Month: March 2024

“The desire for peace is the mark of all civilized men and women.” – Henry Kissinger, 1973 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

In the last four blogs we looked in some detail at ultimate reality as schematized by Alfred North Whitehead, the last major philosopher to formulate such a system. Whitehead is convinced that our primary experience of the world comports best with a metaphysical structure that conjoins modern scientific cosmology with a philosophy of organism and creativity. To this he adds a speculative element of divine wisdom and agency which transforms potentiality to actuality and envelops and integrates feelings, of which the most important is love.

Humans, as actual entities, are an integral element of Whitehead’s cosmic organism, but a more expansive participation is attainable in exchange for greater diligence guided by insight. That is, consciously or unconsciously we are part of the organism and of creative advance, and we serve as components of interdependent nexūs, and we share feelings that influence and are influence by God. However, a greater consciousness of the nature of the world offers opportunities for higher impact. There are at least four interlocking levels on which we enhance our connection (in rough order of degree): general, religious, creative, and cultural.

GENERAL

The two general aspects of connection are Nature and Immortality.

NATURE

At the simplest level humans are a part of Nature not mere cultural beings. Like all physical bodies we are made up of ‘societies’ of actual entities, for example our constituent molecules, and contribute to ‘societies’ such as our immediate environment. In addition our perceptions participate in nature. “According to the philosophy of organism, physical and mental operations are inextricably intertwined; also we find the sense functioning as forms participating in the vector prehensions of one occasion by another…mental operations transmuting the functions of sense as to transfer them from being participants in causal prehensions into participants in presentational prehensions. But throughout the whole story, the sensa are participating in nature as much as anything else.”¹ The same applies to feelings: “The actual entities of the actual world are bound together in a nexus of these feelings.”²

But there is more; humans can achieve the intellectual conquest of Nature through science, mathematics, and measurement. From these efforts we learn of the “order of nature,” its continuous changing and adapting for attainment of an end – the end always being the “satisfaction of societies.” Nevertheless, we see that “nature is never complete, it is always passing beyond itself.”³ On the one hand we come to a metaphysics where final (teleologic/philosophical) and efficient (mechanical/scientific) causes are properly correlated. On the other, in a transcendental leap, as Lytton Strachey surmised the most obvious characteristics of nature are “loveliness and power.”⁴

(continued next post)

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¹Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality. The Free Press, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-02-934570-7, page 327.

²Ibid., page 238.

³Ibid., page 289.

⁴Whitehead, Alfred North, Adventures of Ideas. The Free Press, New York, 1973.Page 11.

CREATIVITY

For Whitehead, creativity is the universal of universals, the ultimate metaphysical principle which underlies all things without exception, including God.¹⁹ His description of the categories, interdependency, nexūs, process, and the divine formulate the matrix which establishes the defining feature of reality, its dynamism or creativity.

On the one hand there is a physical component of creation. At this level God is the principle actor, initiating a continuous process of potentiality becoming actuality, wherein elements are synthesized into new unities or “concrescences”. On the other hand, within the universal organism (and guided by divine wisdom), nexūs undergo process leading to novelty. Whitehead calls the emergence of the new the “creative advance.”

However the creative advance is more than the novel; it includes the objectification and harmonization of feelings. While intellect and consciousness arise in higher forms of concrescence, feelings are more fundamental and pretheoretical or precognitive. They are of three types – physical, conceptual, and transmuted. The creative advance integrates these various types of feelings in a process called “satisfaction.” Every phase in the creative, interdependent progression is qualified by past, present, and future leading to a final coordinated whole, that is, organism.

SUMMARY

Whitehead attempts to create a comprehensive metaphysical system that accounts for modern scientific cosmology by replacing traditional philosophy of substance with a philosophy of organism and creativity. Whitehead’s cosmos is fluid and changing, but in an orderly, deified fashion – a virtual self-creation. His system foreshadows chaos and complexity theory which were developed later chronologically, but Whitehead would surely add that a divine agency and integration of the subjective are required in his understanding of the universal organism and the creative advance. Next time we will examine his thoughts on human participation in this new vision of the world.

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¹⁹Magill, Frank N. and McGreal, Ian P. (editors), Masterpieces of World Philosophy in Summary Form. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1961. Page 923.

INTERDEPENDENCY/PROCESS

Whitehead  asserts science and experience inform us that each event in the universe is a factor in every other event such that “all things ultimately inhere in each other”¹² – there are no isolated events. The real world then is an interdependency of interrelated parts more descriptive of an organism than a machine. Moreover all occasions develop within the spatio-temporal continuum and are qualified in past, present, and future. New actual entities arise from prior occasions and eventually themselves perish, but not before being objectified by still later occasions.

Each “actual entity is that which it can become”¹³ and thus ‘being’ is constituted as ‘becoming’ or in other words is a ‘process.’ Process leads to novelty and the emergency of novelty which may inhibit or delay creativity or may lead to a creative advance. The inhibition or delay in creativity represents an evil, but the final creative advance that follows is better by virtue of that evil.  This dynamic actualization, interdependence, process, and creativity concord with the primary data of our immediate experience of the universe.

ORGANISM

Whitehead’s philosophy of organism springs from his analysis of Bergson’s default to reality as partly mechanistic and partly  elan vital or ‘vitalism.’ Whitehead feels this is an unsatisfactory compromise whereby “mechanism is partially mitigated within living bodies” while in fact, “the gap between living and dead matter is vague and problematical to bear the weight of such an arbitrary assumption, which involves an essential dualism somewhere.”¹⁴

Instead he suggests all “concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it.” Consequently “this doctrine involves the abandonment of traditional scientific materialism, and the substitution of an alternative doctrine of organism.”¹⁵ He justifies this further by pointing out how modern science has replaced the primacy of ‘mass’ with that of ‘energy.’ Energy, it turns out, is fundamental, but energy “is merely the name for the quantitative aspect of a structure of happenings: in short, it depends on the functioning of organism.”¹⁶

Whitehead’s goes on: “The notion of ‘organism’ is combined with that of ‘process’ in a twofold manner. The community of actual things is an organism, but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion of process of production. Thus the expansion of the universe in respect to actual things is the first meaning of ‘process’; and the universe in any stage of expansion is the first meaning of ‘organism.’ In this sense, an organism is a nexus.”¹⁷ He concludes: “The Cartesian subjectivism in its application to physical science became Newton’s assumptions of individually existent physical bodies, with merely external relationships. We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions, and within actual occasions. Such a change of thought is the shift from materialism to organism, as the basic idea of science.”¹⁸

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¹²Magill, Frank N. and McGreal, Ian P. (editors), Masterpieces of World Philosophy in Summary Form. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1961. Page 924.

¹³Ibid., page 925.

¹⁴Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World. The Free Press, New York, 1969. Page 79.

¹⁵Ibid., pages 79-80.

¹⁶Ibid., page 102.

¹⁷Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality. The Free Press, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-02-934570-7, pages 214-215.

¹⁸Ibid., page 309.