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. … Read More
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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 … Read More