Historical Gradients

There is a sense A N Whitehead is always historically aware of the philosophical precedents of what he coins ‘organic philosophy’ (be is Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza or Hume and Kant) authors he mentions repeatedly and often quotes, even as he makes clear one has to read them against their own conclusions and even their (later) systematized traditions.
Whitehead makes sure he can always rescue and scavenge significant bits - odd turns of phrases that he transforms into something oddly significant against the intentions of their authors. He picks up on strange discontinuities, missteps or non-systematic intuitions in the thinking of all these named predecessors which are not actually his direct predecessors in fact. They are indirectly shaping up his own organic philosophy by what they are not saying, and only because he makes something else out of them and spells out what they could have said but aren’t saying.
He takes great care that he carefully weaves his own elaborate metaphysical reconstructions in a patient way, evolving a jagged intellectual continuum. ANW almost always appreciates the unorganized side of major thinkers, appreciates their lacunae more than they would have ever done.
He picks as important – certain odd tidbits or whatever did not make it into the final draft or recognized and canonical Tractatus. From this patient, only slightly pedantic nit-picking, ANW makes sure that he and us (his possible readers) are in constant contact with and kept involved with an inherited list of ideas developed under a very different and disjunct historical period (from his or his immediate predecessors). The impact of several Western authors is felt at a distance and without their accord it feels. The result is that what does not get mentioned or lies outside of their conclusion - feels even more important.

He is hailed as the only modern philosopher that has developed a deliberately insistent and easly the most complex metaphysical project to date – with regard new and relevant scientific theories of his day (relativity theory and quantum mechanics).
I am wondering about the atmosphere that has shaped such interests – the “penumbral” historical background that sustained and nurtured ANW mature metaphysics – outside the range of names he dutifully mentions in his key books (Process & Reality or Science and the Modern World, etc).

One of the best things in reading him is that one is not dragged down by heavy-duty philosophical inheritance (or lack of reading all these fundamental texts). No jungle of footnotes, nor lengthy, winded polemics.
His polemics is not so much with authors but with certain aporias of Western thinking, his engagement is with meta-theories or directions of research. Even when he is always mentioning what organic philosophy is not, he skips dense webs of references – and this is an integral part of his low profile tone and no name-dropping style.

Yet I am left with all these residual questions – of why Aesthetics is the prima philosophia for him? How come there is this easy (and surprisingly modern) involvement with en-minding matter or the building blocks of reality? Why is mind or experience so central to his cosmology? Why does he find this en-minding of matter as fundamental to our understanding the most recent theories of physics? These are important questions and I am always feeling a nuub in relation to ANW – but they are related.

What I appreciate is his evolutionary and bottom-up or rather the up-at-the-bottom perspective. Where does his non-anthropocentrism or his physiological interest stem from?
There is a convergence btw various philosophers of mind and Whiteheadian panpsychism (the most developed modern panpsychism we have probably). Yet it is very rare that he ever gets a mention in recent books on the subject of consciousness or the ‘hard problem of consciousness (apart from William Seager or David Ray Griffin). The same thing happens with other authors – Galen Strawson, whose mentalistic physicalism comes close to Whitehead (but rarely mentions him) reviewing a book (Philip Goff’s -Galileo's Error Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness) by panpsychist philosopher Philip Goff and chiding them over not mentioning a larger and more complete list of processors beside Arthur Eddington and Betrand Russell. A list that accoring to Galen Strawson should perforce include: W K Clifford, CA Strong and Durant Drake.

It is almost as if this amnesia about Whitehead helps their own project along and keeps them free of what Thomas Nagel has called (in 1986): “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory”.
What I am trying to say is that everyone is allowed to have favorite genealogies or mention his own chosen predecessors, yet when it concerns panpsychism – the ‘pan’ is historically eliminativist, always tends to choose certain authors over others.
Whitehead’s is a difficult inheritance. Besides being mired with his verbiage or outright dismissive of his entire metaphysical edifice, one might risk attracting the wrong attention, loose face, loose readers, respectability etc what do I know.
What if one’s own carefully thought-out theories of mind would get rapidly dismissed by even one mentioning of him or giving him due credit. Maybe it is the usual academic risk or denial, a normal fear of being convicted as guilty by association or of being treated as (dangerously) ‘speculative’ or even (damning) humbug.

I will pick up on A. Nagel’s (pejorative) mention of the “metaphysical laboratory” and its slight air of superiority. Yes, maybe it is good to cut straight to the chase, yet I consider the problem exactly the opposite. It is not a problem of clear-cutting, but of allowing more largesse. Otherwise, everything feels like miraculous birth – and we might miss a certain underlying commonality.
In fact, I do miss this laboratory feeling, that there was a certain vaguely related but varied and diverse range of authors that could have prepared A N Whitehead's arguments at a distance and up close.
I think that his particular and quite original approach suffers from this lack of historical density or having a wider range of domains (outside the strictly philosophical). A dialogue that is not primarily even between philosophers and so does not enter the canonic mind philosophy list.

For me Whitehead is the tip of an unseen iceberg of largely only alluded to free speculation and long term involvement with mindmatter, enlivened materialism, transmissible and active affect, or affecting of being affects, of scientific and artistic interests with low-end organisms and non-human emotions. Let's say this could range from Darwin’s letting his kids play music to worms or feeding carnivorous plants in his hothouse or William James's (he gets ample mention in Whitehead) interest in physiology, nervous tissues and a graded/gradual evolution of mind.

Whitehead is eminently a dispositional thinker even if when he talks about the intrinsic nature of things – because he puts you in a certain mood, and partakes of a certain disposition (perspective) of mind towards the possibility of mind (outside of properly human heads).
In order to make you sensitive to certain things that would have left you indifferent, he takes on the perspective of an elementary particle (also recently discovered) electron – what is it like to be an electron? Does this sound so different from Einstein trying to imagine what it is like to be traveling like a photon on his bike?
Yet this responsibility should point us towards non-scarcity in regard to AWN complex ideas since his own system does this on a regular basis. It searches for this gradient – something that is not miraculous, exceptional, nothing special but usual and primary.
Consciousness or higher-level faculties of the mind are not isolated, put on a pedestal. They are just a special case out of a much more varied non-special, available readiness for experiencing of the world by the world. He is very keen on making sure that we accept this pervasiveness of mind and explore under-explored avenues of feeling and becoming.

Let’s apply this pervasive gradient-thinking approach to his own system, as a system that is being nourished, new and growing or exploding the bound or a larger epochal context (in tune with his cosmic epochs there is this larger missing history). What I felt was missing from both Whitehead’s account of his own ideas as well as from others mentioning their own Whiteheadian engagements is this historical background noise. I appreciate this dim largely experimental aesthetic background radiation because it puts things in contrast.

Recently I discovered a wonderful study – filling in this gaps. This book by Benjamin Morgan is called The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature.
Again, Benjamin M does not mention ANW directly, because ANW is somehow outside of the scope of this historical study of experimental aesthetics, but at the same time, he is one of those that have enjoyed and absorbed a lot of what The Outward Mind aims to be about.
This is, I think, the missing historical Gedankenkollectiv that offers many other gradations, graded ways in which the late Victorian era (I get more and more convinced this is so) has transmitted disparate interests with development from the physical sciences or concerns as to the naturalization of mental processes. Heidegger for me is a key philosopher that somehow obscures this Victorian background noise, he is closer to the Critical Idiom in his disparagement of technology and science, in the sense that his own anti-scientific opposition manages to produce a tabula rasa in regard to all these previously very rich cross-overs and intellectual cross-fertilization that (according to Benjamin Morgan) characterized experimental or laboratory aesthetics in both Germany and Great Britain (US and France and other places?!). Looking fwd to reading this book.

Benjamin Morgan study, the Introduction on, brings numerous such cases to light in order to show us that there was much more appetite from the 1850s on for the sort of hybrid preoccupations that seem to dwindle afterward or get lost with the dual culture split (arts vs sciences). This externalization of mind, this en-minding of matter, or the generalization of the feeling process across the universe is very similar to what Whitehead is keeping alive and reinforcing with new ardor and necessarily new additions osmotically traveling across the scientific membrane.