Dr. Matthew Segall: Whitehead and Process1:21:55
Premiered Sep 11, 2022Aired on Twitter Spaces 9/10Co-hosts Christopher Satoor + Elisabeth SchillingGuest: Dr. Matthew SegallMatthew 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.Matt Segall's YT: @Footnotes2Plato
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[Process] Quotes & Sayings
I.
"Philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance include Heraclitus, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Nail, Alfred Korzybski, R. G. Collingwood, Alan Watts, Robert M. Pirsig, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Charles Hartshorne, Arran Gare, Nicholas Rescher, Colin Wilson, Tim Ingold, Bruno Latour, and Gilles Deleuze.
In physics, Ilya Prigogine distinguishes between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming". Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and experiences, but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion, philosophy, and science."
II.
"It seems sensible to understand "process philosophy" as a doctrine committed to, or at any rate inclined toward, certain basic propositions:
1) Time and change (event) are among the principal categories of metaphysical understanding.
2) Process is a principal category of ontological description.
3) Processes (events) are more fundamental, or at any rate not less fundamental, than things (matter) for the purposes of ontological theory.
4) Several, if not all of the major elements of the ontological repertoire - God, Nature as a whole (the cosmos), persons, material substances (quantum particles and macro objects) - are best understood in process terms.
5) Contingency, emergence, novelty and creativity are among the fundamental categories of metaphysical understanding.
A process philosopher, then, is someone for whom temporality, activity, and change - of alteration, striving, passage, novelty-emergence - are the cardinal factors for our understanding of the real.
Ultimately, it is a question of priority - of viewing the time-bound aspects of the real as constituting its most characteristic and significant features.
For the process philosopher, process has priority over product - both ontologically and epistemically."
- Nicholas Rescher, Process Philosophy, 1928, p 6.
III.
"The cycles that can ground us through our busy lives are: breath, rhythms of the day, weekly rhythms like Sabbath rest, waxing and waning lunar cycles, seasons of the year, seasons of a lifetime, ancestral time, and cosmic time.
Each cycle encourages us to mindfully consider the time that passes as quickly as each breath and as slowly as the passing of generations."
- Christine Valters Paintner, Sacred Time, 2021
IV.
"Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap."
- Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1928, p. 4
"Language often stands in the way of expressing processual beingness. However, the felt experiences of passing events tumble through the barriers of psychic language bringing meaning, regeneration, thrival, and hope to the felt processual language of beingness." - RE Slater
V.
"Process philosophy, a 20th-century school of Western philosophy that emphasizes the elements of becoming, change, and novelty in experienced reality; opposes the traditional Western philosophical stress on being, permanence, and uniformity. Reality - including both the natural world and the human sphere - is essentially historical in this view, emerging from (and bearing) a past and advancing into a novel future. Hence, reality cannot be grasped by the static spatial concepts of the old views, which ignore the temporal and novel aspects of the universe given in man’s experience."
- Encyclopedia Britannica, 2021
VI.
"Mind transforms the continuance of physical spacetime into moments (the absolute Now) and blends these moments into an apparent continuity through an overlapping of unfolding capsules. The flow of psychological time is an illusion based on the rapid replacement of these capsules. Each mind computes the measure of time passing and duration from the decay of the surface present (the event) in relation to a core of past events. As each new surface (event) is generated, that surface, the rim of the immediate past, recedes in the wake of rising contents. This recession, an uncovering of phases latent in the original traversal, exposes layers in the past forming the content of the immediate past moment. The surge of the microgeny to a surface that dissolves the instant it appears, the priority of the Self in the unfolding sequence, the feeling of agency, create a Self in a state of becoming, a Self that travels in time like the crest of a wave, always in pursuit of a future just beyond the grasp of the present."
- Jason W. Brown, Psychology of Time Awareness, 1990
"Our felt experience and recognition of passing time carries forward from past eventful experiences to future eventing experiences." - RE Slater
VII.
"The Huayan developed the doctrine of "interpenetration" or "coalescence" (Wylie: zung-'jug; Sanskrit: yuganaddha),[23][24] based on the Avatamsaka Sūtra, a Mahāyāna scripture. It holds that all phenomena (Sanskrit: dharmas) are intimately connected (and mutually arising). Two images are used to convey this idea. The first is known as Indra's net. The net is set with jewels which have the extraordinary property that they reflect all of the other jewels. The second image is that of the world text. This image portrays the world as consisting of an enormous text which is as large as the universe itself. The words of the text are composed of the phenomena that make up the world. However, every atom of the world contains the whole text within it. It is the work of a Buddha to let out the text so that beings can be liberated from suffering. The doctrine of interpenetration influenced the Japanese monk Kūkai, who founded the Shingon school of Buddhism. Interpenetration and essence-function are mutually informing in the East Asian Buddhist traditions, especially the Korean Buddhist tradition."
"Beingness both draws from and, experiences, all of the cosmos' beingness corporately, as well as some of the cosmos' beingness in uniquely creative experiences individually. Life draws from the life of the cosmos as well as it's own personal experience while continually making adjustments to it's corporate and constitutionally personalized paths." - RE Slater
VIII.
- "Reality is a process: nothing ever stays the same.
- The process of reality is creative, emergent, evolutionary, and social.
- There is a profound relationship between creativity, beauty, and life.
- All life deserves respect; nothing in nature stands alone; everything is connected.
- Thinking and feeling are connected; mind and body are not separate entities; aesthetic wisdom and rational inquiry are complementary.
- Human experience begins by feeling the presence of the world and being affected by it.
- Human happiness involves sharing experience with others and responding in harmony to these relationships."
- Jay McDaniel, 2020, Some Principles of Process Philosophy
IX.
"This sense of reality as a dynamic breath-force tissue is reflected in the Chinese language itself, and so operates as an unnoticed assumption in ancient Chinese consciousness. There is no distinction between noun and verb in classical Chinese. Virtually all words can function as either. Hence, the sense of reality as verbal: a tissue alive and in the process. This includes all individual elements of reality, such as mountains or people, and contrasts with our language's sense that reality is nominal, an assemblage of static things. A noun in fact only refers to a temporal slice through the ongoing verbal process that any thing actually is."
- David Hinton, China Root, 2020, p. 35
X.
Some Principles of Whitehead's Thinking
1. Question the assumptions of your community, your society, your religion, your science, your educational institutions, especially those that are rarely mentioned.
2. Question the dominant media, asking who controls it and what they want you to think.
3. Recognize that a serious answer to any important question brings into view lots of other questions [as well as a new language to the soul].
4. When people appeal to mystery, consider that it may be mystification. Push critical thought as far as you can.
5. Recognize that the wider range of influences on an event or person that you consider, the better you understand that event or person.
6. Recognize that the broader you consideration of the context and of the likely consequences of your actions, the better chances you will make towards the right choice.
7. Realize that all your ideas and values are influenced by your particular situation, but refuse to conclude that for this reason they can be dismissed as merely "relative."
8. Recognize that there may be no actions that are completely harmless, but do not let that prevent you from acting decisively.
9. Understand that compassion is the most basic aspect of our experience, and seek to liberate and extend your compassion to all with which you come in contact.
10. Deepen you commitments to your own immediate communities, but always remember that other communities make similar demands on their members. Let you ultimate commitment be all-inclusive."
- By John B. Cobb, Jr., What would Whitehead Think?
XI.
“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.”
- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
XII.
The Core Doctrines of Process Philosophy for Circa 2020 CE
"1. The integration of moral, aesthetic, and religious intuitions with the most general doctrines of the sciences into a self-consistent worldview as one of the central tasks of philosophy in our time.
2. Hard-core commonsense notions as the ultimate test of the adequacy of a philosophical position.
3. Whitehead's nonsensationist doctrine of perception, according to which sensory perception is a secondary mode of perception, being derivative from a more fundamental, nonsensory "prehension."
4. Panexperientalism with organizational duality, according to which all true individuals - as distinct from aggregational societies - have at least some iota of experience and spontaneity (self-determination).
5. The doctrine that all enduring individuals are serially ordered societies of momentary "occasions of experience."
6. The doctrine that all actual entities have internal as well as external relations.
7. The Whiteheadian version of naturalistic theism, according to which a Divine Actuality acts variably but never supernaturally in the world.
8. Doubly Dipolar Deism.
9. The provision of cosmological support for the ideals needed by contemporary civilization as one of the chief purposes of philosophy in our time.
10. A distinction between verbal statements (sentences) and propositions and between both of these and propositional feelings."
- David Ray Griffin, Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism, 2001, p.1-12, summary excerpts.
