Month: April 2024

CULTURAL

According to Whitehead, the final level at which humans participate in ultimate reality is through our unique subset ‘organism’ within the universe – civilization. Some of his most beautiful prose describes this so I will quote liberally and perhaps excessively. He starts:

“The notion of civilization is very baffling. We all know what it means. It suggests a certain ideal for life on this earth, and this ideal includes both the individual human being and the societies of men… Yet civilization is one of those general notions that are very difficult to define…I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, and Peace.”¹⁸

He addresses that fifth quality in the final chapter of his last major work within which he pulls together being human with ultimacy.

“Truth, Beauty, Adventure, and Art can be ruthless, hard, cruel; and thus as the Italian Renaissance illustrates, lacking in some quality of civilization. The notions of ‘tenderness’ and ‘love’ are too narrow, important though they be…We are in a way seeking for the notion of a Harmony of Harmonies, which shall bind together the other four qualities…I choose the term ‘Peace’ for that Harmony of Harmonies which calms destructive turbulence and completes civilization.”¹⁹

Whitehead becomes very precise now:

“The Peace that is here meant is not the negative conception of anesthesia. It is a positive feeling that crowns the ‘life and motion’ of the soul. It is hard to define and difficult to speak of. It is not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details. It is a broadening of feelings due to the emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized and yet momentous in its coordination of values. Its first effect is the removal of the stress of acquisitive feelings arising from the soul’s preoccupation with itself. Thus Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. There is an inversion of relative values. It is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty. It is a sense that fineness of achievement is as it were a key unlocking treasures that the narrow nature of things would keep remote. There is thus a grasping of infinitude, an appeal beyond boundaries. Its emotional effect is the subsidence of turbulence which inhibits. More accurately, it preserves the springs of energy, and at the same time masters them for the avoidable of paralyzing distractions. The trust in the self-justification of Beauty introduces faith, where reason fails to reveal the details.”²⁰

This kind of Peace appears spiritual yet unintentional, and as such is a ‘gift.’ It involves a high level of self-control however. The individual at peace understands the tragic nature of reality, but also of the essential place of tragedy in the creative advance. There must be both harmony and freshness in Nature, and the tragic cycle of ‘birth, culmination, and death’ is the human role in that process. Whitehead concludes,“The inner feeling belonging to this grasp of the service of tragedy is Peace – the purification of the emotions.”²¹

He closes this chapter exquisitely,

“At the heart of the nature of things, there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy. The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty, This is the secret of the union of Zest with Peace: – that the suffering attains its end in a Harmony of Harmonies. The immediate experience of the Final Fact, with its union of Youth and Tragedy, is the sense of Peace. In this way the World receives its persuasion towards such perfections as are possible for its diverse individual occasions.”²²

Plenty to think about…

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¹⁸Whitehead, Alfred North, Adventures of Ideas. The Free Press, New York, 1973. Pages 273-274. Whitehead defines the word “Adventure” as “the search for new perfections.” (Ibid., page 258). Practically this appears to mean spontaneity, originality, vigor, exploration, and at last novelty within a society which might otherwise become static or decadent through excessive complacency and conservatism.

¹⁹Ibid., pages 284-285.

²⁰Ibid., page 285. Whitehead sounds religious or even mystical here. Once again philosophy seems to come full circle into a kind of transcendental state.

²¹Ibid., page 286.

²²Ibid., page 296.

(We continue now with the third of the four mean for us to participate in ultimate reality as pictured by Alfred North Whitehead.)

CREATIVE

In addition to the general and spiritual ways we connect to the Whitehead’s ultimate reality of organism and the creative advance, there remain two others – our individual creativity as a factor in the creative advance and our participation in the subset organism of humanity – civilization. We will start with individual creativity, specifically human efforts in the creation of beauty.

In setting context, Whitehead reviews the classical philosophical problem of Appearance vs. Reality. Traditionally, Truth is defined as the correspondence of Appearance with Reality. Indeed Truth is one of Whitehead’s five essential qualities of civilization, however the second, Beauty, is something more –

“a wider and more fundamental notion than Truth…the internal conformation of the various items of experience with each other, for the production of maximum effectiveness. Beauty thus concerns the inter-relations of the various components of Reality.”¹³

Then he makes two assertions that are quite unexpected, “The teleology of the universe is directed to the production of Beauty.”¹⁴ and “Beauty is left as the one aim which by its very nature is self-justifying.”¹⁵

From there he moves to the individual:

“Art is purposeful adaptation of Appearance to Reality. Now ‘purposeful adaptation’ implies an end…This end, which is the purpose of Art, is two-fold, namely Truth and Beauty [Truthful Beauty]” ¹⁶

(Art it turns out is another of the five essential qualities of civilization.) Art’s purposefulness occurs by its attempt to harmonize feelings of the parts for each other and towards the whole; the resulting harmony is beautiful. And Art neglects the future in the interest of immediacy instantiating Beauty in existing reality. Art originates in a craving for re-enaction that leads to novel content which reshapes it into its final phase of satisfaction while exhausting the creative urge.¹⁷

I think Whitehead is using these ideas of Beauty and Art loosely, not only signifying what is customarily called art, but the entire human project: literature, science, technology, society, even politics. When any of us assesses the world presented to us and makes efforts to clarify its meaning or improve it, we manifest a type of creative urge wherein we generate a kind of art or beauty that projects into the future organism of humanity and the universe.

(final continuation next post)

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¹³Whitehead, Alfred North, Adventures of Ideas. The Free Press, New York, 1973. Page 265.

¹⁴Ibid.

¹⁵Ibid., page 266.

¹⁶Ibid., page 267.

¹⁷Ibid., page 192.

RELIGIOUS

Next we consider religious features of human participation in ultimate reality. In anticipation of the physicalist’s, scientist’s or skeptic’s objection to his views, Whitehead says:

“It is childish to enter upon thought with the simple-minded question, What is the world made of? The task of reason is to fathom the deeper depths of the many-sidedness of things. We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates there are always heights beyond which block our vision.”⁹

For Whitehead, beyond these heights is the notion of God, where Christianity “dwells upon the tender elements of the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love… It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present.”¹⁰

Whitehead believes we connect with ultimate reality as manifest in God through feelings or emotions. He offers as an example the Christian meditating on a Gospel phrase whose concern is not its truthfulness, but the feelings it elicits. This ‘lure for feeling’ emanates from the divine and guides concrescence and satisfaction. It leads to identification of and discrimination among eternal objects introduced into the universe. A similar if more banal process occurs with meditation on the events of one’s daily life.¹¹

Moreover God’s consequent nature which originates actual occasions, such as us, completes the deficiency of God’s mere conceptual reality. The passage of actual occasions is taken up by God towards an end of perfect unity and perfect multiplicity. While we are a ‘means’:

“The function of being a means is not disjoined from the function of being an end. The sense of worth beyond itself is immediately enjoyed as an overpowering element in the individual self-attainment. It is in this way that the immediacy of sorrow and pain is transformed into an element of triumph. This is the notion of redemption through suffering which haunts the world.”¹²

In short, human existence – particularly, our endless processing of emotions and feelings, our suffering and our joys – is ultimately tied to the divine as shared means and ends in the developing oneness of the universal organism. Here we have Whitehead’s version of mystical union.

(third continuation next post)

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⁹Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality. The Free Press, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-02-934570-7, page 342.

¹⁰Ibid., page 343.

¹¹Ibid., pages 185-187..

¹²Ibid., page 350.

(we pick up with general ways in which Whitehead suggests we participate in ultimate reality)

IMMORTALITY

Whitehead’s theory on immortality follows logically from his premise that actual entities or occasions, including humans develop within the spatio-temporal continuum and are qualified in past, present, and future. Of course the past and the future do not exist per se, only the present exists. According to Whitehead, “In the philosophy of organism it is not ‘substance’ which is permanent, but ‘form.’ Forms suffer changing relations while “actual entities ‘perpetually perish’ subjectively, but are immortal objectively.”⁵ Elsewhere he elaborates: “…time is perpetually perishing. In the organic philosophy an actual entity has ‘perished’ when it is complete. The pragmatic use of the actual entity, constituting its static life, lies in the future. The creature perishes and is immortal.”⁶ This is critical for Whitehead; doctrinally, future itself is understood “in terms of account of the process of self-completion of each individual actual occasion.”⁷ This objective immortality is demonstrated by repetition which is fundamental to organism.

But actual occasions (including us) do not just repeat past ones. Self-completion proceeds from ‘re-enaction’ to ‘anticipation,’ during which ‘novel content’ is acquired. Novel content includes feelings and prehensions that integrate and re-integrate with other past and present ones to inform the creative advance.⁸  It appears Whitehead is saying that human immortality is the persistence of the reworked feelings and the creative forms that result from each of our lives.

(third continuation next post)

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⁵Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality. The Free Press, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-02-934570-7, page 29.

⁶Ibid., page 82.

⁷Whitehead, Alfred North, Adventures of Ideas. The Free Press, New York, 1973. Page 192.

⁸Ibid., page 192-193.