“Where’s The Beef?” : Searching for “Process” in Whitehead

Topic

“That the actual world is a process, and that the process is the becoming of actual entities. (PR 22)”

I remain somewhat stuck on the matter of locating “the process” in Whitehead’s detailed schema, at least within his “Process and Reality.” Though it is nowadays referred to often as “Process Philosophy”, my understanding is that Whitehead only used the term “Organic Philosophy” to describe his overall schema. At the same time his opus is quite clearly entitled “Process and Reality!” What am I missing ?

I can find “process” at the microscopic scale of Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme, though it is problematic. And I do find references to the universality of process. But in some way the latter feels like an icing on top of a cake; a tasty combination but in essence two different things just layered upon one another.

As I understand it the “process” which Whitehead refers everything to, as is evident in the quote above, is the process of the becoming of an actual entity. And these latter are seemingly only microscopic. [see my essay on ‘Balancing the Scales’ elsewhere]. For me “Process and Reality” does not seem to accomplish a coherent analysis of macroscopic process.

Here is how I see the two forms of process Whitehead represents at the microcosmic scale.

The primary process of becoming of an actual entity is concrescence. This becoming is a process in which the entity (a) prehends or grasps the vast actual world of already-settled and hence objective occasions as objective data, (b) makes subjective choices under the pushpull of its own subjective aim and appetition, and (c) is possibly, but not necessarily, influenced by the suggestions of Whitehead’s god – and thus becomes a definite, unique being; ultimately, itself, another objectively-immortal being. “The many become one and are increased by one.”

But this process of concrescence is explicitly said to lie outside of “physical time” and to be entangled in a branching and recombining and looping and splitting non-linear staging of phases. Whitehead repeatedly characterizes his “genetic” analysis of the forms and phases of concrescence as abstractions in which the inseparable are separated for purposes of that analysis. If a process is akin to an event and an event is defined as temporal this is not by any means a prototypical “process.” Nevertheless, as one reads the analysis of his Part III one develops a sense of “process” underway. I accept this as an element of process in Whitehead while retaining a skepticism about the possibility that the “process of analysis”, the language, has been what creates the illusion of an actual process.

Furthermore this process of concrescence culminates in an instant of “satisfaction” which itself brings forth “droplets” (or quanta) of both space and time. The “extensive continuum” is understood to arise at this “transition.”

And this “transition” is somehow claimed to be the second form of “process” in Whitehead’s philosophy. Again, one can see process in the analysis and its implications but in some ways it seems build on shifting sand. These transitions would seem to string together time (and ‘weave’ space) and thus lend a primal temporality to the cosmos – the underpinnings of any processuality. Furthermore if the “elements in between” the droplets of spacetime-ness are themselves non-temporal then they will not interrupt an apparent continuity of time and process. In the vast cycling of being-becoming-being-becoming that lies at the core of the metaphysics, the “becomings,” are outside of time. All that remains are “beings” which themselves create time. This bears a suspicious degree of similarity to a substance-based temporal materialism.

So. I struggle to fully grok the element of process in Whitehead’s cosmology at the microscopic scale. But things get much vaguer for me at the macroscopic scale – especially if one attempts to move upward slowly. To go from the ground floor to the penthouse one has to make a vast, quantum-seeming, leap, nonstop: there is no betwixt of the micro- and the macro-.

Read a book like Rescher’s “Process Philosophy” and you will find a thoughtfully-framed scheme of description and analysis of events and process in reality at the macroscopic scale but only the barest of tethers to the microscopic. I can certainly get my mind around a biology or a sociology which are process-centered but a metaphysics ought not to be split into forms which work for this or that level of reality.

This concern of mine elicits many further questions of which I can here only briefly highlight one.

The “combination problem” is frequently brought to challenge panpsychism. In essence the question is: how, exactly, can minute elements of “psyche” combine to become larger elements of consciousness. Considering the similarity of panpsychism and what scholars (e.g. Griffen) have termed Whitehead’s panexperientialism, this challenge levels to Whitehead as well.

Now, interestingly, Whitehead seems seriously attuned to the challenge and in much of his analysis of the microcosmic he trails into detailed-feelng considerations of the arising of different forms of experience, including in some cases consciousness (consider the final chapters of his Part III in P&R). But the scaling suffers from his “pinning” of process to actual entities as in the initial quote of this article. Though he briefly suggests the possible natures of macrocosmic actual entities, such as his “regnant occasion” of a human organism, Whitehead seems to pay little heed to the question of rescaling the process of concrescence (remember – this is his primary form of process) to such an immaterial and richly elaborate macrocosmic entity as my “self.” (see my ‘Balancing the Scales’).

Substance materialism, against which Whiteheadian process-relational, organic panexperientialism is matched, has explicitly grappled with the combination problem by means of their vast and growing menagerie of the “laws” of nature. Quarks with “charm” and “color” combine according to mathematical laws purporting to be coherent and complete to form subatomic particles with “spin” and “charge” which combine according to… and so on… all the way up to you and me and the whole cosmos. But the critiques of substance materialism are robust. Process is the better way to explain everything. This is why we seek a process-relational metaphysics.

I do not see how “process”, as described in “Process and Reality” is central in a coherent way to an understanding of the nature of things at all scales of analysis.

note: Before memes were, er…, a meme, a thing, a genre… advertising jingles were all we had (consider the similar roots and manipulative purposes), “Where’s The Beef” was a tagline from an old commercial for one of the burger companies which cast aspersions on the patties of their competitor… in the form of a garrulous but persistent elderly lady.