Cosmic Consciousness in Whitehead and Goethe

I visited George Holliday's podcast This Mind of Ours to talk about the philosophy of organism.

Abridge Transcript:

George: Who was the first—do you recall the first—philosopher or philosophy book which really sort of grabbed your attention?

Matt: Another Brit, actually. It was Alan Watts.

George: Okay, yeah.

Matt: And the book was called The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. My high school psychology teacher recommended it to me as a junior. It’s a short little book, it’s written in a simple way, but it’s quite mind-bending. It clued me into the fact that philosophy could be not just an interesting intellectual exercise, but a kind of spiritual path and deeply transformative of one’s outlook on life. So I was hooked after that.

George: Yeah, and what you say there makes a lot of sense, having read your work and your writings—Footnotes to Plato. My next question was going to be, “How do you see the role of philosophy?” But I think you’ve sort of alluded to it there, which is it can be transformative for oneself, but then in turn, I suppose, the world, because we are in connection with the world. Is that how you see philosophy? Because, for example, Hegel—I think—he had that quote referring to the Owl of Minerva, which I believe was essentially him positing that philosophy comes quite late to the party and it actually doesn’t necessarily have much influence on the outcome of things, right? Is that your take on it? Is that what he was getting at?

Matt: That’s what Hegel means when he says the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Philosophy—wisdom, you know, the Owl of Minerva represents wisdom—his point was that this understanding of history always occurs in retrospect, and that the role of the philosopher is not to instigate revolutions—that would be Marx turning Hegel upside down—but rather to interpret history. I think Whitehead, though, would want to give philosophy a more active role to play in shaping civilization, even if it’s not as quick as we would like, and not as powerful a force as we might like. Nonetheless, over centuries, the ideas entertained by philosophers and given articulation and expression by them, Whitehead would say, do shape the course of society and culture and the values of our civilization. So I don’t fully—I get why Hegel would say what he says. It’s not that it’s simply false, but I think it’s also true that philosophy can play a positive role in shaping the future.

George: Yes, yes.

Intro to Whitehead

George: So I thought it would be nice, if it’s okay with you, to sort of elaborate or elucidate perhaps Whitehead’s system or ontology broadly, and maybe refer to the general terminology as it helps make sense of that framework. Particularly, what was he responding to? Perhaps many things, but for example, one of them, which I know you’ve written about, is this idea of “the bifurcation of nature.” Also, which I’ve enjoyed reading your work on, is your critiques of the current Zeitgeist, maybe in physics and cognitive sciences—for example, predictive processing. Not to throw them all out completely and say predictive processing has no… You’ve been clear on that. But perhaps where it falls short or why it can’t quite explain certain phenomena—perhaps things like feeling. I think you’ve critiqued the idea of… but yeah, before we get on that, maybe—what was Whitehead responding to, and how does his philosophy of organism differ from previous ontologies?

Matt: Yeah, so interestingly, predictive processing models of human neurology and neurophysiology—Helmholtz developed that in the second half of the 19th century. It’s quite an old approach that’s been dusted off and advanced more recently. So in some ways, Whitehead was already responding to that—these advances in physiology in the second half of the 19th century. But also the revolutions in physics, both relativity and quantum theory, in the first part of the 20th century, really demolished the old mechanistic materialist metaphysics that had undergirded physical science, physics, since Descartes and Newton. Whitehead was well prepared to understand the significance of those scientific revolutions and paradigm changes because he was a mathematician, very interested in applied mathematics in particular, and one of the few mathematicians alive, I think, in the 19-teens who could actually understand what Einstein was proposing, because he had already done some work on non-Euclidean geometries and whatnot.

So Whitehead realized these new approaches in physics required a new metaphysical background. The old mechanistic picture was entirely inadequate for accounting for the relativity of space and time—absolute space is out the window—so there’s no longer this empty container through which simply located material particles could traverse distances. He set to work developing this more organic conception of the universe, where what there are, are not these inert, solid particles that exist entirely independently of one another, and whose location can be defined independently of their relationships to any other particles. Rather, what finally exists for Whitehead are events. An event’s location can only be defined by reference to the other events in its community. So it’s a network ontology of events, or occasions, as he would later call them.

This process ontology, or process-relational ontology, helped make sense of what physics was saying. But then there’s also biology, and there’s also evolutionary theory, and there’s also human consciousness. So how do we integrate the fact that we are conscious organisms that have emerged over billions of years of evolution with this picture of the physical world? He ends up generalizing the idea of “organism” beyond just biology, so that it includes any self-organizing entity. He’ll say physics is the study of the smaller organisms—like protons, electrons, hydrogen atoms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms, and astrophysics is the study of the even larger organisms—like stars and galaxies. All these are self-organizing systems. In Whitehead’s view, just like us and other life forms, there’s some kind of interior experience. The universe is not lights-out, a bunch of events occurring with nobody to experience them. There’s subjectivity everywhere, to different degrees. Whitehead would even say a photon is the expression of some kind of enjoyment—there’s a feeling, an entertainment, in the process it’s going through, even for a photon or electron.

It’s pretty radical, but if we want a comprehensive cosmology within which all of our knowledge and experience finds its place, it seems to me we’ll end up with something like what Whitehead proposed. Whitehead seems to have done a pretty good job including almost everything.

George: Yeah, yeah. So you mentioned there the actual occasions, or these events. I believe there are two terms which essentially—at these smaller scales, these events happen, and then as they, I don’t know how you’d say, aggregate or accrue over time or something, they sort of ascend through… as occasions become “nexūs” of occasions, eventually you have—well, you go from atoms to beings like us or all the way through. There is some element of enjoyment or maybe sentience—not consciousness necessarily, because I know you’ve spoken about this referring to Whitehead—that it’s not necessarily consciousness as we see it, but a sort of feeling. We’re a society of actual entities. Meaning that we’re essentially a collection, and that happens through concrescence, if that’s how you pronounce it, in Whitehead’s terminology. Also prehension. How is it that—what’s the developmental or that “becoming” process? How does that take place through prehension, and that other word you just pronounced?

Matt: Concrescence.

George: Concrescence, yes, right.

Concrescence and Prehension

Matt: Right. Whitehead has a lot of words he invents. Concrescence is actually a Latin word he reappropriates. It means growing, it just means growing together. It’s a term he uses to explain the process whereby a new event or occasion of experience arises out of its past and achieves a new perspective in the present, and then perishes to become food, as it were, for the next round of concrescence. There’s a transference of feeling and value which occurs with each concrescence as it arises out of its past, achieves a novel perspective in the present, and then perishes into the future, giving itself to the next round of concrescence. As a result of these cyclical processes of concrescence, there’s a kind of accumulation that occurs. That gives rise to what we normally experience as enduring bodies—our own bodies, all the plants and animals around us, stars, galaxies. These are what Whitehead calls “societies” of actual occasions, which is to say our body maintains its form moment by moment because there are innumerable actual occasions inheriting the past, repeating it in some large degree in the present, with a little bit of novelty, and then handing it off to the next round of concrescence. So there’s a certain form or characteristic that’s repeated reliably, allowing you to recognize me as time unfolds, even though at the molecular level, I’m changing a lot—molecules are entering and leaving my body. If we’re going to be fussy, there’s no sharp line dividing my body from the environment. Nonetheless, certain characteristics are maintained by the repetitiveness of some actual occasions moment by moment that compose my body. But there’s also some degree of novelty moment by moment.

Think of our bodies as a society of societies, and some societies are nested within the brain and the nervous system. Whitehead would say, because of how well-organized the body is—through billions of years of evolution—our brain is able to shelter a higher intensity of experience, and even consciousness, that can, in his terms, ingress or prehend or feel more possibility moment by moment than, say, the actual occasions composing my fingernail, which are just very repetitive, or composing the desk or a coffee mug. There’s not as much novelty moment by moment in the case of inanimate objects; it’s just repetition. Whereas in the case of living organisms, there’s more possibility being felt by the actual occasions that compose me. So what we feel at the level of our own consciousness is an emergence out of all of this activity. Whitehead would say our consciousness is a high-grade form of the feeling, or the prehension, going on among all these innumerable actual occasions. He’s not suggesting a photon is conscious, but he is suggesting a gradient from very small amounts of feeling up to self-reflexive consciousness, and never a zero point of experience.

George: Right, yes. Is that also making sense in the context of what I think he spoke about, or maybe you have when writing about him, referring to the critique of pure feeling? Essentially what you’ve just said, that these actual occasions and how they concresce—that’s a good word for it too. (I’m always getting teased about my pronunciation.) But yeah, so basically, what he’s doing is articulating an account for the necessary conditions to explain us and how we are conscious beings. That’s essentially what his ontology does—it provisions the conditions to, in the same way that Kant provisioned the conditions for us to be rational beings that can make sense out of the sensorium.

Critique of Pure Feeling

Matt: Yes, definitely. There’s an analogy there with Kant and his transcendental philosophy, trying to provide the conditions for the possibility of our conscious experience. But with Whitehead, in contrast to Kant—who’s looking for a critique of pure reason—Whitehead is looking for a critique of pure feeling. Instead of anchoring our experience on a hierarchy of categories, as Kant does, Whitehead anchors it in this hierarchy of feelings. It’s an aesthetic ontology, rather than a cognitive ontology—if Kant even has an ontology, since he’s making epistemology first philosophy.

George: That’s a really interesting point you make, because I’m nowhere near a philosophical scholar and have never really read Kant directly. People talk about him in terms of transcendental idealism, but he never really—like it’s not a full ontology, because he never actually speaks to what’s beyond mind; he’s just talking about the conditions required of us in order for us to make sense out of something.

Matt: That’s right, yeah. For Kant, the human mind—its activity of reflecting upon concepts and its sensory organization—is something we can know and understand, but we can’t know what’s beyond our sensory experience. He doesn’t deny a real world of things in themselves, but says we can’t know a damn thing about them. What Whitehead does is say, “Why do we need to put the human mind at the center of everything? The human mind obviously evolved out of this real world.” Instead of saying, “What are the transcendental logical conditions that make our experience possible?” Whitehead says, “What are the cosmological conditions of our human conscious experience?” He’s starting with our sense of conscious agency, as human beings, and distilling it down to its simplest possible form, which would be the actual occasion of experience. He’s boiled off all the higher-grade forms of consciousness and self-reflection and is saying that’s what is cosmically basic, and everything else arises from reorganizations of this basic form of feeling or prehension. That’s similar to Kant looking for conditions of possibility, but almost turned inside out. Whitehead wants to begin with the real universe, whereas Kant begins with our ideal reflection upon a phenomenal world, and we don’t know what’s behind that phenomenal screen.

Descendental and Schelling

George: You, Matt, I believe, have spoken about “descendental” something, from Schelling. Is that related to this?

Matt: Exactly, yes. “Descendental” is the opposite of transcendental. It’s this movement down through our bodily feeling back into the cosmos in search of the conditions for the possibility of our conscious experience. Whereas Kant started from the most abstract and removed from body and world, trying to derive our consciousness from that. “Descendental” is a term I borrow from the German idealist Friedrich Schelling, who came a few decades after Kant wrote his critiques. Schelling inherits but transforms Kant’s critiques, in a way very similar to Whitehead. I think of Schelling as an early progenitor of process philosophy—a proto-process philosopher.

Schopenhauer and Abstraction

George: Yes, that’s really interesting. I’ve been making my way slowly through Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. When I first encountered his ideas, they drew me in. One thing he criticizes, even back in 1816 or so, is people reifying abstractions. He talks about abstract representation and sense representation, and he even says that people then, in 1816, were suggesting consciousness is an abstraction. We see that today with epiphenomenalism or illusionism. Nothing changes, in 200 years.

Matt: Right, I think Schopenhauer is very Kantian in his thinking, but he was also exposed to Buddhism, and there’s the Buddhist concept of trishna—craving. For Schopenhauer, the underlying metaphysical reality is Will, a blind irrational striving. We humans are often unconscious of that Will because it’s not personal. We experience a representational enclosure in terms of space, time, and causality. Schopenhauer was pessimistic about our being able to break through that illusion to contact the underlying Will. If we did, we’d have to give up our consciousness. So it’s either we’re conscious and under an illusion, or we’re in touch with reality but we’re not conscious anymore.

There is a way in which Whitehead also recognizes a kind of cosmic Will—he calls it Divine Eros, desire—and for him, it’s precisely that desire that allowed the universe to evolve from simpler forms of experience into the self-conscious kind of experience we have. It may still be true that to directly feel the non-human world, we have to let go of some of our egoic self-awareness, but at the same time, Whitehead holds out the possibility of further evolutionary potentials. Our species isn’t the pinnacle of evolution; our form of consciousness could be just the platform for even more complex super-consciousness.

Part–Whole

George: Yes, that’s a big difference. My understanding is that Schopenhauer moved beyond Kant so far as he said, “We can know the noumenon, for example Will, in ourselves,” but he still said our representation is a mere phenomenon. So there’s still a subject–object dichotomy, whereas Whitehead, my sense is he’s trying not to keep that. He doesn’t see perception as subject and object but more part–whole, and that perception and causation are the same.

Matt: That’s right, yes. Whitehead still talks in terms of subject and object, but he shifts into part–whole relationships. In Whitehead, what was a subject in one moment becomes an object for a new subject in the next moment. So there’s a nesting as the past accumulates. Every subsequent actual occasion or subject includes what the subjects prior to it felt, but as objectified. What was subjectively immediate for that concrescence perishes and becomes objectively immortal, felt by the next occasion from its perspective. So there’s a transference of feeling. What you feel in one moment eventually becomes what I feel in the next moment if we’re communicating, but I don’t feel it exactly as you felt it; I feel it as I feel it from this point of view. Still, I’m feeling what were your feelings. We’re immersed in a network of feelings being transmitted back and forth. The subject–object dichotomy is no longer two enduring subjects here and there representing isolated objects; it’s relative to perspective, moment by moment. It’s throwing the subject–object relation into process instead of imagining it spatially, with isolated subjects trying to represent isolated objects.

Whitehead and Psychoanalysis

George: One of the things I like about Whitehead’s framework is how it helps make sense of phenomena in mental health psychology—like psychoanalysis, where they talk about transference and countertransference. That idea that we can imbue the other with a feeling—there’s an unconscious emphasis, but any time you’re in an encounter with someone, you sense feelings crossing between you. You feel them in the room. Predictive processing would see that as a rational calculation, whereas Whitehead’s view is more that we’re feeling creatures, not just calculators.

Matt: Yes, absolutely. With predictive processing, you can model how we might build AI that mimics life forms by adjusting priors based on sensory inputs. That might be great for AI, but it’s different from saying this is how we actually do it. It’s model-centrism to say the brain is a Bayesian calculator. We humans often do things not in our individual self-interest—altruistic things, for instance. That can be explained with group selection, but still, we’re feeling creatures. We identify differently in different contexts. Sometimes I identify as an individual, other times I identify with my partner, my family, or my nation. The predictive processing approach often wants to locate everything inside the skull, but that’s an unnecessary limitation. We’re not isolated, purely computational systems.

Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

George: Right, so you see how predictive processing is effective for certain data, but then it often becomes this ontological stance, forgetting it’s just a model. That’s what Whitehead criticized as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness—mistaking the abstraction for reality.

Matt: Exactly. Whitehead says you can’t explain the concrete with the abstract; you can only explain the abstract with the concrete. The best we do is build analogies, but model-centrism occurs when we forget that’s what we’re doing. It’s not that models can’t be helpful, but we need to be careful not to mistake the model for the reality.

Boundary of Materialism and Model-Centrism

George: Right. We see people not realizing that all of this is metaphysics, and then reifying abstractions—like calling consciousness itself an abstraction, or an illusion. It’s almost a will-to-power thing. And I remember a Whitehead quote along the lines of, “There’s something curious about scientists whose purpose is to prove they have no purpose.”

Matt: Yes, exactly. “Scientists animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject of study.” That’s the quote.

Soul and Dying

George: Yes, so I like how you see philosophy as reflective. For instance, Plato said philosophy is preparation for dying. That’s also a big theme in religious or spiritual traditions—this idea that we must die to be reborn in some sense. Whitehead talks about how each actual occasion must perish into the next. It sounds like Zen Buddhism’s Satori, dying each moment.

Matt: Right. There’s this doctrine of reincarnation, often associated with Eastern religions, but there’s a version in Judaism, early Christianity, paganism. Modern Western cultures have denied it, but Whitehead’s process of arising and perishing is essentially reincarnation on a microcosmic scale. Every moment is dying into the next and leaving karma or the results of prior decisions as the ground for future occasions. That’s what we do. We have responsibility for the future because of the decisions we make now. So yes, each moment perishes and hands itself off, and that’s a kind of reincarnation.

Final Causation and Scholasticism

George: Right, so from Whitehead’s perspective, does he speak of free will? He basically reintroduces final causation from Aristotle, that we’re not only shaped by efficient causation from the past but also by final aims. That’s how novelty appears?

Matt: Yes, Whitehead says historically, the medieval Scholastics overemphasized final causes from Aristotle, and then the mechanistic philosophers emphasized efficient causes. Final cause is purpose—why a thing is happening. Aristotle would say heavy bodies fall because they want to be with the Earth, whereas Newton and mechanistic philosophers tried to remove purpose from the explanation. But even in mechanistic philosophy, you still have laws of physics, which are not easy to account for in a purely materialist ontology. So Whitehead says the Scholastics had too much final causality, and the mechanists had too much efficient causality. We need both.

In the process of concrescence, there’s the physical pole—efficient cause, or how the past is inherited—and the mental pole, where we have aim and purpose. Whitehead calls that conceptual prehension, where new possibilities can be drawn in. So Whitehead’s is a dipolar ontology: there’s actuality (the past) but also possibility (the future). There’s an infinite array of alternatives. Lower-grade occasions are more dominated by the physical pole, repeating the past. Living organisms can ingress more novelty, so they can aim at something else, not just repeat. That’s how he balances efficient and final causation.

Goethe

George: Goethe is someone you’ve read, and obviously you have an affinity for German thinkers. People think of Goethe mainly as a poet, but he also contributed to science, right? And he critiqued the standard scientific method.

Matt: Yes, he’s known as a poet, writer, and statesman—privy councilor to the Duke of Weimar—but he was also a scientist. He felt his most important contribution was his theory of color, rivaling Newton’s, but he also worked on theories of plant metamorphosis, bone morphology, geology. He was less of a philosopher himself, though he sought help from philosophers like Schiller, who was a Kantian, and Schelling. Goethe would say, “When I observe plants growing, I see an archetype.” Schiller would respond, “No, that’s in your mind.” Goethe insisted he was really seeing the form at work in the plant. He wanted a participatory epistemology, much like Aristotle, where the same archetypal form in the plant is coming alive in the scientist’s imagination.

He developed a method meant to overcome dualism. When we observe the process of a plant’s growth, we see that underlying archetypal power. It’s a real cause, not just an abstraction. He did the same with bone morphology, saying all bones are vertebrae in metamorphosis—there’s one archetypal form that unfolds in variations. This approach was carried forward by alternative scientists—there’s a whole school that does Goethean science, and Darwin actually acknowledged Goethe’s influence. So that’s how Goethe’s holistic approach stands in contrast to mechanistic or reductive approaches. It’s akin to the “right-hemisphere” perspective Ian McGilchrist discusses.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Social Media

George: Yes, it’s that right-hemisphere sense of allowing presencing, as opposed to imposing models. That seems to be what Goethe championed. It’s interesting how this ties back to Plato. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is so relevant in our digital media environment.

Matt: Indeed. Plato was precient about the manipulative power of shadows on a wall. Today, we have social media algorithms. Philosophy is the attempt to turn around in the cave and see where the light is coming from, and possibly exit the cave. There’s a social and political critique, but also a deeper spiritual one—preparation for death, seeing if the soul is immortal, and so on. Whitehead’s idea of arising and perishing is akin to that. Philosophy is a lifetime’s work, turning around to catch ourselves in the act of constructing reality.

Matt’s Approach to Different Metaphysics

George: Yes, that’s great. Final question: Do you feel we can be truly confident in a metaphysics? Or is it all open-ended?

Matt: I think there are better and worse metaphysical schemes. Those that can integrate more data without dismissing inconvenient phenomena are better. But I don’t think we ever get a final, closed system. Whitehead himself exemplified that, correcting his own categories mid-text in Process and Reality. The method is systematic yet open-ended, inviting future refinements.

George: Yes, so we have to remain open and avoid dogma. Thank you so much, Matt. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Matt: Great questions, George. I enjoyed exploring all these ideas. We can do a part two at some point if you want.

George: Yeah, I’d love to—whenever you have time, because I know how busy you are. I really enjoyed the conversation, so for those who got to this point, I will link Footnotes to Plato (which is Matt’s website) and his books.

Matt: Thank you.

George: Thanks, Matt. Have a lovely rest of your day.

Matt: Likewise. Have a good night. See you around.

George: Thank you, bye.

End of Written Transcript