Title: Truth and Beauty in Whitehead's Cosmos
#Truth and Beauty in Whitehead's Cosmos
([PDF](whitehead.pdf), [Text](whitehead.txt))
*Carl Johnson*
“Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow.”
—John Keats
####Contents:
##Introduction
Is philosophy, as Keats suggests, inimical to a romantic view of the world?
Certainly, it is possible to create a philosophy that leaves the gnomes in
their mines, but in the twenty-first century it is unlikely that very many
will be swayed by it. Natural philosophy (that is, science) has made such
sentimental philosophies untenable. But, while the gnomes may be disproved and
the rainbow split by a prism, does this also entail the unhaunting of the air
and the clipping of angels' wings? Many claim that it does. Richard Dawkins in
_Unweaving the Rainbow_ and many other books, essays, and lectures has argued
that religion is blight on humanity, and that religious experience is a
fundamentally flawed perception of the world, left to fester by evolution. A
summary of this quite common philosophical outlook is that it is
> a fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an
irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of
configurations. In itself, such a material is senseless, valueless,
purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine[…].[^]
[^]: _Science_, p. 17. To be fair, Dawkins allows that the universe is beautiful and so forth from the perspective of humanity, but as Whitehead points out this is a "theory of psychic additions." Nothing in Dawkins' universe is good or bad but human thinking makes it so.
This is the worldview that Alfred North Whitehead called, "scientific
materialism." According to adherents of this view, matter is inert; symbolism,
and especially religious symbolism and ritual, is separate from and inferior
to language as a means of communication; all value is a human construction;
beauty is a matter of mere taste; and God is a dispensable, indeed pernicious,
hypothesis.
Against this view, Whitehead presents an alternative hypothesis. To be sure,
according to Whitehead, scientific materialism is "not wrong if properly
construed."[^ibid] Elsewhere, he writes, "I assume as an axiom that science is
not a fairy tale."[^] If we constrain our explanations and descriptions to
certain portions of experience, we can generate perfectly functional theories
on the basis of scientific materialism. However, when pushed to its limits,
scientific materialism ultimately collapses and begs off the final explanation
of meaning and being as not proper subjects for inquiry. This failure of
scientific materialism may not be definitive. It is perhaps a mere limitation
of rational thought and inquiry. Nevertheless, if it is possible to construct
a theory which can account for more of our experiences without stripping away
either the values that make practical life possible or the scientific insights
that have revolutionized the human experience, and without being a mere
chimera of the two, then practical reason suggests we investigate it
thoroughly.
[^]: _Concept_, p. 45.
##Whitehead's aims and outlook
In order to understand how Whitehead challenges the views of scientific
materialism, it is necessary to first briefly describe some of the differences
between his thought and that of conventional philosophy. Whitehead defined
philosophy as the "critic of abstractions"[^] and described his own
speculative metaphysics as a series of "working hypotheses" crafted with the
goal of functioning as a framework with which to interpret every element of
our experience.[^] As such, one of Whitehead's goals was explaining the ways
in which prior philosophies failed to account for aspects of experience due to
the application of mistaken abstractions. Whitehead reserved particular ire
for what he calls "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," in which the casual
assumption of a substance ontology causes an endless variety of perplexities
and incongruities. The end result of Whitehead's critique is what he called
"the philosophy of organism," but what has come to be called by its
contemporary adherents "process philosophy." As Nicholas Rescher describes it,
the difference between process ontology and substance ontologies is that
whereas substance ontologies must posit both events (like waves crashing on
the shore) and substances with properties (like water that is blue), process
ontology is "a one-tier ontology of process alone," with "an internally
complex monism of activities of varying, potentially compounded sorts."[^] In
other words, in a Whiteheadian philosophy, the world is not a collection of
static substances with inhering properties but a dynamic process of "creative
advance into novelty"[^] in which "every actual thing is something by reason
of its activity[…]."[^]
[^]: _Science_., p. 87.
[^]: _Adventures_, p. 222.
[^]: Rescher, p. 9.
[^]: _Process and Reality_, 42. All quotes of _Process and Reality_ are from the corrected edition, but for the convenience of readers with old editions, all numbering is from the Macmillan edition.
[^]: _Symbolism_, p. 26.
Along with this antagonism to the dualism of substance and event, Whitehead
also opposes the dualism of fact and value. Whitehead's system is ultimately
an aesthetic system of values. In _Science and the Modern World_, he
approvingly quotes Tennyson's verse, " ‘The stars,' she whispers, 'blindly
run,' " as a critique of the mechanistic framework of modern science and
philosophy.[^] Such systems may attempt to reintroduce value as a constituent
of experience but do so in such a way that value is ultimately an extraneous
appendage on an otherwise complete system, merely awaiting its pruning off by
an ambitious nihilist. In contrast, according to Whitehead, aesthetic value
enters into the universe in its minutest elements and thoroughly permeates all
levels of experience. Value is "the intrinsic reality of an event"[^] and "the
outcome of limitation."[^] That is to say, whether we are speaking of an
electron which is limited in experience to orbiting a proton or a human being
choosing one action over another, on every level value is the actuality that
results from the event of productive engagement with limits.
[^]: _Science_, p. 77.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 93.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 94.
This vision of a philosophy which is general enough to apply to both the
electron and the human being reveals the other distinctive aspect of
Whitehead's philosophy and part of his motivation for calling it "the
philosophy of organism." For Whitehead, reality follows the same principles at
every level with only differing degrees of complexity and integration, rather
than qualitatively different substances, as in Cartesian mind-body dualism. As
he writes, "It is a matter of pure convention as to which of our experiential
activities we term mental and which physical."[^] Of course, there is a
difference between matter and mind, but it is only a difference of the
"routes" that give rise to their occasions. In either case, a bit of mind or
matter is just "a route whose various occasions exhibit some community of type
of value."[^] The ultimate justification for Whitehead's unitary view of
nature is that, "there is but one nature, namely the nature which is before us
in perceptual knowledge."[^] In order to avoid any mistaken bifurcation of
nature, Whitehead posits a philosophy that is a holographic system at the
highest level of generality in which each part exhibits the structure of the
whole. At the same time, Whitehead does not attempt to reduce our concrete
experiences to expressions of the abstract laws of physics, as contemporary
scientific materialists might. To the contrary, the job of philosophy is "to
explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete
things,"[^] not vice-versa. Attempts to explain the concrete in terms of the
abstract always fail because they seek to explain what is certain in terms of
what is uncertain.
[^]: _Symbolism_, p. 20.
[^]: _Religion_, pp. 108–9.
[^]: _Concept_, p. 46.
[^]: _Process_, 30.
##Theory of perception
With this background in place, we can now explore the theory of perception
that Whitehead presents. He finds an interesting antecedent to his own work in
the _Natural History_ of Francis Bacon. According to Bacon,
> It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet
they have perception; for when one body is applied to another there is a kind
of election to embrace that which is agreeable, and to exclude or expel that
which is ingrate; and whether the body be alterant or altered, evermore a
perception precedeth operation, for else all bodies would be like one to
another.[^]
[^]: Quoted in _Science and the Modern World_, p. 43.
Whitehead embraces Bacon's distinction between perception and sense. Clearly,
an object like a stone lacks sense as we know it. However, according to
Whitehead, that does not mean that the stone lacks all forms of perception and
experience. Indeed, it is a kind of "perception" that allows the stone to
negotiate its boundary with the earth it rests on and the air around it.
Reconceptualizing the inanimate world in this way allows Whitehead to explain
how it is that our consciously apprehended experience is non-reductively built
up out of the simpler "prehensions" (uncognitive apprehensions[^]) of our
parts. While this doctrine may seem radical, in many ways, it is merely an
attempt to take the way that we use language seriously. For example, Whitehead
points out that Hume repeatedly violates the tenets of his own theory of
perception by saying that "the eye sees." In Humean perception, it is not the
eye that sees but the soul that sees thanks to "unknown causes."[^] For
Whitehead, we really do see with our eyes, touch with our hands, etc. Of
course, sometimes our seeing is due to other causes, such as intoxication, but
this does not challenge the idea that seeing is normally done by the eye.
[^]: _Science_, p. 69.
[^]: _Process_, 259, *passim*.
The traditional division of the qualities of substances into primary qualities
that really inhere in the object and secondary qualities that arise from the
sense organs of the perceiver is also seen by Whitehead as a problematic
reversal of common sense. If it were true that secondary qualities ought to be
attributed to the perceiver rather than the perceived object then,
> nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: The rose
for its scent; the nightingale for his song; and the sun for his radiance. The
poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves,
and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the
human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless[…].[^]
[^]: _Science_, p. 54.
Again, owing to his organismic model, Whitehead seeks out modes of perception
that really do get at the world, while at the same time accounting for our
lived experiences. So for example, when we look at a wall, "the wall
contributes *itself* " to our experience, so that "we perceive *the wall's*
color and extensiveness."[^]
[^]: _Symbolism_, p. 15. Emphases original.
Against Descartes and others, Whitehead suggests that in order to find the
most basic forms of perception involved in our experience, we should not seek
out what is most clear and distinct. In fact, "the opposite doctrine is more
nearly true."[^] It is only after great training that an artist is able to see
a chair as just a blob of colors.[^] Clarity of perception is the result of
refinement rather than rawness. Seeing a wall as merely a field of color is
only possible by "discarding the concrete relationship between the
wall-at-that-moment and the percipient-at-that-moment."[^] Whitehead divides
experience into two types comprising three modes. The main types are
conceptual and perceptual.
[^]: _Process_, 263.
[^]: _Symbolism_, p. 3.
[^]: _Ibid_., pp. 15–6.
Conceptual analysis stands by itself as a mode of experience[^] in which
experiences "are primarily derivate from physical feelings, and secondarily
from each other."[^] It is in conceptual valuation that experiences gain a
positive or negative valuation. In other words, conceptual analysis is a
meta-experience of the value of other experiences.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 17. _Process_, passim.
[^]: _Process_, 378.
The type of experience called "perceptual experience" can be further
sub-categorized into the modes of "presentational immediacy" and "causal
efficacy." When we see the wall as a wall (as opposed to a color field), this
is an experience of perception according to the mode of presentational
immediacy. It is what other philosophers have termed "sense-perception."[^]
[^]: _Symbolism_, p. 21.
To understand causal efficacy, it is helpful to look at organisms of a "lower
grade," such as flowers or stones. A flower rarely fails to turn toward the
sunlight, and a stone never fails to negotiate, in Baconian way, its boundary
with the earth beneath it.[^] These actions are examples of perception in the
mode of causal efficacy. Other philosophers like Hume and Kant deny that
causal efficacy is a direct part of our experience. Rather, they suggest that
it is something added to experience, either by irrational habits or
transcendental reason. However, when Hume admits that we see "by the eye," he
shows that he has already imported the notion of causal efficacy to explain
the means *by which* we see.[^] Causal efficacy is an inescapable part of our
experience. It is in the eye that the causal efficacy of light on the eye
becomes a part of the presentational immediacy of a light seen before us.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 42.
[^]: _Ibid_., pp. 50–1.
##Symbolism
###In perception
The two modes of perception constitute a Jamesian foreground/background or
focus/field structure. As Whitehead describes it, "the habitual state of human
experience" is "a vast undiscriminated, or dimly discriminated background, of
low intensity, and a clear foreground."[^] In the center of our experience is
a clear focus of presentational immediacy which is surrounded by a halo of
increasingly dim causal efficacy. This foreground/background distinction can
also be cast in terms of the traditional distinction between the "Appearance"
of presentational immediacy and the "Reality" of causal efficacy (though the
different nuance of these terms in Whitehead's philosophy must be kept in the
foreground of our thoughts). He explains,
[^]: _Adventures_, p. 260.
> Thus it is that Appearance which in consciousness is clear and distinct, and
it is Reality which lies dimly in the background with its details hardly to be
distinguished in consciousness. What leaps into conscious attention is a mass
of presuppositions about Reality rather than the intuitions of Reality itself.
It is here that the liability to error arises.[^]
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 270.
The connection between these two modes of perception is an important
precondition for fallibility. At the lower level, causal efficacy is a
reliable future orientation in perception, but at the higher level, the
perception of causal efficacy where it does not exist is possible. Say, for
example, I look at a chair and see it as something for sitting. In that case,
in addition to the foreground presentational immediacy of my sight of the
chair, in the background I also experience a causal efficacy that I associate
with it. When I do sit in it, only to have it collapse, what has happened is
that the presentational immediacy of my experience of the chair was
erroneously fused to a background memory of previous perceptions of causal
efficacy and as a result I made a mistake. This fusion of the two perceptual
modes of experience is called "symbolic reference." Symbolic reference reveals
the common ground of unity of feeling that lies at the basis of presentational
immediacy and casual efficacy. It is not the same as the experience of
conceptual analysis, although it can be the product of conceptual experience
as well as perceptual experience when something experienced in conceptual
analysis refers to something presentational immediacy or causal efficacy.[^]
The difference is that symbolic reference merely refers, whereas conceptual
analysis is the mode of valuation. A pure mode of perceptual experience by
itself and devoid of symbolic reference is called "direct recognition." Direct
recognition is, in a certain sense, infallible, in that if one sees an
illusionary object, it is still true that one sees it. Symbolic reference is
basis of fallibility.
[^]: _Symbolism_, p. 19.
Symbolism is bound up in liability to error as the link between Appearances
and Reality, perceptual immediacy and causal efficacy. In _Process and
Reality_, Whitehead gives the conditions of all symbolism:
> The requisites of symbolism are that there be two species of percepta; and
that a perceptum of one species has some "ground" in common with a perceptum
of another species, so that a correlation between the pairs of percepta is
established.[^]
[^]: _Process_, 274.
Symbolic reference is a "synthetic activity"[^] which pervades our existence.
While certain forms of symbolism, like religious iconography, can be pushed
out of life, on the whole symbolism is indispensable.[^] While its form must
change to suit the times, symbolism itself is basic to our existence. Again,
it is symbolism that allows us to effortlessly treat a blob of visual data as
a chair.[^] Moreover, language itself operates on the principles of symbolic
reference. This is not just a simple process by which the word "tree" maps
onto the thing tree. In fact,
[^]: _Symbolism_, p. 18.
[^]: _Ibid_., pp. 1, 2, 61, 62, et al.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 3.
> Both the word itself and trees themselves enter into our experience on equal
terms; and it would be just as sensible, viewing the question abstractly, for
trees to symbolize the word "tree" as for the word to symbolize the trees.[^]
[^]: _Ibid_., pp. 10–1.
Indeed, exactly this sort of inversion takes place when, for example, one has
the idea of what one wants to say but not the words.[^] In that case, it is
the actual tree which symbolizes the thing sought for, which is the word. This
is to say nothing of the further interplay between a spoken word as "a species
of sounds"[^] and the further abstraction of the written word, etc. In each of
these cases, there is a different but overlapping set of abstract associations
that arrives with the experience. Symbols are so useful for us because they
allow us synthesize our experience in a way impossible for organisms of a
lower grade. The rock can react to gravity and the earth, but it cannot react
to what is in front of it, like a frog, or to its expectations about future
events, like the higher animals. Of course, this ability of higher organisms
comes with the penalty of fallibility, but this is merely the price of more
elaborate truth.
[^]: _Symbolism_, p. 12. _Process_, 277.
[^]: _Process_, 276.
Whitehead's philosophy allows for different kinds of truth, but what is common
to the different kinds of truth is that "two composite facts participate in
the same pattern."[^] For practical purposes, the kind of truth we most often
deal with is "symbolic truth." One mark of symbolic truth is that in spite of
the general commensurability of Appearance and Reality, "in no direct sense is
the Appearance the cause of the Reality, or the Reality the cause of the
Appearance."[^] Because of this property of symbolic truth,
[^]: _Adventures_, p. 242.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 248.
> it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the very meaning of truth is
pragmatic. But though this statement is *hardly* an exaggeration, still it
*is* an exaggeration, for the pragmatic test can never work, unless […] there
is a definite determination[…].[^]
[^]: _Process_, 275.
The final test of symbolic truth is in the definite experience of comparison
between the symbol and the meaning in the modes proper to them. Their
relationship is merely conventional, but no less important for that. Once the
link has been established then we can interpret from one form of experience to
another by means of the symbol:
> Two behavior patterns mutually interpret each other, only when some common
factor of experience is realized in the enactment of either pattern. The
common factor constitutes the reason for the transition from one to the
other.[^]
[^]: _Adventures_, p. 250.
Thus, the English word "God" translates the Greek word θεός only to the extent that both refer to a similar set of
meanings (which in turn may or may not refer to some ultimate object), just as
the word "tree" represents a tree by virtue of their common connection in
experience to the meaning of tree. To be sure though, there is always
something lost in translation from one symbolic reference to the next, such
that "no verbal statement is the adequate expression of a proposition."[^]
[^]: _Process_, 19.
###The fallacy of simple location
To fully understand the meaning of Whitehead's system of symbolic reference,
we must also be aware of his opposition to what he called "the fallacy of
simple location." According to Whitehead,
> In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every
location involves an aspect of itself in every other location.[^]
[^]: _Science_, p. 91.
This doctrine may seem surprising, but it can be understood as Whitehead's
reinterpretation of relativity theory. When I see the chair from the front,
the chair is present to me in the aspect of "chair from the front." Even when
I am no longer in the room with the chair, conventional science tells us that
there is still a consciously imperceptible effect on us from the gravitational
field of the chair. Whitehead wants us to expand this notion of the field, so
that we understand the chair itself to be the manifestation of an omnipresent
field in a particular place that nevertheless has a relation with all other
places in the present and future universe, though this is expressed in
different aspects in different times and places. The causal efficacy of the
chair is always with me, though it may grow so dim that it can no longer be
distinguished from the rest of the background of my experience. Because of
this, each "epochal occasion is a microcosm inclusive of the whole
universe."[^]
[^]: _Religion_, p. 100.
This understanding of location also helps explain why Hume referred vision to
the eyes, even against his own philosophical system. For example, when we see
a colorfield, we do not merely see the field, we see it as located in space.
Moreover, we not only locate the colorfield in an external space, but we also
locate the perception of the colorfield in the eye. Thus, "color is referred
to an external space and to the eyes as organs of vision."[^] From this
Whitehead concludes that,
[^]: _Symbolism_, p. 53.
> Ultimately, all observation, scientific or popular, consists in the
determination of the spatial location of "projected" sense-data.[^]
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 56.
The implication of this non-simple location for our perceptions is that, due
to symbolic reference, it is possible for unlikely pairs to mediate for one
another in experience. As a result, in our aesthetic experience, meanings and
symbols come to be experienced together. Just as we see by the eye, we feel
from the symbol:
> This is the whole basis of the art and literature, namely that emotions and
feelings directly excited by the words should fitly intensify our emotions and
feelings arising by a contemplation of the meaning.[^]
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 84.
Thus, words may take on symbolic connotations beyond their meanings, music
generates strong feelings, and religious art takes on the emotional
associations and holiness of its subject.
The connection between religion and symbolism is well-known. Religious ritual
in particular makes much use of this connection:
> [E]motion waits upon ritual; and then ritual is repeated and elaborated for
the sake of its attendant emotions. Mankind became artists in ritual. It was a
tremendous discovery--how to excite emotions for their own sake, apart from
imperious biological necessity. […]
>
> Mankind was started on its adventures of curiosity and feeling.
>
> It is evident that, according to this account, religion and play have their
origin in ritual.[^]
[^]: _Religion_, p. 21.
Thus, through the manipulation of symbolism in ritual, religion is able to
make present in experience emotions that would otherwise be absent. That these
ritual actions center on the emotional does not mean that they are devoid of
truth content, however:
> Music, ceremonial clothes, ceremonial smells, and ceremonial rhythmic visual
appearances also have symbolic truth, or symbolic falsehood. [… Music]
performs this service, or disservice, by introducing an emotional clothing
which changes the dim objective reality into a clear Appearance matching the
subjective form provided for its prehension.[^]
[^]: _Adventures_, p. 249.
The truth relation of ritual consists of the appropriateness of the Appearance
or presentational immediacy that ritual produces in corresponding to the
Reality or causal efficacy that it relates to. Furthermore, the medium in
which the relationship is expressed affects, through the inclusive nature of
non-simple location, the content of the relationship. This means that just as
certain relationships are difficult to express through religious ritual, so
too there are certain relationships which are more easily expressed through
religious ritual:
> It is easier to smell incense than to produce certain religious emotions;
so, if the two can be correlated, incense is a suitable symbol for such
emotions. Indeed, for many purposes, certain aesthetic experiences which are
easy to produce make better symbols than do words, written or spoken.[^]
[^]: _Process_, 278.
In the example of incense in particular, one's foreground attention to the
emotions and experiences of piety and devotion becomes symbolically linked
with the background experience of the smell of the incense, allowing the
incense to stand in the place of the emotions and assist in generating them on
subsequent occasions. Just as we can see with the eye, we may also be able to
feel with the incense.
##Value in experience
###Beauty
There is more to symbolic reference than truth value. There are innumerable
true things, but not all of them appropriate at all times. Thus, Whitehead
explains that, "It is more important that a proposition be interesting than
that it be true."[^] Whitehead says this not denigrate the inherent value of
truth or the strength of the correlation between degrees of truth and degrees
of interest but to reinforce his commitment to the permeation of value in
experience:
[^]: _Adventures_, p. 244.
> Value is inherent in actuality itself. To be an actual entity is to have a
self-interest. This self-interest is a feeling of self-valuation; it is an
emotional tone.[^]
[^]: _Religion_, p. 100.
As mentioned previously, value enters experience through the mode of
conceptual analysis, in which the experience of other experiences feels either
satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Whitehead writes in _Process and Reality_,
> The integration of each simple physical feeling [ie., a feeling of
presentational immediacy or causal efficacy] with its conceptual counterpart
produces in the subsequent phase a physical feeling whose subjective form has
gained or lost subjective intensity according to the valuation up, or the
valuation down, in conceptual feeling.[^]
[^]: _Process_, 380.
These valuations in conceptual feeling may be oriented toward different
intermediate goals, but their ultimate goal is satisfaction by synthesis into
a novel harmony. This goal is the normative force of experience--what ought to
happen. However, "There cannot be values with antecedent standards of value
[…]."[^] What is the antecedent standard of value that drives the valuation
process forward? Since beauty is defined as "the mutual adaptation of the
several factors in an occasion of an experience"[^] according to the
conceptual mode of experience, we can also call the norm that drives our
conceptual valuation of experience "beauty."
[^]: _Science_, p. 178.
[^]: _Adventures_, p. 252.
For Whitehead, beauty is "the one aim which by its very nature is
self-justifying. "[^] Beauty is the force that gives a truth its quality of
interestingness, since "Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good nor bad,"[^]
and "Truth matters because of beauty."[^ibid] The universe itself aims at
beauty, since "The real world is good when it is beautiful,"[^] and, "The
Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream"--the dream of youth--"and
reaps tragic Beauty."[^]
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 266.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 267.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 268.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 296.
Beauty is at its highest when there is the contrast between the components
that make up an experience allow for the highest intensity. It takes the
background elements of an experience and brings them into the foreground. For
this purpose, contrast is vital, since
> Contrast elicits depth, and only shallow experience is possible when there
is a lack of patterned contrast.[^]
[^]: _Process_, 175.
In a state of beauty, the contrast between parts brings everything into focus,
so that
> the whole heightens the feelings for the parts, and the parts heighten the
feelings for the whole, and for each other.[^]
[^]: _Adventures_, p. 268.
###Art
Symbolism is important not only because it is a means of expressing truth
relations, but also because it is an important means of creating a higher form
of beauty, art. Art uses symbolism to join together absoluteness and
relativity:
> In the work of art the relativity becomes the harmony of the composition,
and the absoluteness is the claim for separate individuality advanced by
component factors.[^]
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 264.
A work of art expresses in the foreground the unbounded cosmic background of
causal influence that affects every occasion.
The purpose of art is two-fold, since it aims at both truth and beauty.[^]
Moreover, like religion, its medium is always highly concrete even though what
it symbolizes is highly abstract. Accordingly, examining the category of
religious art allows for a highly resonant application of Whitehead's
philosophy, since religious art employs symbolism and ritual in the pursuit of
truth and beauty, and at the same time, considers this pursuit to be no
different from the pursuit of God.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 267.
##The pursuit of ultimate values
###God, creativity, and the world
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that in Whitehead's system, beauty is
God. As he writes, "God is the measure of the aesthetic consistency of the
world."[^] God is the "lure of feeling" which draws all entities toward new
heights of creative beauty. God is both the measure of their past successes
and their spur to new ones. God is "the ultimate limitation, and His existence
is the ultimate irrationality,"[^] since God explains the evolution of
everything else but cannot be explained in terms of anything else. God is both
the Alpha and the Omega, since God is both the primordial source of
normativity and the harmony of beauty towards which experience strives.
[^]: _Religion_, p. 99.
[^]: _Science_, p. 178.
To be sure, Whitehead is not a traditional theist. He is rather a
panentheist.[^] For Whitehead, "The kingdom of heaven is God,"[^] but
following the Gospels, "the kingdom of heaven is within you."[^] This can be
understood on the one hand as an extension of his doctrine of non-simple
location, but more profoundly, it is an expression of the way that aesthetic
beauty lures us forward by speaking to our own natures in themselves allowing
for the realization of the self by its aesthetic fulfillment in beauty.
[^]: This interpretation is not accepted by William Christian. See _Religion in the Making_, Glossary, p. 250.
[^]: _Religion_, p. 154.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 72 quoting Luke 17:21. Whitehead makes the same remarks elsewhere, notably _Process and Reality_.
Also unlike traditional theistic philosophies, in Whitehead's system God is
not the only ultimate. There are three ultimates in Whitehead's system:
"creativity," "many," and "one."[^] Process theologians and advocates of deep
religious pluralism have put these three ultimates to use in explaining the
diversity found in the varieties of religious experience across the world.
According to David Ray Griffin, what Whitehead calls "one," or "the
singularity of an entity,"[^ibid] is also called, “ ‘Amida Buddha,'
'Sambhogakaya,' 'Saguna Brahman,' 'Ishvara,' Yahweh,' 'Christ,' and 'Allah,’
”[^] among other names. All of these are names for the ultimate reality that
draws the universe forward into a synthesis of beauty.
[^]: _Process_, 31.
[^]: Griffin, p. 47. In his article, Griffin is taking these names from John Cobb, but for simplicity, I am referring to them as Griffin's.
The actual process of advance proceeds according to the principle of
creativity. Under its auspices, "The many become one and are increased by
one."[^] Something really new is created, which responds to what has come
before without simply recapitulating it. According to Griffin, this ultimate
has been called "Emptiness," "Śūnyatā," "Dharmakaya," "Nirguna Brahman," "the
Godhead," and "Being Itself."[^] Because this is a very different aspect of
ultimate reality, we should not be surprised that the ways that humans
symbolically relate to these ultimates is different. God is "worshipped," but
Emptiness is "realized."[^] The reason for these differences is that it is
inappropriate for humans to relate to very different kinds of ultimates in the
same way.
[^]: _Process_, 32.
[^]: Griffin, p. 47.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 46.
The third ultimate is the many, called by Whitehead the "disjunctive
diversity"[^] of the universe. The many and the one presuppose one another as
flip sides of the same concept. For the deep religious pluralists, the
existence of this third ultimate explains the many religions which hold the
cosmos itself to be sacred and worship the cosmos rather the creator of the
cosmos. Other deep religious pluralists show how certain religions reflect
aspects of each of the three ultimates but in different ways appropriate to
each.
[^]: _Process_, 31.
###Religion
According to scientific materialists, the existence of a variety of religions
shows with diverse opinions on what the universe is like and how we should
behave proves that no religion is true, since they conflict. This conclusion
is very strange, since by the same criteria, the fact that Einstein
contradicts Newton should disprove both.[^] According to the deep religious
pluralists, the key is that different religions represent different means of
grappling with different ultimates towards different goals.
[^]: Cf. _Process_, 20–1, in which Whitehead points out that the changing of metaphysics through the centuries ought to be no more scandalous than the changing of science. The same argument can be made for religion.
For Whitehead, religion is both "a thoroughly social phenomenon"[^] and "what
the individual does with his solitariness."[^] The reason for this paradox is
that religion is the outcome of a social process by which individuals have
attempt to concretize what is most abstract. It is a way for the individual to
grasp the general through the particularity of one's personal, individual
experience. This makes religion philosophically significant both as a source
of experiential data and as a prompt that allows the individual to grasp the
more abstract aspects of experience:
[^]: _Religion_, p. 27.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 47. _Religion_, p. 16 has a similar quote but with "his *own* solitariness" (emphasis mine) substituted.
> Religion is the translation of general ideas into particular thoughts,
particular emotions, and particular purposes; it is directed to the end of
stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating particularity.
Philosophy finds religion and modifies it; and conversely religion is among
the data of experience which philosophy must weave into its own scheme.[^]
[^]: _Process_, 23.
From this we can see that a philosophy that merely dismisses religion without
adequately investigating the nature of religious experiences discards an
important source of information about the world.
The chief danger for religion is dogmatism:
> A dogma--in the sense of a precise statement--can never be final; it can
only be adequate in its adjustment of certain abstract concepts. […]
>
> […] A dogma may be true in the sense that it expresses such interrelations
of the subject matter as are expressible within the set of ideas employed. But
if the same dogma be used intolerantly so as to check the employment of other
modes of analyzing the subject matter, then, for all its truth, it will be
doing the work of falsehood.[^]
[^]: _Religion_, p. 131.
Unlike a dogmatic religion, a rational religion organizes its rituals and
beliefs into "a coherent ordering of life" that both "elucidates thought" and
commands "ethical approval."[^] What makes a religion rational is its ability
to resist the impulse to dogmatism, to continually make its truth new through
the reorganization of its symbolic relations. When a religion refuses to adapt
its symbolism to changes in the experience of life, it is liable to both
stifle thought and commit ethical atrocities.
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 31.
##Whitehead's Burkean anti-conservatism
While religion must continually be critiqued so as to prune away its harmful
dogmas, this is by no means a smooth process. Changes in the symbolic order
always dangerous, such that
> It is not therefore true that any advance in the scale of culture inevitably
tends to the preservation of society. On the whole, the contrary tends more
often to be the case, and any survey of nature confirms this conclusion.[^]
[^]: _Symbolism_, p. 69.
For this reason, Whitehead deliberately compares his view of social change to
Burke, stating that Burke "was right in his premises and wrong in his
conclusions."[^] Burke was right to think that social "progress," so-called,
often leads to the destruction of the society that embraces it, as was the
case in the French Revolution. Burke was wrong to think that as a result such
revolutions must be avoided at all costs. For Whitehead, there is something to
be said for both the path of the iconodule and the path of the iconoclast:
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 71.
> There is a greatness in the lives of those who build up religious systems, a
greatness in action, in idea, and in self-subordination, embodied in instance
after instance through centuries of growth. There is a greatness in the rebels
who destroy such systems[…].[^]
[^]: _Process_, 513.
What makes both paths productive is that they both lead to the building up of
a more complex, responsive system able to take in new abstractions and enjoy
the beautiful harmony of new contrasts. Symbolism is always "dangerous," since
it "may involve an arbitrary imputation of unsuitable characters."[^] Still,
this danger is worth it, since it is the cost of higher consciousness. In the
end,
[^]: _Symbolism_, p. 87.
> The art of the free society consists first in the maintenance of the
symbolic code; and secondly in the fearlessness of revision, to secure that
the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those
societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of
revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy
of a life stifled by useless shadows.[^]
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 88.
The gnomes, thus, must be dismissed, but the haunted air may remain.
##Challenges and criticisms
Of course, as initially indicated, Whitehead's philosophy is ultimately a
"working hypothesis." Nothing presented here guarantees its truth. As is the
case with all symbolic truth, the ability to grasp what is more complex brings
with it the danger of fallibilism. What suggests the general usefulness of
Whitehead's philosophy is its ability to take in and explain a greater variety
of experiences than can be accommodated by conventional scientific
materialism, but this suggestion must always be tempered by a sense of its
potential for revision.
Even among those who accept Whitehead's philosophy in general, there remain
disputes about the finer details. Given the aforementioned comments of
Whitehead about the importance of criticism and progress, this is as he would
have wanted. The one element in Whitehead's philosophy that has generated the
most intense debate is his idea of God. For process theologians, Whitehead's
picture of God is a useful precursor for further refinement through engagement
with specific religious traditions. Others, however, feel that use of the term
"God" in Whitehead's system is misleading, and that its function might better
be served through more pluralistic vision of aesthetic good. In particular,
Donald Sherburne argues convincingly in "Decentering Whitehead" that Whitehead
has not solved the problem of evil. Although Whitehead's God acts only as lure
for value and not as an omnipotent Father, nevertheless, our own experiences
of pain, evil, and suffering belie the existence of even this more constrained
God. Accordingly, Sherburne sketches out a vision of the universe that retains
many elements of Whitehead's system without retaining God.
In a similar vein, David Bentley Hart in _The Beauty of the Infinite_ argues
that any theodicy which, like Whitehead's, attempts to justify God on the
basis of the goodness of the final result fails
> the test of Ivan Karamazov: If the universal and final good of all creatures
required, as its price, the torture of one little girl, would that be
acceptable? [… T]he moral enormity of this calculation is not mitigated if all
creation must suffer the consequences of God's self-determination.[^]
[^]: _Beauty_, p. 119
In other words, Hart suggests that the beautiful end state of the cosmos in a
Hegelian or Whiteheadian system is no excuse for the innumerable cruelties
suffered along the way. Surprisingly, Hart is nevertheless a theist. He
suggests though that evil, rather than being the necessary byproduct of a
process aimed at ultimate good, is meaningless and marked for absolute
overturning by God. As the title of his book suggests, he shares with
Whitehead an aesthetic vision of the world redeemed by beauty, but his vision
is ultimately founded on the dogmas of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, rather
than philosophical reconstruction. In the aftermath of the 2004 Boxing Day
tsunami Hart wrote,
> [S]uffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at
all.
>
> I do not believe we Christians are obliged—or even allowed—to look upon the
devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console
ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s
goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or
purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of
salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the
absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate
these things with a perfect hatred.[^]
[^]: "Tsunami and Theodicy."
For Hart, Whitehead's concept of God is in need of revision because it is
insufficiently soteriologically oriented, and his philosophy gives evil too
much credit by calling it the "contrast" that makes the beautiful more
beautiful.
Marilyn McCord Adams agrees with Hart that most theodicies, including
Whitehead's, fail the "Karamazov test," when they attempt to effect
> *global* aesthetic solutions that rest content with defeating horrors via
their organic relations to 'higher harmonies' of cosmic wholes[…]. What I
conclude (tipping my Platonizing hand) is not […] that aesthetic concerns are
irrelevant, marginal, or of dubious propriety, but that it is wrong to make
the global context the primary, much less the only frame of evaluation when it
comes to horror's challenge of the Goodness of God.[^]
[^]: Adams, p. 149. Emphasis original.
Like Hart, she feels that the philosophical question of theodicy is too often
bogged down by being
> carried on at too high a level of abstraction. By agreeing to focus on […]
"restricted standard theism," both sides avoided responsibility to a
particular tradition; […].[^]
[^]: _Ibid_., p. 3.
Her recourse is, like Hart, to attempt bridge this gap by focusing on the ways
that specifically Christian traditional doctrines may be able to answer the
questions of theodicy that are not available to non-sectarian attempts, like
Whitehead's. At the same time, by bringing the lived religious experiences of
that lead to the creation of those Christian dogmas to bear on the problems of
theodicy, what Hart and Adams are doing is exactly in line with Whitehead's
call to rationalize religion by ever testing its applicability: Christianity
must engage with the problem of evil if it is to contribute positively to the
societies it inhabits.
While there is not enough space here to assess the success of either
Sherburne, Hart, or Adams, they do point to ways that Whitehead's philosophy
may be open to further critique or revision and are worthy of further
examination in future works.
##Conclusion
As we have seen, Whitehead's "philosophy of organism" or "process philosophy"
allows us to overcome many of the difficulties associated with scientific
materialism. Whitehead agrees with Hume's conclusion that scientific
materialism ultimately rests on faith in the ability of abstractions of
science to classify all that is worth classifying.[^] The working hypothesis
that Whitehead presents, however, allows us to more easily account for our
concrete perception of qualities inhering in external objects, causal efficacy
in perception, the symbolism of language, the seemingly paradoxical
interrelatedness of spatially separate locations, and the permeation of value
(especially aesthetic value) in experience. On this basis, he goes on to
speculate about the non-cognitive apprehensions underlying the physical world,
the plurality of ultimates in experience, the importance of ritual and art as
means of symbolic expression of truth, and the importance of both critique and
conservatism for the flourishing of society. While some, like Sherburne, have
expressed doubts about the necessity of God in Whitehead's system, and others,
like Hart and Adams, have expressed concerns about the attempt to resolve the
issue of theodicy through appeals to global harmony, nevertheless, we can
confidently conclude that philosophical system of Whitehead offers an
important new tool for the preservation of the romance of existence against
those who would reduce the richness of its content in order to better fit
their simplicity of their abstractions.
[^]: _Science_, p. 51.
“ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
—John Keats
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