Alfred North Whitehead His life and thought by Professor Michael Hauskeller

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:18]The history of philosophy started with one particular puzzle. That puzzle was how can the many different things that the world is made of all despite their often contradictory properties be part of the same world? Or in short, how can the many also be one and the one also be many? Since the time of the prescratics, philosophers have tried to navigate between two extreme views without getting shipwrecked. Those two views were denying all differences and claiming complete unity or alternatively holding on to the differences and sacrificing unity.

[00:01:03]Most often they failed miserably and fell into the clutches of monism or dualism. The silla and kuripus of philosophy while common sense could row past unscathed.

[00:01:15]What became an ever greater enigma to philosophers the more philosophy lost its original naivity remained for ordinary people an undeniable fact of immediate experience.

[00:01:28]That the world is an ordered hole in which there is room enough for body and mind, freedom and necessity, being and becoming. in which other people are just as real as we are and in which the experience of an external world is precisely what it appears to be. And this is nothing other than the naive and profoundly human belief in the reality of relations that underlies all thought.

[00:02:01]The stark contradiction between philosophical theory and everyday experience which became acute in the 17th century when the methodological dualism of the emerging sciences merged with medieval substance metaphysics is a starting point of one of the most complex and profound philosophical systems of the 20th century.

[00:02:26]a system that has yet to receive the recognition it deserves even though interest in it has grown considerably in recent years. The creator of that system is Alfred North Whitehead.

[00:02:42]Whitehead was born in 1861 in once thriving English seaside town Ramskate.

[00:02:48]He grew up in comfortable circumstances and until the age of 14 was homeschooled by his father, a rather uninspired clergyman of the Anglican church in classical languages and the basics of mathematics.

[00:03:03]In 1875 he continued his average and as he himself put it regrettably narrow education at Sherbone school a boarding school in Dorset where he was first introduced to literature. Excel primarily in mathematics and rugby and was otherwise only moderately successful.

[00:03:26]From 1880 to 1884, he studied exclusively mathematics, which at that time also included physics, at Trinity College, Cambridge, and later debated political, social, and philosophical questions with fellow students in the famous Cambridge Conversation Society, which were better known at the time as the apostles.

[00:03:49]In 1884, he was made a fellow of Trinity College. He later wrote his dissertation Maxwell's electricity and magnetism.

[00:03:59]From 1884 to 1910 he taught mathematics at Cambridge publishing very little and exclusively on mathematical topics.

[00:04:10]The culmination of this period was a publication between 1910 and 1913 of Principia Mathematics, a work written in collaboration with a student Bertrand Russell.

[00:04:25]A new period on Whitehead's work began in 1910. Angered by the expulsion of his colleague and friend Andrew Forsythe from teaching at Cambridge, he resigned and moved to London without having anything else lined up. In 1911, he obtained a poorly paid position as a lecturer in applied mathematics at University College London until finally in 1914 he was able to secure his first professorship. Also in applied mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. Inspired by his involvement in various committees, he became increasingly engaged with educational issues which led to several publications which were collected in 1929 in the aims of education and other essays. But he also during the same period became aware of certain contradictions in the foundations of modern natural sciences which he thought required a radical rethinking of our understanding of nature.

[00:05:30]In his book concept of nature published in 1920 he vehemently opposed what he called the bifocation of nature into subjective perception and objective fact into appearance and reality which he argued contradicted all rational claims of the natural sciences.

[00:05:51]The aim of this and preceding works, especially in inquiry concerning the principles of natural knowledge, published in 1919, was to develop a unified theory of nature based solely on what is given in sensory experience and to clarify the subject matter and method of the natural sciences without exceeding the realm of pure description.

[00:06:20]Unlike in his later writings on natural philosophy, no attempt was made in these earlier books to go beyond the perceptible realities in order to understand the essence of existence itself.

[00:06:34]The values of nature, he wrote, are perhaps the key to the metaphysical synthesis of existence.

[00:06:42]But such a synthesis is exactly what I'm not attempting. I'm concerned exclusively with the generalizations of wider scope which can be affected respecting that which is known to us as a direct deliverance of sense awareness.

[00:07:06]The opportunity to make up for what he had deliberately left out arose in 1924 when he was unexpectedly offered a chair in philosophy at Harvard which given Whitehead's age was highly unusual even then he accepted the offer and left England at the age of 63.

[00:07:29]A year later, the first of three major philosophical works in which Whiter develops his philosophy of organism emerged from the lower lectures he delivered in 1925.

[00:07:42]Science and the modern world.

[00:07:45]Because science in the modern world became a great commercial success, the University of Edinburg then decided to ask Whitehead to deliver the prestigious Gifford lectures in natural theology in 1927 and 1928.

[00:08:03]White had used this opportunity to further develop and systematize the ideas he had presented in science and the modern world.

[00:08:13]In 1929, an expanded version of the Gford lectures was published in New York as process and reality, an essay in cosmology.

[00:08:25]Process and reality is widely regarded as Whitehead's ous magnum, though I would not recommend starting with it. A better starting point is science and the modern world or indeed the third of Whitehead's great books which is the intellectual history study adventures of ideas which was published in 1933.

[00:08:49]White had officially taught until 1936 and unofficially continued to do so long afterward. His last public lecture in 1941 was entitled immortality.

[00:09:02]It ended with the words exactness is a fake.

[00:09:07]White had died on the 30th of December 1947 at the age of 86 from a cereble hemorrhage.

[00:09:16]The shock and grief felt by all who knew and valued him, not only for his intellect, but also for his gentle nature was expressed in the words of Gustaf E. Müller in the second edition of his American philosophy.

[00:09:32]Early in 1948, Alfred North Whitehead, professor emeritus of philosophy, died at Harvard.

[00:09:41]With him, one of the most important thinkers of all time has passed away.

[00:09:46]The spirit that emanates from his works, and I found it in his students as well, is a benevolent spirit of a truly patient, allervading kindness.

[00:10:00]Now, what about Whit's philosophy? What is he actually saying? Well, it would take a lot more than one video to provide a full picture. So I can here only provide some pointers. What Whitered is primarily concerned with in most of his writings is clarifying the basic structure of the world or as he calls it the nature of things.

[00:10:25]As he writes in science and the modern world, philosophy in one of its functions is a critique of cosmologies.

[00:10:33]It is a function. It is its function to harmonize, refashion and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme.

[00:10:57]In other words, Whitehead seeks to identify and describe the most general or most fundamental aspects of reality while at the same time doing justice to the whole of our experience of the world. And because he is mainly interested in our ultimate ideas as to the nature of things, it is hardly surprising that in his work he focuses mainly on metaphysical and ontological questions.

[00:11:25]There's no treatise on ethics to be found among his writings.

[00:11:30]However, this does not mean that his cosmological speculations have no ethical relevance. It is precisely this aspect of whites whited philosophy that I want to focus on in this episode.

[00:11:46]M philosophers today mostly strive to separate questions of morality of how we should live from metaphysics or what Whitehead would call cosmology. What the world is and how it works.

[00:12:01]As if the kind of world we live in or believe we live in were irrelevant to questions like what is good or bad or what is right or wrong.

[00:12:12]But clearly what we do and what we think we ought to be doing depends very much on how we perceive the things affected by our actions. How we understand the world we live in determines how we act in it.

[00:12:27]If for instance we believe that a god has created and designed the natural world around us for our use, we will feel entirely justified to use it exclusively as a means to our ends rather than an end in itself.

[00:12:45]But even if we see nature as being composed of, as Whitehead puts it, irreducible brute matter or material spread throughout space in a flux of configurations that has no meaning and follows no purpose as a scientific materialist worldview has it, we will have few misgivings about using it as much as we can. Why?

[00:13:12]Because according to this worldview, there's nothing in it of intrinsic value that would give us a good reason to do otherwise.

[00:13:22]It is assumed here that the natural world can only ever have instrumental value, meaning that it has value to the extent that it can be made use of.

[00:13:35]Now for Whitehead, the strict separation of values from facts that pretty much defines the ideal of objectivity in modern science is a serious mistake. It distorts the very nature of being.

[00:13:54]According to Whitehead, there's no such thing as an empty value reality. Rather, facts and values are inextricably linked. Every fact is in its very essence a process or an event. An event that to a certain degree designs itself and participates in its own design.

[00:14:19]Why that calls those events actual entities or actual occasions?

[00:14:26]When it seems to us that most things simply exist without purpose or meaning or any kind of inner reality, then we actually suppress and ignore a certain level of experience in favor of a mere abstraction.

[00:14:45]This may be more convenient for everyday life, but it fails to capture the true essence or inner structure of things.

[00:14:53]We are actually looking at the lifeless product and ignoring the living process of its creation.

[00:15:02]This way of looking at things entails literally a devaluation of reality. And this devaluation is exactly what Whitehead opposes.

[00:15:14]At the base of our existence, he writes, is the sense of worth.

[00:15:22]Variations of this statement appear repeatedly in Whitehead's writings and form the core of his philosophy of nature.

[00:15:36]The sense of value is familiar to us all from the most mundane and benile situations. Experiencing value accompanies eating when we are hungry, drinking when our throat is dry, or simply consuming something we enjoy.

[00:15:54]Even some smells are experienced as valuable. We can be intoxicated by the erotic scent of a perfume or delighted by the smell of freshly cut grass. All sensual pleasures are experiences of value. We can be moved by the beauty of a landscape, a face, a painting, a children's song or symphony. We can look with joy and love at our own child or partner, a friend, and even sometimes a stranger. Solving a mathematical or scientific problem can be gratifying, as can finding the appropriate expression for thought.

[00:16:32]We experience value when we feel we've had a successful day or when we encounter the sincerity and kindness of a person or when we get caught up in the excitement of a competition.

[00:16:45]And there are contrasting experiences that are just as much experiences of value or though of a negative nature.

[00:16:54]For instance, the lack of sensory stimulation, the blandness and monotony of experiences, boredom, the feeling that one already knows everything, that nothing is truly new, that it's not worth starting anything.

[00:17:10]All the experience of destruction, of pain, illness and death, of ugliness, failure, and disharmony.

[00:17:18]These are all value experiences.

[00:17:23]But although such experiences are frequent and extremely diverse, the sense of value that Whitehead refers to includes far more than that. What I've just mentioned are only those experiences characterized by a particularly high intensity of feeling.

[00:17:40]The tip of the iceberg as it were of which the sense of value constitutes the bumok.

[00:17:47]This sense of worth is not something that comes to us only incidentally from time to time and then disappears again.

[00:17:56]Rather, it is at the base of our existence. It is not simply that we live and have various experiences among which there are also some that can be described as value experiences. No, all experiences are value experiences in so far as there is nothing that is completely indifferent to us.

[00:18:20]Everything is subject to emotional evaluation even if we are not always clearly aware of it in that it touches us in one way or another, attracts or repels us and influences our mood and the way we feel and act in the world.

[00:18:38]Every sound, every color, every smell, indeed everything we experience finds an effective resonance within us that cannot be separated from the perception of the thing itself.

[00:18:54]For we would not perceive it at all if it did not mean something to us, if it were not of some interest to us.

[00:19:04]In so far as we perceive, we are always involved in what we perceive.

[00:19:09]Concernedness, writes Whitehead, is of the essence of perception.

[00:19:16]In other words, there's always what Whitehead calls a subjective form of perception. Not just a what, but also how. A particular way of taking the world in. And that means from the very beginning a personal waiting and classification of the available data. It is not the case that we first perceive a specific sensory datim such as a color and then react to it emotionally in some way. Our habitual fixation on clarity and distinctness misleads us here because it is precisely the other way around. The primary element in color perception is not the color which then in a second step is imbued with emotional content.

[00:20:06]Rather the primary element is the emotional content. Or in other words, the particular way in which the world at which we find ourselves in in any given moment is experienced by us, which is then transformed in an imperceptible process of abstraction into a clearly defined sensory data.

[00:20:34]Yet even with this, we still haven't grasped the full meaning of Whitehead's claim that at the base of our existence is the sense of worth.

[00:20:45]We must in fact understand this quite literally, not just in the sense that experiences of value, the sense of worth are very important for us as human beings or that we constantly have them.

[00:21:01]Whiter doesn't mean that our lives would be different without experiences of value. Rather, he means that without experiences of value, we wouldn't live at all or exist in any way.

[00:21:16]The experience of value forms a basis, the foundation of existence and not just of ours, but of all existence.

[00:21:27]It's not that we exist and then because we exist have experiences of value, but rather that we exist only in so far as we experience events as meaningful to us and evaluate them in some way. We don't simply exist as immutable substances in the world, gliding through space and time untouched like a car through traffic.

[00:21:55]Rather, we reinvent ourselves in every moment and become what we are by making the world from which we emerge our own.

[00:22:05]By deciding which parts of that world should become relevant to us and in what way by incorporating those parts as elements into our own constitution.

[00:22:21]To be always means to be something.

[00:22:25]But we only attain determinacy of existence by including certain things and excluding others from what we are.

[00:22:33]We must define who we are and who we are not. And we can only do this by taking a stance toward the world that presents itself to us. Which means by evaluating what we are presented with.

[00:22:50]Now up to this point it seems we've only spoken about ourselves. that is about human beings and their sense of value.

[00:22:58]However, what forms the basis of our own existence is in fact the only model we have for understanding what it means to exist.

[00:23:09]We have direct knowledge of existence only through our own existence which manifests itself essentially as experience specifically as the experience of value. And there's no reason to assume that we and the most general structures of our being should be of completely different nature than the rest of the world. This is why for whitehead the sense of value is not peculiar to human beings. Something that defines us as a particular kind of being that we are. Rather, it forms a basis of all being.

[00:23:52]And it is not only reason that supports discarding the assumption that our own existence is unique in terms of its most general nature. It is also the way we experience the world around us. The constant selection and evaluation we carry out in our perception of the world does not appear to us to be arbitrary but rather in some way connected to the things we evaluate.

[00:24:20]It is those things the things themselves that suggest to us how we should evaluate them. Our own evaluations are based on pre-existing external evaluations that we have access to through our experience.

[00:24:38]We would remain indifferent to the distinction between things would not form preferences and aversions likes and dislikes if things were indifferent in themselves.

[00:24:53]There would be no human sense of value if there were not something that was actually constituted in terms of value.

[00:25:03]This is why we do not project anything into the world when we attribute different qualities and meanings to its elements. It is the rose that smells sweet, the nighting gale that sings beautifully, and the sun that shines gloriously.

[00:25:25]Contrary to what what modern subjectivist theories of perception suggest, nature, as Whitehead once put it, is not a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless, merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.

[00:25:46]If our perceptions always have meaning, that is if they possess significance or as Whitehead says importance, then this is because what we perceive already possesses significance in and of itself.

[00:26:01]Through our evaluation, we experience not only ourselves, but also the things we evaluate in their value.

[00:26:12]This means, as Whitehead explains, we experience them as things that exist for their own sake that are grounded in reality and possess a completely unique character belonging only to them. What we perceive just like ourselves are independent individual realities that in their individuality transcend all other being.

[00:26:40]Everything that exists is something for others and can only be something for us because it is something for itself.

[00:26:52]To experience the present moment as significant means to experience oneself as significant. But it also means at the same time to experience the other from which this self my own self emerges in its significance.

[00:27:12]Subject and object can here only be understood as different poles of one and the same event. In terms of their significance, they belong together and are dependent on each other.

[00:27:26]This follows from one of the key tenants of Whiteheads philosophy, namely that connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types.

[00:27:38]The point to remember here is that there's no valueree reality. Neither in the sense that reality could ever be experienced as value free nor in a sense that it is ever value free in itself.

[00:27:52]This is because nothing can exist without being something which entails not being something else. All concrete being is determinate. Its existence as a particular thing that it is requires delimitation and exclusion. And because of that, every being also contains the realization of a value which is the reason why I experience it as real in the first place. rather than say a mere modification of my consciousness or my own sensory apparatus.

[00:28:31]Everything writes Whitehead has some value for itself, for others and for the whole.

[00:28:40]This characterizes the meaning of actuality.

[00:28:44]Existence in its own nature is the upholding of value intensity.

[00:28:51]Only because this is so do I experience myself, as Whitehead says, as an actuality in a world of actualities.

[00:29:04]It is no coincidence that this formulation recalls Albert Schwitzer and his famous statement, I am life that was to live. in the midst of life that wills to live which is meant to express our most fundamental ethical experience. For Whitehead too the experience of reality has an imperative though not directly moral character in so far as it creates and claims significance beyond the present moment.

[00:29:34]Our enjoyment of actuality writes Whitehead is a realization of worth good or bad. It is a value experience. Its basic expression is have a care. Here's something that matters. Yes, that is the best phrase. The primary glimmering of consciousness reveals something that matters.

[00:30:05]Of course, all this begs a question where such an imperative of experience leads us. doesn't help us in any way to decide what we should do. What follows from the fact that there is something that matters that possesses a certain value and is therefore not indifferent since everything that exists possesses a certain value by virtue of its existence. It seems that the concept of value can hardly have a guiding function for action unless different levels of value can be distinguished.

[00:30:43]Now according to Whitehead, this is indeed the case. Although everything possesses a certain value, not everything possesses the same value. The level of value depends on the degree of self-activity of a real individual being. That is on the scope of freedom available to it and on how it uses the scope.

[00:31:05]That is to say, to what extent it succeeds in realizing new possibilities of being while simultaneously maintaining stability and fusing all its formative factors into one individual harmonious and richly contrasting unity.

[00:31:25]In short, the high or lower value of a real individual is a function of the complexity of its structures.

[00:31:33]But even if there are different levels of value in the world around us, this does not yet answer the question of how we should respond to that imperative.

[00:31:44]Have a care that matters. Why should we care? Which values are realized in the world out there?

[00:31:55]Well, this question is based on an erroneous assumption. Those values concern me because there's no sharp separation between myself and the other, between self and world. Because the way we experience the world is constitutive for our being. The sharp divide between individuals disappears.

[00:32:19]Everything is connected to everything else. This means that what surrounds me, the values realized there makes me who I am. Those values determine the intensity of value I am capable of realizing because I do not live as a separate self-sufficient existence in the world.

[00:32:42]I'm involved in the creation of myself, but do not create myself out of nothing.

[00:32:48]But on the contrary, I emerge from all the realities that were already there before me and over whose nature I have not the slightest influence.

[00:33:00]However, I'm not entirely at the mercy of this world. I'm not forced to blindly repeat it, but I can and must make a selection. When the many become one, they must change. This means however that I must choose among the available values as constitutive factors of myself and I can choose well or poorly can seize the opportunities offered or miss them embrace high intensities of value or let them pass by unnoticed or not incorporate them as elements into my constitution.

[00:33:36]To achieve a high level of value for myself, I must recognize the achievements around me and integrate them into my own reality. In doing so, I also preserve them for the future.

[00:33:50]Because perceiving existing already attained values means simultaneously granting them continued existence for the present moment.

[00:34:01]It also means making them available for an indefinite future. Although how the future deals with this potential is no longer up to me. That's because I cannot keep anything for myself. Cannot accumulate value and withhold it from the world. Everything I achieve or fail to achieve I immediately pass on to what comes after me for better or for worse.

[00:34:30]Does the achievements of the past serve me just as mine serve the future?

[00:34:36]This fact grounds the solidarity of the world. And I should clarify that I'm now speaking of us only as actual entities that is as momentary existences and not as enduring subjects which we also are.

[00:34:54]Because in us those actual entities build up on each other to form what Whitehead calls a highly organized personal society or in short a proper person with a past, present and future.

[00:35:12]And as persons we certainly preserve values also for ourselves.

[00:35:17]But this is only a special case of experience solidarity. Personal existence most clearly illustrates the immortality of the past. That is its preservation in the ongoing neverending process that we call the world. And that inevitably leaves me and my present experience behind.

[00:35:42]Strictly speaking, I am my present experience. But to feel myself to exist means to perceive myself as effective for the future which for this very reason has relevance for me.

[00:36:00]Now if we assume that morality is something to do with the creation and preservation of values then in Whitehead's conception everything we do is moral.

[00:36:11]Doing here must be understood in the broader sense including our thinking, feeling, willing and perceiving. For all these are acts of our being.

[00:36:21]Each such act influences the acts the acts that follow facilitating or limiting the possibility of new being.

[00:36:31]In this sense, we and by that I mean each and every one of us at every moment are universally responsible.

[00:36:40]That is there's no part of our being that concerns only us. Whatever I am, I am also responsible for what comes after me. And I'm responsible for this because I ultimately always determine who and what I am. Every real individual being that is everything that exists possesses a certain freedom for the final determination of itself. And nowhere is this freedom greater than in human beings.

[00:37:11]Therefore, what I am can never be explained solely by my past. I participate in my becoming. I am at least in part my own creator.

[00:37:27]Of course, there still leaves unanswered the question of what concrete consequences this has for our actions.

[00:37:35]Let's assume it is indeed in our hands to create new values and preserve those already created.

[00:37:43]What should we then let ourselves be guided by? How do we recognize which of the countless alternatives for action and being available to us is the best?

[00:37:55]We may well be responsible, but that doesn't yet answer the question of how we should actually respond to what.

[00:38:05]White himself rarely engages in concrete substantive value judgments and thus not at all in his philosophical writings.

[00:38:14]There's a good reason for that. Whited vehemently rejects a universal system of norms valid at all times and all places.

[00:38:25]For what is right in certain context of action and societies, that is, what produces a high degree of harmonious satisfaction, can be destructive in others.

[00:38:37]Each society, writes Whitehead, has its own type of perfection.

[00:38:44]This means that there is not just one kind of perfection, but many different ones, perhaps even infinitely many. And those different kinds of perfection can also be mutually exclusive.

[00:38:58]All realization of the good is finite and necessarily excludes certain other types.

[00:39:07]While this clearly shows that whiter is committed to some form of moral relativism, it does not mean that what is good and what is bad is up to us.

[00:39:17]Things don't become good simply because we declare them to be good. Well, not everything is good at all times. There's always something that is good and something that is bad. Something that is best and something that is worse.

[00:39:34]What we cannot do, however, is identify establish a fixed unchanging standard for all possible situations.

[00:39:43]Laws, be moral or natural, are always products of events and their interplay.

[00:39:50]This too follows from the fundamental insight that connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types.

[00:40:00]There's no one behavior system, writes Whitehead, belonging to the essential character of the universe as the universal moral ideal. What is universal is a spirit which should permit any behavior system in a circumstance of its adoption.

[00:40:21]But what is a spirit? Whitehead speaks of the aim at the ideal. But this ideal cannot be defined in terms of content because it is itself changeable and we can never predict how it will change.

[00:40:37]What is morally right and wrong depends on the circumstances and we never know all possible circumstances.

[00:40:45]There's no action that might not be permissible or even perhaps obligatory under certain circumstances or at least there's no action that we can be sure will never be permissible or obligatory under certain circumstances.

[00:41:01]And we cannot anticipate all those circumstances either. Destruction and preservation can both be good or bad depending on the situation.

[00:41:13]Every moral code is therefore bound to the existence of certain structures and must therefore remain flexible. Meaning its provisional and revisable nature must be kept in mind. The original sin of any morality is intolerance towards foreign or newly emerging moralities.

[00:41:33]The rigid adherence to what is traditional and proven.

[00:41:39]Unfortunately, that sin is quite common because often enough what is new is fought in the name of morality. The defense of morals writes white head is a battlecry which best rallies stupidity against change.

[00:41:56]But the change that people seek to stop in the name of reality often is unstoppable because change is part of the nature of the universe. The world is essentially a process, a ceaseless realization of ever new possibilities.

[00:42:12]This is why every morality, whatever else it may be, must be tolerant, open to change. Otherwise, it becomes obsolete because it no longer fits the life of the people to whom it is meant to give direction.

[00:42:30]According to Whitehead, the widespread belief that there's only one good and that its nature is known is a source of all moral fanaticism, which then promptly turns the intended good into evil.

[00:42:43]For Whitehead, there's good, but not the good. And what is good to do in any given situation can ultimately only be determined by the feelings of those involved in the event.

[00:42:56]Good is anything that enables or promotes intense experiences in the concrete moment and beyond.

[00:43:05]What matters is controlling the process with the aim of maximizing the importance of the experience.

[00:43:13]This says Whitehead is what being moral consists in. Importance refers here to the magnitude or intensity of the experience. We live in a world brimming with values ready to be received by us.

[00:43:30]Those values present present themselves to us as they are. And it is to our own disadvantage to disregard this offer or to accept something inferior.

[00:43:45]However, there's no guarantee that we will get it right. There's always the risk of failure. There are no clear instructions that could help us safely bridge the chasms of error and defeat.

[00:43:58]The only thing we can do is remain open to the future, to the unknown, to what is for us yet to be made real. We should be prepared to embark on the adventure of ideas, as Whitehead calls it, the search for new perfections. For Whitehead, stagnation is always bad.

[00:44:18]Mere repetition destroys value because without change, the level of experienced value intensity must necessarily decline.

[00:44:28]In other words, a good life can only be maintained as long as we strive for a better one.

[00:44:36]The existing state must therefore be continually transcended. Transcended not destroyed, which includes what we have become so far. Such transcendence requires the willingness to adopt the value experiences of others. For that is what openness is requires sharing joy in pain, happiness and suffering. If we manage that, then we absorb the world with its many diverse experiences, enrich ourselves with it, and thereby increase the intensity of our being and that of those who follow us. Because in those who come after us, we continue to have an effect on the future and become, as Whit would say, objectively immortal.

[00:45:32]It cannot be denied though that our effect on the future in view of the countless competing events that also shape the future is decidedly too small to influence the course of the world in any way. Even if we succeed in ensuring a high intensity of experience for all events within the personal society to which we ourselves belong, which is difficult enough if not impossible.

[00:46:00]Even if we also positively influence events in other societies such as the people in our immediate surroundings, friends and partners, it is still unlikely that anything we have achieved will remain long after we are gone. We perish, our friends perish, our fellow human beings perish. And the memory of all this will eventually fade away as well.

[00:46:28]And even if we want to insist that something always remains, that through our actions and being, we can indeed change the history of humanity, we would only need to look further into the future to see with the eventual demise of humanity and the planet Earth, all the achievements of human civilization disappear into the abyss of complete oblivion.

[00:46:56]But what is the point then of creating values that transcend our own existence?

[00:47:02]For example, working toward a more just, better, and more beautiful world. If this world must eventually come to an end. After all, if we did the opposite, the result in the long run would be exactly the same. When we consider the transiencece of all existence, it is hard to resist the conclusion that ultimately nothing matters. What I do and am seems from the universe's point of view completely irrelevant.

[00:47:32]And yet we often feel that what we do is not irrelevant. That it is important what we do not only in the present moment and not only for a limited period. not only for ourselves and not only for others but for everything.

[00:47:52]Part of this value experience which is at the same time an experience of reality is an experience or perhaps I should better say the intuition that what has once become real will always retain its significance and it will do so whether or not anyone is aware of that significance or even whether there's anyone who could become aware of it.

[00:48:17]The Whitehead had writes in modes of thought a unity in the universe enjoying value and by its imminence sharing value. For example, take the subtle beauty of a flower in some isolated glade of a primeval forest.

[00:48:36]No animal has ever had the subtlety of experience to enjoy its full beauty. And yet this beauty is a grand fact in the universe.

[00:48:49]When we survey nature and think how ever flitting and superficial has been the animal enjoyment of its wonders. And when we realize how incapable the separate cells and pulsations of each flower are of enjoying the total effect.

[00:49:08]Then our sense of the value of the details for the totality dawns upon our consciousness.

[00:49:16]This is the intuition of holiness, the intuition of the sacred which is at the foundation of all religion.

[00:49:29]Why did entire philosophy is pervaded by a strong religious sense although that sense generally stays clear of dogmatic theology?

[00:49:38]I don't want to go into the details of Whitehead's rather idiosyncratic concept of God which would take too long.

[00:49:46]Suffice it to say that God in one of his functions is regarded as a comprehensive unity of experience something like the memory of the universe.

[00:49:57]in which every value that has ever been achieved is stored forever.

[00:50:03]This means that it will continue to influence what is happening in the world because nothing is ever simply there.

[00:50:11]Remember what I quoted before, connectedness is of the essence of all things.

[00:50:18]So this is what God does. He makes sure that nothing is ever lost.

[00:50:26]And this is not an arbitrary claim or merely an element inherited from the philosophical tradition, but rather as almost everything in Whitehead's philosophy an interpretation of experience by describing God as some kind of universal repository of values. Whited attempts to do justice to the strong, widely shared intuition that it cannot be a mere accident that at some stage in the history of the universe, inanimate matter gave rise to life. And that life has developed over millions of years to become more and more complex, eventually changing what started out as an amoeba into a human being.

[00:51:13]Nor can it be a mere accident of little significance that humanity has progressed to its present state and that we, you and I, are here and we live our own personal lives the way we do. There must be something more at stake here than just the satisfaction of arbitrary local values.

[00:51:36]There appears to be some end towards which all this is directed.

[00:51:43]Even though we may not have the slightest idea what this end is, we just feel that all that effort cannot have been spent in vain. And that is a reason why sometimes it seems so important to us to do what is right and to avoid what is wrong.

[00:52:00]As White had remarked in his last public lecture given at the Harvard Divinity School in 1941, what does horn our imagination is that the immediate facts of present action pass into permanent significance for the universe.

[00:52:19]Morality is based entirely on this religious intuition.

[00:52:26]Although we are not able to foresee all the consequences of our actions, we do feel that it matters what we do. The beauty of that flower and its isolated glade, which nobody has ever experienced, yet which is still there, shows that there are perfections that will only become relevant in the future when they can finally be experienced.

[00:52:50]The beauty of nature was there before humans existed, who could fully appreciate it.

[00:52:56]Similarly, what we do and achieve today may reveal its significance only in the far future.