/lit/ - Literature

>>14427434
>Humans have perceptions, rocks don't.
Actually crystalline growth is an excellent example of Whitehead's theory that can be very visible, crystals are a literal example of how external relations are part of the interiority of an object. The structural definition of a crystal, "a piece of a homogeneous solid substance having a natural geometrically regular form with symmetrically arranged plane faces" tells omits the life of a crystal that resulted in such a structure. As a crystal grows the conditions of its environment are continually "impressed" upon its surface as immediate interaction, influencing but not wholly determining future growth. In phantom crystals this can be observed as different layers of inclusions that result from changing physical and chemical conditions. Ordered repetition of structure isn't the only ingredient, but also divergence from self-similarity that can create extremely dramatic formations.

Also consider how mineral specimens are described similarly to works of human art: the mineral species is the medium, and the location (both duration and location of growth) is the "artist." Different growth patterns and appearances can be likened to aesthetic styles, and are appreciated as such by many rock hounds.

>This focus on concrete modes of relatedness is essential because an actual occasion is itself a coming into being of the concrete. The nature of this “concrescence,” using Whitehead’s term, is a matter of the occasion’s creatively internalizing its relatedness to the rest of the world by feeling that world, and in turn uniquely expressing its concreteness through its extensive connectedness with that world. Thus an electron in a field of forces “feels” the electrical charges acting upon it, and translates this “experience” into its own electronic modes of concreteness. Only later do we schematize these relations with the abstract algebraic and geometrical forms of physical science. For the electron, the interaction is irreducibly concrete.