Saturday, March 21, 2020

John B. Cobb - Understanding Whitehead





Whitehead’s Process & Reality

Probing Process & Reality – “Why Whitehead?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njPHcYJQDVk&app=desktop

by John B. Cobb

Claremont Institute for Process Studies
January 27, 2020

"Probing Process & Reality" is a six-week course by John B. Cobb, Jr. and Tripp Fuller. They provide an introduction to Alfred North Whitehead's masterpiece. This video may be found at the end of this post. In introductng the course, Dr. Cobb responds to the question of why Whitehead's work is worth exploring today.

Alfred North Whitehead (ANE) presented at the Gifford Lectures where he systematizes his ideas. Six hundred attended the first night. Six came back the next. His metaphysics is a very difficult subject to comprehend but well worth the effort if given a chance. So then, “Why Whitehead? And why process and reality?”


Question 1.

Philosophers each add to another philosopher’s perspective. Schools of philosophy conceive of different problems and topics from different perspectives.

ANE’s philosophy is one of cosmology. But why be interested in cosmology? It is seldom spoke of in most philosophy departments and has left a large hole in our education. Cosmology attempts to answer the nature of reality and the place of humanity in it; whether our lives are determined; what is freewill; how do we relate to the cosmos and the cosmos to us; how we might understand that natural world and fit within it; of the nature of reality; the human place in that reality; whether we have responsibility in that reality; what is the purpose of living; connectedness; interrelatedness; values; goals; and so forth. This use to be a very popular subject up to the 18th century.

The natural sciences have brought these questions all back to the fore because of their relevance to our questions about cosmology and the metaphysics/ontologies within it. Science and cosmology go together. To speak of one is to speak of the other. As example, the quantum physicist Steven Hawking in his book, “A Brief Period in Time,” brought this subject up when examining evolution and cosmology.

Hawking’s questions helped revive the discussions from ages past providing relevancy to the contemporary eras of today. To be a philosopher or theologian in the realm of cosmology must require a familiarity with science, math, and physics, without which the two streams of thought cannot intersect. Why? As each discipline will inform the other and consequently making each application of insight sharper.

Whitehead’s cosmological explorations between science and philosophy occurred when his very subject had faded from the mainstream of history. But lately it has come back into force with science’s many complex quantum discoveries of the universe linked around the fundamental questions of Darwinian evolution and its meaning for us today.

Question 2.

Why do we need a new cosmology? Its reflection is light of the many new discoveries that earlier ascetics did not have. The Greeks. The early church philosophers. The Enlightenment or even early modern prodigies. All these have left us with the Cartesian world of materialism without answering the question of consciousness nor that of the quantum world which had yet to be discovered.

A sensory, classical world does not understand today’s scientific idea of causality. The Greek’s thought of causes as fourfold:

  • An efficient cause
  • A material cause
  • A formal cause, and
  • A final cause (purpose).

The early modern world freed itself of final causes or purposeful causes. It concluded there was no teleology to a natural world of random, chaotic evolution. Yet perhaps a cosmologist will question these modern day reflections by looking into whether there is a teleology in process within creation. Whether science’s cosmological answers may be insufficient in this area which had dismissed final/purposeful causes to be antithetical to the real world and arbitrarily delimiting the area of scientific study and conjecture.

Many years ago the philosopher David Hume had concluded that purpose should be excluded empirically, and yet, the philosopher Immanuel Kant stated that in terms of metaphysics this cannot be done even in relationship to the known empirical data of that time. That the objective world was not on a par with the hidden the natural world. That what was understood as reality may be hiding a far deeper world of reality under philosophy’s pseudo-understanding.

As such, cosmology was given up only to be retaken by Whitehead in redefining it in newer, more relevant ways. Phenomology (e.g. the appearance of a phenomenon, aka Heidegger) describes human experience which was never noticed before. It’s sub-discipline, existentialism, is closely related to phenomenology. And yet, neither answer the question of what lies behind the reality of the appearance of phenomena? This is the greater question. To find, or see, the real world beyond its patches of color or sound. To refuse to exclude this hidden world of reality. This then is the realm of cosmology which has been left out of philosophical discussions for the past two centuries until science has revived its relativity.

Science then drives many newer questions of the natural world and what may lie behind it than what we had earlier understood in the nascent days of scientific research and discovery. Its strange anomalies have driven us to explore the evolutionary worlds of the very large and the very small beyond that which we had once assumed we knew and could explain. Of worlds which are deeply interconnected belying non-conscious chaotic motion and energy always surging forwards from inorganic to organic life and the many worlds of that life which have spawned in its ever widening wake.

Dualistic concepts of the world such as the ones religion espouses do not fit within these newer evolutionary categories. For example, neuroscience affirms non-binary sentient concepts from nonlinear complex inorganic to deeply interconnected organic lifeforms. The study of cosmology then revives the entire science of evolutionary beginnings and processes-with-unending-endings with perhaps the more relevant questions of whether there is a purposeful evolution - which the very name of evolution itself seems to hint at as it has been taken up since Darwin.

So then, “Why Whitehead?” Because process philosophy looks at the natural world and sees the many processes of evolutionary evolvement especially from the newer scientific perspective of the strange new quantum worlds of chaotic particles and dimensional structure. Beyond a bare cosmology, a theologian might therefore approach process philosophy from a more relevant theistic viewpoint created from the subdomain of process theology as it relates to evolutionary cosmology and philosophy. Much of the heavy lifting in this area has already been begun since Whitehead’s first questions. And yet, there will certainly be many more insights to come related to naturalistic consciousness, mechanism, and the quantum world of the unseen as approaches bring more relevant, open-ended discussions of life and world, God and teleology to light. Process and reality then is by far the best philosophical approach for science and theology to proceed.

John B. Cobb
Edited by R.E. Slater
March 1, 2020




SCHEDULE

March 16 - Session I:  xi-xv and pp. 3-17
o   Part I, Chapter 1 - Speculative Philosophy

March 23 - Session II:  18-36
o   Part I, Chapter 2 - The Categorical Scheme
o   Part I, Chapter 3 - Some Derivative Notions

March 30 - Session III  39-60
o   Part II, Chapter 1 - Fact & Form

April 7 - Session IV  61-82
o   Part II, Chapter 2 - The Extensive Continuum

April 14 - Session V  83-109
o   Part II, Chapter 3 – The Order of Nature

April 21 - Session VI
o   Session I-VI Wrap Up



Additional References

 Saturday, August 12, 2017

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