Process philosophy is a 20th century philosophical movement
embracing novelty of experienced reality to rely on intuition and reject
permanence, uniformity and materialism.
Henri Bergson 1859/ 1941 was considered a founding father who proposed
life’s experience entailed a continuum of creating oneself analogous to
existentialism.
He appealed to both academia and in
common and general appreciation culminating in his Nobel Prize awarded to him
in Literature in 1927.
First educated at Lycée Condorcet in
Paris in 1878 to 1881 he studied at the École Normale Supérieure, as a
brilliant student at home in both Greek, Latin and scientific
subjects.
Early work- introducing the concept
of lived time.
His principal focus concerned his
concept of the inner flow of his so called lived time which opposed the
scientific spatialized conception of time as measured by a clock. .
His concept was to recognise an inner
awareness and liberty to reject scientific determinism.
In 1891 he married Louise Neuburger,
a cousin of the French novelist Marcel Proust.
Mind and Body- memory is independent
of the body
He correctly conclude memory is not
actually lost but rather it is only the bodily mechanism that is lost and
unable to recall memories which was a ground-breaking idea at the time. .
Bergson concluded that memory, and so
mind, or soul, is independent of body and makes use of it to carry out its own
purposes.
In 1897 he returned as the professor
of philosophy to the École Normale Supérieure, having first entered as a
student.
In 1900, he was called to the Collège
de France, the academic institution of highest prestige in all of France, where
he enjoyed immense success as a lecturer until the outbreak of World War
I.
William James was an enthusiastic
reader of his works, and the two men became warm friends.
1903 - 'An Introduction to
Metaphysics' – the two ways of knowing
The two ways of knowing separate the
scientific approach o see things as solid and discontinuous whilst the
intuitive way conceptualises the global, immediate or references matters that
reach into the heart.
The first gets things done but cannot
view reality as it leaves out duration and its perpetual flux, which is
inexpressible and can only be grasped as in self-awareness.
Créatrice (1907; Creative Evolution), is considered his
greatest work to define him as a process philosopher. He proposed that the
evolutionary process involves an enduring (“vital impulse”) that is
continually developing and generating new forms. Evolution is creative and not
mechanistic.
His ideas then are remarkably similar
to modern day evolutionary biology that understands our DNA blueprint is
constantly subject to the environment. It doesn’t represent a form of
Neo-Darwinism as portrayed by evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins
and others as a form of genetic determinism.
In this developing process, he traced
two main lines: one through instinct, leading to the life of insects; the other
through the evolution of intelligence. Both he suggested is the work of one
vital impulse that is at work everywhere. Bergson was on the right track as in
modernity we know, having spent billions on the DNA project we know our genes
only play a limited role and the novel environment is far more influential. The
switches within DNA can be switched on and off according to the environment
which is far more influential.
Summary of Bergson's main ideas:
· Evolutionary
and not materialistic.
· Life
has an 'inner flow', an inner spirit, which is known by intuition and accounts
for material/bodily changes.
· Two
kinds of time exist: Scientific, mechanical, objective, 'out there' time; and
inner time, subjective, of our immediate intuitive flowing experience.
Understanding the self.
He argued any attempt to understand
the self by analysing it in terms of static concepts fails to reveal the
dynamic, changing character. Reality is a continual process of change and is
apprehended intuitively via the inner time awareness as a continuum of all
existing changes or movements, with no break; a continual flow, ever evolving
creatively.
There is a 'life force', an elan
vital that has endured the ages and accounts for the creative evolution of
life, instinct and intellect in all living things. It is the driving force
propelling life to higher and higher levels of structure and organisation, an
impetus which is creative but whose endpoint is not known.
His idea was that the ‘Elan Vital” cannot be known empirically or through the sciences which are concerned
with the static, material, discrete way of apprehending reality.
Instinct is limited because it grasps
the fluid, dynamic nature of life but is limited to the individual; intellect
is limited because it can construct general truths and categories of existence
but by doing so it imposes a static character to reality.
By intuition knowledge is possible
which is superior to that of instinct or intellect working separately.
His system is dualistic, insofar as
he sees reality divided between life (and spirit in life) and matter. It is
life that is the impetus to creativity, the flow ever evolving, unrestricted,
not predetermined.
What flows is whatever we deem to be
there, such as matter (inanimate) in tension with life, (the living, organic
spirit). All part of a flowing reality. Matter tends towards inertia and it is
life that is creative, using matter or whatever there is, to evolve into
greater free forms, not prescribed or limited by the 'dead hand' of
matter.
Critics and analysis of his
Philosophy
The idea that intuition is instinct,
becoming aware not only of its objects but also of itself and is a necessary
part of consciousness; (self-aware) is contrary to the Rationalists, Kant and
Hegel who prioritised the intellect as the way to grasp the nature of reality.
Bergson claimed that the intellect
evolved as a tool to divide and subdivide the flow (matter of life) - a
continual creative process. This intellect-tool is a projection upon
reality, upon the flow, which is reflected back to us so that we suppose it to
be real, made up of clock-time static objects.
But it is not like that; it is just
our way of subdividing the endless, continual flow so that action can be
undertaken.
Later career.
It was until 25 years later in 1932
he published “The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where he claimed that
the polar opposition of the static and the dynamic provides the basic
insight.
According to Bergen there are two
sources of morality with one having its roots in intelligence and the other
based on intuition, and finding its expression not only in the free creativity
of art and philosophy but also in the mystical experience of the saints.
Influence of Bergson
His influence has been greatest in France,
but it has also been felt in the US and Great Britain, especially in the work
of William James and Alfred North Whitehead.
Alfred North Whitehead 1861- 1947.
He was an English mathematician and
philosopher, who collaborated with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica
(1910–13) and, from the mid-1920s, taught at Harvard University and developed a
comprehensive metaphysical theory.
The Concept of Nature (1920).
Whitehead was influenced by Henri
Bergson's anti-mechanistic philosophy of change.
1925 Boston Lectures- A critique of
“scientific Materialism”
He criticized Materialism as
mistaking an abstract system of mathematical physics for the concrete reality
of nature.
Whitehead's mind was at home with
such abstractions, and he saw them as real discoveries and not intellectual
inventions.
Religion in the Making
In 1926, Whitehead interpreted
religion as reaching its deepest level in humanity's solitude, that is, as an
attitude of the individual toward the universe rather than as a social
phenomenon.
Gifford Lectures
In January 1927 the University of
Edinburgh invited him to give a set of 10 Gifford Lectures in the ensuing
academic year.
For this, Whitehead drew up the
complex technical structure of “the philosophy of organism” (as he called his
metaphysics)
The lectures reflected Whitehead's
speculative hypothesis that the universe consists entirely of becoming, each of
them a process of appropriating and integrating the infinity of items
(“reality”) provided by the antecedent universe and by GOd (the abiding source
of novel possibilities.
Whitehead had an unwavering faith in
the possibility of understanding existence and a superb power to construct a
scheme of general ideas broad enough to overcome the classic
dualisms.
But he knew that no system can do
more than make an approach, somewhat more adequate than its predecessors,
to understand the infinitude of
existence. He had seen the collapse of the long- entrenched Newtonian system of
physics, and his “Adventures of Ideas (1933)” was Whitehead's last big
philosophical book.
Whitehead emphasized the impulse of
life toward newness and the absolute need for societies stable enough to
nourish adventure that is fruitful rather than anarchic. In this book he also
summarized his metaphysics and used it to elucidate the nature of beauty,
truth, art, adventure, and peace.
By “peace” he meant a religious
attitude that is “primarily a trust in the efficacy of beauty.”
Main Ideas of Whitehead's Philosophy
· The
conventional, scientific/materialist accounts of the world (matter, bits of it
in motion and that is all there is) is deeply flawed as it fails to give a any
proper account of reality (the universe).
· Physics
(the primary science) has no place for qualia (secondary qualities we perceive,
such as colours, sounds etc...) in its narration of what there is and
doesn’t offers a place for ethics, beauty or the religious
experience.
· Physics
deals with natural laws, concepts like mass, universal constants and force but
cannot provide an explanation of the reason why the universe is as it is. .
· Everything
in reality is super sensitive to the presence of everything else, to represent
our experiences of “the other” through a non-conscious awareness or 'feeling.'
· Our
experience tells us that reality encompasses causation, valid rules of
inductive inference, that the qualities of things must belong to them, that
aesthetics, ethics, religious intuitions are parts of the world not just
figments of the imagination.
· Everything
is connected/related to everything else in a vast organic-like whole and this
connection is a 'knowing' the other through feeling.
What I liked:
Rather obviously our view of reality
is constrained by the fact one can’t step outside of the universe of which we
are inextricably linked and view it independently. That case is argued
under process philosophy rather successfully so that the only way we can view
our place in the world is to understand the processes involved.
I think one can say that process
philosophy ideas have practical benefits in inviting us to consider the
appropriate process involved and to arrive at an optimum solution.
So that Whitehead might be seen more
as one who integrated those past ideas into his philosophy.
Beginning with Henry Bergson the
notion of lived time and the idea we have an inner self we have the
psyche/spiritual aspect to our existence as in process philosophy which spills
out to process theology.
Process Theology
Whitehead’s perspective is the soul has
two poles, a mental/active and a physical/passive. The (infinite) World-Soul’s
references as the “primordial nature of God.” It is sort of like the cosmic
genetic code.
Roughly speaking Process Theology in
my view does not conflict with the idea of existence preceding essence as in
existential thinking.
There is “God", and there is
man, a fragmented image of “God" if you will.
At every moment, we have the ability
to make a choice. We either make that choice based on our past experiences, or
we make it based on a possibility that transcends our past. What allows for
that transcendence? According to Process Theology, it is something like a
mirror that gathers “the data” of all of the activity of the fragments and
mirrors back to each one all of the past experiences along with a new
possibility that would be the next best step to take given all the current
data. Do we take that "leap of faith” into a new experience, or do we
stick with the comfort of our past experiences? Whatever we choose, gets
mirrored back to “GOD”, which is likewise the change in our choices and so the
exchange continues… It’s a process.
As Nietzsche put it, do we remain a camel and follow the path that has been
laid out for us by our familial and societal customs, or do we manage to gain
the courage of the lion and create our own path? If we take on the role of
“lion”, then we must be willing to slay every scale on the dragon, otherwise we
will continue to repeat history.
One might hold the view that this can
best be achieved by meditation and introspection. Another way to look at it is
to say one can “transcends the Ego “?
