Merleau-Ponty Meets The Kripke Monster Redux, #5–Concluding Semi-Autobiographical Quasi-Whiteheadian Postscript.

By Robert Hanna

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1. The Essential Embodiment Theory Briefly and Compactly Re-Presented and Re-Motivated

2. Three Later Significant Elaborations and Extensions of The Essential Embodiment Theory: Natural Libertarianism, The Neo-Organicist Worldview, and The Metaphysics of Liberal Naturalism

3. One Cheer, But Only One, For Analytic Panpsychism

00. Concluding Semi-Autobiographical Quasi-Whiteheadian Postscript

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This essay has been published in five installments; this fifth and final installment contains section 00.

You can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay, including the REFERENCES, HERE.

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00. Concluding Semi-Autobiographical Quasi-Whiteheadian Postscript

By virtue of its commitment to the neo-organicist worldview and the metaphysics of liberal naturalism, the essential embodiment theory bears certain important similarities to A.N. Whitehead’s panexperientialist organicism in his 1929 masterpiece of speculative cosmology, Process and Reality (Whitehead, 1929/1978) According to Whitehead, everything in the cosmos is essentially, systematically, and organically composed of micro-level, living atomic processual events he calls actual entities, each of which necessarily and complementarily possesses a “mental pole” and a “physical pole,” and also enacts special kind of subjective experience and relational intentionality that he calls prehensions. But it seems to me that filling the cosmos, all the way down, with micro-level living atomic mental/physical experiential processual events, is an excessively and implausibly strong theory, when it’s also fully feasible to be committed to the essential embodiment theory, natural libertarianism, the neo-organicist worldview, and the metaphysics of liberal naturalism. Nevertheless, the essential embodiment theory and its presuppositions or implications do, in a specially restricted way, share some of the metaphysical benefits of Whitehead’s panexperientialist organicism: namely, that creatures like us — i.e., appropriately dynamically complex kinds of organismic living creatures — are indeed minded all the way down. But, in salient contrast to Whitehead’s panexperientialist organicism, the essential embodiment theory says that all and only those creatures are minded in this way.

One last thing about Whitehead & me. More precisely, I’ll now conclude with a semi-autobiographical quasi-Whiteheadian comment that might throw some further light on the philosophical provenance of the essential embodiment theory and its later elaborations and extensions, right up to 6am this morning. As an upper-level undergraduate student and a beginning graduate student, I was a Whiteheadian True Believer for several years, and even travelled all the way to Washington, DC to write my MA thesis on Whitehead’s metaphysics under the direction of Paul Weiss, who had been a PhD student of Whitehead’s at Harvard.[i] During my Whiteheadian True Believer phase, I even bought myself a 1929 first edition copy of Process and Reality for more money than I had that month for groceries. And then, a year or so after that, when I’d moved on from Whitehead’s process philosophy and was a recovering Whiteheadian, I read and closely studied Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and I thought to myself (roughly): “This is amazingly amazing! Conscious, intentional human perceivers like us, who, by means of ‘our body, as the potentiality of this or that part of the world, surges towards objects to be grasped and perceives them’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: p. 106), are just macro-level versions of Whitehead’s actual entities!” And I fantasized about actually working out an adequate solution to the mind-body problem along those very lines, when I finally grew up to be a real philosopher. So I think that, to this extent, Embodied Minds in Action could also be accurately microsynopsized as

Merleau-Ponty Meets The Whiteheaded Kripke Monster

— which sounds like some amusingly off-the-wall horror/science-fiction movie from the 1950s or 1960s, directed by Jack Arnold, Roger Corman, or Ishiro Honda. I like that too.[ii]

NOTES

[i] Later, at Yale, Weiss was also Richard Rorty’s PhD supervisor. The fact that Rorty and I were both Yale PhDs, roughly thirty years apart, and that we both had the same supervisor, ditto, and other closely-related amazing historico-philosophical facts, is another story for another day (Hanna, 1983, 2020c).

[ii] A version of this essay was presented at LMU Munich in December 2022. I’m very grateful to Christopher Erhard for arranging this talk and for thought-provoking conversations on and around the main topics of this essay, and also grateful to the members of that audience for their good comments and questions.