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and i'm going to say hello and a warm welcome to the free monthly online holistic science talks again they're organized by schumacher college in collaboration with the field
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center i'm simon reece um having asked you where you're from i'm in nelsworth at the ruskin world trust i'm the publishing manager for ruskin world trust and a researcher at the
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field center this month we are delighted to be welcoming matt seagal and matt will be presenting on alfred north whitehead's philosophy of the organism
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sorry philosophy of organism i'm going to give a brief introduction to matt who is a process philosopher and he teaches on process relational thought and german idealism for the philosophy cosmology and
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consciousness program at the california institute of integral studies in san francisco matt's going to present on whitehead who's best known for his process philosophy
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has a broad number of applications and you can find this for example in ecology theology education physics economics and other other such areas so before i hand over to matt there is a
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q and a box that you'll find on the bottom of your screen and then if you put your questions on your comments i will then shape those into a discussion with matt for you
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at the end of his discussion of the end of his presentation uh please try not to put them in the chat box try and put them in the q a um
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okay matt a very very warm welcome to you we're delighted to have you with us thanks so much simon great to be here uh on planet earth somewhere
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you all are and i'm here in california um it's a delight to be able to uh join schumacher college um you know to meet simon this morning to see troy and
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judith here and um i've been really enjoying uh the opportunity to teach a bit for schumacher i've talked twice now in the past once in person at dartington hall
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back in 2018 of course on whitehead and then earlier this year online in in uh pandemic mode of course on whitehead and goethe and i'm doing that again later this summer
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and um you know it's a real it's a real delight both you know to work with master students at schumacher college and also short course participants i've found
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in teaching whitehead that there's such a diversity of people with a diversity of backgrounds that are interested in his work as simon was mentioning he's sort of touched on a whole variety of different disciplines
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he's not just a philosopher um or at least his philosophy is not just relevant to other philosophers it's also meant to be an aide to our everyday lives and
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uh part of an effort to allow us to reconnect to a universe that you know in the last few hundred years has really grown in size in in magnitude
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compared to what pre-modern people were used to and so we're in quite a a novel situation and and whitehead's philosophy of organism is an attempt to make us or allow us to
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feel more at home here so i'm going to try to go into go until the top of the hour here and uh run through first a brief sort of biographical uh
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introduction to whitehead who he was the trajectory of his career i think that helps um make sense it helps us make sense of how it is he managed to touch on so many
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aspects of you know contemporary human life here on planet earth and then i want to just step back and ask the question you know why would we even care why do we do philosophy why do we do
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metaphysics why is it relevant to our lives and then i want to spend the remaining time going into detail
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introducing you to some of whitehead's philosophical concepts and to try to paint the picture of a world in process uh he's a process philosopher right and
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so i'll introduce you to some of his his categories his concepts his new words neologisms and um after that you'll you'll probably be full of questions uh so
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all right let me uh share my screen here and thumbs up troyer simon if that's good okay great uh so there he is
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whitehead was born in ramsgate uh england in 1861 and uh by the time you in his late teens you know he's already showing a lot of promise in mathematics and
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he makes his way to cambridge university um king's college and trinity excuse me not kings college
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and studies math there he studies with james clerk maxwell's student so maxwell of course invented the or discovered the
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electromagnetic theory and developed the maths to understand the propagation of light waves and whitehead wrote his dissertation on the electromagnetic theory
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and so from you know his very first academic work and research he is bridging mathematics and physics and this connection between the abstract domain
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of of of geometry and the concrete physical world remains of deep interest to him throughout his career as we'll see so in i think 1884
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or so 1885 he began teaching mathematics at cambridge around 1906 uh he and bertrand russell begin to collaborate
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actually russell starts as whitehead's student and they you know very quickly realized that you know they were peers uh to some extent and that they should be working together
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on a project that uh climaxed in the principia mathematica which was a supposed to be four volumes it ended up being three volumes which
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was an attempt to uh prove logically that one plus one in fact equals two and we might take for granted that this is a simple formula uh that even uh you know
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elementary school children can uh can solve but in fact uh as they discovered in the course of writing this book together there are some logical paradoxes embedded in this simple formula
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um we don't really have a clear definition of what a number is much less what two numbers are uh and so russell and whitehead did really
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you could say inaugurate the whole discipline of analytic philosophy by developing a um quite impenetrable symbolic language uh that cost quite a bit of money for
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cambridge to print i think they even asked uh to just to do this the type setting i think they even asked russell and whitehead to chip in a little bit of their own funds
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to print the first 500 copies um the book didn't sell very well but it was nonetheless very influential so that was i think 1911 through
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that these three volumes came out there was supposed to be a fourth volume um on geometry which was going to be mostly whitehead's contribution but the war
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started and whitehead and russell began to have some tension around that russell of course would be himself dismissed from trinity uh college cambridge for his pacifism
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and anti-war activism whiteheads uh i don't know that he was cheering on the war but his son eric was drafted and was in the royal air force and a few years later actually would be
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shot down over france i believe and died and so um you know given that uh just the the difficulty around um
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the the loss not just for whitehead personally but for many um of the european nations during the war and russell's uh you know you could say brave pacifist stance at that point whitehead and
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russell who were good friends sort of had a bit of a falling out and at that point um there were there was something else uh brewing in uh the
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um international scene of physics and and cosmology uh albert einstein of course uh beginning in 1905 and then in 1916 had published his special and general theories of relativity
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and whitehead independently of einstein had already been exploring again this relationship between math and the physical world actually also in 1905 white had published
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this article that was called mathematical conceptions of the material world and in there he's exploring different approaches to modeling the physical
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world mathematically and he looks at four or five different models and the fourth and fifth models begin to gesture towards something like a relativistic understanding of um bringing space and time into more
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intimate relationship than uh had hitherto been done but you know einstein was the real genius here in um you know bringing together some work that had already been underway
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um you know with physicists like lorenz and um minkowski and ryman and others building on the development of non-euclidean geometry right to totally shift
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and transform our understanding of space and time and gravity and matter and energy and so whitehead was really swept up by this uh einsteinian revolution in physics
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in uh the first you know two decades of the 20th century and it brought him more and more out of just mathematics and physics and into metaphysics so
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to set the scene here uh in in 1916 einstein had made some predictions about how light would bend around the sun and suggested that during an eclipse we
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would be able to take photographs of the moon blocking the light of the sun and see the stars around the sun and we could actually measure the the parallax the degree to which the
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light from the stars around the sun shifted due to the warping effect of the sun's gravitation eins newton had also made a prediction that this would occur but einstein's
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prediction was about i think twice as much as newton's and so they could determine whether einstein's theory of gravity was correct or not by observing an eclipse um actually einstein's first
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uh prediction was off he got the math wrong and lucky for him the attempt to prove uh his theory in 19 uh
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i think 1916 it must have been um was thwarted because uh well actually it was 1914 so he had developed a theory a little bit earlier and someone went off to russia to try to
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observe an eclipse that was happening then but the war started and this this scientist was was arrested and his equipment was impounded and he couldn't run the test if he had he would have found that
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einstein's prediction was off so luckily that didn't occur or einstein would have been dismissed and wouldn't be the greatest genius of the 20th century einstein has another chance to uh to redo his math makes a new prediction
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um sir arthur eddington and a team of astronomers from the royal society decide in uh 1919 that they're going to travel
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to the west coast of africa and to brazil to have two teams to observe the eclipse in 1919 they're able to uh to take some photographic plates they
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barely got enough plates it was it was hot and the mirrors were warping and in in you know eddington was in off the coast of um africa on this island where monkeys were
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stealing his equipment and so it was not easy to to get these photographic plates of the eclipse but they managed it and eddington makes the announcement uh
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later that year in london at the royal society whitehead is in the audience and eddington says uh we have confirmed einstein's predictions
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light indeed is warped by the presence of mass because according to einstein space bends space space-time is warped it bends um that's
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what many of the uh newspaper headlines read the next day um you know there were headlines like space caught bending right and um whitehead reports the sort of theatrical environment
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uh in the the hall at the royal society when um you know these these these men and women uh of science are taking in this this new discovery um you know the universe has has
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unveiled another aspect of itself but whitehead has some issues with this notion of space bending and over the next several years he would have several occasions to
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speak with einstein um at the the statesman and philosopher um lord haldane's home in london there was a party that held and through uh invited einstein einstein gave a
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couple lectures as well like cambridge and elsewhere and whitehead tried to talk einstein out of his implicit metaphysics he was fine with the with the physics
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and with the uh the new geometrical tools that einstein had developed with help from other mathematicians but he was worried about this notion of space bending
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because the thing about um measurement is that you need a rigid ruler in order for measurement to be accurate and whitehead thought that if space was allowed to bend due to the presence
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of mass which is sort of contingently spread around the universe we're in a situation where before we can measure anything accurately we first have to know where all the mass is but to know where all the mass
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is we'd first have to measure it and so you can see how um as whitehead put it we'd first have to know everything before we can know anything and you know einstein had a response to
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this that because over the the spread of the entire universe mass is distributed more or less um evenly we don't have to worry about the warping of space over long distances
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whitehead was not convinced um he thought that we needed to distinguish between um space which was a matter for geometers geometry to figure out and physics where you know the mass
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which was what we're trying to measure and if we conflate the two we end up with some logical and indeed metaphysical paradoxes and so this set whitehead off into metaphysics himself
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and he developed um a whole philosophy of nature and a cosmology which integrated relativity theory and also the early some early aspects of quantum
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theory that were being developed in the 1920s and just as whitehead was beginning this work he was invited to when he was 64 i believe he was invited to come to
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the united states uh to the other cambridge cambridge massachusetts where he began lecturing in the philosophy department for harvard university
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whitehead says uh in his first course uh as a professor at harvard that it was also uh it has to count as his first philosophy course himself he'd never actually taken a philosophy course
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in here here he was taking up the chair that william james a great american philosopher had held until like 1910 and whitehead continues at harvard
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from 1924 until 1937 when he retires and during this time he publishes a number of books on um process philosophy or his so-called philosophy of organism
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process and reality uh was published in 1929 it was actually a series of lectures he gave uh at the university of edinburgh so he went back across the pond uh to scotland and and gave
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the gifford lectures and process and reality is one of the most difficult books in the history of of western philosophy i don't recommend that you try to read it by yourself
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you may get lost and and will never be seen or heard from again in the thicket of um [Music] new words and uh and difficult arguments um that whitehead makes in
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that text however um if you can find a group of other people who are weird enough to be interested in metaphysics studying it together is is helpful you
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can keep track of each other you can speak with each other in this new language that whitehead develops and i don't mean to scare you off from studying whitehead's work
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i just think it's important to recognize that he's really developing a new language in in this book and his subsequent texts um which are a little bit easier to read adventures of ideas
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modes of thought uh some titles of his later books which take uh the dense technical and formal uh language of process and reality and
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make it a little bit more digestible but whitehead's really trying to develop a new language that um once we learn it it all it in fact alters our perception i would say and we
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begin to inhabit a world um that is no longer uh sort of the the the mechanistic common sense that for the last few hundred years we've been raised to uh to accept where we're in a sort of
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spatial container with other solid objects um in this container and that you know time is is simply a a measure of the change of the location
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of these objects in the spatial container and that these objects including we ourselves we have no intrinsic relationship to each other we're all what we would say is whitehead would say
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we're all just externally related in this container of space bumping into each other right that's the sort of more or less newtonian picture that whitehead thinks 20th century physics
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completely demolishes and so um let's shift then uh to this question of why philosophy is is even important and you know why whitehead was drawn into metaphysics
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um you know i spoke to this a bit it was he was really uh inspired by the einsteinian and quantum revolutions in physics to move into philosophy but why well because he felt that these
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revolutions in physics had demolished the old mechanistic world view the old mechanistic metaphysics that had undergirded science since its foundation
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in the 17th century whitehead refers to this as scientific materialism and it was based on the idea two main ideas which he refers to as the idea of simple
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location that a thing has simple location in space and that its location can be determined independently of the location of everything else in space and the other idea would be this notion
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of nature being fully present at an instant or say a bit of matter being fully present at an instant uh so that there's sort of this notion of
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of matter as just this enduring lump of stuff or substance would be the technical metaphysical term that just mutely endures indoors um in its motions through space or its
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endurance through time it's just there right fully present at an instant and with simple location now after relativity and quantum theories
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um demolished both of these these notions of simple location and nature at an instant whitehead realized that um science was now advancing its theoretical understanding
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uh almost floating in free air uh floating without a metaphysical foundation and if you try to understand quantum theory and all the the weirdness that um ends
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up seeming um like a consequence of of some of the findings of quantum theory you'll note that there's such a uh a disconnect between our common sense experience
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and what quantum theory is telling us like schrodinger's cat right in this in this chamber with a radioactive isotope apparently we can't know whether the cat is dead or alive but it's worse than
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that we have to say that the cat is both dead and alive at the same moment right this totally conflicts with our common sense understanding and from whitehead's point of view this is because we don't have we don't have the metaphysical
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substructure uh to undergird our scientific understanding such that what we discover in the special sciences whether it's in physics in the different aspects of physics or
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in biology or in chemistry unless all of these special sciences have a a metaphysical substructure we don't know first of all how they all relate to each other just within science
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but we also don't know how science itself relates to our everyday experience to our common sense experience of being conscious agents in a world of other conscious agents
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who we think have some responsibility for their actions uh who perceive beauty uh who you know have have purposes and life goals how do we um integrate the findings of
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contemporary science with the hardcore presuppositions of our everyday lives whitehead thought that um the 20th century revolutions in physics
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and even before that the metaphysics of scientific materialism and mechanism had sort of left us in a bit of a muddle in a fragmented state because i mean
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before the revolutions of the 20th century if you looked at mechanistic science and tried to integrate that even though mechanistic science was white had admitted a clear set it had a clear set of principles
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everything was more or less understood the universe was a clockwork right that doesn't integrate with our understanding of human life at all this is why you know descartes an early
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modern scientist had his dualism where the mechanistic world could be understood with perfect precision mathematically but it was set apart from the inner realm of of the human soul
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right and this was a sort of uh compromised position but as science advanced it began to encroach more and more upon the inner life of the human soul um but then in the early 20th century as
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as this mechanistic metaphysics is called into question whitehead seized the opportunity to develop a more coherent understanding that was not dualistic that didn't separate
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human consciousness from the rest of nature but that understood nature not as a collection of objects blindly colliding with one another in empty space
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but rather uh came to understand nature as a network of events you might say um and this network of events is uh for whitehead um in
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in a process of becoming that is inherently um tilted towards complexity tilted toward beauty he would say
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and when we think of nature as a network of events uh whitehead thought that an event or an occasion a happening
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something like uh you know the the agitation of energy described in electromagnetic theory um that this was easier to bridge you know and the agitations of energy as
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a as a as a happening as an event is easier to bridge with our understanding of experience because experience too is a happening it's not just an object in space right
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it is a subject to which events are transpiring or for which events are transpiring and so in whitehead's universe subjectivity is understood to be pervasive
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not conscious self-reflective uh you know rational consciousness such as human beings some of the time possess but a more basic form of experience
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which is uh simply the the feeling of inheriting a past and anticipating a future right so every event in the universe for whitehead is inheriting a past and anticipating a future even
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if you think of the wavelength of light you know it's even if it's highly repetitive in its inheritance of the past just repeating the same energetic pattern over and over again whitehead says well why is it repeating
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that pattern because it's enjoyable right and so um this is a point where many people who are perhaps more wed to the materialist worldview and want to see human consciousness as something totally
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different whitehead is going to give them pause here and they're going to find this perhaps incredible incredible um but white had found reasons looking at and we'll go into
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this uh looking at um the post-einsteinian post-quantum uh study of physics and looking at biology and evolutionary theory
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he found that he was justified in moving to what's called a pan-psychist or a pan-experiential metaphysics because again his goal was not only to integrate all of the sciences
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but to understand how science and human life can be integrated such that the universe that we actually experience as conscious human beings would have some relationship to
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uh the you know the particles and the waves and and the galaxies and stars distant stars studied by uh by science and so we do philosophy and metaphysics
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whitehead would say in an effort uh to to understand our place in the universe right and one of the best images that i could
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find for describing whitehead's universe was was this spiderweb with some dew drops on it so rather than again a universe
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imagined as a spatial container with objects within it i described whitehead's universe as a network of events and whitehead refers to events also as
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actual occasions and these are actual occasions of experience right and each of these dew drops you can imagine as an actual occasion of experience and that they exist in this
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network or mesh work with one another is to say that just as each of these dew drops reflects all the other dew drops each actual occasion uh is mirroring the rest of the universe
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and so there's a holographic sense in which within each actual occasion at whatever location it happens to be in the universe it is in fact
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containing within itself the entirety of its cosmic environment right and so if you were to zoom in on any of these dew drops uh you'd see each of the other dew drops reflected there
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and then if you were to zoom in on those dew drops uh you'd see again the repetition in a fractal-like way of the entire web and so there's this infinite nesting occurring in each of
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these actual occasions of experience and in whitehead's universe um we're not just externally related to one another from moment to moment uh we are
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including one another one another's pasts within ourselves right and so the only problem with this web is that it it presents a sort of static picture of
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interconnection white has understanding of the relationship among these actual occasions of experience is in process right and so we'd have to
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um imagine a more dynamic image whereby these dew drops uh are constantly um growing together into one another and then dispersing out again
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if we think about this in human terms it's a profoundly whiteheads is a profoundly relational understanding of existence whereby you know as you're taking in
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my image and my words right now uh yes it has to be uh translated uh into you know electronic uh pulses in a in a series of uh
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transistors and and microchips and then sent across the planets wherever you are but then it's produced through your speakers on your computer back into sound um and my image is conveyed to you and
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whitehead is saying that the energy that i am expressing is absorbed by you and it actually becomes part of you um and when i get to hear your questions later uh
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you will become part of me and that we're in this constant give and take with one another whereby we are literally making each other from moment to moment
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and so it's quite a profound uh mesh work that challenges not only this old idea of mechanistic physics that things exist independently of other things but it challenges our
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modern um sort of political and social sense of um individuality at least if we take that to an extreme if we were to imagine individuals
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uh existing on their own private island without being constituted by their relations to others i mean it becomes quite obvious when we think about developmental psychology and the maturation
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of uh of an infant in relationship to the mother um we can see i think in that dynamic the sense in which um we really do belong to one another we
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really do require uh our relationships with one another to be who we are as individuals and that's very much in the spirit of
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of whitehead's philosophy so before even the 20th century revolutions in science there was the first scientific revolution which was
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um shocking enough right it begins with copernicus who rediscovers some ancient pythagorean speculations about uh the design of the solar system
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and uh you know copernicus puts forward this this hypothesis that actually it's not the earth that's at the center it's the sun that's at the center and the earth like the other planets is
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wandering in space so the you know copernicus throws the earth into motion this was profoundly unsettling uh for um you know the the medieval
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uh world to to take in and in many ways hundreds of years later we're we're still grappling with the fact that we live on a planet that is in motion through space and
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following copernicus kepler galileo and newton developed laws of physics that allowed allowed them to overcome this ancient sense of a division
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between the earthly and the heavenly realms right the terrestrial and the celestial domains for aristotle very different laws applied in these two domains there is perfect motion above the sphere
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of the moon perfect circular motion but below the sphere of the moon on the terrestrial sphere there was only imperfect motion but newton with his
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universal law of gravitation says nope the same laws apply uh in heaven as as as as apply on earth and so modern science um inaugurates
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this new sense of uh the unity of the universe in fact and one way of looking at this is to say that now um post-scientific revolution the earth
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is itself brought into heaven um i mean the materialistic way of saying it would be that the heavens were brought down to earth but i think we can look at it either way and so you know from a contemporary
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cosmological point of view whitehead felt the urgency of providing us with a newfound sense of of where we are right situating us in these vast
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expanses of space and time but just to think about our situation in space this is a map as it were of our local galactic
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neighborhood with the milky way at the center andromeda off to the right and down a bit andromeda is actually hurtling towards us and we will collide with andromeda um
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at some point in the next i think billion or two years um it it might not be as uh catastrophic a collision as as you might first assume
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two galaxies colliding there's a lot of space within each galaxy and while the gravitational effects might distort the perfect spirals of these two galaxies
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it's likely that we will survive or the earth will survive and that in fact this the gravitational effects of this collision will seed new stars right so this whole
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understanding of of our situation as a galaxy among other galaxies billions hundreds of billions of other galaxies in our visible universe it's you know we're talking about a century here
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uh where this has been understood and um it's profoundly disorienting right there's been plenty of documentaries that uh you know carl sagan may be the first to do it and um
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more recently people like neil degrasse tyson and others who just um depict this this new story of where we are um and it's almost maybe we think it's
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normal now um we know the words you know to use to describe our situation but have we really taken it in the magnitudes here are i think
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actually impossible for us to grasp we don't have the the the biological capacity given the proportion that our senses have evolved you know to allow us to perceive i don't
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i don't really think we have the imagination that is powerful enough to really make sense of our scientific knowledge and for whitehead this was a problem because if we don't have uh
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if we if we're not adequate if our imagination is not adequate to our knowledge uh he he was worried that the very foundations of civilization would be unstable because a civilization
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needs to have some sense of confidence in its purpose and to know our purpose we have to know our place in the wider universe and so whitehead was very worried right
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about as much as he was excited by the advances in science he was worried that there wasn't enough effort being made to connect this uh this new cosmological story
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to our everyday human existence and this is an attempt to depict our situation in time if that galactic map was our situation in space this is a
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simulation of what happened hundreds of millions of years after the big bang as the first clouds of gas condensed and gravitational forces brought them together to form stars
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which form the first spiral galaxies and so from whitehead's point of view right remember as i was describing this in the with the spider web and the dewdrops um
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all of that space all of that time despite the the vast magnitudes we're talking you know roughly 14 billion years um back to the origin of of the visible universe
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um according to you know inflationary cosmology or big bang cosmology and the you know hundreds of millions billions hundreds of billions of galaxies uh that we can observe
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whitehead thinks that all of this is um unfolded within each moment of our experience that it took uh the entire history of the universe
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to produce each one of us right and you know we know we're all stardust right and that even it took us a second generation star um to produce heavy elements through the
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process of you know going supernova so that complex uh chemistry and the emergence of life would be possible here on planet earth and perhaps on other planets
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so whitehead really wants us to feel the the energies and the magnitudes of this wider cosmic environment as as something that is present within us
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as a potential and that is in fact um giving us the strength and the power to to move forward in the world as human beings in a creative way we are an expression of all of that
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cosmic organization but how do we bring it down to earth how do we inhabit this planet how do we make sense of
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of our situation here you know with grass and trees and clouds in the sky let's hear from whitehead for the first time he says philosophy has to rescue the facts as
00:42:34
they are 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
00:42:45
the direct fact of observation is the sun as the sole origin of light and the bare heavens
00:42:58
conceive the myth of adam and eve in the garden on the first day of human life they watch the sunset the stars appear and lo creation widens to man's view
00:43:15
the excess of light discloses facts and also conceals them right and so whitehead is here pointing out the way that um there's more
00:43:29
to the universe than what at first meets the eye which is why the scientific process of discovery is um so exciting and so with lauren we think we have understood something and
00:43:43
we continue to study it and then there's there's a deeper layer which reveals itself from whitehead's point of view this process of discovery is unending because the universe isn't just a finished object
00:43:56
it's not a um the big bang is not something which occurred uh 14 billion years ago and then finished right it's still banging the universe is still
00:44:08
in the process of creating itself and we as scientific observers are a part of that creative process and so in a universe of creative process we
00:44:20
will never be done knowing right knowing itself must remain an open-ended process and whitehead wants to invite us into a
00:44:34
new understanding of knowledge right and this is where it uh his understanding of um science and and philosophy relates to education he was an educational reformer
00:44:48
um who while he was always teaching mathematics and philosophy he was also involved in administration uh trying to shape the modern research university to provide a holistic education
00:45:01
for uh for its students so that students who majored in science would also also take courses in literature and the humanities and vice versa he thought that if someone were to graduate from university
00:45:14
only having studied uh engineering without any sense of um you know shakespeare or without any uh exposure to um to kant and
00:45:26
the history of philosophy that it really diminishes our outlook on the nature of reality and so for whitehead knowledge is really
00:45:37
um important but it's a side issue the important thing is learning right and the process of learning do learn in order to come to possess knowledge um but in whitehead's view
00:45:50
we have to be willing um to not be possessive over our knowledge because it's going to constantly need to be updated and expanded and so you know we could think of his view of of science and the scientific
00:46:04
investigation into nature is not an effort to produce knowledge as though the universe were just some fixed already completed collection of objects out there but science is really about this ongoing
00:46:15
process of learning and that um in in many ways it is an end in itself right it's not that we investigate as a means to arrive at some
00:46:28
end where we will then possess the complete and and final understanding of everything science is the process of learning the process of discovery is itself uh
00:46:41
the end right and we need to whitehead uh would say um be content to remain in wonder at this universe and ourselves our place within this universe
00:46:53
to pursue science um as an infinite task right rather than something that could finally be completed you know whitehead says uh i often start my talks on whitehead with this quote but i'll give it to you now
00:47:06
that echoing aristotle he says philosophy begins in wonder but whitehead adds uh at the end when philosophic thought has done its best
00:47:19
the wonder remains right and so the goal of the philosopher is not to replace wonder with explanation to explain away wonder right by reference to whatever
00:47:31
mechanism might be favored in a particular era rather the goal of the philosopher and the scientist is to
00:47:43
elucidate and and bring some understanding to our experience of wonder but that experience will always remain it cannot be explained away right and if science begins to explain
00:47:58
away the wonder for whitehead that's a pretty good indication that it has become dogmatic and needs to be it needs the critic the critique of a
00:48:10
philosopher uh to remind um to remind it that in fact we inhabit a creative universe
00:48:21
so one more uh powerful line from whitehead and then we'll get into some of the details of his metaphysics you know what i only have like five minutes left so we'll have to i'll give you the quicker version of
00:48:37
whitehead's entire metaphysical scheme so whitehead says in our experience there is always the dim background from which we derive and to which we return
00:48:51
we are not enjoying a limited doll's house of clear and distinct things secluded from all ambiguity in the darkness beyond their ever looms
00:49:03
the vague mass which is the universe begetting us right and so for whitehead this vague mass is what he calls creativity right it is this ultimate metaphysical category for
00:49:16
him and everything that we see around us everything that we experience in ourselves is an expression of this creativity it's this creativity um
00:49:28
taking the form of temporary products right so creativity is infinite productivity and then our bodies planets stars these are um temporary
00:49:42
sort of achievements of creativity which enjoy themselves as they arise but then perish back into this creative process but they perish back into the creative
00:49:56
process gifting their experience back to the whole such that the process of the universe is unfolding for whitehead is i would call it cumulative right there's a memory bank
00:50:09
and everything that happens in the universe gets added to that memory bank so that um the next moment to arise has this storehouse of experience to draw upon to
00:50:19
advance the universe one step further right so this is going to be quick and do not expect to have by the end of this five minutes uh mastered whitehead's technical jargon
00:50:38
here but i want to use this illustration to introduce you to some of his concepts here this is uh these are some daffodils and i'm going to explain the process of concretence to you concrescence is whitehead's term for how
00:50:51
creativity or infinite productivity becomes a finite product quinceance is that process whereby the infinite becomes finite but only for
00:51:03
a moment because the finite entity which has concrete immediately perishes back into um this you know dim background from out of which we arise and perish
00:51:15
so if we turn these daffodils on their side we can use them to illustrate illustrate concreteness which whitehead defines as in terms of this i think almost magical formula
00:51:27
um concrescence is the process whereby the many become one and are increased by one what does that mean well the many are perished objects in the past environment
00:51:40
so the daffodils here are let's say an actual occasion of experience right and each actual occasion of experience begins by inheriting perished objects in
00:51:53
its past environment now in addition to the past environment whitehead also had this realm of what he called eternal objects these are like platonic forms but unlike
00:52:06
plato's forms whitehead didn't privilege this realm of eternal objects as the preeminent actualities right for plato the forms were the most real things that there were
00:52:19
and the actual world was a pale imitation whitehead totally inverts that picture these eternal objects for whitehead become deficient in actuality he says their pure potentials but
00:52:31
they long for actualization and their pure potential so that they provide um the different forms of definiteness that become actual in an actual occasion of experience so
00:52:46
colors shapes sounds they're they're sort of like the adjectives that characterize our experience so every actual occasion has these two poles to it
00:52:59
a physical pole and a mental pole right and so everything down to um subatomic particles and the most trivial puff of existence in far off empty space
00:53:14
up to each moment of our conscious human experience is an actual occasion which has a physical pull and a mental pole though for very simple occasions like those associated
00:53:26
you know with photons or protons or subatomic particles these occasions are mostly dominated by their physical pole right which is to say that they're repeating
00:53:39
what has occurred in their past without much innovation now an occasion inherits its past via what whitehead calls apprehension apprehension is a feeling
00:53:52
right apprehensions are the process whereby the past is allowed the objectified past right the perished past is allowed entry again into the into the present to be felt by
00:54:06
this concreting occasion of experience now eternal objects are are not you could say they're pretended they're conceptual apprehensions but whitehead also has a term for this called ingression so
00:54:20
these pure potentials ingress into the mental pull of an occasion to allow this occasion to again characterize what is it what it has inherited from its past environment now
00:54:33
without the ingression of eternal objects to provide an actual occasion with some novelty some alternative ways of characterizing what it is inheriting
00:54:45
from its past then there would only be repetition right in each of these occasions of experience and so the ingression of eternal objects provides some source of novelty
00:54:57
in the mental pull of an occasion so that it can innovate upon what it is inheriting from its past but again simpler forms of experience say in the inorganic world
00:55:09
they don't ingress much novelty they mostly repeat the past right it's only more complex living organisms and multicellular animals like
00:55:21
like you know mammals and primates and humans who can ingress um these pure potentials so as to you know really radically shift
00:55:35
from from what we inherit from the past and do something totally new almost free we might say freedom something like freedom seems to become possible in in human beings
00:55:47
we don't just have to repeat the past anymore but again the inorganic world does mostly repeat the prehensions of its past which is why physics can develop such reliable
00:56:00
lawful descriptions of what happens in the inorganic world whereas it's very difficult to um predict how a human being will behave in a new situation but even us we still have some degree of
00:56:13
habituality right in our behavior but nonetheless we ingress we ingress these pure potentials and are capable of quite a bit of novelty now this term subjective form is
00:56:27
whitehead's way of talking about the emotional quality that a occasion experiences as it begins to inherit its past how does it feel about that past right that's the subjective form
00:56:39
and then the subjective aim is how in the process of uh concressing the various preventions of the past are led to grow together and and any conflict between them
00:56:54
between the feelings of the past is brought into contrast whitehead says and harmonized like notes in a chord that is struck and so the subjective aim allows
00:57:05
the many of the past to grow together into a new one right and achieve satisfaction as this new subject which for whitehead
00:57:17
as soon as that new subjective point of view is achieved it perishes right and becomes a superject and this superject
00:57:31
is a subject's way of of persisting into the future of gifting itself and the value that it has realized in its process of concretence to the future so that it becoming a part of the
00:57:46
universe again can be taken up by the next moment of concretence right so the last thing i want to say about this is if we think about it um at the level of our own psychology as human beings this
00:57:58
this process of concretence is meant to apply at multiple levels right it's the it applies at the simplest level of a wavelength of light and electromagnetic propagation uh as it does to
00:58:11
our stream of consciousness you know for for we psychologically um complex human beings and what it what whitehead is suggesting
00:58:24
in in our case is the reverse of of the cartesian understanding where descartes said i think therefore i am right which implies that there's an already existing subject
00:58:35
me who has experiences right and or has thoughts and these thoughts sort of they qualify my substantial self but my substantial
00:58:50
self the subject that i am pre-exists my experiences of objects in the environment and um sort of persists as the same entity throughout my life
00:59:00
whitehead is saying that actually in each moment of my experience a new subject is emerging and rather than a pre-existing subject having experience of objects
00:59:13
in whitehead's universe the parished objects of the past are growing together and being concressed into a new subject so a new subject grows out
00:59:26
of the perished objects of the past allowing the past which is finished and perished right to to move again into the future um through the present and so each present moment of our subjective
00:59:39
experience is the result of the growing together of these objects and so whitehead says he says no thinker thinks twice right and if if you're familiar with the first
00:59:52
process philosopher heraclitus he says uh you can't step into the same river twice well whitehead is extending this principle of process philosophy into our own conscious experience
01:00:04
no thinker thinks twice or we could say no subject experiences twice right because each moment the subject of perspective that we are is arising out of our environment
01:00:18
experiencing itself as a new perspective enjoying that perspective and then that perspective perishes and becomes an object for the next moment to inherit and so in whitehead's view
01:00:31
my identity my personality my sense of flow of consciousness is actually a whole series of these actual occasions a historical route he says of these occasions
01:00:43
which are uh in the case of my own consciousness intimately related to one another in a way that um you know my historical root is not um as intimately woven together as
01:00:56
uh with your historical root and so we each have our own sort of flow of consciousness because we each are composed of a of a distinct chain of actual occasions
01:01:08
um which are inheriting from one another and so a human soul uh in whitehead's view um becomes something that needs to be understood as a sort of pulsing uh process of becoming right
01:01:22
rather than a substantial ego as it were as it was in descartes view we're more of a process right and we are a process that is constantly enfolding the environment uh into us
01:01:36
right and so we're not separate from the environment we are the environment coming to take a subjective perspective upon itself it's a radically uh different view of who and what we are from the
01:01:50
typical cartesian perspective so i will i will stop with that um i'm sure you you are i'm sure your heads are spinning um that's a good thing this is um
01:02:06
a very novel perspective on reality and so if you're not confused then you probably didn't hear me but i'm happy to uh discuss this with you and and answer some of your questions so
01:02:20
uh thanks for your attention i'll stop sharing my screen here too there we go so matt i want to thank you very much for the first of all for the invitation into the confusion but also for the for the clarity that
01:02:36
you brought um i really appreciate your introducing your whitehead's biography and then deepening into philosophy i get a sense of somebody who wants to develop a language to enable a
01:02:49
new seeing of the world but one that is corroborated by science at the same time and it also gives the human being this this creative knowing it has creative knowing and the process
01:03:02
of becoming back to the human being yes good so uh the next session we're gonna come we're gonna give over to a discussion
01:03:16
and i've got some questions that have come in from the participants and this is jason and he's saying concerning whitehead and einstein developing a mathematical physics
01:03:30
this is to say that math wasn't really meaningfully applied to physics or to the study of the material world before this point what does it mean more broadly to have begun to conceive the world
01:03:42
abstractly at this time yeah very good question um no it's not to say that math isn't meaningfully applied to physics um there would be no modern physics if
01:03:59
we couldn't meaningfully apply math um and you know whitehead was in being critical of einstein
01:04:10
um wasn't trying to say that we cannot uh use mathematics to model the physical world he was simply trying to suggest that we must be
01:04:24
careful not to mistake the model the mathematical model for the reality and so in the case of einstein whitehead did not deny the practical utility
01:04:38
of a four dimensional geometric manifold for making predictions about how bodies masses move in space einstein's equations
01:04:50
are very accurate in the predictions that they make about large masses um in space and in fact in space-time even his his understanding of the relativity of
01:05:04
space and time has been tested um by synchronizing clocks very accurate clocks putting one of them in an airplane flying it around for a while and coming back to look at the to compare the two clocks the clock that
01:05:17
moves in the airplane is slower relative to the clock that remained on earth we've tested this so the the faster that an object moves apparently the slower that time passes
01:05:30
for it relative to a stationary observer um so the consequences of some of einstein's equations while they may be
01:05:43
um difficult for us to grasp and imagine are nonetheless many of them experimentally proven now but the question still remains
01:05:55
given the physical accuracy of einstein's mathematical models what's going on metaphysically what is the relationship between the model and the reality now
01:06:08
one of the issues that whitehead um has with einstein is in he would describe it in terms of what he called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness many people who have not read whitehead
01:06:22
directly have probably seen him cited uh in other works with with regard to this fallacy of misplaced concreteness and this is just precisely to mistake the model for the reality
01:06:34
if einstein's model of space-time is correct in other words not just correct but if it is in fact if there is no difference between the model and the reality then that says something about our human
01:06:47
conscious experience of a flow of time it says that it's an illusion basically and einstein repeated this notion um you know he famously wrote in a in a
01:07:00
letter to one of his best friend's um widows that um upon the death of his best friend that um you know for us believing physicists the difference between the past the present
01:07:12
and the future is nothing but a stubbornly persistent delusion now for whitehead this is no basis for a purposeful human life to take that
01:07:23
point of view seriously and so whitehead like some other 20th century philosophers disagreed with einstein not about the um accuracy of his new model for making
01:07:35
predictions but about the metaphysical interpretation that einstein was giving it bergson henry bergson the the french philosopher had a debate with einstein in 1922 about the nature of time
01:07:52
and and bergson wanted to say hey we can only do science um because we are conscious beings and all the dials uh and meters and and doing the math it all
01:08:05
presupposes conscious human beings right um a clock can't get itself red without a conscious human being to look at it and for bergson as for whitehead there's a
01:08:16
a time a process of unfolding that is um anterior to or prior to the time that is measured on clocks by physicists
01:08:28
and einstein did not like this idea he didn't want to cede any territory to the metaphysicians claiming this um concrete time of becoming as somehow primary but if we don't recognize this time as
01:08:41
primary as concrete then we lose ourselves in the abstractions of the model and we we begin to denigrate the deliverances of our concrete experience by reference to the model
01:08:53
which we are told is what's real and so whitehead is just saying to einstein and he's not saying we can't use the tools of math to understand the physical world he's saying do not forget that we're dealing with
01:09:07
models and that there's more to the concrete becoming of the universe than any model can capture so hopefully that helps with that question
01:09:22
matt thank you that also uh there was also another question on bergson but we've touched on burst in a little bit um i want to go from the west to the east we've got two questions around and this is normal this is quite a popular question around western
01:09:34
philosophers this um this this genre question so this comes from jurgen and also from dennis what would you say about the connection between whitehead and eastern thought say taoism to me it
01:09:48
seems almost as if whitehead is dressing towers in western language so there's a friendly smiley face after that one i should explain and then also yeah does whiteheads philosophy relate to the i'm
01:10:03
sorry how does whitehead's philosophy relate to the hindu vedic cosmological concept of indra's net or web if that is something you are familiar with yeah um great questions indra's net is
01:10:19
precisely what i was attempting to illustrate with my um spiderweb with dewdrops on it that is certainly um an apt metaphor for whiteheads
01:10:29
cosmology with the caveat that we have to throw it into motion and make it more dynamic whitehead's universe is not simply not that it's simple it's not simply though
01:10:43
um a holographic universe wherein each part reflects the whole it's also a creative advance whereby again remember the definition of concrescence the many become one and are
01:10:55
increased by one so the universe is this um cumulative process that is continually growing the universe is never the same twice and
01:11:07
so when we think about the universe as a whole because all of these occasions of experience reflecting or mirroring or containing one another
01:11:18
there's also new occasions of experience constantly being birthed which contain the entire past but carry it forward into the next moment so it's much like indra's net though um
01:11:30
with this dynamic tilt toward toward the future toward toward the as yet unrealized future and you know in terms of the broader connection to eastern thought uh eastern religion and philosophy
01:11:44
whitehead says himself in process and reality that his metaphysics resembles more um vedic and and buddhist
01:11:57
forms of thought than it does um anything in western philosophy uh or in the judeo-christian religious traditions um and so he was quite aware of this he didn't
01:12:10
study um taoism or buddhism in any depth so far as i know um he did write a book called religion in the making which was published shortly after process in reality where it's
01:12:24
clear he had done some reading in uh buddhism he was impressed enough by the buddhist tradition to say that it qualifies as what he called one of
01:12:37
the rational religions and he certainly his notion of of flux and impermanence right has uh quite a a similarity to the
01:12:51
the buddhist notion of um you know impermanence or emptiness um the relationship of these dew drops on the web is also something you can describe as a relationship of dependent
01:13:04
co-origination which is an important concept for certain mahayana buddhist traditions and in the contemporary world
01:13:17
actually whitehead's work is being taken up um by china uh there are something like 35 graduate programs in china devoted to
01:13:30
process philosophy and and whiteheads thought um two billion people 35 graduate programs so it's you know a lot of people but still that's a lot of whitehead in china and
01:13:42
i think there are several reasons that the chinese are so interested in whiteheads thought one is that yeah it fits naturally with um the the taoist and confucian buddhist traditions there
01:13:55
but my understanding is that you know the communist party is a little bit hesitant to allow in those more ancient traditions into they want to be modern and whitehead affords them the
01:14:07
opportunity to to be modern with his understanding of science and you know he's coming from the west um but while still tapping into these these deeper um traditional
01:14:20
understandings of of the the nature of the universe as as laozi and schwanzer and confucius um not the taoism and confucianism are the same but there are some
01:14:32
similarities there whitehead's thought allows uh china to in a way get in touch with its own history while also moving more into the modern world and so his thought is exploding there i
01:14:47
think precisely because of the resonances that that are being remarked upon in these in these questions matt thank you um i want to go in a different direction now and this is what to do with with pan
01:15:01
psychism and possibly consciousness studies and this is from dennis you're saying matt in your view what does it mean to experience and the sub question from that is can
01:15:13
particles experience yeah good question this is a major stumbling block for many people who are new to whitehead's thought though um what's sometimes called pan-psychism
01:15:27
is actually undergoing a bit of a renaissance right now um even in analytic philosophy more philosophers of mind are taking this
01:15:38
idea seriously um even in the last five or ten years than ever before um whitehead's not the first man psychist obviously um leibniz was a was a pan psychist um
01:15:53
giordano bruno one of the early modern scientists was a pan psychist um and so there's a there's a sort of venerable tradition here it's a sort of um marginalized yes but still um readily uh
01:16:06
visible stream in the history of western thought even heraclitus process philosopher yes right everything is flux but heraclitus also referred to everything as
01:16:19
he says the universe is an ever-living fire and so in other words life goes all the way down right life isn't something that just emerges atop a physical substrate
01:16:31
um and so for whitehead he protested against what he called the notion of vacuous actuality a vacuous actuality would be um some sort of an entity which is
01:16:44
imagined to exist independently of experience whether it's own experience or being experienced by someone else um he thinks it's a meaningless notion and
01:16:56
the reason pansysm is becoming um is coming more into the mainstream academic uh philosophical uh arena is because of the difficulty of
01:17:10
this hard problem of consciousness right which is if we do inhabit a physical world that is not experiential at what point
01:17:21
does something like conscious experience arise or emerge and and how does it emerge right if if in the physical world you have parts
01:17:34
that just rearrange their relative location to one another um and just mutely persist right as these substantial bits um how is it that
01:17:46
surely through a rearrangement of those inert parts you could ever get something like an interior experience right or or experience of what it's like to be somebody
01:17:59
[Music] it seems like not only a hard problem but an impossible problem and so pan psychism is an attempt not so much to solve the problem but to to dissolve it and not to have ever imagined in the first place that there would be a
01:18:11
dualism between matter on one hand and mind on the other and so you know whitehead's taking this track uh in an attempt to understand how there could be conscious animals like us in this universe what must the
01:18:24
universe be like such that we are possible um is the question that whitehead asks and so he wants to push experience down all the way to the simplest happenings
01:18:36
in nature but remember he's a process thinker so it's not that atomic bits of matter are or have experience
01:18:50
we don't want to think of particles as little substances as as um little inert um you know globules of stuff
01:19:03
um remember in whiteheads metaphysics the universe is made not of stuff but of happenings and so um a particle for whitehead let's say a hydrogen atom it's an
01:19:17
enduring entity we can actually see groups of atoms now under microscope and for whitehead that enduring entity is itself he would call it
01:19:29
a society of happenings it's a or a historical route of happenings that are repeating the same pattern inheriting the same pattern from moment to moment as
01:19:41
this helium or this hydrogen atom right and so you could say the experience of the hydrogen atom is this rather repetitive um experience of just saying ah i am healing i am helium i am helium i
01:19:55
am helium just over and over and over again and there is indeed a vibration to these to these uh particles right and for whitehead the vibratory signature is itself
01:20:07
um an expression of this this process of um arising and perishing arising inheriting the past and perishing and so we get the sort of um the vibrate the vibratory
01:20:21
pattern of this atom persisting uh through time and so what is experience in this context well at the simplest level it's just the feeling of inheritance
01:20:32
of a past and the the contrast of the contrast between that feeling of inheritance and an openness to the future and so if you can just just imagine the the um
01:20:47
barest form of like tension that might exist in this present moment that is not closed off from the past and the future but it's held in tension between past and future between inheritance and
01:21:01
anticipation and you know for these simpler forms of existence it's just a flash right and that that moment the present moment as you move up the scale of nature and
01:21:12
into more complex organisms the present moment can expand a bit we can in our conscious imaginations as human beings we can we can hold the present moment
01:21:26
keep the tension stretched and taut and consider different possibilities before we actualize one of them right for a hydrogen atom there's no time for considering possibilities it's just
01:21:38
repeat the past repeat the past but always with some little bit of creativity otherwise hydrogen wouldn't have formed stars stars were something new in the universe um
01:21:51
you know 500 000 years after the big bang or thereabouts hadn't been any stars and then all of a sudden there were stars where did they come from well it's because these simpler forms of energetic activity aren't just repeating
01:22:03
the past they're also lured by certain possibilities to take on greater complexity and order and deepen their experience so you know it's it's a difficult
01:22:17
imaginative exercise to think of experience in a way that's generic enough and general enough that it's not conscious reflective human experience
01:22:29
anymore but something yeah vaguer and just more basic uh but whitehead thinks you know if we give it a try we can't imagine something um simple enough that it could
01:22:43
reasonably be applied across every scale of the universe thank you um we've still got a number of questions to get through but i'm just gonna i'm gonna um because of the time i just want to
01:22:59
balance the scales a little bit um and take it in a different direction and bring it back to the human being this is um so i think you talked about the transformation of the subject into this
01:23:10
is it the superject great okay um and this is a question from paul and it's rorty and other american pragmatists have suggested that the contemplation of
01:23:23
metaphysics has been a philosophical distraction for 2000 years partly because we can't know what we know rather the goal of philosophy should be making life better for all
01:23:35
please discuss yeah so richard rorty called himself a pragmatist and i think you know he he is a version of pragmatist um you
01:23:50
know inheriting the thought of william james and charles saunders purse and john dewey whitehead is also a pragmatist you know as i mentioned he took up william james's chair
01:24:02
philosophy at harvard um a little more than a decade after james had died and you know for for whitehead william james
01:24:15
was he called james the american plato and thought that james put philosophy and metaphysics on a new basis and what white had found so important about
01:24:29
james's philosophy was its pragmatic emphasis and so whitehead is a pragmatist he is a radical empiricist in james's
01:24:41
sense of the term and so given that you might wonder well why was he doing this abstract metaphysical stuff well you could say that what whitehead did was take
01:24:53
james's psychology and if you've read james's 1890 book uh principles of psychology maybe you haven't read the whole thing it's it's quite thick
01:25:05
but any part of it um you'll see what a brilliant writer james is it's so accessible um and still very relevant i mean you know neuroscience was just beginning to take baby steps back
01:25:18
then but so much of what james had described is you know with a few tweaks here and there still accurate and whitehead's taking james's psychology and actually this this phrase um
01:25:32
drops of experience whitehead borrows from james's psychology and applies it to cosmology um james had some of his own speculations and i think we could say he was a pan
01:25:44
psychist of sorts but what whitehead does is take james's psychology and systematizes it into a cosmology and so you know whitehead has to do some system building
01:25:57
um he has to develop all of these categories as part of his new cosmological scheme because he wanted to make sense of science um and james might have been somewhat
01:26:09
unhappy with the the systematic element of whitehead's philosophy james was suspicious of system um he worried that it it grew it would grow too abstract and disconnected from
01:26:22
everyday life and you know perhaps one could criticize whitehead on these grounds but whitehead himself at least his intention uh was to elucidate our everyday experience he even goes so far as to say
01:26:36
right at the beginning of process in reality he says the sole justification for any thought the sole justification for any theory is the elucidation of experience and so
01:26:50
what's driving whitehead to erect this whole cosmological scheme is he wants to make sense of uh the universe that science is describing to us so that it can be understood as congruent
01:27:02
with and consistent with our everyday conscious experience and he thought that already with the first scientific revolution and the mechanistic worldview that there was an incoherence because the human soul was
01:27:16
put off to one side the rest of nature was described as a machine and then in the 20th century we couldn't even fit um the disciplines the sub-disciplines of physics together as part of the same universe right
01:27:29
because you know i didn't mention relativity theory describes um the macroscopic universe as this you know continuous field whereas quantum theory
01:27:41
describes the microscopic universe as discontinuous they don't fit together these two theories they're describing two very different universes and so that's the first problem whitehead wanted to solve with his cosmology how can these two theories relativity
01:27:54
and quantum theory describe the same universe but also how can our physical understanding of the universe be related to our human conscious experience right and how can we preserve a sense of importance
01:28:10
and purpose and value and freedom and beauty all the things that are part of the human realm of conscious existence right how can we take all of that seriously as
01:28:23
real factors in the universe not just as nice things that humans can believe in despite the fact that physically we know they're not real for whitehead if that's the metaphysics or the cosmology that's guiding our
01:28:36
civilization we're in deep trouble because that's a very fragmented world view where we're asking people uh to find purpose in their lives that they know or
01:28:48
they're told to believe is actually ultimately illusory whitehead didn't think that that was a stable foundation upon which to build a civilization he thought that the scientific picture our scientific understanding of the
01:29:01
universe must in some way support the values that we presuppose as civilized human beings and so his pragmatism comes through in his
01:29:13
effort to justify uh human human values uh in light of our cosmological understanding so how can we fit our scientific
01:29:26
understanding into a cosmological picture that would provide a source of inspiration for us in our social and cultural and political endeavors rather than being at best irrelevant or
01:29:39
at worst a profound challenge to any sense of purpose that we might attempt to realize so yeah ultimately i think whitehead is a pragmatist
01:29:52
who already didn't like whiteheads metaphysics i think rorty was um especially influenced by ludwig wittgenstein in this um in this view uh where you know whitehead was engaging in
01:30:05
this form of metaphysics that you know is is predicated upon the idea that language can um provide us
01:30:17
some insight into the nature of of reality of of the world beyond words and you know there are some readings of wittgenstein that suggests that that's just a faulty understanding of
01:30:32
what language is and what the task of the philosopher is which is simply to to clarify our our sentences and to make sure we know what can and cannot be said whitehead wasn't satisfied with any
01:30:43
sense of boundary um he didn't want to remain silent about the apparently ineffable he wanted to be able to expand the dictionary as he said and invent new words to
01:30:55
describe realities that we hadn't even conceived of yet or hadn't yet perceived um and in this way he's you know he engages philosophy like a poet and that with new turns of phrase uh we
01:31:08
can actually enhance our perception so that the world we thought we knew with the prior language is expanded as we begin to speak about it in a new way
01:31:25
matt thank you so much i want to thank you on behalf of all the participants for being for being so generous with your insights um with your eradication and also for fielding such
01:31:36
um a broader broader rate in the discussion from the questions there um and just jumping in we've got three invitations and one of them is going to come from youth because you're doing an online course at
01:31:51
schumacher which is science and the soul of the world and that is 24th of july to saturday 28th of august can you say a few words
01:32:03
to tempt people in yes so um this is my second go at this course it's science and the soul of the world it's not just on whitehead it's also on
01:32:16
a german poet and scientist and statesman um goerta and what i'm trying to do here in this course is
01:32:30
[Music] reveal the ways in which uh gerta as a poet scientist and whitehead as a mathematician and philosopher
01:32:41
though they may seem like quite different like they have quite different approaches to to understanding the natural world they are in fact sort of ideal opposites that in
01:32:55
brought into polar relationship with one another can intensify our understanding of the universe and indeed a universe that is insoled a universe that has a soul um and that
01:33:08
they these figures both whitehead and gerta allow us to engage in science um not as a a method which would disenchant the world but in fact there's an another approach to science
01:33:22
which they exemplify uh which allows us to um to study it in a way that enhances its enchantment that in that allows us to deepen into
01:33:34
the life of the whole of which we are apart and so um i think we have six sessions together and you know we'll go deeper into whitehead we'll go deeper into gerta we'll bring them into dialogue
01:33:47
and um i think it's gonna be a lot of fun matt thank you and i think troy has put the the link to the dartington website um into the chat so you guys can get it there if not if
01:34:00
you just go to the dartington website um then you can find out all about that okay so two more invitations to join us um the next one is for the holistic science online um
01:34:12
lecture series we'll be back on thursday the 1st of july again at 4 pm with stephen harding and steven uh sorry stefan is one of the founding
01:34:26
members of schumacher college and he will be presenting on deep ecology and the healing of the earth and then there's an invitation to join us in person actually live live human beings and
01:34:40
that's at schumacher college later in the year october the 1st to the 3rd that is for the holistic science in dialogue conference that's a collaboration between the field center schumacher college and the
01:34:52
holistic science journal and that conference revisits and builds on the contributions to holistic science made by henry bortoft margaret calhoun and brian goodwin um
01:35:05
so we'll have presentations research panels and also discussions booking for um for the life for that live conference will happen as of next week
01:35:18
so we have confirmed speakers emma kidd dr judah sassoon claudio stern and also a confirmed keynote is isis brooke so um once again thank you very very
01:35:32
much to matt segal i'm going to say thank you and depending on where you are where you've been tuning in from around the world all of you lovely participants on behalf of the team i'd like to wish you a very good day
01:35:44
evening or night wherever you may be and hope to see you soon thanks simon thanks everyone
01:36:00
you
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