Review: 'Whitehead's Living Ontology: Five Principles of Process Philosophical Astrotheology'

Introduction

This paper is one of my favorite Process-Relational Philosopy (PRP) works. I've both read and listened to it several times and still get something new out of it whenever I pick it back up. There is a lot of ground to cover, so this will only be the first part of a 3-part series.

For the newcomer to PRP, the content can be quite daunting, and so I'm hoping this review will be both informative from a critical perspective and enlightening from a learner's perspective. It's organized into five sections to align with the five principles, so we'll tackle it in the same manner. Below are the five principles. The two covered here are in bold:

The Anthropic Reversal
Retrospective Ontology for Evolutionary Cosmology
Aesthetic Teleology
God as Chief Exemplification and Persuasive toward Imago Dei
Goodness, Divine Limitation, and Extraterrestrial Plenitude.

The Anthropic Reversal

It isn't uncommon to hear even well-respected scholars talk about the human experience as if we were, by nature, separate from the universe. They talk as if someone injected us into Nature and we're all here exploring foreign territory. Davis, relying heavily on Whiteheadian sources, seeks to bring us back to the truth of the matter. He defines this 'anthropic reversal' as "...the need to reembed human experience as a fact within the universe" (p. 224). I found Davis' language on this point to be smoothly striking as it evoked a perspective that's so obvious, yet, so overlooked and misunderstood. Indeed, the idea of human beings as a "fully natural expression of the universe" or "expressive of the deeper shapes and rhythms of cosmic evolution" (p. 226) immediately stimulates a re-objectification of oneself as something akin to a fruit growing from a tree branch rather than a bird that has flown down to sit on that branch from some outside location.

The real struggle here was to avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water, i.e. Davis presses us not to lose the value and naturalness of human subjective experience with the discovery that the Earth isn't the center of the universe with us as her masters. He provides several Whitehead quotes on the issue that leave one taken aback with wonder. In order to avoid overloading the reader, I'll place some of them at the end of this review, but there is one direct statement from Davis that sums them all up. He says, "Although we remain very small, our experience is actually very large because it expresses the same metaphysical principles that reign throughout the cosmos in various hierarchies of organization, complexity and intensity" (p. 227).

Retrospective Ontology for Evolutionary Cosmology

In this section, Davis attempts to "philosphize downward from our experience through" the different "levels of reality" (p. 228). At the most fundamental, metaphysical level, he argues for three ontological primatives: life, mind, and value, which reveal some of the basic features of reality, shared even across different universes. This multi-versal perspective, he states, is the pursuit of metaphysics, whereas comsology is a field that seeks to understand the basic principles of this particular universe. Given the sensitive and perhaps even dangerous nature of this approach, Davis stresses that, "This method is always tentative in nature, and it must be in consonance with human experience and the best findings of the sciences."

Life

Davis' push for life, mind, and value as primative elements of reality stems directly from scientific discoveries, which have been taking place since the early 1900s. What we have been finding is that the world is "a layered multiplicity of organisms within organisms across various scales of evolutionary emergence and complexity throughout nature" (p. 229). That is, it's starting to look like we're a part of a living universe that is alive from the ground up, rather than a dead one where life has somehow emerged in a later evolutionary phase.

This is a hard sell for many. Davis' first line of business is to offer a different understanding of what qualifies as "life" and "experience." The Whiteheadian stance that he takes is that even at the subatomic level (quarks, electrons, photons, etc.), we are still dealing with organisms, which means the real question is at what point do we consider an organism to be alive, given that even these tiny organisms "exhibit active evolution, dynamic response, and purposive internal relations to their environment" (p. 229)? He runs with a degreed concept via Ford (1968) arguing that the difference between organisms that are and are not alive is merely the difference between novel and habitual response.

Thus, even at the tiniest, most fundamental level, we should expect there to be actual entities: primative drops of living experiences. This requires us to place experience and consciousness into a gradually evolving spectrum rather than neatly separated, and perhaps completely different categories. We are asked to shed the idea that alive things are limited to dynamic, thinking creatures like humans and dogs. Life goes all the way down. It just begins to look and behave differently as it reaches unfathomable levels of complexity.

Mind

The 'livingness' of actual entities, I would suggest, is not only linked to their creative becoming, but to the fact that their becoming is the becoming of experience. Actual entities are "occasions of experience" and they exhibit a dipolar structure in their emergence from the past to the future through phases of physical inheritance, mental anticipation and 'decision' (pgs. 230-31).

This elegantly written statement on the nature of actual entities and their relationship with time initiates the section on mind as an ontological primative in Nature. Davis goes on to describe the past as an amalgom of saved objects; data that actively press upon the present experience (causal efficacy) in the shape of a physical pole. In this process, it is the mental pole that navigates, anticipates, and decides. And it is this mental pole that serves as the generator of novelty in the universe as it synthesizes different combinations of prehensions, conceptual (eternal objects) and physical (actual entities), which then creates new, blissful experiences.

Again, we are faced with a counter-intuitive notion, this time it is that mind goes all the way down to the most primative forms of existence. Davis argues that the physical and the mental are both constituents in every occasion of experience, but falls back on the original claim from the section on life, that mental operations are not to be considered a monolith. We are dared to conceive of mind as an essential element spread throughout the specturm of experience, so primative in its foundation that we struggle to imagine what it would be like, and so complex at the human phase of the specturm that we tend to use a separate term to describe it: consciousness. For clarity, he adds the mind-blowing quote from Whitehead's magnum opus, Process & Reality: "Consciousness is the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base" (Whitehead, p. 267).

Value

In the final third of section 2 of his paper, Davis adds one more ontological primative: value. It's fitting that the section ends this way because it serves as a segue to section 3: Aesthetic Teleology (to be covered in part II of my review), which deals with a value-driven reason for existence. In his words, "As the most fundamental sparks of life, experience and feeling, actual occasions are not valueless for Whitehead, but valuable in and for themselves. They are permeated with intrinsic value in their very reality of becoming." This position is reminiscent of the Sanskrit word ānanda "the bliss of existence". He ends the section with this statement:

Value is inherent in the making of fact, and fact is an attainment of value. As with life and experience then, so too with value: there is no meaning to evolution beyond the progressive reach for deeper intrinsic value. Life, experience, and value necessarily rise together in the achievements of cosmological evolution (p. 234).

Summary

These first two sections of Davis' paper flip substantive ontology upside down, injecting life, mind, and value into the primative roots of existence and reanalyzing the different "levels" of experience, which many tend to view as separate and possibly unrelated categories (alive vs not alive, thinking vs not thinking, blissful vs blank), as a singular, gradually evolving spectrum, thus escaping the hard problem of consciousness and quickening what was once considered a dead universe of colliding bits of matter. This perspective does not anthropomorphize the universe, but rather offers an explanation as to how the universe might eventually begin expressing parts of itself as thoughtful, human forms in the first place. A dead ontology, in all of its glory, all of it predictive power prefers to ignore life, mind, and value, as unnecessary to perform its function, but in allowing this, we fall victim to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. We objectify the universe as things alone. Davis, via Whitehead, is insisting that life, mind, and value are just as much a part of the universe as any other thing we perceive, and therefore require a place in any metaphysical framework that we might dare to call "fully explanatory" to any degree. The gears of the mechanistic perspective still move without the experiencer, but it's refreshing to see that real scholarly work is being done to find a place for us, the ones who are here to experience and describe it all in the first place.

Critique

While Davis taps into something profound at this point of the paper, I couldn't help but feel just a bit