No topic has suffered more from this tendency of philosophers [that the more fundamental factors of the clear and distinct elements of experience, will ever lend themselves for discrimination with peculiar clarity,] than their account of the subject-object structure of experience. ... In the first place this structure has been identified with the bare relation of knower to known. ... I agree with this proposition, but not in the sense in which subject-object is identified with knower-known. 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. (Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures Of Ideas, pp 225-226).
All knowledge is conscious discrimination of objects experienced. But this conscious discrimination, which is knowledge, is nothing more than an additional factor in the subjective form of the interplay of subject with object. This interplay is the stuff constituting those individual things which make up the sole reality of the Universe. These individual things are the individual occasions of experience, the actual entities. (Ibid pp 227-228).
'Objects' for an occasion can also be termed the 'data' for that occasion. The choice of terms entirely depends on the metaphor which you prefer. One word carries the literal meaning of 'lying in the way of', and the other word carries the literal meaning of 'being given to'. But both words suffer from the defect of suggesting that an occasion of experiencing arises out of a passive situation which is a mere welter of many data. Thus viewed in abstract, 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. (Ibid pp 230-231).
But in another sense I have endeavoured to put forward a defence of dualism, differently interpreted. Plato, Descartes, Locke, prepared the way for Hume; and Kant followed upon Hume. ... The dualism in the later Platonic dialogues between the Platonic 'souls' and the Platonic 'physical' nature, the dualism between the Cartesian 'thinking substances' and the Cartesian 'extended substances', the dualism between the Lockian 'human understanding' and the Lockian 'external things' described for him by Galileo and Newton - all these kindred dualisms are here found within each occasion of actuality. Each occasion has its physical inheritance and its mental reaction which drives it on to its self-completion. The world is not merely physical, nor is it merely mental. Nor is it merely one with many subordinate phases. Nor is it merely a complete fact, in its essence static with the illusion of change. Where a vicious dualism appears, it is by reason of mistaking an abstraction for a final concrete fact. (Ibid pp 244-245).
The Universe is dual because, in the fullest sense, it is both transient and eternal. The Universe is dual because each final actuality is both physical and mental. The Universe is dual because each actuality requires abstract character. The Universe is dual because each occasion unites its formal immediacy with objective otherness. The Universe is many because it is wholly and completely to be analysed into many final actualities - or in Cartesian language, into many res verae. The Universe is one because of the universal immanence. There is thus a dualism in this contrast between unity and multiplicity. Throughout the Universe there reigns the union of opposites which is the ground of dualism. (Ibid p 245).
Adventures of ideas
IDENTITY
And God said: Let there be a solid vault in the middle of the waters, so as to form a division between water and water. (And it was so.)
And God made the solid vault and created a division between the waters above the vault and under the vault.
And God named the vault heaven. And it was evening and it was morning, a second day. (Genesis 1.6-7, trans. Westermann/Scullion.)
The association-separation between light and darkness will be resumed in the Day 4 rubric, notwithstanding a crucial demarcation of the two pairs, Day 1 (light : darkness) and Day 4 (day : night), upheld by the logic governing the narrative as a whole, which it sorts into three pairs:
And God said: Let there be light! And there was light.
And God saw, how good the light was. And God separated (ldyw LXX diexwrisen) the light from the darkness.
And God named the light day, but the darkness he named night. (Genesis 1.3-5).
And God put them [the two great lights] in the vault of the heavens to give light over the earth,This is the single incidence of the verb 'separate' (ldb LXX diaxwrizein) in the second part of the narrative. It recapitulates the former description, reasserting the distinction between light and darkness according to the theology of transcendence. Nevertheless, according to the textual formal, propositional structure, we cannot fail to observe the dissimilarity as well as similarity between the initial couplet light-darkness, and the final couplet day : night. The effective result of which is to portray the relation of the couplets complementarily to those of Days 2-5 and Days 3-6. In the first case, Days 2-5, the depiction of the conceptual forms space and space : time respectively, the first rubric is paramount. The theological outlook of this narrative as a whole is weighted in favour of transcendence, and the portrayal of the transcendent heaven in the Day 2 rubric, is of primary importance. Not so in the second case, that of Days 3-6. For the first member of these concerns the creation of the earth, and the last, that of the earth animals. Thus the alterity between the two paired couplets must be taken into account. Here then, the paramount rubric is actually the final one, Day 6, even though the overall perspective of the narrative privileges transcendence, and thus the first three Days are of signal importance. Day 6, according to the overarching narratological structure belongs to the 'earth' half of the story, distinguished by its quota of four, rather than three members, Days 4, 5, 6, and 7.
to rule over the day and the night and to separate (lydbhlw, LXX diaxworizein) light and darkness. And God saw how good it was.
And it was evening and it was morning, a fourth day. (Genesis 1.17-19).
And God said: Let the water beneath the heaven gather into one place, so that the dry land may appear. And it was so.Even though the idea of transcendence through disjunction is clearly qualified in the description of Day 3, as indeed it must be, all the things created during the first three days are identified and named. Identification and naming nowhere occurs in the second half of the text. It is a distinguishing feature of P's theology of transcendence, just as identification of Jesus will be of the 'transcendent' miracles. The arguments concerning which it is not necessary to repeat here. The presentation of that motif in all three of the miracle narratives further verifies their relation to the theology of transcendence proper, since it comports with the concept of 'beginning' or creation, in the P narrative.
And God named the dry land earth, but the gathering of the water he named sea. And God saw, how good it was. (Genesis 1.9-10 emphasis added.)
And God said: Let the earth sprout forth fresh green (h#$d): plants (b#() which produce ((yrzm) seed ((rz) (LXX speiron sperma), (and) fruit trees (C( yrp) that bear (h#$() fruit (yrp,, LXX culon karpimon poioun karpon) on the earth (Cr)h l() each of its kind, fruit containing its own seed. iwb w(rz r#$), LXX to sperma au)tou en autw).The text is faithfully, if fatefully, indebted to such a description, given its core subject matter, the created order. Creation is ongoing, and although it is not mentioned explicitly, procreation casts a long shadow in the form of death. Creation is necessarily connected to reproduction because of, and/or in spite of, consumption, as we see from the ensuing J narrative. In the P story, consumption appears to involve vegetable life only, the animals are not objects of human consumption, even if the text eludes mention of consumption of animals by other animals. Consumption, which will be fully thematically and theologically utilised in the messianic series, is acknowledged as requisite for the continued existence of the animal-human realm. Hence death remains the central suppressed premise undergirding every one of the blessings and injunctions to reproduce, since everything consumed, with the exception of water, was itself, once a living organism. (The two anomalous cases are milk and honey, but these too are produced from once living organisms by parent creatures.) 'Kind' thus too recurs throughout the second half of the narrative (vv 21, 24, 25 bis), as we would expect, pursuant to its initial usage which linked it to 'earth', as to immanence. There, it was in accord with the first and notional presentation of immanence as 'togetherness' in the portrayal of the waters of the Day 3 story.
And the earth sprouted forth fresh green: seed-bearing plants (whnyml (rz (yrzm b#(, LXX speiron sperma), each of its kind, and trees that produce fruit, containing its own seed (wb w(rz r#$)), each of its kind. And God saw how good it was.
And it was evening and it was morning, a third day. (Genesis 1.11-13, Westermann/Scullion, emphasis added.)
We have considered the theology of immanence from the point of view of unity, its seal. The forms of unity in the creation story introduce it, albeit in its secondary realization, the conceptual pole of consciousness, prefatory to that of the perceptual pole, its final and actual instantiation. The J narrative further takes account of that particular exemplification of immanence and of The Holy Spirit, the (animal-anthropic) form of unity male and female, first listed in the Day 6 narrative. The primary disclosure of immanence is undertaken in the messianic series, in the four Eucharistic events. Once again, it occurs in relation to epistemology-psychology, as Christological. This inflection renders it apposite to the logos theology of John and of The Transfiguration. Immanence is routinely catalogued by the metaphor appetition and consumption. Its depiction as such, supports perfectly the interpretation of sense-percipience in all four modes, haptic, acoustic, optic and osmic-gustic, a propos of perceptual data as persistently available to memory. Of the three phenomenal modes, optic sentience corresponds to immanence and to The Holy Spirit. The conceptual form of unity male and female, and the perceptual radical optic memory, are those members of their taxa which are structured in virtue of immanence.In all my interactions and changes something is retained that makes them my, in virtue of which all these interactions and changes happen with me, not with someone else − this “something” is my separate self (I). It is absolutely separate in the sense that I am always I, not someone else − although it obviously is not separate, if ‘separateness’ is understood in the sense of isolation, the absence of interactions with anything that is not me (including all other I-s).
Sometimes, the idea of selfness is denied with a reference to ecstatic experience – peculiar experiences that are interpreted as unity with another I, dissolution of one’s own self in another. It can be the state of merging with God, as described by mystics, or an extraordinary feeling of unity with another human being, perhaps in mystical or sexual ecstasy. I think that this is a false interpretation of the experience. What is illusory here, is not I (self) but the merging-dissolution. We have to do with an inaccurate description-interpretation of a certain extraordinary experience that belongs to the very I at issue. The experience is someone’s experience. It is my, or your, or his, or her experience; it is what have happened with me, or you, or him, or her – what I, or you, or he, or she have (has) experienced. Thus, the self (I) of the experiencer was there throughout the experience; it did not vanish, or dissolve; it was the one who experienced this extraordinary mental state. Therefore, if it seemed to this self that it has disappeared-dissolved, it was an illusion – the self’s illusion. The self itself is not an illusion. It is real and separate in its existence. It is the same self (I) that “stands behind” all interactions in which it takes part, and all changes that happen with it. The self (I) is an individual, distinct of all others, subject-bearer of experience and changes.
Really, the feeling of the unity with the world need not be opposed to one’s “selfness”, distinctness, separateness, individuality: one does not contradict the other. The unity of reality means that everything is in the process of interactions with one another – not the non-existence or “illusoriness” of those elements of reality that interact. Changes, in the case of a self, are changes of subjective states with the retention of the subject. (Dmytro Sepety, The Mind as Subjectivity: the Mystery of the Self, 8. The Problem Of Personal Identity.)
On the third day (Kai\ th~? h(me/ra? th~? tri/th?) there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee ... (John 2.1);The temporal phrases in these introductions are referent to the creation taxonomy as consisting of two triads. Additionally, both ciphers three and six, point to just those rubrics which identify The Holy Spirit, and which we briefly reviewed above. (Matthew's recension of the miracle also contains references to the 'Son of man' both before and after the miracle (Matthew 16.27, 17.9, 12). I have identified the symbolic masculine of the Day 3 rubric with the same figure, Son of man. Apart from the introduction to The Feeding Of The Four Thousand: '"I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat;"' (Mark 8.2, par. Matthew 15.32), the only other references of this kind, diurnal, temporal phrases, which also act as introductions, are those of the resurrection appearance narratives. These invariably utilise the construct 'eight days', or 'on the first day of the week', and their recursion to the P creation narrative is obvious, as is the fact that it nominates the Day 1 rubric of that cycle. We shall come to this issue in discussing the octave as a fundamental part of the acoustic semiosis.
And after six days (Kai\ meta\ h(me/rav e(\c) Jesus took with him Peter and James and John ... (Mark 9.2);
And after six days (Kai\ meq' h(me/rav e(\c) Jesus took with him Peter and James and John his brother ... (Matthew 17.1).
And God said: Let the waters teem with living beings, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the heavens.Reading the double pentad and the double hexad of the Transcendental and Christological miracle stories as both signalling the two poles of consciousness, conceptual-subjective and perceptual-objective, a propos of the forms of value native to each, the true and the beautiful respectively, follows from the first order distinction the narratives posit as wholes. It does not stem from simple allegorical methods of interpretation, which are metaphorical rather than analogical. The remaining substance of the Transcendental miracle story, the two fish, reaffirms the same hermeneutic. Fish are tokens of both operations, actively consuming and passively being eaten. The figure 2 numbering the fish, then complies with the same inference conveyed by the two pentads. Taken in conjunction with the number of loaves as well as thousands, since both are foodstuffs consumed by the persons, it fully serves the identification of the paired texts, Day 2 - Day 5, which identify Transcendence in the two narrative sections. But the chief emphasis of the miracle story falls to the figure 5, even if Day 2 is certainly the paramount rubric the pair 2-5 in the creation series.
And God created the great sea monsters and every living being that moves, with which the waters teem, each of its kind, and every winged bird, each of its kind. And God saw how good it was.
And God blessed them saying: Be fruitful and increase and fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.
And it was evening and it was morning, a fifth day. (Genesis 1.20-23, trans. Westermann/Scullion.)
And they had a few small fish (kai\ ei])~xon i)xqu/dia o)li/ga); and having blessed them, he commanded that these also should be set before them (Mark 8.7);This is not to say there is no consideration of polarity. In keeping with the actual emphasis of the wine and not the water in the Christology, the 7 here certainly enumerates the sevenfold messianic series. This marks the shift from the orientation of The Feeding Of The Five Thousand as the Transcendental Eucharistic event, to the Pneumatological Eucharistic event, and so from from the 'beginning' to the 'end'. So it includes the Eucharist, a point worth noting. The figure 6 in the Christology, isolates for attention the six miracles proper, analogous to the six days of creation proper. There are not seven conceptual forms, even if we count the perceptual categories as sevenfold, adding the fourth mode of sentience smell-taste to the tally. This was the point in describing the Sabbath as a member of the last four days, and as provisional, in that the second part of the narrative anticipates the four Eucharistic episodes. The Pneumatological feeding miracle story confirms this reading. Just as importantly, it combines with the Christological narrative, but not in terms of a qualitative marker for the distinction between subjective and objective axiologies synonymously with the conceptual and perceptual categories respectively. The integration of meaning between The Transformation Of Water Into Wine and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand turns upon the figures and not the substances. This it achieves while also recurring to the sevenfold schema which structures the story of beginning, since the Pneumatology catalogues the unequivocally immanent form of sense-percipience, optic memory. In other words, it lays claim also, to being the episode in completest contrast with the story of beginning, of any of the three Eucharistic miracle stories.
And Jesus said to them, "How many loaves have you?" They said, "Seven, and a few small fish ( e)pta\ kai\ o)li/ga i)xqu/dia)." And commanding the crowd to sit down on the ground, he took the seven loaves and the fish, and having given thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. (Matthew 15.34-36).
Now on the first day of the week ... (Th?~ de\ mia?~ tw~n sabba/twn ... John 20.1)This temporal framework cannot be understood without immediate reference to John's logos theology at the inception of the gospel, and the synoptics are no exception to this fact. Indeed they confirm it. The messianic series as a whole is implicated in the resurrection narratives as we see quite plainly from the three miracles of virtual transcendence. The empty tomb story from the shorter ending of Mark begins synonymously with the first of the appearance stories in John, and so does the appearance story from the longer ending. The stories of Matthew and Luke follow suit:
On the evening of that day, the first day of the week ... (Ou)/shv ou~n o)yi/av th?~ de\ mia?~ tw~n sabba/twn ... (John 20.19)
Now when the Sabbath was past ... (Kai\ diagenome/nou tou~ sabba/tou ... Mark 16.)
Now when he rose early on the first day of the week ... (A)nasta\v de\ prwi/ prw/th? sabba/tou ... Mark 16.9)It is obvious from these introductions, like those of the Christological messianic miracle stories, that the octave is semiologically bound to doctrines of resurrection. There are other resurrection appearance stories which do not involve the first day of the week: The Commissioning Of The Disciples (Mark 16. 14-18, Matthew 28.16-20); Jesus And Thomas (John 20.24-28), the phrasing of which however, is similar to that of the first narratives as well as to Luke's introduction to The Transfiguration, 'Eight days later ...' (John 20.24); and finally, the epilogue of John, which contains the third appearance story in that gospel, The Appearance Of Jesus To The Seven Disciples (John chapter 21). It begins simply:
Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week ... ( O)ye\ de\ sabba/twn, th?~ e)pifwskou/si ei)v mi/an sabba/twn ... Matthew 28.1)
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn ... (Th?~ de\ mia~? tw~n sa/bbatwn o)/rqrou baqe/wv ... Luke 24.1).
After this Jesus revealed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he revealed himself in this way. (John 21.1)The narratives which do begin with reference to 'the first day of the week' (the 'octave'), are significant to the understanding of the gospel of Mark in particular. That is because the acoustic semiosis discloses two forms of intentionality, the perceptual mode, knowing, and the conceptual mode, will-to-believe, which emanate respectively from acoustic memory itself, and the conceptual form space : time. These are semiologically represented by the same cadence in the major scale, 7-8. Moreover they recur at the beginning of The Apocalypse in the seven letters, and reassert Mark's soteriological agenda in eschatological terms.
Now about eight days after these sayings ( E)ge/neto de\ meta\ tou\v lo/gouv tou/touv w(sei/ h)me/rai o)ktw\) he took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. (Luke 9.28)
And he who sat there appeared like jasper and carnelian, and round the throne was a rainbow that looked like an emerald. (Apocalypse 4.3).So it seems viable to understand the lamps themselves as refracting the various colours of the spectrum. References to the menorah are concentrated in the first part of the text, and are linked with the seven letters to the angels of the churches. It is first described as golden, and seven in number:
Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden girdle round his breast; (Apocalypse 1, 12, 13);The first letter begins with a reference to the lampstands, and the church is threatened with removal of its lampstand:
As for the mystery of the seven stars which you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands, the seven stars are the angels of the churches and the seven lampstands are the seven churches. (1.20).
"To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: 'The words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands.'" (2.1),The idea of place here, especially in the first of the letters, is appropriate. It resonates with the iconography of the three-dimensional spatial manifold, which was reflected in the morphology of the creation narrative, and which the menorah reconfigures. The menorah is intelligible as a concrete metaphor of the same space : time manifold, though it accentuates the role of temporality. It accords with the acoustic semiosis as a metaphorical, if not analogical, means of reckoning the antithetical relational patterns subtended by the twelve categoreal radicals of consciousness, and justifies the use of the semeioptika in the same endeavour. The uniqueness of its single stem is equivalent to the singularity of the central point at which the three axes of the co-ordinate system intersect. This corresponds to both cadences in the conceptual and perceptual semioses respectively, 4th-3rd major/6th-5th minor and 7th-8th major/2nd-3rd minor, and to the single repetition of that particular semeioptikon representing the form of intentionality, in the conscious order. In the conceptual world of the creation narrative this is the former, and in the perceptual realm, it is the latter, for all six normative modes of intentionality.
"'Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place ( e)k tou~ to/pou au)th~v), unless you repent. '" (2.5).
It's doubtful whether the distinction between properties and relations can be given in terms that do not ultimately presuppose it - the distinction is so basic. Nevertheless, there are elucidations on offer that may help us better appreciate the distinction. Properties merely hold of the things that have them, whereas relations aren't relations of anything, but hold between things, or, alternatively, relations are borne by one thing to other things, or, another alternative paraphrase, relations have a subject of inherence whose relations they are and termini to which they relate the subject. More examples may help too. When we way that a thing A is black, or A is long, then we are asserting that there is some property A has. But when we say that A is (wholly) inside B then we are asserting that there is a relation in which A stand to B.Internal relations exhibit unity. These are relations of perceptual radicals to conceptual radicals. There are two Christological instances of this: (1) the normative and conscious relation of haptic memory to mind, expressed as the interval of a perfect fourth: A#:Eb; and (2) the non-normative and aconscious relation of haptic imagination to the conceptual form of unity soma (mind : body), expressed as the perfect fourth, E:A. Both relations are unequivocal.
Be careful though not to be misled by these examples. A can only be (wholly) inside B if A is distinct from B. So the relation in which A stands to B if A is (wholly) inside B requires a distinct subject from terminus. By contrast, A can be black without prejudice to anything else. But we cannot infer straightaway that every relation holds between more than one thing because there may be some relations that a thing bears to itself, if, for example, identity is a relation. So we cannot distinguish properties from relations by appealing to the number of distinct things required for their exhibition, since these may be the same, viz. one. Hence the plausibility of thinking that a relation differs from a property because a relation, unlike a property, proceeds from a subject to a terminus, even if the subject and terminus are identical. (MacBride, Fraser, "Relations", The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)).
When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine." And Jesus said to her, "O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come." (ou(/pw h(/kei h)/ w(/ra mou. John 2.3-4).
... but when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. (John 19.33-34).
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: "Thou art my beloved Son (su\ ei~ o( ui)o/v mou o( a)aphto/v; the title is sometimes translated 'my Son, my (or the) Beloved'); with thee I am well pleased." (Mark 1.9-11).
And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, "This is my beloved Son (ou(to/v e)stin o( ui)o/v mou o( a)gaphto/v); listen to him." (Mark 9.7; par. Matthew 17.5; Luke 9.35. The recension in Luke substitutes o( ui)o/v mou o( e)kleleghme/nov for o( ui)o/v mou o( a)gaphto/v, 'my Chosen' instead of 'my beloved'.)
(This he said to show by what death he was to glorify God.) And after this he said to him, "Follow me." (John 21.19).We observed the interaction between the themes of love and death in the second half of the creation narrative, as contingent upon assimilation, that is, the propagation of species, and the necessity of consumption. This tendency is of course even more pronounced in the J narrative. Both of these texts anticipate the Eucharistic miracle stories and the Eucharist itself. The first half of the creation rubrics may seem far less forthcoming with evidence of the association between love and death which the Christological narratives draw, but that is to mistake the meaning of the Sabbath and its relation to the hexameron. The Sabbath in the P narrative contains no explicit reference to death such as The Letter To The Hebrews will later develop. Nevertheless, it is the context for those events which immediately follow, the J narration of the disobedience of the first human couple. Death and the sexual propagation of the species are thus framed as following immediately upon the Sabbath.
An occasion of experience is an activity, analysable into modes of functioning which jointly constitute its process of becoming. Each mode is analysable into the total experience as active subject, and into the thing or object with which the special activity is concerned. This thing is a datum, that is to say, is describable without reference to its entertainment in that occasion. An object is anything performing this function of a datum provoking some special activity of the occasion in question. Thus subject and object are relative terms. An occasion is a subject in respect to its special activity concerning an object; and anything is an object in respect to its provocation of some special activity within a subject. Such a mode of activity is termed a 'prehension'. Thus a prehension involves three factors. There is the occasion of experience within which the prehension is a detail of activity; there is the datum whose relevance provokes the origination of this prehension; this datum is the prehended object; there is the subjective form, which is the affective tone determining the effectiveness of that prehension in that occasion of experience. How the experience constitutes itself depends on its complex of subjective forms. (Ibid, pp 226, 227).
Whitehead is among those who retain the distinction of subject and object while rejecting the accompanying metaphysical dualisms. For him, all (actual) objects were once subjects and all subjects become objects. (The term "actual" is inserted parenthetically, because there are also objects that are always objects - called "eternal objects" by Whitehead. These objects are not actualities but mere possibilities. They are discussed as such in section VII.) Subjects and objects are not two types of actual entities, but the same entities considered in different ways. [Emphasis added.]
To understand this, return to Ms. Smith. Whitehead, no less than most modern philosophers, focuses attention on what is going on in Ms. Smith's experience. But whereas most modern philosophers have taken as their paradigm case Ms. Smith's visual experience of a physical object, Whitehead takes as the paradigm case the causal efficacy of Ms. Smith's immediately past occasion of experience in the present occasion, or Ms. Smith's present prehension of that past occasion. The present occasion of experience is the subject of this prehension. The immediately past occasion is the datum of this prehension. A datum is an object for the subject for which it is given. In this way the subject-object structure of experience is reaffirmed.
But notice that the object [emphasis original] of the experience is itself an occasion of experience that had come into being as a subject of prehensions of other occasions. What is felt in the present occasion are the feelings of the past occasion. Those feelings or prehensions are its objects, but as feelings they have not lost their subjective forms. The difference is only that they are now completed and finished - in short, past. The world of (actual) objects is the world of past subjects. [emphasis added.] (John B. Cobb, Jr., Alfred North Whitehead, in, Founders Of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead And Hartshorne, State University Of New York Press, Albany, 1993, pp 174, 175).
Now the Word became flesh and took up residence among us. (Kai\ o( lo/gov sa\rc e)ge/neto kai\ e)skh/nwsen e)n h(mi~n.) We saw his glory - the glory of the one and only, full of grace and truth, who came from the Father. (John 1.14 NET Bible, emphasis added.)
When the head steward tasted the water that had been turned into wine (to\ u(/dwr oi}non gegenhme/non), not knowing where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), he called the bridegroom ... (John 2.9, emphasis added.)
Six days later Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John and led them up a high mountain privately. And he was transfigured (metemorfw/qh) before them ... (Mark 9.2 NET Bible, emphasis added.)The NLT renders the second sentence: 'As the men watched, Jesus' appearance was transformed'; the MSG has: 'His appearance changed from the inside out, right before their eyes'; and the BBE has: '... and he was changed in form before them.' See NET Bible Mark 9.2.)
Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name; and seeing him, he fell at his feet, and besought him, saying, "My little daughter (to\ quga/trio/n) is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live." (Mark 5.22-23, emphasis added).When we next hear of her fate, she is referred to unmistakably in the feminine:
While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler's house some who said, "Your daughter (h( quga/thr) is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?" (Mark 5.35, emphasis added).It is here that the personae of both parents enter the picture:
And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside, and he took the child's father and mother (to\n pate/ra tou~ paidi/ou kai\ th\n mhte/ra) and those who were with him, and went in where the child (to\\ paidi/on) was. (v 40).
And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue; and many who heard him were astonished, saying, "Where did this man get all this? What is the wisdom given to him? What mighty works are wrought by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?" And they took offense at him. (Mark 6.2-3).In the same vein, Jesus is referred to as '" ... Son of the Most High God ..."' (Mark 5.7) in the immediately prior healing miracle, The Gerasene Demoniac (5.1-24), the taxonomical treatment of the symbolic masculine within the healing miracle series.
'"The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath; so the Son of man is lord even of the sabbath."' (2.27-28).The healing miracle itself occurs, remarkably, on the sabbath. So the event amounts to a climax. It depicts the semeihaptikon of haptic memory as explicitly as possible, from the point of view of its axiological identity, and once again, the bonded relatedness of love and death emerges a a central construct:
And he said to them, "Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do harm (a)gaqo\n poih~sai h)\ kakopoih~sai), to save life or to kill?" But they were silent. (Mark 3.4, emphasis added.)In the concluding summary of healing that follows this suite of texts, A Multitude At The Seaside (3.7-12) also, we meet the Christological perceptual category:
And he told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, lest they should crush him; for he had healed many, so that all who had diseases pressed upon him to touch him. ( i(/na mh\ qli/bwsin au)to/n... i(/na au)tw~? a(/ywntai, 3.9-10) emphasis added.)
"For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels." And he said to them, "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here (tinev w[de tw~n e)sthko/twn) who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power." (Mark 8.38-9.1 emphasis added).This squares with John's final portrait of the 'beloved disciple', 'the disciple whom Jesus loved', in contrast to Peter:
When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, "Lord, what about this man?" Jesus said to him, "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!" (John 21.21-22).I am not seeking to identify the beloved disciple with the persona of the particular disciple John, said to have been present at the last messianic miracle; but rather to relate that miracle itself to that identity, just as Peter will be related to The Walking On The Water by Matthew (Matthew 14.28-33). We should recall here the significance of these three figures, Peter, James and John in the synoptics and the gospel of John, and the clear affiliations linking several of 'the twelve' with corresponding miracle stories, beginning with the association John forges between Nathanael and the first event of the messianic series. There does seem to be a clear link between these three foremost of the twelve disciples in Mark and the three miracles of virtual transcendence, and thence to the three pure conceptual forms, as part of a theological typology of personality. An important strand of which must be the developmental psychology inherent in the taxonomies of both Genesis and the gospel. Once again, such a possibility stems from the conceptual forms themselves.
But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God ( e)/dwken au)toi~v e)cousi/an te/kna qeou~ gene/sqai); who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 12.13).Consideration of the limited truth of the Peripatetic Axiom brings to light the reality of transcendence and its seminal role in Christian doctrine. The alliance between Transcendence and the future is more than simply one more means of opposing immanence and transcendence. It completes the reckoning with presented time as imbued with inheritance from the past (immanence) and anticipation of the future (transcendence). The equal and opposite influence brought to bear upon the present temporal domain by the past and the future is inseparable from the doctrine of intentionality, as this in its turn, conforms to the bifurcation of the spatiotemporal manifold. It gives rise to the discussion of causation as well as the elaboration of subjective and objective phases of intentional processes. Causality in this context is usually spoken of as either efficient, or final. A synonymous characterisation is that of passive and active. This introduces a further dichotomy to the several already deployed here. And it is perfectly apt to the way in which the categoreal paradigm is responsible for the categorisation of forms of unity with forms of memory as grafted to past experience on the one hand, and on the other, the antithetical categorisation of pure conceptual forms and forms of imagination.
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus (Tou~to fronei~te e)n u(mi~n o(/ kai\ e)n Xristw~? I)hsou~), who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped (o(\v e)n morfh~? qeou~ u(pa/rxwn ou)x a(rpagmo\n h(((gh//sato to\ ei]naie i)/sa qew~?), but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men ( e)n o(moiw/mati a)nqrw/pwn geno/menov). And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2.5-11).
There persists, however, throughout the whole period [the last three centuries] the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what is does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call 'scientific materialism.' Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived (Whitehead, Alfred North, Science And The Modern World: Lowell Lectures 1925, The Free Press, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1967, p 17, [p 22]).We shall have further recourse to the insights of process philosophies and theologies, even though it is obvious that certain discrepancies between some of these and certain Christian doctrines arise. For example, although it makes adequate allowances for final causality, and admits the reality of the future as influencing the present, God is not seen as creator, in spite of the role attributed to 'Creativity' in the abstract. The salvation of the world process is nevertheless envisaged, even if, once again, there is no equivalent to the doctrine of incarnation, Whitehead's interest in the middle Platonism of the Alexandrian fathers notwithstanding. The role of memory in the salvation of the world as understood by process philosophy, sits well with the Christian epistemology provided by the messianic series, but there is a real deficiency in Whitehead's psychology which stems from the premium placed upon on immanence at the expense of transcendence. And just as clearly, there can be no account of the threefold nature of God, although we find a systematic focus on the threefold forms of value, The Good, The True, and The Beautiful, which comes tolerably close to an equivalent of the Trinitarian God. (A further example of the inconsistency of process metapsychology with the exposition given here must be the summary and wholesale depiction of the to the 'primordial' (transcendent) nature of God as 'unconscious', and the subsequent definition of God's 'consequent' (immanent) nature as fully conscious. We shall pursue these matters in more detail in later chapters.)
Evolution, on the materialistic theory is reduced to the rôle of being another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive. But the whole point of the modern doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms. The doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature. (Ibid p 107 [135]).
The theory of the relationship between events at which we have now arrived is based first upon the doctrine that the relatednesses of an event are all internal relations, so far as concerns that event, though not necessarily so far as concerns the other relata. For example, the eternal objects, thus involved, are externally related to events. This internal relatedness is the reason why an event can be found only just where it is and how it is, - that is to say, in just one definite set of relationships. For each relationship enters into the essence of the event; so that, apart from that relationship, the event would not be itself. This is what is meant by the very notion of internal relations. It has been usual, indeed, universal, to hold that spatio-temporal relationships are external. That doctrine is what is here denied. (Ibid pp 122-123, [p 155]).
In every case of the antithesis maintained according to one specific Trinitarian identity, the relation of a pure conceptual form to a form of memory is external; and the relation of a form of memory to a pure conceptual form is internal.Axiom 11: External and internal relations in the aconscious order
In every case of the antithesis maintained according to one specific Trinitarian identity, the relation of a conceptual form of unity to a form of imagination is external; and the relation of a form of imagination to a conceptual form of unity is internal.Axiom 12: The resolution of the Christological, antithetical, relations
All Christological antithetical relations are either external or internal. Their resolution follows from the criterion of normativity. Relations of pure conceptual forms to correspondingly antithetical forms of unity are thus external, as are relations of forms of imagination to correspondingly antithetical forms of memory, in every case of the antithesis maintained according to one specific Trinitarian identity. Relations of forms of unity to correspondingly antithetical pure conceptual forms, and relations of forms of memory to correspondingly antithetical forms of imagination are internal, in every case of the antithesis maintained according to one specific Trinitarian identity.Axiom 12 clearly relates to the hermeneutic of the central structural patterns in both textual cycles, the creation series and the messianic series, independently of one another. But since the normative elements of immanent consciousness, the forms of memory, are given in the messianic series, and since the normative elements of transcendental consciousness, pure conceptual forms, are given in the P narrative, the resolution of the Christological relations entails the integration of the two texts. Neither is intelligible in isolation. The presence of the same Christological, antithetical mode in the formulation in each to so marked a degree that it is impossible to ignore, provides still further vindication of interpreting the creation narrative and the messianic series as wholly interdependent.
The relation of God to the world is external; the relation of the world to God is internal.Thus all of the numerical references must comply with fundamental relational patterns readily discernible in the acoustic semiosis. Viewing the 5 and 4 of the two narratives, as counting thousands of persons, and consequently as somehow jointly intelligible, we shall revisit the two opposing circles of fourths and fifths which structure dodecaphonic series in both directions. (We have already accounted for the 12 and 7 numbering the baskets of fragments a propos of the twelve semeiacoustika and 6-7 semeioptika respectively. This is yet another instance of the coherence of what is meant by 'jointly intelligible'.) The consideration of the two intervals, perfect fourth and perfect fifth, entails the question of internal and external relations. These are tenets essential to the theology of semiotic forms, which are at once congruent with the notion of subjective and objective forms of consciousness.