Compelling framing. This short piece really aids my understanding of your article on eternal forms. As Levin approaches this area of inquiry from biological science and you are clearly wrangling with the harmonization of scientific/quantum/morphological theories with philosophical/metaphysical approaches to consciousness I wonder how our understanding of animal (seemingly) moral/ethical behavior fits into the ’god’/divine equation. See https://www.noemamag.com/the-moral-authority-of-animals.
The Book of Genesis shows us how consciousness was embedded into physical reality, and also names why no one has solved the Hard Problem. Plato's Forms have always been interpreted as being frozen. I see them as being alive. I am in close agreement with what you have said here. We are resonating.
I think the textual evidence weighs way more on the other side: Whitehead does view eternal objects as changeless such that they cannot "evolve" over time, in any meaningful sense. As Whitehead puts it in SMW, eternal objects have internal relations to one another and external relations to actual entities. That is to say, whatever contingently happens through actual entities does not affect the essence of eternal objects.
Similarly, Whitehead doesn't reject "the picture of nature as determined by fixed laws in favor of one of open-ended creative emergence"--because it is not an either/or but rather a both/and for him. Nature (or, in general, any part of reality) is still determined by fixed metaphysical laws, although he remains open to what those laws are. He also recognize a separate type of "law" specific to cosmic epochs, that are therefore not fixed/eternal. These cosmic laws are contingent and capable of change, but not due to any properties of the eternal objects involved. Rather, this is due to the properties of the cosmic epoch as a society. His explanation of how societies ground contingent laws then presupposes the necessary, metaphysical laws.
Beyond Whitehead exegesis, this raises interesting questions of what metaphysical work our theory of forms is doing. I think most of the important things a theory of forms/universals does requires them to be static, changeless entities. Two individuals cannot have two different predicates be true of them by virtue of exemplifying (or participating in) the same form: all differences in true predication have to be grounded in exemplifying different forms. Otherwise, these forms seemingly no longer really play the role of grounding predications. Since we can appeal to other entities or principles to ground contingent or changing laws, there isn't good reason to make eternal objects changing so that they can now play that role, since that would in turn raise serious difficulties over their primary role in grounding predications. If we don't want to admit changeless entities, or entities not intrinsically tied to some particular spacetime event, we should just get rid of eternal objects for a trope theory.
"There are no novel eternal objects," but I am not sure how else to square the consequent and primordial natures except by affirming that the historical unfolding of the creative advance, integrated into the consequent nature, transforms at least the relative meaning and certainly the truth-value of eternal objects, even if the metaphysical rules of extensive connection remain unchanged.
Eternal objects don't have a truth-value, only propositions do. As to their relative meaning changing: if by this you mean that actual occasions will come to prehend the same eternal object with different types of subjective forms,, then I would say, yes, but that is an external relation that doesn't change what the eternal object essentially is. Any prehension is an internal relation for the prehending subject and external relation for the datum: the datum is given for, and cannot be changed by, the prehension.
Yes, I was implying "the truth-value of eternal objects" *as prehended by the consequent nature of God.* There is no truth-value as far as the primordial nature is concerned, there is only an unconscious originating aesthetic envisagement of the internal relations among infinite possibilities. I am saying that God comes to prehend the same infinite realm of eternal objects with an ever-enriched subjective form, with a deepened and intensified sense of their significance, that grows creature by creature with the creative advance.
It's misleading to say this entails that the eternal objects themselves evolve, though. This is instead just the typical platonist position: the forms in themselves do not change, but what does change is the way the world participates in, exemplifies, or otherwise relates to said forms.
"Every actual entity is what it is, and is with its definite status in the universe, determined by its internal relations to other actual entities. ‘Change’ is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things." (PR 59)
While it is the universe that evolves, and not forms in themselves, evolution can only be characterized in terms of the changing adventures of eternal objects. However I am unsure what meaning you think can be assigned to "forms in themselves" in Whitehead's scheme, given the importance of the ontological principle? Form in itself may be verbally thinkable as a kind of regulative ideal, but I don't see how any form in itself could be knowable. Whitehead expresses skepticism of this possibility even in the case of simple arithmetic. Indeed, if there are truly eternal metaphysical rules of some kind, though it realizes them not even God's primordial nature could "know" them, as that would require consciousness, and consciousness is only possible in relationship to what actually occurs.
What I mean by a “form in itself” is what Whitehead terms an eternal object’s essence. To quote at length: “the essence of an eternal object is merely the eternal object considered as adding its own unique contribution to each actual occasion. This unique contribution is identical for all such occasions in respect to the fact that the object in all modes of ingression is just its identical self. But it varies from one occasion to another in respect to the differences of its modes of ingression. Thus the metaphysical status of an eternal object is that of a possibility for an actuality” (SMW 159). Thus, as he later puts it, “an eternal object can be described only in terms of its potentiality for ‘ingression’ into the becoming of actual entities; and that its analysis only discloses other eternal objects” (PR 23). He must thereby mean that an eternal object’s essence can only be so described in terms of its potentiality. To say an eternal object is externally related to actual entities is to say that the ways in which eternal objects ingress into actual entities does not change their essence.
Whitehead is also clear that we can become acquainted with an eternal object’s essence, apart from its realization in particular actualities; indeed, that is even his criterion of what makes an entity count as an eternal object: “Any entity whose conceptual recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entities of the temporal world is called an ‘eternal object.’” (PR 44)
Thank you, Matthew! Your analysis of Whitehead's thought and Levin is fascinating. Scientists like Levin and Donald Hoffman see "reality" detached from the "metaphysical" dimensions. We need both science and philosophy to catch "wholeness," which may not be "either-or" but both in existential tension. Thank you for grappling with the subject in this post. A dialogue between Donald Hoffman and British Iain McGilchrist, MD, a neuroscientist, philosopher I heard some time ago, puts both views in "direct" confrontation with the challenges we face between strict scientific views and the more philosophical human reality.
Matthew, this is a beautiful and careful essay, and I think you are naming a real metaphysical danger with precision. I share your concern that replacing gene-centrism with pattern-centrism risks a new kind of reduction, no longer “downward” into matter, but “upward” into Forms. Your insistence that patterns are not puppeteers but conditions of intelligibility is exactly right.
Where I find myself pressing a bit further is on the status of Form itself. You rightly argue that possibility cannot actualize itself, and that agency belongs to actual occasions and the enduring societies they compose. From my perspective, this suggests an even stronger conclusion: patterns are not merely insufficient for agency, they are derivative of it. Patterns are the stabilized after-effects of successful action—condensed histories of valuation and survival—rather than a pre-existing space organisms must navigate.
In this sense, organisms do not primarily ingress patterns; patterns sediment out of organismic activity over time. Recurrence is not evidence of prior sovereignty but of remembered success. This preserves exactly what you are protecting—creaturely decision, novelty, and lived subjectivity—while avoiding any slide toward pattern sovereignty, even in a softened Whiteheadian or theological form.
I resonate deeply with your claim that forms are notes, not players. I would only add: the notes exist because the playing has already happened. Patterns remember what action discovered. Agency does not follow form; form follows agency.
If nature is ordered, it is not because possibility was primordially valued in advance, but because action—once begun—cannot help but leave traces. Those traces recur, stabilize, and lure explanation. But they never decide. The deciding remains local, historical, and lived.
Grateful for the clarity of your intervention, and for how much room it leaves for genuine metaphysical dialogue.
Thanks, Joseph. What you say tracks rather closely to the discussions Tim Jackson and I have been having about Whitehead’s account of divinely envisaged eternal objects. Much food for thought! Incidentally, another helpful analogy here would be to think of Forms precisely as “food” for thinking agents.
Thought are certain patterns of aware-ized energy, consciousness, and are the outcome of mixing, matching, sifting, searching, sorting, and merging ideas. Your thought is then focused, using your consciousness as the tool to do so, and becomes your physical reality.
I grow and cultivate my thoughts. I provide amendments. In my mind, and in my 2000 sq ft organic garden in central Maine. For example, I just ate my own winter squash and collards, at lunch.
Thanks very much for the synthesis, and analysis-out of a difference. How much of what you're talking about in the latter respect is it a matter of 'growing up': one follows rules not of ones own making, becomes, one knowingly chooses the rules one shall follow? (Alternatives to a 'rulws' formulation are of course available.) There's a cognitive dissonance in the transition. And a new value arises. The value that attaches to 'voluntary necessity' (which may be John Vervaeke's phraseology). Experience of the value comes after the transition into a new kind of being. (I think Nietzsche is in the background to such thoughts.)
My question would be, in respect of your piece, why can't one allow that higher order patterns inhere in the possibility space ahead of time; why should they be seen as creatively obtaining, and reality itself as creative?
Compelling framing. This short piece really aids my understanding of your article on eternal forms. As Levin approaches this area of inquiry from biological science and you are clearly wrangling with the harmonization of scientific/quantum/morphological theories with philosophical/metaphysical approaches to consciousness I wonder how our understanding of animal (seemingly) moral/ethical behavior fits into the ’god’/divine equation. See https://www.noemamag.com/the-moral-authority-of-animals.
The Book of Genesis shows us how consciousness was embedded into physical reality, and also names why no one has solved the Hard Problem. Plato's Forms have always been interpreted as being frozen. I see them as being alive. I am in close agreement with what you have said here. We are resonating.
I think the textual evidence weighs way more on the other side: Whitehead does view eternal objects as changeless such that they cannot "evolve" over time, in any meaningful sense. As Whitehead puts it in SMW, eternal objects have internal relations to one another and external relations to actual entities. That is to say, whatever contingently happens through actual entities does not affect the essence of eternal objects.
Similarly, Whitehead doesn't reject "the picture of nature as determined by fixed laws in favor of one of open-ended creative emergence"--because it is not an either/or but rather a both/and for him. Nature (or, in general, any part of reality) is still determined by fixed metaphysical laws, although he remains open to what those laws are. He also recognize a separate type of "law" specific to cosmic epochs, that are therefore not fixed/eternal. These cosmic laws are contingent and capable of change, but not due to any properties of the eternal objects involved. Rather, this is due to the properties of the cosmic epoch as a society. His explanation of how societies ground contingent laws then presupposes the necessary, metaphysical laws.
Beyond Whitehead exegesis, this raises interesting questions of what metaphysical work our theory of forms is doing. I think most of the important things a theory of forms/universals does requires them to be static, changeless entities. Two individuals cannot have two different predicates be true of them by virtue of exemplifying (or participating in) the same form: all differences in true predication have to be grounded in exemplifying different forms. Otherwise, these forms seemingly no longer really play the role of grounding predications. Since we can appeal to other entities or principles to ground contingent or changing laws, there isn't good reason to make eternal objects changing so that they can now play that role, since that would in turn raise serious difficulties over their primary role in grounding predications. If we don't want to admit changeless entities, or entities not intrinsically tied to some particular spacetime event, we should just get rid of eternal objects for a trope theory.
"There are no novel eternal objects," but I am not sure how else to square the consequent and primordial natures except by affirming that the historical unfolding of the creative advance, integrated into the consequent nature, transforms at least the relative meaning and certainly the truth-value of eternal objects, even if the metaphysical rules of extensive connection remain unchanged.
Eternal objects don't have a truth-value, only propositions do. As to their relative meaning changing: if by this you mean that actual occasions will come to prehend the same eternal object with different types of subjective forms,, then I would say, yes, but that is an external relation that doesn't change what the eternal object essentially is. Any prehension is an internal relation for the prehending subject and external relation for the datum: the datum is given for, and cannot be changed by, the prehension.
Yes, I was implying "the truth-value of eternal objects" *as prehended by the consequent nature of God.* There is no truth-value as far as the primordial nature is concerned, there is only an unconscious originating aesthetic envisagement of the internal relations among infinite possibilities. I am saying that God comes to prehend the same infinite realm of eternal objects with an ever-enriched subjective form, with a deepened and intensified sense of their significance, that grows creature by creature with the creative advance.
It's misleading to say this entails that the eternal objects themselves evolve, though. This is instead just the typical platonist position: the forms in themselves do not change, but what does change is the way the world participates in, exemplifies, or otherwise relates to said forms.
"Every actual entity is what it is, and is with its definite status in the universe, determined by its internal relations to other actual entities. ‘Change’ is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things." (PR 59)
While it is the universe that evolves, and not forms in themselves, evolution can only be characterized in terms of the changing adventures of eternal objects. However I am unsure what meaning you think can be assigned to "forms in themselves" in Whitehead's scheme, given the importance of the ontological principle? Form in itself may be verbally thinkable as a kind of regulative ideal, but I don't see how any form in itself could be knowable. Whitehead expresses skepticism of this possibility even in the case of simple arithmetic. Indeed, if there are truly eternal metaphysical rules of some kind, though it realizes them not even God's primordial nature could "know" them, as that would require consciousness, and consciousness is only possible in relationship to what actually occurs.
What I mean by a “form in itself” is what Whitehead terms an eternal object’s essence. To quote at length: “the essence of an eternal object is merely the eternal object considered as adding its own unique contribution to each actual occasion. This unique contribution is identical for all such occasions in respect to the fact that the object in all modes of ingression is just its identical self. But it varies from one occasion to another in respect to the differences of its modes of ingression. Thus the metaphysical status of an eternal object is that of a possibility for an actuality” (SMW 159). Thus, as he later puts it, “an eternal object can be described only in terms of its potentiality for ‘ingression’ into the becoming of actual entities; and that its analysis only discloses other eternal objects” (PR 23). He must thereby mean that an eternal object’s essence can only be so described in terms of its potentiality. To say an eternal object is externally related to actual entities is to say that the ways in which eternal objects ingress into actual entities does not change their essence.
Whitehead is also clear that we can become acquainted with an eternal object’s essence, apart from its realization in particular actualities; indeed, that is even his criterion of what makes an entity count as an eternal object: “Any entity whose conceptual recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entities of the temporal world is called an ‘eternal object.’” (PR 44)
Thank you, Matthew! Your analysis of Whitehead's thought and Levin is fascinating. Scientists like Levin and Donald Hoffman see "reality" detached from the "metaphysical" dimensions. We need both science and philosophy to catch "wholeness," which may not be "either-or" but both in existential tension. Thank you for grappling with the subject in this post. A dialogue between Donald Hoffman and British Iain McGilchrist, MD, a neuroscientist, philosopher I heard some time ago, puts both views in "direct" confrontation with the challenges we face between strict scientific views and the more philosophical human reality.
Matthew, this is a beautiful and careful essay, and I think you are naming a real metaphysical danger with precision. I share your concern that replacing gene-centrism with pattern-centrism risks a new kind of reduction, no longer “downward” into matter, but “upward” into Forms. Your insistence that patterns are not puppeteers but conditions of intelligibility is exactly right.
Where I find myself pressing a bit further is on the status of Form itself. You rightly argue that possibility cannot actualize itself, and that agency belongs to actual occasions and the enduring societies they compose. From my perspective, this suggests an even stronger conclusion: patterns are not merely insufficient for agency, they are derivative of it. Patterns are the stabilized after-effects of successful action—condensed histories of valuation and survival—rather than a pre-existing space organisms must navigate.
In this sense, organisms do not primarily ingress patterns; patterns sediment out of organismic activity over time. Recurrence is not evidence of prior sovereignty but of remembered success. This preserves exactly what you are protecting—creaturely decision, novelty, and lived subjectivity—while avoiding any slide toward pattern sovereignty, even in a softened Whiteheadian or theological form.
I resonate deeply with your claim that forms are notes, not players. I would only add: the notes exist because the playing has already happened. Patterns remember what action discovered. Agency does not follow form; form follows agency.
If nature is ordered, it is not because possibility was primordially valued in advance, but because action—once begun—cannot help but leave traces. Those traces recur, stabilize, and lure explanation. But they never decide. The deciding remains local, historical, and lived.
Grateful for the clarity of your intervention, and for how much room it leaves for genuine metaphysical dialogue.
Thanks, Joseph. What you say tracks rather closely to the discussions Tim Jackson and I have been having about Whitehead’s account of divinely envisaged eternal objects. Much food for thought! Incidentally, another helpful analogy here would be to think of Forms precisely as “food” for thinking agents.
Thought are certain patterns of aware-ized energy, consciousness, and are the outcome of mixing, matching, sifting, searching, sorting, and merging ideas. Your thought is then focused, using your consciousness as the tool to do so, and becomes your physical reality.
"As in the Inner, so in the Outer"
I grow and cultivate my thoughts. I provide amendments. In my mind, and in my 2000 sq ft organic garden in central Maine. For example, I just ate my own winter squash and collards, at lunch.
Consciousness create form. Form does not create consciousness.
Within my limited understanding, I see your voice as most necessary. Keep on.
Thanks very much for the synthesis, and analysis-out of a difference. How much of what you're talking about in the latter respect is it a matter of 'growing up': one follows rules not of ones own making, becomes, one knowingly chooses the rules one shall follow? (Alternatives to a 'rulws' formulation are of course available.) There's a cognitive dissonance in the transition. And a new value arises. The value that attaches to 'voluntary necessity' (which may be John Vervaeke's phraseology). Experience of the value comes after the transition into a new kind of being. (I think Nietzsche is in the background to such thoughts.)
My question would be, in respect of your piece, why can't one allow that higher order patterns inhere in the possibility space ahead of time; why should they be seen as creatively obtaining, and reality itself as creative?
Like Jordan Peterson and Michael Levin had a baby.
see my restack