The Essence of Evolution

Reflections on my dialogues with evolutionary biologist Tim Jackson about God and Eternal Objects

My friend

Timothy Jackson

and I have been engaged in a rich interdisciplinary dialogue for nearly four years now. Where does the time go? After a bit of an email correspondence in the summer of 2021, our first podcast conversation occurred back in March 2022. We discussed the importance of generalizing evolution beyond biology so that the whole universe can be understood as an evolutionary process. Tim had initially reached out because he was curious to learn more about what I called Whitehead’s “general theory of evolution” in my book Physics of the World-Soul (2021). I was in turn eager to learn from him about the relevance and application of philosophical concepts to his scientific work as an evolutionary biologist and chemical ecologist.

Since our first conversation in 2022, we’ve recorded nearly 30 long-form podcasts (roughly 80 hours) on an array of related topics including evolutionary cosmology and metaphysics, the Free Energy Principle, Carl Jung’s psychology of religion, the psychedelic renaissance, Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic ontology, and improvisation in music and biology (including a fun dialogue with the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake). On top of all that we have a very active WhatsApp thread. Here’s a playlist (you can also find transcripts of these talks on my Substack).

Playlist Link

Tim and I are kindred thinkers who agree on just about everything, but one of the gifts of our sustained dialogue has been an increasing clarity about the subtle differences in our points of view, which grow out of our different disciplinary trainings, including my intensive study of especially Whitehead, Schelling, Goethe, and Rudolf Steiner. I thought it would be valuable to unpack these interpretive tensions, both for the sake of my own self-understanding, and perhaps also for advancing the general conversation about what an evolutionary cosmology entails.

The basic issues include Whitehead’s process theological account of God’s primordial and consequent natures, his category of Eternal Objects, and the origins of form and aim in nature. In short, I’ve defended an interpretation of Whitehead’s reformed Platonic vision, whereas Tim argues for a thoroughly constructivist reading of the emergence of form and purposiveness in the course of cosmic and biotic history. He believes that the creative evolution of endless forms most beautiful can be explained without invoking what he perceives to be Whitehead et al.’s unnecessary positing of transcendent ordering principles.

While I do agree with Tim that novel morphologies have and will continue to emerge, I believe this process of emergent evolution presupposes a deeper metaphysical grounding. Our dialogues are more than scholastic sparring; it is part of a larger effort to rethink nature, meaning, and value in light of both scientific discovery and metaphysical reflection. What kind of universe allows for life, mind, and meaningful transformation? Evolution has metaphysical conditions of possibility, and I have found Whitehead’s process-relational ontology to be especially productive for thinking through what those conditions might be.

I do not pretend certainty about any of this. What I am offering is a speculative hypothesis, which I fully intend to be subject to correction due to any logical errors or incoherencies, and to adjustment due to any empirical inadequacies or new evidence. I also approach metaphysics in a pragmatist spirit, which is to say that I think the sorts of ideas we settle on regarding our cosmic situation really do matter for how we live. The point is not that truth is reducible to utility, nor that ideas with ethically or aesthetically upsetting implications are automatically to be deemed untrue. While I do think truth, beauty, and goodness are in some important sense dependently co-arising and mutually implicated, my pragmatic method simply means that I reject the modern separation between theory and practice. I agree with Whitehead that: “The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought” (PR 4). Whitehead elaborates:

“Whatever is found in ‘practice’ must lie within the scope of the meta­physical description. When the description fails to include the ‘practice,’ the metaphysics is inadequate and requires revision. There can be no appeal to practice to supplement metaphysics, so long as we remain con­tented with our metaphysical doctrines. Metaphysics is nothing but the description of the generalities which apply to all the details of practice” (PR 13).

As a human being engaged in inquiry concerning the nature of my own and others’ existence—Who am I?—and my/our place in the universe—What is this?—I strive to avoid the sort of dualistic theorizing that would seek to explain that universe as if we did not exist. In other words, I am seeking a theory of the world that includes the fact that there are theorists, and that recognizes the way theorization is always an embodied activity. Self-conscious agency like ours has taken billions of years of evolutionary experimentation to arise, but that it did arise tells us something essential about the evolutionary process. What follows is my attempt to spell out that essence.

Whitehead burning the dictionary.

Whitehead introduces many neologisms and is thus notoriously difficult to understand. Even when he uses traditional philosophical terminology—like subject and object—he does so in an entirely new way. In Whitehead’s way of thinking, an “object” is a potential for feeling, while a “subject” is the feeler in process of arising from a synthesis of said feelings. This process of integration is what he calls “concrescence.” Thus, eternal objects are the definite potentials available for feeling, and actual occasions are the determinate subjects that feel. Notice that these terms require one another for their meaning: no objects without subjects and vice versa. The relationship between object and subject is not a substantial duality but a processual polarity: each concrescing actual occasion arises out of and inherits the objective data of its past (what Whitehead refers to as “physical prehension”), synthesizes that data with relevant alternatives (via “conceptual prehension” of eternal objects not already felt in the past) in the subjective immediacy of the present, and then upon reaching aesthetic satisfaction perishes into the transcendent future as a “superject” that functions as objective data for the next round of concrescence. “[Each] concrescence is an in­dividualization of the whole universe” (PR 165), meaning that moment by moment, occasion by occasion, the macrocosm is microcosmically recapitulating itself, differentiating into ever-richer complex unity.

God is conceived as an actual entity whose process is determined by the same categoreal obligations as any other actuality, with the exception that God’s concrescence is everlasting. Because God’s experience arises primordially without any history to inherit, there is an inversion in the usual physical-to-conceptual prehensive flow. God’s experience begins with conceptual prehension of the unbounded realm of eternal possibilities. For Whitehead, God’s primordial envisagement of infinite possibility is a prerequisite for the intelligibility of the creative advance of the historic universe. God is that actual entity by virtue of whose original and ongoing concrescence every subsequent actual occasion prehends a shared spatiotemporal “extensive continuum” and axiological ideal. While each actual occasion is absolutely unique and self-creating, the divinely ordered continuum of possibilities that occasions arise out of and perish into assures coherent relationality. Finite occasions also inherit and are situated by the patterned habits laid down over evolutionary history; but in addition to inheriting what actually happened in the past, they also feel all the unrealized but relevant alternatives, all the possibilities that could have but did not happen. Thus the pathos of the past results not just from the facts, but from the penumbra of could-have-beens haloing our memory of the facts. Whether physically prehended in the realized potentiality of the already past, or conceptually prehended in the eternal potentiality of the could be but not yet, eternal objects thus have an essentially relational function, serving as the cosmic glue holding together otherwise once-occurrent perspectival bursts of creativity. “The solidarity of the universe is based on the relational functioning of eternal objects” (PR 164).

Whitehead’s conception of God is unorthodox in the extreme: God is not an omnipotent creator but the primordial creature of Creativity responsible for catalyzing otherwise chaotic possibilities into definite (but not yet determinate) patterns that invite the decisions of finite creatures by granting them a sense of relevant novelty. Phylogenetic adaptation and ontogenetic learning obviously provide biological organisms with a great deal of inherited context and capacity to inform intelligent decision-making. But without a primordial lure, can an evolutionary process really get going? Without a grain in the oyster, an attunement in the tenor of all things to one another, a hint of harmony behind the humming of bird, bee, and blossom, can anything evolve? That is the question: Can all the whirling worlds including ours with living beings—including we who raise such questions—be explained by chance accumulation of blind but more durable variations across the strata of “pure difference”? Are mind and life, and the forms and aims that animate them, entirely emergent from the pre-individual stochasticity of material-energetic processes?

I do not want to caricature the sort of vitalist materialism that Tim defends (he is even willing to adopt the phrase “vitalist-animism” for rhetorical purposes). It is not the mechanistic materialism of our great grandparents. I, too, want to redeem φύσις from the demotion and domestication it has suffered at the hands of modern theology and science alike. Matter is alive, but for me, life means soul, and soul means form. Tim and I often find ourselves agreeing that matter is always already informed and at no point needs to be stamped by forms by some transcendent demiurge. An evolutionary cosmology requires us to imagine the artist and the medium as mutually immanent. The creation creates the creator as much as the reverse.

But again, without a divine longing latent in the plenum of potentiae to disturb their evaluative equilibrium (where no pattern is preferred) and so to stir learning (rooted in the preference for truth, beauty, and goodness)—without a Relator God or primordial possibilitect to define (without individually determining) the continuum of co-extension, and to provide the graduated intensive relevance that makes individuation possible—I fail to see how an evolutionary process could ever get underway. Evolution builds on but cannot itself generate form and aim.

Without an initial aim or objective lure to guide their subjective aims, Whitehead worried that finite creatures would drown in the onrush of Creativity. “Apart from God, there could be no relevant novelty” (PR 164).

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla is the music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Image from classicfm.com.

Whitehead’s ontology is profoundly relational. To say his understanding of relationality is profound is to say that it is literally groundless. Relationality is not a new foundation so much as the fountain from which his metaphysics springs. His eternal objects are not abstract universals fixed in the changeless perfection of heaven. They are real functions involved in the hustle and bustle of the world-process, essential to the maintenance and creation of new relations among actual occasions. I quote Whitehead at length:

“…every item of the universe, includ­ing all the other actual entities, is a constituent in the constitution of any one actual entity. This conclusion has already been employed under the title of the ‘principle of relativity.’ … Some principle is now required to rescue actual entities from being undifferentiated repetitions, each of the other, with mere numerical di­versity. This requisite is supplied by the ‘principle of intensive relevance.’ The notion of intensive relevance is fundamental for the meaning of such concepts as ‘alternative possibilities,’ ‘more or less,’ ‘important or negli­gible.’ The principle asserts that any item of the universe, however pre­posterous as an abstract thought, or however remote as an actual entity, has its own gradation of relevance, as prehended, in the constitution of any one actual entity: it might have had more relevance; and it might have had less relevance, including the zero of relevance involved in the negative prehension; but in fact it has just that relevance whereby it finds its status in the constitution of that actual entity. … There is interconnection between the degrees of relevance of different items in the same actual entity. … There are items which, in certain respective gradations of relevance, are contraries to each other; so that those items, with their respective intensities of relevance, cannot coexist in the constitution of one actual entity. … [Prehensions or] ‘feelings’ are the entities which are primarily ‘compatible’ or ‘incom­patible.’ … These eternal objects determine how the world of actual entities enters into the constitution of each one of its members via its feelings. And they also express how the constitution of any one actual entity is analysable into phases, related as presupposed and presupposing. Eternal objects express how the predecessor-phase is absorbed into the successor-­phase without limitation of itself, but with additions necessary for the determination of an actual unity in the form of individual satisfaction. The actual entities enter into each others’ constitutions under limitations im­posed by incompatibilities of feelings. Such incompatibilities relegate various elements in the constitutions of felt objects to the intensive zero, which is termed ‘irrelevance.’ The preceding phases enter into their succes­sors with additions which eliminate the indeterminations. The how of the limitations, and the how of the additions, are alike the realization of eternal objects in the constitution of the actual entity in question. An eternal object in abstraction from any one particular actual entity is a potentiality for ingression into actual entities. In its ingression into any one actual entity, either as relevant or as irrelevant, it retains its poten­tiality of indefinite diversity of modes of ingression, a potential indeter­mination rendered determinate in this instance. The definite ingression into a particular actual entity is not to be conceived as the sheer evocation of that eternal object from ‘not-being’ into ‘being’; it is the evocation of determination out of indetermination. Potentiality becomes reality; and yet retains its message of alternatives which the actual entity has avoided. In the constitution of an actual entity:—whatever component is red, might have been green; and whatever component is loved, might have been coldly esteemed. The term ‘universal’ is unfortunate in its application to eternal objects; for it seems to deny, and in fact it was meant to deny, that the actual entities also fall within the scope of the principle of relativity. If the term ‘eternal objects’ is disliked, the term ‘potentials’ would be suitable. The eternal objects are the pure potentials of the universe; and the actual entities differ from each other in their realization of potentials” (PR 148-149).

Eternal objects thus allow actual occasions to relate intimately with one another while still remaining different from one another. Eternal objects are not merely universals but potentials whose realization simultaneously differentiates and unifies actual entities in their creative advance toward novelty.

Eternal objects are “deficient in actuality” in themselves. They only exist as ingressions in actual entities. This is Whitehead’s inversion of Plato’s theory of Forms: rather than concrete things being mere imperfect copies of transcendent Forms, for Whitehead the concrete actualities are the primary reality and eternal objects only exist as ingredients in actual processes. Whitehead still thinks metaxically about the relationship of form and fact. Neither could pre-exist or instantiate the other. They participate one another, though not in a one-way direction (whether fact derived from form as some streams of Platonism might suggest, or form derived from fact as some streams of constructivism argue).

In God’s primordial conceptual prehension of eternal objects, every possible pattern of value is felt. Whitehead imagines God as unconsciously beholding all the pure potentials and intuiting their mutual compatibilities and contrasts (God would remain unconscious without a consequent physical prehension of the world’s reaction to the primordial aim.) “The primordial nature of God” is this ideal ordering of possibilities: an everlasting vision of how each eternal object could contribute to the realization of cosmic beauty. God does not create the eternal objects (they are uncreated potentialities) or actual occasions (they are self-creating); rather, God’s envisionment harmoniously relates eternal objects among themselves and to actuality generally.

God does not determine how individual actualities decide to ingress eternal objects. But because, as Whitehead puts it, God’s primordial nature is “the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality,” every finite occasion prehends possibility comparatively with the divine ideal. To speak colloquially, God cannot force us to do anything, but we always know God—“the judge arising out of the very nature of things”—is watching, not to condemn but to encourage.

“Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each tem­poral Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified—the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore” (PR 390).

God injects an element of purpose into each moment of creation by offering it an ideal aim at some valuable realization. It must be emphasized again and again that this influence is persuasive, not coercive: God gently goads each actual occasion toward the forms of feeling that best harmonize with the ideal of intensified beauty. Creatures are free to deviate or degrade this ideal—hence evil and dissonance—but God’s erotic lure ensures that there is always an optimal form of order toward which the process can be drawn, a future into which every seemingly dissonant note can yet come to harmonize. It is in this sense that Whitehead calls God the “poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness” (PR 346).

Whether in the form of least action or jazz improvisation, the divine eros is the great counter-force to entropy that pulls the universe upward into the promise of as yet invisible futures even while the past appears to lay in ruins. Whitehead’s dipolar conception of God is unorthodox, but it allows him to affirm that the universe has an intelligible directionality without undermining the genuine freedom and creativity expressed in individual occasions. God’s envisagement is the enabling condition for creativity to produce the ordered novelty of a self-organizing universe.

Tim contends that Whitehead’s theology and reformed Platonic forms add unnecessary metaphysical baggage. From a constructivist point of view, form can be explained (so far as explanation is possible) by evolutionary and developmental history, without positing any eternal archetypes or divine agency. To introduce something like Whitehead’s eternal objects or God’s primordial mind, he argues, is to saddle our explanation with unexplained pre-existents—which he views as essentially “naked posits” that leave an explanatory debt rather than resolve one (see his discussion with Robert Prentner and Michael Levin). Why assume a ready-made phase space of pre-defined possibilities when we can explain how forms emerge gradually through the self-organizing iterations of difference? This line of thought aligns with the philosophy of C. S. Peirce, who suggested that:

“The evolutionary process is…not a mere evolution of the existing universe, but rather a process by which the very Platonic forms themselves have become or are becoming developed” (CP 6.194).

Importantly, Whitehead is here not all that different from Peirce. As he puts it in Process and Reality:

“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).

Both reject a bifurcation between timeless, pre-given universals and historical, emergent particulars. For both, form is neither imposed from above nor merely constructed from below, but arises through a creative negotiation between potentiality and actuality.

All enduring patterns and “laws” of physics are themselves evolving results of the world-process, not stone inscribed commandments. In Peirce’s terms, laws are habits. In Whitehead’s, laws are a function of relatively stable societies or historical routes. From such a perspective, appealing to a transcendent principle (whether Forms or a Demiurge) can seem like a throwback to pre-Darwinian “preformationist” thinking. The constructivist insists that we should strive to explain how order and form arise out of prior disorder and simpler interactions, rather than posit an order that exists before the world.

Tim’s challenge presses Whitehead to justify why any eternal or divine element is needed at all, given that science already provides powerful frameworks (natural selection, complexity theory, etc.) for understanding the emergence of form. But to my mind, this is just to conflate levels of analysis. Whitehead agrees with Peirce and with Tim’s constructivist insistence upon the historical emergence of all enduring structures and laws. But the level of enduring societies presupposes the interplay of actual occasions and eternal objects (ie, occurrences and recurrences, respectively). These are the metaphysical ingredients that provide the enabling conditions for the historical evolution of self-organizing social orders. Eternal objects stand not in opposition to evolutionary cosmology but as its metaphysical presupposition.

Plato launched astronomy toward scientific self‑discovery by posing the “problem of the planets”: beneath the tangled, wandering crossings of stars and planets, there must lie a single, harmonious design. Were we to gaze downward from heaven rather than upward from earth, the sky would unveil its true, eternal architecture—an immense cosmic world‑tree. Even heliocentrism, for all its elegant simplification, is merely a clearer view of the embroidered backside of reality, still confined to the sensory tapestry and thus no final answer to Plato’s challenge.

Whitehead manages to “save the appearances” (as Plato intended) without bifurcating reality into two severed tiers. The realm of eternal objects is not elsewhere. Possibility only exists in reference to what occurs here and now. It is the conceptual precondition and ever-present companion of the physical world. Whitehead thereby honors Plato’s vision of a rational order while avoiding the explanatory debt of simply positing that order as already existing prior to the or any moment of genesis. As James Bradley puts it:

“Whitehead accomplishes an extraordinary task: making the language of novelty and difference speak through the apparatus of traditional metaphysics. … If Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics revealed the metaphorical character of concepts, Whitehead's transcendental cosmology rediscovered the conceptual power of metaphors. This is a complete reversal of Platonism—but it is carried out from within metaphysics and in the name of metaphysics” (Bradley 1993).

One of the other sites of tension between Tim and I is the question of whether the primordial nature of God is a naked logical posit or a metaphor offered as a description of an descendental fact. Whitehead tries to show how the forms are efficacious (through God and creaturely prehensions) and why they do not render evolution redundant but on the contrary grant it intelligibility. He inverts and naturalizes Plato’s Forms by integrating them into the creative flux of becoming.

Another key point that feels like an important tension is that, for Whitehead, God’s emergence is contingent from the perspective of Creativity, which is the ultimate metaphysical category. Creativity is the principle of novelty, of becoming itself. God is said to condition Creativity in such a way that novelty is not sheer chaos but assumes definite (but, again, not determined) form. After God “emerges” (though Whitehead does not posit a temporal emergence at some specific point in the past, but only claims to be describing an evident cosmological function), God becomes necessary for all finite occasions of experience. Thus, what begins as contingent from the absolute perspective of Creativity becomes necessary from the perspective of the actual occasions inheriting the divine ordering.

Tim still fears that this sort of talk just sneaks essentialism or transcendence in the back door. I do not at all intend to deny biological reality because of an extra-scientific faith commitment, but simply seek to adequately generalize the cosmological implication of mind and life. We agree that Darwin was not trying to explain the origin of form or aim as such, but rather the historical differentiation of forms. Still, the shift from special creation to survival of the fittest is a dramatic one, and I agree with Tim that Darwin demands philosophical attention. Form is not forged once and fixed forever but fluid, more river delta than rigid program. Where we diverge is in whether the evolutionary emergence of form and aim as such from arbitrary change is intelligible.

Darwin assumes living organisms capable of self-production, variation, and inheritance, and a changing environment capable of selecting for fitness. He does not ask or claim to explain how auto/sympoietic organisms could emerge from Newtonian physics. Whitehead attempts to generalize Darwin by showing that even physical processes exhibit an evolution of organic forms and purposive development. While it is true that Darwin grants far more agency to organisms than neo-Darwinian genetic reductionists, he still attempted to theorize life within the confines of a mechanistic cosmology. The universe begins evolving not out of arbitrary perturbations in extended matter but through the aesthetic lure of novel intensities. Form is not imposed from above but is eternally available as a patterned field of possibility made real by the Being of the Between Whitehead perhaps ill-advisedly decided to christen “God.”

Whitehead, I would argue, neither posits Forms as pre-given archetypes nor denies the role of construction. He seeks a balance between eternal potentiality and actual emergence, a philosophy of organism in which one form is given so all forms can be made.

Tim emphasizes strong emergence, top-down causation, and circular feedback in complex systems. Consciousness or experience or life need not have been there from the beginning, in his view. Emergence is real, generating genuine novelty. I don’t disagree, but I believe Whitehead’s panexperientialism offers a richer ontological account of how any evolutionary emergence is possible in the first place.

Most theories of physicalist emergence treat conscious experience as epiphenomenal or secondary. Tim is far from a greedy reductionist and so grants conscious beings real agency. But if we are to explain agency, purpose, and feeling, the panexperientialist argument is that we need these qualitative powers to be operative from the start—not fully formed, of course, but nascent. Whitehead’s concept of “prehension” allows for a continuity between the most rudimentary energetic transactions and full-blown conscious self-reflection. This is not panpsychism in the sense of smearing consciousness haphazardly across the universe, but the recognition of a processual continuum of experiential intensities. There is emergent evolution because the cosmos is oriented not only toward perpetuation of the same but toward experiential intensification through the realization of novel beauty. Cosmogenesis aims at value.

I know Tim appreciates the poetic and mystical allure of such views, but he remains cautious. Of course the universe is beautiful to us! We’re made of it. But maybe science requires just the brute facts? I sympathize with the sober, prosaic impulse. But I would argue that Whitehead’s aesthetic ontology is not mere projection. It is a recognition that experience (whether scientific, artistic, or religious) is value-laden, that perception just like causation is not neutral but evaluative. The fact that we find the cosmos beautiful is not an accident of our evolution but a clue about evolution’s deepest nature (and to be clear I know Tim agrees the sources of our perception of beauty run deeper than the reductive explanations of evolutionary psychology).

He has a robust grasp of the philosophy of science, but it sometimes seems to me that Tim wants to remain within the province of scientific epistemology, thereby ensuring that metaphysical claims do not overstep their empirical warrant. I respect this caution and remain his student on many empirical matters. But I want to affirm that metaphysics, understood as an experimental and fallibilist inquiry, can illuminate what science alone cannot—namely, the conditions for intelligibility, value, and novelty (an affirmation he likely shares, though we differ on which metaphysics).

Whitehead's speculative philosophy is not a return to classical idealism or a disguised theological dogma. It is an attempt to synthesize the insights of evolutionary biology, modern physics, and the broadest possible survey of human aesthetic and religious experience.

God is neither a cosmic engineer nor a transcendent necessity but the evident reality of relational order that conditions Creativity without determining its outcomes. Eternal objects are not pre-existing archetypes dispensed from heaven but the potencies inhering within and between actualities.

Tim's constructivist hesitation is essential to keep this metaphysical vision grounded. Slipping back into classical idealisms or foundationalisms would be a tremendous disservice to Darwin’s legacy. But I believe Whitehead’s rendering of the metaphysical stakes offers the most promising scheme for unifying science and spirit, fact and value, actual and eternal. The tensions between us may be, in the end, an example of the generativity of evolution itself—a dialectic leading not to refutation but mutual intensification.