Segall excerpt:

Whitehead challenges the Baconian legacy that elevated empirical observation of brute facts while casting aside Aristotle’s principle of sufficient reason and final causation. This early modern revolt against scholastic metaphysics, though fruitful for the advance of natural science as an instrumental method, left a lingering philosophical difficulty: the problem of induction. How do we move from the observation of particular instances to the general or universal laws that scientists routinely claim to discover? Whitehead would eventually address this question in great depth in Process and Reality^[4], but in the fall 1925 semester he hints that part of the answer lies in recognizing that thought is always an analytic act of abstractive selection. No bundle of concepts can ever fully exhaust the concrete particular it seeks to analyze, because every actual entity carries within itself a multiplicity of elements—some relevant to our purposes, others not. This insight underpins what Whitehead calls his “organic empiricism,” the notion that good theories are those whose ideas both cohere internally and sufficiently express the features of the experiential world that matter to us, while acknowledging there is always something more left unaccounted for. Whitehead’s debt to William James’ radically empirical method has been well established, but the novel and perhaps more apt phrase “organic empiricism” features only in HL2, never making it into his published works.^[5]

Whitehead dwells on his divergence from Kant’s view that universality and necessity are a priori aspects of our mental organization that must be added to experience. His alternative view is that universal forms are inextricably entangled with actual occasions of experience. Echoing Aristotle’s claim that each immediate occasion is a union of being and non-being, Whitehead suggests that non-being corresponds to what he terms “beyondness,”^[6] the fact that any single act of experience must include reference to realities beyond itself. Thus, instead of imagining universals as either transcendental categories structuring cognition (Kant) or transcendent ideas recollected in the soul (Plato), Whitehead treats them as real potentialities that function within concrete occasions throughout the cosmos. He calls this “organic empiricism” because each occasion’s unity is achieved by fusing the immediate data of its physical inheritance with conceptual possibilities (or “eternal objects”).

Whitehead’s keystone concept, “concrescence”—the process by which many diverse factors “grow together” into one emergent actuality—makes its first appearance in Conger’s notes on October 21, 1926.^[7] In the same lecture, Whitehead also uses terminology not seen in HL1 to distinguish between a “physical pole,” where efficient causality and direct inheritance of the past predominate, and a “mental pole,” which introduces conceptual analyses and imaginative possibilities. This “dipolar” conception of concrete fact was explicitly introduced during his lectures in King’s Chapel, Boston, in February 1926, published later that year as Religion in the Making. Regardless of exactly when Whitehead arrived at his preferred terminology, the publication of his student’s notes reveal that the conceptual background of his mature scheme was in utero from the moment he first ascended a lectern at Harvard. In the lightest atomic element and the deepest reflections of a human mind, there is always some measure of inheritance and some creative advance toward a fresh pattern of value. In this sense, final causality—traditionally associated with purpose or teleology—becomes not an extraneous add-on to a world of efficient causes, but an intrinsic ingredient in all natural processes. Whitehead repeatedly stresses that the concept of function requires what he calls a “depth of time”: an organism or event must integrate not just what came before (efficient causation) but the lure of what might yet be (final causation).^[8] One of the reasons he rejects a purely morphological or shape-bound account of nature (natura naturata) is that it neglects the ongoing activity by which concrescent occasions generate emergent values (natura naturans).^[9]

Despite his relative praise of Plato’s influence in Process and Reality, HL2 also reveals Whitehead’s criticisms of Plato’s exaltation of static geometric forms. Rather than treating ideal forms as otherworldly perfections that overshadow the feeble attempts of passing facts to imitate them, Whitehead inverts the Platonic doctrine by re-envisioning the cosmos as a creative flux of occasions that partially realize eternal objects in an ever-evolving harmony. This emphasis on harmony and value in the flux resonates with Heraclitus, whose approach Whitehead admires and seeks to reconstruct.^[10] Where classical empiricism tended to dismiss future possibilities as wholly unknown or arbitrary, Whitehead’s organic empiricism posits that each event must already include a definite (and distinct) relation to past and future occasions mediated by eternal objects, thus allowing for a participatory, non-deterministic relationship to the whole amplitude of time in each and every momentary occasion.

Whitehead’s organic empiricism could also be described as onto-epistemic, in that it challenges any system in which knowledge remains external to what is known. Throughout these lectures, he insists that a complete metaphysics must incorporate the act of cognition into the fabric of nature. If our account of reality renders knowledge impossible or isolates mind as a substance wholly cut off from the physical world, we have failed to give an adequate description of what is actually happening. By contrast, his doctrine of “prehension”^[11] allows for a direct inclusion of other occasions—physically inherited and conceptually transformed—within each new occasion. This means that subject and object, knower and known, are not separately enduring substances but relational dipoles within a dynamic universe composed of countless intra-dependent occasions of experience. What is an object in one moment of experience enters into the subject of the next, only to again perish as a superject to be inherited by the next round of concrescence.