Thank you so much. I want to go back to the quote that you began with from Novalis at the very beginning. Sorry to make you go all the way back.
Matt:
No, it’s fine.
Audience Member:
But you only put half the quote: “The world must be romanticized. In this way, its original meaning will be rediscovered. Romanticization is nothing but a potentiation of potential”—so this potentiation. But he also said it’s also a depotentiation. It’s this oscillation between potentiation and depotentiation that I would suggest, especially in the Romantics, they were quite interested in. So you can see that—just to take an example—he goes through the poetic, he goes through the empirical, he goes through the practical, farming, the scientific, and he doesn’t really settle on any one. There is no sort of conclusion.
So, who is that goddess? It’s the goddess of nature, Diana—the wonderful, often-repeated figure of the time: the multibreasted goddess of Isis, goddess of nature, who has a figurative form. I think one of Novalis’s key arguments is that we are always in a figurative form—we are always in language. We can never get to the absolute. We almost have to recognize the limitation, as it were, on each of our articulations. Schlegel also talks about this: romanticism as an aspiration to this formative impulse, but then critique is also part of the recognition that we are only able to articulate fragments. But for Novalis, it’s kind of like constantly unveiling the goddess nature, and she’s always present there in some figurative form.
So I was wondering how that aspect of romanticism—not just potentiation but also depotentiation, that recognition of critique as part of the process of creation—fits into your account. I mean, it could tie to your last comment about Schelling, about him always coming up with new systems. They’re always just an expression, the absolute itself.
Matt:
Yeah, I mean, in the longer paper, I draw on your work, actually, to point out that in your study of these thinkers, you’re left without any evidence of anything like a unified system of romantic biology—and the fragmentary nature of this romantic approach is very important. In some sense, what I was trying to depict in that slide with the way that there’s always a hidden side to nature—the veiled goddess, right?—is the night. The light of the sun obscures the many stars in the night’s sky, right? And, you know, I like Schlegel—Friedrich Schlegel’s—point that it’s equally deadly for the spirit to have a system and not to have one, right? And so we have to always keep that tension in mind and recognize that the philosophy of nature is an infinite task. We will never complete it; we will never arrive at the final system.
Whitehead is known as a systematic metaphysician—he’s trying to do systematic metaphysics in the late 1920s, just when philosophy, both in its analytic and continental forms, is flying away from anything like system. But he’s approaching systematic philosophy as a radical empiricist, as a pragmatist. He wants his system to be open, and he demonstrates that in Process and Reality, where one of the categories he lays out in his “Category of Scheme” at the beginning—the category of “conceptual reversion”—on page 250 or thereabouts, he realizes, “Oh, I’m going to abolish that category because I’ve discovered another category subsumes it.” So he’s renovating his own metaphysics in the process of articulating it, and he just leaves it in there—he doesn’t go back and rewrite the book—which I think is an invitation to us to recognize the fragmentary nature, the partial perspectives that we have to work with when we attempt to understand the whole or the absolute.
Audience Member:
Thank you, thank you very much. I wanted to go back to—I’ve got a lot about the fragment, of course, but also the translation, because I just want to draw out something that I think is missing in that particular translation. Actually, if you translate it differently, it leads to more connections to what you’re actually talking about. So when Novalis talks about “qualitative realization of a potential,” he actually uses the word “potenzieren” and “potenzieren”—it could be “potentization,” but it’s actually using it in a sense of “exponentiation,” in a mathematical sense. He’s one of these few people who is poetic about mathematics, you know? So, he has “exponentiation,” so raising to a higher power—you have the identity, say, of a single number and you raise it to a higher power, so it’s like a self-increasing thing. And with “potenzieren” lowering, he uses also a mathematical term, which is not “lower organization”—that’s right. He inverts the operation, putting “cum.” And I think what’s really fascinating in Novalis is this image, or this mathematical metaphor. There’s one particular fragment which really ties in with what you were talking about at the end, and he says something like, “Human thinking is the quality”—so he gets this quality of potentization, not quantitative, it’s quality—“of self-intensification.” But then your thinking is the general forces of nature—and it might even use something like “plastic forces of nature”—raised to the nth degree, which goes very much in line with your idea that we have these kind of formative powers in nature, and human thinking is a flowering, a kind of flowering of what we find in the whole of nature. I mean, maybe you’re aware of all these things, but…
Matt:
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I didn’t include the German in this one—I did in the other Novalis quotes—and I’m just using Robert Richards’ translation here, but I clearly need to revisit the translation, especially with that mathematical metaphor in mind. Thank you for bringing that out.
Audience Member:
And let me add another thing—something that interests me a lot about fragments. We tend to think of a fragment as just a piece broken off from a whole, but for Novalis it’s mainly because of the seed: the fragment contains the whole. What is the seed?—potential, right? The fragmentary nature is true, but each fragment is holographic in a sense; it contains the whole in miniature, in a somewhat diluted form, but still, it’s there.
Thank you very much for your lecture. I don’t know whether I have to reassure you as to narcissism—the only thing is, I think the topic of narcissism is an interesting one for philosophers. For sure, without narcissism, we wouldn’t be here. So personally, I couldn’t consider it a negative at all. Meanwhile, I think there’s some things to be taken from more clinical approaches to narcissism—Freud, or Lacan on the mirror stage, for instance. They deal with questions of object investments, how one identifies oneself as something, and in that regard, the arrival of narcissism is quite confusing. But Lacan issues it in his first seminar, actually, on this technique. One of the things he clearly states is that, even at the level of identification in the image, in the “I,” it’s symbolic. You don’t arrive at it without another next to you saying, “Hey, you see that?” So it’s a weird operation, you know? Schelling has lots to say about this, and the question comes up for me: to take something as something is clearly the interest of the person. So I told you, I have PhDs working on the person—I wait and see.
Matt:
Yeah, I know—thank you. I hadn’t considered the connection between Lacan and Peirce, but I think Lacan was influenced by Peirce somewhat. Some people say yes, but what Peirce is saying represents something… and, as Lacan says, the signifier represents a subject for another signifier. So, he’s cutting the signifier’s autonomy apart, right? So, the “for something” is not present in the signifier itself. But at least in Peirce, the subject is sort of transitory, just like Whitehead’s account of concrescence—there are new subjects arising. We don’t have an enduring subjectivity through time; Whitehead has this term “society,” which is how multiple subjects inherit from one another in a very intimate way. So, our sense of personal identity is not one continuous subject for Whitehead, nor for Peirce. The interpretant, or the subject who is experiencing the sign’s relationship to the world in Peirce, is new in each moment. There’s an infinite process of semiosis, and what’s the interpretant in one moment becomes the sign in the next moment for a new interpretant. So, we’re not stuck in the same subjectivity—that’s Lacan’s “continued referral of one signifier to another,” and in between, the subject is, as Lacan says, “timed in the gap,” an effect of two signifiers.
What I appreciate about Peirce is that he’ll talk about semiosis going on throughout the natural world—there’s physiosemiotics, chemosemiotics, biosemiotics—so signification isn’t just something that human beings do in Peirce’s account. It’s a higher order or an intensification of something that’s pervasive in nature, and to me, that seems far more relevant to our ecological situation, to be able to break out of the human enclosure.
Audience Member:
Thank you very much. You’re probably the first person who talked about the idea of the “double stream of time,” which I was listening to. I’m talking about it, and I want to ask you about the idea—which is actually not mine, but it’s an old Aristotelian idea, and then Steiner reconfigured it—that the present is a continuously concrescent moment which integrates the past and also has a relation toward what the future is. But in the Aristotelian idea and in Steiner’s idea, there is something that endures, or is able to stop the stream of time, and which is not all the time newly created. And this is the spiritual, the idea, yes? How would you interpret that—that there’s something still remaining, enduring, not physical of course, but ideal?
Matt:
Yeah, I mean, Whitehead develops a whole theology—process theology. In a later section in this paper, I compare what he calls the “primordial nature of God” to the “I”—to this element that’s coming down, descending perpendicular to the stream of time. Whitehead has an account of the primordial nature of God as ordering the realm of possibility before the universe begins—in a logical sense, not temporally. I think that Whitehead also describes the way this primordial nature of God is an ingredient in, or an element in, the concrescence of all other actual entities, and it becomes conscious in the human being. This is at least resonant with Steiner’s understanding of the “I.” Whitehead also has the “consequent nature of God,” which is God in relationship to the world. So, the primordial nature is eternal and unchanging; the consequent nature of God grows with history, experiences the joy and suffering of every being. It’s one God, but it has these two aspects. I’ll have to share the rest of my paper with you to see if you can follow the comparison I make between Steiner and Whitehead on that question.
Audience Member:
Yeah, because there is something eternal in Whitehead. He’s a process philosopher, but he also has eternal objects, and he has this eternal divine being. So it’s more complicated than just “everything is process.”
Matt:
Exactly.
Audience Member:
We still have time for more questions. Else, I’d like to ask or to add—my turn! At some point, you spoke about how physical processes also manifest a kind of impulsiveness. And maybe not to get too into that, but how do we make sense of that? Because, of course, we can’t think of organisms as just popping out of nowhere—we have to understand their relation to other processes. But are these processes really normative in the same way as organisms? I would say that’s quite a difference.
Matt:
Yeah, well, on Whitehead’s account, we cannot sever the facts from values—every fact is a realization of some value. If we look at what are called physical laws, Whitehead’s understanding is that law is actually a product of an evolutionary process. It’s more like a habit. He’ll describe—as Dan mentioned yesterday—for Whitehead, physics is just the study of smaller organisms. An atom is a self-organizing system. Whitehead even describes the process by which the first hydrogen atom emerged, where you have a proton and electron forming a symbiotic relationship with one another, such that a new form of endurance is achieved, a new pattern of value is achieved. Once that pathway is discovered, the whole universe is transformed as a result. Similarly, when hydrogen atoms are drawn together into stars, and stars into galaxies, and so on—these are akin to organisms or self-organizing systems. These patterns of organization are not just determined in advance, like some preformation of laws imposed from eternity and constants that just happen to be perfectly aligned to allow for that type of order to emerge. Their achievements are expressions of value, right? So it’s a totally different rendering of the physical world. I think, as Dalia was hinting at, if we want to naturalize purposiveness and aim, we really have to go all the way down with this; otherwise, the organic becomes sort of closed in, the biological becomes closed in on itself, and we end up not being able to account for the transition from physics and chemistry to biology.
Audience Member:
Yes, you actually respond to a question I had, which is always presupposing in a way, in my understanding, that you somehow still start from physics and atoms, and then you try to build up the cosmos from there. I don’t know whether Whitehead did that, but just how you explained it now. Why not suppose it could be solved the other way around—that something alive was first? The principle of life, and that when that dies, the dead force becomes too strong, it dies and crystallizes, it becomes matter. Why do we start with matter first?
Matt:
Yeah, yeah. This is just a habit of thought. Why not conceive matter as a precipitation or a dead end product—something that was alive and then, having lost its creativity, becomes visible and becomes physical? Whitehead is a species of psychist. A lot of the analytic philosophers of mind who call themselves pansychists now are still thinking in a substance ontology; Whitehead’s is a different kind of psychism. But there’s no such thing as dead matter in Whitehead’s ontology—there’s no matter in Whitehead’s ontology. Creativity replaces this idea of matter as some kind of dead substance.
That’s something I also can’t quite follow, because you can say there’s “creativity” inside the table, but the phenomenological appearance is different from something that is alive. That’s also a question I had about your talk: it sort of jumps beyond phenomenology, tries to find unifying principles, and for me this is not, of course, not completely un-phenomenological, but I can follow it easier if I think there’s a life process first—maybe mentality first, life, and then there is a precipitation of something that has been creative, but lost its creativity and becomes visible and becomes physical.
Matt:
Well, you know, Whitehead says in his book The Function of Reason—where he’s looking at evolutionary theory and he’s critical of Darwin’s account of natural selection as being able to explain complexification, and why life should give rise to forms of organisms that are comparatively deficient in survival power (we’re way more fragile than bacteria, which are functionally immortal)—so why is life evolving in this way if survival is the only point? But he says, you know, instead of trying to explain the more complex by reducing it to the simpler, why don’t we reverse that process and understand how it is that beings like us, conscious living beings, could come to exist in this world? What must atoms be like such that we could exist? That’s what he’s talking about—he’s seeking to develop an ontology from the perspective of life on this earth, and from the perspective of human beings alive on this earth. I know there’s, in terms of evolution being a process, where the human being didn’t exist and atoms and stars and galaxies and cells and all that led to the human being, versus seeing the human being as kind of there all along. I think Whitehead would allow us to view it either way, though in order to be conversant with the general understanding of evolution, he tended to talk about it as coming from a developmental process to the human.
Audience Member:
I would perhaps add one more thing from basic anthroposophy. Steiner distinguishes not really between matter and spirit or between principles, but between perception and thinking. This word “polarity” is the key for us at this moment in history. What we are about is a point, and matter is not substance, but what we perceive and call matter is, as Steiner says, matter in perception. If you grab it this way, then you get a completely new access to all these questions, because you can always ask: what is the perceptive part, what is the thinking or ideal part, and how are they brought together within our cognition? I completely agree with you and with Whitehead that the conscious human mind is the place where all these things become conscious, or where they appear—maybe not to say where they happen, but…
Matt:
Sure. And in Whitehead’s 1920 book The Concept of Nature, he begins similarly, talking about the split between concept and percept, and he thinks this has led to our inability to understand their synthesis or their unity, which has led to a picture where we have what he calls the “subjective dream” on the one hand, and then the “conjecture of physics”—so that nature poets should be congratulating themselves, he says, about the beauty of nature, because according to physics and the conjectured models, nature is soundless, scentless, colorless, right? So, he wants to heal the bifurcation by showing how concept and percept can be brought together again. I think there might be a parallel there.
"This temporal intuition has far-reaching consequences relevant to this presentation. It vindicates the scientific importance of the human I—the human ego—as Fichte’s original breakthrough in the Wissenschaftslehre suggested. For Fichte, the “I” is a self-positing, self-intuiting being that discovers its own existence in its deed. For Schelling, Fichte’s insight blossoms into a philosophy of organic nature in which subjectivity is nature’s self-revelation. Whitehead universalizes this same dynamic: every actual occasion is a miniature “I,” the germ of consciousness—a momentary, self-creating creature that both receives and reshapes the world. Human consciousness is thus a concentrated exemplar of an ubiquitous concrescent activity, not an anomalous spectator."
"I" come into existence literally every second anew.
Great paper once again Matt. Each time I read or listen to one of your podcasts, I understand Whitehead and Schelling more completely. Minor but meaningful point though is the difference between feeling and emotion. As you have noted these feeling responses that can result in prehension and concrescence are mostly tacit or unconscious. Emotion, on the other hand is the triggered response to a feeling and mostly conscious. It is the source of Jung's understanding of what can trigger a complex.
Thank you so much for posting this, Matt! I was wondering whether you are aware of Johannes (Yogi) Jaeger, a development biologist turned process philosopher. I would love to listen to a conversation between the two of you
Thanks Matt - I'm not an academic but managed to hang on in there! I will pass it on to my grandson who is awakening to these ideas. You said: "Whitehead adds that the excess of light discloses facts and also conceals them."
I am reminded of a verse in the Psalms: "in your light we see light". Also in the account of creation we come across light being formed *before* the sun and the stars.
The implication is that light is not just the emanation from an object but contains another aspect as this this primal non conceptual, universal idea.
Again reading your lecture the quote: "we are not a collection of objects but rather a communion of subjects" come to mind - thanks again 👍
Q&A
Audience Member:
Thank you so much. I want to go back to the quote that you began with from Novalis at the very beginning. Sorry to make you go all the way back.
Matt:
No, it’s fine.
Audience Member:
But you only put half the quote: “The world must be romanticized. In this way, its original meaning will be rediscovered. Romanticization is nothing but a potentiation of potential”—so this potentiation. But he also said it’s also a depotentiation. It’s this oscillation between potentiation and depotentiation that I would suggest, especially in the Romantics, they were quite interested in. So you can see that—just to take an example—he goes through the poetic, he goes through the empirical, he goes through the practical, farming, the scientific, and he doesn’t really settle on any one. There is no sort of conclusion.
So, who is that goddess? It’s the goddess of nature, Diana—the wonderful, often-repeated figure of the time: the multibreasted goddess of Isis, goddess of nature, who has a figurative form. I think one of Novalis’s key arguments is that we are always in a figurative form—we are always in language. We can never get to the absolute. We almost have to recognize the limitation, as it were, on each of our articulations. Schlegel also talks about this: romanticism as an aspiration to this formative impulse, but then critique is also part of the recognition that we are only able to articulate fragments. But for Novalis, it’s kind of like constantly unveiling the goddess nature, and she’s always present there in some figurative form.
So I was wondering how that aspect of romanticism—not just potentiation but also depotentiation, that recognition of critique as part of the process of creation—fits into your account. I mean, it could tie to your last comment about Schelling, about him always coming up with new systems. They’re always just an expression, the absolute itself.
Matt:
Yeah, I mean, in the longer paper, I draw on your work, actually, to point out that in your study of these thinkers, you’re left without any evidence of anything like a unified system of romantic biology—and the fragmentary nature of this romantic approach is very important. In some sense, what I was trying to depict in that slide with the way that there’s always a hidden side to nature—the veiled goddess, right?—is the night. The light of the sun obscures the many stars in the night’s sky, right? And, you know, I like Schlegel—Friedrich Schlegel’s—point that it’s equally deadly for the spirit to have a system and not to have one, right? And so we have to always keep that tension in mind and recognize that the philosophy of nature is an infinite task. We will never complete it; we will never arrive at the final system.
Whitehead is known as a systematic metaphysician—he’s trying to do systematic metaphysics in the late 1920s, just when philosophy, both in its analytic and continental forms, is flying away from anything like system. But he’s approaching systematic philosophy as a radical empiricist, as a pragmatist. He wants his system to be open, and he demonstrates that in Process and Reality, where one of the categories he lays out in his “Category of Scheme” at the beginning—the category of “conceptual reversion”—on page 250 or thereabouts, he realizes, “Oh, I’m going to abolish that category because I’ve discovered another category subsumes it.” So he’s renovating his own metaphysics in the process of articulating it, and he just leaves it in there—he doesn’t go back and rewrite the book—which I think is an invitation to us to recognize the fragmentary nature, the partial perspectives that we have to work with when we attempt to understand the whole or the absolute.
Audience Member:
Thank you, thank you very much. I wanted to go back to—I’ve got a lot about the fragment, of course, but also the translation, because I just want to draw out something that I think is missing in that particular translation. Actually, if you translate it differently, it leads to more connections to what you’re actually talking about. So when Novalis talks about “qualitative realization of a potential,” he actually uses the word “potenzieren” and “potenzieren”—it could be “potentization,” but it’s actually using it in a sense of “exponentiation,” in a mathematical sense. He’s one of these few people who is poetic about mathematics, you know? So, he has “exponentiation,” so raising to a higher power—you have the identity, say, of a single number and you raise it to a higher power, so it’s like a self-increasing thing. And with “potenzieren” lowering, he uses also a mathematical term, which is not “lower organization”—that’s right. He inverts the operation, putting “cum.” And I think what’s really fascinating in Novalis is this image, or this mathematical metaphor. There’s one particular fragment which really ties in with what you were talking about at the end, and he says something like, “Human thinking is the quality”—so he gets this quality of potentization, not quantitative, it’s quality—“of self-intensification.” But then your thinking is the general forces of nature—and it might even use something like “plastic forces of nature”—raised to the nth degree, which goes very much in line with your idea that we have these kind of formative powers in nature, and human thinking is a flowering, a kind of flowering of what we find in the whole of nature. I mean, maybe you’re aware of all these things, but…
Matt:
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I didn’t include the German in this one—I did in the other Novalis quotes—and I’m just using Robert Richards’ translation here, but I clearly need to revisit the translation, especially with that mathematical metaphor in mind. Thank you for bringing that out.
Audience Member:
And let me add another thing—something that interests me a lot about fragments. We tend to think of a fragment as just a piece broken off from a whole, but for Novalis it’s mainly because of the seed: the fragment contains the whole. What is the seed?—potential, right? The fragmentary nature is true, but each fragment is holographic in a sense; it contains the whole in miniature, in a somewhat diluted form, but still, it’s there.
Matt:
Yes, absolutely—good truth. Thank you.
Audience Member:
Thank you very much for your lecture. I don’t know whether I have to reassure you as to narcissism—the only thing is, I think the topic of narcissism is an interesting one for philosophers. For sure, without narcissism, we wouldn’t be here. So personally, I couldn’t consider it a negative at all. Meanwhile, I think there’s some things to be taken from more clinical approaches to narcissism—Freud, or Lacan on the mirror stage, for instance. They deal with questions of object investments, how one identifies oneself as something, and in that regard, the arrival of narcissism is quite confusing. But Lacan issues it in his first seminar, actually, on this technique. One of the things he clearly states is that, even at the level of identification in the image, in the “I,” it’s symbolic. You don’t arrive at it without another next to you saying, “Hey, you see that?” So it’s a weird operation, you know? Schelling has lots to say about this, and the question comes up for me: to take something as something is clearly the interest of the person. So I told you, I have PhDs working on the person—I wait and see.
Matt:
Yeah, I know—thank you. I hadn’t considered the connection between Lacan and Peirce, but I think Lacan was influenced by Peirce somewhat. Some people say yes, but what Peirce is saying represents something… and, as Lacan says, the signifier represents a subject for another signifier. So, he’s cutting the signifier’s autonomy apart, right? So, the “for something” is not present in the signifier itself. But at least in Peirce, the subject is sort of transitory, just like Whitehead’s account of concrescence—there are new subjects arising. We don’t have an enduring subjectivity through time; Whitehead has this term “society,” which is how multiple subjects inherit from one another in a very intimate way. So, our sense of personal identity is not one continuous subject for Whitehead, nor for Peirce. The interpretant, or the subject who is experiencing the sign’s relationship to the world in Peirce, is new in each moment. There’s an infinite process of semiosis, and what’s the interpretant in one moment becomes the sign in the next moment for a new interpretant. So, we’re not stuck in the same subjectivity—that’s Lacan’s “continued referral of one signifier to another,” and in between, the subject is, as Lacan says, “timed in the gap,” an effect of two signifiers.
What I appreciate about Peirce is that he’ll talk about semiosis going on throughout the natural world—there’s physiosemiotics, chemosemiotics, biosemiotics—so signification isn’t just something that human beings do in Peirce’s account. It’s a higher order or an intensification of something that’s pervasive in nature, and to me, that seems far more relevant to our ecological situation, to be able to break out of the human enclosure.
Audience Member:
Thank you very much. You’re probably the first person who talked about the idea of the “double stream of time,” which I was listening to. I’m talking about it, and I want to ask you about the idea—which is actually not mine, but it’s an old Aristotelian idea, and then Steiner reconfigured it—that the present is a continuously concrescent moment which integrates the past and also has a relation toward what the future is. But in the Aristotelian idea and in Steiner’s idea, there is something that endures, or is able to stop the stream of time, and which is not all the time newly created. And this is the spiritual, the idea, yes? How would you interpret that—that there’s something still remaining, enduring, not physical of course, but ideal?
Matt:
Yeah, I mean, Whitehead develops a whole theology—process theology. In a later section in this paper, I compare what he calls the “primordial nature of God” to the “I”—to this element that’s coming down, descending perpendicular to the stream of time. Whitehead has an account of the primordial nature of God as ordering the realm of possibility before the universe begins—in a logical sense, not temporally. I think that Whitehead also describes the way this primordial nature of God is an ingredient in, or an element in, the concrescence of all other actual entities, and it becomes conscious in the human being. This is at least resonant with Steiner’s understanding of the “I.” Whitehead also has the “consequent nature of God,” which is God in relationship to the world. So, the primordial nature is eternal and unchanging; the consequent nature of God grows with history, experiences the joy and suffering of every being. It’s one God, but it has these two aspects. I’ll have to share the rest of my paper with you to see if you can follow the comparison I make between Steiner and Whitehead on that question.
Audience Member:
Yeah, because there is something eternal in Whitehead. He’s a process philosopher, but he also has eternal objects, and he has this eternal divine being. So it’s more complicated than just “everything is process.”
Matt:
Exactly.
Audience Member:
We still have time for more questions. Else, I’d like to ask or to add—my turn! At some point, you spoke about how physical processes also manifest a kind of impulsiveness. And maybe not to get too into that, but how do we make sense of that? Because, of course, we can’t think of organisms as just popping out of nowhere—we have to understand their relation to other processes. But are these processes really normative in the same way as organisms? I would say that’s quite a difference.
Matt:
Yeah, well, on Whitehead’s account, we cannot sever the facts from values—every fact is a realization of some value. If we look at what are called physical laws, Whitehead’s understanding is that law is actually a product of an evolutionary process. It’s more like a habit. He’ll describe—as Dan mentioned yesterday—for Whitehead, physics is just the study of smaller organisms. An atom is a self-organizing system. Whitehead even describes the process by which the first hydrogen atom emerged, where you have a proton and electron forming a symbiotic relationship with one another, such that a new form of endurance is achieved, a new pattern of value is achieved. Once that pathway is discovered, the whole universe is transformed as a result. Similarly, when hydrogen atoms are drawn together into stars, and stars into galaxies, and so on—these are akin to organisms or self-organizing systems. These patterns of organization are not just determined in advance, like some preformation of laws imposed from eternity and constants that just happen to be perfectly aligned to allow for that type of order to emerge. Their achievements are expressions of value, right? So it’s a totally different rendering of the physical world. I think, as Dalia was hinting at, if we want to naturalize purposiveness and aim, we really have to go all the way down with this; otherwise, the organic becomes sort of closed in, the biological becomes closed in on itself, and we end up not being able to account for the transition from physics and chemistry to biology.
Audience Member:
Yes, you actually respond to a question I had, which is always presupposing in a way, in my understanding, that you somehow still start from physics and atoms, and then you try to build up the cosmos from there. I don’t know whether Whitehead did that, but just how you explained it now. Why not suppose it could be solved the other way around—that something alive was first? The principle of life, and that when that dies, the dead force becomes too strong, it dies and crystallizes, it becomes matter. Why do we start with matter first?
Matt:
Yeah, yeah. This is just a habit of thought. Why not conceive matter as a precipitation or a dead end product—something that was alive and then, having lost its creativity, becomes visible and becomes physical? Whitehead is a species of psychist. A lot of the analytic philosophers of mind who call themselves pansychists now are still thinking in a substance ontology; Whitehead’s is a different kind of psychism. But there’s no such thing as dead matter in Whitehead’s ontology—there’s no matter in Whitehead’s ontology. Creativity replaces this idea of matter as some kind of dead substance.
Audience Member:
That’s something I also can’t quite follow, because you can say there’s “creativity” inside the table, but the phenomenological appearance is different from something that is alive. That’s also a question I had about your talk: it sort of jumps beyond phenomenology, tries to find unifying principles, and for me this is not, of course, not completely un-phenomenological, but I can follow it easier if I think there’s a life process first—maybe mentality first, life, and then there is a precipitation of something that has been creative, but lost its creativity and becomes visible and becomes physical.
Matt:
Well, you know, Whitehead says in his book The Function of Reason—where he’s looking at evolutionary theory and he’s critical of Darwin’s account of natural selection as being able to explain complexification, and why life should give rise to forms of organisms that are comparatively deficient in survival power (we’re way more fragile than bacteria, which are functionally immortal)—so why is life evolving in this way if survival is the only point? But he says, you know, instead of trying to explain the more complex by reducing it to the simpler, why don’t we reverse that process and understand how it is that beings like us, conscious living beings, could come to exist in this world? What must atoms be like such that we could exist? That’s what he’s talking about—he’s seeking to develop an ontology from the perspective of life on this earth, and from the perspective of human beings alive on this earth. I know there’s, in terms of evolution being a process, where the human being didn’t exist and atoms and stars and galaxies and cells and all that led to the human being, versus seeing the human being as kind of there all along. I think Whitehead would allow us to view it either way, though in order to be conversant with the general understanding of evolution, he tended to talk about it as coming from a developmental process to the human.
Audience Member:
I would perhaps add one more thing from basic anthroposophy. Steiner distinguishes not really between matter and spirit or between principles, but between perception and thinking. This word “polarity” is the key for us at this moment in history. What we are about is a point, and matter is not substance, but what we perceive and call matter is, as Steiner says, matter in perception. If you grab it this way, then you get a completely new access to all these questions, because you can always ask: what is the perceptive part, what is the thinking or ideal part, and how are they brought together within our cognition? I completely agree with you and with Whitehead that the conscious human mind is the place where all these things become conscious, or where they appear—maybe not to say where they happen, but…
Matt:
Sure. And in Whitehead’s 1920 book The Concept of Nature, he begins similarly, talking about the split between concept and percept, and he thinks this has led to our inability to understand their synthesis or their unity, which has led to a picture where we have what he calls the “subjective dream” on the one hand, and then the “conjecture of physics”—so that nature poets should be congratulating themselves, he says, about the beauty of nature, because according to physics and the conjectured models, nature is soundless, scentless, colorless, right? So, he wants to heal the bifurcation by showing how concept and percept can be brought together again. I think there might be a parallel there.
"This temporal intuition has far-reaching consequences relevant to this presentation. It vindicates the scientific importance of the human I—the human ego—as Fichte’s original breakthrough in the Wissenschaftslehre suggested. For Fichte, the “I” is a self-positing, self-intuiting being that discovers its own existence in its deed. For Schelling, Fichte’s insight blossoms into a philosophy of organic nature in which subjectivity is nature’s self-revelation. Whitehead universalizes this same dynamic: every actual occasion is a miniature “I,” the germ of consciousness—a momentary, self-creating creature that both receives and reshapes the world. Human consciousness is thus a concentrated exemplar of an ubiquitous concrescent activity, not an anomalous spectator."
"I" come into existence literally every second anew.
Live in the present moment!
With all the implications.
Great paper once again Matt. Each time I read or listen to one of your podcasts, I understand Whitehead and Schelling more completely. Minor but meaningful point though is the difference between feeling and emotion. As you have noted these feeling responses that can result in prehension and concrescence are mostly tacit or unconscious. Emotion, on the other hand is the triggered response to a feeling and mostly conscious. It is the source of Jung's understanding of what can trigger a complex.
Thank you so much for posting this, Matt! I was wondering whether you are aware of Johannes (Yogi) Jaeger, a development biologist turned process philosopher. I would love to listen to a conversation between the two of you
Thanks Matt - I'm not an academic but managed to hang on in there! I will pass it on to my grandson who is awakening to these ideas. You said: "Whitehead adds that the excess of light discloses facts and also conceals them."
I am reminded of a verse in the Psalms: "in your light we see light". Also in the account of creation we come across light being formed *before* the sun and the stars.
The implication is that light is not just the emanation from an object but contains another aspect as this this primal non conceptual, universal idea.
Again reading your lecture the quote: "we are not a collection of objects but rather a communion of subjects" come to mind - thanks again 👍