On staying with the complexity of P&R: Session 12 thoughts
- This topic has 0 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 3 years, 7 months ago by .
I am sorry I missed the 9/18 class discussing Part III, Chapter I. A planned casual family dinner with my son and his spouse turned into a larger gathering with her parents and her sister and brother-in-law – with me appointed “grill chef.” It was a nice time but I was aware throughout of the diminished numbers of rowers on our little boat and had so many questions on which I had hoped to ask your thoughts. Thank you all who were there for staying the course and I will look forward to the video.
Anyways… though there seem to be only occasional visits to this forum I find it helpful to put together my thoughts and questions here.
As you may have noticed I struggle with instances of “re-scaling” of Whitehead’s ideas and his overall schema with questions about it’s applicability or coherence when used as an analytic tool applied to, say, human or social processes. At the same time I am deeply drawn to these approaches – even if only metaphor. In parallel (perhaps due to my astrological Capricorn ascendant!) I am drawn back again and again to the hard, hard grapple with the nitty-gritty or Whitehead’s words.
It feels something like the archaeologist with the fine brush – laboring for weeks over the disclosure of an old bone embedded in a rockface.
So I went to all these conflicting places struggling through the initial section on the “Theory of Feelings” (imagine that! The title itself is kind of mind blowing — and then we are called back to recall that this is no mere psychology text but Whitehead’s chosen introduction to the meat and bones of P&R in sections III and IV. [the latter almost certainly also the most-skipped section of the book].
As I struggled to uncover this particular bone I shifted back and forth between P&R and some of my companion “aids” for reading.
In this case I found this startling reminder, from Elizabeth Kraus, of the importance of working to keep a steady hand on the brush… to stay with the detail.
[from Kraus (1978) page 93 – all emphases mine]
Whitehead’s genetic account of an actual occasion enters a spiral of complexity so dizzying that it is all too easy for the reader to lose sight of its purpose and central theme: namely, to give a metaphysical account of the self-creative process of an occasion, of its experience.
What is to be explicated in the account is the core of the philosophy of organism: that out of the sheer multiplicity of the past, new subjective unities emerge.
Past chapters of PR, and indeed all of SMW, speak of “intertwined prehensive unification,” of “the many becoming one and being enriched by one,” of the subject’s emerging from its actual world as a novel, aesthetic synthesis of that actual world.
However, if this romantic insight is to become metaphysics rather than mere poetic metaphor, it must achieve the precision of exact formulation, a formulation meeting and answering the metaphysical problems latent in the romantic insight.
• Through what mechanism can objectivity become subjectivity without destroying either or both in the process?
• How can novelty in the present arise when perforce it must arise within the context of a causally efficacious past?
• How are the primary feelings in a concrescence related to subsequent feelings so that phenomena such as the various modes of perception and the higher forms of consciousness do not lock the conscious and judging subject into a phenomenal world hopelessly divorced from the unattainable noumenon?
• How can freedom be a meaningful world, given the inescapability of past fact?
In a word, what is the finegrained rendition of process, of concrescence and transition, of the actual entity as subject–superject, which fills in the interstices in the coarse-grained account to make it more than a “likely story”?
Whitehead’s response is the labyrinth of detail which constitutes his genetic and coordinate analyses of Parts III and IV.
[ – end Kraus excerpt ]
I am quite interested in your thoughts on this. In particular I find myself hyper-aware of one matter here: as Kraus emphasizes – in P&R Whitehead MUST do more than merely state that “objectivity can become subjectivity” (and vice versa), he must describe a mechanism through which this happens.
The bifurcation between subject and object, between “mind and matter” is at the root of Whitehead’s and my personal critique of the flawed philosophical system, going back centuries, underlying the processes of disintegration of world and world-view that are characterizing our Anthropocene era. But Whitehead has quite damningly condemned the failures to mend this rent by other philosophers and we must assume he is intent not to stoop to mere metaphor to re-charactize the oneness of all experience.
My question : If concrescence is fundamental to the becoming of all actuality, and prehensions are the core element of a genetic analysis of the process of concrescence, and feelings are the mode of prehension then does Whitehead’s “Theory of Feelings” as laid out in this chapter accomplish the basis for this necessary mending of the world ?
regards,
daryl
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.