Thoughts on Nature

As we make our way through the films, here are some reminders (from Whitehead, Nature Alive).

205-206 Now as a first approximation the notion of life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment. This must mean a certain immediate individuality, which is a complex process of appropriating into a unity of existence the many data presented as relevant by the physical processes of nature. Life implies the absolute, individual self-enjoyment arising out of this process

of appropriation.

>>  Immediate individuality: no mediation here (no culture/nature dichotomy)

>> self enjoyment of the immediate individuality - this is not about a human's enjoyment, but a process's capacity to reach its potential

206 I have termed each individual act of immediate self-enjoyment an 'occasion of experience'

>> everything that is experienced enjoys its process of experience. To enjoy is not to bring a moral register - it is to emphasize the open-endedness of potential. This is not mediated by human experience, though to become intelligible to us, it will always be in the register of the more-than human (there is of course experience which remains unintelligible to us).

206 This concept of self-enjoyment does not exhaust that aspect of process here termed 'life'. Process for its intelligibility involves the notion of a creative activity belonging to the very essence of each occasion.

>> life exceeds intelligibility. This is its anarchic share. Creativity can be understood as this anarchic share coinciding with a certain capacity to be registered. (The capacity to be registered is something that art can do.)

207 It is nonsense to conceive of nature as a static fact, even for an instant devoid of duration. There is no nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration. This is the reason why the notion of an instant of time, conceived as a primary simple fact, is nonsense.

>> time exceeds metric time. 

207-208 We must add yet another character to our description of life. This missing characteristic is 'aim'. By this term 'aim' is meant the exclusion of the boundless wealth of alternative potentiality, and the inclusion of that definite factor of novelty which constitutes the selected way of entertaining those data in that process of unification. The aim is at that complex of feeling which is the enjoyment of those data in that way. 'That way of enjoyment' is selected from the boundless wealth of alternatives. It has been aimed at for actualization in that process.

>> aim is the way the anarchic share co-composes with the process of making-intellibile of existence that troubles life. Aim cuts into potential to make experience discernible (to us, to more-than us).