Process Thought and Science 2025 (Session 1)

The Whiteheadean atomism is different to other atomistic points of view. Listening to a lecture by Matt Segall, he claims that Whitehead did not see the universe as not divided, instead it’s relational where every actual occasion of experience from sub-atomic to stars and galaxies is a unity of physical and mental feelings.

Metaphysically this is correct in the Bennett philosophy as well, whose writing references the Whitehead tradition many times. Having never read Whitehead I can’t say how structured his work actually is, but I have read Bennett and know first hand that it’s extremely structured though I struggle to recall the whole of the DU. What Matt is referring to as eventities running from atoms to galaxies is what Bennett would have called the “apokritikal levels of being”.

Here’s an image:

This take on the universe being relational would be what JGB would see as triadic relation.

It’s interesting that Matt claims that Whitehead puts biology and life at the center of the universe, rather than physics. This is not in conflict with the Bennett teaching but it is perhaps more nuanced than organisms and machines. 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. Which basically translates material, living and cosmic. The full 12 levels relate to the concrete significance of number, which is JGB’s epistemology, again described in the DU. So when Matt says that ecology is at the center of the universe, the statement is semantically true according to Bennett’s schema in so far as the autonomic falls between the hyponomic and hypernomic domains!

He goes on to talk about how the autonomic (biological) world is a revelation to what’s implicit in the hyponomic (physical) world. Again the views align, and here it’s quite interesting to apply hermetic philosophy (as above so below) because we can start to reason by analogy between worlds; what if we think of ourselves as atoms or magnetic fields, how do the laws of this level apply to sociology? And how do our actions influence the heavens?

By this standard Matt makes the claim that the most fundamental science is ecology, the relationships between organisms (and eventities). The phrasing with regards to fundamentality is potentially confusing as it allows us to remain in a substance paradigm when we should probably think of the fundamental as constructed or maybe derived based on relational binding and rational ordering in an ongoing process of realisation.

Last comment on Matt’s recording is that apparently in Whitehead’s view, every fact is the realisation of some value; a relationship that is also foundational to moral philosophy discussed in Bennett’s second book though I believe in the latter case realisation reconciles fact and value, so they mutually realise each other. My intention isn’t to complain about Matt’s semantics, it’s hard to hold space for non-linear expressions in the linear flow and syntax of chronological time, but more to point out that it’s just one of six aspects of a triadic relationship and that I assume that this was not all that Whitehead had to say on the matter because he was assumedly reasoning through ternary rather than binary logic.

This leads to the deeper questions of living a process philosophy, and how we as living eventities transform through interactions with each other?

Wisdom after all is enacted.