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so whitehead was born in 1861 he died in 1947. he was born at rams gate in the isle of thanet in the easterly most point of kent in
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england and he was growing up as a child amidst roman ruins and had a profound sense of
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of history as a result even from an early age i think i've mentioned in prior sessions that uh his grandfather was descendant was a descendant of george whitehead the quaker
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uh religious freedom fighter and his grandfather and father were both uh educators who ran a boarding school in in um
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uh thanit at the on the olive bannet and uh so whitehead comes from this lineage of educators uh at 15 he enrolled in school at uh sherbourne
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in uh dorsetsure which is a school which at this point is almost 1300 years old uh it claims alfred the great as one of its early pupils
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so again um you know whiteheads growing up with this rich historical context that despite his inclinations toward mathematics and science gave him a deep appreciation for the
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humanities by 1880 he was uh enrolling at trinity college cambridge to study mathematics
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within five years uh he became a fellow at cambridge and began teaching himself and he'd continue at cambridge until 1910 teaching mathematics
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while he was a student he was a member of the famous cambridge apostles which was a sort of club uh started in the 1820s by tennyson
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the poet and whitehead recounts as part of this this group the apostles they would meet at 10 p.m on saturdays and continue in dialogue with one another other
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students and invited guests sometimes scientists or politicians and statesmen poets and writers would join the students and they'd just continue talking until the
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early morning and so whitehead says a lot of his education in philosophy and literature which he wasn't getting in his mathematics classes would occur during these conversations
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um he would meet his wife evelyn in the late 1880s they would marry in 1890. um here's a picture of whitehead oh that's trinity college
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here's a picture of whitehead and evelyn taken much later and uh he he says in his a short biographical statement that he wrote towards the end of his life that
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it was evelyn's evelyn's vivid life taught him that beauty both moral and aesthetic is the aim of existence and that kindness
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and love and artistic satisfaction are among its modes of attainment so evelyn was um very much uh a
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lover of the arts uh in literature and helped to round out again um whitehead's appreciation uh for these aspects of human life
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even though he uh by nature was right more of a mathematician and a logician white hat had three children with evelyn all born in the 1890s all three two boys one girl they served
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in world war one uh in various functions one of whitehead's sons eric died in the royal air force during world war one he was shot down over france in march
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of 1918 quite tragic obviously and um here's a photograph of whitehead on a pond outside his house
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where he lived um in the first decade of the 20th century with one of his sons there i believe that's north and his daughter jesse
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his son eric was a bit older and so not joining them on this row boat this is uh in grant chester it's about three miles outside of cambridge so this this image i think is uh perhaps
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the best metaphor one could ask for for the deep structure of reality as whitehead sees it right these beads of dew on a spider web each reflecting
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all the others and we'll get more into how this reflects whitehead's process relational ontology i want to continue sharing a few more facts about his life getting more into
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his philosophical and uh initially mathematical work uh in 1898 when he was still at cambridge his first book was published titled treaties on
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universal algebra and this book it formed the basis upon which all of his subsequent work on mathematical logic would build if you're familiar at all with the
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history of math in the 19th century there were a number of important paradigm shifts you know moving beyond euclidean geometry which would later make the einsteinian revolution possible so
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whitehead was building on mathematicians like grassmann and hamilton and boole who i mentioned earlier this book was
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important enough that it led to whitehead being elected to the royal society in 1903. also in 1903 he would begin collaborating with bertrand russell russell was initially a student of
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whiteheads at cambridge in the 1890s but quickly they became colleagues and realized that their work on mathematical logic overlapped enough that
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they began collaborating they thought that they could publish the results of this collaboration uh attempting to ground arithmetic in logic within a year
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it ended up taking closer to a decade and it was this collaboration that um produced the principia mathematica three volumes um basically attempting to prove logically
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that one plus one does indeed equal two um they didn't completely succeed in this task but they opened up many avenues for further work in
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developing symbolic logic in many ways this effort inaugurated the analytic approach to philosophy there was a fourth volume planned but um because of certain philosophical as well
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as whitehead says sociological differences in their points of view their collaboration um ended around 1911. um russell was a pacifist and by the time
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the first world war had started with you know all of whitehead's kids being involved in that war one of them dying i think you can see how despite their more than uh
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decade and a half of friendship and collaboration they sort of drifted apart whitehead would leave cambridge uh in 1914 or in 1910 actually he would leave cambridge and for a few years he
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was drifting around teaching at different uh universities by 1914 he starts he takes up a position at the imperial college of science and technology in london
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and he would teach there for 10 years mostly applied mathematics uh he taught a lot of astronomers during this time and he did a lot of administrative work and it was here at the imperial college
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um which was a new school that at this time that he began reflecting on some of the problems facing university education at this moment in history
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the traditional models where you know like cambridge or oxford education was kind of reserved more for uh elites whitehead felt was um
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inadequate for the you know um more growing middle class uh people clamoring for education um sometimes technical education and so he was struggling to
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figure out how to reform education because he felt ultimately that unless education could adapt itself to this new kind of industrial technological situation
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that civilization would um be in dire straits so he saw he saw this this need for educational reform as one of the factors which might either doom or save civilization
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uh he has a book aims of education that collects some of his papers and and addresses to different um educational reform groups at this time and so in addition to
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all his work in math and logic and science and philosophy he was also deeply invested in educational theory so by
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1924 after a decade teaching at imperial college he was 63 i believe at that time and he was invited to take up a position
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in philosophy at the university in the other cambridge massachusetts at harvard and he accepted and he would teach at harvard from 1924 until 1937 this is
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when most of his major philosophical books were written he reports in 1924 in the fall when he began teaching his first philosophy course to these students at harvard that it was
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also his first philosophy course of course he'd been studying philosophy but he'd never had formal education in it so as is often the case with major you know paradigm changes someone from outside
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the discipline within which they um provide some new paradigmatic understanding uh is looking at the old problems with fresh eyes right they don't have the disciplinary training that would
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tend to um leave one stuck in the existing concepts and categories whiteheads coming into philosophy right with fresh eyes and so the novelty of his scheme of thought is in some
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degree to some degree a result of this whitehead says that philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language and i think this image of the spiderweb
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with the dewdrops each reflecting the others is the perfect analogy for whitehead's uh ontology you know his conception of the nature of being
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um you may have heard of indra's net this picture that comes out of i think madhyamaka buddhism the idea of dependent co-origination of all things
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that nothing has independent abiding existence but is rather caught up in a network of relations or causes and conditions and so you can't remove any of the nodes in the network without
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destroying the node and totally changing the rest of the network that it was embedded within right this is the key to what a process relational ontology is trying to reveal to us about
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the nature of reality right dependent co-origination or you could say the inter-penetration of all things though in whitehead's cosmology there really are no
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things if by thing you mean an inert isolated entity whiteheads ontology is really composed of events right or processes
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you could say and these processes for whitehead are drops of experience right so for whitehead there's there is no node in the network of reality that is
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not there for itself right it is not enjoying some degree of experience or subjectivity or has some degree or capacity for feeling whitehead's technical term
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for the feelings that each of these nodes in the network have of one another is prehension prehension is like you know think of it as short for comprehension
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comprehension usually implies more of a conscious sort of rational reflective understanding when whitehead shortens that to prehension he's he's trying to get at something that is not yet conscious
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certainly not self-reflective uh but more of a um an aesthetic feeling of being um
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permeated by the presence of the other beings in an environment without yet reflecting on the fact all right so apprehension or feeling is a kind of unconscious
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apprehension right so our conscious forms of apprehension or comprehension uh are a further elaboration upon a much more basic form of apprehension or
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feeling that again whitehead argued pervades the universe at every scale and so each of these drops of experience
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in whitehead's view is composed of its feelings or apprehensions of all the other nodes in the network to which it belongs right so there is no reality to any of
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the nodes outside of its feelings of the others the other nodes in the network to which it belongs so this is similar to the kind of buddhist understanding of emptiness
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right there is no abiding self that's true whether we're talking about human experience or whether we're talking about the experience that whitehead would say
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is present in even a subatomic particle and for whitehead a particle is more of an event it's a happening right particle
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is a is an abstract term that makes us makes us think of an inert little bit of matter um but in whitehead's interpretation of 20th century physics there's no such thing as a little bit of matter um photons are
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events they're happenings it takes a certain duration of time for a complete photon to manifest similarly you know an electron it's a vibratory happening it's doing something
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it is a doing rather than a thing right and these doings for whitehead are uh there for themselves right there's something it feels like to be this electronic
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occurrence even at the sub-atomic scale now as these events that compose the natural world continue to unfold over the course of
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evolutionary time they begin to develop habits because they're all sort of evolving together and with each new drop of experience that arises from the network
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of feelings out of which it is composed there's a little bit of novelty that each drop of experience adds to the network out of which it emerges from right so that it's not just that
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each event that emerges from this network composing the rest of nature is determined by its relationship to others there's always a little bit of novelty with each new drop of experience and so
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there's a kind of uh reality at its fundamental basis is a kind of evolving relationship among all of these white heads technical term again
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actual occasions of experience and as they as they co-evolve new habits emerge and these habits uh allow uh nature at various scales to form what
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whitehead calls societies and so an example of a society of occasions or experiential events would be
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hydrogen atoms the first hydrogen atoms which emerge i think a few hundred thousand years after uh the big bang represent the the growing together of what had been
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um distinct processes right protons and electrons to form this relationship that would be enduring which we call the hydrogen atom
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that's a society right of uh actual occasions of experience that has formed and then hydrogen atoms continue this evolutionary process uh and collect together into the first
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stars and a star would be another example of a society of actual occasions of experience and as these new forms of social organization are emerging over the course of cosmic evolution
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what physics describes in terms of laws begin to take shape but again for whitehead these are not eternally fixed laws imposed on the process of evolution that's
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unfolding rather what we call laws emerge from out of that process itself as a result of the creative relationships being formed by these actual occasions of experience
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right and so rather than speaking of laws imposed from outside whitehead understands uh physical law in terms of the habits which which emerge over the course of
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time as a result of relationships so for whitehead the task of philosophy is really to situate us in our experience his is a is an experiential metaphysics right and
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as we've seen in our study of gerta the idea here is not to look behind or beyond experience for something which might be the cause of experience
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the participatory approach to science that gerta and whitehead were both attempting to articulate requires that we stay with experience so metaphysics then
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is not an effort to explain away our common sense experience it's really the effort to bring logical coherence and consistency to experience to find
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the all-pervasive relationships among various aspects of experience and so science becomes the search for those relationships within experience rather than the search for some mechanical
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uh explanation which would be before or behind or beneath experience now of course there's more to experience than at first meets the eye and a great example of
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this would be as you know we discussed in prior sessions this important paradigm shift out of the old geocentric conception of the universe into the copernican
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heliocentric understanding it looked before copernicus as though the earth was the stationary center of the universe but using the
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methods of geometry copernicus was able to successfully argue that in fact the earth is in motion and now we've sent probes to the moon we can observe the fact
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that the earth is in motion this image was taken by a japanese satellite orbiting the moon so this is an actual image of earth rise on the moon
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and so the lesson here rather than the cartesian lesson which said nope guess we can't trust our senses we have to use math to understand a physical world which would be forever beyond our sensory
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experience the lesson for whitehead as for garter is that well we can't ever actually get outside of our experience the cartesian conception of
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res extensa or extended matter which can be measured precisely in mathematical terms that's an idea cartesian matter is an idea right if we want to do
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science in a way that is empirical we need to come back to our experience and understand on an experiential basis how it is uh that the
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copernican understanding of a moving earth can still cohere with our sense of um of an experiential horizon right and so there's a
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paradoxical way in which in light of modern cosmology we can say every point of the universe is in some sense at the center right there's this old hermetic maxim
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that the universe is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere i think this is still an adequate account uh even in light of all that we have
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learned in modern cosmology and so yes of course the geocentric understanding that the astronomer ptolemy uh put forth with all of its epicycles and
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other machinations attempting to explain the wandering motions of the planets so-called retrograde motions we we've advanced beyond that to a simpler understanding
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and yet uh at a deeper level um we can still see how we live in an omnicentric universe right and we can also see how uh although for copernicus
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replacing this the the earth with the sun as the stationary center of the universe now we know the sun itself is moving the galaxy itself is moving motion is totally relative
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there is no absolute space by which we could determine the absolute motion of this planet or that star or this galaxy we have a map here of our galaxy situated in space within
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its local neighborhood some of you may know that andromeda which sometimes visible with the naked eye ortho telescope it's actually hurtling toward the milky way and
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will eventually collide with the milky way this is our local context right and so everything is orbiting around everything else we can also consider our
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cosmic situation temporally this is a simulation of how matter congealed after the big bang
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this formation of the first stars this sort of rhythmic process of expansion and contraction right it's an archetypal phenomenon this expansion and contraction that goethe later
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perceives in the plant realm in the animal realm but it was active many billions of years ago in the formation of stars from my head's point of view all of that cosmic activity is
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folded into us right now it's not somewhere else right it's not left behind in the past it has perished uh but in some sense um
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it is still contained within us right so the archetypal phenomena of expansion and contraction that we saw active in that simulation again is now still
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evident in the expansion and contraction in the various phases of plant metamorphosis right so let's after having zoomed out right into this sort of um
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fractal context at the galactic and cosmic scales let's try to come back to earth and situate ourselves because as garter reminded us um it's quite difficult for us to even
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imagine these cosmic magnitudes billions of of years billions of light years of spatial distance billions of years of of time
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um these these sorts of magnitudes are so far beyond beyond our capacity to grasp uh in terms of human proportions they're just very abstract and
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both gerta and whitehead were worried that as modern science advanced we were increasingly replacing we were in a rush to replace our concrete experience with these abstractions
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and this can be quite disorienting let me remember this quote i shared last time i think whitehead says that philosophy has to rescue the facts as they are
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from the facts as they appear we view the sky at noon on a fine day it is blue flooded by the light of the sun the direct fact of observation is the
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sun as the sole origin of light and the bare heavens whitehead continues conceive the myth of adam and eve in the garden on the first day of human life they watch the sunset the stars appear
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and lo creation widened to man and woman's view the excess of light discloses facts and also conceals them right
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and so the analogy here is while metaphysics must be grounded in experience experience as it first appears to us may be deceiving we have to stay with the complete round of
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metamorphic process as it were in this case the complete day night cycle before we can have a complete sense for the phenomenon in question if we only had uh
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the daytime view of the sky we would totally miss this broader cosmic context revealed when the sun sets and so even though it seems like during the day uh with the bright light that we're seeing
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everything as clearly and distinctly as we could ask be patient the metamorphic process is not yet finished right and so this is a an analogy for the way in which both
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garter and white had insist that we stay with the phenomena in their archetypal process in their uh morphogenetic process
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so that we stay with the evolving relationship between perceiver and perceived and not rush to conjecture something that would be behind phenomena
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something that would be unperceived but not just unperceived now but unperceivable even in principle that might explain our experience of the phenomena
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so you remember last time i talked about gerta and his understanding of theory in the original greek sense uh as contemplative observation right theory as in theoria related to theater
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and in the context of theater right we want to if we want to understand the meaning of the play we don't pull the curtain back and look in the dressing room we watch the action unfold on stage we wouldn't be satisfied
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seeing what was going on in the dressing room right the whole meaning of the play would be lost we'd see you could say we're seeing the um the typical sort of um
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scientific modern scientific metaphor here would be oh well we do want to pull the curtain back we want to see the inner workings we want to see the guts right behind the scenes but from a white heady in our guardian point
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of view it's not that there aren't many layers of experience to pull back it's just even if we were to pull the curtain back we're still dealing with experience at a different level and the worry for gerta and whitehead is
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that we forget sometimes with the typical scientific method that we can only ever apply concepts derived from our empirical experience
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and so if we're trying to understand uh experience as if it were really an illusion produced by collisions of particles or brain chemistry or something that we can never
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in principle experience what we're doing is applying concepts derived from our experience to an imagined realm that we think is beyond experience but
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it's not we're this is whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness we're imagining an abstract realm in terms of concepts derived from experience and saying that that realm could cause experience and so we're
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getting confused about what's abstract and what's concrete right so it's true that there's often more to the phenomena than what it first meets the eye
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but the the remedy for that situation for grocer and whitehead is to be patient to look deeper to stay with the metamorphic process until we're sure that the hole has revealed itself
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whitehead says in our experience there's always the dim background from which we derive and to which we return we are not enjoying a limited doll's house
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of clear and distinct things secluded from all ambiguity in the darkness beyond there ever looms the vague mass which is the universe begetting us
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right and so the vague mass is not only uh the full spatial extent of the universe as it exists now but the depths of time the generative process
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that has given our eyes to this uh spatial extent and all of that as i was saying earlier though it we might think of the past as having perished it remains present within us
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another white hedian technical term it is objectively immortal right the effects persist within us today even of events which occurred billions of years ago
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because the universe is a temporal process constantly building on what's been achieved in the past right in order to achieve yet more complex things in the future
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so i want to now uh introduce the key concept in in whitehead's mature metaphysics concrescence right can crescence is derived from a latin term which literally means to grow
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together and i'm using daffodils here as a sort of metaphor for understanding how concretence is ultimately an organic process
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and it's whitehead's attempt to describe a universe composed of events right can crescence is a description
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of the phases in the process by which reality advances out of the past through the present and into the future concretence occurs
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in our own experience as conscious human beings so it's a general description of what occurs both in our own experience as conscious human beings as well as in
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electromagnetic phenomena uh as well as in any moment in the life history of the sun uh or any other organism biological organism on the surface of
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the planet it's meant to be concrescence is meant to be a general enough description that it can apply at all these different scales of reality right so you should sense the analogies to your own experience as a
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conscious human being as you advance from moment to moment of your life history but whitehead intends concrescence to also be applicable to events at every other scale of nature
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right because for whitehead metaphysics is is an attempt to devise a language that is general enough that it can be applied
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to uh all experience it can be applied to what all the special sciences are describing it can be applied to human
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conscious existence morality art religion he wants one scheme of categories which applies to this ultimate context and he's admitting also right at the beginning of
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process in reality that this is a hopeless quest his system will not finally be adequate but he's trying to get as close as he can and he's inviting us to continue the effort so he says that concretence is the
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process by which the many become one and are increased by one right the many here refers to the past the perished objects
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in the past environment there's another domain that whitehead makes reference to he's a platonist in this sense though he's a reformed platonist
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he makes reference to this realm of eternal objects which for him are pure possibilities i was mentioning tim eastman earlier he calls this domain res potentia
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the realm of possibilities which have not yet been actualized and so for whitehead the realm of possibility is infinite the realm of actuality is finite
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in the realm of actuality uh there's a limited amount of certain types of experience which have been realized but the realm of actuality draws upon this plenum of possibility
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and it's because there is this plenum of possibility in relationship to the realm of actuality that novelty is possible new things can still happen we're not just constantly repeating the
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past right whitehead describes the process of concrescence or each drop of experience as dipolar having two poles there's a physical pull
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and a mental pull each concrescence or drop of experience begins with the physical pull where the perished objects of the past environment are apprehended or felt
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and these feelings of the past grow together into this newly emerging drop of experience and then in the process of their growing together the actualized
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perished objects of the past environment are brought into comparison with eternal objects or pure potentials possibilities and these possibilities ingress right so
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there's ingression of eternal objects and prehension of past actualities ingression of potentials prehensions of past actualities and what the
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aggression of eternal objects do is provide each occasion of experience each concrescence with um the opportunity to interpret the past differently to say oh uh
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maybe it's not like that maybe it's like this and so these ingressions come into the mental pole right which is the uh if the physical pole is what initiates the experience of each
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concressing occasion the mental pull is is a subsequent process that compares what's been felt in the past with what is possible
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alternatives that could be experienced that are not given yet in the past the subjective form is how the occasion fills the past the subjective aim is what draws the many feelings of the past towards
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uh the unification and the mental pull where the ingression of eternal objects and the feelings of past actualities are brought together into what whitehead calls
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this moment of satisfaction it's the culmination of the process of con concretence where a new perspective on the universe is achieved this is
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the many have become one they are increased by one when the satisfaction is achieved it's a new perspective on the whole as soon as this new perspective is achieved
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it becomes a superject which is not a subject enjoying its own experience anymore it's a perished subject the superject is
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is the achieved perspective that has been experienced but then perishes itself into into a superject hood to become one among the many
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that will be inherited by the next moment of experience the next concrescence and this superject has objective immortality in the sense that every subsequent concreteance will inherit
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the satisfaction achieved by the prior concreteants right and so this is the most general account in whitehead's view that we can offer of the nature of
00:41:35
reality the nature of the passage of nature the movement out of the past through the present and into the future experience is always in the present right
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and the satisfaction that is achieved by each moment of concretence is is enjoyed in the present but as soon as we achieve that it perishes and the next moment of concretence
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arises to inherit what was achieved and this is an iterative process right it's repeating constantly and it's cumulative it's a process of growth building on what's been achieved in the past
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this is the castle rock of edinburgh at whitehead has this famous example of how conquestance works even in the inorganic world of rocks a rock may seem like an inanimate object
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that's just kind of sitting there not doing anything but we know that at the molecular level and certainly the quantum level even rocks are pervaded by energetic activity
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so whitehead says the castle rock of edinburgh exists from moment to moment and from century to century by reason of the decision affected by its own historic route
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of antecedent occasions so castle rock maintains its form because all of the concretences which are taking place
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are repeating the past with a high degree of fidelity though weathering is occurring and the rocks are breaking down gradually but nonetheless the rock
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composing this structure persists because of this process of inheritance whitehead refers to the historic roots of antecedent occasions of experience that are
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maintaining the form of even rock over the course of centuries by inheriting feelings from the past now rocks uh
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because of their lack of organization don't have as much capacity to ingress alternatives to what's being inherited from the past and so rocks largely remain
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the same there's no sign of life which would be the ingression of novelty when you get to the level of complexity of living organisms there's much more capacity to ingress
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novelty to not just repeat the past but to do something new but for whitehead there's no ontological break between
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say inorganic matter and the biological world of organisms for whitehead this idea of organism can be generalized
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hydrogen atoms are organisms stars galaxies are organisms of less complexity than cells and multicellular plants and animals but nonetheless organisms in the sense that they are
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societies historical roots of occasions of experience that have been organized over the course of time they're not just inert stuff that are sitting there without any
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active process in each moment composing them so in addition to concrescence one of the other key categories key concepts in
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whitehead's scheme of thought is creativity creativity is the ultimate in whitehead's conception of reality if you were to ask
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um what is reality made of what is the universe ultimately composed of for whitehead it's not matter anymore it's not space anymore it's creativity creativity is what reality is made of
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and it's not a substance it's a process and it's never the same twice but this is where whitehead's process theology comes in
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creativity can only appear under conditions and the initial condition for whitehead is what he calls god the primordial nature
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of god to be specific so if we have the world of actual occasions which i've been trying to describe for you finite creatures right that exist in the world we have different forms of leaves and flowers
00:46:25
here to represent that this world of actual occasions from whitehead's point of view emerging out of creativity is only possible finite form is only
00:46:37
possible because creativity has been filtered by the primordial creature which he terms god now we don't have to use the term god to
00:46:48
refer to this we could just think of the initial conditions that physicists cosmologists sometimes refer to as having fine-tuned the physical laws of the universe so that you know
00:47:02
forms of organization stars and galaxies and life could emerge later there's a very small range of the numerical values of physical constants and laws that would allow for
00:47:14
life to emerge later in whitehead's view these these constants these um this fine-tuning is established by the primordial creature
00:47:29
and we he calls it god but it's kind of odd to refer to god as a creature if you're familiar with uh most uh christian or judaic or islamic theology god's the creator not the creed not a
00:47:42
creature right but no whitehead saying creativity is is ultimate god is the first creature of creativity and god's role as the first creature is to act as a kind of filter you could think of creativity as the
00:47:54
realm of possibility or eternal objects that i was describing in the last slide god's role is to give some order to that realm of possibility and to say
00:48:07
these possibilities are more beautiful this so whitehead invis whitehead's god envisages the realm of possibility and gives it some
00:48:19
some ordering some um sense of what would be more valuable to realize and so i've i've put a gertian color wheel in here to symbolize the way in which
00:48:31
uh this primordial creature is giving some order to the realm of eternal objects now this realm of eternal objects i should have mentioned earlier is not just um like mathematical forms
00:48:45
it's also the qualitative domain of colors and scents and sounds it's the the realm of sort of adjectives and adverbs by which we
00:49:00
describe our experience right the definite possibilities in terms of which we can characterize the various facets of our experience the primordial nature of god is giving some
00:49:14
order to this realm and each finite occasion of experience like each moment of our own stream of consciousness or each moment in the life history of a flower say
00:49:28
is inheriting god's primordial nature whitehead calls this the initial aim and this initial aim gives to each finite creature a sense of relevant
00:49:41
novelty or relevant possibility the realm of possibility itself is infinite and if each of us as finite creatures were exposed to that realm with no filtering we'd be completely overwhelmed we have no idea which
00:49:55
possibilities were relevant to our finite situation and so the role of god is to provide us with a sense of relevant novelty through this initial aim that is granted to us
00:50:08
god doesn't control how we decide to interpret our experience but god god provides uh a sense of relevance within which we can then freely decide each creature for whitehead
00:50:21
is self-creating but there's some divine assistance in each moment of our experience that's sort of whispering in our ear hey this might be the most beautiful way to interpret what is going on for you right now
00:50:34
whitehead says that god provides to each creature a mirror reflecting its own greatness what what it could be in each moment now
00:50:47
typically we don't live up to that highest potential in each moment but nonetheless there's enough of this initial aim ingredient in each moment of our experience that over the course of billions of years
00:50:59
the universe has tended towards greater organization and complexity and indeed and why it had to view greater beauty greater beauty doesn't mean everything's fine and dandy and there's no suffering
00:51:11
for whitehead uh the highest form of beauty is actually tragedy right so keep that in mind like every other creature whitehead's god is dipolar
00:51:25
god has a mental pull and a physical pull though unlike the depiction of concrescence i gave you in the last slide god's experience is reversed the mental
00:51:37
pull comes first the physical pull comes consequently right that's really the only difference between god's experience and the
00:51:49
experience of any finite creature it's the order of the phases or the poles so god's mental pull is the ordering of the realm of possibility god's physical pull then
00:52:01
is that which feels the decisions made by all the finite creatures as they achieve satisfaction in each moment of concretence god's consequent nature is sort of this
00:52:15
cosmic memory whereby nothing which occurs in the experience of finite creatures is lost it's all preserved and it's preserved in a way that whitehead says is harmonized with god's
00:52:29
ideal vision of what could be and so you can think of god's consequent nature as in some way the atonement for even the mistakes made even the tragic losses
00:52:45
that we experience in our our lives as mortal creatures god's primordial nature you could say is whitehead's way of accounting for as i said the sort of cosmological fine-tuning in terms of which or or by
00:53:01
means of which an ordered self-organizing universe could unfold the consequent nature i think is whitehead's attempt to provide some sense of justification for
00:53:14
our human need i would say we can we can discuss whether or not this is a real need sort of intrinsic to human nature but our need for some sense of
00:53:26
meaning and ultimate purpose to existence without this consequent nature of god uh to uh provide a sense of immortality for every
00:53:39
experience which has ever occurred and not just immortality but atonement that gives meaning and puts even the experience of loss and suffering and tragedy into a greater context within
00:53:51
which um you know some purpose can be can be revealed whitehead thinks human beings would have no basis for civilized life we would just spiral into nihilism
00:54:03
and so the consequent nature of god is a response to the sort of anthropological need that human beings have for meaning whereas the primordial nature of god is more of a
00:54:15
almost cosmological genetic code in terms of which we can understand how the universe could be so ordered right now it might seem like these are two gods uh and indeed there's lots of
00:54:30
debate among process theologians about how these two aspects of the divine fit together but whitehead certainly intended to describe one one god
00:54:43
one soul of the world if you prefer to use that term because unlike traditional conceptions of god as creator whitehead's god is is involved in the world
00:54:56
whitehead's god he says is a fellow sufferer who understands so world soul might be the better term than god in that sense but whitehead intends it to be one god with these two uh
00:55:09
aspects to it and finally um whitehead says nature is plastic although to every every prevalent state of mind
00:55:26
there corresponds iron nature setting its bounds to life right there are stubborn habits in other words that condition and limit the degree to which we can express novelty in the next
00:55:38
moment it is a false dichotomy he continues to think of nature and man or nature and humanity mankind is that factor in nature
00:55:54
which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of nature plasticity is the introduction of novel law right and so
00:56:08
rather than think of laws as eternally fixed as the creative advance of nature continues new habits are being established which provide the basis for yet further novelty
00:56:24
the doctrine of the uniformity of nature right that that the laws of nature so-called apply across the entire cosmos there's not remember that in ancient cosmology there was this conception like in
00:56:39
aristotle that the laws as they apply below the moon are quite different from the sorts of laws that apply above the moon in the um superlunary sphere
00:56:53
above the moon it was thought all motion was in perfect circles the beings above the moon were eternal and divine below the moon everything is corruptable motion is
00:57:06
erratic right that's the old conception of a sublunary and superlunary division the scientific revolution destroys that division
00:57:17
we have a sense of universal laws right an apple falling from a tree follows the same rules as the planets orbiting the sun as as newton revealed so the doctrine of the uniformity of
00:57:31
nature very important doctrine is to be ranked with for whitehead the contrasted doctrine of magic and miracle as an expression of partial truth
00:57:44
unguarded and uncoordinated with the immensities of the universe so what he means by bringing in magic and miracle here is these were ancient ways pre-modern ways of
00:57:57
understanding what for whitehead is novelty the capacity for occasions of experience as they can crest to ingress novelty and not just be determined by law
00:58:09
or by the habits of the past nature is always advancing into novelty for whitehead and he thinks that the ancients understood this in terms of magic and miracle and that we have to bring that ancient understanding
00:58:26
into coherence with this modern understanding of the uniformity of nature where miracles are not supposed to happen but before life emerged on earth
00:58:37
uh it would seem that the universe was a purely physical and chemical process and that life appears in that context it seems like a miracle but for whitehead that's not a miracle as though
00:58:50
a god was required to reach in to the machine to arrange physics and chemistry to make life possible no physics and chemistry from white's point of view were not never simply
00:59:03
dead mechanisms right they were always already on their way to what we refer to as the biological world of living organisms so the emergence of life is not a miracle in the old sense requiring some
00:59:16
divine intervention it's just a further expression of this process of novelty that ingresses over the course of evolution so he says our interpretations of experience determine the limits
00:59:30
of what we can do with the world
End of transcript