Coherence and Value: Camus, Whitehead, and the DQM

Written by DS
Lead-In: The Question of Value

From Aristotle to Nietzsche, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, philosophy has circled the same question: what is value, and where does it come from? Aristotle rooted it in flourishing, Nietzsche in will to power, Kierkegaard in faith, Heidegger in authenticity. Each sought to show how value emerges, whether as essence, strength, surrender, or resolute choice. Yet the question remains unsettled: is value discovered in the world, created by the self, or guaranteed by the structure of being itself? This essay argues that value, at its most fundamental level, is coherence, and turns to two different voices, Albert Camus and Alfred North Whitehead, exploring how their insights can be reframed through the Dynamic Quadranym Model (DQM) to show how coherence might itself be the origin of value.

  • Part I: Camus — Coherence Claimed
  • Part II: Whitehead — Coherence Felt
  • Part III: DQM — Coherence Expressed
Part I: Camus — Coherence Claimed

Albert Camus grounds his philosophy in a fundamental human experience: our innate search for meaning. We long for our lives, choices, and suffering to add up to something, yet the world, as he sees it, offers no such guarantee; it is indifferent. The clash between this human longing and the world’s indifference is what Camus calls the absurd. He argued that metaphysics is a response to humanity’s inherent “yearning for unity”—a desire to find a singular, ultimate, and rational explanation for existence. However, he found that reason and the natural world are silent on this matter, leading to the frustrating paradox he called the absurd.

This “Absurd” isn’t the meaninglessness itself, but the confrontation between the human need for order and the world’s chaotic silence.

Camus strategically begins his work by rejecting traditional metaphysics, insisting that the only valid perspective is a purely human one. He is not describing a mood but asserting that an individual’s sense of value and coherence is a volitional act—a choice made by human will in the face of an indifferent universe. This stance gives his claim of “not doing metaphysics” its rhetorical force: he is stripping philosophy back to the level of lived human experience and existential choice.

Nevertheless, his work cannot avoid metaphysical weight. By locating value in a personal, subjective choice, he is not simply describing an emotion. Instead, he is deploying metaphysics precisely to claim that coherence and value do not pre-exist in the world but arise from the subjective state—the individual’s stance of rebellion against absurdity. This is a profound claim: that something real and meaningful can emerge from a condition of nothingness.

Camus’s project thus redefines the relationship between the subjective and the objective. He takes the objective state of cosmic absurdity and uses it as the very material from which a subjective, volitional value is built. Value is not discovered but created; not inherited but claimed.

In his view, there are two common responses to the absurd: evasion or revolt. Evasion involves either suicide or a “leap of faith” into an ideology that imposes false meaning. Camus insists on revolt: the refusal to give in to despair, living and acting without the need for external guarantees.

His most famous image is Sisyphus, eternally condemned to push his boulder up a hill. While the task is purposeless, Camus imagines Sisyphus happy. Why? Because Sisyphus claims coherence for himself. His dignity comes from the sheer holding of his subjective state, his refusal to collapse, and the persistence of his will against indifference. He affirms the cycle, even without promise.

Ultimately, Camus’s achievement is to show that value can be claimed here, at the point of coherence itself. By isolating value in the subjective act of revolt, he reframes one of philosophy’s oldest concerns, axiology. While axiology traditionally asks whether value is intrinsic or instrumental, objective or subjective, Camus offers a different answer. Value, for him, is intrinsic, but not discovered; it emerges in the conscious act of rebellion. In this way, he advances a position of real philosophical importance: coherence itself can stand as value, created in and through human volition.

Part II: Whitehead — Coherence Felt

Where Camus locates coherence in revolt, Alfred North Whitehead treats coherence as fundamental to reality itself. His process philosophy begins from the claim that the basic units of reality are not substances but events—what he calls actual occasions. Each occasion is a pulse of becoming that arises, integrates, and perishes, only to contribute its coherence forward into the ongoing advance of the universe.

Coherent feelings do not perish over time; rather, they form the basis of a self-creating momentary entity called an “actual occasion”. Each occasion integrates its feelings to achieve a unified, coherent experience before perishing. This process of perpetual perishing and integration is basic to the unfolding of reality. Historical coherence exerts a causal influence on the creation of new moments. 

For Whitehead, coherence is not something fragile that must be claimed against indifference. It is guaranteed as the very structure of process. Every actual occasion integrates novelty into its own coherence; every perishing becomes a contribution, or superject, to the lineage of the many becoming one, and being increased by one. In his view, coherence is felt at the heart of experience itself—every occasion prehends others, takes them up, and in so doing affirms their togetherness in a nexus.

This “feeling” of coherence is not the same as self-awareness or conscious reflection. It is a more primitive, fundamental grasp of other occasions and their relations. It is the nexus of feeling and process that provides the reflective layer of cognition—the layer that makes a coherent instant something to be claimed. Consciousness, for Whitehead, is an emergent property of more complex actual occasions, like those that make up a human mind. It is a feeling of feelings, a higher-order experience that can reflect on the pre-conscious coherence that is always present.

This metaphysical stance gives Whitehead’s system its optimism, but an optimism that fully accounts for tragedy. Nothing is lost; every satisfaction, however small, is preserved in the advance of creativity. But the essence of tragedy is not unhappiness; it is “the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” The perpetual perishing of occasions, the loss of what was, is the tragic dimension of the universe. Value is not precarious or dependent on rebellion but is intrinsic to the fabric of becoming.

Coherence here is not claimed, as in Camus, but inevitable: it is the metaphysical ground of order, novelty, and beauty, which includes a tragic beauty that is inseparable from loss.

If Camus sharpens the drama of human revolt by denying metaphysical guarantees, Whitehead expands the drama of reality by showing that coherence is always already guaranteed, even in tragedy. What feels like indifference or emptiness in Camus is, for Whitehead, simply the silence before coherence makes itself felt.

Part III: DQM — Coherence Expressed

The Dynamic Quadranym Model (DQM) offers a grammar of orientation. Where Camus isolates value in revolt and Whitehead grounds it in metaphysics, the DQM proceduralizes it, showing how coherence operates as a function across all orientations. It does not reduce coherence to meaning, nor inflate it into ontology, but traces how it is sourced, pressured, and expressed in cycles of becoming.

Quadranyms nest into various hierarchical layers (i.e., from general to relevant). These nested layers form virtual systems of responsiveness. The approach aims to assist with hard Artificial General Intelligence semantic orientation tasks.

Prime Quadranym:[Expansive(subjective) → Reductive(objective)]

Coherence as Default

In the DQM, the subjective state is always coherent by definition. It is the anchor that holds, the stable ground that makes orientation possible. But crucially, this coherence is not meaning. It is value without content—a silent ground that does not yet carry propositional form or truth conditions. Meaning belongs to the world of objects, relations, and potentials, but coherence belongs to the subjective pole itself.

In the orientation grammar, canonical forms of the quadranym, such as the Prime Quadranym, model the general process of orientation, while specific quadranyms like, Space, Time, Energy and Agent are their particular renderings or species. A Quadranym is a construct for a topic (T) that models how subjective coherence is expressed as an objective reality. Its basic equation is Subjective for Topic = Objective, where the subjective side’s inherent coherence is expressed through an expansive mode and a reductive mode. It is a way to model how we orient to things to target the meanings of things from a position of coherence. For example, passage for door is an  orientation rendering that finds a barrier (object). Passage can stay unmeasured as its objectification as a barrier becomes the measure and therefore the meaning. If the system can no longer orient on passage as the coherent anchor, then the door is no longer a door. The affordance collapses, and door becomes a wall. Coherence is not a property of the object (e.g., “that’s a door”) but of the system’s ability to orient around a coherent affordance. That orientation is always anchored in a standpoint, not in a static semantic label. This procedural foundation allows the system to calculate transitions and maintain coherence.

Door[Open(passage) → Close(barrier)]

The Recursive Process

The model formalizes this as a recursive loop. A system begins with a coherent subjective state, canvasses potentials (Expansion), meets pressures from the world (Positive Displacement, PD), and binds to one of them (Reduction) if its coherence (Negative Displacement, ND) can hold. The bind installs a new objective state, which satisfies for the coherent being of the next loop. Orientation is therefore not a single act but a ceaseless cycle of coherence holding, binding, and perishing forward.

Camus captures this very structure symbolically in the myth of Sisyphus. What appears in his work as a human allegory of endless repetition, the DQM formalizes as a recursive feedback loop between coherence (ND) and pressure (PD). The boulder returns, the will returns, and each cycle becomes the site where value is claimed.

The Value of Void

This is where Camus’s revolt and the DQM most clearly intersect. For Camus, dignity arises when one claims value in the absence of meaning—coherence held for itself, even against the indifference of the world. In the DQM, this same logic applies not to a special category, but to every quadranym: the subjective state is always coherent, unmeasured, and unattended. It is value without content, the silent ground that makes all objectified meaning possible.

Space[Infinite(void) → Finite(between)]

One of the clearest illustrations of this is the Space quadranym, where the subjective pole is void. Void here does not name a philosophical category of nothingness or Camus’s void as the fundamental meaninglessness of existence; it is simply the coherent, unmeasured side of space, contrasted with between, the measured and objectified pole. Here, void is non-propositional but coherent. In practice, void is constantly overshadowed by “between potentials,” the myriad objects, relations, and separations that fill space. These are PD, pressing in with demands that threaten to overwhelm the quiet coherence of void. In the recursive churn of orientation, void is often buried, swept up into the process of spatial objectification.

Camus’s act of revolt can be read as a reclamation of void. By refusing to flee into illusion or despair, he restores the value of the subjective state itself. Sisyphus, in pushing his rock, does not uncover hidden meanings in the world; he asserts the coherence of his will, holding void against the press of between. His dignity lies in claiming this intrinsic value untouched by the world’s meanings.

Value doesn’t emerge from matching the world — it emerges from persisting as a coherent subject even when the world offers nothing.

Synthesis:

The DQM provides a grammar for the very dynamic that Camus dramatizes and Whitehead metaphysicizes.

Where Whitehead guarantees value by grounding coherence in the metaphysics of process, and Camus claims value by isolating it in revolt, the DQM shows how both are possible. The subjective state is by default coherent; that coherence is value without content. Swept into objectification, it takes on meaning. Held consciously, as in Camus’s rebellion, it becomes dignity. In either case, coherence is the source from which value arises.

Afterthought: Holding Coherence for Ourselves

It is easy to lose sight of value in the ceaseless churn of process. Whitehead assures us that nothing is lost, that every event contributes to the advance of creativity, yet even his optimism must account for anguish and tragedy. The DQM shows us the recursive machinery of orientation, how coherence persists through cycles of pressure and change, but in mapping the process we risk forgetting its felt ground.

Camus’s brilliance is to make that ground appear. He does not point to it as Whitehead does, nor formalize it as the DQM does, nor dissolve it into metaphysical optimism. He insists on it, simply and directly: rebel, hold, feel. In the face of an indifferent universe, his revolt calls us back to the subjective state, where coherence itself is value. For this we should be grateful. His stand gives dignity to the moment we inhabit — before meaning, before metaphysics, before the process carries us on.

  • We can respect Whitehead’s vision without mistaking it for proof.

  • We can use the DQM without letting it overwrite the rawness of experience.

  • We can return to Camus—not for answers, but permission to live with none.

Notes & Clarifications

Subjective State/Coherence:

When we talk about coherence in a purely scientific or formal sense—like in physics, systems theory, or logic—it often refers to structural consistency, symmetry, or lawful integration. But such coherence doesn’t mean anything unless there’s a standpoint from which it matters. That’s where the organismic element enters: coherence isn’t just a pattern that exists—it’s a pattern that is felt, responded to, lived through, and held together by a system capable of sensing it.

Quadranym Components & Variables:

Template:
T: [Y(a) → X(b)]

Term Function (Generalized)
T (Topic) The orientational domain — a word-topic that frames interpretation (e.g., agent, space, goal, social, energy). It defines the local shifts.  
➤ In other words, local dynamics being tracked in a global situation.
a (Anchor) The original, contextually coherent state or principle. Not measured, but assumed as the base of orientation (e.g., self, void, culture, movement).
➤ Simply put, a is FOR T to find b.
b (Target) A context-driven expectation or evolution projected from a. Not an alternative to a, but a potential fulfillment, variation, or extension — judged through real context.
➤ Example: culture (a) → social order (b)
Y / X (Extensions) Modes of expansion or testing. Y is typically expansive (identity, inclusion, potential); X is reductive (feasibility, output, implementation).
➤ They trace how b emerges from a.
COT (Context of Text) The situational context (institutional, social, historical, environmental) in which orientation is judged.
➤ Includes events, conditions, discourse, and constraints.
Gate (Coupling Gate) A threshold that tests whether b meaningfully fulfills a, in light of COT.
➤ Compares ND (anchor coherence) with PD + τ (pressure + margin). If ND ≥ PD + τ → b is installable.
Install Occurs when b passes the gate and becomes content for the new anchor a′.
➤ Signals a shift in orientation and enables actionable scripts from b.
Deepen Happens when b fails the gate. a holds, but becomes more layered and specific.
➤ Orientation stays coherent while rejecting change.
Script A repeatable action or procedure that emerges when b is installed.
➤ Indicates that the proposition is operational — it’s “doing work.”
τ (Hysteresis Margin) A buffer to prevent overreaction or rapid switching.
➤ Protects orientation from flipping prematurely; gives time for real conditions to mature.
ND (Anchor Coherence) A measure of how coherent, strong, and intact a remains.
➤ High ND defends against install; a still holds its place and sense.
PD (Pressure to Deliver) External pressure or urgency to move from a to b.
➤ Can come from events, institutional needs, social demands, or crises.

The Quadranym is fractal like in a systemic system of orientation.