In this course Dr. John B. Cobb, Jr. will present a series of ten lectures that critically examine our current condition and constructively propose an alternative for the future, informed primarily by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Students will have the opportunity to interact with and learn from one of the world’s foremost experts in process thought, and together think through some of humanity’s greatest challenges.
Each week’s lecture will be presented in front of in-class participants, and also live-streamed and recorded for online participants. Live streams and recordings will be available by clicking on the individual topic pages in the “Course Content” section below.
Course Description
The course assumes that participants are aware that humanity is in dire straits. We will spend very little time describing what is happening to soil, air, forests, grasslands, fresh water, oceans, the ocean level, and climates. The problems are now beginning to have drastic consequences for some people. More are being affected every day. Other species of animals are already dying off at a rapid rate. Some say we are entering a new geological age. In any case, we should be able to agree that “the modern world” is unsustainable and is crashing down around us. Rather than accepting this crash as the last word, we can notice and encourage the emergence of a new civilization, built on the best of modernity, but founded on a different foundation. Some of us call it “and ecological civilization.”
Some people see the losses that are already occurring, and view catastrophes of unimaginable proportions as inevitable. Some fail even to look, and they plan to continue modern militaristic nationalism, mechanistic materialism, and neo-economic liberalism with its consequences in global financial capitalism. This course is for people who see that modernity in that sense speeds us toward self-destruction. They are open to considering a post-modern alternative that could work for the common good. Indeed, focusing on what is still possible may lead to mitigating the now inescapable suffering. I want to show how Whitehead’s philosophy offers that kind of alternative. The following ten titles together with their explanatory paragraphs provide an overview of what will be presented.
The double title assumes that if all our future action is already determined, simply acting out the predetermined future does not provide a sense of meaning. It is hard to believe that that there are people who really think this way, but since most university education explains things as physically determined, some are socialized into this belief, and others are shaken in their sense of meaning and purpose that they have taken for granted. Many solve the problem by ignoring it. Others follow Immanuel Kant in adopting a dualism of pure and practical reason. But a deeper solution is offered by Whitehead, who shows that and how we can distinguish between what is determined by the past and what is open for determination in the present moment.
This topic is quite similar to the former one, especially on the negative side. We assume that a mechanism can only do what it is constructed to do. So, a mechanistic world is a deterministic one. When determinism is contrasted with freedom, the focus is on humans. When it is contrasted with organism, the focus is on nature. Modern science began by removing purpose from the natural world. By shifting the focus to “efficient causes,” it led to centuries of immense increase in our ability to understand and control the world. Nevertheless, we all treat our pets as if they often behave purposefully. Today it is not only animals, but even plants, and, perhaps most important, quanta and quarks that do not fit the mechanistic model. Without taking away from its value in directing much research, we now see that this model does not explain anything exhaustively. The organic character of the world must also be recognized.
The title language brings us back to the human sphere. For Whitehead, we, too, like all living things, are organisms. Organisms differ from mechanisms in that they are fundamentally in interaction with other things. An organism cannot survive without food, and also, in the human case especially, a great deal else derived from the human environment. Relations are integral to organisms, whereas the machine remains the same regardless of its environment. Sadly, much of the study of human beings has taken self-contained individuals as primary. Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is based on the idea of competitive individuals, and so is neo-liberal economics. Lynn Margulis has shown that evolution has in fact required a great deal of synergy, whereas the theory of evolution has emphasized competition. Whitehead’s organic philosophy shows that individual persons exist only in community. We need an economics for community.
Organisms are something for themselves. Many of them also contribute to human wealth and enjoyment. Human beings have no choice but to use nature, and even to transform it for greater usefulness to us. But we do have a choice whether, in that process, we also are aware of the values we are destroying and take them into account. Our economic theory does not, and our businesses rarely have. We have typically approached nature as though its only value could be measured by money. This has also led to ignoring the long-term consequences of our actions, since they play no role in normal calculations of profits. Whitehead says, “All life is robbery.” We must accept that. But he also says, “the robber requires justification.” Robbery that leads to disaster will be hard to justify.
We have nowhere to begin except with our experience. However, the main streams of empirical philosophies begin, not with experience as such, but with the objects of vision. The assumptions seem to be that experience in general tells us nothing about the world in general and that vision is our reliable access to that external world. Although most philosophies recognize that we have other senses, these remain largely ignored. Whitehead follows William James as a “radical empiricist” considering every aspect of experience as valuable, important, and informative. All experience is “subjective,” but much of it is of other entities. Vision is of patches of color that are taken to be appearances of solid objects. Most empiricism thinks of the world as made up of the sort of things that are objects of seeing. Whitehead teaches that in fact it is made up of other occasions of experience, a few, being human, more, animal, but most the experience of microscopic entities.
When we think of reality as composed of objects like those of vision, we think that relations are secondary to objects. An object’s existence is not relational. An object is what it is wherever it is. We may talk also about its distance from another object. That is a relation, and there are myriads of such relations that can be posited of an object. But they do not affect what the object is in itself. If we think instead of a momentary experience in our own lives, we see that it is related to its past in a quite different way. The experience in which if hear one chord in a musical composition is what it is because a moment ago, I heard another chord. The experience can be of music only if the past is still present in the present. The other that is experienced is a past occasion of experience that largely constitutes what the present experience becomes. Of course, my current experience is also incorporating events in my body and in the surrounding world. It is a process of synthesizing all of this.
This pairing often suggests a conflict. As a widespread phenomenon, that sense of conflict came into being with evolutionary thought. Before that, people thought that the experience of human beings was not part of the world that science studied. That world could all be studied as “clockwork.” Human experience belonged to the world of spirit. Although there were many conflicts between scientists and between those who pronounced about the world of spirit, the two communities largely left each other alone. After we found that we are part of the nature studied by science, additional conflicts were inevitable. One group of thinkers, we call them neo-naturalists, undertook to think of nature in a way that did not take away from the value of human life or the explanation of human actions. Whitehead was a neo-naturalist who found continuity, but also enormous difference between quarks and humans. As long as science commits itself to a materialist/mechanist metaphysics there will be profound tensions with those interested in the spiritual dimensional of life. Whitehead offers science metaphysics of organism that solves many of its problems.
When we approach “God” in strictly theological terms rather than philosophically, we usually use the term to mean whatever a person puts first in life. That is sometimes wealth, sometimes physical pleasure, sometimes the adulation of others. Academicians sometimes make the advance of their academic disciplines the unifying goal of their lives. Athletes sometimes make their team’s success their god. Some Christians turn the Bible into their god. Some naturalists view nature as what is ultimately worthy of their devotion. Although some of these commitments are admirable in themselves, none are comprehensive. Total devotion to anything limited is “idolatry.” The true God is in some sense all-inclusive, that is, concerned for all people and every thing. Whitehead calls for “world loyalty.”
In addition to traditions that focus on the question of the object of devotion, there are others that have no interest in God. Some consider that the goal is to free us from such concerns and direct our efforts to understanding what we are in an ultimate sense. Leading Hindus hold that the self “atman” is ultimately the same as ultimate reality overall, “Brahman”. This is similar to Being Itself in the Western tradition. Buddha taught that being is “empty.” There is only an ultimate self-emptying. There are also traditions that are oriented to the world in a holistic way. Today, as people react against the total secularization of nature, some find their fulfilment in oneness with it. Often these three types of “ultimates” are thought to conflict with one another. Whitehead shows that they are all real and important and that styles of life oriented to them separately can be complementary. We can learn from one another and each tradition can supplement and enrich the others.
Most spiritual traditions emphasize the centrality, or ultimacy, or at least the primacy of love. Sadly, the metaphysics to which most scientists, and many participants in other academic disciplines, subscribe, has no place for love. For Whitehead the units of reality are syntheses of relations, which Whitehead also calls feelings. The synthesized feelings in some measure reenact the feelings of what is felt. They are “feeling with”, or “com-passion”. The more fully the feelings felt are re-felt, the richer the life of the feeler. Compassion toward ourselves and others is metaphysically fundamental. Buddhist metaphysics highlights this vision. In theistic traditions, God is understood to feel everything perfectly. God is love. We feel God’s love and what that love calls us to be and do very imperfectly. The more fully and clearly we feel it, the better are our lives. It is not sentimentality to hold that if we love the world and God, and especially one another, our lives will stop contributing to human suicide and begin to build an ecological civilization.
