Emotion Everywhere
​

  • Life is the enjoyment of emotion.
  • The enjoyment of emotions is self-enjoyment.
  • Self-enjoyment is immediate and absolute,
  • Even quantum events within the depths of atoms enjoy emotion; they are subjects for themselves and not simply objects for others.
  • The same holds true for atoms, molecules, living cells. liquids, solids, gases, and plasmas; they are aggregate expressions of things with emotion.
  • Human emotion is an expression of, not an exception to, the pan-emotionality of the universe.
  • There is emotion in outer space.
  • If there are entities in other dimensions of the universe, they, too, have emotions.
  • Even the divine reality is an act of self-enjoyment; even God is emotional.
  • Nature is alive.

Life is the Enjoyment of Emotion
​

Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future. It is the enjoyment of emotion which was then, which is now, and which will be then.” 

​- Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought

Self-Enjoyment is
Immediate and Absolute
​

In “Nature Alive,” the eighth chapter of his last book, Modes of Thought, Alfred North Whitehead writes that “the notion of life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment… [t]he occasion of experience is absolute in respect to its immediate self-enjoyment” (MT 150-151). In other words, life is a process of pure auto-affection. It involves a “self-enjoyment” that is both “immediate” and “absolute.” Self-enjoyment is “immediate” in that it happens pre-reflexively in the moment itself. I enjoy my life as I am living it; my enjoyment of the very experience of living is precisely what it means to be alive. “The enjoyment belongs to the process and is not a characteristic of any static result”. Also, self-enjoyment is “absolute” in that it unfolds entirely in itself and for itself, without conditions. A living occasion is “absolute” in the etymological sense of this word: it is unbound, set free, released from all relation. Every moment of life is an autonomous “self-creation”. A living occasion must “be understood without reference to any other concurrent occasions”. 

SELF-ENJOYMENT AND CONCERN: ON WHITEHEAD AND LEVINAS, Stephen Shaviro. Click here.

Whitehead's Metaphysics
of Self-Enjoyment



Does the universe have a joyful side? Is something like "enjoyment" part of the very fabric of the universe?

Process philosophers say Yes. Influenced by Whitehead, process philosophers argue that "self-enjoyment" exists wherever there is actuality of any kind. 

Here, "actuality" doesn't refer to enduring substances such as trains traveling along tracks or bodies moving through space. It refers to the moments of experience that compose all beings, according to process thought. The world around us and we ourselves are manifestations of such moments, or in Whitehead's terminology, "occasions of experience."

Whitehead speaks these moments as "actual entities." A quantum event within an atom, fleeting as it may be, counts as an actual entity, just as does a single moment of human experience. Actuality is composed of moments rather than things.

Whitehead then adds that every moment has a reality for itself and that, amid this reality-for-itself, there is self-enjoyment. In "Process and Reality" he writes:

"The organic philosophy interprets experience as the 'self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.'"

"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."

This notion, that actual entities are acts of self-enjoyment, might seem far-fetched against the backdrop of evident human suffering. Buddhism's First Noble Truth underscores that all beings suffer, not that they revel in being one among many. Is there self-enjoyment even in suffering?

To make sense of Whitehead, we must dissociate "enjoyment" from happiness or satisfaction. I suggest that self-enjoyment is:

  • the activity of creating a response to what is given for experience by the past actual world,
  • In this creativity a subject creates itself in relation to what has been given for it, a
  • In this creativity the subject enjoys the act of self-creativity as an achievement of value or importance, whether happy or sad,
  • The value created is the emotion felt

Self-enjoyment may or may not be joyful or even enjoyable, given ordinary meanings of those words. It is self-creative responsiveness, moment by moment. Given this view, self-enjoyment applies to microorganisms on Earth and potentially to quantum events deep within atoms, encompassing entities anywhere in the universe, whether or not they are "living" in the biological sense. In this view, joy indeed permeates outer space. There can be self-enjoyment without joy.

​- Jay McDaniel



​Joyful Spirits of the Universe

Matthew Halsall

Open Horizons