Whitehead's Philosophy of the Organism

Discussion

Matthew David Segall:

"He develops an alternative “philosophy of organism” in which value is reintegrated into nature. Every organism, he says, is the realization of a “definite shape of value.” Every fact is, in some sense, an achievement of value, an aesthetic attainment in the ongoing creative advance of the world.

In Process and Reality, he also redefines metaphysics itself as a kind of disciplined imagination. Metaphysics, he says, is an unusual effort of directed toward the analysis of the obvious: those invariant features of experience that are so constant we tend not to notice them. Because they are always there, we require imagination to call them into question and to suggest alternatives to our habitual modes of perception.

Imagination, for Whitehead, is not a decorative add-on to a finished empirical picture but rather the faculty that allows us to reconfigure the categories through which we understand experience. He is explicit that imagination has a legitimate and necessary role to play in bringing us into more intimate contact with reality.

At the same time, he insists that philosophy is tasked with the self-correction of consciousness. In a crucial passage early in Process and Reality (15), he writes:

“Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements, by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual of such higher grade has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.”

Consciousness, in this sense, is not ubiquitous. Whitehead is a panexperientialist, but not a “pan-consciousist.” Feeling or experience goes all the way down, but consciousness arises at higher grades of complexity as a specialized, selective intensification. It deepens individuality by narrowing the field of awareness to a focal region.

Modern selfhood is thus purchased at the price of a certain blindness. Our individual perspective has traffic with the totality by virtue of being part of it, but we obscure that totality insofar as we focus narrowly on our own purposes. The task of philosophy becomes the recovery of what has been left out by our own selective intensification. And imagination is the organ of that recovery."

(https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/romantic-imagination-and-the-recovery)