New Segment: What Did Whitehead Mean By That?

Alfred N Whitehead is, in my opinion, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. He set in motion a series of events that would go on to revolutionize science and religion. The full implications of his work are only now being explored in systems theory and process theology. But his original work is extremely dense and difficult to understand. Whitehead is forced to invent vocabulary to talk about a lot of the issues he wants to deal with. I have decided I will, from time to time, take Whiteheadian nuggets and try to explain them as best I can. We begin here with this bit from RELIGION IN THE MAKING, Lecture 3, Segment: "God & The Moral Order":

The adjustment is the reason for the world. it is not the case that there is an actual world which accidentally happens to exhibit an order of nature. There is an actual world because there is an order in nature. If there were no order, there would be no world. Also since there is a world, we know that thee is an order. The ordering entity is a necessary element in the metaphysical situation presented by the actual world.

This line of thought extends Kant's argument. He saw the necessity for God in the moral order. But with his metaphysics he rejected the argument from the cosmos. The metaphysical doctrine, here expounded, finds the foundations of the world in the aesthetic experience, rather than as with Kant in the cognitive and conceptive experience. All order is therefore aesthetic order, and the moral order is merely certain aspects of aesthetic order. The actual world is the outcome of the aesthetic order, and the aesthetic order is derived from the immanence of God.

So what does Whitehead mean by this? Two things that you should understand about Whitehead when approaching these words: he is a panpsychist (meaning all things have some level of mind or subjectivity) and he is a regularist (meaning that the laws of nature are regularities of natural behavior, not some external facts that force things to be the way they are). Both pansychism and regularism are viable philosophical positions, not ones I'm willing to debate right now, but I think both can be defended against, and are at least AS reasonable to believe, as alternative philosophical positions. In any event, my point here is not to defend Whitehead's positions, but to explain them. For Whitehead, all object/events (for Whitehead objects and events have the same ontological status), called 'epochal occasions' have a level of freedom. The world is not made up of hard and fast 'objects' controlled deterministically by some kind of invisible 'forces', rather it is made up of becomings, or nodules of self-creation. Freedom is fundamental to the universe.

The thing that surprised Whitehead was that these free willed beings operated according to such regularity that those regularities could be described in terms of physical laws. Whitehead solves the mind/body problem by making mind a feature of all things in the world. What becomes mysterious then is not the mind that emerges from the physical (which is the problem most philosophers face) but the physical order that emerges from the collection of mind. Whitehead saw a world of free epochal occasions choosing to behave in such a way that an ordered, consistent universe was possible. It became clear to him, then, that there was some Uber-Mind, a being very much like the semitic vision of God, that was presenting the world with a moral-aesthetic vision, a vision of the way the world should be. This vision, this ideal, gave the world something to aim at, and limited the options of those free beings that decided to rebel against it. Additionally, Whitehead saw that the epochal occasions' behavior could only be seen as rational if their actions on behalf of the whole were also on behalf of themselves AS epochal occasions. 

Simply put (if anything Whitehead said can be simply put), Whitehead was convinced by Kant's argument for God based on the rationality of morality. Whitehead needed a God that could 'immortalize' the decisions of the epochal occasions, so that their actions on behalf of the whole was also an act that led to their own survival. But since all of reality has freedom in some way related to human free will, all of reality is presented with the same dilemma about moral action. For Whitehead, the moral order of humanity does not 'emerge' from the physical order of the universe, but the physical order of the universe is one particular example of God's own moral order being presented to a world of free beings. The order of nature is the result of a moral -aesthetic struggle. Re-read the passage with this understanding in mind, and see if it is not clearer for you.