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Philosophical materialism enjoys a large body of empirical support in cognitive psychology precisely because the agenda of the psychology is motivated by the very concepts the philosophy endeavors to explain. This is not the case in process thought where the genetic concepts that underlie evolutionary and developmental theories have had scant impact on process studies and there is little or no interpenetration of philosophical analysis with psychological research. This is not a promising state of affairs.

The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the implications for process philosophy of a new approach to brain psychology and the dynamics of the mental state -- microgenetic theory -- that has developed out of the study of symptoms in neurological cases. This approach has much in common with process metaphysics, especially in the concept of time, change and the actualization (becoming) over phases in the brain in the momentary development of a cognition.

I. Microgenesis and Process Theory

Microgenesis refers to the actualization (Aktualgenese) of a cognition over "layers" in mind and brain that retrace growth patterns in phyloontogeny.¹ The recapitulation that is the cornerstone of historical theory is a repetition of the antecedents of a behavior that phyletic or ontogenetic process lays down. In its simple form, the theory held that a cognition develops over anatomical stages in the brain. These stages are entrained at successive phases and are aligned in a sequence that reflects evolutionary growth. This was the shape of early recapitulation theory as applied to brain and behavior. There were some who postulated a retracing of archaic repertoires that remained embedded in the final behavior, for example Paul MacLean’s notion of a reptilian and protomammalian brain within the mature human brain.²

Gradually, it became clear that it is not the stages or the behaviors that are reproduced but the configural properties of the process through which they actualize, that is, the process is revived, not the actual elements into which it deposits. Moreover, the earlier concept of a collapse of the millions of years of phylogeny, or the lifespan of ontogeny, into the milliseconds of a cognition, or the idea of a process that continued over evolutionary, lifespan and cognitive durations was replaced by the concept of an iteration of a single process or pattern that binds together the different time frames.

More precisely, the duration of phyletic or ontogenetic process is not the evolutionary (maturational) history of a species (organism); the former is more accurately the sum of its ontogenies. Evolution is a population dynamic, ontogeny the life story of an individual. From the individual standpoint, evolution is the antecedent line of all prior ontogenies for that organism. Thus, the question, what exactly is an ontogeny? The conventional view is of a process that extends over the lifespan. But there is a way of regarding ontogeny as a moment of growth that is cyclically revisited. What is the lifespan if not a temporal aggregate that is woven by the mind into a seamless thread from the series of discrete momentary actualities.

If this is the proper way to interpret ontogeny, the duration we are seeking would not extend from infancy to senescence; ontogeny is not the longevity -- the growth and decay -- of the organism from birth to death. Rather, the duration of an ontogeny lies in the covert process that deposits the organism each moment and at every phase in its life cycle. In this way of thinking, the momentary actualization of the organism, its becoming, is the fundamental note from which the melody of development is composed.

Every becoming of the mental state (microgeny) creates a novel moment. The moment has to be novel for change to occur. The absence of novelty is sameness or identity. An entity cannot be self-identical from one moment to the next. This would imply an absence of change, thus an absence of time. The novelty of the entity, its temporality and change from one moment to the next, are codependent phenomena. The becoming creates the novelty as well as the duration through which the entity momentarily exists. Each novel moment is a constituent of an imaginative series over which the entity endures.

The genetic concepts can be related to those of change and time. Instead of the microgeny occurring over an objective duration that is linked to other genetic processes, one can say that the microgeny of the mental state does not fill time or "take" time but is time-creating! The microgenesis of an object elaborates the time in which that object exists and is enjoyed. The momentary state is a universe of time and change. This world of the moment, which is all we know, becomes the setting for an illusory extension into longer or shorter time scales which then seem to occupy a portion of an external time in a relation of the phenomenal to the absolute.

There is a distinction here of a potential time that becoming creates, and a container time over which the becoming occurs. The distinction is important, as is the choice, because in making it one takes a stance on the frontier of the conceptual. Microgenesis is firmly committed to the subjectivity of temporal experience. Whitehead alluded to this distinction and proposed that mental space-time conforms to the dominant space-time of nature: he was led to the position "that we are aware of a dominant space-time continuum and that reality consists of the sense-objects projected into that continuum" (ENP 102;³ PPT⁴).

Leaving aside the details of the theory and its clinical basis, which have been discussed at length elsewhere (LM), microgenesis can be characterized as a whole-to-part specification that recurs in rhythmic overlapping waves-fields, i.e., wave fronts, oscillators. The sequence is obligatory, recurrent and unidirectional. The cascade of whole/part shifts over evolutionary growth planes in the brain leads from a core in upper brainstem through limbic formations to the neocortical rim. The progression is from the intrapsychic to the extrapersonal, from image to object, from self to world. Consciousness is a configuration over phases in the same mental state, those that lay down, in succession, the self, personal space and the external world. This relation, as with every relation, is not Instantaneous -- in an instantaneity, relations are annihilated -- but depends, as Whitehead pointed out, on a virtual duration that is derived from an imaginative reconstruction of the specious present (ENP 100).

II. Divisibility

In a microgeny the succession of phases is ordered from earlier to later (SP; TWMP),⁵ though a complete traversal of all phases is necessary to establish a self, a world and a phenomenal now. Since the specious (phenomenal) present (see Figure 1, below) is extracted from a disparity across surface and depth phases, the disparity -- in order for there to be one -- obligates a realization of the entire sequence. But the phases do not have an independent existence until the becoming terminates, i.e., achieves an actuality, after which the phases constituting that becoming can be delineated. Without an actuality, the phases are "out of time" and therefore non-existent.

The brain state is indivisible, yet it is a complex entity. The indivisibility reflects the non-temporality of the succession of phases in each occasion. The epoch over which the phases are distributed, i.e., the subjective duration the entity elaborates, not its enactment in physical time, does not exist prior to its completion. The reconstruction of a phase-sequence is a retrospective act. The becoming is atomic, an indivisible unit of time. This temporal unit must first be created before its phases can be hypostatized.

Similarly, for Whitehead, the temporal passage in a becoming was not to be construed in the sense of a uniquely serial advance" (PR 35). A becoming is not divisible into parts, though a gradation of phases can be described. The analysis of an entity is an intellectual act. Indivisibility is not a sign of simplicity. Indivisible objects are not basic entities. Indeed, there are no basic entities.

For some Whitehead scholars, the analysis of concrescence into phases, and the account of a sequence of prehensions, are inconsistent with the concept of a nontemporal becoming.⁶ Sequence and phase are temporal concepts. But a phase does not count for something until there is an entity. An entity creates its phases no less than it is created by them. The completion of the becoming does not require that a set of phases complete its cycle but rather that the entity become itself, i.e., whatever it is. Waiting until the concrescence is complete before its analysis can take place is not a waiting for the details of the genetic sequence to be revealed. Successive states are "called up" and ordered. The calling up creates the order. The ordering creates the temporal unit over which the calling up occurs, but not before a whole entity is achieved.

Clearly, a comparable paradox bedevils microgenetic thinking. The identification of segments in a continuum introduces an arbitrary demarcation. The continuum must objectify before the segments can be identified, but even then their demarcation is not possible. In the succession of phases, the direction is anisotropic. The formative sequence of brain evolution guarantees the direction of the actualization. Evolution and growth are constraints on the direction of process. If cognition is unidirectional, like phyloontogeny, the direction from past to present entails that a comparable sequence of phases in the microgeny should be discernible.

In each microgeny, phases are conceptual anchors in the continuous flux of change. The change within a microgeny is novel and indeterminate prior to an actuality. Every phase is a potential for the ensuing phase. A phase in transition is insubstantial, unbounded, like a wave in the ocean. The concept of phases or segments in a continuum, i.e., when boundaries are assigned, if taken too literally, may be irreconcilable with a whole-to-part process. Segmentation implies a concatenation or, if a continuity, one that is chopped into sections. Segments have delimitations yet can be overlapping; phases are less discrete.

III. Category and Phase

The brain is an organic process through which actual or existent objects (acts, utterances, feelings, etc.) are created. Process is a pattern of change. What is unique about brain process is that it stabilizes change, or "chunks" it into categories. The forming of categories achieves a stability of a natural kind that is unlike the artificial properties of intellectual analysis that have to carry the full weight of logical stability for objects that are otherwise unrepeatable. Categories are wholes to their members, which become wholes to subsidiary members, and so on, in a progression that is bottomless. The forming of wholes, or categories, is what the brain does best, and the effect is powerful. A real world and a constant self depend on it. That is why the illusion of stability is so pervasive and the dynamic of change so opaque.

More precisely, from the standpoint of conceptual processes, the continuum is a transition from a category (whole) to an instance (part) where the latter is the basis of another transition. The transition has the character of an emergence of whole-like parts from part-like wholes, where the wholes are not mere collections, and the parts are not definite elements but the potential to form subsequent wholes. The whole-part relation is a successive nesting that finally terminates in a concrete part, an actuality, that does not serve as a whole for a further transformation. An actuality is a concrete fact. An actual object is the finality for every succession of phases. The final transform completes the entity and thereby makes it real. The relation of whole to part is that of a recursive embedding of potentialities. One might imagine the pattern of concentric waves when a stone is tossed in a pool, but in reverse. It is questionable whether this relation is captured by the notion of phases or segments in a longitudinal series.

IV. Past and Present

The past is re-presented in the present. The development is wholly in the present but can be described as proceeding from the past to the present, loosely, from memory to perception.⁷ This progression is the reverse of the presumed flow of mental process in the research paradigms of experimental cognition and in neuroscience, where perception is held to precede memory, i.e., objects register and are secondarily identified through a match to items in memory. The immediate object is relayed to a past copy of that object for recognition. On this view, perception is inevitably passive. We never know what we are looking at, or what we want to look at, until after we see it.

Microgenetic theory entails that objects are recognized before they are consciously perceived, that objects are remembered into perception. A memory is an incompletely developed perception, while an object is a memory that has objectified or an image that has exteriorized. The sequence from past to present or from memory to perception corresponds with the direction of growth trends in forebrain evolution. For example, ancestral limbic systems mediate "long term" memory, i.e., meaning and experiential relations, whereas later evolved neocortical zones mediate the discriminant perception of external objects, i.e., the analysis of mental objects into (external) space.

The succession of phases in microgenesis is not to be construed as a conveyance or transfer of mental content from one stage to the next. A phase transformed was only the potential for that transformation. The transformed phase is a potential for the phase to follow. The final actuality actualizes the entire sequence. Preliminary phases in the object are ingredient and constitutive. We know this because damage to a preliminary stage can result, say, in a well-formed object (word, etc.) deprived of its meaning or recognition. Or, the conscious perception of the object’s form can be "lost" with good apprehension of meaning, i.e., meaning is "encoded" before objects are consciously perceived. Here, the past of a present object -- its recognition, familiarity, etc.-- is realized into a present cognition, though the actual object that embodies that recognition has not been adequately discriminated.

An object is a process of momentary actualization. Each traversal from depth to surface is a minimal or irreducible unit of cognition and elaborates a whole unit of subjective time. The full, formative diachronic process, its temporal "thickness" or extension, is the object. As in process philosophy, the essence of the object is its microformation; the object’s being, i.e., its existence or being present or realness, is its becoming. A veridical object is the final thrust of becoming as process carries the past into the present. Every object is an assertion of the configural history of the organism. One can say that a present object consists mostly of the personal past of the observer. This past, or its abstract residue, that is imminent, covertly, in every occurrent state.

In microgenesis, objects are generated from phases of potential to forms that become actual in order to become real. A pure subjectivity is avoided by the assumption that the material world modulates the generative process. What actualizes is a negative image of the entire realm of multi-tiered nature. Still the objects of perception are concrete images in the mental space of an observer. This differs from process metaphysics, which incorporates the object in the act of becoming, holding that an object is given or imminent in an occasion. The problem of substance-quality categories is circumvented by this move, though in my opinion at the cost of some coherence in the theory.

Every actuality revives the past as it actualizes. For the sake of a momentary appearance, the actual reaches back to ancient neural structures at the horizon of subjectivity. The past is out of time, and depends for its existence on the reinstatement of present experience. In the formation of the present, the past exerts a configural influence of which one is ordinarily unaware. This is the implicit past, i.e., personal and world knowledge, that is brought to bear on every act and object. The past becomes explicit when it achieves an awareness as a memory. Becoming explicit is becoming a fact of experience, even if what is explicit is a mental fact, e.g., an image, an idea however fuzzy, a proposition, etc.

A memory image is a present image of a past event. Were it to fully objectify, were the incipient present to vivify a recollection into a solid object, the result would be a present image of a present event. Whitehead wrote, "there is no essential reason why memory should not be raised to the vividness of the present fact" (CN), but to revive the actual present of a past state, i.e., not a memory of the past but a preceding actuality, would be to hallucinate with an object-like clarity. But of course there is nothing to say this is not the case with ordinary perception.

If an actuality is not achieved, the past remains forever past; it is excluded from subjectivity, thus from existence. Only in an actuality does the past become alive, and then not as the fact it once was but as an implicit constraint on a novel content. The continuum from implicitness to fact as a past (memory) grows into a present (perception), retraces the process of percept formation. The micro-genesis of an object is a microcosm of its birth, life and death, a surge of the object into actuality out of abstract, timeless potential.

V. Change

Whitehead’s metaphysics is a meditation of exceptional depth on the "locus" of change in the mind and the world. An epoch of change is an epoch of time that is bounded by a past out of time that grows through subjective time into its forward limit with every epoch creating a present that is absorbed into timelessness for the next cycle of actualization. Time and change are a flutter of the imagination in the embrace of two eternities. This is so for process metaphysics where becoming is bounded on either end by an eternal (timeless) object. For microgenesis, the onset and terminus of the mental state are changeless boundaries encircling a process of change. The microgeny is a moment of time suspended between the limits of timelessness, like the experience of living, which is the dream of life that hovers on the eternity of sleep.

Every entity has a finite period -- for a mind, a microgeny -- over which it becomes. The entity then perishes and is replaced, as in the blink of the Brahma, by an oncoming epoch that is a near replication. The entity changes in becoming actual. The change is intrinsic to the actualization. The actuality is epochal. The final object cannot be detached from all the phases in its becoming, indeed, it is those phases, so that change within the becoming is not apparent to a self that is deposited by the becoming, a self that is conscious only of a succession of objects, the apparent or illusory change from one actual object to another. The self is more closely replicated than its objects, which differ (come and go, change position, etc.) across the series of replications.

A replication is driven by the intrinsic constraints of the resting state at each phase as well as by the extrinsic constraints of occurrent sensation. A given state actualizes over the residue of a prior one; its thresholds limit the freedom in each traversal. The replication is never exact. The degree to which an actuality departs from a prior entity is determined by a number of factors, the flux of occurrent sensation, the baseline activity at each phase as it is activated, the decay of prior states and the emergent novelty inherent in the becoming process.

In microgenesis, change is perceived as a comparison across the successive occasions of an actual object. Objects are perceived as solid entities that change, not changes that assume the appearances of entities. The perception of change is a perception of difference not a perception of change. Genuine change is intrinsic to a given object; apparent (extrinsic) change is the perception of difference or a comparison across two changes. Genuine change occurs in the process of actualization through which a percept develops. The process leading to the object is the change from the object of a moment ago. Once the object actualizes, it no longer changes. The neural activity corresponding to the object is "erased" in the brain as a path is prepared for the next actuality.

We perceive an entity as a solid because we need to perceive it that way in order to perceive it at all, and in order to survive. The stability of self and world has been achieved through a long evolutionary struggle. That is why we are here. The brain neutralizes change by transferring it from the time within objects to the space between them, displacing the change that is ingredient in the object to a surface interaction as another property of space. Genuine or non-illusory change is imperceptible for the reason that the change that is occurring can not be apprehended from a stationary viewpoint. The viewpoint is what the change is laying down.

Change is cyclical and pulsatile, a rising into actuality and a falling into abstract endurance. Wallack wrote that actuality "jumps from occasion to occasion" (ENP). The jump from one object to another gives apparent change in consciousness. Genuine change and subjective time are generated by the actualization of a single object. Every change is a changed world. Change is not in the "interval" between two actualities. The interstices of a series of microgenetic epochs are timeless, thus non-existent. The continuity across changes -- the "glue" of passage -- arises from the timeless (changeless) "gap" between actualities.

The observer has a perception of change across successive entities (worlds). Some objects seem to change rapidly, others not at all. Yet a butterfly on the wing and a stationary rock in the garden are each, as Whitehead would say, a mass of raging particles. The persistence of the rock, or its apparent lack of change, is not the absence of change but the relative similarity of its recurrence. The object keeps replacing itself and changes little in each replacement. With a butterfly, each replacement is a changed object. Change deposits the replacement in a series of novel objects. The perception of change, and the rate at which an object seems to be changing, depend on the resemblance of actualities across recurrences. With labile change across instances in a series of microgenies, the resultant entities appear to change quickly. Even with the minimal change of a rock, a recurrence is never exact. The light, the shadow, the perspective, the world around the rock, the world "inside" the rock, everything changes in every change. The repetition of a becoming is always a new beginning. This is consistent with Whitehead’s belief "that what becomes involves repetition transformed into novel immediacy"(PR 137).

The meaning of change is linked to the meaning of time though change appears to be more fundamental because time is generated by change, i.e., an absence of change is an absence of time, and time more than change is mind-dependent. Change is what actually happens in the actualization of a given entity. Time is an emergent of a series of actualizations once the sequence of phases within an actualization has been established.

In process philosophy, there are two meanings of change. According to Leclerc, "the kind of change involved in an act or process of becoming must be carefully distinguished from the kind of change constituted by a transition from one entity to another" (WM 79). Becoming is one form of change, transition across entities is another. The former is the process through which an entity exists, the latter is "the difference between actual occasions comprised in some determinate event" (PR 73).

These forms of change differ in causal relations. Whitehead wrote that "efficient causation expresses the transition from actual entity to actual entity; and final causation expresses the internal process whereby the actual entity becomes itself’ (PR 150). The efficient causation (causa quod) of process theory, the existing state of affairs, corresponds with the apparent or illusory change of microgenetic theory, while the final causation (causa ut) of process theory, the state to be produced, the intention, corresponds with the real or intrinsic change of microgenesis.

There is no change of an entity in a becoming, for the becoming is the entity. The process through which the entity becomes is its change. Change within an entity is the process constituting that entity, so it cannot fairly be said that the entity changes through a becoming. The entity is not what it is until the becoming is complete. Once it is complete, it does not change, it perishes. Change and time in our experience of the world are perceived as related to the differences between objects. A difference involves a comparison. If the comparison is between simultaneities, the act of comparison introduces a succession. With time and change, the I. comparison is across successivities, i.e., from a prior to a subsequent state. The problem is exceedingly subtle. If the comparison is between entities that actualize but do not change, nor change once they actualize, i.e., if change deposits entities which themselves do not change, where is change if not in the observer, and what is an observer if not an emergent of change?

VI. Time

Whitehead states that in scientific thinking, "change is essentially the importation of the past and of the future into the immediate fact embodied in the durationless present instant" (PNX).⁸ In process thought, however, the future is not imported into the present but is grounded in the present as a subjective aim. Becoming is asymmetric. The assumption of an anisotropy of time, along with the "momentariness" of change in spite of the epochal nature of moments, aligns the theory with microgenetic concepts.

In process philosophy, the not-being of an object that perishes is not a nothing. It is absorbed into the permanent structure of the non-temporal world to endure as an abstract foundation for ensuing change. Actuality passes into timelessness; once timeless, the entity is eternal. In contrast, in the genetic process, temporal order is created out of non-temporality and devolves back into timelessness. The mental state spans a non-temporal inception that merges with a non-temporal outcome. Every mental state creates its own duration. Time inhabits many worlds, timelessness only one. Perishing and becoming are the ingress and egress of temporality as it pulses in and out of the same non-temporal ground.

In process philosophy, time is the conformity of successive states to their antecedents. The epochal nature of becoming displaces time from within an epoch to the succession of epochal states. Whitehead commented that the synthesis or realization of objects introduces temporal process. For some interpreters, such as John Cobb, time is in the transition; for others, time is in both the transition across occasions and in the becoming of the occasion itself. In microgenetic theory, time is only within the becoming. Time in duration, thus the past, present and future, precedence, etc., is created by a single state within which antecedents are embedded. The succession is necessary for the revival as an implicit "layering" within the occurrent state. Time is not elaborated by the succession, but by relational features of the revival of antecedents within a unique occasion. A micro-genetic state is both epochal and time-creating.

The perishing of a state is a dying back or attrition from the surface of the next revival. The entire state perishes but earlier phases are revived more readily than final ones. Conceivably, the earlier phases fade before the later, in the same sense that antecedent moments in the orbit of an electron no longer exist by the time the orbit is complete. The "by the time" is the problem, for there is no time until the sequence is concluded. This epoch is required for an entity to become itself. Every happening within an epoch is out of time until the epoch is whole. Only in retrospect can precedence be established, so an entity not yet in time cannot perish, while once "in time" it has perished already.

In each microgeny, earlier phases generate the past, later ones the present. Studies in process metaphysics have tried to disambiguate the before/after series from the past/present succession. One can have a before and after, but there is no past until there is a present for the past to be past in relation to. The actualization of the present transforms the before and after to a sequence from past to present.

When we say that decay begins with the present and leads depthward to the past, it is equivalent to saying that in the occurrent state, i.e., in relation to a present, only the past of a prior state is revived. Still there is a paradox in the association of early and late with past and present when the entire state is the present state, including the configural effects on that present of any and all prior states. The death of the present is the death of the entire state, but the greater reproducibility of the proximal portion of the state, and the graded revival of the distant, then the recent, past, give the impression that a loss of the distal segment is a loss of the actual present. The surface activity of the state appears to be progressively attenuated to make way for the next actuality, while the past or depth of the state is renewed with greater conformance.

Decay and revival point to incompletion of process. To say a prior entity decays in an occurrent state is to say it is partially revived in the ensuing one. The degree to which the state unfolds, and the recession of prior states within the present, give the "specious" or phenomenal present. This duration is extracted from the disparity between the forward edge of the actual object and the "floor" of the decay, or the "ceiling" of the revival, of a prior actuality. The state is revived to a point where the immediate past is a content in "short-term memory" buried in the actuality of the present.

The duration of the present in microgenetic theory is comparable in some respects to that in process philosophy, though the duration at issue is that of the subjective present, not the duration over which an entity becomes itself. A duration is not a stretch of time spanned by a perception but a virtual compresence of successive events in a "concrete slab of nature," in which all events are simultaneous, and successive simultaneities overlap. Whitehead thought there was no explanation for this phenomenon. But a genetic approach to the mental state, in which the feeling of duration arises as an implicit comparison between the surface of the actual present and the revived (immediate) past within it, can provide an account of this aspect of the mental life.

Legend: The state at T-1 is incompletely revived at T-2, less so at T-3. The duration of the present is extracted from the disparity between the "surface" at T-2 or T-3 and the embedded "floor" of T-1 or T-2.

In a succession of occasions, the initial state is revived less and less in each subsequent microgeny, eventually to recede into long-term memory beneath conscious accessibility. Every state unfolds over personal memory from the distant to the recent past. The present fades as a new present appears but phases of memory within that present are uncovered as if in a backward descent. In this way, the recent past and the momentary present, the recession of the old and the recurrence of the new, form the boundaries of a virtual duration that is the theatre of conscious experience.

VII. Individuation

In the becoming of an object there is a progression toward greater definiteness. Whitehead wrote, in process "the creative idea works toward the definition and attainment of a determinate individuality" (PR 150). In the process that generates an object, diverse entities become concrete by a coalescence or synthesis into a unitary occasion. Concrescence is the coming together of parts to form organic wholes. Microgenesis entails a progressive specification of parts that individuate out of unity. The fundamental direction is the analysis of spatial wholes into temporal parts.

The striving toward definiteness is the goal of evolutionary process. Form is shaped into objects by the elimination of the unfit. Cognition is microevolution. Before they even take hold, those routes of potentiality that could be maladaptive are pruned by sensory and other constraints to make way for what becomes actual. The endogenous generates a potential that is parsed to an object that survives the pressures of adaptation, i.e., the constraints on its development, to a fit with the sensory environment. The concept of parcellation in neuronal growth, the individuation in maturation of specific acts and objects, the analysis of gestalts into features, the relation of surround to center, theories of frame to content or context to item development in language and cognition, attempt to describe a wave of whole-part shifts through a succession of constraints on emergent form as a process in which diverse elements resolve out of organic wholes.

VIII. Mind and World

One can agree with David Bohm, that scientific objects are not fundamentally different from what happens in immediate perception (STR 228). Mind is governed by the same laws as the material world. It is the agency through which the world is perceived and understood. Accounts of the object world are theories of the mind, and ultimate accounts of the physical describe universal properties of mind. A machine theory of physical matter leads to a mechanical or computational account of mind. A causal account of scientific objects gives a causal account of mental ones. Such a theory has difficulty explaining patterns of behavior unless those patterns are reduced to the effects of lower level elements, e.g., genes, chemical reactions, modules.

The inner is primary because a subjectivity at the mercy of experience would consist of random impacts. The subjective is not a construction but creates the assemblage of facts and contents on which its supposed explanation rests. Subjectivity imposes order on experience. The mind is an organism in constant struggle. The organismic theory of mind is harmonious with the concept of the world as a creature. Mind is a living organism that pursues its own nature. One can be lead to a theory of scientific objects through the mind or to a theory of the mind through science. Each theory should have a set of axioms the other can share. The starting point doesn’t matter unless one starts with the wrong theory.

Whitehead based his metaphysics on quantum features of the material world and gave us the grounding of a philosophical psychology. A beginning with psychology, however, can lead to insights on physical process not anticipated by science. There is a deep consolation in the fact that the laws of mind and nature are reciprocally discoverable, and that both manifest the activity of thought. This leads one to ask if the becoming of material entities is an attribute of their existence in the mind or if their becoming in the mind is an instance of material becoming in nature. Put differently, is microgenesis a theory of mental process or is the process that the theory describes an instance of world process exemplified in the human mind?

References

Works by Jason W. Brown

LM Life of the Mind. New Jersey: Erlbaum, 1988.

PPT "Psychoanalysis and Process Theory," Neuroscience of the Mind on the Centennial of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 843. Edited by Robert Bilder and Frank Lefever. New York, 1998.

SP Self and Process. New York: Springer, 1991.

TWMP Time, Will and Mental Process. New York: Plenum, 1996.

Other References

STR David Bohm, The Special Theory of Relativity. New York: Benjamin, 1965.

WM Ivor Leclerc, Whitehead’s Metaphysics. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958.

ENP F. Bradford Wallack, The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1980.

Notes

1For the history of the idea, see Heinz Werner, "Microgenesis and Aphasia," Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology 52 (1956), 347- 353. See also: Robert Hanlon and J.W. Brown, "Microgenesis: Historical Review and Current Studies," Brain Organization of Language and Cognitive Processes, edited by Alfredo Ardila and Feggy Ostrosky (New York: Plenum, 1989) and Cognitive Microgenesis: A Neuropsychological Perspective edited by Robert Hanlon (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1991). On neuropsychological data in support of the theory, see my Life of the Mind (hereafter cited LM).

2See the article by Paul MacLean relating microgenesis to fractal geometry, "Neofrontocerebellar Evolution in Regard to Computation and Prediction: Some Fractal Aspects of Microgenesis," in Hanlon, see note 1.

3F.B. Wallack, The Epocal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphyics (cited as ENP).

4Jason W. Brown, "Psychoanalysis and Process Theory" (cited as PPT).

5Jason W. Brown, Time, Will, and Mental Process (cited as TWMP).

6 For example, Edward Pols, Whitehead’s Metaphysics (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967; cited as WM). See also the discussion in William Christian, "Some Aspects of Whitehead’s Metaphysics," Explorations in Whitehead’s Philosophy, edited by Lewis Ford and George Kline (New York: Fordham University Press, 1983), 31-44. See the discussion in Lewis Ford, "Can Whitehead’s God be Rescued from Process Theism?" Logic, God and Metaphysics, edited by J. Harris (Netherlands: Kluwer, 1992), 19-39.

7Memory and perception axe differently active at each phase. The topic is discussed in my "Psychoanalysis and Process Theory" (PPT).

8See the discussion in Paul Schmidt, Perception and Cosmology in Whitehead’s Philosophy (New York: Rutgers University Press, 1967).

The Choice

Today, at the portals of the 21st century and the dawn of the third millennium, we have the freedom to choose our destiny. The alternatives before us are evolution with distinction -- or devolution, ultimately to extinction. The choice is real and it is ours. The responsibility for making it can be neither ignored nor postponed.

Human life on Earth and in the wide reaches of the cosmos is a rare and precious resource. Among billions of galaxies, one is ours; among billions of stars in our galaxy, the sun is ours; among billions of living species on Earth, we are one. We may be but one among many living things on a small planet swimming in the endless spaces of a vast galaxy within an almost infinite cosmos, yet surely we are among the most astonishing manifestations of evolution in the whole of the universe. As atoms form from particles, and molecules form from atoms, so crystals and cells form from molecules and organisms form from cells. The human organism, too, formed in the course of this grand evolutionary beat, is co-evolving in a delicately balanced rhythm with the embracing web of life on this planet. In the last fifty thousand years, after twenty billion years of evolution in the cosmos and four billion years of evolution on Earth, the evolutionary beat brought forth the remarkable phenomena of human mind and consciousness.

A conscious being is a rare and perhaps unique element in the evolving cosmos. The atoms and molecules from which life has been fashioned are universal; life itself exists in myriad forms on this planet and may exist on myriad other planets in this galaxy and in countless others, but a conscious mind capable of thinking and feeling is unique on Earth and may be unmatched in the whole of the universe. Conscious human beings can rise above their history and gain insight into their condition. They can, if they so decide, take control of their destiny, and the destiny of their planetary habitat.

Yet, as we look at the contemporary world, what we see is not the panorama of a growingly conscious mastery of human destiny, but the unthinking courting of collective disaster. Political, ethnic and religious strife, social and economic injustice, and environmental degradation put in jeopardy the very future of life on Earth. If our generation makes wrong choices, the generation of our children will be the last in history. And if our children disappear, the untold potential for insight, for creativity, and for love and compassion of which the human spirit is capable, would vanish from the stage of the unfolding cosmic drama.

The choice between evolution and extinction confronts us this very day, and every day. Whatever we do either creates the framework for continuing the grand adventure of life and mind on this planet, or sets the stage for its termination. Our problems have assumed critical dimensions. Our ranks have exploded from one billion souls in the middle of the last century to five-and-a-half billion today, and will inflate to twelve or more before demographic growth could stabilize a hundred years hence. Our weapons of mass destruction could kill all the billions of humans, together with all life higher than insects and grass, not once but a dozen times over. And we are not only numerous; we are also avaricious. We exploit the Earth’s resources and place a growing load on its biosphere. In the last quarter of this century we have used more natural resources, destroyed more lifeforms, and created more air, soil and water pollution than in all previous ages put together.

Our generation, of all the thousands of generations before us, has been called upon to decide the destiny of life in this corner of the cosmos. This is an unprecedented challenge. In centuries past, even as a tribe or village overreached itself and destroyed the integrity of its immediate environment, its people could move on, seeking virgin territories and fresh resources. Today there is nowhere left to go. We are living throughout the habitable regions of the planet, and living close to the carrying capacity of its biosphere. There are no more islands, protected backyards where one could do as he or she pleased; what one does affects all others. There are no merely local populations and local ecologies; strands of interdependence criss-cross the globe. Overreaching ourselves could lead to the collapse of the planet’s entire life-support system. Living within a crowded and delicately balanced economic, social, and ecological system, we have become vitally dependent on each other, and on our collective habitat.

Though meeting the challenges that face us is difficult, it is not impossible. The remarkable faculties of a conscious mind embrace the powers of reason and intelligence, as well as the powers of love and solidarity. If we grow conscious of our condition, if we recognize the choices facing us, we shall develop the insight as well as the will to opt for a life-enhancing path of evolution rater than a life-destroying descent into extinction.

The Responsibility

Human beings seek more in life than food, water, shelter, and sex; more even than self-esteem, social acceptance, and love. They also seek ideals and causes of fundamental value -- something to live for, ideals to achieve, responsibilities to accept.

Conscious beings can be aware of the consequences of their actions and hence they can accept responsibility for them. Because in our interdependent and rapidly evolving world all actions impact on one another; even local actions can have global and long-term consequences. Thus accepting responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions means accepting responsibility for one’s impact on the future -- not just one’s own future and the future of one’s family and enterprise, but the future of all people in the present and in coming generations, the future of humanity. In an era of rapid transition and chaotic change, responsibility for one’s actions means responsibility for the evolution, rather than the extinction, of humanity.

The human responsibility for evolution entails specific responsibilities for one’s actions as: private individuals; citizens of one’s country; collaborators in a business; creators and transmitters of one’s culture; and members of the human species.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, the world is haunted by the dark side of interrelatedness. Human impact on the soils, rivers, land, air, and seas has reached devastating proportions in many places. Pesticides from farms in California accumulate in seals in the Arctic, radiation from Chernobyl spills north to Sami reindeer herds. Western forests are clear-cut, and eroding soil clogs salmon spawning areas. In industrialized areas, air and groundwater pollution contribute to rising rates of cancer and other diseases. The picture is sobering; it cries out for our attention.

Paul Ingram’s (See Paul O. Ingram The Jeweled Net of Nature, at www.religion-online.org.) major question reflects the spiritual and ethical human angst of existing in an undeniably interconnected world -- How then shall we live? I agree that Western views and practices responding to the natural world have been strongly shaped by Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman philosophy. It is our responsibility as Westerners to thoroughly investigate the structure and implications of these views in light of their environmental impact. I believe this deconstruction work is not only healthy, it is necessary for a full awakening to the systemic nature of widespread environmental deterioration.

Buddhist-Christian dialogue is an excellent arena for this conversation. Together we can use the tools of Buddhist analysis and Christian theologies to examine the complexities of the situation on behalf of the Earth. To lay blame on any single causal agent is not only simplistic but obstructive to dialogue. To blame is to create convenient but false dualisms of good and bad, which leave one mired in choosing sides and labeling enemies. From my Buddhist environmentalist perspective, we are all in this together, and we can’t afford to waste time pointing fingers at each other.

In the challenge and sometimes great suffering of this awakening process, there is often a great yearning for "harmony," often construed as the natural order of life from which we have strayed. Ingram suggests harmony is central both to the new ecological paradigm arising from science and to Kukai’s Buddhist world view. As this word has great potential for misinterpretation, I would like to comment from a Buddhist point of view on what harmony is and is not.

Harmony is not necessarily "balance," as Ingram implies in his third principle (7). The balance of nature is a Romantic idea of a pristine order before human influence, reflecting some notion of baseline stability, i.e., "the way things were." Scientists have wrestled with inadequate data and fossil records to describe the pre-human environment, but it is a difficult task at best. Stability of ecosystems is only relative; the concept of climax communities has been replaced by a more dynamic model of nature. Chaos theory explains the patterns set in motion by single specific and often random events; biological speciation reflects these events as well as temporary climate or landform stability. Under the fluctuating dynamics of change, "the balance of nature" is fleeting at best.

From a Buddhist perspective, harmony is more accurately seen as the fullness of nature in the widest sense, including humans and including terrible forces of destruction. To live in nondual harmony is to embrace the nature of all reality as 1) impermanent, 2) not existing as separate, and 3) interdependent. These characteristics are true for all forms of existence -- a thought, a tree, a lie, a city, a mountain. All arise and pass away; none hold a separate self-contained life; and each depends on numerous causes and conditions to come into being. To align with reality as it exists -- whether it is peaceful, violent, nourishing, or destructive-is to find the liberated mind of harmonious nonduality. This requires the systematic and rigorous investigation of one’s own and one’s society’s ideas of reality. Attachment to deluded concepts of nature generates the suffering of alienation -- the root of human separation from the environment. Thus, the Buddhist quest for harmony cannot be a peaceful escape to a serene projection of nature. The practitioner must avoid such laziness and actively root out deceptive ideas in order to be fully available to the awesome dimensions of the natural world. In so doing, one comes to experience and recognize the interdependent nature of all human, plant, and animal interactions. The harmonious life is then the responsible life, in which one accepts one’s role in the web as causal agent and chooses to act accordingly.

Kukai’s method for attuning oneself to the "eternal cosmic harmony" cultivates the experience of underlying unity in the relationship of mind and matter, subject and object, seer and seen. The four mandalas point one toward physical, ontological, communicative, and karmic nonduality. The goal of nondual understanding is especially attractive right now to Westerners living in a world characterized by fragmentation -- of landscapes, cities, families, and social communities. But I would like to emphasize that in the relative view of reality, differences do exist. And it is these differences we must negotiate to address difficult environmental problems. Beings do exist in distinct forms; this in itself is what allows for conversation and flow of activity. We have some choice about how we will interact with human and non-human others. The fact of distinction and differences sets up the possibility for dialogue, hope, and creative collaboration. Paying careful attention, we see how one desert is not the same as another, how different trees flourish under specific conditions, how some cultures speak with animals as spirit-friends. I believe the very practice of observing difference in great detail leads directly to profound understanding, instance after instance, of the penetrating unity of reality.

The question remains -- How then shall we live? Kukai’s three Mysteries of Body, Speech, and Mind offer some possibilities. The traditional prohibitory Buddhist precepts are guidelines for restraint, encouraging the practitioner to care for these three mysteries. "No killing," "no stealing" prevent abuse of material form or body; "no lying," "no slander or gossip" prevent abuse of communication; "no abuse of intoxicants, sexuality, anger, or delusional thoughts" prevent abuse of consciousness. How do these translate into caring for the earth?

The Mystery of the Body is the mystery of the Earth body, the human body, the landscape body, the bodies of plants, animals, rivers, and mountains. Not defaming this mystery in all its forms requires not polluting the soil, air, or water, not supporting excessive, unsustainable harvesting, consciously treating all beings as manifestations of the Mystery of Body. No killing means no thought of killing the interdependent nature of existence.

Speech, in Kukai’s sense is self-revelation; one’s sounding or speaking reflects one’s nature -- the creek rumbles, the blackbird warbles, the lightning booms. Human speech of Western cultures tends to objectify nature, maintaining dualities of hierarchical value with people above nature. One tends to speak about or for others, assuming that humans are the only life forms that self-reveal through speech. In contrast, Buddhist practices of environmental right speech would include non-stereotyping of animals, plants, and landscapes; non-anthropocentric bias in consideration of all interdependent relations; and non-objectification of others. In recognizing the wider Mystery of all self-revelatory beings, one would listen for or speak with the truth of the Other in co-equal conversation.

To examine the Mystery of Mind requires attention, reflection, and observation of the invisible interiority of self. Habits of thought and mind consciousness are shaped by both individual and social conditioning. Two predominant Western habits are enemyism and anthropocentrism, both of which promote false dualisms between people and nature. Enemyism is the habit of viewing the Other as a stranger to be feared, projecting one’s own negative traits onto the Other as destructive. To the extent one fears the natural world -- snakes, bats, cockroaches, poison oak, quagmires -- one labels certain forms of existence as enemy and rationalizes their destruction. The Buddhist antidote to anthropocentrism is not ecocentrism or biocentrism, but rather a-centrism, as Ingram points out (14). The Mystery of Mind arises in all forms of existence, everywhere at once. To observe and participate in the acentric nature of reality requires deconstructing the habits of mind that preserve self-isolation in all the many forms these take. Conversely, one can praise the Mystery of Mind by naming one’s dependence on others, cultivating gratitude and joy in the existence of infinite relationality.

The aesthetic order of nature suggested by new physics, process theology, ecology, and Buddhist philosophy presents a radical shift from the currently dominant "logical order" of mainline Christianity and Western rational thought. Recognizing the differences between the two and the implication of each for environmental health and stability, one can again ask the question -- How then shall we live? How can we cultivate a nondualistic appreciation of "rightness" which reveals the full expression of emergent nature? The Buddhist practices of mindfulness and living in the present moment are two places to begin. Mindfulness in breathing, mindfulness in walking, mindfulness in eating -- by paying close attention to these simple, daily activities, one gains continuity in remembering the intimate, dependent relationship with the natural world. The air we breathe, the ground we walk on, the food we eat all become practice teachers.¹

The practice of living in the present moment means paying attention to the particular nature of each moment, each situation, each interaction, each relationship. In this practice, one notices the tendency to generalize, to universalize, and aims to penetrate the limits of conditioned ideas to see the actual reality in its specificity. Living ecologically in the present moment may mean investigating one’s own watershed, learning where one’s food is grown, understanding one’s dependence on economic use of trees and oil. Over and over, one takes on the challenge of observing the contributing causes and conditions of each particular moment. In this way, one gains confidence in breaking free of "preassigned patterns of relatedness" established by the logical order, allowing one to fully apprehend the infinite creativity of the natural order.

Ingram draws a strong parallel between Kukai and Whitehead in their emphasis on continuity within nature -- organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman. He describes this continuity primarily as manifested in material form and location. Yet there is another aspect of this parallel which I feel is crucial to understanding the environmental crisis we face today. Whitehead’s doctrine of "the immanence of the past energizing the present," the "vector-structure" of nature, could be compared with the Buddhist law of karma. Since all activities cause effects and are influenced by many causes, this law simply states there are consequences to actions. Strong actions have strong consequences. Karma expresses the continuity through time of nature, including human actions. Thus we live now with the fruits of the actions of early industrial capitalism, nuclear weapons used in World War II, the Green Revolution, widespread deforestation. The terrible cumulative impacts on the planet’s air and water, landforms and ecosystems, area natural outcome of human activity over the recent past. Seeing this continuity is important, for right within it lie the seeds of understanding. It is right in the middle of this particular mess that we will be pushed to find a way through.

I applaud Ingram’s enthusiasm for Buddhist-Christian dialogue on this very critical topic. We can only benefit from building friendship on behalf of the Earth as we investigate this material together. As a small contribution to the dialogue, I offer a simple set of Buddhist guidelines common to all Buddhist traditions -- the Three Pure Precepts. Framed here in the language of interrelationship, they can perhaps provide a starting point for evaluating oar individual and collective actions with the Earth in answering Ingram’s question -- How then shalt we live?

I vow to refrain from all action that ignores interdependence

This is my restraint.

I vow to make every effort to act with mindfulness.

This is my effort.

I vow to live for the benefit of all beings.

This is my intention.²

Notes

1See, for example, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Transformation and Healing: Sutra on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness and Present Moment, Wonderful Moment (1990), both published by Parallax Press. Berkeley; and The Miracle of Mindfulness, Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.

2 I wrote this version of the Three Pure Precepts for an Earth Day precepts ceremony at Green Gulch Zen Center, Muir Beach, California in April, 1990. The full ceremony is described in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship Journal, Summer 1990, pp. 32-33.

During my last visit to Japan I was invited by three Shingon Buddhist lay scholars to a restaurant outside Osaka specializing in preparation and serving of a deadly toxic fish known as "fugu." Though it has a certain Russian-roulette quality, eating fugu is considered by many Japanese a highly aesthetic experience.

Of course, I declined; my aesthetic tastes run in different directions. Still, the experience of watching my friends eat fugu made me wonder about the condition that we, in chauvinistic shorthand, refer to as "human." Beings who will one day vanish from the earth in that ultimate subtraction of sensuality called death, we spend so much of our lives courting it: fomenting wars, watching with sickening horror movies in which maniacs slice and dice their victims, or hurrying to our own deaths in fast cars, cigarette smoking, or suicide. Death obsesses us, as well it might, but our responses are so strange.

This is particularly true of our response to nature. All we have to do is look in a mirror. The face that pins us with its double gaze reveals a frightening secret: we look into a predator’s eyes. It’s rough out there in nature, whether in the wilds of a rain forest or an urban jungle, partly because the earth is jammed with devout human predators unlike all others: we not only kill for food, we kill each other along with the natural forces nourishing life on this planet.

We stalk and kill nature even as we know what contemporary ecological research makes plain: that we are enfolded in a living, terrestrial environment in which all living and non-living things are so mutually implicated and interrelated that no distinct line separates life from non-life (LL Chap. 3). This conclusion is not only a biological claim; it is also a claim about the nature of reality. Of necessity, ecological research alters our understanding of ourselves, individually, and of human nature, generally. Or at least it ought to. For not only do "ecology and contemporary physics complement one another conceptually and converge toward the same metaphysical notions" (NAT 51), so do contemporary process theology and Buddhist teachings and practices. The question is, how can we, the most efficiently aggressive predators in nature, train ourselves to act according to what this research shows?

It is least of all a matter of technology, mostly a matter of vision, that sense of reality -- "the way things really are" -- according to which we most appropriately structure our relation to nature. For as Proverbs 29:18 warns, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." My thesis is this: dialogical encounter with Buddhist tradition -- in this case illustrated by the esoteric teachings of Kukai -- and Western ecological models of reality emerging in the natural sciences and Christian process theology, may energize an already evolving global vision through which to refigure and resolve the current ecological crisis. What is at stake is nothing less than the "liberation of life" (LL Chaps. 1 and 2).

But first, some remarks about mainstream Christian teaching about nature. In 1967, Lynn White, Jr.’s controversial essay, "The Modern Roots of our Ecological Crisis" (S 155: 1203-1207) started a debate that raged through the 1970s among theologians, philosophers, and scientists. One focal point of this debate was White’s recommendation for reforming the Christian Way in order to lead humanity out of the ecological shadow of death he thought "mainstream Christianity" originally created. Specifically, he recommended that mainstream Christianity endorse a "Franciscan world view" and "panpsychism" in order to deliberately reconstruct a contemporary Western environmental ethic (S 155: 1206-1207).

Initial reaction to White’s essay focused on identifying the Christian world view. Surprisingly, there was little Christian bashing; more surprising, most Christian discussion agreed with White’s characterization of Christian tradition. But there was little agreement about how to reconstruct a distinctively Christian view of nature, or indeed, whether it could or should be reconstructed.

Recently, the structure of "mainstream" Christian tradition roughly caricatured by White was formulated into a typology by J. Baird Collicott and Roger T. Ames (NAT 3-4): (1) God transcends nature; (2) nature is a creation, an artifact, of a divine craftsman-like male creator; (3) human beings are exclusively created in God’s image, and therefore essentially segregated from the rest of nature; (4) human beings are given dominion by God over nature; (5) God commands humanity to subdue nature and multiply the human species; (6) nature is viewed politically and hierarchically -- God over humanity, humanity over nature, male over female -- which establishes an exploitive ethical-political pecking order and power structure; (7) the image of God-in-humanity is the ground of humanity’s intrinsic value, but nonhuman entities lack the divine image and are religiously and ethically disenfranchised and possess merely instrumental value for God and human beings; (8) the biblical view of nature’s instrumental value is compounded in mainline Christian theology by an Aristotelian-Thomistic teleology that represents nature as a support system for rational human beings.

The upshot of this seems clear. The great monotheistic traditions of the West are the major sources of Western moral and political attitudes. Christianity doctrinally focuses on humanity’s uniqueness as a species. Thus if one wants theological license to increase radioactivity without constraint, to consent to the bulldozer mentality of developers, or to encourage unbridled harvest of old growth forests, historically there has been no better scriptural source than Genesis 1-2. The mythological injunctions to conquer nature, the enemy of God and humanity, are here.

However, placing the full blame for the environmental crisis on the altar of the Christian Way is far too simplistic. Historically, the biblical creation story was read through the sensitivities of Greco-Roman philosophy; in fact, the legacy of Greco-Roman contributions to the ecological crisis may be more powerfully influential than distinctively biblical contributions.

Furthermore, Greek philosophical anthropology assumed an atomistic world view, paradigmatically expressed in Plato and given its modern version by Descartes. Human nature is dualistic, composed of body and soul. The body, especially in Descartes’ version, is like any other natural entity, exhaustively describable in atomistic-mechanistic language. But the human soul resides temporarily in the body -- the ghost in the machine -- and is otherworldly in nature and destiny. Thus human beings are both essentially and morally segregated from God, nature, and each other. Accordingly, the natural environment can and should be engineered to human specifications, no matter what the environmental consequences, without either human responsibility or penalty.

Here we have it in a nutshell. The contemporary ecological crisis represents a failure of prevailing Western ideas and attitudes: a male oriented culture in which it is believed that reality exists only as human beings perceive it (Berkeley); whose structure is a hierarchy erected to support humanity at its apex (Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes); to whom God has given exclusive dominance over all life forms and inorganic entities (Genesis 1-2); in which God has been transformed into humanity’s image by modern secularism (Genesis inverted). It seems unlikely that mainstream Christian tradition, married as it is in the West to the traditions of Greco-Roman philosophy, is capable of resolving the ecological crisis Christian reading of Genesis 1-2 through Greco-Roman philosophy created.

However, the traditional Western-Christian paradigm of nature is being challenged by new ecological models and theoretical explanations of the interconnectedness of humanity with nature developing within the natural sciences.² Recent Christian theological discussion, most notably process theology, also focuses on these same scientific models in recognition of the inadequacies of traditional Christian and secular views of nature.³ Of course, there are a number of Western versions of this emerging ecological paradigm; no two of them are exactly alike in their technical details or explanatory categories. Even so, it is possible to abstract three principles these paradigms share.⁴

The first principle is holistic unity -- nature is an "eco-system whose constituent elements exist in constantly changing, interdependent causal relationships. What an entity is, or becomes, is a direct function of how it relates with every entity in the universe at every moment of space-time.

Second is the principle of interior life movements -- all living entities possess a life force intrinsic to their own natures that is not imposed from other things or from God, but derived from life itself. That is, life is an emerging field of force supporting networks of interrelationship and interdependency ceaselessly occurring in all entities in the universe. Or to invert traditional Christian images of God, God does not impose or give life; God is the chief exemplar of life.

The third principle -- that of organic balance -- means that all things and events at every moment of space-time are interrelated bipolar processes that proceed toward balance and harmony between opposites.

Similar organic principles have always been structural elements of the Buddhist world view. The Shingon (Ch., chen-yen or "truth word") "esoteric" (Jpn., mikky or "secret teaching") transmission established in Japan by Kukai in the ninth century particularly embraces these elements.⁵ His Buddhist environmental paradigm is summarized in the first stanza of a two-stanza poem Kukai wrote in Chinese in Attaining Enlightenment in This Very Body (Sokushin jobutsu gi).

The first two lines, "The Six Great Elements are interfused in a state of eternal harmony," presuppose two propositions upon which Kukai’s Buddhist understanding of nature rests: (I) The Buddha, Dainichi Nyorai ("Great Sun"; Skt., Mahavairocana Tathagata), and the Six Great Elements are interfused, and (2) Dainichi and the universe coexist in a state of timeless non-dual harmony.

Kukai’s buddhaology and subsequent Shingon doctrinal formulation assumed standard Mahayana "three-body theory (Skt., trikaya; Jpn., sanshin), but with a difference. Prior to Kukai’s teacher, Hui-kuo, Dainichi was symbolized as one of a number of sambhogakaya ("body of bliss") forms of absolute reality called dharmakaya ("Dharma" or "Teaching Body") that all Buddhas comprehend and manifest when they become "enlightened ones." But in exoteric Buddhist teaching and esoteric Buddhist tantra prior to Hui-kuo and Kukai, the Dharmakaya is ultimate reality, beyond names and forms, utterly beyond verbal capture by doctrines, while yet the foundational source of all Buddhist thought and practice. Thus Sambhogakaya forms of Buddhas are not "historical Buddhas" (nirmanakaya), of whom the historical Shakyamuni is an example: they exist in nonhistorical realms of existence, forever enjoying their enlightened bliss, as objects of human veneration and devotion. Normally, bodhisattvas and nonhistorical Buddhas, including Dainichi, were represented as Sambhogakaya forms of the eternal Dharmakaya.

It was probably Hui-kuo who first identified Dainichi as the Dharmakaya Buddha and who taught that the Dainichi-kyo and the Kongocho-kyo, which according to Shingon teaching embody the fullest expression of truth, were preached by Dainichi, not the historical Shakyamuni (K 881-82).⁶ Kukai, following Hui-kuo, transformed Dainichi into a personified, uncreated, imperishable, beginning-less and endless Ultimate Reality. He reasoned that as the sun is the source of light and warmth, Dainichi is the "Great Luminous One" at the source of enlightenment and unity underlying the diversity of the phenomenal world. And since the Buddha Nature is within all things and events in space-time -- an idea Kukai also accepted -- the implication is that Dainichi is the Ultimate Reality "originally" within all sentient beings and nonsentient natural phenomena. As Kukai explained it:

As a Buddhist, Kukai also accepted the doctrine of "interdependent co-origination" (Skt., pratityasamutpada), but he interpreted this teaching according to his notion that reality is constituted by the Six Great Elements in ceaselessly interdependent and interpenetrating interaction: earth, water, fire. wind, space, and consciousness or "mind" (Skt., citta; .Jpn., shin). The adjective "great" signifies the universality of each element. The first five elements stand for all material realities, and the last, "consciousness," for the Body and Mind of Dainichi.

All Buddhas and unenlightened beings, all sentient and non-sentient beings, all material "worlds" are "created" by the ceaseless interaction of the Six Great Elements. This means that all phenomena are identical in their constituent self-identity; all are in a state of constant transformation; and there are no absolute differences between human nature and the natural order, body and mind, male and female, enlightenment and ignorance. In short, reality -- the way things really are -- is nondual. In Kukai’s words:

The problem is, how do we train ourselves to experience this eternal cosmic harmony and attune ourselves to it as it occurs? This "how" is expressed in the second line of the stanza: "The Four Mandalas are inseparably related to one another." Involved here is the practice of meditation, which in Shingon tradition is a skillful method (upaya) of integrating our body, speech, and mind (the "three mysteries" or sanmitsu) with the eternal harmony of Dainichi’s Body, Speech, and Mind. In this sense, Shingon meditation is a process of imitation of Dainichi’s enlightened harmony with nature through ritual performance of mudras (Body), mantras (Speech), and mandalas (Mind).

Shingon training involves a number of mandalas, but Kukai’s poem refers to four: (1) the "Maha-mandala" or "Great Mandala" (Jpn., daimandara) are circular portrayals of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and deities in anthropomorphic form painted in the five Buddhist colors -- yellow, white, red, black, and blue or blue-green. Each color corresponds to five of the Six Great Elements: earth is yellow, water is white, fire is red, wind is black, space is blue. Since consciousness is nonmaterial, it is colorless and cannot be depicted in the mandala. But Kukai also taught that there is perfect interpenetration of the Six Great Elements, so that consciousness is present in the five colors and pervades the painting. Thus Maha-mandalas symbolize the universe as the physical extension of Dainichi.

The second mandala is the Samaya-mandala. "Samaya" is a Sanskrit word meaning "a coming together, and agreement." So Samaya-mandalas express the ontological unity underlying the diversity of all things in space-time as forms of Dainichi’s Dharma Body. Accordingly, every thing and event in the universe is a samaya or "coming together, and agreement" of this ontological unity -- all things and events are forms of Dainichi -- experienced from the perspective of Dainichi, as well as all Buddhas.⁸

The third mandala, the Dharma Mandala, is the same circle as the Mahamandala and the Samaya Mandala, but "viewed" as the sphere where "revelation" of absolute truth -- the Dharma -- takes place. Thus Dharma mandalas portray Dainichi Nyorai’s continual communication of the Dharma throughout all moments of space-time to all sentient and non-sentient beings. The universe is Dainichi’s "sound-body." Dharma mandalas represent the totality of the sound of the Dharma as Dainichi continually discloses or "preaches" it throughout the universe as depicted in "seed syllables" (Skt., bija; Jpa., shuji) written in Sanskrit letters.

Finally, Karma Mandalas are the same circle viewed from the perspective of Dainichi’s action in the realm of samsara. Since, as Kukai taught, all things and events, all transformations in the flux of nature, interpenetrate the actions of Dainichi’s Dharma Body, every change in any form or entity is simultaneously an action of Dainichi. Conversely, every action of Dainichi is simultaneously the action of all things and events in the universe.⁹

In summary, the Four Mandalas symbolize Dainichi Nyorai’s "extension, intention, communication, and action" (K 91). "Extension" is Dainichi’s compassionate wisdom; "communication" is his intended "self-revelation" as the "preaching of the Dharmakaya" in all things and events in space-time; and his "action" is all movement in the universe.

The third line of the stanza, "When the grace of the Three Mysteries is retained (our inborn three mysteries will) be quickly manifested," summarizes Kukai’s conception of esoteric Buddhist practice. In relation to Dainichi Nyorai, the Three Mysteries stand for suprarational activities or macrocosmic functions of Dainichi’s Body, Speech, and Mind at work in all things and events. Thus through the Mystery of Body, Dainichi’s suchness is incarnate within the patterns and forms of all natural phenomena; the Mystery of Speech refers to Dainichi’s continual "preaching" or "revelation" of the Dharma through every thing and event in space time; the Mystery of Mind refers to Dainichi’s own enlightened experience of the "suchness" of all natural phenomena as interdependent forms of the Dharmakaya.¹⁰ In this way, Kukai personified the Three Mysteries as interrelated forms of Dainichi’s enlightened compassion toward all sentient and nonsentient beings.

Finally, in the stanza’s fourth line, "Infinitely interrelated like the meshes of Indra’s net are those we call existences," Kukai employed the well-known Buddhist simile of India’s net. As every jewel of India’s net reflects all others, and as all jewels are reflected in a single jewel, so existence is Dainichi Nyorai: seemingly discrete entities are interdependent forms of Dainichi, the one ultimate reality underlying the diversity of all natural phenomena. Or in Kukai’s words:

That Kukai’s Esoteric Buddhist teachings assert an ecological conception of nature quite different from mainstream Christian tradition is quite evident. First, Christian tradition understands and explains the universe in terms of a divine plan with respect to its creation and final end. Kukai’s universe is completely nonteleological. For him, the universe has neither beginning nor end, no creator, and no purpose. The universe just is, to be taken as given, a marvelous fact which can be understood only in terms of its own inner dynamism.

Second, mainstream Christian teaching and our Greek philosophical heritage have taught the West that nature is a world of limited, external, and special relationships. We have family relationships, marital relationships, relationships with a limited number of animal species, and occasional relationships with inanimate objects, most of which are external. But it is hard for us to imagine how anything is internally related to everything. How, for example, are we related to a star in Orion? How are Euro-Americans related to Lakota native Americans or Alaskan Inuit? How are plants and animals related to us, other than externally as objects for exploitation? In short, Western persons generally find it easier to think of isolated beings and insulated minds, rather than of One Reality ontologically interconnecting all things and events.

In contrast, Kukai’s universe is a universe of non-dual-identity-in-difference, in which there is total interdependence: what affects and effects one item in the cosmos affects and effects every item, whether it is death, ignorance, enlightenment, or sin.

Finally, the mainstream Christian view of existence is one of rigid hierarchy, in which a male creator-god occupies the top link in the chain of being, human beings next, and nature -- animals, plants, rocks -- the bottom. In contrast, Kukai’s universe posits no hierarchy. Nor does it have a center, of if it does, it is everywhere. In short, Kukai’s universe leaves no room for anthropocentric biases endemic to Hebraic and Christian tradition, as well as those modern movements of philosophy having roots in Cartesian affirmation of human consciousness divorced from dead nature.

It is at this point that Kukai’s Esoteric Buddhist world view makes contact with the vision and work of earlier Western physicists such as Faraday and Maxwell, later physicists such as Einstein and Bohr, and process philosophy and Christian process theology. Like Western "new physics" and process thought, Kukai ‘s world view also characterizes nature as an "aesthetic order" that cognitively resonates with contemporary Western ecological ideas.

According to Roger Ames (NAT 117), an "aesthetic order" is a paradigm that: (1) proposes plurality as prior to unity and disjunction to conjunction, so that all particulars possess real and unique individuality; (2) focuses on the unique perspective of concrete particulars as the source of emergent harmony and unity in all interrelationships; (3) entails movement away from any universal characteristic to concrete particular detail; (4) apprehends movement and change in the natural order as a processive act of "disclosure" -- and hence describable in qualitative language; (5) perceives that nothing is predetermined by preassigned principles, so that creativity is apprehended in the natural order, in contrast to being determined by God or chance; and (6) understands "rightness" to mean the degree to which a thing or event expresses, in its emergence toward novelty as this exists in tension with the unity of nature, an aesthetically pleasing order.

In contrast to the aesthetic order implicit in Kukai’s view of nature and contemporary science and process thought, the "logical order" of mainline Christianity characterized by Ames assumes: (1) preassigned patterns of relatedness, a blueprint" wherein unity is prior to plurality, and plurality is a "fall" from unity; (2) values concrete particularity only to the degree it mirrors this preassigned pattern of relatedness; (3) reduces particulars to only those aspects needed to illustrate the given pattern, which necessarily entails moving away from concrete particulars toward the universal; (4) interprets nature as a closed system of predetermined specifications, and therefore reducible to quantitative description; (5) characterizes being as necessity, creativity as conformity, and novelty as defect; and (6) views "rightness" as the degree of conformity to preassigned patterns (NAT 116).

A number of examples of logical order come to mind: Plato’s realm of Ideas, for instance, constitutes a preassigned pattern that charts particular things and events as real or good only to the degree they conform to these preexistent ideas. But aesthetic orders such as Kukai’s or process philosophy’s are easily distinguishable from a logical order. In both, there are no preassigned patterns in things and events in nature. Creativity and order work themselves Out through the arrangements and relationships of the particular constituents in the natural order. Nature is a "work of art" in which "rightness" is defined by the comprehension of particular details that constitute it as a work of art.

Of course, the technical details of the "aesthetic order" portrayed by Kukai’s ecological paradigm, and, for example, those of Christian process theology, are not identical. This much, however, should be noted: in spite of important technical differences, two common conceptualities are foundational in Kukai’s world view and Whiteheadian process theology. The first is there is continuity within nature. Kukai portrayed this continuity in his doctrines of the Three Mysteries and the Six Great Elements. For both Kukai and Whiteheadian thought, nature’s continuity extends internal relatedness -- a metaphysical relatedness in which individuals and societies are constituted by relationships of interdependence -- to organic and inorganic nature. The second shared teaching is that human beings have vital connection with nature, since all of nature is interconnected. This corresponds to Kukai’s image of Indra’s Jeweled Net, as well as his doctrine of the Six Great Elements.

Whitehead’s definition of "living body" gives some precision to these similarities. The living body, he writes, is "a region of nature which is itself the primary field of expression issuing from each of its parts" (MT 22). This means that those entities that are centers of expression and feeling are alive, and Whitehead clearly applies this description to both animal and vegetable bodies. Also, this same definition of living body is an expansion of his definition of the human and animal body; the distinction between animals and vegetables is not a sharp one (MT 22-25).

Whitehead also contended that precise classification of the differences between organic and inorganic nature is not possible; although such classification might be pragmatically useful for scientific investigation, it is dangerous for nature. Scientific classifications often obscure the fact that "different modes of natural existence often shade off into each other" (MT 18). The same point was made in Process and Reality, where Whitehead noted that there are no distinct boundaries in the continuum of nature, and thus no distinct boundaries between living organisms and inorganic entities; whatever differences there are is a matter of degree. This does not mean that differences are unimportant; even degrees of difference affirm the continuity of all nature (PR 109; 179).

This point is central to Whiteheadian biologist Charles Birch and process theologian John Cobb’s definition of "life." They raise the issue of the boundaries between animate and inanimate in light of the ambiguity of "life" on hypothetical boundaries (LL 92). Viruses are particularly good examples of entities possessing the properties of life and nonlife. Another example is cellular organelles, which reproduce but are incapable of life independent of the cell that is their environment.

The significance of these examples for the ecological model of life Birch and Cobb propose is that every entity is internally related to its environment. Human beings are not exceptions to the model, nor in Cobb’s opinion, is God, who is the chief example of what constitutes Life (LL 176-78; 195-200). Kukai’s view is similar: every entity in nature is internally related to its environment and to Dainichi. Although Dainichi is not a reality Christians or Shingon Buddhists name as God, like God, Dainichi is the chief example of what constitutes Life.

As there is continuity between organic and inorganic in Whiteheadian process thought, so too there is continuity between human and nonhuman. Whitehead underscored this continuity by including "higher animals" in his definition of "living person." Both human beings and animals are living persons characterized by a dominant occasion of experience which coordinates and unifies the activities of the plurality of occasions and enduring objects which ceaselessly form persons. Personal order is linear, serial, object-to-subject inheritance of the past in the present. Personal order in human beings and in nature is one component of what Whitehead called "the doctrine of the immanence of the past energizing the present" (AI 188). This linear, one-dimensional character of personal inheritance from the past is called the "vector-structure" of nature. A similar picture of nature evolves in Kukai’s notions of the Five Elements and the Three Secrets.

At this point, the question is, so what? Why is it important for Western organic environmental paradigms to encounter Asian versions of organic views of nature such as Kukai’s? The answer is, because what people do to the natural environment corresponds to what they think and experience about themselves in relation to the things around them.

Even at the level of empirical confirmation of scientific theory, it seems evident that "the ruination of the natural world is directly related to the psychological and spiritual health of the human race since our practices follow our perceptions."¹¹ Culture and world view, faith and practice, merge in language and indicate perceptions in persons and in societies. When we relate to nature as a "thing" separate from ourselves or as separate from God, we not only engender, but perpetuate the environmental nightmare through which we are now living. The Christian term for this separation of ourselves from nature is "original sin," the Buddhist word is "desire" (tanha).

The environmental destructiveness of Western rationalism’s hyper-yang view of its own culture and of nature has been to a large extent delayed. But the ecological limits of the Earth are now stretched, and in some cases, broken. Dialogue with Asian views of nature such as Kukai’s can foster the process of Western self-critical "consciousness-raising" by providing alternative places to stand and imagine new possibilities. In so doing, we might discern deeper organic strata within our own inherited cultural biases and assumptions, and apprehend that we neither stand against nor dominate nature.

But like any particular dialogue, dialogue between Buddhists and Christians about nature has an inner and an outer dimension. Discussion of organic paradigms must not remain at the level of verbal abstraction. Buddhists can understand and appreciate the conceptions and technical language of Christian process views; process theologians can understand and appreciate Buddhist conceptions of nature. Both may be conceptually transformed. But this is an outer dialogue. Important as such dialogue is, it is incomplete if divorced from an inner dialogue about how Buddhists and Christians can personally experience non-duality between themselves and nature. For to the degree we experience the realities to which Buddhist and process Christian concepts of nature point, to that degree are we energized to live according to the organic structures of nature outer dialogue conceptually reveals.

It’s like the union of lyrics with music in a great chorale: the "music" of inner dialogue "enfleshes" the abstract lyrics of outer dialogue. What inner dialogue teaches is that we can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience -- even of silence -- by choice. People destroy the environment -- by choice because they experience it as a machine. Choosing to experience nature organically is to stalk our calling in skilled and supple ways, to locate the most tender live spot in nature we can find and plug into its pulse. This is yielding to nature, not dominating nature.

From Kukai’s perspective transformed by encounter with Christian process thought, outer and inner dialogue means, appropriating Joseph Campbell’s words, "following our collective bliss." Would it not be proper, and obedient, and pure, to begin by flowing with nature rather than dominating nature, dangling from it limp wherever nature takes us. Then even death, where we are going no matter what, cannot us part. Seize nature and let it seize us up aloft, until our eyes burn and drop out; let our murky flesh fall off in shreds, and let our bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles. Then we discover there was never anything to seize, nothing to grasp all along, because we are nature, looking at ourselves.

Or from a Christian process theological perspective transformed by inner and outer dialogue with Kukai: God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not God. For God is the "Life" of nature, intimior intimo meo, as Augustine put it -- "more intimate than I am to myself." God needs nothing, demands nothing, like the stars. It is life with God that demands these things. Of course, we do not have to stop abusing the environment; not at all. We do not have to stop abusing nature -- unless we want to know God. It’s like sitting outside on a cold, clear winter’s night. We don’t have to do so; it may be too cold. If, however, we want to look at the stars, we will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

References

K -- Kukai: Major Works, Trans. Yoshitito S. Hakeda. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.

LL -- Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr. The Liberation of Life. Denton, TX: Environmental Ethics Books, 1990.

NAT -- Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought. Eds. J. Baird Collicott and Roger T. Ames. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989.

S 155 -- Lynn White, Jr. "The Modern Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." Science 155 (1967): 1203-07.

Notes

1All citations from Kukai’s works in this essay are from Hakeda’s translation, although I have checked them against the Chinese text in Yoshitake Inage, ed., Kobo Daishi Zenshu (The Complete Works of Kobo Daishi), 3rd edition revised (Tokyo: Mikkyo Bunka Kenkyusha, 1965). Although Hakeda’s volume does not translate all of Kukai’s works, it remains the best English translation of Kukai’s most influential writings in print. Since I cannot improve on Hakeda’s translations, I have cited his with gratitude.

2See E. A. Bunt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1954). Also see Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature; two recent studies by Kenneth Boulding entitled The World As a Total System (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1985) and Ecodynamics (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1981); and two works by Fritjof Capra entitled The Tao of Physics (Boulder, CO: Shambala Publications, 1975) and The Turning Point (New York: Bantam Books. 1982).

3 I have recently cited John B. Cobb, Jr.’s, Is It Too Late? Toward A Theology of Ecology. Also see The Liberation of Life (LL) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Richard H. Oberman, Evolution and the Christian Doctrine of Creation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967); and a series of wonderful essays edited by Ian Barbour, Earth Might be Fair: Reflections on Ethics, Religion, and Ecology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 1972), especially Huston Smith’s essay, "Tao Now: An Ecological Testament," 66-69.

4Much of what follows is based on previous research published in my essay, "Nature’s Jeweled Net: Kukai’s Ecological Buddhism," The Pacific World 6 (1990): 50-64.

5Kukai (774-835), "Empty Sea," is commonly known as Kobo Daishi, an honorific title posthumously awarded to him by the Heian Court. "Kobo" means "to widely transmit the Buddha’s teachings," and "Daishi" means "great teacher." Widely revered in his own time, Kukai remains a figure of profound reverence in Japan today, both as a Buddhist master and a culture hero. In 804 Kukai traveled to China to study Buddhism, and while there he visited many eminent teachers, among whom was the esoteric master, Hui-kuo (746-805). He become Hui-kuo’s favorite disciple. Presumably, Kukai’s understanding of Hui-kuo’s teachings was so impressive that Hui-kuo declared Kukai his dharma-heir before he died. Kukai’s study in Japan lasted only thirty months, and he returned to Japan at age thirty-three as the eighth patriarch of the Shingon School. See Hakeda, Kukai, 10-15.

6Also see Yamasaki Taiko, Shingon: Japanese Esoteric Buddhism (Boston: Shambala Publications, 1988), 62-64.

7Sokushin Jobutsu Gi (Attaining Enlightenment in This Very Existence).

8Samaya Mandalas portray each of the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and deities in some samaya or "symbolic" form, such as a jewel, sword, or lotus, that embodies the special quality of the individual Buddha, Bodhisattva, or deity portrayed.

9Karma Mandalas portray the "actions of awe-inspiring deportment" (rijigyo) of all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in three-dimensional figures representing each particular Buddha and Bodhisattva painted in the five colors of the Great Mandala.

t0Adrian Snodgrass, "The Shingon Buddhist Doctrines of Interpenetration," Religious Traditions 9 (1986): 66-68; and Yamasaki, 106.

11Jay C. Rochelle, "Letting Go: Buddhism and Christian Models," The Eastern Buddhist (Autumn 1989): 45.

In "The Approach to Whitehead: Traditional? Genetic? or Systematic?," Jorge Luis Nobo offered what is, to date, the most articulate critique of Lewis S. Ford’s genetic approach to Whitehead’s metaphysics. On the basis of some remarks made by Whitehead himself about his thought and writings, Nobo proposes to refute Ford’s claim that the views expressed in Process and Reality have been preceded by anterior stages of metaphysical systematization. On the contrary, says Nobo, Whitehead always held the same metaphysical system, though expressed in more or less compressed and applied ways in his various books (62). Even more problematic according to Nobo, however, is one of the consequences of Ford’s approach. It is said to have had "the unfortunate and dangerous effect of lulling adherents of the traditional approach into a false sense of security regarding the adequacy of the interpretations they have arrived at by means of that approach" (60). Ford, indeed, does not see those interpretations as being threatened by his views;¹ according to him, Whitehead expressed his final metaphysical position in the last revisions he made to his manuscript of Process and Reality, and the traditional interpretations of Whitehead’s metaphysics would precisely be based on the parts of Process and Reality that resulted from those final revisions. Given Nobo’s claim that an adequate interpretation of Whitehead’s metaphysical system ought to be based on all his metaphysical books, Ford’s approach and the traditional interpretations it confirms are deemed insufficient (60).

Ford replied to Nobo’s critique in a recent issue of this journal. On the one hand, he defends his genetic approach to Whitehead’s metaphysics, though he admits that his interpretations should be supported by more evidence. On the other hand, he maintains his endorsement of traditional interpretations of Whitehead’s metaphysics:

That there is a strong similarity between traditional interpretations and what Ford presents as "the perfected system" is hardly disputable. However, Ford’s passage-by-passage approach to Whitehead’s texts, Process and Reality in particular, has systematic consequences that he himself may have overlooked. Indeed, the interpretation Ford gives to certain passages in that book is such that his reconstruction of Whitehead’s final metaphysical stance ends up being, on several key aspects, at variance with traditional interpretations. The purpose of this note is to illustrate, in a brief fashion, the difference between Ford’s presentation of Whitehead’s metaphysics and its traditional interpretations. Two notions in particular are at stake here, both having to do with the important question of the relationship between God and the world.

I. Two Notions, Key Passages

One of these notions is the objectification of the consequent nature by the world. Easy to locate in the writings of the interpreters Nobo associates with the traditional approach, it appears, for example, on page 164 in A Christian Natural Theology, where John B. Cobb claimed that "it is demanded by the principle of universal relativity that just as God in his consequent nature prehends us, so also we prehend God’s consequent nature."² The other notion is the involvement of God’s consequent nature in the derivation of initial aims. Held by many representatives of the traditional approach to Whitehead’s metaphysics, either its pioneers (e.g., Christian 307-08; Cobb 167) or more recent contributors, (e.g., Franklin 341) this notion is particularly well exemplified in Sherburne:

Those notions, namely the objectification of the consequent nature by the world and the involvement of that consequent nature in the provision of initial aims, have also made their way into process theology, becoming foundations for the image of a creative and responsive God. In The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context, for example, Marjorie H. Suchocki holds the following views:

Traditional interpreters base the above mentioned views on specific passages taken, in general, from Process and Reality. In the case of the objectification of the consequent nature by the world, the key passage consists of the short development on the fourth creative phase of the universe’s accomplishment of its actuality. Whitehead writes in Process and Reality: "In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience" (351)³ Some interpreters refer also to Whitehead’s reference to the "superjective nature" of God in Process and Reality: "The ‘superjective’ nature of God is the character of the pragmatic value of his specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity in the various temporal instances" (88).⁴ In this case, however, the actual warrant lies again on page 351, as it is under the light of that particular passage that the "superjective character" on page 88 is interpreted as a reference to the objectification of the consequent nature.

With regard to the involvement of the consequent nature in the derivation of initial aims, three passages from Process and Reality are used as warrants by traditional interpreters sampled here. One of them is the passage from page 88 of Whitehead’s magnum opus quoted above. Sherburne uses it in conjunction with another passage excerpted from Process and Reality "The primordial nature is conceptual, the consequent nature is the weaving of God’s physical feelings upon his primordial concepts" (345). According to Sherburne, the passage from page 88 has to be interpreted in the light of the one from page 345, in such a way that a close link is established between the consequent and superjective natures.

The other passage in Process and Reality that is perceived as calling for the involvement of the consequent nature in the derivation of initial aims may be found in Chapter III:

II. Ford on the Key Passages

Let us examine, now, how Ford interprets these passages on the basis of his genetic approach to Whitehead’s texts. From the outset, it is very clear that Ford gives the remarks in Process and Reality 351 on the "fourth phase" an interpretation that differs strikingly from the Ones proposed by the traditional approach. Indeed, and although he admits that given their poetic character those remarks do not lend themselves to an easy interpretation, one thing is nevertheless clear to him: the "fourth phase" should not be understood as an implicit statement made by Whitehead to the effect that the consequent nature is prehended by the actual occasions. Commenting on that "fourth phase" in The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, Ford says:

In other words, Whitehead may have wanted to be able to say that the consequent nature has an impact on the temporal world, but his conceptual system did not allow him to, Ford contends. The concept of objectification, in particular, is of no use in the case of God’s consequent nature, since the latter never reaches satisfaction.

As one should expect, given the interpretation Ford gives of the remarks on the "fourth phase" in Process and Reality 351, his understanding of the "superjective nature" passage from Process and Reality 88 differs from traditional interpretations. He, in fact, contradicts them as he rejects the common view according to which that particular passage speaks of the objectification of the consequent nature. Rather, says Ford, God’s superjective character pertains to the primordial nature in Process and Reality 88:

In sum, Ford’s interpretation of the passages on pages 88 and 351 is such that his reconstruction of Whitehead’s final position in Process and Reality cannot include the notion of the objectification of the consequent nature by the actual occasions. That it actually does not is confirmed by the following comment Ford made in one of his most recent articles:

What of the passages used by representatives of the traditional approach as warrants for their views on the involvement of the consequent nature in the provision of initial aims? On the one hand, Ford does not interpret Process and Reality 88 from the standpoint of page 345, as Sherburne does. He does not establish any linkage between the consequent nature and the superjective nature -- quite to the contrary, as we have seen, Ford associates the superjective nature in the passage on page 88 with the primordial nature. As a result, he does not consider this passage as evidence for an involvement of the consequent nature in the provision of initial aims. Similarly, Ford does not even come close to presenting Process and Reality 345 as evidence for an involvement of the consequent nature in the provision of initial aims. He simply interprets it as a passage where Whitehead introduces the notion of a physical pole in his concept of God and presents the consequent nature as a synthesis of conceptual and physical feelings ("Growth" 61). There remains, then, Process and Reality 244f, to which Ford devoted a whole section (18-20) in "Subjectivity in the Making." Most interesting for our purposes is the following remark: "At this juncture, I believe, Whitehead does not anticipate any difficulty working out the particulars as to how God could influence the world, but then he has not yet proposed the consequent nature with its everlastingness that will pose the major problem" (19). The key element here lies in the last part of the quotation, where Ford relegates the composition of the passage on page 244 to a time where the consequent nature had not yet been conceptualized. In Ford’s classification of the layers of Process and Reality, the material on 244 belongs to G, stemming thus from the second revision prior to I, the one that brought along the consequent nature of God. When G was composed, God was still conceived as the non-temporal actual entity consisting in the conceptual realization of eternal objects. At the time 244 was written, then, the provider of initial aims was God thus conceived. This means that in the reinterpretation of the previous layers of Process and Reality brought by the insertions from 1, 244 pertains to the primordial nature. In Ford’s interpretation, then, that passage has nothing to do with the consequent nature and in no way can be seen as evidence for an involvement of the consequent nature in the provision of initial aims.

The interpretation Ford gives to Process and Reality 88, 244f and 345 suggests that he does not see Whitehead considering at any time in the composition of Process and Reality an involvement of the consequent nature in the provision of initial aims -- 88 and 345 are indeed, according to Ford, very late insertions to Process and Reality. In reality, Ford contends that Whitehead solved the problem of the particularization of aims in a way that differs significantly from what has been customarily held in traditional interpretations. Indeed, says he on the basis of 244 and 344, Whitehead held that God could provide particularity even when he had not conceptualized the consequent nature. In Whitehead’s final position in Process and Reality as reconstructed by Ford, then, the provision of initial aims would be a matter that concerns the primordial nature only, and not the consequent nature, as traditional interpreters have thought for a few decades: "Concrescent occasions prehend only initial aims from God, and these are purely conceptual. No direct prehensions of divine physical feelings were contemplated" ("Growth" 67).

From the standpoint of theology and religion, the problem of the relationship between God and the world is a crucial one. On that matter, process theology proposes quite provocative views that are based on traditional interpretations of Whitehead’s metaphysics. As it turns out, Ford’s reconstruction of, in particular, Whitehead’s final position in Process and Reality -- Whitehead’s definitive metaphysical stance, according to Ford -- challenges core aspects of traditional interpretations of Whitehead’s views on the God-world relationship. Indeed, many believe on the basis of those interpretations that God’s creative response to the world involves the consequent nature’s selection of appropriate aims for specific situations, and/or that such a response is experienced through objectifying the consequent nature. Ford contends that, quite to the contrary, Whitehead never said that the consequent nature was part of our experience and that he never spoke of any involvement of it in the provision of initial aims. If Ford is right, then, a whole chapter in process theology’s discourse on God is threatened at its very foundation.

Ford’s genetic approach, it seems, has the potential to do more, and in fact already does more than simply tracing the successive shapes taken by Whitehead’s metaphysical system during the composition of Process and Reality. This "archeological" task rests on a reinterpretation of key passages that in turn fosters a reconstruction of Whitehead’s metaphysics that differs significantly, at least on some key points, from the traditional interpretations. Besides revealing an evolving Whitehead, then, the genetic approach may show us a Whitehead that is quite different from the one we have been presented by the traditional interpretations of his metaphysical writings.

Notes

1. Nobo quotes from page xi of Ford’s preface of The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics: "This study will probably disturb prevailing interpretations of Whitehead’s philosophy less than might be imagined, for the interpretations have largely been based on what I call [...] the final revisions" (60).

2. See also William A. Christian’s An Interpretation of Whitehead’s metaphysics 323; Donald W. Sherburne’s A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality 227; Ivor Leclerc’s Whitehead’s Metaphysics 206. Apparently shared by most of those who pioneered the traditional approach to Whitehead’s metaphysics four decades ago, the idea that actual entities objectify the consequent nature seems to have become common among Whitehead scholars. Forrest Wood’s Whiteheadian Thought as a Basis for a Philosophy of Religion is only one among many recent interpretations of Whitehead’s metaphysics where that idea resurfaces:

3. John B. Cobb, for example, quotes that passage after deriving from the principle of universal relativity the position that the world objectifies the consequent nature (see the quote above from Cobb 164).

4. See Sherburne 190n15; also Christian 323.

5. See Christian 308.

6. Or again, in "God at Work: The Way God is Effective in a Process Perspective" Ford writes:

References

Christian, William A. An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics. New Haven: Yale UP, 1959.

Cobb, John B. Jr. A Christian Natural Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965.

Ford, Lewis S. "The Consequences of Prehending the Consequent Nature. Process Studies 27 (1998): 134-46.

-- The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Albany: State U of New York P, 1984.

-- "God at Work: The Way God is Effective in a Process Perspective." Encounter 57 (1996): 327-40.

-- "The Growth of Whitehead’s Theism." Process Studies Supplement 1.2 (1999). <http://www.ctr4process.org/pss/>.

-- "In Partial Response to a Tribute." Process Studies 27 (1998): 332-44.

-- "Subjectivity in the Making." Process Studies 21(1992): 1-24.

Franklin, Stephen T. Speaking from the Depths: Alfred North Whitehead’s Hermeneutical Metaphysics of Propositions, Experience, Symbolism, Language, and Religion. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990.

Leclerc, Ivor. Whitehead’s Metaphysics. London: Allen and Unwin, 1958.

Nobo, Jorge Luis. "The Approach to Whitehead: Traditional? Genetic? Or Systematic?" Process Studies 27 (1998): 48-63.

Sherburne, Donald W. A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Suchocki, Marjorie H. The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context Albany: State U of New York P, 1988.

Wood, Forrest. Whiteheadian Thought as a Basis for a Philosophy of Religion. Lanham: UP of America, 1986.

For a number of years now, a debate has been underway in the Whiteheadian academy about the method we should adopt to interpret Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysical writings. Many specialists, if not most, contend that those writings express a single point of view, that is, the same metaphysical system. It is their claim, consequently, that each of those writings provides data for the reconstruction of Whitehead’s metaphysical system and that all of them should be used for that purpose. William A. Christian’s landmark work, An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, may be the quintessential exemplification of that approach to Whitehead’s metaphysical writings.¹ For a number of years, however, those writings have been approached from a radically different method by Lewis S. Ford. His genetic approach, characterized by the practice of compositional analysis,² led him to propose a quite different set of views about Whitehead’s metaphysical writings which he presents as having evolved over time. According to Ford, there have been significant conceptual shifts not only between the various books expressing Whitehead’s philosophy of organism but also during the very composition of some of them individually. In The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (1923-1929), Ford claims that Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality, is the end result of ten revisions of an initial draft.

It goes without saying that for those who believe Whitehead always proposed the same metaphysical system, the Anglo-American metaphysician held the same concept of God from Science and the Modern World (1925) to Modes of Thought (1938). According to Victor Lowe, for example, the distinction between two divine natures may have been made explicit only in Process and Reality but was nevertheless already present in Religion in the Making (1926): "The distinction of God’s primordial nature from the ‘consequent’ nature is introduced in Process and Reality, but the corresponding ideas can be discerned in Religion in the Making" (100). Lowe actually traces the primordial nature as far back as in Science and the Modern World.³ Ford, quite to the opposite, claims that, in Process and Reality alone, Whitehead successively held three different concepts of God.⁴

The position that I will defend here lies between Ford’s and that of his opponents. It is my claim that not only one, and not as many as three -- but at least two concepts of God can be found in Process and Reality. In effect, there is strong evidence that in an earlier stage in the composition of that book Whitehead conceptualized God without distinguishing between two divine natures, the primordial and the consequent. More precisely, there was no such thing as a consequent nature of God in an earlier conceptual stage manifest in some passages in Process and Reality. The problem is that these particular passages have been either neglected by Whitehead’s main exegetes or interpreted from the standpoint of a matrix or grid based on the last chapter in Whitehead’s magnum opus. A careful reading of those passages, with particular attention given to the divine attributes that are mentioned in them, leads to the conclusion that these passages are traces of an earlier, more basic concept of God which Whitehead eventually sought to replace by the concept of God in two natures, as found in the published version of Process and Reality.

I will consider first an initial set of three passages from Process and Reality in order to show the presence, in that book, of another concept of God. Then, using three other passages from the same book, I will demonstrate that this other concept is earlier than the concept of God in two natures. I will propose next a reconstruction of that earlier concept of God. In a final section, I will address Lewis S. Ford’s proposal of a third, even earlier concept of God in Process and Reality.

I. Another concept of God in Process and Reality

As surprising as it may seem, at least twenty-two passages where God is mentioned in Whitehead’s magnum opus have been written from a different conceptual standpoint than the one expressed in the passages where God is presented as having a primordial and a consequent nature. Of these twenty-two passages, three stand out as particularly clear manifestations of this particular conception of God. The first is actually the passage where Whitehead mentions God for the very first time in Process and Reality:

The key feature of this short passage is, for present purposes, the relationship established between God and time. Whitehead writes that "God is [the] non-temporal accident of creativity]" (Process 7). There is no qualification here, no restriction as to the scope of the attribution of non-temporality to God: it is God as such, not an aspect or a side of God nor only a nature of the divine actual entity, that is non-temporal.

Such a statement is problematic, at least inasmuch as it is incompatible with the concept of God as primordial and consequent natures that appears at other places in Process and Reality, particularly in the last part of the book. Indeed, what is proposed by Whitehead in those other places is the concept of a God that is non-temporal in the primordial nature, but temporal in the consequent nature. The latter, in effect, is ontologically, and relationally temporal. God, conceived according to the distinction between a primordial and a consequent nature, as ontologically temporal is required by the following passage:

What is stated here is that the consequent nature evolves. Given the parallel drawn in the passage by Whitehead between the consequent nature’s evolution and the evolution of the world, and given the contrast he made there between the consequent nature’s evolution and the completeness of the primordial nature, we can only conclude that since the consequent nature evolves it is incomplete, it grows, and it changes. Whitehead actually claims that the consequent nature "is ever enlarging itself" (Process 349). It should be understood, at this juncture, that Whitehead conceptualizes change as "the difference between actual occasions is some determinate event" (Process 73), thus as involving and requiring more than a single act. The consequent nature, then, precisely because it changes, has to be a series of acts. The consequent nature evolves: in Whitehead’s metaphysical system, this means that God in God’s own self-creative process, is temporal.

Besides being ontologically temporal, the consequent nature is also relationally temporal. This at least is suggested by a few passages, such as the one from Process 12 quoted above.⁶ It is actually required by Whitehead’s technical statement about the kind of objectification that takes place in the consequent nature. About the latter, he writes that "[t]his element in God’s nature inherits from the temporal counterpart according to the same principle as m the temporal world the future inherits from the past" (Process 350). In Whitehead’s philosophy of organism expounded in Process and Reality, the principle according to which in the temporal world the future inherits from the past is causal objectification, a temporal relationship that takes place between non-contemporary acts? Through the consequent nature, in sum, God is relationally temporal in the sense of being involved in temporal relationships with the actual entities of the world.

Since the consequent nature is ontologically and relationally temporal, the statement that "God is [the] non-temporal accident [of creativity]" (Process 7) is incompatible with the concept of God in two natures developed in the last chapter of that book. Indeed, the statement excludes any temporality in God.

Therefore, it could not have been written from the conceptual standpoint that underlies the concept of God in two natures. This leads to the conclusion that there is another concept of God being proposed in Process 7, namely, that of a God devoid of any temporal side.

A very similar manifestation of that concept of a non-temporal God can be found in this passage:

Here, Whitehead writes that the divine element in the world "combines the actuality of what is temporal with the timelessness of what is potential." God, in other words, is actual and timeless. As was the case with the passage from Process 7 above, neither in Process 40, nor in its immediate context provided by section 11.1.1, is the timelessness of God restricted to an aspect, side, or nature of the divine actual entity. It is God as such, integrally, that is timeless according to that passage, which cannot in any way be interpreted as allowing for a temporal aspect, side, or nature in God. Therefore, the statement that God "combines the actuality of what is temporal with the timelessness of what is potential" is incompatible with the concept of God in two natures developed in the last chapter of that book where, as we have seen above, God is temporal in the consequent nature. Since, however, the statement is identified with the one made in Process 7, it has to be interpreted as a second manifestation in Process and Reality of a concept of God, namely, one devoid of any temporal side.

The third passage that witnesses to a concept of God that differs from the concept of God in two natures is located in section II.III.3:

The second sentence, especially its last part, is of particular relevance for this discussion. God is presented there as "a being at once actual, eternal, immanent, and transcendent." The divine attributes of actuality, immanence and transcendence are not problematic in any way: all of them characterize the God in two natures for which Whitehead is so well known. The same cannot be said, however, of the attribution of eternity to God, or, better, of the way eternity is attributed to God in Process 94. In effect, it is without any qualification or limitation of its scope that the attribution of ‘eternal’ is applied to God in that passage. Other qualifications are not thereby excluded, of course, and, as we noted earlier, Whitehead says that, besides being eternal, God is also actual, immanent, and transcendent. However, the logical consequence of such a non-restrictive attribution of the qualification ‘eternity’ to God is that, thereby, contrary qualifications are excluded. That God is temporal is one of those excluded attributes. As a result, it is God integrally, and not an aspect, side, or nature of God, that is said to be eternal in Process 94.

Such a statement is incompatible with the concept of God as having primordial and consequent natures that appears at other places in Process and Reality, particularly in the last part of the book. That incompatible concept is one that holds God is eternal, but also everlasting. It is a concept in which the attributions of eternity and everlastingness are made in a differentiated fashion: God is eternal in the primordial nature, but everlasting in the consequent nature. Everlastingness, besides, is defined and applied to the consequent nature in a way such that the latter cannot in any way be even remotely considered eternal. Quite the contrary, that the consequent nature is everlasting means that in its own process there is creative advance: Whitehead writes that the consequent nature has "[t]he property of combining creative advance with the retention of . . . immediacy" (Process 346). A technical expression in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, ‘creative advance’ is the fundamental dynamic of the universe. It is, on the one hand, the unification process that takes place where and whenever there is an actual entity. It is, on the other hand, the never ending emergence of new unification processes.⁸ Since Whitehead contends that there is always novel creative advance in the consequent nature, this means that there are always new unification processes, new acts of unification that take place in the consequent nature. This confirms what I had noted earlier, namely, that God, in the consequent nature at least, is a series of acts, thus temporal.

Since it excludes the possibility of a temporal aspect in God, the presentation of God as "a being at once actual, eternal, immanent, and transcendent" (Process 94) could not have been written from the standpoint of the concept of God in two natures developed in the last chapter of that book. In relationship to the latter, it amounts to a false statement. The only possible conclusion is that this passage is yet another manifestation of the presence in Process and Reality of a another concept of God in addition to the concept of God in two natures. Otherwise, we would have to cling to the a priori notion that Whitehead wrote Process and Reality from the standpoint of the concept of God developed in the last part of the book, and posit that he would have written true statements in some places in the book and false statements in others.

Needless to say, the interpretation proposed here of the references to God in Process 7, 40 and 93 differs in a major way from views held by traditional and systematic interpreters of Whitehead. Actually, a survey of some of the most important works devoted to Whitehead’s metaphysics suggests that the current interpretations of the concept of God are based on the last ten pages of the book, and shows that the three passages featured here in this present paper have been, at best, neglected in the elaboration of those interpretations. For example, the passage from Process 7 is mentioned by William A. Christian in An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (311, 403), by John B. Cobb in A Christian Natural Theology (168,206), by Ivor Leclerc in Whitehead’s Metaphysics (83 and 84), by Donald W. Sherburne in A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (32), and by Elizabeth M. Kraus in The Metaph₃sics of Experience (39). The passage from Process 7 is not used in these citations, however, as material or data for the interpretation of Whitehead’s concept of God. Apart from Cobb, who sees in that passage evidence that God is subordinated to creativity, the aforementioned scholars limit themselves to general comments, mostly on the notion of the "Ultimate." As for the important description made of God as "the non-temporal accident [of creativity]" (Process 7), only Cobb mentions it, and this in a quotation meant to illustrate God’s subordination to creativity.

The passage from Process 93 is neglected even more: it is mentioned only three times in the books listed above (An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics 9, 48, and A Key to Process and Reality 160), and barely commented upon.

The passage from Process 40 is more substantial, and it receives, correspondingly, more attention from the Whitehead exegetes mentioned above. However, and somewhat similar to the case with the passages from Process 7 and 93, it is not so much its doctrinal content on God that draws the scholars’ attention, as other aspects of that passage. In effect, most of Christian’s comments bear on the doctrine of eternal objects discussed there. The same can be said about Sherburne’s comments, and Leclerc uses Process 40 mostly as a source of data for understanding the ontological principle. The very few comments that concern Whitehead’s concept of God remain superficial. For example, in light of Process 40, God is seen by Christian as the source of the togetherness (269) and of the order (271) of eternal objects; as the source of the relevance of eternal objects (27) and of novelty (25) by Sherburne; and as the provider of subjective aims by Leclerc (201). At the same time, some of those comments are quite instructive as to the method followed by at least some of the exegetes referred to here. Indeed, in An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, Christian assimilates the passage from Process 40 to a discussion of the primordial nature of God (271). In a similar way, but with even more insistence and clarity; Kraus does the same (61 and 63). Considering the absence of any mention of the primordial nature of God in Process 40, it is quite obvious that both Christian and Kraus interpret that passage from a conceptual framework based on the interpretation of other passages, namely, those in Process and Reality where the concept of God in two natures is developed. As we have seen, however, the conceptual content of Process 40 on God is incompatible with that concept of God in two natures.

Is it because Christian and Kraus did not pay enough attention to the implications of the attribution of God as timeless in Process 40 that they were able to interpret the word "God" in that passage as meaning "primordial nature of God," or is it because they glossed over the conceptual difficulty that I pointed out earlier in this paper? The fact of the matter is that their interpretation of Process 40 amounts to an unwarranted importation of meaning from other passages in which a different concept of God from the one that appears in Process 40 is expounded.

Coming back to the concept of God that manifests itself in Process 7,40 and 93, we can find more evidence of its presence in Process 31, 32, and 46. Besides providing more data for the reconstruction of that concept, these passages (the former triad) hear witness to the relationship between the latter triad and the concept of God as primordial and consequent natures that is usually seen as the only concept of God in Process and Reality.

II. The Second Concept of God in Process and Reality: An Earlier Concept of God

One of the most important manifestations of the concept referred to so far as the "second concept of God" in Process and Reality appears in the following passage:

This passage ends with the following remark: "Its status as an actual efficient fact is recognized by terming it the ‘primordial nature of God’." Wouldn’t that be sufficient for one to conclude that the whole passage describes the primordial nature of God? Many scholars did so conclude and others still do.¹⁰ However, the presence of two particular elements in that passage invalidates such a conclusion. There is, on the one hand and once again, the qualification -- non-restricted in its scope -- of God as non-temporal, which, as such, is sufficient to ground the conclusion that there is, in Process 32, a manifestation of a concept of God that differs from the usual concept of God in two natures. On the other hand, the passage quoted above also includes the following remark: "By the principle of relativity there can only be one non-derivative actuality, unbounded by its prehensions of an actual world" (32). The key expression here is "non-derivative actuality" The word "actuality" is particularly important since it allows one to determine the referent of that expression and, by the same token, of the surrounding description. Indeed, in light of its use in Process 32 (that is, in the context of a statement of the ontological principle) "actuality" means more than simply "something which is actual." It means "actual entity"¹¹ Thereby; the primordial nature of God is excluded as the referent of the description made in Process 32. The referent can only be God.¹² Furthermore, the referent can only be God as conceived without the distinction between a primordial nature and a consequent nature. Indeed, as we noted in Process 32, God is said to be the "non-derivative actuality." The absence of any restriction as to the scope of the attribute ‘non-derivative’ is significant. It means that it is God, as such, not a side or a nature of God, that is non-derivative. Any derivative aspect in God is thereby excluded here. The incompatibility between the description made, in Process 32, of God as the non-derivative actuality and the concept of God in two natures is blatant. Indeed, is it not one of the main characteristics of God, thus conceived, to be free in the primordial nature, but determined in the consequent nature (345)? Does Whitehead not say about the consequent nature that "the completion of God’s nature into a fullness of physical feeling is derived from the objectification of the world in God," and that "his derivative nature [the consequent nature] is consequent upon the creative advance of the world" (345)? Obviously, God was not described, in Process 32, from the same conceptual perspective as in Process 345. God, as conceptualized in Process 32, did not have a consequent nature -- the very possibility of the latter is negated by the qualification of God as non-derivative.

Given that the basic description of God as a non-temporal actual entity found in Process 7, 40 and 93 appears again in Process 32, it is safe to conclude that this last text, with the exception of its last sentence where the primordial nature of God is mentioned, manifests the same concept of God as the three former texts. That concept is barely mentioned in Process 7 and 93, but developed in a fuller way in Process 32 and 40. However, before moving on to a reconstruction of that concept of God, the question of the relation between it and the concept of God characterized by the distinction between two divine natures should be addressed. More precisely the question remains as to the chronological order in which Whitehead introduced these concepts into Process and Reality.

The passage from Process 32 is helpful in this respect. Indeed, as the analysis above implies, there is in this passage an interface between two sub-passages that express two different concepts of God. The bulk of Process 32 has been written from the standpoint of the concept of a non-temporal God, whereas the last sentence is an expression of the concept of God in two natures, primordial and consequent. As a result, the two sub-passages are not contemporary, neither conceptually nor compositionally. Which concept is earlier, and which is later? The interface is quite telling in this regard. It seems quite clear, in effect, that the last sentence in Process 32 was written specifically an order to modify the meaning of the overall passage, more precisely, in order to assimilate what was a description of God as such into a description of the primordial nature of God. The two concepts of God expressed in the bulk of Process 32, for one, and in the last sentence, for the other, being non-contemporary, that the last sentence is later, compositionally, than the rest of Process 32 (because of this assimilative role) entails that the content of that last sentence is later, conceptually speaking.

There are at least two other interfaces between passages written from different conceptual standpoints on the topic of God that we should consider. One of them is on pages 31 and 32 of Process and Reality. The interface here is between the bulk of the passage quoted below and sentence 3, the latter printed in italic:

What should be noted are the shifts that take place from one sentence to the next in terms of their respective topics, and the faulty references that are thereby created. In sentences 1 and 2, the grammatical subject, and, as it should, the topic under discussion is the non-temporal act of all inclusive unfettered valuation. In sentence 3, because it is referred to by the pronoun "it," the grammatical subject remains the non-temporal act of all inclusive unfettered valuation. However, the topic under discussion does not correspond to the grammatical subject, since the former becomes God as primordial and consequent natures. A faulty reference is thereby created at the beginning of sentence 3, where it is said that "By reason of its character as a creature, . . . it receives a reaction from the world." That reference is here said to be faulty since what is referred to by "its" and "it," that is, the non-temporal act of all inclusive unfettered valuation, cannot receive a reaction from the world.

Another difficulty concerns the actual subject of sentence 4. This subject remains the non-temporal act of all-inclusive unfettered valuation, that is, God considered as such in light of the identification made at the outset of sentence 4 with "It is here termed God." However, it is clear that, grammatically speaking, the real subject of sentence 4, in other words the topic being discussed, is God, considered as primordial and consequent natures.

The topical shifts and faulty references are caused by sentence 3. As it causes the topic under discussion to shift, it operates a reorganization of meaning such that a passage devoted -- in its first two sentences -- to God as the non-temporal act of all-inclusive unfettered valuation becomes, with the third sentence, a passage whose subject is God understood as primordial and consequent natures. The fact that ambiguities and contradictions can be found in the resulting text, especially at the juncture of sentences 2 and 3, suggests that the latter has been added in Process 31-32. This is actually confirmed by the continuity between sentences 2 and 4, and by the internal coherence of the text made of sentences 1,2 and 4 when sentence 3 is removed. In light of the passages where the concept of a non-temporal God has been found, it would have been appropriate for Whitehead to declare that the non-temporal act of all-inclusive unfettered valuation is God, and to characterize it as the timeless source of all order, as he does in the text in sentences 1, 2 and 4.

A similar phenomenon to the one observed in Process 32 appears, then, at the juncture of Process 31 and 32. A sentence expressing the concept of God as having primordial and consequent natures has been added to a passage that had been written from the standpoint of a different concept of God, namely, the concept of a non-temporal God found in Process 7, 32, 40 and 93. Once again, that inserted sentence reinterprets its context, this time by transforming what was a description of God conceived as the non-temporal act of valuation into a description of God conceived as having primordial and consequent natures.

A third interface between a passage written from the standpoint of the concept of God in two natures, on the one hand, and, on the other, an expression of the concept of a non-temporal God can be found in here:

Quite obviously, given the two mentions of the primordial nature, the second paragraph in the quote above is an expression of the concept of God as having primordial and consequent natures. Moreover, since that whole paragraph presents a unified discussion of the relationship between the primordial nature and eternal objects, it should be considered as having been written as a whole from the standpoint of this concept of God with two natures.

The same cannot be said, however, about the first paragraph. Implicitly Whitehead identities the non-temporal actual entity and God: "This ‘somewhere’ is the non-temporal actual entity Thus ‘proximate relevance’ means ‘relevance as in the primordial mind of God."’ The consequence drawn there -- that is, that "relevance" is in God -- can be drawn from the premise -- that is, the localization of the general potentiality of the universe in the non-temporal actual entity -- only if that actual entity is God. Given considerations entertained earlier in this article, the fact that God is conceived as the non-temporal actual entity in the first paragraph of Process 46 is sufficient to conclude that the latter has been written from a different conceptual standpoint from the second paragraph, where God is conceived as having a primordial and a consequent nature.

There is, then, in Process 46, an interface between passages written from different conceptual perspectives on the topic of God. And again, the passage that has been added is the one that expresses the concept of God as having primordial and consequent natures. Indeed, although grammatically speaking the second paragraph does not refer to the discussion that took place in the first paragraph, the former nevertheless is continuous with the latter in topic, as it furthers the reflection on the intradivine localization of eternal objects while modifying an aspect of the problematic. When the second paragraph is taken into account, it is no longer the non-temporal actual entity that is the locus of eternal objects and relevance, but the primordial nature of God. That kind of relationship between two passages that are not conceptually contemporary, a relationship such that one reinterprets the other on a topic discussed in both passages, tells of the compositional ulteriority of the passage that performs the reinterpretation, namely, in this case, the second paragraph of Process 46.

Thus, the interfaces in Process and Reality between passages written from the perspective of the concept of a non-temporal God and other passages stemming from the perspective of the concept of God in two natures reveal that the former is an earlier concept of God that came to be replaced by the latter in the published version of the book. They also provide supplementary data for the reconstruction of that earlier concept, to which we now move.

III. Process and Reality’s Earlier Concept of God: A Reconstruction

It is a much simpler concept of God that Whitehead held at an earlier stage In the composition of Process and Reality before he developed his later concept of God as having primordial and consequent natures. God was, at that earlier stage, the primordial (7), non-temporal actual entity (7, 31, 32, 40, 46, 93). In that concept, God was devoid of any physical dimension, being rather an entirely conceptual act of valuation of pure eternal objects, that is, of eternal objects in themselves, rather than as actualized in temporal actual entities. For example, Whitehead describes God as "the non-temporal act of all-inclusive unfettered valuation" (Process 31)13 All-inclusive (Process 32) in the sense that all eternal oh jets are valued in it, so that the divine actual entity is non-derivative (Process 32). Its objects are not received from other actual entities but, rather, from the realm of potentiality For the same reason, God thus conceived is free ("unfettered," in Process 31).

Since feelings give rise to actualization, the non-temporal actual entity is the ideal actualization of all eternal objects, including all those that are not yet actualized in temporal actual entities. In this way, God gives to each and every eternal object an access to actualization, thereby making them available for objectification by temporal actual entities. Indeed, it is because of this actualization in God that eternal objects exist from the standpoint of those temporal actual entities and become available to be actualized physically in their concrescences. As Whitehead writes in Process 40, it is because of God that "the barren inefficient disjunction of abstract potentialities obtain primordially the efficient conjunction of ideal realization," and, as a consequence, "each eternal object has a definite, effective relevance to each concrescent process. Without God, in sum, "there would be a complete disjunction of eternal objects unrealized in the temporal world" (40). Quite clearly, mediating "things which are temporal" and "things which are eternal"(40) is God’s main role, and accounting for that mediation was probably the reason why Whitehead mentioned and conceptualized God the way he did at an earlier stage in the composition of Process and Reality. Even at that early time, as Process 40 and 46 make clear, it was actually an exigency of Whitehead’s metaphysical system that all reasons reside in one or many actual entities. Because of that principle, the "ontological," Whitehead had to put forth the concept of an actual entity that would account for the mediation between eternal objects and actual entities. The solution consisted, it seems, in conceiving God as he did in the passages referred to in this reconstruction of the first (chronologically speaking concept of God of Process and Reality. The fact that the ontological principle is mentioned in two of the most important passages that express the early concept of God in Process and Reality suggests that extending the application of that process and principle was what brought Whitehead to include a non-temporal actual entity (that is, God) in his metaphysical system. As a matter of fact, he insists in Process 40 that "[b]y this recognition of the divine element the general Aristotelian principle is maintained that, apart form things that are actual, there is nothing -- nothing either in fact or efficacy."

The divine valuation of eternal objects is made according to all the degrees of adversion and aversion. As Whitehead writes in Process and Reality, God operates the "basic adjustment of the togetherness of eternal objects on which creative order depends," in other words, the "conceptual adjustment of all appetites in the form of aversions and adversions" (32). Accordingly; each eternal object is conceptually actualized at every degree of intensity in the divine actual entity Since the relevance of an eternal object for a concrescence is in proportion with the intensity of its actualization in the actual occasions given as data for that concrescence,¹⁴ God, as the conceptual actualization of all eternal objects at every degree of intensity; is the reason not only for the relevance,¹⁵ but also for the graduated relevance of eternal objects for the concrescences:

Precisely because God is the conceptual adjustment of all appetites, God actually incites the actual occasions to physically actualize the eternal objects whose valuation God is.

Finally, God is the source of both order and novelty in the actual process. In Process and Reality Whitehead proposes that "the contemplation of our natures, as enjoying real feelings derived from the timeless source of all order, acquires that ‘subjective form’ of refreshment and companionship at which religions aims"(31).¹⁶ As for the relationship between the divine non-temporal actual entity and novelty, Whitehead claims that without God "novelty would be meaningless, and inconceivable." (Process 40)¹⁷

Obviously, there is a partial resemblance between the early concept of God as the non-temporal actual entity and the later concept of God as primordial and consequent natures. Indeed, is there not a correspondence between the former and the primordial nature of the later concept? Was God, as conceptualized in the early stages of the composition of Process and Reality, limited to what was to become the primordial nature in a later, expanded concept of God? That this is the case is actually confirmed by the dynamic observed in the three interfaces analyzed in the previous section. On each occasion, Whitehead inserted a passage written from the standpoint of the later concept of God in order to reinterpret a passage initially written from the standpoint of his earlier concept such that the subject of the resulting passage would shift from God as the non-temporal actual entity to the primordial nature and, more widely, to God as primordial and consequent natures.

It seems, then, that late in the composition of Process and Reality, Whitehead became dissatisfied with his concept of God. Was this due to his interest for new considerations, perhaps more theological than philosophical, such as the problem of everlastingness? Or (and?) was his intention to secure the universal application of principles other than the ontological principle, for example, the dipolar character of actual entities? One thing is clear. Whitehead added a new dimension to his concept of God, a dimension of such magnitude that, as a result, a new concept of God emerged, one that superseded the concept of God as the non-temporal actual entity in both his metaphysical system and in Process and Reality. That new concept of God is the concept of a God with two natures, primordial and consequent, and it is that concept that remained in the final version of the book.

IV. Lewis S. Ford’s Proposal: Three Concepts of God in Process and Reality

(a) Ford’s Views

In 1984, Lewis S. Ford proposed that two concepts of God can be found in Process and Reality.¹⁸ His views have evolved since then, however, and quite significantly. In 1999, he proposed that before developing the earlier concept of God that I reconstructed in the previous section of the present article, Whitehead did hold yet another, even more basic, concept of God. Expressed in an article titled "Whitehead’s Intellectual Adventure," Ford’s new position is more fully explained in Transforming Process Theism and "The Growth of Whitehead’s Theism." He claims that the passages in which he and I recognize an earlier concept of God in Process and Reality should actually be divided in two groups.¹⁹ Some of those passages, including the passage from Process 7 examined above would belong to an early stage in the composition of Process and Reality. They would manifest a concept of God that Ford considers the initial concept of God in Process and Reality.²⁰ Other passages would stem from revisions that Whitehead would have brought later, before actually publishing the book, and would then pertain to what Ford considers an intermediate concept of God. Among the relatively numerous passages (26, according to Ford) that would harbor this second concept of God, Ford sees Process 31, 32, 40, and 46, all of which were discussed above in sections I and II.²¹

Mutatis mutandis, the reconstruction, proposed in the section III, of what I consider the only early concept of God in Whitehead’s magnum opus could be taken as an appropriate description of the intermediate concept of God found in Ford’s classification. This is so because the passages that Ford isolates as manifestations of an even earlier concept of God (Process 7, 18, etc.) are conceptually compatible with the passages that he links to what he calls the intermediate concept of God (Process 31, 32, 40, and 46, among others).²² Besides, both Ford and I use, in general, the main key passages as data for our respective reconstructions, namely, Process 32, 40, and 46. It is not surprising, then, that his intermediate concept of God and the concept that I consider the only early concept of God in Process and Reality are identical. Both are reconstructed on the basis of the same set of passages.²³

What, then, is that initial concept of God that Ford distinguishes from another concept that he considers as intermediate? As Ford himself suggests in "The Growth of Whitehead’s Theism," there was not very much content in that concept. Because Whitehead wanted to complete his cosmological reflection in order to entertain more fully the topic of God, as Ford claims ("Growth" 12), the most recurrent, and main, statement about God in the passages expressing the initial concept of God is that God is the non-temporal actual entity (e.g., Process 7, 18, 222). Almost nothing else is said about God in these references (which are generally made in passing) other than God is primordial (e.g., Process 7) and, Ford adds, "transcendent, immanent, eternal, cause of itself, the basis for reasons of the highest absoluteness, and possibly the source of the eternal principles of value" (Transforming 57)²⁴

As I mentioned earlier, the passages in which God is presented as the non-temporal actual entity and those where God is described as the conceptual valuation of eternal objects are conceptually compatible. If Ford still distinguishes between two non-temporal concepts of God, it is because he believes that the passages that harbor the intermediate concept are later insertions. According to him, indeed, the fact that the passages in which God is conceptualized as the conceptual valuation of eternal objects are insertions is sufficient to ground the conclusion that this concept of God has been proposed later than the simpler concept of God to be found in the original text:

At first glance, Ford’s proposal seems well-founded. Indeed, if all the passages in which God is presented as the conceptual valuation of eternal objects have been inserted in an already existing text where God is always described in much more general terms, the logical conclusion is that the views expressed in the insertions must be conceptually later than those expressed in the text where they have been inserted. Such an inference, of course, is valid only if all the passages where God is presented as the conceptual valuation of eternal objects are in fact insertions. It also requires that those passages are actually expressions of that notion of God. On closer analysis, however, it seems that among those passages, many cannot be interpreted as such expressions of the above mentioned notion of God. Moreover, it will become clear that, for those passages where God is in fact described as the conceptual valuation of eternal objects, the "pattern of insertions" is not as clear as Ford contends it is.

(b) Critique

I had mentioned earlier that Ford finds no less than twenty-six different passages expressing an intermediate concept of God, that is, passages in which God is presented as the conceptual valuation of eternal objects. I would argue that this number should be revised, and lowered in a substantial way. Among these twenty-six passages in question, some are actually manifestations of what both Ford and I agree as referring to the final concept of God in Process and Reality. This is the case with the passages from Process 105, 108,25 189, 278, 344, and 34926 Other passages are what I term "limit cases" in Relive Whitehead. Those passages that appear in Process 3l, 164, and 257,²⁷ are so named because they max, but only may, include a component written from the standpoint of the concept of God as conceptual valuation of eternal objects, although the concept of God as primordial and consequent natures is obviously present in them.²⁸ As a result of this, their compositional and conceptual status is too ambiguous for any solid conclusions to be based on them.

In addition, two passages among those considered by Ford as manifestations of the intermediate concept of God do not mention God, and, therefore, must be left aside in this discussion, namely, Process 69 and 277. Finally, there are those passages that have either been written in the final stages of the composition of Process and Reality, or at least late in the period when Whitehead did conceive God as non-temporal. Those passages, that appear in Process 87, 224, 244, 246-47, 247, and 249,²⁹ are indeed insertions, but the fact that they may be expressions of either the concept of God with two natures in the final version of Process and Reality or an earlier concept makes it impossible for us to use them in the present discussion.

As a result, of the twenty-six passages Ford considers manifestations of the intermediate concept of God, only a handful can actually be considered as such. These are Process 32, 40, and 46, provided of course that these passages are insertions, as Ford contends. But are these passages insertions? Let us consider the passage from Process 32 first. In this case, I agree with Ford to a certain extent. In effect, there are indications that the fourth full paragraph of Process 32 has been inserted in its current position in Process and Reality. More precisely, it seems that the third chapter of the first part of Process and Reality, while having been written late during the composition of the book, incorporates earlier materials that have been displaced from their initial location in the book.³⁰ The passage from Process 32 discussed here would belong to that category.³¹ However, one should not, and cannot, conclude, on the sole basis that the fourth full paragraph from Process 32 is an insertion, that this paragraph of has to be considered an expression of a second -- chronologically speaking -- concept of God as non-temporal. Such an inference would only be possible in the case of an insertion located in a context where God is conceived as the non-temporal actual entity, according to Ford’s distinction outlined above. The lateness of the concept of God as conceptual valuation of eternal objects vis-à-vis the concept of God as the non-temporal actual entity would have then been suggested by the interplay between the context and the insertion. It is not the case with the passage from Process 32, however, inasmuch as the context of the insertion is, somewhat oddly, later with respect to its composition, than the insertion of the fourth full paragraph of Process 32, or, rather, and more accurately, later in the above mentioned sense than those materials that have been included in it to form the fourth full paragraph of Process 32.

Let us move to the passage from Process 40. In this case, Ford considers lines 40.6b-17 as being made of two insertions, one at 40.6b-15c, and the other at 40.15d-17.³² Both would be manifestations of the intermediate concept of God. However, when those lines are read in context, no strong indications suggesting that they have been inserted can be found. Quite to the contrary, their content is conceptually and rhetorically continuous with their context. Indeed, the development from 40.6b onwards, that is based on the notion of God as the conceptual valuation of eternal objects, can be seen as expanding on the notion of the timeless but actual entity of Process 40.3b-6a. On the rhetorical plane, no textual irregularities that suggest, and eventually prove, the existence of one or many insertions, such as digressions, unwarranted topical shifts, or grammatical irregularities, appear in Process 40. In a word, the application to Process 40 of the criteria that Ford has devised to determine the existence of insertions³³ actually shows that there are no insertions there.

Similar conclusions can be drawn from the compositional analysis of the first full paragraph of Process 46. Indeed, that kind of analysis shows that the section in which it is located -- the third section of the first chapter in the second part of Process and Reality (II.I.3) -- is mostly made of insertions.³⁴ However, given its thematic continuity with materials that belong to the original version of that same section and of the previous section (II.I.2), the first full paragraph of Process 46 appears to belong to that original version.³⁵ More precisely, Whitehead had clearly stated, in section II.I.2, his option for a "theory embracing the notions of ‘actual entity’, ‘giveness’, and ‘process"’ (Process 43), a theory in which "the ontological principle is the first stage" (Process 43). As it turns out, the introduction of the development of such a theory can be found in the original version of section II.I.3, pages 44, 45 and 46. The first full paragraph of Process 46, considered an insertion by Ford, fits quite nicely as the part of this introduction that deals with the ontological principle, and should, for that very reason, be considered as part of the original version of Process and Reality.

In sum, three passages from Process and Reality had to be shown as insertions in order for Ford’s proposal of an intermediate concept of God to be warranted. These passages are those from Process 32, 40 and 46. As it turns out, compositional analysis shows that all of them belong to the original version of Whitehead’s magnum opus. Thereby, and furthermore, this kind of analysis shows that the concept of God as conceptual valuation of eternal objects has been developed in that same original version of Process and Reality wherein references to God as the non-temporal actual entity abound. Consequently, there seems to be no other alternative than to consider these references to God as the non-temporal actual entity and developments concerning God as the conceptual valuation of eternal objects as mutually contemporar₃; that is, in the sense that they must have been composed from the same conceptual perspective. In other words, those references and developments must point to and manifest only one concept of God, the concept of God that, given its chronological relationship with the concept of God as primordial and consequent natures, has been termed the "early concept of God of Process and Reality" in the first sections of this article.

Such a conclusion is also called for by external evidence. Indeed, as Ford himself admits, the concept of God as the conceptual valuation of eternal objects was already present in Religion in the Making, Whitehead’s previous book.³⁶ There Whitehead wrote about God that "[t]his ideal world of conceptual harmonization is merely a description of God himself," then added that "the nature of God is the complete conceptual realization of the realm of ideal forms" (154). Ford’s proposal implies that Whitehead had abandoned such views between the publication of Religion in the Making and the composition of Process and Reality, and that he then had reverted to the concept of God as formative element that he had developed in the first three parts of Religion in the Making. In other words, Whitehead had moved back and forth between two concepts of God. His views would have shifted during the composition of Religion in the Making in 1926 from the concept of God as formative element to God as the conceptual valuation of eternal objects, then back in 1927 to the former concept when writing the original version of Process and Reality, but back again, sometime in early 1928, to the latter concept of God of Religion in the Making in a revised version of Process and Reality.

This is quite unlikely,³⁷ and, actually, the interpretation that I proposed above of Process 32, 40 and 46 suggests that such wavering did not take place. Assuming that Ford’s analysis of Religion in the Making is accurate, Whitehead would have moved, during the composition of that book, from conceiving God as a formative element to God as the conceptual valuation of eternal objects. Contrary to Ford’s claims, however, the new, more developed concept of a non-temporal God was held by Whitehead until and through the composition of the original version of Process and Reality. More precisely, that concept lasted until Whitehead developed the distinction between a primordial and a consequent nature in God. As we have seen, indeed, all the passages where God is conceived as non-temporal are in terms of their composition contemporary and, as a result, express the same concept of God; and that concept, where God is presented as the conceptual valuation of eternal objects, is the very same concept that Whitehead held in the final version of Religion in the Making.

In sum, a compositional analysis of the passages where God is conceptualized by Whitehead in Process and Reality shows that, contrary to views commonly held by traditional and systematic interpreters, two concepts of God have been successively held by Whitehead during the composition of his Process and Reality. Passages from Process 7, 31, 32, 40, 46, and 93, among others, reveal that Whitehead had not developed the distinction between a primordial and a consequent nature at an earlier stage in the composition of the book. These passages manifest another concept of God, more basic and simple, where God was restricted to what eventually became the primordial nature in a revised -- actually, a new -- concept of God. However, more evidence would be needed in order to show that at an even earlier stage in the composition of his magnum opus, Whitehead did conceive God as nothing more than a formative element, as Lewis S. Ford claims.

Notes

l. A distinction has been established between two groups in the camp of those who contend that Whitehead always held the same metaphysical system. Jorge Luis Nobo claims that there is, on the one hand, a traditional approach. Its defining assumption is that "the whole of Whitehead’s metaphysical system finds complete expression between the covers of Process and Reality" (48). The preceding books in Whitehead’s metaphysical period, namely, Science and the Modern World, Religion and the Making, and Symbolism, express the same system "at least in its general outline and perhaps in a less mature form" (48). On the other hand there is, according to Nobo, a systematic approach. It rejects the assumption made by the traditional approach, that Whitehead’s whole metaphysical system is found in Process and Reality. The other books, including the later books, are essential for an accurate interpretation of Whitehead’s metaphysical system, because they include applications, even doctrines that are absent from Process and Reality (49).

2. Created by Ford, the method of compositional analysis aims, essentially, at the identification of insertions m Whitehead texts, and eventually at the reconstruction of the successive redactional layers of those texts. Ford’s most complete explanation of that method may be found on pages 42 and 43 in Transforming. See also the introduction of "Growth."

3. After commenting on the necessity of a principle of limitation and of its identification with God in Science and the Modern World, Lowe concludes that "the actual entity that is needed to order the possibilities is called the primordial nature of God" (101). A similar interpretation is proposed by Abraham Zvie Bar-On:

4. See, for example, Transforming xvi, 46 and 59.

5. Those passages appear on pages 7, 18, 31, 32, 40, 46, 49, 65, 74-75, 87, 93, 95, 110, 111, 220, 222, 224, 244, 246, 247, 249-50, and 316 in Process and Reality.

6. Especially the following phrase: "The ‘consequent nature’ evolves with its relationship to the evolving world." See also Process and Reality, where Whitehead states that in the consequent nature there is "fullness of physical feeling . . . . derived from the objectification of the world in God."

7. See Process and Reality, the definition of causal objectification as the transmission, by a subject, of what it objectifies to the future actual entities: "In ‘causal objectification’ what is felt subjectively by the objectified actual entity is transmitted objectively to the concrescent actualities that supersede it" (58).

8. As Whitehead writes in Process and Reality, "the universe is . . . a creative advance into novelty" (222).

9. Whitehead writes:

He reiterates those views in the very last section of Process and Reality.

10. See, for example, Christian 269, 274,323; also Leclerc 169.

11. According to the Ontological Principle, every reason lies in an actual entity:

12. The primordial nature is actual (though deficiently, as Whitehead noted in Process 345), and may be, consequently and in that sense, considered an actuality; however, it is certainly not an actual entity: in Process and Reality, it is God as such that is an actual entity (see 7, 88).

13. See also Process 40, where God is presented as the "ideal realization of potentialities," and Process 32, where Whitehead writes that "such a primordial superject of creativity (God, that is) achieves, m its unity of satisfaction, the complete conceptual valuation of all eternal objects."

14. The relationship of direct proportionality between intensity and relevance is established by Whitehead in Process and Reality

15. On the divine non-temporal actual entity as ground for the relevance of eternal objects Whitehead contends that "if there be a relevance of what in the temporal world is unrealized, the relevance must express a fact of togetherness in the formal constitution of a non-temporal actuality" (Process 32).

16. See also Process 40.

17. See also Process 46.

18. See, for example, The Emergence 186 and 197.

19. See his critique of my views, especially in "Growth" 9-10.

20. See "Growth" 13. For a list of the passages considered by Ford as belonging to the first concept of God, see note 11 (page 84) in the same article.

21. The only passage discussed in this article that is not taken into account by Ford is Process 93. One would suppose that Ford would classify it as a manifestation of what he calls the initial concept of God in Process and Reality.

22. Ford acknowledges the conceptual compatibility between the passages he assigns to the early and intermediary concepts of God in "Growth," where he writes that "[b]ecause my two versions of divine nontemporality are not inconsistent with each other, both can be construed together as constituting a single initial concept" (9).

23. The other passages considered by Ford as expressions of the "intermediate" concept of God, and which I did not use in this article, witness, in my view, to internal developments or shifts undergone by that concept. Those shifts which apply to what I would see as the only early concept of God in Process and Reality are discussed in the fourth and fifth chapters of my Relive Whitehead. In chapter 4, the emergence of the notion of "subjective aim" in the early concept of God of Process and Reality is shown on the basis of passages from Process and Reality 224 and 244. In chapter 5, the application of the notion of ‘hybrid physical feelings to God is entertained through a study of passages from Process and Reality 246, 247, and 249. These may reveal a second internal shift in the conceptualization of God as the conceptual realization of eternal objects. Those two shifts, that is, the emergence of the notion of a divine providence of subjective aims and of the notion of hybrid physical feelings of God by actual entities, are also perceived by Ford, although interpreted differently ("Growth," Part B, sections 14, 15, 18, 19, 20).

24. In sum, according to Ford’s genetic reconstruction, God would have been conceived, at a very early stage in the composition of Process and Reality, as non-temporal and non-concrescent (the initial concept); then, at a later stage in the preparing his manuscript for publication, as non-temporal and concrescent (the intermediary concept); eventually, in the final version of Process and Reality, God would have been reconceived as temporal and concrescent (the final concept). See Transforming 59 for a summary statement, by Ford, of his findings on Whitehead’s concepts of God in Process and Reality.

25. The passages from Process 105 and 108 are not explicitly identified by Ford in "Growth." However, those are the two references to God in what Ford names the "living occasions" insertion on pages 36-39 in the same article, an insertion that he associates with the intermediate concept of God.

26. See my analysis of those passages in Relive Whitehead: 54-57 for Process 105, 108, and 189; 60-61 for Process 278; 31-33 for Process 344; 48-49 for Process 349.

27. Again, see my analysis of those passages in Relive Whitehead: pages 266-68 for Process 31, pages 272-73 for Process 164, pages 270-72 for Process 257.

28. These are cases similar to the passages from Process 31-32, 32 and 46 studied in section 2 of this article, but different insofar as it is not possible to ascertain the presence, in them, of a component that manifests a concept of God as non-temporal.

29. See note 32 above on those passages. Process and Reality 87 is analyzed on pages 87-97 in Relive Whitehead.

30. See "Growth," in particular note 45, wherein Ford asserts that "[t]his chapter (1.3) seems to have become Whitehead’s repository for materials that could not fit in otherwise."

31. The initial location of the fourth full paragraph of Process 32 (with the exception of the last sentence) may have been at the end of the paragraph on the Category of Subjective Harmony, Process 27.

32. See "Growth" 22.

33. For an exposition of those criteria by Ford, see "Growth" 7-8.

34. 1 propose that the following segments of section II.I.3 have been inserted: 43.37-44.30a; 44.34-45.41; 46.1 6b-28.

35. The original version of sections II.I.2 and II.I.3 would have been made of sections II.I.2 as a whole, followed by a few segments of section II.I.3, that is, 44.30b-33 and 45.42-46.16a.

36. See "Growth" 5 and 11.

37. To those who would find such conceptual wavering unlikely; Ford’s answer is that Whitehead never actually abandoned the concept of God as formative element in Religion in the Making, the fourth and last part of that book, where Whitehead writes about God as the conceptual valuation of the realm of ideal forms, is nothing else than the result of "a theistic projection based on the revelation of Western religions" ("Growth" 11).

Works Cited

Christian, William A. An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1959.

Cobb, John B., Jr. A Christian Natural Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965.

Ford, Lewis S. The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (1925-1929). Albany: State U of New York P, 1984.

____"Whitehead’s Intellectual Adventure." Studies in Religion/Science’s Religions 28(1999): 63-75.

____"The Growth of Whitehead’s Theism." Process Studies Supplements 1.2 (1999): 1-99 <http://wwwctr4process.org/PSS/Growth.pdf>

____Transforming Process Theism. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000.

Hurtubise, Denis. Relive Whitehead. Les concepts de Dien dans Process and Reality. Sainte-Foy, Québec: Les Process and Realityesses de l’Université Laval, 2000.

Kraus, Elizabeth M. The Metaphysics of Experience. A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, New York: Fordham UP, 1998.

Leclerc, Ivor. Whitehead’s Metaphysics. London: Allen and Unwin, 1958.

Lowe, Victor. Understanding Whitehead. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1962.

Nobo, Jorge Luis. "The Approach to Whitehead: Traditional? Genetic? Or Systematic?" Process Studies 27(1998): 48-63.

Sherburne, Donald W. A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. New York: Macmillan, 1926.

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

Zvie Bar-On, Abraham. The Categories and the Principle of Coherence: Whitehead’s Theory of Categories in Historical Perspective. Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1987.

1. Introductory Remarks

In The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics,¹ Lewis S. Ford describes Process and Reality as the result of a complex redactional procedure in which an original manuscript from the summer of 1927² has been repeatedly supplemented by additions from renewed perspectives. As a matter of fact, Ford contends, Whitehead’s metaphysical outlook kept shifting during the very composition of Process and Reality. Various procedures would have been used by him in order to revise his text, the most important being the insertion, at various places in the original manuscript, of passages expressing his new vision, at times a few lines, at times even whole sections, with the intention of leading his eventual readers to interpret the whole context in the light of the point of view of the inserted materials.³ Ford proposes that Whitehead did modify his original manuscript accordingly a number of times before its publication in 1929, with the result that the final version of Process and Reality is actually the outcome of the superposition of texts from successive redactional strata over the original stratum made by the manuscript of the summer of l927.⁴

According to Ford, this original stratum included an original version of the now Part V of Process and Reality. As he says, it would have been most unusual if Whitehead had not written anything about God when the chapters he was preparing for his book on metaphysics were also destined to be presented the following June in Edinburgh as the 1928 Gifford Lectures, which are lectures on natural theology. Furthermore, Ford adds, there is in Part V enough materials consonant with the general viewpoint of the original stratum to advocate the existence of an original version of this Part of Process and Reality.⁵

In addition to these arguments by Ford, the existence of an original version of Part V of Process and Reality is also suggested by some peculiarities that characterize the text of that Part as it appears in its final version. I am here referring to the incongruities that riddle Part V of Process and Reality.

One such incongruity can be found in the radical shift of concern that happens at the end of section V.1.3. From the beginning of that section until 339.33a,⁶ Whitehead elaborated on the necessity of not disjoining order and novelty when all of the sudden, without even starting a new paragraph, he drops that concern in order to discuss in the next few lines a totally unrelated matter, namely a consequence of the transmutation of causal efficacy into presentational immediacy.

Another anomaly can be found in V.1.4, more specifically in 340.25-341.7. Indeed, we see evil being first presented there as loss of the past: "The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a ‘perpetual perishing’ (340.250. Then, in 340.34b-341.2, Whitehead proposes a solution to the problem of evil, that is, what he calls "the provision of intermediate elements introducing a complex structure of harmony" (340.41-42a). Finally, in 341.3-7, he comes back to a statement on the nature of evil as lost of the past. The anomaly in this case lies in the regression 341.3-7 introduces in the argumentation. As a matter of fact, one can wonder why Whitehead would conclude a discussion obviously meant to present a solution to evil with a stern restatement of the concept of evil he just transcended.

Those difficulties, to which other examples could be added, suggest that the text of Part V of Process and Reality has been reorganized by Whitehead, and, therefore, that there has been an original version of that Part V.

This article is concerned with that original version of Part V. My intention is to propose a reconstruction of it, that is, a reconstruction of the text of Part V as It stood before the numerous modifications Whitehead made to it.

That reconstruction is, to be sure, the result of a careful scrutiny of the text of the final version of Process and Reality. It aims, basically, at recovering the original component textual units of Part V of that book and rearranging those textual units in what is felt to be their right original sequence. Still, this scrutiny is only based on textual evidence, that is, on discontinuity and continuity between various textual units. There is no external evidence that is apt to confirm the adequacy of the reconstruction. This entails, therefore, that the reconstruction proposed is necessarily tentative. The most that can be done is to propose it and try to defend its plausibility. Accordingly, the article will consist in an exposition of the reconstructed original Part V, with footnotes in which the plausibility of the reconstruction is advocated.

But before getting to the texts, I think it is appropriate to warn that the original version of Part V as reconstructed below, is quite different from the final version available in Griffin and Sherburne’s corrected edition of Process and Reality.⁷ This can be explained by the fact that Whitehead did continue to revise the original version a number of times and according to the rather unusual procedure I discussed in the introduction, that is, mainly, by adding new materials. Indeed, he revised his text by following two general patterns. At times he would add new passages, generally inserting them in between original materials. At other times, he would remove passages from the original version in order to reinsert them in other parts of the book. Both procedures have been extensively used in the progressive revision made by Whitehead of the original Part V with the result that the early versions below are only partly similar to the final version.

Reconstructing the original version of Part V requires that we bring together textual units that are now separated in the final version. Consequently, and in order to make it easier for the reader to recognize those textual units, I will identify each of them by bracketed capital letters. Those letters will facilitate further reference to the textual units they identify. In addition, I will use bracketed small letters to point out places in Part V where Whitehead inserted new materials in the course of his several revisions. These insertions are discussed in footnotes.

2. The Original Version of Process and Reality, Part V

Section 1

[Unchanged from original until final version: corresponds exactly with V.1.1 in the final version]

Section 2⁸

[A: 338.l8-26]⁹ The four symbolic figures in the Medici chapel in Florence -- Michelangelo’s masterpieces of statuary, Day and Night, Evening and Dawn -- exhibit the everlasting elements in the passage of fact. The figures stay there, reclining in their recurring sequence, forever showing the essences in the nature of things. The perfect realization is not merely the exemplification of what in abstraction is timeless. It does more: it implants timelessness on what in its essence is passing. The perfect moment is fadeless in the lapse of time. Time has then lost its character of ‘perpetual perishing’; it becomes the ‘moving image of eternity’.

[B: 208.4-209,7a]¹⁰ That ‘all things flow’ is the first vague generalization which the unsystematized, barely analyzed, intuition of men has produced. It is the theme of some of the best Hebrew poetry in the Psalms; it appears as one of the first generalizations of Greek philosophy in the form of the saying of Heraclitus; amid the later barbarism of Anglo-Saxon thought it reappears in the story of the sparrow flitting through the banqueting hall of the Northumbrian king; and in all stages of civilization its recollection lends its pathos to poetry. Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

At this point we have transformed the phrase, ‘all things flow’, into the alternative phrase, ‘the flux of things.’ In so doing, the notion of the ‘flux’ has been held up before our thoughts as one primary notion for further analysis. But in the sentence ‘all things flow,’ there are three words -- and we have started by isolating the last word of the three. We move backward to the next word ‘all’ and ask, what is the meaning of the ‘many’ things engaged in this common flux, and in what sense, if any, can the word ‘all’ refer to a definitely indicated set of these many things?

The elucidation of meaning involved in the phrase ‘all things flow’ is one chief task of metaphysics.

But there is a rival notion, antithetical to the former. I cannot at the moment recall one immortal phrase which expresses it with the same completeness as that with which the alternative notion has been rendered by Heraclitus. This other notion dwells on the permanence of things -- the solid earth, the mountains, the stones, the Egyptian Pyramids, the spirit of man, God.

The best rendering of integral experience, expressing its general form divested of irrelevant details, is often to be found in the utterances of religious aspiration. One of the reasons of the thinness of so much modern metaphysics is its neglect of this wealth of expression of ultimate feeling. Accordingly we find in the first two lines of a famous hymn a full expression of the union of the two notions in one integral experience:

Here the first line expresses the permanence, ‘abide’, ‘me’ and the ‘Being’ addressed; and the second line sets these permanences amid the inescapable flux.

[a]¹¹ [C:338.11b-17] Ideals fashion themselves round these two notions, permanence and flux. In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux: and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. Those who would disjoin the two elements can find no expression of patent facts.

[D: 346.37-347.2] ¹² The vicious separation of the flux from the permanence leads to the concept of an entirely static God, with eminent reality, in relation to an entirely fluent world, with deficient reality. But if the opposites, static and fluent, have once been so explained as separately to characterize diverse actualities, the interplay between the thing which is static and the things which are fluent involves contradiction at every step in its explanation. Such philosophies must include the notion of ‘illusion’ as a fundamental principle -- the notion of ‘mere appearance.’ This is the final Platonic problem.

[E: 342.17-343.19]¹³ The notion of God as the ‘unmoved mover’ is derived from Aristotle, at least so far as Western thought is concerned. The notion of God as ‘eminently real’ is a favorite doctrine of Christian theology. The combination of the two into the doctrine of an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys, is the fallacy which has infused tragedy into the histories of Christianity and of Mahomedanism.

When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers. The code of Justinian and the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.

In the great formative period of theistic philosophy which ended with the rise of Mahometanism, after a continuance coeval with civilization, three strains of thought emerge which, amid many variations in detail, respectively fashion God in the image of an imperial ruler, God in the image of a personification of moral energy, God in the image of an ultimate philosophical principle. Hume’s Dialogues criticize unanswerably these modes of explaining the system of the world.

The three schools of thought can be associated respectively with the divine Caesars, the Hebrew prophets, and Aristotle. But Aristotle was antedated by Indian, and Buddhist, thought; the Hebrew prophets can be paralleled in traces of earlier thought; Mahometanism and the divine Caesars merely represent the most natural, obvious, idolatrous theistic symbolism, at all epochs and places.

The history of theistic philosophy exhibits various stages of combination of these three diverse ways of entertaining the problem. There is, however, in the Galilean origin of Christianity, yet another suggestion which does not fit very well with any of the three main strands of thought. It does not emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love; and it finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as to morals. It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present.

[F: 347.3-l6]¹⁴ Undoubtedly, the intuition of Greek, Hebrew, and Christian thought have alike embodied the notions of a static God condescending to the world, and of a world either thoroughly fluent, or accidentally static, but finally fluent -- ’heaven and earth shall pass away.’ In some schools of thought, the fluency of the world is mitigated by the assumption that selected components in the world are exempt from this final fluency, and achieve a static survival. Such components are not separated by any decisive line from analogous components for which the assumption is not made. Further, the survival is construed in terms of a final pair of opposites, happiness for some, torture for others.

Such systems have the common character of starting with a fundamental Intuition which we do mean to express, and of entangling themselves in verbal expressions, which carry consequences at variance with the initial intuition of permanence in fluency and of fluency in permanence.

Section 3¹⁵

[G: 338.28-339.33a]¹⁶ Another contrast is equally essential for the understanding of ideals -- the contrast between order as the condition for excellence, and order as stifling the freshness of living, This contrast is met with in the theory of education. The condition for excellence is a thorough training in technique. Sheer skill must pass out of the sphere of conscious exercise, and must have assumed the character of unconscious habit. The first, the second, and the third condition for high achievement is scholarship in that enlarged sense including knowledge and acquired instinct controlling action.

The paradox which wrecks so many promising theories of education is that the training which produces skill is so very apt to stifle imaginative zest. Skill demands repetition, and imaginative zest is tinged with impulse. Up to a certain point each gain in skill opens new paths for the imagination. But in each individual formal training has its limit of usefulness. Beyond that limit there is degeneration: ‘The lilies of the field toil not, neither do they spin.’

The social history of mankind exhibits great organizations in their alternating functions of conditions for progress, and of contrivances for stunting humanity, The history of the Mediterranean lands, and of western Europe, is the history of the blessing and the curse of political organizations, of religious organizations, of schemes of thought, of social agencies for large purposes. The moment of dominance, prayed for, worked for, sacrificed for, by generations of the noblest spirits, marks the turning point where the blessing passes into the curse. Some new principle of refreshment is required. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order, Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.

The same principle is exhibited by the tedium arising from the unrelieved dominance of a fashion in art. Europe, having covered itself with treasures of Gothic architecture, entered upon generations of satiation. These jaded epochs seem to have lost all sense of that particular form of loveliness. It seems as though the last delicacies of feeling require some element of novelty to relieve their massive inheritance from bygone systems. Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.

But the two elements must not really be disjoined. It belongs to the goodness of the world, that its settled order should deal tenderly with the faint discordant light of the dawn of another age. Also order, as it sinks into the background before new conditions, has its requirements. The old dominance should be transformed into the firm foundations, upon which new feelings arise, drawing their intensities from delicacies of contrast between system and freshness. In either alternative of excess, whether the past be lost, or be dominant, the present is enfeebled. This is only an application of Aristotle’s doctrine of the ‘golden mean.’ [b][c]¹⁷

[H:340.2-16a]¹⁸ The world is thus faced by the paradox that, at least in its highest actualities, it craves for novelty and yet is haunted by terror at the loss of the past, with its familiarities and its loved ones. It seeks escape from time in its character of ‘perpetually perishing’. Part of the joy of the new years is the hope of the old round of seasons, with their stable facts -- of friendship, and love, and old association. Yet conjointly with this terror, the present as mere unrelieved preservation of the past assumes the character of a horror of the past, rejection of it, revolt:

Each new epoch enters upon its career by waging unrelenting war upon the aesthetic gods of its immediate predecessor. Yet the culminating fact of conscious, rational life refuses to conceive itself as transient enjoyment, transiently useful. In the order of the physical world its role is defined by its introduction of novelty.[d]¹⁹

This is the problem which gradually shapes itself as religion reaches its higher phases in civilized communities. The most general formulation of the religious problem is the question whether the process of the temporal world passes into the formation of other actualities, bound together in an order in which novelty does not mean loss.[e][f][g][h]²⁰

[I_: 350,8-13]²¹ Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites -- of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the ‘opposites’ are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of ‘God’ is the way in which we understand this incredible fact -- that what cannot be, yet is.

Notes

1. Lewis S. Ford, The Emergence of Whiteheads Metaphysics (Albany: Slate University of New York Press, 1985). Henceforth referred to as EWM.

2. External evidence points to the summer of 1927 as the moment when the original manuscript, or at least parts of it, was written. In a letter sent to his son North on August 22, 1927, Whitehead talks about the book which would become Process and Reality: "It seems years and years since I wrote to you. But I have written nearly half a book on Metaphysics this summer, and have not wanted to break my thoughts in any way. Anyhow I have now got nearly 9 1/2 out of a projected plan of 20 or 25 chapters..."(EWM 179).

3. On Whitehead’s compositional method, see, for example, pages xi and 177 in EWM.

4. Ford isolates thirteen successive redactional strata in Process and Reality, and refers to them with capitals from A to M. Those strata are themselves sometimes divided in substrata, as it is the case, for example, with strata C and F, due to some minor shifts that, though introducing new features, are still closer conceptually to the stratum to which they are related than to the next one. As Ford himself mentions (see EWM 179), the compositional analysis of Process and Reality is not yet complete. New redactional strata could be found, entailing that the "A to M’ classification of redactional strata could be modified by such new findings in the text.

5. See EWM 186f.

6. References to passages in Process and Reality will be made by following the customary model adopted in Griffin and Sherburne’s edition, that is by page(s) then line(s). Thus, 339.32a means page 339, first part of line 22. As for the sections, they will be referred to the same way Whitehead himself used to, that is by Part, then Chapter. then Section. As an example, II.10.1 means Part II, Chapter 10, Section 1.

7. Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected Edition by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978).

8. The second section in Part V’s original version is the ancestor of section V.1.2 in the final version. As it will become obvious, the bulk of section V.1.2 was already present in original section 2. However, that original section 2 may have included other textual units that would have been moved to other places in Process and Reality during the various revisions Whitehead made of the book. Here are, listed according to the order in which we propose they appeared, the textual units that would have composed Part Vs original section 2:

[A] 338.18-26

[B] 208.4-209.7a

[C] 338.11b-l7

[D] 346.37-347.2

[El 342.17-343.19

[F] 347.3-16

9. It is plausible to conceive the second section of Part V’s original version as opening with [AI on the basis of the relation between [AI and the textual unit that follows it immediately, that is, [B], for one part, but also on the basis of the relation between [A] and the rest of the section. As a matter of fact in [A], Whitehead does basically two things. First, through the image of the Medici Chapel, he discusses two aspects of reality, namely permanence (‘everlasting elements,’ ‘timelessness’) and fluency (‘passage of fact,’ ‘what in its essence is passing’). Secondly, he presents the symbolic statuary figures as exemplifying the dual and simultaneous presence of permanence and fluency in a same moment of reality. Now, if we consider that [B] is a discussion of permanence and fluency, and that from [B] to [F], Whitehead demonstrates, though briefly, how the history of thought has always separated permanence and flux, the relation between [AI and [B] but also between [A] and the rest of the section can be seen as a relation of continuity. Indeed. [A] can be seen as providing a first general introduction of the two notions Whitehead is going to discuss in a more formal manner in [B], those notions being flux and permanence. And in a parallel introductory role, [AI can be understood as a statement made by Whitehead of his view of the way flux and permanence should be dealt with, that is, jointly, as a contrasting background for the presentation he is about to make of the separation that the history of thought has perpetuated between the same two ideals. In both cases, thus, Whitehead can be understood as stating in [A] the notional and ideological background upon which he elaborates the discussion that follows from [B] to [F].

That [A] stood as the opening paragraph in the second section of the original version of Part V means that somehow in revising his manuscript Whitehead brought that paragraph from the opening to the concluding position, [A] being the concluding paragraph of section V.1.2 in the final version. I suspect that this transfer from opening to conclusion has been effectuated this way; [A] has probably been moved from section 2 of the original version to 11.10.1 together with [B] (see note 10) in order to serve as an introduction for the latter section. Then, after Whitehead removed [C], [D] and [E] from section 2 (see notes 10, 12 and 13 below), he probably realized how little material remained in that section, namely the introduction he added in order to replace [A] and [B], and [C]. In view of this, and considering that [B] could constitute an adequate introduction to 11.10 on its own, he brought [A] back to section 2, but at its end, another introduction having been added when [A] and [81 had been moved to 11.10.1, namely [a] (on the latter, see note II below).

It should be noted that another possible position for [A] in the original version would be immediately after [F]. In this case, there is also continuity between [B] to [Fl, on one hand, and [A], on the other, the latter following the former. As a matter of fact, [B] to [F] can be seen as forming the background Whitehead sets up in order to state his own opposite opinion in [A]. Indeed, the discussion as a whole deals with the separation between flux and permanence, and how the history of thought shows that such a separation has been perpetuated. Such an historical survey sets the stage adequately for Whitehead’s own stance on the same matters, especially in view of the contrast between his position and the ones surveyed.

10. That [B] preceded [C] in the original version is plausible considering the continuity that exists in the dynamics of the discussion of the whole made by the juxtaposition of the now two separated passages. [B] introduces the two notions, ‘flux’ and ‘permanence’ while [C] affirms the importance of those two notions for the formation of ideals. Alternatively, [C] presupposes that the concepts it is discussing have been previously introduced, and such an introduction of the concepts of ‘flux’ and ‘permanence’ are to be found in [B]. Actually, the very formulation of [C] refers to a previous discussion of ‘flux’ and ‘permanence’ by means of the demonstrative pronoun ‘these’: "Ideals fashion themselves round these [italics mine] two notions, permanence and flux" (338.11b-12a)

Another indication favoring the original location of [B] before [C] is the use of ‘notion’ as referring to ‘flux’ and ‘permanence’ in both [B] and [C]; in the introduction of ‘flux’ and ‘permanence’ made in [B], Whitehead rigorously refers to those two objects as ‘notions’, and he does the same in [C]. This is an argument for continuity insofar as we recognize that Whitehead had not adopted a constant or standard referent for objects that are said to be essential for the understanding of ideals, that is, besides ‘flux’ and permanence’, ‘order’ and ‘novelty.’ As a matter of fact, Whitehead refers to ‘order’ and ‘novelty’ as ‘elements’ in the very next section (section 3). This should indicate that for Whitehead, flux and permanence are not necessarily to be referred to as notions, and, as a consequence, that the recurrent reference to them as notions in [B] and [C] could well indicate that both texts were written consecutively.

11. The original position of [A] as preceding [B] entails that [a] (338.7-Il in the final version) should be considered as not belonging to the original version of part V of Process and Reality. Indeed, the presence of[A] as the introduction of the notions of flux and permanence would make [a] quite redundant, although it is very much needed once [A] and [B] were removed.

[a] is made of the following sentences:

There are various contrasted qualities of temperament, which control the formation of the mentalities of different epochs. In a previous section (Part II, Ch. X) attention has already been drawn to the sense of permanence dominating the invocation ‘Abide with me,’ and the sense of flux dominating the sequel ‘Fast Falls the Eventide.’

12. V.1.2, being shrunk to two paragraphs in the final version of Process and Reality, may have originally had as many as fifteen paragraphs, which are now found not only in 11.10.1, but V.2.1 and V.2.5. One of these now displaced passages is [D], now located in V.2.5. In the original version of Part V. it may have immediately followed [C], though in a new paragraph.

The proposed sequence ‘[C] then [D]’ is plausible if one considers the continuity that links the boundary sentences. At the end of [C], Whitehead states: "Those who would disjoin the two elements [flux and permanence] can find no interpretation of patent facts." At the outset of [D], he indicates an instance where reality is interpreted from the standpoint of the same disjunction: "The vicious separation of the flux from the permanence leads to the concept of an entirely static God..." Having concluded the discussion on flux and permanence in [C] by stating the problem caused by their disjunction, Whitehead, in [D], turns to an instance of this problem.

13. Another passage that through revising his manuscript Whitehead may have transferred from the second section of Part V’s original version to another place in Process and Reality is [E]. now located in V.2.1.

The possible original position of [E] after [D] is plausible on the basis of the continuity that exists between those two passages at the level of the dynamics of the discussion that takes place in the broader unit made by both [D] and the first paragraph (actually, the whole) of [E]. In [D], Whitehead had stated that the separation of flux from permanence leads to a concept of a static God and a fluent world. Then, in [E], he focuses on the notion of God as static in order to situate its historical origins and its historical development. [E], thus, can be perceived as continuous with [D] insofar it develops one of the two elements that are discussed in [D], namely, the notion of God as static.

There is also continuity in the correspondence between the qualifiers used for God in both [D] and [E]: ‘unmoved mover’ in 342.17 ([El) recovers, in a formulation that is peculiar to some philosophical systems, the general idea of staticity in God (346.38, in [D]), whereas ‘eminently real’ (342.18-19, in [E]) is identical to ‘eminent reality’ (346.38, In [D]). [E] discusses the same very precise subject as [D], namely God as static and eminently real.

Moreover, [D] introduces the concepts [E] seems to presuppose. Starting a discussion as it does ("The notion of God as the ‘unmoved mover’ is derived from Aristotle, at least so far as Western thought is concerned. The notion of God as ‘eminently real’ is a favorite doctrine of Christian theology."), without any anterior mention of this notion of God, is possible, even though abrupt. But it is also plausible, because of this abruptness of the sentence as a discussion opener, to understand this sentence as presupposing an introductory discussion of this special notion of God. [D] provides such a required introduction or discussion of the notion of God mentioned in [E].

14, Originally, [E] was possibly followed by [F], now located in V.2.5. This original location is plausible if we consider the dynamics of the discussion taking place in [E] and [F] as together constituting a whole. In this case, the continuity revolves around the first sentence of [F]: "Undoubtedly, the intuitions of Greek, Hebrew, and Christian thought have alike embodied the notions of a static God condescending to the world, and of a world either thoroughly fluent, or accidentally static, but finally fluent – ‘heaven and earth shall pass away.’"

This sentence is a double statement, with a first statement on God and a second statement on the world. Of those two statements, the one on God is the most important Insofar it can be seen as grounded by the preceding developments, that is, by [E]. Indeed in [E], the history of ancient thought is overviewed and perceived as having presented God in the image of an imperial ruler (Christian theology), a personification of moral energy (Hebrew thought) and an ultimate philosophical principle (Greek thought). It is thus seen as having presented God as static. Now, the statement above on God opens the paragraph that follows that overview of ancient thought by asserting that Greek, Hebrew and Christian thought embody the notion of God as static. That statement, then, simply repeats, in an abridged form, the overview. Therefore, as the first part of the double statement on God and the world that follows immediately the overview of ancient thought, the statement on God can be seen as grounded by the overview, and on this ground as acting as transition between [E] and [F].

15. In the same way in which the original V.1.2, as tentatively reconstructed, was the forerunner of the final V.1.2, sections V.1.3 and V.1.4 of the final version appear to be the result of the progressive revision made by Whitehead of the third and last section of the original version of Part V. That third section would have been made of materials now scattered in sections V.1.3 and V.1.4, but also in section V.2.6 in the final version. Those materials would have consisted in the following textual units listed below in order of appearance in the original V.1.3:

[G] 338.28-339.33a

[H] 340.2-23 (minus insertion at 340.16b-19)

[I] 350.8-13

16. The third section of the original version of Part V probably began with what is now section V.1.3 in the final version, with the exception of the last lines of that section V.1.3, that is 339.33b-44, that could have been added later by Whitehead. The sudden and unprepared mention of ‘causal efficacy’ and ‘presentational immediacy’ in the discussion (lines 33b-36a), combined with a second passage of the same sort a few lines further concerning the body and bodily life (lines 36b.44), suggest that 339.33b-44 were not part of the original discussion, and that they have been added later. In fact, we propose that this added material consists of two successive insertions, a first one at 33b-36a (or [b]), and a second one at 36b-44 (or [c]). These two insertion are quoted in note 17 below.

As for the origins of those insertions, it seems that both have been brought in from another place in Process and Reality where they did belong when first written. The first one, that is, [b], could have been at one time located in section IV.4.l, page 314, between lines 25 and 40, thus at the place where 314.26-39, which did not exist then, is located in the final version. Whitehead would have brought [b] at the end of V.1.3 after he inserted 314.26-39 in order to replace it. As for 339.36b.44 (or [c]), it seems that it was for a while located at 109.9. When Whitehead rewrote 109.9-31 in terms of enduring objects, he could have moved [c] to V.1.3.

17. Insertion [b], that is, 339.33b-36a in the final version of Process and Reality, reads as follows:

The lesson of the transmutation of causal efficacy into presentational immediacy is that great ends are reached by life in the present; life novel and immediate, but deriving its richness by its full inheritance from the rightly organized animal body.

Insertion [c] is the following:

It is by reason of the body, with its miracle of order, that the treasures of the past environment are poured into the living occasion. The final percipient route of occasions is perhaps some thread of happenings wandering in ‘empty’ space amid the interstices of the brain. It toils not, neither does it spin. It receives from the past; it lives in the present. It is shaken by its intensities of private feeling, adversion or aversion. In its turn, this culmination of bodily life transmits itself as an element of novelty throughout the avenues of the body. Its sole use to the body is its vivid originality: it is the organ of novelty.

18. Part V’s original version probably did not include some materials that appear now in sections V.1.3 and V.1.4 of the final version (see the two preceding notes, also notes 19 and 20). Rather, [H] (now 340.2-16a) probably followed immediately after [G] without any break between the sections.

[H] can be understood as continuous with [G] insofar it presupposes a previous discussion of the concepts it deals with, namely order and novelty, and their importance for understanding the world. Indeed, the opening sentence in [H]. that is, "The world is thus [italics mine] faced by the paradox that, at least in its highest actualities, it craves for novelty and yet is haunted by terror at the loss of the past, with its familiarities and its loved ones," refers, because of the use of the word thus, to a previous argument that provides the grounds on which Whitehead bases his assertion that the world requires both novelty and order. Now, [C] is just such a discussion, with examples from history and art at hand. Consequently, the previous argument [H] refers to could very well be [C].

19. Whitehead probably inserted [d] (that is, 340.16b-19 in the final version) in [H] at some point in his revision of original Part V:

But just as physical feelings are haunted by the vague insistence of causality, so the higher intellectual feelings are haunted by the vague insistence of another order, where there is no unrest, no travel, no shipwreck: ‘There shall be no more sea.’

That [d] plausibly constituted an insertion can be seen on the basis of the continuity that links the lines surrounding it, that is, 340.12-16a and 340.20-24. The lines that precede [d] describe in general terms the tension between order and novelty, that is, the need the world is confronted with of both order and novelty. The lines that follow [d] formulate, also in general terms, the ‘religious problem’: the tension between emergence of novelty and loss of order. There is continuity here insofar as the religious problem is formulated in the terms of the tension between order and novelty that is discussed before [d]. As such, [d] only introduces a break in the dynamics of the argumentation by introducing, between the two moments of a discourse made in general terms, a repetitive reformulation done in technical terms of the first moment of the discourse. Indeed, [d] expresses the same tension between order and novelty that was already expressed in the lines that precede it, except that the tension is expressed, in [d], in a technical language (with terms such as physical feelings and intellectual feelings) that is not used in the immediate context. In other words, there is continuity in the discussion taking place in the textual whole made by the juxtaposition of 340,12-I 6a and 340.20-24, but also in the style used in this textual whole, that is a general style, to be opposed to the more technical style used in [d].

Another argument could be added about [d] as constituting an insertion, although it is based on considerations that cannot be developed here. [d] should be understood as an insertion because it includes late concepts, that is, ‘intellectual feelings’ and ‘physical feelings’, respectively from redactional strata H and D (on those concepts as belonging to later redactional strata, see chapter nine in EWM). That those concepts do not belong to Process and Reality’s original version, and thus to the original version of part V, implies that the passage they belong to. namely [d], has been inserted later by Whitehead in his revision.

20. The rest of the final version of section V.1.4, that is, from 340.25 to 341.17, was not, it seems, in the original version. It is possibly made up of four passages that have apparently been added to the original version at some point in the revisory process. probably independently of one another. Those passages are referred to as [e], [f], [g] and [h]. and correspond, respectively, to 340.25-34a, 340.34b-341.2, 341.3-7, and 341.8-17:

[e]

The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a ‘perpetual perishing.’ Objectification involves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy. The process of time veils the past below distinctive feeling. There is a unison of becoming among things in the present. Why should there not be novelty without loss of this direct unison of immediacy among things? In the temporal world, it is the empirical fact that process entails loss: the past is present under an abstraction. But there is no reason, of any ultimate metaphysical generality, why this should be the whole story.

[f]

The nature of evil is that the characters of things are mutually obstructive. Thus the depths of life require a process of selection. But the selection is elimination as the first step towards another temporal order seeking to minimize obstructive modes. Selection is at once the measure of evil, and the process of its evasion. It means discarding the element of obstructiveness in fact. No element in fact is ineffectual: thus the struggle with evil is a process of building up a mode of utilization by the provision of intermediate elements introducing a complex structure of harmony. The triviality in some initial reconstruction of order expresses the fact that actualities are being produced, which, trivial in their own proper character of immediate ‘ends.’ are proper ‘means’ for the emergence of a world at once lucid, and intrinsically of immediate worth.

[g]

The evil of the world is that those elements which are translucent so far as transmission is concerned, in themselves are of slight weight; and that those elements with individual weight, by their discord, impose upon vivid immediacy the obligation that it fade into night. ‘He giveth his beloved -- sleep.’

[h]

In our cosmological construction we are, therefore, left with the final opposites, joy and sorrow, good and evil, disjunction and conjunction -- that is to say, the many in one -- flux and permanence, greatness and triviality, freedom and necessity, God and the World. In this list, the pairs of opposites are in experience with a certain ultimate directness of intuition, except in the case of the last pair. God and the World introduce the note of interpretation. They embody the interpretation of the cosmological problem in terms of a fundamental metaphysical doctrine as to the quality of creative origination, namely, conceptual appetition and physical realization. This topic constitutes the last chapter of Cosmology.

As has been mentioned in the introductory remarks, a shift occurs in the discussion at 340.25. Up to that point, that is, in [G] and [H], Whitehead discussed order and novelty. After 340.25, he abruptly shifts to a discussion of evil in which order and novelty are never mentioned. Such an absence of continuity suggests that the discussion on evil has been added later.

I propose that this added material on evil is made of three different insertions, which are [c], [f] and [g], quoted above. Those insertions are distinguished from each other on the basis of the differences among their respective contents. Indeed, all of them are definitions of evil that are mutually coherent in respect to the basic nature of evil, but the definitions differ as to the way the nature of evil is expressed. In [e] evil is defined as "the fact that the past fades, that time is a ‘perpetual perishing’." In [f] evil "is that the characters of things are mutually obstructive," while in [g] "the evil of the world is that those elements which are translucent so far as transmission is concerned, in themselves are of slight weight; and that those elements with individual weight, by their discord, impose upon vivid immediacy the obligation that it fade into night." Although all three definitions are fundamentally similar in that in each one evil consists in the loss of the past, the particular expression of the nature of evil that is found in each (due to the equation between the nature of evil and one of its manifestations) suggests that Whitehead has elaborated each of those definitions from the standpoint of differing preoccupations or points of view. It suggests, thus, that Whitehead has composed them at different moments, and, consequently, that they are distinct textual units.

As for [h], I suggest that it is a late insertion. Like [a], (see note II), this passage may have replaced another passage. More precisely, the passage now located in 350.8-13 ([I]) probably once served as the conclusion for section 3 in the original version (see note 21 immediately below). Indeed, [h] as well as [I] are summary statements about the universe as exhibiting a variety of opposites, and, furthermore, some pairs of opposites are mentioned in both, such as ‘multiplicity and unity’ and ‘freedom and necessity.’ Such a repetition suggests that if [I] first concluded original section 3, [h] was inserted to conclude what would become the first chapter in the final version of Part V when [I] was transferred to its present location in section V.2.6.

21. In original Part V, [I] probably followed [H]. Indeed, [I] provides an appropriate conclusion for the original version of Part V. It summarizes the main idea of that version, that is, that the universe unfolds itself through opposites, among which flux and permanence, order and novelty have been discussed.

In the penultimate paragraph of Process and Reality,¹ Whitehead introduces² a new feature in his concept of God, making thereby possible a fourth phase, never mentioned before in the book,³ in the universe’s accomplishment of its actuality: "But the principle of universal relativity is not to be stopped at the consequent nature of God. This nature itself passes into the temporal world according to its gradation of relevance to the various concrescent occasions" (PR 350.33-35) (??check notes!!) Clearly, Whitehead states that the consequent nature passes into the temporal world. What is less clear is the meaning of that statement. As a matter of fact, Whitehead offers no description of that passage in order that its modalities be understood. Even in PR 351.4-13, where he discusses the fourth phase, all one finds are repeated assertions of that passage and images evoking its effects in the world.

What, then, did Whitehead mean when he wrote about a passage of the consequent nature into the world in PR 350.33-35? How did he conceive of this passage taking place? Many authors have tackled that question, trying to infer answers based on different frameworks. Without pretending to take into account each and every answer given to those questions since the time Whitehead’s writings became objects of scholarly exegesis, I first propose, in the following pages, reconstructions of the main interpretations of the word "passage" in PR 350.33-35. Second, I provide a critique of these interpretations, preparing the way for an alternative interpretation.

I. Several Interpretations

Towards the end of the fourth chapter of A Christian Natural Theology, when John B. Cobb, Jr. is about to conclude his reconstruction of the Whiteheadian doctrine of God as expounded in Process and Reality, he mentions a "final feature" of the consequent nature of God that is treated in the last two paragraphs of Whitehead’s book: "It is demanded by the principle of universal relativity that just as God in his consequent nature prehends us, so also we prehend God’s consequent nature" (CNT 164).

Evidently, Cobb is commenting on PR 350.33-35: the structure of his argument is identical to the one Whitehead proposes in those lines, that is, asserting that the principle of universal relativity applies to the consequent nature, then stating the result of such an application.⁴ According to Cobb, the consequence of the application of the principle of universal relativity to the consequent nature of God, that is, the passage of the latter into the temporal world, must be understood through the concept of prehension: God’s consequent nature passes into the temporal world by being prehended by us.⁵

A very similar interpretation of PR 350.33-35 can be found in Forrest Wood’s Whiteheadian Thought as a Basis for a Philosophy of Religion:

As Cobb did, Wood reads into the reference in PR 350.33-3 -- a passage of the consequent nature into the temporal world -- the assertion of a prehension of the consequent nature by the actual occasions. But whereas Cobb mentions this prehension without drawing any inference from it for an understanding of Whitehead’s views about the relations between the world and God, Wood uses it to support the assertion that God’s impact on the actual occasions is not restricted to the provision of initial aims. Rather, he contends, the consequent nature, because it is prehended by the actual occasions, has an effect on the actual occasions that comes as its response to each of them:

A variation on this interpretation of the notion of passage in PR 350.33-35 is evident in Thomas Hosinski’s "The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ and the Development of Whitehead’s Idea of God" (KH 203-215.) In a series of comments about PR 350.33-351.13, Hosinski mentions Whitehead, stating - Hosinski refers here, obviously, to PR 350.33-35 -- that "the principle of relativity allows us to deduce or predict that the consequent nature of God must somehow be immanent" (KH 212). Even though Hosinski warns that Whitehead has never solved the technical problem of how this immanence can be understood in metaphysical terms, he nevertheless contends that God as a whole (the result of the integration of God’s two natures) is prehended by the actual occasions of the temporal world.

According to Hosinski, then, the immanence of the consequent nature -- its passage to the temporal world -- is to be conceived in terms of its prehension by the actual occasions. However, as opposed to Cobb’s and Wood’s interpretation, for Hosinski the consequent nature does not pass into the temporal world by being prehended as isolated from the primordial nature, but as integrated with it. Given Hosinski’s remarks about PR 350.15-24a, PR 345.43- 346.21a and PR 347.40 - 45a (KH 209 - 211), this means that the passage of the consequent nature into the temporal world takes place through the prehension of the result of the transformation of the temporal world that occurs in the consequent nature as the actual occasions are integrated with the primordial nature.⁶

A somewhat different interpretation of PR 350.33-35, specifically of the way the consequent nature of God passes into the temporal world, is found in David Griffin’s God, Power and Evil: A Process Theodicy. The conclusions he draws from PR 351.7b-1a⁷ are now of special relevance: "Hence, there is no basis for a dichotomy between the overcoming of evil in God and in the world. In fact, since it is ‘overcome’ in God’s consequent nature in the sense that it is responded to with an initial aim which aims at restoring goodness in the world, this ‘overcoming’ in God is precisely for the sake of overcoming evil in the world" (GPE 305).⁸

Griffin contends that the overcoming of evil through the "transformation of a worldly fact into a ‘perfected actuality’" (GPE 304) that takes place in the consequent nature is meant to affect the world, since the overcoming of evil is followed by the provision of ideal aims destined to restore goodness and harmony in the world.

Griffin thereby states implicitly his understanding of the way the consequent nature passes into the world: since the overcoming of evil that takes place in the consequent nature may also happen in the world through the provision of ideal aims, and since the ideal aims are derived, according to him, from the primordial nature,⁹ this means that somehow the consequent nature influences the primordial nature so the latter ends up providing the ideal aims. Does the "self-determining response by God" mentioned earlier take place in the consequent nature, simultaneously with the "purely receptive response"? Or does it rather happen in the primordial nature, as a counterpart and following the latter? Griffin offers no explanation of this matter. However, it is clear that somehow the overcoming of evil in the consequent nature determines the provision, by the primordial nature, of ideal aims destined to overcome the evil in the world -- the consequent nature thereby passes into the world.^*

II. A Critique

Both interpretations expounded above have been reached on the basis of inference. The one held by Cobb, Wood and others uses the theory of prehensions as conceptual framework in order to deal with the problem of the immanence of the consequent nature of God. From the premise that any immanence, in Whitehead’s metaphysical system, involves the conceptual triad "objectification, feeling, prehension," these authors conclude that the only possible way the consequent nature passes into the temporal world is through its prehension by the actual occasions. Griffin also uses a deductive approach, deductive in a sense similar to that of Cobb and others, that is, by selecting one of the theories developed in Process and Reality as a conceptual framework for the interpretation of the word "passage" in PR 350.33-35. In Griffin’s case, however, it is the theory of initial aim that guides the interpretation, rather than the theory of prehensions. As a matter of fact, Griffin describes the divine activity of restoration of goodness in terms of provision of initial aims, regardless as to whether this activity is performed by the primordial nature or the consequent nature. Moreover, there is a relationship, according to Griffin, between the overcoming of evil performed in the consequent nature and the overcoming of evil in the world: the former makes possible the latter, since the initial aim the consequent nature elicits as response to a specific evil and the initial aim provided by the primordial nature in the context of this evil are one and the same. From such premises, the passage of what is done in the consequent nature -- implicitly, the passage of the consequent nature to the temporal world -- must be understood in terms of the provision of initial aims.

It is not wrong to attempt to infer the meaning of a word when no indication whatsoever is given about it in a text. However, one has to ensure the conceptual framework chosen will not determine an interpretation such that the inferred meaning of that word would be incoherent with other concepts or theories of the conceptual system of which both this word and that conceptual framework are part. In the case of the word "passage" in PR 350.33-35, the conceptual framework has to be "wide enough" that the inferred meaning is compatible with the concepts or theories expounded in Process and Reality. Presupposing as we do, Whitehead’s coherence as a philosopher and his ability to express his system in a coherent way, any incompatibility between an inferred meaning of the word "passage" and a concept or a theory discussed in Process and Reality invalidates the interpretation as inadequate for the task of conveying the meaning of that word in PR 350.33- 35. As a matter of fact, since the word "passage" is considered by Cobb, Griffin and others as expressing an aspect of Process and Reality’s concept of God, its reconstructed meaning must be coherent not only with the other components of the concept of which it is considered a part but also with the other concepts and theories expounded in Process and Reality.

Therein lies the problem with the two interpretations outlined earlier: neither of them has been inferred on the basis of a wide enough conceptual framework. This is particularly obvious with the interpretation proposed by Cobb, Wood, Barineau and Hosinski, according to which the consequent nature passes into the temporal world by being prehended by the actual occasions. Inasmuch as those interpretations suppose, and actually posit, a prehension of the consequent nature by the actual occasions, they are incompatible with Whitehead’s theory of prehension as expounded in Process and Reality. In effect, God’s consequent nature is an everlasting process of self-realization, as Whitehead says in PR 346.8-10a: "Always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance, moving onward and never perishing." Since the consequent nature is perpetually ongoing, it is everlasting and never perishes nor reaches the state of satisfaction. There are always new objectively immortal actual occasions to be prehended, yet in Whitehead’s conceptual system the satisfaction of an actual entity is the condition sine qua non for its prehension by subsequent actual occasions:

Given the theory of prehensions expounded by Whitehead in Process and Reality, the consequent nature cannot be prehended by actual occasions. Any interpretation of the word "passage" that posits such a prehension, as Cobb’s and others’ do, must therefore be considered inadequate.¹¹

Griffin’s interpretation has also been inferred from an insufficiently wide conceptual framework. Though the notion of an indirect passage of the consequent nature to the temporal world seems promising, it nevertheless contradicts one aspect of God’s primordial nature clearly stated in Process and Reality; namely, its completeness. As a matter of fact, one of the six qualifications given to the primordial nature in PR 345.29b-30a is "complete" (PR 345.29c). Its meaning is made clear by the passage in which it appears, that is, the second chapter of the fifth part of Process and Reality, more precisely PR 343.38-39, where Whitehead describes the primordial nature of God as "the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality": since it realizes conceptually and in an unlimited way each and every possibility, the primordial nature is complete in that nothing -- neither any possibility, nor any new realization of any possibility -- can be added to its constitution. Insofar as such a completeness precludes any novelty in the primordial nature, it amounts to immutability, something Whitehead clearly acknowledges in PR 12.40b-13.1a, where, what’s more, Whitehead states that the consequent nature’s process does not affect the primordial nature: "Such representations compose the ‘consequent nature’ of God, which evolves in its relationship to the evolving world without derogation to the eternal completion of its primordial nature."

By admitting an influence of the consequent nature on the primordial nature, as Griffin does by holding that the overcoming of evil in the consequent nature determines the provision, by the primordial nature, of ideal aims destined to overcome the evil in the world, Griffin contradicts an aspect of Whitehead’s conceptualization of God in Process and Reality; namely, the completeness of the primordial nature. Moreover, he also contradicts Whitehead’s statement, in PR 12.40b-13.1a, to the effect that the primordial nature cannot be influenced by the consequent nature. Such an incompatibility between, on the one hand, the meaning of the word "passage" as interpreted by Griffin and, on the other, aspects of the conceptualization of God made by Whitehead in Process and Reality, makes Griffin’s interpretation inadequate.

III. An Alternative Interpretation

The preceding assessment of two current interpretations of the word "passage" in PR 350.33-35 strikingly narrows down the field of that word’s possible meanings. By showing the impossibility, in Process and Reality, of a passage of the consequent nature into the temporal world either through its prehension by the actual occasions or through the more indirect channel of an influence of the consequent nature on the primordial nature’s activity of providing initial aims, we have eliminated what would have been the two alternative modalities of a passage of the consequent nature into the temporal world in the framework of Whitehead’s metaphysical system as expounded in Process and Reality. In such a framework, the normal route for the passage of an entity to another is the prehension of the former by the latter. Also, an indirect passage can occur without involving the prehension of the passing entity by the entity which is at the receiving end of the passage. In this case, the prehension, by the receiving entity, of an entity that has prehended the passing entity makes such a passage possible, the elements of the passing entity that have been included in the concrescence of the mediating entity becoming object for the prehensions of the receiving entity. The interpretation shared by Cobb and others was based on an application of the normal route to the relationship between the consequent nature and the actual occasions, whereas Griffin opted for an application of the indirect passage to the same relationship. We have seen that those applications simply collapse, conceptually, because of the contradictions they entail with other aspects of the metaphysical system expounded in Process and Reality, Therefore, it is impossible, in the framework of the metaphysical system developed in Process and Reality, to conceptualize the way the consequent nature passes into the temporal world. What did Whitehead mean, then, when he wrote that "this nature itself passes into the temporal world according to its gradation of relevance to the various concrescent occasions?" (PR 350.34b-35).

Three possible answers to that question may be considered. The first is based on two considerations: (1) the position of the word "passage" in Process and Reality, in the next-to-last paragraph of the book; (2) the impossibility, demonstrated earlier, of conceptualizing the way the consequent nature passes into the temporal world in the framework of the metaphysical system developed in that book. Given these considerations, it may be suggested that the word "passage" expresses a concept of the consequent nature’s immanence in the world that would have become possible in a renewed version of Whitehead’s metaphysical system. Such a renewed version would have been such that articulating a passage of the consequent nature to the temporal world in its framework would not cause contradictions with other aspects of it. Whitehead would have developed it extremely late in the process of writing Process and Reality, one of its manifestations in that book, maybe the only one, being 350.33-35, more widely 350.33-351.13.

This hypothesis, however, has to be rejected. In order to be verified, it would have needed to be substantiated by a demonstration of the existence of a concept of "passage" enshrined in a renewed version of Whitehead’s metaphysical system. His writings that followed Process and Reality, especially the third book in a trilogy in which Whitehead expresses his ‘understanding of the nature of things,"¹² that is, Adventures of Ideas, should include some mention of this concept. This is not the case, however: no such concept appears in either Adventures of Ideas, or in the books that followed, such as Modes of Thought. And not only is the word "passage," as taken in the context of a discussion of the relationship between the consequent nature and the world, absent, but there can be found nowhere in those books any conceptualization of the way the consequent nature passes into the temporal world.¹³ Actually, in a conversation that took place between him and A. H. Johnson in 1936, Whitehead acknowledged that he did not make any attempt towards such a conceptualization:

A second possible answer to the question of the meaning of the word "passage" in PR 350.33-35 could be based on the admission that Whitehead’s conceptualization of God was incoherent. In the later stages of the composition of Process and Reality, when he tried to complement his concept of God with a new dimension, a divine responsivity, Whitehead would simply have asserted, though he was aware that his metaphysical system did not allow him to do so, that the consequent nature passes into the temporal world in the sense that it is prehended by the actual occasions, or that it influences the primordial nature’s provision of initial aims. In such a case, quite ironically, the two interpretations discussed earlier could be considered appropriate, given their faithfulness to Whitehead’s actual - but incoherent-conceptualization of God in 350.33-35.

Besides the unlikeliness of such blatant incoherence in Whitehead’s conceptualization of God, there is an important limit with this second approach: it assumes that "passage" is a sub-concept in relationship with Process and Reality’s concept of God; just like "consequent nature," "passage" is taken to be an aspect of that concept, which is developed -- as the concept is -- in the framework of Whitehead’s metaphysical categories. As we know, however, from Whitehead’s own admission to A.H. Johnson, he never attempted to solve the problem of the immanence of the consequent nature, that is, to conceptualize its passage into the temporal world. Process and Reality is no exception. In it such a passage is evoked, but not discussed and certainly not described, in Whitehead’s metaphysical categories, in an effort to construct a sub-concept designated by the word "passage." Interpreting PR 350.33-35 in terms of the theories of prehensions or initial aims elevates the word "passage" to the level of a concept, something Whitehead never did.

If the word "passage" in PR 350.33-35, does not refer to a sub-concept in Whitehead’s metaphysical system, how can it be interpreted? Furthermore, what is its status and what did Whitehead mean when he wrote about a passage of the consequent nature to the temporal world? Two considerations can be brought in as guidelines towards an answer to that question. On the one hand, even though there is no concept of passage in Process and Reality, it has to be acknowledged that the word as such is used in a context where Whitehead still expounds his concept of God. In PR 350.33-351.13, as a matter of fact, Whitehead proposes a final synthesis of the part of his metaphysical system that concerns the relationship between God and the world. On the other hand, there is an obvious elusiveness in the language surrounding his use of the word "passage": Whitehead’s reflections on the fourth phase in PR 351.4-13, that are meant to develop the assertion of a passage of the consequent nature into the temporal world, are expressed in a non-technical language. Especially from PR 351.7b and following, Whitehead leaves aside his metaphysical categories, using instead various images in a prose that leans towards poetry:

I propose, then, that the word "passage" expresses a pre-concept of the immanence of the consequent nature in the world. Whereas a concept can be defined as an intellectual representation of an object made through a set of categories, and here we are speaking of Whitehead’s metaphysical categories, a pre-concept is an assertion about an object that is not developed in those categories. The word "passage" in PR 350.33-35 is a pre-concept: Whitehead simply asserts the immanence of the consequent nature in the temporal world without describing it in the framework of his system, that is, without giving any indication about the way the consequent nature is supposed to pass into the temporal world. What else could he do, since his metaphysical system did not allow him to conceptualize such a passage?

When he wrote about a passage of the consequent nature to the temporal world, then, Whitehead meant only that somehow the consequent nature is (or has to be) immanent in the world, nothing else.¹⁷ Thereby, he lets his readers know what kind of a God he is trying to conceptualize, that is, a God who (or which) is engaged in a "spiral" relationship with the world. He wants a responsive God, a God whose influence on the world is determined by his internal reaction to worldly events, that is, by the harmonizing process occurring in the consequent nature. But in doing so, Whitehead candidly reveals an important limitation of his metaphysical system as developed in Process and Reality, that is, its inability to offer a philosophical framework in which a concept of a fully relational God can be constructed.

As Lewis S. Ford has said in a comment about Process and Reality’s final section, where PR 350.33-35 appears, a "problem has been bequeathed [by Whitehead] to his followers"(EWM 229). But contrary to Ford, I contend that the problem concerns the conceptualization of the consequent nature’s prehension by actual occasions.¹⁸ To be sure, finding ways to conceptualize this prehension would solve the problem of the consequent nature’s immanence and, ultimately, make a fully relational God possible in a Whiteheadian philosophical environment. However, focusing on the problem of the consequent nature’s prehension, as many scholars seem to be doing currently, may lead one to channel in a too narrow path efforts towards reconceiving some aspects of Whitehead’s metaphysical system and thus to overlook other ways to reach that goal.

References

CNT John B. Cobb, Jr., A Christian Natural Theology. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1965.

EWM Lewis S. Ford, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985.

GPE David Ray Griffin, God, Power and Evil: A Process Theodicy. Westminster, 1976, and Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990.

KH Thomas Hosinski, "The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ and the Development of Whitehead’s Idea of God," Process Studies 16 (1987), 203-215.

WTB Forrest Wood, Whiteheadian Thought as the Basis for a Philosophy of Religion. Lanham. MD: University Press of America, 1986.

Notes

1New York, Macmillan Publishing Co., 1929. For sake of precision, the references are according to page, line and line segment (the latter delimited by any two punctuation signs). As does Process Studies, I use the Corrected Edition, edited by David R. Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, Free Press, 1979).

2The verb "introduce" is appropriate here, since Whitehead evoked only once, and very early in Process and Reality, the problem that is dealt with in PR 350.33-35, that is, the immanence of the consequent nature in the temporal world: "Thus God has objective immortality in respect to his primordial nature and his consequent nature. The objective immortality of his consequent nature is considered later (cf. Part V)" (PR 32.6-8a).

3Up to that point, Whitehead had spoken of a process in three phases. In PR 346.21b-25a, he claimed that "the universe includes a threefold creative act composed of (i) the one infinite conceptual realization, (ii) the multiple solidarity of free physical realizations in the temporal world, (iii) the ultimate unity of the multiplicity of actual fact with the primordial conceptual fact." He addressed the same topic in PR 349.29-41, where he went as far as qualifying the third phase as "final", "This final phase of passage in God’s nature is ever enlarging itself" (PR 349.39b-40a).

4 This is being reinforced by the comment that follows immediately in Cobb’s book and the quotation from Process and Reality introduced thereby. Indeed, after having said that "This [i.e., the content of PR 350.33-35] prepares the way for Whitehead’s final summary of the interactions between God and the world," he quotes PR 350.36-351.7a:

5Cobb revisited this topic in "Sherburne on Providence," Process Studies 23 (1994), 25-29. In a extremely carefully-crafted text, he refutes a particular interpretation of the notion of a passage of the consequent nature to the world. Speaking about PR 350.33 -- 35 1.13, in particular about PR 350.33 -- 35 as can be gathered from the quote that follows, he states that Whitehead "does not say that when the Consequent Nature passes back into the world, this affects the aim derived from God by individual occasions" (26). However, Cobb would not commit himself to an alternative interpretation. Rather, he simply says that "what is clearest from this paragraph is that there is some sense of the reality and presence of ‘the great companion -- the fellow-sufferer who understands’" (26).

6As Hosinski writes in a comment about PR 350.15 -- 24a:

7Griffin quotes PR 351.7b -- 11a: "For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world" (GPE 305).

8Griffin argues in a similar, but more precise way:

9Griffin states:

10PR xiii.38b -- xiv. La. See also PR 220.4b -- 9a:

11In The Lure of God (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1978), Lewis S. Ford argued against the notion of a prehension of the consequent nature of God, stating that "only that which is complete, either a completely definite primordial nature, or a completely determinate actual occasion, can be objectified. But the consequent nature is never complete, since there are always new occasions for God to prehend" (110). A very similar argument is proposed by Stephen D. Ross in Perspective in Whitehead’s Metaphysics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983): "If Whitehead means that each occasion prehends this consequent nature directly and objectively, his position is incompatible with the principle of subjective unification, since until God has been completed, he cannot be prehended objectively" (254).

12As Whitehead says in the preface to Adventures of Ideas: "The three books -- Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas -- are an endeavour to express a way of understanding the nature of things, and to point out how that way of understanding is illustrated by a survey of the mutations of human experience."

13Whitehead limits himself to evoke an immanence ₀f the consequent nature in the temporal world. In Adventures of Ideas (295), he writes about an "Immanence of the Great Fact including this initial Eros and this final Beauty," the latter term referring to the consequent nature. In Modes of Thought (128), the divine "unified composition," which includes what corresponds to the consequent nature in that book, is a "datum" for the world.

14Johnson refers to the original version of Process an⁴ Reality. In Griffin and Sherburne’s corrected edition, the passage he alludes to can be found on page 220.

15Quoted from A.H. Johnson, "Some Conversations with Whitehead Concerning God and Creativity," in Explorations in Whitehead’s Philosophy, edited by Lewis S. Ford and George L. Kline (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 1983), 9-10.

16In "Two Process Views of God" (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 38 [1995], 61-74), Bowman L. Clarke mentions other cases, in Part V of Process and Reality, where Whitehead moves from a technical to a poetic language in order to discuss the consequent nature of God. He cites (71) PR 346.24-25a ("the ultimate unity of the multiplicity of actual fact with the primordial conceptual fact"), PR 346.13b ("the completed whole"), PR 346.13c-15 ("the image -- and it is but an image -- the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost"), and PR 345.23c-25 ("the primordial nature is conceptual, the consequent nature is the weaving of God’s physical feelings upon his primordial concepts").

17Even the quite moderate statement that follows is unfair to the meaning of PR 350.33-35, since it implies an equation between the words "passage" and "prehension": "We are not told, however, how God as an everlasting concrescence [reference is made here to the consequent nature] can ever be objectified for the world in a system where concrescences must be completed in determinate unity before they can be prehended. This is an example of Whitehead’s proleptic writing, where his intuitions outrun his concepts" (EWM 229).

18Thomas Hosinski presents the problem as being the problem ₀f the immanence of God. It is clear, however, that in keeping with his interpretation of 350.33-351.13, he sees this problem as the problem of the prehension of the consequent nature of God by actual occasions: This is, however, only a partial resolution of the problem concerning the immanence of God. It is partial because it leaves unanswered the technical problem of how God, as a single actual entity, can have "objective immortality" (see PR 32/47) and be prehended by concrescing occasions without "perishing." Whitehead states that the principle of universal relativity allows us to deduce or predict that the consequent nature of God must somehow be immanent (PR 350/532), [...] but he never solved the technical problem of how this was to be understood with metaphysical precision. (KH 212-213)

End Notes

*End Notes [Editor’s note: these endnotes are inserted here, rather than as footnotes, due to the extraordinary number of notes and the length of some of them, both of which caused formatting difficulties]

*1. The complete text of the penultimate paragraph of Process and Reality (PR 350.33-351.13) is the following:

*2. This interpretation has been put forth again recently by Maurice Barineau in The Theodicy of Alfred North Whitehead A Logical and Ethical Vindication (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991). The key notion, in this case, is that of "God’s superject nature." Barineau contends that God’s consequent nature reaches satisfaction, and therefore can be prehended, and so does the envisagement of the potentialities relevant to the actual world embodied in that satisfaction. God’s superjective nature is God’s consequent nature as it "passes into the temporal world according to its gradation of relevance to the various concrescent occasions" (87). Such a passage occurs though the prehension of the envisagement mentioned above, hence though the prehension of the consequent nature: "The envisagement of God for the actual world becomes an object for the prehension of emergent actual occasions, and Whitehead refers to this objective efficacy of God as the ‘superject nature’" (87).

*3. Other scholars since have proposed that Whitehead, in Process and Reality, posits an involvement of the consequent nature in the provision of initial aims. However they apparently do not ground their interpretation on PR 350.33 -- 35 or, more generally, PR 350.33-351.13, as Griffin does. Donald W. Sherburne refers instead to PR 345.24b-25 ("the consequent nature is the weaving of God’s physical feelings upon his primordial concepts") m the recapitulation of how God functions in the world which he uses as point of departure for the case he makes for a "decentered Whitehead," that is, a Whitehead without God, in "Decentering Whitehead" (Process Studies 15 [1986], 83- 94). It is that weaving of the prehensions of the consequent nature upon his primordial grasp ₀f pure possibility, as he states later in the article (88), that makes it possible for God to offer each actual entity the most appropriate aim given the situation in which it emerges in the world:

In The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), Marjorie H. Suchocki also contends that in Process and Reality, Whitehead held that the consequent nature plays a role in relationship with the initial aim:

As she confirms in a footnote, she bases this interpretation on PR 32.6-7a: "Thus God has immortality in respect to his primordial nature and his consequent nature."

In "The Incoherence of Whitehead’s Theory of Perception" (PS 9:94-104), Robert H. Kimball tries to show how Alfred North Whitehead’s account of perception is a failed attempt to reconcile two traditional theories of perception: phenomenological (or sense-data) theory and causal (or physiological) theory. Whitehead fails, Kimball argues, in two main ways. First because his notion of symbolic reference requires the simultaneous enjoyment of perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy and causal efficacy. Kimball believes this experience is, in principle, impossible and supports this claim by attacking Whitehead’s conception of causal efficacy and the experiential evidence used to support it. Whitehead’s second failure results from the first: Whitehead’s erroneous belief in the simultaneous enjoyment of the two modes of perception leads him to construct a theory of perception which is composed of two contradictory parts: realism and mediatism. In this essay, I will examine Kimball’s attack on causal efficacy and symbolic reference and show why Whitehead’s theory of perception is not susceptible to Kimball’s charge of incoherence.

Kimball’s Traditional Accounts

Before considering Kimball’s arguments, it is important to understand his conception of the two traditional accounts which he believes Whitehead is attempting to reconcile. The phenomenological account (hence "PA") is only and can only be a description of what is given in immediate experience; it is not at all concerned with explaining how such experiences are caused, The only things that can be found in such experiences are geometrical areas and the sense qualities which inhere in them. As far as knowledge of objects is concerned, these are the only truly certain things -- all else is (doubtful) inference. As far as PA is concerned, Kimball writes, "...a legitimate account of perception can only describe what is perceived, and all that is clearly and distinctly perceived are such areas and sense qualities" (PS 9:95).

The other traditional account to be considered is the causal account (hence "CA") of perception, sometimes described in physical and/or physiological terms. "[T]his type of theory," Kimball writes, "takes the experience of perception as a result of an extensive series of unperceived antecedent causes. ...In this way it goes beyond what is immediately experienced in perception and in fact asserts that what is immediately experienced is relatively unimportant compared to the causal mechanism which contributed to its production" (PS 9:95). The purpose of CA is to draw attention to the fact that our perception of objects is, contrary to the way we unreflectively consider it, indirect; perception comes through a complicated medium. CA attempts to explain how perception transforms objects and how the effects experienced in perception are produced.

It is Kimball’s position that PA and CA, as described above, are incompatible. "Each theory," Kimball writes, "has implications which trespass on the territory of the other. For this reason it is not possible consistently to hold both., at the same time" (PS 9:95-6). For example, the proponent of PA will not be able hold CA because to do so would require the subject to entertain a more distanced, or "objective," perspective. The PA holds that to sacrifice immediacy for a more "objective" explanatory viewpoint is to give up certainty; thus, adopting non-immediate perspectives is illegitimate. In order for a proponent of PA to accept CA, the full array of causal mechanisms responsible for a subject’s present sense-datum must be apprehensible by that subject’s immediate awareness. This. Kimball argues, is impossible because "There is not enough room in consciousness for that. One can occupy only one perspective at a time; the field on which one can focus one’s attention is limited" (PS 9:96).

Conversely, according to Kimball, the proponent of CA must also reject or discount the claims of PA. The reason is that for CA, "one can come to see the perceived datum as only the final link in a long causal chain....With this perspective on the whole act of perception -- the true or ‘real’ perspective, according to the advocates of [CA] -- one is apt to discount the significance of that small part of the causal nexus which is consciously experienced...one is led to a belief in the ‘mereness’ of what appears" (PS 9:97).

Because Kimball will allege that Whitehead’s account is irreconcilable for similar reasons, it is important to pause for a moment to make several observations about Kimball’s portrayal of these traditional accounts and their incompatibility.

First, it should be noted that Kimball’s version of the PA seems to define an extreme, rather than a moderate, position. It severely restricts awareness to a tightly-focused area of attention, vis one’s indubitably clear and distinct perceptions. This kind of phenomenological description is not the only possibility, of course; e.g., one may allow descriptions of unclear sense-data from the penumbra of consciousness and still be giving a PA. In short, Kimball’s version of PA reflects a conservative adherence to Cartesian criteria, criteria which predispose this particular version of PA towards insularity.

Second, Kimball’s version of the CA describes an account which values its explanatory telos so highly that it is predisposed to downgrade or dismiss the importance of the data of immediate consciousness as "mere" appearance. Other causal accounts, such as those which view sense-data as the culmination or achievement of the causal chain, are also possible; a scientist concerned with causation may speak legitimately of "aims" and even "crescendos" of a causal sequence and still be giving a causal account.

Thus a preliminary criticism of Kimball’s historical background sketch is that though he includes significant elements from the traditional accounts, he caricaturizes both PA and CA in a way which makes them likely to be irreconcilable.

Whitehead’s Theory of Perception

Kimball’s next step is to describe the components of Whitehead’s theory of perception. He writes,

Like the PA, Whitehead’s presentational immediacy describes those perceptions which are vivid and immediate. In perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy, no causal past nor future is given, only geometrical areas with qualities inhering in them. In addition, these perceptions have relatively little efficacious force and cannot do much more than vividly discriminate one society from another.

Kimball notes that unlike PA, Whitehead does not equate perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy with the entire content of our present consciousness; i.e, "attention" _ "concentration." For Whitehead, perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy constitute a highly sophisticated and (genetically) late phase of the actual occasion’s concrescence; they are just a part of our overall consciousness. Thus, "consciousness" in Whitehead’s philosophy is not as narrow as the consciousness PA describes and so it may have the "room" to entertain causally efficacious factors. Because this difference seems to mitigate at least one obstacle to the simultaneous enjoyment of perceptions in both modes, Kimball turns his focus towards the other mode of perception, causal efficacy.

In Whitehead’s scheme, causal efficacy complements the "barren aesthetic display" of presentational immediacy with the "...perception of the various bodily organs, as passing on their experiences by channels of transmission and of enhancement" (PR 119). The mode of causal efficacy discloses the causal relationships which result in the sense data of presentational immediacy and it is precisely the nature of this disclosure that Kimball is unclear about: ".. perception in the mode of causal efficacy is supposed to give some kind of awareness of causal relationships. Exactly what kind of awareness it is supposed to give, however, is far from clear" (PS 9:97). Kimball is asking reasonable questions, for these perceptions contribute a great deal to Whitehead’s theory. What are these disclosures like? How much do they tell us and about what? Under what circumstances can we know we are enjoying them in a pure form?

Kimball’s investigation into the manner in which causal efficacy discloses itself begins with his rejection of William Christian’s interpretation that perceptions in the mode of causal efficacy are not percepts in the same sense as those in presentational immediacy. Rather they are (1) a disclosure of the relations between presentationally immediate data and (2) an indication that "something is going on in nature and some things are affecting other things" (IWM 147). In the example "The flash made me blink," "flash" and "blink" are entities of the same logical type, but "made" is of another kind. Christian writes,

Kimball believes that this interpretation of causal efficacy is too simple and commonsensical -- it cannot be what Whitehead really intended! Such an interpretation would make Whitehead’s doctrine of causal efficacy ‘philosophically innocuous . . .[and] in fact it would not be able to sustain the weight of the philosophical edifice he builds upon it" (PS 9:98). It is unfortunate that Kimball does not give any further reasons for his rejection of Christian’s interpretation, which I believe was quite well-grounded.¹ Instead, Kimball moves on to what he feels is a more plausible interpretation, one which he believes is supported by other evidence given by Whitehead, that of "withness" of the body.

Kimball’s Interpretation of Causal Efficacy, His Attack on the Evidence

Kimball believes that causal efficacy makes an even stronger claim than Christian thought. This causal efficacy

To Kimball, Whitehead’s conception of causal efficacy was one which could, through the experience of "withness" of the body, give direct evidence for a full physiological account of perception. But when Kimball looks to the passages in which Whitehead describes "withness", Kimball discovers that "in none of the passages...does Whitehead describe this phenomenon in anything approaching the detail of a physiological theory; he hits only the high points" (PS 9:102). What Kimball was hoping causal efficacy could provide was the direct experience of, for example, the nerve links which supposedly operate between the hand holding the stone and the brain; causal efficacy fails to provide this. This failure prompts Kimball to conclude that causal efficacy’s evidence is insufficient:

A defense of Whitehead could proceed by asking where Kimball got the idea that "withness" (or causal efficacy itself) is supposed to disclose in detail the subtle routes of transmission of a perception. Kimball might have had in mind White-head’s statement that

However this quote claims for perceptions in the mode of causal efficacy only "direct" perception not "detailed" perception. In fact if Kimball had examined Whitehead’s slightly earlier discussion, he would have noted that the presented locus

Whitehead seems to be saying that so far as causal efficacy’s presented locus is concerned, nothing approaching Kimball’s required level of specificity is even possible in direct perception. In his article. Kimball gives no reference in Whitehead’s writings for this aspect of causal efficacy and I have tried in vain to find a passage in Whitehead that claims causal efficacy has any ability to "disclose in considerable detail." My conclusion is that Whitehead did not believe an immediate detailed awareness of a complex causal chain is either possible or necessary. The vector character of the stone in the hand is enough, I believe, to indicate the fundamentally conformal nature of experience and to let us know that a chain must exist; it is up to the inductions of science to depict the chain.² Perhaps Kimball has not taken to heart Whitehead’s warning that for too long philosophers have preferred to worry about "remote consequences" instead of "stubborn fact" and the time has come for them to "confine attention to the rush of immediate transition" (PR 129).

Kimball’s lack of references is unfortunate for he intends to use this interpretation of causal efficacy as an important component in later criticisms against symbolic reference. Part of his contention will be that the complexity of perceptions in the mode of causal efficacy makes symbolic reference implausible because human awareness is too narrow to entertain both modes at the same time.

Symbolic Reference

In our experience, the pure modes are very rarely experienced in their pure form, what Whitehead called "direct recognition" (S 19). In symbolic reference "the various actualities disclosed respectively by the two modes are either identified, or are at least correlated together as interrelated elements in our environment" (S 19). This integration of the two modes of perception happens by virtue of the common ground between them. This ground is constituted by the a) shared locality of the two modes, and b) the eternal object expressed by them.

Kimball finds Whitehead’s theory of symbolic reference to have two main incoherencies. First, symbolic reference requires the mind to perform an impossible task: focus on both modes of perception simultaneously. This conclusion largely depends on Kimball’s preferred interpretation of perceptions in the mode of causal efficacy. Second, symbolic reference leads to the self-contradictory epistemological conclusion that we perceive actualities though they come to us, transformed, through a medium. I will now evaluate these two incoherencies in turn.

As Kimball intimated earlier, Whitehead’s theory of symbolic reference is vulnerable to an incompatibility quite similar to the one separating the traditional phenomenological and causal accounts. Kimball writes,

The difficulty which Kimball implies is encountered here is due to two things: the demands that "copresence" makes on one’s consciousness, and the degree to which the complexity of perceptions in the mode of causal efficacy aggrandizes those demands. Kimball illustrates the impossibility of copresence with an example. It involves seeing a chair with our eyes:

In this example, Kimball betrays a deep allegiance to the traditional equivocation between perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy and the entire content of consciousness. Three aspects of the example make this obvious. First, the example chosen is one of sight, a sense which dramatically represses attention to perceptions in the mode of causal efficacy. Second, Kimball’s descriptor for mental attention is the highly selective "concentration." (Notice, too, the quotation’s shift from "concentrating" to "conscious") Third, the criterion employed to judge the experience is "equal vividness," a criterion which sets an unreasonably high standard on achieving a balance between perceptions in the two modes, and which also favors presentational immediacy, a naturally vivid mode. Despite Kimball’s earlier acknowledgement that Whitehead himself does not equate perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy with the entire content of our present consciousness, Kimball nevertheless goes ahead and applies this Cartesian-type equivalency to examples meant to discredit Whitehead. With standards as uncharitable to Whitehead as these, it is not surprising that Kimball concludes that simultaneous, direct awareness of perceptions in the two modes is not possible.³

Realism and Mediatism

In the end, Kimball believes, Whitehead’s theory of perception winds up being an epistemological round-square: it attempts to be both a realist and a mediatist theory of perception. Kimball writes,

The problem Kimball envisions is this: suppose a perceiver M sees an object O, mediated by a host of intervening occasions. In this example M will consciously perceive O by the final link in the causal chain, occasion Z. M is aware that Z is a modified version of the first datum in the sequence, A, because perceptions in the mode of causal efficacy alert M to the fact that some conformation has taken place. Kimball is uncomfortable with this account because it lacks a standard by which M may compare final percept Z with initial percept A and initial source O in order to know how modified Z really is. Without such a standard, Whitehead’s belief in the direct realist perception of O

Kimball’s argument runs: If we had a standard to compare O with Z, we would have direct access to things and would no longer need to maintain a theory of mediated perception; conversely, if all we have access to is mediated perceptions, such a standard is empirically impossible to discover. But Whitehead himself insists that an actual occasion never feels another actual occasion in all its immediacy (only as objectified data and subjective form) and from this we must deduce that we can have no such unmediated standards. Therefore, Kimball concludes, Whitehead’s theory fails because it claims we can have true knowledge of mediated actualities but it does not explain how an unmediated standard is possible.

A proper response to Kimball’s conclusion must include two main points. First, Kimball’s interpretation of causal efficacy as something that gives direct awareness of how entities are objectified is askew. As noted above, Kimball interpreted causal efficacy to disclose causal chains "in considerable detail"; this interpretation led him to believe that causal efficacy could bridge the gap between, to use Kimball’s words, "modified objects" and "things as they are in themselves." But for Whitehead this gap does not exist to be bridged because Whitehead’s notion of perceptions in the mode of causal efficacy is simply a way for us to know that (not "how") our perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy are the inherited culmination of a genetically earlier process.⁴ Any certainty about what we perceive will result from an extended process of inquiry rather than a comparison with an unmediated vision of the "real thing-in-itself." As Whitehead states "Symbolism can be justified, or unjustified. The test of justification must always be pragmatic. . . In a slightly narrower sense, the symbolism can be right or wrong; and rightness or wrongness is also tested pragmatically" (PR 181).

The second point has to do with Kimball’s underlying assumptions. Kimball faults Whitehead for not reconciling his theory’s "opposing tendencies of realism and mediatism," but given the cosmology described in Process and Reality, how could such a reconciliation really make any sense? For Whitehead, mediation -- or more accurately, "transaction" -- is a basic fact of all existence. In perception one may, if one wants, move in for a "closer look" and thereby reduce the number of intervening actual occasions. But a closer look offers nothing more "real" or "true" than the initial look, only more detail. It is a mistake to believe that even the closest look will ever reveal anything more (such as Kimball’s "thing in-itself") immediate than the objectified data and subjective form passed on by the satisfaction of an actual occasion. Thus, Kimball is mistaken in believing that Whitehead would even try to fit the square peg of realism into the round hole of mediatism, for Whitehead is not playing that game. Kimball’s charge that Whitehead’s theory of perception is incoherent is the result of his desire to contain it within the confined parameters of a debate between two traditional theories. In actuality, Whitehead resolves the conflict between traditional theories by superseding them with a more comprehensive picture.

References

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 (Fall/Winter 1979): 94-104.

Notes

1See Whitehead’s account in Process and Reality : "Thus [the experient subject] M, which has some analytic consciousness of its datum, is conscious of the feeling in its hand as the hand touches the stone. According to this account, perception in its primary form is consciousness of the causal efficacy of the external world by reason of which the percipient is a concrescence from a definitely constituted datum. The vector character of the datum is this causal efficacy" (PR 120).

2 See Christian, p. 150: "The use of a theoretical explanation of influence, on Whitehead’s view, is not to deduce causal efficacy but only to describe a context within which it is logically possible to acknowledge a fact of experience" (IWM).

3A possible counter example could be offered to support Whitehead. If one stares at a book, for example, and forces their vision to go out of focus, there are distinguishable perceptions in both modes: the page-blur and strain of the eye (PI) and the correlation of that strain with the page-blur (CE). One might even be tempted to attribute to the mode’s perceptions an "equal vividness."

4As Christian notes, "Whitehead’s account of causal efficacy is not an attempt to demonstrate real connections. It is not his business logically to derive the effect from the cause. . . . After all has been said about the reproduction of feeling, there comes a point where he does not attempt, conceptually, to bridge the gap between cause and effect, between the past subject and the present subject" (IWM 150).

I. Introduction

The four fundamental abstract dimensions of physics are mass [M], length [L], time [T], and charge [Q]; all physical parameters are built out of products of these and their inverses. Indeed, measurement systems derive their names from the choices of corresponding units. Thus the MKSQ system fixes upon meters, kilograms, seconds, and coulombs as its fundamental units. Forces, for instance, are then measured in units of kilogram-meters per second squared, called newtons, whose abstract dimensions accordingly are [M] [L]²[T]. Note that this dimensional characterization is independent of any measurement system; forces always take this form. Similarly, Planck’s constant h intrinsically has abstract dimensions [M] [L]²/[T]. Clearly then, mass is key to physics. Like the other fundamental dimensions, it seems to quantify an. essential attribute of matter and substance. Moreover, entities that exhibit mass seem to do so in a way that is constant over time -- a state of affairs ostensibly supporting a traditional ontology where substance is understood to exist through space and time. In this sense, the concept of mass would itself seem to lie in opposition to process theory. Why should short-lived Whiteheadian actual entitles or their collective societies attract each other or resist changes in motion?

In this essay we examine the connection between mass and substance, from both the traditional and process perspectives. We begin by highlighting the most important historical developments, including the notion of mass as it appeared prior to and in Newton’s work, the formal characterization of Mach, and its eventual role in relativity and quantum theory. We next deploy a superstructure which frames the rest of the discussion: the complementary notions of preprojective and postprojective discourse. Within this framework we prepare for a characterization of mass in process terms by a refined appeal to elements of Quine’s metaphysics, and we hope here to have made a new point of contact and reconciliation between Whitehead and the more traditional metaphysical theories. Moving into a fully process-theoretic context, we use one of the Categoreal Obligations to deduce the very idea of mass and then speculate on why the body has mass, but the soul does not, without a simple, pluralistic dismissal of the idea as a mere category error.

Finally, we address a problem posed by Charles Hartshorne concerning a process view of God and relativity’s denial of absolute simultaneity. We suggest that only entities or societies of a technically restricted type are subject to relativity’s constraints.

Two aspects of this brief program require some early advisories. First, we do not claim to establish some tight correspondence between the rigid formalisms of current-day physics and the more colloquial terms of a less adamantine metaphysics. One cannot hope to give a metaphysical definition of mass. We seek only to make plausibly consistent our understanding of the world as mediated so effectively by physics and certain general metaphysical notions, including fundamental aspects. of process thought. Second, our attempt at some reconciliation between Quine and Whitehead, which many might judge to be doomed from the outset, is not an attempt to reconcile their ontologies. Rather, we are applying certain methodological features of Quine’s analysis of things in the world to Whiteheadian actual entities in order to recover aspects of the less radical Quinian world view. In the same sense that experience underdetermines science (TDE 42 or PMN, Part Three), this approach is hardly peculiar.

II. A Brief History

Allow us first to make a loose but useful distinction, which we promise to make taut in the following section. The term mass has two senses in ordinary discourse. First, to say that this pear has mass might be to say that within the framework of physics and systems of physical measurement and associated units, there is some number m greater than zero, which, to some unspecified tolerance, functions as a parameter in a mechanical analysis of the pear’s behavior. Second, outside this elaborate technical framework, but nonetheless within the even more elaborate framework of ordinary language, to ascribe mass to this pear is to acknowledge a host of fundamental properties and behaviors that need no formalization. In this latter sense, the pear has mass, but not its shadow. At the heart of the matter we find a kind of exclusion principle: a pear resists sharing the spacetime it occupies with any other material object.¹ Extending this informal usage, we attribute more mass to a bigger pear that requires more effort to lift. Thus things with mass seem to partake of a quantity of continuous material, of substance. We learn to speak of objects or societies with these familiar properties as having mass long before we ever appreciate mass as a physical parameter. We recognize, moreover, that this property is largely independent of physical form.

To appeal to the Quine’s metaphor from his famous essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (TDE 42-46), if the synthetic and the analytic are not dichotomous, but rather the respective periphery and center of a web of knowledge and beliefs, then our casual use of the word mass lies at the periphery, while our technical meaning lies near the center. With this in mind, let us now make some remarks about the evolution of the term as it developed analytically, i.e., as it moved toward the center of the Quinian web.

Max Jammer, in Concepts of Mass (CM 37-73), recounts the emergence of mass as a working concept in both metaphysics and physics. He observes that the Aristotelian notion of substance, encompassing both prime matter and corporeal form, with the latter contributing the property of extension, led directly to the problem of characterizing corporeal form, and eventually to our technical notion of mass.

To summarize Jammer’s development with merciless brevity, the evolution of the concept is punctuated principally by Avicenna (980-1037), Averroës (c. 1126-1298), Aegidius² (c. 1247-1316), Kepler (1571-1630), and Newton (1642-1727). Avicenna characterized corporeal form as the tendency of prime matter to manifest dimensionality, which is to say spatial extension. Averroës proposed to correct Avicenna in two ways: first, that the essence of corporeal form lies in indeterminate dimensions, thus asserting the priority of spatiality in the abstract over the particular incidental form of a body, its so-called determinate dimensions; second, a characterization of corporeal form as "merely the capacity of prime matter for natural motion and as merely the tendency to move to its natural place" (CM 40), a harbinger of the formalities of dynamics to come. Aegidius then took the crucial step: he refined Averrës thesis by identifying indeterminate dimensions with quantitas materiae (quantity of matter) and explicitly detaching this attribute from the determinate dimensions. This move begins to resolve what we now understand to be a long-standing entanglement among the concepts of mass, density, and extension (volume).

If quantitas materiae is somehow the proper concept of mass -- as much for what it discards as irrelevant as for what it asserts definitively -- it is left to Kepler and Newton to systematize this notion and to incorporate it into the technical panoply of working physics. The process begins when Kepler submits to the ellipticity of the planetary trajectories. For an ellipse, an apparent distortion of the putatively more natural and ideal circle, implies that inertial mass, as it lies in opposition to force, must be attributed to the planets, and that more generally the motions of the planets require dynamic, as opposed to merely geometric or kinematic, analysis³ Here indeed may lie the kernel of a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Moreover, Kepler speaks decisively when he says, "Inertia or opposition to motion is a characteristic of matter; it is stronger, the greater the quantity of matter in a given volume⁴ because in this statement he essentially identifies Aegidius’s raw concept with a soon-to-be measurable parameter in a full-blown theory of dynamics. In developing this theory, however, Kepler still suffered from a confusion, initiated by Aristotle, between force and momentum. This confusion was ultimately resolved by Isaac Newton.

Newton had difficulties of his own in defining mass, and seems guilty of a double circularity. First, his definition -- independent of dynamics -- of mass as the product of volume and density begs the question insofar as density (mass per unit volume) must then be introduced into physics as an independent fundamental dimension. Indeed, it then becomes exactly as difficult to define density as to define mass. Second, to the extent that one can derive mass from the relation

his famous second law of motion, mass again depends on a prior fundamental dimension: in this case force. However, here one could postulate the possibility of equal forces (say, a spring compressed to a fixed limit), from which relative mass could be measured inferentially from the ensuing kinematics. But perhaps a better way to frame these perplexities lies in the linguistic philosophy of our own century. Rather than looking for an unambiguously grounded formal theory in Newton, we should perhaps look instead for simple coherence. It does assert something about the world to say that two parameters such as force and mass can be deployed in such a way as to predict or describe a large class of mechanical phenomena. This accords very well with Newton’s third law of motion: we take it starkly as conservation of momentum; Newton more likely saw it as reciprocity between mass and force. Again, coherence.

The Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838- 1916) did succeed, in a most straightforward way, to give a theoretical definition of mass. Consider an isolated system consisting of a reference body held at some fixed distance from test body B₁. Then (by gravitation) our reference body experiences an acceleration a₁ in the direction B₁. If we replace B₁ in our system by another body B₂, our reference mass will experience an acceleration a₂. Now arbitrarily taking the mass of B₁ to be unity, we can define the mass of B₂ (or any other test body) as the ratio a₂ /a₁. In other words, the measured mass simply is proportional to the observed acceleration, and here we have our definition. Of course, this is highly idealized, but nonetheless, it does yield a definition without reference to force and is certainly consistent with the law of universal gravitation.

While our historical sketch to this point is sufficient background for our subsequent discussion, some remarks on the role of mass in postclassical physics will be illuminating.

In the special theory of relativity, one shows that the mass of an object is no longer constant, but varies with velocity according to the relationship

where m₀ measures rest mass, v is velocity, and c is the speed of light. From this one deduces -- as an exercise in first-year calculus, incidentally – the famous Einstein mass-energy equivalence, E= mc². At first glance, it would seem that any interpretation of mass as a measure of quantitas materiae is obliterated by its dependency on velocity. But, in fact, since we can always compute rest mass from observed mass, it still makes sense to compare two objects moving at different velocities, and to that extent quantitas materiae survives. Perhaps more significantly from our point of view, however, is that the equation above and the Einstein mass-energy equivalence in some sense redefine the concept of mass away from any intuitive interpretation. For instance, now light and heat have mass, too. To revert to Quine’s metaphor, this illustrates the extraordinary measures science, as a holistic enterprise, will take to protect the center of the web.

In quantum theory we find a similar migration of meaning by formalism. To measure mass is to measure energy, and the uncertainty principle, which embodies the essential complementarity of wave and particle descriptions of physical objects, tells us that

where _E is the uncertainty in energy, At is the duration of the measurement, and h once more is Planck’s constant. This is to say that any measurement of energy made over a finite time is fundamentally uncertain, thus relegating both mass and energy to probability distributions, rather than ordinary numbers. Again quantitas materiae might be said to survive weakly to the extent that one might compare the means of such distributions, and again one observes how privileged is the center of the web.

III. The Preprojective and the Postprojective: A Synopsis

In a previous article (PP), we have attempted to characterize physics, and perhaps science more generally, as proceeding via a class of correspondences, suggestively termed projections,

which to each event E associate a point E(E) in some mathematical space. The key aspect is the explicit separation of an event from its projection: they are held as distinct members of disjoint classes. To illustrate briefly, we consider classical dynamics. Here, for a given event E, we might take (E) to lie in the 5-dimensional representation space

The first factor represents position (requiring three coordinates, each a member of the set of real numbers R), the second time, and the third mass. (R denotes the set of nonnegative real numbers).⁵ In this model we recognize a persistent identity as a connected set of images in the codomain. In fact, in Newtonian physics we would expect that the image of a single substantial object would be identifiable not only by the continuity of its first three factors as an implicit function of the fourth, but also by the constancy of the fifth. In relativistic dynamics, the final factor is no longer constant, but still varies continuously.

To extend our example, note that in dealing with electrodynamic phenomena the representation space cited above is insufficient. Physicists are then wont to refine the projection, enlarging the representation space to:

introducing a new factor of R to represent electrical charge. A mathematician says that the projection has been made more nearly faithful. In this augmented space, one might now better analyze systems of charged particles in motion among their mutual gravitational and electromagnetic effects.

Note that in this second example all of the fundamental dimensions as given in the introduction are now represented. One should not feel, however, that this somehow exhausts the possibilities: the species of representation spaces are limitless. (Further examples are given in PP.) In particular, discrete mathematical spaces are also available. These include the kinds of spaces used to describe the behavior of computers and even the space of ordinary written language.

One of our main points in setting out this framework is the claim that in some deep sense, to do physics is to find laws that relate (E) to (E¹) for separable events E and E¹ (including of course the special case that E and E¹ pertain to the same substance or object in the naive sense of those words. These laws do not necessarily constitute predictions of future values of these projections, but are sometimes merely constraints on associated quantities or their relations. So, for instance, one might explicitly derive the ballistic trajectory of an object in a vacuum, or one might be content to assert that the sum of the potential and kinetic energy of said object is constant. Or one might declare that (E) and (E¹) are necessarily independent if the distance between their spatial coordinates divided by the difference between their temporal coordinates, in some common frame, exceeds the speed of light.

IV. Mass and Matter

It is clear from the preceding discussion that the second, more technical sense of mass that we introduced in our historical synopsis is indeed the postprojective one. That various particular projections may have held sway historically, with more or less precision, is inessential. The point is that the concept simply never gels without projection, and the key characteristics of the projection are these:

Thus while the idea of the predicate has mass is sensible preprojectively as an attribution to be made at the periphery of the Quinian web, it seems to have no deep meaning -- this is to say, no embedding into a network of concepts and actions that allows us to describe and circumscribe the phenomenal world -- without recourse to mathematical abstraction. Indeed, the imprecise notion of quantitas materiae is already a groping in that direction: it anticipates a representation space without making explicit a projective mechanism; that is, a kind of measurement.⁶

We approach a natural inference here reminiscent of Russell’s attack on Kantian metaphysics. Just as Russell asked how could relations among phenomena not reflect relations among noumena, we can ask the following question: if a key feature of mass is continuity, then does this not imply some underlying substrate that must persist without change from measurement to measurement? More generally, does not the effectiveness of continuous projections in describing the physical world suggest an underlying substance metaphysics, certainly at variance with the discontinuities of process thought? We have then in our usual objects and substances not misplaced concreteness, but simply inferred concreteness. This seems to us to be a deep and difficult question, to which we now turn.

V. Ontology, Projection, and Continuity

We shall now argue that the metaphysical implication from projection to substance of the preceding section is escapable: the continuity or connectedness of a projection such as mass as it appears in the mathematical model that is physics does not imply a preprojective substance ontology insofar as an examination of terms -- or more properly the origin of particular terms -- reveals a circularity of argument. This leaves the way clear for a process metaphysics that is consistent with both physics and contemporary theories of entification.

In laying out his metaphysics, Quine explicitly connects entification with continuously varying properties. He says, for instance, "Most of our general terms individuate by continuity considerations, because continuity favors causal connections" (TTPT 12). Implicit in this, of course, is the recognition that the causal connection that looms largest in the world is stability: the most likely precondition for the existence of this pear at a given location at any given time is its existence at a nearby location at a proximate prior time. In our framework and language, we would say that what entifies is that which tends to admit a continuous projection into generalized mathematical spaces; moreover, the particular projections that we choose are those that are useful in the derivation of regular mathematical features. Now we do not mean to suggest here that the everyday ontology of the non-physicist is somehow driven by the high abstractions of mathematics -- although to some extent it is of course driven by current scientific models. Indeed, the river almost always flows in the opposite direction: our informal, intuitive notions of cardinality, time, space, and causality in fact drive the evolution of abstractions such as functions, geometric spaces, real numbers, and coordinate systems. That these abstractions appear natural and ineluctable -- and at times even have attained the lofty status of Kantian transcendence -- is the result of effective habits of thought that favor a certain class of proto-abstractions.⁷ (See MFF for detailed and compelling development of this thesis.) With this caveat taken to heart, we may assert that the thrown ball as it crosses my field of vision is viewed as a single object to the extent that its geometric features and trajectory vary continuously, and similarly for a moving picture of that same ball.⁸

Mass, as we have seen, is one element of a composite projection appropriate to physics. Thus together with spatiotemporal coordinates and other postprojective features, mass helps to define that to which it is later attributed. So, for example, if I turn away from my desk for a minute and see a brown pear where before had stood a green one, this violation of continuity leads me to believe that the same pear no longer sits before me. Similarly, if my pear suddenly seems to suffer a gross attenuation of density, I again doubt its sameness. In other words, the various projections that we carry out intuitively or with the refined instrumentations of physics are indeed the facilitators of entification. In this sense, the common objects of the world are the posits of our projections, so that the continuity of these projections for such objects is in this respect tautological.⁹

The implications of this line of reasoning for process metaphysics are huge. One may now assert that a physical element of a process-driven reality does not have mass because it is a substance, but rather that it appears as a substance because it has mass -- in the postprojective sense. Thus the attribution of substance should in fact be viewed as postprojective. The key point is that projection and entification constitute a kind of looping negotiation with reality: we entify largely by the continuity of some projections, are guided in the choice of subsequent projections by what has previously entified, and the process iterates. The pattern is similar in its gross dynamics to the story of how astronomers and physicists deduced the existence of the outer planets and subatomic particles.

VI. A Process View of Mass

In our general view of process thought we follow Charles Hartshorne’s interpretations and revisions of Whitehead, especially on the issue of the nature of eternal objects. For us, Whitehead’s eternal objects are too abstract, too Platonic, too flat, and, as defined as absolutely pure potentials, seem completely vacuous. We seek to reduce the polarity of the "certain extreme finality" (PR 22) of the contrast between actual entities and eternal objects. Our "eternal objects" are more or less abstract and more or less potentials.¹⁰ We believe Whitehead’s eternal objects cannot include the vast, incredible variety of kinds of abstract feelings that are part of actual entities -- the only place that so called eternal objects can occur. We have come to this conclusion reluctantly from a study of Whitehead’s attitude towards mathematics. In our judgment, Whitehead was led astray by a typical posture towards mathematics at the time. We believe that this error on his part was the primary reason for his quick slip into professional mathematical irrelevance (see WEPM).

Any revised interpretation of the basic polarity of actual entities and eternal objects must ripple through the rest of Whitehead’s philosophy. Although we see minimal distortion of orthodox process thought by our change, we do notice that it has informed our position on the nature of mass primarily through the interplay of the "more" and "less" abstract prehensions during the process of concrescence. The standard interpretation of concrescence pictures a transition from the physical pole to the consummate satisfaction associated with the mental pole. However, Whitehead began to allow the physical pole to have aspects of mentality through his hybrid physical prehensions, which as a type of physical prehension occur at the earliest stages of concrescence. If one relaxes the rigidity of Whiteheadian eternal objects, and interprets them as varying degrees of abstract feelings, one can have the full range of such feelings, both physical and mental, as subjective forms of prehensions as well as their objective data. This means that one can more easily describe the transition in concrescence from the preprojective physical feeling of mass to the postprojective mathematical description that occurs as an idea in the mentality of the concrescence. More importantly, one can interpret how the postprojective mathematical description of mass, prehended at an early level of concrescence, can guide a concrescing entity to a physical feeling of mass in a satisfaction. This is important to us, for we believe – à la Kuhn’s theory of paradigms -- that the feeling of mass in objects by professional scientists is significantly conditioned by their understanding of the theoretical description of mass. This theoretical description is influenced by the culture of science, which must have its grounding as science in experimental evidence. Again, a looping negotiation.

Although Whitehead does not define mass in Process and Reality, he presents the philosophical background for its preprojective origins in Chapter III, "The Order of Nature," Sections IV through VII. He first introduces the top level of his hierarchical description with what he calls the general presumption of the whole and part, which is characterized as pure extension. This has a nice mathematical analog in the idea of a topological space, a set with no a priori notion of distance that nonetheless formalizes the ideas of separation and proximity. His second level, the geometrical society, is a particular kind of topological space, one that does admit some sort of metric -- a measure of distance -- although not a unique one. He characterizes this in terms of straight lines, by which he means geodesics relative to a differential notion of length.

The third level, the level of so-called electromagnetic societies, is of most importance to our present discussion. Here Whitehead posits the universe of the current epoch: individuation and the laws of physics. This is a beautiful idea, although his terminology is puzzling. Consider that electromagnetics constitute only one of the four fundamental forces as currently understood. That Whitehead excludes the weak and strong nuclear forces is understandable -- these were not identified until the 1930s -- but why is gravity omitted? One might conjecture that perhaps as a thorough student of relativity, Whitehead felt that gravity, in accord with the general relativistic notion that it is a property of space, should more properly be folded into the second level of his hierarchy. But still there is something most curious about the level of electromagnetic societies: mass is ignored, as though perhaps its only manifestation were gravity -- which is simply false, even in our current understanding of the universe. Our point is that Whitehead, within the limits of his knowledge, might more properly have spoken of material electromagnetic societies, or have used some other term to acknowledge mass explicitly. Possibly he did not mean to exclude mass at this level but to emphasize the nongravitational forces between masses, so that the concept of mass is not absent by design, but merely left implicit. One might be persuaded to this position, but nonetheless the terminology is revealing and we are left to ourselves to derive the notion of mass from the more basic elements of his metaphysics.

Whitehead’s argument in preparation for our characterization of the preprojective kernel of mass is as follows. Every society of actual entities exists within a larger and changing environment of actual entities in which it "may be more or less ‘stabilized’" in that environment, which is to say, persistent in some group of characteristics despite environmental changes (PR 100). Continuing in this vein, Whitehead then argues that for a society to maintain itself through a changing environment, it must be "unspecialized" in the sense of being resilient and flexible in its responses to the world, with the consequence that an unspecialized society is also likely lacking in the strong structural characteristics that would lead to an intensity of satisfaction. "Thus the problem for Nature is the production of societies which are structured with a high ‘complexity,’ and which are at the same time ‘unspecialized.’ In this way, intensity is mated with survival" (PR 101).

One solution to the problem of complex resilience, says Whitehead, occurs by appeal to the Category of Transmutation. The society in question takes a characteristic approach to the world, in particular to its objectification of the nexus that surround it. The approach maintains the stability of the society by "eliciting a massive average objectification of a nexus, while eliminating the detailed diversities of the various members of the nexus..." (PR 101). In other words, "It ignores the diversity of detail by overwhelming the nexus by means of some congenial uniformity which pervades it. The environment may then change indefinitely so far as concerns the ignored details so long as they can be ignored" (PR 101). It is important to realize that this objectification reflects a process of abstraction, occurring in a concrescing entity, that determines a common form of a society. For an entity that is part of the society, the form is internalized in such a way as to maintain that formal aspect. An entity not a part of the objectified society, but of some other, may perceive the form of the society as an objectified property of the society.

So what then is mass? We hold that mass, in its preprojective sense, is an objectified form of certain physical societies, a form that acts as a universal leveler of relations in societies, and one that, in a distant echo of Averroës, completely ignores elements of internal structure. Thus in this objectification, the constituents of a society with mass are so flattened that what remains is a kind of counting measure, or its continuous analog, a density integral¹¹ And thus at least informally mass as quantitas materiae can be recovered for process thought.

To the extent that one feels that something has been achieved in a process-theoretic characterization of mass that seems to answer to the first, historic gropings for the meaning of this idea, one is tempted to ask to what extent our thesis answers to the later, more sophisticated, formal, and patently postprojective notions. We proceed here with two observations in response to two fundamental questions that prepare the ground for the more radical analysis of the following section.

First, we ask, to what kind of societies is mass attributable? The obvious proposal here is to restrict this attribution to societies that admit a serial order (see PR 34). The point is that the very idea of mass -- either preprojectively, with time regarded as mere serialization, or postprojectively, with time as a topologically sophisticated abstract coordinate system -- is insupportable without temporal context. Preprojectively, we see from Whitehead’s analysis of the survival of complex resilient systems that the Category of Transmutation must apply across the serial evolution of a nexus. This is consonant with essential features of the postprojective formalization of mass: we may speak of a mass m at an instant t, but

To summarize, the upshot of our first observation is this: the notion of mass apart from time is nonsense. Therefore in process thought, mass must be a certain kind of objectification of a determinate form of a nexus that persists over time. This entails that it be a society with serial order.

Second, we ask, what role does the attribution of mass play in our successful negotiation of reality? For this, let us begin with the postprojective as a metaphor for the preprojective. Consider again Newton’s second law of motion, rewritten thus:

From this we see that in an environment of bounded forces, the reciprocal of mass bounds the observed accelerations. Thus when we ascribe mass to an entity, we are asserting a kind of limit on its dynamics.¹² Bringing this back to the preprojective, we are saying that insofar as a high-grade society objectifies a given nexus by virtue of the Category of Transmutation in the flattened form that is mass, the dynamics of that nexus are bounded, at least with regard to its extensive relations with the world. What is most striking here is that in the preprojective discourse the connection between mass as quantitas materiae and inertia is not accidental: the value and the goal of the transmutation is to slow things down; to facilitate a universe that is negotiable.

VII. Why the Body Has Mass but the Soul Does Not

Whitehead speaks of a structured society as one that "provides a favorable environment for the subordinate societies which it harbors within itself" (PR 99). These societies, called "inorganic" (PR 102) by Whitehead, can exist outside the structured society with only slight differences resulting from the change in their environment. A molecule is an example of an inorganic subordinate society within the structured society of a living cell (PR 99). Some general features of the molecule, including its mass obtained by the abstractive levelings described above, are independent of the environment of the molecule. Speaking postprojectively, we can claim that the mass of the molecule is the same inside or outside the cell, subject to relativistic considerations.

However, there is much more to the living cell than just its societal components that have mass. There are other actual entities that cannot sustain themselves outside the environment of the cell, for example, "living occasions" (PR 102). In the society of a live animal body there are such occasions, together called an "entirely living nexus," (PR 103) that may assume dominance over the body. Whitehead conjectures that this entirely living nexus is not a society for two reasons. First, it requires the protection of the structured society of the body (PR 103). Second, he understood such a nexus to be deficit of any "defining characteristic," which is that required common element of form that describes and is inherited by each actual entity of the nexus of a society. In particular, he asserts that the entirely living nexus does not have the form of "life."

Whitehead is claiming here that by its very nature, the essential creativity of a living occasion is too evanescent to be subject to the Category of Transmutation. By analogy, we may look at the surface of the ocean on a calm day and see waves, and even, if we so choose, assess their amplitude and frequency. But this mode of description fails entirely in the random turbulence of a cataclysmic storm, so that concepts such as amplitude and frequency may no longer apply. In the same way, the entirely living nexus does not have that form whose abstraction gives mass because of the extent and nature of its originality. It is so creative that it cannot be subject to that common form that is the general leveler of all physical societies. Mass captures only the inherited, noncreative aspects of societies. The entirely living nexus has no such characteristics. Indeed, when Whitehead speaks of entirely living occasions, he removes all that is hereditary and leaves only raw originality, which in essence can have no inertia.

While Whitehead’s denial of any persistence of form in purely living occasions leads to a satisfying explanation of why the soul does not have mass, in another sense it seems to fly in the face of experience: our living cohorts in the world do not seem so psychologically indeterminate. The existence of the most elementary social structures and the sciences of psychology and ethology suggest strongly that living occasions may indeed exhibit the structure of enduring objects that have personal order. Hence we question whether there exists any living nexus that is as purely creative as Whitehead suggests; that is, an entirely living one. To the contrary we have asserted previously (PAWM 39) that there is good evidence in Process and Reality that the physical pole is part of the unified satisfaction of any entity. Under this interpretation, the dominant occasions that constitute the soul of a personal society could have some aspect of physicality. If so, why cannot that inheritance of physical form in the living nexus of the human soul be leveled to give at least some mass? Our highly speculative answer: it might do so, but not normally.

We think that there are two reasons in addition to the explanation given above for denying mass to living nexos in ordinary occasions. The first is the highly emotive nature of the soul. This complexity of emotion that is the core of the soul and the essence of creativity of life as described above may so overwhelm the forms of physicality of the soul that they cannot be leveled to get mass. The second is the normal nature of the physicality of the soul, which explains why it can be overwhelmed by emotion and creativity. Concrescence begins in physical experience, the prehension of past actual entities, which is a necessary condition for the development of mental experience. But as the process of concrescence unfolds, that which was physical normally becomes more mental, that is, abstract. We acknowledge the firm influence of the physical body on the soul through efficient causes. Further, we have attempted to describe how the soul controls the body via final causes through abstractions of physical processes derived from the body (PAWM 41). The point is that the soul does have a structure that includes forms of physicality inherited from the physical pole. However, like emotions, these forms as higher abstractions do not have mass. Whitehead’s enduring objects internalize a common form as part of their actual or physical being. Soul events internalize physical forms for purposes other than being physical; for example, in order to influence physical events. Thus, whatever physical existence, if any, is attributable to soul events is easily obscured by creativity and emotion.

VIII. Some Speculations on Knowledge and God

Our process-theoretic analysis of mass and earlier discussion of ontology suggest that science is generally limited to the study of only a subset of the features recognized by Whiteheadian metaphysics. Perhaps the three most salient strictures are these:

We raise these limitations because they bear directly on Charles Hartshorne’s question of the reconciliation of special relativity’s denial of absolute simultaneity with the process view of God.¹⁵ How indeed can God participate both as possible subject and object in every actual occasion in a universe subject to a principle of locality? In a universe for which action at a distance is impossible and the transmission of signals is limited by the speed of light? Our speculative answer is this: the principle of localization pertains only to causal relations mediated by the restricted class of abstractions admissible to science. In particular, this restricts the application of localization to only those abstractions (such as mass) that depend only on the ingression of the objectified past. This point of view accords well with Bell’s theorem, which provides for the instantaneous correlation of separated events, in this case what appears to be the simultaneous choice of orientations. Thus we hold that creative synthesis, as such, is then not subject to localization, and thus without contradicting the current laws of physics God is free to participate in the creative process across the entire universe, because God’s contact with the world is not mediated by scientific abstraction and is therefore not subject to the restrictions of a local, postprojective theory.

IX. Conclusion

Broadly speaking, this paper has presented a rationale for materialism in a process-driven universe, in the sense that we have tried to account for the origins and effectiveness of materialist-substance ontology in a Whiteheadian world. Following Whitehead, we see the appearance of mass in the world as a fundamental element in the way that a complex, resilient society might approach reality and survive. (The same might be said for the notions of duration, extension, and even electrical charge.) That this approach is successful is undeniable: after all, we are here to affirm it. But a metaphysical penalty is assessed in connection with the consequent inferred and misplaced concreteness, which drains reality of its creative richness. By asserting the process-theoretic foundations of our world, we can maintain both science and God and thus escape the materialist malaise-perhaps never better expressed than in this brief excerpt from a work held by many to be the greatest novel ever written:

Process metaphysics requires no such mutually exclusive exchange: we have our muslin blouse and our warm coat, and an abundant, nonexistentialist universe in which to enjoy both.

Notes

1. We acknowledge the eventual technical insufficiency of this naive exclusion principle, which sounds rather like the essential distinction between waves and particles: waves superimpose; particles do not. Insofar as this distinction is blurred by quantum theory, so that ordinary light has particle aspects and ordinary baseballs have wave aspects, much more needs to be said. But we only propose this feature as a starting point in acquiring the informal use of the predicate has mass. One learns quickly, indeed, that one can walk through the shadow of a lamppost, but not through the lamppost itself.

2. Perhaps more commonly known as Giles of Rome.

3. This is no small feat, as Bronowski and Mazlish point out (WIT 111), in that the four-element tradition did not recognize the heavenly bodies as material. Indeed, their lofty perch in the upper reaches of the world was not a place held by things material. See also CM 55.

4. Quoted from CM 56.

5. One must not confuse our idea of a representation space for an event with that of a state space for a dynamic system, which in the case of a one-particle system would also require a momentum vector.

6. At this point, one might well ask with some urgency to what extent philosophers are enjoined to accept the definitions of science in their own analyses. Some would maintain that philosophy is entirely free to dismiss scientific formalisms. Others might declare that the goal of philosophy is not the explication of science (as Russell and Whitehead once tried to explicate mathematics), and hence the question is irrelevant. We hinted at our own view in the introduction: philosophy can sometimes profitably illuminate the phenomenological and semantic path from experience to science, and, in so doing, both the beginning and the end of the journey are prime data.

7. The very notion of continuity, which ultimately requires the context of an abstract mathematical domain, is a case in point. The idea of continuous change presupposes some measure of nearness, an abstraction that distills itself into the mathematical formalism of a topological space. While the attendant technicalities may be necessary to systematize this idea, we are hardly without it naively.

8. One might say that everyday entification occurs somewhere between the periphery and the center of the web. What is critical for us here is only that it does not occur at the periphery. While one might assert that both Whitehead and the logical positivists mandate that we always begin at the edge, Kuhn (SSR), Quine, and Rorty have shown that one cannot remain there for long and still make sense of the world.

9. Physicists often suffer the same circularity in defining a closed system.

10. Abstractions have a complex ordering, which is not adequately symbolized by Whitehead’s abstractive hierarchies. We have attempted to show a more appropriate ordering of abstractions as forms of concrescence in PAWM.

11. We are being blatantly, but we hope suggestively, metaphorical here; what we intend by this characterization of mass is entirely preprojective. Nonetheless, that the metaphor recalls Newton is most satisfying.

12. Recall that Kepler used the converse of this implication to deduce the substance of the planets.

13. This is a generalization of the conclusion we reached in PP about measurement.

14. A measurement is intersubjective, not in the sense that everyone would record the same numbers, but in the sense that everyone reading the records agrees on what they are seeing, and in particular on when two measurements agree. Thus a recorded value of 3.1416 centimeters may have whatever experimental uncertainty, but as a record it is unambiguous and eminently distinguishable from 2.7183 or even 3.1417.

15. In a personal letter to Henry dated October 20, 1969, Hartshorne states, "My own worst problem is how to reconcile a process view of God with relativity’s denial of absolute simultaneity." His solution to the problem came in response to a modified Whiteheadian theory of events proposed by physicist Henry Pierce Stapp in "Quantum Mechanics, Local Causality, and Process Philosophy" (PS 7 [1977]: 173-182). Hartshorne’s article followed Stapp’s article in the same issue and is titled "Bell’s Theorem and Stapp’s Revised View of Space-Time."

16. From Anna Karenina (1876) by Leo Tolstoy, Part Eight, Chapter Eight; translation by Joel Carmichael (1960).

References

CM Max Jammer. Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.

ME Richard Rorty. "Matter and Event," Explorations in Whitehead Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 1983.

MFF Saunders Mac Lane. Mathematics: Form and Function. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986, 455-456.

PAWM Granville C. Henry and Robert J. Valenza. "The Principle of Affinity in Whiteheadian Metaphysics," Process Studies 23(1994), 50-49.

PP Granville C. Henry and Robert J. Valenza. "The Preprojective and the Postprojective: A New Perspective on Causal Efficacy and Presentational Immediacy," Process Studies 27(1998), 33-55.

PMN Richard Rorty. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

SSR Thomas S. Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Second Edition, 1970.

TDE Willard Van Orman Quine. "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (second, revised edition, 1961); New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

TIPT Willard Van Orman Quine. "Things and Their Place in Theories," Theories and Things. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981.

WEPM Granville C. Henry and Robert J. Valenza. "Whitehead’s Early Philosophy of Mathematics," Process Studies 22 (1993), 21-36.

WIT J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish. The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel. New York: Harper and Row, 1960; Harper Colophon edition, 1975.