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Whoever comes in contact with process philosophy today encounters it more often than not in the form of Whitehead’s philosophy. This was the way it was for me when I was guest professor in 1963 at the University of Chicago and ran into an entire school of Whitehead adherents in the theological faculty (not, I must say, in the philosophical faculty). Consequently, for the sake of my own intellectual survival I had to come to grips quickly and intensively with the writings of this philosopher, who was at that time hardly known on the continent of Europe.

The experience was enriching. It supplemented the great tradition of German Idealism in the latter’s serious lack of a philosophy of nature or metaphysic adequate to the demands of our century, one that, from the outset, integrates the horizon of consciousness as mediated by contemporary knowledge of nature with experience as disclosed by the humanities and social sciences. The more time I spent with Whitehead the more I was shocked, however, by the very dogmatic way in which he is read in the U.S.A., in the school of process theology -- which has in the meantime become quite influential. In that school Whitehead is taken to be an entirely self-sufficient systematic thinker and, as such, authoritative, like Aristotle in the high scholasticism of the 13th century. Many people fail to see Whitehead as an exponent of a wide stream of process thinking, in the context of which his philosophical approach represents only one of the possible and, to some extent, actually explored options.

If one sees Whitehead’s philosophy in the neighborhood of thinkers such as Henry Bergson and Samuel Alexander, to name only these two, then one becomes aware of different versions of the process philosophical perspective. It becomes clear that a process philosophical approach, which dismisses the thought of a timeless, identical substance, must not necessarily be bound to specific hypotheses of Whitehead, such as his doctrine of discreet emergent "occasions" or elementary events,¹ as the ultimate realities, and his doctrine of eternal objects as potentials for these "occasions’" self-realization.

Let us turn to the first hypothesis: namely, that actual "occasions" or "actual entities" form the final real things which constitute the world (PR 18/ 27). This thesis implies an atomistic ontology; Whitehead himself says: "Thus the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism" (PR 35/ 53). He calls his philosophy "an atomic theory of actuality" (PR 27/ 40). The continuum he takes to be derived from the discreetly emergent actual entities. Taken by itself, the continuum is only possibility, "potentiality for division" (PR 67/104), and it is by the actual entities divided. Whitehead thereby enters into conflict not only with Newton’s theory of absolute space and absolute time but also with Bergson. For in the type of process philosophy developed by Bergson, "duration" and with it a form of continuum is fundamental. Bergson’s "duration" is the continuum of becoming itself, while for Whitehead becoming is not continuous; in line with the paradoxes of Zeno, he asserts: "there can be no continuity of becoming" (FR 35/ 53).

On this question, Samuel Alexander sides with Bergson; although Alexander, anticipating Whitehead’s somewhat later remarks (PR 321/ 489f.), criticizes Bergson’s opposing space to time. The "spatialization" of time, which Bergson judges to be the result of the intelligence and which he goes so far as to blame for the errors of traditional substance metaphysics, Alexander takes to be the essence of time itself (STD 1143; cf. 149). It is only space that makes continuity possible, because an instant can be common to different places; above all because, inversely, many consecutive events can occur at the same place (STD I 48f.). A succession of instants in themselves would lack continuity; it would consist of perishing instants (STD I 45). Continuity, which later Whitehead secured by his subtle theory of "eternal objects" and their ingression into the world of actual occasions, is still guaranteed in Alexander by a space which had not yet been relativized. To this extent we can understand Alexander as Whitehead’s precursor.

However, Alexander’s conception of the infinity of space-time, as the condition for the determination of finitude, is opposed to Whitehead. Following Samuel Clarke and also Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, Alexander thinks of finitude and, above all, individual points/instants as limitations of infinity. "The infinite is not what is not finite, but the finite is what is not infinite" (STD I 42).

Like Levinas today, Alexander appeals to Descartes for the constitutive meaning of the infinite with regard to the thinkability of the finite as such. But then, naturally, atomism cannot be the final metaphysical truth. Alexander shares Bergson’s conception of the primordiality of movement as always holistic and continuous (STD I 149). "Motion is not a succession of point-instants, but rather a point -- instant is the limiting case of a motion" (STD I 321). The discrimination -- of point-instants is the product of intellectual abstraction. "They are In fact . . . inseparable from the universe of motion; they are elements in a continuum" (STD I 325). Alexander consequently moves close to Spinoza; space-time is the whole of existing, the infinite, which precedes all finite actuality (SID I 339ff.).

In view of Bergson and Alexander, on the one side, and Whitehead’s event-atomism, on the other, therefore, one has to do with two fundamental and alternative approaches for process thinking. To be sure, Alexander attempted to distinguish infinite space-time both from the category of substance and also from a whole of parts (STD I 338ff), the latter because such a whole in his view is always to be thought of as composed of parts. However, with regard to motion, at least, he spoke indeed of the whole of motion as prior to its individual space-time instants (STD I 321). Conversely, Whitehead proceeds from the ontological priority of discrete events or their components. Does he not thereby fall into the logical aporiae of every atomistic metaphysic? They have already been formulated in the concluding parts of Plato’s Parmenides (Parm. 165ff): without the One the others can be neither one nor many and there would be absolutely nothing.

Many ones are many of the same (in the sense of the abstract One), but also many in relationship and so parts of a whole; if they do not form a totality, then they cannot be thought of as exemplifying the same One. In any case, an enveloping unity must already be presupposed, if atoms are to be thought as unities at all.

If I am not mistaken, Whitehead nowhere discusses the logical difficulties attending the systematic concept of atomism: although he discusses in Adventures of Ideas (1933) different forms of atomism (AI 159ff.), and in so doing opposes the types of atomism that can be traced back to Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, and from which the positivist interpretation of modern natural science is derived: here the atoms are only externally related, i.e., according to the principle of randomness. These relations are no less external in Newton’s mechanics as expressions of laws imposed from without by the will of God. In contrast, Whitehead sees Plato as the originator of a way of looking at things which understands laws (AI 162) and therefore the relationships between things as regulated through them as immanent in the things (AI 156ff.). Whitehead himself is inclined to this conception.

Correspondingly, Whitehead already in Science and the Modern World (1925) opposes the description of relations between events solely in terms of external relations, which he finds in the usual accounts of space-time relations (SMW 180). Insofar as the individual events are constituted by the relationships in which they stand, these are internal to the events: ". . . the relationships of an event are internal, so far as . . . they are constitutive of what the event is in itself" (SMW 152). The acceptance of such inner relationships demands, according to Whitehead, the acceptance of a subjectivity of the individual event, as integrative of the manifold relations which constitute it (SMW 180). To that extent, these internal relations represent themselves as acts of the event itself and as such are called "prehensions." In Whitehead’s main work, Process and Reality, this concept stands in the center of his analyses, while the discussions of external and internal relations recede to the background.² (Yet the concept of prehensions is even here still defined as "concrete facts of relatedness" [PR 22/ 32].)

Now each individual event prehends all other events of the world, which it encounters and which it must appropriate as its own: "each actual entity includes the universe, by reason of its determinate attitude towards every element in the universe" (PR 45/ 71f.).³

It may appear that the one-sidedness of atomism is thereby counterbalanced. Indeed, with the thesis that every individual event is conditioned by the totality of all the others, justice is apparently done to the constitutive meaning of the whole for the individual. Still it should be observed that Whitehead does not speak directly of a meaning of the universe for the individual, but only indirectly, on account of the relationship of every event to every other "element" of the universe. Only in this sense does he say: ". . . every actual entity springs from that universe which there is for it" (PR 80/124). Since the universe or the space-time continuum is not given as a real whole to the individual event, it is always only this individual event which must integrate into a whole the manifold relationships into which it enters. Consequently, as many perspectives of the universe arise as there are events that emerge. It is no accident that one thinks of Leibniz here. Whitehead explicitly appeals to Leibniz’s doctrine of the monads: " I am using the same notion, only I am toning down his monads into the unified events in space and time" (SMW 102). Leibniz, however, with his thesis of the "windowlessness" of monads, would have denied the concrete reality of internal relations. The monads, for Leibniz, do not stand in real relationships to each other but only mirror the primary monad and the universe created by it in refraction of their own respective finite positions.

In consequence, according to Leibniz, natural laws are as much externally imposed on the world as they were in Descartes (AI 170f.). Whitehead, on the contrary, wants to understand the laws of nature as emerging out of the reciprocal relationships of the things themselves, as expressing these reciprocal relations. Hence individuals appear to him not only as reflections of the universe but also as subjects of the creative integration of the manifold relations which constitute them, while the spatiotemporal continuum is taken to be the result of an abstraction from the concrete eventness, out of which the relationships among the actual entities" emerge (cf. already CN 78).

We must therefore hold that in the end Whitehead’s theory of prehension does not really counterbalance the onesidedness of atomnisn,, because the whole of the universe or of the spatiotemporal continuum, on his account, has no ontological independence over against the monad-like events. Leibniz felt otherwise, because the universe is pregiven to each individual creature as grounded in the thinking of God and is only mirrored by the creature. In Whitehead, however, God is not the creator but only the cocreator of the actual occasion; consequently the elemental events, as self-constitutive are at the same time the ground of the continuum expressing their nexus, and this continuum is "derived" from these events.

Through the concept of the subjectivity of individual events, seen as the integrating centers of the manifold of the relationships which constitute them, Whitehead wanted to oppose a more profound vision to the materialistic description of the natural processes, which settles for mere external relationships (SMW 151f.). But the concept of a self-constituting subjectivity of actual occasions leads into new difficulties. On the one hand, the actual occasion or entity ought to be the ultimate constituent of the physical universe. On the other hand, these final constituents of the universe are taken to be still further analyzable into the relations or "prehensions’’ which constitute them. Now, Whitehead says, the analysis of an "actual entity" is only feasible in thought. "The actual entity is divisible; but it is in fact undivided" (PR 227/ 347). If, however, the analysis of the actual occasion into the prehensions (or internal relations) which constitute it is only feasible by virtue of mental abstraction, then we are faced with a problem. How is it possible to continue to interpret the actual occasion itself as a process with different phases, in which it generates itself (PR 26/39), while asserting that the end phase of this process, on the other hand, ought to be identical with the complete duration of the event (PR 283/ 434)?

When Whitehead, in Process and Reality, presents a genetic analysis with its differentiation of various phases in the self-constitution of the event (cf., e.g., PR 26f./ 40, 248f./ 380f.), he becomes liable to the suspicion of confusing the abstract and concrete, thereby committing the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," which he has often astutely criticized in other thinkers. If we cannot, in fact, really divide the actual occasion further but can only abstractly differentiate the relationships which constitute its identity, then we cannot, by the same token, characterize the actual occasion as being the result of a process in which these aspects which can only be distinguished in the abstract are actually integrated. This is even more difficult since these relations themselves are said to be constituted only by the actual occasion.

Whitehead assuredly needs this way of looking at things, if he wants to be able to affirm the subjectivity of actual occasions as causae sui (PR 86/ 131, 88/ 135, cf., 25f./ 38). If one conceives of the actual occasion as merely determined by the happenstance of the relations which constitute it, then it is only thought as an object, which as such cannot be separated from its field but is nothing other than the systematically adjusted set of modifications of the field (CN 190).⁴ It seems, however, that Whitehead must assume the subjectivity of the event in order to be able at all to assert its autonomy. It is therefore the condition of Whitehead’s atomistic interpretation of reality. If, however, the independence of actual occasions is thought of as self-constitution, then it seems to follow that the actual occasion itself must be reconceived as a process which integrates that which precedes it, thus constituting its own identity. This conception remains self-contradictory because the actual occasions are claimed to be the ultimate components of reality, not integration of more primitive components. This basic thesis cannot be reconciled with the assumptions of the actual occasions’ self-constitution.

Now Whitehead’s "genetic analysis" of the actual occasion, doubtless, amounts to an extrapolation which forces onto the interpretation of actual occasions the experiential structure of more highly organized forms of life. Whitehead himself described this procedure of his speculative philosophy as the method of imaginative generalization (PR 5/ 8, cf. 4ff/ 7ff.); it is precisely the principle of self-constitution as creativity which forms, in his own philosophy, the central instance of applying this method (PR 7/11). Whitehead’s doctrine of the subjectivity of actual occasions shares many individual features with the philosophical psychology of William James. More specifically, Whitehead’s doctrine deals, on the one hand, with the momentary character of the I and, on the other hand, with the description of each I-instant as being a momentary integration of experience and especially of the past of such I-instants. Presumably, Whitehead’s theory of the subjectivity of actual occasions can be interpreted, to a very large extent, as a generalization of this idea of the I in William James’s psychology, a generalization achieved by applying this idea to the (interpretation of the) foundations of physics.

It was not for nothing that Whitehead considered William James alongside Bergson and Dewey among the thinkers to whom his chief work is especially indebted. In Science and the Modern World he even compared James to Descartes as a founder of a new era of philosophy (SMW 20Sf.).

The demonstration of such connections is certainly not enough to substantiate our objection to Whitehead’s claims. The procedure of imaginative generalization obviously plays a considerable role in any formation of philosophical concepts. Whitehead himself says, however, that such procedure has the character of tentative formulations (PR 8/ 12) and that it requires, along with inner consistency and coherence, confrontation with facts.:" Speculative boldness must be balanced by complete humility before logic and before fact" (PR 17/25).

Measured by this yardstick, it would seem illegitimate to extrapolate the structures of subjectivity in order to interpret actual occasions, because in contrast to James’s psychology of subjectivity, which has to do with a real succession of moments of experience, Whitehead’s thought cannot claim such real succession in the genesis of the individual actual occasion. James’s psychology of the self can conceive each individual moment of experience as a new integration of previous experience, because the successive moments are really distinct and because the relation of the later to the earlier, as their integration, constitutes the special quality of human, subjective relations in the medium of experience, reflection, and memory. Whitehead, for his part, can only use the factual universal relationship of all events as a basis for applying the Jamesian model of subjectivity to the relationship that obtains between newly emerging events and all the other events and so also their predecessors. It is very questionable whether there exists here a sufficient measure of analogy. The I, which according to James always emerges momentarily, relates itself in no way to all preceding events but only to the earlier experiences made present to it by memory. The human faculty of memory, however, is a highly specialized function which cannot, without further ado, be attributed to all natural processes.

Moreover, the integrating performance of the momentarily emerging I is, in James, conditioned by the fact that neither the human body, on the one hand, nor the "social self" the sum of social expectations concerning the individual’s performance, on the other hand, emerge instantaneously; they both, rather represent continua, in relation to which each momentary synthesis of the I (die punktuelle Ichsynthese) can function as the principle of novelty and creativity.

Whitehead’s speculative extrapolation of the principle of subjective integration, momentarily achieved, may overestimate the measure of uniformity encountered in the real world. (The generalization of the structure of the human I, as understood by James [but disengaged from the problematic of the self as distinguished from the I], leads paradoxically to the reduction to the place of elementary processes.) These more complex forms of natural evolution are merely described as diversely ordered series, societies, of actual occasions, which, because of the abstract structural moments reproduced in their sequence and systematically modified, appear as stable unities without finally being such. In Process and Reality, the comparatively brief treatment of this topic already suggests that the ontological dignity of stable and perduring forms is considered secondary in contrast to the structure of actual occasions. If we were to suppose, however, that the formation of higher forms were already deciphered, in principle, with the correct description of actual occasions, of which all higher forms consist, then we would repeat the style of thinking characteristic of materialism, the very thing to which Whitehead wanted to offer an alternative.

The fact that the emergence of form cannot be derived from the actual occasions of which they might consist shows once again that the unity of the field cannot be reduced to elementary momentary events which appear in it. In view of the metaphysical relevance of the form as actuality, not merely as structure in the sense of Whitehead’s "eternal objects," we see once more how onesided the atomistic interpretation of reality is; it cannot do justice to wholeness as a metaphysical principle of equal dignity with that of individual discreteness.

Curiously, however, it is precisely Whitehead’s genetic analysis of actual occasions with all its paradoxes which offers new points of view that could help at this impasse. According to Whitehead, the phases of concrescence are not to be thought of as temporally successive, since the event is what it is as an undivided unity. Therefore, the representation describing a process of genesis appeared to us as paradoxical. But Whitehead’s analyses illuminate the understanding of processes whose phases certainly must be thought of as temporally successive, in which, however, the final aim (das Werdezeil) of the form is already present.

In any event, all life processes seem to be of this nature. In the process of its growth the plant or animal is always this plant or this animal, although its specific nature indeed comes fully to light only in the result of its genesis. By way of anticipation it is in each instant already that which it only becomes in the process of its growth. The identity of its being is assuredly not that of a momentary event but resides in the identity of its nature, of its essential form, which perdures throughout the course of some particular time. By anticipating its essential form in the process of its growth, a being’s substantial identity is linked together with the notion of process.

In Whitehead’s genetic analysis of elementary processes, the concepts of "subjective aim," and "superject" play a similar role. Already in Process and Reality Whitehead himself spoke occasionally of anticipatory feelings with respect to subjective aim (PR 278/ 424f.; cf. 214f./ 327f.). He did so above all in Adventures of Ideas (AI 25 (M). To be sure, Whitehead does not go so far as to describe the significance of anticipation for the formation of the subject, as constituting its subjectivity out of a future which already determines the present by way of anticipation. Rather in Whitehead, anticipation means that the subject, constituting itself in the present, includes also its future relevance for others (its "objective immortality") in the act of its self-constitution.

Whitehead did not exhaust the theoretical potential of the element of anticipation implied in the concept of "subjective aim." Aristotle’s analysis of motion, which forms the background to all teleological descriptions of processes, went much further in that direction. Aristotle interpreted the very anticipation of the final state of natural movement in the moved as entelechy. Although this resulted in turning the action of the future end upon the present becoming into the effectiveness of a living organism’s seed with respect to its future end, he nevertheless spoke of an effect of the end upon the process of becoming. This does not happen in Whitehead, because he sees becoming in each of its stages as self-constitutive. That is why, despite his use of telelogical language, the element of anticipation cannot really become constitutive in his interpretation of subjectivity.

The idea of the radical self-creation of each actual occasion is the reason why Whitehead’s metaphysics cannot be reconciled with the Biblical idea of creation nor, therefore, with the Biblical idea of God. To be sure, American process theology has attempted to interpret Whitehead’s concept of creativity in terms of the divine activity of creation.⁵ In Whitehead himself, however, the constitution of each actual entity’s subjectivity remains always a self-constitution, and this despite the dependence of each actual entity upon God, who provides it with the conditions of its self-realization through its "initial aim." This shortcoming follows from the fact that Whitehead relates the teleological structure of becoming to the elementary level of actual occasions, which are called processes but do not allow for temporal extension in the sense of a succession of phases in time, since actual occasions, of which everything else is supposed to consist, are indeed said to be momentary and undivided.

The matter would be otherwise if we limit the applicability of Whitehead’s genetic analysis to processes that take place in time, instead of using that analysis to explain the constitution of actual occasions. Then the "subjective aim" of the process would have to do with the future of one’s own essential completion in the future, a future which would be still to come. This completion could not simply be in the power of the present decision but would eventually be reached or not reached by such a decision. Correspondingly the anticipation of one’s own essential completion in the future would gain greater significance for the constitution of subjectivity; the latter could not be identified with the self-creation of present decisions but would be dependent on the manifestation of the whole of one’s own essential completion in each present.

Certainly such a conception would no longer be that of an atomistic metaphysic. It would no longer attribute subjectivity to the simplest actual occasions. Rather from the impossibility of such attribution (because it implies the paradoxical assumption of a nontemporal process), there would arise an argument to the effect that the autonomy of finite being and subjectivity can increase with the complexity of forms rather than being fully pronounced as early as in the elementary occasions. The unity of the field from which actual occasions proceed would no longer be traceable to a network of relations which is itself constituted only by these occasions. Rather the unity of the field would have to be seen along with the unity of the forms which appear in increasing differentiation on higher levels of natural processes, keeping in mind that such unity of the forms cannot be derived from actual occasions although it consists of such occasions.

Such a view of the matter would be, as I said, no longer atomistic, because it does not limit reality (in the sense of what is actual) to the undivided elementary actual occasions.

For that reason alone, however, it would not step outside the circle of process philosophies, although it would hold to the idea of an essential identity of the being which becomes in the process of its genesis, as an idea encompassing this whole process; thus it would link the fundamental intention of the concept of substance with the process perspective. It is precisely in that direction that Whitehead’s analysis of genetic processes, with his concept of the subject as "superject’’ of one’s own process of formation, has developed important impulses, even if these impulses bear fruit only after they have been liberated from the limitation to momentary actual occasions and its attendant atomism. They are thereby also liberated from the aporiae which burden them in the theoretical context of such assumptions.

References

STD -- Samuel Alexander. Space, Time and Deity. 1920; New York: Macmillan, 1966.

NOTES

1More precisely "actual occasion," designates the primary constituents of events: an actual occasion is the limiting type of an event with only one member (PR 73/113).

2 This may be connected with the fact that now relations may be characterized as reciprocal (the complex of mutual prehensions, (PR 194/ 295) while SMW still distinguishes, in an Aristotelian sense, between internal and external relations (analogous to the difference between relatio realis and relatio rationis in scholastic philosophy). Cf. also PR 222f / 340 and 50/ 79.

3 Cf. 123: "each actual entity is locus for the universe", as early as The Concept of Nature (1920) 152. Later Whitehead relates this idea to the concept of a physical field (PR 80/123f.).

4 In The Concept of Nature Whitehead still did not view, one must remember, the point-flash or event-particle as the ultimate real component of the natural world: "You must not think of the world as ultimately built up of event particles," he expressly says there (CN 172 cf. 59). The world is rather "a continuous stream of occurrences which we can discriminate into finite events forming by their overlappings and containings of each other and separations a spatio- temporal structure’’ (CN 172f.; cf. also AI 161).

5 So, especially, John Cobb, God and the World (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965).

In much recent philosophy, including mine hitherto, space and time have been considered primarily as they appear either to common sense or to relativity physics. But quantum physics suggests important qualifications. This should not surprise us. For it is only in quantum physics that science arrives at long last at the true idea of single "happenings," events not reducible to a series of subevents. This corrects or qualifies the idea of space-time as continuous. Actual happenings are discrete, not instantaneous or indefinitely extended temporally or spatially, and only the potentiality of happenings is continuous. In general (as Peirce saw, but in his "Synechism" partly forgot) continuity is the order of possibility, rather than of actuality. Pure geometry deals with possible, not actual events. Heisenberg seems to have seen more clearly than some, e.g., Schroedinger, the importance of the idea that a quantum "jump" is a single event, not a continuous series of events. Before the jump occurs, there is only a probability of its happening, and the wave function gives this probability.

The attempt to reduce probability to a mere matter of our ignorance has led nowhere in the fifty years since Heisenberg’s famous paper. The future is the aspect of reality that is definite only as probability, while the past is definite -- period. What happened happened, whether we know it or not. Becoming is creation of definite actualities. Peirce and Bergson had said this before the discovery of quanta, and for good reasons, but in quantum physics science discovered factual evidence that, if it did not prove these philosophers right, at least made it much easier for such views to get serious consideration.

Nature keeps making what amount to decisions (mostly not conscious as such), each causally conditioned but not causally determined. Every event has a cause if "cause" means necessary condition; no concrete definite event has a cause if "cause" means sufficient or determining condition, for that would make the result as necessary as the condition. Only for certain more or less abstract or approximate features of events, for instance statistical uniformities, can there be sufficient or necessitating conditions. Since the classical view that ultimately equates necessary and sufficient conditioning is no longer operative in science, there is no point either in affirming the compatibility of human freedom and classical determinism or in introducing ad hoc exceptions to determinism in the case of human decisions. Relevant also is the truth noted by Bohr that quantum physics applies strictly only to isolated systems, which at best are idealizations, and is not without further qualification applicable to organisms. Thus even quantum statistical determinacy is not absolute.

Quantum physics of course limits the precision with which spatiotemporal localization can be assigned to events, or to world-lines, that is, event sequences or careers. In 1964 a more radical correction of traditional views was discovered by J. S. Bell.¹ In a personal communication Stapp writes:

Whether or not this result reinstates absolute simultaneity is another question. What does follow, again in the words of Stapp, is that "spatially separated parts of reality must be related in some way that goes beyond the familiar idea that causal connections propagate only into the forward light-cone." Thus the famous Einsteinian concept of the space-time structure, standard for nearly sixty years, receives at last some qualification.

Peirce’s or Popper’s fallibilism, or Whitehead’s dictum, "seek simplicity and mistrust it," should have led us to expect something like this. To quote Stapp once more, "causal effects can be transmitted over large distances without the possibility of material conveyance. Admirers of Whitehead will recall his qualification, "provided physics keeps to its denial of action at a distance." It has not kept to it. Only so far as nonquantum effects are concerned is causal influence confined to the forward light cone, leaving a mass of contemporaries for any given event E, although most of these contemporaries of E are not contemporary with one another. ("Contemporary with" here means "mutually independent of.") This relativistic conception is quite different from older concepts not only of simultaneity but also of contemporaneity. It is one of the strangest ideas ever introduced by science. No wonder some physicists almost went out of their minds trying to assimilate it. By accepting it as ultimate, Whitehead rendered the great doctrine of events as summing up the influences of the past distressingly ambiguous. For "past" has no clear meaning in relativity physics. There is the "absolute past" of a given event and its absolute future, but between them a "present" teeming with relations of before and after.

For philosophy there was another difficulty. The conception of events related only by the nonrelation of independence implies the idea of purely external relations, not to be found in any of the events but sprawling somehow "between" them. I believe I have shown elsewhere that monistic arguments against wholly external relations and pluralistic arguments against wholly internal relations are equally cogent and that the solution to the problem of relating events is to be found only in a theory of asymmetrically internal-external relations, constitutive of one term but not of the other. Such relations are vulnerable to neither of the objections to which the symmetrical extremes are exposed (5).

In spite of these considerations, relativity physics has seemed to compel us to accept the symmetrical independence of spatially separated events. For decades I suffered philosophically from this seeming necessity. Now, may Allah bless him, Bell has done away, it seems, with the problem. For he shows that the mathematics of quantum theory, which has yielded such manifold confirmed predictions, is incompatible with the idea of mutually independent contemporaries. And in the thirteen years since 1964 no one has shown how to rid the quantum mathematics of this implication and yet retain its utility.

It should be said that Bell somewhat confused the issue by employing the notion of hidden variables, perhaps to save determinism, but Stapp has shown that this feature can be eliminated and the theorem still derived.

We have then physical as well as philosophical reasons to dismiss the idea of mutually independent events. The science that produced the idea has also eliminated it. The alternative is not to suppose that contemporary, spatially separated events are mutually influential. In that case a decision here would have to take account of a decision there that would have had to take account of a decision here taking account of the one there, and so on in endless proliferation and confusion. Or else one would have to say there was, at a given moment, but a single decision for the cosmos, as though the universe were but a series of acts of God. This is the monistic nightmare in which all localized action is lost and nothing definite can be said without saying everything else, which is impossible. This was why, after for some years defending (against Whitehead) an interdependence view of contemporaneity in order to avoid the paradox of purely external relations, I came to accept the relativistic view, paradoxical as it also seemed. But now with Bell and Stapp things are different. Events at place A and those at place B cannot be independent. Not that they must be interdependent. But either an influence goes from A to B or from B to A. The analogue in formal logic is that of P and Q being neither equivalent nor simply independent, though we do not know which is the entailing and which the entailed proposition.

The idea of interaction or biconditioning does seem a requirement of common sense and experience. Thus in dialogue each person influences the other. Yes, but persons, and individual things generally, are not single events, ultimate units of the world’s plurality, or final terms for spatial or temporal relations. Rather they are sequential series, families, of events. The veto upon mutually interactive events is compatible with mutually interactive careers or event sequences. "Interaction," and symmetry generally, is shorthand. Thus I now may influence you as at a later moment, and you as you were a moment ago may influence me as I am now. These relationships require three terms, three events, not just two. Between the ultimate units of analysis, the single events, there is only one-way influence, but several such asymmetrical relations may for convenience be summed up as interactions between individuals. The truth that talk about individuals is shorthand was seen by Buddhists long ago. How many philosophers today are pre-Buddhist in this respect! Also prescientific, for all modern science relates events to events, in the last analysis, not things to things.

The relativity scheme of space-time remains intact as a way of picturing ordinary, nonquantum relations between persons or things and even as a way of picturing relations between single events so far as these relations consist only of influences of the kind dealt with in ordinary life, such as those used to move macroscopic bodies, or to send messages. The influence of events at A upon events at B or of events at B upon those at A is shown to be mathematically necessary, but the mere knowledge that some such influence exists does not allow us to predict what a change at A will do in any single case to things at B. We do not even know which way the influence will go, but only that there must be one. Moreover, the effect disappears when averages are made over physical ensembles. Thus the veto on messages sent faster than the speed of light still stands.

It follows from the foregoing that for many practical purposes the idea of mutually independent contemporaries retains its significance. If some remote planet is inhabited by rational beings, we cannot plan any definite action upon those beings or in our lifetime exchange messages with them. This is all to the good. It is enough to have to concern ourselves with people on the other side of this our planet without having to think of the weal or woe, or the intentions, of those on remote planets in quite other solar systems. Altogether there is as much interaction and as much independence as we have need of.

In the foregoing I have been leaning heavily on the work of the physicist Henry P. Stapp. He holds a "revised Whiteheadian" theory according to which all single events, creative acts, or decisions" (he shares Whitehead’s fondness for this word in its most generalized or nonanthropomorphic meaning, which does not entail conscious choice) belong to one well-ordered series, each event being a necessary condition for all and only those coming "after" it in the series. The interaction of two things or persons consists in each having some of its events in this sense before and some after one or more of the other’s events. Each event is necessary condition for every, but sufficient condition for no, following event. (It is sufficient condition for there being some subsequent event and for its type of probability, but not for its definite character.) If values of the variable x denote events in my career and values of the variable y events in my neighbor’s career, then as we interact there are in the well-ordered or ultimate series (on which, according to Stapp, all events fall) some instances of x both before and after instances of y. No single instance of x would both condition or come before and be conditioned by or come after the same instance of y. Causality would be wholly noncircular.

The net effect, as Stapp notes, is a great gain in coherence for the process view of reality, which was gravely compromised by taking relativity as the last word on the structure of space-time.

This change also simplifies, if it does not first make possible, the influence upon the world that Whitehead attributes to divine decisions. They only need be inserted between successive events in the ultimate series. Only those who know the troubles process philosophers have had in trying to insert divine influences into the World of mutually independent contemporaries know what a relief this doctrine affords (1, 2, 6). One possibility I thought of years ago in wrestling with this problem was a one-dimensional series similar to the one that Stapp postulates, but, since neither common sense (nor past philosophy) nor the physics I then knew about seemed to give any support for the idea, I could not quite believe it.

With all its complexities and subtleties, the process view as now revised is, in basic essentials, the simplest and most straightforward cosmology ever conceived that is compatible with what we now know about nature. The only way to refute this assertion is to point to another cosmology that is superior in these respects. To do this will prove harder than to find grounds for complaint about this or that feature of White-head’s writings. Stapp’s writing, some of it not yet published, seems a model of clarity and very different in various ways from Whitehead’s, yet it preserves what on the basic level most matters in the Whiteheadian vision.

Metaphysics, the irrelevance of which has been so widely declared, is showing itself relevant indeed. We stand, one may surmise, before a new era in speculative philosophy. Bell’s discovery is philosophically as revolutionary as Heisenberg’s. That so many years could pass before it was much noticed seems surprising. Perhaps the needless entanglement with the sterile idea of hidden variables is the reason for the neglect. In any case, as many such cases show, the world is always busy as well as prejudiced. However, philosophy can hardly abstain much longer from considering Stapp’s startling idea, derived from Whitehead with help from Bell, that the four dimensions of space-time are our way of picturing relations obtaining, in terms of various types of influence, among instances of creative becoming whose well-ordered series of conditions and conditioned fall upon a single ultimate dimension. This dimension is far more like an ultimate time than an ultimate space, since it has a radical directionality, each member conditioning (when all types of influence are taken into account) all those coming "after" and none of those coming "before" it. It is time’s one-way dependence, not space’s symmetrical dependence or interdependence, that is the clue to reality in general or as such. Taken absolutely, space is, as so many philosophers have suspected, an illusion. (A Kantian might view this as at least a partial vindication of the formidable Koenigsberger.)

This result is only what formal logic should have led us to expect. For the relation upon which all reasoning depends is neither mutual conditioning (equivalence) nor complete independence but the normally one-way entailment or simple conditioning. This point is almost childishly simple. But it is profound, for by it alone can we reconcile the indispensable contrasting ideas of order and freedom, persistence and novelty, necessity and contingency, past and future, being and creative becoming, security and adventure, the satisfyingly predictable and the thrillingly unforeseeable, as in scientific discoveries or in all the best music. "Order" is significant only because, as Whitehead bluntly says, disorder is as real as order. The past can be "closed" only because the future is open. Asymmetry, not symmetry, is king.

Realities are neither simply outside each other, as flume, Russell, and other extreme pluralists have held, nor simply inside each other, as Fa Tsang in ancient China and Royce and Blanshard in recent times have stated, but cumulatively inside their successors as new realities which have essential reference to their predecessors are endlessly created. Causality is merely the way in which each instance of freedom takes into account the previous instances, as each of our experiences refers back through memory to our own past and through perception to the world’s past. Freedom is influenced by its own previous acts and by nothing else whatever. Even divine influence can only be the Eminent form of freedom whose decisions also must be in the ultimate series. Thus Berdyaev’s idea of a "divine time" can be given a meaning. For it is only divine "prehension," as the Eminent form of memory and perception, that can adequately preserve what has come to be and thus render it truly closed and forever definite thereafter. Atheistic systems will have to do with some less complete and positive account of how the past influences the present.

Every great scientist, like every great philosopher, sees some things rightly and some wrongly. Thus, granted Stapp’s interpretation of Bell’s discovery, though Einstein was wrong in refusing to give up classical determinism, he was right in rejecting absolute simultaneity. Two unit events at strictly the same locus in the ultimate succession must have the same conditions and probably consequences and be indistinguishable. And what could assign them the same locus in ordinary time? If they are interdependent, their distinguishability is lost; and if they are entirely independent, what could enable them to form parts of one unambiguously present state of nature?

It was also sound to look for a finite upper limit to velocity. An actual world cannot be all possible worlds, and any world order consists in excluding some logically possible sorts of happenings. Thus Epicurus was right in contradicting Democritus’s idea that atoms exist in all conceivable sizes. To be actual is to exclude some possibilities. This applies to actual laws, say those characterizing our "cosmic epoch," as well as to instances coming under the laws. It is quantum theory that has at last brought science to admit the contingency that qualifies every instance of becoming. The new indeterminacy is piecemeal contingency. Not only could there be other laws, but also, even granted the laws and the actual causal conditions, each new actuality could have been otherwise than it has been. Einstein, who was somewhat in love with necessity, inclined to view it as the very meaning of order and rationality. Rather, order or rationality is a mixture of "necessity and chance," as Epicurus shrewdly divined. "P entails q" is significant only because it is possible and common in such cases for q not to entail p.

In fairness we should perhaps agree with Pauli (against Born) that Einstein’s main objection, and a more cogent one, to quantum theory was not the statistical aspect, to which he was a major contributor, but to the subjectivism sometimes derived from it, the view that nature is merely certain correlations (statistical or not) among our perceptions. This for Einstein made the theory an incomplete description of the order of nature, which can hardly obtain as only an order of human perceptions. Yet it is widely agreed that, as now formulated, quantum theory gives us a mathematical model, not of an independent reality, but of our perceptions of reality. Einstein (also, I think, Schroedinger and Popper) has expressed dissatisfaction with this limitation. Heisenberg seems not wholly consistent on the issue. Stapp desiderates a mathematical model of what is going on in nature at large, but he concedes that we do not yet have such a model. In his view the present theory is merely "pragmatic." According to the revised Whiteheadian theory, the desired model should refer to items on the ultimate series, the members of which may be conceived abstractly as decisions or partly free events, subject only to statistical regularities. Our momentary human experiences are paradigmatic examples of such events, but they have no ontological priority.

Experiencing as creative of its own novel unity is the absolute principle, and it includes the persistence of the already created. Causality is merely, as Whitehead so nicely put it, the necessity that each new actuality must "house" its actual world, i.e., its past. I have shown elsewhere that the partial predictability of the future is a logical consequence of this postulate (4; cf. also 3). It is the real solution to Hume’s problem about causality, provided we take past to refer to the order in which actualities come to exist, rather than only to the "temporal" order as it appears in relativity physics or is accessible to detailed human discernment. We can believe in an order of creation without necessarily supposing that observing animals such as we are have unlimited capacity to know that order. Obviously we cannot know just how it feels to be a butterfly, or even a chimpanzee, or for that matter our own wife or husband. So why should we complain because there is some mystery for us about the order in which actualities become actual?

Whitehead makes one remark that might seem to imply a potential objection to the new principle. He says that the mutual independence of contemporaries constitutes their freedom. Without this independence, what happens anywhere would immediately condition what happens anywhere else. However, this would be fatal to freedom only if the sole alternative to mutual independence were mutual dependence. And this is not a necessary, if it is even a possible, interpretation of Bell’s result. What happens here now may condition what happens somewhere else without measurable temporal lapse, although what happens at the somewhere else does not condition what happens here and now. In that case what happens here is entirely free so far as the other happening is concerned, and the other happening, though conditioned by what happens here, still retains its freedom since, by the process conception of conditioning, no set of conditions can be fully determinative of the resulting actuality. I think Whitehead was subtly misled by the symmetry that distinguishes space from time, a symmetry that, we now appear to know, holds only with respect to certain forces, those communicated not over the speed of light and constituting interaction only as shorthand description of a tissue of one-way actions between unit events.

We seem to have in this situation one more example of the truth that symmetry is invariably partial or in some sense artificial. The mutual externality that has often been taken to distinguish matter from mind, the spatial from the merely temporal, like so many other supposedly absolute distinctions between physical and mental process turns out to be an illusion, if taken without qualification. And the mutual interaction that has often been proposed as the way to avoid that illusion is revealed as an opposite exaggeration.

Not symmetry, asymmetry is king, the one-way dependence of creativity in each instance on its antecedent instances.

SOME FURTHER REFLECTIONS

The modified Whiteheadian view has in common with the unmodified doctrine that, in either case, substance and spatiality (Kant’s third category of reciprocity) reduce to Kant’s first category of cause-effect, which in process terms is the same as prehendable-prehending. Against the unmodified view I see two objections.

(1) There is Bradley’s argument that (mutually) external relations imply a relation between the terms and the relation, generating a regress. (With the externality holding of one term only, there is, as Bradley failed to note, no regress, for the internally related term, simply in being itself, has relation to the other term.)

(2) There is the difficulty of seeing how the divine Consequent Nature can be compatible with the idea of its taking light years for spatially separated events to be together as data of one prehension. To meet this difficulty one may (with Whitehead and Ford) view God as an actual entity" or (with me) as a society, in either view not without what may appear as troublesome paradoxes.

For the two reasons stated I must hope that the Stapp modification proves acceptable, odd as it may seem to our human imaginations. Whichever way further study takes opinion, it is, I hold, a great advantage of process philosophy that it faces only one basic problem where tradition saw three. The basic problem is that of one-way dependence, or in the Buddhist phrase, whatever this or that Buddhist meant by it, "dependent origination." Substantiality (or social order) and spatiality are but complications in the essential business of prehensive supersession, A prehending B which prehended C, etc. Substances, societies, are especially intimate sequences of actualities prehending a common characteristic from predecessors; spatiality is only the at least partly symmetrical case: either (the unmodified view)

A) Mutual inheritance between sufficiently near or enduring societies, otherwise mutual non-inheritance, and

B) Mutual non-inheritance between actual entities; or (Stapp)

A) As above, except as qualified by

B’) One-way inheritance of a special, subtle kind between pairs of actual entities; otherwise non inheritance, as in (B).

Thus on both theories a single principle does triple work. When a physicist or mathematician achieves such sweeping integration of concepts under one concept, people get excited. Philosophers, for one reason or another, often seem not to care. Physicists now say what Whitehead said rather long ago: nature consists in the last analysis of "events, not things." Physicists as such can hardly be expected to see also that causal inheritance is prehensive. But when psychologists seriously turn their attention to the question of comparative psychology and the general problem of mind in nature, then they and the physicists (and perhaps even most of the philosophers) may come to see it.

References

1. Paul Fitzgerald, "Relativity Physics and the God of Process Philosophy," Process Studies 2/4 (Winter, 1972), 251-73.

2. Lewis S. Ford, "Is Process Theism Compatible with Relativity Theory?" Journal of Religion 48/2 (April, 1968), 124-35.

3. Charles Hartshorne, "The Meaning of ‘Is going to be’," Mind 74/293 (January, 1965), 115-29.

4. Charles Hartshorne, "Creativity and the Deductive Logic of Causality," Review of Metaphysics 27/1 (September, 1973), 62-74.

5. Charles Hartshorne, "The Neglect of Relative Predicates in Modern Philosophy," American Philosophical Quarterly 14/4 (October, 1977).

6. John T. Wilcox, "A Question from Physics for Certain Theists," Journal of Religion 41/4 (October, 1961), 293-300.

Notes

1 I am deeply indebted to Henry P. Stapp for his lucid explanations (partly in conversations) of the essentials of Bell’s theorem and for his revision of the Whiteheadian cosmology to render it compatible with Bell’s result. For the relevant literature see the references given in Stapp’s essay above, particularly 1, 9,10, and 7, sections iii, x, and especially appendix B on p. 1318.

Personal identity is a special form of genetic identity and is very different from the more strict identity dealt with in logical systems (since Leibniz first defined it as complete equivalence of predicates). My view of personal identity can be cumulatively built up in the following steps. (On this issue my view is, so far as I can see, entirely in accord with Whitehead’s and is in some respects close to historical Buddhism, whether Theravada or Mahayana.)

a) Becoming is not "being" minus something, but being plus something. Or rather, being is only an abstraction from process or becoming, which is "reality itself" (Bergson). One corollary is that terms like "reality," or "the universe," or "the truth" have no single referent, fixed once for all, but acquire a partly new denotation each time they are used. Whereas "being" contrasts with "becoming," reality contrasts only with the fictitious or merely imaginary. What has happened up to now is not fictitious but real, and is, if you will, being rather than nonbeing. But mere being, abstracting from process, is, as Nietzsche saw long ago, but an empty universal, the common property of all becoming whatsoever. One argument for the primacy of becoming is this: if anything becomes and something else does not, the totality of what becomes and what does not become itself becomes. A new constituent makes a new totality. In other words, the only way to make becoming less than being is to deny that there is any real becoming. Of course many have done this, e.g., Sankara and McTaggart. If the immutable-and-the-mutable is real in both aspects, then what the entire phrase refers to is mutable. It is process which is inclusive, and being is a constituent of this inclusive reality.

b) Becoming is actually discontinuous, though the potentialities for becoming form a continuum. Actuality is always in definite units, and these are not instantaneous, any more than they are spatially punctiform. Proofs for this view have been given by James and Whitehead, using a form of Zeno’s paradox. A proof I incline to prefer is given by von Wright, who does not mention the other proofs.¹ In sum, apart from logical niceties, the argument is: a thing cannot have contradictory predicates at one and the same time; but, if change is continuous, no time can be found, unless an absolute instant, in which a process is not both p and not-p for some predicate. And, in an instant, nothing can happen, no change or process can take place. Would Leibniz have accepted this argument? I think he should have, for it is but the spatiotemporal form of his argument that spatial extendedness requires a plurality of unitary entities, one here, another there. Temporal extendedness also requires such units, one now, another then. But in a continuum there are no definite units, only indefinite divisibility. Continuity is a matter of possibility, of ideality, not of actuality. Bergson neatly missed (yet unwittingly gave away) the point with his cinema analogy: the illusion is the continuousness of becoming, the reality is the succession of units. In this doctrine I not only follow James, Whitehead, and von Wright, but also rejoin the ancient Buddhist tradition as well as one of the traditions in Islam.

c) The unit realities or "actual entities" are "experient occasions," that is, analogous, however remotely, to momentary human experiences (occurring normally in the human case some 10-20 per second). This is in partial agreement with the entire "idealist" tradition, much older in Asia than in the West, according to which "matter" is a form of manifestation of "mind" (in the broad or nonanthropomorphic sense) and is nothing simply on its own. My kind of idealism has, however, rather little in common with the Berkeleyan or even the Hegelian forms, for these are essentially anthropomorphic. In the West only Leibniz offers any close analogy (prior to Peirce and Whitehead), and even he in but a few aspects of his monadology.

d) Experient occasions have previous such occasions, whether or not closely similar to themselves, as their data. Thus what memory seems almost obviously to be, intuition of the past, perception is also, though less obviously. Memory and perception are both intuitions of the past. I call the one personal and the other impersonal memory.

e) As many idealists and some realists have held, in becoming datum for an experience or unit-subject, an entity becomes constituent of the subject. Subjects include their objects. Thus an actual entity must "house" its actual (meaning its past) world, must embrace the latter in the "synthesis" forming its own unity. Excluded by this doctrine of synthesis or "prehension" is the view that the data of an experience are merely adjectives of that experience. Instead they are prior experiences which are taken into and thus qualify subsequent experiences; yet in themselves they exist antecedently and independently. Excluded also are the views that occasions can be directly intuited or given to contemporary occasions and the view that data may in some cases be bits of mere matter or merely material processes, "vacuous" of any internal life, feeling, or value.

f) Bergson’s protest against mutually external units of process is justified; but instead of saying that experiences "interpenetrate he should have said: the earlier penetrate the later, but not vice versa. The past comes into the present; the present cannot go back into the past. Where an asymmetrical relation was called for, Bergson used a symmetrical word. This is the nemesis awaiting those who scorn logical analysis and yet use concepts that are either subject to such analysis or are mere poetry and should be left to poets not seeking to convey knowledge.

g) Another symmetrical relation is identity. Hence those who suppose that genetic identity is strict identity are contradicting the meaning of "genetic." It cannot be identity which explicates "time’s arrow," but only some way of being identical and nonidentical; or, to remove the contradiction, of being only partially identical.

h) Since the present includes the past, becoming is cumulative and is a growth and indeed the ultimate form of growth. Here I agree with Bergson and also W. P. Montague, as well as Whitehead, and, in one essay at least, Peirce.

i) However, the cumulativeness is more or less hidden, and hence missed by most thinkers, because of the indistinctness characterizing all experience other than the divine. Leibniz was the first to put this sharply, as he was the first to put so many things (both right and wrong) with full sharpness. All human perceptions (and memories) are indistinct, or as he also, less happily, phrased it, "confused." Only God prehends clearly what he prehends. Whitehead’s "negative prehensions" are his term, perhaps not a very good one, for perceptual indistinctness. (His "transmutation" is the form this weakness of all nondivine experience takes in all but very low forms of experiencing.)

j) Since data are past events indistinctly given in the present we have, but do not fully have, our past. Apart from God’s perceptions, most of the value of the past, the vividness of its more or less intense harmonies and discords, is lost. And so, apart from God, or the mystery of Nirvana, Whiteheadians and Buddhists can agree that all things human and humanly valuable are ephemeral, "passing whiffs of insignificance," as Whitehead phrased it.

k) Occasions fall into sequences, more or less definite strands of becoming, which Whitehead calls societies, and might have called families or tribes. These sequences can be spoken of as genetically identical, provided one realizes that this is much less strict in its requirements than sheer logical sameness. It will not help matters here to distinguish between numerical and qualitative identity. No one is interested in an identity which connotes nothing as to qualities -- at least, no one other than some believers in reincarnation, and indeed not even they. Apart from qualities, all things are identical, for they are all indistinguishable instances of thinghood.

People who today clamor for "identity" are not looking for numerical sameness but for a mixture of qualitative uniqueness, and qualitative overlapping in relation to other persons and the world generally.

Genetic identity, which has only a relatively definite meaning, involves (1) some "defining characteristic" reappearing in each member of a sequence or family of occasions; (2) direct inheritance by appreciably positive prehensions of this character from previous members.

l) The main subdivisions of the class "societies of occasions" consist of the linear or "personally ordered" societies, the familiar example being a stream of consciousness" of a single person, and nonlinear societies, such as a tree considered as a colony of cells. Perhaps each cell is personally ordered but probably not the tree. One form of nonlinear society is that which, unlike the tree, is accompanied by a linear society of "presiding occasions." A live human body with its "mind" or "soul" is the example nearest at hand. Leibniz spoke of the body as a group of monads with a "dominant monad," a human soul. Whitehead’s analysis gets down to the spatiotemporal units, whereas Leibniz is less analytic of time than of space, or if you like, he refuses to take time seriously.

m) Of course Whitehead has no reason to accept Leibniz’s denial of "windows," of interaction, since his units respond to or prehend not only prior members, if any, of their society but also members of other societies. Occasions have perceptions as well as memories, whereas Leibniz restricts literal prehension, without which perception is only a pretense, to personal memory. Whitehead’s theory of perception, and of units of succession, completely disposes of Leibniz s argument against interaction between sequences.

n) What then is personal identity? it is the persistence of certain defining characteristics in a very complex bodily society endowed with a preeminent linear society or "soul." This complex society may be said to begin with conception, or with a late stage of embryonic development, or with early childhood, depending upon the purpose which determines what one takes as its defining characteristic. There is no absolute right or wrong here, and this is one weakness of some arguments about abortion. Did "I" exist at the moment the fertilized egg with my unique chemistry, that is, my gene structure, came into existence? I deny that this is a justified way of speaking, except for the rather trivial purpose of distinguishing between that egg and all others. The egg was not even a vertebrate animal, let alone an animal endowed with actual human thoughts and feelings. It was but a single cell, and man is at the least a multicellular animal with an elaborate nervous system.

o) Another limitation in personal identity is this. Am I myself in dreamless sleep? My body is then real, and my past experiences as past, but what more? Nothing more, I think, if this "more" is supposed to be something actual. Of course there is the possibility, the great probability, of my beginning to dream and then, before long, waking up. But this probability is simply the actual state of my body, taking into account the principle of process or of creativity that every process is destined to be taken up in some suitable form of further process.

p) Well did Buddha (I believe it was really he) say that the identity of the bodily career is stricter than that of the mental career. Contemporary analysts are, I think, right in holding that the persistence of the person includes that of the body; and, I add, the mental persistence is in some ways a more limited and partial one. However, it is immensely important for all that, and involves a considerable measure of strict identity. Always, after a given moment, my vague and potentially clarifiable background of memories will include whatever I experienced prior to that moment. Over and over I go back once more to the same memories, none available in this way to any other stream of experiences; always, if I want to, I can recall that I had such and such a mother and father, brothers and sister, went to such and such schools, read certain books, etc., etc., through countless items of the kind. Always my unique bodily chemistry, as gene-determined, is there, unconsciously influencing all that I think or feel. Always the unique pattern of my nervous system, not quite like anyone else’s but in certain outlines fixed since early childhood, is there, and not there for nothing. Thus a lot of my past keeps penetrating my present. But it keeps its integrity as past throughout. My deeds remain what they were, my failures to act, likewise; my pains and pleasures as they occurred continue to have been just that.

q) On the foregoing view, the failure of substance philosophies is not in maintaining that there is some element of strict identity though change, but in either obscuring the truth that there is also nonidentity in an equally literal and equally numerical sense, or in misstating the relations between the identity and the nonidentity. Is the identical in the different or the different in the identical? Which is the more determinate or concrete reality? There is linguistic precedent for saying that a person is in a state, as though the common element between past and present is but a constituent of the present. But substance philosophies have never been clear and consistent in admitting this. They keep suggesting that the state is in the person, as an adjective belongs to a noun. This is incorrect, unless Leibniz was correct in holding that all of a person’s states belong to him at all times, a monstrously paradoxical view. If yesterday I did not have my today’s experiences, then my today’s reality is a whole of which my yesterday’s self is at most a constituent. Thus I am today, as a total reality, numerically new. Personal identity is literally partial identity, and therefore partial nonidentity; moreover, the nonidentity refers to the complete reality, and the identity to but a constituent.

r) The ethical and religious importance of the foregoing is profound. For if self-identity is partial, then the nonidentity of one self with another may also be partial. And hence altruism is as directly grounded in the nature of the self as is self-interest. I look back upon my past experiences with sympathetic appreciation and forward to my probable future experiences in a similarly sympathetic way, allowing for possible or probable aspects of antipathy, self-hatred, and the like. And I look back upon and forward to the experiences of others (and even of imaginary characters) with similar mixtures of sympathy and antipathy. In principle there is no absolute difference. Always, too, in self relations and other relations, there are causal connections backward and forward, these being prehensive relations, the prehending being always on the effect side and the prehended on the cause side. I expect to remember my present state in my future states and expect my friends, so far as they perceive my present, to remember it also. My awareness of my past tends to be more vivid and direct than of the past of others, but this is no absolute difference.

s) It is the philosophical glory of Buddhism that it saw through the relativity of substantial identity long, long ago. The extreme of missing the Buddhist point was precisely reached in Leibniz’s windowless monads. Ironically, he admired Buddhism, so far (not far) as he knew what it was. A monad was by definition absolutely identical with itself through time and absolutely nonidentical with its neighbors. (I am not forgetting that it "mirrored" them. But this is either contradictory or hopelessly unclear. There is no absolute sameness of the individual though time by any criterion which can justify an absolute nonsameness of different individuals.) The greatness of Leibniz is that he gave clarity to the substance doctrine and dared to draw the consequences. Isle was gloriously wrong, where many were ingloriously so, and therefore ingloriously right as well, thanks to ambiguity and lack of the will to clarity.

t) Leibniz rightly objected to the doctrine of "accidental predicates." To say that a thing has a predicate though it would be that very thing if it did not have the predicate is to speak without any clear meaning. It makes "having" predicates deeply ambiguous. Strict identity means equivalence of predicates, and hence the doctrine of inessential predicates cannot refer to subjects with strict identity. What then short of that? Aristotle tried to say. If we cannot do better than his doctrine of essence, accidents, and matter, we are wasting our time. The world has made some progress in analysis since his day.

u) To reject inessential predicates is not to reject contingency. For since genetic identity is partial or somewhat abstract, and the concrete has always a contingent plus compared to the abstract, of course an enduring individual, i.e., a society or sequence of occasions, can have contingent or inessential members. But the relation of member to society is distorted if assimilated to that of adjective to noun. The most concrete correlates of nouns are actual occasions or experiences. Which predicates are "had" depends entirely upon what actual occasions occur. Contingency is in what subjects, with their predicates, become or are created, not in what predicates get attached to what subjects -- as though a subject were like a hook or wire on which predicates could be hung like garments or hoops. Definiteness, concreteness, belongs to occasions, not to things or persons. My first experience this morning will always have been just that, with whatever predicates it had.

v) A German logician, who was also a fine theologian, Heinrich Scholz, has pointed out, following Bolzano, that temporal designations belong with the subject, not the predicate. It is not that John has the predicate sick-now, but that John-now has the predicate sick. Universals have a certain time independence. For instance, having a temperature of about 104_ Fahrenheit is just that, whether at time t or time t¹. But it is not the man simply, but the man-at-time-t that has this property. Individuation is finally spatiotemporal, and perhaps at long last we should join the Buddhists in recognizing this, instead of trying to tuck time designations either under the rug or under the predicate. Here too, Leibniz was splendidly clear, though mistaken. For him high-fever-at-time-t was indeed the predicate, and the subject was just the man, regardless of time. He wisely admitted that this doctrine utterly exceeded our human understanding.

w) There is nothing in the foregoing to imply that pronouns, as they function in ordinary discourse, are in any way inappropriate. For the context of discourse provides the relativities which substance doctrines tend to deny. "I think . . ." may mean the momentary self or ego which just came into reality with, for me, a new thought; it may mean a common denominator of all my momentary selves in recent hours, days, years, or even since I was a child. The same with "he thinks. . . ." Ordinary speech is indeed often wiser than philosophers have mostly been. But ordinary speech, though wise, is without a doctrine of wisdom, and in spite of Wittgenstein I see a role for doctrinal wisdom. But this wisdom about genetic identity can scarcely be found in any of the older traditions, unless the Buddhist. Only Peirce and Whitehead rival ten thousand Buddhists in their insight into the limitations of pluralistic substantialism.

x) Orthodox (Advaita) Vedanta realizes that substantial pluralism is at best less true than substantial monism; but it fails, in my opinion, to see that the radical pluralism of actual entities and the radical monism of God or Nirvana (however one distinguishes these) are the two poles of the real problem, not the ordinary substantial pluralism of common sense, a compromise which bars the path to the highest ethical and spiritual insight.

y) Plato’s Timaeus is the nearest counterpart to Buddhism in the ancient West; for Plato’s cosmos consisted of the universal and elusive "receptacle" and its momentary qualifications, thus allowing for both mysterious ultimate unity and radical empirical plurality. (The unity is somehow also the world soul and creative demiurge, but the plurality is of momentary actualities.) Aristotle, as a great scholar (Chung-Hwan Chen) has shown in a work not yet published, substituted for the receptacle (as subject of changing predicates) the banal plurality of substantial identities, which of course in some sense are real. But the correct sense was never clearly articulated in the entire Aristotelian tradition. Alas, in some ways, the step from Plato to Aristotle was a step backward. Plato’s "world soul," ignored by Aristotle and his followers, was closer to a viable theology than Aristotle’s unmoved mover.

I repeat: it is time to rejoin the Buddhist tradition, the most subtle of all very old international philosophical-religious traditions. Buddha’s insights were appreciated by his disciples, while Plato’s were half lost almost immediately.

z) If the symbols a and b refer to one and the same entity, then the sole difference is in the symbols, or acts of symbolization, not in the thing symbolized. This is strict identity. How vast the contrast between this and the genetic identity, e.g., of Peter Bertocci at age of two days with Peter Bertocci at age of sixty-one years, or even of Peter Bertocci in dreamless sleep with the same man thinking vigorously about personal identity! Those who deny or fail to realize the immensity of the gulf between the two forms of identity condemn themselves to miss the clarity enjoyed by over twenty centuries of Buddhists in many countries, and by a few Western philosophers for some decades, concerning what it is to be an individual.

Notes

G.H. von Wright Time, Change and Contradiction. Cambridge University Press, 1968. (Eddington Memorial Lecture)

Dr. Craighead argues most ingeniously and with unusual fairness. I still think, though, that "there might have been nothing" is meaningless or contradictory. As to contradiction, consider "the being of pure nonbeing"? Also that "there is . . ." implies location. One can always ask, where? Sometimes the true answer is, somewhere, everywhere, or nowhere. However, in sheer vacuity, none of these words would mean anything. "There are no dodos" means take any locus you please, it will contain something other than and exclusive of dodos. But there are loci, places, only because there are real processes. In vacuity there is not even a nowhere. Our conceptual machinery breaks down in trying to explicate the idea of pure nothing. Another sign of this is the temporal language we use for modalities. Kant, more truly than his system allows, found the "schema of all our conceptions" in the temporal structure of experience. We are inclined to say, there might never have been anything. But in vacuity time too, vanishes. And so does eternity, for that is meaningless apart from its contrast with becoming.

I agree that the falsity of panpsychism implies that of much else in my philosophy. It does not follow that I must "first" establish panpsychism and then argue for other doctrines. I can also reverse the procedure. Thus panpsychism (I hold) follows from the existence of God, and there are a half dozen reasons for believing in that. (See my just published Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, LaSalle and London: Open Court; SCM.) That so many reject psychicalism would impress me more if I found signs of careful attention in their writings to the arguments which I and others have advanced for this doctrine. I find very little under this head.

There is perhaps some lack of communication in regard to whether God for me is the source of existence or is "being itself." Any particular concretum presupposes divine creativity as antecedent condition of its coming to be. To be sure, God "creates," not out of nothing, but out of preceding actuality, including his own. Yet he is "being itself" in the sense that what things are for him necessarily coincides with what they really are. Thus to be is to be for God, to fail to be is to fail to be for God. He is the definitive reality, the measure of all truth. And his persistence with essential integrity through every change is the only infallible mode of persistence. Since it cannot fail, to say that he requires a coexisting world is not to make his existence contingent, for in any possible case he will have whatever he requires by way of a world.

"It might have been that there was nothing," supposing it makes sense, implies, as my critic realizes, that one must drastically renounce the strict form of the principle of sufficient reason. But one must also give up even a weaker and (in my opinion) more reasonable form. This form is, "Whatever begins to be or could have failed to exist is influenced, though not fully determined, by antecedent causal conditions." God’s existence can have no such conditions. In spite of Hume, to reject this more reasonable form of the principle is for me strongly counter-intuitive. Hoyle’s steady-state theory does not violate the principle, so far as I can see. There are antecedent conditions, even though they permit considerable leeway in what comes to be.

Dr. Craighead seems not to feel the attraction, as I do, of the theory that contingency is the clash of positive with positive, rather than of positive with merely negative. I hold that the former covers every need we have to talk of contingency except the alleged need to consider the possibility of nothing. That some universe exists clashes only with God existing alone (supposing this conceivable) or with sheer vacuity. Only the second would mean (if it means anything) the divine nonexistence.

As to Whitehead and the "grip of the creative ground" this is picturesque and, on his own showing, somewhat misleading language. But here too there is an intuitive difference between my critic and me. For me it is a credible and illuminating view of modal terms to hold that they get their meaning entirely from the freedom of the creative process, in both its worldly and its divine aspects. Logical possibility as the absence of incompatibility of one concept with another is significant only because the concepts, one by one, express aspects of the creative process. Peirce, Dewey, Whitehead, and Bergson held this view. To ask about the possibility of there king no creative process is to ask about the possibility of there being no possibility, even logical, for thought has no other function than to express, guide, or enrich that process. The process has had, or has in the long run, infinite freedom as between concretes. There is no sense (for me) in adding that it has freedom between concretes and nothing.

What makes "there are green trees" true is the green trees. Would it be nothing that made "there is nothing" true? What then is the difference between "nothing makes p true" and "p is not made true" (by anything) -- i.e., it is not true?

The quotation from Huxley is ambiguous between, "Why this universe?" and "Why a universe?" Smart is clearer, but I trust my intuition more than his. And Milton Munitz, Jonathan Edwards, and Bergson take my view on this issue -- as do Plato and Aristotle.

The "psychological" argument I should call pragmatic. In agreement with Peirce, James, Dewey, and even Whitehead, I hold that a belief which could not be expressed in action is only verbal. That there might never have been anything, or might be nothing, is something about which nothing ever could have been or be done. For me that rules it out.

All argument must proceed from something known. If I did not know that "nothing" has only a relative, not a possibly absolute meaning. I don’t see how I could expect to know anything about God, one way or another.

The universe before the emergence of mind is offered as counter-instance to the proposition that anything must be directly knowable. In rejecting this counter-instance I beg the question no more than Dr. Craighead does in urging it. If he can refute both theism and psychicalism, he will have shown the conceivability of his counter-instance; otherwise all he has is that he thinks he can conceive a mindless universe. To the contrary stand theism and psychicalism, proposed as a priori truths. So, if I have not proved the impossibility of an unknowable, neither has he proved its possibility. And all proof rests on intuition somewhere. For me the proof on my side is strong.

Reese’s case was better than our critic grants. "Socrates does not exist" is conceived as a clash between the actual universe and the requirements of the mental picture or verbal description of Socrates. We look not to nothing but to something to refute positive (or negative) statements. I hold with my former collaborator.

My argument that a false assertion of necessity should lead to absurdities, whereas "it is necessary that something exists" leads to none, is not, I feel, done full justice to. To say, for example, "man exists by necessity" implies either that every species does so, or that, whereas other species are contingent, man escapes this contingency. The first violates the principle of contrast and thus makes modal terms, including necessity, vacuous. And the second lacks a credible criterion of the distinction affirmed. None of the ten criteria I discuss in The Logic of Perfection would fit. They do however fit "something exists" and also "something divine exists" and even "something non-divine exists." This is because no empirical terms are involved in these three expressions, but only pure highest-level conceptions, capable of king entertained in any state of existence in which thinking and thinking about thinking can take place. No special sense organs, like those of man, or special laws of nature are required. Such organs or laws exclude positive alternatives. The mere existence of something, or deity, or non-deity, does not do this. They are compatible with any positive state of reality. I have dealt with this once more in Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (Chapter XII).

One might, of course, take the "being of nothing" to mean, not sheer vacuity but a set of universals, all lacking instances. However (in spite of Santayana), this theory of "separable forms" has since Aristotle struck few philosophers as credible. Santayana was aware that, given only a realm of essence, actual existence would not even be "possible," if possibility refers to a cause or causes capable of producing the existents. (Producing need not mean "wholly determining") And what is the point of universals if no instances are, ever have been, or ever could be in an intelligible sense possible?

Whitehead once wrote, "The unknowable is unknown. This doctrine is a paradox. Some ‘cautious’ philosophers, indulging in a species of false modesty, have attempted its definition." I take this to put Whitehead on my side. Thought is about experienced reality and reality is what can be experienced and thought.

That we can conceive each particular thing not to exist implies that we can conceive nothing existing in its place only if one assumes the falsity of my or Reese’s analysis of how we make negative judgments, or of the view that contingency just is the freedom of creativity as between positive options. To think something and then think blank nothing is, for all Dr. Craighead shows, and apart from confusion or sense of the familiarity of certain words, the same as to think something and then stop thinking. I prefer to go on thinking. Of course, I appreciate the care he has taken in reporting upon my treatment of these problems.