Daryl Anderson
Thank you for this thoughtful reply. I think your turning attention to “practice” is an important reminder.
I just got the image of our course, and this small forum, as a rather busy little “airport” with multiple “flights” taking off and landing in Whiteheadian praxis !
Though I gain much from being part of this fleet of planes (!) I do sometimes struggle with the feeling that some proponents of process-relational philosophy are on a different sort of less-grounded “flight”…
More like the old 3-stage rockets where the first part launches the main rocket into the sky and, rather than return to earth in Whiteheadian praxis, then the remaining still-skybound stages blast further upward and then a third stage is propelled even further upward. The seeming disregard of the grounding elements has too many bits left behind on the ground for my taste. (admittedly resulting from a sense of clear-and-present environmental disaster).
My struggle.
A belief in immortal continuance of a soul need not lead to “terrifying” moral consequences.
Whitehead said somewhere that “life is robbery.” We are all “robbers” of some other lives. One wonders why he did not move to the stronger claim that “life is murder”.
We kill or hire the killers of our food. We kill countless microorganisms when we take a dose of antibiotics. We kill when we mow our lawns or build our houses. We kill when we endorse mandated medical procedures for the “greater good”. We endorse killings on our behalf or merely allow them. I could go on.
We argue against these hard realities – when we allow ourselves to face them – by claiming “they are not sentient” or “they were raised sustainably” or it was “necessary to save lives” or “I voted for the other one” or “they are all terrorists” or “I could not stop them.” I could go on.
All of these explanations attempt to frame the killings in broader contexts. Some are lame, some may appear sound. Some may be sound. A process-relational personal philosophy would surely make this argument only harder, as it must be – as Whitehead counseled.
Just as we provide ourselves with broader context for our moral dilemmas, Krishna, in the quoted piece from Baghavad Gita is stating a broader context for Arjuna to consider.
IF there is no continuance after mortal death of a being, then killing that being seems the ultimate moral wrong one can inflict upon them.
But if there is some continuance (of the “atman” in Krishna and Arjuna’s metaphysics) then that context shifts the moral equation. It may well still be a wrong against the other being. It may also be a self-harm. But it is not an ultimate wrong. And it may be a negligible wrong.
We bring a child to the dentist and witness the harm that the stress and fear of our actions bring to them – but attempt to contextualize for ourselves and the child by the awareness of future pains avoided. We bring a loved one to their chemotherapy day and see the physical suffering they endure – but we both attempt to contextualize by a view of future comfort.
If there were no “tomorrow” for that child or cancer patient then a final day of suffering would be an absolute moral harm.
Krishna reminds Arjuna that there is a vast tomorrow beyond the battle ahead for all those who may die. In their metaphysics (which I do not particularly endorse) this widening of the view is all important. In the traditional christian metaphysics (which I also do not endorse) there is a similar looking forward.
I don’t feel that the section of the book at issue was meant to be merely a critique of Hindu metaphysics. It seemed clearly to use this particular frame as a sort of strawman to represent ANY belief in an immortal soul and to endorse the conclusion that Krishna’s false tomorrow is more universally condemnable. I disagree.
Great questions Alexandre!
Its interesting that the word “habits” carries much more of a processual flavor while “memories” feel more like bits or atoms of stored experience. Saying something is a “habit” suggests a true accumulation (for good or bad) of events which vibrate around some center but over time settle.
I think probably BOTH are at the core of thinking about what brings a “self” to be(come). And this tension of harmonizing the two itself creates a new way of considering selves.
Of course Psychology has much to say about the nature and formation of the self with specific regard to human selves. A long time ago I thought the formal study of psych would provide deep answers. But so much of Psychology, like the so-called “hard” sciences, suffers from being built upon under- or simply un-examined metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality and humans within and as a part of and as a relational exemplar of the cosmos. One can explore the psychology literature on the nature of the self but this fundamental incoherence will only produce sources of false clarity. Those who claim answers as to the nature of the self only do so if they willfully ignore contradictory views to their chosen one.
Thus we need some Philosophy to construct foundations. Which is probably why you and I and our classmates are here! I think Whitehead, by de-centering the human even while speaking of “feeling” and “experience” offers an important pathway.
I, too, struggled with this phrase. Though more with the seemingly casual conflating of three distinct elements of human experience.
“… soul, (mind/psyche)”
I understand human be(coming) and a vast number of other non-human complex becomings to include a threaded or entangled element (not necessarily “above” or hierarchical) which is neither material nor mortal. That, for me is the soul, and, importantly, is consistent with Whitehead’s notion of a “regnant occasion”.
I understand the embodied (thus material and mortal) and entangled threads of many forms of becoming which prehend and preserve the “enduring history” of certain forms of personal societies of societies of occasions to be the mind. This prehending, like all within the coherent scheme of Whitehead always incorporates an element of choice, creativity and subjectivity and is experienced, in me, as free will.
I think the flickering but persistent flashes of self-awareness within my mind-experience and those of many other forms of becoming comprise the psyche or, “consciousness”. I think it is likely that there are other forms of reflectivity that many other being/becomings experience: – be they mountain, galaxy, or virus or river-spirit. These flickering occasions can be either material or immaterial and need not be constrained by time.
All three are mutually prehending and immanent and transcendent. All three threads are prehensive of the multitudes of atomic and cellular and visceral and ecological and cosmological superjective occasions and societies of the actual world as well as of those occasions which are mostly or entirely non-physical.
It seems that a god such as Whitehead proposes could envisage and tend a garden of sorts in which all these threads co-entangle and co-create within and outside-of time.
Of course one of the seeming goals of Process Theology (PT) and Process-Relational Philosophy (PRP) is to seek “re-enchantmant” — but nevertheless to vigorously avoid the “supernatural”.
Griffin addressed this in his aptly-titled book
Nevertheless there seems to be an element of the approach to banishing the super-natural within PRP and PT camps that resonates with the Faustian bargain the early natural philosophers made with science. Theisms sans god and unwillingness to meaningfully address the elements of human experience which are truly “super”-natural may not lead us forward. This book re-parses the phrasing and examines the theology and metaphysics in provocative ways.
This Open Horizons piece, capturing from Cobb’s eloquent “Whitehead Word Book” speaks to some of these thoughts. Empty Space, Mountains and Souls
Re: “Can we experience dipolar prehension?”
I love how the asking of something like this raises for me a Whiteheadian “flight”. Just the unusual combination of words triggers a large “hmmmm” – the takeoff. Then I arrange and rearrange concepts, feel vague feelings of things I know or think I know, then land with a temporary feeling of satisfaction. Here:
I think Whitehead regards conscious experience as just that experiencing of the dipolar. I believe he said in a few places that consciousness manifests as the feeling that something ‘is but need not have been’ or ‘is not but could have been’.
My sense of each of these is that the initial feeling arises in the initial physical feeling of the process of concrescence whilst the inversion or negation process arises in the mental pole of concrescence. So. Dipolar.
just a “short hop”.
d.This is nicely said Bill: “I wonder if eternal objects function outside of actual becoming, offering possibilities to we undergoing the fresh adventures of becoming. Does what God cherishes become eternal and is the eternal outside of time capable of functioning like a lure in any time? Is that part of what nourishes telos?”
I think Whitehead’s god does indeed cherish the infinitude of eternal objects and these are the lure which all occasions consider as potentialities in creating the future. I think WH would say, though, that it is only in functioning inside the process of becoming that EOs become dynamic entities in the world. The beauty of this created future is evident in Whitehead’s evocation of value and morality and beauty in the world.
But. If I dream, tonight, of a future event that then occurs in 6 months, that powerfully suggests that some element of human experience is not encompassed by Whitehead’s metaphysics and also that human free will and the broader creative advance have been mis-conceived.
In a world where the biosphere is under threat is is so important to draw in the interconnectedness of all life. But this biocentrism can be put into a useful tension with Whitehead’s clear view that elements of actuality which we do not consider living, such as so-called subatomic particles, are also experiencers.
Rupert Sheldrake has seriously asked the question: Is the Sun Conscious?
These questions all loom large as we face questions of non-biological sentience and exo-sentience.
“It took several years of wandering in the maze before I discovered Alfred North Whitehead and a way of putting the pieces together…”
Ah. Yes.
“… Beauty, even God suddenly found a place in a cosmos that decades of teaching calculus and Newton had shrunk to the size of a dry walnut”
Exactly
“Middle-School” math(s) for me – a very, very energized and exploratory age.
Re Kant.
My sense is that Whitehead both welcomed and critiqued Kant’s ideas but ultimately felt his “Transcendental Idealism” was in error. The name “Kant” appears exactly 100 times in P&R.
I am not a philosopher and have not read Kant in the original.
But. I believe the essence of Whitehead’s critique is that K frames his belief around “things” with minimal “relation” in his ontology, and carries a limited notion of sensation and cognition in his epistemology. The world “out there” is related to by the knower strictly through sensory perception and some sort of mind or cognitive apparatus. Of course this leads to a disconnection of “knowing” from “being”.
In my limited understanding of W’s metaphysics there is no true “out there” – everything is truly and actually brought into, and a part of, my and every other actual occasion’s process of becoming.
Intertwined with this uncovering of deep relationality, W necessarily extends the characterizations of both perception and cognition beyond the merely sensory and psychological.
He starts with the broadest idea of “experience” and, by coaxing us to consider far-from-human “experience” (as Bob Mesle does so adroitly in the book), allows us to realize that we thus can be seen to truly “know” our becoming world – just not necessarily consciously or even comprehensively. All actual occasions, similarly, can be said to have true knowledge of their actual world…
Thanks for the referral to the Reed book. It looks very interesting. We certainly live in an epoch wherein so much of experience is socially-electronically “mediated” (interesting word with its inclusion of “media”). This, i imagine, Reed would characterize as “secondary experience”.
With respect to “primary experience gained through the senses” I do think Whitehead brought an important expansion of the notion of experience qua perception as not being merely sense-organ perception.
His addition of the notion of perception in the mode of “presentational immediacy” to the more evident perception in the mode of “causal efficacy” was significant. His synthesis, concluding that most of what we consider “perception” is actually a hybrid act of “symbolic reference”, allows for a deeper view of both perception and experience.
I think reading Reed might be a useful dialectical process. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing that powerful experience Dennis. It is, in a fascinating recursive way, sort of a “performative affirmation”; in the process of exploring experience you (we) appeal to experience. Thus Whitehead began his journey.
Contrast this to the notion of “performative contradiction” wherein the very act of acting/saying/writing a notion contradicts that notion… it has been applied to the behaviors of those philosophers who deny consciousness (or free will) whilst seeming manifesting important elements of it in their philosophizing.
I shared a similar experience of rock-nature, an actual feeling of the rock feeling my own feelings, over here: The Rock (gasped)
daryl
Nice question. My thought is that the two elements of God that you mention “bracket” all of becoming for all entities down to the merest electron. Since humans and our consciousness come to be within the same frame it would be true to say C is a ‘combination’ of these. But, for Whitehead at least, “psyche or “consciousness” is scarce within the cosmos and perhaps only a peculiar quality of certain sorts of becomings – far from general. Thus WH is not a panpsychist but a panexperientialist (though he used neither term AFAIK.)
[Gods Primordial Nature: “timeless realm of potentiality”
–
– all of becoming, each individual becoming
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Gods Consequent Nature: “empathic reception of all that happens”]Wow… thank for this evocative and articulate post.