Whitehead's "eternal objects" -- and his God

This is my fifth recent post on the meaning of Whitehead's masterpiece, PROCESS AND REALITY.

On the big issue of Time versus Timelessness, Whitehead generally seems more on the side of Heraclitus than on that of Zeno. He believes that time, change, motion are all real. Indeed, at points in this book he seems to be struggling to invent a new vocabulary to allow precise statements about the realities of THOSE realities.

But every once in a while he can pull us up short with a mention of "eternal objects." What the heck are THEY?

An eternal object is an abstraction. Whitehead uses "eternal" in this sense to mean precisely outside of time. And he uses "object" to denote something objective, neither a social construction nor a subjective whim. So Whitehead, it is fair to say, is not a nominalist about abstractions.

Eternal objects are the sorts of things that can recur. That is, Christopher Faille as a living breathing person does not recur. The person I was an decade ago will never exist again. We can say the same of the person I was an hour ago. These are the Christopher Failles of distinct beats of temporal reality, distinct occasions -- with a complicated relationship with each other.

But a very specific shade of green? This is an abstraction, i.e. an eternal object. And that is perhaps paradoxically why it not only occurs but recurs within the temporal flow. This leaf in front of me may never be exactly the shade of XYZ Green than it was an hour ago. But that won't stop some other leaf from occupying exactly the same spot in the logical space of green.

Beyond this we get to morality. Because among the abstractions/eternal objects there are those that act as "lures." These represent ways I might act and lives I might live whenever I come to a forking of possibilities. I am being lured one way and another by eternal objects, and I must choose wisely among them.

Now ... who or what is Whitehead's God? I can't really claim to understand Whitehead adequately here, but I will press on. God seems to play a part in Whitehead's system as the bestower of order upon the indefinite multiplicity of eternal objects. There exists an objectively best way for me to go in any case of choice. When I puzzle to figure out what the best way is, I am struggling (though I may not acknowledge this) to discern the mind of God. The lures have been both laid out and ranked in a primordial way.

Note that this, with all of Whitehead's talk of "lures," seems very different from the traditional views of God within the three big Monotheisms and the books they share. Whitehead's God does not command. He does not send down commandments and threaten hellfire. He lures. The process theologians like Hartshorne have tried to reconcile Whitehead's God with those old texts, but with let us say imperfect success.

The problem with that reconciliation is that God as Whitehead understands Him (and I'm skipping ahead to near the end of the book to find this) is the "principle of concretion -- the principle whereby there is initiated a definite outcome from a situation otherwise riddled with ambiguity."

Sorry, but that doesn't sound very scriptural.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog