John Cobb - Whitehead's Process & Reality, Part III

I've been thinking, everything I've been working on since 2011-2012 has been pointing towards this direction. That the non-process Western philosophies I grew up with, and the Continental philosophies I recently have learned, were not revealing a process-based world shown to us in quantum physics, the neurosciences, the postmodern arts, and so many other disciplines. It took a process-driven cosmology that knows how to dip its toes into the paradoxical realms of metaphysics and ontologies of the natural and spiritual worlds to do this. Like the many layers of an onion, the more you peel the onion the deeper its layers go down until there is nothing left. And in its nothingness you've missed the whole. Process says the reality was the relationship of the onion to itself in its parts, to its whole, and including the exploration of the observer and his/her/its connection to the cosmos. A dualistic, or binary, concept of today's postmodern world is no longer relevant. We must turn to nonlinear complex processes to better explain the world of the unseen, the hidden, and the sublime structures and purposes driving nature and man. - re slater

PART III - DISCUSSIONS AND APPLICATIONS 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I. Fact and Form 39

• I. Appeal to Facts, European Tradition; Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant; Intrinsic Reasonableness; Footnotes to Plato; This Cosmology Platonic; Participating Forms; Divine Ordering; Ontological Principle; Facts the only Reasons; Facts are Process; Prehension, Satisfaction. 
• II. Rationalism a Faith, Adventure of Hope; Limits of Theory, Givenness, Professor A. E. Taylor on Plato; Decision, the Ontological Principle; Entities and Process, Actual Entities and Decision; Stubborn Fact. 
• III. Platonic Form, Idea, Essence, Eternal Object; Potentiality and Givenness; Exclusiveness of the Given; Subject-Superject, Becoming and Being; Evaporation of Indeterrnination in Concrescence, Satisfaction Determinate and Exclusive; Concrescence Dipolar; Potentiality, Givenness, Impossibility; Subsistence. 
• IV. Actual Occasions Internally Determined, Externally Free; Course of History not Necessary, No Perfection; Efficient Causation and Final Reaction; God's Primordial Freedom; Each Concrescence between Definite Free Initiation and Definite Free Conclusion, the Former Macrocosmic, the Latter Microcosmic. 
• V. Universals and Particulars, Unsuitable Terms with False Implication; Illustration from Descartes, also Hume; Descartes' Alternative Doctrine, Realitas Objective, Inspectio, Intuitio, Judicium; World not Describable in Terms of Subject and Predicate. Substance and Quality, Particular and Universal; Universal Relativity. 
• VI. Locke's Essay, Agreement of Organic Philosophy with It; Substitute 'Experience for Understanding'; Ideas and Prehensions; Locke's Two Doctrines of Ideas, Ideas of Particular Things; Representative Theory of Perception; Logical Simplicity and Genetic Priority not to be Identified; Substance, Exterior Things, Societies; Solidarity of the Universe. 
• VII. Locke's Doctrine of Power, Power and Substance; Causal Objectification and Presentational Objectification; Change Means Adventures of Eternal Objects; Real Essence, Abstract Essence; Doctrine of Organism and Generation of Actual Entities. 

Chapter II. The Extensive Continuum 61

• I. Continuum and Real Potentiality, Atomized by Actual Occasions; How the Continuum is Experienced, Presentational Immediacy, Sensa; Real Chair and Chair-Image; Complex Ingression of Sensa. 
• II. General Potentiality and Real Potentiality; Standpoints of Actual Occasions, Determined by Initial Phase of Subjective Aim; Extensive Relationships; The Epochal Theory of Time, Zeno, William James. 
• III. Newton's Scholium.
• IV. Newton's Scholium, Comparison with Philosophy of Organism and with Descartes; 'Withness of the Body,' Status of the Body in the Actual World; Ontological Status of Space for Newton, Descartes and the Organic Philosophy.
• V. Undifferentiated Endurance and the Passivity of Substance, Source of Errors. 
• VI. Summary.

STUDIES WITH JOHN B. COBB

Alfred North Whitehead, Process & Reality

Notes from Session 3

*Disclaimer. These are my notes from reading and listening to

John Cobb which may not truly reflect his learned positions or sentiments

built over a lifetime of study and interaction with historic material.


CHAPTER III - SOME DERIVATIVE NOTIONS

God & Eternal Objects

pg 31 ff

Observation by John Cobb:

Everything has to be somewhere. The whole realm of

pure potentials must include all creation somewhere.

Thus begins a brief discuss of God & Eternal Objects.

Eternal objects are ordered for the sake of influencing creation to make possible an increase of value in creation.

We tend to think of the world as a static thing without novelty. But this type of thinking would be incorrect. There does exists real novelty in the world. And it is by this observation the "process of organism" or "process of philosophy" begins its trajectory towards metaphysics and ontology.

Observation by John Cobb:

To exclude God from the world is to exclude novelty.

Atheism has a very difficult time affirming novelty.

Let's go further. God is like all other actualities. But God is also unlike all actualities. In one sense God is a "creature" or "organism." But in another sense God is neither creaturely nor organic. What we're driving at here is that God has real connectivity to the world.

Further, God is the only Actual Entity which is NOT an Actual Occasion unless it be in Himself. Though all creatures and aspects of creation "come-and-go," that is, they are perishable, it is God who is the everlasting Entity and Occasion. There is no other Entity or Occasion before Him.

There are three categories of "The Ultimate":

1 - Temporal ~ Creation
2 - Eternal Objects ~ Not real entities but a "category"
3 - Everlasting ~ an Entity or Process which is not momentary

The notion of the "Ultimate" usually is understood as something, or some ideal, which is inert, inactive, (im)passive, or distinct from the cosmos/creation/world. This would be the Aristotelian sense of the word.

In Process Philosophy the notion of the "Ultimate" speaks to something which is active - not inert nor (im)passive. Something which is integrally connected to the world. Something which moves towards novelty and creativity:

God / Being ----> Creativity / the Act of Being

Creativity implies activity vs. Inert, passive objects of inactivity

Process Philosophy vs. Aristotelian Philosophy

In the Whiteheadian sense of the Ultimate, God cannot be divorced neither from Himself nor from His creation nor from His act of creativity. He is the ultimate explanation of physical phenomena as He participates in all of it at every moment everlastingly.

* * * * * * * * * * *

NOTHING EVENTS

pg 82, last Paragraph

This conception of an actual entity in the fluent world is little more than an expansion of a sentence in the Timaeus: "But that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is." Bergson, in his protest against "spatialization," is only echoing Plato's phrase "and never really is."

John Cobb - Opinion without Reason is always something that "never really is." This latter phrase indicates the characteristics of something whether it is ever really "spiritual, liberating, despairing, or distressing." If the reality of an Actual Event (AE) or Actual Occasion (AO) ever really is then there will be valuative outcomes by its concrescence. If not, "it never really was, is, or ever will be" anything but a potential prehension.

Process Philosophy (and by congruence, Process Theology) share a lot in common with the Asian Culture in its nominative verb structure of the language, thought processes, and lingual agreements. As example, in Buddhism, the idea of "NOTHINGNESS" is not something reality will cling to. As such, neither should we (even though existentially we never could, if something is nothing).

Nothingness, used in the perishing sense, says that neither you, nor I, are things we may cling to. That we are always in the process of transition, of becoming, and then perishing, and then becoming, and then perishing, eternally while we live. In this sense, this idea of becoming ever more than we are might free us from the stress and anxiety of never amounting to much, or having lost out in earlier stages of life of missed opportunities. It actually releases us to the idea of freedom and compassion to others as well as to ourselves that we may elect to become even as we have been becoming all our lives in one sense or another. That we might release our being into the hands of the God of process to be used in reflective ways which has congruency to our being-of-becoming seeking remission and efficacy in relationships and personal/societal/ecological valuation.

---

As God is, who was the Primordial God of eternity past, and is the God of the Present, the God of the Now, who is the God of the Becoming Past, and the God of the Becoming Future, so God is the Prehending Ultimate. These statements then are multiple sides of the same coin, or orb, or whatever shape a multiple prehending Ultimate might be described as. But in process terms, the immediate present is so slim a thing and so transitory a momentary event that is is nearly always eclipsed by the preceding past and incoming/becoming future meshing and molding together with its present state.

Stepping out of time as a process one might imagine that the only process state we have to live in is the state of the present, the ever living now, the becoming moment where we receive our past, meditate on it, and release it into the future without allow our present to be lost in the flows of our many lives. Our value is in the now, which is never static. In our acts of the moment which determine who we are, where we are going, what we're about, and how we might think and act. What process gives to the present is the gift of connection, wholeness, relationship to the All which surrounds us, encompasses us, enmeshes, enfolds us, holds us, influences us, and abides with us. - res

Our present is perpetually perishing as it presses forward from eventful occasions of our past pushing us onwards towards an enmeshing future which I once spoke of in one of my poems as a "membrane" or "BRAN" (in the quantum mathematical expression of the concept) of becoming (cf. poem, School Days). Succinctly, all our past, all our perishable moments of our reflective being, are scooped up and accumulated into the everlasting Presence-and-Being of the God of our unforgettable moments of ourselves. In God we never really perish but are an "everlasting are" of many moments held in one everlasting essence of God. The God of process then is the God who is our timeless Keeper.

---

Descartes describes man's reality by the static statement of "I think, therefore I am." Whereas Whitehead describes man as an always actuating "Am" who never perishes but always moves forward moment by moment as an "everlasting becoming." (sic, "I am, therefore I become").

Contra Plato re his thoughts on the perishable object, Whitehead describes a creation in which everything perishes with continuing influence upon a future filled with existential consequentiality.

If nothing endures then what's the point of life? Of living? But in God all is PRESERVED.

THE NATURE OF A STONE

AND CHAOS

pg 78 ff

We may describe a stone by its whole or by its parts. If by its parts we might describe it by color, weight, shape, appearance, relationship to the terrain and topology, its geography, or its regional location on this planet or another; or by its crystalline molecules, or its molecular structure, or by its quantum states, or even by its dimension quantum string states epitomized by its dimensional vibratory structure (sic, how it "sings" or "sounds" to the quantum universe around it).

One part of the process of description might grow from the stone itself upwards to include an ever-expanding universe of inclusion. That is, how it might relate from itself to the universe. Another way of describing the stone was within itself in a cascading sequence of ever-descending worlds of the small. And finally, we might describe the stone in all its parts and its wholeness as a thing in flux, movement, and chaos with the rest of creation. That even in its seeming structure of eternality there are interior and exterior forces without, and within, which will affect its balance and harmony of the now, the present, the moment. Who knew there was so much going on with that stone!

So much so then with living things, a living cosmos, or transitioning inorganic matter! All of creation "sings, claps its hands, shouts for joy, or roars its thunder" throughout its rhythms and motions. This is its nature. It is a nature in process with itself. It is the restless nature of God given to creation to order its chaos into new chaoses of being and becoming through event and occasion.

Chaos in itself is not evil if structured with an evolving, valuative process of concrescence. But chaos can and does become evil dependent upon how it disrupts the valuative concrescing processes of living things. Rains may become floods; fires destructive; breezes become gales; fresh water too briny; and so forth. Chaos is how creation runs. It is part of creation's evolving structure. Without it there can be "normative" growth. No "novelty, wonder, or creativity."

Chaos is a good thing which ever orders itself as a quality which is shared with its Creator. A Creator who orders chaos to become move than it is. It involves both life and death. Chaos has its cycles. But, being indeterminate, it may also create bad disrupts instead of good disruptions. The nature of God is not bad but the freewill agency He has granted to creation may devolve as well as evolve. With non-living, inorganic matter, it goes where it pleases.

But if left alone, as exampled by nature in its evolving stages, it always moves towards wholeness, balance, harmony, and rhythm. It can settle out and be mitigated by sources of life spring up everywhere underneath its forces (biblically, "wings"?) which lend stability to its times of fury and fickleness. Green landscapes have the power within itself for such mitigation. The winds die down, the water is tamed and made healthy, the light of the sun finds fields to feed and trees which offer shade. Rhythm and harmony. These are valuative consequences of concrescing processes.

LANGUAGE: OBJECT (noun)
or EVENT (verb)?

HOW WE THINK IN A LANGUAGE DEFINES

OUR UNIVERSE, BELIEFS, AND METAPHYSICS

pg 79

The simple sentence consists of a noun or pronoun, a verb, and an actionable event:

Noun/Pronoun + Verb --> Event

If the language of a society is highly visual, then its "world" or "metaphysics" or "beliefs" are prejudiced towards objectifying what it sees. If a language of a society is shaped towards actions, events, hearing, or narrative, then that language is prejudiced towards actionable events or occasions. This latter is where process philosophy/theology lives. Actual Entities (or Occasions) which are always transitioning towards something.

In English, and the Indo-European languages, both have roots in the Latin and Greek languages of the ancient world where nature and life were objectified. We see all around us in a material sense and wish to then reduce its components into orderly consequences of finally states. This is the science of empiricism. It is the basis of modern science.

It grows out of a visual world of many types of enduring objects and actions. It is what drives Western philosophy; and it has also been produced in parts of Continental Philosophy as it breaks metaphysics down into worlds of idealism, phenomena, existentialism, dialectic, etc. Such societies inform themselves of their universe by predominantly their visual experiences hidden within the sublime sensory organ of vision over all other sensory organs and conceptualized perceptions.

In Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese these languages differ. They concentrate on the "VERB" of the responding event where all is in motion with itself. Such motion-based languages "hear" the wind, the trees, the mountains and valleys. They write of its narratives in a flowing majesty of resplendent living life bounding across a universe of joy and gladness. Its stories are stories of harmony, flow, rhythm, and balance. There is no object, no substance, in its attitudes as all have become one and the one the many. Its language informs its speakers of another kind of world which non-Semitic and non-Oriental worlds cannot "hear" very well.

Language then may express a succession of event without a need for an objectifying that event as a substance. When one listens to a symphony one does not easily hear the entirety of the notes or the musical phrases which for the sections of that symphony. It is very hard to do. Like ourselves, a symphony of sound washes our us, our feelings, our being. It is very difficult to try to remember a symphony's collection of tonalities and phrases while hearing the symphony itself. It is very hard to take a fluid, liquid language of succession and objectify it.

If we focus on its moments we cannot hear the score. If we hear the score we cannot focus on the notes. This kind of processional language involves not seeing but feeling. Even processional language has a hard time describing poetically what it hears, feels, senses in its being. Consequently, if we are to "tune in" to a process universe than we will need another kind of language even beyond that dominated by verb structures. We'll need a language which cannot be spoken, written down, perhaps even scored. One may call it the language of the trees or the universe, but I suspect even those languages will not be enough to hear the many tonal forms of a process creation.

---

Of note, when Alfred North Whitehead wrote his process philosophy he did not consider any other language than his own, English. Hence, his philosophical "empirical breakdown" of its conceptual components is very Continental-like. It has its good insights and its problems or restrictions. Perhaps a new endeavor might take Continental Philosophy's process-based parts, mix it up in a verb-based societal language, and try re-writing it in the new world of quantum science. But to do that will require a cross-discipline between a competently versed quantum theoretical physicist, a thorough-going abstract Continental philosopher, and contemporary processed-based orthodox theologian. As such, there are very, very few of these types around. So, I will expect many different forms of process philosophy/theology to result over the years to come as searches are made to better express the kind of metaphysical cosmology we live in.

---

We see the world through ourselves. The ever dominant "I". In Whitehead, the I is different in every moment of its being while affecting a new future which hadn't existed before the I had entered into it. In a process world, the I is called into being the best it can be as a valuative component moving from one future to the next towards best possible outcomes.

(As an aside, I personally wonder if a disruptive form of bad chaos might be helpful here in the sinful world of men. But then again, bad may seem good though it never seems to engender good through bad means. Thus, if we change the disruptive form of bad chaos to good chaos, here we might better obtain a formative sequencing where good may birth good. However, other freewill agents might just as will resist such positive choices to continue and perhaps enhance bad outcomes. The point is, it is still the onus placed upon the individual to move towards a future of every hour and every day with greater resolve against a persisting state of disruptive processes resulting from non-valuative choices.)

CAUSAL EFFICACY &

PRESENTATIONAL IMMEDIACY

With the terms of causal efficacy (CE) and presentational immediacy (PI) we must now ask the question as to how the past shapes the present with effect and causality. According to Whitehead, the past is represented in the present as the present's initial phase. The diagram of light helps to demonstrate light's journey from past to immediate past to present to immediate future to future futures.

Again, Whitehead thinks that a causal past is how we might prehend our contemporary world before either we or the world enter into a relationship of presentational efficacy. But once we do than at that moment the prehended past becomes a concrescing present pressing forward even as it quickly perishes. Therefore, any discussion of immediacy will also show how dependent it is on the past. 

Too, presentational efficacy involves both sensory and non-sensory organs. Not only the eyes et al but the mind which conjectures, rationalizes, reasons, and speculates. The wall in a room presents itself with color to our eyes and a solid surface to our touch but to our mind it projects itself as a barrier we shelter behind or must go around to get pass.

As causal efficacy occurs and presentational immediacy takes place, by extension, time and distance projects the causal efficacy into the past so that presentation immediacy may create its own causal efficacy on a future occasion.

---

Whitehead's categories organized in Peircean triads The physical categories on the left represent what Whitehead (1929) called "the ultimate facts of immediate actual experience." The three categories Whitehead defined for actual entities, prehensions, and (societal) nexûs make up a triad of physical categories characterized by the Kantian triad under Relation: Inherence, Causality, and Community.

AE/AO ---> derivations / extensions ---> AE / AO

There are three or four kinds of prehensions:

1 - Physical
2 - Conceptual
3 - The Intermixture of both 1 with 2 and 2 with 1
4 - The Strain of Experience and Extension

As time and displacement take place as a continuum from the experience moment a new process begins. The process world of reality is thereby "extended" beyond what it was into another world of becoming. But not as independent realities but as collective realities joined together, though perhaps not affecting one another because of displacement between its remote organs in relation to nearer organs (e.g., process philosophy is also a philosophy of "organism").

For example, a star is born, lives, and dies and yet we may see or not see its light because of its remoteness, time and distance between us, and the brevity of life we bear. This discussion then might enter into discussions of spacetime and how objects move in relationship to one another:

A moves through ST ---> In respect to B's causality

B moves through ST ---> In respect to A's causality

And yet, time and space are never fixed. They are fluid and move relatively to one another. Things that move within this world or spacetime such as light or radiation contort with its gravitational effects among other factors creating a unique kind of "extensive continuum".

Newton's Substance Reality (Materialism) ---> Is replaced by Einstein's Motion / Event

In Relativity Theory anything can be used as a spacetime reference point where each "organic event" moves relative to another "organic event".

I --> Others

Others --> I

Earth --> Stars

Stars --> Earth

The Sun's Solar System --> Milky Way

The Milky Way --> The Sun's Solar System

The Milky Way --> Nearby Galaxies

Nearby Galaxies --> The Milky Way

etc

As example, current quantum theory states that the Big Bang resulted from a compressed chaotic state of one-dimensional plasmic space we might think of as a "spatial void." A void where time and infinity are lost within this spatial state of timeless dimension consisting in a "liquid" plasmic state where there is no time as there are no reference points. Only energetic radiation bound to itself through intense gravitational forces forming an "unobservable" spatial void.

When birthed, this spatial void began an everlasting birthing process which changes with the varying spacetime dimensions it has created. Now weather the Big Bang was borne from the collision of one uniquely separate universe with one or more uniquely separate universes; or whether in itself, it began the very process of everlastingly bubbling multi-verses we may never know. What we do know is that cosmic evolution tells of a process-based evolution allowing for all parts of process formature as underlying themes to our present cosmic context.

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Plato's Naturalistic Realism evolved in the 17th Century as British Empiricism forming the basis of modern science. Descartes, Hume, and Locke spoke of final and efficient causes where our observations tell us what the world is like. Hume said that causality is fundamental to science. That is,

cause A-->led to cause B-->led to C--> led to D.

Then one day he asked an unthought question... "What is Cause?" If it is not visible, or able to be empirically testable, then what is cause in the metaphysical sense? With this observation Hume effectively ends British Empiricism.

At which point Immanuel Kant awakens from his dogmatic slumbers and proposes a philosophical Transcendentalism. Having assumed experience gave us reality he noticed immediately upon Hume's observation that with the inability to perceive cause one cannot know from the study of Science its causal relationships. These are hidden from us as observers empirically. Therefore, it is the Mind! Reason! Which is the ultimate causality. Which give necessary ordering to the multiplicity of observed data.

Data --> Mind ---> Organizes Data

In effect, Kant says to forget the empiricism of data to concentrate on the empiricism of the mind. Pure reason. Thus, was birthed the Age of German Idealism into which Hegel next responded. And with Hegel began the course Continental Philosophy in its many directions to contemplate the unseen, the untestable, the unthought. An Age of Critical Thinking. And it was into this era which A.N. Whitehead, being American, and living in a Western tradition, responded. But because he wasn't considered to be a "critical thinker" the worthies of German Idealism were not impressed by his metaphysical theories on cosmogony while they were concentrating on the metaphysical suborders within cosmogony. Here then was an impasse. The parts of the whole were the subjects of study rather than the whole itself, which Whitehead deigned to discuss, and conjecture, as a superseding whole to all other suborder discussions.

This is not to throw Continental Philosophy under the bus. In many ways it has enlivened philosophy for contemporary undertakings of the universe and how things work. But in another sense, Process Philosophy is becoming the conceptual bridge over which both Western Philosophy and Continental Philosophy might find agreement with one another as each concentrates on an aspect of a reality deemed important to their discipline.

Beginning then with Kant, we move from Kantian Dualism (sic, noumenal worlds of reality we cannot understand) to Descartes' Cartesian Dualism (sic, Mind v Body Dualism) which states that mental phenomena are non-physical, and that metaphysical/ontological matter exists independently of the mind (which can or cannot be known). In all of this, what Whitehead wished to do was to restore to nature its mystery by incorporating its causality into the experiential world of processes which are no longer mechanistic, material-based objects that could be measured or determined.

To rely on mystery as an explanation is not sufficient for a coherent theology of God, nature or man. Conversely, one may never state with absolute certainty a surmise in an ever-evolving cosmogony between God and creation. The best we can do is to approximate reality that it sufficiently explains pain and loss, joy and passion. In this might a theology be described as coherent but never static as a dynamically evolving system. - re slater