Matt Segall
Good question, Charlie.
Realism means at least two things in my use in this book. 1) is that, independent of human thought and language, a world of actual entities exists and enters into real relations; 2) independent of human thought and language, a realm of eternal objects exists with its own ideal internal relations. Incidentally, this obviously makes Whitehead’s philosophy of organism quite distinct from Nelson Goodman’s antirealism. Whitehead affirms that a world of actual entities and their relations exists and that we can know it more or less faithfully if thought sticks close to experience, and that abstract entities also exist and make possible our symbolic languages (rather than, as I take it Goodman argues, our symbolic languages make possible the illusion of abstract entities).
Hi Chris,
I am not sure exactly what the wording in the interview with Rupert may have been, but a duration (in Bergson’s sense) or an occasion (in Whitehead’s) is not the sort of process that could be measured by a clock. It is not a unification of the past/present/future of clock-time. If anything is a unification of measurable clock-time (where past and future are equally contained) it would be the Einsteinian “block universe” model, which both Bergson and Whitehead could hardly be more opposed to.
The sense in which the future could be said to be immanent in an occasion of experience is by way of anticipation. An occasion feels and aims at some possible future by way of its self-transcendent feelings of anticipation. Whether or not what actually happens next aligns with its hopes and dreams in the present is none of its concern, as it will have perished out of subjective immediacy into objective immortality. It is then no longer experiencing itself but experienced by another. A new actual occasion receives the decisions made by antecedent occasions and makes its own decision as to how to inherit what was once just a dream. It could actualize the dream of its antecedents, or it could decide not to conform and to aim at its own preferred future.
Wow, Kevin, what a story! I am glad you are here to tell the tale. Your sources of skepticism about the validity of classic NDEs is something I’ve also wondered about. The closest analog I have in my own experience is waking up from a dream and trying to recount it. Sometimes it is very hard to remember all the details, but in the telling it is tempting to allow my waking mind to reconstruct them. I also wonder about expectancy, as NDE stories have become so prevalent now and usually follow a predictable script, how can we control for the possibility of a kind of unconscious priming? All good questions to ask Ed Kelly later today!
Hi Jessica,
I’m so glad to hear my cartoon of concrescence was helpful : )
What we mean when we say “I” is rather mysterious, of course. So let us not mistake what I can say from a Whiteheadian point of view as somehow explaining away that mystery. Regardless of what insight process philosophy can bring, “the wonder remains.”
The “subjective form” is one phase of the concrescence of an actual occasion, but Whitehead does say it is the phase wherein consciousness arises. In those occasions that become conscious and capable of saying “I,” the subjective form has achieved a level of intensity and contrast of feelings required to integrate both what is physically felt as “given” in the past with various conceptual alternatives that “may be.” Most occasions of experience are not conscious because they do not achieve such an integration. Whitehead calls consciousness “the feeling of negation,” or sometimes “the affirmation-negation contrast.” This is his fancy way of saying that consciousness involves an experience not just of what is the case, but of what could be the case. This entails that conscious occasions of experience have a much greater degree of imaginative freedom to decide on how to interpret and alter what they inherit from their past environment.
In Whitehead’s view, an actual occasion cannot fail to achieve satisfaction. All that can happen is that the achieved satisfaction is of a very low intensity. This is a kind of failure in that perhaps a greater, richer harmony was possible; but it is not an ultimate failure, because some synthesis, however meager, must be achieved. That is just how Whitehead believes reality works.
Whitehead does allow for distinctions between “true” and “false” prehensions. But sometimes it happens that false prehensions are more interesting, or even more valuable, than true ones! Indeed, without the possibility of divergent interpretations, novelty could not interrupt the rote repetition of the past. In Process and Reality, Whitehead goes so far as to say that “it is more important that propositions be interesting than that they be true,” adding that true propositions usually add to interest, but not always.
Speaking of the Moon, you may appreciate this exploration of the two ways of looking at the Moon that are available to us: https://www.natureinstitute.org/article/martin-wagenschein/two-moons
Bill,
Thanks for sharing those interesting takeaways from your mediations on light, warmth, and sound. The Whyte poem is a marvelous companion to the exercise, reminding us not only that we sense the world, but that it may sense us, in turn.Hi Jessica,
I’d say you’ve grasps the process of concrescence decently well for a first pass. You can imagine the process as a kind of cycle, where each new occasion arises from the data of the settled past, interprets that data afresh and achieves some new perspective in the present, and then perishes into the future, gifting whatever novelty it has realized to the next round of occasions. The sequence is from past objective data, to subjective immediacy, to superjective immortality (which is simultaneously new objective data for the next occasion of experience).
I am not sure “calculation” is the right term for the interpretive feelings that an occasion experience when deciding how to inherit its past environment. That implies it is some kind of computational process that might be modeled with 1s and 0s. Whitehead saw the process of concrescence as aesthetic, not algorithmic. That is, is a a function of feelings and contrasts of feelings. Though they sometimes offer useful descriptions and predictions, reality is not made of mathematical equations, but values, emotions, aims, etc.
Such a beautiful poem. Thank you for sharing it, Kathleen!
Hi Mark,
Yes, Goethe placed great emphasis on the active role the perceiver plays in what is perceived. He was a thinker of polarities, and his method involves becoming more aware of the ways we can alternate between active and passive poles in perception. When it comes to color vision, his interpretation of such phenomena as the so-called after images involves the idea that the eye strives toward the opposite complementary color to whatever is presented to it outwardly, which becomes apparent when, eg, we stare at a green patch for a time and then look at a white background, seeing it as red.
As for his archetypal plant or Urpflanze, he certainly would have rejected the idea that it was “unobservable.” This may be your critical rejection of what he believed he was doing, but at least on his own terms, the whole point of his method was to avoid going beyond phenomena. His view is that the phenomena themselves, rightly arranged, reveal the archetype.
Hi te’a,
I think that Otto Scharmer has been influenced by Whitehead, but I am not positive. I see he does cite thinkers/feelers like Peter Reason and Francisco Varela, who I know definitely have read Whitehead. But the good news is Whitehead does not have a monopoly on process or relational ways of thinking. That many people would independently converge on these insights is a good sign that there is some truth and importance in them : )
Whitehead borrows the word soul or psyche from Plato but obviously reimagines it in line with his process-relational ontology. A soul from a process perspective is a gathering of contextual relations into a locus of intense experience that oscillates from prehension to expression. I am not sure why you think Whitehead has invented a new category for human personalities? He would say that all living beings are “nonsocial nexūs,” not just humans (though there are of course different intensities at play, but that is a matter of degree and not of kind).
It is not just human beings who achieve a kind of immortality in God’s consequent nature. All occasions of experience pass into God’s physical pole.
A human personality or soul, as experienced from within, is what Whitehead would call an entirely living non-social nexus of occasions. It is not a society, since a society is a historical route dominated by the routine imposed by its shared characteristics, whereas a human soul expresses a high degree of novelty not determined by any past experience. Of course, we inherit much from our own pasts, and our behavior is often quite habitual. But the mental poles of the occasions of experience composing such a soul-nexus are highly developed.
We could also then refer to a moment in the life-history of a living personality or soul as an actual occasion. The person is not the occasion, but nor is he/she some substance behind a given occasion that “has” experiences. A person is a streaming of experiences. Whitehead does speculate at some point that living personalities or souls may achieve a degree of intensity that grants them a form of immortality (not just objective immortality, which all occasions achieve, but subjective, as well) beyond the death of the body in the consequent nature of God (see Adventures of Ideas, p. 208).
He also claims in an earlier book (Religion in the Making) that his metaphysical scheme: “is entirely neutral on the question of immortality, or on the existence of purely spiritual beings other than God.”
Krauss’ book is great! You might also check out this book: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Epochal_Nature_of_Process_in_Whitehe.html?id=QpY0thi4laAC
I find it to be written in a poetic and accessible way.Hi te’a, Here is a link to John Cobb, Jr’s “Whitehead Word Book,” a helpful glossary of major terms. https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/whitehead/WordBookWeb.pdf
Great question, Charlie. There have been some comparisons of Heidegger and Whitehead. Olav Bryant Smith’s book Myths of the Self comes to mind immediately. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739108437/Myths-of-the-Self-Narrative-Identity-and-Postmodern-Metaphysics
There is some convergence between the two, but when it comes down to it, Heidegger likely would have rejected Whitehead’s integration of experience with natural science. Heidegger famously claimed that “science does not think.” He views it as part of a Western metaphysical tradition that obscures the Being of beings. Of course, to the extent that it is rooted in a Cartesian form of dualistic materialism, Whitehead would agree. But Whitehead sought to reform science, while Heidegger just ignored it.
Thanks for these contributions, Mark. Whitehead is always seeking a middle path. Despite being a deeply relational thinker, he refuses to completely reduce individuals to their relations. Here are a few quotes from PR that illustrate the balance he is trying to strike.
“Each task of creation [each actual occasion] is a social effort, employing the whole universe.” –Process and Reality, p. 223
“In the philosophy of organism, an actual occasion…is the whole universe in process of attainment of a particular satisfaction…The final actuality is the particular process with its particular attainment of satisfaction. The actuality of the universe is merely derivative from its solidarity in each actual entity.” –Process and Reality, p. 200
So, each occasion arises from an objective past, achieves a moment of private subjective immediacy, and perishes back into objective immortality, becoming data for subsequent occasions. He wants to do justice to both individuality and community.