Month: February 2024

‘CATEGOREAL’ SCHEME

Whitehead believes that philosophy serves to explain the abstractions that we develop from our interaction with the concrete world. These abstractions originate from a framework of “generic notions inevitably presupposed in our reflective experience,”⁵ specifically actual entities, prehensions (cogitation or ideas), ‘nexūs’ (plural of nexus – involvement of actual entities with each other through prehension), and ontological principles.⁶ This intuitive base leads to his second major philosophical principle: we bring the abstract and the concrete together using a ‘categoreal’ scheme comprised of four categories: (1) Categories of the Ultimate (creativity), (2) Categories of Existence (eight items), (3) Categorical Explanations (twenty-seven items), and (4) Categorical Obligations (nine items).⁷

The foundations of reality are the categories of existence: (1) actual entities (particular substances), (2) prehensions, (3) nexūs, (4) subjective forms, (5) external objects, (6) propositions, (7) multiplicities, and (8) contrasts (opposites). Of these, most important are actual entities which include living and nonliving things, humans and God. Actual entities, also termed ‘actual occasions’ (exclusive of God – more on this to follow), are the building blocks of the organic universe making them the ultimate facts. They are in a continuous process of becoming and perishing, but taken up in the creative advance. Because actual entities also pass into other actual entities through prehension, a kind of immortality is realized by all actual entities.⁸

A set of actual occasions in a unity of relatedness constituted by reciprocal prehensions leads to a nexus. Nexūs are thus societies of actual occasions that grow together through a process of integration of prehensions or feelings to a final phase he calls “satisfaction” or “concrescence.” Throughout this process is reflected two key doctrines: (1) the doctrine of self-constituting identity wherein each actual entity identifies itself as an individual constituent, and (2) the doctrine of cosmic order wherein all prehensions contribute to a pre-established universal harmony.⁹

GOD

There is one exceptional actual entity, God, which (who?) alone is not occasioned by something else – i.e. God is an actual entity but not an actual occasion, but a (the) primordial fact lacking temporality. However, God has two natures, first as the primordial entity, the actual entity which envisages all eternal objects and the appertition for their actualization.¹⁰ Eternal objects are pure potentials and neutral within the temporal order. They are permanent, immutable, principles of determination fixed in the primordial vision of God. They are the structure of the organismic process in which process and structure are interdependent.

God’s second nature, consequent nature, wherein is God transmutes eternal potentials into each and every concrete actual entity or occasion through divine wisdom. God shares in the fullness of the physical feelings of the world as a conscious entity and God’s relation to the world, according to Whitehead, is one of love and care tending to the preservation of all. In part then God is “the great companion, the fellow sufferer who understands.” Nonetheless, Whitehead is clear, God is a part of the system and thus subordinate to the category of the ultimate.¹¹

(further continued next post)

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⁵Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality. The Free Press, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-02-934570-7, page 18.

⁶Ibid.

⁷ Magill, Frank N. and McGreal, Ian P. (editors), Masterpieces of World Philosophy in Summary Form. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1961. Page 923.

⁸Ibid., pages 923-924.

⁹Ibid., page 924.

¹⁰Ibid.

¹¹Ibid.

“But that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.” – Plato, Timaeus¹

In our quest for a comprehensive philosophical understanding of ultimate reality we have reviewed the ancient Greek and Hellenic sages and our first four modern thinkers: Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer.² We come now to our last major modern philosopher who describes a vision of the ultimate nature of reality, the twentieth century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead’s interpretation, although remarkably complex, can be distilled to a single word – organism – by which he means the universe is ultimately a unity, not a multiplicity; a process, not a state; a becoming, not a being. He lines up with Heraclitus, Plato, and Leibniz, in contrast to Parmenides, Aristotle, and Descartes.

He develops his theory chronologically in three texts – Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Adventures of Ideas – for a combined 800 pages, some of which is quite dense, even inscrutable. I will try to extract his basic concepts and arguments in this first part and explore the opportunities for participation by humans in the second part. I will divide my summary of his system into six sections: Empirical foundation, ‘Categoreal’ scheme, God, Interdependency/Process, Organism, and finally Creativity.

EMPIRICAL FOUNDATION

In his essay, Science and Philosophy,³ Whitehead offers the starting point for understanding his system. He begins contextually; whereas science seeks to understand the stark particulars of reality and disregards or denies meaning, philosophers seek to explain universal principles and mutual references, eliminate arbitrariness, and demand meaning. Traditionally ancient philosophers focused on the “drama of the universe” while modern thinkers emphasize the “inward drama of the soul,” but Whitehead wants to revert to the former.

Next Whitehead argues that a purely rationalist or intuitional approach (for example that of Kant and especially the idealists) is fundamentally flawed. He is an avowed empiricist – that is, experience should guide our approach. For Whitehead, the fundamental situation of experience is not “subject-object”, but “ego-object amid objects.” As such any philosophy of Nature notes the interdependency of existing substances or in his words, “the primary fact is an impartial world transcending the ‘here-now’ which marks the ego-object, and transcending the ‘now’ which is the spatial world of simultaneous realization. It is also a world including the actuality of the past, and the limited potentiality of the future, together with the complete world of abstract potentiality, the realm of eternal objects, which transcends, and finds exemplification in and comparison with, the actual course of realization.”⁴

Whitehead argues then that Nature, as organic, is the appropriate starting point for understanding ultimate reality. He further believes this is confirmed in physics as demonstrated by electromagnetic field theory, the flux of events in space-time, and energy transmission.

(continued next post)

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¹Quoted by Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality. The Free Press, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-02-934570-7, page 82.

²I am omitting Leibniz (monads) and Nietzsche (Will to Power and The Eternal Recurrence) which I discussed in some detail in earlier blogs.

³Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World. The Free Press, New York, 1969. Pages 139-156.

⁴Ibid., page 151. (I am reminded of Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world.’)

In concluding Schopenhauer’s thoughts on relationship to his vision of ultimate reality as Will – the thing-in-itself for each thing including us, and for everything, i.e. Nature and the Universe – I will extract liberally from his own writings some tasty morsels for the reader’s intellectual palate, with the hope it may lead you to his very readable, even poetic prose.

“Any willing arises from want, therefore from deficiency, and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied. Further, the desire lasts long, the demands are infinite; the satisfaction is short and scantily measured out. But even the final satisfaction is itself only apparent; every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one; both are illusions; the one is known to be so, the other not yet.”⁷

“But when some external cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly out of the endless stream of willing, delivers knowledge from the slavery of the will, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them without personal interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all the peace which we were always seeking but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord and it is well with us…the state …as necessary for the knowledge of the Idea, as pure contemplation, as sinking oneself in perception, losing oneself in the object, forgetting all individuality…it is this blessedness of will-less perception… The world as idea alone remains, and the world as will has disappeared.”⁸

For Schopenhauer the surest way to such a state is the contemplation of art. He tells us that while “science… can never reach a final goal…art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation out of the stream of the world’s course, and has it isolated before it. And this particular thing, which in the stream was a small perishing part, becomes to art the representative of the whole, and equivalent of the endless multitude in space and time. It therefore pauses at this particular thing: the course of time stops; the relations vanish for it; only the essential, the Idea is its object.”⁹

Schopenhauer’s definition of art is a bit problematic – in some sense he seems to mean anything aesthetic – in fact he starts with human physical beauty and the beauty within Nature. Nonetheless he seems to designate a special place for the created arts in his expansive sense. These include not just the visual arts, but poetry, drama (especially tragedy), perhaps even history, at least as the artist anticipates “by so great a degree of intelligence that he recognizes the Idea in the particular thing, and thus, as it were, understands the half-uttered speech of nature,  and articulates clearly what she only stammered forth.”¹⁰

However, Schopenhauer reserves his highest regard for music which in his words “is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself, nay, even as Ideas, whose multiplied manifestation constitutes the world of individual things. Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself. Since, however, it is the same will which objectifies itself both in the Ideas and in music, though in quite different ways, there must be, not indeed a direct likeness, but yet a parallel, and analogy, between music and the Ideas whose manifestation in multiplicity and incompleteness is the visible world.”¹¹

So, it seems to me, Schopenhauer is not, in the end, a pessimist, but the opposite. It is in the contemplation of human artistic creation that we encounter and synchronize with the ultimate. I know of no greater advocacy of humanism in all of philosophical literature… I leave you now for a little Mozart!

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⁷Mann, Thomas (editor), The Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer. David McKay Company, Philadelphia, PA, 1939. Pages 106-107.

⁸Ibid., pages 107-109.

⁹Ibid., page 102.

¹⁰Ibid., page 111 (Schopenhauer’s italics).

¹¹Ibid., page 117 (Schopenhauer’s italics).

Last time I discussed how ultimate reality for Schopenhauer is Will and also that the world is an Idea arising within the human mind. Schopenhauer is, for many, the greatest philosophical pessimist in history because on his account: the all-controlling Will is a purposeless, striving and yearning without rhyme or reason. It is insatiable or only briefly satiable, and is seemingly inescapable. Free will then can be reduced to the dubious freedom to suffer from an unquenchable will.

Schopenhauer must have thought long and hard about this dilemma seeking an exit. For instance he considers and rejects suicide since that too is merely the playing out of Will (the desire to be free of the torment). He eventually discovers the solution in the ancient Eastern tradition of the Upanishads, while adding a distinctly Western flavor. Instead of the esoteric practice of meditation, Schopenhauer thinks we can neutralize the will by deep identification with objects and the Ideas or Forms.

Stepwise relief (salvation?) comes first from knowledge of the world as the stage of suffering and second by transcending the world of necessity via the intellect which may “wrench itself free from will.” Under  happy circumstances “the subject ceases to be merely individual and becomes the pure, will-less subject of knowledge.”⁵ This is most demonstrable in ‘the aesthetic state’ because aesthetic gratification is pure and leads us to the Ideas. Art, by the genuine artist, and perhaps Beauty in general, is as Kant taught us, “what happens without interest (Schopenhauer thinks this means ‘without reference to the will’). By concentration on the aesthetic we can reach “a state of selfless resignation, where reference was [is] to things as sheer ideas, no longer as purposes; and a peace…the painless state praised by Epicurus.”⁶ And finally, Schopenhauer believes the most pure of all art is music and therein may be the greatest escape available.

(further continued next post)

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⁵Mann, Thomas (editor), The Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer. David McKay Company, Philadelphia, PA, 1939. Page 13.

⁶Ibid., page 14.