Matt Segall's Process Lectures on
Imagination, Whitehead, and the Panpsychic
Quality of Feeling
58:26Now playing
Showing posts with label Commentary - Matthew Segall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commentary - Matthew Segall. Show all posts
Monday, March 3, 2025
Saturday, January 4, 2025
Matthew Segall's Series on Whitehead
Introduction
by R.E. Slater
I
At the 22:00+ minute mark Matt Segall speaks to why Whitehead's process metaphysic is becoming so attractive to the natural sciences. It is why I became so quickly attracted to it once learning of it: "That in Whitehead is offered a helpful, competent cosmological metaphysic to the quantum world of science more than any other current metaphysic presently available." If you have a science background you will understand what I mean.... As introduction, Matt spends the first 22 minutes speaking to why process thought came to life in the early days of the quantum revolution of the sciences.
Moreover, Whitehead's process ontology seems to right all the errors I had once been taught from an Americanized bible educational perspective as learned from within a Reformed Calvinist evangelical theism. My education was neither Methodist nor Lutheran, Catholic nor Orthodox, nor even interfaith though I strive to understand each a bit better now then I could then when held in the grips of westernized evangelical thought. And yet, it may be said that all Christian and non-Christian religions easily fall into my critique of the Christian faith here in this article.
Finally, I find Whitehead's process ethic to be ironically far more generous than any Christian ethic displayed by the church when influencing state government and social thought as observed historically over the centuries by Christian oppression, cruelty and terror. Not that other parts of Christianity hasn't had its good results despite it's assimilating efforts of Westernized thinking and behaviour when communicating in cross cultural situations. But in Whitehead's universe, God and experiential outcomes tell of the love God holds for us and is working causally (not casually) through a cooperating universe... which tells us of an interacting divine prescence which is real and meaningful:
Usage: Cause v Casual: "The interviewers tried to be as casual and friendly as possible whereas Cause is the reason or source for something to happen." Thus, I prefer to write of a processual God as an interacting, non-coercive causal presence than of an evangelic God seen more as a determinatively controlling and forceful presence over-ruling creaturely agency. Hence, God by love, is working causally through a cooperating universe effecting not only God's non-coercive, interacting causal will but affecting universal and creaturely will as well in a working fellowship of novel creativity, benevolence, and beauty.
17 "You know this, my beloved brothers and sisters. Now everyone must be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger; for a man’s anger does not bring about the righteousness of God. Therefore, ridding yourselves of all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness, in humility receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls. But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not just hearers who deceive themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was. But one who has looked intently at the perfect law, the law of freedom, and has continued in it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an active doer, this person will be blessed in what he does. If anyone thinks himself to be religious, yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this person’s religion is worthless. Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world."
II
Having watched the good-and-bad words-and-deeds of the church tells us the "Christian" God needs a better definition than what God has been given by the church over the centuries. I submit that Process philosophy undergirding Process theology can offer any church or religion a more thoroughly loving God and universe than presently had under earlier Greek/Roman Stoicism, neo-Platonic Hellenism, or conflicted Jewish-Semitic thought. This would include all succeeding church ages held under various philosophic arguments and arrangements which have influenced its theological outcomes. As example, the Marxist German-Lutheran God who was quickly turned into a Nazi-Aryan God of hate and genocide. Thus and thus, a non-processual God is a more secularized and worldly God than a loving God of processual actuality as seen in Whiteheadian vernacular.
Which brings us to the subject of sin and the many kinds of "bible" theologies behind this idea.... Process theology describes sin differently than would a non-processual theology. That the subject of sin is approached through creaturely freewill or agency rather than as an inbred force of nature. That is, creation is good and beautiful. It is not inherently sinful even though it groans and is affected by sin. So too humanity. We are not sinful but fraught with ethical tension. I would suggest we rather are born with a love nature in a freewill universe.
Moreover, a loving God created a world and a creation without sin as birthed from God's image as versus i) the church's imagined "sin nature" which it's theology flatly states inhabits all creation. It is further imagined ii ) that "Sin entered Adam and that all creation fell in Adam" per the Apostle Paul. Whence comes the idea that humanity is born into sin even as all creation is... thus answering the church's question of sin and evil's origin.
However, Paul's kind of Semitic thought was influenced by the intermix of Greek and Roman philosophies across his own Semitic Judaism. Paul is searching for words and phrases to describe sin and evil which a processual theologian may take as a tensional force interacting with love-ingrained or imputed "freewill " agency. But NOT as an imputed force into nature as described by the traditional church's "Adamic Fall." Sure, it makes for good preaching but soon all of God's creation is seen as ugly and unloving giving to us in consequence a fickled, dipolar God who both loves and shows wrath which in consequence gives to us a austerely moral church full of legalism and hypocrisy, but not a church of love and goodwill. The point? The kind of God we have is the kind of God we get. God becomes humanized rather than Godly. God is love. God is not evil.
Hence, today's meta-modernist theologian must work through the bible-and-church's many pan-philosophical and psycho-social historical outlooks of God which church has betrayed it's kind of God that it worships. The portrayal of God in either Moses' day, or Jesus' day, 4000 to 2000 years ago is quite a bit different from the 21st century church's God today. A God which the church has added to in the bible or subtracted from in the bible over it's many theological eras. It is a myth that tbe traditional God has only been one kind of God.
And so, in process thought the church is afforded the opportunity yet again to re-orient it's bible's many enculturated kinds of theologies so that it may revisualize a God worthy of following. A God who speaks love and beauty against the unbeing and unbecomingness of unloving theologies, attitudes and actions.
As example, look at the early church's bible in it's eschatological depiction of God in the New Testament book of Revelation. Certainly this is not a loving God but a God of wroth and judgment. Such a picture defies a God of love, health and welfare (notably, I have discussed Revelation in another article several months ago which the interested reader may review). Let's just say that Christian thought has been affected by secular thought many, many times.
Too, God has often been described by our own anthropological demeanors too many times. So if we are going to continuely employ such a practice let us justifiably pursue a decent enough philosophy to help guide us in our preaching and ministries rather than to look to ourselves as the sum total of who God is as theologians and dogmatists have done over the centuries. Which is another way of saying that if we are to effect God's love than we our responsible to love in word and deed in healthy, helpful ways per the kind of God we have constructed in our minds and hearts. When we do not, the world blows up under us and around us. That is the story of Revelation. An eschatological picture of what happens when we do not love one another. It is the story of us and our failures and not of God and God's character.
Conclusion
And so, it is not necessary to further describe God as a wrothful divine ruler come to curse and destroy. We are the ones who are affecting our own destruction... not God. The gods of the Greek pantheon are not like the Jewish God of Jesus. They are different. And the church must account for the bible's many interior enculturated writings of God and theology when reading the bible for it's own day and age. If it doesn't, we continue to get a muscular dipolar God of human imagination. In process thought this won't do.
Hence Whitehead, and hence a reconstruction of Westernized theology from a post-evangelical or post-traditional outlook. One that is built on a processual metaphysic, ontology, and ethic. Process theology's God is more thoroughly beautiful. More loving. More kind and good. And traditionalized words like "holiness" become irrelevant as all creation is seen as holy in processual thought even as all can be beautiful and loving when based in a God which is beautiful and loving in God's Self.
Amen and Amen,
R.E. Slater
January 4, 2025
Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism
with Matthew D. Segall
Dartington Trust | June 4, 2021
This talk introduces Alfred North Whitehead’s “Philosophy of Organism,” a novel metaphysical scheme that he articulated in the first half of the twentieth century not only as a protest against the lifeless Nature imagined by scientific materialism, but also as a rejection of the narrow linguistic analysis and sterile logical positivism of his philosophical contemporaries. His was an attempt to make natural science philosophical again by asking whether physical causes and motions need be so violently segregated from the conscious reasons and emotions by which we apprehend them. We will explore the major themes of his magnum opus, Process & Reality, wherein Whitehead attempts to construct an organic system of the universe that not only brings quantum and relativity theories into coherence, but gathers up scientific truths, aesthetic feelings, and religious values into an integral vision of reality.Matthew D. Segall is a process philosopher whose research focuses on process-relational thought (especially Alfred North Whitehead) and German Idealism (especially Friedrich Schelling). He is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA (CIIS.edu). He has published articles on a wide-array of topics, including metaphysics, Gaia theory, religious studies, psychedelics, and architecture. He also blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.
This talk is part of the Holistic Science programme at Schumacher College. Find out more about the programme and register for updates about the course: https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/...
Related YouTube Videos
by Matthew David Segall
Oct 10, 2024 | 55:42
Matt Segall, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Department at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and the Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute. He is author of Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead, and Physics of the World Soul: Whitehead's Adventure in Cosmology. His website is https://footnotes2plato.com/about-me/
New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death.
---
Aug 4, 2022 | 1:26:31
Matt Segall weaves together the thought of Descartes, Kepler and Alfred North Whitehead in a deep synthesis with biology, physics, cognitive science and theology.
---
Mar 22, 2024 | 1:40:16
Matthew David Segall returns to the Homebrewed podcast with Dr. Tripp Fuller after 8 years! It was a blast to talk with Matt about his new book and a bunch of other process-related goodness. When you get done listening make sure you check out his YouTube channel and the new book.
How did Matt end up with cosmological questions finding Alfred North Whitehead through Terence Mckenna "Whitehead is like Psychadelics, you shouldn't jump into them alone." The allure of Whitehead's vision of mind in nature as the potential of a process engagement with different sciences. Tripp talks about how part five of Process & Reality feels like a philosophical revival sermon; the limits of science and problem of repressed reductive metaphysics; what does Whitehead mean by a philosophy of organism; the hot spring hypothesis for the origin of life; what is in the concept 'world-soul'; how does Whitehead help one think of life after physical death; how Whitehead came to affirm God.
Matt shares the story of his own wrestling with Christianity and his reflection on the future of the faith... 'a non-denominational non-institutionalized Christian' what do we make about the power and problems that come with a religious tradition. Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
---
April 1, 2022 | 1:21:29
Welcome to More Christ, where we seek to bring some of the world's most interesting and insightful guests to discuss life's central and abiding questions. In this sixty-ninth episode in a series of discussions, I'm joined by Dr Matt Segall.
Matthew D. Segall, PhD, received his doctoral degree in 2016 from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. His dissertation was titled Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead. It grapples with the limits to knowledge of reality imposed by Kant's transcendental form of philosophy and argues that Schelling and Whitehead's process-oriented approach (described in his dissertation as a "descendental" form of philosophy) shows the way across the Kantian threshold to renewed experiential contact with reality. He teaches courses on German Idealism and Process Philosophy for the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.
---
Jan 30, 2024 | 1:36:16
Prof. Matthew David Segall (@Footnotes2Plato) is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer, and philosopher applying process-relational thought across the natural and social sciences, as well as in the study of consciousness. He is the Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA and the Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute. Prof. Segall has authored many books, including 'Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead' and is the creator of Footnotes2Plato. In this episode, we discuss the paradigm shift in biology, Whitehead's philosophy of organisms, Schelling's Naturphilosophie, deep ecology, Transcendental Materialism and Slavoj Žižek.
---
August 2, 2023 | 46:04
My presentation summarizing the paper linked below at the 13th International Whitehead Conference hosted by the Munich School of Philosophy. Introduced by Godehard Brüntrup.
Link to paper I am summarizing: https://footnotes2plato.com/2023/06/2...
---
Sep 5, 2023 | 1:13:00
Matthew Segall joins The Meaning Code to discuss the intersection of music, memory, and the fundamental nature of life. They explore the communal nature of cellular life and how it relates to the collaborative effort of human development as well as the importance of intelligent sensitivity in decision-making and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
---
Apr 6, 2022 | 58:06
Conversations in Process has returned for a second season! Host Jay McDaniel will be interviewing exciting guests from both within the process community and beyond. Want to listen to this conversation on the go as an audio-only podcast? Find the show on your preferred podcasting application at https://cobb.institute/conversations-...
On this episode of Conversations in Process, Jay is joined by Professor Matthew Segall to discuss the finer details of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy and theology, and to draw connections between Whitehead’s thought and other important thinkers and religious traditions.
Matt is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where he teaches graduate level courses on process philosophy and German Idealism. His recent book, Physics of the World-Soul: Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, put Whitehead’s process cosmology into conversation with various contemporary scientific theories, such as general relativity and quantum theory. This book is exemplary of much of Matt's recent work, which puts ideas from process philosophy into conversation with the natural sciences.
In this conversation, Matt begins by sharing a bit of his own intellectual journey, telling how he came to Whitehead through Terence McKenna. He talks about his own spiritual background, growing up in a mixed religious family and coming to appreciate eastern religious sensibilities at a young age. Along with guidance from mentors, he eventually discovered that the spiritual insights from dharmic religions which had captivated him in his adolescence actually had equivalents within Western spiritual and religious traditions. Discovering these sources of Western wisdom was what eventually led Matt to encountering Whitehead’s own work, first exploring Adventures of Ideas before diving into Process and Reality.
At this point, Matt and Jay dive into some of the finer details of Whitehead’s philosophical vision, spending some time dwelling on his conception of God, considering how this differs from previous understandings of the divine and subverts certain Western philosophical tendencies generally. Matt also shares his perspectives on God as both the divine lure and the divine companion in Whitehead’s thought, and also emphasizes how Whitehead’s God is something that may appeal to more scientifically-minded folks due to the strong empirical emphasis in Whitehead’s thought. Another important aspect to Whitehead’s philosophy is his insistence on “organic realism,” which Matt presents as an alternative to either idealism or materialism.
Matt and Jay conclude this conversation with a discussion of how Whitehead’s thought interfaces with other important traditions such as Neoplatonism, shamanism, Buddhism, and Jung’s depth psychology. Matt and Jay both emphasize that these two-way dialogues are always fruitful and that these are areas ripe for further research and conversation. Matt will be returning to Conversations in Process later this season to continue this dialogue and explore the ways in which process thought can contribute to contemporary social, cultural, and ecological issues. Stay tuned!
---
Sep 13, 2020 | 1:07:01
Matt Segall is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness a the California Institute of Integral studies. Here is a link to one of his talks: Religion in Human and Cosmic Evolution: Whitehead's Alternative Vision (with discussion)
Matt and I have a deep discussion and get into dialogs about Whitehead's process philosophy and his idea of the religion in the making which has connections to the religion that is not a religion. It was a very great pleasure to talk with Matt, and I look forward to many more such discussions.
Sunday, December 29, 2024
Matthew Segall - Whitehead in 20 minutes:Why the World is Unfinished
 |
| Philosopher, Mathematician A.N. Whitehead |
Matthew Segall is a proficient Whiteheadian whom I have followed for a number of years since discovering process philosophy or, as ANW had first described it as The Philosophy of Organism" which later generations renamed as the modern beginnings of process thought at once both ancient and new.
Having listened to the podcast twice I thought that writing it down would be the more helpful which transcript I found on Matthew's site saving a lot of work for myself. There is a lot that is said here bearing reflection and much more discourse hence this article today to help old and new process geeks and newbies find a new way forward in philosophical and theological reflection. Once understood the world both ancient and new will open up away from Plato and back into the ebb-and-flow of creation itself with fewer mental barriers and dead ends.
Happy New Year,
R.E. Slater
December 29, 2024
“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
Why the World is Unfinished: Whitehead in 20 Minutes
by Matthew Segall | Footnotes2Plato | 19:01
Why the World is Unfinished:
Whitehead in 20 Minutes
by Matthew Segall | Footnotes2Plato
The following reflections are based on transcribed excerpts from a recent podcast that should appear at the end of the year and that I will be sure to share.
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
..
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)