Daryl Anderson
I am not familiar with Gendlin. Can you recommnd a (gentle) entry point ?
Whitehead use the term “genetic analysis”, in the case of his presentation in Process and Reality, to comprise the analysis of the “becoming” of the actual entiry… the whole (abstract) seeming sequence of Initial Aim -> “Concrescence” of multiple Prehensions (and possible secondary forms of prehension) -> “ingressing” of Eternal Objects -> Satisfaction -> Superjection… Essentially the view of a thing in stages of development. Though he reminds up constantly that these are not a temporal process and each aparent stage only an abstraction from a process in which all are co-arising. This is much of the book.
“Coordinate Analysis” is essentially the analytically, and abstractly, taking apart of a static snapshot… thus delving into extension in space and time. This comprises the very dense Part IV of the book.
d.
Many of Dean Radin’s papers are collected here (filter for “precognition” applied)
Here are summaries of many of Daryl Bem’s papers including precognition work. Bem’s work has been contended with mixed replication results. Look at it youself!
One of Ruth Kastner’s more lay-person accessible books: “Understanding Our Unseen Reality”
The Science of Precognition (youtube) Dr. Julia Mossbridge
There really are many more… not to mention the vast “anecdotal” literature of centuries. Human experience.
Thanks George for the clarification.
This allows me to ask about your saying that you see those two, experience and process, as “knowledge (epistemological) concepts not ‘widely accepted’ parts of reality (ontological concepts).”
Honestly I am still easily confused by the philosopher’s parsing of ideas (like ‘epistemology’ and ‘ontology’) so I could be way off in being so contrary. But
My contrary view is that process and experience are deeply-rooted in the explicitly ontological enterprise Whitehead is pursuing. I agree with a characterization of epistemology as exploring modes of knowledge – and thus mind and thus, frequently, consciousness… which we agree is a subset of both experience and reality. In that I see epistemology as quite limited. I think
(a) that “process” is ontological. That Whitehead (and other process philosophers) extend the definition of ontology to expand (or even supplant) the “being” part with a “becoming” part. Thus altering your (1) above to say “Concerned with the nature of becoming, existence, and reality.”. Of course this always prods us to useful further discussion but I think it happens under the broader umbrella of “ontological discussion”… epistemology, for me, always (necessarily) carries an anthropo-centric limitation.
(b) that “experience” is also shifted much more to the ontological pole by a Whiteheadian approach. I see that experience, as human subjective experience, as sensory awareness is a central part of how we humans know – and a place to focus epistemology. But the experience of an electron-process, or of a tree-process, say, encountering and changing (reacting to) a slightly-higher atmospheric CO2, seems not to be epistemology at all. If we imagined an “epistemology of the subatomic particles”, or those trees, I think we would actually be on an ontological exploration. Whitehead, at the outset of P&R, in pursuing “the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.” immediately leaps to a pan-experientialism when he expands to say “that the texture of observed experience, as illustrating the philosophic scheme, is such that all related experience must exhibit the same texture.” (my highlight). Thus we can only know the experience of one human self but must seek to expand to consider that of all becomings.
Anyways… thanks for engaging. It really helps me think to write stuff down.
-darylRandall, I think this
“(Perhaps fear of death is behind repetition, the effort to overcome or to defeat the continual perishing of the occasion, but repetition also denies life. I think this is another way of approaching love, as embracing life in the occasion.)”
is very compelling. Thanks.
I hear Whitehead saying that mere repetition throughout would be a static, unchanging cosmos whilst change always and everywhere would be chaos. The dialectic of the two, the holding of the contrast and the never-ending clash of harmonization and intensity is god’s ultimate aim.
In P&R Whitehead’s god is a metaphysical and hence seemingly austere one. Love in various forms get 19 mentions but here (p.105) we see the austerity :
“The primordial appetitions which jointly constitute God’s purpose are seeking intensity, and not preservation. Because they are primordial, there is nothing to preserve. He, in his primordial nature, is unmoved by love for this particular, or that particular; for in this foundational process of creativity, there are no preconstituted particulars. In the foundations of his being, God is indifferent alike to preservation and to novelty. He cares not whether an immediate occasion be old or new, so far as concerns derivation from its ancestry.”
In his post-P&R work his explorations of the arising of morality and aesthetics and human culture create a wider space for a loving god.
… and this ! “I want there to be an arc toward justice, a movement toward actualization of the good. Process thought provides a hope for this very contingent possibility. We may make it happen, contribute to it’s becoming. I want to believe this and I think Whitehead’s conception of God plays this role in his thought.”
I, personally, struggled with the seeming addition of “spontaneity” to the lists and to the Whitehead I know… I don’t believe Whitehead uses it and it is not a “category”. Nevertheless I see how it answers an almost unanswerable question – or one that should be unanswerable.
All actual occasions self-create through a process of feeling the entire pre-existing world, feeling an initial aim from god’s vast garden of potential, and make a “decision” which is fully subjective and then perish into objective immortality by throwing themselves at all future occasions. Good stuff.
The question is: “How do they ‘decide’?”
The answers do not seem to lie in the metaphysics, except in grounding but non-explanatory framings like “creativity”.
I know, to a slight degree, how I “decide” certain things and can have a grasp of what the becoming of a human occasion might feel. I can sort of “explain”. But even to consider how a hydrogen atom decides to pair with another to become helium can only itself be described through the mathematics of nuclear physics or the simple naming (which is not explanation) as “fusion”. Whitehead significantly equated the energetic processes and energy-mass models of physics to what he is calling “feeling” – and I do not believe he was speaking by means of analogy.
All I can come down to is that electrons “decide” by electron’ing and trees by tree’ing. This feels true but oddly un-tethered. Explanation is such a struggle.
I think “spontaneity” may name the process in an important way (though it does not “explain” it).
I think spontaneity is useful as it preserves a sense of agency for the actual occasion.
I feel that the deeply-established “Process Theology” roots of modern process thought have embedded that famous “lure” of god in ways that could allow us to forget true spontaneity in becoming. The notion can slide into one in which any choice which is not in line with the subjective aim provided by god to the entity is a failing of sorts – endured and taken-in patiently by god, but nevertheless yet another example of reality’s failure to live up to an ideal. For a similar reason I am cautious with the idea of god’s “superjective nature” – which can be felt as a more directive power than the true spontaneity of reality offers.
Thanks for triggering my meanderings on this.
D>p.. Whitehead does use the word once in P&R. Here it is, without further commentary on my part:
“Thus God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities. The evocation of societies is purely subsidiary to this absolute end. The characteristic of a living society is that a complex structure of inorganic societies is woven together for the production of a non-social nexus characterized by the intense physical experiences of its members. But such an experience is derivate from the complex order of the material animal body, and not from the simple ‘personal order’ of past occasions with analogous experience. There is intense experience without the shackle of reiteration from the past. This is the condition for spontaneity of conceptual reaction. The conclusion to be drawn from this argument is that life is a characteristic of ‘empty space’ and not of space ‘occupied’ by any corpuscular society.“
Paula, I appreciate your sharing your deeper, “feeling” relationship with those stones. In metaphysics they are so often constrained to austere propositions like “the stone is grey”. I appreciate Whitehead’s distinction between actual entities and aggregates, and the complexities of whole-part relationships, and the tension between “endurance” and “change”. But I think his powerful extending of “experience” to all things (including, interestingly, the atoms of those stones) can meaningfully be thought with regard to those stones. Certainly my animist friends and many pre-modern peoples considered mountains, rivers, celestial objects as living becomings. In an odd synchronicity I posted a reply to Bob Mesle’s reply to a post over on the “Session 2” forum which comprised a more poetic response I had, once, to a stone.
Thanks for this thoughtful posting George. I am not sure I understand the part where you say:
“But both of these aspects of actual entities, imho, are knowledge (epistemological) concepts not “widely accepted” parts of reality (ontological concepts).”
I am intrigued by your distinction between epistemological and ontological concepts but am shy of asking since I am confused by which of two possible “boths” you are referring to!
In the enclosing paragraph you mention two things that might be the “both”: (a) “process and subjective experience” and (b) consciousness and subjective experience.
Could you clarify which of (a) or (b) you were referencing here ?
thanks
D.Years ago at the commencement of a grief-shrouded vision quest I had an experience of a rock and a sensed mutuality of engagement with that deeply unknowable actual entity. Here is how it wrote itself through me.
The Rock
gasped.In its way.
In a hundred million years
(of heaving and grinding and cleaving and, yes, feeling
… those pains paled to compare to)
this: this was new… this feeling… this sadness.Of course there were no labels, no names
no: “grinding” or “cleaving”. No sadness.
The rock was not prone to labels.
Yet there was feeling.There was chemistry:
the light brush of air in a trillion billion molecules,
the insistent flowing, eroding fluids,
the cycling from thaw to freeze,
the hormone-drenched, pheromone-scent of,sweat
of my hand, as I lifted it, weighing
the pros and
cons
of this spot, of this rock that I chose
to mark the symbolic door
to the east
of my cornmeal-marked circle
of my daylong sit
of my quest.How, after all, does a human
(a dog, a newt)
feel
if not through, in the end, one molecule
igniting
another.The slowing vibration
of
atoms
of
cooling sunset air triggering sodiums
and calciums and proteins
(in a mechanism “not yet understood” [wikipedia])
and an afferent flow of neuronal current
to our brains.We do not understand how we, ourselves,
feel cold
yet
we would deny such feeling to my rock?There was also time:
The gasp took a fraction
of a cycle
of a breath, as it were,
since lacking lungs or lips
(or breath)
the stone tallied time
in other terms –
of varying vibrations
of atoms
of the felt changes
of sensation
(of warming then cooling)
of the silicon and oxygen
of its own ignited calciumin a mechanism not yet understood.
Good question Christopher. Though the introductory reading does appear to include god somehow as a “category”, in fact in P&R Whitehead definitely does not include god his “categoreal scheme”
… not in the 8 categories of existence we looked at, nor the 27 categories of explanation nor the 9 “categoreal obligations”, and, in fact, not as the Category of “The Ultimate” (which he labels “creativity”).
In fact “God” only enters the picture in Chapter III, “Some Derivative Notions” !
This lends support for the belief that Whitehead’s god arises as a consequence of his metaphysical exploration and speculation and comes to be seen as a necessary “glue” of the metaphysics.
Hmmm… I thought I heard him (Bob) say that a “personal” god was not needed by the metaphysics… perhaps that reflects my own bias toward agreeing with that specific framing – while remaining convinced that the metaphysical god of P&R is necessary. A discussion worth following. Thanks for asking the Q.
Good question Christie. I can’t think of any sources right now and will subscribe to this thread just in case anyone can provide more.
When I encountered “superjective nature” in the course reading I had a bit of a double-take. I realized i am so attuned to Whitehead’s emphases on “dipolarities” that I had tended to focus on “consequent nature” and “primordial nature”, attuned to god’s physical and mental poles. I did a text search and there it was in P&R page 88 “(iii) The ‘superjective nature’ of
God is the character of the pragmatic value of his specific satisfaction
qualifying the transcendent creativity in the various temporal instances.” In fact he aligns it with a generalization of all actual entities as having a threefold” character.That being said I thought I once understood that the consensus of readers of Whitehead was that god as an actual entity was open-ended, never arriving at the “satisfaction” which delineates the subjective-superjective move; never perishing; never achieving objective immortality. It is not clear how such an ongoing, eternal actual entity could thus manifest “superjectivity”.
I think I read that Hartshorne and/or maybe John Cobb elabotated at length upon a conception of a god which is eternally recreating itself through the sort of repetition characterizing, say, a human person, via their “regnant nexus” persisting through time as an “historic route” of occasions… though the seemingly temporal nature of this concept seems to conflict with the everlastingness or a-temporality of god.
I think the notion of a personal or “responsive” god is somewhat driven by theological presuppositions or personal desires… both of which I entertain (!), but I remain somewhat skeptical of the metaphysical necessity.
Greg, An excellent and thoughtful and appropriately detailed question. I have wondered these paths as well. I, too, am a “roots” person.
The hardest question in a fully-relational system will always be “where to begin”.
In an ecosystem is it the predator or the prey, or the climate or the geology, of the bacterial microbiome or the dna or the circadian cycles of heavenly bodies… or, for that matter, if you are an animist or deist, is it the living riverbank or the divine will. Is the wolf a constraint upon the rabbit or vice versa. I hazard few answers but mostly this thinking informs a sense of humility and awe.
I suspect there is some parallel here to attempting to frame a fully-relational metaphysics. I imagine Whitehead might well have started with the actual occasion but barely had time to think a thought before the realization struck that such an element could only come to actuality via some sort of engagement with potential and ideal and eternal “objects” and all the rest. And so it may have gone as he strolled through Harvard Yard. I think he does say, somewhere, that AOs and EOs have some primacy in the scheme. But the scheme and the levels and natures of the relationships in the scheme are only analyzable through genetic or coordinate analyses which are themselves always to be seen as abstract (and limiting) analytical tools.
I can imagine a philosopher coming to an intuition that “propositions” are the lynchpin of a metaphysics and then, through a process of struggling to make it both “coherent” and “adequate” might eventually bring in contrasts, multiplicity, and eventually actual occasions.
Wonderful and thought-provoking. Though I do have to ask in what way, if any, is Whitehead’s categoreal scheme diminished for you if some of the eight elements are less “primal” ??
It also bears noting that his overall scheme in P&R had other TYPES of categories – expanding to include (27) “Categories of Explanation”, (9) “Categories of Obligation” and the (1) “Category of the Ultimate”.
Very much the mathematician, Whitehead, laying these out first (though I disagree with another post that these are rightly considered “axioms”). And such a DAUNTING “front door” to P&R… almost like the Gates of Mordor.
My personal sense is that only by trying these gates many times, passing through them eventually, and returning to repeat the trek, is this or any richly coherent metaphysics going to take “root” (!) in my soul as being worthy of the trust that allows me to set it somewhat aside to pursue other works grounded upon it.
thanks
Dennis. I have that same habit of checking the index of books for references to Whitehead. An absence of such often a indicator to a shallow treatment of ideas!
In all my reading of and about Whitehead I have never seen him described as arrogant. He was known for welcoming other colleagues and students to his home for regular low-key salons of a sort. He was deeply concerned about the injustices of the world and a doggedly hard worker even in mundane things like academic and public committees.
I think he was maybe rather humble and maybe insecure about his own ideas. I think the notion of finely honing them in an editing process may have felt to him like elevating them beyond the level of attention they deserved. He always was careful to label his work speculative and life’s intellectual challenges essentially transient. I expect the death of his son Eric opened that hole in his heart for a lifetime.
Sherburne and Griffin’s “corrected Edition” of P&R did, indeed capture and carefully correct the typos and many small inconsistencies in the original work. Few of them approach being substantive and it bears noting that Whitehead himself was willing to abandon an element of his “categoreal scheme” in mid-book as he realized that his line of argument (about the metaphysical god I think) made it redundant.
But his process (!) of bringing ideas to print in P&R was clearly one that had to be almost recursive and “fractal” and the fact that he did not go back and eliminate the arguments related to that redundant category reveals to me that he still felt that those paths of constructing an idea remained compelling. He did say viz “propositions” that it was more important that they be “interesting” than true.
Great question Montgomery !
It is somewhat ironic that Whitehead, who universalized the broadest notion of subjectivity to all actual occasions, came to be shunned by that “subjective turn”. Of course it was so ignorantly powered by a notion that only humans, their languaging and their experiences, were to be allowed subjectivity. An “inadequate” metaphysics which is ending with a whimper.
It is doubly ironic that Whitehead, one of the small number of mathematicians who could understand and grapple with the fine detail of Einstein’s formulation and could foresee the implications of the early quantum theory, would not live to see the resurgence of his organismic conception of all of reality manifesting in the paradigm shifts that you rightly characterize as “systems thinking.”
They say that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Since I am not a philosopher I struggle sometimes with Whitehead’s excursions into the history of philosophy. But even these elements of his work, his critical views of the historical growth (and mis-growth) of philosophy, help me to see his own broader work as more soundly rooted.
and her recommended reading on “Projective Geometry”