Self-Creative Enjoyment
of a Given World
This entire page is an exploration of two chapgers in Part II, Chapter IV of Whitehead's Process and Reality, where he develops an account of the subjective nature of every moment of experience. Scroll to the bottom of the page for extended excerpts. There he suggests that each actual occasion of experience seeks satisfaction through the enjoyment of contrasts: an enjoyment which is experiential but not necessarily conscious.
Earlier in Process and Reality he has defined this enjoyment as "self-enjoyment."
The organic philosophy interprets experience as meaning the ‘self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.’ (PR, 145)
And he has said that this self-enjoyment is also self-creative:
An actual entity considered in reference to the privacy of things is a ‘subject’; namely, it is a moment of the genesis of self-enjoyment. It consists of a purposed self-creation out of materials which are at hand in virtue of their publicity. (PR, 289)
My suggestion is that 'meaning' is the self-creative enjoyment of a given world that has significance for the subject of experience, and that this enjoyment is not only of the world experienced but also the self-enjoyment of experiencing it and creating felt-contrasts amid the experience. Significance lies in the world and in the experience of felt-contrasts in the world as experienced. Following Whitehea, I suggest that something like this occurs even at the miniscule level of subatomic events; 'pulsations' of energy in the depths of atoms. They are primitive forms of self-creative, self-enjoyment.
Of course cosmic evolution yields many forms of meaning-making which are more than momentary pulsations. Among the more complex meaning-makers of the universe are animals on earth, including ourselves. Our own meaning making includes rich forms, ethical responsiveness, and also, if we are very fortunate, an inwardly felt sense that the universe as a whole is a Harmony of Harmonies.
The notion of a Harmony of Harmonies comes from Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas, where it is connected with his reflections on Peace as a mode of experience that transcends mere immediate satisfaction. The suggestion developed here is that the experience of such a Harmony of Harmonies represents the crowning experience in the journey of an experiencing subject: a widening of feeling in which diverse contrasts, meanings, relationships, and values are gathered into a richer and more encompassing unity. This experience need not imply the elimination of tragedy or difference, but rather their inclusion within a wider harmony whose beauty surpasses what any isolated moment can enjoy on its own. The experience of Harmony of Harmonies is, so Whitehead suggests, a surpassing of personality.
For readers interested in meaning, I strongly recommend a complement to what is said on this page: namely Andrew Davis' Mind, Value, and Cosmos and his presentation of these subjects in a YouTube video; click here. What I am calling meaning-making he calls aesthetic achievement. Davis covers many topics related to value not included on this page, specifically the role of ideals in the pursuit of value and the role of divine influence in the world, The treatment here is incomplete without Davis' additions and amplifications.
Felt Significance (I)
Nine Theses
1. Feeling
The universe begins not with inert matter but with the transmission of feeling from moment to moment.
2. Momentary Meaning
In the smallest depths of reality, meaning first appears as a pulsation of emotion and a momentary realization of value. Meaning is the felt significance of the moment.
3. Complexity
As experience grows richer, meaning unfolds through memory, anticipation, imagination, and widening harmonies of feeling.
4. Collective Meaning
Meaning is not merely created by isolated selves but woven together within living wholes and communities of experience. Societies seek and enjoy meaning, too.
5. Richness of Experience
The act of meaning-making is filled with desire and advenure. It seeks richness by gathering greater varieties and degrees of feeling into wider patterns of harmony.
6. Purpose
At higher levels of life, the enjoyment of feeling becomes joined with purpose and with care for what may yet come to be. Anticipating the future becomes part of meaning making.
7. Ethics
Ethics emerges when meaning-makers ask which ways of seeking satisfaction deepen and enrich the lives of the many.
8. Recognition of the Other
Meaning reaches a fuller depth when we recognize others as fellow centers of feeling whose lives make claims upon our own. We are confronted, challenged, and inspired by the autonomy of other lives with meaning of their own.
9. Harmony
Ultimate meaning lies in a Harmony of Harmonies where every fragment of beauty, sorrow, and value becomes part of an unfinished cosmic melody. The experience of this Harmony of Harmonies is peace.
The universe begins not with inert matter but with the transmission of feeling from moment to moment.
2. Momentary Meaning
In the smallest depths of reality, meaning first appears as a pulsation of emotion and a momentary realization of value. Meaning is the felt significance of the moment.
3. Complexity
As experience grows richer, meaning unfolds through memory, anticipation, imagination, and widening harmonies of feeling.
4. Collective Meaning
Meaning is not merely created by isolated selves but woven together within living wholes and communities of experience. Societies seek and enjoy meaning, too.
5. Richness of Experience
The act of meaning-making is filled with desire and advenure. It seeks richness by gathering greater varieties and degrees of feeling into wider patterns of harmony.
6. Purpose
At higher levels of life, the enjoyment of feeling becomes joined with purpose and with care for what may yet come to be. Anticipating the future becomes part of meaning making.
7. Ethics
Ethics emerges when meaning-makers ask which ways of seeking satisfaction deepen and enrich the lives of the many.
8. Recognition of the Other
Meaning reaches a fuller depth when we recognize others as fellow centers of feeling whose lives make claims upon our own. We are confronted, challenged, and inspired by the autonomy of other lives with meaning of their own.
9. Harmony
Ultimate meaning lies in a Harmony of Harmonies where every fragment of beauty, sorrow, and value becomes part of an unfinished cosmic melody. The experience of this Harmony of Harmonies is peace.
Felt Significance (II)
Amplification of the Nine Theses
Introduction
In common parlance the word meaning is used in different ways. And this is how it should be. Words 'mean' different things in different context. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 36 meanings for the noun 'meaning.'
Consider how word functions in the following questions:
In some of these cases, meaning concerns linguistic definition or conceptual content. In others it concerns intention: what someone meant to say. In still others it concerns significance, value, purpose, consequence, or the sense that one's life matters within a wider context. Sometimes meaning is intellectual; sometimes emotional; sometimes existential; sometimes ethical or spiritual.
Many people assume that meaning belongs chiefly to language and human thought. They think of meaning as something human beings create or discover through concepts, symbols, stories, and interpretations. Of they think that 'meaning' is something given to things by outside observers, as in "You impart meaning to it."
The proposals developed below, with help from Open AI, begin from a different starting point. Meaning has deeper roots than language and consciousness.
Meaning first appears as felt significance rather than conceptual interpretation. Or, to use Whitehead's language in Modes of Thought, felt importance, Human meanings—our ideas, purposes, values, narratives, and ethical commitments—are richer and more complex expressions of a process already present throughout nature itself. Other animals seek and have meaning, understood as felt significance or felt importance. Living cells do the same. And so do momentary pulsations of energy within the depths of atoms.
Whitehead's philosophy provides a framework for this possibility. It represents what one of his most astute interpreters, David Ray Griffin, calls a panexperientialist point of view, in the context of which every entity in the universe either is, or is an aggregate expression of, momentary drops of experience or "occasions of experience." Every actual occasion of experience is a concrescing subject, and every concrescind subject inherits feelings from the past and creatively integrates them into new forms of satisfaction.
Meaning begins as a movement toward value-achievement or value-enjoyment, however primitive. And in this movement the concrescing subject is important to itself. Human meaning does not emerge out of a meaningless universe; it emerges from a universe already alive with feeling, significance, and the pursuit of satisfying intensity.
The suggestion below is that meaning belongs not merely to human language but to the very structure of reality itself. Reality may be understood as an ongoing process of meaning-making: a creative advance into richer forms of feeling, value, significance, and beauty.
Consider how word functions in the following questions:
- What is the meaning of the word "meaning"?
- What did you mean when you said that?
- What does this poem mean?
- What does this dream mean?
- What does this event mean for our future?
- What meaning do you attach to event?
- Why did this happen to us? What does it mean?
- Does my life have meaning?
In some of these cases, meaning concerns linguistic definition or conceptual content. In others it concerns intention: what someone meant to say. In still others it concerns significance, value, purpose, consequence, or the sense that one's life matters within a wider context. Sometimes meaning is intellectual; sometimes emotional; sometimes existential; sometimes ethical or spiritual.
Many people assume that meaning belongs chiefly to language and human thought. They think of meaning as something human beings create or discover through concepts, symbols, stories, and interpretations. Of they think that 'meaning' is something given to things by outside observers, as in "You impart meaning to it."
The proposals developed below, with help from Open AI, begin from a different starting point. Meaning has deeper roots than language and consciousness.
Meaning first appears as felt significance rather than conceptual interpretation. Or, to use Whitehead's language in Modes of Thought, felt importance, Human meanings—our ideas, purposes, values, narratives, and ethical commitments—are richer and more complex expressions of a process already present throughout nature itself. Other animals seek and have meaning, understood as felt significance or felt importance. Living cells do the same. And so do momentary pulsations of energy within the depths of atoms.
Whitehead's philosophy provides a framework for this possibility. It represents what one of his most astute interpreters, David Ray Griffin, calls a panexperientialist point of view, in the context of which every entity in the universe either is, or is an aggregate expression of, momentary drops of experience or "occasions of experience." Every actual occasion of experience is a concrescing subject, and every concrescind subject inherits feelings from the past and creatively integrates them into new forms of satisfaction.
Meaning begins as a movement toward value-achievement or value-enjoyment, however primitive. And in this movement the concrescing subject is important to itself. Human meaning does not emerge out of a meaningless universe; it emerges from a universe already alive with feeling, significance, and the pursuit of satisfying intensity.
The suggestion below is that meaning belongs not merely to human language but to the very structure of reality itself. Reality may be understood as an ongoing process of meaning-making: a creative advance into richer forms of feeling, value, significance, and beauty.
1. Energy as the Transmission of Feeling
The transmission of energy from one actual entity to another is a transmission of feeling. What passes from past to present is not merely a causal influence or a transfer of energy understood as something externally measurable; it is also an inheritance of feeling. Every new moment of experience receives the world that has preceded it as a felt reality.
At the same time that a new moment receives feelings from the past, it generates its own feeling aimed at satisfying intensity through the enjoyment of felt contrasts among what it inherits from past actual entities. Reception is never passive. The new moment actively shapes, integrates, and transforms what it receives into its own experience. This self-enjoyment, and the aiming at it, is its meaning. Meaning is not first an abstract idea or conceptual interpretation; it is initially a felt movement toward satisfaction.
At the same time that a new moment receives feelings from the past, it generates its own feeling aimed at satisfying intensity through the enjoyment of felt contrasts among what it inherits from past actual entities. Reception is never passive. The new moment actively shapes, integrates, and transforms what it receives into its own experience. This self-enjoyment, and the aiming at it, is its meaning. Meaning is not first an abstract idea or conceptual interpretation; it is initially a felt movement toward satisfaction.
2. Primitive Meaning-Making: Pulsations of Emotion
In very simple entities at submicroscopic levels, this meaning takes the form of a momentary pulsation of emotion—a primitive enjoyment of intensity and contrast. Thus a pulsation of energy in the depths of an atom can, in this sense, be understood as a meaning-making event. The meaning involved here is not reflective or conscious meaning; it is an elementary form of value-achievement, a momentary realization of felt significance.
This is how a subatomic event in the depths of an atom may be said to "make meaning." It does not make meaning by interpreting symbols or entertaining ideas. It makes meaning by achieving a momentary satisfaction through the integration of inherited feeling into a new realization of value.
This is how a subatomic event in the depths of an atom may be said to "make meaning." It does not make meaning by interpreting symbols or entertaining ideas. It makes meaning by achieving a momentary satisfaction through the integration of inherited feeling into a new realization of value.
3. More Complex Forms of Meaning-Making
In more complex entities this enjoyment becomes richer and more differentiated. It comes to include memory, anticipation, imagination, conceptual feeling, emotional interpretation, and the coordination of multiple contrasts within a larger experiential unity. Feeling becomes increasingly deep and layered.
Examples of entities which exhibit more complex meaning-making activity include living cells, plants, animals, and human beings. Wherever there is a momentary realization of felt significance, there is meaning.
Examples of entities which exhibit more complex meaning-making activity include living cells, plants, animals, and human beings. Wherever there is a momentary realization of felt significance, there is meaning.
4. Collective Meaning-Making and Living Wholes
It is possible that meaning-making also occurs in aggregates of actual entities that are "living wholes": societies of actual entities that consist of many entities as parts but also possess some degree of emergent unity and subjectivity that exercises causal influence upon those parts. Their meaning-making is thus not only for themselves but also for the entities composing them.
In such cases, meaning-making is collective rather than merely individuated. The significance achieved is not reducible to the isolated experiences of individual constituents, even though it emerges through them and influences them in return. The whole becomes a field of shared feeling, coordinated activity, and common purpose that shapes the meanings available to its members.
Examples might include biological organisms, ecosystems, families, communities, cultures, and perhaps civilizations.
In these more complex collective entities, meaning-making is no longer limited to momentary pulsations of feeling. It involves the integration of multiple streams of inheritance, memory, anticipation, and response across time. A plant bends toward sunlight, integrating environmental contrasts into patterns of growth. Animals coordinate sensations, emotions, habits, and aims. Human beings weave together memory, imagination, language, ideals, and concern for possible futures into rich forms of self-interpretation and action. Collective entities may likewise coordinate multiple streams of feeling and response into shared forms of significance, shaping the meanings available to those who participate within them.
In such cases, meaning-making is collective rather than merely individuated. The significance achieved is not reducible to the isolated experiences of individual constituents, even though it emerges through them and influences them in return. The whole becomes a field of shared feeling, coordinated activity, and common purpose that shapes the meanings available to its members.
Examples might include biological organisms, ecosystems, families, communities, cultures, and perhaps civilizations.
In these more complex collective entities, meaning-making is no longer limited to momentary pulsations of feeling. It involves the integration of multiple streams of inheritance, memory, anticipation, and response across time. A plant bends toward sunlight, integrating environmental contrasts into patterns of growth. Animals coordinate sensations, emotions, habits, and aims. Human beings weave together memory, imagination, language, ideals, and concern for possible futures into rich forms of self-interpretation and action. Collective entities may likewise coordinate multiple streams of feeling and response into shared forms of significance, shaping the meanings available to those who participate within them.
5. Richness of Experience: Varieties and Degrees
Richness of experience involves both varieties and degrees of feeling. An experience becomes richer not simply by becoming more intense but by integrating a greater range of contrasts into a larger unity. Whitehead sometimes speaks of an increase in "width" of experience: the capacity to gather many different feelings, relationships, perspectives, memories, and possibilities into a coordinated whole.
Richness thus includes diversity as well as intensity, complexity as well as vividness. A narrow experience may be intense but limited; a richer experience harmonizes multiple contrasts without reducing them to sameness. Human life often seeks such richness through love, friendship, learning, art, music, contemplation, community, and participation in the larger world.
From a process perspective, the adventure of the universe can be understood in part as an ongoing movement toward richer forms of experience.
Richness thus includes diversity as well as intensity, complexity as well as vividness. A narrow experience may be intense but limited; a richer experience harmonizes multiple contrasts without reducing them to sameness. Human life often seeks such richness through love, friendship, learning, art, music, contemplation, community, and participation in the larger world.
From a process perspective, the adventure of the universe can be understood in part as an ongoing movement toward richer forms of experience.
6. Meaning, Purpose, and the Future
At higher stages of experience this enjoyment is also conjoined with concern for the future through anticipatory feelings. The present is no longer experienced only as immediate satisfaction but as contributing to what is yet to come. Meaning becomes joined with purpose, aspiration, responsibility, hope, and care.
Experience becomes not simply an enjoyment of intensity in the present moment, but participation in an ongoing adventure whose significance extends beyond itself.
Experience becomes not simply an enjoyment of intensity in the present moment, but participation in an ongoing adventure whose significance extends beyond itself.
7. Ethics as Reflective Meaning-Making
It is at this stage that questions emerge, for meaning-makers themselves, concerning standards of meaning. Are some meaning-making activities—some subjective aims at satisfaction—better than others? In human life these questions are at the heart of ethics. They arise because human beings do not merely experience meanings; they can also reflect upon, evaluate, compare, criticize, and revise them.
From a process perspective, not every achievement of intensity is equally valuable. Some forms of intensity may be destructive, narrow, compulsive, or self-defeating. Others may widen experience, deepen relationships, enrich contrasts, and contribute to the flourishing of individuals and communities. Whitehead repeatedly emphasizes that intensity by itself is insufficient. Intensity must be joined with harmony if it is to contribute to richer forms of value.
Ethics thus emerges from aesthetics. Questions of right and wrong develop from more fundamental questions concerning the quality of experience itself:
Human ethical life can therefore be understood as reflective meaning-making: the conscious effort to participate in the ongoing creation of forms of experience that are not only satisfying but also valuable. Ethics becomes the art of seeking those aims that create wider harmonies, richer intensities, and more enduring forms of significance.
From a process perspective, not every achievement of intensity is equally valuable. Some forms of intensity may be destructive, narrow, compulsive, or self-defeating. Others may widen experience, deepen relationships, enrich contrasts, and contribute to the flourishing of individuals and communities. Whitehead repeatedly emphasizes that intensity by itself is insufficient. Intensity must be joined with harmony if it is to contribute to richer forms of value.
Ethics thus emerges from aesthetics. Questions of right and wrong develop from more fundamental questions concerning the quality of experience itself:
- What kinds of feeling contribute to richer life?
- What forms of enjoyment deepen rather than diminish existence?
- What subjective aims generate forms of beauty that include and enrich others rather than impoverish or destroy them?
Human ethical life can therefore be understood as reflective meaning-making: the conscious effort to participate in the ongoing creation of forms of experience that are not only satisfying but also valuable. Ethics becomes the art of seeking those aims that create wider harmonies, richer intensities, and more enduring forms of significance.
8. Ethical Claims and the Recognition of Others
As ethical reflection develops, another realization emerges: the pursuit of richness of experience cannot concern only oneself. The world inherited by each experiencing subject already includes other subjects who are themselves centers of feeling, each with their own needs, capacities, vulnerabilities, and aims at satisfaction. Others are not merely objects within one's experience; they are fellow participants in the adventure of meaning-making.
From a process perspective, these others make claims upon the experiencing self. Their claims are not necessarily external commands imposed from outside experience. They arise within experience itself through sympathy, empathy, memory, affection, responsibility, and the direct or indirect feeling of others' needs and possibilities. The presence of others becomes part of what is inherited and integrated into one's own process of becoming.
Ethics therefore cannot be reduced to maximizing richness of experience for oneself alone. Richness itself becomes transformed through relationship. The realization that others likewise seek richer forms of life places demands upon the self—not necessarily demands of sacrifice alone, but demands of recognition. To recognize another is to perceive that other as a center of value, a being whose own meaning-making matters.
This recognition and honoring of others then becomes part of meaning-making itself. Individual meaning-making becomes not simply self-seeking, nor even merely other-honoring, but other-recognizing. One's own satisfactions become richer when they include sensitivity to the satisfactions, sufferings, and possibilities of others.
Ethical recognition does not always occur gently or comfortably. Sometimes it arrives as a disruption of self-centeredness, a shaking of the self out of complacency and narrow satisfactions. Here the language of "the face of the other" from Emmanuel Levinas is helpful. The phrase is not limited to a literal human face. It functions as a metaphor for the living presence of another being as encountered by us—the irreducible reality of another center of experience whose existence makes a claim upon us.
The face of the other interrupts self-enclosed meaning-making. It says, in effect: your satisfactions are not the whole story. It introduces an ethical demand into experience itself. The other appears not merely as part of the world one inherits but as a presence whose vulnerability, needs, capacities, and possibilities require recognition.
From a process perspective, this interruption can itself become part of the movement toward richer forms of experience. It may initially be unsettling because it challenges narrow forms of intensity and self-enjoyment. Yet by widening the scope of feeling and concern, it can enlarge the width of experience itself. The self becomes capable of participating in richer harmonies precisely because it has become responsive to lives beyond itself.
Meaning-making therefore becomes not only a process of self-creation but also a process of being called beyond oneself. The recognition of others—and at times being shaken awake by their presence—becomes one of the ways the universe moves toward wider and deeper forms of beauty.
From a process perspective, these others make claims upon the experiencing self. Their claims are not necessarily external commands imposed from outside experience. They arise within experience itself through sympathy, empathy, memory, affection, responsibility, and the direct or indirect feeling of others' needs and possibilities. The presence of others becomes part of what is inherited and integrated into one's own process of becoming.
Ethics therefore cannot be reduced to maximizing richness of experience for oneself alone. Richness itself becomes transformed through relationship. The realization that others likewise seek richer forms of life places demands upon the self—not necessarily demands of sacrifice alone, but demands of recognition. To recognize another is to perceive that other as a center of value, a being whose own meaning-making matters.
This recognition and honoring of others then becomes part of meaning-making itself. Individual meaning-making becomes not simply self-seeking, nor even merely other-honoring, but other-recognizing. One's own satisfactions become richer when they include sensitivity to the satisfactions, sufferings, and possibilities of others.
Ethical recognition does not always occur gently or comfortably. Sometimes it arrives as a disruption of self-centeredness, a shaking of the self out of complacency and narrow satisfactions. Here the language of "the face of the other" from Emmanuel Levinas is helpful. The phrase is not limited to a literal human face. It functions as a metaphor for the living presence of another being as encountered by us—the irreducible reality of another center of experience whose existence makes a claim upon us.
The face of the other interrupts self-enclosed meaning-making. It says, in effect: your satisfactions are not the whole story. It introduces an ethical demand into experience itself. The other appears not merely as part of the world one inherits but as a presence whose vulnerability, needs, capacities, and possibilities require recognition.
From a process perspective, this interruption can itself become part of the movement toward richer forms of experience. It may initially be unsettling because it challenges narrow forms of intensity and self-enjoyment. Yet by widening the scope of feeling and concern, it can enlarge the width of experience itself. The self becomes capable of participating in richer harmonies precisely because it has become responsive to lives beyond itself.
Meaning-making therefore becomes not only a process of self-creation but also a process of being called beyond oneself. The recognition of others—and at times being shaken awake by their presence—becomes one of the ways the universe moves toward wider and deeper forms of beauty.
9. Ultimate Meaning: A Harmony of Harmonies
The movement toward richer forms of experience may naturally lead to another question: Is there an ultimate context within which all finite meanings find their place? Human beings often seek not merely momentary satisfactions or even enduring relationships but a wider significance—a sense that the many partial meanings of life participate in something larger than themselves.
Whitehead suggests such a possibility in his reflections on Peace and on what he calls a "Harmony of Harmonies." The phrase does not imply a static perfection in which all differences disappear. Nor does it suggest a universe free from tragedy, conflict, loss, or discord. Rather, it points toward the possibility that the diverse meanings emerging throughout the world—the joys and sufferings, achievements and failures, harmonies and tensions—may themselves be woven into a larger aesthetic unity.
If meaning at simpler levels involves the integration of feelings into momentary satisfactions, and if richer meaning involves wider harmonizations of contrasts, then ultimate meaning would involve the widest possible integration: a harmony capable of receiving and preserving the innumerable meanings realized throughout the universe.
From a process perspective, this wider harmony may be understood as belonging to God's consequent nature: the divine reception of the world in which nothing finally disappears into absolute nothingness. Every achievement of value, every act of love, every fragment of beauty, and every tragedy becomes part of a larger life in which the many are gathered into a continuing whole.
Such an ultimate meaning need not always be consciously experienced by finite creatures. One need not perceive the whole in order to trust in it. Faith, in this sense, may consist not in certainty about a predetermined cosmic plan but in confidence that our finite acts of meaning-making participate in a wider adventure whose beauty exceeds our comprehension.
The search for meaning thus culminates not in the isolated self but in participation in a larger harmony: a Harmony of Harmonies in which each finite meaning contributes its own distinctive note to an unfinished cosmic song.
Whitehead suggests such a possibility in his reflections on Peace and on what he calls a "Harmony of Harmonies." The phrase does not imply a static perfection in which all differences disappear. Nor does it suggest a universe free from tragedy, conflict, loss, or discord. Rather, it points toward the possibility that the diverse meanings emerging throughout the world—the joys and sufferings, achievements and failures, harmonies and tensions—may themselves be woven into a larger aesthetic unity.
If meaning at simpler levels involves the integration of feelings into momentary satisfactions, and if richer meaning involves wider harmonizations of contrasts, then ultimate meaning would involve the widest possible integration: a harmony capable of receiving and preserving the innumerable meanings realized throughout the universe.
From a process perspective, this wider harmony may be understood as belonging to God's consequent nature: the divine reception of the world in which nothing finally disappears into absolute nothingness. Every achievement of value, every act of love, every fragment of beauty, and every tragedy becomes part of a larger life in which the many are gathered into a continuing whole.
Such an ultimate meaning need not always be consciously experienced by finite creatures. One need not perceive the whole in order to trust in it. Faith, in this sense, may consist not in certainty about a predetermined cosmic plan but in confidence that our finite acts of meaning-making participate in a wider adventure whose beauty exceeds our comprehension.
The search for meaning thus culminates not in the isolated self but in participation in a larger harmony: a Harmony of Harmonies in which each finite meaning contributes its own distinctive note to an unfinished cosmic song.
Conclusion: A Universe Alive with Meaning
Meaning is not a late-arriving human invention imposed upon an otherwise meaningless universe. Meaning belongs to reality from the beginning, first as primitive pulsations of felt significance and later as increasingly rich and complex forms of emotional, conceptual, anticipatory, communal, and ethical life.
Human meaning emerges not out of a void but out of a universe already alive with feeling. The universe itself can thus be understood as an ongoing process of meaning-making: a creative advance into richer forms of feeling, significance, and beauty.
Human meaning emerges not out of a void but out of a universe already alive with feeling. The universe itself can thus be understood as an ongoing process of meaning-making: a creative advance into richer forms of feeling, significance, and beauty.
Part II, Chapter IV: The Subjectivist Principle
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
SECTION III
The primitive form of physical experience is emotional—blind emotion—received as felt elsewhere in another occasion and conformally appropriated as a subjective passion. In the language appropriate to the higher stages of experience, the primitive element is sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another. We are so used to considering the high abstraction, ‘the stone as green,’ that we have difficulty in eliciting into consciousness the notion of ‘green’ as the qualifying character of an emotion. Yet, the aesthetic feelings, whereby there is pictorial art, are nothing else than products of the contrasts latent in a variety of colours qualifying emotion, contrasts which are made possible by their patterned relevance to each other. The separation of the emotional experience from the presentational intuition is a high abstraction of thought. Thus the primitive experience is emotional feeling felt in its relevance to a world beyond. The feeling is blind and the relevance is vague. Also feeling, and reference to an exterior world,† pass into appetition, which is the feeling of determinate relevance to a world about to be. In the phraseology of physics, this primitive experience is ‘vector feeling,’ that is to say, feeling from a beyond which is determinate and pointing to a beyond which is to be determined. But the feeling is subjectively rooted in the immediacy of the present occasion: it is what the occasion feels for itself, as derived from the past and as merging into the future. In this vector transmission of primitive feeling the primitive provision of width for contrast is secured by pulses of emotion, which in the coordinate division of occasions (cf. Part IV) appear as wave-lengths and vibrations. In any particular cosmic epoch, the order of nature has secured the necessary differentiation of function, so as to avoid incompatibilities, by shepherding the sensa characteristic of that epoch each into association with a definite pulse. Thus the transmission of each sensum is associated with its own wave-length. In physics, such transmission can be conceived as corpuscular or undulatory, according to the special importance of particular features in the instance considered. The higher phases of experience increase the dimension of width, and elicit contrasts of higher types. The clash of uncoordinated emotions in the lower categories is† avoided: the aspect of inhibition and of transitory satisfaction is diminished. Experience realizes itself as an element in what is everlasting (cf. Part V, Ch. II), and as embodying in itself the everlasting component of the universe. This gain does not necessarily involve consciousness. Also it involves enhanced subjective emphasis. The occasion [248] has become less of a detail and more of a totality, so far as its subjective experience is concerned. The feeling of this width, with its enhancement of permanence, takes the form of blind zest, which can become self-defeating by excess of subjective emphasis. The inhibitions of zest by lack of adequate width to combine the contraries inherent in the environment lead to the destruction of the type of order concerned. Every increase of sensitivity requires an evolution towards adaptation. It must be remembered, however, that emotion in human experience, or even in animal experience, is not bare emotion. It is emotion interpreted, integrated, and transformed into higher categories of feeling. But even so, the emotional appetitive elements in our conscious experience are those which most closely resemble the basic elements of all physical experience.
SECTION IV
The distinction between the various stages of concrescence consists in the diverse modes of ingression of the eternal objects involved. The immanent decision, whereby there is a supervening of stages in an actual
entity, is always the determinant of a process of integration whereby completion is arrived at—at least, such ‘formal’ completion as is proper to a single actual entity. This determination originates with conceptual prehensions which enter into integration with the physical prehensions,† modifying both the data and the subjective forms.
The limitation whereby there is a perspective relegation of eternal objects to the background is the characteristic of decision. Transcendent decision includes God’s decision. He is the actual entity in virtue of which the entire multiplicity of eternal objects obtains its graded relevance to each stage of concrescence. Apart from God, there could be no relevant novelty. Whatever arises in actual entities from God’s decision, arises first conceptually, and is transmuted into the physical world (cf. Part III). In ‘transcendent decision’ there is transi- [249] tion from the past to the immediacy of the present; and in immanent decision’ there is the process of acquisition of subjective form and the integration of feelings. In this process the creativity, universal throughout actuality, is characterized by the datum from the past; and it meets this dead datum—universalized into a character of creativity—by the vivifying novelty of subjective form selected from the multiplicity of pure potentiality. In the process, the old meets the new, and this meeting constitutes the satisfaction of an immediate particular individual.
Eternal objects in any one of their modes of subjective ingression are then functioning in the guise of subjective novelty meeting the objective datum from the past. This word ‘feeling’ is a mere technical term; but it has been chosen to suggest that functioning through which the concrescent actuality appropriates the datum so as to make it its own. There are three successive phases of feelings, namely, a phase of ‘conformal’† feelings, one of ‘conceptual’ feelings, and one of ‘comparative’ feelings, including ‘propositional’ feelings in this last species. In the conformal feelings the how of feeling reproduces what is felt. Some conformation is necessary as a basis of vector transition, whereby the past is synthesized with the present. The one eternal object in its two-way function, as a determinant of the datum and as a determinant of the subjective form, is thus relational. In this sense the solidarity of the universe is based on the relational functioning of eternal objects. The two latter‡ phases can be put together as the ‘supplemental’ phase.
An eternal object when it has ingression through its function of objectifying the actual world, so as to present the datum for prehension, is functioning ‘datively.’ Hence, to sum up, there are four modes of functioning whereby an eternal object has ingression into the constitution of an actual entity: (i) as dative ingression, (ii) in conformal physical feeling, (iii) in conceptual feeling, (iv) in comparative feeling. But the addition of diverse eternal objects is not of the essence of ‘supplementation’: the essence consists in the adjustment of subjective importance by functioning of subjective origin. The graduated emotional intensity of the subject is constituting itself by reference to the physical data, datively there and conformally felt. All references to ‘attention’ usually refer to such supplementation in which the addition of diverse eternal objects is at a minimum; whereas references to ‘emotion’ usually refer to such supplementation complicated by profuse addition of diverse eternal objects. Supplementary feeling is emotional and purposeful, because it is what is felt by mere reason of the subjective appropriation of the objective data. But it is of the essence of supplementary feeling that it does not challenge its initial phase of conformal feeling by any reference to incompatibility. The stages of the subjective ingression of eternal objects involve essential compatibility. The process exhibits an inevitable continuity of functioning. Each stage carries in itself the promise of its successor, and each succeeding stage carries in itself the antecedent out of which it arose. For example,† the complexity of the datum carries in itself the transition from the conformal feelings to supplementary feelings in which contrasts, latent in the datum, achieve real unity between the components. Thus components in the datum, which qua dative, are diverse, become united in specific realized contrast. As elements in the datum, the components are individually given, with the potentiality for a contrast, which in the supplementary stage is either included or excluded. The conformal stage merely transforms the objective content into subjective feelings. But the supplementary stage adds, or excludes, the realization of the contrasts by which the original datum passes into its emotional unity.
This account enables us to conceive the stage of consciousness as a prolongation of the stage of supplementation. The concrescence is an individualization of the whole universe. Every eternal object, whether relevant [251] or irrelevant to the datum, is still patient of its contrasts with the datum. The process by which such contrasts are admitted or rejected involves the stage of conceptual feeling; and consciousness is evidently only a further exhibition of this stage of supplementary feeling. Conceptual feelings do not necessarily involve consciousness. This point is elaborated in detail in Part III.
Again in this explanation, ‘contrast’ has appeared as the general case; while ‘identification’ is a sub-species arising when one and the same eternal object is contrasted in its two modes of functioning.
Thus the two latter stages of feeling are constituted by the realization of specific modes of diversity and identity, the realization also involving an adjustment of intensities of relevance. Mere diversity, and mere identity, are generic terms. Two components in the constitution of an actual entity are specifically diverse and specifically identical by reason of the definite potential contrast involved in the diversity of the implicated eternal objects, and by reason of the definite self-identity of each eternal object. The specific identity arising from the synthesis of diverse modes of functioning of one eternal object is the ‘individual essence’ of that eternal object. But the concrescence reaches the goal required by the Category of Objective Unity, that in any subject one entity can only be felt once. Nothing can be duplicated. The many potentialities for one entity must be synthesized† into one fact. Hence arise the incompatibilities productive of elimination.
Properly speaking, modes of functioning are compared, thereby evoking specific contrasts and specific identifications. The two latter stages of feeling are the stages of comparison; these stages involve comparisons, and comparisons of comparisons; and the admission, or exclusion, of an indefinite complexity of potentialities for comparison, in ascending grades.
The ultimate attainment is ‘satisfaction.’ This is the final characterization of the unity of feeling of the one actual entity, the ‘superject’ which is familiarly termed the ‘subject.’ In a sense this satisfaction is two-dimensional. It has a dimension of narrowness, and a dimension of width. The dimension of narrowness refers to the intensities of individual emotions arising out of individual components in the datum. In this dimension, the higher levels of coordination are irrelevant. The dimension of width arises out of the higher levels of coordination, by which the intensities in the dimension of narrowness become subordinated to a coordination which depends upon the higher levels of comparison. The savouring of the complexity of the universe can enter into satisfaction only through the dimension of width. The emotional depths at the low levels have their limits: the function of width is to deepen the ocean of feeling, and to remove the diminutions of depth produced by the interference of diverse emotions uncoordinated at a higher level. In the place of the Hegelian hierarchy of categories of thought, the philosophy of organism finds a hierarchy of categories of feeling.
The primitive form of physical experience is emotional—blind emotion—received as felt elsewhere in another occasion and conformally appropriated as a subjective passion. In the language appropriate to the higher stages of experience, the primitive element is sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another. We are so used to considering the high abstraction, ‘the stone as green,’ that we have difficulty in eliciting into consciousness the notion of ‘green’ as the qualifying character of an emotion. Yet, the aesthetic feelings, whereby there is pictorial art, are nothing else than products of the contrasts latent in a variety of colours qualifying emotion, contrasts which are made possible by their patterned relevance to each other. The separation of the emotional experience from the presentational intuition is a high abstraction of thought. Thus the primitive experience is emotional feeling felt in its relevance to a world beyond. The feeling is blind and the relevance is vague. Also feeling, and reference to an exterior world,† pass into appetition, which is the feeling of determinate relevance to a world about to be. In the phraseology of physics, this primitive experience is ‘vector feeling,’ that is to say, feeling from a beyond which is determinate and pointing to a beyond which is to be determined. But the feeling is subjectively rooted in the immediacy of the present occasion: it is what the occasion feels for itself, as derived from the past and as merging into the future. In this vector transmission of primitive feeling the primitive provision of width for contrast is secured by pulses of emotion, which in the coordinate division of occasions (cf. Part IV) appear as wave-lengths and vibrations. In any particular cosmic epoch, the order of nature has secured the necessary differentiation of function, so as to avoid incompatibilities, by shepherding the sensa characteristic of that epoch each into association with a definite pulse. Thus the transmission of each sensum is associated with its own wave-length. In physics, such transmission can be conceived as corpuscular or undulatory, according to the special importance of particular features in the instance considered. The higher phases of experience increase the dimension of width, and elicit contrasts of higher types. The clash of uncoordinated emotions in the lower categories is† avoided: the aspect of inhibition and of transitory satisfaction is diminished. Experience realizes itself as an element in what is everlasting (cf. Part V, Ch. II), and as embodying in itself the everlasting component of the universe. This gain does not necessarily involve consciousness. Also it involves enhanced subjective emphasis. The occasion [248] has become less of a detail and more of a totality, so far as its subjective experience is concerned. The feeling of this width, with its enhancement of permanence, takes the form of blind zest, which can become self-defeating by excess of subjective emphasis. The inhibitions of zest by lack of adequate width to combine the contraries inherent in the environment lead to the destruction of the type of order concerned. Every increase of sensitivity requires an evolution towards adaptation. It must be remembered, however, that emotion in human experience, or even in animal experience, is not bare emotion. It is emotion interpreted, integrated, and transformed into higher categories of feeling. But even so, the emotional appetitive elements in our conscious experience are those which most closely resemble the basic elements of all physical experience.
SECTION IV
The distinction between the various stages of concrescence consists in the diverse modes of ingression of the eternal objects involved. The immanent decision, whereby there is a supervening of stages in an actual
entity, is always the determinant of a process of integration whereby completion is arrived at—at least, such ‘formal’ completion as is proper to a single actual entity. This determination originates with conceptual prehensions which enter into integration with the physical prehensions,† modifying both the data and the subjective forms.
The limitation whereby there is a perspective relegation of eternal objects to the background is the characteristic of decision. Transcendent decision includes God’s decision. He is the actual entity in virtue of which the entire multiplicity of eternal objects obtains its graded relevance to each stage of concrescence. Apart from God, there could be no relevant novelty. Whatever arises in actual entities from God’s decision, arises first conceptually, and is transmuted into the physical world (cf. Part III). In ‘transcendent decision’ there is transi- [249] tion from the past to the immediacy of the present; and in immanent decision’ there is the process of acquisition of subjective form and the integration of feelings. In this process the creativity, universal throughout actuality, is characterized by the datum from the past; and it meets this dead datum—universalized into a character of creativity—by the vivifying novelty of subjective form selected from the multiplicity of pure potentiality. In the process, the old meets the new, and this meeting constitutes the satisfaction of an immediate particular individual.
Eternal objects in any one of their modes of subjective ingression are then functioning in the guise of subjective novelty meeting the objective datum from the past. This word ‘feeling’ is a mere technical term; but it has been chosen to suggest that functioning through which the concrescent actuality appropriates the datum so as to make it its own. There are three successive phases of feelings, namely, a phase of ‘conformal’† feelings, one of ‘conceptual’ feelings, and one of ‘comparative’ feelings, including ‘propositional’ feelings in this last species. In the conformal feelings the how of feeling reproduces what is felt. Some conformation is necessary as a basis of vector transition, whereby the past is synthesized with the present. The one eternal object in its two-way function, as a determinant of the datum and as a determinant of the subjective form, is thus relational. In this sense the solidarity of the universe is based on the relational functioning of eternal objects. The two latter‡ phases can be put together as the ‘supplemental’ phase.
An eternal object when it has ingression through its function of objectifying the actual world, so as to present the datum for prehension, is functioning ‘datively.’ Hence, to sum up, there are four modes of functioning whereby an eternal object has ingression into the constitution of an actual entity: (i) as dative ingression, (ii) in conformal physical feeling, (iii) in conceptual feeling, (iv) in comparative feeling. But the addition of diverse eternal objects is not of the essence of ‘supplementation’: the essence consists in the adjustment of subjective importance by functioning of subjective origin. The graduated emotional intensity of the subject is constituting itself by reference to the physical data, datively there and conformally felt. All references to ‘attention’ usually refer to such supplementation in which the addition of diverse eternal objects is at a minimum; whereas references to ‘emotion’ usually refer to such supplementation complicated by profuse addition of diverse eternal objects. Supplementary feeling is emotional and purposeful, because it is what is felt by mere reason of the subjective appropriation of the objective data. But it is of the essence of supplementary feeling that it does not challenge its initial phase of conformal feeling by any reference to incompatibility. The stages of the subjective ingression of eternal objects involve essential compatibility. The process exhibits an inevitable continuity of functioning. Each stage carries in itself the promise of its successor, and each succeeding stage carries in itself the antecedent out of which it arose. For example,† the complexity of the datum carries in itself the transition from the conformal feelings to supplementary feelings in which contrasts, latent in the datum, achieve real unity between the components. Thus components in the datum, which qua dative, are diverse, become united in specific realized contrast. As elements in the datum, the components are individually given, with the potentiality for a contrast, which in the supplementary stage is either included or excluded. The conformal stage merely transforms the objective content into subjective feelings. But the supplementary stage adds, or excludes, the realization of the contrasts by which the original datum passes into its emotional unity.
This account enables us to conceive the stage of consciousness as a prolongation of the stage of supplementation. The concrescence is an individualization of the whole universe. Every eternal object, whether relevant [251] or irrelevant to the datum, is still patient of its contrasts with the datum. The process by which such contrasts are admitted or rejected involves the stage of conceptual feeling; and consciousness is evidently only a further exhibition of this stage of supplementary feeling. Conceptual feelings do not necessarily involve consciousness. This point is elaborated in detail in Part III.
Again in this explanation, ‘contrast’ has appeared as the general case; while ‘identification’ is a sub-species arising when one and the same eternal object is contrasted in its two modes of functioning.
Thus the two latter stages of feeling are constituted by the realization of specific modes of diversity and identity, the realization also involving an adjustment of intensities of relevance. Mere diversity, and mere identity, are generic terms. Two components in the constitution of an actual entity are specifically diverse and specifically identical by reason of the definite potential contrast involved in the diversity of the implicated eternal objects, and by reason of the definite self-identity of each eternal object. The specific identity arising from the synthesis of diverse modes of functioning of one eternal object is the ‘individual essence’ of that eternal object. But the concrescence reaches the goal required by the Category of Objective Unity, that in any subject one entity can only be felt once. Nothing can be duplicated. The many potentialities for one entity must be synthesized† into one fact. Hence arise the incompatibilities productive of elimination.
Properly speaking, modes of functioning are compared, thereby evoking specific contrasts and specific identifications. The two latter stages of feeling are the stages of comparison; these stages involve comparisons, and comparisons of comparisons; and the admission, or exclusion, of an indefinite complexity of potentialities for comparison, in ascending grades.
The ultimate attainment is ‘satisfaction.’ This is the final characterization of the unity of feeling of the one actual entity, the ‘superject’ which is familiarly termed the ‘subject.’ In a sense this satisfaction is two-dimensional. It has a dimension of narrowness, and a dimension of width. The dimension of narrowness refers to the intensities of individual emotions arising out of individual components in the datum. In this dimension, the higher levels of coordination are irrelevant. The dimension of width arises out of the higher levels of coordination, by which the intensities in the dimension of narrowness become subordinated to a coordination which depends upon the higher levels of comparison. The savouring of the complexity of the universe can enter into satisfaction only through the dimension of width. The emotional depths at the low levels have their limits: the function of width is to deepen the ocean of feeling, and to remove the diminutions of depth produced by the interference of diverse emotions uncoordinated at a higher level. In the place of the Hegelian hierarchy of categories of thought, the philosophy of organism finds a hierarchy of categories of feeling.