Sentences with phrase «occasion of reality»

In light of this ethical perspective, what can we abstract from the concrete values we are given in each emerging occasion of reality?

That is, every occasion of reality is to be regarded as a momentary experience or specious present.

Not exact matches

On various of these occasions the Times happily reported the return to reality.

It is rather an objective but strictly non-entitative reality, i.e., a structured environment or unified field of activity for the emergence of successive generations of actual occasions.

What does in fact appear is the new reality in the physical satisfaction of the concrescent occasion; but in the early phases it has not completely appeared and is therefore only mere appearance.

In the Whiteheadian interpretation of reality, these initial aims proposed by God are not capricious nor due to inscrutable divine purposes for his creatures, but are relevant aims toward maximizing the intensity of experience which is possible from the particular perspective of each concrescing occasion.

But it is consistent with Whitehead's statement elsewhere in Process and Reality that «agency belongs exclusively to actual occasions» (PR 31/46) and it does circumvent the charge of reductionism (atomism) which Ivor Leclerc and others have leveled against Whitehead in the past (NPE 289 - 91; PN 118 - 22).4

But it would allow Whiteheadians to affirm the unitary reality of atoms and molecules simply as democratically organized societies of occasions rather than as mini-organisms requiring a dominant subsociety of occasions for their ontological cohesiveness.

In any case, in the following paragraphs I will first analyze Whitehead's remarks in Process and Reality on societies as the necessary environment for the ongoing emergence of actual occasions and then show how this analysis throws unexpected light on Whitehead's further explanation of the hierarchy of societies within the current world order, in particular, the difference between inorganic and organic societies, and, among organic societies, those with a «soul» or «living person» and those without such a central organ of control.

As Whitehead comments in Process and Reality, «the presiding occasion, if there be one, is the final node, or intersection, of a complex structure of many enduring objects» (PR 109 / 166f).

Is this to say that the objects known, the actual occasions which are known by subjecting them to divisions, are realities, not appearances, in the realm of being, not becoming?

For, while Hartshorne allowed for the reality of structured societies and only specified that their unity as compound individuals was effected through the presence and activity of a dominant personally ordered subsociety, Ford equivalently wants to eliminate the reality of structured societies altogether, at least insofar as they function as compound individuals rather than as simple aggregates of occasions.

When an occasion has appeared, when it has fully come to be, it loses its subjective immediacy, its process of decision, its feeling of self - possession; for the feeling of self - possession consists precisely in deciding on the appearance of one's own reality.

The aesthetic character of reality means that every worldly value - experience contributes to the divine totality partly through the beauty that it actualizes and partly through its contribution to the beauty of subsequent occasions.

Whereas Leclerc argued that the ultimate constituents of material reality are mini-substances which act on each other reciprocally and by their interaction co-constitute the new reality of a compound substance (NPE, 309 - 10), Ford argues that such natural compounds are instead to be understood as «single strands of personally ordered actual occasions, potentially divisible into structured societies but not actually so divided» (109).

The aesthetic character of reality also means that the importance which an occasion can have for itself and the future depends upon the importance that the past has for it.

This adventure embraces all particular occasions but as an actual fact stands beyond any one of them... [It] includes among its components all individual realities, each with the importance of the personal or social fact to which it belongs.

Of course, our gathering is more likely to be just one more of many occasions on which representatives of seminaries gather to discuss what might be desirable, knowing all the while that the realities of institutional politics preclude any significant changOf course, our gathering is more likely to be just one more of many occasions on which representatives of seminaries gather to discuss what might be desirable, knowing all the while that the realities of institutional politics preclude any significant changof many occasions on which representatives of seminaries gather to discuss what might be desirable, knowing all the while that the realities of institutional politics preclude any significant changof seminaries gather to discuss what might be desirable, knowing all the while that the realities of institutional politics preclude any significant changof institutional politics preclude any significant change.

In Process and Reality, Whitehead describes a knowledge of Greek in terms of an historic route of occasions which inherit from each other to a marked degree: «That set of occasions, dating from his first acquirement of the Greek language and including all those occasions up to his loss of any adequate knowledge of that language, constitutes a society in reference to knowledge of the Greek language» (PR 137).

Furthermore, such a view would be incompatible with the description of the final percipient route of occasions in part V of Process and Reality «It toils not, neither does it spin.

Through Nietzsche's vision of Eternal Recurrence we can sense the ecstatic liberation occasioned by the collapse of the transcendence of Being, by the death of God — and we may witness a similar ecstasy in Rilke and Proust; and, from Nietzsche's portrait of Jesus, theology must learn of the power of an eschatological faith that can liberate the contemporary believer from the inescapable reality of history.

Whitehead nowhere in Process and Reality argues explicitly for such intermediate entities, but it is interesting that he maintains a gradation of enduring objects, from the one extreme of the atomic material body to the opposite extreme of the presiding thread: «But just as the difference between living and non-living occasions is not sharp, but more or less, so the distinction between an enduring object which is an atomic material body and one which is not, is again more or less.»

Ford's general and surely correct thesis is that between Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality there is a shift from monism to pluralism, a devolution of creative power from a Spinozistic substantial activity to the self - creating activity of actual occasions.

Various promissory notes are given (PR 32 / 47), such as the sole explicit discussion of «the «superjective» nature of God» (PR 88 / 135; but see PS 3:228 f), and the famous «fourth phase» of the last two pages of Process and Reality, which proposes a «particular providence for particular occasions.»

Indeed, process thought maintains that the very reality of God's concrete nature is completely dependent upon what each actual occasion of experience contributes to it.

In Whiteheadian philosophy, the processive and relational aspects of reality are described in terms of nexus of actual occasions.

Each moment of creation finds its place in the divine reality, because each occasion manifests a conceptual as well as a physical aspect.

What we normally take as physical reality is composed of a continuous, dynamic process of occasions of experience inheriting one another through a mode of activity that can best be called «feeling.»

We have seen in an earlier lecture that the presence of «evil» is not for a moment denied in such thought; neither is there any minimizing of the reality of its effect in hindering the on - going of creative occasions, with the dreadful results that inevitably follow.

As God ensures the continuation of the series of occasions constituting the contingent world, does the continuation of the series of occasions of his own reality necessitate, as Neville puts it, «another kind of super-divine ontological being» (p. 61)-- whose continuation would, presumably, require the postulation of a super-super being and so on ad infinitum?

The problem for Nature, as he describes it in Process and Reality (Part II, Chapter III, Section VII) is to produce societies which can survive through time but which do not sacrifice all opportunity amongst their constituent actual occasions for what he called «intensity» of experience.

The juxtaposition of these two comments on the threefold character of an actual occasion indicates that Whitehead expressed at least two different conceptions of God in Process and Reality, and at least some of the passages depicting the final concept are insertions.11 It turns out that all of them can be so construed, except for the main text (V.2.3 - 6) which Whitehead reserved for the end.

But if we hold, as for example in Process and Reality, that all final individual actualities have the metaphysical character of occasions of experience, then on that hypothesis the direct evidence as to the connectedness of one's immediately present occasion of experience with one's immediately past occasions, can be validly used to suggest categories applying to the connectedness of all occasions in nature.

Without the two-fold reality which the relativity principle attaches to all completed occasions (and, more generally, to every entity of every type), the Category of the Ultimate, or principle of creativity — the most general principle presupposed by all the other categories of Whitehead's metaphysics (PR 31)-- would be an outright contradiction.

The reality underneath this appearance is a temporal sequence of what he dubbed «actual occasions.»

Hence, the Category of the Ultimate, or principle of creativity, is self - contradictory — unless, of course, it be interpreted in light of the two-fold reality of completed occasions that is implied by the principle of relativity.

But in Process and Reality, Whitehead recognizes two fundamentally different types of actual occasions, those constituting space - time empty of matter, and those constituting experient occasions in the histories of particular particles, corresponding to basic pulses or beats in the theories of quantum physics (PR 177/269).

We recognize tension between the technical language introduced in Process and Reality, where the «occasions are the final actual entities», and Whitehead's assertion in Adventures of Ideas that «the real actual things that endure are all societies.

Although Whitehead's Category of the Ultimate is meant to lessen the distance, so to speak, between actual occasions and societies of actual occasions, the application of Whitehead's metaphysics to persons seems troublesome; the ancient metaphysical problem of appearance and reality seems to lurk in the background, for the philosopher who wishes to identify res vera in the system soon finds herself perplexed, asking if the subjects of experience are actual occasions, societies of occasions, or sentient beings, such as persons and animals.1

Not only might there be a problem of appearance and reality if the occasions are taken to be the final actual entities in the sense of most developed or last, but there is also another problem, one which concerns time.

It reads: «It is the reality of what is potential, in its character of a real component of what is actual...» I submit that our analysis of real potentiality has revealed that there is no incompatibility at all in recognizing that «future regions» have the sort of potential reality which does «underlie» the future in the way that real potentiality does this, and at the same time recognizing that, as actual, regions do indeed most definitely originate with the becoming of occasions.

This makes it plausible to say that since the future is real and since the continuum enjoys that same reality, it is therefore nonsense to speak of regions of the continuum originating with the becoming of occasions.

But the admission into, or rejection from, reality of conceptual feeling is the originative decision of the actual occasion.

If our human existence is not that of some supposedly substantial and indestructible soul to whom experiences happen, but is rather those experiences themselves held together in unity and given identity by the awareness and self - awareness which makes it possible for us to say «I» and «you», then the enduring reality, which God accepts and values, is precisely that series of events or occasions which go to make us what we are.

In the present instance God is the concrescing entity, so God can not be the ground of the givenness of X when God is prehending X. God is in unison of becoming with every occasion (cf. Christian, 333 - 334), but it is the definition of contemporary occasions, occasions in unison of becoming, that neither of them prehend the other (cf. Process and Reality, An Essay in Cosmology 102).

The relationship of the finite creature with the supremely worshipful and unsurpassable deity is being affirmed; and along with it there is also affirmed the possibility of its becoming on occasion a matter of conscious knowledge on the part of the human, as it is always a present reality in the very nature of God himself.

Provided that physical science maintains its denial of «action at a distance,» the safer guess is that direct objectification is practically negligible except for contiguous occasions; but that this practical negligibility is a characteristic of the present cosmic epoch, without any metaphysical generality (Process and Reality, An Essay in Cosmology 468 - 469).

These two analyses make up the detailed theory of actual occasions in Process and Reality.

Process and Reality, An Essay in Cosmology 345 - 346 and 435 imply clearly that (b) is the alternative Whitehead had in mind, for in each passage he presents a situation where a given occasion, X, inherits from another occasion, Y, in its past, which in turn inherits from Z, which is in its past — the point of each passage is to say that X inherits doubly from Z, both immediately and as mediated by Y. Z is not in the immediate past of X, and yet X is exhibited as prehending Z directly.

To underpin this realistic interpretation, one may refer to Whitehead's magnum opus, Process and Reality, where, on several occasions, he explicitly objects to a Kantian epistemology, presenting his philosophy of organism as a return to a pre-Kantian mode of thought.22