A.N. Whitehead on Disorder and Order in societies (from Process and Reality)

 But there is not any perfect attainment of an ideal order whereby the indefinite endurance of a society is secured. A society arises from disorder, where ‘disorder’ is defined by reference to the ideal for that society, the favourable background of a larger environment either itself decays, or ceases to favour the persistence of the society after some stage of growth: the society then ceases to reproduce its members, and finally after a stage of decay passes out of existence. Thus a system of ‘laws’ determining reproduction in some portion of the universe gradually rises into dominance; it has its stage of endurance, and passes out of existence with the decay of the society from which it emanates. (pg.91:’Corrected Edn. of Process and Reality’ eds Griffin and Sherburne)

I had to type out that paragraph in order to better get at the intricate meanings implicated in each other that have to be painstakingly unfolded and balanced against each other. It is a matter of subtraction and re-inserting. It seems to me that as he writes, the new ideas that occur are spliced in and do not fit neatly. He is not natively lucid.

His observations cover everything from the macro to the micro, from this ‘cosmic epoch’ to the adventures of protons. The same process is at work throughout though with the added boon of rationality in the human. There is an implication for political life there also. With mass migration you may have an element enter into national life that is antithetical to the culture, to what Whitehead terms its ‘satisfaction’. We may expect change towards adaptation or a mixed reception tending towards deterioration in the long run. When the majority of the receiving society has lost its sense of identity and the confusion that occurs with too rapid social change all kinds of demented adaptations will ensue. (Cf. Mattias Desmet ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ also ‘The Pursuit of the Millenium’ by Norman Cohn)

Hundreds of years may pass before the culture stabilises into partial fusion or in the worst case, the domination of one sector over the others.  

'Dracula': The novel as an actual entity.

 A metaphor for the workings of the universe according to the theory of ‘Process and Reality’ would be the novel.  Take ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker as an actual entity.  As a whole congealed event the elements in it are happening at the same time intertwined, separable conceptually but single.  The different modes of information are plied linking the characters.  All the apps of the age, stenography, wax cylinder recording, letters, legal instruments and the vade mecum of travel, Bradshaw’s.   The modern 19th.Century is pitted against the malign chthonic forces rising out of the East.  The hope of rationalism that everything can be explained by theory is ‘decided’ which means in the etymology favoured by Whitehead, cut off.  Transcendental sacramentals, holy water, rosary beads, the figured cross, superject their energies.  The congeries that is the novel is drawn from the mind of Stoker-god who is both within and without his novel.   He is sunk in the text and its embodied genius takes him, its putative author, by surprise.  The book becomes energic  when this happens.  It lives, it lives.  

Reading 'Process and Reality' (in my shed)

 

Well then have I definitively given up on ‘Being and Time’? Yes.  My feeling was that the trek was not worth the trudge.  Now I have to look for a ‘hard’ book to read, a challenge that might be worth the slog.  I have lit on ‘Process and Reality’ by A.N. Whitehead.  Published in 1929 based on the Gifford Lectures of ‘27 and ‘28.  I’ve looked at it before on several occasions and have a general idea of the scope and ambition of what is his major work which has given rise to a school of process philosophy and theology.  One major difference between this work and B&T is that when Whitehead gives you neologisms/locutions he details precisely how this new expression serves to distinguish his thought from that which has gone before.  Thus ‘substance’ might be replaced by ‘actual entity’ and ‘universal’ by ‘eternal object’.  That that sentence under advisement.  As I go on my understanding will change.

The coherence, which the system seeks to preserve, is the discovery that the process, or concrescence, of any one actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity of the world receives its explanation.  (pg. 7 ed. Griffin and Sherburne )

He later adds that his process philosophy has a relation to Eastern thought:

In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ‘eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.

Nisargadatta in answer to a question about causality responds treating the universe as a single block:

Q: As long as the mind operates, causation is a valid law.

M: Like everything mental, the so-called law of causation contradicts itself. No thing in existence has a particular cause; the entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing; nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. When the source and ground of everything is the only cause of everything, to speak of causality as a universal law is wrong. The universe is not bound by its content, because its potentialities are infinite; besides it is a manifestation, or expression of a principle fundamentally and totally free. (#4 I AM THAT)

Note on A.N. Whitehead's 'Science and the Modern World'.

When you are on a topic everything seems to feed into it. A journalist that reports on the government’s ‘most substantive meeting’ gets you pondering whether there can be a superlative of ‘substantive’. A substance is a free standing thing of which things are said. The expression noun substantive preserves this meaning but I will not bore you with a discussion of the Aristotelian implications of what H.W. Fowler calls a genteelism:

By genteelism is here to be understood the rejecting of the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, and the substitution of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd, less familiar, less plebeian, less vulgar, less improper, less apt to come unhandsomely betwixt the wind and our nobility. (Modern English Usage - 1966 ed.)

A. N. Whitehead avoided words that were polluted by a history of discussion that tended to draw the mind down dead ends:

“These transcendent entities have been termed ‘universals.' I prefer to use the term ‘eternal objects’ in order to disengage myself from presuppositions which cling to the former term owing to a prolonged philosophical history. Eternal objects are thus, in their nature, abstract.”

What Whitehead is at here is moving away from that solid thing substance to the realm of the possible which may or may not issue as an entity that is manifest. When they do the eternal objects are evident as ‘actual occasions’. His emphasis is on the nature of the universe as a monistic holistic pattern of interactions which can themselves be ‘eternal objects’. His breaks down mind/body dualism into a dyad of dual aspect:

“Thus the mental cognition is seen as the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit occurrence. This unit is the integration of the sum of its partial happenings, but it is not their numerical aggregate. It has its own unity as an event. This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned aspects of the universe of events.” (from Science and the Modern World)

It is as though we then graft on to that totalising moving through events an ontology of subject and objects.

“The private psychological field is merely the event considered from its own standpoint. The unity of this field is the unity of the event. But it is the event as one entity, and not the event as a sum of parts. The relations of the parts, to each other and to the whole, are their aspects, each in the other.”

How this relates to my understanding of the theory of superimposition in Advaitic Vedanta is a topic for another occasion. �

Satkaryavada, Sankara & Whitehead

 “This misapprehension is promoted by the neglect of the principle that, so far as the physical relations are concerned, contemporary events happen in causal independence of each other.” (Chap.II. sec.1 Process and Reality).

This might be what Plotinus called the Plenum or Sankara ‘The Field’ (B.G.Bh ch.13).  Here is the pure satkaryavada of the non-difference of cause and effect.  Here suspended in Being, as it were, is the totality of existence.  The sense of contingency as a rational demand is strong as I dwell on this profound insight of Whitehead’s.

Marc Pugliese’s interesting paper on Sankara and Whitehead stresses the immanence of the cause in the effect held by both of them.

Pugliese on Sankara and Whitehead

Whitehead meets Bhagwan Hamsa on Mount Kailas

(repost from 2012)

This misapprehension is promoted by the neglect of the principle that, so far as physical relations are concerned, contemporary events happen in causal independence of each other. This principle will have to be explained later, in connection with an examination of process and of time. It receives an exemplification in the character of our perception of the world of contemporary actual entities. That contemporary world is objectified for us as 'realitas objectivas', illustrating bare extension with its various parts discriminated by differences of sense data. These qualities, such as colours, sounds, bodily feelings, tastes, smells, together with the perspectives introduced by extensive relationships, are the relational eternal objects whereby the contemporary actual entities are elements in our constitution. This is the type of objectification which (in Sec. VII of the previous chapter has been termed 'presentational objectification'.

(from Process and Reality by A.N. Whitehead. Chap. II: The Extensive Continuum

From Sankara's commentary on the Brihadaranyaka Upanisad II.iv.11:

Objection: In everyone of these instances the mergence of the objects only has been spoken of, but not that of the organs. What is the motive for this?
Reply: True, but the Sruti considers the organs to be of the same category as the objects, not of a different category. The organs are but modes of the objects in order to perceive them, as a lamp, which is but a mode of colour, is an instrument for revealing all colours. Similarly, the organs are but modes of all particular objects in order to perceive them, as is the case with a lamp. Hence no special care is to be taken to indicate the dissolution of the organs; for these being the same as objects in general, their dissolution is implied by that of the objects.

I place these citations together to show that the dissolution of the subjective point of view arrived at by the progressive absorption of lower perspectives into higher ones, brings in its train the monistic condition of pure self-awareness, "one without a second". According to Whitehead the natural awareness of the subject is an atomised one because "The notion of a direct 'idea' (or 'feeling') of an actual entity is a presupposition of all common sense." (P&R) From that bare pre-theoretic intuition Whitehead concludes:

Some real component in the objectified entity assumes the role of being how that particular entity is a datum in the experience of the subject.

All actual entities are open to all other actual entities in a philosphy of organism. In short to divest the essential insight of the bewildering prolixity of Whiteheadian categories - everything is open to everything else and this openness is limited by the nature of each entity. But what is an entity? It is from our subjective point of view, according to the evolved interests of the human being, that we divide the world. Ecology has taught us, that, although these are natural to us, Nature continuously draws back into seamless unity the pieces we have cut out of the whole.

I believe that I can connect these two citations, not by an easy assimilation but by the telescoping that is a feature of both. In the way that actual entities are in each other according to the rubric of their eternal objects, do I dare to call them limiting adjuncts, so are the limiting adjuncts/upadhis successively dissolved. as described in the experience of the sage on Mount Kailas. That this is merely a fanciful connection with the philosophy of organism must be countered by the remark of Whitehead’s in Process and Reality:

This conception of an actual entity in the fluent world is little more than an expansion of a sentence in the Timaeus “But that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in the process of becoming and perishing and never really is.” Bergson in his protest against ‘spatialization’ is only echoing Plato’s phrase “and never really is”.

The words of the sage Bhagwan Hamsa on Mount Kailas mirrors the progressive dissolution of the stages between becoming and being:

Here my Manas merged into Antahkarana (heart); the antahkarana with the Manas merged into Chitta (mind-stuff); the Chitta along with Antahkarana and Manas merged into Buddhi (intellect); the Buddhi with Chitta, Antahkarana and Manas merged into Ahankar (egoism); and the Ahankar along with Buddhi, Chitta, Antahkarana and Manas merged into Absolute Brahma! I found myself reflected everywhere in the whole Universe! It was all one harmony - full of wisdom, Infinite Love Perennial and Bliss Eternal! Where was the body, its tenements and the ‘I’! It was all Satchitananda. (Truth, Wisdom, Bliss).

(from The Holy Mountain by Bhagwan Shri Hamsa)

Joad on Whitehead (from Guide to Philosophy)

Well Joad does admit the difficulty presented by Whitehead. His ideas he says are "intrinsically difficult to grasp. They involve a total reconstruction of our imaginative picture of the universe, and, even when the intellect is convinced, the imagination refuses to implement the conviction". Yes I heartily concur, even after having read Process and Reality and read in it a few times I more feel it than get it. Joad finds "Professor Whitehead's mode of writing (is) exceedingly obscure".

There are as I have hinted in the Introduction, two kinds of obscurity - the expression of obscurity and obscurity of expression. The first is pardonable, perhaps inevitable. There is, as I pointed out, no a priori reason why the universe should be such as to be readily intelligible to a twentieth century mind, or why a man of average intelligence should be able to grasp the profounder thoughts of a philosopher of original insight. But obscurity of expression is simply another name for bad craftsmanship. A writer should study to make himself understood, and the more difficult his subject, the more paramount is the obligation of clarity. It is by no means certain that Professor Whitehead has always recognised this obligation.

Joad has a go but confesses that this chapter is the least satisfactory in his book ; feeling that he "may have said either too much for adequate interpretation , and too little for adequate comprehension".

Aiding the readability of Joad is the fact that the writing is beautifully punctuated.

Process and Reality (Corrected Edition) by A.N. Whitehead

How is one to read Process and Reality? Very slowly is an acceptable response as is ‘with wrinkled brow’. Don’t look down when you climb Mount Whitehead or you will be overcome by vertigo. There I am with my pencil moving over the lines, anchoring my eye to the page lest the effort of comprehension may make my mind flee to the sunnier climes of reverie. I have read it a few times in the past and then my procedure was to not dwell on specific knotty points which might dull the mental plane blade but to push on trusting that all would be made clear. Faced with eight categories of existence, twenty-seven categories of explanation, nine categoreal obligations and more to come what else can you do. In many ways it’s like a large Russian novel which mixes patronymics, pet names, and titles so that you have to keep going back to the Cast of Characters to see who is in question.

Yet withal there is no sense of ad-hoc extensions, this is archetectonic with the occasional grand sentence thrown in. He tells us:

That the actual world is a process, and that the process is the becoming of actual entities. Thus actual entities are creatures; they are also termed 'actual occasions’. (First Category of Explanation pg.22)

On page 28 you have an explication:

It follows from the first category of explanation that 'becoming’ is a creative advance into novelty. It is for this reason that the meaning of the phrase 'the actual world’ is relative to the becoming of a definite actual entity, which is both novel and actual, relatively to that meaning and to no other meaning of that phrase. Thus conversely, each actual entity corresponds to a meaning of ‘the actual world’ peculiar to itself.

Coming back to the text with a different feeling for the concept of God I shall be interested to see whether God as the underwriter of novelty is merely a thin colourless wash or the tactful verger for the ‘tremendum et fascinans’.

Now I’m at Chapter III : Some Derivative Notions. That cliche of woodworking when dealing with difficult grain, ‘the plane blade should be sharp and closely set’, comes to mind. More anon.

Mount Whitehead

you can't possibly believe that because you've never doubted it. That is what the belief in the external world amounts to.

They say that the first lecture in philosophy Whitehead ever attended was his own. That allowed him to dodge the classical path into the maze, of Realism, anti-realism, irrealism, idealism and all the other holds the masters teach. In the multiple choice question about the world doubt had no little box to tick with your special pencil. What though was the special combination of climate and topography, that raised those fata morgana of the mind, was an interesting question.

Inevitably, because the old maps were faulty, Whitehead had to reconfigure the territories. New finger posts were erected, actual entity, eternal object, event, object but not as you knew them and ways of getting to those places which seem to have more in common with alchemy. One senses the overheated alembic of the Whitheadian conk.

I've done the pradakshina (circumambulation) of the sacred mount Process and Reality twice before and now it seems that I am due to do it again. Because it's there I suppose.

My compass will be:

Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the song of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the duck will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground. We will come to the waters edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small unobtrusive sign that says, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT. - B.TRAVEN.

(Charles Bowden: Blood Orchid)