Whitehead's cosmology -- and a tee shirt

 So, what's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the tee shirt we live? 

I have written of late in this blog about Alfred North Whitehead's book, Process and Reality. But I have written chiefly of what he says there about other philosophers.  Plato, Locke, Hume....Now I hope to get to the core of Whitehead's original thought. What does he say about ... process and reality? What is his cosmology? 

I have to bring one more historic figure, Leibniz, into the mix even to say this next bit, though. Because you can think of Whitehead's core supposition as a monadology. Any one of us is a society of society of societies ... all the way down. The ultimate bottom level, the individual nuggets (or monads, if you will) at the bottom of this hierarchy of societies? Whitehead seems to think there is a bottom, and he does give it a name: occasions. A lot of unconscious and brief occasions, conceived of as independent of content, might constitute the bottom building block. Sort of a monad, except that Leibniz' monads were windowless and Whitehead's are ALL window. 

Science may continue moving downward through molecules to atoms to sub-atomic particles to what he called, writing a century ago "the mysterious quanta of energy" and still find that any quantum is a society of societies, the monad eluding us. To quote Whitehead directly on a related point: "The electromagnetic society exhibits the physical electromagnetic field which is the topic of physical science. the members of this nexus are the electromagnetic occasions."

Occasions.  The word ends that resonant sentence. As a word it suggests process rather than substance, which is the point. What we end up with is something akin the the old idea of a "great chain of being," thought of dynamically rather than statically. A society is a member of a society of societies which is a member of a society of society of THOSE societies and so forth. On each level, one must think of time as the coming and going of occasions of experience.  Experience here is a far wider concept that consciousness, though out of it consciousness arises. 

Occasions of experience give rise to consciousness as prehensions give rise of comprehension. For Whitehead, "prehension" is a critical term.  A prehension is the taking-into-account of A by B, regardless of what A and B are, all up and down the great chain of being just described. The tug of planet on moon is prehension. 

Reality is additive.  Physical prehensions don't subtract from each other. What has been done has been done. Thus, the cosmic process is one of a coming together of all with all, whereby every bit of space time comes to be more in tune with its world OVER time. This is why Whitehead called his own views the philosophy of organism. The cosmos is an organism, just as you are. 

Where mind arises, we may say in more dynamic terms that "conceptual prehensions" have come to be. There is com-prehension.  One key fact about conceptuality is that a duality emerges here, the possibility of subtraction along with addition. In our minds and in the workings of our societies there are positive prehensions ("feelings") and there are negative prehensions ("exclusions"). As history moves forward, some things are remembered/preserved and some things are forgotten, negatively prehended. 

We cannot give a good example of a total exclusion in human history because, if it has been completely excluded, it is not available for our use as an example! But surely conversations transpired even between Socrates and other folks present in the agora with him that were never preserved. Perhaps they discussed how fickle the weather can be in Athens -- nobody thought to preserve Socrates on meteorology, so it has been discarded. 

Anyway, you have just received my 7 paragraph italicized effort at paraphrasing the Big Picture according to Whitehead. Now allow me to return to the history-of-philosophy stuff for a moment. 

Whitehead famously called William James "adorable."  I don't see that adjective in the book yet, but in the opus Whitehead explicitly agrees with William James about the proper answer to Zeno of Elea.  Zeno's paradoxes were built around the infinite divisibility of lines, of any movement from A to B, and they were meant to show that motions and with them changes of all sorts are illusions and to enforce a Parmenidean monism. This purpose was anathema to James of course. James used it to show how conceptualist or intellectualist reasoning goes wrong as it departs from lived needs, pragma. 

James said, relatedly, that in lived experience one either sees/notices a certain change or one sees none. There is no infinite divisibility to it. Reality grows in "buds or drops," like the discrete drops of water we can see emerging out of a barely-leaky pipe. Whitehead thinks likewise. No water splashes on the floor until the whole of a drop escapes together. At every level of the great chain there is chunkiness to the world. 

The next time I write of Whitehead here I expect to write about what Whitehead calls "eternal objects," and with that of Plato. Perhaps I'll say a few words about Whitehead's God.