Commentary
This video is a much needed and excellent introduction to Whitehead's life and thought, with special focus on his theory of value as related to lived experience. If you have time to watch the video, which lasts about an hour, but don't have time to read this commentary, please do so. It is well worth using in many educational settings, formal and informal, and for private edification. I teach many online courses on Whitehead, and I am often wishing for approaches to Whitehead that speak to the concreteness of human experience. I will easily use this video in a heartbeat. On, then, to the commentary:
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Professor Michael Hauskeller is a faculty member at the University of Liverpool. He is a German-British philosopher whose work focuses primarily on ethics, philosophy of art and beauty, perception, and questions surrounding human enhancement and posthumanism.
His books include Better Humans? Understanding the Enhancement Project, Sex and the Posthuman Condition, The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television, and Mythologies of Posthumanism. More recently, his work has turned toward questions of meaning, mortality, and what it means to live a meaningful human life.
He has also offered, in this video, one of the best introductions available to Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, especially as it points toward a Whiteheadian theory of value. I'd like to recommend John Cobb's essay, too: Whitehead's Theory of Value. Cobb's essay and this video complement one another.
For my part, I see strong resonance between Whitehead's outlook on life and Hauskeller's own interest in meaning, mortality, and what it means to live a meaningful life. As Hauskeller explains, Whitehead’s mature philosophy—developed in the latter stages of his career in Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Adventures of Ideas—begins not with detached substances, but with life as lived: with feeling, relationship, enjoyment, suffering, and becoming. The world Whitehead describes is composed not of isolated entities but of interrelated moments of experience, each inheriting a past and contributing something new. Whitehead’s metaphysics is an attempt to describe the most general features of this living process while remaining faithful to the fullness of experience itself - the whole of it:
Hauskeller's lecture begins with a concise, ten-minute intellectual biography of Alfred North Whitehead, and then turns, in a Whiteheadian vein, to lived experience itself, that is, to how the world feels to us and how we feel the presence of the world in each and every moment. The guiding idea developed by Hauskeller, and true to Whitehead, is simple but profound: “At the base of our existence is a sense of worth.” The world matters to us as we experience it, and we matter to ourselves in the ways we respond to it. Existence and value - being and care for importance - are inseparable.
Value in Experience Itself
Hauskeller makes clear that, for Whitehead, value is not added onto experience, like a coat of paint added to a billiard ball. Instead, value is in experience itself.
Experience involves a desire for intensity of experience aimed at harmonious satisfaction relative to what is possible in the situation at hand. We respond to the world through acts of feeling, decision, and emotion—what Whitehead calls subjective forms—and in doing so we experience the world as meaningful and important to us. The enjoyment of this momentary satisfaction is intrinsically valuable; it is what Whitehead calls “self-enjoyment.” It is not merely an intellectual judgment but a felt experience of significance. “Everything is subject to emotional evaluation,” Hauskeller explains, shaping our moods and responses in ways inseparable from the world we inhabit.
Amid our active experiencing, the world is meaningful to us, important to us, positively or negatively, and this meaning is not merely our own projection, thinks Whitehead. We experience the already meaningful world as beautiful, tragic, confusing, wonderful, horrible, and much else besides. It comes to us with a sense of value already included in its very givenness to us: the givenness of plants and animals, of landscapes and waterways, of inorganic objects, of hills, rivers, trees, and stars, and, of course, of other people.
And we may also sense—rightly so, from a Whiteheadian perspective—that every finite thing, every concrete actuality in the world, is itself an achievement of a certain kind of value, a value lying in its own specificity, its own concreteness, its own way of becoming what it is. And, of course, many of these so-called “its” are also “yous”: other living beings, other people—friends and family and strangers. The point here is that, even as we ourselves are intrinsically valuable in our very act of experiencing, so the world we experience is also intrinsically valuable. Its facts are also values.
From this perspective, we do not simply project value onto an otherwise meaningless world. We respond to a world that already matters to us, and through our responses we add our own value to it. In doing so we become the kinds of selves we are. The process of self-creation is relational from beginning to end. The value we have for ourselves cannot finally be separated from the value others have for themselves. As Hauskeller emphasizes, for Whitehead “connectedness is of the essence of all things at all times.”
This emphasis on value belongs to Whitehead’s larger philosophical aim: overcoming the split between a world of supposedly objective, value-free facts and a private realm of subjective feelings and perceptions. In The Concept of Nature, Whitehead criticizes this “bifurcation of nature,” arguing that feeling and value belong to reality itself and are not simply added to it by the human mind. Hauskeller presents this critique with unusual clarity.
Whitehead also rejects the idea that ethics can be reduced to rigid and eternal rules applicable to every situation. “There is good but not ‘the’ Good,” Hauskeller remarks. Ethics, in this view, requires responsiveness to concrete situations rather than obedience to timeless abstractions.
Axiology and Theology
Listeners already familiar with Adventures of Ideas and Process and Reality may wish for more discussion of Whitehead’s broader axiological themes: for example, in Adventures of Ideas, the ideal of civilization and its associated values of adventure, peace, truth, beauty, and art; the idea of beauty as “the telos of the universe”; and that of Peace as experiencing a “Harmony of Harmonies,” the crowning achievement in the journey of a soul. All seem relevant to a Whiteheadian understanding of value. Whitehead's words on Peace may be especially relevant to a consideration of value, because it [points to the relevance of Beauty in Whitehead's philosophy.
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Professor Michael Hauskeller is a faculty member at the University of Liverpool. He is a German-British philosopher whose work focuses primarily on ethics, philosophy of art and beauty, perception, and questions surrounding human enhancement and posthumanism.
His books include Better Humans? Understanding the Enhancement Project, Sex and the Posthuman Condition, The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television, and Mythologies of Posthumanism. More recently, his work has turned toward questions of meaning, mortality, and what it means to live a meaningful human life.
He has also offered, in this video, one of the best introductions available to Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, especially as it points toward a Whiteheadian theory of value. I'd like to recommend John Cobb's essay, too: Whitehead's Theory of Value. Cobb's essay and this video complement one another.
For my part, I see strong resonance between Whitehead's outlook on life and Hauskeller's own interest in meaning, mortality, and what it means to live a meaningful life. As Hauskeller explains, Whitehead’s mature philosophy—developed in the latter stages of his career in Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Adventures of Ideas—begins not with detached substances, but with life as lived: with feeling, relationship, enjoyment, suffering, and becoming. The world Whitehead describes is composed not of isolated entities but of interrelated moments of experience, each inheriting a past and contributing something new. Whitehead’s metaphysics is an attempt to describe the most general features of this living process while remaining faithful to the fullness of experience itself - the whole of it:
Hauskeller's lecture begins with a concise, ten-minute intellectual biography of Alfred North Whitehead, and then turns, in a Whiteheadian vein, to lived experience itself, that is, to how the world feels to us and how we feel the presence of the world in each and every moment. The guiding idea developed by Hauskeller, and true to Whitehead, is simple but profound: “At the base of our existence is a sense of worth.” The world matters to us as we experience it, and we matter to ourselves in the ways we respond to it. Existence and value - being and care for importance - are inseparable.
Value in Experience Itself
Hauskeller makes clear that, for Whitehead, value is not added onto experience, like a coat of paint added to a billiard ball. Instead, value is in experience itself.
Experience involves a desire for intensity of experience aimed at harmonious satisfaction relative to what is possible in the situation at hand. We respond to the world through acts of feeling, decision, and emotion—what Whitehead calls subjective forms—and in doing so we experience the world as meaningful and important to us. The enjoyment of this momentary satisfaction is intrinsically valuable; it is what Whitehead calls “self-enjoyment.” It is not merely an intellectual judgment but a felt experience of significance. “Everything is subject to emotional evaluation,” Hauskeller explains, shaping our moods and responses in ways inseparable from the world we inhabit.
Amid our active experiencing, the world is meaningful to us, important to us, positively or negatively, and this meaning is not merely our own projection, thinks Whitehead. We experience the already meaningful world as beautiful, tragic, confusing, wonderful, horrible, and much else besides. It comes to us with a sense of value already included in its very givenness to us: the givenness of plants and animals, of landscapes and waterways, of inorganic objects, of hills, rivers, trees, and stars, and, of course, of other people.
And we may also sense—rightly so, from a Whiteheadian perspective—that every finite thing, every concrete actuality in the world, is itself an achievement of a certain kind of value, a value lying in its own specificity, its own concreteness, its own way of becoming what it is. And, of course, many of these so-called “its” are also “yous”: other living beings, other people—friends and family and strangers. The point here is that, even as we ourselves are intrinsically valuable in our very act of experiencing, so the world we experience is also intrinsically valuable. Its facts are also values.
From this perspective, we do not simply project value onto an otherwise meaningless world. We respond to a world that already matters to us, and through our responses we add our own value to it. In doing so we become the kinds of selves we are. The process of self-creation is relational from beginning to end. The value we have for ourselves cannot finally be separated from the value others have for themselves. As Hauskeller emphasizes, for Whitehead “connectedness is of the essence of all things at all times.”
This emphasis on value belongs to Whitehead’s larger philosophical aim: overcoming the split between a world of supposedly objective, value-free facts and a private realm of subjective feelings and perceptions. In The Concept of Nature, Whitehead criticizes this “bifurcation of nature,” arguing that feeling and value belong to reality itself and are not simply added to it by the human mind. Hauskeller presents this critique with unusual clarity.
Whitehead also rejects the idea that ethics can be reduced to rigid and eternal rules applicable to every situation. “There is good but not ‘the’ Good,” Hauskeller remarks. Ethics, in this view, requires responsiveness to concrete situations rather than obedience to timeless abstractions.
Axiology and Theology
Listeners already familiar with Adventures of Ideas and Process and Reality may wish for more discussion of Whitehead’s broader axiological themes: for example, in Adventures of Ideas, the ideal of civilization and its associated values of adventure, peace, truth, beauty, and art; the idea of beauty as “the telos of the universe”; and that of Peace as experiencing a “Harmony of Harmonies,” the crowning achievement in the journey of a soul. All seem relevant to a Whiteheadian understanding of value. Whitehead's words on Peace may be especially relevant to a consideration of value, because it [points to the relevance of Beauty in Whitehead's philosophy.
The Peace that is here meant is not the negative conception of anaesthesia. It is a positive feeling which crowns the ‘life and motion’ of the soul. It is hard to define and difficult to speak of. It is not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details. It is a broadening of feeling due to the emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized and yet momentous in its coordination of values. Its first effect is the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling arising from the soul’s preoccupation with itself. Thus Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. There is an inversion of relative values. It is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty.
Listeners may also wish for more discussion of God as love, so prominant in Part V of Process and Reality: what Whitehead calls the Galilean alternative to images of God as a ruling Caesar, namely the image of God as a Companion to the world: a "fellow-sufferer who understands,” who cares for each creature "with tender care that nothing be lost." Or God as a non-coercive guiding presence in the world who supplies the initial phase of each subjective aim. Or, as described in the final pages, of God as as a recipient of earthly love who then recycles it back to earth as fresh possibilities for love anew.
These, too, seem relevant to a Whiteheadian understanding of value. In any case Hauskeller regards Whitehead’s doctrine of God as somewhat "idiosyncratic" (his term), which is one reason he does not dwell on its more technical details, even as he recognizes a religious dimension to Whitehead's thought.
Even so, near the end of the lecture he speaks movingly of the sacred and of God as the remembrance and preservation of value. “This is what God does,” he says, “he makes sure that nothing is lost.” The idea that nothing is lost is important to Hauskeller. It is the idea that the small and localized acts of goodness we enact in our own lives, moment by moment—even if they do not alter the larger systems of the world, and even if they are forgotten in the immediate or distant future—are nevertheless retained in the ongoing life of universe. Nothing of value is finally lost. All life, and perhaps each life, is significant to a wider horizon more than itself.
Value and Possibility
Some listeners to Hauskeller’s lecture may nevertheless miss an emphasis they find elsewhere in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy: namely, the role that possibility as such plays in the achievement of value in human life, in other forms of life on earth, and indeed in all forms of actuality within a pan-experiential universe. The achievement of value is not only the creation and enjoyment of harmonious intensity and satisfying experience. It is also the actualization of possibilities for such experience.
These possibilities take at least two forms in Whitehead’s philosophy. One is what he calls “eternal objects,” pure potentialities for the determination of actuality. The other is what he calls “propositions,” which are not merely linguistic statements but relevant possibilities felt as meaningful and applicable within a particular situation. Every moment of experience is thus not only an inheritance from the past but also a response to possibilities for becoming otherwise.
Hauskeller’s lecture alludes to this dimension, but some listeners may wish it were more explicitly thematized. Ultimately, the issue returns us to the ideals named earlier in this essay: truth, goodness, beauty, adventure, peace, and art. These are not best understood, in my view, as eternal objects in the technical sense. They are better understood as enduring and widely relevant possibilities for human and cosmic flourishing.
Goodness
One such ideal that seems especially important in relation to Hauskeller’s concerns is goodness, understood not as obedience to rigid moral laws but as compassion, care for the vulnerable, responsiveness to suffering, and perhaps some sense of justice as well. Hauskeller is surely correct that there are no eternally fixed norms in Whitehead’s universe. Yet one may still wonder whether there are not relatively constant ideals within human life that we do not simply invent or choose arbitrarily, but discover as relevant to the deepest possibilities of existence itself.
Whitehead himself often seems inclined in this direction, even if cautiously and without absolutism. Some interpreters of Whitehead emphasize this dimension quite strongly—for example Andrew Davis in Mind, Value, and Cosmos, who stresses the role of ideals and normative aims within process thought. In any case, this more possibility-centered interpretation of value is not a central emphasis in Hauskeller’s lecture, even though it remains deeply compatible with the spirit of his presentation.
Ecology, Beauty, and the Sacred
In closing, I want to emphasize that there is a subtle and quite laudable ecological theme in Hauskeller’s approach, one with which Alfred North Whitehead himself would readily resonate. This is especially clear in light of Whitehead’s own reflections on the value of nature in Science and the Modern World, where he turns to Romantic poetry—especially the poetry of William Wordsworth—as a corrective to mechanistic understandings of the natural world.
Toward the end of the lecture, Hauskeller appeals to Whitehead’s discussion of the "subtle beauty of a flower in some isolated glade in a primeval forest." Here Whitehead writes:
“There is a unity in the universe, enjoying value and (by its immanence) sharing value.” He then invites readers to consider the beauty of a flower that no human being has ever seen and whose full beauty no animal has completely appreciated. And yet, Whitehead insists, this beauty remains “a grand fact in the universe.” Even the separate cells of the flower do not enjoy the total effect of the flower’s beauty, but nevertheless that beauty contributes value to the whole. For Whitehead, this realization awakens what he calls “the intuition of holiness, the intuition of the sacred, which is at the foundation of all religion.”
Hauskeller lets this image serve as an invitation to recognize the value of realities that may go unnoticed by human beings and yet still possess importance within the wider whole of the universe, indeed (so I suggest) within the widest horizon we can imagine—that “Harmony of Harmonies” of which Whitehead speaks in Adventures of Ideas.
The wisdom of Hauskeller’s lecture is that it points not only to the role value plays in human existence but also to the ecology of existence itself. Although Hauskeller's focus is on lived human experience, this experience includes the recognition that realities we never directly encounter but can only imagine—the isolated flower in the forest, for example—also possess intrinsic value, also matter, also contribute something irreplaceable to the life of the universe.
Gratitude in a Value-Laden World
Might this capacity to recognize and appreciate value beyond our experience be part of our gift to the world as human beings. Hauskeller's lecture closes by suggesting that evolution itself points toward something more than arbitrary mechanism. The emergence of life, consciousness, and increasing complexity indicates, Hauskeller suggests, that “something is at stake” in the universe. He points toward a cosmos in which value, feeling, memory, aspiration, and intrinsic worth are woven into the creative advance of reality itself. Might we ourselves - at our best but not our worst- be examples of that advance. I cannot help but hear Hauskeller's lecture as a call to claim a certain kind of human vocation. It is not a vocation to dominate or control, but to be 'with' a world of polycentric value in a meaningful, gentle, and good way.
Hauskeller points out that there are gradations of value in Whitehead's world. Often this idea is used to recognize that some organisms have 'more' intrinsic value than other, based on their capacities for sentience. Porpoises, for example, are more highly sentient that paramecia - so we think. But Haukeller's lecture points me in a different direction. It is to say that human life itself can evolve into a 'higher' or 'more beautiful' way of being in the world - one that moves beyond the mechanism and dominating spirit that permeates modernity. We ourselves can recognize gradations of value in the human experiment itself, and do our best to evolve into a more value-appreciative way of living in the world. Perhaps Whitehead, and Hauskeller, point us in this just direction.
- Jay McDaniel
Hauskeller lets this image serve as an invitation to recognize the value of realities that may go unnoticed by human beings and yet still possess importance within the wider whole of the universe, indeed (so I suggest) within the widest horizon we can imagine—that “Harmony of Harmonies” of which Whitehead speaks in Adventures of Ideas.
The wisdom of Hauskeller’s lecture is that it points not only to the role value plays in human existence but also to the ecology of existence itself. Although Hauskeller's focus is on lived human experience, this experience includes the recognition that realities we never directly encounter but can only imagine—the isolated flower in the forest, for example—also possess intrinsic value, also matter, also contribute something irreplaceable to the life of the universe.
Gratitude in a Value-Laden World
Might this capacity to recognize and appreciate value beyond our experience be part of our gift to the world as human beings. Hauskeller's lecture closes by suggesting that evolution itself points toward something more than arbitrary mechanism. The emergence of life, consciousness, and increasing complexity indicates, Hauskeller suggests, that “something is at stake” in the universe. He points toward a cosmos in which value, feeling, memory, aspiration, and intrinsic worth are woven into the creative advance of reality itself. Might we ourselves - at our best but not our worst- be examples of that advance. I cannot help but hear Hauskeller's lecture as a call to claim a certain kind of human vocation. It is not a vocation to dominate or control, but to be 'with' a world of polycentric value in a meaningful, gentle, and good way.
Hauskeller points out that there are gradations of value in Whitehead's world. Often this idea is used to recognize that some organisms have 'more' intrinsic value than other, based on their capacities for sentience. Porpoises, for example, are more highly sentient that paramecia - so we think. But Haukeller's lecture points me in a different direction. It is to say that human life itself can evolve into a 'higher' or 'more beautiful' way of being in the world - one that moves beyond the mechanism and dominating spirit that permeates modernity. We ourselves can recognize gradations of value in the human experiment itself, and do our best to evolve into a more value-appreciative way of living in the world. Perhaps Whitehead, and Hauskeller, point us in this just direction.
- Jay McDaniel