Andrew Davis
Hi Bill,
An abbreviation of citations will indeed be included in the front matter of the book. You are right about PR and MT. FL refers to whitehead’s First Lecture at Harvard and HL refers to Harvard Lectures. AI is Adventures of Ideas and RM is Religion in the Making. You will also see CW for A.H. Johnson’s “Conversations with Whitehead.” Also DW is Lucien Price’s Dialogues with Alfred North Whithead.”
I hope that helps for now,
Dr. Davis
Dear Christie,
Thank you for sharing this moving poem which highlights so many of the themes we’ve been discussing. As I noted in the reading, the notion of “rhythm” is one Whitehead uses often. Process is rhythmic and musical in nature–an unfolding improvisation rather than a pre-written score. Reality is also poetic in nature, in fact, theo-poetic, since God (as we will see) is conceived as the “Poet of the World.” We co-write the poetry of reality, together.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Bill, sorry about this!
Naturalism SAM is a particular kind of naturalism based upon 1. a Sensationalist doctrine of perception, according to which all knowledge is based upon our five senses alone; 2. Atheism; and 3. Materialism, according to which what is fundamental is vacuous actuality.
Griffin’s alternative naturalism (Prehensive, Panentheist, Panexperientialist) critiques each of these commitments as inadequate both philosophically and scientifically.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Robert, I’m glad Matt’s erudition has assisted you in your question concerning analogy. He’s great! Part of the difficulty is our language. As Whitehead, admits we are stretching language to areas foreign to usual contexts of applicability, namely our own “feelings,” “decisions,” etc., but we arise out of this world expressing itself in these ways. Analogy and imagination are both required as we descend into what the depths of things must be like in light of our experience. What I’ve termed “retrospective induction” is an imaginative exercise based upon our analogous (rather than anomalous) relation to all that is.
Best to all,
Dr. Davis
From one Andrew to another: Beautifully communicated!
As I emphasized in class, Whitehead’s thought has been at the origins of early environmental ethics, philosophy, and theology. That every experience is also a value-experience shows that not just experience, but value pervades the natural world. We will touch on this in our next session together.
For now, Henning’s book Value, Beauty, and Nature gives a great overview of Whitehead’s importance to ecological thought. See chapters 1-2 especially.
Dr. Davis
Gentlemen, a fantastic discussion here!
For Whithead what the eye sees is not so much important and, indeed, he critiques philosophy for too easily taking what the eye sees macroscopically to be what reality as such is like microscopically (e.g., dead, vacuous matter). What is primary is the extraordinary confluences of compounding feelings derived from our bodily society such that we see with our eyes. As some of you indicated, there is a more fundamental visceral nature to perception (“causal efficacy”) of which our five senses are narrower delimitations (“presentational immediacy”). For more, I recommend Whitehead’s slim book Symbolism–which is excellent. The entire universe begets us moment by moment and the “sacred ingression” (I love that, Bill) leads us on.
Best,
Dr. Davis
Robert and Roni, nice discussion brewing here. Robert, you are right to see a certain interplay in Whitehead’s approach to philosophy and science. Consider his statements below from Adventures of Ideas:
“It is the task of philosophy to work at the concordance of ideas as illustrated in the concrete facts of the real world. It seeks those generalities which characterize the complete reality of fact, and apart from which any act must sink into abstraction. But science makes the abstraction, and is content to understand the complete fact in respect to only some of its essential aspects. Science and Philosophy mutually criticize each other, and provide imaginative material for each other. A philosophic system should present an elucidation of concrete fact from which the sciences abstract. Also the sciences should find their principles in the concrete facts which a philosophical system presents. The history of thought is the story of the measure of failure and success in this join enterprise” (AI, 146).
Roni, more needs to be done on how Whitehead’s philosophy might inform discussion of AI, certainly. Taking in data is a form of experience that the driverless care has, it seems, but this experience may be quite different from how Whitehead conceives experience as prehensive feeling and interiority which I suspect a driverless car would lack. And it would certainly lack the meta-cognitive awareness that is characteristic of consciousness like our own. As you indicate, much has been written on these topics and the various terms are indeed a challenge.
Cheers to both,
Dr. Davis
Kaeti,
Thanks for these great comments! You may enjoy some of the integrative work explored between Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman, among others. For a classic text, see Griffin, Archetypal Process and more recently Kling, A Process Spirituality. I think you will enjoy both greatly! David E. Roy’s Toward a Process Psychology is also a great resource.
Best,
Dr. Davis
Dear Bhavana,
Thank you for sharing such wonderful comments and key quotes/insights from our reading! I agree with Bill, we can feel your engagement with this material–and that’s wonderful.
Another way to speak of the systematic togetherness of things is simply to speak of how things are intimate to each other. Reality is based upon intimacy and intimacy signals the way in which things are together in the process of becoming. This way of speaking of togetherness is emphasized in David J. Temple’s recent book, First Principles and First Values, which you may enjoy.
Whitehead has indeed influenced Systems Thinking. In fact, if you are familiar with Ervin Laszlo’s work, Whitehead’s thinking was instrumental. As Laszlo communicates in a recent chapter about his intellectual journey (here), he discovered Whitehead through the Indian scholar B.K. Mallik’s work in Related Multiplicity and it changed the way he saw everything.
Very best,
Dr. Davis
Nelson, sounds good!
Dr. Davis
Many thanks, Bill! She was/is a gem!
Dr. Davis
Bill, thanks for this excellent follow-up.
The group therapy setting is a really insightful context for considering these issues. We will find later that some of your statements (eg., “therapist arrives in the heart of traumatic, frozen, structure-bound suffering, takes in the whole of what this experience…”) is deeply resonant with how Whitehead describes the “consequent nature of God.”
Hmmm…What if reality itself is akin the to group therapy process and God is akin to the therapist guiding the transformation? There could be a book written on these connections, I suspect. 🙂
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Gentlemen, great discussion here!
Before we jump into whether or not God is required for process philosophy, it would help to hear why Whitehead himself included God. Dennis, I’m curious to hear you tell us why he did so. This is important because if we don’t have an adequate grasp of this, we will misunderstand the nature, function, and necessity of God for his philosophy. Once we grasp this, we can better see the issues that emerge when God is simply removed. In truth, God can’t be removed and Whitehead’s universe stay the same. You may, if you wish, try to construct a different universe in which God is not required, but you will inevitably run into the same difficulties Whitehead resolves theologically.
To “‘chunk’ off all of Whitehead’s metaphysics that pertain to a primordial god and call what remains a ‘skinny Whiteheadian metaphysics'” risks sounding like we should just not take him seriously because he included “God.” And that’s just anti-theistic dogmatism. Moreover, these statements assume you know the function that the primordial nature plays in Whitehead’s universe. Also, you make no mention of the “consequent nature” and the roles it performs (which are equally essential!). For Whitehead, its not about what works for our individual preferences, its about coherence and adequacy between experience and theory.
Of course, we will come back to all this in our class and reading, but we are still a few weeks out.
Cheers to all,
Dr. Davis
Andrew, excellent comments and I wholly agree!
In his youth, whitehead read the nature poets as if they were his Bible and it only makes sense that he returned to them later in his philosophy. Chapter V of Science and the Modern World is titled the “Romantic Reaction” in which Whitehead praises the nature poets for “protesting against the exclusion of value from the essence of matter of fact.” I think you would enjoy this chapter.
Also, let’s not forget one of Whitehead’s most famous statements of God as the “poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.” Reality is a theopoetic process bringing value and fact together.
Whitehead also insists that “philosophy is akin to poetry” in Modes of Thought. Indeed, one of the initial hooks for me when initially reading Whitehead was the poetic beauty of much of his writing.
All poets welcome!
Dr. Davis