"Appetition is at once the conceptual valuation of an immediate physical feeling combined with the urge toward realization of the datum conceptually prehended." (Whitehead) I have noticed that when my son needs to eat if I eat he will often just pick at his food or entirely ignore it. This noticing is the appetition of his current distress with the vagueness of my love for him and the suffering he will experience as this concresces in his experience of his life later as he matures as well as the desire in me for his health and well being and for harmony and peace in his everyday life.
It is the actual event of suffering in the world that I keep returning to in my relationship to people's thinking. As I said before, Whitehead's philsophy of organism does not adequately address suffering for me. It has a natural positive tendency that does not transform or alchemize the oppression of life.
Eating and appetition have nothing directly to do with eachother. That is not just a problem limited to the philosophy of organism or the language of process thought, but a confusion that extends out into every form of thought. Like the difference between limbs that evolve in a direct descent or in disconnected ways- "The wing is a classic example of convergent evolution in action" (Wikipedia)- for example, in birds and bats.
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