Cupid and Psyche: Part Five

We now move to the turn from nineteenth to the twentieth century, and to the Anglo-American philosophical tradition with F.H. Bradley and Alfred North Whitehead.It is also the last time the dialectic of will and intellect is a metaphysical issue, instead of a psychological issue. We shall start with Bradley, but the emphasis in this section shall be on Whitehead. The reason being that is that Bradley is more straight forward on the dialectic. In Bradley we observe a new feeling about the cosmos manifesting. A view that shall soon make itself known in literature. Let us go to some quotes by Bradley: (quotes taken from T.L.S. Sprigge's book: "American Truth and British Reality") "Now what does all this rest on? Observation of our experience, that of a few passing parasites on a speck of dust." Bradley again: "My way of contact with Reality is through a limited aperture. For I cannot get at it directly except through the felt "this", and our immediate interchange and transfluence takes place through one small opening. Everything beyond, through not less real is and expansion of the common essence which we feel burningly in this one focus, And so, in the end, to know the universe, we must fall back upon our personal experience and sensation." It is interesting to comapre the above quotes with the fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft, (taken form "Call of Cthulhu"): "The most merciful thing in the world, I think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents, We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of a black seas on infinity, land it was not meant that we should voyage far." The idea that there is no God's eye view of the cosmos is a new one in the Western tradition. The confidence that the human intellect can grasp reality and solve all the riddles of the cosmos is gone. Bradley received a lot of criticism for this position. G.R.G. Mure complained that the intellect committed suicide in Bradley's philosophy. How did this happen? Bradley starts out as an orthodox rationalist making the law of non-contradiction the centerpiece of his epistemology. The turn in Bradley is that he uses the law of non-contradiction to show how are knowledge is flawed. He does this by destroying relational knowledge. And since, all abstract knowledge is relational the intellect falls. So Bradley insists that the only way humans can grasp the cosmos is by a comprehensive feeling. Bradley always puts will over intellect. We know from the Wheeler principle that whenever you make the law of non-contradiction the centerpiece of your epistemology that you shall come up with a One in your metaphysics. And Bradley does come up with a One, but Bradley's One is a passive One, like Parmenides. Unlike Parmenides the One is a feeling not an abstraction. The One is not actively creating the world like in Plotinus. Bradley does admit that abstractions and reason can educate the emotions, but never triumph over feelings and emotions. The only grasp we can have on reality is a comprehensive feeling. Whitehead was deeply influenced by Bradley, but comes to different conclusions. So to Whitehead we turn. To understand Whitehead's philosophy we must begin with his theory of actual occasions. The actual occasion is the fundamental particle or stuff of the cosmos. As we shall observe the actual occasions resemble cells in a living organism. Thus, Whitehead's calling his thought the philosophy of organism. The easiest way to imagine actual occasions is as pixels in a television screen. Each pixel is stationary; they never change location. Everything from electrons to galaxies is made of actual occasions; like the images on a television screen are made of pixels. Actual occasions are four dimensional instead of two dimensional like pixels. Actual occasions create the three dimensions of space like pixels create the images on a television screen, this is what creates space, the relation between the images. Actual occasions create the dimension of time, by continually being created and perishing. This is what creates the oscillation of reality. In this way actual occasions differ from pixels, by constantly coming into and going out of existence, but each time series of actual occasions always maintains the same location, like a pixel changing colors. When an actual occasion perishes another comes into existence, just like a pixel changing colors. The creating and perishing of actual occasions create time, while the actual occasions relation to one another create space. Now we must turn to the inner life of actual occasions. According to Whitehead actual occasions have a rich inner life, so to the inner life we go. The actual occasion has and appetite for realization. Remember earlier I compared actual occasions to living cells. Its realization is also its satisfaction. So how does an actual occasion reach realization. To answer this we must examine Whitehead's concept of God. Whitehead's god is concerned with intensity, and novelty. To understand how God works his twin purposes of intensity and novelty we must bring another of Whitehead's theories that of the eternal objects. Whitehead says we can also call the eternal objects potentials, and it must be said potential is a much better term for what Whitehead is discussing. The potentials act like Plato's Forms, but have significant differences, The potentials provide the means for actual occasions to reach realization. The potential like Plato's Forms are abstractions, such as humanity, electrons, planets, etc. Actual occasions have an appetite (desire) to choose a potential and realize (bring about) the abstraction as a material entity. Of course, one actual occasion cannot by itself realize an electron or a human. So the actual occasions group together to form constellations. Back to our analogy of a television screen. One pixel cannot make up a image of a human on the screen, but a coordinated group (constellation) of pixels can form an image of a human on the screen. As always with Whitehead this brings up another question: how do the actual occasions choose? And again we have to bring in another of Whitehead's concepts, that of prehension. Prehension is a way of saying that each actual occasion feels or is influenced by all the actual occasions that proceeded it. If an actual occasion accepts the data from another preceding actual occasion it is a positive prehension, it it rejects or excludes the data of preceding actual occasions it is a negative prehenison. Let us pause to observe how this fits in to the dialectic of will and intellect. The actual occasions are of course will or desire, the potentials are abstractions and intellect. Whitehead says everywhere that potentials and God are limiting factors. With out limiting limits there would be only a buzzing chaos. Intensity is caused by limiting the desires of the actual occasions into realizing an abstraction. The actual occasions by limiting there desires by realizing a potential create our everyday world. We must now tie this in with Whitehead's concept of God. It is the potentials that are the cause of intensity by focusing the energy of the actual occasions. The unrealized potentials are the primordial nature of God, these are the potentials that can be chosen by actual occasions. This is why Whitehead differentiates his position from Kant's philosophy. In Kant the subjective creates the objective, while in Whitehead the objective potentials create the intensity of the actual occasions, thus realizing the material cosmos. After a potential has been realized it moves to the consequent nature of God, and achieves what Whitehead calls objective immortality. To put it more simply, what has been realized influences what can be realized in the future. A crude analogy may help to clarify. To build a ship one must first have the wood or material, and the tools to build the ship. So once certain potentials are realized they influence what can be realized in the future. This is how God creates novelty. So God in his primordial nature and consequent nature has a reciprocal relationship with the actual occasions. In many ways Whitehead's philosophy resembles the philosophy of Bohme. That the cosmos is a continual process of self-realization. Whitehead differs from Bohme in that he cuts will and intellect into two distinct ontological entities: actual occasions and potentials. so far Whitehead''s cosmos is tending towards greater consciousness by way of greater abstraction. There should be no doubt that Whitehead views intellect as the moving term, and the goal of the process. This was a popular view of the time; it can also be found in Bergson, C.E.M. Joad, and in literature in H.G. Wells, and oddly enough in George Bernard Shaw. So there is no doubt of Whitehead's position, let us go to one of the more pellucid passages from: "Modes of Thought." "I remember an incident proving that at least some squirrels have not crossed this borderline of civilization. We were in a charming camp situated amidst woodland and bordering a Vermont lake. A squirrel had made its nest in our main sitting room, placing it in a hole in brick-work around the fireplace. She came in and out to her young ones, ignoring the presence of the human family. One day, she decided that her family had grown up beyond the nursery stage. So, one by one, she carried them out to the edge of the woodland. As I remember across the years, there were three children. But when the mother had placed them on a rock outside, the family group looked to her very different from grouping within the nest. She was vaguely disturbed, and ran backwards and forwards two or three times to make quite sure that no young squirrels had been left behind. She was unable to count, nor had she identified them by christening with names. All she knew was the vague multitude in the nest. Her family expediences lacked the perception of the exact limitation imposed by number. As a result she was mildly and vaguely disturbed. If the mother could have counted, she would have experienced the determinate satisfaction of a job well-done in the rearing of three children; or, in the case of loss, she would have suffered vivid pain from the absence of a determinate child. But she lacked adequate experience of any precise form of limitation. Thus the rise in vivid experience of the good and the bad depends upon the intuition of exact forms of limitation." To conclude I am going to compare Whitehead's philosophy of organism to string theory in physics, and offer some criticisms. I am not an expert on string theory so if I misrepresent it through misunderstanding its advocates should have no problem answering my criticisms. String theory and Whitehead's actual occasions have a lot of resemblances. In string theory the fundamental entity is the sting, it is the smallest unit, and what everything is made of. Reality of the cosmos is made up of innumerable strings. I guess you could say instead of material entities being constellations of actual occasions, they are chords of strings. The strings are time strings, I am supposing physicists are saying that the strings reach from the beginning of creation to the end-point. Our cosmos is created by the oscillation of the strings. Let us use a crude analogy. Imagine a lighted fuse; our cosmos is like the flame that moves from the beginning to the end of the fuse. So what is the fuse of the strings doing before and after our cosmos, or the flame of the analogy? Are there other oscillations on the strings, making up other universes? There could be other universes both behind us and ahead of us on the chord of strings. If our cosmos is just the oscillation of the strings, is it like F.M. waves; are we only the peaks like the music on F.M. waves? so there could be other universes in the valleys of the oscillation; phasing into existence as we phase out. I have had a lot of fun with this idea in fiction. (see the "Monas Stone") Where i made the other dimensions of reality the home of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. It would seem Whitehead's idea of the creations and perishing of the actual occasions causes a lot less trouble. What is the anchor of the strings at the two endpoints? It also seems like Whitehead's philosophy of organism, that string theory requires some sort of Platonic Forms. Why would oscillating strings form stable entities like animals or planets, why not just a buzzing chaos? And this of course brings more difficulties. That there is a Form for electrons, a Form for living cells, a form for an animal organ, etc. So string theory seems to need theory of a hierarchy of overlapping Forms as in the philosophy of Proclus. Whitehead seems to lean this way in his extensive continuum. I do not know the opinion of Proclus by physicist. It would be interesting if a physicist would write a commentary on "Elements of Theology" Let me venture my final criticism. That both Whitehead and string theory suffer from a visual bias in thinking. That there is a God's eye view of reality. That there is some privileged point of view, where all of creation can be taken in at a glance; Spinoza's "sub specie aeternitas." Maybe somewhere in the cosmos there is an intelligent race of rats, that think there is a privileged smell that would comprehend all of creation.