a
stronger sense from entities that are not spatiotemporal. The new physics leading
to the emergence of spacetime, more precisely, can be expected to be the one
captured by increasing numbers of interacting, quantum fundamental entities,
with space, time, and geometry arising from the collective behaviour of the same.
Collective behaviour is indeed the prototypical producer of emergent physics,
and the conceptual setup would here see spacetime in analogy with condensed
matter and quantum many-body systems (Oriti 2018). With increasing numbers of
fundamental entities, there come new emergent properties, new approximations,
and effective dynamics, and with them new concepts.
The above expansion of the scope and content of quantum gravity research
has been discussed in some detail in Oriti (2020), including also a brief survey
of recent developments. These include spin foam lattice renormalization (Dittrich
2012; Bahr, Dittrich, Hellmann, and Kaminski 2013; Bahr and Steinhaus 2017;
Delcamp and Dittrich 2017; Dittrich 2017), continuum limits in random tensor
models (Gurau and Ryan 2012; Rivasseau 2016) and dynamical triangulations
(Ambjørn, Görlich, Jurkiewicz, and Loll 2012), GFT renormalization (Geloun and
Rivasseau 2013; Carrozza, Oriti, and Rivasseau 2014; Benedetti, Geloun, and Oriti
2015; Carrozza 2016; Geloun, Martini, and Oriti 2016; Carrozza, Lahoche, and
Oriti 2017), and the extraction of effective cosmological dynamics as GFT hydro-
dynamics (Gielen, Oriti, and Sindoni 2013; de Cesare, Pithis, and Sakellariadou
2016; Gielen and Sindoni 2016; Oriti, Sindoni, and Wilson-Ewing 2016; Oriti 2017;
Gielen and Oriti 2018).
Here, we want to stress the conceptual shift that such expansion brings, con-
cerning the nature of space and time. When looked at from the point of view of
the (candidate) pre-geometric atoms of space (level 1), it is clear that space, time,
geometry, and matter have dissolved in a deeper, more radical sense than from the
perspective of quantized GR (level 0). There, one had to get rid of the idea of any
preferred notion of space and time, and a multiplicity of potential physical notions
(be they defined by special configurations of spacetime geometry or by relationally
defined frames). All such notions were made possible and had to be constructed
by means of continuum fields. They are now missing. Thus, even the possibility of
daniele oriti 25
space and time, in the sense of level 0, has yet to emerge. It has to be obtained by
moving along the new dimension of increasing numbers of fundamental building
blocks and by exploring their collective properties.
This raises a number of questions concerning the nature of the atoms of space
themselves. In particular, to what extent do they carry spatiotemporal properties
at all? The need to reconstruct space and time from them, at least in some
approximation and with respect to special aspects of their collective dynamics,
implies that they carry at least ‘seeds’ of space and time with them. By this we mean
that some of their properties should be translatable into spatiotemporal notions
at least in those approximations, even though they are not fully spatiotemporal
in general. In other words, if spacetime has to be reconstructed at all, the more
fundamental theory should allow for a dictionary, mapping its basic entities
and some of their properties into continuum fields including those defining
spatiotemporal notions, in some sector of the same theory and in an approximate
manner. The map will certainly not be one to one, or exact, but it should exist if the
candidate fundamental theory is to have any physical relevance at all. The existence
of such a dictionary, i.e. being part of the domain of this translation map, implies
a ‘proto-spatiotemporal’ characterization of some properties of the fundamental
atoms of space (and justifies their name). Nothing more than that should be
assumed, however.
A more precise characterization requires probably to consider specific examples
of candidate atoms of space and of quantum gravity formalisms. In particular,
it is possible that some properties attributed to such atoms of space, among
those that are crucial in reconstructing the standard notions of space and time,
can be understood as offering a more primitive notion of space and time (e.g.
based on adjacency, ordering, etc.), farther away from usual physics, but arguably
more fundamental. A more primitive spatiotemporal reality would then replace,
despite its radical departure from any traditional understanding (and use) of space
and time, the one that we are accustomed to. This may end up being simply
a matter of nomenclature. If the new properties are truly radically different (in
mathematical and physical understanding) from the space and time of continuum
relativistic physics, to call them ‘spatiotemporal’ may not offer more than a
psychological relief.
An important issue is the ontological nature of the new fundamental entities
underlying spacetime and, conversely, of space and time themselves, once we
deprive them of their fundamental status and understand them as emergent. In
fact, modern ontology (van Inwagen and Sullivan 2018) is based explicitly or
implicitly on spatiotemporal notions, to the point that ‘to be real’ is often thought
equivalent to ‘to exist in space and time’, i.e. to have a well-defined location
and stable duration. This already raises ontological issues concerning the fields
(in particular the metric field) that are used to define location and duration in
relativistic physics. But the same ontological issues are brought to a whole new
stage when referred to the putative atoms of space, underlying the same continuum
fields and replacing them at the fundamental level. Conversely, unless one adopts
the radical opposite of the usual position (to be real is to exist in space and
time) and thus deprives space and time of any reality at all, due to their loss of
fundamental status, one is forced to revise the very notion of reality in the presence
of emergent behaviour. One has to accept a multi-level ontology of some sort,
in which both fundamental and emergent properties and entities are real in an
appropriate sense. In other words, an emergent spacetime scenario forces a radical
revision of metaphysics in parallel with the revolution in physics that it represents,
concerning what is meant by real (which has to be independent to some extent
from spatiotemporal properties) and what this attribute is assigned to (which
probably has to be done in a more liberal and less exclusive way). For recent work
on these issues, see Butterfield (2011a,b); Butterfield and Bouatta (2012); Lam and
Esfeld (2013); Wüthrich (2020).
Another set of issues raised by emergent spacetime scenarios is of a more
epistemological nature. It concerns the physical salience of the candidate atoms of
space and of the theories describing them, and their empirical coherence (Maudlin
2007; Huggett and Wüthrich 2013; Oriti 2014). The worry is that, because we live in
spacetime and the notions of space (e.g. locality) and time (e.g. duration) are at the
very root of our empirical access to reality, any theory formulated without them
is either empirically empty or empirically incoherent. We maintain (Oriti 2014)
that the necessary requirement of reproducing some (possibly modified) form of
relativistic spacetime physics settles the worry of empirical emptiness of emergent
spacetime scenarios, at least as a matter of principle. We also maintain that the
empirical coherence of the same scenarios will have to be ensured by the details
of such spacetime reconstruction, and of course tested in each specific formalism,
but again that there is no obstruction in principle. The conceptual difficulties of
course remain, and have to be consistently and seriously tackled in any quantum
gravity formalism. We refer to recent literature for more details (Maudlin 2007;
Huggett and Wüthrich 2018).
To summarize, the existence of new types of physical degrees of freedom, of
a non-spatiotemporal type (in particular, different from continuum quantum
fields), suggested by several quantum gravity approaches, points to an emergent
nature of space, time, and geometry (and matter). It enlarges greatly the scope
of quantum gravity research by requiring a focus on such emergence (which
includes the continuum limit of the fundamentally discrete quantum gravity
structures) and by raising a large number of conceptual issues. These include both
ontological questions about the nature of spacetime and of its more fundamental
‘constituents’, and epistemological questions about their empirical significance and
accessibility.
daniele oriti 27
Notice that, while the technical issues related to the emergence of spacetime
in such quantum gravity approaches are not much affected by the interpretation
of the ‘atoms of space’, the conceptual issues listed above certainly are. Even if
we regard them as mere technical tools encoding some sort of regularization
or representing simply an intermediate step towards the true definition of the
theory in terms of quantized continuum fields, the problem of the continuum
limit remains the key one to tackle, via coarse graining and renormalization, as it
remains necessary to devise observables that encode continuum physics in terms
of the discrete building blocks one uses at first. In this case, however, no new
conceptual issue arises with respect to level 0, since no meaning is assigned to any
part of the theory before the same continuum limit is taken and the formulation
of the theory in terms of continuum quantum fields is achieved. Not so if we give a
realistic interpretation to the atoms of space suggested by the formalism and thus
we investigate their physics and metaphysics even before spacetime has emerged.
2.4 Level 2: Non-Geometric Phases—The Atoms of Space(time)

Are Really Not Spatiotemporal
If we take a realistic stance towards the non-spatiotemporal atoms of space, we

should be ready for even more conceptual challenges.
Moving along the direction of increasing numbers of them, thus exploring
their collective behaviour and continuum limit, we should expect to find that
the continuum limit of such system is not unique. This is what generally (there
are of course exceptions, which we treat as such) happens for any system of
many interacting quantum degrees of freedom. The quantum dynamics of such
interacting systems leads normally to different macroscopic phases, separated by
phase transitions. Each macroscopic phase is characterized by different emergent
properties, different macroscopic observables, and a different effective dynamics.
In some sense, the underlying microscopic quantum system is ‘replaced’ by a
very different kind of emergent, macroscopic system in each phase. A different
macroscopic phase is, in many ways, a ‘different world’ (Strocchi 2015).
For our non-spatiotemporal, quantum gravity system of atoms of space, the key
issue becomes then to identify such macroscopic phases and, among them, the one
(or more) in which an effective description in terms of space, time, and geometry
is possible, and it is governed by an effective general relativistic dynamics, at
least in some approximation. In other words, the emergence of spacetime that we
envisaged in the previous section should be expected to take place only in one
(or some) of the possible macroscopic phases, in which the fundamental non-
spatiotemporal atoms of space organize themselves. It is the task of quantum
gravity formalisms that suggest fundamental non-geometric atoms of space to
show that there exists such a geometric, spatiotemporal phase, in a continuum

limit, in some approximation.
Quantum gravity approaches have embraced this task and have obtained con-
siderable progress in recent years. New phases (alternative to the usually non-
geometric ones in which the formalisms are first defined) have been studied in the
loop quantum gravity context (Koslowski 2007; Koslowski and Sahlmann 2012;
Bahr, Dittrich, and Geiller 2015; Dittrich and Geiller 2015, 2017) and in GFT
(Kegeles, Oriti, and Tomlin 2018), where condensate states have also been put in
correspondence with effective cosmological dynamics (Gielen, Oriti, and Sindoni
2013; Gielen and Sindoni 2016; Oriti, Sindoni, and Wilson-Ewing 2016; Oriti
2017). Indications of phase transitions have been obtained in spin foam models
(Dittrich 2012; Bahr, Dittrich, Hellmann, and Kaminski 2013; Bahr and Steinhaus
2017; Dittrich 2017) and again in the GFT context (Geloun and Rivasseau 2013;
Carrozza, Oriti, and Rivasseau 2014; Benedetti, Geloun, and Oriti 2015; Carrozza
2016; Carrozza, Lahoche, and Oriti 2017). Extensive studies of the phase diagram
of simplicial quantum geometries, and supporting evidence for an extended De
Sitter-like geometric phase, are at the core of causal dynamical triangulations
(Ambjørn, Gizbert-Studnicki, Görlich, Jurkiewicz, and Németh 2018). Similar
work has started recently in the causal set programme (Glaser, O’Connor, and
Surya 2018). More examples could be mentioned.
One important note concerns the coupling constants, or other parameters,
which characterize the quantum gravity phase diagram. In simplicial quantum
gravity approaches, they are usually identified directly with the same coupling
constants of continuum gravitational theories (Newton’s constant, cosmological
constant, etc.), since the quantum dynamics is defined as a discretization of this.
In spin foam models, the situation is similar, but new parameters may enter,
motivated by the specific model building guidelines or by the renormalization
schemes. In GFTs, as well as in tensor models, the matching with gravitational
dynamics is searched for only in a continuum approximation (even if it can be in
principle performed also at the discrete level, as in simplicial quantum gravity).
This matching is anyway a necessity in any quantum gravity formalism.
Our main point, now, is the following. In the presence of a non-trivial macro-
scopic phase diagram, thus of different macroscopic phases, and with only some
of them (hopefully) of a spatiotemporal and geometric nature, spacetime and
geometry can be said to be emergent (thus, not fundamental) in a deeper and more
radical sense than already exposed at level 1.
Of the new issues raised by the existence of non-spatiotemporal atoms of space,
mentioned in the previous section, the epistemological ones are not much affected.
The ontological ones are.
The reason is that such atoms of space are now deprived even more of any
spatiotemporal attribute, even though they remain, mathematically, the very same
daniele oriti 29
entities identified at level 1. In fact, whatever properties of such entities end up

producing spatiotemporal observables or dynamics (e.g. some ‘volume/extension
attributes’), after coarse graining or some other approximation, or after being
treated in a collective manner, they do so only in some specific phase of the
system (e.g. only for specific values of the coupling constants or macroscopic
parameters characterizing it). They may be ‘seeds’ of an emergent spacetime, in
some sense, but one is precluded the possibility to consider them ‘spatiotemporal
properties’ in disguise. Yet in other words, something more radical is at play than
a simple ‘approximation’. For example, continuum spacetime and geometry are
not just an approximate construction from a discrete and quantum spacetime and
geometry, differing only in some aspects but sharing the same nature. The very
same entities, even when looked at in the same macroscopic approximation or
treated by analogous coarse-graining techniques, may not produce a continuum
spacetime or geometry at all. Their ontology has to be understood as being of
a truly different kind. In parallel with it, the ontological status of continuum
spacetime and geometry has also to be understood differently, since it turns out
to be emergent in an even more radical sense.
Of course, new issues arise also at the epistemological level, at least in the sense
that many of the same questions raised at level 1 have to be further refined in the
presence of new quantum gravity phases for our universe. Any further analysis of
such epistemological refinements, as well as of the new ontological issues raised
at this new level, will have to be carried out in the context of specific quantum
gravity formalism. In any case, the very existence of such new issues is the reason
to emphasize the existence of such new levels of spacetime disappearance (and
emergence).
2.5 Level 3: Geometrogenesis—The Emergence of Spacetime

via a Phase Transition as a Physical Process
The process of deepening and broadening our perspective on spacetime disap-

pearance and emergence, stimulated by the hypothesis of new non-spatiotemporal
entities underlying the universe, proceeds even further once the possibility of new
macroscopic (continuum) phases is granted. If a realistic interpretation of the
fundamental atoms of space is valid, and they can organize themselves in different
collective phases, there is no obvious reason why the phase transition separating
non-geometric from geometric phases should not be regarded as physical as well.
This phase transition, dubbed ‘geometrogenesis’, and the mechanisms produc-
ing it, has been studied in a number of quantum gravity formalisms. From a more
physical perspective, it was first discussed in Konopka, Markopoulou, and Smolin
(2006) in a graph-based approach to quantum gravity, and immediately afterwards
in the GFT formalism (Oriti 2008). More recently, it has been discussed in relation
to the phase diagram of causal dynamical triangulations as well (Mielczarek 2017).
Its conceptual aspects, on the other hand, have received little attention until now
(see Huggett and Wüthrich 2018 for recent work).
Investigations of such conceptual aspects, however, will have to rely on a better
understanding of the physical nature of the geometrogenesis phase transition as a
physical process. But what type of physics does it capture?
One natural hypothesis is that it should be given a cosmological interpretation,
as the process that underlies (or replaces) the big bang, as the origin of the
physical universe as described by GR and quantum field theory. This is the
suggestion made in the mentioned studies of geometrogenesis, and it has also been
explored from a tentative phenomenological perspective in a cosmological context
in Magueijo, Smolin, and Contaldi (2007). It is also the underlying hypothesis of
GFT condensate cosmology (Gielen, Oriti, and Sindoni 2013; de Cesare, Pithis,
and Sakellariadou 2016; Gielen and Sindoni 2016; Oriti, Sindoni, and Wilson-
Ewing 2016; Oriti 2017), where geometrogenesis is technically implemented as
a condensation of the microscopic atoms of space, with the emergent universe
described in analogy with a quantum fluid.⁵ It resonates as well with the so-called
emergent universe scenario for primordial cosmology, an alternative to cosmic
inflation, first proposed in Ellis, Murugan, and Tsagas (2003) and also realized in
the context of string gas cosmology (Brandenberger 2011).⁶
While this cosmological interpretation is suggestive and, indeed, natural, it is
also tricky and prone to misunderstanding. The main difficulty is the immediate
temptation to interpret a cosmological phase transition not only as a physical but
also as a temporal process. This is also a problem with the very language we use
to characterize physical processes. A phase transition is pictured as the outcome
of ‘evolution’ in the phase diagram of the theory, or of a ‘flow’ of its coupling
constants; we say we ‘move’ towards the cosmological, geometric phase from the
non-geometric, non-spatiotemporal phase, or vice versa. However, we are dealing
with a system which is already described at level 2: there is no continuum space, no
continuum time, no geometry in the usual sense; and it is also not characterized
by features which are just ‘one approximation away’ from time and space.
So, first, we need to have a background-independent and non-spatiotemporal
notion of ‘evolution’ in the space of quantum gravity coupling constants, i.e. in
the ‘theory space’ characterizing the quantum gravity formalism at hand. Notice
⁵ In the GFT cosmology context, the idea of geometrogenesis as replacing the big bang competes
with the alternative idea of a bouncing scenario, as discovered in the simplest hydrodynamic descrip-
tion of the system.
⁶ Here, however, the emergence process does not involve the temporal aspects of the universe,
since a time direction remains well defined during the whole cosmic evolution, even across the phase
transition.
daniele oriti 31
that such evolution will relate different continuum theories, in particular different
macroscopic effective dynamics, for the same fundamental quantum entities. This
notion of evolution in theory space is what specific renormalization group (RG)
schemes in various quantum gravity formalism will provide.
Next, we can ask whether any notion of ‘proto-time’ and ‘proto-temporal’
evolution can be associated with such flow in a quantum gravity theory space, and
how it relates to any of the notions of time that may emerge in the geometric,
spatiotemporal phase of the universe (thus, ‘after’ the geometrogenesis phase
transition).
There are two orders of difficulties here. One is the mentioned absence of any
notion of time at level 2, which adds conceptual difficulties to the absence of any
notion of time of level 1, and to the ‘problem of time’ in (quantum) GR, i.e. level 0.
The other is that, strictly speaking, even the standard RG flow of coupling constants
in ordinary statistical (field) theory is ‘timeless’ and not interpreted as standard
evolution, since it may well refer to systems at equilibrium.⁷ The reason why we
have no particular conceptual issue in understanding the flow in theory space and
the approach to phase transitions in temporal terms, despite the fact that they
refer to a change in the time-independent coupling constants of the system, is that
we can easily imagine an external observer (the experimental physicist in the lab)
tuning such coupling constants towards their critical values, and thus pushing the
system towards the relevant phase transition. Needless to say, no such external
observer is available in quantum gravity.
Any notion of time or, better, ‘proto-time’ that could be associated to such
flow across the quantum gravity phase diagram would in any case deserve such
name only in the sense that, once used to parametrize the flow across a non-
geometric phase towards a geometrogenesis phase transition, it ends up matching
some spatiotemporal observable that can be used as a time variable within the
geometric phase. Vice versa, it would correspond to what is left of some geometric
variable used to define a notion of time in such phase, and used as well as a notion
of RG scale for the quantum gravity system, once the same system flows across a
geometrogenesis phase transition into a non-spatiotemporal phase.
We leave a detailed and concrete analysis of this problem, and of the many
conceptual issues associated to it, to future work. Here, we only suggest a possible
strategy, which can be understood as ‘pushing the relational framework (used
to obtain a notion of time at level 0) two levels forward’. The idea would be to
take an internal (dynamical) degree of freedom, used as a relational clock in the
geometric GR-governed phase at level 0, to parametrize (as the relevant notion of
‘scale’) the RG flow of the underlying non-spatiotemporal quantum gravity system.
⁷ Of course, when one is dealing with systems out of equilibrium, and thus time-dependent, this
additional difficulty is absent.
This would allow us to give a proto-temporal evolution interpretation to the same

RG flow, even in the non-geometric phases, and thus to the geometrogenesis
phase transition. One example could be the emergent (free, massless) scalar field
used in GFT cosmology (de Cesare, Pithis, and Sakellariadou 2016; Oriti, Sindoni,
and Wilson-Ewing 2016; Gielen and Oriti 2018) as well as in (loop) quantum
cosmology (Agullo and Singh 2017). Another could be any observable playing the
role of ‘volume’ or scale factor of the universe, in the geometric phase; one could
imagine then the RG flow to drive the system and its coupling constants from
large volumes towards very small volumes and there hitting a geometrogenesis
phase transition (thus replacing the big bang singularity), ushering the universe
into the non-spatiotemporal phase (where the interpretation of the same variable
as ‘volume’ or relational time would cease, contextually, to make sense).
A scenario of the type sketched above, we believe, will require serious reflections
not only on the nature of space and time, but also on the RG when applied to
quantum gravity and on a covariant, spacetime-free understanding of statistical
mechanics. Even more clearly, it may have profound implications on the philoso-
phy of cosmology that will be subject to a broadening of scope and perspective in
parallel with the one we are suggesting for the philosophy of quantum gravity.
In the end, these many new conceptual issues that arise in this scenario are the
reason to associate to it a new level of spacetime disappearance and emergence.
2.6 An Analogy: From the Atoms to the Hydrodynamics

of (Super)fluids
Before concluding, we would like to offer a physical analogy of the situation out-
lined for quantum gravity, and of the various levels of ‘emergence’ we illustrated
in this contribution. We hope this will clarify further the conceptual framework
we have in mind. For more details on this example, see Volovik (2008).
Consider the hydrodynamic description of a fluid, with the main dynamical
variables being the fluid density and velocity, and interesting observables being
the total momentum and energy, vorticity, circulation of vortex excitations, vis-
cosity, etc., which are functions of them. On top of the global configurations
of the fluid, one has propagating excitations over them corresponding to sound
waves with their own characteristic dispersion relation. Notice that one can also
consider extended versions of standard fluid hydrodynamics, including additional
functions of the same density and velocity fields (e.g. gradient terms); this is
the case, for example, of superfluid hydrodynamics. In our analogy, standard
hydrodynamics would be the counterpart of GR, with spatiotemporal, geometric
observables (volumes, areas, distances, time intervals, curvature, etc.) correspond-
ing to various hydrodynamic observables, which are functions of the basic fields
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dictated by the artistic requirements of the subject, and not by the
necessities or allurements of what I may call for brevity, competitive
painting. It was never a question with him of the preparation within
twelve months of an annual poster, which was to occupy so much
linespace, and send the betting on him up or down as the case might
be.
What, on the other hand, were the essential ideas of Bastien-
Lepage’s work? To begin with, he was a painter of exhibition
pictures, of what are called in Paris machins. He was an inveterate
salonnier, with the ideals and the limitations of the typical uncultured
Paris art-student, the fort of his atelier. Faire vrai is the sum and aim
of his intention. Realists he and his like have been jauntily labelled
by the hasty journalist. But the truth in their work is truth of
unessentials, and their elaborate and unlovely realities serve only to
cover themes that are profoundly unreal.
To begin with, it was thought to be meritorious, and conducive of
truth, and in every way manly and estimable, for the painter to take a
large canvas out into the fields and to execute his final picture in
hourly tête-à-tête with nature. This practice at once restricts the limits
of your possible choice of subject. The sun moves too quickly. You
find that grey weather is more possible, and end by never working in
any other. Grouping with any approach to naturalness is found to be
almost impossible. You find that you had better confine your
compositions to a single figure. And with a little experience the
photo-realist finds, if he be wise, that that single figure had better be
in repose. Even then your picture necessarily becomes a portrait of a
model posing by the hour. The illumination, instead of being that of a
north light in Newman Street, is, it is true, the illumination of a
Cornish or a Breton sky. Your subject is a real peasant in his own
natural surroundings, and not a model from Hatton Garden. But what
is he doing? He is posing for a picture as best he can, and he looks
it. That woman stooping to put potatoes into a sack will never rise
again. The potatoes, portraits every one, will never drop into the
sack, and never a breath of air circulates around that painful
rendering in the flat of the authentic patches on the very gown of a
real peasant. What are the truths you have gained, a handful of
tiresome little facts, compared to the truths you have lost? To life and
spirit, light and air?
The tacit assumption on which the theory and practice of the so-
called realist rests, is that if photography, instead of yielding little
proofs on paper in black and white, could yield large proofs on
canvas in oils, the occupation of the painter would be gone. What a
radical misconception of the nature and function of art this is,
becomes evident when we paraphrase the same idea and apply it in
the region of letters. Few would be found to defend the proposition
that a stenographic report of events and words as they occurred
would constitute the highest literary treatment of a given scene in
life. A page of description is distinguished as literature from reporting
when the resources of language are employed with cunning and
mastery to convey, not a catalogue of facts, but the result of the
observation of these facts on an individual temperament. Its value
depends on the degree of mastery with which the language is used,
and on the delicacy and range of the writer’s personality, and in no
wise on the accuracy of the facts recorded.
Richter says somewhere that no artist can replace another, and
not even the same artist himself, at different periods of his life. One
characteristic of the work of the modern photo-realist in painting is
that almost any one of them could have painted a portion of the work
of any other without making any appreciable discord of execution
apparent. They are all equipped from the first at the studios with a
technique which serves them equally, once for all. It is known as la
bonne peinture. It differs from style in being a thing you can acquire,
and I believe it is even maintained, not only to be perfectible, but to
have been, on several occasions, perfected.
Nothing is more frequently brought home to the student of modern
painting than the truth that the work of the salonnier, the picture, that
is, that is born of the exhibition and for the exhibition, wears its air of
novelty and interest strictly for the season. If he meet it again in a
house, or in the holocaust of a retrospective exhibition, its date is
stamped upon it with the accuracy of a page of Le follet or Le
moniteur de la mode. And whether a picture be asserted at the date
of its exhibition as advanced, or the contrary, as daring or dull, if it is
born of the exhibition, it dies with the exhibition, and the brood to
which it gives birth hold their life on the same tenure.
It was impossible, on seeing Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc at the
Paris Exhibition of 1890, after a lapse of some years since its first
appearance, to resist the conclusion that it falls inevitably under the
heading of “machin.” In the composition, or in what modern critics
prefer to call the placing, there is neither grace nor strangeness. The
drawing is without profundity or novelty of observation. The colour is
uninteresting, and the execution is the usual mechanically obtrusive
square-brush-work of the Parisian schools of art. Dramatically, the
leading figure is not impressive or even lucid; and the helpless
introduction of the visionary figures behind the back of the rapt maid
completes the conviction that it was an error of judgment for a
painter with the limitations of Lepage to burden a touching and
sanctified legend with commonplace illustration. A faithful copy of so
strange and interesting a subject as Mme. Sarah Bernhardt cannot
fail to be a valuable document, but Lepage’s portrait has surely
missed altogether the delicacy of the exquisitely spiritual profile. The
format of the little panel portrait of the Prince of Wales evoked in the
press the obviously invited reference to Clouet. The ready writer
cannot have looked at so much as a single pearl in the necklace of
one of Clouet’s princesses.
To judge fairly of an artist, however, we must follow him on to his
own ground. In his portrait of his grandfather, at the same exhibition,
it was quite possible to see Lepage at his best as a workmanlike and
photographic copyist of a figure in repose. It was at the same time
possible to turn from this picture straight to Manet’s fifre, and to his
bon bock, and thus to measure the gulf that separates a meritorious
workman from an inspired executant of the first rank. No useful end
can be gained by obscuring this fact, and if, in league with the
modern gigantic conspiracy of toleration, we are to speak of Bastien-
Lepage as a master, what terms are left us for Keene and Millet, for
Whistler and Degas?
WALTER SICKERT.
Chelsea, 1891.
A STUDY OF MARIE
BASHKIRTSEFF.
In Possession of her Mother.] [Engraved by C. State.
Marie Bashkirtseff.
(From a Portrait by Herself.)
A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.
The brilliant sunshine of a glorious October morning poured through

the tall windows of Marie Bashkirtseff’s studio on my last visit to the
Rue de Prony. This mellow light bathing her canvasses brought them
out in fullest relief, and I had never had such a favourable
opportunity of judging her work in its entirety. I was struck more than
ever by the vigour and vitality of these studies, sketches, pastels,
and pictures struck off at a white heat of mental production between
the ages of seventeen and four and twenty. Hanging above the
gallery which runs along one side of the wall were her first studies
from life, which astonished Julian so much that he pronounced them
phenomenal; here were her numerous sketches showing the
sincerity of her efforts to be true to nature; and her finished pictures
full of individuality and power.
As the eye rested on these portraits where the keynote of
character had been so unmistakably struck,
on these bits of city life in their shabbier aspects, on these Paris
street children with faces so prematurely sharpened or saddened,
you became at once aware that this artist was a naturalist of the
naturalists. Her chief object was to seize life—to seize the flying
impression as she happened to see it; to render it with unflinching
faithfulness to nature without any attempt at arrangement,
composition, or beauty of treatment.
“Oh, to catch nature!” This is the cry of Marie Bashkirtseff, as it is
the cry of Impressionism, as it was perhaps the cry of the primitive
artist who with much labour and wrestling of the spirit modelled the
first rude image of the lioness or painted the first likeness of an
archer, bow in hand. Not quite the same, perhaps. For these early
workers in clay or pigments saw nature with the eyes of children—
those visionary eyes to which the leaves of the trees, the flowers of
the field, the dogs and horses and cats and cows are as much part
of the interminable fairy-tale in which they live as the more fantastic
figures in more orthodox stories. For these primitive artists looked at
the world with the eyes of children, and though they looked at her
with clear, wide-open eyes, they could not help seeing her
symbolically, seeing the analogy between men and beasts, between
beasts and plants, between the articulate and inarticulate phases of
nature, so that whatever they produced not only stood for itself but
for a host of subtly apprehended affinities linked together by
imaginative insight into the mystery of things. And in tracing the
development of this primitive style of art a little further, in following it
to its legitimate development into the loftiest forms of Greek art, we
cannot help seeing that it was the consummate flower of this archaic
symbolism. With this difference, that while Egyptian, Assyrian, and
Indian artists invented the most grotesque and fantastic forms to
express the wonder and mystery of the world, the Greeks tried to
find outward expression for that archetype of beauty which has as
yet only existed in the mind of man.
And nature, plus the mind of man, plus that master faculty which
refuses and chooses, and which reaches its highest results by
making fresh combinations from what is widely diffused in nature:
that, surely, is the secret of art. This faculty of selection and
concentration, within the limits of some more or less conventional
form, seems to belong to every manifestation of art, which can never
under any circumstances be a simple reproduction of nature. How
can it, indeed, since, as Blake so pithily puts it: “A fool sees not the
same tree a wise man sees”? And we question whether any two
people, any two painters would ever see precisely the same thing—
the same tree, however hard they might try to free themselves from
the bias of personality; or would succeed in giving us an identical
pictorial representation of any subject whatsoever. For the artist’s
own mind, unlike a photographic apparatus, would always intervene
so as to force him to see life through the medium of his
temperament. Indeed, will not the circulation of the artist’s blood, the
pitch of his nerves, the thoughts he has thought and the emotions he
has felt from the beginning of consciousness, have to be taken into
account as factors in any individual painter’s picture of a tree or any
other object? For this reason a picture can never be truly likened to a
window opening on nature unless, indeed, it be a stained-glass
window. On the contrary, the artist for the time being lends us his
eyes to see nature with. And as the eyes of a Titian or a Turner saw
combinations and harmonies of tones and tints whose magnificent
effect entirely escapes the eyes of ordinary mortals, it is much wiser
to accept their interpretation than to go into hair-splitting discussions
as to the precise exactitude of their copy to a reality which is
eternally changing.
Take only the painters of the realistic modern French school—can
we not tell at a glance, in going through the Louvre, whether it is
nature according to Corot, to Rousseau, or to Millet that we are
looking at? For whether the realists like it or no, the world will reflect
itself in their brains according to the laws of their peculiar
individuality, and the preciousness of all art expression seems
precisely to consist in this rare flavour which the artist’s self
impresses on nature outside himself. This priceless quality which we
call style is as inseparable from the genuine artist as the shape of his
nose. It clearly differentiates a peasant woman by Millet from any
ordinary peasant woman we may chance on in a field, and is as
marked in his simple pourtrayal of rustic subjects as in the most
sublime compositions by Michael Angelo.
These few inadequate remarks may not be entirely out of place
when speaking of the æsthetic views of our day; or of an artist who is
peculiarly representative of them. For the new scientific spirit which
has revolutionized our views of nature, has also penetrated the
realms of literature and art, and impelled artists to attempt a perfectly
unprejudiced reproduction of life. For the present this has led them to
a grim realism, which loves to dwell exclusively on the material side
of existence, scouting the romantic and ideal as figments of man’s
fancy to be relegated into the limbo of unrealistics along with the
dragons and griffins of the world’s childhood. The same movement
which has produced the extremely powerful but one-sided novels of
De Goncourt, Zola, and Guy de Maupassant may also be studied in
the works of the realistic French painters in their almost fierce
insistence on what is natural even to the pitch of repulsiveness.
Impressionism was in the air when Marie Bashkirtseff entered on
her artistic career in 1877. It would amount to a truism to give any
fresh account of her birth, parentage, and early life at this time. All
the world has read her famous journal. All the world knows that she
was born at Poltava, in the south of Russia, in 1860. That her
parents were separated after a few years of marriage; that her
mother and aunt came to the West of Europe with the two children—
Paul and Marie, and a cousin Dina; that they travelled about after the
fashion of their kind, afterwards settling down first at Nice, and later
on in Paris. As Marie often bitterly laments, her education was
carried on in a rather desultory fashion. But her faculty for acquiring
knowledge was so surprising, her intellect so extraordinary, that she
became an admirable linguist, a skilled musician, a splendid singer,
a fair mathematician with a rapidity that seemed to amount to
intuition. Her powers of observation had probably been much
developed by all that she saw and heard on their travels. She had an
early opportunity of seeing the master works of all time in Florence
and Rome, and was an indefatigable frequenter of museums and
picture galleries. At the age of fifteen, her judgment was already so
independent that she had the audacity to speak of the “cardboard
pictures of Raphael” and the “stupid if glorious Venuses of Titian.”
She had never as yet lived in Paris, mixed with artists, or heard the
talk of the studios, yet in many respects she seems already a full-
fledged art student, with the last phrase of the hour on her lips.
Already she sought in pictures that scrupulous resemblance to
nature which was her chief aim when she herself took to painting.
But though deeply interested in art, it did not at that time occupy the
chief place in her thoughts. Music attracted her more, and the desire
to be a singer was her greatest ambition. In fact, she laboured under
the disadvantage of an embarras de richesses in regard to her
natural gifts, and for several years she found it difficult to make a
choice.
However, one day in October, 1877, there entered M. Julian’s now
famous life-school in the Passage des Panoramas two very tall
ladies, all in black, accompanied by a young girl dressed in pure
white from head to foot, as if she were a lily of the field. This strange
and striking trio made quite a sensation. M. Julian himself, with his
happy picturesqueness of phrase in describing the first appearance
of Marie Bashkirtseff in his studio, spoke of her as une blancheur—
something bright and startling, which seemed to have little in
common with the severe work-a-day routine of studio life.
Nevertheless, she had come, accompanied by her mother and aunt,
to be entered as a pupil; and in the letter which she brought him from
an eminent physician, he found this curt word by way of introduction:
“I have sent you a monster.”
All this was very unlike the usual order of things. But it was there
and then settled that Marie Bashkirtseff was to attend his classes,
and every morning found her duly at place, working away as if her
life depended upon it. At first, her master took this wish to paint for
the caprice of a spoilt child, which would soon pass when confronted
by the difficulties of execution. Before long, however, he recognized
his mistake; he felt that she was a power; that there was something
which lifted her out of the ranks and placed her apart among her
fellow pupils. Something which gave to her first efforts, however
crude and tentative, a vigour and spontaneity which were truly
astonishing. And he discovered, too, that so far from playing at art
she was in deadly earnest. Instead of being less regular in her
attendance than the other art students, she flung herself into her
work with the passionate zeal of an enthusiast. Morning, noon, and
night found her either at her easel, or else taking private lessons in
anatomy and modelling, or haunting sales and picture galleries—
always, on the alert to improve herself. Indeed, Julian found her a
little monster of energy, of talent, of ambition, of concentrated will.
Whatever she took into her head to do, she did and accomplished
the seemingly impossible.
In a surprisingly short time she had mastered the elements of art,
and her studies from the nude were considered wonderful by her
masters. By the intensity of her attention and fever of work joined to
her native endowment she managed after only two years of study to
produce a picture of a woman reading, which was hung in the Salon.
It evinces all her characteristic qualities—masterly vigour of drawing,
and a vivid and striking manner of painting human faces. Her
extreme sensitiveness to impressions gave her a peculiar facility for
catching likenesses and bringing out the salient and personal traits in
her models.
After some few years devoted to painting in the studio, Marie
Bashkirtseff began to feel very unhappy about her work as a
colourist. It fell so far below her own standard as to plunge her into
fits of despair. In the midst of this profound dissatisfaction, in the
autumn of 1881, she went to Spain, and there she seemed to
awaken to a new sense—for the first time to awaken to the full,
glorious significance of colour in the painter’s sense.
In reading those pages of her journal which describe the
picturesque Moorish palaces, the gloomy Gothic cathedrals, the
dark, crooked streets with their groups of gipsies and the treasures
of art stored away in museums and churches, it seems as if they
were illumined by a mellower light than the rest of the book.
Velasquez and Goya opened her eyes, and she “raised herself on
tiptoe,” as she says, to master the secret of their unique method.
Day after day she steeped herself in those glowing canvasses, and
on her return to Paris she began to reap the benefit of this
enthusiastic absorption. Soon afterwards she painted The Umbrella,
in which she made a great leap forward.
Her method and style of painting now placed her definitely in the
same school to which Bastien-Lepage belonged, or of which he was
the master. It was the school which said: “We will let the open air into
our pictures. Let us paint light just as it is out of doors, not the
artificial studio effects from north aspects and skylights.” The Plein
Air movement of the painters was precisely the same as that which
Zola inaugurated in literature. It was nature taking the citadel of art
by storm—at least, what these particular men and artists understood
by nature.
At the head of this school stood Bastien-Lepage, the young
painter who so early became what the French call Chef d’École. His
pictures taken fresh from the country—his Haymakers, and
Harvesters, and Potato Gatherers, and Rustic Lovers filled Marie
Bashkirtseff with boundless delight. “He is not only a painter,” she
says, “he is a poet, a psychologist, a metaphysician, a creator.” His
perfect imitation of nature, the quality which ranked highest in her
judgment, was beyond all praise in her eyes.
Many of the French critics called her the pupil of Bastien. But she
had of course never been his actual pupil, having been trained in
quite a different school, and it always gave her much annoyance to
be called so. But in spite of the striking contrast between the origin
and early associations of these two young painters they were
singularly alike in their love of realism, their early fame, and
premature end.
Look, on the one hand, at Marie, this offspring of Tartar nobles,
with savage instincts lying like half-tamed wild beasts in the
background of her consciousness. She was descended from owners
of lands and serfs, and the instinct of command, the pride of power,
the love of all things splendid became part of her inheritance. She
was the idol of two women, her “two mothers,” who, in her master
Julian’s incisive phrase, “would have burned down Paris to please
her, or had themselves cut into a thousand pieces to satisfy one of
her caprices.” Nature had endowed her with such lavish gifts that her
very talents turned into a stumbling-block, threatening to divert her
efforts into too many channels. Music, literature, sculpture, the stage,
were successively the goal of her ambition; and each one of these
arts was in her eyes only the means to an end—the one burning
desire for fame. However, as the deep meaning of work, of the
artist’s simple and disinterested absorption in what he is fashioning,
became familiar to her she began to forget herself more and more in
the things she did. Her devotion to art, her love and delight in it, grew
steadily with her increasing mastery over its technical difficulties.
She says truly: “Outside of my art, which I commenced from caprice
and ambition, which I continued out of vanity, and which I now
worship; outside of this passion—for it is a passion—there is
nothing.”
Little by little—with many outcries, it is true, and kickings against
the traces—Marie Bashkirtseff had begun to discover that there is no
royal road to art. That to him only is given who is ready, also, to give
up much. She found out that however great her natural gift might be,
it would remain a diamond in the rough, unless she regularly applied
herself to the task of acquiring technical mastery. After some years’
intense but interrupted application she would have admitted that no
work of first-rate talent can be produced without the expenditure of
as much courage, perseverance, and self-control as might have
made a hero. For, as Schumann truly says: “The laws of morality are
also the laws of art.”
What a widely different lot was that of Bastien-Lepage. He, the
son of French peasant proprietors, came of people who are perhaps
the most thrifty and industrious class in existence: people punctual to
their daily task as the sun himself in his rising and down-going;
clinging to the soil they till with the tenacity of rocks and trees;
working much and wanting little, asking no joy of life except rest.
Just as Marie’s parents lived apart in painful disunion, those of
Bastien were united by the tenderest family affection. The shrewd,
caustic, clear-headed old grandfather—a sort of village Nestor—the
thoughtful father, the devoted mother, were helpful influences which
unobtrusively helped in developing Bastien’s faculties. He began to
draw as naturally as another child learns to talk; and his father,
noticing his aptitude, very wisely set him to copy some object or
other every evening from the age of five. Country life, with its
primitive simplicity and its regular succession of daily tasks, sank
deeply if unconsciously into the little fellow’s mind: it sank as the
seed does, without question or self-analysis, to hide its time in
silence and shoot up strong and vigorous when the appointed hour
had come. Bastien probably never asked himself whether he should
be a painter, a poet, a psychologist, or metaphysician. He became
one very likely because he could not help painting. And I suppose he
never asked himself whether in his pursuit of art he was sacrificing
something that might be more precious. But he was not dazzled and
enchanted by the sight of Italian cities and Carnival festivities and
ball-room flirtations. Toil and hardship were the rule of life around
him, and in his love for art he was willing to undergo any amount of
it. Instead of rushing in express trains from Berlin to St. Petersburg
and from St. Petersburg to Paris, he remained stationary in his low-
roofed country home, seeing the same round of occupation going on
year after year: the labourer following the plough; the haymakers in
the mowing grass with the light beating on their sunburnt faces, or
stretched in the shade of full-leaved trees in the luxury of repose;
reapers reaping the orange-coloured corn; summer evening in the
village, with the cattle coming home to their stalls, as their shadows
deepen on the bright green meadows. Such were the impressions
which graved themselves always afresh on the lad’s receptive
memory, to turn themselves one day into those pictures of rural life
which may truly be called “the harvest of a quiet eye.”
Though Bastien-Lepage’s lot—who had to make his living by
turning post-office clerk while studying at the École des Beaux Arts—
may appear so much harder than that of Marie Bashkirtseff, it was in
reality more favourable to the development of an artist. For,
according to Goethe, “Character is formed by contact with the world,
while talent develops in seclusion.” Marie Bashkirtseff, with her
penetrating intelligence, was quite aware of this. She, for whom
nothing was ever sufficiently fine, would sometimes quite seriously
envy her fellow-students’ their poverty, their humble way of life, their
cares and hard work shared in common in a Paris garret. A stern
necessity seemed to lend dignity to their art work, while hers was so
often patted on the back by her fashionable friends as the pastime of
a charming young Mondaine.
I was particularly fortunate this year in finding in Marie
Bashkirtseff’s studio a picture by Bastien-Lepage, L’Annociation au
Bergers, which he painted in 1875 to compete for the Prix de Rome.
It was interesting to compare these two artists in their likeness in
unlikeness. The same uncompromising realism applied in different
ways, and the same power of catching expression and pinning it
down as you would a butterfly without losing any of the delicate
shades. This picture of a “far-off, divine event” is treated by Bastien-
Lepage in a surprisingly naturalistic way, and yet without sacrificing
that mystical element which sometimes belongs to the simplest
aspects of life. Here is none of that conventional treatment of
religious subjects against which Marie rebelled in those “old dusky
pictures in the Louvre.” Here was real atmosphere, there were real
shepherds, rough, homely, unsophisticated men, brown as the soil;
and yet, in spite of the reality, this picture gave you a sense of
unfamiliar awe. Sitting there in the twilight before the fire lit in the
open air, they seem to have been more or less overcome by
drowsiness. The first, an old man, an expressive, rugged figure, has
bowed his head in adoration and is kneeling before the angel whose
sudden apparition has taken the shepherds by surprise. Bewildered
and amazed the second leans forward with gaping mouth and
outstretched hands as if to assure himself by touch of the reality of
what he sees. Hardly able to rouse himself from sleep the third one
sits huddled together in the distance. It is as true as can be to simple
shepherd life. The apparition itself has nothing supernatural. It might
be purely human with only the angel light of tenderness beaming
from the face. The grace of the figure is suggestive of the “eternally
feminine” as the celestial messenger shows the shepherds the way
to Bethlehem visible in the distance by the luminous haze encircling
it like a halo.
This picture with its effect of gloaming light is an idyl of shepherd
life. It breathes that simplicity of nature which invests the calling of
the herdsman, the ploughman, the mower, the reaper, with the
poetry of primitive existence, I shall never forget the impression once
produced on me by a Highland shepherd and his flock slowly
winding along the solitary road of an upland moor. The long white
line of the wavering sheep with that sombre figure of the solitary
shepherd was thrown into relief by the smouldering purple of the
barren hillsides. It was a scene which seemed to carry one back to
remote ages. Even so in the mythic East might the flocks and their
shepherds have passed along similar roads in the vast silence of
deepening twilight. This same feeling of nearness given to what is
dimly remote appeared to me one of the chief attractions of Bastien-
Lepage’s work.
As Bastien by the country, so is Marie Bashkirtseff inspired by the
town. The boulevards and squares of Paris became to her what the
hay and harvest-fields had been to Lepage. Her pictures were
imbued with the atmosphere of Paris—those delicate, pearly greys
which strike one as its keynote of colour. She caught that misty light
which you see clinging to masses of architecture as you look from
one of the bridges along the blue-grey Seine to the picturesque old
Cité with the iron-grey towers of Notre Dame outlined against the
clouded azure above. Effects of roofs and clusters of buildings half
seen through the confusing haze of early morning; drab-coloured
walls enlivened by black and white placards and the flashy tints of
rival advertisements; narrow streets with masses of shadow
emphasizing the value of light on wall and pavement—these became
the dominant note in Marie Bashkirtseff’s work as a colourist.
Her subjects, too, are usually taken from the every-day life of the
French capital as you may meet it round every street corner. The
blouse of the artisan, the cap of the milliner, the rags of the gamin
appeared better adapted to Marie Bashkirtseff for pictorial treatment
than the thousand freaks of fashion with which society annually
delights to astonish the world. As a painter she preferred the
Boulevard de Batignolles or Avenue Wagram to the Champs Élysées
and the Bois de Boulogne. The faces of weary people sitting on
public benches casually seen in passing or caught sight of across
the counter of a shop had hints and suggestions of meaning which
she missed in the sleek features of the swells whom she met in the
drawing-rooms of her friends.
So it happens that instead of painting the pretty, neat, carefully
brushed children marshalled by stately bonnes in the Parc
Monceaux, she chose in preference the unkempt ragamuffins
running wild in the streets. She found more scope there for the
exercise of that scrupulous and powerful realism which was the
secret of her strength. In the Jean and Jacques, The Girl with the
Umbrella, Le Meeting, she has vividly rendered some of the
incidents in the town life of children. The faces of these little boys
and girls, so pathetic in their premature maturity, in their shrewd or
sad or pathetic outlook on the world, are extraordinary in their truth
to life. With most of the childhood taken out of their childish features,
they look at us, if we consider them well, with eyes where experience
has already taken the place of innocence—the experience taught
them by the teeming streets, those books of the poor, for ever
unfolding fresh pages before their inquisitive eyes.
A Meeting.
(By Marie Bashkirtseff.)
They cannot be called beautiful, these pictures, in the sense that
fine forms, nobility of outline, charm of expression are beautiful. But
they are interesting, vivid, quick with life. Take that little piteous figure
clutching the big, gamp-like umbrella, while she draws her battered
shawl more closely around her. With what a look of stolid, inarticulate
suffering she seems looking through the rain on the life that is dark
and dreary as the prospect before her. You see the hair actually
blown back from the forehead, and one mesh has got caught round
the handle of the umbrella as she meets the force of the wind with
tight-shut lips—a humble subject, but remarkable for the solidity of its
handling. Indeed there is a Holbeinesque quality in the vigour of the
drawing and the truth of the pose.
Jean et Jacques, the picture of two boys, of seven and four years
old, is an equally striking work. They stand so naturally on their legs,
these little fellows, their attitudes are so unstudied, their expressions
so admirably true to life. The eldest has already that responsible look
which the offspring of the poor acquire so early. With his cap at the
back of his head, a shabby umbrella tucked under his right arm, he
steps along in his clumsy boots with the resolute air of a little man;
the handkerchief tied cravat-wise, but all on one side, the leaf stuck
between the lips as a make-believe cigar, show Marie Bashkirtseff’s
close observation of the ways of his kind. With one hand he grips the
unwilling Jacques, dawdling obstinately on his way to school, while
with the other in his pocket he pensively fingers the seductive
marbles that invite him to play.
Le Meeting, her most important work, is a fine, powerfully painted,
vividly realized picture. Just a group of Paris gamins met in council at
a street corner, discussing the use to which a piece of string is to be
applied, with the excitement of stockbrokers buying and selling
shares on the steps of the Bourse. It is a triumph of realism. The
faces speak, the limbs are informed with life; it seems as if any
moment their legs and arms might begin to move quite naturally.
There is nothing conventional about these figures, so fresh in their
unstudied attitudes and gestures. These faces, bathed in the pale air
of a Paris back street, breathe quite as much of town life as the
discoloured walls and palings in the background. How pert, how
Parisian, how wide-awake they are, with their thin, sharp-edged
features and their gimlet eyes which allow nothing to escape them.
The biggest of the six, with his back to the spectator, is eloquently
holding forth to his intently listening comrades, even as he may one
day hold forth to quite a different kind of audience, when, after due
graduation in the philosophy of rags, he shall begin to practise the
lessons which the stony streets have taught him. Quite a different
lesson from that which Bastien-Lepage’s shepherds have learnt on
the hillsides of the wooded Meuse. The execution of this picture,
hung in a place of honour at the Luxembourg, is extremely good.
There is a genuine feeling for colour in the grey and sombre tones in
harmony with the nature of the subject. The open-air effect is happily
caught, and the faces stand out in brilliant light. The powerful
realism, scrupulous technique, and excellence of the painting, make
a great success of Le Meeting, and it is a performance which at once
secured a wide recognition for Marie Bashkirtseff, not only in artistic
circles, but from the general public.
Marie loved to recall Balzac’s questionable definition that the
genius of observation is almost the whole of human genius. It was
natural it should please her, since it was the most conspicuous of her
many gifts. As we might expect, therefore, she was especially
successful as a portrait painter, for she has a knack of catching her
sitter’s likeness with the bloom of nature yet fresh upon it. She
seems to me equally good in her men and women and children, the
contrast of many of her heads showing the range and variety of her
power. Her portraits are noticeable for that absence of family
likeness which is often seen even in the works of great painters, as if
the artist had some ideal head before his mind’s eye to which he was
unconsciously trying to assimilate the faces of his models.
Marie Bashkirtseff’s impressionable nature was a safeguard in
that respect. All her likenesses are singularly individual, and we
realize their character at a glance. Look, for example, at her portrait
of a Parisian swell, in irreproachable evening dress and white kid
gloves, sucking his silver-headed cane, with a simper that shows all
his white teeth, and then at the head and bust of the Spanish
convict, painted from life at the prison in Granada. Compare that
embodiment of fashionable vacuity with this face, whose brute-like
eyes haunt you with their sadly stunted look. What observation is
shown in the painting of those heavily-bulging lips, which express
weakness rather than wickedness of disposition—in those coarse
hands engaged in the feminine occupation of knitting a blue and
white stocking. Again, take those three heads expressive of different
kinds of laughter. And nothing is perhaps more difficult than to paint
laughing or singing faces: the open mouth being apt to give a foolish,
strained, and unnatural look to the face. But Marie Bashkirtseff
evinces great skill in painting a natural effect of laughter. The little
smiling boneless baby face is a delightfully realistic study of an
infant, and equally good is that of the pert little girl whose mouth
bubbles over with a child’s artless laugh. Much more knowing is the
wicked laughter of the young woman with the stylish hat and bunch
of violets fastened coquettishly in her sealskin cape. She surely must
be laughing at somebody—at some lovelorn swain, whose antics
make all her features twitch with amusement.
One of Marie Bashkirtseff’s first portraits, and an admirably
painted one, is that of her cousin Dina. It was her first work exhibited
at the Salon, and shows a young woman with her elbow resting on a
table and her face in her hand. Her loose gown of light blue damask,
white muslin fichu and soft, pale golden hair harmonize very happily
with the green plush of the table-cover, the white of the book, and
the flowers beside the bare arm. The delicate flesh tints of a buxom
blonde are admirable in tone, and the face extremely characteristic.
It has the unmistakable Tartar type in the low brow, slightly oblique
eyes, flattened nose, and broad lips with their expression of
sensuous indolence. Here there is nothing of that vivacious charm
which is so marked an element in the portrait of Mdlle. de Canrobert.
This sketchy portrait looks as if the painting had been done at the
first stroke. The round hat, the well-fitting clothes, the plants in the
background seem dashed in with the facility of a master. The face
sparkles at us from the canvas as if about to utter a witticism. This
cleverly-painted figure is all life, all movement, and in its style of
treatment and freedom of pose is suggestive of Mr. Whistler’s
manner.
Her portrait of herself, palette in hand, painted in the last year of
her life, is extremely interesting. It is a three-quarters length, and she
is standing looking straight in front of her with a harp a little behind to
the left. She is done in that becoming black studio uniform with the
broad white frills and jabot which has been so often described, and
the gown fits as if moulded on the body. Her deep blonde hair, thickly
coiled on the top of the head, ends in a fringe over her forehead. Her
features are more refined and spiritual than we know them from the
photographs. It seems as if the invisible presence of death had
already laid a finger on her fair body and fined it down to a greater

Philosophy Beyond Spacetime Implications From Quantum Gravity Christian Wuthrich All Chapter

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Philosophy Beyond Spacetime :

Implications from Quantum Gravity

Philosophy Beyond Spacetime

11. The ‘Philosopher’s Stone’: Physics, Metaphysics, and the Value of

3.1. Equivariance of duality for dynamics: for states and quantities 51

Jeremy Butterfield, Trinity College, University of Cambridge

Quantum gravity offers a fertile ground for philosophical work, particularly

The current situation in contemporary physics results from a long historical

christian wüthrich, baptiste le bihan, and nick huggett 3

1.1 Searching for Spacetime

helpful analogy of the emergence of hydrodynamic properties of (super)fluids

christian wüthrich, baptiste le bihan, and nick huggett 5

from a non-spatiotemporal to a spatiotemporal or geometric phase, sustaining

christian wüthrich, baptiste le bihan, and nick huggett 7

1.2 The Metaphysics of Spacetime Emergence

That space and time or spacetime might emerge from a non-spatiotemporal

is it possible for fundamental physical theories to be justified by observations of

christian wüthrich, baptiste le bihan, and nick huggett 9

non-spatiotemporal structure of QG. Likewise and in line with other works, he

can then analyse, in some approaches, emergent spacetime as being caused by a

christian wüthrich, baptiste le bihan, and nick huggett 11

spatiotemporal world simplifies their relations greatly. (The significant plasticity

1.3 Methodological Issues

christian wüthrich, baptiste le bihan, and nick huggett 13

in metaphysical activity by using constraints from empirically well-confirmed

christian wüthrich, baptiste le bihan, and nick huggett 15

Gomes, H. (2017). Quantum gravity in timeless configuration space. Classical and

We explore the issue of spacetime emergence in quantum gravity by articulating

The problem of quantum gravity is terribly multi-faceted and can be characterized

18 levels of spacetime emergence in quantum gravity

20 levels of spacetime emergence in quantum gravity

2.2 Level 0: Classical and Quantum (Modified)

A more physical way of characterizing these difficulties is to say that they

22 levels of spacetime emergence in quantum gravity

2.3 Level 1: New Degrees of Freedom—Geometry

24 levels of spacetime emergence in quantum gravity

physical mechanisms and under which approximations they become amenable to

26 levels of spacetime emergence in quantum gravity

2.4 Level 2: Non-Geometric Phases—The Atoms of Space(time)

If we take a realistic stance towards the non-spatiotemporal atoms of space, we

28 levels of spacetime emergence in quantum gravity

show that there exists such a geometric, spatiotemporal phase, in a continuum

entities identified at level 1. In fact, whatever properties of such entities end up

2.5 Level 3: Geometrogenesis—The Emergence of Spacetime

The process of deepening and broadening our perspective on spacetime disap-

30 levels of spacetime emergence in quantum gravity

32 levels of spacetime emergence in quantum gravity

This would allow us to give a proto-temporal evolution interpretation to the same

2.6 An Analogy: From the Atoms to the Hydrodynamics

The brilliant sunshine of a glorious October morning poured through

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