Archives: Articles

1. The Issue and Some Definitions

"The many become one and are increased by one" (Process 21) is a formulation of Alfred North Whitehead’s Category of the Ultimate so well-known it could be a mantra. Charles Hartshorne held it to be Whitehead’s most important insight. Yet "become" in this expression can mean either (1) the transition from a multiplicity of actual entities to a new one -- exhibiting extensive connection spatially or (2) the process of growth within one actual entity --exhibiting extensive connection temporally. Since "the one" must be a whole, the ambiguity in the meaning of "become" raises the following question: Is the creating process itself one whole with "the many" as its parts, or is the completed satisfaction of a process the whole?

"Transition" will always refer here to the first meaning of "become," to the objectifications of the many as the data in a new process, as in "the transition from particular existent[s] to particular existent. This transition . . . is the origination of the present in conformity with the ‘power’ of the past" (Process 210), or again, a "feeling -- i.e., a positive prehension -- is essentially a transition effecting a concrescence" (Process 221). The initial data are a multiplicity to be felt. As felt in a transition, Whitehead says some are prehended negatively, by "exclusions from contribution to the concrescence" (Process 220). However, it is doubtful anything (except processing contemporaries and immediately prior and noncontiguous actualized processes) can be excluded from an actual entity s positive feeling since each "instance embraces the whole [universe], omitting nothing, whether it be ideal form or actual[ized] fact" (Religion 108).

As for "the many," they do nothing on their own: "There is no emergent evolution concerned with a multiplicity. The treatment of a multiplicity as though it had the unity belonging to an entity. . . produces logical errors" (Process 30). Only unit/wholes can be influenced, and each whole is influenced by each of the many simultaneously. Only wholes are creative. Every whole extends over, or around, a multiplicity of others as objectified, and becomes objectified in many successive wholes simultaneously and successively. No temporal extension exists between the multiplicity of subject/superjects comprising the initial data to be felt and their objectification in another wherein they are felt. Only in retrospect, and in abstraction from process, can one refer to a multiplicity, since everything in existence is felt.

Unfortunately Whitehead occasionally uses "transition" synonymously with "concrescence," highlighting his ambiguous use of "becoming": "The essence of existence lies in the transition from datum to issue. This is the process of self-determination" (Modes 131). Notice, however, that Whitehead uses "datum" here, not the plural, "data," as he does when referring to the "initial data." Since all that exists are comings-to-be, there can be no (essence of) existence between satisfactions as initial data and their objectification(s) in another as its datum.

An additional ambiguity exists in the Category of the Ultimate in the second meaning of "become" in what Whitehead defines as "concrescence." Does process (2a) select from a realm of specified and discrete possibilities one to be ingressed (actualized) as the many come together into a one (a whole?), or does process (2b) create from a continuum of generic potency a determination never before specified? Again, does creativity select one possibility to ingress from among a multiplicity of previously (eternally?) specified objects, or does it create a new specification which becomes a determinate object for others?

Whitehead vacillates on which defines "concrescence." He seems to want, and probably needs, creativity to originate new specification, but he emphasizes potentiality as a multiplicity of objects specified prior to the selection. He say’s an actual entity only positively prehends some eternal objects while others are excluded (Process 219), so eternal objects must be a disjunctive multiplicity, not a continuum. Process viewed as selecting does not create objects since the objects must exist before the selection, and apparently in Whitehead’s mind, eternally so.

II. Wholeness and the Category of the Ultimate

One, many and creativity are the notions Whitehead says complete the Category of the Ultimate (Process 21). Yet, he soon adds identity and diversity to explain the generic notion of "togetherness," and later he says extensive connection is the ultimate relationship that cannot be explained or defined, and that the extensiveness of a whole and its parts are likely necessarily interdependent: "If you abolish the whole, you abolish its parts; and if you abolish any part, then that whole is abolished" (Process 288).

Whitehead gives other formulations of the Ultimate Category, but they help little to clarify the ambiguity. When he says creativity "is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively" (Process 21), is he saying the members of the multiplicity (that an actual entity prehends) are parts of one whole as it begins its concrescence, or is he saying they do not become parts of a whole until the actual entity reaches its satisfaction?

This ambiguity in the meaning of "becoming" is at the core of Whitehead’s system. Without knowing which is meant, much is left unclear. One would wish Whitehead used the part/whole language more often, particularly when discussing the Category of the Ultimate. He uses "whole" to refer to the life history of an enduring object or person (Adventures 190). Most often he mentions parts and wholes in his explication of coordinate division (Process 283ff.) where a whole is the superject of an actualized process. The parts of this object/whole are previous actual entities objectified for the process that created it. Since a process made this object/whole with its analyzable spatial parts, one might assume process itself is not a whole.

But Whitehead means something else by a "whole" (as an ultimate unit of reality) when he says it is "the singularity of an entity" (Process 21), or the unity of a subject (Category of Subjective Unity. Process 26), or an "ultimate individual fact" which he says "must be describable as process" (Modes 120, Adventures 199, emphasis added), or the self that determines itself (Modes 131), or the "substantial activity of individualization" (Science 123), or when he also says "the subject of the feeling is causa sui" and any feeling is impossible to understand "without recourse to the whole subject" (Process 221, emphasis added). The whole subject is the whole process from start to finish since there must be a "‘subject’ which feels [… the] ‘objective datum’ which is felt" (Process 221) as a process begins. What the concresing subject creates "is the reaction of the unity of the whole [subject] to its own internal determination. . . the decision of the whole arises out of the determination of the parts" (Process 28, emphasis added).

The actualizing of an actual entity is a subject, and the actualized result of its coming-to-be is an object. Since subjects must be concrete units (wholes), not aggregates, and since subjects include objects, it follows that the concrescing of an actual entity is a whole with its physical prehensions as determinate parts. Since an actual entity must be an indivisible unit (subject) throughout its concrescence, the meaning of "become" in the first clause of the mantra, "the many become one," must refer to the transition from a multiplicity of actualized entities to the one actualizing whole including them, and not as usually understood (seemingly by Whitehead himself) to the concrescence of a multiplicity into a whole during an actual entity’s concrescence.

III. Dipolarity and Subjective Wholeness

To deny process itself is a whole while asserting process results In a whole, would raise a serious problem with the ontological status of the multiplicity of subjects/superjects that are somehow in a process but have not yet grown together into new whole. Such entities would cleave nature into two self-sustaining ultimates: (1) So-called units that process and prehend others as objects but not as parts since these process "units" are not yet wholes to have parts, and (2) static units (the objects themselves) that must be wholes (even though they are "in" a process) since they are not yet parts of any whole. But "there can be no ‘many things’ which are not subordinated in a concrete unity" (Process 211), and all concrete units are process/wholes.

In order to maintain a dipolarity of process and permanence, rather than an incoherent dualism of these principles, whatever exists at the termination of a process/whole must be sustained by another process, that is, must be a part of some new creating whole. To be a part is to be an object, and to be an object is to be a part. All wholes have parts, and all parts are in wholes. So, if a satisfied actual entity is objectified (as it must be), it is a part in another process/whole. "Wherever a vicious dualism appears, it is by reason of mistaking an abstraction for a final concrete fact" (Adventures 192). The full concreteness is the process. Its result is not a whole, but an abstraction from, that is, a part within, superseding concrete wholes.

The mantra’s other clause, "the many . . , are [become] increased by one," refers to the internal process of temporal growth which, when it has completed its creation, dies leaving a new one, that is, a new object for the superseding world. A new whole exists as soon as the many are objectified within a new process at transition. The many become parts of one whole (one subjective unity) at the founding of the actual entity or there is no new actual entity. Though Whitehead gives considerable attention to genetic growth, how an actual entity originates at the transition from the subjectivities of the many to the new subjectivity of the superseding one, is left relatively unarticulated. Perhaps little can be said, but this transition which originates a new process/whole must be carefully distinguished from the creative process which originates a new object/part, a one of many that is objectified in others.

An actual entity must be a whole throughout its process of creating because a multiplicity cannot aim at a result (Process 30). Only wholes can extend over and prehend a multiplicity simultaneously and yet have a single aim. A whole exhibits propositional unity: The many are the proposition’s compound subject; the aim is the proposition’s simple predicate (Process 257). This comparison of an actual entity to the structure of a linguistic proposition can be misleading, however, since the concrete wholeness of a process is the creating subject (which is closer to the simple predicate linguistically) and the subject/whole’s parts are objects (the subjects linguistically). In a concrete actual entity conceived dipolarly, the one (creative subjectivity) includes the many (objectified subjects) as parts.

Just as a multiplicity cannot aim at a result, neither can an aim be a multiplicity. On this point Whitehead struggles to be consistent, because an actual entity’s oneness can only reside in the unity of its creative mentality (its subjective aim) from its initiation to its satisfaction. But insofar as Whitehead conceives of eternal objects as a multiplicity of discrete specifications among which actualities select, coherently conceiving the aim as one is problematic at best.

IV. Concrescence, Creativity and Subjective Aim

If process is a whole with parts, the meaning of "process" as temporal extension cannot be a growing together of parts into a whole, or the "concrescence of many potentials" (Process 22), because the "togetherness of things" in the occasion of experience (Adventures 234) is already established as the actual entity begins since "relationship is not a universal. It is a concrete fact with the same concreteness as the relata" (Adventures 161). An actual entity either has its objectified antecedent world (its potentials) together with its many contrasting parts as it begins creating, or it does not have them together and is never born. If a whole can only exist with its prehended parts objectified together and in contrast, "concrescence" can only determine how the old parts (as already related to each other) fit into the new specification being determined by the creativity of the present.

"‘Creativity’ is the principle of novelty (Process2l), according to Whitehead, but what would be new if "an actualization is [merely] a selection among possibilities" (Science 159) since a decision only selects among items already delineated before the decision? Whitehead also says "‘Actuality’ is the decision amid ‘potentiality"’ (Process 43), but an actuality’s creating is more radical than selecting an object to ingress: A creation results in a new specification never felt before. It is "the evocation of determination out of indetermination" (Process 149, also 226). As Charles Hartshorne says,

Selection among eternal objects would imply the so-called unity of the subject, its aim, would be a multiplicity, not a unity. On the other hand, if the subject had to process toward only one "fully specified" aim, it would fail to do anything new. It would fail to be creative, that is, fail to exist at all. So when Whitehead says an "indetermination stands in the essence of any eternal object" (Science 162), is he allowing every eternal object to be more or less specific? Is each a more or less generic potency endlessly specifiable? Is each, perhaps, a created specification of the one continuum of potentiality?

Though the past as inherited sets the realizable limits and opportunities for the moment’s creative power, the eventual creation with all its determinate detail could never have existed nor subsisted before it is created, not even in a primordial vision of potentialities. The only eternal objects, that is, the only eternal characterizations of all actualizations, are the metaphysical Categories. All other objects have been created and inherited (physical objects), or created in the present (conceptual objects), not selected.

The objects inherited when an actuality prehends others at transition are simultaneously aspects of its own subjectivity and aim since "the subjective forms of the immediate past are continuous with those of the present" (Adventures 185), continuous, not "reproduced" as Whitehead also misleadingly say’s (Process 238). By "the principle of conformation . . . what is already made becomes a determinant of what is in the making" (Symbolism 46). An actual entity only exists as simultaneously feeling what others have done and feeling (in a somewhat general way) what might be done with what others have done. It necessarily includes others as aspects of itself, but the essence of a self, a whole, is the drive to make something new and pass it on as a determinate condition for others, not merely to make an object determinate in the actual spatio-temporal nexus already (eternally) specified conceptually. Each self must do its own specifying, and each determination must be a new specification, an object never felt before exactly as it is by anyone, neither physically nor conceptually.

V. Novel Multiplicity at Transition and the Aim’s Uniqueness

Process cannot create a novel outcome unless novelty exists at the very foundation of the process to provide a unique aim. "Complete conformity means the loss of life" (Modes 87) at the origination of an actual entity, just as "Complete self-identity can never be preserved in any advance to novelty" (Modes 146) since a whole must make something new that did not exist as it began. The novel beginning is assured because each actual entity, as it begins its life, must embrace a multiplicity never before embraced, assured, that is, if its single aim can be consistently conceived.

An aim is uniquely specified and determined by the unique many the subject inherits, yet, as Hartshorne proposes, the aim is always one continuous range of possibility, infinitely specifiable, yet not further specified until the subject/whole creates a new specific result. The actuality is unified and causally determined by its single, given aim, but since its aim is always somewhat generic, it is free to create a unique specification within the emphasis of its range.

To say the creative process within an actual entity does not create a new whole, because it is a whole, may sound heretical. But the logic of change requires actual entities be wholes that create object/parts for other wholes. These object/beings are the potentials for the new subject/becomings. A new whole is "created" or "comes to be" at transition when what was subjective for two or more preceding others, is immediately objectified for a new subject. The subject/whole uses its power to create new determination within the opportunities offered by the hierarchy of generic aspects carried within the determinate objectifications it inherits.

"The [ultimate and necessary] generic aim of process is the attainment of importance" (Modes 16, emphasis added), but the actual world must provide contingently created objects that are less general specifications of this ultimate aim in order to allow creatures with limited creative ability to accomplish a new determinate specification. This "real potentiality," provided by objectified actual entities immediately prior and contiguous to the present, enhances a small aspect of the full potential continuum (Whitehead’s "pure potentiality") each object inherits and exhibits. Whatever specifications have been determined by all previous actual entities are also presented for every originating actual entity as mediated by those it immediately prehends (including God). In this way, all of the many that have been actualized, the complete multiplicity, of the cosmos (except immediately prior and noncontiguous contemporaries) is objectified for each actual entity with some degree of importance however minuscule (Religion 108 and Process 22, Principle of Relativity).

Whitehead’s characterization of "potentiality" as generic is likely correct, but not compatible with a theory of discrete objects eternally specified and envisaged. He says "indetermination [as to how inherited objects will fit into the actuality’s satisfaction], rendered determinate in the real concrescence, is the meaning of ‘potentiality"’ (Process 23), but indeterminacy is not about which of several "modes" (Process 23) will be fulfilled; the mode to be fulfilled has not yet been exactly specified. When it has been and the actuality is satisfied with the result, the specification, with whatever clarity or vagueness, quality and pattern, desirability or repulsiveness it has, is determined and must remain changeless forever as it is in future wholes.

VI Togetherness and Inexplicable Wholeness

So when Whitehead says it "lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity" (Process 21), he should be referring first of all to (1) transition -- the way the incipient whole overlaps the many of the preceding world so they "become" objects or parts of its process. But he is also referring to (2a) concrescence -- the "production of novel togetherness" (Process 21), the way the many objects (pseudo-parts) initiating a process grow together into a whole that only exists at the end of the process. He would do better to speak of concrescence as (2b) origination -- the way the process/whole creates new specification around its changeless parts as it comes to be a new determinate object.

The reason for this suggested change of language is that wholes are established at transition, and creative process (as in 2b) uses the togetherness of the many prehensions (that give birth to the new whole at transition) to make a new specification. This newness is a constant problem for Whitehead given his assumption that potentiality is an eternal multiplicity and his theory of ingression. He wants an eternal object to be "the same for all actual entities" (Process 23), and yet needs each creating subject to have its own subjective form of that object (Process 227, 232, 246), in other words, to create its own, novel "eternal" object.

The equivocation in the Category of the Ultimate permeates passages like the following on things that become: "in the becoming [transition or concrescence?] of an actual entity, novel prehensions, nexus, subjective forms, propositions, multiplicities, and contrasts, also become; but there are no novel eternal objects" (Process 22). Though some of these examples of things that become do refer to what happens within the internal life of one actual entity, still others refer to relationships between objectified actual entities at transition. How, for example, can the internal constitution of one actual entity become a multiplicity or a nexus of actual entities? But the subject/superjects of many as simultaneously objectified in one actual entity is a spatial nexus, and abstracted from their necessary inclusion in a one, they are a multiplicity.

If an actual entity is a whole from inception to satisfaction, it cannot reject any of its prehended objects nor prehend additional objects once it is established nor even alter the objective parts it has, or it would not be the same whole. An actual entity as a "self-creation is separate and private" (Adventures 198); any changes to its parts and it would not be the same actuality (Process 288). An actual entity can only bring into being a new specific object, a determinate object for others.

Even though Whitehead says "the novelty received from the aggregate diversities of bodily expressions. . . requires decision" to reduce it to a coherent expression (Modes 36), still the diversities once received are determinate object/parts logically required to remain as they are in order to retain the self-identity of the process/whole. In order for the actual entity to "advance to novelty" (Modes 146), its process dies. Just as the new object is about to be born through the whole’s creative activity and to be added to itself, the whole’s life ends, leaving the result of its creative effort as a next object for other wholes. "New" means "in addition to and inclusive of" the old. It cannot mean "other than" nor "separate from" nor even "an alteration of" the old, since without the old (as the old is) to contrast with the newness, newness is meaningless; the "actual[ized] world is not destroyed. It is reproduced [embraced] and added to" (Process 238).

When Whitehead says an actual entity embraces the diversities of the whole universe and "brings them into is own unity of feeling under gradations of relevance and of irrelevance" (Religion 108), he should be referring to the unity (wholeness) required to establish an actuality at transition, but is likely expressing his belief the many grow together into a unity (whole) during concrescence. But coherence must be achieved by the whole (with its parts already in mutual relationships) adjusting the relative importance of the old diversities within the new possibility becoming realized, not by altering nor rejecting them since "an actual occasion has no history. It never changes. It only becomes and perishes" (Adventures 205). It is the same "it" from birth to death, so it must be one reality throughout its process, that is, one making, one process, one whole. Reality (the "essence of existence") moves not from disorder to order, but from presented order (however fortunate or regretful) to a somewhat new order inclusive of the old. Only from a distance do different orders appear unordered.

VIII. Creativity as Conceptual Wholeness

Creativity and conceiving (mentality) are really identical. Conceptuality is subjective feeling, and subjectivity is always appetitive (Adventures 151), always oriented towards the ultimate goal (to achieve importance) and to the continuous hierarchy of less general goals as embodied in its unique subjective aim. As Whitehead says, "the subjective forms of the conceptual prehensions constitute the drive of the Universe" (Adventures 196). But the "subjective forms ["of the total objective datum"] are merely contributions to the one fact which is the subjective feeling of the one occasion" (Adventures 254, emphasis added). The mental and physical (the new-making and the old-made) are necessarily in a dipolar contrast: The single mentality includes and responds to the many physical feelings which are the result of previous mental efforts.

There is no first nor last effort. God’s so-called primordial conceptual envisagement could never have occurred prior to all physical feelings since there cannot be conceptuality except as it grows around an inherited multiplicity of previous, determinate specifications which establishes the potentiality of the moment’s aim. "Pure conceptuality" is a myth (Modes 14), as much so as "pure matter." Both are abstractions that should not be hypostatized. Even if there could be primordial conceptuality prior to all physical inheritance, it could only contain the uncreated, metaphysical conditions of all creative specifications. All other specifications of potency are unique, created beings that become "universalized" by being prehended by others. They are the potentials for others; "it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every [successive] ‘becoming"’ (Process 22). If the interpolation of "successive" is not required, and every potency is, and has always been, specified and influencing every process, there is no reason for process to create anything; but such a block universe is not what Whitehead wants to describe.

Conceptuality does embrace the primordial, created past (which does include the eternal Categoreal Conditions) as mediated by the immediate past, but in itself, abstracting from its necessary physical base, abstracting from its dipolar contrast with the dead conceptuality of the past it begins with and includes, conceptuality is that which makes new specifications. This new-making is necessarily subjective (conceptual) and must include the objective (physical) as that aspect of its whole, growing self that is stubbornly, necessarily unalterable. Conceptual feeling is necessarily vectored always more or less specified, oriented toward an ought or worth to be fulfilled and an enrichment to be enjoyed by others in the future just as it now enjoys or suffers those in its past. Its aim is based upon the many that come vectored from the past that the wholeness of the present has embraced and is carrying into the future for others.

When Whitehead says, "Fact includes in its own nature something which is not fact, although it constitutes a realized item within fact. . . . This is the conceptual side of fact" (Modes 167), he misleadingly equivocates on the meaning of "fact" and misstates the dipolarity involved. His first, third and fourth uses of "fact" mean, or should mean, a process/whole. The second use of "fact" refers to what has been objectified, so the conceptual, of course, is "not fact" since it has not yet been objectified. The conceptuality of the present is obviously not in the objectified facts, but neither is it in the full reality of the present whole. Conceptuality is not in the whole because it is the whole. As the whole reality, it includes all previous conceptuality as objectified within the conceptual subjectivity of its present.

IX. The Category of the Ultimate Reformulated

Let me suggest a better way to express the Category of the Ultimate: Each of many wholes becomes a part in many wholes. The word "becomes" is still ambiguous, but taken either way, it functions meaningfully: (1) Each (of many wholes) becomes, that is, each grows and creates a newly specified determination within the range of its inherited hierarchy of generic possibility; (2) Each becomes a part in many wholes, that is, each whole’s result is inherited by many other wholes, immediately and successively forever. This formulation not only sorts out the part/whole issue, it also puts the same emphasis on the one-becoming-many as it does on the many-becoming-one. Not only do many (as objects) flow into one (subject), but one (as object) flows into many (subjects).

X Creating particulars and universals

A whole’s new determinate specification becomes at transition a part in others’ specifying and determining processes. A newly specified quality arises from an occasion’s internal creativity; a new pattern arises from contrasts of qualities inherited at transition as it originates (Adventures 253). Herein resides the dipolar difference between (1) aesthetic judgments which are concerned with both (a) contingent relationships of patterned qualities and (b) necessary relationships (both those conditionally necessary, found in the given patterns, and those metaphysically necessary, found in all possible givens) and (2) logical judgments which are only concerned with the necessary aspects of relatedness. Even though the determination which a whole creates begins as a unique, once-in-a-universe object, it becomes universalized as it is endlessly embraced by others.

"Eternal" objects are not eternal, but created and everlastingly inherited by many others -- by all successive others when divine mediation is included (see "Hartshorne, God and Metaphysics"). "Expression is the diffusion, in the environment, of something initially entertained in the experience of the expressor" (Modes 29); or better, created and determined in the expressor, and not first (or eternally) in God unless some moment of God is the expressor. A creation becomes the small end of endless abstractive sets as the multiple strands of spatio-temporal order advance. An "eternal" object is the same for all who prehend it because it is the same object. There is only one object; it is never reproduced (copied). Superseding others just conform to it, even though (except for God) it must be perspectivally prehended and usually mediated by others in closer proximity, exhibiting the H. A. Lorentz spatiotemporal transformation inherent in perspectival prehensions, that is, those necessarily including only some of all the immediately prior, objectified contemporaries.

Such objective characteristics will define societies when they are inherited and passed on as dominant characteristics by the members in the society. But the object does not ingress into the world eternally pre-specified. It is created from the generic aspects of previous creations in a way "inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence" (Process 21). "Potentiality is the characterization of Actuality, either in fact or in concept" (Modes 96, also Adventures 199 and Symbolism 39). This is the sense in which "a fact can harbor potentiality" (Adventures 138): All objects that exist are actual either (1) as determinate, satisfied processes physically felt, or (2) as indeterminate objects created in the present and conceptually felt in the present -- by what Whitehead would call Valuation (also Reproduction and Conformity) and Reversion -- as the present whole weighs somewhat general and indeterminate alternatives for its satisfaction.

A "concept" is an aspect of one’s inclusive conceptual actuality; it is born as a unique, "nonactual[ized]" (Process 22) characteristic of the actuality that first created it conceptually before being diffused into its superseding world physically. Whitehead would agree all concepts are in actuality as long as all concepts which have not yet ingressed into the world (by reversion and/or satisfaction) are held in God’s conceptuality as a discrete, infinite multiplicity, some of which we prehend when we have a "new" conceptual feeling; his version of reversion. But each moment of divine conceptuality can only entertain possibility as a continuum (which is always generic) and can only create one determinate result, a result that includes all the generic aspects of all previously specified determinations by including the determinations themselves, the "abstract is in the concrete, [so] any concrete contains the entire unlimited form" (Divine 144).

Every determination is incompatible with any other that could have come to be at that moment, but nothing is excluded from God since all past determinations are included and all possible future specifications for determination have not yet been created to be excluded. The present does not select among "completed specifications" for determinations, leaving the others excluded. Actual entities create new specifications. Conceptuality does create and entertain alternative possibilities for determinations, but only as more or less generic and indeterminate. A determination freezes a new specification forever. Each actuality must create its own specification to be determined, a unique result not found anywhere in its full detail, not even in God, until it is accomplished.

God’s own creative accomplishments must also be determined sequentially, not primordially nor eternally, since a "fully specified" object only occurs when it is determined, and the possibilities for new (and simultaneously incompatible) determinations are endless. "By means of process, the universe escapes from the limitations of the finite . . . [it] escapes from the exclusions of inconsistency. . . . In process the finite [and, Whitehead should say, as yet unspecified] possibilities of the universe travel towards their infinitude of realization" (Modes 75). All objects characterizing subject/superjects are everlasting and changeless, as Parmenides said, but only those who have not escaped the full Parmenidean mind-set assume all objects have always been as well as always will be.

XI. Theism, modality and the Category of the Ultimate

Even though Whitehead seems to have developed his Categories in response to issues in the philosophy of nature, still nothing in reality can be an exception to the Categories, especially the Category of Categories, so how does the Category of the Ultimate intersect with Whitehead’s theism? "Any instance of experience is dipolar," Whitehead clearly states, "whether that instance be God or an actual occasion of the world" (Process 36). He expressly says God is not to be an exception to the principle of dipolarity, so why is Whitehead so vague on the necessity for divine experience to exhibit the epochal dipolarity of coming to be and passing into objective immortality in others? Perhaps it hinges on a confusion between (1) the necessity for there to be a modal dipolarity between God and the World and (2) the necessity for there to be an epochal dipolarity within God, that is, for the moments of God to exhibit the fundamental dipolarity (expressed by the Category of the Ultimate) between the present moment of God-as-creating and all previous moments of God-as-created which the present contains.

Modal dipolarity concerns the difference between the actual entities of God’s series that must exhibit the Categoreal Conditions (when they are adequately expressed) without qualification, and all others that must exhibit the Categories restrictively, in quantity and quality: Those who do not know all, exist within the reality that does; those who objectify some others in transition, must be contrasted to (and within) the one wherein all others are objectified; those whose creations could have been richer are contrasted within one whose actions are impeccable.

A dipolar modal contrast is within the all-inclusive or supreme pole. But this does not excuse the reality that is the unsurpassable, modal exemplification of the Categories from first being an epochal instance of the Categories. Modal dipolar contrasts are built upon epochal dipolar contrasts, and in every case upon the Ultimate Categoreal Contrast between coming-to-be and come-to-be. That which has come to be and now is (by the principle of dipolarity) must be within that which is coming to be (since that which is, is absolutely changeless and cannot, therefore, contain that which is coming to be). All comings-to-be are finite: Temporal extension is always epochal. All actual entities die, either by failure or satisfaction: all beings (that have come to be) become parts of other becomings.

The dipolar modal contrast between finite life and eternal life is not to be found in one actual entity who is an exception to the meaning of "actuality" by never dying satisfied (nor being born). It is found in the way actual entities are together. Ways of being together exhibit the modal relationships of necessity or contingency. Though all moments of creative process (including those of cosmic inclusiveness) are created facts which are necessarily not necessary, that is, necessarily contingent in some aspects, still all contingent facts must exhibit necessary factors. Necessary wholes could not exhibit nor contain contingencies, but contingent wholes must exhibit necessities. One ubiquitous necessity all actual entities exhibit is the Category of the Ultimate. Every whole is born in response to others’ deaths, comes to be and dies when it does. Every being ("dead datum") (Process 164) is in others’ comings-to-be "to the crack of doom" (Process 228).

How God is necessary and how necessity is secure within contingent actualities is answered by understanding why there must be ever-new contingent lives in the divine personal series, not by positing one "necessary life," one whole that illogically alters or remains eternally static. Reality, especially at the unsurpassable level, is necessarily social (Divine 26ff).

XII. Summary

To recapitulate, a whole is a self-powered reality, both embracing and feeling many unalterable and objectified others simultaneously, and creating a new specification (inclusive of the many felt) to be felt as a changeless determination by many superseding wholes. The specifications determined by wholes are not wholes. Once the actualizing is accomplished, the result is no longer self-sustaining or "self-moved." Others do, and some others must, take this dependent reality into themselves and sustain it as a part of their creating wholes. Once a process/whole is established, it cannot be altered by the addition of new physical prehensions, nor by the elimination or modification of any already embraced. A whole somewhat adjusts the relative importance the embraced many will have in the newly specified determination it brings into existence as it dies satisfied. In so doing, the present partly determines forever the feelings of those who must conform to its unique creation.

Works Cited

Hartshorne, Charles. The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God. New Haven: Yale UP 1983.

____A Natural Theology for Our Time. La Salle: Open Court, 1967.

Voskuil, Duane. "Hartshorne, God and Metaphysics." Process Studies 28.3-4 (1999): 212-28.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. 1933. New York: Free Press, 1967.

____Modes of Thought. 1938. New York: Free Press, 1968.

____Process and Reality. 1929. Corrected Edition. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.

____Religion in the Making. 1926. New York: Fordham UP, 1996.

____Science and the Modern World. 1925. New York: Free Press, 1967.

____Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. New York: Macmillan, 1927.

I. Oomen’s Proposal

Palmyre Oomen proposes to answer how God can be one actual entity, one subject primordially and forever, and still (1) continuously integrate multiple prehensions of the world successively, and (2) continuously present data for the world to prehend (PS27 108-133). Her answer hinges on attributing to God (a) one satisfaction which remains eternally one yet alters since it grows, and (b) one subjective aim which remains eternally one yet alters since it adjusts to the world’s new creations.

The apparent contradictions in God remaining one whole that changes by the additions of a "growing satisfaction" and retaining one aim that changes relative to new worldly data are supposedly resolved by Oomen’s magic bullet, the "reversed polarity of God," which is "essential" for her view (P327 116,132).

II. Generic-Specific Confusion

Admittedly, God’s satisfaction can grow and God’s aim remain constant yet change, but only when referring to them generically as one does when speaking of a person’s life’s goal and the satisfaction acquired during its accomplishment. Each momentary satisfaction can include previous satisfactions without internally modifying them, but it (and what it includes) is the result of a new whole’s satisfaction not numerically identical with the former satisfied entities included. "The many become one and are increased by one" (PR 21).

However, this is not Oomen’s solution. Her single-entity view of God can only have one satisfaction, so it must keep changing.² She blurs the distinction between concrete states and their generic aspects. She either imputes concreteness to common, abstract factors found in a series of concrete moments, committing the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, or equivocates on the meaning of basic concepts, denying, for example, that for God "the ‘satisfaction’ is the ‘superject’. . .[which] closes up the entity" (PR 84).

God’s "constant aim" can also be seen as an expression referring generically to the common element in all God’s somewhat different specific aims. Since all of God’s momentary aims necessarily have a common aspect, and since God can have no first nor last momentary aim, their common element is necessary and changeless. What this eternal element is is the matter under debate, though Whitehead’s realm of eternal objects seems highly suspect. The only truly eternal aspects are the metaphysical Categories themselves. These Categories include the necessity to love and be loved.

Loving in an unsurpassable way is God’s changeless and abstract (PS 27 330) primordial aim, an aim to embrace all and influence all to be lovable. But God’s influence can never be fully determinate nor eliminate tragedy since the world’s acts are necessarily somewhat self-directed, recalcitrant "matter," Plato would say. God’s specific response to the world must wait on its creations, the reason God’s actual subjective aims can never be eternally established. That God has some aim or other is not dependent on any particular actual world. Neither are the completely generic aspects of God’s specific aims dependent on any particular world, but God could not exist without some actual world or other, and every actual aim God does have is conditioned by all previous creations.

So why does Oomen think God is more rationally conceived as a single actual entity, an entity allowed to be a major exception to the principles applying to other actual entities (though, she maintains, not an exception to the metaphysical scheme)?² She claims the serial view of God has even greater problems (PS27 115-116) because God viewed as a personal nexus (1) does not allow God to have a primordial conceptual pole and, therefore, a constant divine aim, nor (2) does it allow God to be prehensible at all times by the world since God would be momentarily indeterminate during each divine concrescence.

III. Primordial Aim

As for the first point, God, or every moment of God’s series, must have the dipolarity required of all processes. "Primordial" can only refer to Categoreal characteristics all actual entities have always exhibited, not a state of existence before concrete moments began. God "is the beginning and the end. He is not the beginning in the sense of being in the past of all members. . . . He is . . . in unison of becoming with every other creative act" (PR 345). Contrary to Whitehead’s mythical expression, there never could be "one non-derivative actuality, unbounded by its prehensions of an actual world" (PR 32). There have always been divine (and nondivine) creative processes. The primordial conditions for process are those absolutely abstract, metaphysical characteristics which all specific potencies must exhibit. Every process, divine and nondivine, must prehend this primordial condition ‘which includes the primordial "valuation," the unavoidable purpose of existence.

Whitehead does write that God’s "conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and establishes the categoreal conditions" (PR 344). Certainly God must exemplify the Categories, but God cannot "establish" them, if that means God creates them or decides what they are to be. They are eternal necessities, or they would not be Categoreal.³ With a theory of eternal objects akin to Plato’s Ideas,⁴ the primordial condition would be in need of a primordial valuation, an adjustment of their relative significance in light of, some Form of the Good since ‘there can be no ‘many things’ which are not subordinated in a concrete unity" (PR 211). But a Hartshornean view of potentiality leaves only the mutually interdependent and equally important⁵ metaphysical abstractions as the primordial condition. Every other potency is more or less specific and has been created and valued at some time in the past, just as new potencies will be created forever.

Every subjective aim begins with a concrete situation and is, as Oomen says (but only of nondivine occasions), consequent upon physical prehensions. likewise, every physical prehension is consequent upon a prior conceptual aim, or potency, that existed as a means to bring the satisfaction into existence. Here, too, Oomen is right. Potency or conceptual prehension is indeed prior to any specific actualization, just as some physical prehensions or other are necessarily prior to every actual aim, including God’s. Both are, and have always been, required for anything to exist. Neither alone is fully actual or concrete. In this dipolar, primordial chicken and egg neither can be said to be temporally prior or more significant than the other: Each is "on the same level."⁶

All potency or valuation resides in some actual process or other, and since every process is dipolar, Whitehead’s statement that "general potentiality is absolute" (PR 65) or pure can only be mythical All potentiality is, and always has been, real, never pure. The primordial nature of God cannot be an "actual entity" despite Whitehead’s use of that expression when he is opposing the world to God (PR 65). Since only actual entities act, it is impossible that "for the determination and providing of an initial aim, God’s consequent nature⁷ is not needed" (P527 330) or that "God’s aim is derived from God’s primordial nature without any reference to a given actual world" (PS27 116-117), unless these expressions mean that no particular world is needed even though some world or other is necessary. Universal characteristics of all possible aims only exist as common aspects of actual aims, so physical prehensions are not added to an abstract primordial nature (as Oomen suggests, PS27 115). There is no primordial entity as such to add to; abstractions cannot exist, much less be adjusted, apart from concrete wholes.

IV. Process and Prehensibility

As for Oomen’s second reservation with God conceived as a personal nexus, that God’s objectified satisfactions would not always be available for the world to prehend, why is it necessary to maintain that previous satisfactions (which are objectified and in the process of being added to by the new moment) are inaccessible and not prehensible by others? A process philosophy need only affirm: (1) the process of making a new object is not in itself an object, and (2) once a process begins, causally conditioned by objectified others, it cannot be further influenced. Beings created by others and prehended by a divine or nondivine process are maintained by that process. The maintenance keeps them available for others rather than hides them from others.⁸

To support her contention, she argues that "‘always in concrescence and never in the past’ [PR 31] should be read as ‘always subject never merely object"’ (P327 117). Indeed, God is always a subject, that is, always some subject or other, and yes, God is never merely object; but what logic requires the conclusion that God is only one subject through time? No person is ever merely object as long as still living,⁹ yet each moment of a person’s series perishes and another begins, prehending the satisfaction/superject of the previous moment of the series, together with other contemporaries.¹⁰ God’s actual entities also perish, yet God is always a concrescing subject (though not the same momentary subject), since God’s personal series could never have a first nor last moment.

Finally, although in the following paragraph Whitehead injudiciously uses "temporal" to refer only to fragmentary actual entities, he does come close to saying God is a personal series (a chain) functioning along the same principle (in the same way) as those in the world.

An enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors. The correlate fact in God’s nature is an even more complete unity of life in a them of elements for which succession does nor mean loss of immediate unison. This element in God’s nature inherits from the temporal counterpart according to the same principle as in the temporal world the future [present] inherits from the past. (PR 350, emphases added)

V. Problems With Oomen’s Single-Entity View of God

Whether Oomen’s view is more or less like Whitehead’s, I hesitate to say since Whitehead’s view is not clear, but any formulation of a single-entity view of God will likely stumble into the illogic of substance philosophy, "the notion of an actual entity which is characterized by essential qualities, and remains numerically one amidst the changes of accidental relations and of accidental qualities" (PR 79).¹¹ New additions to God’s satisfaction ‘would certainly be accidental. They could not be essential to God without holding all that will be is already determined to be. But this predeterminism reduces to a Leibnizian monadic view of a changing whole or to a block universe with no temporal sequence.

Is God a fact? Does "God" name one fact, one whole? If God is one fact, one actual entity, how can God not be a changing, altering or growing fact contrary to the meaning of an actual entity? "Actual entities perish, but do not change; they are what they are" (PR 35). If God is one fact, why isn’t God’s satisfaction "intolerant of any addition"? Further, how can Oomen’s God be aware of God’s "growing satisfaction" without again violating the definition of an "actual entity" since "no actual entity can be conscious of its own satisfaction; for such knowledge would be a component in the process, and would thereby alter the satisfaction" (PR 85)? If God is not one fact, then what can God be but a series of facts?

Oomen thinks God’s constant initial aim avoids the contradiction of an altering whole since the unity of God (as with all actual entities) resides in God’s aim and not in the multiple prehensions of others or the accumulating satisfaction. But a constant aim is only an abstraction from actual aims, not an actual aim itself. An actual aim is conditioned by the physical content of the process. The primordial nature has no aim, nor can it exist by itself because it is abstract, and abstractions are only characteristics of concretes. The one, concrete, living Actual Entity that supposedly is God would have a constantly changing aim adjusting to the ever-novel world, and so God, in Oomen’s view, and likely all single-entity process views, is constantly one and many.¹²

As an additional complication, the "growing satisfaction" seems able to grow continually in spite of Zeno’s Paradox and the logical necessity that all change be temporally atomized, "God includes incessantly, like a reservoir, which grows incessantly" (PS27 330). "Physical prehensions are constantly added" (PS27 115). However, "continuity concerns what is potential; whereas actuality is incurably atomic" (PR 61).

God is not only an exception to all other actual entities, but is probably a Categoreal exception, because "in God’s case, the aim is never achieved in the sense that the process stops" (PS27 331).¹³ This so-called "process" is not a concrescence aimed at a satisfaction, since God is always satisfied according to Oomen. Her use of "process" refers to a mysterious growth adding to God’s "state(s)" of satisfaction. So God as one whole is always determinate (baying a satisfaction) and yet always indeterminate in "process" of acquiring more satisfaction). God is perfectly round becoming rounder.

A final problem: Oomen seems to say God grows everlastingly but not primordially. If God has always been growing (whether by concrescing to a satisfaction or by "adding" more satisfaction), there never could be a Primordial Valuation prior to physical prehensions. When Whitehead’s says, "the non-temporal act [sic] of [an] all-inclusive unfettered valuation" (PR 31), and God "in his primordial nature, is unmoved by love for this particular, or that particular; for in this foundational process [sic] of creativity, there are no preconstituted particulars" (PR 105). he again is using mythical expressions. There are no acts or processes except those of actual entities, and all actual entities are conditioned by physical prehensions of previous acts. As Whitehead himself says, as he continues the above quotation, this unfettered valuation

When Whitehead speaks of a "non-temporal actuality," e.g. (PR 46) he is either referring (with an unfortunate phrase) to an actual entity that is not all-inclusive or is speaking mythically of a "time" when the metaphysical characteristics were "established" (PR 344). But in his more careful and literal moments, he knows the metaphysical aspects of reality, with their primordial valuation, were never established. They have always been.¹⁴ Here again Whitehead’s realm of multiple, eternal and specific potencies causes his theory to be expressed vaguely if not incoherently There is no need for a primordial valuation of the metaphysical "principles which actuality exemplifies [since they] all are on the same level" (PR 18), and all valuations of contingent potencies have occurred at some time in response to some actual world and all previous divine creations.

VI. Conclusion

The force of Oomen’s interpretation which allows Whitehead’s God a "growing satisfaction" plays on his vague and ambiguous statements about God’s so-called primordial nature. I doubt Whitehead can consistently mean there is a primordial "concrescence" of eternal objects (PR 87), though Whitehead can meaningful say God is "always in concrescence" (PR 31) as a series of concrescences with no first nor last member, and with no extensive pause between the satisfactions and their objectifications.

Whitehead does not speak of God’s "ever-growing satisfaction," much less as an exception to other actual entities. All actual entities, including God, must "concresce as the transition from indeterminateness to determinateness" (PS27 113), because bringing about "definition is the soul of actuality" (PR 223). A "dynamic satisfaction" (PS27 112) is an oxymoron. Dynamism is the function of concrescent process that Oomen denies occurs in God (PS27 114) except when she redefines "‘concrescence’ as continually growing satisfaction" (PS27 113). An actuality satisfied can be and do nothing more and still remain the same actual entity.

For theism to be taken seriously, God must be an unavoidable exemplification of the ultimate Categories in terms of which all reality is understood. Though God’s exemplification can and must exhibit the Categories in an ideal and unique way, this uniqueness cannot equivocate on Categoreal meanings or one has not moved beyond the via negativa. Oomen’s effort only makes more clear the inevitable contradictions inherent in an altering whole, an insight generally ignored since Parmenides pointed it out.

Notes

1. [First "2" as printed] An altering whole is logically problematic and contrary to Whitehead’s definition of "change" "The fundamental meaning of the notion of ‘change’ is ‘the difference between actual occasions comprised in some determinate event’. . . I shall use the term ‘event’ in the more general sense of a nexus of actual occasions. An actual occasion is the limiting type of an event with only one member" (PR 73). Need Whitehead here make an exception for God?

2. Whitehead says, "The metaphysical characteristics of an actual entity -- in the proper general sense of ‘metaphysics’ -- should be those which apply to all [possible] actual entities" (PR 90). "God is not to be treated as an exception to all [sic] metaphysical principles invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification" (PR 313). I read Whitehead to mean "any" where he says "all." All metaphysical categories either apply to all that does or could exist, or they are simply not universal, the hallmark of metaphysical. He also says, "There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. But though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actually exemplifies all are on the same level’ (PR 18, emphasis added. Also see PR 350).

"The description of the generic character of an actual entity should include God, as well as the lowliest actual occasion," and though there will be differences, differences arise from their inclusiveness. . . In the philosophy of organism as here developed, God’s existence is not genetically different from that of other actual entities, except that he is ‘primordial’ in a sense to be gradually explained" (PR 75). I doubt Whitehead ever really explained this, and I am not convinced Oomen has either.

3. Neither can God, as the Principle of Concretion, initiate a "definite outcome from a situation otherwise riddled with ambiguity" (PR 345, emphasis added]. God, as is necessarily (Categoreally) the case with any subject, can only condition the world superjectively to have this or that kind of outcome. Of course, God is unique since only God conditions every successive moment.

4. "Idea," I-dea, which roughly means "Goddess in me," is something, however, that process philosophy can mean literally.

5. Note again Whitehead’s statement quoted above in footnote 2 that when it comes to "the principles which actuality exemplifies "all are on the same level?’ (PR 18, emphasis added].

6. Unless reality is non-temporal, one must either assert reality had an absolute beginning, or maintain some form of infinite regress. An infinite regress of self-creating entities seems least objectionable: Some actual entities or other have always been; all inherit and exhibit the same generic characteristics; and only one at each moment does so in an unsurpassable way.

7. God’s consequent aspect is God’s prehension of some state of the world or other.

8. See "Hartshorne, God and Metaphysics" PS 28 for further elaboration of this point.

9. Of course, neither is any subject, including God, merely subject, since all subjects must include objects.

10. For God the next moment must begin immediately or the just perished moment would he "mere object" or "nonbeing," that is, meaningless.

11. Whitehead continues. "There then remain two alternatives for philosophy: (i) a monistic universe with the illusion of change; and (ii) a pluralistic universe in which ‘change’ means the diversities among the actual entities which belong to some one society of a definite [personal] type" (PR 79). How does Oomen’s entitive view avoid this alternative?

12. Hartshorne writes in Chance Love and Incompatibility:’ "The first step toward a more intelligible view is to recognize with Scholz and a number of other logicians that absolute identity of the concrete or particular is given in an event or occasion, not in a thing enduring through time, like a person or a body. The merely relative identity of the latter may be called, with Levin and Scholz, genetic identity, Genidentität." This essay can be found in Philosophers of Process, D. Browning and W. Myers, eds., Fordham Press. 1998,442.

13. Oomen argues that no Categoreal Condition requires a process to perish to be objectively immortal (PS27 117). If she is right, this would seem to weigh heavily against Whitehead’s having adequately expressed the Categories. He does say, however, God has "objective immortality" (PR 32, quoted below), and that satisfaction "closes up the entity" making it "intolerant of any addition," and even if sense could be made of God’s "reversed polarity:’ I fail to see how it would avoid the problem of a changing whole. Whitehead’s epochal theory of process is likely his greatest insight.

14. If they were adjusted and subordinated, it would have to be in an actual entity not in a primordial time before any actual world existed because "there can be no ‘many things’ which are not subordinated in a concrete unity" (PR 211, emphasis added, and only actual entities are concrete.

References

FS27 Palmyre M. F. Oomen, "The Prehensibility of God’s Consequent Nature." Process Studies 27 (1998), 108-133; Palmyre M.F. Oomen, "Consequences of Prehending God’s Consequent nature In a Different Key,~’ Process Studies 27 (1998) 329-331.

Editor’s note The essays by Paimyre Oomen in PS 27 were based, in part, on her Ph.D. dissertation which has been published in Dutch as Dpet God ertoe? Een interpretatie van Whitehead als bijdrage aan een theologie van Gods handelen (Does God Matter? An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Philosophy as a Contribution to a Theology of god’s Agency) Kampen (The Netherlands): Kok. 1998: 602 pages. including a summary in English.

George Santayana (1869-1952) and A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947) were almost precisely contemporary philosophers each of whom elaborated a complete metaphysical or ontological system, the affinities and contrasts between which are of considerable interest (I am not distinguishing here between metaphysics and ontology as the terminologies of our two thinkers diverge on this in ways attention to which would only unnecessarily complicate comparison). These certainly represent the most important contributions to traditional metaphysics of their time in English, and arguably in any language.

Both developed their metaphysical systems quite late in their philosophical career, having previously worked in somewhat different veins. Thus Santayana’s earlier work consists in philosophical comment on human life rather than constructive metaphysics or ontology, while Whitehead’s is devoted to the foundations of mathematics and the analysis of scientific concepts. The most important statements of Santayana’s later system are Skepticism and Animal Faith,1923 (SAF), and the four books of Realms of Being (RB); The Realm of Essence, 1927 (RE); The Realm of Matter, 1930 (RM); The Realm of Truth, 1938 (RT); The Realm of Symbols 1940 (RS).

The most important statements of Whitehead’s, in my opinion, are Science and the Modern World, 1925; Process and Reality 1929; Modes of Thought 1933. Of Santayana’s works it is The Realm of Essence, and even more, The Realm of Matter which it is most fruitful to compare to the work of Whitehead.

Both Whitehead and Santayana are rightly counted as figures in the history of American philosophy (and more specifically as main figures in the line of outstanding Harvard philosophers) but their relations to America are in striking contrast. While Whitehead found that he could only develop his final system satisfactorily after having left Europe (Britain) for the US.A. in 1924, Santayana found he could only develop his after having left the US.A. for Europe. Santayana was Spanish, but, for somewhat complicated family reasons, lived in the U.S. from the age of nine till he was nearly fifty, leaving it in 1912 to live first in England until after the first world war, and then in Rome. His resignation from the Harvard philosophy department (and total retirement from university life) where he had graduated and taught from 1899 was the source of some distress to American philosophers who had regarded him as one of the leading figures in a distinctively American tradition,

Different as their relations to, and attitudes towards, America were, both philosophers belong to a tradition which is strikingly American and both philosophers have only been adequately appreciated there. Santayana was self-consciously Latin as opposed to Anglo-Saxon, he said that his aim in philosophy has been to say as many un-English things in English as he could, and he wrote a good deal of a somewhat denigratory nature about American life (though he had positive things to say as well) but he admitted that it was as an American philosopher that he was to be counted if he was to be counted at all. In fact, he was more influenced than he evidently realized by William James. This is one link between him and Whitehead who appreciated the extent to which James had anticipated key features of his own process philosophy. In any case, whatever the causes, Whitehead and Santayana form with James, Josiah Royce, C.A. Strong, C.S. Peirce, Charles Hartshorne and others a distinctive philosophical grouping with common concerns distinct from those of British and European philosophers. One striking affinity between all these philosophers, except Peirce, is the central role in their metaphysics played by the notion of "the specious present."

Santayana and Whitehead are among the few philosophers in this century who have elaborated complete metaphysical systems which are distinctively pre-Kantian in style. Both offer large scale systematic accounts of the nature of reality in general, largely dismissing the suggestion that the only world we can know is one whose main structure is determined by the human cognitive system and which, therefore, only exists for us. Thus both reject that centering of the philosophic enterprise upon epistemology so typical of philosophy in recent times. They thereby stand in contrast to the two traditions which have been distinctive of British and European philosophy respectively this century namely those of conceptual analysis and phenomenology. Certainly one of the reasons for the neglect of both thinkers among English language philosophers has been that they have not played the role which Russell and Wittgenstein did in generating so-called analytical philosophy (a philosophical style inimical, upon the whole, to attempts to theorize about the nature of the universe in general. Likewise they are far apart from such metaphysics or ontology as spawned by phenomenology and which, even in its Heideggerian form (contrary as this is to how those soaked in it may be willing to admit), seems more an inquiry into how the world is for us than into its real nature. (Insofar as these traditions now issue in "deconstructionism," Whitehead and Santayana are still further away from them, since both patiently attempt to work out just how things really are.)

In short, both Santayana and Whitehead are realists. Details of their official accounts of truth aside, each basically supposes that there is a world with its own definite character and that thought is true to the extent that it is able to capture something of this character in words or concepts (even if often only in highly symbolic terms).

Likewise each thinker, both in mood and theory is totally opposed to anthropocentrism. Each sees the existence of the human race as just one particular episode in a vast non-human immensity and is hostile to the hubris which would tailor the universe to the human scale. (Santayana, however, thought that Whitehead’s identification of reality with experience risked jeopardizing such naturalism. He may also have thought that Whitehead’s theism belonged with theism in general as a fallacious attempt to humanize the universe; for Santayana, though he saw theistic religion as possessing a type of poetic or symbolic truth, was, at the level of blunt factuality, an atheist.)

I turn now to some of the more technical points of contrast and affinity between our two thinkers.

The question of what it is to be or to exist is central to the thought of each. Whitehead’s approach here is crystallized in his "ontological principle," that "whatever things there are in any sense of ‘existence,’ are derived by abstraction from actual occasions" (PR 73). Thus for Whitehead that which exists or has being in the most fundamental sense is a fully concrete particular individual. There are plenty of other things, but their being is in every case somehow derivative from that of one of these completely concrete bits of reality.

Thus while eternal objects play a major role in Whitehead’s scheme, he denies them independent being. That they are independent of us only goes to show that there must be a God whose apprehension grounds their being. No such principle is accepted by Santayana. He posits essences characterized in terms mostly the same as Whitehead’s eternal objects, but the "pure being" which they possess is not dependant on any home they may find in particular existences. He does, however, carefully distinguish this being from existence. Just two of the four Realms of Being which he distinguishes are existential: the items which form the realms of matter and the realm of spirit both exist, while the being which essences possess in detachment from the existential realms is not properly called "existence." As for truth, Santayana speaks of this as subsisting, holding that it has an intermediate status between pure being and existence as that segment of the realm of essence which is distinguished from the rest by its role as a description of what exists.

Though he denies that their being depends on their occurrence as aspects of the nature of existences, Santayana shares something of Whitehead’s concern to avoid "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," in general and specifically with reference to essences. It is because he fears that speaking of pure essences as existing will encourage assimilation of their status to that of efficacious particular things that he insists that so long as they stick within their own eternal realm they only have pure being. Santayana and Whitehead often echo each other in what they say about their essences and eternal objects. Thus both appeal to them to explicate the sense of counter-factual suppositions. Moreover, Santayana would agree with Whitehead’s statement that "[an] eternal object is always a potentiality actual entities; but in itself . . . it is neutral as to the facts of its . . . ingression in any particular actual entity of the temporal world" (PR 44). Thus, Whitehead holds that it is the actual occasion which decides which eternal objects it will participate in, so that one must not look to the eternal objects to explain why one enters existence as a character present in some actual occasion rather than another. This is a main theme of Santayana’s too (see, for example, ED 276). The realm of essence is the home of an eternal infinity of qualities and forms which the flux of physical existence (the realm of matter) may or may not actualize from time to time as the character of one of its phases (or which spirit may or may not conceive or imagine from time to time) but there is no dynamism in the realm of essence to determine which shall thus enter the concrete world (see RB 385-386). The essences sit there passively in the realm of essence to be picked out by an activity on the part of the physical flux which they do nothing to explain. In the same spirit Santayana and Whitehead agree in objecting, like Nietzsche, to the idea that change in the natural world is controlled by "laws of nature," viewing the laws rather as simply descriptions of what each unit to which they apply "decides" to do itself (RB 301-302). For Santayana, however, a word like "decides" must be taken as heavily metaphorical here, while for Whitehead it has a more literal sense (at least with respect to conscious actual entities).

However, although their being is rooted in God’s apprehension of them, and only through mediation do they enter into our life and thought, Whitehead gives eternal objects a role as final causes somewhat alien to Santayana. For Whitehead evidently supposes that it is the value which God apprehends an eternal object as possessing, or its suitability for ingression in a particular context, which makes it a lure for action. As against this, Santayana is loath to see matter (which alone is fundamentally efficacious) as genuinely attracted to any particular essence. However, he does hold that the goal towards which physical processes are directing the behavior of an animal finds conscious expression at the level of spirit by its intuition of the goal’s essence under the form of the good. That special essence or form, then, though it exercises no real control over what happens, does have a special role in registering the direction in which some particular portion of the natural world is moving.

The extent to which Santayana and Whitehead are often quite close is disguised by Santayana’s wish to formulate new thought in as traditional a form as possible, and Whitehead’s belief that his ideas require a new terminology. This is particularly illustrated by the difference between their treatment of the vexed notion of "substance."

There are two senses of "substance" which are relevant here. First, there is the notion of an individual or "primary" substance, an ousia in Aristotle’s sense, which retains its individual identity through change and of which universals are predicable, while it itself is predicable of nothing. Second, there is the notion of substance or matter, ulh or upokeimenon, in Aristotle’s sense, as that which in combination with form constitutes such an individual ousia.

Whitehead rejects both notions in the Aristotelian and traditional sense. True, there are on his account, individual substances, namely his actual occasions, and, indeed, they are the only things which exist in the primary sense of "exist," but they are quite unlike those of Aristotle. For (1) they are not continuants which remain the same through change, but pulses of process; (2) they are predicable of each other, so that the proper fundamental description of an actual occasion is not in subject-predicate propositions, where the predicate is a universal, but in terms of the way in which other actual occasions enter into its being; (3) there is no distinction between their form and matter in Aristotle’s sense. Thus the fundamental particulars of the world are events rather than continuants and their inherent nature consists, not in the universals under which they fall, but in the past particulars which enter into their being there to be synthesized in new arrangements.

On the face of it Santayana rejects all three of these departures from the tradition, since (1) he makes no very explicit move from a continuant to an event ontology, (2) regards the inherent nature of an object as a matter of the individual eternal essence which it actualizes and (3) regards the distinction between matter and form as at least a virtually inevitable way of expressing the obscure manner in which one state of things takes over from another (see RB 278-284).

But how great really is the difference between them here? Certainly as regards (1) there may be less difference between them than at first appears. For when Santayana explains what it is for an essence to be exemplified, or for a truth to be about something, he typically talks of their instances or objects as "facts," meaning by this some particular bit of the natural world as it is at a specific time and place (as it is directly if physical or derivatively if mental). Enduring things arise simply because the physical flux goes on exemplifying a certain form in a certain context for a time (see ED 274,279). And when he presents his deepest account of the structure of the natural world he characterizes these facts as "natural moments" or "moments of spirit" (if mental). Thus, after all, the fundamental constituents of the world are for him "events," each actualizing its own essence, together with (as the obscure bond between them is most readily described) the substance which they inherit from their predecessors and pass on to their successors, rather than persisting continuants changing their accidental properties while retaining their essence. So if Santayana is not an "event ontologist" like Whitehead, it is not because he thinks ordinary continuants or "primary substances" are ontologically more basic than events, which he does not, but because he speaks of the derivation of one event from another as the transmission of matter or substance, in the sense of ulh, from one to another. This certainly looks like a commitment to the tradition attacked by (3) but we shall be seeing that it is doubtful how deep the divergence between our two thinkers really goes even on this point.

Where Whitehead and Santayana are strikingly similar is in holding that the spatio-temporal world is ultimately atomic or quantic so that what constitutes the world at any one moment, or a piece of history, is a system of facts, events, natural moments, or actual occasions, whose relations (or perhaps rather possibilities of relations) constitute space and time (as opposed to their being as mere possibilities of relations) rather than are in them as containers (see ED 27). Assuming the reader’s familiarity with Whitehead’s conception of an actual occasion I shall point Out some features of Santayana’s notion of these fundamental units of space-time which are more or less close to this.

A natural moment is an ultimate unit in the flux of existence in which an essence is actualized in an all-at-once fashion. (For Santayana’s treatment of natural moments, see RM chapter V and VII, especially at ED 280-292 and 323-325.) The essence may be complex but if this is so there is no separate actualization of its elements by genuinely distinct units of existence. In contrast stand conventional moments. These are bits of the world which may be considered as units for good human purposes, but which do not possess the unitary character of a natural moment since they are composed of such moments in external relations to one another. A conventional moment does indeed exemplify an essence. But this essence is the truth about it, that is, it is a unit in the realm of essence which does genuine justice to what it is without being exemplified by it in the all-at-once fashion it would be if it were exemplified by a natural moment. Rather, is it a unitary picture of a bit of reality which itself only exists in a piecemeal dispersed fashion (see ED 269-270, and 293-296). This seems to me the clear sense of what Santayana is saying, though some commentators understand him rather differently.

Santayana holds that essences could not be brought into the world of existence at all unless at a certain level there are essences actualized in this all-at-once fashion. Although he does not appeal, like Whitehead, in justification of this atomic view of the ultimate elements of the spatio-temporal world, to Zeno’s paradoxes, the thought is somewhat similar to the latter’s belief that nothing could become unless there is some becoming not composed of more minute becomings. But how do these natural moments stand to each other so that they make up larger units and ultimately a world? Santayana speaks of them as in external relations to each other. His use of the external/internal distinction is different from Whitehead’s. The sense in which these relations between natural moments are external is that they are not simply contrasts and affinities between the essences of the terms, such as hold between them in the pure realm of essence. And it is precisely the holding of such external relations between them which constitutes them as existing things -- without such relations they would simply be their essences (RB 278). For there are no external relations in the realm of essence, only internal relations of two kinds: (1) the contrasts and affinities between essences; (2) the way in which the elements of a complex essence stand together in the unitary pattern which it is. This means that the truth about a complex of natural moments can never quite do justice to it; for the relations between its elements are external, while the truth is an essence in which those relations are indicated by internal relations, in the second sense, between its elements. So even if we knew the literal truth about the ultimate units of the world, and how they stand to each other, there would be something we would not grasp thereby, namely the external relations between natural moments constitutive of all larger "facts" (see ED 218). But can this be grasped at all? Only in a generalized sense of the existential flux which we lose the greater our conceptual clarity. The most we can do is use words suggestive of this fundamental feature of reality which is necessarily opaque to truth and mind (see RB 274). (It is not that truth is mental, but that mind’s access to nature is, at least so far as it becomes clear, through grasp of the truth about it.)

The words Santayana uses here are "substantial inheritance" and "lateral tension," The first is the mode of passage of natural moments into their successors, the second is the mutual pressure on each other of contemporary natural moments which influences what each thus passes into. As regards the former, Santayana suggests that we cannot much improve on the "[t]he classic expedient [which] is to analyze existence into matter and form, the matter being transmissible and serving to connect moment with moment, and to render the later the offspring of the earlier, while the former serves to characterize each moment and give it individuality and limits" (ED 279; see also ED 208 and 282).

Evidently in trying to understand natural moments and how they stand to each other Santayana is concerned with just those issues with which Whitehead is coping in his discussion of the constitution of actual occasions and their influence upon one another. But his answer diverges in two ways: (i) In speaking of "lateral tensions" as having some influence on what each natural moment passes on to later moments, Santayana is in conflict with Whitehead’s view that in its process of becoming an actual occasion is causally quite detached from its contemporaries, and operates privately upon the past occasions which have entered into it in order to produce that over-all character which it will pass on to later occasions. Here there is a real divergence between our thinkers. (ii) In talking of "substantial inheritance" Santayana seems to be using a category of matter which Whitehead rejects. For Santayana, "matter" is the appropriate name for such "substance" as the character possessed by the substance of our actual world (see RB 234). However, it should be realized that Santayana thinks this relation of substantial inheritance (like that of "lateral tension"), as an external one, is simply uncapturable in terms of essence, so that, as real as it is, no truth about it can quite capture its nature. So it is doubtful that Santayana believes in matter in a way which conflicts with Whitehead’s rejection of it. And some of what he says about the taking over of one moment from another sounds quite Whiteheadian. Thus each moment is a "center and self-assertive" by "being a focus of rays gathered into it from external sources and discharged again into eventual effects." (The phrase "natural moment" is not used at this point but the idea, developed more fully shortly after, is implied.) On the other hand, it would seem that for Santayana, Whitehead’s attempt to replace this by the notion of actual occasions prehending each other represents no advance on this. However, granted the difference in their use of "internal," one cannot say that Santayana rejects Whitehead’s view that the relation is internal; he certainly accepts that it is intimate.)

There is much in Santayana’s discussion of these matters which would justify calling him a philosopher of "becoming" Thus he says that the "natural moment exists only in act" as something "essentially transitional" (ED 282). And in explaining, so far as he can, lateral tensions and substantial inheritance, he implies that there is a kind of process within the natural moments which he calls "forward tension" while time for him comes down to the taking over of one set of natural moments by another. But there are two respects in which he remains a philosopher of being. First, there is the independent reality which he ascribes to the realm of essence. He is not too far from Plato in regarding the world of process into which these are dragged from time to time as a second rate reality. Second, and more importantly, Santayana holds that there is an eternal truth about the world as a whole which does not change, and that the distinctions between past, present and future are not ultimate, In the last resort every natural moment is just there eternally in its own position in the total system, and the past is simply what is past from the point of view of some particular moment (see RB 253, 254. 256-257, 264-265). At least as most interpret him, Whitehead rejects this view, though I wonder whether his idea of God does not eventually imply something like it. For if God is an actual entity, and if the elements of an actual entity are only abstractions from its concrete units there must be some level at which the consequent nature of God is complete and everything at all times displayed to God. Be that as it may, Santayana would have little truck with any notion of the "loss of subjective immediacy" and the "objective immortality" of an actual entity (see especially ED 264- 265). So far as moments of spirit go, each is just there in its own position in the universe enjoying its own intuition and intent, and its pastness is something which it only has for other moments of spirit just as it has futurity for others.

Thus the difference between Santayana and Whitehead over the latter’s first and third divergence from the Aristotelian notion of substance listed above is less than might at first appear. How is it with respect to the second way that Whitehead departs from the tradition? Santayana treads a delicate path here. On the one hand he says: "That a thing by its internal being should have reference to something external -- a fact which in the case of knowledge gives so much trouble to logicians -- is so far from being an anomaly or an exception that it is the indispensable condition of existing at all," and he applies this principle to his description of a natural moment as intimately bound up with its antecedents and consequents and with the moments whose lateral pressure helps determine what the consequents shall be. But though he sees neighboring natural moments as deeply involved with each other, he also insists that the possession by each of its own essence or nature is a sharply distinct fact from the possession of its own nature (the same or another) by any other.

It is this latter idea, that the nature of a particular thing consists wholly in the universals which it exemplifies (and therefore cannot contain intrinsic reference to any other particular thing), which Whitehead sees as the ground for taking solipsism seriously. He sees Santayana as a perfect modern example of this tendency (see PR 48 and 158).

Thus for Whitehead solipsism is only a temptation because intellectually we turn our back on that deep connectedness which we always really feel between our present pulse of subjectivity and other actual occasions. Santayana thinks, in contrast, that "a solipsism of the present moment" is, indeed, the logical upshot of commitment to certain canons of rationality and is, in principle, more intelligent than many more qualified skepticisms, which are inferior to it by these criteria and hardly more sustainable psychologically (see SAF chapters VI, VII, XI). However, since no one who addresses others, or takes ordinary steps to look after himself; is such a solipsist, the sensible part is to revise our conception of rationality and associate it with the inevitable credo of animal faith, that is, with the beliefs which we cannot but have as animals coping with the world. True, the belief that we are such animals is itself simply part of this credo but there is no reason why a belief’s genesis, as opposed to its justification, should not lie in what it posits. Moreover, since we really do have these beliefs, we have no justification for describing them as though they were a form of play-acting, as some idealists do, but should insist that the world really is, as Santayana is quite sure that it is, as they characterize it (see SAP chapters XVIII, XIX).

To the extent that Santayana thinks solipsism has its own kind of rationality, this is indeed because he ascribes a certain completeness to a single state of mind, so that what is fully present to it does not absolutely prove that there is anything beyond. Whitehead is right that this would be undercut by his own account of actual occasions, and what he calls their internal relatedness in a sense of "internal" different from Santayana’s). The contrast between Santayana and Whitehead here springs partly from the fact that for Santayana moments of spirit, being non-efficacious, are less intimately related to other events than are physical events.

Actually it is an over-simplification to say that Santayana thinks solipsism of the present moment the logical upshot of rationality as traditionally conceived. Consistently carried out it would lead to a pure intuition of essences enjoying their pure non-existential being (see SAF chapter VII). For Santayana denies that the mind confronts itself or its own acts immediately. Rather it intuits essences, which animal faith interprets as characterizing events in a natural world. If this animal faith is resisted, it is not one’s own mental states with which one is left but pure essences detached from any existential home.

In virtue of this it would appear that Santayana rejects what Whitehead calls the subjectivist principle, both in the traditional form Whitehead rejects, and in the revised form he accepts. For Whitehead thinks that Descartes was right in saying that the primary data for philosophy are not such propositions as "This stone is grey" but rather "my experience of this stone as grey" (PR 159). Where Descartes went wrong was in treating the given subjective facts as concerning the separable character of one’s own subjectivity rather than the presentation of an independent object thereto. It is one’s subjectivity as cognizant of what is independent of it which is therefore basic according to the revised version of the principle.

Santayana would reject the principle in both forms since he holds, as we have just seen, that there is no special immediacy about mind’s knowledge of itself: What is ordinarily, and properly, called "knowledge" is, for Santayana, the intuition of an essence combined with an act of intent directed upon some reality beyond which this essence is taken as a description. If mind could concentrate on itself it might indeed find solipsism tempting, for the ultimate units of reality; including complete mental states or moments of spirit, as we have seen, each have their own distinctive character. But, in fact, mind’s main choice is between the correct, though finally improvable, acceptance of most of the essences it intuits as a description of a world in which mind has no special primacy and a confinement of attention simply to the eternal individuality of the essences immediately present to it.

Santayana thus identifies two aspects of mind or spirit, intuition of essences and intent directed upon things and processes in the natural world, and conceives knowledge as arising from their combination (see ED 350, 663-665 and 726). "Intent" in this sense is sometimes called "animal faith" (though sometimes he uses this expression to refer to those beliefs, arising from a mixture of intuition and intent, which an agent practically engaged with the world around him cannot honestly deny that he holds for true). Whitehead makes the interesting suggestion at one point that if "animal faith" (in the sense of "intent") refers to perception in the mode of causal efficacy then Santayana’s position is virtually the same as his (see PR 52, 81 and 142).

One could hardly accept such an identification as fully true to Santayana’s intentions, yet there is a certain intriguing affinity between Whitehead’s distinction between perception in the mode of presentational immediacy and perception in the mode of causal efficacy and Santayana’s distinction between intuition and intent.

Whitehead thinks of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy as the presentation of clear, obvious sensory data, such as vision most strikingly affords, and which are the basis for the Humean notion of impressions. In contrast stands the more basic perception in the mode of causal efficacy; which "is our general sense of existence, as one item among others in an efficacious external world" and "of derivation from an immediate past, and of passage to an immediate future"; its data "are vague, not to be controlled, heavy with emotion." There truly is a strong affinity here to Santayana’s idea of intent or animal faith as the way in which we turn dumbly to a reality beyond, whose character can only be more exactly specified for us by the essences which we intuit. essences Santayana usually takes as what Whitehead would call "presentationally immediate" as his typical examples. Surely our two philosophers are responding here to the same facts (see, for example, Santayana at RB 216). However, so far as their actual interpretation of these facts goes, they are hardly at one. For Santayana intent is a kind of felt turning to the world and readiness to take intuited essences as describing it intent and intuition are thus aspects of every sort of perception (and thought), not two types of perception. The most one could say is that, in bodily sensation, the essences are less clearly defined than those of the distance senses and the dumb intent more insistent. but there is no such difference, as Whitehead claims, in the certainty of what they convey; each is as capable in principle of a solipsistic interpretation as is the other (but see RB 216).

Although Santayana rejects the subjectivist principle both in its Cartesian and its Whiteheadian form, he is otherwise nearer to Cartesian dualism than is Whitehead.

Whitehead in his attack upon the "bifurcation of nature" declared his opposition to Cartesian dualism. Our minds are a series of actual occasions which, in their general nature, are akin to those which constitute the inner being of the physical world at large. Even if those commentators are right who say that Whitehead is not properly called a panpsychist, he is certainly close to being one. In fact, in spite of his insisting that most actual occasions are unconscious (and that there is much that is unconscious even in that series of actual occasions which constitute our successive mental states), his talk of their experience or feeling of themselves, the influence of their predecessors, and their subjective immediacy seems pointless unless each of them is supposed to feel its own being, in some genuine sense, however dimly, so that there is a truth as to what-it-is-like-being-it. Certainly that raises difficult problems. The supposed structure of actual occasions is far more complex and jam-packed than anything which one can easily persuade oneself that one feels in one’s own being, while to say that this is because much of it is unconscious leaves one’s consciousness as a felt unit of concrete reality standing apart from the totality of the occasion to which it belongs in a manner which threaten the latter’s unity. But however all this may be, it is certainly central to his metaphysics that the natural world is made up of items of the same general sort as our own states of mind and that they share a common type of efficacy.

Santayana’s position is, on the face of it, very different. Moments of spirit (i.e., total states of consciousness) are, for him, like natural moments inasmuch as they are fundamental units of existence in which essences are actualized in an intensive fashion. Otherwise, however, the contrasts outweigh the affinities. The natural moments contain no consciousness of these essences, or of anything else, but they, and the material substance which we must speak of them as passing on from previous to subsequent moments, are the sole efficacious agencies in the world. Moments of spirit, in contrast, are inefficacious expressions of material substance when the natural moments into which it flows are patterned to form goal-pursuing organisms (in the sense, as we might put it now, that they are physically programmed to act in ways which favor the development of a certain specific life cycle). They provide the organism, or, as Santayana puts it, the psyche (this being the power of the organism to develop and protect its form in a manner responsive to the environment) with its consciousness (symbolic rather than literal of what and where it is, and of what it is up to, but play no real part in controlling its behavior. Although this is Santayana’s unambiguous and continually reiterated position, I believe that his notion of a natural moment owes much to this sense of what a moment of spirit is. If so, his thought drifts in a more Whiteheadian direction than suits his official claims. He would reply, however, that mental terms do serve as a useful metaphor for the natural flux but should not be thought of as having literal application to it. He develops this point in particular with reference to "will," e.g. in RS chapters IV and V; see also ED 379.) The distinction between symbolic and literal truth and knowledge is a main theme of Santayana’s; he holds that most of our knowledge is of the former kind but that, in recognizing this, we should never forget that there must be a literal truth thus symbolized.

Santayana’s main reason for his "epiphenomenalism" turns on the claim that moments of spirit, by their very nature, could not be states which an enduring material stuff takes on to be transmitted thereby to further states (see ED 604-605; 366), We cannot examine this reasoning here. I should note, however, that for Santayana the recognition that spirit has no efficacy, far from rendering it pointless, clarifies what it really adds to the world, namely value.

On God, to come to deity finally, there is little but contrast between our philosophers. For Whitehead God is a metaphysical necessity, not as the world’s creator, ex nihilo but as that foundational actual entity which is the home of eternal objects and the medium by which they can become objects of that aspiration on the part of ordinary actual entities which is the moving force of the world. For Santayana neither the pure being of essence, nor the activity of the physical world, with its generation of spirit, calls for such an explanation. Yet Santayana regards religion, of one definite sort or another, as a requisite for a good human life, in either of the two great forms he distinguishes: the life of reason and the spiritual life. Within that context. "God," in his various aspects, serves as a potent and hallowed symbol for various features of reality. On the one hand, it points us towards the highest ideals to which spirit can commit itself, on the other to our dependence on a vast cosmos towards which natural piety is the proper emotion.

Notes

1.I have refreshed my mind on the thought of Whitehead before writing this article with the help of Whitehead’s Metaphysics: An Introductory Exposition by Ivor Leclerc (Indiana University Press, Bloomington and London, 1985). But my knowledge of Whitehead is based on a thorough reading of the relevant works in the past and of most of the commentaries also on discussions with Leemon McHenry.

2. Thus Santayana expressed his own sympathy with Whitehead’s naturalistic turning of his back on the empiricist "way of ideas" of Berkeley, Hume, Mill and Russell, but thought the naturalism was spoilt by Whitehead’s movement to panpsychism. See The Letters of George Santayana edited by Daniel Cory, New York Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955, at 33); see also Santayana: Th Later Years by Daniel Cory (George Braziller Inc. 1963, at 59 and 83-85).

3. See The Letters of George Santayana (326) for Santayana’s criticism of Whitehead’s unnecessary neologism. Santayana himself avoids calling them "events" since he reserves this term for what he calls "conventional moments" (see RB 293).

4. Are the absolute bases of the credo of animal faith literally or wily symbolically true for Santayana? I think that; while the ordinary person’s grasp of them is completely merged with the symbolic or poetic, the ontological can detect a detachable core of literal truth. See RB 202 - 217, 232-235 (The Realm of Matter, chapters II and III at end.)

5. On this matter see my debate with Angus Kerr-Lawson in "Overheard in Seville" The Bulletin of the Santayana Society, 1(1984).

References (Santayana)

SAF Scepticism and Animal Faith, London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1923.

RB Realms of Being, New York Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942.

I. Stage Setting: Historicity

Process philosophy represents a philosophical approach that is of substantial interest and value in its own right. However, the object of this present discussion it to exhibit its substantial instrumental value. For, as will be argued here, it is also of great utility for the clarification and resolution of philosophical problems which do not overtly lie in its own characteristic domain. In this regard the specific object of present concern is the much debated issue of historical relativism.

Everything that we humans manage to do is done within a setting of place and time. The historical process envelops all our activities and dealings. Everything we do is a part of history, caught up in the grand macro-process of human development and finding its place there in some micro-context of era and culture. In thinking as in looking we can only get the view of things from where we are. Be it with the vision of the eye or of the mind, we can only see things from the particular perspective we happen to occupy There is, for us, no Archimedean fulcrum outside the spatiotemporal historicity of place and era for pivoting the lever of thought. As philosophers repeatedly insist, we have no possibility of achieving a "God’s eye view" or a "view from nowhere." Our activities -- alike physical and mental -- are inevitably part of that grand historical process, subject to the relativization of era and culture. We are trapped within history. The inexorable contextuality of things inescapably tethers our thought to our spatiotemporal placement in era and culture even as it ties our shadows to our physical placement on the earth’s surface.

All of this is central to a historicist view of the world. And it must, I submit, be taken as a given, a fact of life, a straightforward statement of the way things are. This aspect of historical relativity has to be acknowledged as pretty much undebatable and indeed virtually truistic. The real question -- and what indeed is debatable in the matter -- is what follows from it. Given that our human existence is unavoidably subject to historical conditions, just what conclusion can be taken to follow?

II. Epistemic Relativism

The main conclusion that is commonly drawn from the fact of historicity is epistemic relativism. The line of thought at issue here runs as follows:

Theoreticians insist that the real truth of things is timeless and placeless -- that what is indeed true is so always and everywhere. But human thought and acceptance are always historical, always issuing from and based in a setting of era and culture. And this means that we have no way to determine what actually is true but only what people in certain places and times think to be such. Everything we assert and accept is accompanied by the ubiquitous Kantian I think. We only have and can only ever achieve opinion and putative truth: the real article -- the truth as such -- lies outside our grasp. Belief and thought in general is always history-bound, while the real truth as such (if such there is) will be something that transcends history The unavoidable conclusion here is that we cannot capture the truth as such. We cannot escape historicity: if timeless and placeless truth is where we want to go, then we have no way to get there from here.

So reason the historicist advocates of epistemic relativism. Their argumentation is tempting -- but at the same time profoundly fallacious.

III. The Perspective of Process

There is good reason to think that the fatal flaw of the indicated argumentation for epistemic relativism lies in its failure to give due heed to the dialectic of process and product -- and in particular the distinction between instances of the production of information and the items of information that are produced. Granted -- thinking, inquiry, assertion, and the like are all intellectual processes carried on by humans which, as such, must inevitably have an historical setting by way of place and time, of culture and era. But this is clearly not the end of the matter. For the reality of it is that there is no reason to think that there cannot be changeless patterns of stability within a changing historical process. And the nearer we get to communicative basics, the more stable. Cats give birth to kittens, not woodchucks, oxygen bonds with hydrogen to make water and not alcohol. The recognition of such facts is unquestionably a matter of place and time, but this does not hold for these facts themselves.

The very idea of a process involves trans-temporal constancies. Water evaporates. That is to say, water evaporates is a generic process. It has many instances, occurring alike after rainstorms in 16th century Lima and in 20th century Atlanta. One simply cannot identify a process that is not a process of a processual type and which, in consequence, is not at that level of abstraction capable of repetition. Any particular process -- and every such process -- is always an instance of a process type -- an instantiation of a general pattern. And so the concreta of history, viewed in an epistemic perspective, can in fact manage to transcend their space-time settings to instantiate general patterns. Although their manifestations are inevitably temporal and concrete, those processes themselves are atemporal and generic.

And of course different concrete instances of a process can produce products of exactly the same generic type. Different factories can and often do produce the same model of car; different cooks can produce the same variety of soup. And this is strikingly so when the product happens to be information: different presses can print the same text, different respondents can give the same answer to the same question; different mouths can utter the same sentence; different minds can think the same thought.

The point is that in the realm of informational abstractness products can escape the limitations of their (invariably relativized) productive origins. The historical relativization of the production process to a particular historico-cultural context -- the fact that the thinking or the assertion of a truth is so relativized -- of itself does nothing to limit the product (the truth that is so thought or asserted) to a historico-cultural context. Once produced it is generally available -- and (insofar as abstract) will be cross-temporally accessible via its exemplifications and manifestations at different times and places.

A currently fashionable position takes the line: Different individuals and different societies live in altogether different thought worlds. We contemporary Westerners live in a realm of physical and chemical causation. Our primitive ancestors three millennia ago lived in an animistic realm of nature-spirit-wind gods, cloud-spirits, and the like. There is no way to cross such conceptual gaps. Chronological impracticability apart, exchanging information by ordinary communicative processes would be totally impracticable. Every culture is entrapped in its own concept realism. The prospect of actual communication is inexistent. And so since there is no way to effect contrast there is no prospect of any agreement or disagreement. And as in matters of thought so also in matters of action. Here there is no objective right or wrong either. To each his own -- and to each his own is right and anything else altogether fallacious.

The fatal flaw of such a position is that is overlooks what might be characterized as the unavoidable overlap between any two conceptual realms that have concept manifolds of a complexity sufficient to deal with "the real world."

Consider an example: the famous duck-rabbit. You are schooled to see it as a duck; I to see it as a rabbit. And never the two can shall meet. Wrong! At the duck/rabbit level of conceptual complexity we indeed cannot come together. But when it comes down to more rudimentary talk about "A linear configuration that looks like that (pointing)" we are in coordination. You think of that object as a pencil, I (who know nothing about such writing implements) think of it as a hairpin. Conceptually we are miles apart. But both of us can agree that it is "A small wooden stick with a black something that comes to a point on it." I think the voodoo maven cast an evil spell on my neighbor, you think he suffered through imaginative autosuggestion when he learned about the doll with its pin. We are miles apart regarding how we think about the events at issue. But we have no trouble agreeing that "The maven stuck a pin through the head of the doll she used to represent the neighbor and he suffered illness as a somehow-produced result."

The point is that any complex concept scheme has internal resources through which the materials of another can be captured in a descriptively more rudimentary -- and thereby descriptively neutral -- manner so as to make communicative contact possible. Whatever is represented in the one can be represented in the other in sufficient detail to make communicative contact possible. There is never an absolutely unbridgeable gap, a total incommensurability of conception. Anything can be characterized at a sufficiently enough and rudimentary level to possibilize its accessibility to another scheme at that level.

In this connection an absolutely crucial resource is provided by the machinery of supposition, assumption, and hypothesis. Granted, there is just no way in which we can translate the machinery of the Galenic humors into the machinery of modern medicine. But this just does not render it conceptually unavailable to the moderns. We can say: "Let’s make an assumption. Suppose the heart were a furnace-type heat source, and that by its heating the blood warmth could be supplied to the human extremities. Then . . ." That is, we could unfold a story within a framework of assumptions that rendered the whole Galenic instrumentarium accessible to the modern mind. And inversely. We could not explain modern medicine to the Galenic physician within the concept machinery of his favored theory. But we could certainly go back and teach it to him beginning with the pre-systematic conceptual resource that we use in bringing the modern student-novice into the realm of modern scientific medicine.

And so while it may indeed transpire that concept-schemes may be so "disjoint" that one cannot be translated into the other, they are never so disjoint that one cannot find within the resources of each sufficient expository resources materials to render the claims of the other accessible at a level of generality that allows of an information transfer which -- however imperfect -- suffices to make communicative contact possible.

The problem is that the contemporary discussion of these issues only envision extreme options: either total concept-incommensurability or all-out concept identity. The intermediate situation of a halfway house that allows for a degree of concept-consideration sufficient to provide for communicative contact is simply ignored. And yet it is just exactly here that the realities of the situation lie.

Accordingly, the inevitable historicity of all human proceedings does nothing to show that various beliefs and behaviors cannot be more than the characteristic possession of a transient and temporary era in the history of a particular culture.

IV Transcending Origins: Escaping Historicity via Information

Two concessions must of course be granted to the relativist: (1) different bodies of evidence will be available at different times (in the wake, for example, of archeological research or of document discoveries), and (2) different frameworks of interpretation of available evidence will come to light (in the course, for example, of medical or psychological research). And, clearly; such changes in the volume or in the bearing of the evidence will change our views regarding what the truth of the matter is. But these changes of course affect just that -- our views. They do not alter the facts of the matter. If we should learn that Caesar has an egg for breakfast on that fateful Ides of March this discovery would relate to a change in our information about the thing, but would not effect a change in Caesar himself from a non-egg breakfaster to an egg breakfaster.

Information, in particular, is a special sort of product -- one that is inherently abstract. There is the actual making or staking of a claim (which is always biographical and therefore historical) and the claim that is made, which exists ahistorically outside of space and time.

Consider an analogy, the color green vs. green things (a leaf, a lawn), or again, the number two vs. pairs of things (twins, ears). Those concrete particulars are historically specific: they exist in particular times and places. But colors and numbers as such are ahistorically generic: they have historical instantiations and exemplifications but they themselves are outside of space and time. Human activities -- cognitive activities such as claims and contentions in particular -- are exactly like that. To historicize them is to treat them as concrete things, and thereby to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, as Whitehead called it.

It is important here to bear in mind the distinction between the trans-historical (omnitemporal) and the ahistorical (timeless). Genuine laws of nature (fundamental physical laws) are omnitemporal: they hold always and everywhere -- they pervade space-time, so to speak. But purely abstract conditional relationships (for example) are atemporal. (Vertebrates and canines are historical entities, but conceptual facts on the order of if it’s a canine, then it’s a vertebrate are by nature timeless and ahistorical, holding always and everywhere, even when canines and vertebrates are absent.) The abstractness of information is something which, by its very nature, carries us outside the scheme of history. For while the learning or imparting of information is always historical, the information that we learn or impart need not be. Cognitive processes are indeed spatiotemporal, but the objects they involve can be abstract.

Some sorts of things exist out of space but not time -- one’s ownership of a piece of jewelry, for example, or one’s right to exercise an option to purchase a tract of land. Other sorts of things exist neither in space nor in time -- facts, for example. (The Eiffel Tower was erected in Paris in the 19^th century, but the fact that Julius Caesar did not realize this is something that has no spatiotemporal emplacement. The horse that John stole is located in space and time but the fact that stealing is wrong has no spatiotemporal emplacement.) Some sorts of things -- numbers, facts, and generalized relationships are just by nature the sorts of things that have no spatiotemporal emplacement. And information is like that. The things that information may be about are spatiotemporal, as will be the speech or writing by which the information is conveyed from one person to another. But the information itself is altogether nonspatiotemporal. It simply lies in the nature of certain sorts of things -- information included -- not to be located in space and time -- to be "abstract."

The overall situation in matters of abstraction is triadic (to use the term favored by C. S. Peirce). There are the various and sundry concrete green things: the abstract property at issue (viz., the property or characteristic of being green); and the mediative conception or idea of greenness which is the thought-instrumentability through which that abstract property comes to be imputed to those items that putatively manifest it. That third item -- the idea or concept -- is also historicized (it too has an originative placement in era and culture). But its nature is mediative since what is at issue are generic cognitive processes that enable that idea or concept to provide us with the (cognitive) means of linking the concrete to the abstract. And the abstraction to which it yields access is not something that it creates and whose reality is dependent upon it. The medieval metaphysical dispute between nominalism, conceptualism, and platonism needs to be resolved conjunctively: we require a nominalism for particulars, a conceptualism for concepts, and a platonism for abstractions. The situation is not one of either/or. We need to make use of all of those doctrinal positions, each in its own place.

The trouble with a narrowly rigoristic nominalism lies in its vitiatingly fragmented vision. True, universals may indeed represent features that separated individuals have in common. But of course those commonalties only exist because generic processes are at work "across the board" in point of space and time, processes that function so as to produce those commonalties. Those shared properties on which the nominalists rely are themselves clearly not nominalisitcally self-sufficient. They do not stand on their own but root in processual generality Were it not for generic processes that reach across the limits of space and time, those nominalistic commonalties would not, could not be there.

This line of thought has important consequences for our present problem-situation. Information as such is abstract: the believing vs. the belief; the theorizing vs. the theory; the assuming vs. the assumption. Different people at different times and places have the same beliefs, project the same theories, make the same assumption. The history-bound nature of the concrete-episode (the believing, theorizing, assuming) does not affect the ahistorical nature of the informative item at issue (the belief, theory, assumption).

Of course we have no way to get to the abstract (the belief) save via the historical (the believing). But what we achieve (the product) is something of a nature different and status distinct from the mode of its realization (the process). When we engage in intellectual processes that carry us into the informational domain we impel ourselves from history into an ahistorical sphere. The same idea (the same thought-process, the same belief) is accessible to people at different times and places. Were it not so, communication would be altogether impossible.

But how can temporalized thought deal in timeless information? How is it that particularized episodic thought can make episode-abstractive generalizations? That’s just how things work. It’s like puzzling about brass bands by asking how tubes of bent metal can make music. No matter how much we may puzzle at the phenomenon we have to accept it as part of the world’s realities.

Admittedly, when we are viewing something, the only views we can possibly obtain are views from somewhere (and views belonging to us and not to God). But where the viewing is done with the eyes of the mind, and its object is the realm of information rather than the realm of physical reality, then what the view is a view of is something ahistorical. For information as such exists outside of history even though our accessing it is invariably an historical transaction. We must avert the category mistake of confusing process with product here, of conflicting the information that we access with the historical actions and events of our accessing it.

V Against a Monistic Nominalism of "Concreta"

To make a success of the idea of being "trapped within history" we would need to be medieval-style nominalists who project an ontology of concreta alone, denying the conceptualists’ idea that universals (abstracta) can be manifested in such concreta in a way that enables them to reach into the realm of the general. The almost unavoidably sensible ideas that concreta can instantiate or exemplify transcending generalities would have to be abandoned. And from a process point of view this is eminently unrealistic. For processists do -- and, given the genius of their theory, must -- reject the idea that the atemporalities and trans-temporalities of the realm of abstractive generality at issue with processes as such cannot be exemplified in the world’s experienced concreta which, so to speak "participate" in them, (to use Plato’s term).

Human action and experience embeds us in a concrete order of particularized reality with its particularized setting in the spatiotemporal and causal order. But ideas and information carry us into a universal (abstract) order our experiential concreteness instantiates but does not encompass. And intelligence with its characteristically mental processes provides for a linkage that mediates between these two realms. It is exactly this -- intelligent thought -- that provides for the linking processes that conjoin and mediate between experiential concreta and ideational abstractness. It lies in the very nature of intelligent beings that they function as amphibians able to operate conjointly and concurrently both in the realm of concrete experience and in that of abstract thought.

It lies in the very nature of intelligence that it effects the transit from the episodically causal (the thinking) to the abstractly rational (the thought) -- and in matters of discourse also from the concrete declaring to the generic declaration. All such intellectual process involve the projection from spatiotemporal specificity to informative generality. In the domain of bodily action we are indeed trapped within history, but intellectual action provides us with an escape -- a means of entry into the region of abstract generality. For with thought -- unlike bodily action -- we can get beyond the present into the past and future and indeed from the realm of the real into that of the merely possible. Present action can only replicate but not actually repeat past actions, while present thoughts can not only implicate but even repeat past ones.

With rational creatures, then, the two factors of causality and justification can come together in a conjoint fusion. It is exactly here -- in explaining the modus operandi of rational beings -- that these two must not be separated. The "experience of having a cat perception of a suitable sort" -- exactly because it is a cognitively significant experience -- at once and concurrently constitutes the cause of X’s claiming that "The cat is on the mat" and affords X with a reason for making this claim. In the cognitive experience of intelligent beings there are not separable regions of causes and of reasons: one and the same of experience will at once provide for the ground and for the reason of a belief.

For intelligent beings whose modus operandi is suitably shaped by their evolutionary heritage, the step from experience to belief is at once causal and rational: we hold the belief because of the experience both in the order of efficient and in the order of final (rational) causation. With creatures such as ourselves experiences of certain sorts are dual-purpose; their occurrence both causally engenders and rationally justifies the holding of certain beliefs. Informatively meaningful perceptions and physical stimuli run together in coordinated unison.

Intelligent agency brings something new upon nature’s scene in the course of its own functioning. Consider the following exchanges: Q: "What causally produced his belief that the cat is on the mat." A: "He saw it there." "Why -- for what reason -- does he claim that the cat is on the mat" A: "He saw it there." His seeing experience is a matter of dual action in both modes of causality. Certain sorts of eventuations which are amphibious because they operate at once and concurrently both in the realm of natural causes and in the realm of reasons. My perspective experience of "seeing the cat on the mat" is at once the cause of my belief and affords my reason for holding that belief. With intelligent agents such as ourselves, experiences do double-duty as eventuations in nature and as reasons for belief.

Intelligent agents as amphibians: they operate both in the realm of the causality of nature and the causality of reason. And for them experiences such as "cat-on-mat sighting" have a double aspect, able at once to engender and (in view of imprinted practical policies) to justify suitable beliefs. Accordingly, such intelligent agents are able to have dual-function experiences that at once cause their beliefs and provide the reasons for holding them. Laurence Bonjour declares:

It would thus be contended that, for example, while the actual occurrence of pain, suffering, disappointment (etc.) may be extra-theoretical, nevertheless a person’s awareness of such things is not, but rather lies only in the area of belief -- of mere opinion. The two functions of experience and belief can thus be detached from one another. But this assumption of separability is deeply problematic.

The fact is that beliefs are concurrently produced and justified by experiences. My belief that the cat is on the mat need not rest on the further and different belief that I see it there, it can rest directly and belief immediately on my seeing it. Beliefs, that is to say, do not require a justification via other beliefs, they can rest directly on appropriate experiences -- and do so concurrently in the modes of. My reason for holding that belief is not yet another belief but an experience -- an experience which from one point of view produces and at the same time considered from another point of view validates and justifies that belief.

A concretizing particularism of the nominalistic sort ("there are no abstracta") is totally at odds with process thought. For a concrete process is always an instantiation or tokening a general process-type. It is axiomatic in process philosophy that "To be a process is to be a process of a certain specifiable sort." And in the setting of a process theory of mind this fundamental fact carries us from sporatic cognitive experiences to the abstractions of information management.

VI. Communicative Processes

Communication is by nature a process of conveying information. And information in its turn is by its very nature something general and abstract. If you are to understand me when I talk about apples, then the words that I use must apply to your concreta as well as mine. Information transfer could not take place between us if the concreta of my experience had to correspond to those of yours. And this means that the instrumentalities by which the process of communication works must transcend the limits of their historical foothold.

In matters of communication, subscription to an objective reality, abstractly independent of the historical vagaries of individualized discussion episodes, is indispensably demanded by any step into the domain of the publicly accessible objects essential to communal inquiry and interpersonal communication about a shared world. We could not establish communicative contact about a common objective item of discussion if our discourse were geared to our own historical activities and our personalized conceptions that are bound up with them. The conventionalized intention to take impersonal objects to be at issue is fundamental because it is overriding -- that is, it overrides all of our other intentions when we enter upon the communicative venture. Without this conventionalized intention we should not be able to convey information -- or misinformation -- to one another about a shared "objective" world that underlies and connects those historical discourse-activities of ours.

It is thus crucial to the communicative enterprise to take an egocentrism-avoiding stance that rejects all claims to a privileged status for our own conception of things as bound to our own particular historical position in the world’s processual scheme. If our communicative mechanisms were inseparably confined to the concrete conditions of their use -- to the space and the time of their employment -- communication would become impracticable. One could then never advance the issue of the identity of communicative focus upon a single item of mutual concern past the status of a more or less well-grounded assumption. And then any so called communication would no longer be an exchange of information but a tissue of frail conjectures. The communicative enterprise would become a vast inductive project -- a complex exercise in theory-building, leading tentatively and provisionally toward something which, in fact, the imputational groundwork of our language enables us to presuppose from the very outset.¹ Only by using the resources of thought to free our communicative resources from the spatio-temporal processes of their employment can we manage to communicate with one another across the reaches of space and time. Subscribing to that fundamental reality postulates can we take the sort of view of experience, inquiry, and communication that we in fact have. Without this, the entire conceptual framework of our thinking about the world and our place within it would come crashing down.

The viability of abstraction as a process that transcends the limits of experiential concreta follows by a transcendental argument from the possibility of communication -- to the "conditions under which alone" communication is possible. And so, to whatever extent Cicero’s contemporaries can gain access to his thought via his deeds and his writings, so -- in principle -- can we. Communication and information transfer can take place to the extent – and only to the extent -- that we can reach out beyond the historical concreta of our experience to function at a level of processive abstraction.

It is time to summarize. The idea that we can be cognitively trapped within history by a relativism that tethers us to our time and culture founders on fundamental considerations of process thought -- and in particular the role of information in the communicative process. When evolution produces an intelligent social being on the order of homo sapiens, it thereby brings into existence a creature equipped with the intellectual resources to enter into the realm of communication process in a way that enables it to transcend the historical concreteness of its particular spatiotemporal context of existence. In virtue of being the kind of thing it is, such a creature is no longer "trapped within history." For if we indeed were so trapped in the way that a doctrine naive epistemic relativism insist upon, then any and all prospect of communication across the divide of space and time would be annihilated. To advocate such a position would be to fly in the face of the realities of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition -- the fact that we humans as homo sapiens are a creature that lives and breathes and has its being within the processual setting of a communicative community.²

Notes

1. The justification of such imputations is treated more fully in Chapter 9 of my book Induction.

2. This paper is a somewhat expanded version of an invited lecture delivered at the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, CA in November of 1998. I am grateful to John K. Roth for constructive commentary.

Works Cited

Laurence Bonjour, "Rescher’s Idealistic Pragmatism." The Review of Metaphysics 39 (1976): 702-26.

Rescher, Nicholas. Induction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.

I. Aspects of Processes

The present deliberations have two distinct phases or stages, the first dealing with processes as such and the second with process philosophy as it has evolved in the work of people like Peirce, Whitehead, and Hartshorne. The natural course of events will make it clear why this is so -- and why it has to be so within the wider context of the discussion’s prime purpose of placing process in its proper location in the philosophical landscape.

Let us begin, then, by looking in a rather broad-gauged way at what is at issue with processes.

Nothing particularly new or unusual will be said here on the issue of understanding what a process is. A process will be construed in pretty much thc usual way -- as a sequentially structured sequence of successive stages or phases. Three factors accordingly come to the fore:

Although processes themselves are always temporal, they can in general be given an atemporal representation. Thus the mathematical process for solving an equation can be represented by a formalized instruction sequence, or a process of musical performance can be represented by the score that specifies how the performance is to go. Of course, such process representations are not themselves processes as such. The computer program for solving a mathematic problem is not a process -- only its execution, carrying with it the actual solving of the problem, will be so. The program conveys the instructions by which a solver (human or mechanical agent) actualizes the process of producing a solution. Again the score conveys the instructions in line with which a process -- the performance that realizes it -- can be produced by players proceeding to do the right things. And the same holds for text script by which a set of performers (human agents) can actualize the actual process of mounting a stage performance. In such instances, what we have is an instruction set, and this instruction set is not the process itself; but merely the recipe for producing (i.e., realizing) it. In such cases, it is only the realization of the recipe -- its concrete execution or production -- that constitutes a process (of solving or performing, respectively).

Now while the recipe or instruction set for process production is, or may in a certain sense be, a timeless item, nevertheless the process itself must be temporal. To exist (to actually be realized) it must exist in time (with its full realization unfolding "in the course of time," so to speak). In consequence, the actualization of a process by an agent or agency must always intervene between the mere instructions and the process itself. Only by such activity can the process be realized concretely.

This issue of the existence of processes leads to the question: under what sorts of circumstances can processes be said to exist? The answer is: only through their concrete manifestations. For processes, to be is to be exemplified. As long as it is not concretely realized, we have only a possible and not an actual process.

"But surely processes can be contemplated, thought of; described, etc., without being exemplified." Quite right. But, process-descriptions (a conceptualization in general) do not create processes, any more than people-descriptions create people. The principle "To be is to be describable" holds for process conceptions, all right, but not for processes as such. The coherent description of a process does indeed indicate the existence of a correlative process-concept (i.e., of a certain mentalesque abstraction). But, of course, the process itself is something else again, something which must have its footing in space and time in order to exist.

Next, we may turn to the issue of the typology of processes. A process is a sequentially structured sequence of successive stages or phases which themselves are types of events or occurrences (in the case of an abstract process) or definite realizations of such types (in the case of a concrete process). A structureless sequence -- just one darn thing after another -- is not a process. There are, accordingly, three principal ways of classifying processes: (1) by the character of the sequential structure at issue, (2) by the type of subject-matter concerned in the way in which this character is realized, and (3) by the nature of the end-result to which the process tends.

Accordingly, the classification of processes will revolve about three questions:

With respect to the first we can discriminate, for example, between such different types of sequential structures as those involved in the following:

With respect to the second, we can discriminate between such topical subject matter, themes for occurrences as:

With respect to the third, we can discriminate such different end-results as:

As such deliberations indicate, processes at large plausibly can be classified in such a tripartite schema: structure-type, occurrence-type, result-type, that is to say by format, by thematic content, and by end-product.

With these deliberations about the nature, the existence, and the classification of processes securely in place, let us now move off in another direction, subject to the understanding that we shall eventually return to this analytical point of departure.

II. Aspects of Process Thought

The topic that will now occupy our attention is "process philosophy," the philosophical doctrine, dating back to Heraclitus, that sees processes as central in the ontological scheme of things. In particular, let us consider some issues regarding how this philosophical approach is positioned on the philosophical stage.

As this century now approaches its end, it is becoming clear that its historians are inclined to picture the situation in philosophy in terms of a great divide. On the one side lies so-called "Analytic" philosophy -- the tradition evolved in the wake of thinkers like Frege, Moore, Russell, and C. D. Broad. On the other side lies the tradition of Continental Philosophy, evolved in the wake of thinkers like Heidegger, Cassirer, and Gadamer in Germany; and Croce or Sartre elsewhere. The one movement aims at precision and clarity taking as its model the formal or the empirical sciences, the other aims at historical depth and hermeneutical generality taking a humanistic and value-oriented approach.

Now in this regard, the general tendency among students and historians of philosophy has been to see process philosophy as firmly emplaced on the Continental side. Classical precursors of processism are seen to include figures like Leibniz and Hegel and its later exponents on the American scene comprising such Continentally influenced thinkers as Peirce, Whitehead, and Hartshorne. Anti-processists, on the other hand, have been principally recruited from the Analytic side of the divide, and include such philosophers as Ramsey, Quine, and Strawson, logically inspired theorists who work under the influence of an essentially static picture of the world drawn from logical theory. And in the setting of this perspective, students and devotees of process philosophy alike have viewed this philosophical approach as positioned squarely on the Continental side of the divide.

Such a view is not without its justification. For it must, of course, be recognized and acknowledged that process philosophy poses problems of assessment -- of prioritization and doctrinal evaluation -- that involve intimate doctrinal as well as historical affinities with Continental thought. Processists are concerned with issues of priority and significance, of interpersonal action and interaction, and of larger human concerns in a way that is generally -- and rightly -- seen as central in the Continental tradition of philosophizing

All the same, it has to be said that this is very far from being all that there is to it. For to think that process philosophy can simply be integrated into the Continental Framework is in error. This error is one of omission rather than commission. The fact is that there is nothing inherently one-sided about process philosophy. On the contrary it is very much of a broad church -- a large-scale project that has affinities and involvements across the entire board of philosophical concerns.

In particular, as the issues with which these present deliberations began clearly indicate, process philosophy is also involved with a whole list of fundamentally analytical issues along the lines of the following:

It is evident that questions of this sort are quintessentially analytical in character. And it is no less clear that any process philosophy that can stake a cogent claim to adequacy must come to terms with them. In neglecting such issues, it would leave us in the lurch with respect to expectations that are altogether reasonable with regard to the cogent articulation of a philosophical position.

On this basis, I would submit that process philosophy has an inherently analytical dimension that functions so as to block the adequacy of any account that one-sidedly positions it on the Continental side of the divide.

Any fair-minded and conscientious view of the matter has to acknowledge that process philosophy is a complex and prismatically many-sided project that resists any attempt to fence it in neatly and narrowly in the pre-established program holes of philosophical textbook typology. The fact of the matter is that process philosophy is so complex and many sided as to send forth its tentacles into every area of philosophical concern.

And this line of thought brings use to another related point.

In a classic paper of 1908, the then prominent and influential Johns Hopkins University philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy gave reign to his not inconsiderable annoyance with pragmatism.¹ "What," he asked, "is it that those pesky pragmatists want anyway?" And in probing for an answer to this question Lovejoy provided a discussion -- provocatively entitled "The Thirteen Pragmatisms" -- that enumerated many different pragmatic themes and theories. Each of these rather different versions of pragmatism varied from the rest and, often as not, actually came into logical conflict with some of them. In scanning this complex and disunified scene Lovejoy concluded that pragmatism just is not a coherent position in philosophy. The doctrine, so he contended, simply self-destructs through inner fission.

However, Lovejoy’s plausible-looking objection to pragmatism commits a series of far-reaching mistakes. For it fails to acknowledge and accommodate the fundamental differences in philosophical teaching between a philosophical doctrine or position on the one hand, and the philosophical approach or tendency on the other. The one is a specific and definite substantive position, the other a generic and potentially diffuse doctrinal tendency. And it is, of course, mistaken to look for doctrinal unity within any broad philosophical tendency.

The fact is that any substantial philosophical tendency -- realism, idealism, materialism, etc. -- is a fundamentally prismatic complex. Each is a broad programmatic tendency that can be worked out in various directions. In each instance it would indulge an inappropriate essentialism to insist on having a single definite monolithic core doctrinal position. Each such tendency is inherently many sided and multiplex.

And of course this holds not just for pragmatism but for process philosophy as well. It too is not a doctrinally monolithic tendency predicated in a particular thesis or theory but a general and programmatic approach. To see it as a unified doctrine would in fact be as much an error as it would be to identify it with the teachings and ideas of a single thinker.

Like any philosophical movement of larger scale, process philosophy has internal divisions and variations. One important difference at issue here roots in the issue of what type of process is taken as paramount and paradigmatic. Some contributors (especially Henri Bergson) see organic processes as central and other sorts of processes as modeled on or superengrafted upon them. Others (especially William James) based their ideas of process on a psychological model and saw human thought as idealistically paradigmatic. Or, turning from substance to methodology, it might be observed that some processists (e.g., Whitehead) articulated their position in terms that root in physics, while others (especially Bergson) relied more on biological considerations. And then too, of course, there are socio-cultural processists like John Dewey But such differences not withstanding, there are family-resemblance commonalties of theme and emphasis that nevertheless leave the teachings of process theorists in the position of variations on a common approach. So in the end it is -- or should be -- clear that the unity of process philosophy is not doctrinal but thematic; it is not a consensus or a thesis but rather a mere diffuse matter of type and approach. All this is something to which a Lovejoy-style complaint about doctrinal diversity would do serious injustice.

The satisfactory articulation of any sort of process philosophy requires the sort of evaluative appraisal and historical contextualization that characterizes Continental philosophy. But it also requires the sort of conceptual clarification and explanatory systematization that characterizes Analytic philosophy. The long and short of it is that process philosophy covers too vast a range to belong to one side or the other of this divide: it is too big to be owned as an exclusive possession of any one particular philosophical approach or tendency.

And there is good reason for accepting this state of things as only fitting and proper. For in this respect process philosophy is simply being true to itself. Process thought, after all, inclines towards viewing reality as a complex manifold of varied but interrelated processes. And just exactly this is, to all appearances, true of process philosophy itself.

Notes

1. Arthur O. Lovejoy, "The Thirteen Pragmatisms," The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods (1908): 5-12 and 29-39.

Alfred North Whitehead’s critique of modernism is similar to what are now considered "postmodern" critiques. In particular, Whitehead’s philosophy and critique of modernism parallels many of Derrida’s epistemological and contextual concerns. Although the philosophies of Whitehead and Derrida are similar in some respects, there is nothing to link them beyond a few references to common sources such as Peirce, Bergson, and to a lesser extent for ‘Whitehead, Nietzsche (OG 48). Nevertheless, ‘with the exception of a few process philosophers, most postmodern thinkers ignore Whitehead as a potential source for postmodern thought.

To propose that Whitehead shared concerns similar to those of postmodern philosophers is not a novel idea in itself. David Griffin and John B. Cobb have written about Whitehead’s postmodern agenda. For instance, David Griffin, along with other writers in the series on Constructive Postmodern Thought, have argued convincingly that Whitehead was indeed aware of both the dangers and the demise of modernism. In addition, these writers correctly claim that people like Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne go beyond the deconstruction of modernity by providing the context for a constructive postmodernism. According to them, these constructive postmodern thinkers recognized both the fallacies of modernism and the need for re-constructing its world view (Griffin, FCPP 1-42). Cobb argues that the development of the new physics and William James’ philosophy led Whitehead to an awareness of the onset of a radical shift in world views. Cobb also argues that although Whitehead never used the term "postmodern," he spoke of the modern world in "postmodern tones," recognizing both the accomplishments and the limitations of modernity (Cobb, FCPP 167-187). This leads Cobb to examine how Whitehead moves from the substance oriented language of modernity to a "postmodern" understanding of events-in-relation which overcomes the subject-object dichotomy of modernity (FCPP 167-187).

However, regardless of these arguments by Cobb and Griffin, Whitehead’s metaphysical concerns continue to obscure his postmodern views in the minds of most of his readers. As a result, the "presence" of postmodern views in Whitehead’s writings still remains largely ignored in most of the works that trace the development of postmodernism and deconstruction. This failure is partially due to a simplistic understanding of Whitehead’s project. Whitehead attempts to tread a fine line between what he considers the two primary fallacies of philosophy: the dogmatism that presupposes its ideas are irrefutably absolute and the and-rationalism that discards all philosophical methods (AI 223). The first concern leads him towards a critique of modernism; the second leads him toward a constructive reconception of his philosophical world view. Because of the latter concern, Whitehead is characterized unfairly as a passé metaphysician by most students of postmodernism and readily dismissed as a potential source of postmodern thought.

Although Whitehead maintains a certain degree of the "rationalism" disavowed by exponents of deconstruction, he is not merely continuing the Enlightenment project. The premature burial of Whitehead’s thought in the grave of modernism and metaphysics by some postmodern writers obscures the rich diversity of Whitehead’s work. In a sense, we need to "deconstruct" the primacy given to his metaphysics to recover his original hermeneutical and "postmodern" stance. To accomplish this task, I will examine several areas in Whitehead’s writing to demonstrate how they are both postmodern and similar to Derrida’s concerns.

In doing this, I am also breaking ranks with those, like Griffin, who place Whitehead in direct contrast to postmodern deconstructionists. Griffin interprets Whitehead’s philosophy as a constructive revision of modernism. According to him, the weakness of modernism is the attempt to eliminate a transcendent view of God while retaining the ideologies that presupposed this view of God. Because modernism retained these ideological presuppositions, the "modern self " also retained the notions of detachment, isolation, and individualism ascribed to the transcendent God. Griffin believes constructive postmodern theologies can overcome these modern views without eliminating notions of a centered universe, self, and history (VPT 31; 41). Although Griffin is correct in this preliminary assessment of modernity he goes on to contrast Whitehead’s constructive approach to deconstruction or, as he calls it, eliminative postmodernism (VPT 31; 41). Griffin’s intent is to combat the dangers of a radical relativism and nihilism which he correctly believes are inherent in some postmodern approaches. However, in creating this contrast between Whitehead and deconstruction, he alienates an important aspect of postmodern philosophy and risks missing the similarities that exist between Whitehead’s and Derrida’s projects.

Contrasting Whitehead’s philosophy and deconstruction places these two important philosophies at odds with one another. In addition, it limits the potential for a deeper dialogue and exchange between these philosophies. One exception to this polemic against deconstruction is a paper by William Dean that presents a valid possibility for comparing Whitehead’s empirical concerns to Derrida’s historical deconstruction along a naturalistic and pragmatic view of history (DP 1-19). This opens a possibility for further dialogues and exchange between process and postmodern philosophies. Although Dean’s paper begins to address this possibility in a specific area, I intend to extend this comparison in a broader scope with the hope of engendering further research.

While Griffin’s interpretation of Whitehead merits serious consideration, it still attempts to salvage a "centeredness" which is difficult to maintain in Whitehead’s philosophy. It is true that Whitehead wants to recover certain metaphysical categories and to develop a constructive project. This is part of his attempt to develop a comprehensive interpretive system (PR 3-4) and his desire to combat the anti-rationalistic fallacy. However, we also must recognize that Whitehead’s critique of modernism radically deconstructs the possibility of an unbiased, axiomatic center that can be abstracted from the whole. This does not mean that Whitehead advocates a radical relativism or a denial of freedom like some advocates of deconstruction. But neither does Derrida’s philosophy in its basic presuppositions advocate a radical relativism and a denial of freedom as some of his interpreters propose. What they both advocate is a suspicion of abstractions that pose as absolute universal truths as well as philosophy’s failure to recognize the limitations of its particular contextual perspectives and standpoints. Underlying this suspicion of abstract absolute truths is a shift in their respective philosophies from Western views that give primacy to being permanence, presents, space, detachment, and individual substance, toward views that incorporate becoming, change, time, interrelations and fluidity.

Although it may not seem evident, Whitehead does not want to establish an absolute metaphysical system. What he wants is to develop a comprehensive hermeneutical scheme to serve as a interpretive context in which individual experiences can acquire meaning (PR 10). According to Whitehead, the task of the speculative philosopher is "the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted" (PR 3; AI 222). The comprehensive nature of Whitehead’s project leads him to create a neo-metaphysical system as a hermeneutical tool. However, his metaphysics does not replace his hermeneutical concerns. Rather, his metaphysics is a result of his basic assumption that all propositions, and hence, all interpretations, always and inescapably assume a metaphysical context within which they acquire meaning (PR 11-12). Whitehead uses the term metaphysics to refer to a broad meta-context or matrix of experience, not to an overarching, transcendent logocentric ontology. Whitehead’s hermeneutical concerns lead him towards an examination of language as the mediator of experience and philosophy. As a result, his philosophy struggles with questions regarding meaning and its simple location in "objective" linguistic assertions. The neglect of Whitehead’s hermeneutical concerns in favor of his metaphysics prevents a true appreciation of Whitehead’s postmodern views and limits comparisons to Derrida’s agenda.

I. Language and the Task of Philosophy

Language plays a crucial role in mediating, interpreting, and constituting human experience. It is the tool of the philosopher, the medium that both crafts and conveys the philosophical world. Thus, we encounter some of the most striking parallels between Whitehead and Derrida as they examine its role and effect upon the work of the philosopher. This eventually leads them both to recognize that language itself carries limitations and interpretative presuppositions that influence philosophy (PR 11-13; OG 57-58). Whitehead’s writings demonstrate a strong concern with language both as the tool of philosophy and as the means for conveying human experience (PR 11). It is the latter that emerges as a central interest of Whitehead’s empirical philosophy, leading him to explore the role of language in both the construction and expression of experience. As a result, he turns his attention toward both hermeneutics and the deconstruction of philosophical presuppositions.

Whitehead and Derrida’s shared suspicion of how philosophy and metaphysics use language is evident. Derrida’s project questions the order of both language and rationality by denying the philosophical presumption that language reflects and conforms to the rational order of some external reality apart from human interpretive activity According to Derrida, Rousseau’s condemnation of writing as the destruction of presence reveals language’s inability to seize presence (OG 141). Rousseau, says Derrida, understands writing as a mediate form of speech which becomes a dangerous supplement that usurps the place of speech by forgetting its vicarious nature and by making itself "pass for the plenitude of a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplement" (OG 144). Thus, Rousseau’s desire is to eliminate the mediative role that language plays between presence and absence (OG 157). However, for Derrida, the mediative role of language, and most significantly, writing, is inescapable. Thus, it is the graphic differentiation of the silent play of difference that serves as the condition for both the possibility and function of signs and phonemes (MP 5). Without it, speech and language would be impossible. Writing differs from speech in that writing neither presupposes the presence of Being, nor its transparency to it. As a result, writing is primarily an interpretive exercise enmeshed in the "play" of interpretation that takes primacy over speech. This has several implications for Derrida’s philosophical insights (OG 6-26).

First, since the differentiation of the sign precedes even speech, Derrida gives writing primacy over speech. Second, he notes the elusive nature of presence in language and argues that every representation is a continual play between absence and presence. In other words, every representation both discloses and hides something; it is always an abstraction. Therefore, Derrida concludes that it is impossible to efface the linguistic venue of philosophy in hopes of presenting its supposed signified content (OG 160). This leads Derrida to challenge both the philosophical presumption that linguistic signifiers can convey an accurate picture of an extra-textual reality and the tendency of metaphysicians to privilege these philosophical assertions as higher expressions of truth. Derrida rejects the philosopher’s assumption that there is something outside the text to which signifiers point, since "there is nothing outside the text" (OG 158).

The force of Derrida’s argument comes from his understanding that the play of difference (spacialization) and defer-ence (temporalization) in thc linguistic context of the sign is the prime source of meaning. As a result, there is no external referent to language that it can approach for verification. Language is primarily interpretive. Derrida rejects the presumption that philosophy presents being, presence, and reality more accurately than literature and other forms of linguistic expressions. Therefore, Derrida’s arguments breaks down the sharp distinctions that separate and privilege philosophy over other forms of linguistic expressions. This forcefully presents the philosopher with the inescapability of prejudices, intentions, presuppositions, and biases. There is no external "truth" or "essence" that can serve as an objective test for thc accuracy of philosophical presuppositions beyond the linguistic structure of the text.

This recognition of the limits of both philosophy and language is also evident in Whitehead’s philosophy. Whitehead notes that "an old established metaphysical system gains a false air of adequate precision from the fact that its words and phrases have passed into current literature" (PR 13), leading to a "false" presumption of descriptive precision that assumes the obvious simplicity of the philosophical statements offered. Like Derrida, he recognizes the privileged position accorded to certain types of philosophical assertions by virtue of the language system they presuppose. Although Whitehead is reacting primarily to the popularity of logical positivism during the early part of the century, he also takes to task the presupposition that the method of philosophy should lead to "premises which are severally clear, distinct, and certain; and to erect upon those premises a deductive system of thought" (PR 8).

Instead of a verifiable system of presuppositions that conforms to an external reality, Whitehead favors an ongoing, progressive, interpretive "scheme" that measures success by its pragmatic ability to interpret experience within a given context (PR 8-9). Whitehead is indebted to Peirce and James for his conclusion. However, unlike Peirce who eventually came to believe that an absolute and final interpretation was attainable, Whitehead’s interpretive system maintains an ultimate non-finality to it (PR 9). Whitehead’s interpretive system is dynamic in its rationalism and does not limit valid interpretation to philosophers and scientists. On the contrary, Whitehead acknowledges the role of poetic artistic insight and imagination in the advancement of productive thought. In addition, he sees it as necessary for transcending attempts to create a direct representation of what appears to be obvious (PR 9).

Whitehead explodes the boundaries of philosophy and denies it a privileged position over artistic and imaginative enterprises. According to him, the parameters imposed by philosophy’s formal and structural presuppositions constrains attempts to "stray" beyond their established limits (AI 228-229). These limits prevent innovations in philosophy and criticize new expressions as unnecessary neologisms. Naturally, these presuppositions do not prevent Whitehead from manipulating language to create new metaphors that could open new philosophical perspectives, nor does it prevent Derrida from coining the term differance.

Both writers share a tacit recognition of the inherent limitations language imposes on the philosopher. Thus, Whitehead turns his attention to language as the tool of philosophy. Like Derrida, Whitehead notes how even simple subject-predicate propositional forms, such as "The whale is big," can "conceal complex, diverse meanings" (PR 13). The dependence of a statement’s meaning upon its context prevents a singular monolithic expression of truth in Whitehead’s philosophy. Truth is always and necessarily contextual. Even when Whitehead moves beyond language, he still locates meaning and "truth" within, the complex play of interrelatedness (MG 675-681). Ultimately, the inter-connectedness of reality and form takes primacy over the Cartesian preference for substance and quality in Whitehead’s philosophy (PR xiii).

Admittedly, Whitehead does not go as far as Derrida in noting the dependence of thought on language. According to Whitehead, language cannot be "the essence of thought." If language were the basis for thought any attempt at translation would be impossible. Instead, Whitehead states that thought originates from the way a particular fragmentary sense experience impresses us in relation to other experiences. In the constitution of our bodies and the way they relate to the environment there are certain common elements with which we can identify. However, Whitehead also contends that the retention, recollection, communication, and integration of thought into higher complex ideas is impossible without language. Like Derrida’s play of differance, Whitehead concludes that it is in the relating and contrasting of experiences that thought emerges. As a result, he recognizes that without language, thought would be impossible (MT 32-36).

Whitehead maintains that language functions as a mediator of present experience to both the past and other experiences (MT 33). According to Whitehead, both language and thought emerge together, but logically thought must have primacy over language. The importance of language to Whitehead’s philosophy is most clear in the final sentence of lecture two, entitled "Expression": "The account of the sixth day should be written, He gave them speech, and they became souls" (MT 41). Nevertheless, Whitehead does not go as far as deconstruction in placing language at the forefront of all thought and experience.

On the other hand, as this citation reveals, Whitehead still maintains a connection between speech and presence and a representational understanding of language -- both concepts that Derrida repudiates. For Whitehead, writing is an artificial and modern development while speech is the embodiment of human nature (MT 37). Even further, Whitehead gives primacy to speech because of its representative character. He writes that in the breath of speech, there is the intimation of the core of organic existence, hence, life (MT 32). However, in fairness to Whitehead, he also makes a distinction between writing and speech, indicating that the former is a beneficial innovation that in discussions about language often gets intermingled with the latter (MT 37). As a result of this recognition, Whitehead calls for a more precise distinction between writing and speaking, but not for a dichotomy that places one over the other. According to Whitehead, symbols predate the onset of writing and play a crucial role in the formation of linguistic practices (MT 37). Even if symbols do not precede speech, Whitehead’s use of "symbols" in this manner indicates an awareness of a strong relationship between thought, writing, and speech that he felt other scholars had neglected.

Whitehead also makes a remark regarding linguistics that merits further attention. He notes in passing how the accessibility of writing and reading to the masses is a fairly recent innovation (MT 37). According to him, through countless eras, at least in Europe, writing had been primarily the domain of the aristocrat, the politician, and the academician. In this respect, we can add that writing can be both a source of power and a source of oppression. Scholars often ignore the socio-economic power of writing to disseminate, control, and shape ideas. The control of the written word by aristocrats, clergy; academics, and politicians skews our understanding of culture and history in the West -- a history portrayed by those in control of society. Our interpretive venture must continually recognize the inherently oppressive nature of written documents that were and often still are controlled by the educated and the powerful. Although Whitehead does not elaborate upon the theme, he opens the door to some of the socio-economic implications of writing which now play an important part in the hermeneutical concerns of deconstructionism and postmodernity.

Whitehead understands language as connecting different aspects of sense experience into a unity that reflects the connectedness of the world or a common activity (MT 33-34). This suggests an external referentiality to language. However, this suggestion should not be taken too strongly logocentrically. Language, according to Whitehead, still abstracts and reproduces elements of experience that can be "most easily reproduced" in human consciousness (MT 34). Thus, the abstract quality of language in itself is already an interpretive enterprise. Humans continually use abstracted elements of experience, associate them with a contextual framework of meaning, and even suggest a particular world which they represent (MT 34).

On the other hand, his assertion regarding the dynamic interconnected-ness of language as reflecting the interconnected activity of the world creates a new possibility for preserving a connection between language and the world without falling into logocentrism. In an article in the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki explores this connection and posits a viable thesis that connects language and reality as a response to American deconstructionists such as Carl Raschke and Charles Winquist. However, we can also apply it to Derrida. Although language interprets reality preventing a referential logocentrism, its interconnected play represents the interconnected creative activity of the world, ultimately providing a possible link between Whitehead and Derrida,

Language can never capture the fullness of reality, nor can any linguistic function ever predict the total possibility of its meaning. On the contrary, language presents a distorted picture of reality in which single words, "bounded by full stops, suggest the possibility of complete abstraction from any environment" (MT 66). This tendency gives the false appearance that philosophy can conceive of the interconnection of things, discretely understandable, without making reference to other things (MT 66). Whitehead’s rejection of this presupposition denies the philosopher the possibility of absolute unbiased descriptions of reality devoid of any interpretive system. In recognizing the limitations created by our finite perspectives, he acknowledges the need to move beyond a "narrow" epistemology based merely upon sense-data and introspection, and appeals to literature, ordinary language and practice as other sources (AI 228).

Whitehead understands language as originating from the characteristic functions of "emotional expression, signaling, and [the] interfusion of the two (MT 37). In both instances, these characteristics are reactions to particular situations within a particular environmental context (MT 38). The origins of language are predominantly functional rather than representational. In addition, Whitehead notes that the characteristic functions of language fade into the background as language advances, leaving a suggestion (trace?) of something which has lost its dominating position (MT 37 –38). Since the specific context in which language originates is no longer present, language can never be identically reproduced in its original function. Only certain elements, abstracted from their original context by the linguistic function, can be repeated, thus leaving the appearance that something has disappeared from the language. Eventually linguistic functions move toward higher levels of abstraction that both facilitate civilization and obscure the abstract, and hence, the interpretive nature of language. Thus, Whitehead recognizes the dilemma of philosophers who must use language to express their philosophies, but cannot escape the biases and interests inherent in their language.

Like Derrida, Whitehead rejects the possibility that language might express "propositional truths" outside of its linguistic context. Thus, Whitehead writes in Process and Reality:

Although the last sentence points toward Whitehead’s "ontological principle" that grounds every aspect of reality on actual entities, it also provides insights into the problem of interpreting human experience. There is no detached, discrete "fact" in itself. It is always part of the interrelated complex of entities. In the above statement, Whitehead does not simply mean that propositions require metaphysics. He means that all propositions already imply a metaphysics. Therefore, philosophical assertions are not simple, objective, detached descriptions of objects or of the external world. They are already enmeshed in a presupposed context that defines them and their usage. Since all propositions presuppose a system and context, it is impossible to reduce linguistic assertions to a simple definite signification of reality. Thus, Whitehead writes that "language is thoroughly indeterminate by reason of the fact that every occurrence presupposes some systematic type of environment" (PR 12).

The meaning of particular propositions depends upon their particular context and can vary from one context to another. As a result, we cannot assume that there are any self-evident unprejudiced philosophical arguments that do not presuppose some interpretive context and world view. In rejecting the possibility of a detached and disinterested philosophical description, Whitehead moves away from the core of modernism and opens the way for the deconstruction that also marks Derrida’s works (MP 329-330). This implication already reflects a "postmodern" bent in that it does not presuppose a singular "universal" metaphysical context Rather, it presupposes a multitude of contexts; a multiverse.

Derrida also recognizes the impossibility of the philosophical presumption of attaining precision and accurate representation in a philosophical language. In his reflections upon Valéry’s work, Derrida contends that the philosopher gives a formality to philosophical language by forging a connection with natural language that allows mere ciphers to resemble the thing in itself (MP 293). As a result, philosophy can only pretend to escape the vagueness and metaphorical nature of its language despite its pretense at formality and precision (MP 292). All philosophical assertions necessarily rest upon a previously assumed context that provides those assertions with meaning, preventing the philosopher’s escape from the linguistic concepts the language presupposes. It is this realization that opens the door to deconstruction as philosophy’s logocentric bias, prejudices, and intentionality becomes evident.

Whitehead and Derrida present us with similar concerns about language and its relationship to philosophy. These concerns force philosophers to explore both the manner in which philosophy uses language and the impossibility of escaping the abstractive, interested, and contextual nature of language and its interpretive play. While Derrida concerns himself primarily with writing and its liberation from logocentrism and onto-theological claims, Whitehead concerns himself with language and its role in the interpretation of experience. Nevertheless, they both reject the representational role of language, as simply conforming to some external reality; and they both reject static and self-evident notions of language. Any utterance or symbol is already an interpretive activity.

II. Meaning and Contextuality

The contextual and interrelated nature of language lead Derrida and Whitehead to recognize both the interrelated nature of the signifier to its context and the dependence of meaning upon their interplay. Meaning is the result of an interplay of differences and similarities. It is not the result of a correlation to an ultimate reality. For instance, to arrive at the notion of differance and play, Derrida builds upon Saussure’s maxim that language is a complex network of differences placed in relation. In the context of language, meaning does not occur as ontological presence. Neither is meaning dependent upon nor constituted by an essential substance to which linguistic expressions approximate themselves (OG 31- 32; MP 24-25, In other words, we do not derive meaning from being nor from a symbolic correlation to being. Instead, meaning and value come from the interplay of differences and deference that Derrida hopes to capture in coining the word "difference" (OG 50-57).

According to Whitehead, the interrelated nature of meaning allows for the differences in meaning that can occur between the speaker and the hearer, and more importantly, between the writer and the reader. Our language, both spoken and written, allows us to abstract particularities from their immediate context. As a result, we are able to place them in different contexts that give those particulars new meanings. Due to a different context, both in speech and in writing we are able to arrive at different conclusions even though we share a certain identity of meaning for a given word. For instance, Whitehead notes wisely that the expression "a warm day" is "very different for speakers in Texas, or on the coast of England bordering the North Sea" (MT 39). The words "a warm day" might share certain common meaning, but convey a different feeling for speakers in these different climates. In the case of a book, this goes even further since the book can be far removed from the context in which it is written, conveying different feelings and moods to different readers. As a result, language bears an elliptical character in which there is a hermeneutical play between the interpreter and the originator of a proposition (CN 1-25).

The contextual nature of language leads Whitehead to conclude that there are "no brute, self-contained matters of fact, capable of being understood apart from interpretation as an element of a system" (PR 14). Like Derrida, Whitehead recognizes that meaning results from a complex interplay of differences and contrasts that distinguish one thing from another, even if that play is not limited to language. As early as 1917, Whitehead begins to explore the necessary connection between context and meaning. As a result, he concludes that the fragmentary nature of experiences require an interrelated context from which they can derive meaning (OT 217). Later, Whitehead argues that meaning and value emerge from the interplay between the infinite relatedness of things and their concrete embodiment (MG 674-675). In the development of his philosophy, Whitehead concludes that in the processes of exclusion and differentiation things acquire their identity and uniqueness (MT 50-54; 57-63). In the process of differentiation which render "things" concrete, meaning can also emerge. For Whitehead, meaning is never the result of an infinite universal essence. Instead, it is the result of an "inter-play" of differentiations and inclusions within a particular concrete entity in relation to other concrete entities. Unfortunately, as Whitehead notes, the "history of thought is a tragic mixture of vibrant disclosure and of deadening closure" (MT 58). These assumptions of closure and certainty in knowledge are the "anti-Christ of learning" and "dogmatism" which Whitehead rejects (MT 58).

III. The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

Another area that demonstrates how Whitehead’s postmodern concerns develop alongside his metaphysical concerns is in the development of what he calls "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." In developing his argument against this fallacy, Whitehead’s philosophy moves away from modernity’s logocentric assumptions of an underlying ontological reality to which linguistic expressions conform. His metaphysics and his hermeneutics coincide in noting this fallacy. According to Whitehead’s philosophy, reality is a fluid interplay of relations between concrete actualities and infinite possibilities. As a result, he argues that reality cannot be limited to any given static or fixed concept without reducing its fluid nature to a rigid abstraction. Linguistic expressions are necessarily abstractions from reality, and hence, interpret actual entities by defining only certain aspects. These abstractions, taken as full representations of actual entities, would both distort and pose as the final reality (MT 18). In addition, Whitehead’s actual entities are ontologically the equivalent of Descartes’ res vera. with one exception: their substantial self-sufficiency (PR xiii, 59. 205). Thus, the particular spatio-temporal self-determinations of actual entities prevent the conveyance of their full "ontological presence" in any linguistic expression.

Whitehead understands each experience as being particular in nature and confined to its own universe (PR 43). Experience is both finite and interrelated to its context As a result, he argues that there is no singular absolute universal expression of truth (MT 69-70). All truth is ultimately relative to certain given presuppositions, abstractions, and exclusions (AI 241- 242). Truth depends partially upon the unique perspective and standpoint of the interpreter. In this respect, Whitehead’s philosophy parallels the theories of relativity in physics. What is true for one observer may not be true for another observer even if they are talking about the same event. This does not mean that truth is reduced to an utter relativism. Instead, Whitehead allows for the "verification" of truth by its correspondence to the actual state of affairs (PR 186-191). In other words, truth is not determined by its identification with an absolute universal. Rather, it is determined by how well it depicts and describes a particular state of affairs in a given context from a given perspective.

The recognition of both our perspectival limitations and the interrelated nature of reality leads Whitehead to argue, similarly to Peirce and James, for an open metaphysical system that continually seeks "better" descriptions of the whole of reality. But, unlike them, he does not share the belief that a final and ultimate description of reality is possible. Instead, Whitehead offers an open system that allows for the continual development of new interconnections and meaning.

According to Whitehead, science and philosophy abstract their data from the complex and dynamic interrelatedness of reality. What they abstract also depends on the particular interests and perspectives of the discipline. Because scientists and philosophers abstract data based on particular interest, the objective philosophical and scientific precision craved by the rationalism of modernity is impossible. There is always a creative or vested interpretation of reality involved. The fallacy occurs when these disciplines forget that their concepts are particular abstractions from reality and thus function as if their concepts were actual universal representations of reality. The danger of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is the pretense that a given abstraction is the actual reality it purports to represent. According to Whitehead, this pretense leads to the mechanistic views of the universe that pervaded modernity (SMW 76).

Interestingly enough, Whitehead arrives at the notion of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness through his reading of Bergson’s critique of simple location and the spatialization of things (SMW 50), a critique also familiar to Derrida (MP 37; 227). The extent to which Bergson serves as a common denominator to both Whitehead and Derrida is minor, but not insignificant. Whitehead "deconstructs" the modern fallacy of simple location and the spatialization of reality, thus critiquing the representational assumptions of philosophy. He moves away from any immediate representational understanding of linguistic abstractions that deny temporality to them (PR 8). Like Bergson and Derrida, Whitehead desires to open the way for including temporalization in his philosophy. Without this temporalization, a simple location of reality creates a false representation that excludes the fluidity of temporal relations (SMW 51).

Whitehead suspects "modern scientists" who claim to explain every element of the universe by means of a theory. He suspects them because scientific theoretical methods involve certain presuppositions and contextual experiences (PR 42). Thus, Whitehead prefers that different interpretative methods co-exist. Whitehead wants to unmask the scientific and philosophical desire to abstract and fix reality in a singular expression. Similarly, Derrida wants to unmask the "pretense" of modernity that attempts to fix the meaning of the flux of experience in singular monolithic assertions. In this task they share a common vision that recognizes both the fluidity of human experience and the futility of our attempts at systematizing them into rigid and monolithic systems.

In addition, Whitehead did not think that our sense perception itself is a simple enterprise. Rather, it is the juncture of two modes of experiences: presentational immediacy and casual efficacy. Together, these forms of experience take the form of "symbolic reference" (PR 168 ff). Our perception internally combines a multitude of sense experience into a manageable whole that we project to a particular location that might be either internal or external to ourselves (S 30-59). Through "presentational immediacy," Whitehead distinguishes between the manner in which "things are objectively in our experience and formally, existing in their own completeness" (S 25). As a result, Whitehead concludes that objectification is an abstraction that does not objectify the actual entity in its entirety (S 25). The "symbolic" nature of sense perception and experience prevents the ontological fullness of being from being captured by either language or philosophy.

Not only do we fail to recognize our epistemological limits by generalizing abstractions, we also unconsciously generalize our individual finite perspectives into an infinite universal reality (MT 42- 43). Human experience "atomizes" the interrelated continuum of time and space into manageable bits that are conditioned by our perspective (PR 67). While this segmenting of time and space facilitates our understanding and perception of the whole of "reality," it also places limitations on our perspective. Ultimately, all metaphysics is limited by its unique perspective and its unique standpoint (MT 67). These limitations imply that our understanding is primarily "abstract" in nature, limiting our ability to know the significance of something in relation to all possible environments (MT 60).

IV. Intertextuality and the Dissolution of the Subject-Object Dichotomy

One of the strongest moves that Whitehead makes toward a postmodern stance is his critique of the Cartesian separation of the subject from the object. The detached rationality of the Enlightenment project is an impossibility for Whitehead. According to John Cobb, Whitehead overcomes the epistemological and metaphysical dualism of the subject and the object while preserving a distinction between them. As a result, Whitehead moves away from the epistemology of modernity, according to all things a certain level of subjective agency (FCPP 174-178). Furthermore, according to William Dean, the empiricism of Whitehead’s philosophy not only destroys the dualism of the subject and object, but also other traditional dualisms, such as those of spirit-matter and human-nonhuman, in a manner that even transcends Derrida’s works (DP 8). Whitehead accomplishes this task in several ways. First, his pansychism prevents the privileging human experience above that of other entities. As a result, no actual entity is purely objective. Second, the role perspectives play in constructing our experience allows him to assert that both subjects and objects are the same actual entity conceived from different spatiotemporal perspectives (FCPP 174-175).

Third, Whitehead recognizes a subjective bias in Descartes’ philosophy. According to Whitehead, Descartes gives primacy to the experiencing subject over the object of experience, thus shifting the focus to the subject as the primary source for philosophical reflection. Although Whitehead agrees with the benefits of Cartesian philosophy, he argues that Descartes and his successors missed the extent of their discovery by understanding experience in terms of substance-quality categories (PR 159). Ultimately Whitehead articulates what he calls the revised subjectivist principle: "that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, bare nothingness" (PR 167). Whitehead rejects any notions of primary substances underlying sense perception, as well as the harsh subject-object division of experience, Instead of a simple bifurcation of mind and nature, Whitehead recognizes with the onset of the new developments of physics, that the subject as active and the object as passive is not an accurate depiction of reality (CN 27). Attempts at reducing the world to subjects and objects inevitably fail because they do not recognize that we are hopelessly interrelated with the world that we experience (PR 49-50; SMW 129). The subject cannot be removed from the object nor can the object be removed from the subject. On the contrary; Whitehead argues for their mutual constitution of each other.

In Derrida’s case, this issue plays itself out in the realm of language and philosophy. Derrida, like Whitehead, also seeks to overcome what he terms the "illusion" of a singular, objective present that dominates language and philosophy in favor of the interwoven play of meanings and differentiation (MP 12-13). Rather than a fixed meaning that conforms to some objectively verifiable exterior reality, Derrida acknowledges the interrelated nature of language itself, and rejects the presumed fixed meaning of abstractions and objective data. In Whitehead, the interrelated and fluid nature of reality prevents rigid fixed meanings that objectively depict reality in its fullness. In Derrida, it is the interrelated and fluid nature of language that prevents it. Nevertheless, the results are remarkably similar. Since Derrida rejects the possibility of a purely objective philosophical language that corresponds to reality; he also rejects the radical subject-object duality that pervades modern philosophy.

V. Temperalization, Iterability and the Present

Whitehead’s and Derrida’s shared postmodern concerns also undergird the development of their philosophies. For instance, in Derrida’s philosophy, temporality plays a crucial role as an element of the radical otherness of differance, as well as in the iterability of the sign. For Derrida, signification can occur only if every element present in the presence of being is "related to something other than itself thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what it is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not. . ." (MP 13). As a result, he understands the "present" of presence as being an irreducible synthesis of traces "of retention and protensions" which he eventually terms differance. The temporalization of presence recognized by Derrida bears a strong similarity to the constitution of an actual entity’s concrescence in Whitehead’s philosophy. Both are inescapably interrelated, temporalized, and constituted by relations and differentiations to the past (givenness) and the future (possibility).

For Derrida, the basic nature of anything that can be termed "presence" is already constructed by the dynamic interplay, interrelation, and differentiation of differance. As a result, Derrida concludes that any and all ontological presence is necessarily mediated by signs if they are to be known (MP 316-319). Since the temporalization of the present requires the separation of an interval to differentiate the "present" from what it is not, then only in the temporal deferral of a "sign" can one encounter the mediation of presence. For Derrida, only signs are repeatable and objectifiable. In a sense, the "sign" bears a similarity to the eternally objectified superject that allows the closure and repeatability of objectified actual entities in other actual entities which are no longer their temporal contemporaries.

In addition, Derrida’s notion of differance serves as the "constitutive, productive, and originary causality" that grounds the very possibility of rationality (MP 6). Linguistically speaking, differance is a productive activity or movement that serves as the ground of what can be said. Whitehead understands creativity as the originary creative activity or principle which unites the disjunctive many into one that then becomes part of the disjunctive many once more, as well as the ground of reason itself (PR 21). Similarly; Derrida understands differance to be the originary ground of language and reason. In addition, Derrida expressively argues that differance is not to be equated to either a being or God. This distancing of differance from both being and God remarkably resembles Whitehead’s differentiation of creativity from both actual entities and God. The similarities between these concepts are apparent. In part, these similarities may be due to their shared concern with temporality and their shared critique of modernity. Regardless, these similarities merit further consideration beyond the scope of this paper.

VI. Conclusions?

The very act of arriving at any conclusions is a risky enterprise that attempts to fix and give closure to the very openness of the system that both Whitehead and Derrida recognize. However, in the juxtaposition of their ideas and concerns, a new possibility for dialogue and openness emerges. Rather than hiding Whitehead in the shrouds of an arcane modern world view, we can achieve a greater appreciation for his work. We may be unable to detach Whitehead from his own particular context at the end of modernity, but neither can we cover him with the presumptions of a dead metaphysics. When we place Whitehead in a new relationship with the postmodern world view we realize that what some might claim to be the arcane ravings of an old philosopher actually prophesy the coming of a new age.

Underlying both Whitehead and Derrida are radically similar concerns that recognize the limits of language and philosophy while deconstructing many of the presuppositions of modernity. Even more, both Whitehead and Derrida share a dynamic and interrelated view of "reality" And while Derrida’s "reality" is limited to the interplay of language, for Whitehead, the interplay of relations, contrasts, and differences is both linguistic and actually at the base of all experience.

Although we might be tempted to ignore Whitehead’s contribution to both a postmodern critique and the deconstruction of modernity, we cannot ignore either of them. We can no longer ignore Whitehead as a potential contributor to and predecessor of our current postmodern philosophers. Nor can we limit our postmodern analysis of Whitehead to his constructive metaphysical system. Instead, we need to recognize the full scope of his philosophical tasks which includes both a critical deconstruction of the presuppositions of modernity and a reconstruction of new hermeneutical and metaphysical systems to interpret all aspects of human experience.

If we take seriously both Whitehead’s and Derrida’s critique of the presumptions of detachments, abstractions, permanence, and exclusivity inherent in modernity, we pave the way for a radically new approach to human interaction and scholarly reflection. The detachment and isolation engendered by modernism can be replaced by a greater appreciation for the interconnected nature of all reality. This can help us overcome the dichotomies that separate and thrust us against each other, as well as against all of creation. A recognition of the creative interplay of both language and reality can impart a greater appreciation of its role in our thoughts and in the construction of our way of experiencing reality. Rather than the domination of absolute, unchanging truths and ideologies, an appreciation for change and diversity can create an openness toward different perspectives.

The dominance of Western philosophical views in scholarly circles often reduces Third World perspectives to an inferior status. Theologies and philosophies that deny the possibility of detached critical reflection are still viewed with suspicion and relegated to a marginal status. However both Whitehead and Derrida’s critique of modernism present a noble and exciting possibility for decentering the domination and absolutist claims of modernity; opening the way for other philosophical perspectives without necessarily falling prey to a radical relativism.

References

DP William Dean, "Deconstruction and Process," Journal of Religion 64 (1984).

FCPP David Ray Griffin, et. Al. Founders of Constructive Postmodern, Philosophy. Albany State University of New York Press, 1993.

MG Alfred North Whitehead, "Mathematics and the Good," in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951.

MT Jaques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

OG Jaques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore John Hopkins University Press, 1976.

VPT David Ray Griffin, et. al. Varieties of Postmodern Theology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

Whitehead’s theory of perception, though undoubtedly bold and original, and consequently of considerable philosophical interest, nevertheless suffers from debilitating flaws.¹ So I argued in "The Incoherence of Whitehead’s Theory of Perception" (PS 9), which David 1-lildebrand criticized in "Kimball on Whitehead on Perception" (PS 22).² In this paper I offer new reasons to doubt the cogency and consistency of Whitehead’s theory of perception. In particular, I argue that Whitehead’s account of perception in the mode of causal efficacy is question-begging.

Any assessment of Whitehead’s contribution to the philosophical study of perception must come to grips with the question of whether his theory of perception can stand on its own and so should be considered as a contribution to the subject independently of any support the categories of his system might give it, or whether his theory of perception should be treated primarily as an illustration or application of systematic categories, especially prehension, and not logically separable from them. After Lewis Ford’s genetic investigations in The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, I think there can be little question that Whitehead intended his theory of perception to be independent of his system.³ Ford calls PR II.4.5-8 & II.8 the "Original Treatise on Perception" and shows that Symbolism is a revision of it. Both the Original Treatise and Symbolism were composed before Process and Reality. Thus Whitehead could not have intended that his Original Treatise should draw evidential support from the independently supported categories of his completed system. Therefore, he must have believed that his Original Treatise could stand on its own feet and did not need additional support. On the contrary, I claim that Whitehead’s theory of perception is not adequately supported in independence of his completed system.

I. The Appearance and Reality of Casual Efficacy

The primary question I wish to address is whether Whitehead provides adequate justification in the Original Treatise for the claim that perception in the mode of causal efficacy (CE) reveals actual causal connections. I see the major issue not as how much detail of the real causal nexus CE reveals but whether we are justified in believing that it reveals any at all. I find that Whitehead’s exposition is question-begging and seriously misleading.⁴ The exposition is misleading insofar as it suggests that belief in either a specific or generic causal nexus is adequately justified by a subject’s experience of CE alone and not ultimately by systematic considerations, particularly those related to prehension.⁵ If Whitehead’s theory of perception was intended to stand alone without support from the rest of his system, as Ford suggests (EWM 181-182), then I claim that it is insufficiently justified insofar as a part of it, the theory of CE, is inadequately justified.

Such passages as the following seem to suggest that the evidence Whitehead offers for believing that CE is a unique kind of perception and that it is not illusory, i.e., supplies the subject with (more or less) accurate information about its environment, is primarily a particular kind of "experience." My claim is that such support is question-begging unless the reliability of such "experience" has been previously established.

Although "experience" and "feeling" are not necessarily conscious events in Whitehead’s philosophy, the use of ‘private experiences,’ ‘percept,’ and especially the fact that the man reports his experience, all make it seem evident that the experiences and feelings mentioned in the above passage are conscious. On the face of it, the warrant for belief provided by conscious percepts or private experience is limited to what seems to be the case to the subject of the percepts or private experiences; it does not extend to what actually is the case without evidence beyond the percepts or private experiences themselves which support the accuracy of the percepts or private experiences. On the face of it, "‘I know it, because I felt it"’ is an expression of certainly not a justified knowledge claim.⁶

In endorsing the view that "we know that we see by our eyes and taste by our palates" Whitehead seems to confuse knowledge with belief. For knowledge we need justification (according to standard accounts), not just conviction -- unless (contrary to the internal point of view of "immediate conviction") the justification is external.

From the assumed fact that Hume and everybody else has a real conviction that "visual sensations arise ‘by the eyes’," Whitehead concludes that we know the causes of our (visual) sensations. On the traditional assumption that knowledge is justified true belief, we may interpret Whitehead as asserting that from the fact that we have a strongly held, possibly even unshakable, belief we may conclude -- apparently only on that basis -- that the belief is true and adequately justified.

Whitehead seems to infer from the fact that we never doubt, i.e., are completely certain about, "the conformation of the present to the immediate past" that "the present fact" is actually "the outcome from its predecessors, one quarter of a second ago." As in the other quoted passages, he moves from "seems" to "is" without providing explicit reasons for the inference.

In these passages, Whitehead does not seem to distinguish between the appearance and reality of perception in the mode of causal efficacy. He seems to infer is on the basis of seems. He seems to treat CE as accurate and reliable if not infallible. These passages seem to suggest that (1) perception in the mode of causal efficacy has more cognitive and epistemic significance than the mere occurrence of a sense-datum considered in itself: the quotations seem to suggest that CE does not merely give information about how the world seems to us; they suggest that CE gives information about how the world really is. But (2) the only reason given for accepting the objective claim of CE as true is that in CE they seem to be true; the only reason for accepting that the subject knows that causes are operating in the way they appear to be is that it believes with strong conviction that they are. The only reason for accepting that perception in the mode of causal efficacy is accurate or reliable is that the perception occurs (where the perception is considered strictly as an experience without any cognitive or epistemic significance).

However, it does not appear that just because something seems -- even indubitably -- to be a certain way to a subject that it actually is the way it seems to be. To give as evidence for the accuracy of something’s seeming to be a certain way the fact that it does seem to be that way appears to beg the question of whether it is accurate or not. The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that these claims for the accuracy and reliability of CE are unwarranted, because what seems to be the case cannot by itself justify claims about what is the case. To do so would require establishing the accuracy or reliability of CE independently of establishing that CE provides a kind of experience to which the appearance/reality, seems/is distinction does not apply. Otherwise, Whitehead’s approach appears to be question-begging.

On this line of reasoning, then, we can take issue with Whitehead’s apparent assumption that such experiences are so self-evidently accurate that they need no further justification. They can hardly be self-justifying, since it is possible that they could be deceptive. As Ross points out, "Whitehead’s examples of causal efficacy in conscious experience are a light flash and the agent’s claim that ‘the flash made me blink’ (PR 175). It might well have been something else, a reflex, a drug, etc." (PWM 103). The crucial epistemic question concerning the experience of CE from the subject’s point of view is whether the experience is accurate or deceptive. To assume the experience of CE is accurate appears to beg that question. Whitehead’s exposition appears to be question-begging, since he appears to assume that what he describes is an (accurate) experience of CE, whereas it is an open question for the subject whether the experience is accurate or not, whether it is an experience of actual CE or only an experience believed to be of CE. As far as the subject can tell, it is possible that the experience is erroneous, so the subject’s epistemic situation should be described as believing that it experiences actual, objective causation or that it appears to him or her that it does. In his exposition Whitehead appears to assume that what he describes is an experience of CE when all he is entitled to assert is that it is an experience which appears to the subject to be of CE. To cite experiences putatively of CE as evidence of their own accuracy when it is in doubt whether they are actually experiences of CE seems to beg the question at hand.

However, citing an experience of CE as evidence for its own veracity would not always be viciously circular in this fashion, if there were some independent way of telling when the experience of CE was reliable and when it was not. In particular, it would not be circular if we knew by independent means that the experience was reliable. A theory of error for CE, giving conditions for the reliability of the experience of CE, could provide these criteria. If he had such a theory, Whitehead would not just be gratuitously assuming that CE is always reliable; the very existence of a theory of error would be an acknowledgment that error is possible, and the theory would specify under what conditions error occurred and under what conditions it did not. Thus it might be objected to my previous argument that Whitehead does indeed have a theory of perceptual error and so his account of CE is not question-begging after all.

According to Whitehead’s theory, only two kinds of perceptual error are possible. The first involves a spatial mismatch between the two pure modes of perception, presentational immediacy (PI) and causal efficacy (CE), in symbolic reference (SR). "[W]hile the two pure perceptive modes are incapable of error, symbolic reference introduces this possibility" (PR 168). In SR, the kind of perception with which we are almost always acquainted, a datum from CE is spatially located by the relatively sharp spatial definition of PI. The effects of past occasions are identified as emanating from a region of space defined by PI. "[T]he vague efficacy of the indistinct external world in the immediate past is precipitated upon the representative regions in the contemporary present" (PR 172). If the effects felt in CE do not m fact emanate from the region identified by PI, then a perceptual error has occurred.

If I duck because I think something is about to hit me on the head, I have committed a perceptual error if something is coming from a different direction from the one I think or if nothing is coming from that direction at all. (The second kind of perceptual error, detailed in PR III.5, occurs relatively late in concresence and involves the mistaken attribution of an eternal object to a perceptual datum. This kind of error might involve the erroneous attribution of an eternal object to CE, but it would not involve incorrect information contributed by CE; thus it is not germane to the question of whether CE itself can involve error.)

It might seem that this theory of perceptual error is adequate to acquit Whitehead of the charge that his account of CE is question-begging, since it describes conditions under which perceptual error occurs in SR. Although it does not provide error-conditions specifically for CE, it entails that CE itself makes no contribution to perceptual error, since error arises only in SR from the spatial misalignment of the data of P1 and CE. And if CE makes no contribution to perceptual error, then effectively CE is infallible. Thus whether the data of CE are reliable or not would not be an open question, because they could not fail to be reliable. Therefore, Whitehead’s theory of perceptual error seems to provide a reason for thinking that CE cannot be erroneous. Apparently the reason is that if one mistakes the spatial region from which a percept in the mode of CE originates, one still is not mistaking that that percept in the mode of CE originated from somewhere. Thus one cannot be mistaken that one is causally affected, since one is always being causally affected by something, one can be mistaken only about the spatial origin of the percept in the mode of CE.

However, I claim that CE could itself provide erroneous data for perception. The above argument that it cannot -- that all perceptual error arises from SR -- assumes a form of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, according to which every event has some cause; this is why a feeling of CE cannot be erroneous: it is only a vague feeling that causation is taking place -- which, given the Principle of Sufficient Reason, cannot be wrong -- and because of CE’s vagueness it does not adequately localize itself. CE itself does not include the assertion that it is emanating from this region; it includes only the information that "something is going on and some things are affecting other things." But this argument depends on the assumption that every event has a cause. The mere data of CE as cited by Whitehead are inadequate to justify this sweeping global principle. That it seems to me that "something is going on and some things are affecting other things" is not an adequate reason for believing that they actually are. It could be the case that the data of CE are erroneous and there actually is no causation in the world. The feeling of CE is insufficient to refute Hume.

II. Replies and Objections

Since on the face of it Whitehead’s assumption that the experience of CE is reliable seems unsubstantiated, the Principle of Charity demands some explanation to make his assumption more plausible. Several possibilities follow.

(1) Whitehead might assimilate appearance to reality for systematic reasons, because he is taking a point of view in relation to perception which includes both the datum perceived as it is in itself (its formal reality) and the way it appears to the perceiver (its objective reality). To do so, however, it would seem that he has to assume a point of view external to that of the perceiver. But this seems inconsistent with the internalism of such statements as "actual entities are the only reasons" (PR 24). It seems to be an instance of "misplaced concreteness."

(2) CE could be "just an experience" in the same sense that pain could be so considered, i.e., with no cognitive significance, no (objective) cognitive claim about its causes; it could be completely non-propositional and have no belief component. If so, that would make CE immune from error; in that case it would make no claim that could be wrong, just because it made no claim at all. However, Whitehead uses the experience of CE as evidenced for an objective claim, so it seems as if he is making an objective claim about it, and hence it could be erroneous, since there could be a difference between "seems" and "is."

(3) Another justification for Whitehead’s apparently gratuitous assumption that the experience of CE is accurate requires that the "experience" of CE not always be conscious. Whitehead attributes such perception to creatures who are very unlikely to be conscious.

Thus perhaps we should conclude that Whitehead uses "perception" in an extended sense, like many other terms he appropriates from ordinary language, such that one need not be conscious to have perceptions in the mode of CE. This would make perception of X in the mode of CE essentially identical to being causally affected by X. So a subject would "perceive" in the mode of CE whatever (and only what) causally affected it. Since under this definition of "perception" it could not perceive in the mode of CE something which was not actually causally affecting it, its perceptions of CE would be effectively infallible?¹⁰

Unfortunately, this interpretation would yield a vacuous infallibility for CE, since it would be a matter of definition that under it the subject’s perceptions in the mode of CE would be of (ale the actual causes operating on it. Furthermore, the required definition of ‘perception’ is counterintuitive. In addition, as in the last case, even if the subject’s infallibility were not vacuous, that it is infallible is not necessarily information that is available to it: the theory stipulates only that the subject "perceive" what causally affects it, not that it know or be aware of what it perceives, much less that it know that it is perceiving real causes. This knowledge is external and hence not internally available to it. Externalism may be a defensible epistemological theory but it seems inconsistent with Whitehead’s subjectivism.¹¹

(3) Quite likely Whitehead assumes CE is reliable on systematic grounds: the doctrine of prehension, according to which one actual entity is (objectively) in another (PR 50), ensures that perception, in whatever mode, as a special instance of prehension, can never be completely delusive?¹² Probably Whitehead assumes the validity of his theory of prehension, which he holds on grounds other than those provided by the experience of CE, when he describes the experience of CE and treats it as reliable. Perhaps he is not really committed to the ~eti~na of CE alone providing adequate justification for the accuracy of that experience; perhaps he does not believe that the experience of CE is self-justifying, despite his explicit exposition, which would then have to be regarded as an unfortunate misstatement. So even though the Original Treatise was composed before Process and Reality it is not logically independent of it in that it is not fully warranted without it.

Whitehead believes that in prehension (and hence perception) one occasion is (objectively) in another. This means that for Whitehead perception is not mediated by internal representatives of its ultimate objects but is directly of those ultimate objects themselves. Thus the kind of error which arises from differences between the representatives and the things they represent is impossible for such direct perception. Perception cannot be fundamentally delusive in the sense that a subject might believe that it were perceiving something real but actually not be. If perception is direct, then its objects must be real: it must be of realities; therefore it cannot be fundamentally delusive in the above sense. If it were indirect or mediated, the immediate or proximate objects of perception might be at variance, with the realities they ultimately represent. But if the representations (representatives) are eliminated -- as they are in direct perception -- then this unfortunate epistemic possibility cannot arise.

On non-representationalism, the subject’s epistemic situation is such that it cannot have a completely delusive perceptive experience: it cannot have an experience which is just like an accurate perceptive experience but is actually not accurate. It cannot falsely seem to perceive a real object. This way of being veridical (like theories of direct reference) comes at a price: it does not entail that the subject know what it is perceiving in the sense that it can correctly characterize it. The upshot of these observations is that the reliable character Whitehead attributes to CE stems most plausibly from the direct, non-representational character of prehension. Unfortunately, even backed by prehension, the reliable character of the experience of CE is not as bill-blooded as might be desired, since its ultimate justification, in terms of the justification of the theory of prehension itself, is external to the perceiving subject.

I have concluded that the experience of CE does not in itself have objective epistemic significance, because whether it is reliable is an open question and it is not self-justifying Furthermore even if taking the experience of CE as veridical is justified systematically by the direct perception underwritten by prehension, nevertheless the sense in which such direct perception is reliable is epistemically disappointing, since it is external to the subject and does not necessarily involve any propositional knowledge on its part. Nevertheless, there is a way in which CE might be justified which we have not yet considered. The real-time experience of the "withness of the body" might be justified on pragmatic, specifically on evolutionary grounds. "Symbolism can be justified, or unjustified. The test of justification must always be pragmatic" (PR 181).¹³ The experience of CE and particularly of the "withness of the body," if accurate, gives us essential real-time information about events in our environment which could well have a vital impact on our well-being. It might be argued that the survival success of a species which bases its immediate actions, especially those in which the survival of its individuals is at stake, on a particular experience constitutes a powerful argument for the general reliability of that experience. (Of course this justification would be external to the individuals making use of it.) It is important to realize, however, that this pragmatic justification of CE underwrites only its general reliability at best and by no means guarantees its universal infallibility Even if generally reliable because of its survival value, it is quite possible that on a particular occasion an experience of CE via "withness of the body" might be misleading, illusive, or even delusive.¹⁴

III Whitehead and Analytic Philosophy Suggestions for Dialogue

I have concluded that Whitehead may have conceived of his theory of perception before his completed system, and so he may have intended his theory of perception to be independent of his system, but in fact it is net logically independent of his system. Ultimately his theory of perception will be justified only if the whole system is justified, and it is difficult to imagine how a metaphysical system as comprehensive as Whitehead’s could be independently justified. Obviously a consideration of the justification of Whitehead’s whole system, even if it is possible, lies outside the scope of this paper. In fact I have approached Whitehead’s theory of perception by using concepts from analytical philosophy such as knowledge as justified true belief. Suffice it to say that much interesting work could be done in connecting Whitehead’s concepts to more current topics of discussion in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. In metaphysics, issues of realism and antirealism are relevant to Whitehead’s fundamental attitude, as well as questions about the nature and identity conditions for events. In philosophy of language, issues of direct reference and token-identification would have interesting repercussions applied to prehension and the formal and objective existence of actual entities. In philosophy of mind, issues surrounding the disappearance of the self and personal vs. sub-personal levels of explanation are very germane to Whitehead’s system. I think it would be beneficial both to Whitehead studies and to relevant portions of analytic philosophy to bring Whitehead more back into the American philosophical mainstream by considering his specific problems and solutions in light of current interests and as susceptible to criticisms from current perspectives.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Nancy Potter, two anonymous referees, and Lewis Ford for many helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.

2.1 now think it is better to describe the sense in which traditional phenomenological accounts of perception are "incompatible" with causal accounts in epistemic rather than psychological terms. Phenomenological and causal accounts make different assumptions about what is most clearly and most certainly known in perception. Phenomenological accounts assume that first-person perceptual experience-tokens are more certainly known than any inference about their external causes. On the other hand, the basic epistemic assumption of causal accounts is the existence of an objective physical world. they then go on to explain the occurrence of the subjective data of perception by treating them as instances of law-like regularities of types of objective physical occurrences. Phenomenological accounts award the highest epistemic warrant to the subjective deliverances of the senses and withhold it from the proposition that an objective physical world exists; on the other hand, causal accounts award the highest epistemic warrant to the proposition that an objective physical world exists and withhold it from judgments about the subjective deliverances of the senses. Thus traditional phenomenological and causal accounts of perception embody epistemic attitudes which are rationally "incompatible" in the sense that a fully rational thinker should not hold both at the same time. It should nor hold both, because the beliefs are inconsistent (In respect to their attitudes toward the external world, they are analogous to agnosticism and religious belief) However, they are not "incompatible" in a psychological sense, because an irrational person could hold both simultaneously.

Because I now believe the difference between traditional phenomenological and causal accounts of perception is not a difference in kinds of experience. I now believe the question of whether the characterization of phenomenological accounts in IWTP was so "extreme" as to exclude the experience of causation to be moot. The character of the first-person phenomenological data of perception is not crucial in distinguishing phenomenological from causal accounts the essential differences are in epistemic assumptions. These remain constant -- and inconsistent -- however the first-person phenomenological experiences of perception are described.

3. Lewis S. Ford, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics: 1925-1929 (Albany State University of New York Press, 1984): 181-182.

4. Particularly at PR 115-123, 168-183, 311-317, and 323-327 and S 45-46, 50-53, and 58.

5. "Whitehead’s metaphysical realism needs no support from incorrigible sensationalistic foundations" (PWM 102); "Prehension is the ground of all metaphysical principles, the basis of Whitehead’s system. It is as such neither corrigible nor incorrigible. but simply the vectoral relation in feeling among entities. It is how entities are related to other entities . . . . It is not, however, a mode of testimony." (PWM 103).

6. That "[t]he philosophy of organism accepts the man’s statement, that the flash made him blink" does not, of course, mean that the philosophy of organism’s only evidence for the reported causal efficacy is the experience of them himself. However ". . . actual entities are the only reasons" (PR 26).

7. S 54, PR 168, and PR 173.

8.1 assumed in IWTP that perception in the mode of CE is necessarily a conscious experience, and that assumption may be mistaken.

9. E.g.. "feeling" and "experience."

10. Since a given actual entity is causally affected by every other actual entity In its past, this theory would tend to support my original "detailed" interpretation of CE in IWTP, according to which Whitehead is committed to a theory of perception in the mode of CE which yields very specific knowledge of causes. However, contrary to my original claim in IWPT, this theory would not require such perception to be conscious.

11. "Nothing is to be received into the philosophical scheme which is not discoverable as an element in subjective experience" (PR 166). ". . . actual entities are drops of experience" (PR 18) ". . . apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness" (PR 167). "‘The universe is always one, since there is no surveying it except from an actual entity which unifies it" (PR 231-232).

Of course a perspective on the epistemic situation of a given actual entity A is available from the perspective of another actual entity B in which A is objectified. This perspective of B as external to that of A. However, Whitehead’s theory is inconsistent with versions of externalism which assume a hypothetical ideal observer or versions of externalism dependent on types of realism which posit objective facts of the matter independent of the experience of any actual subject.

12."... where Whitehead speaks of ‘perception’ he is not concerned with conscious perception, but with prehension" (PWM 97).

13. But note that". . . the pragmatic test can never work, unless on some occasion -- in the future, or in the present -- there is a definite determination of what is true on that occasion" (PR 181).

14. The "withness of the body" is a kind of folk-theory of causation in perception, much like folk-psychology or folk-medicine. On this analogy, the relation between scientific theories of perception and the experience of the "withness of the body" would be like the relation of scientific psychology and scientific medicine to folk-psychology and folk-medicine. In general, folk-theories are unsystematic accumulations of conventional wisdom on a particular topic; they may embody some truth but are as likely to embody much falsehood. Even though scientific theories may have folk-theories as their origin and folk-theories may have to serve as reliable guides to a given subject in the absence of a developed scientific theory, when truth is the primary concern and time is no object, folk-theories are usually superseded by their scientific counterparts. Like other folk-theories, the experience of CE through the "withness of the body" would provide rough and ready, faute de mieux real time information essential for immediate survival but would hardly provide an epistemic criterion.

References

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

IWM William A. Christian An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1959.

PS9 Robert H. Kimball, "The Incoherence of Whitehead’s Theory of Perception," Process Studies 9 (1979), 94-104.

PS22 David L Hildebrand, "Kimball on Whitehead on Perception," Process Studies 22 (1993

22(1993), 13-20.

KWPR Donald W. Sherburne, A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

PWM Stephen David Ross, Perspective in Whitehead’s Metaphysics Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983.

In his "Materialist and Panexperientialist Physicalism" Professor David Griffin gives both a judicious and illuminating exposition and critique of the contemporary "mainstream" physicalism and a brief but clearly articulated synopsis of his own alternative approach which he calls "panexperientialism." Although Griffin’s discussion focuses on my own work, many of his points are applicable, more or less directly, to the broad physicalist framework within which much of current philosophical work in philosophy of mind is being carried on. The relevant papers of mine that Griffin discusses, all of them from my Supervenience and Mind,¹ were written over a period of a dozen years, and my views on the issues involved continued to change and evolve during this time (needless to say, this process is still continuing). In view of this, I am especially impressed by Griffin’s ability to tell a reasonably coherent and intelligible story about my overall picture on the mind-body problem.

I consider the following three theses to be central to contemporary physicalism:

1. [Ontological physicalism] The space-time world is wholly constituted by basic bits of matter and their aggregates.

2. [Supervenience] Any two items -- things, events, phenomena, even whole worlds that are physically indiscernible are indiscernible tout court. Alternatively, physical facts determine all the facts.

3. [Causal closure of the physical domain] If any event causes a physical event, it itself is a physical event. In fact, any causal chain that involves at least one physical event must lie wholly within the physical domain.

As is well known, there are various inequivalent ways of stating these claims, but the slight differences between them will not matter for our purposes here. Ontological physicalism gives a sense to the idea that physics, the science of bits of matter in spacetime, is our basic science -- whatever its ultimate success may turn out to be, it is the only science that attempts to give us a comprehensive understanding of all of our world, Other sciences are "special sciences," in that each of them concerns a specially restricted domain. Only physics concerns the whole spacetime world.

Ontological physicalism only concerns the objects, or entities, in the world, and does not speak, at least not directly, about their properties. Properties come on the scene in the second thesis, the doctrine of supervenience; for physical indiscernibility is indiscernibility with respect to physical properties (and relations). Further, a physical fact is constituted by a physical object exemplifying a physical property, or a group of physical objects standing in some physical relationship. The supervenience thesis gives an explicit form to the idea that physical properties are primary and basic, and the physical properties an object instantiates -- that is, its physical nature -- determines all of its properties, that is, its entire nature. This of course allows things to have properties that are nonphysical, perhaps, certain physical aggregates with a high degree of systemic unity and organizational complexity, such as biological organisms and computing machines, may exhibit nonphysical properties.

The third thesis of physicalism, the principle of causal closure of the physical domain, guarantees the self-sufficiency of the domain: there are no nonphysical causal agents -- Cartesian souls, Hegelian spirits, or neovitalist entelechies -- that causally influence the behavior of physical objects or the course of physical processes.² It also guarantees the explanatory sufficiency of physics: if a physical event has an explanation, it has a physical explanation. Note that this does not say that every physical event has an explanation, or a cause. In particular, the causal closure thesis does not entail physical determinism, and, further, physicalism does not entail determinism. It only says that physical events do not have nonphysical causes. If you deny the causal closure principle, you are saying that theoretical physics is in principle incompletable -- unless, that is, it invoked nonphysical causal agents. This might be the case; but if you believe that this in fact is the case, you are not a physicalist, and you wouldn’t want to be called a physicalist.

I believe that these three theses receive substantial -- for some people, compelling -- motivation and support from what we know about the world -- that is, our best sciences. To me, these are not ideal metaphysical speculations. Do I think they are all true? I believe that ontological physicalism is true, and that the physical causal closure is difficult to deny. I would like to believe in supervenience as well, but I don’t know if it is true. My reason for this hesitation is that I don’t know if qualia, the qualitative characters of our conscious experiences, are supervenient on physical/neural processes. This depends in part on the strength of the supervenience relation involved. However, I agree with many physicalists in thinking that a clear and satisfying form of physicalism must insist on supervenience with the force of metaphysical necessity -- for reasons that I cannot go into here. What I mean to say, then, is this: I do not know whether qualia supervene, with metaphysical necessity, on physical/neural states and processes. That is, I do not know that we can exclude metaphysically possible worlds that are physically indiscernible from this world but in which qualia are distributed differently -- or perhaps entirely absent.

In any case, that is physicalism. Qualia, as noted, present a fundamental challenge to physicalism. Another challenge comes from mental realism -- in particular the reality of mental causation. As Griffin correctly observes, I take mental realism and mental causation as essentially equivalent. If mental causation is real, then mental phenomena must be real. Conversely, any object or phenomenon in the spacetime world that we wish to recognize as real must have causal powers. That is what I have called "Alexander’s dictum," in honor of the British emergentist Samuel Alexander. Physicalism, however, is not the only thing a physicalist believes. I am a physicalist (modulo the qualia issue), but I believe lots of things other than physicalism. One of them is that mental phenomena are real, and that they have causal powers. The challenge to the physicalist is how to make his belief in the reality of mental causation consistent with his physicalism -- in particular, the physicalist must give an account of how mental events can exercise their causal powers in a physical world in a way that is consistent with the supervenience thesis and the physical causal closure. Griffin gives a lucid account of the conundrum – "the dead end" -- that the physicalist brings upon himself.³

Griffin says: "[Kim] takes his version of physicalism as more certain than our assumption as to the reality and thereby efficacy of conscious experience. I would agree with Whitehead . . . , by contrast, that those notions that we inevitably presuppose in practice should be regarded as the non-negotiable elements in our belief system" (12). I do not believe that I take physicalism as "more certain" than the causal efficacy of the mental. I’m not sure what "more certain" could mean in this context. For me this is not a question of epistemological priority but metaphysical priority. I believe that our own practical epistemic needs must not take metaphysical priority over what we believe to be the fundamental structure of reality, The former should nor dictate the latter. To me, reversing the order here is fundamentally inimical to the very idea of rationality and objectivity. If we want to protect consciousness, mental causation, and free agency we should give an account of how these things are possible within a scheme of a world mandated by theoretical reason -- our science and the best metaphysics that goes with it. To me, it is a form of philosophical indulgence to purposely and consciously build into our foundational metaphysics exactly what we want to protect and save. Doing metaphysics is difficult and rewarding because we want to begin with an austere fund of basic resources and try to get, and explain, other things that we want out of it. To begin metaphysics ‘with all that we want to preserve is a form of what Frank Jackson has called "big list" metaphysics: you would be doing this kind of metaphysics if your ontology consisted merely of making up a list of all that you believe to exist.⁴ "Serious metaphysics," as Jackson calls it, enters the scene when you begin with an austere and sparse foundation and endeavor to show that it is enough to yield the things you want to save.

I am not suggesting that Griffin begins with all that he wants to save in the way of human consciousness, mental causation, and free agency. That would have been a "wish list" metaphysics," to go along with Jackson’s "big list" metaphysics. But Griffin’s metaphysical foundation -- the foundation of his panexperientialism -- does remind one of a metaphysical wish list. For consider his "individuals." I am not sure exactly what individuals, in general terms, are in Griffin’s (or Whitehead’s) system, but he writes:

As I take it, the basic particles of physics are, or are among, Griffin’s "simple individuals," and each of them has some sort of proto-mentality, which endows it with "spontaneity" and "creativity." Moreover, it is because of these individuals’ spontaneity and creativity that the laws governing them, that is, quantum mechanical laws, are statistical and nor deterministic. Although I don’t know the details, which I am certain are worked out systematically in Griffin’s book, Unsnarling the World-Knot,⁵ this talk of spontaneity and creativity appears to indicate the presence of some form of proto-agency even in "simple individuals." I am reminded here of what William James once said:

The basic idea here appears to be something like this: we know that consciousness has emerged from the process of evolution. But unless we posit consciousness at the starting point, there is no way of accounting for the existence of consciousness. So we must endow each and every atom with some form of "aboriginal consciousness" – "Mind-dust" as James calls it.⁷

Note that neither Griffin’s nor James’s procedure is exactly what I called "wish list" metaphysics. For what they posit at the beginning, or at the bottom level, is not full-flown mentality or free agency, of the sorts we see in humans, but some sort of "aboriginal" or proto-mentality, or, to use Griffin’s words, "an iota of mentality." But what I don’t see is how this really helps. How are we supposed to derive human consciousness -- our rationality and intentionality, our richly variegated qualitative experiences, our sense of free choice, our complex and highly developed agency -- from the aboriginal mentality of the simple individuals, presumably the basic particles, that constitute us? For Griffin, we are "compounds," not mere "aggregates," of simple individuals, and this makes us genuine individuals. He regards individual cells to be endowed with mentality. He says that "the brain cells are themselves regarded as centers of experience," and that "living cells themselves provide a lower-level example, in that the cell’s living occasions of experience have emerged out of the cell’s more elementary constituents" (19-20). But exactly how is the positing of mentality at the level of individual cells and neurons supposed to help explain the emergence of full-blown consciousness in the human brain?⁸ Just what sort of mentality is the supposed proto-mentality possessed by basic particles, and how does a "compound" made up of these particles get to have a resultant mentality of a certain kind? I suppose that Griffin’s notion of a "compound" must do most of the work if these questions are to be answered. In particular, what I would like to see is an independently motivated and defended principle that tells us that if something X is a compound individual composed of individuals x₁ . . . , x_n each with a certain specific kind and degree of mentality and in a certain structural configuration R, then X exhibits mentality of some specific kind M.

Although Griffin refers to his position as a form of emergentism, it clearly is not a form of classic emergentism. The classic emergentism of Samuel Alexander, C. Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad would nor accept basic material particles with a "mental pole." The emergentism these philosophers defended accepted ontological physicalism, where the "bits of matter" are nothing but bits of matter without anything mental to them. For them mentality was a true emergent, and what they regarded as a brute and unexplainable fact is that mentality emerges when certain physical/biological conditions are realized. Alexander advised us to accept this with "natural piety." In this sense, these emergentists were austere metaphysicians, and they would have rejected Griffin’s and Whitehead’s framework in which the basic constituents of the world are given some form of mentality as ad hoc and ultimately not very helpful. Furthermore, as is clear from the title of his essay, Griffin believes that his approach is, or can be considered, a form of physicalism. This is a gracious gesture on his part, but I am inclined to think it misleading to regard panexperientialism as any form of physicalism. I believe that this position is inconsistent with each of the three doctrines (understood in their proper intended sense) that I listed above as central to contemporary physicalism.

Finally, I would like to correct one point in Griffin’s discussion of my views, since it represents one kind of misapprehension that seems widely spread among the critics of physicalism, and even among some physicalists (especially, of the nonreductive variety). I am willing to take the blame for this since the lack of clarity in my writings has undoubtedly helped abet the misunderstanding. Griffin writes:

A bit later, he says: "All observable things are of the same organizational type, so that human beings are analogous to material things such as rocks and bodies of water."(19). Here Griffin is not speaking for himself; rather, he is drawing what he considers to be the consequences of the kind of physicalism I espouse – specifically, the mereological supervenience of macro-properties on micro-properties.

Griffin appears to be reasoning as follows: mereological supervenience says that the properties characteristic of wholes are supervenient on, or determined by, the properties of their parts, and ultimately, therefore, the properties of the basic particles that make them up. And the causal powers of these wholes must, too, be supervenient on the properties of these basic microconstituents, and reduce to them. Now compare a human being and a rock: at bottom they are made up of pretty much the same basic particles -- electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and what have you. So, on this view, there can be no principled difference between human beings and animals ("genuine individuals"), on one hand, and rocks, clouds, and water puddles ("mere aggregates"), on the other. In fact, it is a mystery; on this account, how the causal powers of human beings can differ from those of rocks.

If this indeed is Griffin’s thought, it can be rebutted. Mereological supervenience only asserts that the properties of the whole are determined, or fixed, by the properties and relations that characterize its parts. That only means that if two wholes are microstructurally identical, they must exhibit the same macroproperties -- and the same causal powers. And these can be new causal powers; it is only that they are determined by microstructure. Mereological supervenience does not say, or imply, that the properties of the whole are identical with properties of their microconstituents. As emergentists, too, would say; such properties as inflammability, ductility, and temperature of macro-objects are not among the properties of individual molecules or atoms. For both emergentists and (most) physicalists. they are genuine properties and causal powers, which supervene on, or are determined by the microstructural makeup of the objects that have them. Emergentists and physicalists would stress that the Structural configuration, no less than the intrinsic properties, of microconstituents is crucial in determining what macro-properties are exhibited by a whole. For wholes -- anyway, those of interest to us -- are structures, not mere assemblages of atoms and particles, and the very same atoms and particles configured in different structural relationships can, and do, exhibit very different properties and causal powers at thc level of wholes. And many of these properties are not had by the wholes’ micro-constituents. This is completely consistent with physicalism, and in particular with mereological supervenience and micro-reductionism. Thus, two points: first, determination must be sharply distinguished from identity’ and, second, structure is crucially important. These points would have been acknowledged by many classic emergentists as well, including C. D. Broad.

Griffin’s essays poses serious challenges to contemporary physicalism, not only because it forces physicalists to return to the beginnings and re-examine their fundamental assumptions but, more importantly, because it does so by proposing a radical, thought-provoking alternative. I do not presume to have grasped the details and full import of Griffin’s approach. The main question I will have to keep in mind as I read his book (as I hope to in the near future) is whether, and to what extent, the panpsychic approach he espouses helps us to understand "the mystery of consciousness" -- that is, just how it does its job better here than the various well-known forms of contemporary physicalism. Finally, we should all be grateful to Professor Griffin for his important service in bringing the Whiteheadian perspective to bear on current debates in the analytical philosophy of mind and showing how the two approaches can be relevant to each other, especially in regard to our shared concern to understand the place of the mind in the natural world.

Notes

1. Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

2. Does ontological physicalism imply the causal closure of the physical domain? No, because, as noted, the supervenience doctrine allows physical systems to have nonphysical properties, and these nonphysical properties might causally interact with physical properties.

3. For additional considerations see my Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge MIT Press, forthcoming.)

4. See, e.g., Frank Jackson, "Finding the Mind in the Natural World," in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, ed. R. Casati, B. Smith, and G. White (Vienna: Verlag Hoelder-Pichler, 1994).

5. David Ray Griffin, Unsnarling the World-Knot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

6. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1983; originally published in 1890), 152 (italics in the original. I came upon this paragraph in James Van Cleve’s "Mind-Dust or Magic? Panpsychism versus Emergence," Philosophical Perspectives 4 (1990), 215-226.

7.And I have heard philosophers say that there is consciousness "all the way down" -- down to the level of elementary particles, quarks. or what have you.

8. Van Cleve, in the article cited in note 4, raises similar questions.

9. There is another distinction that is often overlooked (but not by classic emergentists): to be determined by such-and-such is one thing, to be explainable by such-and-such is another thing. On the standard conception, emergents are determined by their "basic conditions" but not explainable by them. At least, the concept of determination here does not entail explainability.

Abortion is a recurring theme in Charles Hartshorne’s later works. He discusses aspects of abortion in Wisdom as Moderation, (1987), Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984), and in his autobiography, The Darkness and the Light (1990). In 1981 he published "Concerning Abortion: An Attempt at a Rational View" in The Christian Century; it drew a heated response.

Despite the timeliness of the abortion question, and the relevance and potency of Hartshorne’s views, no scholarly work has been published on this area of his thought. The recent spate of books containing critical essays and Hartshorne’s personal responses has disregarded his opinions on abortion as though they were non-existent. Unfortunately even the prestigious Library of Living Philosophers volume fails in this respect. Valuable opportunities have been lost for Hartshorne to add a unified response to his discussions on this sociologically and philosophically significant topic. Given Hartshorne’s age, this is regrettable.

In addition to his publications on abortion, in 1981 Hartshorne accepted an invitation to debate abortion with pro-life advocates at Dartmouth College. It was an action he later called "unwise" (TBEF 38). He stated afterward in personal correspondence:

This paper begins by detailing Hartshorne’s view of abortion, which is rooted in his philosophical views on God and rationality, and his theory of contributionism, which holds that the ultimate value of human life is in the contribution it makes to God. Hartshorne believes that a woman’s rationality and capacity for contributing richer experiences to God allow her wants, needs, and desires to supersede those that can be assumed on behalf of a nonrational, marginally contributing fetus. He believes that no other person and certainly no governmental body should dictate a woman’s decision about abortion. However, in supporting his position he emphasizes only rationality’s contribution to God, ignoring other important contributors, particularly his own vision of love as the highest of values, and our most God-like attribute.

Hartshorne refers to attempts to legally abolish abortion, an issue which lacks clear public consensus, as "tyranny" (CS21 45). He is critical of those who automatically value a fetus over the productivity and activity of the pregnant woman, and condemns those, particularly men, who would dictate the limits of her choices. Hartshorne’s strong "pro-choice" position is a natural outgrowth of his view of those qualities which make humans uniquely valuable.

Hartshorne links the value of all creatures to what they directly contribute to God. While he maintains that every life and life-form contribute in some way to the Divine life, he also claims that our individual capacity for rational thought and moral sensitivity allows humans to contribute more to God than any other creatures. This becomes problematic when considered against the backdrop of Hartshorne’s more general positions. I believe that Hartshorne compartmentalizes his thinking on abortion and value, focusing exclusively on rationality He neglects the value of mutual experiences, and the value of love, even though he distinctly emphasizes both in much of his work When considering abortion, Hartshorne fails to acknowledge in any positive way how the lives of less complex creatures, particularly human creatures, contribute to the qualities and abilities which affect the experiences we bring to God. Love for others is an important part of experience, and adds a value to our lives that is different from, yet no less precious than, the value of rational thinking. The foundation of human value is broader than its cornerstone of rationality, and Hartshorne clearly upholds this view when discussing areas other than abortion.

An examination of the roots of Hartshorne’s position on abortion begins with his vision of what I call the "creaturely continuum." Hartshorne views all life on a rising continuum which represents the value of creatures. This continuum does not represent possible or potential value to God, but only fully realized value. He boldly states, "I hold that the ultimate value of human life, or of anything else, consists entirely in the contribution it makes to the divine life" (WM 118). Hartshorne refers to this as the doctrine of contributionism. While he maintains that every life and life form contributes in some way to the Divine life, he also claims that our individual capacity for rational thought allows humans to contribute more to God than other creatures.

Under no circumstances does Hartshorne lower creatures as valueless. Like diamonds of differing sizes, they are merely less valuable in a world that is completely precious. This may be a difficult fact to keep in sight, however, for in discussing abortion Hartshorne consistently focuses on the variations in creaturely value, which are represented by movement up or down the creaturely continuum.

Hartshorne’s position on abortion is also influenced by his theory of aesthetic value, which emphasizes that a diversity of experiences balanced by an aesthetically pleasing amount of complexity and orderliness contributes to life and to God, more fully than do less balanced experiences. Creatures capable of self-reflectively enjoying aesthetic values contribute richer, more diverse experiences than simpler creatures. Humanity’s unique contribution to God is in the depth and richness of its moral and aesthetic feelings.

A fetus of any sort, be it pig, primate, or human, begins its life at the bottom of the creaturely continuum as a single egg cell, in a position similar to a single-celled paramecium or amoeba. Each creature ascends the continuum, attaining at least whatever level its genetic programming allows. Any adult mammal will be higher on the continuum than any fetus, for one is reaching its apex, while the other is just beginning its ascent. The specific species is not the relevant issue, but how much diversity of experience each creature can incorporate at that given moment.

An adult porpoise, capable of experiences that include the use of sophisticated communication and socially interactive behavior, is clearly higher on the continuum than a newborn human baby, whose experiences are primarily basic reflexive actions, and less interactive.

Consider the creatures at the high end of the continuum: members of the primate family, porpoises and whales, and at the very top, humans. It takes only a few months for a human baby to pass all creatures except for the most capable large-brained mammals. Soon even these are passed, as the very young child begins to demonstrate the higher cognitive functions that are found only at the top of the continuum.

Why are we so special? What separates us from the whales and apes and puts us at the very top of the creaturely continuum? Language, for a beginning. It is no small accomplishment to grasp abstract thinking and represent it symbolically (WM 100, 124). We are also the most creative and inventive of all creatures, showing tremendous diversity in our actions. But most importantly we are able to reason and develop morals by which we recognize right and wrong. Hartshorne sees this as a powerful component of value, one that, so far as we know only humans are able substantially to contribute to God.

According to Hartshorne, the top of the continuum is not gained, nor is it retained, simply by having a human origin. It is attained as we develop those qualities that characterize humans as different from other animals. He states, "The line between the human and the subhuman is crossed in the life of each one of us, if by human one means, actually rational" (WM 119).

Hartshorne carries this to its limits, for he would not elevate the human fetus or infant to any point on the continuum that it could not sustain through its capacity for experience. Nor would he allow persons in a coma, who are incapable of experiencing, or the feeble-minded elderly, who have an impaired ability for rational thought, to remain at the top of the continuum.

This is no mere academic exercise for Hartshorne, but a strongly personal view that leads him to state:

A careful definition of the word "person" is essential to understanding Hartshorne’s arguments on abortion. Indeed he quotes Webster’s dictionary; and names it as the "secret source" of the entire abortion controversy. There are two definitions: the first, which is most commonly used by "pro-life" proponents, is simply a human being or individual. The second, more specific definition, is that of a being who is able to reason and distinguish right from wrong. Hartshorne holds that this second definition best illuminates the differences between human and subhuman. He is adamant that rationality and morality are the measure of personhood (WM 32).

Hartshorne is not alone in this view Mary Anne Warren refers to a human being in a moral sense as "a full-fledged member of the moral community" whose traits include, but are not limited to, consciousness and the ability to reason. She also specifies a genetic sense of the term, in which "any member of the species is a human being, and no member of any other species could be" (TM 53).

Hartshorne has no patience for those holding a genetic view of personhood, who claim that the potential represented in a fertilized human egg cell is equivalent to an actual person. For Hartshorne, the difference between actual and potential is crucial. Having potential is an indefinite state, while actuality is identifiable, ascertainable, and functional. (This can be easily understood by considering the difference between potential money earned and actual money earned.) A potential person has only potential contributions that may or may not be made to God, while an actual person is an actual contributor to the Divine life, and therefore far more valuable. Hartshorne explains,

Hartshorne occasionally becomes vexed with those who fail to understand his position that the question the issue of abortion raises is the question of personhood. He once pointedly observed that "no one denies that its origin is human, as is its possible destiny. But the same is true of every unfertilized egg in the body of a nun" (CSPM 21, 42).

Contributing invaluably to Hartshorne’s view of genetic identity and abortion were the differences between his twin brothers, James and Henry. Despite sharing identical genetic structure, they had highly individual personalities. Hartshorne attributes this to differences in the life experiences each encountered, including differences in prenatal experiences, such as their position in the womb. According to Hartshorne, this individuality simply cannot be accounted for generically:

This point of view is echoed by the emergence theory of psychogeny (the study of the origin of the mind), which holds that individuality is not defined genetically. According to Wayne Viney and William Douglas Woody,

For Hartshorne the ability to think rationally, on at least an elementary level, is a milestone in human life. It is a line we cross from being an animalistic human "creature" to being an individual human "person," capable of moral thoughts and actions.

Yet it is impossible to cross this line unaided. Whether one speaks of a fetus, an infant, or a very young child, no development at all is possible without a great commitment of time, effort and care, first from the mother bearing the child, then after birth, by her and other caregivers. There are contingencies to contend with during and even before development: Is the egg healthy? Was the egg fertilized? Is the pregnant woman addicted to alcohol or drugs that might overwhelm the developing cells? Does she have a disease such as diabetes that makes maintaining pregnancy difficult? An unhealthy or addicted mother’s problem may destroy the fetus entirely, or may stunt its development so severely that there is little hope for normalcy after birth. Here the fetus’s welfare is inescapably in the hands of the mother.

The newly born infant is incapable of all but the most rudimentary reflexive actions. Without continual tending from other persons, it would quickly die, and personhood would never be attained. But life or death, is not the only issue.

Mental and emotional health are essential factors if the infant is to develop into a rational creature capable of the actions we consider human (OOTM 116, DL 244). Hartshorne reminds us:

The continuation of life, too, has many contingencies. Simply stated, babies require time, attention, and love. One only has to remember the terrible stories of under-socialized babies in wartime orphanages to recognize the need for love and care. If it is not met, the resulting child may be human, but still not capable of anything beyond animalistic experiences and reactions.

When we return to the creaturely continuum, it is easy to see that under normal circumstances no matter what point the fetus or infant has progressed to on the continuum, its mother, already a fully rational person, is clearly situated at the top. The fetus and the infant simply do not display the characteristics of rationality and moral discernment which Hartshorne considers to be essential components of personhood. The fetus cannot at any stage, therefore, counterbalance the needs and desires of the pregnant woman, for it cannot match her value -- the experiences she contributes to the Divine life.

Despite his belief in the intrinsic value of all creation, fetuses and even infants are, in Hartshorne’s mind, only shadows of persons yet-to-be. Therefore, he takes this position to its extreme, considering neither abortion nor infanticide full-fledged murder (WM 123). He states:

In Hartshorne’s view of contributionism, should a woman desire to choose abortion, even if unfortunate or reprehensible on other grounds, she may do so without the moral condemnation of murder. Murder is not a term that can be properly applied to a fetus, for it lacks the essential components of personhood. This position is, for both pro-life proponents and some pro-choice proponents, a drastic view, for it does not preclude abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

Hartshorne is critical of people, particularly men, who would legislate or in any way order pregnant women to do what men themselves are not capable of -- bearing a child (TBEF 35. 38). The consequences of such legislation are simply too grave. He states his position plainly and forcefully:

Hartshorne believes that a woman’s rationality and capacity for contributing to God allow her wants, needs, and desires to supersede any that can be assumed on behalf of the non-rational fetus, including what is sometimes called a "right-to-life." He believes that no other person can fully comprehend the complexities an individual must weigh when making such a decision. Therefore, no one other than the individual is entitled to make that decision. Finally, he believes that no governmental body should dictate whether or not abortion is an available choice.

The question Hartshorne scholars must consider is whether he has been consistent with his own philosophical beliefs when discussing abortion. Hartshorne takes the position that rationality is the only essential consideration in this debate. I believe it can be argued that rationality as the highest measure of creaturely value is not consistent with Hartshorne’s overall philosophical vision.

In my opinion, when discussing abortion Hartshorne uncharacteristically underplays the direct value our social experiences have for God. He relegates relationships and socialization to a lower status than rationality, yet emphasizes that we cannot reach rationality and moral sensitivity without them. He focuses solely on the roundabout contribution to experience made by our ability to think, reason, and make moral choices. Most importantly, when discussing abortion Hartshorne neglects his own emphasis on the primacy of love. Throughout Hartshorne’s work love has been the standard by which decisions are best determined, yet he fails to think as broadly on abortion as he does on most other philosophical questions.

Certainly rationality is relevant to the abortion question. For Hartshorne, its importance lies in the fact that the higher the level of rationality the higher the level of experiences creatures are able to contribute to God. Rational beings are capable of richer, more diverse, and more moral experiences than non-rational beings. They increase God’s pleasurable prehensions -- God’s sharing in, experiencing, and feeling of our feelings -- in ways beyond the capabilities of non-rational creatures. Hartshorne says:

Much of what people find troubling about abortion is the fact that it halts a life on the upswing, a life that could grow into and become almost anything we could imagine. It is an even deeper dilemma for this reason than euthanasia, which only occurs when life is on the downswing, already sliding toward death. To end a life on the downswing is sometimes the loving thing to do. Seldom is this true of life on the upswing, and the circumstances must be bleak indeed, for ending life so early to be a loving choice.

Love, too, is why we become so angry when a woman is casual about having an abortion. We find her casual attitude offensive. It often seems such a decision is made quickly, lightly or selfishly. Yet we feel deep sympathy and empathy for the woman who agonizes over her choice, and finally decides that abortion is the best, most caring decision she can make for herself, the fetus, and other children she may have. Each woman takes the same action. Each woman has an abortion, yet we as observers have strongly differing reactions, and differing amounts of respect for their decisions. The difference lies in the amount of love behind their choices.

Despite the fact that Hartshorne believes all creatures are intrinsically valuable to God, when he discusses abortion he focuses on the only value humans contribute, excluding non-rational creatures. Only when discussing abortion does Hartshorne convey this disassociation between humans and other creatures.

I believe Hartshorne’s focus on rationality as the source of our highest value is misplaced. While it has a vital and unique contribution to make, rationality alone is not what elevates humans above other creatures. Rationality is not our most God-like quality; it is merely our least animalistic attribute.

When considering value to God, there are distinctions that can be made other than the one between rationality and non-rationality. The distinction between loving actions and unloving actions is just as important (and sometimes just as ambiguous) as the distinction between the capacity or lack of capacity for rational thought and moral understanding. Surely the person who is both rational and loving contributes more value to God than one who is rational and full of hate.

We protect our children, both as parents and through legislation, from people who would contribute hate to their lives, whether those people are rational or not. This protectiveness is, in many circumstances, extended against those who are simply unloving or non-loving toward children. We would not willingly choose such a person, no matter how rational, as a friend, companion, or guardian for them. The contributions unloving people might make to children run the risk of damaging them, and there is little doubt on anyone’s part that the contributions of hate-filled persons create serious damage to the lives around them, whether child or adult.

Yet given appropriate supervision, we do not protect children from experiences of non-rational people, such as the mentally handicapped, in the same way. Many of the mentally handicapped are only marginally rational, yet extremely loving. The persons around them gain from sharing their experiences, and we teach our children to respond to them kindly or lovingly rather than with fear. If this is a sensible view of what we believe non-loving and non-rational people contribute to our children’s experiences, it should be a reasonable beginning for considering what they would contribute to God. Certainly I am unwilling to accept the idea that non-rationality squanders God’s experiencing of the world in the same way hate does. How can a simple lack of rationality have even less value than outright wickedness?

If we are more valuable to God than other creatures, it is because rationality and morality make us capable of a love more like God’s own love than any other creature. When discussing how God "fully appropriates every feeling of value there is," Hartshorne states: "The highest intrinsic value must be the value of the most perfect and inclusive form of love" (OOTM 81). According to Hartshorne, we are to love others as we love ourselves, and to love God with all we are, for that is how we best contribute to God (WM 83). Hartshorne also states: "Whatever good qualities of experience we enjoy, or help others to enjoy, will be indestructible elements in the Life, love for which is, so far as we understand ourselves, our inclusive concern. If there is any serious rival to this as an aim, I do not know of it" (OOTM 120). Love is the best standard we have of value to God, for it is our best understanding of God. Indeed, to insist on any other standard would be demeaning, for it would rob even the most highly rational beings of value.

Hartshorne discusses the significance of experience in connection with the development of identity and individuality, and again when he discusses the development of rationality He considers social experience to be crucial for developing the emotional health that leads to rationality. But social experience is also crucial for developing love. Love, like rationality, cannot develop unaided. Neither intellect nor rationality is sufficient for love to develop. The interplay between self and others is essential to love, both before and after we become rational.

Hartshorne must face certain criticisms if he excludes love from his measure of value. Consider that he plainly states, "In sober truth, how can one love a fetus, by all evidence with less actual intelligence than a cat, as one loves oneself? I say, it cannot be done. Self-righteousness is not the same as love, whether for God or the creatures" (TBEF 35).

Hartshorne does not explain his assumption that only the intelligence of the fetus determines whether one is able to substantially feel love for it. I think this statement captures the basis for his highly utilitarian view of the abortion issue, and I think it is a fundamental error which misdirects Hartshorne away from his own emphasis on love. It contrasts oddly with much of his other work. Here Hartshorne seriously and uncharacteristically underestimates the sources, depth, and quality of the loving feelings of many mothers at the very least, and probably many fathers, grandparents, and others as well. The simple fact that these feelings exist demonstrates that the idea of love cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the abortion question. Hartshorne’s sole focus on rationality without including love distorts the picture.

Love for a fetus can be clearly shown to be separate from any question of intelligence. Consider that millions of women have loved the life within them just the way they love themselves -- and sometimes better, or at least with more care and kindness, than they love themselves. The intelligence of the fetus plays no essential part in this experience. The pregnant woman cannot treat the fetus worse -- less lovingly or with less care -- than she treats herself. She can, however, treat it better than she might normally treat herself. It is common to find that a woman takes better care of her health during pregnancy through good nutrition, adequate rest, avoiding drugs, and having prenatal checkups. These are not simply acts of self-righteousness, but actions of love and concern for the fetus’s current as well as future well-being.

It might be claimed that a woman who would take these actions on behalf of her fetus would not be the sort of woman who would consider an abortion, But such assumptions perpetuate precisely the sorts of prejudice that should be dispelled -- that only "bad" women, or women who would make "bad mothers." would ever consider or obtain an abortion.

Next, consider the grief a miscarriage produces. That grief is more than sadness at the loss of a potential person. The simple knowledge that the fetus exists alters the lives of the people whose existence it touches. One’s thinking changes, and certain actions change as well. If the miscarriage is in the latter stages of pregnancy, grief is more pronounced, for the mother suffers the loss of shared experiences with the fetus as well as the anticipated time together. This grief is experienced even when for some unhappy reason it is a relief that the pregnancy ended. Truly, isn’t this the loss we suffer at any stage of life? Death is in many aspects simply the loss of shared experiences.

Shared experiences help create love. In discussing abortion Hartshorne seems to have forgotten that he calls "life sharing, delighting in the lives of others the most fundamental aspect of love" (WM 119). Hartshorne also says, "The primacy of love means that there is no possible value that any being could have simply in and by itself, or simply by its own decision" (OOTM 45). According to Hartshorne, even God must have a world to experience, and to love.

Only when discussing abortion does Hartshorne fail to account for synergy in our relationships. Synergy between two creatures creates a value beyond what either of them can create independently, even when some creatures are non-rational. This means there is a value in our lives that is not accounted for at an individual level. Experiences do not have to be based on intelligence and rationality to create this value. Even fetuses can contribute synergistically to value by influencing the lives of those around them. Our merely knowing they exist alters our behaviors and choices. This is precisely why Hartshorne opposes legislating against abortion -- he recognizes the power of the relationship and the alteration of experiences that will occur due to the fetus’ existence. That relationship may create love, fear, worry or hope, but it is clearly not valueless, nor experience-free. If it were, there would be no need for debate about abortion.

Take as an example the infant which Hartshorne considers a non-person. This infant is not capable of directly contributing anything much, relatively speaking, to God. Yet through a relationship with the infant, its mother or father can develop a new capacity for maturity, strength, and love. Children, too, who learn about loving and caring for others more helpless than themselves, whether goldfish or baby brothers, become capable of more depth of feeling in their experiences and relationships. They develop a larger capacity for contribution to the Divine life than they would be capable of without those experiences and relationships. They learn to be more loving, They grow into it, as we all do. Hartshorne says:

Those whose existence allows us the opportunity for growth in love have a value that cannot be properly measured when rationality is the yardstick. Growth and the rounding off of the rough edges of our humanity occur when our lives and experiences touch. Relationships with others who cannot give back anything of apparent value to us or to God still create more value than any single person can contribute.

Clearly there is more to be considered under the topic of abortion than Hartshorne’s simplistic view that the value of the pregnant woman’s rationality and morality outweighs the lack of rationality and morality of the fetus. Even by Hartshorne’s own standards, the best measure for value may not be rationality, for he says the following:

It is clear that value is created in our lives that would not exist without love. The value of loving feelings and experiences is not strictly individual, nor is it solely based on intelligence and rationality. Without love, experience is incomplete. Without love, rationality has the capacity to remain inhuman and immoral, which contributes little to God. It cannot be excluded from the criteria for value.

Further, it is disconcerting to find all humanity pooled together at the tip of the creaturely continuum, just beyond rationality’s threshold. If such a continuum must be devised, it should continue far beyond the point of rationality, in order to demonstrate the position of those whose experiences and actions better emulate God’s love. The continuum is misleading if it fails to differentiate between the Hitlers and the Mother Teresas of the world. It fails to represent an important aspect of our value.

Hartshorne appears to compartmentalize his thinking about abortion. It is the only place in his philosophy where he attempts to ignore the value of our social experiences, which cannot sensibly be discounted. This much is clear from the significance he places on social experience as essential to rationality. He may be justified in removing sole emphasis from the genetic view of humanity and pointing up the problems inherent in dealing with potentiality, but they should not be dismissed from the deliberation. They, too, are a part of our humanity.

Hartshorne’s neglect of the synergistic effects of love as it applies to fetuses and infants is a signature of this compartmentalized thinking. He separates abortion, neglecting to apply to the issue ideas that are, for Hartshorne, central metaphysical and theological beliefs. Love, both human and Divine, has always been a defining concept in Hartshorne’s work.

Even so, Hartshorne takes a solidly pro-choice stance: that no one can fully understand the complexities an individual weighs when making a decision about a pregnancy; that no governmental body is entitled to dictate to individuals what the available choices are, including abortion; and that ultimately the woman directly involved has the right to make a decision about her commitment to a pregnancy without moral condemnation. A further implication of Hartshorne’s position, although never expressly stated, is that abortion on demand, at any stage of pregnancy, is endorsed. This is an unpalatable position to many who might otherwise agree with Hartshorne’s views.

Those who turn to these criticisms hoping for a firm argument against abortion and Hartshorne’s support of it will not quite find what they seek. The addition of love to contributionism does not alter Hartshorne’s position in the strong sense of disallowing abortion on moral grounds. But while it does not provide grounds for a general condemnation of abortion, this addition may allow a moral distinction to be made between an abortion chosen in a thoughtful, loving manner, and one carelessly or selfishly chosen.

Certainly a further examination of the tension between love, rationality, and the ability for moral sensitivity is needed to determine the appropriate proportion of emphasis among these criteria, as is a careful examination of their moral implications. A thorough philosopher looking to modify Hartshorne’s position might also wish to examine the consequences of using Hartshorne’s conception of love as the sole determining factor in the abortion issue, to probe Hartshorne’s views on potentiality and to consider the criticisms of those who see Hartshorne’s position as too utilitarian in nature.

Examining Hartshorne’s ethics against his metaphysical and theological views is fertile ground for further investigation. It allows insight into the internal strength of his work, as well as searching out his flaws and inconsistencies.

References

CC21 Charles Hartshorne, "Concerning Abortion: An Attempt at a Rational View," The Christian Century 21(1981), 42-45. Reprinted in Speak out Against the New Right. Edited by Herbert F. Vetter. Boston: Beacon Press, 1982,152-157. Also reprinted in The Ethics of Abortion. R.M. Baird and S.E. Rosenbaum. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Press, 1989,109-114.

DWV Charles Hartshorne, Personal letter to Donald Wayne Viney, May 4,1981.

PCH H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr, "Natural Theology and Bioethics," The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne Library of Living Philosophers Volume XX, Edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn. La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1991,159-168.

TBEF Charles Hartshorne, "Scientific and Religious Aspects of Bioethics," Theology and Bioethics Exploring the Foundation, and Frontiers, Edited by Earl E Shelp. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1985,27-44.

TM Mary Anne Warren, "Moral and Legal Status of Abortion," Th Monist 53 (1973),43-61.

TP Wayne Viney and William Douglas Woody, "Psychogeny: A Neglected Dimension in the Teaching of the Mind-Brain Problem," Teaching of Psychology 22(1995), 173-177.