It’s never easy to know how to introduce Whitehead’s ideas into the midst of an interdisciplinary conversation. He’s notorious for his neologisms. And yet careful study of his ideas is richly rewarding, because of the way it lets you see connections among the special sciences, and between natural science and one’s own human experience—as an appreciator of art, as a devotee or practitioner of various religious and spiritual traditions, and as a human being who has to make decisions and take responsibility for one’s actions, who has to be a spouse or partner, a parent... We play all these roles, and I think philosophy and metaphysics should be of use to them.
I’m a pragmatist at the end of the day, and so I engage in this effort of imagination not just for the sake of enjoyable flights of fancy, but to transform the world in a positive way. I want to bring more harmony into our shared reality, and that’s my guiding light in this work.
I’ll be speaking with Mike Levin tomorrow. Mike is a developmental biologist at Tufts University, and the context for our conversation is the International Whitehead Conference, which is in Zhuhai, China this year. I’ll be traveling there in a few weeks, but Mike will be back in the US—and given the time zones, rather than have him wake up at 4 a.m. to join us on Zoom in China, I’ve invited him to record something with me in advance.
Mike and I have had a number of dialogues over the years, and I’ve been delighted by the transformation—the Kuhnian paradigm shift—that he’s helping to inaugurate in biology. He points to the collective intelligence of cells, which are able to leverage the formative power of bioelectric fields to intelligently organize themselves in response to novel problems and environments that they’ve never experienced, that their ancestors haven’t experienced, responding creatively in a way that seems to go beyond their inherited genetic repertoire. Mike is beginning to point to another source of order in evolution. He calls it the Platonic morphospace, and he wants to argue that forms have a kind of causal agency—that what we think of as minds are a gradient of patterns. At the bottom of that gradient are mathematical facts that we don’t think could have been otherwise. But as you ascend the gradient of these formal patterns in Platonic space, they become more and more agential; the minds become more and more intelligent.
I never would have imagined that I’d live to see this kind of shift at the heart of biology, where all of a sudden formal and final causality, purpose, and this field-like formative patterning that Levin points to become serious scientific hypotheses and research programs again. But here we are. As a process philosopher, I obviously want to encourage this kind of paradigm-changing science. But I also think the metaphysics is messy, and we need to think through what we mean by agency, what we mean by form, and the role of history and time—the role of chance alongside necessity, and then, in addition to chance and necessity, something like learning, something like agency: decision-making ability, intelligence.
We want to tell a naturalistic story in the modern age. But of course, anyone familiar with my work knows I’m not shy about bringing in theological concepts, because I think modern science is itself built out of components that are theological. If you’re going to talk about physical laws, if you’re going to talk about causal explanation, then at the end of the causal chains and the logical arguments there will be certain moments where you have to bite the bullet and say: nature is intelligible because there’s an intelligence at work.
Now, I am not an intelligent-design theorist or a creationist, and the reason is that they tend to be just as mechanistic as the materialists. I think organically. I know Mike has been trying to break down the machine/organism dichotomy, and I think this is really a terminological issue. I don’t necessarily disagree with what he’s saying there—but, playing a different language game than the one he’s playing, I’d still want to make distinctions between what’s usually called a machine and what’s usually called an organism.
So rather than use Whitehead’s terminology, let me make a distinction—three distinctions, really, that he makes, but in ordinary terms. I think making these distinctions helps us sort out this issue of agency, because I’ve been concerned that in the Platonic proposal Mike is making, organisms become puppets of the patterns. I’ve wanted to locate the agency differently. But maybe, again, it’s terminological. So one of the issues I want to work out with Mike tomorrow concerns what follows from this distinction.
Events occur—actual occasions, in Whitehead’s terms. Forms recur—eternal objects, in Whitehead’s terms. And organisms endure—societies, or historical routes, in Whitehead’s terms.
Whitehead makes these distinctions so that we can undertake a more concrete analysis of the process of reality, and I think they help us locate agency more rigorously. By making this metaphysical distinction between occurrences, recurrences, and endurances—the events that occur, the forms that recur, and the organisms that endure—I think we can illuminate the data Mike’s lab at Tufts is collecting. So this isn’t a rival metaphysics, necessarily. It’s an attempt to interpret the data, and to affirm the need for a structured space, a latent space of possibilities that is not separate from the physical world as a dualistic substance set apart from it, but that is nonetheless irreducible to how we normally understand that physical world. I agree with Mike about that. But making the distinction between occurrence, recurrence, and endurance helps us navigate the semantic thicket around this term agency.
Endurance is not a third thing alongside the other two. It’s not a third reality, domain, or level standing beside actual occasions and eternal objects. Recurrence is carried by occurrence. Whatever endures is a function of the recurrence of a pattern, and that recurrence is always carried by actual occasions—by occurrences, by events. Forms, patterns, eternal objects recur. Events, occurrences, never recur. So forms recur, they don’t occur; events occur, but they never recur. They are once-occurrent, unique. An organism endures because a route of occurrences keeps occurring that reenacts a recurrent form. That’s what a society is in Whitehead’s sense: a historical route with a definite characteristic that recurs. The persistence of a morphological pattern is nothing but the iterated occurring of a cellular collective’s own acts of feeling, moment by moment, being influenced by an inherited form.
An event is just what it is. You can’t describe it in terms of anything else; it’s singular, and it can’t recur. But an eternal object is what can be again. Eternal objects don’t occur; they only recur. They can be again. So what endure are societies, never occasions—and occasions themselves don’t endure. They arise, and they perish.
I think there’s an asymmetry here, because recurrence is ontologically parasitic on occurrence. This is Whitehead’s ontological principle: outside of actual occasions of experience, there is nothing. Eternal objects must in a sense be housed within actual occasions; they don’t float free in another dimension. Recurrences are ontologically parasitic on occurrences. There can be nothing that recurs except as the recurring of occasions that entertain that form, that pattern. This is a more Aristotelian view, in the way we typically characterize the Platonic–Aristotelian difference—and of course that characterization is a caricature of those two thinkers, but we understand the distinction being made. A pattern endures only because it’s borrowing that endurance from the events, the actual occasions, that ingress it.
So the forms, the patterns, are not the puppeteers; the organisms are not just passive clients subject to the dictates of the design of these abstractions. Patterns don’t act—that’s what makes them patterns, potentials, possibilities. The forms themselves are not the prime agents, because they don’t even persist on their own. They depend on actual occasions to ingress them, and to ingress them in a way that’s persuasive to their inheritors—to future occasions—so that those occasions decide to ingress them again, such that there’s a recurrence, and an endurance as a result. Endurance is always on loan from occurrences. It depends on the decisions of actual occasions whether or not an eternal object will endure.
Another metaphor I’ve used in thinking with—and in response to—Mike Levin’s work is this: the patterns are the notes being played on the piano. They’re not the player. You could say the morphology of the organism is the music, the song. The player is something subtler than the visible, measurable matter the organism is composed of, the molecular parts. There is something about the wholeness, the entelechy, the form and aim of an organism that’s not simply located in its parts. But is that just the pattern—at least a pattern in Whitehead’s sense, the recurrences, the eternal objects? I think we need to shift and concretize our awareness so that we recognize the role of occurrences, of actual occasions, and don’t give all the agency to the forms. Forms are more like the notes being played on the piano.
Let me build another image: a candle flame. It’s a dissipative structure. The shape of the flame is a recurrent form. A flame is a society of occasions of experience, in Whitehead’s terms—there’s a recurrent form that lets us identify it as fire, a definite characteristic by which we see, “Oh yes, that’s fire, there it is again.” It changes moment by moment; it’s a chaotic system. And yet it’s also the same, moment by moment—we see, “Yes, that’s fire, there it is again.” What we call combustion is a stream of perishing occurrences. Different molecules flow through the dissipative structure of the candle flame moment by moment, and that’s a stream of occasions in Whitehead’s terms. What endures—the enduring flame—is a form sustained through that relay of combustion events.
If we describe a flame that way, I don’t think anyone would say that the flame-shape itself, the pattern that gives it its form, is the agent responsible for the combustion, the agent actually burning the wax. The shape of the flame recurs—and this isn’t a static shape; fire is obviously dynamic—but all the shapes the fire takes have a family resemblance, one we recognize as recurring. So the shape recurs; the combustion, the burning of the wax, occurs; and the flame as an activity is what endures—what makes us say, “Yes, that’s the same fire, that’s the same candle burning.”
Now, when we’re in Michael Levin’s lab looking at multicellular animals—planaria, flatworms—seeking a target morphology, that target is the flame-shape. Each act of the cells, the metabolic activity and the gap-junction activity, is the combustion; those are the occurrences, moment by moment. And the organism itself is what endures—it’s the enduring flame, what persists through time. So a set point that can be rewritten—when Levin and his colleagues change the bioelectric field, using certain drugs to shift the charges of cells and redraw the pattern, so that you suddenly get a two-headed planarian—is a shift in which form the occurrings are recurring, a shift in what will recur across the occurrences that lead to the enduring organism in its developmental sequence. But the set point isn’t what burns the candle. The pattern of the flame, the pattern of the organism—that’s not what does the work. The burning does.
This is a subtle distinction. But I think it’s important, and I think it actually affirms everything Mike Levin is doing. It’s just a different metaphysical interpretation of the science.
That’s the thought I wanted to express. I’m speaking with Mike tomorrow afternoon, so I’d be curious what you all think of my framing. It’s always helpful to have feedback as I develop these ideas. Thanks for your attention.
