Charles Bledsoe
If you wish to get up to speed with Whitehead’s specialized language, a fantastic resource is John Cobb’s Whitehead Word Book: A Glossary With Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality. It’s short enough to be read from cover to cover in one sitting, or you can resort to looking up terminology as needed. It’s available at the Internet Archive (I assume that permission was given to make it available for download and that they haven’t done so in violation of the copyright).
Also, while I’m making recommendations, I would recommend to everyone here the website Religion Online. It isn’t an exclusively process site, it has other content, but it has a collection of some of the best articles ever published in Process Studies. It also has a good collection of books. Here’s a link for the Process Studies section https://www.religion-online.org/publication-category/process-studies-journal/ The books are in a separate section. There’s also a section for open and relational theology.
I love some of your language here: “democracy of intrinsic value”, and “aggregate expressions of liveliness”, and will induct these phrases into my personal process lexis, if you’re okay with that.
As I said in my reply to Kent, I also have serious qualms about thinking in terms of any kind of hierarchy. I also very much prefer democracy to hierarchy. For me Eisler’s concept of “actualization hierarchy” helps a bit, by clarifying that what’s being talked about is not a dominance hierarchy. Of course I could use alternative language, such as “scale”, or “ranking”, or whatnot, but I’d still be engaged in hierarchizing the world’s entities. I think that that’s unavoidable, since some entities empirically and manifestly do seem to instantiate subjectivity and value in a more complex way than others. At any rate, I think that we three all basically agree, we all prefer the panexperientialist perspective that everything is alive with subjectivity; and we all prefer to subscribe to a democracy of subjectivity and only begrudgingly concede that perhaps some specimens of subjectivity are more equal than others.
As for the concept of an actualization hierarchy with respect to value, beauty, and liveliness, to my mind the actualization in question is in fact the actualization of the values or axiological, aesthetic, and experiential possibilities that entities select and synthesize into their “satisfaction”. I agree with thinkers such as Whitehead and Andrew Davis, that actual entities are “axianoetic”, that the name of their game is value-realization. And I go along with Whitehead in thinking that beauty is the result of the integration and harmonization of contrasting values in an entity or “enduring object”. And liveliness, from my panexperientialist perspective, also fundamentally involves the expression of the capacity for experience and subjectivity in terms of the creative activity of value-realization and creative integration. What I’m getting at then is that actualization is not something separate, it’s the embodiment of value, beauty defined as harmonized complexity, and experientiality or liveliness. An actualization hierarchy would merely be the graded achievement by entities of these basic raisons d’etre.
But I too am uneasy with the idea of hierarchy. I also prefer democracy to hierarchy, so I certainly understand if you’re not inclined to adopt the concept of an actualization hierarchy. And I agree that experience and subjectivity are ubiquitous. But I think that it’s possible to acknowledge that some entities are less complex specimens of subjectivity, and possibly lack a centralized subjectivity, without holding that their experientiality is trivial and not something that we can and should relate to. I think that we can locate some of the universe’s productions lower down on an actualization scale without dismissing them as “dead” or “nearly dead”. I think that our panexperientialism can be more nuanced than that. We needn’t take the all or nothing perspective that either any given thing is a self-aware subject or its possession of subjectivity is unimportant and it can be written off as a dead thing.
Hartshorne distinguished between what he termed “compound individuals”, who are aggregates of actual entities, but lack a central, regnant occasion of experience; and “true individuals”, atomic actual entities, or complex entities with a central occasion, or series of occasions of experience. A mountain would fall into the category of a compound entity, an aggregate of occasions of experience sans a center of experience. (This move of drawing a distinction between a compound individual and a true individual is a necessary move, btw. Because if a panpsychist doesn’t make this kind of move then panpsychism gets mocked as the wacky belief that rocks and fire hydrants are somehow conscious subjects.) And although I would certainly never describe an entity as majestic as a mountain as “second rate”, and although I reject dominance hierarchies, I think that Riane Eisler’s concept and terminology of an “actualization hierarchy” is useful here. Some entities do in fact actualize greater degrees of complexity, and a greater spectrum of the universe’s creative possibilities than others, and would therefore be located higher up—even higher up than Mount Everest—in an actualization hierarchy.
I very much like Whitehead’s quote “The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe.” But there’s actually a quite different problem with contemporary wearers of that label. I would say that they’re far from being “pure conservatives” and can be more aptly characterized as paradoxically conservative. That is, modern conservatism has its descent from classical liberalism, which 18th and 19th-century conservatives staunchly opposed because it was destructive of traditional values and social structures. In my view modern conservatism is the paradoxical combination of a conservative disposition with an ideology that’s actually quite liberal in the classical sense. I fully appreciate the importance of conserving traditional wisdom, and not recklessly throwing it out with the proverbial bathwater in the name of being “progressive”, but alas I don’t see a wise traditionalism as being what our latter-day conservatives are about. I agree with your assertion that both camps in the culture war aren’t doing a good job of appropriating our civilization’s traditions, but I don’t view the conservative camp as even being earnestly engaged in appropriating and preserving civilization’s positive and foundational traditions. So actually, again paradoxically, conservatives and progressives share a common fault, a failure to appropriate the best of our Western tradition.
You’re very welcome. I think that you’ll find reading Nobo to be well worth your time.
I would recommend David Ray Griffin’s book, Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. I would say that it’s the best book on the topic of consciousness that I’ve ever read, and I’m an avid reader on such topics.
Some of his views are a bit outside of the mainstream of process thought, but they’re thoroughly grounded in his reading of Whitehead. He takes what I think is a more expansive and comprehensive approach to formulating his interpretation of Whitehead. What I mean is that some Whitehead scholars and process thinkers seem to focus on Process and Reality as Whitehead’s most authoritative and last word on topics such as creativity, but Nobo draws quite a bit more than some do from Whitehead’s other works. His understanding of creativity, the extensive continuum, and whatnot, is more of a synthesis of what Whitehead has to say in all of his philosophical oeuvre. Personally, I think that this is arguably a better approach than concentrating exclusively on Process and Reality.
I think that your shades analogy is quite good. I would just add that we should try to keep the shades partially up as much of the time as possible, never completely losing sight of the world’s interrelationality and interdependence.
I certainly agree that an egocentric and selfish orientation acutely gets in the way of exploring and relating to reality on a deep level, and must therefore be overcome. However, I think that seeking to completely “drop the self” is also a mistake. From a Whiteheadian perspective, as I understand it at this point, our raison d’etre (or better, our reason for becoming) is to become a new individual embodiment of creativity and unique synthesis of the universe, to take our personal process of creative self-actualization to its best satisfaction or fulfillment. So individuality and self-actualization should actually be embraced, but with the understanding that our individuality is relational and collaborative not separative, and that the highest level of self-actualization is self-transcendence. This is my interpretation so far.
It occurs to me that what’s involved is something like a Whiteheadian version of the Madhyamaka Buddhist doctrine of dvasatya, of two interrelated levels of truth—an understanding of reality as comprising an ontologically fundamental level of interconnectivity and intercreativity; and a conventional level, on which we’re confronted with the outwardly separate and fixed individuality of entities. Sometimes we’ll find ourselves unavoidably engaging the world from this latter perspective of the conventional truth of substantial being; but our praxis will consist of a commitment to not losing sight of, to practicing a sustained mindfulness of, the deeper interrelational and processive nature of reality. (And Buddhism can perhaps be a source of techniques and disciplines for maintaining such mindfulness.)
Yes, from my reading of process philosophy I’ve come to appreciate that a basic ontological insight of relational process thought is that our subjectivity, our intelligence and identities, are not something that independently pre-exists, and then takes in influences. Rather, our subjectivity and self are inter-created by, an integration of experiences. The result is a subjectivity that owes a great deal to others, that is definitely not an island; but which is also capable of choosing its own path, and shaping itself. In other words, in the process-relational view, as I understand it, we’re still individuals, we aren’t at all robbed of our individuality; but we’re inter-constituted rather than self-standing individuals. Thich Nhat Hanh’s term “interbeing” comes to mind (although I think inter-becoming would be even better). So I think that you’re certainly right Michael, looking at ourselves from a process-relational perspective can lead to a greater, deeper self-knowing, because it’s a more ontologically well-informed self-knowing.