“[W]hen we survey the living world, animal and vegetable, there are bodies of all types. Each living body is a society, which is not personal. But most of the animals, including all the vertebrates, seem to have their social system dominated by a subordinate society which is ‘personal’… Thus in one sense a dog is a ‘person’, and in another sense he is a non-personal society. But the lower forms of animal life, and all vegetation, seem to lack the dominance of any included personal society. A tree is a democracy.” – Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

I recently had a fun online conversation in a process theology fb group with a Whiteheadian influenced thinker named Kyle Humphres (Kyle’s post is here ((joining the group may be required to read the post… not really sure))). At one point during the dialogue Kyle made this claim about human societies:

“Society in America is an ‘aggregate’ because it doesn’t have a unity of experience like a cell or human being. That the emergence of groups, organizations, and society is mediated by language and so is an abstract system made up of concrete living subsystems called human beings. With this understanding we cannot apply a whiteheadian understanding of living societies (atom-human) to groups of organisms because they are not connected in the same way.”

I think Kyle makes a good observation here; human societies don’t necessarily have a unified self-conscious experience like individual humans have. Kyle indicated to me that he staunchly believes that the universe’s unity, for example, can only exist as an interconnected web at the micro-level, and if the universe had any experience of it’s own it would be unconscious, i.e. we see no empirical evidence that the universe is self-conscious like humans are because for that type of subjective, self-conscious experience to appear it would at least require (as far as we know) complex organization (which most likely includes abstract symbolic language of some kind) at the macro-level with a dominant personal society (basically: the universe is too disintegrated to be self-conscious; perhaps if it had a brain and central nervous system like humans have it might be a different story).

Like I said, good observations. I’d like to make a few more observations too:

1) Echoing Whitehead, I think that what John Cobb and Charles Birch observe in their book, The Liberation of Life, is important: “A cell, unlike a stone, has an inherent unity and cellular events are constituted by a new level of internal relations with their environment. This means that a cell has experience of its world in some dim way analogous to our own…”

2) Along with Charles Hartshorne, I think it’s important to point out that there are different types of living societies in the world and some of these other types of societies may be similar in some ways to human societies.

3) There are other living organisms on Earth, besides humans, that talk to each other and we might be mistaken to assume that the intensity of experience open to humans is not also open to them.

First, let’s get some terminology out of the way:

I like to use the basic terms of “living entity” and “inert entity” to refer to living things versus non-living things; an example of a living entity would be a plant (or an animal), and an example of an inert entity would be a rock. As far as I can tell, Whitehead talks about four major kinds of societies: enduring objects, corpuscular societies, structured societies, and living societies.

An enduring object is the simplest kind of society in Whitehead’s scheme, a molecule might be an example. Enduring objects are made up of little events that prehend or envelop each other, one after the other, thus creating a connective thread that lasts through time. These sorts of entities appear to be pretty repetitive and mechanical as there is very little aim at novelty or at the increase of harmony or intensity of experience.

Enduring objects, then, form the building blocks of everything that is around us. Corpuscular societies, for Whitehead, would be inanimate objects such as rocks or chairs. Clare Palmer, in her book Environmental Ethics and Process Thinking, does a great job describing what Whitehead means by “structured societies”:

“Enduring objects and corpuscular societies both exhibit what Whitehead calls ‘structure’. Structured societies contain smaller societies and nexus within them, which Whitehead calls ‘sub-societies’ and ‘sub-nexus’. A table, for instance, contains a structure of ‘sub-societies’ in the form of molecules. A table, However, is a very simple kind of structured societies. The repetitious nature of actual occasions which compose it mean that it persists through time, and through changing environments, by failing to absorb any of the changes which go on around it. This repetition in the face of change may enable the corpuscular society to persist, but it prevents it from generating novel and deeper experience. ‘Its parts merely transmit average expression, and hence the structure survives. For the average is always there, stifling individuality.’”

Living societies come is all shapes and sizes; the simplest kind, perhaps, is the living cell. It is a structured whole, with personal order, and is composed from smaller sub societies and sub nexus of molecules and electrons (which are “enduring objects” but not “living”). Humans are also living societies and so are plants. Famously, however, Whitehead believed that because plants lack a central nervous system and don’t “think” they are more of a “democracy” than a “monarchy” because plants are composed of a societies of cells that appear to be democratically organized, with each being equal to the others. Humans, on the other hand, seem to be guided by a dominant personal society, thus the comparison to a “monarchy.”

Now, to Hartshorne.

I think Charles Hartshorne is right when he says that Whitehead’s societies exhibit differing degrees of closeness but also correctly observes that he (Whitehead) does not make any distinctions between different types of society. Hartshorne does, and this is important. Hartshorne uses “organism” instead of “society” to talk about this stuff (he distinguishes between “organisms” and “quasi-organisms”; both are societies) and in his essay A World of Organisms he says this: “My suggestion is that any whole which has less unity than its most unified parts is not an organism in the pregnant sense here in question,” so an electron, or a human, which are both more unified than their most unified parts, are organisms; while a plant, which is less unified than its most unified parts (its cells) is a quasi-organism. Hartshorne attributes intense individuality to the society called “organisms” (humans, cells) and intense plurality to the society he calls “quasi-organisms” (plants). Because of this Hartshorne believes that we, humans, can more easily identify with an electron than with a plant because electrons are individuals in the sense that they are more unified than their most unified parts; a plant, in contrast, Hartshorne compares to a human city. And I think Hartshorne’s analogy here is a good one.

Unaware of Hartshorne’s likening of a plant to a human city, I made the same analogy during my online discussion with Kyle. Now, I do part ways with Hartshorne and Whitehead a bit here apparently because although Hartshorne clarifies some of Whitehead’s categories, he seems to end up in the same boat with Whitehead thinking of human societies as merely aggregates with no interests of their own; for example, as Kyle reminded me, Whitehead famously says this:

“There is no one American value experience other than the many experiences of individual Americans” (Essays in Science and Philosophy pg.52)

Hartshorne would probably say something similar. Although he would liken a plant to a human city in the sense that they’re both types of concrete living societies, he would probably also say that a plant and a human city have no interests of their own save for the interests of their parts (which is what Whitehead is saying directly above). I disagree. I would want to say, as Brian Henning does in his great book, that a plant (and I personally would also describe a city this way) “is a vast network of societies that work as a whole to form a macroscopic individual with ‘objective interests’ of its own. Its ends may be frustrated or satisfied. Unlike an aggregate entity such as a stone, a blade of grass has ends that may be frustrated or satisfied; for instance, it may have greater or lesser access to the sun or nutrient-rich soil.” The same is true for a city. For example, Flint Michigan (a human society) has needs/ends that may be frustrated or satisfied, in this case clean water. And, as Henning points out in his book (citing Fredrick Ferre), “some plants are capable of defending themselves as a whole, receiving stimuli when attacked and responding with toxins or other defenses in appropriate ways… Plants may turn out to have more tightly organized internal relations than traditional botany has suggested.” That last bit in italics (emphasis mine) is important. Human communities/societies work together: to accomplish goals, to defend themselves, and to help each each other. I’d wager that the internal relations of human societies are more tightly organized than our American, protestant, individualistic mind-frames would lead us to believe.

Henning goes on, continuing to cite Ferre’s book: “[a tomato plant] uses an electric signal to alert its defense system against grazing caterpillars. Attack on one leaf results in chemical antidigestants being produced in others, slowing the grazing process, thereby longer exposing the caterpillars to predators of their own.”

Additional commentary by Henning here: “If we are to honestly meet our obligation of education, we must be willing to admit that some plants may be sufficiently complex to support a form of personal society that provides some degree of central coordination. If this is true, the difference between plants and animals may not be quite as neat as the distinction between “democratic” and “monarchic” societies implies. Thus I agree with Ferre, who writes, ‘From a metaphysical point of view, the distinction between them [plants and animals] is far less interesting than the great similarities that unite them as innovative, responsive, creative systems.’ If plants are indeed more complex than previously recognized, then the intensity of experience open to them is greater than previously realized and we must modify our behavior toward them accordingly.”

Henning’s right. If plants are more complex than we thought then we should modify our behavior of course, but also our theories, perhaps in particular the (anthropocentric) assumption that says humans, with their stupid brains, central nervous systems, “self-awareness” and monarchic societal structures, are the only creatures around enjoying/enduring intense, novel experience; it’s actually no wonder why we have lunatics like Jordan Peterson running around claiming hierarchy and inequality are inherent, unchangeable parts of nature. Humans need to get over themselves! Perhaps, if we’re more sensitive, and attempt to understand the multifarious ways that various life forms on Earth communicate and cooperate with each other it will give us a much broader sense of what “life on Earth” is truly about. Perhaps trees and plants can teach us how to be proper democracies. Maybe we should learn from the trees and from the indigenous people who have been telling us this exact thing for hundreds of years:

“Do you know that trees talk? Well, they do. They talk to each other, and they’ll talk to you if you listen. Trouble is, white people don’t listen. They never learned to listen to Indians so I don’t suppose they’ll listen to other voices in Nature. But I have learned a lot from trees: sometimes about the weather, sometimes about animals, sometimes about the Great Spirit.” -Tatanga Mani or Walking Buffalo, Stoney Indian, Canada (1871-1967)

Amen.

Tags:brian henningcharles birchCharles Hartshorneclare palmerdemocracyecologyjohn cobbnatureprocess philosophysocietywhitehead