Why Metaphysics Matters: A Process Model

A lively discussion about why metaphysics matters in our current Metamodern era

When Whitehead explored a process reality, he exposed something that was sorely missing in the western mind. Western metaphysics is based on substance thinking, thinking in terms of static, independently existing things. This is a metaphysical assumption that is wired deep in our minds and delivers up paradoxes like when we are not so sure if reality is really real if it is constructed, because “construction” tells us that being really real involves a process.[1] This is what Whitehead wanted to correct. Instead of thinking of reality composed of “things,” he thought of reality as ongoing process going on every which way. Instead of existence as a state of being, he disclosed existence as a continuous process of becoming. Even the ordinary things we experience as concrete, stable and lasting, are always coming and going. We can use our four-quadrant matrix of existence to derive a model of how people engage the world in a constructive process that moves “things” through the spectrum of existence.  

The above figure illustrates the process phases of the human project of constructing reality correlated with the same four quadrants in the Matrix of Existence. It is a model of the work that is being done to generate existing realities for humans. Consider again the “invention-discovery” process of the atom. We can begin anywhere in the circle, but let’s begin in creative imaginaries (LR). At some point in history, people conceive of the atomistic nature of reality (LR). They construct a story that satisfies their speculation; but inevitably, people bump into where the story is either incomplete or inconsistent. They begin to use discernment to make their story more precise. The precision sets up the conditions to gauge the story against what people actually experience. Much of what people perceive will be influenced by the story and subject to confirmation bias. Yet through adequate participation, a few people will discover a new clarity in the world that will resists being assimilated into the old story. Adequate participation may also involve new technologies that improve observation, like microscopes and telescopes. People discover effects that are absent causes, and seek to presence them. In the process, they begin to absent by deconstructing, the old story. Through a process that Peirce called abduction, and Bhaskar called retroduction, we bring new imaginaries to the task. The cycle repeats, as these new imaginaries seek new ideas that satisfy them. Many iterations later, people can observe atoms through the technology of the electron microscope and in the process, the “atom” becomes reified as a “thing” – a discrete unit of being that stands in for this long arc of becoming. When we do science, “adequate participation” involves an experimental set-up that provides the necessary conditions for reproducibility, “discernment” means mathematical precision, and “theories” are “ideas that satisfy; while it takes scientists of great genius to supply the creative imaginaries that leap frog over existing paradigms into new realities. Outside of science, the phases are the same, but the standards are not so rigid. Popular stories, cultural narratives, and social memes all participate in creating social realities that correspond with different group identities.

Whitehead’s philosophical method follows this model to a tee. He identified the imagination as the driver of new ideas and as the capacity to presence what is absent. He preached a kind of metaphysical skepticism which was needed to absent the old ideas; and practiced a kind of philosophical humility that was ready to throw away the conditioned habits of thought in order to perceive facts without inferences. He noted that speculative philosophy had both a rational side and an empirical side. The rational side required the speculation to be both “coherent and logical,” hence consistent and complete. The empirical requirement was that the philosophical scheme must be both “applicable and adequate,” hence satisfying and adequately participated in.  These two sides, Whitehead wrote, are “bound together by clearing away any ambiguity,” hence the necessity of discernment and precision. He wrote “A precise language must await a completed metaphysical knowledge.” Cue Hartshorne here, who carries forward Whitehead’s speculative musings toward a precise language of the metaphysics of process thinking.

            Whitehead examined experience through the categories of memory and perception and imagination.  “In studying memory, perception or imagination,” Hartshorne writes, “one needs to distinguish between 1) What is observably present in the experience, 2) what is not observably present; and 3) what is observably absent.” Here, he is referencing the UL, UR and LL quadrants of the matrix, respectively. Whitehead eventually integrated memory and perception with his notion of “prehension” as “intuition of the antecedently real.” This suggests that for Whitehead, the Upper quadrants represent the antecedents or “priors” of experience, those concrete occasions that constitute the “past” actuals; while the lower quadrants would represent the carrying-forward into the near adjacent moment of the possibly real. For Whitehead, perception is the body’s prehension, and memory is the mind’s prehension, which puts them in the UL and UR quadrants, respectively. The past is made concrete when perceptions find ideas that satisfy, or alternately when pre-established ideas discover perceptions that fulfill their expectations. Once this happens, a new round of prehension begins. We can imagine a torus-like animation flowing through the matrix (figure 3). With respect to the lower quadrants, where novelty catalyzes creative advance, Whitehead emphasizes that imagination is never merely mental (the LR aspect) but also always involves our body, as “truly parts of the physical world,” and in its way and degree also “revelatory of the world.” In our matrix of existence, the LL is the domain of this revelatory body, as it participates in world-becoming.

Mapping Whitehead’s process ontology onto the matrix of existence, reveals several important new ideas that are derived from a process view (see figure 3). Most people never really understand the radical shift required in a process view. Most people make the mistake of thinking of “bodies” as concrete actuals in the past, and “minds” as imaginative, flexible possibilities of the future. This results in the kind of patently dualistic reality that both Whitehead and Hartshorne rejected. Rather, bodies and minds together extend from the past through a mutual process of prehension and creative advance.[2]

For Whitehead, bodies and minds, are not equitable to binary objects and subjects. Bodies and minds of the prior occasion are prehended as perception and memory; while bodies and minds creatively advance as participation and imagination. This means that objective and subjective realities interpenetrate at all “times.” The mental model we create in our heads selects aspects of this processual continuum and categorizes them into a simplistic binary schema where there is a “past” as opposed to the “future” and “bodies(objects)” as opposed to “minds(subjects). For Whitehead, this processual whorl composes a “nexus” – which is the local center of the epoch which entails the entire composition. Identifying this nexus would be like finding the center of a musical whole. We can imagine that as the music unfolds, the meaning infolds, as subsequent notes adapt prior meanings. The epoch is the whole given in its entirety—the interpenetration of the unfolding score and the infolding meaning. In Whitehead’s term this double-movement constitutes an epochal moment in an actual occasion. The movement from unfolding processes to infolding ones, constitutes the movement from “bodies” to “minds” in figure 3—from perception and participation to memory and imagination. Taken together, perception and participation are called “prehension” in Whitehead’s terminology—the unfolding movement in the epochal event. Memory and imagination are the forces of infoldment, giving rise to the actual occasion. Every epoch has a “duration” – the local center of which is the nexus. The broader the “duration” the greater the amount of reality prehended and enfolded. This gives rise the fractal scalar pattern of reality, in which entities of various durations constitute greater and lesser wholes. At the universal scale, everything prehends and gives new meaning with everything else. The duration of the universal epoch would be eternal.[3]

            Whitehead, began his career as a British mathematician who, along with his student Bertrand Russel, collaborated on the monumental “Principia Mathematica.” Unlike his contemporaries, however, Whitehead was drawn to the idea of Love as the universal force of creation. At the heart of his Process Reality, is a radical ontology of love as the fundamental universal force. Love, at the universal and eternal scale, manifested as prehension at the local scales, making Love the force of creative advance. Whitehead said that reality arises through a series of moments which feel into the past moment as they feel for(ward) the next moment. For him, the action in-between was nothing at all like the tight wire between the physicists’ cause and effect. Rather, Whitehead thought of this feeling-process as incredibly sensitive, provocative and loving. He construed each individual epoch as the long, long moment of possibility, freedom and choice not only granted to each local nexus, but given as a fundamental property of the universe. Here, prehension is synonymous with sentience, and therefore, each local nexus are sentient beings at all imaginable scales permeating the universal field of feeling (love)[4].

If you situated yourself imaginatively inside Whitehead’s process reality, you would come to experience yourself as a living enter of transformational process without a sense of self. You would feel the act of unfolding and infolding, of both cause-creating-effect and effect-creating cause. In this a-temporal pulsation between antecedent feeling and creative advance—between the love act and her progeny—you would discover vast promise and freedom. Here is where we can see the spiritual chords deep within Whitehead’s speculative ontology. Here is where we discover an ethics of care and concern inside a metaphysics of love as the cosmological force since, by implication, the more one prehends one’s neighbors and relations, the longer one sustains the epochal duration, the more extensive you would become, until you felt the in-becoming of one body through the simultaneous presences of many bodies—the all in one.  Here we see parallels with eastern mysticism, since, by implication, the more stabilized one’s prehension, over the long, slow moment of feeling (love), the more expansive you would become, until you realized the eternal—the in-becoming of one novel moment through the simultaneous presencing of many moments.

By starting with prehension as pure experience, Whitehead avoided the contradictions Kant encountered when starting from phenomena, since the phenomena are already objects in the mind.[5] To experience the redness of an object requires an adequate duration for the actual occasion to concretize (whether or not in the mind of a perceiving subject). On the other hand, to have a perception of redness requires an act of mind, a pre-positioning of the abstract category “red.” Experience, as Eugene Gendlin, (1997) would say, is first-person process, which is prior to perception. In Whitehead’s speculative reality, entities at all scales come and go. The scale of the entity is determined by the duration of this coming-an-going. Light as wave-and-particle is a type of coming and going at the Planck scale, which in Whitehead’s terms, would be considered a “duration.” Duration in Whitehead process reality is the same as “wavelength” in quantum mechanics. Atoms have a very short duration, cells a longer one, and waking human consciousness a longer one still. In this rich imaginary process view, the atoms in my cells come and go at a high frequency. But they come and go asynchronously (or else my body would also blink in and out of reality). As some atoms sneak back into existence, the presence of the other atoms, neatly arranged as my body, mostly guarantees that they will settle into the same groove, and occupy a similar position. Or take another atom’s place. Just like the Buddhist parable of the ship, whose sides, deck, sails, and keel are removed over different times, remains the “same boat,” reality slips in and out of becoming, but asynchronously and at multiple scales, so it “hangs together” despite omnipresent impermanence.

Whitehead’s reality is like a pocketknife one has cared for a long time. One first replaces a few lost screws; and then one day the right side handle is worn and replaced. A few year later, the left side handle is replaced. Eventually one replaces the blade. Despite everything, it remains, in the mind of the owner, the same pocketknife one has carried around “the whole time.”

The Buddhists, of course, tell the story of the replaceable-irreplaceable ship as a metaphor for the self, which can be examined to be the coming and going in and out of existence, riding on patterns of thought. One pattern which has been given a great deal of examination in both the east and the west, is the tendency of thought to move between contradictions. This is called “dialectical” aspect of thought which emerged approximately 3000 years ago, as discussed in the next section.

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[1] Consider how different theories of change play with this sense of reality-as-process. To be a human being involves becoming as developing from fertilized egg to birth and beyond. To be a human (sp) involves becoming in deep evolutionary time. To be a tornado involves becoming as emergent complexity. Note also that different theories of change are derived from different metaphysical assumptions.

[2] In addition to the Peter Kakol (2009) lists the significance of Whitehead’s notion of prehension:

The profundity of Whitehead’s concept of prehension becomes obvious when we consider that it makes possible the unification of no less than nine different phenomena (1) memory, as intra-bodily prehension of the distant past; (2) perception,  as extra-bodily prehension of the more recent past; (3) time, as the passage from prehension to prehension; (4) space, as a complication of time: the prehension of parallel or contemporary prehensions; (5) causality, as the influence (in the sense of necessary condition only) of the prehended upon the prehending; (6) substance, being and enduring individuality, as abstractions from spatial and/or temporal prehensions such that only common features are prehended; (7) mind-body relation, as the interaction between two types of the previous relation—namely, a temporal series of prehensions (the mind) and a spatio-temporal grouping/ series of prehension (the body); (8) subject-object relation as the prehension of past prehension(s); and (9)  God-world relation as the interaction between the totality of non-divine prehensions and the divine series of prehensions (p.17-18)

[3] Eternal here implies simultaneity, or absence of the passage of time. It is not the same as “infinite” which refers to the “infinite passage of time,”

[4] Whitehead had a taxonomy of scales which said that at the same durational scale, all nexi (entities) comprised a society. This is often misconstrued, for example, when someone interprets this to mean that their body is a society of cells. This is an incorrect interpretation. It suggests that a society can supervene on its members in the same way my body can walk my cells around the room. There is no such supervenience in process philosophy. The society of human cells is comprised of all human cells, or more precisely, of many societies of different cell type with different historical nexi. As the biologist Lynn Margulis understood, micro-organisms comprise an enormous “society” in nature in ways that are independent of the kinds of classifications that we, as humans, are fond of making. As people and animals die, the micro-organisms go on to transition to new organizations, new ways of making a living and world-building. In process philosophy, a human body is not a society of cells, but a specific habitat or environment, or niche, that cells participate with(in). And like all habitats, the cells participate through a co-creative process of world-building (niche-construction/ body-building). It is in this way that process philosophy lays the groundwork for Evolutionary Developmental Theory by interpreting “bodies” as “developmental fields in which cells evolve” in the same way that natural ecologies, cultures, and markets are developmental fields in which species, humans and economies evolve. What “evolves” are the developmental fields. What “develops” are the agents with(in) the participation.

[5] There is a similar trap with certain strains of vipassana practices which deconstruct  phenomena into “emptiness” without taking into consideration that the phenomena that we are starting with are already mental objects, void of self-existence.