>>
>> The terms 'higher' and 'upward' are, alas, left utterly undefined.
>>
> Yes. It always struck me how similar the evolutionary picture was
> to the older great chain of being. Only diff being that in one you
> have man at the top, and in the other, God.
>
> And the industrial revolution + capitalism changed our metaphors so
> that the latest is always the best. Put those two together and you
> have some of the less scientific underpinnings of evolutionary theory.
The quoted passage is from a book criticizing the ontological foundations of orthodox evolutionary theory. You can't rationally conclude from the fact that the terms aren't defined in that passage that they aren't defined in the rest of the book or in Whitehead's work as a whole.
Here's a passage from another work, Adventures of Ideas, providing some elaboration and explicitly indicating the relation to Plato.
"The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence into prominence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciations of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty. The moral element is derivative from the other factors in experience. For otherwise there is no content for duty to operate upon. There can be no mere morality in a vacuum. Thus the primary factors in experience are first the animal passions such as love, sympathy, ferocity, together with analogous appetitions and satisfactions; and secondly, the more distinctly human experiences of beauty, and of intellectual fineness, consciously enjoyed. Here the notion of intellectual distinction, or of fineness, is somewhat broader than that of 'truth', which is ordinarily cited in this connection. There is a grandeur of achievement in the delicate adjustment of thought to thought, which is independent of the mere blunt question of truth. We may term it 'beauty'. But intellectual beauty, however capable of being hymned in terms relevant to sensible beauty, is yet beautiful by stretch of metaphor. The same consideration applies to moral beauty. All three types of character partake in the highest ideal of satisfaction possible for actual realization, and in this sense can be termed that beauty which provides the final contentment for the Eros of the Universe.
"For European thought, the effective expression of this critical discontent, which is the gadfly of civilization, has been provided by Hebrew and Greek thought. Its most adequate expression, so far as concerns literary delicacy and definition of the issues involved, is to be found in Plato's dialogues." Adventures of Ideas, p. 12
Ted
Ted