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I also appreciate that process philosophy supplies an ontological basis, a reason grounded in a theory of the ultimate nature of reality, for not foreclosing on possibilities for humanity and life on earth that are radically different from our currently existing global structures; possibilities that are optimistic; possibilities that are unprecedented in history.

If we extend the Whiteheadian analysis of the formation and self-actualization of actual entities, according to which an actual entity inherits and is conditioned by its past, but NOT DETERMINED by its past, and is a drop of creative subjectivity capable of deciding for novel possibilities; if we extend this fundamental mode of being all the way up to human individuals and human societies and civilizations, then we indeed have a justification for hoping that we will not continue on our current self-destructive trajectory as a nation and a species, that instead of staying the course to the bitter end with an economic system that drives egoism and insatiable accumulation; alienation from other humans, self, and society; and ecological self-destruction we might radically course correct and save ourselves and the world.

In my conversations with people outside of the process community I encounter more cynicism than openness to the possibility of our society realizing new possibilities, such as becoming the just and whole society of Dr. McDaniel’s four hopes.

Usually the arguments that I run into for our supposedly being locked into repeating the past are cynical arguments from history or human nature. The argument that we can’t become a just and whole society because history has no examples of a society that is structured for the justice and unconditional compassion of the needs principle (from each according to her ability, to each according to her need). For instance, I have a relative who is fond of saying that “all roads lead to oligarchy”. He thinks that that expression sums up some kind of tough-minded wisdom and he can’t envision the possibility of a genuinely democratically participatory economic system. He dismisses the notion as utterly utopian.

This is one common response that I’ve experienced. The other is the human nature argument, that human beings are for genetic or whatever reasons incapable of creating a better form of society. Our selfish egos or genes supposedly rule this out. Whitehead’s ontology arguably debunks the assumptions of both of these arguments.

Given a Whiteheadian vision of the world as a creative advance driven toward novelty, toward new forms of complex organization; and of our nature as free to decide for and actualize new possibilities, and as geared to relationality and beauty, the idea that we have no choice but to follow the precedents of history, or that we’re determined by a supposedly static human nature, and therefore can’t hope for transformative change is actually what’s naïve, not entertaining the hopes of process thought. Which is all to say that process thought provides excellent grounds for taking its hopes seriously, and this is certainly one of its great selling points for me.

As for the diversity to be found in the process community and tradition, I think that it’s natural given the basic ideas of process thought. I think that process philosophy’s emphasis on creativity; creative freedom; and relationality and interdependence, relational rather than separatist individuality, conduces to openness to people thinking creatively and arriving at different views; and to simple kindness toward those with different views. Also, I think that Whitehead’s temperament was a factor. He was a beautiful antithesis of dogmatism, and I think that that became ingrained in the process tradition.

At any rate, I find the process community’s microcosm here in this forum, and the process community at large, to be a community of individuals who are certainly thinking men and women with viewpoints, but who are accepting of, and downright keen on diversity of opinion; civil and kind toward each other, and toward others in general, regardless of philosophical differences; and positive without suffering from the bright-sided syndrome that Barbara Ehrenreich has so brilliantly critiqued. This all reflects well on process philosophy. At the risk of sounding like a Jamesian pragmatist, I think that to some extent by its fruit is the soundness of a philosophy known, and I would say that the gracious and beautiful fruit that the process tradition has borne and continues to bear is evidence at least of its worthiness of being taken seriously.

A really great post. I think that your understanding of how God is a factor that ensures that evil doesn’t have the last word is spot-on, and very well articulated. It also inspired me to reflect on the cause and nature of the evil that God is always working to overcome. I don’t want to hijack your thread so I’ll post my reflections as a separate post. I hope that you’ll let me know what you think about them.

Thank you for your reply, and positive feedback. And for making an important point here: “yes, while I have not problem insisting that possibility is ultimate–it is only so in abstraction from its reliance upon all ultimates and their reliance on possibility.”

It’s important for those of us who agree with John Cobb and David Griffin that ultimate reality is pluralistic to not lose sight of the metaphysical integrity of the gestalt of ultimacy that various ultimate realities such as creativity, God, and eternal objects are differentiable but not separate elements of. Ultimately the different ultimate realities are interpenetrating features of one metaphysical big picture, abstractions from it. If we forget this then we fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, reifying their individuality excessively rather than properly appreciating the concreteness of the integrative whole.

Weinberg is surprised that nature often produces instances of elegance and beauty that far exceed what’s necessary to promote the viability of living creatures because his fundamental preconceptions and presuppositions feature the belief in what Whitehead termed “vacuous” entities. He holds the perspective that everything in nature is composed of mechanical particles of matter that are numb and dumb, so to speak (insensate and insentient) and only externally related; which are bereft of the experientiality and telic subjectivity (subjectivity with a drive toward value-realization), and the kind of relationality that would make them capable of making decisions for and actualizing a complexity that’s greater than what’s practical in terms of enhancing survivability.

Weinberg and his fellow physicalists are severely handicapped when it comes to understanding complexity. Complexity, to use Robert Neville definition, is differences and contrasts that are harmonized. As Neville points out, if differences were not harmonized there could only be “manifoldness”, not complexity. Well, the natural world is full of complexity, not mere manifoldness. It’s full of complexity that is not going to come about randomly, like the monkey of the infinite monkey theorem haphazardly typing the complete works of Shakespeare. This is something that even Anthony Flew eventually came to acknowledge! No, complexity requires more than infinite time for it to just aimlessly develop as a recurrent fluke (which would be a contradiction in terms). Unless one believes in a unilaterally creative God who has built complexity into the universe, or something along the lines of a Leibnizian God who externally imposes a pre-established harmony upon its complexity, complexity requires that the entities who compose it are minded and capable of forming (axiologically-oriented) subjective aims that lead to complexity. Weinberg and company can’t make sense of, and can only be pleasantly surprised by the complexity (which beauty is a subjective form or experience of) of nature because their physicalism precludes their even entertaining the possibility of panexperientialism.

Panexperientialism is the simple key that unlocks the solution to the artificial mystery of the aesthetic richness of the world. It’s an artificial mystery because it’s due not to the beauty that folks like Weinberg are puzzled by, but rather it’s a mystery of their own making, a mystery created by their outmoded materialism; a materialism that prevents them from embracing the obvious parsimoniousness of the theory that experience and subjectivity goes all the way down. Once that’s accepted the beauty remains, but the confounding puzzlement is cleared up.

Even though it’s very different from the thinking that I articulate in my above post, just to give everyone a sense of how diverse and divergent interpretations of Whitehead can be I’ll mention that Laurence Wilmot, in his book Whitehead and God: Prolegomena to Theological Reconstruction , works out an interpretation in which eternal objects, and even creativity, are the outcome of “an aboriginal creative act of God” in “his envisagement” of the universe. According to this interpretation God doesn’t merely eternally entertain the eternal objects in God’s primordial nature, God is responsible for their existence. This is a radically different explanation from what you’ll find in Whitehead or the writings of most other Whiteheadians. I don’t agree with Wilmot, I merely mention his interpretation as one alternative explanation of eternal objects that’s out there, and that demonstrates that there’s a good deal of diversity of thought in the process tradition.

I love Langer’s description of an artwork as a “symbol of feeling.” Thanks for including that quote.

Here’s a link to an article by Steven Shaviro that contains a paragraph that gives a different explanation of Whitehead’s choice to denominate creative possibilities “eternal objects”. Shaviro points out that it had to do with Whitehead being keen on having eternity and time, permanance and flux interpenetrate.

Eternal Objects

Hi Jason. I just did a post that deals with the topic of the eternality of eternal objects that you might be interested in. If you read it let me know if it was at all helpful. Essentially I go at the question of the eternality of eternal objects from the slightly unorthodox angle of understanding them as an ultimate reality even though Whitehead doesn’t put them in his category of the ultimate.

Yes, it seems that even when thinkers who are outside the Whiteheadian tradition who are groping for a way of articulating panexperientialism realize that “consciousness” is a misnomer for the form of experience that might be ubiquitous they still can’t quite get away from thinking in terms of consciousness and end up using terminology such as “proto-consciousness”, or sticking with the word “consciousness” and qualifying it. It’s unfortunate that they haven’t read Whitehead, he would put them onto the option of adopting the obvious term “experience”.

The title is Transforming Process Theism. Here’s a link to the Google Books page for it:

Transforming Process Theism

Thank you very much for letting me know that. I’m very happy that my posts are helping someone else and not just helping to clarify my own understanding of process thought, which of course is still a work in process.

Yes, the root “psyche” connotes too much that a Whiteheadian doesn’t wish to assert about the form of experience that s/he posits to be omnipresent. The term “panexperientialism” is an all-around better term.

I think that the term “panexperientialism” is most definitely better and preferable for the Whiteheadian variety of panpsychism because “panpsychism” is built from the root “psyche”, and “psyche” has such dictionary definitions as: “the human soul, mind, or spirit”, and “the totality of elements forming the mind”. I think this causes the term “panpsychism” to unfortunately connote full-blown human type consciousness, and to suggest that that’s what’s universal, which is not what any sophisticated kind of panpsychism posits. “Panexperientialism”, on the other hand, doesn’t connote full-blown human consciousness at all, it merely means that some form of experience is ubiquitous. It’s a perfect term for Whiteheadians, who make a distinction between the omnipresent lower-grade experience of elementary actual occasions, and the conscious experience of the actual occasions that constitute human minds. It’s also a better term for describing other versions of “panpsychism” that posit what they term an all-pervasive “proto-consciousness”. I’m glad that Griffin coined the term, validating it, and making it a reputable neologism, so to speak, by virtue of having been coined by an eminent thinker. Now we can use it without being guilty of using a lame neologism.

I’ll offer a few of my own Whiteheadian reflections on the value question. I would define value as realized, embodied possibilities that add to, that enrich experience; that enrich complexity or intensity of experience; either an entity’s own experience, in the case of intrinsic value; or the experience of others, in the case of having instrumental value. Values are not necessarily always good from a human ethical perspective. The possibilities that we embody may be constructive and beautiful (as in the case of someone like the Dalai Lama), or they might be destructive and horrific (as in the case of an Adolf Hitler), but they all contribute to, and enlarge experience. They all have that fundamental importance. That importance is the essence, the base level of the meaning of value. Above that base level is a moral level, where we have preferences among values based upon their constructiveness or destructiveness, the healing or the harm that they promote, their being consistent with or at odds with the social-relational nature of the world, their being consistent or inconsistent with the intrinsic value of others. Values that have to do with these considerations are our social and moral values. And all of the dimensions and areas of experience likewise have their specific values, i.e. specific possibilities that when realized add enrichment. But the ultimate and universal name of the axiological game is enrichment and intensity of experience, period. Having value is having the importance of giving something to experience, whether it’s good or bad, aesthetic or moral or what have you.

But of course things aren’t as amoral as this might sound. There’s also the primordial mind of God, and the presence of all possibilities there. In God possibilities are all ordered, so to speak. God appreciates the distinctions between possibilities, and how exactly they intensify experience. And here’s where the critical role of God and divine initial aims comes in. God has the historical and global perspective, so to speak, to be able to grade our possibilities for us, and to guide us toward the good. Actual entities prehend how God appreciates possibilities, and consequently in fact have a legitimate, objective basis for their subjective evaluation of possibilities and values. Values are never taken account of by actual entities merely as what they innately are, merely as the possibilities for experience that they are, they’re always taken account of with God’s perspective on and valuation of them. So values are possibilities for enrichment of experience + the character that they have for us due to their divine valuation. This is a more complete definition. I think that this Whiteheadian understanding of value has multiple virtues: it makes for a pan-valuism, as you say, finding value to be ubiquitous in the world, recognizing every entity as an embodiment of intrinsic value; which promotes respect for others human beings, nonhuman living beings, and nonhuman and nonliving beings; it helps us find another basis for relating to each other and the world; it helps us relate to God; and it helps us to understand our existence as a process of value-realization, which can encourage us to give that telos more of a focus and make the most of our lives. I think that these are some great selling points for a Whiteheadian understanding of value.

Hartshorne also rejected Whitehead’s eternal objects. What do you think of his views on the question? And btw, do you agree with Hartshorne that God is better conceived as a society of actual entities; or do you prefer Whitehead’s view, that God is a single actual entity?

I agree that Whiteheadian process ontology supports the view that life exists elsewhere in the galaxy. The process and drive toward complexity and value-realization that has produced the forms of life that exist on earth being universal, the same ontology at play everywhere in the universe, it should ensure the evolution of the same kind of life throughout the cosmos. It means that the evolution of life is not random or freakish; rather, it’s what the universe is oriented to and certainly not something restricted to this planet. And since it’s the same creative process, the same kind of building-block actual occasions, the same God, the same eternal objects, the same ontology of interrelationality, the same urge for actualization and complexity operating everywhere, well, all of this sameness should mean that alien life should have a good bit in common with us. It should be relatable, not absolutely alien. Perhaps just as the various space-faring species in the Star Wars and Star Trek universes are relatable, even if sometimes hostile, to one another, real “aliens” would also be less foreign to us than we might think. Of course the creative nature of the universe would also ensure quite a bit of diversity, so aliens would be somewhat alien, just not entirely alien.

Hopefully advanced civilizations don’t all run into the “great filter”, some factor of their undoing, such as bringing an ecological apocalypse upon themselves, or an apocalyptic war with high-tech weapons. I would think that some advanced species should be especially good at following the initial aims that we receive from God, and should thereby manage to avoid self-destruction. And the creative drive for complexity should in many cases produce species who are capable of figuring out how to be a high-tech civilization without ruining their planet’s ecosphere. So I would think that there are civilizations out there that have survived past our current level of development, and have reached a much higher level of sophistication. We should eventually discover that this is the case, unless we turn out to be one of the less smart species that barrels right into the great filter.