IMMATERIALITY For the philosopher, the immaterial dimension of ultimate reality has three expressions: Intelligence, Goodness, and Divinity. Intelligence here (sometimes called Reason, Thought, Mind, Logos, Rationality, or Idea) mirrors the ‘Intelligibility’ of the scientist, but seemingly includes some level of agency, intention, or causation. Philosophically, Goodness (alternatively called Virtue, Good Will, or Love) is both a blanket over existence and a will behind it. Scientists qua scientists must deny any intrinsic goodness related to physical things, but we can have little doubt they e ..read more

“Man can never escape the ideal or absolute; he can merely exchange one for another. He can ignore anything beyond his needs only by making an ideal out of the fulfillment of his needs themselves. In short, man cannot be an animal; he can only be a philosopher or anthropologist who asserts that men are animals and ought to live like them. It is not necessary to point out that this is just to set up another absolute.” – Emil L. Fackenham, Quest for Past and Future. During our journey to characterize ultimate reality, we have already extracted the scientific position from the writings of some of ..read more

CULTURAL According to Whitehead, the final level at which humans participate in ultimate reality is through our unique subset ‘organism’ within the universe – civilization. Some of his most beautiful prose describes this so I will quote liberally and perhaps excessively. He starts: “The notion of civilization is very baffling. We all know what it means. It suggests a certain ideal for life on this earth, and this ideal includes both the individual human being and the societies of men… Yet civilization is one of those general notions that are very difficult to define…I put forward as a general ..read more

(We continue now with the third of the four mean for us to participate in ultimate reality as pictured by Alfred North Whitehead.) CREATIVE In addition to the general and spiritual ways we connect to the Whitehead’s ultimate reality of organism and the creative advance, there remain two others – our individual creativity as a factor in the creative advance and our participation in the subset organism of humanity – civilization. We will start with individual creativity, specifically human efforts in the creation of beauty. In setting context, Whitehead reviews the classical philosophical probl ..read more

RELIGIOUS Next we consider religious features of human participation in ultimate reality. In anticipation of the physicalist’s, scientist’s or skeptic’s objection to his views, Whitehead says: “It is childish to enter upon thought with the simple-minded question, What is the world made of? The task of reason is to fathom the deeper depths of the many-sidedness of things. We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates there are always heights beyond which block our vision.”9 For Whitehead, beyond these heights is the notion of God, where Christianit ..read more

(we pick up with general ways in which Whitehead suggests we participate in ultimate reality) IMMORTALITY Whitehead’s theory on immortality follows logically from his premise that actual entities or occasions, including humans develop within the spatio-temporal continuum and are qualified in past, present, and future. Of course the past and the future do not exist per se, only the present exists. According to Whitehead, “In the philosophy of organism it is not ‘substance’ which is permanent, but ‘form.’ Forms suffer changing relations while “actual entities ‘perpetually perish’ subjectively, b ..read more

“The desire for peace is the mark of all civilized men and women.” – Henry Kissinger, 1973 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. In the last four blogs we looked in some detail at ultimate reality as schematized by Alfred North Whitehead, the last major philosopher to formulate such a system. Whitehead is convinced that our primary experience of the world comports best with a metaphysical structure that conjoins modern scientific cosmology with a philosophy of organism and creativity. To this he adds a speculative element of divine wisdom and agency which transforms potentiality to actuality and envelop ..read more

CREATIVITY For Whitehead, creativity is the universal of universals, the ultimate metaphysical principle which underlies all things without exception, including God.19 His description of the categories, interdependency, nexūs, process, and the divine formulate the matrix which establishes the defining feature of reality, its dynamism or creativity. On the one hand there is a physical component of creation. At this level God is the principle actor, initiating a continuous process of potentiality becoming actuality, wherein elements are synthesized into new unities or “concrescences”. On the oth ..read more

INTERDEPENDENCY/PROCESS Whitehead  asserts science and experience inform us that each event in the universe is a factor in every other event such that “all things ultimately inhere in each other”12 – there are no isolated events. The real world then is an interdependency of interrelated parts more descriptive of an organism than a machine. Moreover all occasions develop within the spatio-temporal continuum and are qualified in past, present, and future. New actual entities arise from prior occasions and eventually themselves perish, but not before being objectified by still later occasion ..read more

‘CATEGOREAL’ SCHEME Whitehead believes that philosophy serves to explain the abstractions that we develop from our interaction with the concrete world. These abstractions originate from a framework of “generic notions inevitably presupposed in our reflective experience,”5 specifically actual entities, prehensions (cogitation or ideas), ‘nexūs’ (plural of nexus – involvement of actual entities with each other through prehension), and ontological principles.6 This intuitive base leads to his second major philosophical principle: we bring the abstract and the concrete together using a ‘categoreal ..read more