Rev Left Radio - Process & Reality: Alfred North Whitehead, Process Philosophy, and Organic Realism

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

Matthew Segall is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is an expert of German Idealism and the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Matthew joins Breht for a wide-ranging conversation on the philosophy of Aflred Whitehead, pan-experientialism, dialectics, organic realism, Marxism, Buddhism, materialism v. idealism, criticism of scientific materialism, nature mysticism, philosophy of mind, and much, much more! Learn more about Matthew and his work: https://footnotes2plato.com/ Gaian Reality After the Virus: https://matthewsegall.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/updated-segall-imagining-a-gaian-reality-after-the-virus.pdf Outro Music: "The Passenger" by Iggy Pop ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have a great conversation for you. I have on Professor Matthew Siegel to talk about the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. But we also touch on Marxist dialectics. We touch on Buddhism, as I'm often wanting to do. And we talk about Einsteinian theory and scientific materialism and Hegelian ideas. and Hegelian idealism and so many other things. It's a really fascinating deep dive discussion on a really crucial philosopher

and opening up that web of connections to philosophy more broadly, to ecology, to spirituality, to religion, to mysticism, etc. A really wide range and fascinating conversation. Matthew Siegel is an assistant professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. San Francisco. He teaches graduate courses applying process philosophy to various disciplines, including the natural and social sciences, as well as the study of consciousness. He is an expert on both the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, as well as German idealism more broadly, and we have a discussion about all of it. It's really, really fascinating,

and I know you'll enjoy it. As always, if you like what we do here at Rev. Left Radio, we are 100% listener-funded. This month marks five years on. the air. And if you want to continue to support the show and make this show possible, you can join us at patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. And in exchange for a few dollars every single month, you have access to not only monthly bonus episodes, but to the back catalog of all the Patreon episodes we've ever done in five years. So that's, I think, hundreds at this point of episodes that you can have access to by becoming a patron and supporting the show. Really love everybody who supports the show and if you don't have money we totally get it you can share this

with a friend you can leave a positive review all those things really really help so without further ado here is my fascinating discussion with professor matthew seagull on the philosophy of alfred north whitehead and so much more enjoy Well, I'm Matt Siegel. I am a process philosopher and professor of philosophy. I teach in a graduate program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. The programs called philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness. and a lot of my courses focus on different applications of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy.

I also teach courses on German idealism, consciousness studies, and a variety of other topics. I just taught a course on collapsology last semester, which is increasingly relevant. But yeah, I'm also always looking for applications of Whitehead's thought to politics and society and culture. so I'm really excited to be able to talk with you about that today, Brett. Wonderful. Yeah, this is going to be really fun. This is, I think, like, you know, I went through undergraduate and then a year of graduate philosophy schooling before I dropped out. And never once, at least through my journey,

did I even hear the name Whitehead. And, of course, in Analytica, philosophy departments, sometimes it's really not about going over the history of major thinkers. But even when those were those history of philosophy classes, Whitehead was somebody that never really came up. So it was only after I left academia and was studying other thinkers that I came across Whitehead and realized that he has a really interesting naturalistic, science-based sort of metaphysics or philosophy that I found very unique and interesting. And it dovetails very nice with, like, we'll get into it later, but like Marxist dialectics or the Buddhist worldview and many other things. We just did an episode with Braun Taylor on nature spirituality and the blossoming of.

these more nature-oriented ways of being and connecting and having Whitehead's philosophical rigor applied to try to understand the natural world, I think is really interesting and pretty, and I think people will like it. So before we get into all that, though, let's just talk a little bit more about you. I know you said some of the stuff that you do in philosophy you can elaborate if you'd like, but also kind of talk about how you came to be interested in Whitehead specifically through the course of your philosophical training. Yeah. Well, I think I knew from a relatively early age, maybe in midway through high school, that I either wanted to be a teacher or a therapist, but in some way work in the domain of what I would call soulmaking. I think education is a process of forming souls, not just souls as opposed to bodies, but persons maybe is the better word for it.

And therapy, obviously, is all about care of the soul, care of the person. But I ended up pursuing graduate work in philosophy and am now a professor. So I went with the teacher root. But I think philosophy taught well is a kind of therapy, not just for the individual, but for those maybe higher aspects of ourselves, transpersonal dimensions of who and what we are that aspires to be of service to the world, to society, to contribute to culture beyond just our own immediate sense of ego gratification and so on. But in terms of Whitehead, I read of him, actually, I heard his name dropped

first in some lectures by Terence McKenna, the sort of psychedelic philosopher who left this dimension in 2000, I believe, he passed away. So if people aren't familiar, he was sort of Timothy, Timothy Leary thought of McKenna as the real Tim Leary. He was very much an advocate for exploring one's consciousness with psychedelics and nature-based spirituality and had a whole theory of time and evolution. And it's in this context that he drew on Whitehead. Whitehead's process philosophy and his really central concept of concrescence. And just hearing McKenna rap about the advance into novelty and creative advance that was central to Whitehead's philosophy really got my attention. But I didn't study him or read Whitehead directly until graduate school.

I was warned against studying him alone without a learning community to sort of help guide me through the thicket of his written works. and I'm glad I waited. I studied him first with a professor named Eric Weiss, who died recently, and really passionate teacher and deep, deep grasp of Whitehead's thoughts. So he was the one that kind of introduced me to that lineage, and that was about, gosh, 13, 14 years ago now. So I've been thinking with Whitehead for quite a while. Nice. Yeah, you mentioned a Terence McKenna, so were you at that time in the world of either psychedelics or spirituality or some mixture of both that pushed you in the direction of listening to McKenna lectures? Yes. I think around 18, I caught wind of McKenna, read some of his books, and found his lectures online, and, you know, really steeped myself in his worldview before I ever had a chance to explore the,

psychedelic terrain myself. I think 19 was when I ate some mushrooms and definitely had an impact on my outlook, my worldview, my my philosophy. So absolutely. Yeah, I know I, um, speaking of Tim Leary, I've been a fan of Ram Dass in particular and yeah, they had a very close relationship. And I think as Tim Leary was dying with cancer, there's this a conversation people can find on YouTube where Ram Dass sits down with Tim Leary and kind of talk about their life together and stuff as Tim Leary is looking at his own imminent mortality, which I found pretty interesting. I actually for a second had Zach Leary, his son willing to come on the show. But for various reasons, he was, he didn't want to talk about his dad his dad's dad. He was like, I have my own life. I like, you know, I kind of wanted to bring him on as like an expert on or like, you know, to talk about his dad's life and work. And he really wasn't feeling that. So it kind of fell through at the last minute. But an interesting figure for. sure. And you also mentioned earlier that you got into German idealism. Before we move on, can you talk a little bit about how you got into that and what thinkers you particularly focus on in that tradition? Yeah. Well, I think anyone who wants to do philosophy, I mean,

you mentioned your training in analytic philosophy. And maybe aside from analytics, though, you know, there are some analytic philosophers interested in Emmanuel Kant, who is sort of the one who kicked off the German idealist movement in 1781 when he published the critique of pure reason. And so I'd studied Kant a bit, but it wasn't until grad school again that I took a course with my professor at the time and now colleague, Sean Kelly. Sean is a Gaglian, wrote his dissertation on Hegel and Young. And so we read, I read Hegel's work first, and then from there, because I needed help understanding what the hell he was talking about. I read some of the other German idealists, Ficta, and Schelling.

And, you know, as soon as I read a couple of paragraphs of shelling, I think I started with his 1797 introduction to the philosophy of nature, or ideas for a philosophy of nature, rather the introduction to that book. And I was hooked. I immediately realized. I was more of a Shalangian than a Hegelian, though they're quite similar in their thinking. We'd have to spend at least a whole hour unpacking the differences if we wanted to get into that. But yeah, so this would have been, you know, maybe 10 years ago, I started getting into the German idealist.

And since then, have really deepened my appreciation for this whole movement of thought. A lot of people know of Kant and Hegel and not as much about Ficta and Schelling, but if you only read Hegel and the phenomenology of spirit and the science of logic, you might think that he originated a lot of ideas, which actually were quite well developed by Ficta and Schelling already. And Schelling, of course, gets the last word, outlives Hegel by 15 years or so, and inaugurates the first, critique of Hegel that then got picked up by people like Kierkegaard, and so shelling's underappreciated, and some of my scholarship and teaching is an attempt to sort of raise the reception of shelling, particularly in the English-speaking world, so that, you know, we understand that he was certainly Hegel's match, and that we need to understand them as in dialogue with each other. If we really want to understand what Hegel was

saying, we have to bring Shelling into the conversation, too. well i think i think that'd be an awesome another episode if you're willing to come back to yeah particularly that that'd be awesome let's do it yeah do you have any thoughts before we move on really quickly on on schopenhauer another german transcendental idealist yeah i mean schopenhauer is playing an important sort of outsider role critiquing these university professors um you know the the figures i was just mentioning um schopenhauer taught his courses uh uh at the same time that Hegel was lecturing, particularly to try to draw some of his students away, and it didn't work very well. But, you know, I think Schopenhauer's philosophy is an interesting initial

attempt to integrate some Buddhist ideas with Western philosophy, and that sort of cross-cultural or intercultural work is super important, and, you know, Schopenhauer needs to be given due credit for kind of inaugurating that, though, you know, the Schlegel brothers and the Schelling and Gerta and others were also very influenced by various Asian streams of thought. So, you know, I've only read Schopenhauer's The World as Will in Representation, and it's been a while, but I think as a 19-year-old, it definitely got me fired up. He's a very, very deep thinker, but for whatever reason, just, you know, when I teach my course on German idealism, I mentioned Schopenhauer, but I don't devote too much time to him just because there's just,

it's just so much in that time period to get into, but I'm glad you brought him up. Yeah. We shouldn't be left out either. For sure, yeah, we just did an episode on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and following that line of thinking through Schopenhauer, through Nietzsche, and into the 20th century. So it was just on my mind. But, you know, something you said earlier, and in fact, I heard you say it on another interview. You kind of alluded to it earlier in this one, but you said it explicitly in another one that I found online, which is you mentioned that you find philosophy to have a spiritual dimension to it. And I know you kind of touched on that a little bit, but can you kind of elaborate on that?

Because I find this idea very interesting. And certainly in my own sort of spiritual and existential crises and struggles, I've turned to philosophy over and over again. to try to find some respite. And so I'm just wondering if you could kind of elaborate on your ideas there. Yeah, well, I think going back to ancient Athens and the story of Socrates, I mean, the history, but we have various depictions of what went down when Socrates was accused by a court of his fellow citizens

of corrupting the youth and disbelieving in the gods, of the polis. And, you know, Socrates's defense, in the process of defending himself from these charges, you know, he basically says that he is not afraid of death and he's willing to receive that judgment from his peers and that sentence from his peers rather than go against his sense of virtue and his mission to question everything. engage with others in in dialogue and you know for socrates he didn't claim to be wise but he claimed to have some relationship to logos you might say and that he really had this i would say

ethical and indeed spiritual commitment to the idea that rationality was something that needed to be in um surfaced in the context of a collective effort right a dialogue uh it's a social process ultimately, but it also depends on individuals being willing to face their mortality without fear. And so this is where the spiritual side of it comes in, I think, and how philosophy and politics connect up for me ultimately is that individuals need to be in some way initiated into the mystery of death. Not that we would, through that initiation, know what happens when we die, but that we would know that at least that there's no reason to believe it is the end and that it's just lights out forever.

And at least there's no reason to be afraid of that unknown, right? And this is what Socrates goes into in the Apology, the Platonic dialogue, and then in the subsequent dialogue, Fado, where Socrates is imprisoned and about to drink the hemlock talking to his students about death. There's no reason to fear that. And until we get over that fear, I think human beings become, in some ways, inhibited from engaging ethically in the practice of public discourse and collective rationality. We need to overcome the fear of death in order to engage with one another in projects that transcend us as individuals. Right. Yeah.

So that's kind of the spirituality that I see underlying the philosophical way of life. Yeah, very, very insightful. And I completely agree. So much of our collective and individual neuroses and intensities and tragedies are really traced back to a lot of the pain and the fear that we have in our bodies that we repressed and look away from. And the ultimate fear is the fear of the total annihilation at the time of death. Whether or not that's true, there's a sort of a refusal to face it, particularly in a culture like ours, obsessed with productivity, tosses its non- productive elderly people into the fringes of, you know, nursing homes or whatever and really just wants to focus on the youth and exuberance and producing and making and profiting, et cetera, the idea of death casts a long shadow over that. And I think a lot of people would rather repress that, escape that, push that down, look away from that, then look it in the eyes because it's so painful to do that. But by repressing, I think it comes out with a bunch of other things, you know, comes out

in these neurotic ways that have instantiations at the collective level. Absolutely. Well, well, let's go ahead and get into the topic of this conversation, which is Alfred North Whitehead. So maybe we can start with kind of a biographical sketch. It doesn't have to be super in depth, but just sort of who he was as a person, and then maybe who were some of his major influences. And for those who have never heard of him, why is he an important figure in philosophy? Yeah, so Whitehead's born in 1861.

and excels, well, he's born to a lineage of Anglican schoolmasters. His father and his grandfather were headmasters at his school in southeast England where he was born. And he's also descendant from George Whitehead, who in the 17th century was a Quaker, part of the religious freedom movement in England at the time. And so, you know, Whitehead has this. religious lineage and himself, you know, was sort of born into an educational context wherein the Anglican Church, you know, was pretty much shaping it. He excelled at mathematics

and rugby from an early age and ended up at Trinity College, Cambridge, to study mathematics. He was a part of this group called the Apostles that studied philosophy together. And he reports when he was at Cambridge as a student reading Kant's critique of pure reason over and over again to the point where he could, he had memorized certain key passages by heart. And so even though he was studying mathematics, he was definitely abreast of this important transcendental revolution in philosophy with Kant. Not that he agreed with everything Kant had to say, but it was an important early influence on him. he eventually ends up teaching at Cambridge. He was there for about 25 years, and at that point, they asked professors to retire. They don't want them staying longer than that.

But in the midst of his time at Cambridge, one of his brighter students, Bertrand Russell, and Whitehead, ended up collaborating on what's what was called the Principia Mathematica. It was four volumes were planned. they only published three, and basically it was an attempt to provide the logical foundations of arithmetic. Volume 4 was supposed to be on geometry, but you could say they succeeded in the sense that the symbolic language that they developed in some ways inaugurates this new analytic method of philosophy. So even though analytic philosophers and philosophy generally is not that big on history, its own history is actually quite dependent on some of Whitehead's innovations in symbolic logic. But ultimately, this Principia project fails in the sense that, well, a couple decades later,

Kurt Gödel would prove logically why it fails that you cannot have his so-called incompleteness theorems, that basically you cannot have a complete formal system that doesn't produce statements which are contradictory, within the terms of that system. And so the whole idea that you could ground mathematics in a complete formal logical system was shipwrecked by this. And Russell never fully wanted to accept that, you know, and I think tried to develop various patches, whereas Whitehead was free to pursue a different kind of philosophy. And right at the same time, physics was undergoing some pretty important paradigmatic revolutions with Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. We're talking at the mid-19 teens here, right? Special theory comes out in 1905,

and then in 1916, the general theory. And this was really shaking things up in fundamental physics. Whitehead had studied with one of the students of James Clerk Maxwell, who developed the electromagnetic theory and the mathematics for that. And so he was, you know, one of the few mathematicians prepared to understand what Einstein was suggesting. And Whitehead was present in 1919 at the Royal Society in London when Eddington revealed the photographic plates from the eclipse experiments that, in a sense, proved Einstein's predictions, and the general theory about how light would warp as it traveled around the sun. And so these changes in physics brought Whitehead into the philosophy of nature because he realized that the old mechanistic understanding of nature

no longer made any sense in light of these new discoveries, particularly in quantum theory. And so he starts developing a new philosophy of nature and philosophy of science, a new epistemology, you could say. And eventually, by the mid-1920s, he's doing full-blown metaphysical cosmology. He's invited to Harvard when he's 64, 65. This is in 1925,

and begins teaching philosophy there for the first time. He had been a mathematics and astronomy and physics teacher before that. And this is when he writes his books like science in the modern world, and process and reality, his magnum opus. And then in the early 30s, adventures of ideas where most of his sort of philosophy of civilization and society is, is found. And in his final book, in 1938, modes of thought,

he actually retired from Harvard in 1937, and he dies a decade later in 1947. So that's kind of the high-level summary there. maybe I'll pause and see where we want to go next. Yeah, that's really interesting in that the engagement with Einstein and general relativity and quantum mechanics is clearly going to go on and show up in his work as he's trying to integrate these new scientific revelations into his holistic, naturalistic metaphysics. But we will get to that. I guess just to finish up this part, who were some of his major intellectual influences? Yeah, well, I think Plato and Wordsworth are probably the two most important ones to mention.

He thinks Plato's cosmological dialogue, the Temaeus, remains the most important and enduring cosmological statement available to Western philosophers. And indeed, Plato influenced many thinkers in the Near Eastern world, Arabic and Islamic Folsom. philosophers as well as European philosophers. And then Wordsworth, Whitehead's daughter and others just really conveyed the importance of Wordsworth for Whitehead,

who would read Wordsworth's poetry daily, treating his poetry texts basically like the Bible. And so this nature poetry, this romantic poetic strain is runs you know in in whitehead's veins and so it definitely um wordsworth was an important influence um and you know this is the the connection between whitehead and shelling

because wordsworth's good friend and collaborator samuel taylor coleridge traveled to germany to to study with with ficta and i think you may have seen a lecture or two of shellings um certainly read ficta and schelling and hegel and even in the bibliographia literaria one of coleridge's books plagiarizes shelling i mean he translates shelling into english without attribution shelling was pretty forgiving of this because he was just glad to be understood so well uh so of course you you you don't there's no direct influence uh from shelling to whitehead though maybe a bit whitehead cites shelling once in all of his books, but through Coleridge, Coleridge's influence on Wordsworth and Wordsworth's influence on Whitehead, there is a Schellengian, there's the scent of shelling,

at least in Whitehead's thought. Otherwise, I think Plato and Wordsworth are the most important. Maxwell, as a scientific influence, in some ways Whitehead's philosophy of organism, his process philosophy is the it's drawing out the metaphysical implications of the wave transmission theory of light and electromagnetism and so I think Maxwell

should be counted also as an important scientific influence so yeah I think that's probably the major ones the major ones yeah okay yeah there's also of course as you mentioned the two huge scientific revolutions

of the time which was Darwinian evolution and Einsteinian general relativity. So those are just like ubiquitous cultural forces that philosophers and intellectuals and thinkers are wrestling with as they're doing whatever field of study that they're doing. I mean, Darwin's origins, I think, came out in 1859. That's two years before Whitehead was born. So, you know, wrestling with evolutionary theory

and the naturalism that it implies is part of all of this. I certainly get a sense of like Leipnitz and even his monads and their relational, you know, juxtaposition, their relationship and how they, you know, a single monad reflects all other monads, etc. Enlightenance, of course, was a mathematician as well. So I feel like that creeps in there. And then I wonder if he has any thoughts on Spinoza, right? Because Spinoza is certainly in a lineage that could include Whitehead as far as like trying to understand the natural world and the sort of divinity that's inherent within it, if you will. Do you have any thoughts on Leibniz or Spinoza and their influence on him, or were they very indirect?

Well, Whitehead definitely read all of the modern philosophers, the empiricists and the rationalists. Spinoza and Leibniz are cited prominently in Whitehead's philosophical works. He's definitely inheriting a lot of their thinking, and I think he, he, he, he, He leans more in the direction of Leibniz's pluralism than Spinoza's monism. The idea that the divine is imminent in nature is something that Whitehead certainly insists upon. But unlike Spinoza, Whitehead doesn't simply identify God and nature. If Spinoza is a pantheist, Whitehead is often described as a pan-entheist, which is just a little added twist that rather than saying the world and God are identical,

the pan-entheist says that in two ways, in two senses, God is in the world and the world is in God. But there's something both about God that transcends the world and also something about the world that transcends God. And so pan-entheism is, sometimes it's called evolutionary pan-antheism, I think is white-ed's innovation that in a way, transcends and includes, or if you want, synthesizes Spinoza and Leibniz. Leibniz has a more pluralistic monodology,

wherein, for Whitehead, the pluralism comes in not so much in just the sense of many things in many things spatially arrayed, but rather for Whitehead, it's about process. And even if the universe is whole, and even if in any given moment, a process of unification collects the many into a novel one, as Whitehead describes it. Each of these new unifications is in the fact that it is novel, it is adding to the universe. And so there's a sense of incompleteness in Whitehead's conception of nature. And a Spinoza might say, well, you know, Spinoza was well aware that this nature or God is an infinite substance. And in that sense, is never complete either.

But Spinoza is a determinist. And so, you know, you could point to aspects of his philosophy that mitigate against the sense of a closed universe. But in some ways, Whitehead's critiques of Einstein's, more or less unspoken metaphysics, is similar to his critique of Spinoza. Einstein was a Spinozist. It's a critique of this notion of determination,

a block universe, right, where in some sense the future is already out there in a fourth spatial dimension. Nothing new is really happening. That's just a function, the idea that the future hasn't happened yet is just a function of our limited perception. This would be the Einsteinian or the Spinoza's view. And Whitehead definitely wants to preserve the sense of an open future. So yeah, you know, definitely in answer to your question, Spinoza and Leibniz are crucial for, you know, if you haven't familiarized yourself with their approaches, it's going to be much more difficult to understand what Whitehead is trying to say. Yeah. Totally. Really well said, really fascinating distinctions to be made there. Specifically, the pantheism versus pan-entheism. We just talked

about that distinction for the first time that I've ever even heard that distinction was on that recent episode of Dark Green Religion with Braun Taylor. So the fact that it comes up again is really funny. Of course, in that context, it was also us discussing Spinoza. So, very interesting. But let's go ahead and talk about process philosophy in general, because certainly Whitehead is seen as sort of the leading figure of process philosophy, but a lot of philosophies could be described as a process philosophy. So I'm wondering if you could kind of talk about what exactly process philosophy is and what role Whitehead played in its development, or maybe what made Whitehead's process philosophy unique. Yeah. So I think there's an ancient pedigree for this approach. We could go all the way back to Heraclytus, the pre-Socratic ancient Greek philosopher who said everything flows, Panta ray. The idea is that, well, as Heraclyus put it, you can't step into the same river twice, not only because the river is constantly changing, but you are also constantly changing. And so rather than emphasizing, static, eternal being as the ultimate nature of reality, as, say, someone like Parmenides would. Heraclytus, or the process tradition in general, is going to say that no change is

ultimate. And Whitehead is a scientifically informed philosopher, as you've been saying. And so for him, the emphasis on process is not simply a sort of metaphysical a priori. It's not simply a derivation from our experience or some kind of phenomenology. But it is, you know, more importantly, an interpretation of what science, physics, and biology have revealed to us about the nature of nature, namely, at least on Whitehead's interpretation, quantum theory rules out the idea that nature could be fully present at an instant. In other words, the idea that the idea that a particle is sort of just an inert geometrically extended lump of stuff that is there at any instant of time and just sort of mutely persist through moments of time. Whitehead thinks

that quantum theory makes that notion of a substantial particle just completely inadequate as a metaphysical explanation. Instead, nature comes in these discontinuous leap. And so when you're talking about, say, a photon, it takes a certain duration for a complete photon, this quantum of energy to manifest. If you don't allow for that duration to unfold, you don't have a photon, right? So no nature at an instant is for Whitehead, one of the consequences of quantum physics that metaphysicians need to take on board. And so it's only one of the reasons, though, that he argues for a process ontology. He examines the history of philosophy, going back to Aristotle, and critiques the idea of substance. And this whole ontology rooted in substance and attributes, right, the properties or qualities that adhere in substances, some of which would be essential, others would be inessential, and so on.

All of Aristotelian logic is sort of built on this. substance property ontology, and Whitehead saw it rooted in the subject predicate grammar of our languages. And he's trying to articulate an alternative process relational ontology that isn't rooted in this idea of independently existing entirely isolated substances, where for Aristotle, as for Descartes, the definition of a substance is that which requires nothing but itself in order to exist. Whitehead is saying, again, in light of quantum physics, but also he thinks this is rooted in experience, there is no such thing as an isolated substance requiring nothing but itself in order to be itself or to exist. Everything exists in this

relational nexus. It's not that individuals are simply reduced to their relations. There is this in Whitehead's philosophy a moment of private satisfaction, you would say, but that satisfaction of a private subject is always temporary. It perishes and then becomes something felt by the community of other subjects, right? So no subject is private permanently in Whitehead's scheme. Rather, we're in this nexus of relationships and his philosophy is an attempt just to apply this idea of the ultimate nature of reality being processes, processes in relationship. He applies that not only in physics and biology and the natural sciences generally, but to human psychology, sociology, and to the entire cosmos.

So, yeah, that's kind of, again, the high-level summary of why his philosophy is called process. He's opposing it to the substance tradition, which has been really the dominant and orthodox tradition in much of Western philosophy. Yeah, incredibly interesting. I know that they're very different, but would Marx be considered a process philosopher in his own way? I think so. There's actually a dissertation and later became a book written by Anne Fairchild Pomeroy called Marx and Whitehead, process dialectics, critique of capitalism, I think, is the subtitle, where she makes this argument that, yeah, Marx needs to be understood as a process philosopher and that his critique of capitalism

as a mode of production only makes sense in the context of the sort of ontology that Whitehead was articulating. So interesting connections there for sure. Really interesting. Yeah, and we will talk more about Marxist dialectics and how it is similar or maybe differs from Whitehead's process philosophy in particular. But I completely agree. I mean, Marxists can understand the flow of history, you know, the dialectical notion of contradiction, analyzing everything in its totality and its relationship to everything else, et cetera. So we can start to see how there's definitely something there that they share.

And I think we'll get into that a little bit more here in a bit. But still focusing on Whitehead and zooming out a bit and with, you know, whitehead's process philosophy in mind, What other major contributions did Whitehead make in philosophy? And what were some other of maybe his core ideas? You mentioned a con Crescence earlier. Yeah. Well, I think concrescence, you know, is this general process that Whitehead describes whereby,

you know, it's his account of this really miracle, whereby the past passes through the present into the future. It's an attempt to describe this concrete unfolding of, of temporality that is so fundamental to everything we are and everything we know and everything we want to do that it's hard to describe it. It's hard to become conscious of something, which is in a sense always already going on in the background of our consciousness as a condition for the possibility of even having a thought. And so concrescence is so core as an idea. It's the keystone of Whitehead's philosophy. It's rather

difficult to define, though. I mean, it's his principle of novelty, right? It's this process whereby the many become one and are increased by one, as I hinted at earlier. And it's meant to apply both to things going on at the level of fundamental physics, as much as to human phenomenology. right? And the flow of our experience from moment to moment, the construction of an identity, a personality from moment to moment. So from physics to psychology, right? It is, concrescence is what is going on. But concrescence is a description of individual moments. And Whitehead, obviously, as a process philosopher, wants to understand how moments relate to one another in the course of the flow of time. And so he has this other concept of societies or historical

roots of these concessant moments. What congresses are actual occasions of experience, right? And as these occasions of experience inherit from one another, they form historical roots of experience or, again, societies. And so Whitehead's taking a term from sociology. used to talk about groups of human beings and generalizing it such that society becomes Whitehead's way of describing groups of anything, groups of atoms, groups of stars, we call those galaxies, groups of cells that we call plants or animals. These are all societies of congressing occasions of experience in Whitehead's terms, right? And so he's not just a process thinker. I should also mention this concept of pan experientialism. This is a word that the whiteheadian philosopher David

Ray Griffin coined to describe Whitehead's philosophy. So Whitehead doesn't use pan-entheism or pan-experientialism to describe his thought. These are words that others have attributed to Whitehead. But pan-experientialism is the whiteheadian form of what's more often called pan-psychism. It's this idea that physical organization at whatever scale is already informed by aims or purposes, you could say. There's a kind of striving or desire at play, even in the simplest physical systems. And there is a form of feeling. There's something it is like to be even a photon. There's something it is like to be a star.

Just is there something it's like to be a single bacterium, or a plant and I think people are more willing to accept the idea that all animals are in some sense sentient or conscious and of course human beings though there are exceptions some very strict materialists who will deny even that human beings are conscious much less anything else in nature but yeah whitehead is a pan experientialist and he thinks that if we're going to understand the reality of human consciousness as a naturalistic emergent product of this evolutionary process, then there can be no zero point of experience. Rather, there's a continuum here, and evolution describes the gradual intensification

of this experiential capacity that is intrinsic to physical process. Yeah, that's probably enough whiteheadian jargon to start off with. What do you think? Yeah, that's great. So just to be very clear, maybe you said this and it just sort of missed me, but, you know, like a David Chalmers type pan-psychism, how does that differ from pan-experientialism? And what's the difference, perhaps, in consciousness? Is pan-psychins, like, everything even down to, like, the thermostat has at least some rudimentary sense of conscious experience? So are those things the exact same, or is there a distinction to be made between pan-psychism and pan-experientialism?

Yeah. Yeah, there is a distinction, which is why Griffin, who I mentioned, coined this new term. I think panpsychism is a prettier word, but the conceptual distinction is important here. Psyche implies, you know, soul or more of a sense of, like, personality, and people tend to associate that more with at least the higher animals and human beings. And so Whitehead isn't saying that some kind of self-reflective personality or self-consciousness goes all the way down. Granted, a lot of people who call themselves pan-psychist aren't suggesting that either. Though they will, like, you know, people like Philip Goff will use the word consciousness to refer to this sort of technically phenomenal consciousness, which is the experience of qualia, the consciousness of qualia, qualitative feelings and whatnot.

And they'll say that that goes all the way down. Whitehead defines consciousness in a very particular way and says that only those very advanced organisms, mammals and birds probably, but definitely human beings who have gained linguistic capacity are conscious in the sense that they can consider possibilities that are as yet. unrealized in their perceptual experience.

And so consciousness is pretty rare in nature, but there's this non-conscious form of experience or feeling or to introduce another whiteheadian word prehension that goes all the way down. And I think the real difference between the pan-psychisms that are discussed more and more now among philosophers of mind and Whitehead's pan-experientialism, again has to do with the difference between

a process and a substance-based ontology. In a substance-based ontology, if you're a panpsychist, typically you'll say that the psyche or the consciousness part is the intrinsic nature of physical objects. And so whereas physics describes kind of the structural or relational properties of the world, panpsychism is introduced to give some contents to the intrinsic nature of of this physical substance, as physics is describing it. And from Whitehead's point of view, I think his process relational approach to pan-experientialism

is as different from substance-based panpsychism as it is for materialism. In the sense that for Whitehead experience is really, experience is always a description of relationships among moments of experience, rather than, the intrinsic nature of an entity for Whitehead experience is the relation among entities. It's the feeling in between that is experiential rather than the intrinsic nature of a physical substance. So hopefully this distinction comes across in a clear enough way. But if we were to think about it in human terms, rather than looking in the brain for some

sort of chemical creatio ex nihilo of consciousness, whitehead would say that experience is in the, is in our collective engagements with one another. It's in the interpersonal, it's in the intersubjective, it's in the process of communication rather than simply located inside of one person's skull, right? So it's just a more relational understanding

of what experience actually amounts to. Yeah, it's incredibly interesting. Is there any sense of a teleology in his metaphysics, particularly with the unfolding of, I guess, higher levels of consciousness? Certainly a human consciousness is higher than a dog, which is higher than a bird's. Is there any sense of a teleological endpoint, or is it more or less indifferent to whether or not nature produces consciousness, whether or not that emerges is more or less a byproduct of other processes? and not in and of itself particularly important or going anywhere in particular. There's definitely aim or purpose or telos in nature in Whitehead's view. It's not a sort of extrinsically or externally imposed teleology, like some kind of design,

but rather a form of purpose that arises within each of the, multitude of creatures that composes the world. And so really, rather than one overarching teleology, there are many, many teloy or purposes or aims that are engaged in this interplay with one another. Though if there were a cosmic aim, an overarching telos in Whitehead's cosmology, it would be the production of beauty, right? And for Whitehead, beauty has to do with the harmonization of ever-increasing diversities. And so the more diversity that you can bring

into unity, the more beautiful that particular phenomenon is going to be in Whitehead's view. And evolution for him, not just as a biological process, but really a cosmic one, is tilted toward this kind of harmonization. And he thinks, you know, looking at the history of the earth, that the history of the universe is best we can piece it together, that there is this tilt toward complexity, you could say. And again, as a pan-experientialist for Whitehead,

physical complexity is intimately related to experiential intensity. And so as things get more complex, they become more conscious. So, yeah, there is, Whitehead does have a teleological view, though I think it's important to distinguish it from, a kind of more closed or fixed Aristotelian form of teleology, which isn't evolutionary in the same sense. And it's also important to distinguish it from something like intelligent design, where there is a divine engineer standing outside and above the world directing how everything unfolds within the world. That's not the kind of purpose that he's suggesting. Yeah, that is incredibly

fascinating and it really leads perfectly into this next question, which is, you know, zooming out on this basic conversation even further. And one of Whitehead's lasting legacies is in the realm of not process philosophy, but also of process theology. So can you, and, you know, we're just kind of talking about the role that a God might play. And in this process philosophy, it seems that insofar as any conception of God exists, that God itself would be subject to processes of change, which is very interesting. So can you kind of talk about what process theology is, although if you know what process philosophy is,

you probably have an idea, and then kind of talk about Whitehead's views on God and religion, and perhaps even mysticism, because I've heard some people call him a mystic of a sort. So that's a big question. You can take it wherever you want. Yeah. Well, if it weren't for the American process theologians,

you know, beginning with like Charles Hartsorn and David Ray Griffin, who have mentioned, and John Cobb, Jr., and others, Whitehead's works might not be in print. And so for the second half of the 20th century, it was really the theologians, typically liberal, progressive theologians who kept Whitehead alive. And thankfully, more recently, many other scholars from outside of religious studies and theology are storming the museum, as it were, to apply Whitehead's thought to various

disciplines in the sciences and the humanities. But process theology is a really unorthodox approach to really the biblical traditions, but as you mentioned earlier, there are, Whitehead himself says that his philosophy, in certain key respects, bears more resemblance to Vedic. and Buddhist traditions than to the biblical traditions. But there's room for everyone in Whitehead's philosophy of religion, and that was his intent, at least, the theistic and the non-theistic traditions he hoped would find some resonance with his final interpretation,

which is what part five of process and reality on God is titled. But Whitehead's God is not the creator god of the normal interpretation of Genesis, um whitehead's god is uh as whitehead describes him he uses that pronoun but i think um it doesn't quite work because there is this personal dimension to it so i'm not quite sure we'll just say god and avoid the pronouns whitehead's god is um as subject to the creative process as any other creature and in fact for whitehead god is a creature a creature of creativity now God is unique in the sense that God's the primordial creature of creativity, and so in some sense bears a unique relationship to every other creature in that God functions as the kind of filter

between the pure possibility of creativity, which you could almost identify as chaos, God's the filter between that, pure creativity, infinite possibility, right? the filter between that and finite actuality and our everyday experience and the limited experience of all other creatures. And so God, even though God's a creature, God has a special relationship to infinite possibility. God feels, in Whitehead's view, everything and reflects that feeling of everything to each finite creature in a way that is most relevant to that creature's situation. And so there's an important metaphysical role that this God concept plays in Whitehead's cosmological scheme. And this may be one of the reasons that academic philosophers and physicists and other scientists have been, you know, until more recently, again, wanting to keep their distance from Whitehead, though it's a metaphysician's God, right?

and not a God that is coming from religious emotion primarily, though for Whitehead religious experience, and this is where mysticism starts to come in, it's part of the data that any cosmology that pretends to be adequate is going to need to find a place for. And so even thinkers who are more materialist in orientation and are absolutely convinced that God's just, an idea invented by humans, even for someone like Daniel Dennett, you know, it's important to understand

the evolutionary role in the history of human societies that religion has played, right? And so one way or another, even if it's going to be a naturalistic explanation, we need to understand what role the history of religious experience has played in shaping our species. And some scholars of religion like Robert Bella, who 2011 he published religion in human evolution, root the religious instincts of human beings in our mammalian ancestors and really grounds it in the propensity to play and sees all culture really as rooted in this, as he puts it, as Bella puts it, this relaxed field that many, especially mammalian species and primates in particular, are able to establish a relaxed field that's kind of outside of the Darwinian struggle for existence

that allows learning to take place. It allows a kind of proto-ethics. Like often you'll see many animals, whether the big cats or wolves and dogs and cats as we live among, when they play with each other, the stronger ones won't dominate the weaker ones. They'll kind of, they have a sense of fairness and they'll sort of give the others a chance, you know. And so those are the kind of proto-justice that's born in these play behaviors. And so we really need to see religion, and this is a very white-headed move, as

rooted in our biology and the social instincts of our animal ancestors. But yeah, for whitehead religious experience, it's part of the data that our cosmology needs to incorporate in order to be fully adequate.

And so the religious emotions and the religious mystical or transcendental experiences that have changed the lives of so many people over history are an indication of something latent in the nature of the universe, right? And Whitehead takes these special experiences seriously, as in some way revelatory, right, of the metaphysical structure of the universe. And so while he's not himself, he never records a mystical experience of his own. I don't get any sense, really, that he was an especially

enthusiastic person. He kind of drift, even though he was raised in this religious context, as I mentioned earlier, he himself never went to church as an adult and sort of drifted away from organized religion, even though he seems to have had this poetic sense of, you know, Wordsworthian Pantheism, or, you know, as I said earlier, Panentheism, or, you know, as I said earlier, it wasn't institutionally grounded in any sense yeah so that's that's that's why it has relationship to god and to religion i absolutely love that in william james i think is another influence on um should have mentioned him earlier yeah thank you yeah but that makes a lot of sense here because even if whitehead himself didn't have a particularly mystical or religious experience by reading something like

the varieties of religious experience by william james you could have a really good understanding that these things are real, they do happen, and trying to make that fit into a holistic, naturalistic metaphysics that really doesn't want to leave anything major outside of its confines. So it does make sense on that level. Now, I have to ask because certainly I, you know, through psychedelics, but then also 15 years of meditation practice and Buddhism that I personally undergo, that I would have what I would call spiritual experiences. And, you know, there's this thinker, a Jack Corn, field. He's from the Insight Meditation Society, one of the people that went over to, you know, the Indian subcontinent and studied under Buddhist teachers and then brought some of that wisdom back to the West. And he talks about, you know, many enlightenments as opposed to one enlightenment. He's like, enlightenments, plural, are these spiritual moments of experience and they can take different forms. There could be an experience of profound emptiness. There could be an experience of profound luminous. where you literally feel as if light is coming through your body and permeating the cosmos.

There's a form of it that is everything gets incredibly, incredibly silent. But one of the major forms is also this feeling of love. And I think more than any of the other ones that he describes, I've had these radical experiences, particularly following deep periods of suffering where I feel, you know, in so many words, like my heart opened up and I literally will start weeping in love and care for, random strangers like my last one I was in a Target parking lot right and then all of a sudden this feeling opens up and I'm just seeing random people pushing their carts out of Target and I literally for at least a few moments genuinely loved them like I love my own children and

that's a fleeting moment it passes but it's certainly for me a religious or a mystical experience and it says something very profound about the role that the central role I really think that love may play in the cosmos and in humanity's spiritual progression. So I'm just wondering if Whitehead had any thoughts on the role love plays in any of this. I know it's kind of a stretch, but I'm just wondering if he has anything to say on that point in particular. Oh, absolutely. If anything, you know, Whitehead would see that God's power is manifest in the world through the love that creatures express for one another. Right. And so it's in, these feelings and the actions that flow from them that God acts in the world, right?

God can't command us to love, but when we do love, that's divine action. And, you know, for Whitehead metaphysically, just to speak on a more abstract, in a more abstract register, each moment of our experience is constituted by the influx of the other, right? This is what the process of concrescence is describing. So we are in Whitehead's view, quite literally made of each other. My experience is the growing together of the perished experience of all the beings in my environment, right, from moment to moment. And so without others, I am nothing, right? And so there's this profound relationality that is just a function of the nature of reality in Whitehead's view. And when we come to love

one another, we're just waking up to the way things are. We're not, adding something new to reality that didn't exist already. We're waking up to the way things always already are. And so I think there is, there's a, there's a metaphysical basis for these feelings of love in Whitehead's thought. Yeah, that's profound. I really did not know that that was an aspect of his work. And I was sort of swinging for the fences with that one.

But the fact that he thought about that and took that into consideration is fascinating. Let's shift from, from God and religion towards scientific material. As you say, there's criticisms that Whitehead has of, you know, these reductive approaches that are still very popular in our culture today. Scientific materialism has certainly had its heyday and is still, I think, a big cultural influence on the way people think about the natural world, even if they have ostensibly religious commitments, I think. So what was Whitehead's criticism of scientific materialism and how does his organic realism differ from both that and traditional forms of idealism? Yeah, important question because, yeah, 100 years later after Whitehead's critique of scientific materialism, which begins in his book, Science and the Modern World, we're still, I think, culturally fixated, or a large portion of the culture is fixated on this materialistic conception of reality, even though physics has moved on. You know, among scientists, the physicists are the, I've found, the least likely to put much credence in a materialist ontology. It's usually the biologists or the psychologists who are assuming there's still this mechanistic ground floor down there.

The neuroscientists. The neuroscientists, yeah. But, you know, the physicists are like, no, there's nothing like that down here. Sorry. but whitehead's critique is is rooted in the what he thinks is the enfeeblement of thought because of the inconsistencies that that crop up when one tries to affirm materialism and what is materialism for whitehead well it's it's the view that nature ultimately is composed of inert particles or if you want inert fields that don't sound, they have no sound,

they have no scent or smell. They're totally devoid of anything qualitative, right? And this goes back to Galileo's bifurcation of nature into primary characteristics, everything that can be measured and quantified and then calculated mathematically, right? And, on the one hand, and then secondary characteristics, on the other hand, which is for Galileo, all the stuff added by the perceiving organism, right? The sense, the sounds, the smells. And so Whitehead, you know, has these beautiful sarcastic comments in science in the modern world in his earlier book, The Concept of Nature, where he's critiquing this bifurcation. He says, really, the nature poets, you know, when they're composing this poetry about the beautiful redness

of the rose or the hues of a sunset, they should be congratulating themselves because all that is conjured in their imagination. It's not part of nature at all. That would be the bifurcated view, at least. But the inconsistencies here are that, you know, the scientific materialist is saying that nature is this soundless, scentless, colorless affair, totally devoid of purpose. And yet they, as scientists, motivated by the purposes of scientific inquiry, they want to understand, they have a desire to know, they're concocting all of these instruments and experiments, you know, to uncover the secrets of nature. That's a quite intense form of purpose, even though they're claiming that the nature to which they belong is purposeless.

And so, and of course, most of scientific materialists also, you know, they obey the law, they love their family, they engage in society in a more or less moral way. Despite the fact, again, that at least their scientific view would suggest that all of that is illusion. All of that is a bunch of BS that we convince ourselves of when in reality, none of it

has any meaning or significance and we're all lumbering robots. And so Whitehead thinks that materialism enfeebles our thought because it prevents us from thinking coherently about the practices that we engage in. And so his critique is kind of

saying, look, there's all sorts of performative self-contradiction going on in one who affirms scientific materialism. You're denying in theory what you are presupposing in practice, right? So that's the, I think, the real meat of his critique. Yeah, that's very interesting. And I always think, like, it's interesting that on the individual level, we often go, as we grow up, we go through phases that humanity as a whole has gone through. So, like, when you're very young, you're overly suspicious. You think There's things in the closets and things under the bed. You see faces in your curtains, right?

Et cetera. And you sort of move on. And then you, you know, for me as a teenager, I became a Catholic of my own volition, got confirmed, baptized, all that stuff. And then in my early 20s, or late teens, early 20s, I shifted into a new atheism, you know, like the, it was, I was right at that time when there was like Harris and Dennett and Dawkins and Hitchens and they were all doing their thing. And for many years, I considered myself a hardcore scientific material.

but it's actually through practices like my meditation practice and other investigations that I've sort of myself outgrown that view and I'm wondering if you if that resonates with you that structure of individuals sort of reflecting a collective development and if you yourself went through a scientific materialist period yeah I mean the great German biologist Ernst Hegel said that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and that's been that idea has been critiqued somewhat, but I think the general notion holds up pretty well. And as you're saying, yeah, as individuals, we sort of relive the stages of the cultural evolution of the species. And I had a very similar journey as you. I mean, I grew up in mixed Jewish Christian

to Jewish Christian parents. And my mom was Christian, my dad, Jewish. And we saw, So I kind of celebrated all the holidays and went to Sunday school. And as a teenager, 12, 13 years old, I started to read Dawkins and Stephen Hawking and wasn't fully understanding the intricacies of their arguments at the point. But there was something about the critique of the stupider, more bigoted dogmas of some of the major institutionalized religions that I, appreciated. And so, yeah, in my early teens, I became a pretty strident, uh, uh, overconfident atheist. And, um, it wasn't until I was 16, 17 that in the context of some philosophy courses, I was lucky enough to take in high school. I was exposed to, uh, Alan Watts. Nice.

And, um, Eastern philosophies and religions, as well as to, uh, Carl, Jung, the depth psychologist, who has a very deep philosophy of religion. And so I started to get another sense of kind of the psychological role that religion can play in a human life. And through Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki and others really got a sense of the esoteric forms of spiritual practice that were coming from Asia. And later I would discover that the West has its own esoteric spiritual streams that were sort of suppressed within the Christian and Jewish traditions.

And so, yeah, I kind of, in my early 20s, with the help of psychedelics and some powerful experiences, mystical experiences, found my way back to a kind of non-denominational spirituality. And I think then through my late 20s, realized that there are some important critiques of the so-called spiritual but not religious movement in that it is, susceptible to a kind of spiritual consumerism and lacks grounding in community and all these things. And so I'm in a place now where I think I feel the wisdom and the importance of the sort of mystical strains in all of the world religions. And I don't have an institutional home. I've tried, but I couldn't make it fit. I couldn't fit into any existing church.

denominations or anything, but I find myself increasingly questioning the extent to which spirituality without religion in the sense of a sort of traditional lineage is really up to the task, the various tasks and challenges that we face socially and ecologically. And I think ultimately, if we're going to get through this civilizational crisis, it will require a religious transformation or a metanoia of some kind and even those who claim to be non-religious often have other kind of surrogate religions that they don't call religion but function in the same way and so I guess I've come to see that religion's not optional whether we are whether our religion is consumerism or you know

or Christianity or any or or football whatever it might be we've we've all got one right and so there's this sort of psychological and psychospiritual process that I think is is just intrinsic to our species and so rather than try to pretend like we could escape it and just become fully rational I think we need to recognize how the human psyche actually functions yeah yeah I completely agree with everything you said it is very funny how how similar our trajectories were. And if people are interested in kind of finding the commonality between all major religions, you could do a Google search for something like the perennial philosophy. And that'll lead you down the road

of seeing how Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all have mystical branches. We've covered them on the show. And then the Eastern philosophies, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism. They have their establishment institutional forms. And they also have their mystical esoteric forms as well. And so if people are interested, definitely continue that. But I was hoping that you could touch really quickly on organic realism and how that is different from idealism. We already talked about how it's different from scientific materialism. Yeah. So Whitehead calls his philosophy organic realism. And while he does have much in common with idealists, particularly in

the shared critique of materialism, ultimately he worries about the idealist tendency to, it's a kind of holistic reductionism, reducing the plurality of creatures and their unique experiential contributions to the one mind with capital letters, right? The absolute spirit. Whitehead's not denying the unity of things, but he, I think, is wanting to emphasize, emphasize the importance of individual achievement at the level of these actual occasions of experience that formed the sort of key ingredients to be analyzed in his philosophy. And so his organic realism is saying that reality is ultimately a co-evolving ecosystem of organisms. And

each organism brings forth its own unique perspective. And there is no final, at least no complete one mind, no finished eternal perspective, which would forever include all of the organic feelings and the organismic perspectives that are continually being brought forth in the course of cosmic evolution. And so he's a very evolutionary thinker, and organism for Whitehead, I should clarify, is meant to, he generalizes this concept. just like he generalizes society such that it applies beyond just the biological realm, right? He describes atoms as organisms in the sense of being self-organizing systems, right? So an atom, say a helium atom is composed of two protons and two electrons and two neutrons, right?

And they, for Whitehead, are forming a symbiotic relationship that is analogous to the symbiomboes. relationship among the organelles forming a cell at the biological level. And so organisms compose the universe at all scales, right? That's organic realism. It's an evolving ecology of organisms, whether we're talking about the biosphere or the solar system or the galaxy and so on. And so he's, yeah, there is a reality out there. It's composed of experiential agents or organisms.

And this is, I think, just a different emphasis than idealism. Often materialists see when I talk about Whitehead's pan experientialism, they're like, oh, that's idealism. And from a materialist point of view, yeah, it is kind of like at least more idealistic, though Whitehead, again, is emphasizing the relationality among organisms rather than the ultimate reduction of individuals to the ones. mind. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and it's really a beautiful way of sort of comprehending the cosmos. Yeah, it doesn't do the Hegelian absolute spirit or the Berkleyan, you know,

God maintains the material world when we look away sort of unity of consciousness. So that's very interesting. All right, well, let's go ahead now that we have a grasp on, you know, to be honest, a complex philosophy, and I know process and reality in particular is Magnum Opus is a notoriously difficult read, but that's nothing new in philosophy. But I do want to talk about politics because Whitehead lived through both World War I and World War II. And although his philosophy is more focused on science and metaphysics and a lot of other things besides for politics, I do wonder did he have a discernible politics, especially in the face of like, you know, World War II, liberal capitalism versus communism versus fascism. And did he ever engage with the work of

Marks and Angles, because as I've sort of alluded to throughout this conversation, Marks and Engels dialectical materialism, specifically the dialectical part, seems very much in line with a process philosophy as a way of viewing the world. So I'm very curious if he ever had that engagement at all. Yeah. So Whitehead does mention Marx, at least in there's a book published by the journalist Lucien Price called Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. And we have to trust Price's memory and fidelity to the actual conversation. But he does record Whitehead discussing Marx and the plight of the worker. Whitehead was not a Marxist. I think it's fair to say he was kind of classical liberal. In his time when he was still living in Cambridge and then

London definitely was a progressive in the sense that he was involved in the women's suffrage movements and equal access to education for women and was in his short biograph. statement, Whitehead, autobiographic statement, Whitehead reports that he was egged more than once by, in the context of political events by, you know, those who weren't as progressive as him. And so in his context, I think a kind of progressive liberal definitely has some Victorian colonial residues in his historical understanding. You know, there are some cringy moments. And this is just typical of any thinker in this age, for the most part, that, you know, he'll talk about North America as an, or North and South America as empty continents prior to the arrival of European colonists and conquistadors and whatnot. So, you know, you get that stuff, which is typical of late 19th century, early 20th century thinkers.

In, you know, around 19, in the 1920s, it was like the height of the British Empire, right? and, you know, so Whitehead's coming from that context, and you see that reflected in his account of civilization, though there are aspects of his view that I think we should not just quickly dismiss, right, as imperial colonial holdovers, because unlike the Marxist, dialectical materialist point of view, Whitehead is not willing to say that history is driven by material condition. He thinks that ideas have a potent role to play in the evolution of human societies and culture. In Adventures of Ideas, his 1933 book, he traces the dawning realization of the ideal of freedom through at least Western European history and shows how the way that ideas only gradually manifest. in the context of human societies and take root in human institutions that can actually sort of defend and apply these ideals. And, you know, if you go back to ancient Greece, right, Aristotle famously says there couldn't be such a thing as philosophy without slavery, right?

Because without the leisure time afforded to an elite, a cultural elite, by masses of slaves that do the manual labor, Aristotle thought, well we just couldn't we couldn't have higher learning and it's only over the course of thousands of years that this is rooted in a sort of philosophical critique of existing social practices that the idea of freedom is expanded and established such that it became only you know less than less than two centuries ago that's most civilized so-called societies realized that they couldn't continue to practice slavery and pretend to be civilized. And so, you know, from Whitehead's point of view, there was a, basically a religious

impulse that was striving to realize itself over the course of thousands of years. And that without that religious impulse and that longing for the actualization of the idea of freedom in human society, that we wouldn't have ended slavery, right? And of course, a Marxist would say, well, technology advanced and, you know, really capitalist markets were instrumental in in what was hoped to be the eventual overcoming of capitalism and that it's really these economic drivers that are allowing slavery to be eventually overcome. I don't think Whitehead was overly so idealistic

that he thought that material conditions didn't matter, but he also is not willing to ignore their power, the power to shape history that these ideas have. So he's a bit, you know, I think there's some tension here between a dialectical materialist view of history and Whitehead's view. Yeah, yeah, in the historical materialist Marxist vision of things that, you know, the idea of something like freedom would be generated by, you know, underlying, as you said, or you alluded to underlying economic forces that are changing society as a whole. And then these ideas are generated in the superstructure.

But Whitehead seems to think that these ideas have some causal power, at least parallel in power to the material underpinnings of society. and its evolution. So, I mean, from a Marxist perspective, we would be a political idealist, just for making that claim. But in any case, it's interesting. And so the materialism thing, that's where the disagreements come in. But do you have anything else to say on the dialectics? Obviously, dialectics go much further back than Marx and angles, though they did put a

particular spin on it. And just like how dialectics in general might dovetail or diverge from Whitehead's process philosophy. Yeah. Well, there, I mean, there's no question that. Whitehead is a dialectical thinker, and you can see dialectic throughout his key concepts, concrescence, you know, as a dialectical process of synthesis. And, you know, you could say that this is coming out of the work of Hegel. Whitehead was surrounded by British idealists and Hegelians, and he says he tried to read Hegel

and couldn't do it, but he definitely absorbed, throughout osmosis, as it were, a sort of Hegelian point of view from various colleagues and friends who were steeped in Hegel. But really, you know, dialectic goes back to Plato. And it's just this sense of reality as a process wherein contradiction is intrinsic, right? And it's, but you don't stop at the contradiction. There's a process of overcoming or sublation whereby reality resolves the contradictions which erupt from its heart and is thereby able to in some way creatively advance beyond the dilemmas and the dualisms that it was faced with.

So it's a view of reality as I think pregnant with possibility and that even when it feels like you've reached a dead end and that you're completely trapped, something cracks and a new reality opens up in the midst of the closure that you thought you had arrived at. And so it's, you know, it's an important form of logic whereby, you know, you overcome these old aristotelian notions of the excluded middle and the principle of non-contradiction. You know, it allows us to think through contradiction and sort of arrive at the other side. Absolutely. Where are your political sympathies? they lie and do they diverge it all from whiteheads more progressive liberalism?

Well, I think we've reached, I mean, this moment in history is, and it's hard to speak about your moment in history when you're in the midst of it. But I was very deeply involved body and soul in the Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020, the primary campaigns. And in, you know, the last one for a second there, it looked like this movement was actually going to have a chance. And then it got totally squashed, you know, with the primary in South Carolina and the full weight of the Democratic establishment coming down to, to douse the fire.

Yep. And after that, I just became so, you know, I was already questioning whether the Democratic Party could be reformed. and, you know, unsure where the political left in the United States could turn. I don't think the word socialist is ever going to fly with most Americans, unfortunately. And so for me, I'm in a process of trying to understand the future of politics beyond liberalism, beyond any form of nationalism. And I think also beyond communism or Marxism,

at least as it has been traditionally understood and applied, whether in the Cultural Revolution in China or in the Soviet Union or elsewhere, I think liberalism, communism, and fascism are the attempts, the attempts at political, modernity that have failed, right? And where do we go next? I am really increasingly desperate to find others who are interested in having that conversation. I think there are important principles and ideals that we can take, you know, from Marx's corpus and from, you know,

certain liberal ideals. I do value, you know, individuality, though I think individualism is is something else that disembeds the individual from the communal context within which, you know, we come to be. So, you know, to become an individual, you need a loving family and community to enculturate you so as to realize your freedom as an individual. You don't come into the world as an infant with a sense of liberal, or rather, libertarian, autonomy. you know exactly um so you know i'm kind of searching i'm kind of searching right now i think you know anarchism and social ecology and um these sorts of points of view are are feeding my hunger to some extent but um you know i'm really eager to to actually organize and and figure out ultimately what

may need to be a post constitutional order in the context of the united states because the current government, the current constitutional order is perhaps unfixable. That's the conclusion that I'm increasingly, I'm not happy to say that, but I don't know that we can salvage it at this point. Yeah. Yeah, I really appreciate your honesty and your candor there. And I agree with much of it. I think I still hold out a lot of faith in the communist ideal and that, you know, viewing communism as a process itself that is updated through attempts to implement it and experiment with it. But communism broadly conceived includes elements of social ecology, includes elements of anarchism as well. But I think people in general are looking for another option. They see that this way of living is dying, if not

already dead. And some of the answers already on hand, more like Marxist orthodoxy from 100 years ago or certainly any form of fascism is no way forward at all. The consciousness, the way of relating to ourselves, to one another, to the natural world, that has to change in profound ways. And I think in egalitarian ways, which are very much aligned with the radical egalitarianism of the far left. But again, I think we are at this crossroads as not only a society in the U.S. but as a species. and I think nature itself is sort of giving us an ultimatum evolve or perish. The old saying that comes out of like Rosa Luxembourg of like socialism or barbarism, I think that still holds true because the wealth and resources of our planet need to be equitably shared.

They cannot be, you know, siphoned up to a tiny handful of ruling global elites, the capitalist class and continue on as we have. And there's things inherent in capitalism that I think give rise to the. eco-crisis, et cetera. But in general, I think, you know, progressive thinkers, anarchist thinkers, communist thinkers coming into dialogue, I think is important and always emphasizing, I think, the experimental aspects of the Marxist tradition, of rejecting all forms of dogma and orthodoxy and understanding this is an open-ended, ever-evolving process that requires open experimentation. It's never going to be taking something from 100 years ago or 50 years of.

ago or yesterday and applying it to today in the present moment as if it's going to fit perfectly. So I think on those, on those points at least, I think you and I can can definitely more or less agree. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that sounds good to me. We definitely need to be creative and experimental. You know, the one thing I'll add from just to bring Whitehead back in here is he, he's not a cheerleader for capitalism. But, um, and it could be, because he does recognize the exploitation of labor. And, you know, he was, he actually had a chance to meet FDR's wife, Eleanor, and was very proving of the New Deal and felt that it was, you know, way overdue.

But he didn't think that the state, he certainly didn't think that the state should have control over the economy. And the reason was is that when he looked at, you know, looked at history, he saw the role that commerce and trade played in actually bringing societies and cultures together. Obviously, slavery was a tremendous stain upon this because it was highly profitable and a major part of commerce for thousands of years. But it was eventually, in some ways, the need for trade and commerce that you could say was a major factor, along with the religious impulses that Whitehead points to that commerce was also a factor in ending slavery in the sense that the technologies of the industrial north increasingly freed up the need for all that human

labor and that without that economic incentive even though southern plantation owners were getting very rich as well as the northern and European bankers who were funding slavery Sorry, that's my dog scratching her collar. You know, so there's also this economic factor that is leading to, and I think Marx recognizes this too, you know, the way that capitalism did in some ways get us out of abject chattel slavery towards wage slavery. So it's a slightly less exploitative, maybe. extremely less exploited form of slavery, but nonetheless, wage slavery is still exploitative.

So there's these other factors, but I think that the point is that commerce is something that White had felt needed to be with all the appropriate social and ecological restraints enforced by the state, nonetheless, not something centrally controlled because it would just lead to inefficiencies and favoritism and really, you know, there are plenty of historical examples of communist regimes who ended up just reproducing the same sort of class structure that they were supposed to be overcoming. Yeah, I largely am sympathetic with that point of view. The thing I kind of will toss out there with that transition from feudalism and forms of

slavery into capitalism is, you know, the liberal bourgeoisie were the progressive social force at that time, right, with the French Revolution, for example, even the Haitian revolution. But these things were fits and starts. Like the transition from feudalism to capitalism took lots of protests, lots of development of ideas, lots of development of the material basis of society, lots of struggle. And so the first ever attempt to build a socialist egalitarian society, the Russian Revolution, of course failed because the first attempt to move from feudalism to capitalism would fail. I mean, the French Revolution itself got drowned in the blood of the Napoleonic reaction to it.

And so that's very dialectical as well. But yes, those experiments ending in failure ultimately, I don't think ultimately takes away from the idea. And also there's the Marxist idea that you can't, you know, in theory at least, you're not supposed to, quote unquote, lay your hands on the ready-made machinery of the state and just use the bourgeois state as the mechanism of control and power to implement socialism, but people find it very difficult when they're immediately attacked, like the Russian Revolution was immediately attacked and descended into civil war, and every attempt to build socialism has been ruthlessly attacked, led almost always by the U.S. and its allies.

In the face of that onslaught, that inevitable onslaught, the state at least offers the ability to defend oneself and the centralization. into the hands of the state almost comes as in part a reaction to the onslaught that these birthing, you know, baby socialist experiments are inevitably have to face by the forces of capital and reaction. But yeah, yeah, yeah, totally fair addition to my comments. Yeah. Cool.

All right, well, let's go ahead and move on because it wouldn't be a Rev. Left episode if I didn't focus on Buddhism. And I love doing this. I love mixing these ideas together and seeing what comes out. Because as with Marxist dialectics, Buddhism dovetails very interestingly with Whitehead's process philosophy, and Buddhism itself can be seen as a process philosophy. In fact, meditation in part is for you to turn your attention inward to see that moment by moment, even the sensations in your body, the thoughts you have, your emotions are in a constant state of radical cascading change. and there's actually no abiding substance or self in the midst of that cascading change

that you could point to and say this is the enduring me that sits behind change and watches it all go but I'm still here right as an individual ego separate self perhaps as pure awareness that that can happen but so with all of that in mind did Whitehead ever engage with any Eastern philosophies and what's your opinion on the similarities

and differences between Whitehead's process philosophy and, you know, Buddhism broadly conceived. Yeah, well, in his book, Religion in the Making, which I think also came out in 1929 right after process and reality, maybe right before, in any event, in that book, he engages with Christianity and Buddhism, which he feels are in his terms the two rational religions. And so we can say, good job Whitehead in including an Asian tradition,

but he doesn't have too many kind things to say about Islam and so I think he's not a scholar of religion he has his cultural and British imperial biases here he didn't I think have exposure to the mystical strains within Islamic thought or he he might have made a different judgment here but in any event he highlights Christianity and Buddhism because he feels that they are the most reasonable, the most rational religions. And he articulates this evolutionary process, this cultural development coming initially out of the sort of ritual play, like Robert Bella's view I was talking about earlier is very much Whitehead's view, that certain primal peoples would engage in ritual performances because they reliably produced certain religious

feelings and emotions, and gradually these rituals were symbolically elaborated and myths developed and belief in the myths. And then gradually from that point, these myths and beliefs were systematized and generalizations were extracted and whole theologies or traditions emerged, which were aiming to be kind of logically consistent and ethically coherent and so on. And he thinks, that Christianity and Buddhism have taken this process the furthest. They're quite different, though, in that for Buddhism, it's more, in Whitehead's terms, the emphasis is more on creativity, which is this process of, you could say, dependent co-origination, which is an idea that comes out of especially like Madiamika Buddhism.

whereas for Christianity, it's the divine person that's most important. And this is more where Whitehead, the theistic element of Whitehead's thought comes from, though Whitehead's God, again, is a creature of creativity. And so creativity is Whitehead's ultimate, which is why Whitehead himself says that really his system, his cosmological scheme, there's more resemblance to the Buddhist approach than to your typical biblical understanding. But, you know, other Buddhist elements in Whitehead's thinking include his conception of the self, as you were describing.

Meditation in its various forms reveals the sense in which there is no abiding substantial self. Rather, there's a continual flow from moment to moment. whitehead says in process in reality no thinker thinks twice we are becoming new in each moment right not only because we are adding a new experience to our own historical route right but also because there's this influx of the other and others into each moment of our experience as I was describing earlier so again it's dependent co-origination each moment of our experience is a rises out of a nexus of causes and conditions, though there is, in Whitehead's view,

in the process of concrescence, the achievement of subjective point of view. It's just that in Whitehead's scheme, the subject is momentary and perishes, right? And so you don't have an abiding self in Whitehead's psychology. And so it's quite similar to Buddhism. But you would say,

still have a moment by maybe a temporary self that rises and is sort of dissolved away? Yeah. Well, Whitehead wants to retain a sense of individual agency. And so for him, in each moment of concrescence in the very, he says, high grade, complex experience of a self-conscious human being, in each moment, we are aiming at and attempting to decide upon, a way of interpreting our experience and an aim for the next moment of experience. It's just that in order to affect the next moment, we as the subject of this moment need to perish. And in perishing, Whitehead coins this term superject. The subject achieves its unique point of view and perishes and becomes a superject.

And that superject then affects and is inherited by the next moment of experience, but not as a subject. The subject has died. A new subject is born that sort of feeds on the aim realized by the prior subject, right? So, you know, in some sense, you could say there's not one substantial abiding self in Whitehead. There is a sort of proliferation of selves that are constantly arising and perishing into one another. Yeah, and that does get pretty damn close to some Buddhist insights, even the idea of a plurality of constantly dissolving selves. because when you really pay attention to, you know, let's say your thoughts for long periods of time,

you sort of start to see that it's actually not one singular unified self, but it's a competing a bunch of little selves, you know, talking to yourself in your head from different directions with different motivations and incentives. So the idea of a plurality of selves instead of a single abiding self is getting a long way towards the Buddhist elimination of the false sense of, of self, as it were. There's also the determinism, right, within Buddhism, I think, and I've talked to a few people on the show and have read many more that are credibly enlightened in the Buddhist sense of the term, and almost all of them say that once the sense of a separate self,

the illusion is seen through, and you see that you are nothing but a part of this broader web of constant change, that free will itself drops away viscerally, that you just know like you feel the sun on your skin, the reality of no free will. And of course, I think there's contentions within Buddhism and the long traditions of philosophical arguments that would go along with it. But I do come back to that point a lot. And that's another reason you said that Whitehead ultimately diverged from Spinoza was the determinism and the attempt on Whitehead's part to salvage a sort of agency in whatever way that he could, which is interesting. And the last thing I wanted to say is the thinker of your thoughts idea, because

this is huge in Buddhism, when we have thoughts, we have inner dialogue, we feel as if there is a subject that is the thinker of the thought, we're the author of the thought. And when you really start to analyze it through systematic meditation, you find that the sense that you are a self, the sense that you're the thinker of the thoughts, is itself a product of a constellation of thoughts. And if you can, when your mind can quiet down to a sufficient degree, stop chattering away to itself, you can see, at least in brief fleeting moments, the complete absence of a thinker to the thoughts. It's just the brain-creating thoughts, and they come and they go in this rapid cascade of, you know, ceaseless change. So just interesting, just interesting that there's

at least an attempt on Whitehead to grapple with some of this stuff. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, I think the Buddhist metaphysics are fascinating. There's lots of disagreement. But I think, you know, the Buddha's original sort of statement on this question, on metaphysical questions was, is this helping you relinquish suffering or not? And so I think ultimately that Buddhism is so much more focused on, you know, what we call so teriology or in the Christian sense, salvation or, maybe a more Buddhist sense just awakening that the question of like you know what is the arrow that was just shot into your chest made of and you know what's what what was it determined and did it always need to happen that you would be shot with this error it's kind of incidental to

the question of how to heal from the wound absolutely um you know so i think i would i don't think that determinism is yes so schopenhauer definitely thought that you know buddhism implied determinism as one example, but I don't think it necessarily does. Think of the whole Zen tradition and the emphasis on, you know, like spontaneity and, you know, this, this freedom that comes from recognizing that there is no self. So it's not a kind of free will of a substantial self that's, you know, acting in the world to, so as to subvert the causes and conditions. but rather just this sense of free spontaneity and creativity, right, that you're not really determined by the past,

even if there's no you to be determined, right? So I think we really have to rethink the dichotomy between free will and determinism in this sort of a context. Yeah, that's very interesting. I like that point a lot. And just for the last thing I'll say on this is with the determinism aspect, you're right about the spontaneity and the creativity but I have heard it described by some practitioners

credibly enlightened practitioners that it's like a natural force is acting through me like in the absence of a self that deludes itself into thinking that it controls and it has agency that there is a spontaneity and a creativity that emerges in fact it's much less fettered because of the ego and the burden that it imposes and the constriction it imposes

falls away but it's almost as if a natural force is acting through you you become more of a vessel but as you say these are continent spanning and cent millennia spanning traditions and within them there is a cacophony of disagreement and you know splits in the tradition from theravada to mahayana buddhism and then all the sex within those broader umbrella so um yeah too much to get into here but certainly a long history of debate on these very deep uh deep questions Let's go ahead and move here. I mean, I want to be respectful of your time. We're coming up on two hours, so I'll just ask another question or two.

But I did want to touch on this because a major legacy of Whitehead's philosophy was his metaphysics, his holistic metaphysics being taken up by ecologists. And particularly in the age of the eco-crisis and climate destabilization, it seems that Whitehead has something, if not plenty, to offer here. So can you kind of talk about that legacy and sort of how exactly his ideas are taken up by ecologists? and environmentalists, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, as an organic realist, who, as I argue in my book, basically replaces physics as the ground floor of nature with, like, the study of physics, with the study of ecology, in the sense that, you know, the universe is ultimately composed of co-evolving organisms.

It's quite easy to see, I think, the application to ecology. And in 1925, when Whitehead was writing science in the modern world, he was already in that book well aware of the destruction of the industrial mode of production, in that, particularly in the context of a materialistic worldview, industrialization doesn't recognize the qualitative values of a landscape and instead just imposes forms, their sheer efficiency in profit-making, or even I think we could look at the ecological, environmental records of the Soviet Union and China and see that this isn't unique to capitalism

in the sense that the mechanistic mindset gets imposed upon natural systems so as to extract resources, whether for profit or to try to equally distribute to the energy and goods to human beings, if we're not aware of the intrinsic values of the organisms, the non-human organisms composing the rest of the biosphere, then we're gradually going to degrade that biosphere and ultimately commit ecocide and suicide. And so, you know, Whitehead levels one of the earlier critiques of the whole industrial mode of production and wants us to come to see value as something that transcends human society and certainly human individuals, human values are derivative from the values of the organisms composing our environment, our Earth community.

And so without those values, which, again, it's not human aesthetic value that's projected onto nature. It's not just human economic value projected onto nature. Nature is intrinsically valuable because nature is composed of the experiential perspectives and the aims of a multitude of other creatures, right? And we are one among that multitude. Certainly we have this Promethean gift of consciousness and technological know-how, but we need to, you know, in the context of an organic realism and an ecological philosophy like Whiteheads,

we need to be more humble in our deployment of this technological power, not just to respect the values of other creatures, but to ultimately prevent us from destroying the basis for our own survival. Yeah, very well said. Yeah, it makes perfect sense why those ideas are taken up in that direction. And I think what Marxist dialectics, what Buddhism, what Whitehead, and what so many other profound thinkers, throughout history are getting at in their own way is that this delusion of separateness does need

to be overcome. This idea that we are, as Alan Watts would say, fundamentally inside of our bag of skin, looking out at a world that is alien to us, that's a primary delusion. And when you see the natural world and you see other human beings as not you, that can give rise to a whole bunch of, you know, terrible ways of treating other people or the natural world, et cetera. And so at the very least, I think that delusion is coming apart at the seams. The natural world now has said that that delusion has been running, you know, sort of the software of that delusion has been running too long on the hardware of the human brains. And we have to start seeing ourselves as embedded in nature, as literally nature. I often talk about environmentalism in

the fight to protect biodiversity as the earth acting through us. You know, we, we, we, we emerge out of the earth and in some sense we are the earth become conscious we are the cosmos become conscious and and we are intrinsically deeply inexorably connected to everyone and everything else and that realization i think has to take hold and spread and manifest in all a million different ways politically religiously and otherwise for humanity to sort of get beyond the crossroads that we're currently at and i think whitehead's philosophy speaks to that in a very unique and systematic way. Yeah, definitely.

You know, your listeners might be, on this point, interested in an essay I wrote a couple years ago when the pandemic first started that's titled Imagining a Gaian reality after the virus, Guyin as in Gaia theory from James Lovelock, because not only does it speak to Whitehead and Marx in their relationship, the relationship of their ideas, rather, but also as you say, sort of puts human beings back in the context of, um, of earthly life, um, and was, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, my attempt to, to think through, um, an awakening that could occur in light of the, the, the sort of pause that everyone was feeling when this pandemic first started. Um, obviously things unfolded in various, um, less than helpful

directions over the course of the last few years. And it's not as clear that the pandemic will be seized as an opportunity to transform society in the ways that we may have hoped. But nonetheless, it's an essay that touches on many of the points that we've gone over already. So maybe I can share the link with you. Absolutely. Yeah. Let's make sure you email me over that link and I'll add it to the show notes so people can go and read that right after hearing this. I do have two more questions, but I'll just combine them and say, do you have any last words that you want to say on Whitehead, what makes them a unique thinker, a recommendation, anything at all?

that you want to say as sort of your last words for this episode? Just that he, as a process philosopher, wanted those who studied his philosophy to realize that it was not finished, that he's, though he's very systematic in his thinking, he intended it to be an open system. And so, you know, when you do come to his thought, if you take on the task of reading his books, Just keep in mind that he ultimately wasn't satisfied with his own articulations and realized many problems remained to be addressed. And he saw ideas and philosophical reflection as ultimately of pragmatic significance, which is to say that we think through the consistency of our ideas and their coherence and adequacy with ultimately with a name toward action, right? I think Marsis can understand this quite well.

Whitehead's not a Hegelian in the sense that he thinks the role of philosophy is just to sit back and reflect upon what has already occurred or to describe its own moment, but rather to really inspire the future, to help us think about the direction we are heading and to allow us to experimentally take action in new ways, you know, in the hopes of eliciting and inspiring the future we'd like to see. So don't engage his books just as like a museum curator. Engage them as an activist and see how they might be useful for your projects. Wonderfully, wonderfully said. Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your expertise with us. I learned a lot just from listening to you talk and prepping for this conversation with you. I definitely feel a kindred spirit in you.

And I would love to have you back on to talk about German idealism and shelling in particular. Certainly that is an interest on this show, and with your expertise, it would be really fun to dive deep on that. But before I let you go, can you please let listeners know where they might be able to find you

and your work online? Yeah, sure. And just likewise, Brett, felt the kindred spiritness and look forward to the next conversation on German idealism. Yeah, I have a blog, footnotes to numeral to Plato.com,

and I'm pretty active on Twitter. footnotes to Plato is my handle there. And on YouTube, same thing. Footnotes to Plato, which for those who don't know is a reference to Whitehead's famous statement that all of European philosophy can be

safely characterized as a series of footnotes to Plato. Absolutely. All right, I'll link to as much of that in the show notes so people can find you and follow up if they wish. Definitely will have you back on. Thank you so much, Matt. And I look forward to talk with you again. My pleasure, Brett. Until next time.

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And hollow sky He see the stars come out tonight He says the city's ripped back sides He sees the winding ocean drive And everything was made for you and me all of it was made for you and me because it just belongs to you and me so let's take a ride and see what's mine

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