Being v. Becoming, Part 7: Flux and Fictional Narrative

Matter, Life, Consciousness, Emotion, Knowledge, Society, Civilization, Art, the Universe, Reality: For A.N. Whitehead, these are all Processes. Call them Adventures of Becoming. Flux is at their foundation(-s). This is the premise of his Process Philosophy.

Relatedness (or Interdependence) and Interiority (or what he calls Feeling) are its key mechanisms. From quantum entanglement to Minkowski world lines to emotion to linguistic communication, Process Philosophy holds explanatory power. (It isn't just some naive Romantic poetic notion.)

To understand these processes of Becoming—these Adventures—requires more than propositional logic (as, say, Gödel demonstrated w/r/t mathematics).

How do we tell the story of the history of the universe? How do we tell the story of life emerging from cold, dark matter? How do we tell the story of the emergence of consciousness and even self-consciousness and empathy? How do we tell the story of the rise of agricultural? Science? Civilization? Creativity? How do we tell the story of how mass emerges from, say, the Higgs Boson? How do we tell the story of Jack falling in (or out) of love with Jill? How do tell the story of Wally finding meaning in the death of his father? How do we tell the story of an injustice done to Billy? How do we tell the story of Becky's rise and fall?

Each of the narratives we seek to tell takes time to develop. Or, to put it generally, Processes take Time. Time is the ground of Process.

Moreover, each process takes time to recount. Stories take time to be told. Time is also the ground of narrative.

Now we're getting closer to the point of this, admittedly, abstruse series of posts. Or at least one of the points.

Process is the condition of narrative, and narrative is itself a process. Narrative has a certain mimetic power which is not propositional. Rather, it enacts process at the same time as it recounts it. Narrative has the power to represent Reality truthfully.

Truth, however, as A. N. Whitehead points out, is a limited concept, much more so than Beauty:

"...Beauty is a wider, and more fundamental notion than Truth. ... Beauty is the internal conformation of the various items of experience with each other, for the production of maximum effectiveness. Beauty thus concerns the inter-relations of the various components of Reality, and also the inter-relations of the various components of Appearance, and also the relations of Appearance to Reality. Thus any part of experience can be beautiful. ... But Truth has a narrower meaning in two ways. First, Truth, in any important sense, merely concerns the relations of Appearance and Reality. But in the second place the notion of 'conformation' in the case of Truth is narrower than that in the case of Beauty. For the truth-relation requires that the two relata have some factor in common. ... 

"[Yet]...the general importance of Truth for the promotion of Beauty is overwhelming. ...[T]he truth-relation remains the simple, direct mode of realizing Harmony. ... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation. The Truth that for such extremity of Beauty is wanted is that truth-relation whereby appearance summons up new resources of feeling from the depths of Reality. It is a Truth of feeling, and not a Truth of verbalization. The relata in Reality must lie below the stale presupposition of verbal thought. The Truth of supreme Beauty lies beyond th dictionary meanings of words." Adventures of Ideas, p. 265-67

Fictional narrative allows us to go (Gö-del?) outside the propositional facts of our lives and create models of meaning. It is an Adventure.

Fiction writing is modelling. Fiction writers create models of selves in the process of becoming. Ideally, these model selves are at hinge points in their fictive lives. Crises. The character is affected by this crisis and must either change or, importantly, decide not to change in some meaningful way as a result.

These models are pictures of the process of becoming as embodied in a realized fictional character. Such change will be a result of both external (social) as well as internal (emotional) factors. This is where the fiction writer's artistry is important.

If we accept the premise that Being just is Becoming, i.e., that the process of growth/change/decay/resistance is the foundational quality of selfhood in human beings, then fiction (at least humanistic fiction) is ideally suited to present us with a model—call it a case study—of this process in all its over-determined detail.

Fictional narratives can create instructive models of the process of becoming, most often and usefully in individual characters at specific, critical points in time. Consistent with Whitehead's systematic (prehension—>concrescence) analysis, such a model must, at a minimum, contain, i.e., depict/portray:

• (a) an existing subject, 
• (b) some specific interaction with an Other (character, nature, society), 
• (c) the subject's perceptions of same (conscious or unconscious), 
• (d) the subject's emotional state, 
• (e) the impact on the subject (externally and internally), 
• (f) the subject's emotional coloring/filtering of the significance of the interaction, 
• (g) the subject's judgment to accept certain aspects of the interaction and reject others (to the extent such are in the subject's control) into the subject's self-identifying trajectory, 
• (h) the change in the subject wrought by the interaction, and
• (i) the effect (external and emotional) of this change on the subject and all his/her future interactions.

This is a Process schema for fictional narrative.

How does this tie in to our Ur-story framework (see Pages in the right column and remember to read from the last post to the first)? That was a look at what I was calling the "Substance" of literature—the coming to consciousness of mortality and the ways to deal, or not, with this fundamental situation. This is, of course, a look at the formal Process.

(to be cont'd)

Being v. Becoming, Part 6(c): More Than a Feeling

For Whitehead, the only way to comprehend Reality is through the rigorous analysis of and abstraction from our own experience. Everything we sense, feel, and, ultimately, know of Reality is necessarily filtered through and limited by our experience. But, at the same time, we are embedded in that same Reality we seek to understand—created by it and, interestingly, creating it in turn. It may be a fair criticism of Whitehead to say that he has a humanistic, or even biological, bias. But that does not get us past the limitations of our own minds.

It is the abstraction element of the above statement that takes Whiteheadian metaphysics out of the subjectivist or solipsistic (or Romantic) mode. Humans are not the only reality, but they participate in Reality. We are not exempt from the world, and every aspect of our experience—including, but not limited to, our spiritual or mental or emotional aspects—must be accounted for in/by the system.

Our subjective experiences are therefore instructive, but naive. They may provide models and even templates for understanding Reality, but those models and templates are always and everywhere subject to correction when they bump up against facts in the real world.

Our scientfic knowledge grows as our consciousness (that is to say our capacity to perceive, which would include such things as telescopes, Large Hadron Colliders, supercomputers, etc.) grows, and our knowledge of ourselves grows as our science develops. That is, as our knowledge confronts and is tested by Reality we gain a deeper sense of who we are.

If Kant's is a critique of pure, or transcendental, reason, Whitehead's is a critique of immanent reason. There is no "pure" stance. Immanent means immersed in the world, part of it, and interconnected with everything in it. Everything in the world "feels" everything else. Feeling is, for Whitehead, the primary mode of experiencing, i.e., processing, the world.

Individuals (actual entites, occasions of experience, events, etc.) are integral parts of the world, and each of them processes (feels) the world uniquely. This is how novelty happens. Creativity is an integral part of the process of universal interaction, its result. And for this reason individuals are never pure, isolated, transcendent.

In some sense, then, (as I mentioned in my previous post) as Buckminster Fuller once proclaimed, if "I seem to be a verb," then what I am is an adverbial process. I filter the Reality I feel through the lens of my own self-generated identity. I process Reality: I feel it (externally I am acted on and internally I self-define), I select out certain aspects and include them in my on-going self-definition, I reject others (some by virtue of their lack of impact or proximity, say), I forget parts of myself and re-self-define, and I emerge a new entity (i.e., a new occasion for further experience). This process repeats until I "satisfy".

Or, as Whitehead says: "how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is." Process and Reality, Part I, Chapter II, Section II, p.23

Some quotes:

"A feeling—i.e., a positive prehension—is essentially a transition effecting a concrescence. Its complex constitution is analysable into five factors which express what that transition consitss of, and effects. The factors are: (i) the 'subject' which feels, (ii) the 'initial data' which are to be felt, (iii) the 'elimination' in virtue of negative prehensions, (iv) the 'objective datum" which is felt, (v) the 'subjective form' which is how that subject feels that objective datum." PR, Part III, Chapter I, Section II, p. 221

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"A feeling is the appropriation of some elements in the universe to be components in the real internal constitution of its subject." PR, Part III, Chapter I, Section X, p. 231.

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"I contend that the notion of mere knowledge is a high abstraction, and that conscious discrimination itself is a variable factor only present in the more elaborate examples of occasions of experience. The basis of experience is emotional. Stated more generally, the basic fact is the rise of an affective tone originating from things whose relevance is given." Adventures of Ideas (1933), p. 175-76. [btw Adventures is a much easier read than PR, a good place to start your foray into Whitehead.]

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"An occasion of experience is an activity, analysable into modes of functioning which jointly constitute its process of becoming." AI, p. 176

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"The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact. It is the flying dart, of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world." AI, p. 177.

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"The creativity is the actualization of potentiality, and the process of actualization is an occasion of experiencing. Thus viewed in abstraction objects are passive, but viewed in conjunction they carry the creativity which drives the world. The process of creation is the form of unity of the Universe." AI, p. 179

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"[P]erception is consciousness analysed in respect to those objects selected for this emphasis. Consciousness is the acme of emphasis." AI, p. 180

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"Suppose that for some period of time some circumstance of his life has arounsed anger in a man. How does he now know that a quarter of a second ago he was angry? Of course, he remembers it; we all know that. But I am enquiring about this very curious fact of memory, and have chosen an overwhelmingly vivid instance. The mere word 'memory' explains nothing. The first phase in the immediacy of the new occasion is that of the conformation of feelings. The feeling as enjoyed by the past occasion is present in the new occasion as datum felt, with a subjective form conformal to that of the datum. Thus if A be the past occasion, D the datum felt by A with subjective form describable as A angry, then this feeling—namely, A feeling D with subjective form of anger—is initially felt by the new occasion B with the same subjective form of anger. The anger is continuous throughout the successive occasions of experience. This continuity of subjective form is the initial sympathy of B for A. It is the primary ground for the continuity of nautre. 

"Let us elaborate the consideration of the angry man. His anger is the subjective form of his feeling some datum D. A quarter of a second later he is, consciously, or unconsciously, embodying his past as a datum in the present, and maintaining in the present the anger which is a datum from the past. In so far as that feeling has fallen within the illumination of consciousness, he enjoys a non-sensuous perception of the past emotion. He enjoys this emotion both objectively, as belonging to the past, and also formally as continued in the present. This continuation is the continuity of nature." AI, p. 183-84.

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"An occasion of experience which includes a human mentality is an extreme instance, at one end of the scale, of those happenings which constitute nature." AI, p. 184.

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