Andrew Davis
Robert and Robert, great points!
Philosophy is all about bettering the questions we ask and not simply the answers that we give. One endeavor of metaphysics is indeed to bring to light the dominant presuppositions of an epoch. Whitehead’s approach is pragmatic in this regard. For example, he states: “We must bow to those presumptions which, in despite of criticism, we still employ for the regulation of our lives.” What this means methodologically is that we should not deny in theory what we inevitably presuppose in practice. Doing so involves what he describes as “negations of what in practices is presupposed.”
Example: one may insist (as many philosophers have) upon a strict determinism in theory and then proceed to live the rest of the day under the inevitable assumption of their freedom of choice. This is a kind of performative contradiction, however. For Whitehead, one of the efforts of metaphysics is to elucidate the dominance of our practice in the form of theory. In this way, theory and practice come closer together.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Roni, thanks for these great reflections. Process philosophy and theology have long been espoused as alternatives to scientific naturalism and supernaturalism. Are you familiar with David Ray Griffin’s work? Perhaps his most influential work is Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion. Highly recommended to you! See also his Panentheism and Scientific Naturalism.
Glad to have you in class,
Dr. Davis
Christie,
I’m so glad my text is adding to your wonder (!) and offering helpful distinctions on these important topics. Whitehead too was a “wonder scholar” (I also love this designation). In fact, toward the end of his excellent text Modes of Thought he states: “Philosophy begins in wonder and in the end when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.”
To let wonder remain is yet another goal of philosophy! If it does not, we either don’t care, or think we’ve figured it all out. Whitehead certainly advises us against both!
Dr. Davis
Kaeti, beautiful reflections here! And thanks for sharing this moment you’ve captured! We will return to the richness of Evelyn’s insight into Whitehead’s thought as we continue in our course, certainly. The quote you included from Neumann is a nice complement to our efforts too.
Happy to have you,
Dr. Davis
Bhavana, excellent!
As you may know, Whitehead named several different fallacies we should avoid in the philosophical endeavor. Chief among them is the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” which is precisely the mischaracterization of our abstractions as concrete. One of roles of philosophy is to point this out–and without shame!
Indeed, to equate the map with the territory is a potent an example of this fallacy.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Paula,
I agree with your sentiments and really enjoy peeking behind the vail of the page to the man himself. His statements about his wife are simply lovely! I try to bring in certain anecdotes when appropriate in my book too. Consulting other chapters in Essays in Science and Philosophy will add to his humanization.
And Chris: you are right about the financial strain on Whitehead. Most of us can relate, yet our philosophy continues (hopefully!).
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Friends, a great discussion unfolding here!
Each of you have brought up salient points for consideration. For Whitehead, consciousness is the crown of experience, not its necessary base. There is a difference between consciousness apprehension and experiential prehension. The former emerges at high levels of layered evolutionary complexity, and the latter pervades nature.
For Whitehead, we know in the form of feeling, not all of which need be conscious at all. Both Roberts brought up important examples. e.g., sleep where the body experiences a form of trauma that was not experienced consciously, but clearly happened; or our response to stimuli like a light flickering on, shocking our retinal response in ways non-conscious.
As Whitehaed has emphasized we see with our eyes which channel more primal felt-stimuli via causal efficacy. What is immediately present in our conscious sense experience (what he terms “presentational immediacy”) is the tip of the iceberg while “causal efficacy” is the unconscious, but nevertheless thoroughly efficacious, mode of non-sensory feeling forming the backdrop of our more delimited conscious sense experiences.
We will touch on this a bit in our next session, but Whitehead’s slim text Symbolism is a good place to dig into these distinctions more. Also, in Adventures of Ideas, he gives various examples of of non-sensory experience.
Bill asks: “But what leads you to believe that such unconscious systems are experiential? Why not think of them as automatic reactions that involve no experience at all?”
Okay, but automatic reaction of what then? This is the hard problem of experience stated differently: how then does experience emerge from states wholly devoid of experience? Whitehead’s answer: it doesn’t and there are no final states wholly devoid of experience. Experience doesn’t pop into being magically, but is part of a continuum of experiential prehension belonging to the body and, indeed, to nature as such (since the body is geography). Remember: for Whitehead, vacuous dead matter is replace by becoming experience in the form of prehensive feeling.
A relevant resource you all may enjoy: Hartshorne, “Whitehead’s Revolutionary Concept of Prehension.”
Best to all,
Dr. Davis
Brain, excellent! You are right to see very important implications for biblical hermeneutics! Here are some key texts you should consult:
Ronald Farmer: Beyond the Impasse: The Promise of a Process Hermeneutic
Ronald Farmer, Process Theology and Biblical Interpretation
Robert Gnuse, The Old Testament and Process Theology
Lewis Ford, Lure of God : A Biblical Background for Process Theism
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Robert,
You bring up an important point here. After our first session, do you have a better sense of the metaphysical endeavor as Whitehead conceives it?
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Dennis,
One of my favorite fallacies Whitehead warns against is the “fallacy of the perfect dictionary”–the notion that any currently developed language is adequate to capture the welter of experience. We always experience more than language is able to express: “depths as yet unspoken.” Philosophy is akin to mysticism, but it attempts to rationalize mysticism through “the introduction novel verbal characterizations.” See the end of Modes of Thought.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
George and Dennis,
As mentioned, Whitehead stood in appreciation and wonder of Leibniz’s achievements from calculous to metaphysics and divinity. He even uses “monad” here and there. His critique of Leibniz is that his monads are windowless to each other, but open to God. He found this inconsistent. Why not open the widows so all monads are mutually implicative? This is what Whitehead has done with his “actual entities.”
Also, I would recommend to you both Lemmon McHenry’s recent book: The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Bill, I like this notion of perishing forward, each entity giving itself to the future, and not simply the past. Both belong, but it is a shift in perspective to see the significance of each as wedded to the process of becoming.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
George, Dennis, and David:
Great conversation emerging here! We will come to this issue of whether or not Whitehead is anthropomorphizing nature and whether or not he does so naively (which certainly happens) or as a part of his abiding conviction that we are nature naturing (!) and therefore clues as to the wider principles which apply to the cosmos at at large.
We will also come to the “primordial nature of God” and why it is that Whitehead included it. I disagree with Mesle, Sherburne, and other “Whitehead without God” folk who think that his system can live on without the functions that God provides–both primordial and consequent. He certainly didn’t think so, and we’ll see why. In fact to remove God from Whitehead’s vision is to commit the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” from the highest possible altitude, by removing the polar contrast of the world itself, and speaking in abstraction. I think its more that case that people are simply offended by the term “God” and just don’t like it. But we will see if this offense is overcome in Whitehead’s vision.
Let’s keep this dialogue going!
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Dear Nelson,
I’m a big fan of Teilhard! He is certainly a pillar (alongside Bergson) in the modern process tradition–and process theology in particular. I mentioned in class that Ilia Delio and I recently edited a volume titled Whitehead and Teilhard: From Organism to Omega. This is the first scholarly volume devoted to Whitehead’s and Teilhard’s thought and includes some great chapters, included a never before translated interview with Teilhard in the appendix. I think you will enjoy it!
Cheers,
DR. Davis
Bill, your statements are a poetic and beautiful testament to your parents and their “objective immortality” in your own life and also that of the wider world. Thank you for sharing them with us. I lost my mother some 8 years ago to breast cancer. She was only 63 years old. Tragedy is a fact in Whitehead’s universe, but the positive value she invested in me lives on! Tragedy and triumph remain deeply tangled for us all. For Whitehead, not even God escapes tragedy.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis