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The title of this paper is taken from this famous viva voce remark by Whitehead. Purportedly this was the final line of Whitehead’s brief introduction of Russell during the latter’s series of William James Lectures at Harvard in 1940. The paper itself takes the occasion of the publication of a book on each of these two philosophers by Paul O. Kuntz (ANW, BR) as an opportunity for re-examining some of the interesting philosophical and historical comparisons between these two pivotal intellectual figures of our century.

I.

"Simplemindedness" hardly seems an appropriate description for Bertrand Russell, one of the more complex minds of our age. Yet beyond Whitehead’s original harmless and humorous intent, there is a serious and sympathetic sense in which this designation captures precisely the spirit and intent of Russell’s basic realistic and logical approach to philosophical questions in the era of G. E. Moore and the "common sense" approach to empiricism. After the apparent dissolution of normal empirical and relational thought at the hands of F. H. Bradley, and the apparent paradox (as Russell himself complained) that it was now impossible to know anything without first knowing everything, "simplemindedness" must have seemed the only antidote possible for philosophy.

Russell’s "simplemindedness" is evident, not only in his demand for clarity and logical rigor, but in his unwillingness to mire himself in important philosophical issues for which clarity and rigor might not represent attainable goals. The latter attitude is revealed, for example, in Russell’s profound discomfort over the subtle differences between the development of realism in Great Britain and America, illustrated in correspondence with his American counterpart at Harvard University, Ralph Barton Perry.

In many respects, the evolution of realist positions in the two cultures was remarkably similar especially when we compare William James’s rejection of Josiah Royce’s idealism with G. E. Moore’s famous attack on Bradley in 1903. But the differences between British and American versions of the realist doctrine are also profound and ultimately were of even greater significance.¹ Russell noticed these differences but simply could not interpret or accept them. He was not, for example, particularly hospitable to the American realists’ attempts to reconceive the very notion of experience upon which empiricism should be founded, preferring instead to join Moore and others in England in a virtually uncritical acceptance of the older "commonsense" notion of experience as human (and usually visual) perception derived from their seventeenth-century cultural predecessors Locke and Hume.²

Instead, Russell in effect joined forces with Josiah Royce in America to condemn James for having abandoned the quest for truth and clarity in favor of expediency. He perceived the realists in America more generally as sliding down the "slippery slope" of metaphysical obfuscation from which all had only so recently emerged. Thus, when Perry and several prominent realist colleagues issued their collective manifesto, The New Realism in 1912, Russell wrote that the Americans had combined a style of logic "that I heartily agree with" with a metaphysic, derived from William James, denying the old mind/matter dualism. He observed: "So far I have not been able to agree with this metaphysic, but I am open to conviction; it is only on logic that I have really decided opinions."³

It is hard to imagine a greater contrast with Whitehead, who later came to regard the presumed exactness of logic as "a fake," and who not only did not refuse the metaphysical task, but delved into it more deeply than any modern thinker since Hegel. Surpassing even the considerable efforts of Bradley, McTaggart, Royce, James, Peirce, Bergson, Alexander, Lotze and a host of other important practitioners of the metaphysical art, Whitehead developed a truly novel and original metaphysical stance that is sufficiently complex so as to border either on the profoundly esoteric or the arcane and obscure. While most intellectual historians agree in ranking Russell among the giants of this century, and even accord him a place of honor in the entire 2500-year history of the Western philosophical tradition, the judgment is still not in on Whitehead’s role and place in that history. Despite the spirited defense of Whitehead’s superior philosophic originality recently offered by Charles Hartshorne,⁴ the charge of "muddleheadedness" lodged by philosophers of a more Russellian, analytic temperament has proven the more serious threat to Whitehead’s reputation than Whitehead’s own charge of "simplemindedness" has proven to Russell’s.

II.

In many respects, Whitehead and Russell symbolize the deep division in professional temperament, style, and methodological stance that has subsequently come to dominate contemporary philosophy: analytic versus continental; logical and linguistic versus the systematic and metaphysical; conceptual elucidation and clarification versus historical study and phenomenological description. Whichever style or stance one favors, and accordingly, whichever philosopher-icon one chooses to defend, it is natural to stress the radical differences between Russell and Whitehead on that account.

The two philosophers themselves seem to encourage that tendency toward stressing their differences. In Whitehead’s "Autobiographical Remarks," and in Russell’s Portraits from Memory⁵ each, with Edwardian grace and dignity, comments on the attitude of affectionate respect for the other, on the growth of that respect to friendship and collaboration on the monumental Principia Mathematica,⁶ and on the subsequent dissolution of the collaboration and cooling of the friendship. Whitehead attributes the later developments to a divergence of "fundamental points of view -- philosophic and sociological." Russell adds an account of the strain in their friendship owing to his pacifist views during the First World War -- and takes principal blame for exacerbating that tension. Each tended graciously to credit the other for formulating most of the seminal ideas in the Principia.

Given all this, it is not to be wondered at that subsequent students and interpreters of each have focused on the differences between the two philosophers. Hartshorne, for example (n. 4), focuses on the admittedly sharp differences in the respective reactions of Russell and Whitehead to five important predecessors: Hume, Leibniz, Bradley, Bergson, and James. Whitehead reacted with moderation, care, and historical sensitivity to each, deriving something of importance from all five in constructing for himself a truly original philosophical position. By contrast, Hartshorne accuses Russell of reacting in an extremist, unhistorical, and largely conventional manner to each, parroting an unreconstructed version of Hume’s logical atomism as his own, and rejecting the likes of Bradley and Bergson root and branch.

This estimate is hardly unbiased and may not be entirely fair to Russell. Nonetheless it is an estimate shared by such otherwise disparate figures as George Santayana, John Passmore, and Errol E. Harris. This assessment does not attempt to do justice to the enduring importance of several of Russell’s own discoveries, such as the theories of descriptions and of logical types, which I shall take up in a subsequent section of this paper. But it is difficult at times to see how the theory of perception encompassed in Russell’s logical atomism adds anything to Hume’s position, even as it is often hard to exonerate Russell from the stigma of simpleminded extremism and inconsistent excess -- as, for example, in his variant intemperate reactions to the metaphysics of William James. The best we can do is acknowledge, with Kuntz, that there is a sense in which this unbridled and rebellious extremism in Russell’s nature stemmed from a secularized Calvinist evangelical fervor in behalf of the quest for Truth, which constituted a venerable tradition in the Russell family (BR, p. 2).

In contrast to Russell, Whitehead’s reaction to Hume and James was complex and highly original. Like James and Russell, Whitehead was committed to a pluralist position, albeit not the "radical" pluralism of either of the other two. He adopts from James (and Bergson) the broad outlines of an event-oriented metaphysics in which the fundamental dynamic and structured entities (his "actual occasions") can, under variant circumstances, be shown to exhibit the properties of both matter and mind, and are themselves not properly classified as either. Somewhat paradoxically, given the pluralist sensibilities of all these thinkers, this view has come to be known (through James) as "neutral monism." From James in particular, Whitehead borrowed the generalized notion of "experience" as pervasive and as constitutive of all entities, characterized chiefly by vague and preconscious feelings of causal connectedness and mutual influence among the neutral entities. This notion is vastly more extensive in scope than, as well as the necessary precondition of, the sort of higher-order and limited "experience" characterized by conscious perception and reflective thought.

But none of these views is accepted without radical revision of the sort that a thoughtful critic like Hume might raise. For example, Whitehead introduced the notion of event epochalism in order to avoid the skeptical implications in the presumed paradox (common to Bergson and James) that an undifferentiated continuity of becoming, since it neither begins nor ends, cannot be conceived as determinate or concrete, nor can it be said to "constitute" a plurality of distinct existents.

Whitehead then proceeds to build upon the metaphysical infrastructure of discrete but internally-related "actual entities" in order to develop a critique of Hume’s attack on induction and causality -- a rejoinder whose importance has been vastly underestimated by non-Whiteheadians. The rejoinder to Hume consists principally in offering a reductive analysis of the sort of perceptual experience upon which Hume’s (and Russell’s) empiricism is based. This kind of perception, common to British empiricists from the seventeenth- through the twentieth-centuries, Whitehead terms "presentational immediacy." It consists of a highly abstract, derivative, and limited second-order experience consequent upon a more vague and rudimentary kind of perception, which Whitehead terms "causal efficacy."⁷ It is the former mode of pre- or subconscious perception -- exhibited in the behavior of bodily organs and tissues, manifest and directly observable also throughout the sentient but nonhuman world, and bearing a close resemblance to William James’s "stream of consciousness" or "blooming, buzzing confusion" -- upon which our conscious knowledge of the "causal nexus" may be grounded. The knowledge of causality may be grounded in experience only by paying attention to the mode of experience in which causality is the principle constituent; but it is precisely this mode of perception that both Hume and Kant ignore. Instead, empiricists and their critics focus exclusively upon perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, in which vivid impressions (sounds, color patches, and the like) are abstracted from their vague, causal nexus and given selective conscious attention. Clearly, if Whitehead (and James) are correct about experience, it is a trivial rather than a profound result that causality cannot be "observed" in Hume’s sense.

It is not clear that "presentational immediacy" is even a form of perception, strictly speaking, at all. Rather, it is a projection by a percipient subject onto a (fictitious) contemporaneous spatiotemporal manifold of certain highly refined and analyzed features of entities directly (but more vaguely and dimly) encountered in the percipient’s immediate past through the mode of causal efficacy.⁸ The important distinction between true perception -- what we might now in Rortyan jargon call nonmentalistic "unanalyzed raw feels" -- and this second-order symbolic projection of select percepta characteristic only of higher-order conscious organisms is somewhat blurred by terming both equally "modes of perception." Whitehead means to deny the "supervenient projection" interpretation of presentational immediacy and portray it as an autonomous and legitimate mode of perception in its own right. But the phenomenological description offered makes it clear that presentational immediacy is consequent upon a particular type of bodily amplification and selection of sense data derived from the stream of consciousness comprising the immediate past actual world, further abstracted and focused in the human situation through selective conscious attention to some, but not all, of the features of the immediate external world recorded and amplified by the body.

Moreover, in developing this rejoinder to Hume and in attempting to distinguish between the "present" implied by "presentational immediacy" and the "past" of causal efficacy, Whitehead on occasion makes inconsistent claims. On the one hand he seems to hold that there is a well-defined simultaneous present encompassing many entities -- that is, a solidarity of distinct entities in a "unison of becoming," as distinguished from the causal influence of other entities from the shared past -- such that "perception in the mode of presentational immediacy" would involve the mutual relationship of entities distinct from those constituting a single entity’s past actual world. On the other hand, Whitehead seems to accept (with some reluctance) the physical doctrine of relativity, according to which there could not be a solidarity of entities in a unison of becoming. Such a phrase would lack precise meaning, as each entity would comprise its own time-frame of reference and exist in a forced "solipsism of the present moment," in Santayana’s famous phrase.

Hence, in calling attention to this unique appropriation of and response to Hume, I do not mean to suggest that every facet of Whitehead’s theory is beyond constructive criticism or revision. Rather, I mean to suggest that, alongside Whitehead’s logic of relations, his stress on the importance of relative predicates, and his novel theory of "prehensions" -- a list Charles Hartshorne quite rightly cites as Whitehead’s "revolutionary" contributions to Western thought -- I would add the doctrine of symbolic reference and particularly the notion of perception in the mode of causal efficacy. While Karl Popper is generally given all the credit for "solving" the problem of induction through the deductive notion of "falsification," it is my own judgment that Whitehead’s is the only account of induction and causality that can respond to Hume while preserving a commitment to empiricism, experience, and that stubborn grain of realism that remains deeply and perhaps forever imbedded in the scientific enterprise. In any case, there is a kind of originality here that Russell, to my mind, never quite successfully emulates.

A more amusing account of the differences, written from a perspective more sympathetic to Russell, highlights the sense in which mainstream Anglo-American analytic thought has tended to ignore or downplay Whitehead. The philosopher Randall Collins in 1978 "unearthed" a forgotten manuscript of Dr. John H. Watson, recounting a suspenseful case of Sherlock Holmes in which Bertrand Russell figured as the central character. The case centers around the suspicious death at Cambridge of the brilliant Indian mathematician Ramanujan, and the incipient madness of Russell’s eccentric young protege, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Interwoven in the case are anecdotes, both real and contrived, about the Cambridge Apostles, Whitehead, G. E. Moore, John Maynard Keynes, Aleister Crowley, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Circle, and Annie Besant and the Theosophical Society. In attempting to unravel the "mystery" of who is really threatening Russell’s life and attempting to drive Wittgenstein to madness -- and to what purpose -- Watson offers midway the following summary indictment:

I hesitate to ruin, through sober commentary, what is all intended in fun. But this deliberate caricature (which is rejected by Holmes and subsequently proves, of course, unfounded!) is only one of numerous places in which certain unconscious governing assumptions in the Anglo-American mainstream -- in which this clever and articulate author, Collins, has been educated -- are glaringly evident. Russell is the philosopher for all seasons, a true hero, scrupulously committed to morality and truth throughout. Wittgenstein, while distant, unapproachable, and eccentric, is beyond question the most brilliant philosopher of this century. The portrayal of Whitehead even in fun, by contrast, is uninformed to the point of total ignorance, wholly unsympathetic, and altogether unfaithful to every scrap of genuine evidence and testimony we possess regarding his biography or the experiences of his numerous colleagues and students, including Russell.

III .

Against that background of division, antipathy, and unenviable ignorance on both sides of the current philosophic divide, I count it one of the strongest aspects of Paul Kuntz’s recent studies of Whitehead and Russell that he labors to call attention (especially in the Russell volume) to the surprising and dramatic similarities between both philosophers. ¹⁰ Given my stress in the previous section on the importance of Whitehead’s theory of perception in the mode of causal efficacy, it is revealing to notice that Russell apparently coined both the term and concept, leaving it to Whitehead to make use of it (BR, p.51). By 1944, however, Russell was enthusiastically acknowledging that "dynamic causal efficacy" also solves the long-standing problem of induction: in his famous Five Postulates of Nondemonstrative Inference, the so-called "structural postulate" makes reference to causal efficacy in asserting and that causal connections can be justifiably inferred from identity of structure within a series of events.¹¹ All of this sounds very close to Whitehead’s position. Hence, if lam right in my estimation of Whitehead’s theory of symbolic reference, some credit ought to be paid to Russell for participating in its formulation, and for coming to a similar recognition of the issue on his own in due time.

On the other hand, Russell credits Whitehead with having "awakened" him from his "dogmatic slumbers" by devising the mathematical technique, called "extensive abstraction," for deriving such presumably fundamental notions as point-instants and material particles from sets of events. Russell claimed that this technique provided the insights which led to his own theory of descriptions and the application of Occam’s razor.¹² It is ironic that both philosophers should have been so deeply indebted to each other for concepts that proved central to their own philosophical methods, especially when one considers the often different uses to which those concepts were put: consider, for example, what might ensue if only the theory of descriptions and Occam’s razor were applied to Whitehead’s notion of microscopically constituent "actual entities"!

If, as I suggested in the last section, the obvious and oft-noted differences between Russell and Whitehead symbolize the current analytic-speculative split, then the kinds of similarities and (perhaps even more importantly) the areas of mutual influence, indebtedness, and philosophic enrichment to which Professor Kuntz rightly points can suggest to contemporary philosophers a neutral "dialogical territory" beyond the present, hostile philosophic "demilitarized zone," which is no longer itself viable, interesting, or worthy of the vocation of philosophy.

While numerous specific instances of such similarity of temperament, method and conclusion are cited, Kuntz’s major effort to compare Russell and Whitehead proceeds by classifying both as proponents of "order." This move is, unfortunately, quite problematic. One of the more famous of the innumerable quotable aphorisms from the pen of Russell would seem to discount such a move from the outset. He writes:

Order is certainly a pervasive and important issue in the classical tradition of metaphysics, and Kuntz might seem to be on firmer ground in suggesting the centrality of this issue in Whitehead’s thought (e.g., ANW, pp.2, 92). The intricate and highly structured categorial scheme of Process and Reality suggests such a concern, which Kuntz rightly links to Aristotle, despite Whitehead’s occasional disclaimers of the Aristotelian tradition (ANW 106). It is not obviously true that Whitehead’s categorical scheme is dialectical, or exhibits explicitly the "dialectical struggle of opposites" (ANW 92). It turns out, however, as Kuntz reluctantly observes, that the notion of "order" that might be derived from a study of Whitehead’s metaphysics is equivocal (ANW 95), and surprisingly, Whitehead on occasion also gave evidence of his distrust of the notion of "order" as the preeminent philosophic issue.

In this regard I recall an anecdote (but not the source or reliability thereof!) concerning Whitehead’ s friend and colleague in the Harvard Law School, Associate Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Frankfurter to the U.S. Supreme Court on January 5, 1939. Shortly thereafter, Frankfurter paid a call on the Whiteheads to bid them farewell. "I’m off to Washington," he announced. "Oh!" replied Whitehead. "What takes you there?" Somewhat surprised that he had apparently not heard the news, Frankfurter reported that he had just been appointed to the Supreme Court. "That’s wonderful" beamed Whitehead. Then, straightening a bit in his chair he said importantly, "We need Order!" While turning to leave, however, Frankfurter overheard Whitehead remark softly to himself, "but not too much order!"

Kuntz’s account of both Whitehead and Russell suffers from "too much order." The elaborate categories and hierarchies of order that Kuntz propounds are his own, rather than either of theirs, and both philosophers fit into Kuntz’s esoteric metaphysical scheme only uncomfortably, at best.¹⁴ Far more valuable, in my opinion, are the specific doctrinal, historical, and biographical comparisons that can be drawn between both thinkers, to which Kuntz along the way in the Russell volume contributes a number of valuable additions. Let me add some of my own reflections.

Whitehead customarily is regarded, for example, as an anomaly in the tradition of British philosophy. Apart from his early mathematical and logical interests, he is more likely to be dismissed along with Bradley, Bosanquet, and Hegel than honored with Russell, Mill, and Hume. But Russell is no less an anomaly in that tradition. His own logical and mathematical interests are no more evident, nor are they any more sophisticated, than Whitehead’s, and his passionate interest in cultural and political affairs is more to be ranked with Sartre, Camus, or perhaps Herbert Marcuse than with the normative tone of academic British philosophy symbolized by the likes of Austin, Prichard, and Moore. In addition, Russell’s thorough and bitter repudiation of the later Wittgenstein and the "linguistic turn" in Anglo-American philosophy is even more strident than his denunciation of American pragmatism, and (as he himself wryly observed) he became as a result every bit as isolated from the subsequent Anglo-American mainstream as was Whitehead or the most speculative "Continentalist" or committed philosophical pluralist today (cf. BR, pp. 71-74).

It is less often noted that, along with common sense empiricism, the British philosophical tradition historically seems to include a strong commitment to a kind of atomism and philosophical reductionism, in the sense of endeavoring to explain the inferred in terms of the experienced, and the compound or complex in terms of component or constituent simples. This is how Russell himself characterizes the essentials of "analysis" (BR, pp. 56-62). Hume is taken as the paradigm case of these tendencies. But if so, we would have to reckon Whitehead and Russell both as Hume’s chief conscious exemplars in this methodological stance -- far more so than Ayer, Austin, or "either" Wittgenstein. Consider first how deeply both 20th-century thinkers were explicitly indebted to Hume in particular, as well as to other classical British proponents of this approach (e.g., Locke). Russell’s indebtedness is often acknowledged, but Whitehead’s is more frequently overlooked. Hume’s methodological commitment to the primacy of sensory experience led him to what we have come to term a "psychological atomism"; Russell’s development of a logical empiricism led to a "logical atomism" (the only characterization of his overall views he was willing to accept; BR, p. 58). Whitehead’s approach, by comparison, led to a metaphysical atomism justified explicitly by the logical and perceptual foundations common to himself and the early modern empiricists.

Finally, it is intriguing to note that, biographically speaking, both philosophers exhibit a profound personal paradox that, to my mind, is not emulated in the other, considerably lesser figures of 20th-century British thought. The paradox can be characterized as follows. While Russell promoted a logical and metaphysical view that seemed to stress disconnectedness, nonconstitutive external relations, and the absence of anything resembling inherent order, structure, or community, it is hard to find a more passionately engaged "community figure" in the contemporary philosophic scene. While his philosophical views would seem to underwrite a notion of privacy and seclusion, there is no more public figure to be found in contemporary English-language philosophy. His well-known and admirable devotion to the education, nurture, preservation, happiness, and well-being of others seems to have little grounding in his formal views.

Whitehead, the proponent of a metaphysics of solidarity, community, and interconnectedness, might have been expected to stress and himself pursue deep personal involvement in the life of friends and acquaintances and active political commitment to the public good. While he was active in local parliamentary politics before coming to America, and while he did indeed stress the value of open public education in numerous of his public lectures and writings in this country, nevertheless Whitehead was, by every account, an intensely private and solitary individual. Although he had many loyal students and devoted admirers, he had few deeply personal relationships or anything resembling close friends. I can think of only one parallel to this extraordinary paradox: that of Royce and James. James, the philosopher of individuality and private conscious experience was a gregarious and community-oriented personal figure; Royce, the philosopher of community and loyalty was, somewhat like Whitehead, a quiet loner, on one occasion reportedly offering a lecture course with an enrollment of one student, whom he never so much as addressed or personally acknowledged. ¹⁵

IV.

Personal and historical details are intriguing, but it is on philosophic substance that the Russell-Whitehead comparison should rest. The remarkable similarity can best be traced by presupposing a background of the Whiteheadian metaphysics of interconnected events and the earlier Jamesian notion of "neutral monism," and tracking Russell’s journey from views ostensibly critical and quite unlike these, to a "final view" after World War II that was remarkably similar to Whitehead’s in many relevant aspects.

Russell is perhaps best known for his theory of descriptions, for his hierarchy of logical types, and for his attempts to correlate empiricism and sense experience with what Sir Arthur Eddington came to call the "two worlds" doctrine of physics and common sense. All of these discoveries reflect Russell’s commitment to logical clarity and certainty; all would be taken as indicative of the sharp distinction between his logical-analytic method and the speculative, descriptive, and often imaginative metaphysical temperament of philosophers like James and Whitehead. However, not only did Russell’s own views evolve more toward a metaphysical position compatible in the main with that broadly shared by the other two philosophers, but one may also see in the early, presumably anti-metaphysical views some of the seeds of Russell’s later pluralistic event monism.

This is perhaps least true of Russell’s distinction of hierarchies of logical types of discourse, which was one of his earlier and most important contributions to logical analysis. It is quite difficult to describe how someone else comes by an important intuition, but in the case of this discovery, I have always had a hunch that Russell simply saw something about propositions and classes of these that reminded him of the sorts of levels or hierarchies mathematicians take for granted in geometry or function theory. In Euclidean geometry, for example, the complete mapping or mathematical "description" of an n-dimensional surface requires a volume of dimension n + 1 or greater. The additional dimension can, somewhat simplistically, be thought to provide the vantage point of perspective from which the surface may be defined without loss of detail. The hypothetical vantage point is not itself a member of the set of points defining the surface, and thus it is not itself constrained by or included in the mathematical description of that surface.

This much is obvious to any geometer, and it simply seems to me that Russell had the genius to recognize that, in like manner, propositions about other propositions had to be understood as of a logical order at least one "step" beyond that of the propositions they described. For example, a proposition asserting a strong predicative claim about the general truth-value of the propositions Cretans normally utter cannot itself be of the same status or order as they (even in the case when this "meta-proposition" is itself uttered by a Cretan). It is at least one logical order "beyond" the class of entities it describes, and is thus not itself necessarily described by the set of properties it ascribes to the class of propositions it is characterizing.

On the basis of this insight, one is able to solve (or better, dissolve) the famous paradox of Epimenides the Cretan (who claimed that all Cretans are liars), or at least identify and clarify the nature of the paradox presently silk-screened on numerous APA fund-drive T-shirts, or, most importantly, circumvent Russell’s own paradox of the class of all classes that are not members of themselves, a notion that was otherwise crucial to the attempt to demonstrate the foundations in logic of the arithmetic concept of number.

This seminal intuition or discovery presupposed Russell’s tacit background familiarity with mathematics, as did numerous of his other innovations. It was just as often true, however, that this tacit background misled or bamboozled, instead of bringing greater clarity. Consider the famous problem of private versus public verification of normative descriptions in sense-data theory, of which Russell was for a time a leading proponent. The problem was this: observers of a penny lying atop a desk in a classroom see a variety of visual percepta -- oblong copper-colored ellipsoid solids of one sort or another -- somewhat at variance with the "normative description" of the "penny-an-sich," which (we claim to know on the basis of experience) is "in fact" a thin copper disk, or better, a right-cylinder of certain mass and spatial dimensions. What each observer "perceives" are unique sets of sense-data, sensibilia, or percepta. Quite apart from the ontological status of these, how do we make the inferential leap from those actual, but diverse, private experiences to the normative or public veridical judgment, "That is a penny on top of the desk" (where "penny" now stands exclusively for the normative description just given, as opposed to the particular ensemble of sense data we happen to perceive from a particular frame of reference)?

Russell held that the normative public description was a construct obtained by collating and coordinating (in principle at least) all of the possible private sensations. The procedure is roughly as follows.¹⁶

To each observer there corresponds a 3-or 4-dimensional perspective or "private space," in which the sense data literally serve as mathematical points in mapping out the existence and extent of objects that a particular observer seems to perceive. For several observers, there will correspond several such "private spaces," and if all are observing a single object, that object will be uniquely mapped into each observer’s perceptual space. However, upon comparing observations, it will become evident to the respective observers that some of the "points" in their space correspond (to a greater or lesser degree) to points in their neighbors’ mappings as well. If all such collaborative or overlapping data are then mapped by consensus into a separate topological entity, which Russell designates "public space," the locus of all such common points can be taken as the normative description of the object as it is in itself

This same procedure could in principle be repeated by a single observer, making many separate and independent observations from different perspectives, and then mapping them onto one another to obtain the "normative" description. In practice, of course, no sane observer would bother to go through such a procedure in every case. Russell claimed that we instead make use of a number of linguistic shortcuts that normally suffice to perform the same task more efficiently. However, this formal method of "construction" could serve both as a foundational account and a court of appeal for disputes arising over perceptual veridicality.

In a short and unremarkable biography of Russell, A. J. Ayer went to some length to describe this procedure of Russell’s, and opined that he found it "rather incomprehensible."¹⁷ We need not, however, be misled, as Ayer apparently was, by this strong dependence upon a mathematical metaphor. Actually, what Russell proposed, in a sense, was a straightforward application of a standard procedure in topology, termed "isomorphic projection," most commonly utilized by cartographers precisely to compile onto a single surface the information contained in a variety of observer’s perspectives, thereby actually producing a (normative) map! Russell’s appeal to this common practice, however, begs the important question of how, in his case, the necessary "correspondence" among different points in the different observers’ perceptual spaces is to be ascertained. And this problem regarding the "public" comparison and verification of diverse "private" sensations is precisely what is at issue in the first place!

I have belabored these somewhat detailed descriptions, because together they illustrate the manner in which Russell’s commitment to logico-mathematical method sometimes yielded striking insights, and yet other times came to nought. Whitehead turns out to be right: the presumed "exactness" of logic is a fake, and Russell was no more or less prone to error or excess through employing it than were other philosophers (like Whitehead) who eschewed it -- a point Russell seems later to concede in his account of his subsequent "Retreat from Pythagoras" (BR, p. 54).

In particular, although the second specific example of logical construction turns out to fail, it nonetheless indicates the more general approach to realism that Russell adopted, captured chiefly in the early period in his theory of descriptions. It is important to notice the realistic-pluralistic metaphysical underpinnings of Russell’s "logical constructivism" which seems on the face of it (and was certainly intended by Russell at this time) as decidedly anti-metaphysical. We can understand Russell’s later cautious advocacy of an explicitly metaphysical position as in part resulting from a consistent and continued commitment to, and application of, this method of logical construction, together with a dispassionate exploration of its full implications, rather than writing off this later phase as entirely distinct and grossly inconsistent with the earlier phases of Russell’s career.

In outline, Russell’s famous axiom of logical constructivism – "whenever possible logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities" ¹⁸ -- can be understood as a generalization of the principle entailed in the earlier theory of descriptions. For the logical constructions are complex propositional functions that represent the descriptive characteristics of inferred entities such as electrons, billiard

balls, and pennies (as mentioned) or also the "golden mountain" of Melnong, the present King of France, or the term "God" described as "that than which nothing more perfect can be conceived." The difference is that, in the first three cases, the propositional functions (propositional phrases, descriptions) will have definite arguments of which they are a function: i.e., actual perceptual data sensed, or capable of being sensed. In the latter three cases, by contrast, the functions will be indefinite or indeterminate: that is, the function, propositional phrase, or description has no definite or determinate argument.

To elaborate: consider the formal sentence "x is Ø," where Ø stands for an ensemble of sense data associated with the alleged substantial entity, x. Let x = "billiard ball," and we can associate a definite Ø_b’ a set of properties in a descriptive sentence corresponding to sense data in an ensemble actually characterizing a portion of our perceptual space, consisting of things like sphericity, hardness, color, elasticity and the like. The sense of the phrase "x is Ø" in this case depends upon the determinate reference to Ø_b.

In a second case, let x = "electron," whence Ø_e , more problematically depends upon another ensemble of sense data in perceptual space, Ø_e ,comprising readings on a number of laboratory instruments. This second ensemble of instrument readings, Ø_e, then constitutes the basis of inference to Ø_e, the description of the electron (or any other such "object" of physical science). This was Russell’s solution to the correlation of the inferred entities of physics and the actual sense data field of experimental laboratory scientists. The sense of "x is Ø_e" here depends on an intervening reference to the sense data ensemble Ø_e

Then finally, let x = "God" in the ontological argument, and Ø_e = "that than which nothing more perfect can be conceived." Ø_g is suddenly now not an ensemble of sense data, nor is it inferred from another ensemble Ø_g referring to some primary locus of an observer’s perceptual space. The reference is formally indeterminate: there is no locus of sense properties in perceptual space, nor can some such ensemble be inferred from any actually existing ensemble. In Russell’s analysis, while we can concoct a descriptive phrase in regard to some entity x, in this particular case there is no reference (either direct or inferred) for Ø_g , so that there are no instances of x. The same holds true for x = "unicorn," or "the present King of France." In Russell’s earlier elaboration of Frege, such phrases appear to have a determinate sense, but, while they therefore seem to denote some object or state of affairs, they have no determinate reference, and so they do not in fact denote anything at all.

In my parlance, the golden mountain, God, and the present King of France are not denoting phrases or descriptions of actual logical constructions. They at best point to hypothetical constructions, and existence is not a necessary property of hypothetical constructs. Hence, while we seem to talk about the latter three entities in sentences of the same grammatical form as those used to talk about electrons, billiard balls, and pennies, that grammatical similarity is seriously misleading and the source of logical conundrums. The grammatical similarities mask the profound difference that there are no instances of such hypothetical entities, and hence a corresponding absence of any sensibilia out of which logical constructions or descriptions are formed. In the absence of such data, the phrases do not denote nonexistent or transcendent objects or entities; rather, they simply do not denote at all, and the presumed metaphysical puzzle is, as much as anything, merely a function of awkward grammar.¹⁹

In a stroke, then, Russell is able to dispense with Meinong’s ontological conundrum and the ontological argument, while providing as adequate an account as anyone has ever been able to offer of how normal human perception and sense data relate to the "objects" of physics. The latter development, a philosophical stage in Russell’s career consequent upon the earlier logical investigations of which the theory of descriptions was a crowning achievement, turns out to have some surprising metaphysical implications. With this method, we have not simply done away with linguistic clutter, we have made the positive assertion that the ultimate "simple" or constituents of things experienced are neither the objects of common sense nor the "scientific" objects of physical theory (electrons, quarks, and the like). Moreover, unlike his colleagues C. D. Broad and G. E. Moore, Russell did not long hold fast to the extensive and absurd violation of Occam’s razor entailed in maintaining some sort of mysterious ontological status for sense data or percepta apart from their originating objects (which are now "constructions").

Instead, Russell came to the conclusion that the ultimate constituents of our universe are "particulars," of which he gave an account that, even midway through his long career, was already remarkably reminiscent of Hume and Whitehead:

Whitehead and numbers of his followers likewise frequently adopt the complex and intriguing metaphor of the composition of symphonies or musical works out of the constituent "vibratory" and non-substantial notes in order to account for the more general composition of enduring compound individuals and objects out of "actual occasions." But Russell added more comparisons. In "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," he appeared to embrace what he had earlier stoutly rejected; the "neutral monism" of William James. ²¹ In his James Lectures at Harvard in 1940, he abandoned the term "particulars" for "universals" or "qualities" that, based on the examples he cites, functioned somewhat like Whiteheadian "eternal objects": that is, ordinary macroscopic objects or experiences are to be conceived as a particular togetherness of these qualia at a given locus in spacetime.²²

My interpretation of Russell’s meaning here is neither forced nor farfetched when we consider his own account of the matter, which he likewise considered a sustained development of his attempt to offer a metaphysical description of things consonant with the latest and best findings of physics, psychology, physiology, and mathematical logic. In his 1959 essay entitled "My Present View of the World," he argued that the fundamental entities are discrete but overlapping "events," that the fundamental entities of mathematical physics are "constructions composed of events," and that entities like conscious minds and "selves" are best understood as collections of events "connected with each other by memory-chains backward and forwards."²³

While the general position seems more reminiscent of the "organic mechanism" of Science and the Modern World, Russell’s discussion of minds and the entities of physics bears an interesting resemblance to the more technical Whiteheadian discussion of personally ordered societies and corpuscular societies of actual occasions in Process and Reality. This is not, however, to force home some sort of fallacious one-to-one comparison or argument for complete correspondence or agreement of metaphysical views. Rather, the point to be noticed is simply that such expressions adumbrate a metaphysical view that is neither inconsistent nor, in broad outline at least, incompatible with Whitehead’s own. Moreover, and contrary to the prevailing portrait, the position slowly and meticulously developed by Russell cannot be dismissed merely as the inconsistent or ad hoc view of an elderly philosophic statesman in his mental decline. The sources of this "final metaphysical perspective" are instead, as I have demonstrated, to be found in Russell’s writings extending backward from 1959 to the early logical and analytic works of 1918 and before. The considerations of realism and the surprising developments in the physical sciences in the early twentieth-century form the backdrop for these speculations, while the resources for them lie in part in the collaboration of Russell with Whitehead, notwithstanding their later personal differences and parting of ways.

V.

Russell’s "event metaphysics" is slow to develop, but it is present and in a state of constant updating and revision throughout his long, controversial, and ultimately distinguished career. While I normally prefer caution in offering such sweeping assessments, in this case I find no substantial reason to prescind from Kuntz’s conclusion that Russell could be classified as a "process philosopher." Committed opponents of systematic metaphysical inquiry, devotees of analysis, and disciples of Russell may nonetheless find this judgment unfair, inaccurate, biased, and tendentious. On the basis of the evidence cited, I do not think such objections will prove warranted. I am attempting here to offer an historical analysis, and not presuming to grind some sort of a priori ideological ax. As a longtime admirer of Russell, and as an occasional student and (in due turn) teacher of his views, I have long believed that the similarities between Whitehead and Russell on metaphysical issues were much closer than we imagined, and I am grateful to Kuntz for laboring to point out some of these. Those who stubbornly prescind from these conclusions notwithstanding can, of course, take refuge in Willard Quine’s judgment that historians of philosophy, lacking any ideas of their own, must content themselves with classifying and interpreting the original ideas of others.

One parting observation regarding Whitehead and Russell. Despite the often considerable differences in their interests, views, and philosophic temperaments, and despite the rather different course of careers and subsequent influence on the profession of philosophy generally, there remains the common commitment of both to plumbing the depths of the nature of things, while eschewing nonsense, pretense, fad, and fraud in favor of (as Russell himself might have put the matter) that modest but frequently neglected goal of truth. In both cases, that honest and unwavering commitment is carried out with a sense of modesty, a recognition of their own inherent limitations, and an attitude of gracious appreciation, both for each other and for a host of other opponents and rivals in their field. It is that commitment and that style, perhaps more than anything else, that is sadly lacking in the present era.

References

ANW -- Alfred North Whitehead, by Paul G. Kuntz (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984).

BR -- Bertrand Russell, by Paul G. Kuntz (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986).

Notes

1Cf. George R. Lucas. Jr.. The Genesis of Modern Process Thought (London and Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1983) 136-44.

2For a complete account of this, see John E. Smith. "The Reconception of Experience in Peirce, James, and Dewey." The Monist. 68. no. 4 (October, 1985) 538-47

3Letter to Ralph Barton Perry, August 30, 1912, in the Harvard Pusey Library archives.

4Insights and Oversights of Great Philosophers (Albany. NY: State University of New York Press, 1983) ch. 22; esp. 260-61.

5Cf. Whitehead’s "Autobiographical Notes." in The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead. ed. P. A. Schilip (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1941) 3-14. Russell’s remark about the pacifist dispute occurs at p. 100 of his account of Whitehead in Portraits from Memory (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951).

6 For a detailed account, see Victor Lowe. Alfred North Whitehead: the Man and his Work (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1985).

7 Cf. Process and Reality, Part II. ch. 8: also ch. 4, secs. IV-VII: see also Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927).

8 For a thorough account of presentational immediacy as projection, complete with schematic diagrams, consult Donald W. Sherburne. A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) ch, 5. esp. Figure 5, 115.

9 Randall Collins. The Case of the Philosophers’ Ring (New York: Crown Publishers, 1978) 97-98.

10 I have endeavored to call attention to some of these similarities as well, more ostensively than through detailed analysis and exposition. See, for example, The Genesis of Modern Process Thought. 6, 16. 140.

11 Cf. Bertrand Russell, Basic Writings (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961). p. 154; Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon and Schuster, 19481 482: and Kuntz. BR 51ff.

12 Cf. Bertrand Russell. My Philosophical Development (London: George Allen & Unwin. 1959) 103; The Principles of Mathematics. 2nd ed. (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1937). xi; Kuntz, BR 62. 38.

13Scientific Outlook (New York: W. W. Norton. 1962), p. 95

14 In ANW. for example, the categories of order which Kuntz uses to organize his material are nested and hierarchical, proceeding from logic and mathematics, through physical nature, biology and psychology, human culture, metaphysics and cosmology, and terminating in theology (cf. 11, 92-95. and passim). One is reminded more of the progress of Hegel’s Encyclopedia than of Whitehead’s own system, which does not appear to recognize any essential ontological significance between these levels or orders of being. All alike comprise societies, nexus and compound individuals, any of which is constituted of the only true res verae. "actual occasions." Hence, there is no greater importance to be attached to a society, the State, or God, than to a human or non-human biological individual.

15I am indebted to John E. Smith for this anecdote concerning Royce.

16 This account is based on Russell’s article, "Physics and Perceptual Space." published as ch. XIII in An Outline of Philosophy (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1927).

17A. J. Ayer, Russell (London: Fontana-Collins, l972).

18 Mysticism and Logic. 2nd ed. (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1917), 155.

19 Logical Atomism" in Contemporary British Philosophy, ed. J. H. Muirhead (New York: Macmillan, 1924) 365.

18Mysticism and Logic, 2^nd ed. (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1917), 155.

19 "Logical Atomism" in Contemporary British Philosophy, ed. J.H. Muirhead (New York: Macmillan, 1924) 365.

20. Mysticism and Logic 124-25.

21Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901-1950 (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1956) 277-79.

22An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London: G. Allen & Unwin. 1940) 117-22.

23 My Philosophical Development 16-27.

1. A Personal and Affectionate Portrait of Lewis S. Ford

Process philosophy in the United States -- indeed, in the world -- today is unimaginable apart from the enduring contributions of Lewis S. Ford. The picture that I chose to illustrate this special issue came from a portfolio of photos that I shamelessly tricked Lewis into providing; I chose this particular portrait because it speaks volumes about the man and his work. The portrait captures a pose familiar to generations of process philosophers who have literally sat across the table from Lewis at conferences, symposia, or in classes where Whitehead (or, about as often, at which Ford’s own interpretive development of Whitehead’s thought) was the topic of discussion. This photograph vividly portrays Ford’s seriousness of purpose, including stern attention to intricacies of argument and to the nuance of textual details, and most of all captures the total concentration of intellectual energy and engagement with which Lewis Ford has unfailingly, throughout a long and distinguished career, approached the life of philosophical reflection.

There is in this photograph also more than a hint of what most of us -- his colleagues, students, and friends -- discovered in our dealings with Lewis himself: that he was a formidable force to be dealt with, unyielding and uncompromising in his devotion to Whitehead, to Hartshorne, and to his own considered interpretations of central process doctrines. My own first encounter with Ford is instinctive, inasmuch as I have heard variations on my own experience related by so many others in our field.

Having spent several years in the study of Whitehead’s thought in seminary and later in graduate philosophy seminars, I had finally worked out a position on the validity of Hartshorne’s ontological argument that related that argument back to the more empirical, experiential, and descriptive theism of Whitehead. The connection (and, I thought, the completion) of the process version of the ontological argument required a complicated detour through Hegel. At that time (the mid-1970s) this was not a detour that many process philosophers were willing to make. I wrote out my argument, vetted it through my graduate faculty, and sent the resulting amended version of a paper called "Organism and Teleology" on to the newly founded journal, Process Studies. About three weeks later I received a detailed reply (four pages of typed, single-spaced commentary) from the founding editor of that journal. Ford took issue with every aspect of my approach to Whitehead and Hartshorne, and dearly indicated that he found the avenue to process theism through Hegel to be an unpromising route indeed! I was furious at this rejection (as I later told him) because it seemed that the objection was one of principle rather than of fact or interpretation, and so was unanswerable: there could be, Ford thought, no demonstrable connection between Whitehead (and Hartshorne) and Hegel.

That position seemed to me so unreasonable and stubborn that I set out to prove him wrong. The result became my doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University (later published by Scholar’s Press in the AAR Dissertation Series as Two Views of Freedom in Process Thought: A Study of Hegel and Whitehead). Lewis, whose intractability had effectively blocked the publication of my article, became a mentor in the project, and introduced me to George Kline at Bryn Mawr, who had already attempted to make these connections in several articles. The dissertation could not have been written without their enormous help -- Kline encouraging and suggestive, and Ford (if the reader can imagine that serious countenance in the portrait shaking slowly, negatively, from side to side) resisting every move I made. An article became a book, and the two major modern figures of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics were brought into dialogue, all on account of Ford’s intransigence . . . and his kind (if militantly skeptical) assistance. I flatter myself that I may have convinced him in the end, but I’m not entirely sure! From what I gather, many another graduate student’s dissertation came to fruition via a similar route!

In certain respects, this portrait of Lewis is also reminiscent of Paul Tillich (sans eyeglasses), a similarly formidable, uncompromising, difficult, and highly original thinker. In light of Lewis’s long and distinguished career, encompassing so many contributions to process philosophy, many readers may have forgotten that Ford began his intellectual career as a Tillichian, writing his dissertation at Yale over thirty-five years ago on "The Ontological Foundation of Paul Tillich’s Theory of Religious Symbol," and publishing his first several scholarly articles in the early 1960s in distinguished journals like the Journal of the History of Philosophy and the Journal of Religion on aspects of Tillich’s thought. Lewis himself once commented that, at the time he first encountered Hartshorne’s thought (as a senior undergraduate at Yale), he was a convinced Tillichian, and thought it would be possible simply to incorporate Hartshorne’s conception of divine knowledge within a Tillichian framework. Subsequent graduate study, culminating in the aforementioned dissertation, convinced Lewis that this synthesis could not be accomplished. Hartshorne made sense to Lewis only against the backdrop of Whitehead, and he found himself increasingly led to the inescapable disjunction: Whitehead or Tillich. History records for us Lewis’s subsequent choice between these diverging paths in his philosophical forest. Robert Frost was right, that choice has made all the difference, and we who count ourselves among Lewis’s friends and colleagues have been the beneficiaries.

I mentioned the shameless ruse by which I came by this photo, and it, too, is revelatory. I wrote to Lewis outlining a plan I had formulated to write a book devoting one chapter to each of the major figures in process philosophy since Hartshorne -- makers of modern process thought, if you will -- to include the work of Sherburne, Christian, Leclerc, Cobb, Kline, Neville, Allan, Nobo and perhaps others. I proposed a short biographical sketch with photo for each, followed by a critical summary and commentary on their contributions. I asked if I could make Lewis the "demonstration chapter," for the purposes of compiling a publication prospectus, and requested his photo. He fell for it, but with a typically Fordian twist: while sending the photo and voluminous suggestions for how to go about composing the chapter on his own work, he modestly demurred, arguing that William Christian should be the featured figure. While never shy about the importance of his own interpretations, he has always been extraordinarily modest in subordinating his own work to that of others, especially colleagues like John Cobb, and teachers like William Christian, to whom he proclaims unfailingly his allegiance and intellectual indebtedness.

II. A Brief Intellectual Biography

Lewis Ford was born in Leonia, New Jersey on November 18, 1933. He attended the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts on full scholarship, from which he was graduated in 1951. He attended Yale College, majoring in philosophy, and received his Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, in 1955. He traveled in Germany during the following year, attending lectures at Muenster, subsequently returning to the U.S. for a year of study at Emory University. He returned to Yale to begin his doctoral studies in 1957, and in that same year married the former Anne Lide. Two daughters (Stephanie Anne and Rachel Lynn) were born while Lewis and Anne lived as graduate students in New Haven. The aforementioned dissertation on Tillich, supervised by John E. Smith, was completed in 1962, and a Danforth Fellowship afforded Lewis the opportunity of undertaking additional work in biblical studies at Yale Divinity School during the following academic year.

The resulting command of interpretive textual methodologies, especially form criticism, was to prove extremely significant in his subsequent work on the evolution of Whitehead’s thought. For, as Lewis would later assert in what I consider his greatest book, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (EMW), the problem of reconstructing Whitehead’s intellectual development on the basis only of apparent seams or fractures in his published manuscripts is not unlike the formidable problem faced by biblical scholars seeking to discern the various distinct historical threads of contribution to the final canonical form of a biblical text, absent attribution or direct evidence of multiple authorship. That sojourn at divinity school also contributed to Lewis’s masterful examination, in The Lure of God (LG) of the biblical grounding of, and justification for, many of the otherwise presumably nonclassical, neo-classical, or anti-traditional formulations of theism offered by Whitehead, Hartshorne, and other process philosophers.¹

In a broader vein, those studies and intellectual interests simply did for Lewis Ford what the study of philosophy at Haverford and later Harvard had earlier done for Charles Hartshorne; namely, bringing to philosophically rigorous form the web of beliefs and commitments of religious faith that constituted the heritage of his upbringing. Lewis’s own commentary (in private correspondence) on his intellectual voyage in this respect is revealing:

Perhaps this passage explains both how, and why, Lewis has been as fearless as he has been inflexible in pursuing his own philosophical path, even in pursuing his own (rather than others’) interpretations of Whitehead and process philosophy. Most of us, I suspect, are impressed by the power of Whitehead’s intellectual vision, and seek to make it more accessible and intelligible to colleagues in other fields (and to the educated public). We seek (to borrow a line of thought from Kierkegaard) to make things easier; Lewis always seemed, by contrast, to be determined (like Kierkegaard himself to offer as his contribution to make things harder -- or, at least (to be fair) not to soft-peddle or back away from the difficulties that Whitehead’s thought presented. Jorge Luis Nobo, who conceived and edited this magnificent tribute to Ford’s work, is another philosopher who possesses this trait of uncompromising intellectual courage in "taking on" the difficulties that Whitehead presents. Greg Easterbrook’s brief, masterful tribute to Charles Hartshorne in U.S. News and World Report (23 February 1998) similarly credits Hartshorne’s ability to achieve his great philosophical work while standing outside the mainstream of philosophical thought, and swimming against the tide of intellectual fashion.

Leaving Yale, Ford taught philosophy during the 1960s first at MacMurray College (Jacksonville, IL), and then at the experimental Raymond College at the University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA). From 1970--1973, he taught in the philosophy department at Penn State, won a prestigious NEH Fellowship, and in 1974 became a full professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where he taught until retirement in 1996.

It was in the late 1960s that Ford initiated a collaboration that was to prove fateful for the future of process philosophy in this country. He spent a sabbatical at Claremont, and arranged what he describes as "a weekly tutorial" with John Cobb. Ford, who portrays himself modestly as the student in these encounters, would set the agenda for each meeting, and the two would discuss issues of interpretation. Ford described himself during these meetings as invariably wedded to some single "correct" or self-evident interpretation of a line of Whitehead’s text, whereupon John would gently, dialectically, raise questions about possible alternatives that, as Ford would subsequently admit, seemed more in keeping with interpretations of other passages to which Ford himself had, in preceding weeks, assented. Of these meetings Ford comments:

These meetings had two profound consequences. One was the eventual collaboration between Cobb (and the staff of the newly created Center for Process Studies at Claremont) and Ford (back East on what Marjorie Suchocki later jokingly dubbed "the periphery" of process studies!) in the publication of a new journal, Process Studies, inaugurated in 1971. Ford was to serve for over twenty-five years as its editor, succeeded (upon his retirement from Old Dominion) by the present editor, Professor Barry Whitney. It is beyond anyone’s estimation how much the Center and this journal have done to foster and encourage the study of process thought in this country and abroad.

The second consequence of this fateful meeting of two great minds is much more subtle, though no less profound in its implications for the future of process philosophy. As Ford’s final sentence in the quotation above reveals, this was the beginning of an intellectual process that concluded some three decades later (as I argue in my Hartshorne Centennial address, "Charles Hartshorne: The Last or the First?" [CHLF]): the gradual disassociation or untangling of Whitehead’s version of process philosophy from Hartshorne’s idealistic philosophical theology. It is clear from Ford’s own account that it was very difficult in those years to distinguish between Whitehead and Hartshorne. The masthead of Process Studies in those early years essentially defined process philosophy as a school of philosophical thought extending from Whitehead primarily (though, the journal was careful to state, not exclusively) to Hartshorne and his followers. Cobb, at that time, used to say that from Hartshorne’s lectures it was very difficult to see where Whitehead left off and Hartshorne began.

But the differences were increasingly apparent to both participants in these seminars in the late 1960s. Ladd Sessions, in the meantime, wrote an interesting and important article, based on his study of Hartshorne’s doctoral dissertation, on the differences between Whitehead’s and Hartshorne’s thought. Ford, to whom this piece was later submitted for publication in the new journal, found Session’s conclusions surprising and frustrating, because that early Hartshorne work appeared to have all the essentials of Hartshorne’s later philosophy in place, but without evidence of any direct influence of Whitehead.² David Griffin, then a new Assistant Professor at Claremont, put together a very valuable compendium of all the differences that Hartshorne had discerned between his own thought and Whitehead’s. Ford then tried to develop a perspective on these differences, and found himself on most points of divergence increasingly drawn to Whitehead’s original perspective, rather than to Hartshorne’s modifications. The result was process philosophy’s counterpart to Hegel’s famous Differenschrift: Ford’s first major (edited) book publication, Two Process Philosophers: Hartshorne’s Encounter with Whitehead (TPP).

This discovery, and this unraveling or disentangling of two important figures whose thought is still stubbornly and inextricably linked in the minds of most philosophers, is important for a number of reasons. The appreciation of Harts-home’s originality has (as I argue in CHLF) been somewhat obscured or upstaged by his own decision, early in his career, to interpret his own thought in such close dialogue with Whitehead’s. Hartshorne’s increasing willingness subsequently in his career to acknowledge his indebtedness to C.S. Peirce in particular, and to a host of other important historical antecedents (especially to Josiah Royce and to a number of personal idealists), helped broaden the discussion of what process thought metaphysically (as well as historically) entails. This is nicely illustrated in Nicholas Rescher’s new treatment of process metaphysics (Process Metaphysics), where Hegel is accorded at least honorable mention if not pride of historical place, and Peirce is credited even more highly than Whitehead with contributing to important alternative doctrines of process (as opposed to substance) metaphysics.

This dissociation liberated Whitehead’s thought as well. In particular, as the late Victor Lowe patiently and quietly maintained throughout his lifetime -- and as Donald Sherburne has forcefully and convincingly demonstrated in his many writings -- theism was not an essential component of Whitehead’s thought, and the viability of process metaphysics does not stand or fall on the issue of theism alone (as the vast majority of process philosophers and opponents of process philosophy and its brands of philosophical theism stubbornly continue to maintain).

If all these diverse claims can be swallowed by the devoted process reader without she or he choking with apoplexy, one further, monumental implication can be drawn, and Ford has drawn it. From the privileged perspective of hindsight on Ford’s own subsequent work following Two Process Philosophers, the implications of this differenz (zwischen Whitehead and Hartshorne) can be seen to have set an intellectual agenda that continues to unfold to the present day. Let me try to state this thesis clearly.

Hartshorne represents one path, largely influenced by the (now virtually lost) traditions of pluralistic, personal idealism, of extending and developing Whitehead’s own modest, philosophically formal, neo-Aristotelian discussions of theism in Science and the Modern World, Religion in the Making, and Process and Reality. The process Differenzschrift set Ford upon a second odyssey: the refocusing of process philosophers on the original thought of Whitehead himself, unredacted through the lens of Hartshorne’s prior personal idealism and philosophical theism. No one but Lewis Ford possessed the requisite understanding, the confluence of intellectual talents, and most of all, the patience, to attempt the painstaking deconstruction and reconstruction of the pattern of authorship of Whitehead’s major work, leading to theories about the evolution of his thought, almost entirely in the absence of the archival documentation (the Nachlass) usually required for such a reconstruction. At first, Lewis apparently conceived his project as the attempt to construct a full-blown natural theology for Whitehead’s metaphysics that would complement the cosmology of Process and Reality. This, coincidentally, would remove a major criticism leveled against Whitehead: that his is essentially a descriptive rather than an explanatory metaphysics, adducing principles that apply (in contemporary modal jargon) to this actual, rather than generally to any possible, world. Just as Process and Reality discusses the world, bringing in God insofar as God is necessary to account for (this) world, Ford sought at first to discuss God more generally, bringing in (this) world only insofar as it was necessary to account for God.

This grand vision in turn required not only that Whitehead’s original line of thought, unredacted by Hartshorne, Christian, Leclerc and Cobb, be recovered (a task Lewis shared with Jorge Nobo), but also that the problems that Whitehead faced, as Whitehead envisioned them, and his various attempts at solution (ending presumably in the views published and taken by most of us as the last word on the subject) be likewise exposed and rethought. The ways in which this task could be carried out, and the interesting metaphysical revisions and alternatives to which it would lead regarding the central doctrines of process metaphysics, has constituted an interesting discussion and dialectical tension between Ford and Nobo over the years, to which many of the rest of us have attended with the greatest interest.

Nobo has played the role of the biblical literalist in these debates, adopting a holistic perspective that requires that every element of the extant text be taken seriously. Often this has led to are-examination of largely forgotten, overlooked, or reinterpreted doctrines in Whitehead’s writings, with Nobo demanding (like the authors of Deuteronomy) a recovery and return to the original form, simultaneously holding all resulting aspects of Whitehead’s views together at once, without loss or revision of any part (for example, the original two-part theory of transition and concrescence, leading to a recovery of the power of the causal efficacy of the past). Ford, by contrast, has focused on a genetic analysis, similar in impact to the introduction of German "higher criticism," in which we are to recognize early or preliminary formulations, superseded by later revisions and insertions in the text; forcing choices among alternative and incompatible doctrines, and producing a theory of Whitehead’s own historical development of his "final" ideas or positions (in which, for example, concrescence gradually supersedes transition, and the power of causal efficacy is reduced to the status of the past as material cause, with the future or "final" cause dominating the process of concrescence).

I have retraced and reviewed these conversations, and attempted to assess their contribution to our contemporary understanding of process metaphysics, in a number of other works (e.g., The Rehabilitation of Whitehead, "The Compositional History of Whitehead’s Writings," "Outside the Camp: Recent Work in Whitehead’s Philosophy"), which help contextualize historically the many contributions Ford has made in over 100 scholarly articles published during the past three decades. Suffice it to say that the results of Ford’s (and of Nobo’s) close textual work on Whitehead’s writings have yielded surprising insights and important dividends, for which we are indebted to both. Were that the end of the story, it would be more than enough for one scholarly career and professional lifetime.

My central point now is that it is only in light of this theory of Whitehead’s own intellectual project that one could do what Lewis has now proposed doing: show its completion or fulfillment in his own theory of God as the subjectivity of the future, a profoundly difficult and complex notion discussed at greater length in other essays by George Allan and Robert C. Neville in this Special Focus. The earlier proposal for a complementary natural theology presupposed that Ford would be able to show how divine temporal valuation contributes to the provision of initial aims for concrete occasions. Lewis writes (EWM 9) that Whitehead’s admission that he could not himself account for how the Consequent Nature of God could be prehended came as a shock. As a result, Ford suggests that he became increasingly dissatisfied with his own early attempt to solve this problem in his seminal essay, "The Nontemporality of Whitehead’s God."³

It was at this same time that Ford describes how he became intrigued by Wolfhart Pannenberg’s definition of God as the power of the future, operative in the present. Pannenberg himself never elaborated upon this suggestively ambiguous hypothesis. Ford commented briefly on this idea in The Lure of God, but a decisive shift occurred subsequently when he began to wonder how we can intelligibly speak of "the influence" of the Consequent Nature if it cannot be prehended. In answer, Ford began to conceptualize the notion of a divine universal future creativity which is somehow pluralized in present actual occasions. This proposed transformation of the conventional understanding of how the Consequent Nature functions began to carry Ford in a direction that led him away from the modifications of Whitehead on this issues as proposed by Hartshorne and Cobb. Ford began to develop this line of thought in the early 1980s, coincident with the completion of the first major phase of his textual study of Whitehead, and has emphasized this direction increasingly since that time.⁴

III. Concluding Unscientific Postscript

At this writing, Ford is still engaged in the project of trying to render this novel conception of natural theology intelligible. Short articles, of which he has published a large number, are not the proper venue for developing a thesis of this complexity. His views are worked out at length in a forthcoming, and quite lengthy, manuscript: The Divine Activity of the Future, soon to appear from the State University of New York Press in the Philosophy Series. The intricate nature of that thesis continues to demonstrate how closely Ford’s own development of philosophical theism is tied to his meticulous textual studies of the development (and, of his perceptions of the ultimate failures or frustrating dead ends) of Whitehead’s own efforts to formulate a natural theology consonant with his cosmological views. In The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, for example, Ford determined that some of Whitehead’s editorial "insertions" after delivering, but just prior to publishing, his lectures produced considerable alterations in the original positions sketched. The classic example is the insertion of the "Epochal Theory of Time" in Science and the Modern World, forcing the eventual transformation of what, in that book, had initially been a Spinozistic approach to creativity as the one, undifferentiated underlying activity (with "events" of varied temporal duration as the "modes" of this underlying process) toward the Leibnizian monadology of actual entities (each a kind of time-quantum) that finally appeared subsequently in Process and Reality. There are many more examples of this technique which Ford has not yet published, largely insertions in Process and Reality (and also Religion in the Making). Some of these pertain, Ford writes, to Whitehead’s concept of God, showing that Whitehead experimented, at different points in the text of that work, with at least three distinct notions of God: (a) as wholly nontemporal and nonconcrescent; (b) as nontemporal and concrescent; and the view that we take as canonical, of God as (c) both temporal and concrescent.⁵

Another book in progress, tentatively entitled The Texture of Process Theism, approaches the problem from a different angle. Through collecting and reworking many of his previously published articles, Ford will attempt in this new book to formulate the requisite complementary natural theology for Whitehead’s cosmology in historical conversation with, and in dialectical opposition to, a number of contrasting perspectives on creativity, temporality, immutability, theodicy, and technical (internal) problems in process metaphysics put forth by Robert Neville, Norris Clarke, Donald Sherburne, and other colleagues over the years.

What this substantial, ongoing, determinedly creative activity on the part of its author reveals is this: despite the appearance of formidable immutability that the photograph I originally chose seems to portray, the reality of Lewis Ford is something else entirely -- the reality of process itself. For this philosopher and his work represent stability precisely through sustained growth, development, and modification -- occasionally surprising us with novelty and change. This is not merely a philosopher who, after a long career, still represents a work in progress (for that alone is true, by definition, of most of us). What we discover in Lewis Ford, in addition, is a mind that approaches philosophical problems in a manner quite analogous to the way that he himself depicts God (following Pannenberg) as interacting with and complementing the world the power of the future, operant in the present, effecting a slow but certain transformation and redemption of the past.

References

Lewis S. Ford

Other References

Notes

1 The importance of this book is discussed in depth in Robert C. Neville’s contribution to this Special Focus on Ford’s work.

2 I discuss that anomaly at greater length in CHLF.

3International Philosophical Quarterly, 13 (1973), 347- 376.

4 See "The Divine Activity of the Future," Process Studies 11(1981), 69-79; "Creativity in a Future Key," in New Essays in Metaphysics, edited by Robert C. Neville (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 179-198. Earlier versions of this position were published in Encounter 41(1980), 287-292; and in the inaugural volume of the (now defunct) Santa Clara University Journal, Logos 1(1980), 45- 52.

5See the preliminary sketch of these views in Ford’s essay, "The Riddle of Religion in the Making," Process Studies 22 (1993), 42-50.

It is often tacitly assumed without much debate that Whitehead’s metaphysics constitutes a species of process philosophy compatible in the main with older varieties of process metaphysics inspired by various evolutionist theories. The influence of these older evolutionary cosmologies on Whitehead’s thought, moreover, is never carefully examined so much as it is presupposed.¹ Against such presuppositions, I shall argue here that evolution and evolutionist theories play no significant role in Whitehead’s metaphysics, and that there is no evidence in his major works of any significant influence from earlier process-oriented "evolutionary cosmologies." This suggests that Whiteheadian metaphysics and evolutionary cosmology are two relatively independent and largely unrelated types of process philosophy, and exonerates Whitehead and Whiteheadians of "guilt by association" in the sorts of analytic, scientific, and historical criticisms often leveled at evolutionary cosmologies.

I.

A comprehensive cosmological theory, whether philosophical or theological, qualifies as an "evolutionary cosmology" if the theory is elaborated principally in terms of some generalized paradigm of evolutionary development. "Emergent" evolutionism (a term first popularized by C. Lloyd Morgan) is a special case of the former, in which it is asserted that evolutionary progress is, on occasion, discontinuous -- exhibiting entirely novel features whose appearance on Nature’s stage cannot be explained merely in terms of some novel rearrangement of previously-existing natural components. ²

Maupertuis, Diderot, Lamarck, and Goethe were among the first intellectuals to develop speculative cosmologies centrally grounded in what tended at the time to consist of highly fanciful, romantic, and largely undocumented theories of evolutionary development. Subsequent figures in this history of "evolutionary cosmologies" include the ponderous English syncretist Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and the later Darwin (attempting to account in a more speculative vein both for the wider significance of his naturalistic interpretation of evolutionary development, and for the apparent mathematical improbability of his earlier biological views on random variation). This genre of speculative philosophy culminates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the more familiar works of Henri Bergson, Samuel Alexander, Jan Smuts, Lecomte de Nuöy, and C. Lloyd Morgan, and survives prominently even in the present in the thought of Teilhard de Chardin, Julian Huxley, C. H. Waddington, Theodosius Dobzhansky, W. H. Thorpe, and Rene Dubos (cf. GMPT 54-98).

Evolutionary cosmologies are commonly inspired by an interest in numerous well-documented phenomena of change, development, and ultimately transformation and supersession both of geological forms and of biological species over the course of time. Evolutionary cosmologies may begin simply as rival evolutionist theories -- alternative causal explanations for these observed phenomena of development, change, and transformation.³ An evolutionist theory becomes an evolutionary cosmology whenever the favored evolutionist theory is extrapolated from its original context as an account of geological or biological change, and made to serve as an overarching cosmological category, such that "evolution" in some idiosyncratic sense becomes the basis for a systematic and unified interpretation of a wide array of diverse phenomena beyond the domains of biology and geology. The "synthetic philosophy" of Herbert Spencer provides an instructive case study of this procedure. Beginning with a mechanistic version of Lamarck’s speculative evolutionist hypothesis, he resolves to apply the concept of "evolution" to every branch of science and learning. He thus proceeds to encompass psychology, sociology, history, culture, ethics, and political theory within the explanatory scope of a version of "evolution" extrapolated and sweepingly generalized into a vast, speculative cosmological category.⁴ More recently, the Jesuit paleontologist and anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin attained notoriety and ultimately widespread popularity by attempting to recast the whole of the Roman Catholic worldview in an "evolutionist" framework.⁵

In the aftermath of Darwin, evolutionary cosmologies -- formulated quite frequently by intellectuals with considerable scientific training and credentials -- appear somehow "grounded" in the most recent developments in the biological sciences, and thus frequently themselves attempt to assume the "mantle of authority" of science. Notwithstanding, virtually all such cosmologies (including even Spencer’s implausible mechanistic approach) entail concepts of evolutionary development which are classically Lamarckian rather than Darwinian. Such cosmologies are almost always "vitalistic" in the sense of requiring auxiliary and somewhat ad hoc hypotheses to account for the apparent violation of the law of entropy in the impetus toward greater complexity manifested in the evolutionary process.⁶ Evolutionary cosmologies thus perpetuate a much older tradition of Romantic Naturphilosophie far more than providing a fully contemporary philosophy of science or some sort of "scientifically-verified" philosophy.⁷

As they focus on the significance of change over permanence, flux over stability, and novel emergence over the mere repetition and rearrangement of existing forms, evolutionary cosmologies are quite understandably viewed as "process" philosophies. ⁸ Indeed, examination of the historical development of process philosophies tends strongly to suggest that evolutionary cosmology of some form is what is most often meant and understood by the term "process philosophy," despite the contemporary name-association of this term with the thought of Whitehead.⁹

Because evolutionary cosmologies are invariably rooted in the tradition of speculative and mystical Naturphilosophie, tend to favor a Lamarckian over a Darwinian approach to evolution itself, and are often wildly speculative and imaginative in content, such cosmologies do not enjoy much favor in contemporary philosophical circles. More generally, the concept of "process" philosophy itself suffers from this tacit historical association. To confess interest in "process philosophy" as a viable vocation (over and against the mere historical study of a certain tradition) is to seem to associate oneself with a tradition thoroughly discredited in the eyes of its more analytically-inclined critics as little more than an historical anachronism -- a throwback to the worst examples of unrestrained 19th-century speculative nonsense.¹⁰

II.

In terms of the foregoing description of "evolutionary cosmology," it is clear that Whitehead himself does not formulate an explicit evolutionary cosmology, although he is understood to have formulated a process cosmology. In this section I propose to investigate simultaneously two related questions: (1) to what extent is Whitehead’s accomplishment similar to or compatible with evolutionary process cosmologies; and (2) to what extent is he influenced in his philosophical development by evolutionist theories generally, or by evolutionary cosmologists, including those whom he cites by name, such as Bergson, Alexander, and Morgan?

If convention is any guide, it would appear that the answer to both questions should affirm strong compatibility and substantial influence. In delineating the "process" approach to speculative philosophy, Andrew J. Reck associates Spencer, Bergson, Alexander, and Teilhard with Whitehead and C. H. Mead (SP). Compiling representative anthologies of process philosophical writing, Douglas Browning in 1965 (POP) and J. R. Sibley and P. A. Y. Gunter in 1978 (PPBW) include Bergson, selections from the later evolutionary cosmology of C. S. Peirce, Samuel Alexander, and C. Lloyd Morgan along with Whitehead and several American pragmatists as constituting the main "process philosophers." This amplifies the customary convention in the history of philosophy generally to designate a tradition of "process philosophy" comprising Bergson, Alexander, and Whitehead, with James or Dewey occasionally thrown in for good measure. The habitual association of Whitehead with Teilhard is too familiar and customary to bear repeating.

Quite apart from this problematic classification of Anglo-American realists and American pragmatists (cf. GMPT 136-80) such conventional associations tend to obscure, rather than elucidate the influence of evolutionist theories on Whitehead’s philosophical development, and do nothing to clarify the actual influence on, or to evaluate the compatibility of evolutionary cosmologies with, Whitehead’s philosophy. Against the uncritical implication of such conventional associations, I claim that there is a remarkable absence of reference in Whitehead’s work to "evolution," to specific evolutionist theories, or to specific evolutionary cosmologies or cosmologists. Such references as do occur, moreover, tend to support the claim that Whitehead was not particularly influenced by those evolutionary cosmologists whom he does politely mention on occasion.

Finally, his scattered references to "evolution" generally suggest that Whitehead himself made no clear distinction between evolutionist theories generally and evolutionary cosmologies: he seems on occasion, for example, to conflate "evolution" [Darwin s theory? Lamarck’s theory?] with "emergent evolution" [Morgan’s cosmology? Alexander’s? Bergson’s?]. Such total disregard for elementary distinctions and significant theoretical differences in those few references to evolution which do occur in Whitehead’s writings suggests, finally, that evolution and evolutionist theories play no significant or systematic role in his philosophy, and that the affinity, the continuity, and even the compatibility of Whitehead’s process metaphysics with evolutionary cosmology is routinely overestimated.

Were my claims untrue, one would expect to find extensive discussion of evolution and evolutionist theories, and expect to detect the significant influence of evolutionary cosmologies of one sort or another, in any of several places. If evolution were of systematic import, it ought to figure centrally in Process and Reality, or at least in the systematic portions of Science and the Modern World or Part III of Adventures of Ideas. Alternatively, one might expect to see the cultural or historical importance of Darwin or the theory of evolution underscored and interpreted in the remainder of AI or the main text of SMW. Failing this, one might search for the mention of evolution in Whitehead’s writings on the philosophy of nature -- either the comparatively early Concept of Nature or the much-later Chicago lectures on Nature and Life. I shall begin with these latter works.

In CN there simply is no reference to evolution whatever. Samuel Alexander is mentioned vaguely in the introduction, concerning his views on relativity and spacetime (CN viii); Bergson is mentioned only once regarding Whitehead’s sympathetic assessment of his approach to time (CN 54). None of the other central figures or issues in evolutionary cosmology are cited, nor can the slightest trace of their influence be detected.

Far more surprisingly, in the 1933 Chicago lectures on Nature and Life (NL), the themes of evolution, emergent evolution, and the works of Alexander, Bergson, and Morgan, are likewise not mentioned at all. The word "emerges" does occur once (cf. MT 24), in a manner that might suggest (albeit very indirectly) Whitehead’s acknowledged presupposition of the central ideas of emergent evolutionism. But no explicit discussion of evolution, evolutionary cosmology, or emergent evolution is offered there or elsewhere. The context of discussion is, rather, that of the continuity between various "levels" of organic and inorganic experience. This doctrine of interconnectedness or organic holism is admittedly in keeping with the Romantic Naturphilosophie tradition of the "great chain of Being" -- a tradition which I have cited as the background of much evolutionary cosmology, and one, moreover, with which Whitehead earlier had expressed a profound sympathy (SMW ch. V).

Whitehead’s express intention in these two lectures is rather to call attention to the continuity between general features of the natural world and the specific, higher-grade phenomena associated with mind and self-consciousness. Whitehead later reissued these lectures with six more given at Wellesley College in 1937, published as Modes of Thought. In the sixth of these Wellesley lectures, as it turns out, there is a mildly negative assessment of the concept of evolutionary emergence and "upward progress, arguing in favor of the greater significance of continuity with the "lower orders" of nature (MT 153).

A major concern of "emergent evolutionists" such as Morgan and Alexander was to provide a scientifically-credible account of the appearance in the evolutionary process of mind and self-consciousness in a manner which would undercut the radical Cartesian and mechanistic distinction between mind and nature. This latter refutation of "arbitrary bifurcation" is clearly also the intention of Whitehead’s Chicago lectures. Moreover, Whitehead’s own views on the significance of mind in and for nature generally have undergone a substantial transformation over the intervening fourteen years since the publication of CN. One need only compare the anti-idealistic, anti-metaphysical polemic in which "nature is closed to mind" and any attempt to "drag in" the relations of nature to mind constitutes a "metaphysical interpretation" which is "an illegitimate importation into the philosophy of natural science" (CN 4, 27f.),¹¹ with the thoroughgoing anti-dualist pansubjectivism of "Nature Alive."

One might be tempted to argue at this point that we have discerned the transforming influence of the cosmology of "emergent evolution" at least on Whitehead’s thinking. But any claim of significant influence turns out to be quite difficult to document and sustain. If we construct an evolutionary account of mind on the basis of NL (which Whitehead does not do), it would be that mind is but a special case -- a particularly high-grade organization -- of the experience or feeling characteristic of all actuality. In C. Lloyd Morgan’s terminology, Whitehead seems to hold that human mind and self-consciousness are "resultants"; novel reorganizations of potentialities and principles present from the beginning and common to all; whereas for Morgan himself, by contrast, mind represented an emergent quality, wholly new, different and inexplicable in terms of what had come before. A vague and quite general similarity of concerns is evidenced; nothing more.

Morgan had earlier complained (EEV) about Whitehead’s treatment of mind in CN as wholly distinct from nature, and objected to Whitehead’s earlier claim that the study of their relations constitutes metaphysics rather than philosophy of science. In SMW, Whitehead in turn gives his only written acknowledgement of Morgan: "There has been no occasion in the text to make detailed reference to Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution or to Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity. It will be obvious to readers that I have found them very suggestive. I am especially indebted to Alexander’s great work" (SMW xi). Clearly Whitehead read Morgan’s book (along with Alexander’s) and found it "very suggestive" -- but in what way we may never really be certain, since none of the central ideas of Morgan’s theory reappear or are acknowledged in SMW, nor later in PR and AI. One is skating on rather thin ice to suggest on the basis of this polite acknowledgement in a preface in 1925 that Morgan at least could have been in any real way instrumental in Whitehead’s development of the ideas found years later in NL.¹² The case remains to be made with respect to Alexander.

Turning to SMW itself, it is surprising how insignificant are the references to Charles Darwin specifically or to the issue of evolution generally, even in Chapter VI on the "Nineteenth Century," given the historical importance of Darwin in the development of modern science. For the most part, evolution is dismissed casually as one of those ideas which heralded the demise of scientific materialism (SMW 147ff.). There is a suggestive comment a few pages earlier (SMW 135), in which Whitehead argues that both scientific concepts and the "laws of nature" themselves "exhibit the arbitrariness of these conditions as the outcome of a wider evolution beyond nature itself,..." [my emphasis]. There is an obvious external comparison which could be drawn here with the evolutionary cosmology of C. S. Pence, in which the laws of nature are described as having evolved, as subject to change, and as having more the characteristic of habit.¹³ However, there is no evidence whatever that Whitehead knew of Peirce’s views or was in any way influenced by them.¹⁴

In the same chapter (SMW 157f.) Whitehead speaks of the "evolution of complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms," as well as of enduring organisms as "the outcome of evolution." It is clear, however -- and confirmed through an examination of his Harvard lectures from this period (see below) -- that the "evolution" to which Whitehead refers here is not macroscopic biological or geological evolution, but the transition from the immediate past to the novel subjective experience of the immediate present. His concern is not with evolutionist theories or cosmology, but with an initial formulation of his micro-ontology of actual occasions, intended to provide a coherent account of the experience of novelty and creativity as more than endless permutations of the previously-given. The point in the context of this chapter is to demonstrate that his "organic mechanism" is itself consistent with the observation of biological and geological evolution (on whatever theory) in a way that the older "materialistic mechanism" is not -- but not in turn to provide yet another theoretical account of such evolution itself.

In Adventures of Ideas there are no references to evolution, emergent evolution, Alexander, or Morgan. Bergson is mentioned only in connection with the tension between the "dogmatic fallacy" of logical philosophy and the reactionary "anti-intellectualism" of Bergson, Nietzsche, and American pragmatism (AI 287). This is similar to the earlier polite dissociation from Bergson’s "attack" on reason which Whitehead had offered in SMW (74).

We turn now to Process and Reality itself. Here again, however, no conclusive evidence regarding the influence of evolutionist theories or evolutionary cosmologies in the formation of Whitehead’s final metaphysical synthesis can be detected. Morgan is not mentioned. Alexander is treated only briefly, by relating his pervasive "principle of unrest" to the first category of explanation, and by suggesting the resemblance of his term "enjoyment" in Space, Time and Deity (1920) to Whitehead’s concept of "Feeling" and Bergson’s understanding of "intuition" (PR 28/ 42f., 40f./ 65). Bergson is cited several times in a sympathetic but nonessential fashion, in connection with such concepts as "intuition, "canalization," and "spatialization," all of which refer to the characteristics of thought and experience, rather than to evolution or to Bergson’s wider evolutionary cosmology. These references suggest Whitehead’s familiarity with Creative Evolution and Bergson’s other works, to be sure, but the ideas are not utilized in any sense remotely resembling an evolutionary cosmology, or suggesting any real influence of Bergson’s own variation of "emergent" evolution (cf. PR xii/ vii, 33/ 49, 82/ 126, 107/ 163, 114/ 174, 209/ 319, 220/ 336, 280/ 428, 321/ 489). Rather, Bergson’s influence on Whitehead is entirely similar to that of William James, as pertaining almost entirely to Whitehead’s development of a theory of subjective experience.

When "evolution" is mentioned or discussed at all in PR, it is in a general, offhand, and vague fashion. Whitehead suggests, for example, that "error is . . . the schoolmaster by whose agency there is upward evolution" (PR 168/256). Earlier Whitehead opines: "The full sweep of the modern doctrine of evolution would have confused the Newton of the Scholium, but would have enlightened the Plato of the Timaeus" (PR 93/ 143). Such remarks do not demonstrate that Whitehead presupposed any specific evolutionary cosmology. Rather, they are unfortunately gratuitous, since neither there nor elsewhere does Whitehead offer the slightest clue as to what he understands by "upward evolution" or the "modern doctrine."

This last observation admits of one possible exception. Early in Part III of PR, Whitehead writes:

This rather obscure reference does not give us much to go on. These "multiple contrasts" of eternal objects, which are formally but not actually analyzable into simpler constituent components, are central to Whitehead’s understanding of the origins of novelty. He may be attempting here to offer an account of Morgan’s "emergent" qualities (the basis of emergent evolution) in a manner which would suggest the wider grounding of that theory in his cosmology. But this is the most I dare surmise.

I base this interpretation, moreover, not on any published material, but on lecture notes taken by Whitehead’s Harvard colleague, William Ernest Hocking, during Whitehead’s first lecture course at Harvard during the academic year 1924-25. In a lecture dated Thursday, May 14 (1925) on the topic "Emergence of Thought," Hocking himself abruptly editorializes: "Very much the same general line as Lloyd Morgan and Alexander. [Whitehead was prior] in Emergent Evolution" (EMW 297).¹⁵ There is no indication on that day or any other, however, that Whitehead himself discussed Morgan. This lecture seems to have been devoted in large part to criticisms of Alexander, specifically that his notion of "emergence" is too vague and muddled to give any useful account of "cognitive experience" in particular, or of the more general observations of the novel and creative features of determinate actualities of whatever sort. In an earlier lecture on "cognitive experience" (April 28, 1924), Hocking quotes Whitehead that "Consciousness is a relation between an emergent entity and the composite potentiality from which it emerges" (EMW 291).

It is clear from the context, moreover, that Whitehead is concerned primarily with the "emergence of novel features in immediate occasions of experience, beyond that indicated by the constraints of the immediate past on such experience. That is, Whitehead is already at work formulating an early version of what will finally become his micro-ontology of the genesis and generic features of "actual entities" -- and he finds prior accounts of "emergence" in evolutionary cosmologies like Alexander’s [and Morgan’s?] entirely unsuited to this descriptive task. He does not discuss, nor does he appear the slightest bit interested in, the larger macroscopic evolutionary cosmologies from which these accounts of emergence derive.¹⁶

I have reserved for last, however, analysis of the one work by Whitehead which would seriously challenge my conclusions: The Function of Reason. This work consists of three brief Vanuxem Lectures delivered at Princeton University (March, 1929), which, of all of Whitehead’s writings, appears to be the most focused upon evolution, and perhaps upon the development of an evolutionary cosmology accounting for the phenomenon of evolutionary emergence and development.

Such appearances, however, are quite deceptive. True, evolution and "emergence" (of a sort) are mentioned. As it turns out, however, these lectures are almost entirely absorbed with developing a philosophy of culture. Very little is actually said about evolution -- and what is said is once again quite general and innocuous. Nothing at all is said about specific evolutionist theories of any sort, and Whitehead certainly does not here formulate one of his own. Bergson is occasionally invoked (FR 29, 33); Darwin receives honorable mention along with Galileo and Newton for developing a generalized scheme of ideas within which elements of actual experience were rendered intelligible (FR 73). Neither Darwin nor Bergson is treated in the context of their evolutionist theories or their evolutionary cosmologies, and FR itself does not in any sense constitute an evolutionary cosmology, nor does it exhibit the significant influence of any other evolutionary cosmology.

The "introductory summary" suggests that Whitehead will contrast the principle of entropy and the "slow decay of physical nature" with a contrary tendency illustrated "by the upward course of biological evolution." Only the first few pages of the first lecture and the penultimate page of the last, however, are devoted to the concept of "evolution." Moreover, in both instances, the "doctrine of evolution" [which?] is faulted for its explanatory deficiencies: "The various evolutionary formulae give no hint . . . why there should be cities" (FR 89; cf. 5)17 The apparent problematic question is raised: "Why has the trend of evolution been upwards?" (FR 7), to which (Herbert Spencer’s unacknowledged) "evolutionary fallacy" of "the survival of the fittest" presumably provides no answer (FR 4).

Here would have been the golden opportunity for Whitehead to have cited, and perhaps quarreled with evolutionary cosmologies with which he is presumably familiar, such as those of Alexander, Bergson, and Morgan -- all of which aim to provide precisely the answer to this question. Here, indeed, would have been the ideal context for Whitehead to explore the evolutionary dimensions of his own metaphysical system -- or perhaps to outline, at least, his own alternative evolutionary cosmology.

Instead, he proceeds to outline the prerequisites for human cultural advancement. Where a central problematic for all prior evolutionary cosmologists had been accounting for the evolutionary emergence of self-conscious mind, Whitehead presupposes the full-blown existence of human reason sundered initially by the apparently unlike functions of theoria and praxis. His hypothesis is that slow development and often even cultural decay are the fruits of this bifurcation, whereas the inadvertent wedding of these two disparate functions of reason during the last century and a half have produced an unprecedented cultural advance: imagination now focused on the improvement of technique; technique guided, illuminated, and immeasurably enhanced through experiment with imaginative alternatives to the given and the known (FR 42). The sworn enemy of such cultural vitality and creativity is "obscurantism," once the domain of the clergy, presently the vice of scientific dogmatists (FR 44).

Students of Whitehead’s systematic thought will recognize his employment of important systematic concepts: concrete actuality involves an interweaving of efficient and final causation; inheritance of order combined with an aim or subjective appetition for novelty yields "an increase in satisfaction" and an "enjoyment of contrasts" (FR 8, 22). It is clear that Whitehead sees a parallel between the physical and mental aspects of dipolar occasions and the practical (physical) and theoretical (mental) aspects which together constitute the proper function of Reason as a counterweight to the general tendency towards dissolution and decay (FR 32f.).

Such observations foreshadow the fully developed philosophy of civilization and culture contained in Al (the assessment of the practical and theoretical function of reason in FR anticipates the evaluation of the Hellenistic and Hellenic ideals of culture in Al, for example). Such views do not (any more than, say, Toynbee’s philosophy of history) constitute an evolutionist theory or an evolutionary cosmology. Indeed, as Hegel’s views on culture and history illustrate, these sorts of speculations are logically independent of any or all perspectives on evolution, even when they turn out to be broadly consistent with evolutionary phenomena. The attempt to portray FR as a significant piece of evolutionist philosophy utterly fails.

III.

It is not a sufficient condition for classification as an evolutionary cosmology that a philosophical system take some vague cognizance of, or prove itself compatible with the brute historical facts of evolutionary change and transformation (which are by no means always "upward" or "progressive"). Merely to be cognizant of the details of evolutionary development is not the same as holding an "evolutionist theory" regarding the cause of such transformations, let alone the same as holding a full-blown cosmological scheme interpreting the "larger significance" and "broader applications" of such transformation! Were it otherwise, then virtually every philosophical position developed in Western Europe and America at least since the mid-nineteenth century would qualify as some sort of evolutionary cosmology and, by implication, as a "process" philosophy as well. Such classification is hardly efficacious.

Whitehead is not an "emergent evolutionist" or an "evolutionary cosmologist" in the more general sense. No clearly definable doctrine of evolution is in evidence in his philosophy. His statements about evolution and the emergent evolutionists are vague, and occasionally even contradictory. He does not appear overly concerned with giving further interpretation to the idea of evolution, and evidently had not clearly thought through his own position on evolution in anything approaching a systematic sense.

This is not to say that evolutionist theories are unimportant to his philosophy. Whitehead is as "post-evolutionary" in his thought as were the pragmatists, for example, in theirs.¹⁸ That is to say, Whitehead, James, Peirce, and Dewey all presuppose some concept of evolutionary development in their philosophies; indeed, their respective styles of philosophizing would have been inconceivable apart from the prior development of evolutionist theories. Only in Peirce’s later thought, however, does an explicit evolutionary paradigm come to assume central importance. Among these four thinkers, that js, only Peirce develops a full-blown "evolutionary cosmology in any recognizable sense.

Whitehead’s cosmology, by contrast, is influenced principally by mathematical physics (primarily relativity theory, and to a lesser degree, quantum mechanics). There is little explicit influence from the field of biology, from biological evolution, or from evolutionist theories generally, all of which are unsystematically presupposed. Thus, Whitehead’s version of process philosophy represents a sharp break from the customs and practices of his many predecessors in the larger tradition of process philosophy, according to which analysis and development of explicitly evolutionary cosmologies constituted the principal mode of philosophical investigation.

Evolutionary cosmology and what I have elsewhere termed Whitehead’s "process rationalism" (GMPT 27) represent quite distinct "schools" of thought within the larger process tradition. Certainly there are similarities, affinities, and lines of mutual historical and intellectual influence which justify grouping these disparate schools as one overall "tradition" of process philosophy. A simple conflation of that tradition, coupled with the uncritical affiliation of the various major adherents of those process "schools," however, dictates a Continual confused evaluation of the process tradition as a whole on the basis of these misleading historical associations, rather than on the basis of the logical rigor and cogency of each school or practitioner in isolation. This unfortunate tendency is, nonetheless, the norm among both disciples and critics of process philosophy. I have simply argued here that we ought not to ignore or misconstrue real differences between these schools of process thought, nor permit their historical conflation to continue unchallenged.

References

BJA -- Victor A. Lowe, "The Influence of Bergson, James and Alexander on Whitehead," Journal of the History of Ideas, 10 (1949), 267-96.

EEV -- C. Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution. London: Williams and Norgate, 1923.

EEWP -- James R. Gray, "Dualism and Monism in Emergent Evolutionism and Whiteheadian Process." Society for the Study of Process Philosophies, December 28, 1982. [unpublished]

EWM -- Lewis S. Ford, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics: 1925-1929. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

FOD -- Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859, eds. Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin and William L. Straus, Jr. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959/1968.

GCB -- A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. "The William James Lectures, 1933." Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942.

GMPT -- George R. Lucas, Jr., The Genesis of Modern Process Thought: An Historical Outline with Bibliography. "American Theological Library Association Bibliography Series, 7." Metuchen, NJ., and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1983.

MPT -- James R. Gray, Modern Process Thought: A Brief Ideological History. Washington: University Press of America, 1982.

POP -- Douglas Browning, ed. Philosophers of Process. New York: Random House, 1965.

PPBW -- Jack R. Sibley and P. A. Y. Gunter, eds. Process Philosophy: Basic Writings. Washington: University Press of America, 1978.

SP -- Andrew J. Reck, Speculative Philosophy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972, pp. 185-232.

Notes

1 One notable exception to this uncritical trend is an essay by Victor Lowe, "The Influence of Bergson, James and Alexander on Whitehead" (BJA), arguing, contrary to prevailing opinion, that the impact of these three predecessors was more that of encouragement or expressed common sympathy with Whitehead’s views, rather than "indispensable influence." A common climate of opinion and a common community of shared, mutual concerns among these philosophers was, in itself, sufficient to account for the similarities occasionally evidenced. I would add only that the "common community of shared mutual concerns" regarding evolution is more in evidence in the appreciative comments of Alexander and Morgan for Whitehead’s efforts, than in any recognizable assimilation by him of theirs.

2 Morgan (EEV) contrasted "emergents" with "resultants -- the latter indeed being new qualities explained on the basis of evolutionary continuity (a novel rearrangement of previously-existing components). No "reasons" internal to nature can be given for emergents -- although Morgan characterized himself as a thoroughgoing "naturalist," and rejected what he characterized as the dualistic, teleological vitalism of Bergson. "Emergents," for Morgan, constitute the inexplicable, radically contingent aspect of novelty in evolution.

3At present, for example, the well-entrenched neo-Darwinian hypothesis of "gradualism" (biological evolution occurs slowly, and more or less continuously as the constant interplay of random variations and natural selection over vast periods of time) is confronted with a somewhat more radical and neo-Lamarckian theory of "punctuated equilibrium" favored by Harvard biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Peter Williamson, collaborated by fossil discoveries of paleontologist and cultural anthropologist Richard Leakey in Africa. The latter theory suggests that biological forms are surprisingly stable over long periods of time, and mutate suddenly and quite rapidly in response to equally sudden and dramatic environmental changes.

4 Spencer’s main corpus includes First Principles (1862), Principles of Biology (1864), Principles of Psychology (1870), and Principles of Sociology (1876).

5Teilhard formulates a comprehensive vision of evolution as the pattern of divine creativity in nature, and, armed with this vision, proceeds to reinterpret the relation of science and Christian theology, the development of human culture (especially the significance of communication technologies), and the emergence of self-conscious mind. Ultimately Teilhard’s evolutionist theory serves as the basis for a comprehensive social philosophy and prophetic-religious vision of the human future. The extensive scope of this vision is suggested by the 620 works by Teilhard, and the over 4300 works interpreting his thought, recently detailed in Joseph M. McCarthy’s Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: A Comprehensive Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1981).

6 While some variation of the "vitalist" hypothesis appears necessary in historical perspective, the recent findings of Nobel-laureate chemist Ilya Prigogine regarding the tendency toward self-organization and greater complexity in dissipative chemical structures shows that the evolution of complexity is itself compatible with, rather than contrary to the general physical principles of thermodynamics. Cf., e.g., Self-organization in Non-equilibrium Systems: from Dissipative Structures to Order through Fluctuations (New York: Wiley, 1977).

7Verne Grant, the author of a widely-used textbook on the modern theory of "synthetic evolution" is harshly critical of Teilhard and other proponents of vitalistic hypotheses, such as "orthogenesis," which are little more than "mystical name-calling" for which there is no scientific evidence whatever. The concept of "orthoselection" stresses organic-environment interaction of sufficient duration to reveal trends which follow environmental shifts -- a neo-Darwinian blending of the Darwinian and Lamarcking approaches which obviates the need for the historical anachronism of "orthogenesis," which is still of interest only to "literary intellectuals and religious philosophers" intent on discerning the working of higher purposes in the evolutionary process. Cf. Organismic Evolution (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977).

8 Cf. the striking remark of intellectual historian C. C. Gillispie: "Lamarck’s theory of evolution was the last attempt to make a science out of the instinct, as old as Heraclitos and deeply hostile to Aristotelian formalization, that the world is flux and process, and that science is to study, not the configurations of matter, nor the categories of form, but the manifestations of that activity which is ontologically fundamental as bodies in motion and species of being are not. This is no longer a familiar view. It is not even recognizable [sic!]" (FOD 268f.).

9This is not my view alone, but is implicit in an earlier study of this history by James B. Gray (MPT). Gray’s own attempt to call attention to the historical priority of evolutionary cosmologies is motivated, however, by a quite different concern (with which I take strong exception), expressed in an unpublished paper: "the particular influence of evolutionary theories on Whitehead’s work has been overlooked" (EEWP 1, 28).

10 A. O. Lovejoy, in his devastating historical critique of the "great chain of being," subtlety seems to connect Whitehead, as he explicitly connects Bergson, with a temporized version of the "Chain of Being" metaphysical tradition in the 20th century (GCB 315-33). A more gracious account of the "dated" nature of process metaphysics, linking it with the last gasp of 19th-century speculative trends, can be found in W. T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, vol. V (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975 [2nd edition, revised]), pp. 15-17.

11The latter comments occur in the context of the chapter on the "bifurcation of nature, but it is clear that Whitehead (at this point in time) holds the idealists responsible for this bifurcation, along with reductionists like Newton and dualists like Locke, because all bog down on the alleged difference, and the subsequent question of the relation between, nature and mind, rather than developing a pure concept of nature in itself.

12 It is worth noting, by contrast, that Morgan later credits the influence of Whitehead on his own ideas: cf. "Mind in Evolution," Creation by Evolution, ed. Frances Mason (New York: Macmillan, 1928).

13 Peirce once commented that "the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution," while evolution itself "means nothing but growth in the widest sense of that word. All laws are the result of evolution and continue to evolve. Thus no laws are absolute. The tendency of everything is to take on habit." Cf. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), vol. VI, pp. 12-15; and Justus Buchler, The Philosophy of Pierce (London: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), p. 360.

14 This impression is borne out in Lewis Ford’s recent and meticulous reconstruction of the critical phases of the development of Whitehead’s metaphysics: EMW 34, 115. There is no indication of Piercean influence in the formation of Whitehead’s views on the evolution of laws of nature. Such influence would have had to have been indirectly mediated through Dewey or James. But there is likewise no significant influence from Dewey, and James enters in only with respect to Whitehead’s approval of his views on the nature of conscious experience.

15 Hocking’s notes are from actual transcripts deposited with Houghton Library at Harvard University as edited by Jennifer Hamlin von der Luft in Appendix I of EMW, pp. 262-302.

16 In lectures delivered between November 21 and December 16, 1924, however, Whitehead does discuss evolution and emergence in more cosmological terms -- but in a manner that is entirely innocuous, unsystematic, and which gives no evidence whatever of interest in or influence of other evolutionary cosmologies: e.g.," Evolution is the production of superior types out of inferior types" (MW 266; cf. 267-69). Bergson is the only other evolutionary cosmologist besides Alexander mentioned by name -- and Whitehead’s interest is here restricted to a few general remarks on time and intuition (cf. EWM 276, 294). A single parenthetical reference to Herbert Spencer has to do only with his theory of perception, not his evolutionist views (EWM 291).

17 This is the only instance I can locate in which Whitehead shows even rudimentary awareness that there is more than one "doctrine" or "formula" of evolution. I have slightly improved the thrust of this quotation: Whitehead actually (somewhat embarrassingly) claims that the "struggle for existence gives no hint why there should be cities" even though Hobbes’ social theory provides just such an account, illustrating that cultural change and even transformation per se has necessarily little to do with the issue of evolution. It is once again apparent from such effective but vacuous rhetorical flourishes that Whitehead holds no clear or systematic concept of "evolution."

18 Charles Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy (New York: Braziler Press, 1970), pp. 7f.