As far as sessions go, this one is particularly meaty - it begins with the question:

“What does Whitehead’s philosophy of organism contribute to understanding how it is that we live in a physical universe which gives rise to organisms here on earth and perhaps many other planets throughout the galaxy and even the cosmos?”

Obviously, this is no small question, and as the lesson suggests, the nature of this question has shifted over the last several centuries - where originally, indigenous cultures have tended to consider the earth to be alive with death as the big mystery - but now the more modern scientific cultures, particularly those possessed by the mechanical point of view, tend to consider the universe to be a dead collection of material particles; so the real mystery becomes: what is life?

The framing here feels along the lines of a dyad with complementary poles between life and death, which would perhaps be of more value framed triadically as a relationship between birth, life, and death. The descriptions of indigenous cultures also draws my attention to religion, which, like indigenous culture, often emphasizes the afterlife.

For mechanistic science, what life is becomes an inquiry of rather urgent concern, as in a mechanistic universe, the emergence of living organisms and indeed conscious beings such as ourselves does not make much sense. Living conscious beings seemed to be an anomaly in the mechanistic universe. The answer to the question from this perspective is seen to be rather bleak, with life as an improbable accident of order and organization that’s clinging precariously to a fundamentally dead rock.

Perhaps here it’s worth holding multiple viewpoints, noting the anthropic and the animistic are in tension with each other? As well as the observation that it seems to be the western view of life that perceives us to be in a precarious position.

According to Matt, Whitehead is ‘inheriting’ a speculative tradition that has origins in ancient Greece which speculated on the world soul and animus mundi, which brought life into organization from the macrocosmic scale, right down to the microcosmic scale of our existence here on earth.

Whitehead apparently appropriated this Greek tradition not because life appears as such an animistic anomaly, but because physics was moving beyond a mechanistic conception, causing him to rethink the materialistic background which led us to imagine life as some form of afterthought or late emerging curiosity in an otherwise mechanical world.

The veracity of this statement is unverified, but if true would be somewhat anomalous itself due to the incongruence with Whitehead’s emphasis on experientialism - though if he ever said such it may be explained as a rhetorical tool to justify a panpsychic perspective to physicists and academics - or the essence of process philosophy as change and transformation is shining through, as we must consider Whitehead’s philosophy subject itself to change, revision and probably contradiction.

Even in Whitehead’s time scientific materialism was proving itself inadequate for accounting for the emergence of life but even for our understanding of what matter and energy are. Matt claims that by reducing organisms to mechanisms, Matt suggests that materialism ends up sawing off the very branch upon which science itself rests - which seems analogously on point if we consider those perspectives a dyad, though more specifically I think what is being reduced here is values to facts. This is almost directly spoken to as Matt goes on to say that for value, experience and purpose to be dismissed as unreal then the scientist’s own pursuit of truth, which is a value they are pursuing, is undermined along with the materialistic enterprise. In other words, it seems to me that Matt is subconsciously equating organisms with values, and mechanisms with facts - directly this makes little sense but when arranged as dyads and compared we can see they relate analogously and are isomorphic within limits, though not strictly so. When we connect the dots in this way our original question of the place of life in the cosmos is not disconnected from the question of how is science possible. In other words Matt’s assertion is sensible, but only when you have a comparative framework to reference.

At its core, Whitehead’s invitation is to consider life as an integral feature of this universe, one that’s woven into the very texture of cosmogenesis. In this view, life becomes a process of coming to know itself ever more deeply in order to become more conscious. Again this is not too far a stone’s throw from Bennett or Gurdjieff’s articulations in the ‘five oblongonian strivings’, the primary aim of which is the conscious transformation of energy, incidentally a schema in which consciousness would be associated with planetary energy.

At this point, it seems particularly useful to circle back to Bennett’s apokritikal scale of being, as I think it can be a useful tool for distinguishing the worlds between experience and narrative. To avoid confusion upon introducing this schema, it becomes necessary to state that according to Bennett himself “being is mysterious” and so a scale of being can only be represented functionally by labeling the exterior or knowable element. In other words, planets, stars, and galaxies have an interiority that we cannot experience without actually being a planet, star or galaxy, much like we can’t know what it is like to be a rock or octopus - but we can subjectively name these entities. So in the following schema, ‘world soul’ is simply a more poetic expression ‘planets’ within the hierarchy - which perhaps offers a glance or inference at the interiority or being of Whitehead himself at the time of writing.

With that noted, Bennett’s (functional) hierarchy of being, or apokritikal levels, is useful here because it allows us to instantiate a list of ‘actual entities’ and reason about their ‘being’ or interiority in relation to other domains like values or energy. This also perhaps allows us to relate and communicate our own experiences of participation within such an animistic or theological entity. One of the advantages of systematics being that we can compare these exteriors across more ephemeral domains in morphospace like values and energy.

These schemas help us better understand the place of life in what is a reformulated and systematised version of both Whitehead and Gurdjieff’s cosmology. Matt claims that Organism must replace mechanism as the core metaphor of natural science - where I prefer to equate mechanism to the lower four levels of the schema, organism to the middle four and superorganism to the remaining higher levels.

Similarly Matt claims that feeling - or “prehension” in Whitehead’s technical terms - must replace blind collision, which was how the entities of a mechanistic universe were thought to relate to each other. In other words he states that prehension in Whitehead’s cosmology is granted primacy in our account of causal relations, as part of a movement to give life its proper due in a now living universe.

He continues by saying that for Whitehead, every actual occasion and every atomic and animal occasion, is a locus of feeling. It’s a moment of experience that involves inheriting the past and anticipating the future, the degree, depth duration and intensity of feeling depends on the complexity of the social organization within which that actual occasion is arising.

It’s not that atoms are as conscious as animals, but in Whitehead’s view there is a modicum of experience. Matt claims that he is generalizing life beyond biology, rooting it in the very fabric of existence, as pan-experientialism, where to exist is to feel - however dim or simply. While I personally have no issue with this take, it somewhat contradicts claims made about biology being the ‘fundamental’ paradigm - unless the biology claim actually implies the biology of our first hand phenomenological experience? In other words we are organisms, and all our knowing is foundationally based in our experience of the phenomenological world, from this we can carefully draw on what we know and extrapolate towards a philosophy of natural science that may reconcile with what we can’t know from first hand experience (for a systematised approach along these lines see Bennett’s Book “The Dramatic Universe Vol.1: The foundations of natural philosophy)

This sounds appropriately along the lines of Matt’s interpretation, where life in its biological form, seen in terms of living cells and multicellular plants and animals, is but a high achievement of this universal capacity for relation, where the cosmos is to be understood as an aesthetic process. In such a view, all levels of organization in the universe are artistic achievements, you could say artistic expressions. For Whitehead the purpose of the universe and evolution is to achieve beauty, in ever richer and more complex forms of beauty. It’s not a universe of mechanisms obeying fixed laws but an organism, a cosmic organism lured by beauty, with a teleology directed towards its production.

At this point we’ve crossed several domains, biology, experientialism and phenomenology and aesthetics. Each is also claiming to take precedent in various ways. This inconsistency is in my view part of the process, and we can ask many interesting questions about Whitehead’s changing perspectives and if there can be an organization to these different perspectives, as well as the cause behind his evolving views. This appears to be what Bennett calls in his second book “a hierarchy of values” which you might see as competing in realtime throughout this lecture.

Next to speak in the value hierarchy is Love, quoted via Maturana and Varela in Matt’s book, where it’s stated that to dismiss love - which is an example of the aesthetic lure of the universe, or the erotic drive that underlies the evolutionary process - would be to turn our back on a biological history that’s more than 3.5 billion years old. Whitehead would extend this claim to say that, love or divine eros is not just the basis of social life, not just the basis of the biological world, but the very pulse of cosmogenesis itself. Bennett would agree, with Love positioned as the highest value, barring only fulfillment - which is associated with the unfathomable.

Matt goes on to affirm that when Whitehead speaks of divine eros driving the evolutionary process towards the emergence of biological life, out of a simpler form of what we might call physical life (eg the rocks), this is not a foreign deity that stands above the world and commands it from without, it’s an immanent lure woven into the experience of each occasion as a call towards greater intensity of experience and harmony with other occasions and deeper beauty. In this view his perspective of God is not a cosmic engineer as the engineer was imagined by the first generation of scientists but the ‘poet of possibility’ that shares in the world’s risks as a fellow sufferer who understands and a fellow enjoyer - so the divine evolves with the world and enters into ever deeper relationships as biological organisms become capable of sustaining of that original divine impulse.

Phew, this has become quite poetic which is commendable, there’s a need for beauty by Whitehead’s own standards but we may be conflating love with God - the latter being the totality which radiates such a value? This is perhaps a difficulty of expression, where looser language seems to be more appropriate to the higher apokritikal levels like the unitive love of galaxies. Using such a schema, we might express God as something like the ‘transcendent fulfillment of the unfathomable’.

But backtracking a little from such lofty heights, we must return to the original question of the place of life in the cosmos?

Matt explains that for Whitehead, Life is not the exception but the rule, life becomes the very basis of creative processes in the universe. It’s not an epiphenomenon, life is really part of a grammar of existence, the cosmos being a living self-making work of art. He claims that life is how we understand the nature of the universe as an experiment in an effort to flourish, drawing new beauty from the depths of possibility. To study life is not simply to analyze DNA or catalogue species, but to learn how the universe itself is striving to enhance and deepen its experience. It’s about seeing how each being, each actual occasion of experience, each moment in the life history of a living cell or plant or animal or a human, inherits the deep evolutionary past billions of years in the making and anticipates novel futures which allows us to understand the evolutionary process as one where love or eros is infused into even the smallest particle or molecule and that the urge of creation is also an urge to relate.

Such an eloquent articulation is quite frankly beautiful, and yes this all seems true as well, though this seems like priming for the deeper questions which relates to the autopoietic or maybe astropoietic process of cosmoi. Using Bennett’s schema relating to types of knowledge, this articulation is what would be called discriminative knowledge that expresses relational knowledge. The deeper question however becomes moving past relational knowledge into the realm of pragmatic knowledge, questions that seem to relate to the process of intentional self-creation, as well as world creation and maintenance.

I believe this is probably what is meant when it’s stated that “against this modern bifurcation of matter and mind, Whitehead is envisioning a participatory cosmos, the place of life in the universe in short being everywhere, the cosmos itself is alive it’s an adventure of feeling, and striving for richer beauty. To be alive is not to stand apart from a dead material universe but to be the universe itself in its most intimate acts of self-enjoyment”.

To be alive, striving and thriving is not necessarily easy depending on circumstance. What is clear is that the richer one is in relationships the easier this becomes as the principles of ergodicity come into play.