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| Philosopher, Mathematician A.N. Whitehead |
“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
– Alfred North Whitehead
Bio & Philosophy: SEOP - Alfred North Whitehead
First published Tue May 21, 1996; substantive revision Thu Nov 10, 2022
Do I consider myself a Whiteheadian? On the one hand, obviously yes—he is certainly the most influential philosopher for me. But at the same time, I would not want to give the impression that I am a Whitehead partisan or that I don’t think he might be wrong or misguided about some things. I mean, he is hard to find bones to pick with, but I still would not want to give the impression that by adopting the label “Whiteheadian,” I am incapable of thinking outside of a Whiteheadian box. He created quite a roomy box, but at the same time, if anything, I would prefer to be thought of as a process philosopher, which is a broader tradition, a meta-philosophical approach that goes back to the origins of philosophy itself. There is a whole attitude that comes along with that, and one of those attitudes is: do not get boxed in and stuck thinking in terms of isms or schools guided by one particular great genius. But I will wear the label lightly, like a sticker that I can peel off as needed.
Whitehead presented us with a comprehensive cosmology. His intent was to provide a scheme of categories that could adequately describe every possible experience we might have, whether within science, religion and spirituality, art, or everyday life. That is a theory of everything, but I think it is obviously broader than what is usually called a theory of everything or a grand unifying theory in physics. It is meant to encompass the whole of human interest, including aesthetic concerns, and moral outlook, not just natural science. Physics is important but I would want to avoid simply saying “we must be naturalistic,” because then I would wonder where the place of spirit is in that? Now, I would not want to go in the opposite direction from naturalism and say, “Oh, I’m a spiritualist.” The fact is I think spirit is just as real as nature in some senses of these terms. What sense remains to be metaphysically worked out.
And it will always remain to be worked out! We have to approach the incompleteness of our knowledge with a playful spirit. So in terms of a theory of everything, I am tempted to also say, “What about nothing?” We need to talk about nothing, even if we are going to performatively unsay whatever we say about nothing. Whitehead introduces a term, creativity, which is his ultimate category. I think one of the words used traditionally, going back in Western philosophy and theology, especially negative theology, for what Whitehead means by creativity would be nothing or nothingness, but a kind of fecund or fertile nothingness from out of which everything issues. We can call it a theory of everything, yes, but we should not forget that there is more—or less—than everything, depending on how you want to talk about it. Nothing has a role to play, too.
There is a sense in which there are no “things” anymore in Whitehead’s universe. There are events or processes, creative happenings, actual occasions. We can redefine what we mean by “thing” or really emphasize the gerund and throw things into process: thinging. I am just playing with words here, but I think it is important to get the full sense of what I mean. He is a systematic philosopher who wants to include everything, but it is also an open system—a scheme that has been sketched in pencil to be revised and not chiseled in stone tablets to be worshipped. The universe itself is unfinished, so of course our attempts to know the nature of that universe must also remain unfinished. “Theory of everything” can sound a little hubristic. That is what we are aiming for, but let us not become too full of ourselves. I doubt we will finally succeed in tying up all the loose ends to arrive at The Target. The target is an eternal sunrise on the horizon we can travel toward but that cannot be encompassed or outshined.
Whitehead began as a mathematician. He worked with Bertrand Russell, who began as his student at Cambridge and quickly became his collaborator on the Principia Mathematica, to ground mathematics in the logic of set theory. They completed three volumes of that project. I like to say it was both a great success and a great failure. It was a success in that it really helped inaugurate this new analytic method of philosophy, bringing symbolic logic and new forms of predicate logic to bear on philosophical problems and the clarification of our propositions, helping us know what we are even talking about. Yet on the other hand, the project was a failure because they ran into a bunch of paradoxes. They tried to find patches for these paradoxes in order simply to prove that one plus one equals two, which an elementary school child knows is true, and yet to prove that with no presuppositions and no intuitive leaps turned out to be impossible. It was not until a few decades later, when Kurt Gödel came along and laid out his incompleteness theorems, that it was rigorously shown why it was impossible to ground mathematics purely in logic.
Russell went on from that project and got quite enamored with Wittgenstein and his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which had a major influence on the Vienna Circle and logical positivism, even though Wittgenstein himself said, “You guys do not understand what I am actually talking about.” Russell developed what he called “logical atomism”—he wanted to pursue a scientistic form of philosophizing, even though he was a Platonic realist about ideas and took morality very seriously. Nonetheless, he was pursuing the analytic approach.
Whitehead, on the other hand, recognized what the failure of the Principia meant at a deeper level and started to ask deeper metaphysical questions in the 1910s, at the same time that physics was undergoing a second major revolution. It was really the second scientific revolution in many senses, both with Einstein and relativity theory and the beginnings of quantum theory. Whitehead recognized this, and he was always interested not just in pure mathematics but in applied mathematics. He learned mathematics at Cambridge from James Clerk Maxwell’s student. Maxwell invented electromagnetic theory, and one of Maxwell’s students was Edward John Routh, and that was Whitehead’s teacher. So he is one removed from Maxwell, a brilliant mathematician obviously applying mathematics to patterns that can be measured in the physical world. Whitehead always had that sense that math is applicable, and he was very interested in how it was relevant to physics. He was one of the few mathematicians alive in the 1910s who could even comprehend what Einstein was proposing, so much so that he even had some criticisms and voiced them to Einstein in the early 1920s.
For all of these reasons—both the limits of logic and the shifts in physics—Whitehead found himself wandering into philosophy, and eventually, in 1924, he was invited to Harvard to teach philosophy, even though he had never taken a philosophy course himself. But very often major paradigm shifts in a discipline are catalyzed by someone coming from elsewhere, from a different discipline, shaking things up. I think Whitehead was very much doing that. He was a very close reader of the history of philosophy and had been studying it on his own, including reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason when he was a college student, as part of the Cambridge Apostles, a group that would meet to do extracurricular reading and study late into the night. He claimed that he was reading Kant so deeply he had memorized whole passages. He was always very conversant, to say the least, with the history of philosophy and a deep reader of Plato.
Unlike Russell, who pursued logical atomism, Whitehead was far more of an organic and holistic thinker. He took the tools of propositional logic as far as they would go, but he was a constructive system-builder who was engaging in a form of speculative metaphysics and cosmology at a time in the 1920s when philosophy in the Anglo-American world was going in a very different direction. Continental philosophy was also going in a different direction with people like Heidegger. Being and Time was published in 1929, I believe, the same year as Process and Reality. But Heidegger’s project, I think, represents a different form of narrowing, in my opinion, in that it is focused more on human existence, whereas Whitehead was focused more on the cosmos at large, with the human as an expression of that. Whitehead took science very seriously, whereas Heidegger did not (at least not seriously enough to try to think with it). Whitehead was doing a very different thing that was very unpopular at the time, and for the better part of the last century, his work has been in cold storage. But it is really beginning to heat up now because the zeitgeist has changed.
Why is there renewed interest in Whitehead today? After century of making basically no progress on the foundations of physics after quantum theory blew up the old mechanistic, materialist picture, plus the ecological crisis forcing us to reimagine how human beings relate to the rest of the natural world—these factors have led people to realize that a reductionistic understanding of life and ecosystems, and a profound ignorance of the intrinsic value of the living world, contributed to us destroying that world. There is more recognition of the importance of aligning our deep values as human beings with what we think we know about the nonhuman world, which, in Whitehead’s view, would be the source of many of our values. We did not just make them up out of whole cloth as human beings because we are special. Actually, there were these deep cosmic values that we inherit. A hunger for more integrative ways of thinking, of bringing the human being back in touch with the natural world, are leading people to look again at Whitehead’s ideas.
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Whitehead draws parallels between his actual occasions and Leibniz’s monads. Leibniz’s ontology is pluralistic, and Whitehead also calls his own ontology pluralistic, opposing it to a kind of Spinozistic monism. But Whitehead is different from both Spinoza and Leibniz in that they were thinking in terms of substance. Whether we are talking about Spinoza’s monism or Leibniz’s monadology, the logic is a substantialist logic, a non-relational logic. For Leibniz, his monads are windowless, walled off, with no openness to causal influence from the surrounding world. Each monad is self-enclosed, as if there is a preprogrammed virtual reality tunnel inside it that God set in place. Leibniz thinks in terms of a preestablished harmony of these monads, so the monads do not causally interact, but God arranged them in advance perfectly. Everything unfolds in an orchestrated way, and each monad experiences its world as if it were in relation to others. But in some sense, it is like a holographic illusion, each with its own little virtual reality running, never actually touching anybody else.
This conception of monads hermetically sealed off from each other is very different from Whitehead’s understanding of a nexus of actual occasions, which are almost all window, open and prehensively related to one another. Prehension is one of Whitehead’s neologisms, meaning a feeling—how that “over there” becomes “here,” how the past lives again in the present, how actual occasions appropriate and feed upon one another. Every actual occasion contains the entire past of the universe unified from its perspective. God is not prearranging everything in advance. Whitehead does have a God, but God is along for the ride, roiling amidst the creative advance with and within every other actual entity. There is a parallel to Leibniz, and it is helpful to know Leibniz before reading Whitehead, to have some sense of the pluralistic cosmology he is articulating. But there are important differences. Whitehead thinks in terms of process and relationship instead of substance, and that makes all the difference.
Interestingly, Whitehead does use Leibniz’s notion of a preestablished harmony in an effort to elucidate how the multiplicity of prehensions within a concrescing actual occasion bring themselves into compositional unity. These prehensions are said to be mutually sensitive to one another as they grow together to form a new actual occasion in the process of concrescence. It is as if there is a preestablished harmony from the perspective of the subject, which is finally achieved as a result of this process of concrescence. In Whitehead, there is still this holographic sense that each contains all, that every actual occasion is a unique recapitulation of the universe. But it is important to note the difference between his process approach and the substance approach to subjectivity. He describes the harmonization of what would otherwise be conflicting feelings into aesthetic contrasts in the process of concrescence so as to give rise to a novel subjective perspective. It might sound paradoxical at first, but for Whitehead, there are no subjects having experiences that preexist their prehensions of the rest of the universe. The subject is an outgrowth of its prehensions, emergent from its feelings. Whitehead also refers to a “superject.” He wants to hyphenate “subject-superject” to emphasize that the subject is the result of a process of experience rather than a substance that is already there in advance having experiences. The reason Whitehead refers to a preestablished harmony is because it is as if there is a subjective aim drawing these prehensions together into the formation of a subject or subject-superject, as if it were already there, but it is not achieved until the end of the concrescence. He is drawing on the Leibnizian allusion to express an important part of his own metaphysics, but it functions differently than it does for Leibniz.
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Whitehead is no more or less accessible than Kant or Hegel or Heidegger. It is a real work of philosophy, and whenever a real work of philosophy appears, you are not going to understand it the first time you read it. Even an academic philosopher will need to reread and commit to learning a language. There is a reason academic philosophy becomes fragmented in a way—there are Heideggerians and Derrideans and Whiteheadians—because it takes a lifetime of study to really get inside and outside the inner workings of a philosopher’s mind of that caliber. Is he accessible? Yes, but you have to work for it. Whitehead presents a unique challenge because his insights come from a variety of disciplines—mathematics, propositional logic, physics, biology, history of religious experience. You have to be conversant in all these fields to see the synthetic argument he is making. It is not very common to have that breadth. For this reason I recommend studying Whitehead in groups. Do not do it by yourself.
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I talked about creativity already, which is his ultimate category. Creativity is a category that is difficult to define because it is everything and nothing. He says it is both one and many. Elsewhere he talks about the principle of creative unrest, which constantly disturbs any sense of settled finality. Creativity is no more disjunctive than it is conjunctive. This leads us to the next important term, concrescence. Concrescence, as Whitehead defines it in a neat little formula, is the process whereby “the many become one and are increased by one.” It is iterative, cycling, cumulative, such that each subsequent concrescence includes the concrescences that came before it. There is a kind of nesting of perspective going on as the universe creatively advances.
The realization of a pulse of light, a photon, would be a prime example of concrescence. Psychologically, it is the most minute moment of experience we can imagine, involving some degree of, as Edmund Husserl would say, retention of the past and protention of the future—some degree of memory and anticipation. Whitehead is not suggesting our consciousness is like a cartoon flipbook with discrete frames that create the illusion of motion, which Bergson criticized as a cinematographic reduction. Whitehead is trying to point out that our experience as conscious psychological creatures is analogous to quantum phenomena, like a pulse or a “wavicle” of light, requiring a certain duration for a concrete occasion of any kind—whether photonic or psychological—to fully manifest as itself.
Reality, for Whitehead, is made of these concrescent drops of experience. They arise out of a past and integrate their feelings of that past with alternative possibilities that remain available. The process of concrescence is also a process of decision and winnowing down what can occur next, involving aesthetic and affective lures. When that decision is made, the many become one and are increased by one because after arising and integrating all these feelings, a concrescence perishes. It transitions from subjective immediacy to objective immortality and is then available for the next round of concrescence to prehend and make something new out of. This description Whitehead intended to apply across all scales, from the physical realm to the biological realm. You can even understand our own psychological experience in terms of these moments of concrescence. That is what Whitehead aims for with his categories—a scheme that applies across all levels.
Whitehead’s prehensions and acutal occasions of experience bear some resemblance to the notion of qualia, but his whole approach is quite different. Qualia come out of a substance ontology, where qualia are intrinsic properties. Whitehead’s ontology is process-relational. It is an alternative to the substance-quality ontology, where there are substances with essential or accidental qualities inhering in them. That is why we usually speak of a being “having” consciousness or conscious experiences, implying there is a substance with qualities attached. Most philosophers of mind who talk about qualia are trying to get at the intrinsic nature of consciousness. That is different from Whitehead, who thinks experience is relational, not an intrinsic property of an isolated substance.
The concept of prehension points precisely to the relational aspect of our experience. It occurs between beings rather than in separate beings. Philosophers of mind refer to qualia to point out the intrinsic nature of consciousness, insisting qualia have no function because once you admit they have a function, the functionalists explain it all in terms of what it does in the brain. The whole reason qualia defenders invoke qualia is to say something is left over—the “what it’s like” aspect—that functionalist accounts leave out, even if we had a complete neurophysiological understanding.
Prehension is different because prehensions do function. They are not ghostly apparitions hovering beyond physical processes but the very essence of causation itself. Prehensions convey feelings from here to there, from one occasion to the next, from many to one and from one back to many. There is an experiential quality, so it is like qualia in that sense, but prehensions are emotional, motivational, active in shaping what happens now and next. They imply a process-relational metaphysical background rather than the substance-property background of qualia.
In the first few pages of Process and Reality, Whitehead describes his categoreal scheme as a matrix, where there are categories meant to apply analogously across different domains of experience. You could say he is just using a mathematical metaphor and mutely appealing for an imaginative leap, but he is also trying to carefully describe a process of mapping many-to-one and one-to-many relationships. I am not an expert in advanced mathematics like category theory or graph theory, but I think methodologically Whitehead is applying a kind of mathematical method to metaphysics. He is a constructive mathematician, not pretending to provide a formula deducing everything or by which the universe could be calculated. He is using a mathematical analogy. For him, rationality is a method of analogy: knowledge is about making analogies between what we know and what we do not know, seeing if the analogy illuminates anything.
In part four of Process and Reality, which is notoriously difficult, Whitehead is founding a new discipline of “mereotopology,” the study of relationships among wholes and parts in terms of overlaps and adjacency. He tries to articulate a new description of extension that is more general than four-dimensional spacetime—what relativistic physics of his time was working on—and more general than any metrical geometry. He offers a projective form of geometry from which any metrical geometry could be derived. There is intensely mathematical thinking going on in Process and Reality. The spacetime we know from relativity physics could be emergent from this more primary type of extension that could also support different dimensional fields or morphologies. Whitehead argues that we should not assume any one geometry is the actual structure of the physical world. There might be multiple geometries revealing something interesting about its structure. He is a conventionalist in the sense that he did not collapse geometry with physics. Geometry is a way of measuring, and there could be multiple useful ways of doing so. Also, even if the physical world has some morphological structure today, it could be evolving into a new form of deeper dimensionality.
Whitehead provides a more adequate metaphysical context for the anomalies of quantum physics, which only seem anomalous to a materialistic, mechanistic understanding of the universe. He provides a way to understand nonlocality, entanglement, and the role potentiality plays in nature. He offers a more coherent account of how it fits together without needing to imagine magic, like conscious observers making the moon exist only when looked at. If you follow him deeply and come back up, quantum physics stops seeming paradoxical and starts just being how a minded universe works.
Whitehead sometimes describes his ontology as an event ontology, and “event” is slightly more general than “actual occasion.” An actual occasion is Whitehead’s attempt to provide an answer to the ontological question: what is a thing, what is it that exists? I implied earlier that “thing” typically implies a hunk of inert stuff, just hanging out until something happens to it, for our materialistic common sense. Actual occasions are not inert chunks of dead matter, but agential experients; they are alive. They have a certain temporal depth, but not measured by clock time; it is more like Bergsonian duration. You cannot measure the time it takes an actual occasion to become itself. Whitehead would say measurable clock time results from a series of actual occasions. He calls a series of actual occasions a society of actual occasions or a historical route of occasions.
It is important to note that most of what we experience—the enduring bodies, including our own bodies and other people’s bodies, all the animals and plants, the minerals, artifacts, coffee mugs—these are not actual occasions. These are societies of actual occasions, historical routes inheriting certain forms or patterns that repeat moment by moment, maintaining the form of the mug or our bodies. There are societies within societies going up and down the whole scale of the cosmos. With actual occasion, Whitehead is trying to give metaphysicians a referent for what exists, what is most concretely real. Among actual entities or actual occasions—he uses those terms synonymously—we include everything from God to a puff of smoke in far-off empty space to a moment of experience in a human life. These are all actual entities.
One implication is that Whitehead wants the same set of categories describing this process of becoming in terms of actual entities to apply to us as human beings, to our experience, to the rest of the natural world, to God, and so on. He says the world is composed of actual occasions. What is the world made of? That is the answer. It is not made of matter, not made of particles, not just ideas. It is made of these agents, these experiential, creative beings who realize a perspective on the world and then perish to give that perspective back to the world, becoming part of the next occasion that arises.
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The most important idea you can take away from Whitehead is that the universe is alive, that life is a matter of degree, and there is no zero point. Everything has some degree of animacy, some degree of interiority and agency. As Thomas Berry, an American theologian and philosopher influenced by Whitehead, said, “The universe is not a collection of objects, it is a communion of subjects.” I think that basic intuition—that we live in a cosmic community of other beings, of innumerable kinds, and that we as human beings are participants in a very ancient process of evolution—is crucial. Everything we do, moment by moment in our individual lives and as a species, will ramify into the future to affect the community members that come after us. It is both a tremendous gift to realize we inherit all this brilliance, and a tremendous responsibility because what we do matters for the future.
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In each process of concrescence, there are physical prehensions of the past integrated with conceptual prehensions of alternative possibilities. The alternative possibilities are what Whitehead calls “eternal objects,” something like Platonic forms but different in an important way. What gets ingressed from this realm of possibilities must be compatible with what is already actualized. Whitehead would say it must be compatible with what is physically prehended by an actual occasion. Leibniz’s idea of compossibility is an inspiration here—compatibility of possibilities not only with each other but with what has already been actualized. You cannot have a square circle, and I cannot sprout wings and fly out the window even if I can imagine it.
We experience moment by moment the entire universe, and to actualize a coherent, harmonious, unique perspective, many of the feelings and prehensions streaming in from the past must have their volume turned down. They must be negatively prehended, so we can emphasize what matters and what we find valuable in our unified perspective. It is important to note, just because we negatively prehend a feeling does not mean it is eliminated. It still contributes to the emotional tone of our final experience. Whitehead even talks about negative prehensions leaving a scar. We might forget something, but that forgotten memory is still functioning in the unconscious. There is a whole theory of trauma and repression implied here.
William James was an important influence on Whitehead. In some sense, Whitehead is taking James’s psychology and drawing out its cosmological implications. James does that himself, especially in A Pluralistic Universe, but Whitehead systematizes James’s psychology and unpacks its metaphysical ingredients. With James, you get the baked cake, and it tastes great. Whitehead reverses the process and shows you the ingredients and order of operations needed to produce that cake, showing what the universe must be like for James’s psychology to make sense. Whitehead did not need to develop his own psychology because it is already there in James. Whitehead’s cosmology developed out of James’s psychology. William James was also an important influence on Carl Jung, so we can also easily apply Whitehead’s process philosophy to enrich our understanding of Jung’s depth psychology and the notions of the unconscious, collective unconscious, and archetypes. There is a way of understanding all that in Whiteheadian terms.
For example, what Jung calls the Self is analogous to God in Whitehead’s cosmology. Whitehead has a conception of God as having two poles. God is an actual entity. Every actual entity is dipolar. There is a mental pole and a physical pole. God’s mental pole is what Whitehead calls the primordial nature of God, and God’s physical pole is the consequent nature of God. We can think of Jung’s idea of the Self as a kind of lure guiding the psyche toward greater wholeness. In Whitehead’s view, the entire pluriverse is occurring inside God, but that does not mean God is outside of it. God is as much in the world as the world is in God. The role of God, with these two poles, is analogous to the Self as a lure toward deeper harmonization. For Whitehead, this is a cosmological process—the whole evolutionary arc of the universe is not determined by but lured by this divine impulse for harmony.
Jung was talking about the individuation process of the human psyche, but already in his own terms individuation allows the human being to become, if not one with the universe, then at least more intimately related to the whole. Process theology, which Whitehead’s idea of God inspired, is one of the best ways I have found to spell out the metaphysical and theological implications of Jung’s psychology. Jung does a good job himself, but he is limited by Kantian epistemological boundaries. He would say he is just a phenomenologist, describing archetypes based on observation of his patients and himself. But in more speculative moods, Jung has a lot to say beyond just phenomenology.
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There is an ancient tradition of negative theology where paradox and the coincidence of opposites is the best way to describe the divine nature. Whitehead would say the primordial nature of God is eternal, and the consequent nature of God is temporal. Why is that? The primordial nature is the mental pole of God, providing some valence or aesthetic order to the realm of infinite possibilities. God’s original envisagement of possibility is felt by finite actual occasions as an initial aim at relevant novel possibilities in each unique situation. That is the role of the primordial nature.
The consequent nature, the temporal pole, is together with the world. The primordial nature is alone, one could say, while the consequent nature is together with the world, collecting the community of all actual occasions that have ever arisen, gathering everything that happens and harmonizing it. There is tension between these two poles. Whitehead does not want two gods, but we have a divine conception that is both eternal and historical, both alone and with the world. He also says the primordial nature of God is unconscious, and the consequent nature becomes conscious due to its relationship with the world. The primordial nature is like an unconscious yearning giving organized value to infinite possibility, informing and luring all finite actual occasions. They are not determined by God; they make their own decisions. Whatever they decide, the consequent nature harmonizes it, bringing it into ongoing unification.
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In Plato, the eternal forms or ideas are the preeminent actualities. The physical world and everything we sense is a kind of imitation, a mimicry, a copy of the reality, the original, which resides in some Platonic heaven. To be fair to Plato, he wrote dialogues, not doctrines, and the best refutations of his own ideas (including the idea of ideas) are also in his dialogues. There is a very important and ongoing argument between Platonic realists and nominalists. Nominalists think universals are just names, while Platonic realists think universals preexist concrete things. The nominalist critique is important. We want to avoid essentialisms. At the same time, it is hard to make sense of mathematics without Platonic realism.
Whitehead also wanted to provide some justification for definite knowledge, which presupposes the ability to recognize and identify the same objects amidst the ever-changing flux. He thus introduced eternal objects as a category. Unlike Plato’s forms, eternal objects are deficient in actuality. They do not cause anything. Whitehead’s ontological principle says actual occasions are the only reasons, the only causes, and all agency lies with the actual occasions of experience, not with eternal objects. Actual occasions draw upon or ingress these eternal objects. This is almost an inversion of Plato. In inverting Plato, Whitehead maintains the importance of having a category of real ideas. He found it necessary to introduce eternal objects to justify our knowledge, so we can reference them and understand how we recognize things like Cleopatra’s Needle in London, which physically is never the same twice at the atomic level, always wasting away. Yet we recognize it as the same object each time we visit. Whitehead says what we recognize again and again is a complex eternal object participating in this society or nexus of flowing occasions.
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Process and Reality is a very difficult book to read. Whitehead warns us that his list of dozens of categories in Part 1 will only make sense when applied in subsequent parts of the book, where he he displays their relevance to the special sciences like physics, biology, physiology, psychology, religious experience, and so on. They are not supposed to make sense immediately. The order of presentation of Process and Realityis not the order of composition. To produce these categories, he first analyzed all these disciplines and found generic principles he could abstract. Categories are just general principles.
Sometimes category means a box to put things in, but I think Whitehead imagines categories more as ways things function. A category is an account of a function that, together with other functions, elucidates our concrete experience. It is not just a box; it is more like a hammer to hammer nails.
In the case of the categories of explanation, these result from him carefully thinking through the process of concrescence to understand what makes logical sense. How to avoid contradictions? How to ensure coherence, that there are no arbitrary definitions, for example, that actual occasions and eternal objects are defined in terms of one another? He wants logical soundness and empirical adequacy. He is signaling an open-ended process of speculative inquiry, a speculative empiricism that we should continue to refine. Three-quarters through the book, he abolishes one of the categories (conceptual reversion), subsuming it into a more general category, exemplifying his creative method. Even he does not treat his system as finished, and nor should we.
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Whitehead notes two different types of process: concrescence is one, and transition is the other. He says this is an intellectual analysis of an unbroken process of becoming, and we should not mistake the order of explanation for the order of actual becoming. He describes these two processes to do justice both to concrescent individuals (the microcosm), to the way the universe becomes unique in each particular, and also to the macrocosmic, the universal, not just each but All. Transition is where what was just unified becomes one of the many again.
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As I enter my late thirties and get older, turning toward the second half of life, I am feeling a transition in my own development and thinking. I have been mostly concerned with natural sciences and abstract metaphysical integrations of special sciences, and now I am increasingly interested in the human being and questions of meaning and life. I have been finding—if not answers—at least interesting questions in various esoteric traditions, like anthroposophy from Rudolf Steiner, inheriting German idealism and taking it further. Just one example: we are at an evolutionary bottleneck as a species, and the secular materialist story of technological progress and consumer capitalism as the end-all be-all, the end of history, seemed plausible in the ’90s, but in the last couple of decades that has collapsed and nothing new has emerged to replace it. We must rediscover a more viable deep motivational structure to guide our existence and understand the further reaches of human evolution. Where are we headed? Thinking we are the pinnacle of evolution is naïve. We have a unique potential as human beings. As the Buddhists say, it is an auspicious occasion to be incarnated as a human being. What are we capable of? These are my questions—what sorts of transpersonal development lie ahead, and how can we consciously decide to further the evolutionary process?
This has less to do with understanding all available knowledge and trying to integrate it—which still interests me, I admit—but as I face the fact that I will die one day, my mortality forces any answer to the meaning of life to reckon with that inevitability. Pure knowledge and intellectual understanding seems less valuable in light or in the shadow of death.
Whitehead claims that “The teleology of the universe is directed to the production of beauty.” His conception of the divine is as the ultimate aesthetic vision. The divine tries to realize beauty, and morality is a subset of aesthetics for Whitehead. God seeks intensity of experience. God does not seek to preserve established modes of experience but to lure us forward, beckoning us onward. Also, not only is morality a subset of aesthetics, but so is logic. This from one of the preeminent mathematicians in world history! Logic is a subset of aesthetics. There is an aesthetic order to the universe, and moral and mathematical forms of order are outgrowths of that. Mathematics is music, in a sense.
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How does this affect me personally? I find it deeply inspiring. I have been on a journey in my life. I became a pretty obnoxious materialist atheist in my teens. Then I discovered the psychology of religion through Carl Jung, Alan Watts, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen. As I went through my twenties, I had some experiences and started thinking and feeling more deeply about the importance of a personal God. Studying esoteric and mystical forms of Christianity, the idea of incarnation resonated with me, as well. Whitehead’s idea of God as “the fellow sufferer who understands” touched me. Whitehead’s God is not omnipotent, not above the world ruling it with decrees like a dictator, but involved with the world, feeling every occasion’s pain and joy, trying to offer a sense of what is possible. This is not just a description of reality. It does seem adequate to my experience, sure; but it is also an invitation to give expression to experience in a certain way, so as to further this vision. There is a participatory element. God needs our help. I find that compelling.
Some people want God to be in charge and make it all okay. To me that is such a boring and inadequate understanding of human life. What is there for us to do if God is in charge? Why is there evil? If God is omnipotent, I am fucking pissed at that God. Instead, I feel inspired by a God who is not jealously guarding power, but crying out to us from even the smallest crevice, “Hey you, let’s do this together.”
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