Posted on by May 5, 2021

Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Whitehead was a mathematician and then a philosopher, spending his career working with abstractions from the physical world and the conceptual world, ultimately building a cosmology. Jung was a psychiatrist and then an alchemist, spending his career working with experiences he himself had with dreams, fantasies and visions, with experiences recounted by patients and alchemists. The raw material is always experience but for Whitehead it was formulaic and logical experience, and for Jung it was mythical and poetic experience. Often the most vivid experiences came from educated but non-academic individuals. 

These two forms of knowing, the rational and mythical, are produced by the same Cosmos and so are sources that can be explored from entirely different perspectives by different temperaments. Indeed, the disposition required for one often precludes exploration of the other. This may be one reason why the hard sciences naturally select for individuals with temperaments unsuited for mythical ideas, and social sciences select for those with a love of narrative. Compare evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists – the former relying on observation with a concrete object of study and the latter relying upon imagination for a purely narrative construct. 

Of course, a myth, such as scientific materialism, is required to tell us what is important to be rational about, and rationality is required to make a narrative, such as the Archetypal Organism, have explanatory value, be self-consistent and judged adequate to our experience. 

Posted on by April 13, 2021
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Thursday, April 1, 2021

Archetypal Organism

My image for Whitehead’s cosmos is Archetypal Organism. Like all organisms it is a unified whole but can be thought of as having a two-fold nature. It is important to realize that any way in which we characterize a whole, even in its entirety, is an abstraction. Of course, we need abstractions in order to think but there is always the danger that we will imagine the abstraction to be the whole, which is the real thing. Keeping this in mind, the Archetypal Organism can be thought of as consisting of two aspects: Creative Energy and Divine Mind. Whitehead calls Creative Energy “creativity”, and Divine Mind, “God”. 

The traditional way of conceiving such opposites is in a linear fashion. Classical theism imagines God as creator, and energy – or whatever physics currently describes as fundamental – as created out of nothing by God. The modern chemical and animal species would fall somewhere in the middle of this line, composed of energy but enabled by God’s creativity. 

When considering the abstractions Creative Energy and Divine Mind, our habitual way of thinking is to imagine two poles at either end of a line and speak of polarity in this oppositional sense. However, if we think of the Archetypal Organism in this linear way we have missed its essential character because Creative Energy and Divine Mind are always found together. Only as a unified whole are they real – the real cosmos in which we live and of which we are composed. 

A better image may be a sphere rather than a line. Imagine a sphere that is both physical and mental at every point – a characterization that applies to a human organism for example. The physical may be thought of as the first pole and the mental the second – only now we have a contrast rather than an opposition. We can’t take a living human arm or head, separate it from the entire human and consider it to have mentality. Only as a whole does a human exist with both physical and mental aspects. Similarly, the Archetypal Organism may be best characterized in its physical and mental aspects as a unified whole. The physical and mental, considered separately, are pure abstractions. 

In theology, we encounter the same problem of Christ’s dual human/Divine nature and it produces the same psychological state: it is psychoactive because the mind wants to have an answer but is unable to reconcile the problem. Like a Zen koan, there is no answer, only a spiritual state produced by the problem of irreconcilable opposites. 

So when discussing these two aspects of the ultimate – and the two ultimates – we must simply juxtapose them and let them do their work. We can’t give a three dimensional definition of a four dimensional space. However, we can, for purposes of getting closer to an understanding, discriminate the two abstractions. Like the wave/particle duality, we can make an assertion that is irreconcilable but complementary. 

As in the abstraction “2” which may stand for two real apples, we can describe the abstract and the literal. Where might imaginary numbers stand between these? Neither abstracted from the real nor real themselves, imaginary numbers can be seen as “between”. They are then either powerful in the real world, as in the use of i (square root(-1)) in our technological world, or they are “pure mathematics” defined by a self-consistent logic but without utility. Something like poetry or play. 

Using this metaphor with religion, the defining characteristic, then, of a living religion would be whether or not the imaginal symbols have an experienced power. That is to say, whether or not they are phenomenologically (experientially) transformational. This is a “betweenness” that is neither literal nor abstract but psychoactive.