This article is a reflection and commentary on Process and Thought lecture 1 - the content of which was provided by Matt Segall - a lecturer from CIIS that’s pretty well known for his expertise on Whitehead. This is my interpretation of the content provided by Matt based on his understanding of Whitehead, so whatever I say about his framing should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.

What’s interesting for me to discover based on this content is that I may be more familiar with Process Philosophy than I initially thought, as listening to him I immediately hear strong correspondences with JG Bennett’s work, an author who’s philosophy I am reasonably connected with and an author who seems to reference Whitehead a great deal. This makes sense given both their timelines, and they seem to be birds of a feather.

At the beginning of the lecture, Matt claims that Whitehead did not see the universe as divided and instead saw it as relational where every actual occasion of experience from sub-atomic particles to stars and galaxies is a unity of physical and mental feelings. Metaphysically, the echoes here are already quite familiar as he is first talking about an undivided, continuous or maybe Monadic universe that is also relational (or maybe Triadic). This undivided and relational universe however contains multitudes of layered occasions in a sort of qualitative infinity - broadly termed potential and actual - which range from the very small to the very large!

You might consider this a paradox because if the universe is undivided, how can there be differences between occasions where the chair is not the table? This is a pretty old discussion and I believe the core distinction between substance philosophy and process philosophy. We can resolve this difference between continuous and discreet by saying that there are types and degrees of relation.

In Bennett’s work this discreet division of occasions or entities is broadly classified into categories called “apokritikal levels of being”:

Matt claims that Whitehead puts biology and life at the center of the universe, rather than physics, which is a pretty strong turn of phrase. If you take the twelve levels in the image above and divide it into three sets of four, organised from bottom to top you get three realms: hyponomic, autonomic and hypernomic. These terms basically translate as material, living and cosmic. As you can see for yourself the middle range beginning with Phytovegetation and finishing after Humans denotes the autonomic realm, which essentially matches the assertion that life is central in these cosmologies.

To be transparent about the epistemology here, the 12 levels that are articulated relate to the concrete significance of number which is further described Bennett’s Dramatic Universe - the foundations of natural science. Assumedly quite similar to Whiteheads process and reason though I’ve not yet read it.

Matt goes on to talk about how the biological (autonomic) world is a revelation to what’s implicit in the physical (hyponomic) world, and referencing the image above you can see that both authors seem to hold the same views once again. The diagram perhaps just enriches this a little and allows us to reason about the relationships between actual occasions by segregating them into levels and categories like the hypernomic realm, made up of planets, stars, and galaxies - which would in turn be a revelation to the autonomic world!

This is perhaps where the terminology between authors diverges, because these levels of abstraction from the planetary scale onwards would be considered the more than living world or superanimate existence - perhaps this is where God resides in Whiteheads philosophy? Oh unfathomable totality, greater even than a collection of galaxies!

While the terminology diverges, the views still seem to align and using these categories we can start to reason by analogy between worlds; what if we consider ourselves as atoms or magnetic fields, how do the laws of this level apply to say sociology? And how do our actions influence the heavens?

Matt’s use of the term fundamental may seem confusing at first, because this idea of fundamentalism may seem like substance philosophy (think object oriented), but the contextual qualifier is that ecology becomes the most fundamental science because it’s about relationships between organisms. This seems allowable based on the principal that everything is an occasion and these occasions are ‘fundamentally’ seen as organisms. However, in order to avoid confusion in terminology I’m going to lean on the Hodgson qualifier and call this perspective a ‘Cosmic Ecology’ which refers to a form of second order science of relationships. In other words, maybe this fundamental that’s asserted is more of an understanding that’s based in the principals of rational ordering, relational binding and the process of ongoing realisation? This seems fair.

If we scale these principals up to the hypernomic levels, it leads us to consider things like the anthropic principals (both passive and active) where we learn about laws of reciprocity and reflexivity - relations between stars and planets and even cosmic will. Going further into the unknown it seems we are asked to explore notions of cosmic accountability thorough conceptions of god and religion, because of course what kind of cosmology would be complete without an origination myth and rich narrative structure, as well as its existential grounding or law conformity?

This opens up some fantastic questions with regards to living cosmologies and moral philosophy, which is where some of the discussion about the realisation of facts and values seems to belong. Is there such a thing as objective morality? A second order perspective would probably allow for this, where facts are the realisation of cosmic values as laws, which in turn enable the realisation of subjective values. Fact as the realisation of value was somewhat touched on in the lecture, though I’ve pushed this a little further to express an alternative aspect of the ternary relationship based on Bennett and Hodgsons work, something that Whitehead may have also touched on - though I am not qualified to say for certain!

Whatever the case, it’s clear that there is more to cosmology than the standard model, and I believe process Philosophy begins to invite such discussions, perhaps holding space between science and religion by allowing neither to become dogma!