Leslie’s maternal-lineage as metaphor… or more…

I have been meaning all week to comment on how powerful (and productive) I found Leslie’s centering of her presentation around reflection on her ownmatrilineal heritage. Two thoughts linger on now – to a new Sunday:

(a) The vast range of facts, beliefs and experiences we hold around about being in a family lineage offers so many useful reflections on the nature of and functioning of Whitehead’s actual occasions. The ways in which some “antecedent” process such as the lived-life of a parent or grandparent, inheres in and generates each of us feels so much like a wonderful metaphor for the phases of concrescence… the rawly physical or objective as entangled with the subjective and feeling. While living each of us in these lineages is immanent in and transcendent to the other. After death… perhaps still. As a grandparent who enjoys the privilege of spending regular time with my younger son and his year-old daughter I see that process unfold on two levels. I see my grand-daughter, and my son… (and myself) change each other’s processes of selfing. As one who recently lost a parent, and some time back a child, I have explored other levels of this “divine matrix”. Thanks for that Leslie!

(b) Is it only a metaphor? Leslie alluded, I think, to the ‘question of scaling’. Can we take Whitehead’s microcosmic metaphysical model of actual occasions and simply scale it up to describe human interactions? nature? politics. Many in the Whitehead-aligned communities seem to often do this and it seems to underlie much of the enthusiasm for the recent resurgence of interest in ANW and his work. I admit I love reading these sorts of essays, though!

But. Even the materialists don’t take the properties of electrons and quarks, their microcosm, and presume to explain human interactions by means of them. They take what I consider to be a cheat by naming, and claiming, “emergence” as a source of macro-cosmic entities. Some scientists do attempt to bring the levels to a meeting place: I think of Sheldrake and Ruth Kastner.

Anyhow… an open question I think.