Saturday, February 13, 2021

Whitehead's "Philosophy of Organism" Explained



Alfred North Whitehead (b. 1861, d. 1947)


Alfred North Whitehead

PHILOSOPHY OF ORGANISM


   


Here in this last series of articles on Whitehead and Process Thought I will encourage the reader to investigate on their own an Index I've been making over the years rather than try to repeat the many specifics of process philosophy and theology. I've given a brief overview of each, both together and apart in this series, but now it's time to delve into the details.

Here, you'll find an expired link to John Cobb's instructive classes (check youtube.com as well) along with a brief intro of Whitehead's book, Process and Reality in the Wikipedia article found further below. Of third generation Whiteheadian books which I think you'll find most helpful would be from the pens of Bruce G. Epperly, C. Robert Mesle, John Cobb, Thomas Oord, along with a host of other writers whom you'll uncover through their book's indexes and notes.

I mention Epperly and Mesle as the most accessible reads by the third generation of Process Pragmaticians; Oord for his Process Theological insights to "Open and Relational Theology"; and John Cobb as the first evangelist of Whiteheadian thought (along with Charles Hartshorn, Whitehead's partner; and David Ray Griffin who was John Cobb's partner out of the University of Chicago's Divinity School in the 1950s). These are the first and second generations to Whiteheadian thought.

Reading Whitehead is something which must be done. It cannot be avoided through the thoughts of others. But to make it easier, by reading Robert Mesle especially, then John Cobb, helps Whitehead become a much easier read in its heavy sections.

What I did was start with Whitehead's Process and Reality first by reading it and rereading it until I kinda understood it. I forget the chapter when it got into the weeds - perhaps chapter 4 (I don't have my book with me to check it out) - but there was one chapter in there which was the hardest to wade through. At this point I needed help from Cobb and Mesle. However, for much easier reads I suggest the well written books Bruce Epperly and Thomas Oord who bring it home in terms of practical living and thinking through of the ramifications of process thought. One last also comes to mind in Tripp Fuller of Homebrewed Christianity podcasts and website where a newbie might find a plethora of resources!  :)

But to help with these efforts I've developed my own index of personal and outside writings to help begin to grasp Process Philosophy and Theology. I think it is a good index and quite helpful. Still, it cannot replace the rigorous studies I've mentioned above. Only to give a glimpse into the wonderous lands where the brave dare to wander, the prophet to envision, and the preacher to recapture his imagination and burning heart's burden to share God's love with all who will hear.

And with that, I'll leave these final links below as guides and help along with Wikipedia's intro article on Process & Reality to show what we're up against when attempting to digest Whitehead's astoundingly profound thoughts.

Once grasped, you'll understand as I did why our entire postmodern lives need to be turned around. From its attempted grasp of God and the theology of the bible, to very nature itself and the abounding world around us. The revival I promise will come from the balance and symmetry of the Spirit of God who intends to rain upon the land God's harmonious goodness and love. It is God's Valentine Message to the World He Made and Cares for deeply. Enjoy.

R.E. Slater
February 14, 2014
(Valentine's Day)


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PART OF A 7-PART SERIES









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MORE RESOURCES

Relevancy22 – Home Page - https://relevancy22.blogspot.com/

Index - Open & Relational Process Theology –

Index- Calvinism v. Arminianism –

Index - Process Philosophy & Theology –

Index to Process-Based Integral Philosophy –


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A Six-Session Course

Introducing
Alfred North Whitehead’s

PROCESS & REALITY




In these lectures John Cobb provides an introduction to one of the most compelling and challenging philosophical texts of the Twentieth Century. Process and Reality is a notoriously difficult text, but the goal of this course is to enable students to not only skim the surface but probe its deeper dimensions. With his decades of experience as a scholar and teacher of Whitehead, Cobb will elucidate the major themes and illuminate the major concepts in a way that is accessible to anyone.


Each week features a

LECTURE + READING + DISCUSSION + Q/A



We are extremely excited about both the content and the format of this class. Each of the elements are inteneded to provide all the resources necessary for the engaged nerd like yourself to wrestle deeply with a powerful text - PROCESS & REALITY.

The LECTURE each week will be given by world’s foremost living expert on Whitehead’s philosophy, Dr. Cobb. Session by session we will walk through the text, developing Whitehead's larger philosophical project.

Following the lecture there will be a DISCUSSION of the texts and themes explored in the lecture between John and Tripp.

Throughout the class everyone will be invited to join and engage each other in our private group page. In additon to all the converstion threads the community will bring, Tripp will be hosting live streamed Q/A SESSIONS within the group & have SPECIAL GUESTS join to explore thier favorite themes in Whitehead.

Can't join live? Want to save the content for later? Go ahead and join.

ALL THE CONTENT OF THE CLASS WAS RECORDED AND SHARED AS BOTH AUDIO AND VIDEO.

In this intro to the course Dr. Cobb asks and answers: "Why Whitehead?"




Dr. John B. Cobb, Jr. taught theology at the Claremont School of Theology from 1958 to 1990. In 2014 he became the first theologian elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his interdisciplinary work in ecology, economics, and biology. He has published over 30 books including the first full length text in eco-philosophy.

In 1973, with David Griffin, he established the Center for Process Studies. In retirement he lives at Pilgrim Place in Claremont, California. Throughout his career he has contributed to Whitehead scholarship and promoted process-relational programs and organizations. Most recently, he helped found the Claremont Institute for Process Studies, and has been heavily involved in supporting work toward the goal of China becoming an ecological civilization.

This course is made possible through a collaboration between friends.


        



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Process and Reality

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Process and Reality is a book by Alfred North Whitehead, in which the author propounds a philosophy of organism, also called process philosophy. The book, published in 1929, is a revision of the Gifford Lectures he gave in 1927–28.

We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies, are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions. Such a change of thought is the shift from materialism to Organic Realism, as a basic idea of physical science.

— Process and Reality, 1929, p. 471.

Whitehead's Process and Reality

Whitehead's background was an unusual one for a speculative philosopher. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his coauthorship and 1913 publication of Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of gravity in Minkowski space as a logically possible alternative to Einstein's general theory of relativity. Whitehead's Process and Reality[1] is perhaps his philosophical master work.

The following is an attempt to provide an accessible outline of some of the main ideas in Whitehead's Process and Reality, based on the book itself, but guided by a general reading of secondary sources, especially I. Leclerc's Whitehead's Metaphysics. An Introductory Exposition.[2] Whitehead often speaks of the metaphysics of Process and Reality as 'the philosophy of organism'.

The cosmology elaborated in Process and Reality posits an ontology based on the two kinds of existence of entity, that of actual entity and that of abstract entity or abstraction.

The ultimate abstract principle of actual existence for Whitehead is creativity. Actual existence is a process of becoming, and "... 'becoming' is a creative advance into novelty."[3] It is manifest in what can be called 'singular causality'. This term may be contrasted with 'nomic causality'. An example of singular causation is that I woke this morning because my alarm clock rang. An example of nomic causation is that alarm clocks generally wake people in the morning. Aristotle recognises singular causality as efficient causality. For Whitehead, there are many contributory singular causes for an event. A further contributory singular cause of my being awoken by my alarm clock this morning was that I was lying asleep near it till it rang.

An actual entity is a general philosophical term for an utterly determinate and completely concrete individual particular of the actually existing world or universe of changeable entities considered in terms of singular causality, about which categorical statements can be made. Whitehead's most far-reaching and profound and radical contribution to metaphysics is his invention of a better way of choosing the actual entities. Whitehead chooses a way of defining the actual entities that makes them all alike, qua actual entities, with a single exception, God.

For example, for Aristotle, the actual entities were the substances, such as Socrates (a particular citizen of Athens) and Bucephalus (a particular horse belonging to Alexander the Great). Besides Aristotle's ontology of substances, another example of an ontology that posits actual entities is in Leibniz' monads, said to be 'windowless'.

Whitehead's actual entities

For Whitehead, the actual entities exist as the only foundational elements of reality, the ultimately existing facts of the world. Nothing "either in fact or in efficacy"[4] underlies or lies beyond the actual entities; rather they underlie all reality.[5]

The actual entities are of two kinds, temporal and atemporal.

With one exception, all actual entities for Whitehead are temporal and are occasions of experience (which are not to be confused with consciousness, or with mere subjectivity). This 'actual entity' idea is most distinctly characteristic of the metaphysics of Process and Reality, and requires of the newly approaching reader a philosophically unprejudiced approach. An entity that people commonly think of as a simple concrete object, or that Aristotle would think of as a substance – a human being included – is in this ontology considered to be a composite of indefinitely many occasions of experience.

The one exceptional actual entity is at once temporal and atemporal: God. He is objectively immortal, as well as being immanent in the world. He is objectified in each temporal actual entity; but He is not an eternal object. Whitehead uses the term 'actual occasion' to refer only to purely temporal actual entities, those other than God.[6]

The occasions of experience are of four grades. The first comprises processes in a physical vacuum such as the propagation of an electromagnetic wave or gravitational influence across empty space. The occasions of experience of the second grade involve just inanimate matter. The occasions of experience of the third grade involve living organisms. Occasions of experience of the fourth grade involve experience in the mode of presentational immediacy, which means more or less what are often called the qualia of subjective experience. So far as we know, experience in the mode of presentational immediacy occurs in only more evolved animals. That some occasions of experience involve experience in the mode of presentational immediacy is the one and only reason why Whitehead makes the occasions of experience his actual entities; for the actual entities must be of the ultimately general kind. Consequently, it is inessential that an occasion of experience have an aspect in the mode of presentational immediacy; occasions in the grades one, two, and three lack that aspect. The highest grade of experience "is to be identified with the canalized importance of free conceptual functionings".[7]

There is no mind-matter duality in this ontology, because "mind" is simply seen as an abstraction from an occasion of experience which has also a material aspect, which is of course simply another abstraction from it; thus the mental and the material aspects are abstractions from one and the same concrete occasion of experience. The brain is part of the body, both being abstractions of a kind known as persistent physical objects, neither being actual entities. Though not recognised by Aristotle, there is biological evidence, written about by Galen,[8] that the human brain is an essential seat of human experience in the mode of presentational immediacy. We may say that the brain has a material and a mental aspect, all three being abstractions from their indefinitely many constitutive occasions of experience, which are actual entities.[9]

Inherent in each actual entity is its respective dimension of time. Potentially, each occasion of experience is causally consequential on every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time, and has as its causal consequences every other occasion of experience that follows; thus it has been said that Whitehead's occasions of experience are 'all window', in contrast to Leibniz's 'windowless' monads. In time defined relative to it, each occasion of experience is causally influenced by prior occasions of experiences, and causally influences future occasions of experience. An occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other occasions of experience, reacting to them.

The causal outcomes obey the usual well-respected rule that the causes precede the effects in time. Some pairs of processes cannot be connected by cause-and-effect relations, and they are said to be spatially separated. This is in perfect agreement with the viewpoint of the Einstein theory of special relativity and with the Minkowski geometry of spacetime.[10] It is clear that Whitehead respected these ideas, as may be seen for example in his 1919 book An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge[11] as well as in Process and Reality. Time in this view is relative to an inertial reference frame, different reference frames defining different versions of time.

The actual entity, the occasion of experience, is logically atomic in the sense that it cannot be cut and separated into two other occasions of experience. This kind of logical atomicity is perfectly compatible with indefinitely many spatiotemporal overlaps of occasions of experience. One can explain this atomicity by saying that an occasion of experience has an internal causal structure that could not be reproduced in each of the two complementary sections into which it might be cut. Nevertheless, an actual entity can completely contain indefinitely many other actual entities.[12]

Whitehead's theory of extension concerns the spatio-temporal features of his occasions of experience. Fundamental to both Newtonian and to quantum theoretical mechanics is the concept of velocity. The measurement of a velocity requires a finite spatiotemporal extent. Because it has no finite spatiotemporal extent, a single point of Minkowski space cannot be an occasion of experience, but is an abstraction from an infinite set of overlapping or contained occasions of experience, as explained in Process and Reality.[1] Though the occasions of experience are atomic, they are not necessarily separate in extension, spatiotemporally, from one another. Indefinitely many occasions of experience can overlap in Minkowski space.

An example of a nexus of temporally overlapping occasions of experience is what Whitehead calls an enduring physical object, which corresponds closely with an Aristotelian substance. An enduring physical object temporally has an earliest and a last member. Every member (apart from the earliest) is a causal consequence of the earliest member of the nexus, and every member (apart from the last) of such a nexus is a causal antecedent of the last. There are indefinitely many other causal antecedents and consequences of the enduring physical object, which overlap, but are not members, of the nexus. No member of the nexus is spatially separate from any other member. Within the nexus are indefinitely many continuous streams of overlapping nexūs, each stream including the earliest and the last member of the enduring physical object. Thus an enduring physical object, like an Aristotelian substance, undergoes changes and adventures during the course of its existence.[13]

Another aspect of the atomicity of occasions of experience is that they do not change. An actual entity is what it is. An occasion of experience can be described as a process of change, but is itself unchangeable.[14]

Whitehead's abstractions

Whitehead's abstractions are conceptual entities that are abstracted from or derived from and founded upon his actual entities. Abstractions are themselves not actual entities, but are the only entities that can be real.

An abstraction is a conceptual entity that involves more than one single actual entity. Whitehead's ontology refers to importantly structured collections of actual entities as nexuses of actual entities. Collection of actual entities into a nexus emphasises some aspect of those entities, and that emphasis is an abstraction, because it means that some aspects of the actual entities are emphasised or dragged away from their actuality, while other aspects are de-emphasised.

Whitehead admitted indefinitely many eternal objects. An example of an eternal object is a number, such as the number 'two'. Whitehead held that eternal objects are abstractions of a very high degree. Many abstractions, including eternal objects, are potential ingredients of processes.

Relation between actual entities and abstractions stated in the ontological principle

For Whitehead, besides its temporal generation by the actual entities which are its contributory causes, a process may be considered as a concrescence of abstract ingredient eternal objects. God enters into every temporal actual entity.

Whitehead's ontological principle is that whatever reality pertains to an abstraction is derived from the actual entities upon which it is founded or of which it is comprised.[15]

Publication data

The several originally published editions of Process and Reality were from New York and from Cambridge UK. There were many textual errors, partly due to Whitehead's imperfect handwriting and lack of interest in proof-reading. A largely corrected scholarly redaction was eventually prepared and published as Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929). 1979 corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press, ISBN 0-02-934570-7.

See also

References

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b Whitehead, A.N. (1929). Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927–1928, Macmillan, New York, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK.
  2. ^ Leclerc, I. (1958). Whitehead's Metaphysics. An Introductory Exposition, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London, and Macmillan, New York.
  3. ^ Whitehead (1929) p. 42.
  4. ^ Whitehead (1929) p. 64.
  5. ^ Whitehead (1929) pp. 41, 116.
  6. ^ Whitehead (1929) p. 135.
  7. ^ Whitehead (1929) pp. 269–270.
  8. ^ Siegel, R.E. (1973). Galen: On Psychology, Psychopathology, and Function and Diseases of the Nervous System. An Analysis of his Doctrines, Observations, and Experiments, Karger, Basel, ISBN 978-3-8055-1479-8.
  9. ^ Whitehead (1929) p. 114.
  10. ^ Naber, G.L. (1992). The Geometry of Minkowski Spacetime. An Introduction to the Mathematics of the Special Theory of Relativity, Springer, New York, ISBN 978-0-387-97848-2
  11. ^ Whitehead, A.N. (1919). An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK.
  12. ^ Whitehead (1929) p. 195.
  13. ^ Whitehead (1929) pp. 52, 87, 285.
  14. ^ Whitehead (1929) p. 52.
  15. ^ Whitehead (1929) pp. 48, 64,68.

Secondary literature

External links


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